Right Wing Nut House

Mike from The Lamplighter sent me this email. I hope you can help him out:

I hate to ask, but I need some help getting some word out (I am still to small here) - costs nothing and it helps our troops.

Thanks
Mike

Give Mike a hand and send him the names of brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, or friends in the military. You know they’ll be happy to get these packages.

A little slice of home is always welcome, I’m sure.

I know what you’re going to say: “C’mon, Moran. Paris Hilton? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

No. I mean it. Even though she has a Nordic ski jump for a nose. Despite the fact she is witless, talentless, shameless, and outrageously puerile. And notwithstanding her most redeeming quality is a limitless, ravenous, hunger for having her picture taken.

I like her. I like anorexic blonds who constantly look as if they are coming off a 3 day rave and in desperate need of some more XTC. I like the fact she feels duty bound to share every inch of her rather ordinary body with billions of people on a daily basis. Here’s Paris getting out of the car flashing a smile. There’s Paris getting out of a car flashing cleavage with just a hint of a nipple carefully placed in view. And is that Paris getting out of a car flashing something perhaps a little more personal, more private (for most of us)?

She reminds me of the most popular girl in high school - one of the cool kids. Always dressed in the latest fashions. Make-up, hair, lipstick always model perfect. Except, she’s not in high school anymore. She’s a 26 year old woman, born into a kind of wealth none of us can fathom. Pampered, spoiled, doted upon - given everything, not having to work for anything.

And suddenly, adulthood and there is nothing you can do to kill the boredom except party hearty and screw like a rabbit. Hey! Why not make a career out of that? Not partying and screwing but making a reality panorama out of my whole boring, repetitive life. Create a multi-media conglomerate out of my partying and screwing and the press won’t be able to get enough of it. Buy some nice looking friends. Hit the trendiest spots in town. And make sure to act outrageously in order to have some copy to go with the titillating pictures. Why the press will be forced to cover it. America will demand it.

And cover it they have. To the nth degree, they have covered the partying, the drunkenness, the drugs, the succession of boyfriends, girlfriends, and probably assorted animals, various mechanical devices, and party dolls. (Note: Paris herself turned down the honor of having her stick-like form transmuted into a sex doll. It is said that the idea “freaked her out.”)

And now that reality panorama has gotten very real indeed. Life isn’t one big party. Actions have consequences. “Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys” means that even Jackie Paper has to grow up and face the music. And a 26 year old fully grown woman cries for her mother as they drag her ass back to jail where it should have never left in the first place.

Yes I like Paris Hilton - as I like watching NASCAR at Talladega, waiting for the inevitable crash along the back straight coming out of the high speed turn. Someone’s overheated tires just can’t get a good enough grip and down into the slot his careening car goes wreaking havoc and mayhem. Only a miracle (and spectacularly good drivers) keeps catastrophe at bay.

Paris is not a good driver. She was dumb enough to drive drunk and then crazy enough to drive on a suspended license, getting stopped twice. Did she not know that her very celebrity made her an easy target for the cops? Or was this tempting of fate part of the show. After all, a little legal trouble is always good for a headline or two.

Except the judge in this case took a rather dim view of being included in the Hilton Saga and clapped the woman in irons, sending her off to jail. Now she cries for her mother and is scared witless of mixing with people she wouldn’t dream of taking a second look at in public.

This ultimately is what really scares her. What if I’m just as ordinary, untalented, and, God forbid, boring as all the rest of the common people of the earth? What will I do with myself if I discover that there is absolutely nothing “special” about me, that everything I am, or known as, is manufactured out of whole cloth - as unreal and ephemeral as the ghostly shadow of my image that flickers so often across the media landscape of America, giving notoriety but little else?

She is perfectly safe in jail. There is no chance that any harm will come to her. She will be kept in a special cell reserved for celebrities. Yes jail is a very, very bad place to be. But the law has had its way with her and for good or ill, it is time for her to pay the piper for her transgressions.

Jules Crittendon thinks we should feel sorry for her:

I feel bad for her. How can you look at anyone piteously sobbing on her way to jail and not feel bad for her, when her crime is not sticking a knife in someone, raping someone’s grandmother, holding anyone up at gunpoint or stealing their life’s savings, but essentially failing to figure out that the rules apply to her. Sort of like how I feel bad for the trainwrecks that are Britney and Lindsay, who are more specifically victims of adults who felt they had to share their little darling’s talent with the world, maybe wanted to live vicariously through their little darling’s accomplishments and make a pile off their darling little asses.

Anyway, drunk driving kills, she did the crime, she has to do the time. Life just got a whole lot simpler than Paris Hilton probably ever expected.

Of course we feel bad for her. Or do we, Ed?

Pardon me for injecting a little conservative thought into all of this, but I have very little sympathy for Ms. Hilton. She has had all of the advantages possible in society, and has shown herself contemptuous to any sense of responsibility. The screaming and crying jag in court only came after she had thrown away her chances to get lenient treatment by lying and evading responsibility for her actions.

[...]

Paris Hilton is no child. She’s twenty-six years old. She has all the money she needs to hire the best lawyers to represent her. For that matter, she had all the money she needed to hire a driver after her license got suspended. Not too many of us have those kinds of resources, but she does, and she decided to flout the law and her probation anyway.

I lean more toward the Ed Morrissey school of thought on the issue. But we can still feel compassion for the poor woman whose emotional growth has obviously been stunted, appearing to have the maturity of a 16 year old little girl.

