Right Wing Nut House

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is newbie Andrew Olmsted for “The Peace Myth.” Finishing second was Soccer Dad for “Baker’s Bad Recipe.”

Finishing first in the non Council category was “The Clash of Convictions and the Remaking of the World of Wars” from Winds of Change.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say hello to the newest Council member, Colossus of Rhodey who will take the place of the departing Shrinkwrapped. Good luck to the good doctor in his future endeavors.

And if you’d like to participate in the weekly Watchers vote, go here and follow instructions.

It’s bad enough when some B-List blogger and wacko talking head like Debbie Schussel runs off at the mouth about the danger of electing Muslims. That kind of idiocy can be partly ascribed to Ms. Schussel’s desire to move up the blogging ladder, bashing Muslims being a quick way to fame and fortune when plumbing the extreme depths of the conservative sphere for audience and links.

But when a Congressman of the United States sends a letter to his constituents that raises the false specter of some kind of Muslim invasion of Congress while simultaneously warning that “traditional” values would be threatened by Muslim immigration, it forces me once again to take up the Cudgel of Righteousness (already bloodied from yesterday’s pummeling of Schussel) and give Representative Virgil Goode, Jr. a few well deserved whacks upside the head:

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., left, said Keith Ellison’s decision to use a Koran in a private swearing in for the House of Representatives was a mistake.
Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

In taking the good Mr. Goode to task for this stupidity, allow me first to slap all of you lefties around a bit for once again overgeneralizing when it comes to Values Conservatives by attempting to make the bad Mr. Goode a poster boy of sorts for that constituency.

Goode isn’t even a good example of an extremist. That’s because his letter is so transparently a political calculation that it doesn’t even come off as sincere. No Congressman can be this stupid, can they?

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Goode’s spokesman has informed us that the Congressman actually is that stupid; he declines to apologize and “stands by” the letter.

Of course, such incidents help Ellison enormously. They allow him to appear the reasonable, bemused, aggrieved party while anyone who has a passing familiarity with the devastating series of articles published by the Powerline boys knows that “reasonable” is not the way to describe many of the new Congressman’s views.

But beyond the shameless, shallow pandering by Goode is a revealed truth; that too often Republican politicians are using this “traditional values” theme to capitalize on some unimagined fear as in the case of Goode and his phantom Muslims. We also see other individual groups like gays targeted as somehow being in conflict with traditional American values - as if these values are practiced by people solely as a result of their religion, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, or any other qualifier that a politician seeks to use to drive a wedge between us.

There are plenty of gay people who practice what, by any definition would be “traditional” American values. They are as monogamous as heterosexual couples. They raise children. They are god fearing folk. The cry when the flag passes in front of them. They fight and die for their country. Aside from their sexual orientation, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate them from your average Joe American. (Don’t believe me? Visit Gay Patriot and any one of a number of Republican/center right gay blogs and read a little bit about what they believe.) And yet, because of the actions of some so-called “Gay Rights” groups - who are much more about advancing a leftist agenda then they are about advancing gay rights - most conservatives look with distrust upon gays who believe in traditional American values.

There are traditional values that are under attack - but not by gays, or Muslims, or any specific group. Rather it is leftist ideology that seeks to remove religion from public life not separate it as they claim. It is leftist cant that seeks to change the narrative of our nation’s founding, substituting the basest of motives for Independence instead of the truly heroic and improbable way our freedom was achieved. The left has spent the last 40 years degrading our culture, denigrating our heroes, altering our history, deriding the simplicity and patriotism of the most common of folk among us, and in the end, trying to tear down 200 years of tradition and decency that our ancestors fought to pass down to the rest of us.

Whether this is their intent or not is a moot point. Their actions are having this affect. Whether it is the “no holds barred, anything goes” cesspool of a culture they have created via Hollywood or, in the name of “civil rights,” erecting a structure of separateness and discrimination via “affirmative action,” the left has done its best to destroy what many Americans cherish and believe in.

But none of this excuses idiots like Goode - and many others who use the battle cry of “Traditional Values” to advance their own agendas - from responsibility for engendering fear and loathing among those who are susceptible to the siren call of nativism. This strain has a long, dishonorable history in America, going back to the first days of the Republic when the first wave of immigrants began to unload onto the docks in New York and Boston. Then it was mostly Swiss and Germans with a smattering of Scots and Irish. Later waves of Irish immigrants would raise the spectre of not only aliens who didn’t possess “American values” but arrivals who were papists to boot. And each successive wave, the nativist impulse would rear its ugly head and find something scary and alien about the newcomers.

Goode is no different. From his letter:

“We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country,” Goode said in the letter. “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”

Right out of the nativist playbook.

I’m all for controlling our borders. I’m all for enforcing the law. But I am also in favor of increasing legal immigration. If someone wishes to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole that it takes to get here legally and then work toward citizenship, that alone should denote a person’s interest in the “traditional values” of America. There are plenty of Muslims here today - second and third generation Muslims - who embrace the same values you and I do and are no more a threat to those values than my pet cat Snowball.

For Goode to posit the notion that Muslims are incapable of adopting and embracing traditional values not only flies in the face of history and everything we know about immigrants but also bespeaks a shallow and corrupt mind, incapable of grasping the shining truth about America as a melting pot that embraces all cultures and ethnic groups.

And that may be the most traditional of all American values.

As the quest to unravel the mystery surrounding Captain Jamil Hussein as a source for approximately 61 AP stories originating from Iraq continues, several critics from the left have weighed in to denounce the effort - most by using the curious logic that it doesn’t really matter, that things are so bad in Iraq what’s the difference if a couple of stories turn out to be created out of whole cloth by the enemy?

Things are bad in Iraq as every blogger who has taken an interest in this story has been constrained to point out. And in the grand scheme of things, whether or not the AP has been a tool for enemy propaganda - willing or unwilling - is not the point either. For myself, I assume that the AP is in the same boat as other western news outlets when it comes to reporting from Iraq, albeit given their extensive contacts and experience in the region, probably not as beholden to “stringers” for getting the facts for a story as others.

What is at issue here and why the stakes are so high is so simple that one would think that both left and right could agree on the vital importance of getting to the bottom of the Captain Hussein mystery; to discover the facts of the matter.

Will this discovery alter the outcome of the war? Of course not. Will it ruin AP if it is discovered that Hussein is either an insurgent plant or a non-existent source, a Jayson Blaired construct without flesh and bones, existing as a convenient catch-all pseudonymous source for particularly ghastly rumored attacks on innocents? Probably not, although it might cause the AP to become a little more careful in the sourcing.

Why then?

Eric Boehlert thinks he has the answer:

The warbloggers’ strawman is built around the claim that if the AP hadn’t reported the Burned Alive story, which was no more than a few sentences within a larger here’s-the-carnage-from-Baghdad-today article, then Americans would still gladly support the war in Iraq. That it was somehow the contested Burned Alive story that swung public opinion on Iraq, not the three years’ worth of bad news.

