Right Wing Nut House

Welcome Hugh Hewitt Readers! Join me this morning from 7:00 AM - 9:00AM Central time for The Rick Moran Show on Wideawakes Radio. Click the “Listen Live” button in the left sidebar to access the stream.

We’ll be talking about the situation in the Middle East all morning and taking your calls. Join the discussion at 1-888-407-1776.

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The news out of the Middle East today is grim and getting more grim by the hour. Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran are nerving themselves for a confrontation that could turn into a general war if things were to get out of control.

First, visit my friends Kit and Heidi at Euphoric Reality. They will have regular updates throughout the day and night. Their sources appear solid and their analysis is sharp. Also, they will be on WAR Radio tonight from 10:00 PM - 12:00AM Central with their thoughts and reactions to the days events.

And these events seem to this observer to be slowly spiraling out of control. This is not the sudden spasm of war as we experienced in 1967 and 1973. This is like a slow motion explosion, almost a steady, determined march toward the battlements by Israel and its enemies as the IDF put more and more pressure on Hamas and the Palestinians to relent and release their captured soldier. It was perhaps inevitable that Hizballah, believing the Israelis tied down in Gaza, felt it an opportune moment to pull the tail of the lion thinking that they would be relatively safe from retaliation. This morning, the terrorist group launched dozens of rockets and mortar shells into the disputed Shebaa Farms region in southern Lebanon killing several IDF soldiers. They then kidnapped two surviving IDF men which precipitated the massive raid by Israel involving planes, helicopters, gunboats, and tanks. So far, the Israelis are making Hizballah wish they had stayed in bed.

Meanwhile, the United States is pointing the finger right where it belongs; Syria and Iran. If not aware of Hizballah’s attack prior to its launch, there is little doubt that the terrorists felt they would have the support of their two major backers in case things got sticky. Given what the IDF is doing to Hizballah pretensions of being a viable military outfit, things couldn’t get much stickier for them than they are right now.

Israel is calling up reserves and sources have revealed that unless the kidnapped soldiers are returned, Israel will escalate even further:

The IAF on Wednesday began to issue call up orders in preparation for retaliatory air strikes against Hizbullah targets in Lebanon, Channel 2 reported. The air force will target power stations and Hizbullah outposts inside Lebanon.

The army was also calling up reservists. Only weeks ago, an entire reserve division was drafted in order to train for an operation such as the one the IDF is planning in response to Wednesday morning’s Hizbullah attacks on IDF forces along the northern border.

A very high ranking military officer said that if the soldiers were not returned in good condition, Israel would turn Lebanon back 20 years by striking its vital infrastructure.

Clearly, the Israelis have had just about enough of Hizballah and their constant provocations and are giving the Lebanese government pretty much of an ultimatum; rein in the terrorists or suffer the consequences.

It appears that Israel may have reached a point that, surrounded as they are by peoples that wish to wipe them off the map, they feel that confronting their tormentors now rather than later is strategically advantageous to them. Hence, the IDF raid into Lebanon to retrieve the two captured soldiers (and pay a visit to Hizballah) is not only a challenge to Syria (who view themselves as Lebanon’s “protector”) but also Iran who may be eager to flex their regional muscles on behalf of their Syrian allies.

And Iran’s most powerful proxy in the region is Hizballah. It may be too much to believe that the Iranians urged Hizballah to take action in order to relieve pressure on Hamas - another Iranian proxy - in Gaza but it’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. More likely, Hizballah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah initiated the military action as a result of a combination of internal Lebanese politics and a belief that he could bargain for the thousands of Lebanese prisoners (many of them Hizballah terrorists) languishing in Israeli prisons.

Nasrallah has been under increasing pressure from the March 14 coalition to get on board the democracy bandwagon and disarm his militia. He has played games with the Lebanese government for months, dangling the possibility that he would fold his militia into the Lebanese armed forces all the while insisting that Hizballah be called “The Resistance” for their confronting Israel over Shebaa Farms, a small village claimed by Israel, Syria, and Lebanon. It could be that Nasrallah saw the opportunity for a quick “victory” over Israel by taking the soldiers and then exchanging them for Lebanese prisoners. If so, he has miscalculated monumentally. The Lebanese government has disowned his actions, the Israelis are shelling Hizballah positions unmercifully as I write this, and after all is said and done, the Lebanese people could blame Hizballah for the misery their actions inflict on the country.

And the Israelis aren’t letting the Lebanese government off the hook that easily. They are blaming them for the attacks. And why not? The attacks were initiated from Lebanese soil. The downside to this is that the Lebanese government may feel compelled to defend Hizballah even though they really don’t want to. This kind of thing could set back efforts to achieve Lebanese stability and democracy many months.