Can we also hope that 23 days in jail will help this individual grow up and get a life? A real life with a sense of responsibility to herself and the rest of us? That is probably too much to ask. But if the old saw “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has any meaning at all, I would suggest that Paris Hilton write that adage in big, black letters and place it on the wall over her prison bunk.

UPDATE

Allah captures the gravity of the situation perfectly:

Are constant medical attention and round-the-clock police protection enough to preserve this delicate flower? Or will the thought of being away from the media for 20+ days cause her to wilt? All men have their breaking point, my friends. An anxious world waits and wonders.

The moment I enjoy most in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is the madhouse scene at the end of the movie where everyone and their brother are coming out of the woodwork to help George Bailey get the money so that the bank shortage can be made good and he won’t be arrested.

His wife Mary shows up with a wicker washer basket full of dollars and coin and is at the head of a line of folks eager to help. There’s Mr. Gower the druggist, who was saved from jail by George when he was just a boy, coming in and boasting he had collected on the drug store’s charge accounts. The Bailey family’s life long maid Annie throws some money in the pot declaring “I was going to save this for a divorce if I ever got married!” Mr. Martini the bar owner, a man George helped finance a home, arrives declaring that he “busted the juke box” in order to help George.

Then, the telegram from George’s lifelong friend Sam Wainwright whose local office was instructed ” to advance you up to twenty-five thousand dollars, stop. Hee Haw and Merry Christmas!”

If you’re not weeping by then, you are made of sterner stuff than I, gentle readers.

Finally, George’s brother Harry arrives. Harry, who lived the life George was forced to sacrifice to keep the Building and Loan business together. Harry, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner who wouldn’t be alive at all except his brother George saved him from drowning when they were little boys.

It is left to Harry to deliver the best line of the movie: “A toast to my big brother George: The richest man in town.”

And that, my friends, is what it’s all about. The outpouring of support my just concluded blog fundraiser elicited was more than just a testament to your generosity. It was, at bottom, an act of faith and, dare I say, of love. To say that it is better to give than receive is something we’ve all heard since we were kids. Our parents drummed it into us. Our preachers, priests, rabbis, nuns, friars, monks, and imams beat it into us - figuratively and, in some cases, literally.

But for you to open your hearts in such a tangible, earthly way and share with someone the fruits of your labor has been the most humbling experience of my 53 years on this earth. After all, Sue and I weren’t in danger of starving to death or getting thrown out into the street. Your gift was the lifeblood to feed the dreams of a middle aged man who wants a chance to do something in life he finds enjoyable, rewarding, fulfilling, even exhilarating. And if my writing can give back some of the joy and happiness your gift has given to us, I hope you will consider it a fair exchange.

I don’t exactly feel like the inmate who has gotten a last minute reprieve. More like a drowning man who has been thrown a life line. The gift of that life line has enabled Sue and I to catch up on all our bills with a little left over for something I’ve been promising for a couple of years.

In the next month or so, the wonderful web designers at EWebscapes will come up with a new design and a new site for me. A new design - and a new name. Not quite sure what exactly it will be yet. But Right Wing Nuthouse will be retired - with honors. The name has served its purpose well of drawing attention to me. From here on out, my writing will have to serve that purpose.

The gift you have given me - this new lease on life- will not be wasted I assure you. Look for a greatly expanded presence of my writing on the web in the very near future at a couple of different sites. You never know just where I might turn up.

Again, Sue joins me in thanking you all from our hearts.

Rick Moran
Proprietor

It was a debate that almost tore the young nation apart. Where to put the Capitol city?

In 1789, Congress was charged with the difficult task of locating a Capitol city that would satisfy the concerns of the two sections, north and south. The current Capitol of New York was deemed unacceptable by most - except New Yorkers for the most part. Congress had earlier carved out some land near Trenton, New Jersey to serve as the Capitol but southerners put their foot down and refused to appropriate any monies to build anything on the site.

The Senate compromised by moving the Capitol to Philadelphia following the second session of the new Congress while the permanent Capitol would be built along the Potomac at the boundary between Virginia and Maryland. So beginning with the legislative session of 1790 until the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Philadelphia served as our nation’s temporary Capitol.

President Washington, ever mindful of his place in history and enormous popularity, made the journey between New York and Philadelphia something of a whistle stop tour. Every town and hamlet he entered with his impressive carriage drawn by 2 beautiful white mares became an occasion those townfolk were not likely to forget. From miles around, everyone would turn out to see him. He made few speeches, usually some words of thanks for the host and asking people to support the new government.

What the people didn’t see was the rest of Washington’s entourage. It included several wagons of trunks and furniture. It also included the 9 slaves George Washington was bringing with him to Philadelphia.

It was never officially acknowledged that Washington brought slaves with him to the new Capitol. That’s because Philadelphia was the birthplace of the Abolitionist Society and was very touchy about the issue of slavery. Therefore, it came as no surprise that archaeologists, uncovering the remains of house where George Washington (and John Adams) lived while the Capitol was located in Philadelphia, have unearthed a secret passage used by Washington’s slaves that kept them out of sight of visitors to the Presidential mansion:

Archaeologists unearthing the remains of George Washington’s presidential home have discovered a hidden passageway used by his nine slaves, raising questions about whether the ruins should be incorporated into a new exhibit at the site.

The underground passageway is just steps from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It was designed so Washington’s guests would not see slaves as they slipped in and out of the main house.