Chasing the Burned Alive story down a rabbit’s hole, giddy warbloggers deliberately ignore the hundreds of Iraqi civilians who are killed each week, the thousands who are injured, and the tens of thousands who try to flee the disintegrating country. None of that matters. Only Burned Alive matters, as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely.

Boehlert might want to rethink that first sentence. In fact, the burning Sunnis was the lead story in hundreds of newspapers around the world. It was headline news in dozens of prominent dailies here in the United States (including the Suburban Daily Herald in my neck of the woods). His contention that it was “no more than a few sentences” is absurd on its face and bespeaks either an extraordinary ignorance of the facts or a deliberate attempt to downplay how the story was disseminated.

But why the superficial, shallow, needlessly partisan, and, in the end, stupid charge that bloggers who are covering this story wish to discredit the AP in order to reverse the slide in public support for the war? What bloggers are after here is the same thing that bloggers wanted from CBS following the Dan Rather TANG documents scandal; an acknowledgement of error. The AP has relied on Captain Hussein as either an eyewitness source or as a knowledgeable spokesman for violent incidents in Iraq going back at least to April. Trying to get to the bottom of who or what Hussein is would seem to be a job tailor made for blogs - right or left.

The larger issues at play in this story should be of concern to every blogger, indeed every American who is a consumer of news. And at the top of the list of questions is does the AP really care if they get it right? It appears to me that their double checking on the accuracy of the story in question was cursory and designed to confirm what had been written rather than approach the story afresh in order to see if their sources were correct. We know now, for instance, that at least two of the mosques that were supposedly burned in the original AP story are still standing and still open - the only damage being some bullet holes in the facade.

And their interviewing of “new” witnesses to the atrocity was revealing; the AP swears that their stories were all consistent with the facts that were reported. I daresay that this should have set off a bunch of red flags to begin with; a first year journalism student knows that eyewitness testimony tends to vary wildly from person to person. And in this case - interviewing witnesses 4 days after the story broke and was featured on al-Jazeera as well as other Arab media - one wonders how much these eyewitnesses actually “witnessed” and how much they gleaned from broadcast media about the story. No word from the AP whether they even tried to determine if their “witnesses” were cross contaminated in this way.

But this is not central to either Boehlert’s argument nor my criticism of his ridiculously flawed and over-generalized piece. For instance, Boehlert links to this Bob Owen piece about the incident where the blogger asks a legitimate question:

This presents us with the unsettling possibility that the Associated Press has no idea how much of the news it has reported out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is in fact real, and how much they reported was propaganda. they failure of accountability here is potentially of epic proportions.

When producer Mary Mapes and anchor Dan Rather ran faked Texas Air National Guard records on 60 Minutes, it was undoubtedly the largest news media scandal of 2004, and yet, it was an isolated scandal, identified within hours, affecting one network and one show in particular.

This developing Associated Press implosion may go back as far as two years, affecting as many as 60 stories from just this one allegedly fake policeman alone. And Jamil Hussein is just one of more than a dozen potentially fake Iraqi policemen used in news reports the AP disseminates around the world. This does not begin to attempt to account for non-offical sources which the AP will have an even harder time substantiating. Quite literally, almost all AP reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations is now suspect, and with good reason.

Why does Boehlert fail to mention that Captain Hussein is a featured source in more than 60 AP stories? Because it ruins his thesis that it is this one story pursued by conservative bloggers is just a question of “holding the AP accountable for questionable sourcing in an isolated incident…” Is Boehlert really this stupid or, like many in the media, is he simply lazy and won’t address the massive implications involved in generating fake news from a war zone?

At the risk of being redundant (something I feel constrained to do given the short attention span and limited reading skills of most of the lefties who visit this site), I will say again the unraveling of this mystery - even if it implicates the AP in years of selling the American public fake news - does not change anything on the ground in Iraq now and would not have changed the attitudes of the American public regarding the war. The people of the United States are a lot smarter than your average lefty and don’t need either enemy propaganda coming from the AP or liberals glorifying our mistakes and blunders in Iraq to know that we are failing there.

But Owens has hit the nail on the head; the only asset that the Associated Press has is its credibility. If it can be shown that Jamil Hussein is a fake or doesn’t exist, where does that leave AP’s coverage of the war over the last three years? How do you separate the facts from what might be propaganda? It’s a question Boehlert doesn’t even bother to address because his mission is to slime “warbloggers” as he calls them by over generalizing and ascribing non-existent motives to their efforts.

And in the process of pooh-poohing the efforts of those who are attempting to get the facts on Hussein, Boehlert also misses a story that would reveal the inner workings of the media and answer some fairly basic questions that absolutely no one connected with any major media outlet has deemed it important enough to answer. That is, the use of local “stringers” to gather the news that western reporters, due to the extraordinary danger of the war zone, cannot gather for themselves.

Boehlert rightly points out that we don’t give enough credit to the dangers faced by western reporters in Iraq. He highlights the death of an Associated Press Television News cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, who was killed in Mosul while filming a gun battle between police and insurgents. Boehlert informs us that Mr. Lutfallah’s death brings the total of journalists and others associated with the media killed in Iraq to 129. Even for the locals, it is an incredibly dangerous place to work.

And, as I’ve written before during the Jill Carroll hostage story and in numerous other posts, the process of gathering facts, writing a story, vetting sources, and meeting a deadline is so hazardous that the media’s reliance on stringers is an absolute necessity. Otherwise, the only news we’d be getting would be from press releases by CENTCOM and the Iraqi government. No one wants that - despite Mr. Boehlert’s hysterically off-base arguments to the contrary.

But as citizens interested in the news, we have a right and, indeed, an obligation, to demand that media outlets using stringers answer a few basic questions about them. We can certainly understand why their real names can’t be used or why they would be withheld. But we can ask about their credentials, their experience, the vetting of sources by both the reporter on the scene and the editor back home, and a dozen other noteworthy issues that bloggers have raised about them.

Boehlert is so busy trashing conservative bloggers and trying to demonize their motives that he’s missing a great story that Captain Hussein is only a part. And writing for a publication that ostensibly deals with issues relating to the media, it is unbelievable that he dismisses the questions raised in the course of reporting on this story. They go to the heart of media credibility and believability and have nothing whatsoever to do with trying to place blame for the American public’s attitudes toward the war on the shoulders of the men and women trying to do an impossible job under the most trying of circumstances.

The incuriousness of Boehlert and the rest of the left regarding how news is collected and disseminated from the war zone is telling. Perhaps they are afraid that if they scratch too deep, some of their own cherished notions about the media and maybe even the war itself will have to change.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has the latest on who is Jamil Hussein.

The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no “Sgt. Jamil Hussein” at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger’s contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named “Jamil Hussein” has ever worked at Yarmouk.

According to the CPATT officers, Captain Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim “denies ever speaking to the AP or any other media.” I retracted information to the contrary two days ago based on a single CPATT source who said he had erroneously stated that Gulaim had admitted being the source.