Iran, of course, has its own agenda. If Syria feels some kind of military demonstration is in order (and as Lebanon’s protector, Assad may feel he absolutely must do something or lose credibility in that regard), Israel may feel compelled to respond to any attack or demonstration with a strike of their own. Escalation would be virtually automatic after that happens.

This doesn’t help Baby Assad in Syria. Relatively speaking, Iran is a long way away and it is doubtful that Syria’s larger but vastly inferior armed forces could stand up to Israel long enough for Iranian intervention to make a difference. But the Iranians may have other plans which could include missile strikes on Israel’s cities.

God help us if the Iranians are stupid enough to initiate a missile exchange. Could the IDF be absolutely sure that those missiles contained conventional warheads? Would they wait to find out or would Israel go with a “launch on warning” policy where they just assume that any missile launched from Iran contains WMD?

Unthinkable.

None of the players want war (save possibly Iran). But the longer Israel remains in Lebanon, the shorter the fuse of war will burn. Let’s hope that Israel can get their captured soldiers back very soon. The alternative would be devastating to everyone involved.

UPDATE

First, Allah has a massive round-up at Hot Air, a dizzying array of links and commentary including a link to a Debka article that confirms some of my speculation - which worries me a little given their reputation for exaggeration and publishing outright rumor. For what its worth, they say that the attack by Hizballah was indeed meant to take the heat off Hamas and was approved by Iran. They also say that Syria is beating the war drums and that the Iranians also are on high alert.

Yikes.

Also, Kit and Heidi are reporting that Israel will declare war tonight.

Judging from the information contained in their updates, this looks like the real thing folks. If, as ER is reporting, Israel goes after Hizballah hammer and tongs, do not expect Syria and Iran to stand idly by while their number one proxy in the region is ripped to shreds. Right now, the only question is how severe their response will be. Will they take the risk and confront Israel directly? Or will they stop short of that and settle for demonstrations?

Time will tell.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Is this a great country or what?

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

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

The kids will probably fall asleep during class anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join me for The Rick Moran Show today from 7:00 Am - 9:00 AM central time. You can access the stream by clicking the “Listen Live” button in the left side bar.

Today’s show will feature a long discussion of what’s going on in Iraq as we examine the report given by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s to the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies). It is an eye opener with both good news and bad.

We’ll also look at the controversy surrounding the Flight 93 memorial as well as some good old fashioned political prognostication as I give my assessment of Senator Lieberman’s chances in Connecticut.

I’ll be taking calls after the 7:30 newsbreak. You can reach WAR radio at 1-888-407-1776.

GLEN REYNOLDS SAYS: “I’D RATHER READ THE CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS THAN DRINK PUPPY SMOOTHIES!”

Something is stirring in the depths of the blogosphere.

Can you feel it? A nebulous, shapeless mass is moving toward the light, struggling to resurrect itself. After a long sleep, the blog beast is shaking off the cobwebs and trying to make its way to the surface so that once again, it can prey on the stupidity, the idiocy, and the utter cluelessness of humankind.

It matters not who comes in contact with The Beast. Be they prince or pauper, glitterati or sham glam, politician or crook (more likely both), it matters not. Bloggers are sharpening their long knives and drooling at the prospect of once again letting loose a verbal barrage of outrageous invective and creative finger pointing. It’s coming. And nothing and no one can stop it.

The Carnival of the Clueless is back!

That’s right. One of the most popular link fests in the history of the blogosphere is making a comeback after a long, well deserved hiatus. And it is coming back with a vengeance. For this time, the Carnival will be the first such blogger project to be featured on live radio.

For those not familiar with the Carnival of the clueless, here are the parameters:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT.

Of course, that won’t stop me from making snarky comments about those that I disagree with, but hey! Ya pays your monies and ya takes your chances, eh?

THE DEADLINE TO ENTER THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL WILL BE TONIGHT AT 10:00 PM EDT. Please send only recent posts – something that’s fairly topical – perhaps no more than 2 weeks old.

Then, on tomorrow morning’s Rick Moran Show, we’ll take most of the 1st hour to read and comment on the best of the entries. I can guarantee you some laughs as well as some jaw dropping idiocy.

You can leave a link to your entry in the comments section here. Or you can email me at Carnival-at-rightwingnuthouse-dot-com. Or you can visit Ferdy the Cat and use his handy Carnival Submission form to enter.

Hope you can join us for the fun.

Starting at 7:00 AM central time, you can listen to the show by clicking the button on the left sidebar.