“As you enter the heaven of liberty, you literally have to cross the hell of slavery,” said Michael Coard, a Philadelphia attorney who leads a group that worked to have slavery recognized at the site. “That’s the contrast, that’s the contradiction, that’s the hypocrisy. But that’s also the truth.”

Coard, a local attorney, hip-hop aficionado, and activist, led a letter writing campaign to force the US Park Service to recognize a small building adjacent to the house as slave quarters for those held in bondage by our first president. The Park Service, who is in charge of the archaeological dig unearthing Washington’s house, was originally only going to put a plaque at the site, not acknowledging its role in housing Washington’s slaves. Now, there will be a memorial at the house not only acknowledging its history but also naming the 9 slaves Washington took with him to Philadelphia.

This is all well and good. It is fitting and proper to recognize the history of the site in this manner. But great care must be taken lest perspective on the heritage of the site be lost leaving only the grim reminders of what Coard calls “the hypocrisy” of that history.

I’ve always thought what truly makes America a different place - “exceptional,” if you will - is this searing dichotomy from our past; that a nation so in love with liberty would have begun its history by holding 3 million people as chattel slaves. Is it “hypocrisy” as Mr. Coard contends? Or is it more like schizophrenia, where the afflicted have only a vague awareness that something is wrong with them? How could Thomas Jefferson write something like the Declaration of Independence -a document quoted by revolutionaries down to this day in calling out tyranny and crying for liberty - while holding hundreds of human beings in bondage?

These are questions asked since the beginning of the republic and even prior to our founding. The English literary giant Samuel Johnson was heard to remark following the Stamp Act troubles in the 1760’s, “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negro slaves?” And Jefferson, perhaps seeking to assuage his own guilty conscience, tried to blame the introduction of slavery in America on the King of England in the Declaration. It was voted down by southerners who knew better than anyone that slavery was America’s sin and blame could not be foisted on any other person or country.

Even casual readers of history know most of these things. They are certainly aware of Washington’s slave owning. But to hear Coard and others talk, one would think that American history is locked away in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day:

Archaeologists have served as guides, answering visitors’ questions. Cheryl LaRoche, a cultural heritage specialist, said she enjoys educating people about how even a prominent statesman like Washington could own slaves.

“We’ve been striving to present a balanced view of history that stands apart from what’s been taught in history books,” LaRoche said.

That’s out and out ridiculous. There isn’t a history book that’s been published in the last 50 years which fails to highlight the slave owning of the Founders. It’s the “Ive got a secret” view of history promoted largely by racialists and “cultural heritage specialists” who probably never paid attention to history in school and therefore would be shocked to learn what they are teaching today’s kids about the Founders.

But my beef isn’t necessarily with the LaRoche’s of this world. It is with those who would sacrifice the narrative power of America’s history on the altar of political correctness and multi-culturalism. Teaching that slavery was an evil, brutal institution is easy. But supplying a little perspective on what that institution meant to the south, to the north, and how it so enmeshed the country in its cultural, economic, and even religious tentacles is a real challenge.

By the time Washington moved into the house they are currently digging up in Philadelphia, slavery had well and truly trapped our country in a hellish nightmare of violence and economic necessity. Parse it any way you would like, but the fact of the matter is that when all is said and done, freeing the slaves at that time would have impoverished the south and turned loose 3 million people to find their way all by themselves.

Many, no doubt, would have stayed on to work the fields as their grandchildren did 70 years later following the Civil War. Many more would have been lost - adrift in an unfamiliar world with few marketable skills and not many friendly faces. There may be something to the idea that living in wretched poverty while free was much preferable to the security of the slave quarters. But that idea doesn’t put food in people’s bellies or give them the skills necessary to feed themselves and their families.

It took a gigantic war to free ourselves from slavery’s iron grip. To this day, that cataclysmic event shapes our politics and our history. Its influence is seen in the controversy over Washington’s house. There is talk of not including the ruins of the House in an exhibit marking the site due to the slavery issue:

The findings have created a quandary for National Park Service and city officials planning an exhibit at the house. They are now trying to decide whether to incorporate the remains into the exhibit or go forward with plans to fill in the ruins and build an abstract display about life in the house.

Making that decision will push back the building of the exhibit, which had been slated to open in 2009. But the oversight committee won’t rush into construction, said Joyce Wilkerson, the mayor’s chief of staff.

“We never thought we’d be faced with this kind of decision,” she said. “We would’ve been happy to have found a pipe! And so we don’t want to proceed blindly or say, ‘This isn’t in the plan.”‘

The care being taken to decide what to do is commendable but I think misplaced. Clearly the site has great historical value and filling it in to erect an “abstract display” of some kind reeks of political correctness. Let’s tell the whole story of what went on in that house. Not just the fact that the first President owned slaves but also through the sheer force of his personality as well as his unquestioned personal integrity, George Washington created the office of the presidency and with it, the new nation he served so well. That’s the kind of history that is not being told in school books today. Without the “indispensable man,” the US experiment in self-government may very well have been stillborn. The forces of separation threatened several times over those first 8 years to tear the country asunder. It was only Washington’s steadfast support for the new constitution and his presence in the government as chief executive that kept the nation from flying apart at the seams.

Will that story also be told in these ruins? Can’t we find room to tell both vital and necessary stories about our first President. Should they include the fact that Washington’s will freed his own slaves upon the death of his wife? What other aspects of our first President’s life and his relationship with his slaves would be appropriate to highlight in order to give a complete picture of the man, the institution, and his times?