If I might venture a little informed speculation…

It is an extremely hazardous business, this transliteration of turning Arabic names into English. As a frequent reader of English language Arabic media sites including The Daily Star, Naharnet, Ya Libnan, al-Jazeera, and Palestine Times, it is amazing the different spellings one comes across for the same proper names and names of organizations.

One example is “Hizbullah.” This is the way that the Daily Star spells the name of the terrorist group. But look at the alternate spellings I’ve come across both in western and Arab media:

Hizbollah
Hezbollah
Hizballah
Hezballah
Hezb’allah
Hizb’allah

The same issues arises with the spelling of the Lebanese Prime Minister’s name:

Siniora
Seniora
Saniora

Is this entire issue a translation problem? I think Malkin has almost totally knocked that issue down although I think we should wait to see if AP has any response whatsoever to what Michelle has discovered. But I find it tantalizing that the spelling of the two names could be so close, even if the individual denies talking to the AP. There are numerous reasons why he might make such a denial, including the fact that he might be in hot water if he did speak to the press without authorization. But then why use his name in the stories?

The AP, of course, could solve this mystery by simply producing Captain/Mister/Sergeant Hussein. Since they haven’t so far, either they are unable to do so or won’t because doing so would place the man in danger (Again, then why publish his name in the first place?). Or, they’re just being stubborn and don’;t want to give in to a bunch of pajama clad bloggers.

UPDATE II

Allah roasts Boehlert slowly on a spit over a hot fire.

One would think that a “Media Critic” would want to, you know, criticize the media once and a while rather than attack his ideological opponents using so many strawmen that one would think the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz had gotten a hold of a Star Trek replicator and populated the countryside with copies of himself.

Senator Barak Obama may as well save his time and money and abandon any thoughts he may have had about being President of the United States.

You see, the internet’s Mother Superior of Religious Intolerance and Hysterical Exaggeration has decided that Obama can’t pass muster when it comes to the Constitution’s well known and time honored religious test.

If you are unfamiliar with this test, don’t worry. Our Holy Mother will shine the light of extraordinary ignorance on your confusion and the obfuscated will become opaque. Just don’t get slimed by the nauseating bigotry oozing from every word:

His full name–as by now you have probably heard–is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Hussein is a Muslim name, which comes from the name of Ali’s son–Hussein Ibn Ali. And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim.

And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not.

How to dissect this idiocy? A better question might be, why bother?

Answering the latter question is easy; because when you ignore bigotry like this, you in effect become part of the problem. Especially if you have a voice to denounce it. This blog may be small (and getting smaller) but as long as I have one reader who will listen, I will always speak out when I believe someone has crossed the line. And Saint Debbie has proved once again that logic and reality take a back seat to unbridled fear and loathing.

To wit:

So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

First of all, my middle name is David. Since everyone knows that David was a mighty King of the Jews (”Once a Jew, always a Jew”), perhaps Rebbi Debbie could explain how my Jewishness has affected my ideology and character.

What’s that? I was born a Christian so we’re talking about a different kettle of fish? Since even Ms. Schlussel doesn’t know whether or not Obama’s father was in fact, a Muslim (”the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim…”), how does she know that Obama’s father didn’t give him the middle name of one of his close relatives who may have been Muslim and hence, the appellation was passed from father to son by tradition and not as a result of any religious significance?

I know that injecting a little logic into this story might cause Debbie’s head to explode but really, what does it matter if Obama’s father or grandfather or his second cousin twice removed on his mother’s side were Muslims? Senator Obama identifies himself as a Christian. And since we’re still poring over the constitution looking for the verbiage that states no Muslim can ascend to high office, maybe we should just accept Obama at his word that he doesn’t keep a blood soaked copy of the Koran in his Senate desk nor does he attend secret meetings of al-Qaeda on his lunch breaks.

And the leap of illogic made by Schlussel that because Obama’s father may have been Muslim that we must then ask “where will his loyalties be” reeks of bigotry and is pretty damned ignorant to boot. Perhaps we should have a loyalty oath for all Muslims in America - even the armed forces. We will allow Muslims to fight and die for their country but, just to be on the safe side, make them swear that they won’t behead any of their comrades in their sleep nor will they proselytize for their religion. And if that’s not good enough for Schlussel, maybe we could assign a reliable Christian officer to keep an eye on them lest they switch sides in the middle of a battle.

One question: Will they take the oath of allegiance on the bible or the Koran? Maybe we should ask Dennis Prager. He and Schlussel should be great pals given that they see eye to eye on the “Muslim Question” in America.

I swore to myself that after the Jill Carroll nuttiness, I’d never link to a Debbie Schlussel post again. But this foolishness is so far beyond the pale of rational discourse that it merits me breaking that promise. The idea that having a Muslim father or even being a Muslim oneself disqualifies anyone from high office is so foreign to the very ideas that gave birth to this country that one wonders whether Schlussel can truly grasp the insult she does and the hurt she causes by even suggesting the idea.

Yes there are radical Muslims who hate us and wish to kill us all (not too many from Kenya, by the way). To be so ignorant as to say that Obama is “is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage” without one shred of evidence that this is so and to hint that this deserves our disapprobation in the first place puts Schlussel and all who agree with her in a very dark place where bigotry and fear rule the mind rather than reason and logic.

Enough, Debbie. Crawl back under your rock and commune with the other slugs and slimy things who would defile the body politic with unreasoning ignorance and hate. You have proven once again that appealing to the lowest common denominator among conservatives may be a path to readership and links but is a poor substitute for the light of reason and tolerance that should be the hallmark of real conservatives.

UPDATE

Baldilocks (who doesn’t write half as much as most of us would like her to) gives it to Schlussel and the paranoid right with both barrels in “A Warning to the Right”:

I’m tired of the insinuations about Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) because his dead father was a Muslim. I’m tired of the insinuations about his middle name—Hussein—and the racist/bigoted insinuations that I’ve seen on the Right that flow from there. I’m even tired of the assertion that the senator isn’t even really a black American (whatever that means to a group of people who are demonstrably of mixed-race for the most part) because he has a white mother and a non-American black—i.e. African—father and, yes, since his father and my father were/are of the same tribe and nationality, I take that last bit of information quite personally.

But Debbie Schussel determines such interest as something else. Well, guess what. I was raised as a Muslim also. My mother and (black American) step-father subscribed to the creed of the Nation of Islam back in the day. And like Obama, I went to a Muslim school—for longer than he did. I even have a high school diploma from Clara Muhammad Elementary and Secondary School, obtained when I was fifteen, since the school didn’t take summer breaks.

Baldilocks is a retired Air Force Reserve officer. Maybe Schlussel wants to question her patriotism and ask where her “loyalties” lie?

UPDATE II

With a predictability that would put a laxative to shame, the left holds up Schlussel’s severed head and proclaims her “Queen of the Conservative Blogosphere.”

I hate to bust up this self-congratulatory party fellas but if you bother to read any of the conservative blogs linking to Schussel’s piece, you would notice one curious thread that connects all of them:

Every single conservative or right of center blog that links to the piece strongly criticizes Schlussel for her bigotry and stupidity.