Today’s show will feature the news headlines, commentary on the horrific video of our Marines being beheaded, a surprise visit from my liberal neighbor Marvin Moonbat, and we’ll take your calls to discuss the issues of the day

We’ll start taking calls after 7:30 AM Central at 1-888-407-1776.

Note: I had the number wrong before. Did the same thing on the air. No wonder nobody called!

The number is now correct.

In Kansas, 150 years ago, brother bled brother as a shooting war broke out between pro-slavery Missouri “Border Ruffians” and free state “Kansas Jayhawkers.” Known as “Bleeding Kansas,” it was a period before the firing on Fort Sumter when the cycle of violence made thinking about a full blown civil war between north and south acceptable.

Up to this point in American history, sectional conflict was seen as a remote possibility, something only firebrands from each section talked about. But as killing begat killing on the Kansas frontier, and especially after John Brown slaughtered seven pro-slavery farmers near Pottawatomie Creek by hacking them to death with broad swords in retaliation for the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by southern sympathizers, Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that they were looking across a great chasm of differences at each other. More importantly, they began to see those on the other side of this divide as the enemy. It was but a short leap to make from Bleeding Kansas to Fort Sumter.

The massacre of Sunni Muslims over the weekend in a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood in the heart of Baghdad was unprecedented in its brutality and brazenness - even for Iraq. More than 40 Iraqis were dragged from their homes or cars, or simply picked up off the street and shot. This is clearly an escalation in the violence and must have ordinary Iraqis thinking very seriously about whether the low level sectarian conflict that has roiled the country for six months might finally break out into a shooting war in the streets:

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

Witnesses say that the shooters wore black and were masked, the uniform of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Militia:

Iraqi officials and residents of the neighborhood identified the gunmen as members of the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In the past three days, Iraqi troops, with the support of U.S.-led forces, have raided the homes of militiamen and detained some of their leaders.

U.S. commanders and diplomats say Sadr and his militia constitute one of the gravest threats to Iraq’s security. Two years ago, U.S. forces fought Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad and in the southern holy city of Najaf. Sadr also holds considerable sway over the political system, with ties to more than 30 members of parliament and several cabinet ministers.

What the Post refers to as a “raid” was actually a coordinated assault on several Mehdi militia strongpoints by Iraqi forces backed up by American air power which was carried out on Friday. This was the first concerted effort by Prime Minister Maliki’s government to rein in the militias who are responsible for most of the revenge killings in and around Bagdhad.

Could this massacre be al-Sadr’s response? What kind of game is the unpredictable cleric playing? How much control does he really have over his men?

Piously, the anti-occupation al-Sadr is condemning the massacre and calling for peace even as some Sunni political leaders are calling for his head:

After the killings, Sadr appealed for calm but criticized what he called a “Western scheme” that foments “a civil and sectarian war among brothers.”

“Iraq is passing through a critical phase and a worsening security situation in spite of the presence of an independent government,” Sadr said in a statement. “I call on all parties, both governmental and popular, to exercise self-control first, and to shoulder their responsibility before God and society.”

Other officials in Sadr’s organization condemned the killings in al-Jihad and denied that the Mahdi Army was involved.

“We regret the statements made by some Sunni Arabs who said that the Mahdi Army militia had conducted the raid at Jihad and killed the innocent people there,” said Riyadh al-Nouri, a top aide to Sadr and his brother-in-law. “If the Mahdi Army wanted to enter into a fight, Iraq would become a blood bath.”

That last statement may be precisely the point. Al-Sadr doesn’t want a civil war as much as he wants influence in the government. His militia is all he really has to bargain with at the moment and the recent assaults may have hurt badly. The Iraqi troops apparently took out two of his major brigades, including one led by a legendary butcher named Abu Deraa:

The Shia terror against Sunni Arabs has a name, Abu Deraa. He’s being called the “Shia Zarqawi” for organizing death squads to take revenge after Sunni Arab suicide bombs kill Shia. But Abu Deraa isn’t the only Shia death squad leader. There are several, plus smaller ones from family or tribal groups organized to take vengeance for kin lost to Saddam’s thugs. This desire for vengeance, and the unwillingness of Shia to fight Shia, has, until recently, allowed a low level civil war to go on unchecked. But now the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa. The Sunni Arab community know Abu Deraa by name, and have even posted pictures of him. That hasn’t changed anything, because Abu Deraa’s death squads still roam central Iraq, killing Sunni Arabs. Several dozen died in Baghdad yesterday, pulled from their cars, identified as Sunni Arabs, and killed on the spot.