These are questions I’d like to see the City Council take up. Alas, in the political world inhabited by most, such questions would undermine the narrative story that the racialists and others would like the public to hear. Such perspective would leave people thinking that Washington was a great leader and flawed human being rather than a one dimensional slave owner and hypocrite.

This articile originally appears in The American Thinker

Peter Rodman, one of the architects of our military and political policy in Iraq and William Shawcross, liberal hawk now branded traitor by the left for his support of the Iraq War, have written what I believe to be an extremely important Op-Ed in the New York Times on why walking away in defeat from Iraq would be an unmitigated disaster:

SOME opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat. A number of them are simply predicting it, while others advocate measures that would make it more likely. Lending intellectual respectability to all this is an argument that takes a strange comfort from the outcome of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the American enterprise in Indochina, it is said, turned out not to be as bad as expected. The United States recovered, and no lasting price was paid.

We beg to differ. Many years ago, the two of us clashed sharply over the wisdom and morality of American policy in Indochina, especially in Cambodia. One of us (Mr. Shawcross) published a book, “Sideshow,” that bitterly criticized Nixon administration policy. The other (Mr. Rodman), a longtime associate of Henry Kissinger, issued a rebuttal in The American Spectator, defending American policy. Decades later, we have not changed our views. But we agreed even then that the outcome in Indochina was indeed disastrous, both in human and geopolitical terms, for the United States and the region. Today we agree equally strongly that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be even more serious and lasting.

So true. The only problem is, there is absolutely no way forward at present that would bring what the Democrats, the world media, the Arab Street, and the America-hating left would be willing to call “victory” in Iraq. These groups have a vested interest in an American defeat - economic, political, strategic - and will proclaim our surrender (along with Osama and his crew) no matter what the military or political situation when most of our combat troops are removed, probably before the 2008 election.

It is maddening to read the pious pronouncements from the left about how desperately they wanted American to succeed in Iraq (this despite the fact that they opposed the war in the first place) all the while deliberately undermining support for the war by the American people. And by “deliberately” I mean they had a game plan, a narrative that they have pushed for the last 4 years with the stated purpose of weakening the resolve of voters so that Democrats could ride the anti-war sentiment into power.

Readers of this site know that it hasn’t been the left alone that caused this drop off in support by the American people. Our war policies have been flawed from the get go and until recently, nothing we tried seemed to stem the violence in Iraq and indeed, made it worse in some respects. But there is a huge difference between mistakes made in planning and policy and the cold, calculated effort by the left to work to crush the morale of the American people so that they could use the Iraq War to vault back into power.

But if the left is trying to convince us that their withering criticisms of the justification for the war, its subsequent prosecution, and all the ancillary issues that have arisen because of it as well as vicious personal attacks on the President were only for the purpose of improving our policies so that we could achieve victory, only little children who still believe in Santa Claus take them at their word. Therefore, one must conclude that their stated reasons for wishing an American defeat in Iraq - that we “deserve” it or that it would teach us a lesson in “humility” - are a true reflection of their beliefs and thinking.

And that kind of thinking, as Rodman/Shawcross point out, is sheer, unadulterated lunacy. It would repeat the mistakes we made in getting out of Viet Nam:

The 1975 Communist victory in Indochina led to horrors that engulfed the region. The victorious Khmer Rouge killed one to two million of their fellow Cambodians in a genocidal, ideological rampage. In Vietnam and Laos, cruel gulags and “re-education” camps enforced repression. Millions of people fled, mostly by boat, with thousands dying in the attempt.

The defeat had a lasting and significant strategic impact. Leonid Brezhnev trumpeted that the global “correlation of forces” had shifted in favor of “socialism,” and the Soviets went on a geopolitical offensive in the third world for a decade. Their invasion of Afghanistan was one result. Demoralized European leaders publicly lamented Soviet aggressiveness and American paralysis.

How does this lesson travel across the years to become relevant in Iraq:

Today, in Iraq, there should be no illusion that defeat would come at an acceptable price. George Orwell wrote that the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. But anyone who thinks an American defeat in Iraq will bring a merciful end to this conflict is deluded. Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.

As in Indochina more than 30 years ago, millions of Iraqis today see the United States helping them defeat their murderous opponents as the only hope for their country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have committed themselves to working with us and with their democratically elected government to enable their country to rejoin the world as a peaceful, moderate state that is a partner to its neighbors instead of a threat. If we accept defeat, these Iraqis will be at terrible risk. Thousands upon thousands of them will flee, as so many Vietnamese did after 1975.

No word from the Democrats or the left on what to do with these brave Iraqis who are constantly at risk of being assassinated for helping us and their government. In their world, they don’t exist or worse, are stupid dupes fooled by us evil Americans into helping to legitimize a puppet government. And our government has shamefully denied most Iraqis visas, setting a strict limit on the number of Iraqi immigrants who can come to this country (a total of 692 so far). While security concerns are paramount, it would seem to me that Iraqis who have served American interests should have their visa applications expedited. Indeed, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff has just recently put procedures in place that will do just that, allowing 7,000 more Iraqi citizens the opportunity to live in the United States.

Rodman/Shawcross conclude by pointing out the necessity for maintaining our credibility:

Osama bin Laden said, a few months after 9/11, that “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The United States, in his mind, is the weak horse. American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.

Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance.