Duh.

This picture and what it represents gives me goosebumps:

TO A casual observer it could be the psychedelic creation of a mischievous puppy that has dipped its paws in paint. But it may be one of the most extraordinary pictures ever snapped.

It is, scientists said yesterday, the glow from the first things to form in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. Snapped by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, the bizarre objects must have existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

An Australian astrophysicist, Ray Norris, said the NASA team may have found “the holy grail” of astronomy.

What the ancient objects are remains a mystery. One possibility is stars, the first to light up after the dawn of time. They would have been “humungous”, said NASA, “more than 1000 times the mass of our sun”. Or they may be “voracious black holes”. While black holes are invisible, heat emitted by matter plunging into them can be detected.

“Whatever these objects are,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, “they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today.” The image was made by Spitzer shooting pictures of five areas of the sky. All light from stars and galaxies in the foreground was then removed, leaving only the ancient infrared glow.

Those photons of light in the above picture travelled 13.7 billion years to end up on my little old blog. To someone like me, a scientific dunce but an enthusiast nonetheless, it’s things like this that make me wish I worked harder in school and applied myself more - especially in math. If you’ve ever read Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time or Timothy Ferris’ The Whole Shebang, you realize just how extraordinary the universe really is. And judging by this picture, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there and what awaits us as we begin in earnest to reach out and touch the face of eternity.

In a long, sometimes contradictory, typically incoherent post, Christy Hardin Smith is crying crocodile tears over the “loss of American influence” in the world.

One would think, judging from the rhetoric and actions of the left over the last 50 years, that she and her fellow liberals would be jumping for joy. The goal of liberal foreign policy has always been a reduction in American influence in the world. Cut the military, unilaterally disarm, rein in the multinationals, do what the United Nations says, and generally grovel at the feet of every thug, dictator, and unelected royal who happens to mention either “colonialism” or the CIA has been, for all intents and purposes, liberal foreign policy goals for more than a generation.

So why the long faces now?

The myth of American superiority has been punctured, most likely irreparably, by the idiocy of George Bush’s policies and failures. Nations which once worked with us — not just because we were working on issues of import to them, but also because it was in their long-term interest to do so with a nation which controlled so much of the economic and military and other resources throughout the world, as well as had its finger on the pulse of so many spheres of influence at once…all of these nations have learned to get by without having to rely on any favor from the United States whatsoever.

Diplomacy is not just negotiating for what you want. It is also maintaining a balance of relationships, a level of trust, and a constant stream of ties that bind one nation to another. This ensures a long-term level of relationships on which we ought to be able to rely when problems — both big and small — crop up, be they in individual nations, regionally, or globally.

The Bush Administration’s disdain for such diplomacy has wrought a whole series of changes to the global system of interdependence and ties — and the web has re-woven itself. But instead of including the strands that the United States had for some many, many years assiduously guarded and jealously built and re-built time and time again, the Bush Administration has allowed many of them to fray, some of them to break — and all of them to become redundant to other lines that have now been built as detours around us.

First of all, allow me to comment on the logic and perspicuity of this extraordinarily convoluted and bizarre reasoning:

Huh?

What “myth” of American superiority is she talking about? Is that the “myth” of a $12 trillion economy? Or maybe it’s the “myth” of the only military on the planet that can project its power to all corners of the globe in a matter of days - even hours?

Couldn’t be the “myth” of our dominant culture, language, arts, sciences, and blue jeans, could it? It seems so recently that the left was skewering America for being too powerful, too dominant. The were imploring American companies to stop being so competitive. They were criticizing Hollywood for making too many movies and TV shows that everyone in the world wanted to watch. They were lambasting American workers for being the most productive on the planet .(Well… maybe they didn’t go that far).

Now that we’re cut down to size - at least according to Smith - one would think that the left would be turning handsprings and jumping for joy.

And as far as this “irreparable”(?) puncture of the “myth” of American superiority, I would dearly hope that Iran, Syria, and half a dozen other nations actually believe that hogwash. I can guarantee that they don’t which makes one wonder why Christy Hardin Smith does. Perhaps she is blessed with that special insight vouchsafed liberals whenever they wish to teach us all a lesson about the evils (or weaknesses) of America.

As for the rest of Ms. Smith’s lovely paean to the “strands” of diplomacy so frayed by the Bush Administration that other threads have been “built around us” - lovely poetry but hardly serious analysis. I daresay the next crisis to roil the world will not see the French or Germans or even Great Britain taking the lead to resolve it; it will, as it has been since the end of World War II, up to the United States to wade in, take the inevitable criticism from friend and foe alike, and bring relief to the suffering masses while the rest of the world stands by and kibitzes from the sidelines.

But here’s where Smith gets particularly incoherent:

Nations which once worked with us — not just because we were working on issues of import to them, but also because it was in their long-term interest to do so with a nation which controlled so much of the economic and military and other resources throughout the world, as well as had its finger on the pulse of so many spheres of influence at once…all of these nations have learned to get by without having to rely on any favor from the United States whatsoever.

First, talking about the power of the United States in the past tense is loony - as in we are “a nation which controlled so much…” and “had its finger on the pulse…” To talk about waning American influence is incredibly short sighted at this point. The doomsayers have buried America several times - most recently just prior to the fall of the Soviet Union when it was widely believed Ronald Reagan was destroying NATO, angering our friends, and driving third world nations into the Soviet orbit all because of our policies in Central America.

They were saying the American “era” was over back then as well. Such sophistry is silly, stupid, and ignores the real world calculations of the Assads and Ahmadinejad’s of the planet who could care less about favors but care very deeply about how fast and how far our military can rampage through their nations before driving them into their very own spider holes.

Belgium or France might not care very much about those calculations but given the stellar level of cooperation between all NATO countries and our allies in the War on Terror, one begins to wonder where Ms. Smith sees this fall off in “favor exchanges.” Is it in negotiating trade and tariff arrangements? Perhaps it is in import-export controls? Immigration? Cultural exchanges?

Even at the UN, all of our allies are on board for sanctions against Iran - most of them wishing stronger ones but recognizing the obstructionist policy of Russia and China in this regard, are fully prepared to go along with the watered down sanctions proposed that our two potential adversaries will eventually agree to. To believe that anything meaningful can be accomplished through diplomacy at the UN with regards to Iran or Syria is a pipe dream in the first place.

One might legitimately ask Ms. Smith then which “nations” she is referring to who have “learned to get by without having to rely on any favor” from America. The Iraq War, unpopular as it is with our allies (decidedly less unpopular than Viet Nam, I might add), as our Central American policies in the past, does not stand in the way of carrying on the business of diplomacy with friend or foe. It is typical liberal exaggeration and overblown rhetorical gibberish to advance the notion that the world is altering right before our eyes as a result of Bush incompetence, or Bush evil, or Bush stupidity. The only thing that is altered is the consciousness of liberals who are giddy at the prospect of American decline.