There is some question of how much control al-Sadr actually has over his men. This is because unlike the larger and better organized Badr Brigade which answers to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shia party, al-Sadr’s political influence is restricted to a few ministers and members of parliament. Independent operators like Abu Deraa may have their own agendas and any influence exercised by al-Sadr may be negligible.

But al-Sadr is not above using the violence to score political points, something he has done in the past with some success. Following the February bombing of the Shrine at Samarra, al Sadr’s black-clad militiamen were seen by many Shias as saviors as they set up security checkpoints and guarded Shia mosques from vengeful Sunnis who themselves were reacting to militia atrocities against their co-religionists.

Prime Minister Maliki has checkmated al-Sadr at every turn lately, as the two major Shia parties - The Daawa and SCIRI - have frozen the radical cleric out of most deliberations regarding the future of the country. The massacre could be al-Sadr’s brutal way of reminding the politicians that he still has clout where it counts - in the streets. It may not be the best of tactics but it’s all he has at the moment.

As for Maliki, he seems to be grasping the reins of power and accepting the major challenges facing Iraq much more quickly than many observers imagined. By initiating hostilities with major elements of al-Sadr’s militia, he has correctly identified one of the primary obstacles to getting control of the security situation in the country. Instead of starting with some of the smaller Shia militias, he has thrown down the gauntlet to the most troublesome of them.

As StrategyPage points out, Maliki has a long way to go:

It’s not like the Sunni Arab leadership can just push a button, and make their bad guys go away. In Arab culture, the process moves a lot more slowly, and involves lots of talking, coffee, promises, deceit and drama. Apparently the drama has been convincing, because the Shia politicians running the country have persuaded Shia military and police units to go after Shia death squads. All of this is going to take months to play out. There will be cries of “Betrayal!” from the Shia community. Some Shia cops and soldiers will balk at busting fellow Shia, even if the perps are stone killers with dozens of bodies on them. However, the national leadership has agreed that peace with the Sunni Arabs, and an end to the vengeance killings, is necessary. Making this happen is the next crucial battle in the war.

Where are the US armed forces in all of this? Right where they should be; in the background offering logistical and air support to Iraqi army units who are doing the bulk of the fighting. This is an Iraqi problem and can only be solved by Iraqis. Our role will continue to diminish as Iraqi troops demonstrate more confidence and competence in handling combat operations on their own. While this is good news, it is getting to a point where we should begin asking questions about how much more good we can do and should our withdrawal be tied to political developments in Iraq that have little to do with any military calculations. As more and more Iraqi troops are trained and, more importantly, demonstrate that they are ready to handle the nation’s security problems on their own, the more we should be asking how much we should be beholden to the politicians in Iraq who don’t have our people’s interest at the forefront of their concerns.

Whether or not Iraqis see this latest escalation of violence as a line that has been crossed or simply more of the same horror remains to be seen. But there is no denying the fact that at the moment, Iraq is bleeding. And only resoluteness on the part of the government will be able to staunch the flow of blood that is making the lives of ordinary Iraqis a nightmare and the prospects for a significant American troop withdrawal remote.

Because of continuing technical difficulties with our new server, The Rick Moran Show will not be aired this morning as planned.

These problems are becoming enormously frustrating. We were supposed to relaunch yesterday but in trying to initialize the stream, we discovered a host of issues that we believed we would have resolved by this morning. This has not been the case, hence the delay.

WAR Radio expects to be up and running sometime today. In the meantime, please join me tomorrow morning for the inaugural edition of The Rick Moran Show.

I particpated in this week’s Pundit Roundtable at Willisms. McCracken had some crackling good subjects to comment on:

Topic 1: North Korea tested seven missiles this week. What, if anything, can or should be done about Kim Jong-Il, his missiles, and his nuclear program?

Topic 3: What is your favorite place you have been to?

My responses:

Topic 1: There really isn’t that much more we can be doing about North Korea than what we are doing now. China is the key to Kim’s heart, being the only thing standing between the NoKo’s and total collapse. Beijing supplies Kim with the food and fuel his country needs to survive on a day to day basis. And even with China’s help, there are indications that thousands are starving to death every month.

But why should China pull our chestnuts out of the fire? We are currently in a full blown competition with them in east Asia and anything that ties us down is just fine with them. So China plays a very interesting and dangerous game; keeping the fires of crisis stoked at a low level while walking a tightrope with us on one side and the North Koreans on the other. They don’t want to appear too uncooperative in getting Kim to give up his nukes while at the same time, it is in their interest for Kim to be threatening Japan, South Korea, and us.

The solution will have to come with us putting a little more overt pressure on China. At the moment, China still needs us a little bit more than we need them. We must use that fact to our advantage and get both Russia and China to knock some sense into the North Korean dictator.