When government officials argued that American credibility was at stake in Indochina, critics ridiculed the notion. But when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he and his colleagues invoked Vietnam as a reason not to take American warnings seriously. The United States cannot be strong against Iran — or anywhere — if we accept defeat in Iraq.

Already, a chorus is growing on the left that Iran is not a threat, that evidence for their aggressive intentions has been fabricated “just like the evidence that got us into Iraq.” To call that kind of myopic twaddle “suicidal” gives bridge jumpers a bad name. We may very well end up going to war with Iran - or not. But to dismiss them as a threat to the United States, our friends, and our interests is childish and stupid.

Even Barak Obama sees Iran as a serious threat and has not taken the military option off the table. Nor has Hillary Clinton or any other serious Democratic candidate for President. Only those who live in their little Bush-hating cocoons and view every action taken by the government as more evidence of the President’s deviousness can possibly believe we are “manufacturing” evidence in order to justify military action against Iran. Why bother? The Iranians have supplied us with plenty of justification without us having to manufacture anything.

We must find a way through to a satisfactory ending to our involvement in Iraq. There is no alternative. Even if the rest of the world crows about our “defeat” in Iraq when our combat troops depart, governments in the region - including Iran - will know better and base their actions on what is going on in the real world and not the desperate imaginings of fanatical jihadists, the anti-American Arab street, and bitter leftists whose desire to see America humbled has so unbalanced them that it is impossible to tell the difference between the language urging the defeat of the United States used by our enemies and the rhetoric that emanates from supposedly respectable liberal quarters in Congress and on the internet.

That too, evokes memories of Viet Nam, the last time our “humiliation” was seen as a good thing by the left.

Glad to see my brother Jim, the Troubadour of the family, back in the blogging saddle. His excellent site Vivid Air is once again alive and kicking.

A teacher for his entire professional life, in the last few years Jim has begun to make a name for himself in the folk music world with his group of 50 something musician friends who have formed sort of a 60’s folk tribute group. The band’s name, Chilly Winds, is from the haunting ballad of the same name by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio and John Phillips who later gained fame as a member of the West Coast band Mamas and the Papas:

I’m goin’ where them chilly winds don’t blow. Gonna find a true love. That is where I want to go.
Out where them chilly winds don’t blow.

I’m leavin’ in the springtime, won’t be back till fall. If I can forget you, I might not come back at all.
Out where them chilly winds don’t blow.

Jim’s most recent entry at Vivid Air details the origins and history of the song many of us have sung around campfires for years. We know it as “Wimoweh” or “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” or perhaps even “Mbube” which is the Zulu word American folk artist Pete Seeger evidently mangled in pronunciation to come up with the Weavers version of the song which they called “Wimoweh.”

More recently, Paul Simon made a version by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and her South African singers famous on his excellent album Graceland. It’s amazing how many artists and arrangements there have been of this little tune. Go read Jim’s article for some fascinating details on the history of the song among Zulus.

And make sure to bookmark Jim’s site and add his RSS feed to your reader.

Joe Klein, reporter, author, columnist, and blogger who is currently ensconced at Time Magazine’s blog Swampland, has had a full flowing, Road to Damascus revelation about the left wing blogosphere.

After pondering the matter for however long he has been taking the slings and arrows flung his way by the rabid dog left, it has suddenly dawned on Mr. Klein that these are not very nice people. Nor are they very rational. Nor are they very “liberal” in the classical sense of the word.

Klein’s eyes were opened when he quoted Representative Jane Harmon (former Chairman of the House Intel Committee until Reverend Mother Pelosi saw fit to boot her off in favor of one of her cronies) prior to the Iraq funding vote as saying that she wanted to vote against the bill but felt an obligation to support the troops by giving them the equipment they needed to do their jobs. Harmon, as politicians are wont to do, changed her mind and voted against the bill anyway leaving Klein hanging out to dry and the netnuts went to town on the poor fellow:

The next day, I was blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up! I had quoted Harman in the past tense—common usage for politicians who know their words will appear after a vote takes place. That was sloppy and… suspicious! Proof that you just can’t trust the mainstream media. On Eschaton, a blog that specializes in media bashing, I was given the coveted “Wanker of the Day” award. Eventually, Harman got wind of this and called, unbidden, to apologize for misleading me, saying I had quoted her correctly but she had changed her mind to reflect the sentiments of her constituents. I published her statement and still got hammered by bloggers and Swampland commenters for “stalking” Harman into an apology, for not checking her vote in the Congressional Record, for being a “water boy for the right wing” and many other riffs unfit to print.

First of all, if Joe wants the job of carrying water for the right wing, he’s more than welcome to it. Somebody’s got to. Since no one in Congress seems to be stepping up to do it, it may as well be Klein.

But Joe would first have to delve into the world of moonbattery and paranoia. For he has, in fact, discovered the lefty netnuts to be a bunch of unhinged, drooling, raving lunatics:

This is not the first time this kind of free-range lunacy has been visited upon me. Indeed, it happens, oh, once a week to each of us who post on Swampland (Karen Tumulty, Jay Carney and Ana Marie Cox are the others). A reasonable reader might ask, Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? Aren’t you pretty tough on the Bush Administration? Didn’t you write a few months ago that George W. Bush would be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history? And why on earth does any of this matter?

[...]