One final note; I realize the idea that “the world was with us” after 9/11 has now become firmly ensconced as one of the enduring myths about that horrible day. But as numerous people (including myself) have pointed out, the facts do not support that conclusion. Those interested in the truth might read this article which has links to other analyses that debunk that bit of hooey promoted by the left as a means to criticize the Bush Administration for losing something the government of the United States never had - the unqualified support of most of the world’s governments.

What we have lost in respect as a result of our Iraq adventure (including Abu Ghraib and Gitmo) is significant but not a body blow to either our position in the world nor especially our influence. To say otherwise is to ignore the fact that in the capitols of the world where governments plan and plot, they worry most about what impact their policies will have on America. And the day that changes, Ms. Smith and the rest of the left will let out a whoop and a holler for joy; not cry crocodile tears as Ms. Smith did today.

From the “Now She Tells Us” Department, Hillary Clinton has disowned her vote to authorize force in Iraq. She wants a do-over, a mulligan as they say in golf. She wants us to forget that she and most of the Democratic party were so knock kneed with fright over the possibility that they would be branded “cowards” or “traitors” by Republicans in the 2002 mid terms, that they swallowed their well documented pacifism in the face of the killers and thugs of the world just to secure their own political hides:

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she “wouldn’t have voted that way” if she knew everything she knows now.

Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today (no WMD, troubled post-war military planning, etc. . .), there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor.

However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — who also voted for the war — and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her — until now.

Talk about a woman with her finger in the air sampling the political winds…

Of course, she learned at the feet of the master of tacking with the political gales. Bill Clinton never met an issue he couldn’t straddle until he was sure that he came down on the right side of it with the public. And Hillary is proving equally adept at the practice - a sure sign that a Hillary campaign would be geared to the general election from the start.

This is a high risk strategy considering who usually votes in Democratic primaries and caucuses. One need only look at reaction to this latest calculated move on her part from the self-styled guardians of ideological purity and party disciplinarians on the left; the netnuts and their campaign to rid the Democratic party of evils such as centrism and strong national security proponents:

Honestly, you have to wonder how many focus groups and strategy sessions with her massive team of highly paid advisors that Clinton had to sit through before coming up with those carefully chosen and fairly meaningless eight words, “and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.”

And on top of that, you have to wonder what all those highly paid consultants were smoking. Is there one voter’s mind who will be changed by this? Right-wingers, who wouldn’t have voted for her anyway, will attack her for lacking the conviction to stand by her 2002 vote. Left-wingers, who wouldn’t have voted for her anyway, will ask what we’re asking now, which basically is, WTF? Maybe centrists will praise her at their 2008 convention, in a booth at Charlie Palmer’s up on Capitol Hill.

That said, it’s not too still not too late for Hillary Clinton to win over at least some anti-war Democrats. And it’s not that hard, either. Just admit in no uncertain terms that you made a mistake in 2002, and why — and then fight like hell on the Senate floor to get us out of that mess over there, ASAP.

Should she wear sackcloth and sprinkle ashes on the Senate floor when she performs this grand mea culpa, groveling before the Attywood’s of the left? Or, should she seek to become part of the solution in Iraq? Getting us out of “that mess” may be an emotionally satisfying solution to the immature and intellectually shallow netnuts. But even John Kerry recognizes that not leaving until something approaching a viable Iraqi state is in the offing marks Attywood and the rest of the mindless, knee jerk, anti-Bush crowd as dangerous loons.

Hillary is not backtracking for them. What Mrs. Clinton is trying to do is build a brand new Democratic coalition, one that will carry her to victory in both the primaries and the general election. She is counting on enormous numbers of new women voters to offset the anger of the far left netnuts. And she’s also counting on disgruntled moderate GOP’ers in the northeast and midwest who may not particularly like her but can appreciate her fairly hard headed approach to national security to swallow hard, cross party lines, and vote for her.

As I said, a high risk strategy but one that holds great rewards if she can manage it. The problem as I see it is that Jesse Jackson tried something similar in the 1988 primaries and failed.

Jackson won 11 primaries that year - including his surprising win in Michigan which temporarily made him something of a front runner for the nomination. Jackson tried to cobble together parts of the old Democratic coalition - big labor and blacks - with the far left and other minorities. It proved too big of a task and he ultimately went down to defeat, losing most of the remaining primaries to Michael Dukakis.

The lesson for Hillary is that the women’s vote alone will not bring her the top prize. Somehow (and Dick Morris has said this as well) she will have to at least mitigate the hatred of the netnuts - pull their teeth - in order to win. She will probably not be able to do this with any grand gestures about Iraq. But she may assuage some of their anger if she begins advocating other issues near and dear to the hearts of the left including national health care and workers’ rights. It won’t satisfy the on-line crowd but it may help with the rest of organized left; not to gain their votes but to prevent their opposition from derailing her candidacy.

It’s a fine line and I don’t believe she can walk it. And even if she does, she will have left herself open to the charge in the general election of being “too liberal” as every Democratic candidate who has run for President in the last 30 years has done.

A Hillary candidacy will be fun to watch. It will electrify women all over the country and, given the novelty of her husband campaigning for her, will constitute one of the greatest shows in the history of our colorful and entertaining political life. But if she doesn’t fail in the primaries, she will almost certainly stumble in the general election. That is, unless the Republicans commit political suicide and nominate someone like Newt Gingrich who may be the only Republican candidate whose negatives match Hillary’s own. But I don’t expect Newt or any other far right candidate to win.

It will be a McCain-Hillary battle. Maybe. Perhaps. Well…don’t take it to the bank. But you might want to slip a fiver to a Vegas bookie on the off chance that I’m right.

This story has been given the predictable spin by the Washington Post; that Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are at odds over the strategy of putting up to 30,000 more troops in Iraq.

But if you read the entire article, you realize that, in fact, the Chiefs are worried about how to define the mission as well as placing a time limit on their deployment - not on whether or not the troops should be dispatched:

But the Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House review is not public.

The chiefs have taken a firm stand, the sources say, because they believe the strategy review will be the most important decision on Iraq to be made since the March 2003 invasion.

At regular interagency meetings and in briefing President Bush last week, the Pentagon has warned that any short-term mission may only set up the United States for bigger problems when it ends. The service chiefs have warned that a short-term mission could give an enormous edge to virtually all the armed factions in Iraq — including al-Qaeda’s foreign fighters, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias — without giving an enduring boost to the U.S military mission or to the Iraqi army, the officials said.

The Pentagon has cautioned that a modest surge could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops, the officials said.

These are certainly fair questions and realistic concerns. And it is important to see any surge in troops as an adjunct to the absolutely necessary political progress that must take place in Iraq if our efforts there are to have any impact whatsoever.

Is there anyone in Iraq who can bring all the factions together to hammer out the numerous issues that stand in the way of a peaceful, viable, Iraqi state? There seems to be some progress on the problem with finding an equitable way to share oil revenue But other issues like federalism and autonomy, amnesty for insurgents, justice for the victims of Saddam’s tyranny, as well as how and when US troops will disengage from the country are proving far beyond the ability of the empty suit of a Prime Minister who currently inhabits that office to even begin to deal with.