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

I was just thinking about this very thing as it relates to the right side of the blogosphere the other day as I was bemoaning my loss of readership over these last few months. While many smaller and mid-sized bloggers have drummed me out of the Conservative Book Club and taken away my key to the executive washroom at Haliburton’s corporate headquarters (a turn of events I regret for the most part since a lot of those people I consider my friends), all of the largest righty blogs still link to this site on occasion and have never attacked me personally for being something of an apostate. This kind of tolerance has always been lacking on the left and bespeaks a mindset exactly described as Klein; if you don’t toe the line, we kick you in the balls.

But before we go patting Joe on the back for having the good sense to recognize the illiberality of liberal blogs, Klein descends into full blown moonbattery himself while ignoring history with a vengeance:

Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party’s bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh’s show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don’t matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right—in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration.

It’s the right’s fault that lefty bloggers are a bunch of pinch-faced, bile spewing half wits? And they are only aping a “tone” that was pioneered by Rush Limbaugh?

Does Klein actually believe that all this bloody “speaking truth to power” by savaging your opponent in the most vile, personal way imaginable sprang from the microphone of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990’s?

I’m sorry, but that is at best disingenuous and at worst, a calumnious lie. Let me give Mr. Klein a little history lesson to open his eyes a bit.

If modern conservatism has a beginning, it could very well have been the publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.. Let us examine what some of those polite, tolerant, intellectually honest liberals said about the book at the time:

The book reviewers were absolutely hostile, enraged at what they read.

“The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face,” snarled one, ominously comparing it to a work of the Ku Klux Klan. “This fascist thesis,” angrily spluttered another, “…This…pure fascism….What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for…?” Still others piled on. The book was dismissed as a series of “fanatically emotional attacks” that “succeeded in turning the stomachs of its readers.” The author drew howls of outrage, the lesser of which focused on adjectives like “rude” and “obnoxious” before descending into cries of “fascist.”

The name of the book was not Godless. And the author was not Ann Coulter. The book that drew such ferocious attention was God and Man at Yale. The author, a recent Yale graduate, was a precocious William F. Buckley, Jr.

With conservatism consigned to the outer political darkness in the 50’s and the 60’s, liberals felt more than enabled to carry out a slash and burn rhetorical campaign against them. “Nazi” and “Klansmen” were common epithets applied to conservatives - as they are today. Witness the treatment Goldwater received in the 1964 campaign:

For Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a presidential nomination, the unending torrent of abuse verged on the apoplectic. CBS News solemnly reported the week of his nomination that Goldwater’s first act after the convention would be to travel to Germany for a visit to “Berchtesgaden, once Hitler’s stamping ground.” And what will the conservative Goldwater do once there? “There are signs,” CBS reporter Daniel Schorr said ominously, “that the American and German right wings are joining up…” Got that? Barry Goldwater, said CBS in so many words, was really a Nazi. With a presidential nomination in hand, he was literally heading to Hitler’s home to get the international Nazi movement rolling. The story, from the trip to Germany to the visit to Hitler’s estate was, of course, false from beginning to end.

Equally hysterical was a liberal magazine that published a 64-page “psychological study” of the candidate which began: “Do you think Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” You guessed it — after claiming to poll over 12,000 psychiatrists across the country, the answer was no. New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger answered the question this way: “The possibility exists that, should he (Goldwater) enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow.” In case voters didn’t get the message, Democratic strategist and LBJ aide Bill Moyers designed the so-called “daisy commercial” that saw a child counting the petals of a flower disappear in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

The Nixonian interlude allowed the left to fully vent their hatred at one conservative who most people think deserved everything he got. But the emergence of Reagan on the national scene gave liberals the screaming meemies. Reagan himself remarked that he discovered once he crossed the Mississippi River, he grew horns and a tail. And the viciously personal and outrageous comments made by his political opponents during his terms in office were unmatched until the Clinton years. Ted Kennedy accused President Reagan of deliberately fostering policies that would starve old people and children. Representative Charles Rangel called him a racist. The vitriolic hate directed against Reagan was met with a shrug, a wink, and usually a devastating put down that always contained a little humor. Hardly the stuff of a right wing attack dog.

For Klein to blame the left’s historic, hate-filled rhetoric on the recent phenomena of talk radio and specifically Limbaugh’s broadly drawn (and at times, over the top) satire is fantastically ridiculous. The world did not begin in the 1990’s with the right’s reaction to the deliberate Clintonian strategy of personally destroying your opponent with outrageous smears and lies. It’s just that the left has now perfected the technique and uses the world of blogs to vastly amplify the tactic so that the target feels beseiged. Witness the most recent kerfluffle over a post at Six Meat Buffet that skewered recently deceased blogger Steve Gilliard.

Forgetting how they reacted every time in the last few years when a person of note on the right passed away, publishing the most outrageously disrespectful, cruel, heartless, drivel imaginable, the netnuts went ballistic I personally found the post in extremely poor taste and borderline racist. But the point wasn’t to skewer Gilliard so much as to show liberal bloggers what incredible hypocrites they truly are.

The fallout from the episode claimed a Tennessee woman - a liberal - who blogged at WKRN. She made the mistake of pasting an excerpt from the Six Meat Buffet piece and not condemning it. For her oversight, she was subjected to a withering blast of stupidity from left wing bloggers and their mouth breathing commenters. She has since quit in disgust.

Klein is already hearing it today for daring to call the liberal blogs what they are; raving lunatics who cannot tolerate an iota of dissent from their worldview. Will Joe Klein do as most other liberals do who find themselves in the crosshairs of lefty blogs and go before them with bended knee and abjectly apologize for his heresy? Or is he enough of an independent thinker to tell them to take a hike?

Should be interesting to watch…

In the past, I have commemorated the anniversary of D-Day by trying to relate the courage and bravery of those men who stormed the beaches of France with our current military and their effort in the Middle East. It seemed to me at the time to be vitally important that we recalled that heroism exhibited by our “Citizen Soldiers” from so many years ago in order to steel ourselves for the challenges we face on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as future battlefields as yet unnamed.

But the road I’ve travelled these past months has caused me to see the conflicts in which we are currently engaged on a more personal level. A young man falls on a grenade and saves the lives of his comrades. Who was he? What was he like? Or perhaps the story of a mother serving her country while her husband and children try to make do at home, missing her terribly with the children not understanding why their mom can’t be with them.

The fact is, we can talk all we want to about the grand strategy in this war and the political fights at home to end it. But the truth is, it all comes down to the guys with the guns who volunteered to serve the larger purposes of their government. No matter what side of the war you are on or what you think about the government that is prosecuting it, you are a small minded person indeed if you can’t see past your boosterism or denigration of the war itself and recognize that individual American citizens, trained and equipped better than any army in the history of civilization, are placing themselves in harms way every day to fulfill a private compact they made with we, the people of the United States. Quite simply, they took an oath to protect us. They promised to take up arms and fight when our freely elected government determined that it was necessary for them to do so.

It is obvious that a sizable majority of them in Iraq believe quite firmly that their efforts are worth the price they are paying. When more than 70% of them re-enlist in order to return despite the extended tours, the hardship the war is causing their families, the personal discomfort of serving in a war zone, and the dangers of combat, even the densest among us must realize that the desire to serve a cause greater than themselves outweighs all else.

You may disagree vehemently with that cause. But who are we - any of us - be we supporters or opponents of our involvement in Iraq to tell these people that they are either right or wrong in what they believe? It seems to me that they have more than earned the right to follow their own lights and don’t require our pity or thanks for that matter. But their actions and sacrifices demand our respect. And that they will have from me until my dying day.

I’ll leave you this D-Day Anniversary with an extended excerpt from one of the participants. Felix Branham was a demolitions expert in the 29th division who went ashore in the second wave at Omaha Beach. His compelling story is told in its entirety here.

We didn’t talk of dying, unless it was a joke. We used to kid a guy named Gino because he carried a big wad of money, $700 or $800, and he had a beautiful ring.

I would say, “Ferrari, when you hit that beach and you fall, man, I’m going to be getting your wallet out.” And another guy would say, “Yep, I’m going to have that ring of yours.”

And we sat around and thought about that, never thinking it would really happen. But what else did we have to talk about?

[...]

We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far and we’d been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home. Well, as it was, we had to settle for another day. We loaded again on Monday afternoon. The rain was letting up some and we started to move out about 10:30 or 11:00 that night. It was still light.

We got twelve miles from Normandy and stopped. We had been told there was a sand bar about 50 yards off shore. [We were also told] if our coxswain on our landing craft let that ramp down, don’t let him do that. Make him go over sideways, but don’t let him let the ramp down because people will drown. Well, that came to pass. A lot of people drowned that way.

We were in the second wave. When we got to the beach, there were 2nd and 5th Rangers piling in with us at the same time. We had a regimental commander named Charles D. Canham and he went in leading us. He was our colonel. There he was firing. He got his rifle shot out of his hand and he reached down and used his .45. He was about 55 years old and was the bravest guy and one of the finest leader. We had lots of leaders. Our platoon leaders, our platoon sergeants, we had good leaders. There’s no question. If we hadn’t had good leaders, we would have never made it off of Omaha Beach.

My boat team was the first one to go over the sea wall; I saw some of my friends die. In my boat team of thirty men we had only lost about five or six men. We were lucky. God knows we were. We followed the line that the engineers had laid out and we got through. We went up the hill then went parallel to Omaha Beach through this little town. Mingled in with us were the 2nd and 5th Rangers. They were scattered about and so forth. Of course, there was a lot of scattering about on Omaha Beach.

[...]

The first man I saw from my company to die was a guy named Gene Ferrara. He was little Italian boy out of Jersey City. He was the kid we teased about carrying $700-$800 in his wallet. I landed and told him to move up. He moved up and then I got ready to move up, too. We were going leaps and bounds, trying to get cover and get behind the sea wall. I moved up ahead of him and happened to look back. The tide was beginning to take him back; he had been killed.

It was chaotic. No one can realize it until they were right there to see it. But you hear so many tales about it. Each one of us had our own little battle field. D-Day was D-Day, and it was awful.

That’s all I can tell you. When we landed on Omaha Beach, we were well trained, we had good leaders, and the Lord God Almighty was with us, and that’s all I can say. That was D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

I have never been back there, but I would love to go. I can’t think of anything that I would rather do right now than to go back to Normandy and see it. I have a little bottle sitting in my living room with sand from Omaha Beach in it. I would love to go and shovel some up in my hand myself and see what I saw on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Ordinary men exhibiting extraordinary courage. And there were 30,000 stories from the beaches that day, all of them equally poignant but all of them different.

Remember them all today…

I first read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s searing account of US government depredations against Native Americans, the summer before my senior year in high school. The book hit me like a ton of bricks. At that age, such knowledge is like a cold splash of ice water in the face, an eye opening bracer that fosters a certainty in the righteousness of a young person’s point of view.