Nouri al-Maliki has got to go. His craven kowtowing to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army has made the security situation in Baghdad worse by preventing American forces from fully engaging the Mahdis when they catch them stirring the sectarian pot. The Iraq Crisis Group - a European-based informal think tank - has pointed out correctly that Maliki is part of the security problem and not the man we want helping us to get control of the capitol:

“What is needed today is a clean break both in the way the U.S. and other international actors deal with the Iraqi government, and in the way the U.S. deals with the region.”

The Iraqi government and military should not be treated as “privileged allies” because they are not partners in efforts to stem the violence but rather parties to the conflict, it says. Trying to strengthen the fragile government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will not contribute to Iraq’s stability, it adds. Iraq’s escalating crisis cannot be resolved militarily, the report says, and can be solved only with a major political effort.

The report also offers some interesting solutions, all of which are probably non-starters with the Administration but nevertheless represent some original thinking about the political problems in Iraq:

The International Crisis Group proposes three broad steps: First, it calls for creation of an international support group, including the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Iraq’s six neighbors, to press Iraq’s constituents to accept political compromise.

Second, it urges a conference of all Iraqi players, including militias and insurgent groups, with support from the international community, to forge a political compact on controversial issues such as federalism, distribution of oil revenue, an amnesty, the status of Baath Party members and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Finally, it suggests a new regional strategy that would include engagement with Syria and Iran and jump-starting the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process.

Why the foreign policy elites of the world are so enamored of the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” and believe that any progress (or lack thereof) in that arena will affect what happens in Iraq is beyond me. It’s almost as if both the Iraq Study Group and now the Iraq Crisis Group have included that recommendation to satisfy the internal biases of specific members of their respective groups, bartering its inclusion in both final reports in order to achieve consensus on other matters contained in the documents. That seemed to be the internal dynamic of the Baker Commission and I have little doubt that something similar occurred in the European group.

But the idea of a “Grand Conference” - if it was possible - is intriguing on a variety of levels. Getting the rest of the region as well as the the Security Council involved in what is happening in Iraq in a more direct way may prove to be the best way to deal with both the insurgency and the scourge of sectarian violence at the same time.

If such a conference could take place in the 18 months or so that many analysts are saying that we can safely commit our extra troops; and if the political situation in Iraq can be improved by booting Maliki and replacing him with someone who wants to confront the security and political problems in the country and not run away from them or seek to finesse them; then there is hope that our increased commitment of men will contribute to stability.

The White House sees the Chief’s questions as the normal give and take in any policy discussion of this magnitude, which is the correct way to view the criticism. I would be a helluva lot more worried if the Chiefs didn’t seek to clarify this commitment and pin the politicians down by clearly defining what the mission of these extra troops would be:

A senior administration official said it is “too simplistic” to say the surge question has broken down into a fight between the White House and the Pentagon, but the official acknowledged that the military has questioned the option. “Of course, military leadership is going to be focused on the mission — what you’re trying to accomplish, the ramifications it would have on broader issues in terms of manpower and strength and all that,” the official said.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said military officers have not directly opposed a surge option. “I’ve never heard them be depicted that way to the president,” the official said. “Because they ask questions about what the mission would be doesn’t mean they don’t support it. Those are the kinds of questions the president wants his military planners to be asking.”

The concerns raised by the military are sometimes offset by concerns on the other side. For instance, those who warn that a short-term surge would harm longer-term deployments are met with the argument that the situation is urgent now, the official said. “Advocates would say: ‘Can you afford to wait? Can you afford to plan in the long term? What’s the tipping point in that country? Do you have time to wait?’ “

I would say that given the state of the insurgency and the growing influence of the militias, there simply isn’t time; we must act now:

The Pentagon said yesterday that violence in Iraq soared this fall to its highest level on record and acknowledged that anti-U.S. fighters have achieved a “strategic success” by unleashing a spiral of sectarian killings by Sunni and Shiite death squads that threatens Iraq’s political institutions.

In its most pessimistic report yet on progress in Iraq, the Pentagon described a nation listing toward civil war, with violence at record highs of 959 attacks per week, declining public confidence in government and “little progress” toward political reconciliation.

“The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace,” said Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who briefed journalists on the report. “We have to get ahead of that violent cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian violence. . . . That is the premier challenge facing us now.”

This report is from our own military. It is not generated by the media. It is not compiled by a left wing think tank. It is not a figment of someone’s imagination.

We are losing the war - on the ground. Not in a tactical sense, of course. We win every engagement in which we are involved. But our efforts are not making the government stronger or the Iraqi people safer.

Driven by sectarian fighting, and a Ramadan surge, attack levels in Iraq hit record highs in all categories nationwide as the number of U.S. and coalition casualties surged 32 percent from mid-August to mid-November, compared with the previous three months, the report said. Over the same period, the number of attacks per week rose 22 percent, from 784 to 959.

Iraqi civilian casualties also increased, “almost entirely the result of murders and executions,” the report said. Since January, before the mosque bombing, ethno-sectarian executions rose from 180 to 1,028 in October; ethno-sectarian incidents rose from 63 to 996 over the same period.

And what of problems with the Iraqi Army and Police? Again - this is from our own military:

The report noted problems with Iraqi forces, however, saying the number of soldiers and police actually “present for duty” is far lower than the number trained and equipped.

Subtracting those Iraqi forces killed and wounded, and those who have quit the force, only 280,000 are “available for duty,” Sattler said. About 30 percent of that number are “on leave” at a time, he said, leaving fewer than 196,000 on the job.

Iraqi police forces in particular are increasingly corrupt, according to the report, which says that some police in Baghdad have supported Shiite death squads. The police “facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of upcoming operations,” it said. “This is a major reason for the increased levels of murders and executions.”

As a result of mass defections or police units being pulled off duty, the number of Iraqi police battalions rated as having “lead responsibility” in their areas fell from six to two, the report said, although officials said that number has since increased.

The Iraqi army has steadily increased the number of its battalions in the lead, from 57 in May to 91 in November, although some units have experienced high attrition when ordered to deploy to different regions of Iraq, such as Baghdad and Anbar.

“High attrition” is an understatement. Most units, according to the Iraqi government itself, refuse to go to either Anbar or Baghdad. Some units simply vote not to deploy - in other words, mutiny. Other units suffer 70% of its soldiers going AWOL and are unable to go.

The point is simple: There is no purely military solution - either American or Iraqi - to the security problems in Iraq.

Sattler implied that no number of U.S. or Iraqi troops would be great enough to quash the revenge killings. “I don’t know how many forces you could push into a country, either U.S. or coalition or Iraqi forces, that could cover the entire country, where these death squads wouldn’t find somebody,” he said.

Indeed, the report documented that major U.S. and Iraqi military operations in the fall did not quell sectarian violence in Baghdad. Attacks dipped in August, but rebounded strongly in September after death squads adapted to the increased U.S. and Iraqi presence.

Any actions we take to increase our troop strength must be taken in concert with political moves by the Iraqi government and - if it can be done - with other countries in the region who have either an involvement in the conflict or a stake in the outcome. I am not overly optimistic about a regional conference to help resolve the problems. But there is simply no alternative to working with the Iraqis on the political problems that fuel the insurgency and the sectarian violence. If the Iraqis refuse to help themselves by trying to heal the numerous cracks in their fractured body politic, I fear that any additional American troops would simply add to the problems and not accomplish much of anything.

Looks like the self-styled “Mullah of the People,” President Ahmadinejad, may be in political hot water. Not with the Iranian people so much. They have about as much say in who governs them as sheep do in deciding who can shear them. The “electoral” process in Iran is not only rigged to prevent even a hint of secularism to intrude on the ruling holy men’s Islamic paradise but time honored electoral shenanigans such as stuffing ballot boxes, intimidating voters (200,000 Revolutionary Guards can be wonderful persuaders for the regime), and out and out dishonest counting assures the ruling elites of continued iron fist control over the country.

But judging by recent events, it appears that the messianic Golden Boy who the hardliners in the Assembly of Experts thought would lead them to a religious revival at home and regional dominance abroad may have over played his hand.

The Iranians may be poised to dominate the region as they have not done since the fall of the Shah but they are unloved by their neighbors, isolated internationally, and the regime itself is in mortal danger as a result of their dalliance with nuclear weapons. Other countries in the region view with alarm the idea of Iranian ascendancy, seeing an aggressive Shia state with nuclear weapons an intolerable situation. And the prospect of sanctions - however weak, limited, and watered down they might be - has the ruling elites nervous and wondering if more biting measures might be on the way.

But it is the threat of American and Israeli military action against Iranian nuclear facilities (and perhaps against the elites themselves) that worries Ahmadinejad’s opponents the most. The mullahs are not stupid. They’ve seen what the modern air forces of Israel and America can do to a nation’s infrastructure.

Make no mistake. Ahmadinejad’s enemies are not our “friends” by any stretch of the imagination. They hate America and the West as much as he does. But the confrontational approach taken by the Iranian President has served to unite most of the Europeans with the Americans in recognizing the danger of the Islamic regime while even their friends Russia and China are reluctantly coming around to the notion that some sort of sanctions regime is necessary. And the President’s bombastic, apocalyptic rhetoric about the holocaust, about the inevitability of Islam’s world dominance, and about the destruction of the regime’s foes has placed the ruling mullahs in the awkward position of being exposed for the truly aggressive nation they are. The pragmatists would much prefer to pretend being the peace loving, spiritual and moral leader of the region rather than the threatening, nuclear armed troublemaker that they wish to be.

All of this has led to an attempt to cut Ahmadinejad down to size, to embarrass him, and to reduce his influence. The President in Iran is actually subservient to the wishes of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And his actions are overseen by the powerful Assembly of Experts whose internal political dynamic may be changing as a result of elections held on Friday. While most of the analysis I’ve read has been cautious, one thing is clear; the hardliners incurred a setback. Several candidates supported by Ahmadinejad have apparently either gone down to defeat or received far fewer votes than was anticipated.

In the Tehran district, the election for the Experts of the Assembly saw Ahmadinejad’s most frequent and outspoken critic, former President Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani receive a huge majority - 500,000 votes more than Ahmadinejad’s candidate. If Rafsanjani can gain control of the Assembly, he can block some of Ahmadinejad’s more radical internal policies such as his purging of the ministries and replacing long time bureaucrats with inexperienced and fanatical true believers.

And Rafsanjani, along with another former President Mohammad Khatami have both made it clear that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational approach must be moderated before serious damage is done:

Mesbah Yazdi, the ultra-conservative cleric who is a close ally of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s new president, thinks that his government is God’s gift to enact Islamic values. This while three prominent and veteran Iranian politicians, former president Mohammad Khatami, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and former chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rouhani believe that Ahmadinejad’s presidency is an era filled with dangers that will deeply hurt the country and the Islamic Republic.

In an unprecedented move, Rafsanjani, the powerful man leading the regime’s Expediency Council that oversees the performance of the three branches of government, talks about the dangers that threaten the nation, and implicitly criticizes Ahmadinejad’s aggressive behavior and his unqualified, undeserving and incapable administration.

All of this manuevering has led to two interesting developments recently. First, the Iranian Parliament or Majlis has just recently slapped the President down by shortening his term in office, ostensibly under the guise of standardizing the election cycles for all elected offices. This will mean that Ahmadinejad will have to “face the voters” about a year and a half earlier than he anticipated which means he can be tossed out if the regime’s electoral machinery is used against him.

And that machinery gave Ahmadinejad a taste of what might be in store for him as local and regional elections held in conjunction with the Experts in Assembly show a move toward what the western press is terming “moderate” candidates but who are actually anti-Ahmadinejad pragmatists:

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, faced electoral embarrassment today after the apparent failure of his supporters to win control of key local councils and block the political comeback of his most powerful opponent.

Early results from last Friday’s election suggested that his Sweet Scent of Service coalition had won just three out of 15 seats on the symbolically important Tehran city council, foiling Mr Ahmadinejad’s plan to oust the mayor and replace him with an ally.

Compounding his setback was the success of Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential pragmatist and fierce critic of the president’s radical policies. Mr Rafsanjani - whom Mr Ahmadinejad defeated in last year’s presidential election - received the most votes in elections to the experts’ assembly, a clerical body empowered to appoint and remove Iran’s supreme leader. By contrast, Ayatollah Mohammed-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, Mr Ahmadinejad’s presumed spiritual mentor, came sixth.

Analysts attributed Mr Rafsanjani’s resurgence to his newly-found status as a saviour of the reformists, the liberal movement that shunned him as a hated symbol of the establishment when it held power. Mr Rafsanjani has been increasingly identified with reformers since last year’s presidential election and many voters turned to him to voice anger at Mr Ahmadinejad.

(As an aside, The Guardian referred to Ahmadinejad’s opponents as “moderate fundamentalists.” Huh?

And only the Guardian could refer to a movement of dyed in the wool, Sharia loving, fundamentalist Muslims as “liberal.”)

While the regime manipulates the election, Ahmadinejad is not without his own ability to fiddle with the vote:

Reformists hailed the poll - billed by many as Mr Ahmadinejad’s first electoral test since taking office - as a “major defeat” for the president, but they also warned that the slowness in declaring returns could indicate an underhand attempt to rig the outcome. The interior ministry, which is in the hands of Mr Ahmadinejad’s supporters, oversees the counting of ballots.

“The initial results of elections throughout the country indicate that Mr Ahmadinejad’s list has experienced a decisive defeat nationwide. They were tantamount to a big ‘no’ to the government’s authoritarian and inefficient methods,” a statement from the pro-reform Islamic Iran Participation Front said.