I must have been insufferable, telling anyone who would listen that the US government was worse than the Nazis and that all whites had blood on their hands. Of course, Viet Nam was tearing the country apart at the time and trust in government had hit an all time low. Placed in that perspective, Brown’s account of government misdealings and misdeeds seemed to amplify already deeply held beliefs about the evil nature of our government and the lie that was America.

Slowly, over many years, I gained more perspective on the extraordinarily complex and tragic history of Native Americans and their contact with white Europeans and Americans. It is a perspective that doesn’t lessen the severity of the crimes committed against Indians but does allow for the recognition that other factors were at work over the 500 years of contact between the two cultures. Most notably that what was happening between the two races and cultures had occurred many times before in many different places on earth as one society moved in to displace another.

This is a story best told by Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempts to answer the question “[W]hy history unfolded differently on the different continents over the last 13 thousand years.” Where early Americans believed that the reason they had guns and steel (and not incidentally, more potent germs) was because they were superior human beings to native Americans, Diamond shows that the reason for the disparity had much more to do with the shape of continents and the subsequent development of agriculture based on indigenous crops and livestock.

Simply put, Eurasia had many times more wild food sources and wild animals conducive to being domesticated by man than anywhere else in the world. The early onset of organized agriculture forced people to form ever more complex social entities which eventually led to nation states and the conquering of indigenous people.

But the drama of displacing native peoples was an old one by the time whites arrived on the North American continent. On every continent as wave after wave of the peopling of our world occurred, more advanced cultures with better weapons, better organization, and sheer numbers overtook and threw out the original inhabitants. And when whites first arrived on our shores, the fate of Native Americans was sealed thanks largely to the power politics of Europe and the zealotry of missionaries.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee wasn’t about perspective. It was an indictment. In that, it succeeded beyond the author’s imaginings. And while the movie concentrated only on the history of the Lakota people from Little Big Horn in 1876 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the book chronicled the equally tragic history of most of the plains Indians as the US government forced Native Americans on to reservations, cutting them off from their culture, their ancestral homes, and most importantly, their spiritual core.

As the movie made crystal clear thanks to a fine acting turn by Aidan Quinn as Senator Henry Dawes, the “do-gooders” actually contributed in no small way to this tragedy. In a classical sense, those who wished to “help” the Indians by tearing them from their land and forcing them to assimilate committed the sin of overarching hubris. This attitude was not as uncommon in America as one might think. Every President from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt spoke of treating the Indians with respect and dignity while showing them the error of their savage ways and turning them into farmers or ranchers. But the reality was much darker, bloodier. In the name of commerce, or settlement (to fulfill Manifest Destiny) or to grab valuable resources, treaties were broken, wars were begun, massacres occurred, and sickness and death descended on the tribes thinning their ranks until the survivors were herded onto barren, desolate parcels of land that the whites didn’t want.

The film brings out this conflict in stark relief. And what makes it so compelling is that the movie resists the temptation to portray most whites as one dimensional evil doers hell bent on blood and destruction of native Americans. The violence done to the Indian is more subtle and concentrates on how forcing Native Americans to subsume their culture and heritage to fit in to white society was every bit as damaging as any war ever fought to subdue them.

The character of Sitting Bull - a powerful performance by veteran actor August Schellenberg - is pitch perfect. What we know of the historical person was that he was a proud resistance fighter against white encroachment who in some ways ended up the very caricature of a cigar store Indian only to redeem himself at the end of his life in the eyes of his people. Schellenberg did not flinch from portraying some of the more unattractive qualities exhibited by Sitting Bull which made his strength and determination all the more evocative. A sure fire Emmy nomination is in the offing for Schellenberg’s outstanding performance.

The final major character of Charles Eastman was perhaps one of the weaker links in the narrative. Part of the reason was the impossibility of trying to show the inner turmoil that Eastman - a Native American ripped from his boyhood home by his assimilated father - must have felt as he made the transition to his own assimilation as a college graduate and doctor. Adam Beach was more than adequate in the role of the Lakota doctor who goes to the Pine Ridge reservation to minister to his people only to end up disillusioned with his own role in forcing the Indians to assimilate while witnessing the atrocity at Wounded Knee.

And that horrible tragedy was portrayed quite well in the film. The story of the Ghost Dance and the role it played in the massacre at Wounded Knee has always touched me to the very depths of my heart. To be so desperate for spiritual comfort to believe that by dancing you can bring back the buffalo, make the white man disappear, and become immune to their bullets sums up the helplessness and hopelessness of tribal people who never could quite come to grips with the destruction of their culture. It is tragedy piled on top of tragedy. And its portrayal on the screen was extremely well done.

No doubt this production will be nominated for numerous Emmy awards. The photography is gorgeous. The script is spare and realistic. The direction is crisp and clean. And the acting is uniformly excellent. My guess is that it will receive numerous nominations next month and sweep the awards in September.

And deservedly so. It’s the best movie of its genre to be made in a while and shows once again that HBO has the best original movies of any network on television.

The Rick Moran Show on Blogtalk radio will go live today from 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here.

In addition to the usual tomfoolery, we’ll take a good look at the controversy surrounding Barry Bonds and his quest to break the all-time home run record currently held by Hank Aaron. I’ll have plenty to say about whether Bonds, an almost certain user of steroids and other banned substances, deserves to be honored for this achievement.

You can call into the show and yell at me by dialing (718) 664-9764.

A podcast will be available after the show ends.