Don’t expect Ahmadinejad to take a back seat to the pragmatists. He burns with the fever of the true believer and can be expected to use whatever power he has to maintain his position. He evidently still enjoys the confidence of Khamenei. And the hardliners are still a powerful force in the ruling Guardian Council which oversees the Parliament and can veto any bill it wishes. The law that would knock time off of Ahmadinejad’s term in office for instance, has yet to be ruled on by the Council. A veto there would shore up his position, at least temporarily.

But the pragmatists seemed poised to either eliminate Ahmadinejad or at least minimize his influence. As for the former, there have been two attempts on the President’s life that we know about with whispered accusations against Rafsanjani being behind the plots. It just goes to show that in Iran, being a true believer is not always a guarantor of longevity.

TANK JOHNSON - IN BETTER DAYS

At 6′3″ and 300 pounds, Terry “Tank” Johnson is a load. His low center of gravity and massive weight allow him to stand his ground in the interior of the defensive line during run plays thus preventing holes from opening up for the opposing running back. He’s what is known in the business as a “run stuffer.”

He is also an idiot.

No, I really mean it. There is no other way to describe Johnson’s stupidity over the past 18 months, during which time he has had run ins with the law three times - twice, including this latest transgression, over illegal possession of firearms. He also scuffled with a police officer outside a Rush street nightclub and resisted arrest. The other gun charge occurred in November of 2005 when he pled guilty to the illegal possession of a firearm in Cook county - one of the more draconian jurisdictions in America when it comes curtailing 2nd Amendment rights. He received probation for the gun charge and the charges relating to his scuffling with the officer were dropped - at the request of the officer. Somehow, I don’t think if his name had been Jamal Johnson from the ‘hood, the cop would have been so forgiving.

Hey! But Tank’s a good guy. He’s just made some bad choices, that’s all. That’s what Jerry D’Angelo, Bears General Manager said after Johnson held forth for two hours at a press conference, telling everyone how sorry he was, how embarrassed the pictures in the paper of his family had made him. He apologized to his team mates. He apologized to the organization. He apologized to the fans. If the old mascot of the guy in the bear suit had been there, he probably would have apologized to him too.

Fat lot of good it did.

Less than 12 hours after that press conference ended, Johnson was down on Clark street in one of the more notorious haunts in that area, known locally as “The Ice House.” He must have been celebrating putting one over on everyone. Instead, tragedy struck.

Arrested on Wednesday with Tank for the gun related charges, Johnson’s lifelong friend, supposed bodyguard, and ex con William Posey got into a fight over what the Chicago Tribune is reporting was the harassment of his “client.”

Witnesses told police that a man repeatedly bumped into Johnson, said a source familiar with the investigation. Posey intervened, striking the man, and both fell to the floor. When club security pulled them apart, the other man pulled a gun from his pants and shot Posey, the witnesses reported.

Sources said Johnson initially denied being at the bar, but he changed his story as he talked with police at Northwestern Memorial hospital early Saturday and later in the day at his Gurnee home. Police said he was not a suspect.

There are certain kinds of bars in Chicago (and I’m sure in other big cities) where most of the patrons are packing heat. Everyone knows this which makes for an interesting evening. It is a macho world where a lot of middle class and upper middle class whites and blacks try to play gangsta from da hood. They strut and pose, daring someone to call them out. Just last April, another shooting took place at the same bar, probably for the same reason. The smell of testosterone must be palpable in places like the Ice House.

What in God’s name was Tank Johnson doing there? More bad “choices?” Or simply a bad character?

A 15 or 16 year old kid makes “bad choices.” A 25 year old adult who has responsibilities to his family, his team mates, and yes, the fans of my beloved Bears who then ends up thumbing his nose at everyone is simply a loser. Recognizing those responsibilities and then going out and partying (maybe the mother of his two children would like to know who he was dancing with when the killing occurred), bespeaks a man who allows his passions to govern his actions. And knowing what is right, then deliberately doing what is wrong is the sign of a truly weak and ignoble character.

The Bears should simply bid Mr. Johnson farewell and adieu. Clean out his locker for him and ship his effects to whatever NFL team will have him - and considering his talent, there will be a good dozen or so lining up with their tongues hanging out waiting to sign him. Wherever he latches on, a year may pass during which time his stellar play will make people forget why the Bears fired him. He will be praised for “turning his life around” - until the next incident occurs with the next police officer or perhaps some innocent who happens to get in the way. Self destructive types like Johnson rarely reform. And the best thing you can do is to stay as far away from the Johnson’s of the world lest you be close enough to receive shrapnel from his next self inflicted wound.

How this entire affair will effect my beloveds is an unknown. Coach Lovie seems to have molded his charges into a pretty tight knit group. The fact that all the negative publicity is reflecting badly on them may draw them closer together - an “us against the world” mindset that would bring out the best in all of them.

Or, it may destroy their solidarity. The Sun Times summarizes the team’s dilemma:

The Bears have a moral dilemma. With Harris out for the season with a ruptured hamstring and Johnson the best remaining interior pass rusher on the roster, do they stand by Johnson and deflect criticism until making a call on his career after the season? They know they’ll never be able to replace him this late in the season. And refusing to play him will hurt his teammates, too.

Or do they put him on the inactive list, knowing it damages their playoff hopes in a season when virtually all the decision-makers — Smith, Angelo and team president Ted Phillips — are looking for contract extensions themselves. What if they keep him up and go one-and-done in the playoffs anyway?

The question for us fans has to be; is a Super Bowl berth worth allowing an obviously flawed and irresponsible player playing time? What price victory?

I suppose the cynical among us will answer that question with some snide comment about pro sports in general being a safe harbor for all sorts of criminals and thugs so why make a big deal of of this one. Perhaps because if that’s what you want professional sports to be like in America, fine. But if you want to change the culture, alter the notion that pro athletes play by different rules and are responsible to nothing and no one save their own hedonistic and base instincts, then Tank Johnson has got to go - not just from the Bears but from the league. One arrest is bad enough. Two is an outrage. Three arrests in 18 months should finish this man as a professional football player in America. Let him play in Canada or Europe if they want him.

I suspect given the media pressure, the Bears will not play Johnson the rest of the way and release him after the season. And I’m also sure that he will have no trouble signing a huge contract with some other team who are willing to cross their fingers that he will be able to stay out of trouble for a few years to justify their gamble to the fans.

Prior to the betting scandal that nearly ruined baseball in 1919, gambling and gamblers were as much a part of the game as the infield fly rule. The riff raff who associated with ballplayers not to mention the whispers about fixing the games gave baseball a decidedly negative image.

Along came Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the new Commissioner of baseball, who shockingly banned 8 Chicago White Sox players from baseball for life after it was discovered that some of them, in league with big time gambler Arnold Rothstein, threw the World Series the previous fall against Cincinnati. Landis had the right idea:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked players and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball

The point was made. Bad behavior was severely punished. Even the appearance of bad behavior and a player risked all.

Could professional sports act so responsibly today? Judging by the Tank Johnson episode, it’s highly doubtful.