Kim, by the way, is not crazy - not in the sense that he hears voices or wears a lampshade to Politburo meetings. But his society is the most insular in the world and he really has no clue how his pronouncements or actions come off to the rest of us. Former Secretary of State Albright was struck by this fact when she visited in 1997. It’s like living on a different planet being in North Korea.

Topic 2: One of the really beautiful things about America is freedom of the press. Unlike Great Britain, we have no Official Secrets Act which makes our press free to publish anything it desires, using only its own conscience as a guide.

I’m not sure why Bill Keller and the Times went with the bank monitoring story. The program was by all accounts legal and that the publishing of it embarrassed people in Europe who were helping us at great personal risk to their own careers and position. My only speculation there is that the Times has decided to take an absolutist position on the Bill of Rights - or at least those portions they feel the Bush Administration is violating. Not an indefensible position but certainly troubling.

As for the leakers, it is past time that there be examples made of them. We need arrests, prosecutions, and jail time for people who flout their oaths and damage our security by circumventing the whistleblowing system we have already in place in our intel agencies and blabbing some of most closely held secrets to the Washington Post or New York Times. If their consciences are bothering them so much about a specific action, there are procedures they can take short of talking to the press that would address their concerns. There simply is no excuse for their actions which leads one to the conclusion that they have ulterior motives in leaking. But personal or partisan, their motivations are irrelevant when we are talking about breaking the law.

Topic 3: Glen Lake, Michigan. It doesn’t exist anymore, at least not as I remember it. But when I was a kid, it was as close to heaven as this suburban boy was ever likely to get. There were forests full of deer to explore. There were sailboats and rowboats and swimming all day. There was a picnicking. There was also no TV and no phone which made curling up next to a roaring fire to keep out the northwoods chill with Edgar Rice Burroughs or Alexander Dumas such an utter joy. There was the first kiss as well. The first time I drank coffee. The first time I smoked a cigarette. The last time I saw my grandfather.

When my family started to take vacations there 44 summers ago, there may have been 2 or 3 motor boats on the entire lake. Today, thanks to making the Sleeping Bear sand dunes a national park, there are dozens of developments around the lake, even a high rise hotel. It is no longer the place it was in my youth. But it still exists in my mind as a magical, carefree place where our family was oh so close and where many of the mysteries of growing up were asked and answered.

*******************************************

Ken was also kind enough to ferret out a picture of Glen Lake as seen from directly across the lake from where we used to stay. I could almost see our big, rambling two story, 7 bedroom summer house where so many of my best memories from childhood played out.

Thanks for digging that up, Ken.

One would think that losing by 200,000 votes in a presidential election would be considered enough of a margin to protect the democratic process from being hijacked by a bunch of thuggish street brawlers. Alas, Mexican moonbats, taking a page from their brethren to the north who believe any election they lose must be rigged, are urging people to take to the streets and force a result more to their liking:

Downtown Mexico City swelled Saturday with the accumulated frustration and rage of the poor, who were stoked into a sign-waving, fist-pumping frenzy by new fraud allegations that failed populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador hopes will overturn the results of Mexico’s presidential election.

López Obrador ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers Saturday morning, alleging for the first time that Mexico’s electoral commission had rigged its computers before the July 2 election to ensure the half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, a champion of free trade. In a news conference before the rally, López Obrador called Calderón “an employee” of Mexico’s powerful upper classes and said a victory by his conservative opponent would be “morally impossible.”

Obrador has even less proof of computer rigging than our own moonbats had of Diebold tomfoolery during the 2004 election. In fact, the charge is completely made up out of whole cloth, a cynical attempt to manipulate the poor, the uneducated, and the resentful into pouring into the streets of Mexico City in order to intimidate and threaten the authorities into giving them what they couldn’t get at the ballot box.

These are the same tactics leftist bully boys have used for more than half a century. What you can’t win fair and square, try and steal. It worked in Eastern Europe with Soviet tanks to back them up. It remains to be seen whether the Mexican authorities can resist calls to throw the election laws to the four winds and, in the name of internal peace, simply hand the election to Obrador.

What Obrador has already done is delegitimize the election results in the eyes of about half the country. This despite election monitors from Europe giving the contest a clean bill of health:

Lopez Obrador called for protests across Mexico, saying last Sunday’s elections were more fraudulent than those held during 71 years of one-party rule. European Union election observers have said they had found no major irregularities.

While Obrador calls for a manual recount of every ballot, the Mexican law specifically forbids it except under extraordinary circumstances:

López Obrador wants a vote-by-vote count, which would require opening sealed vote packets from more than 130,000 polling stations. Electoral commission officials have sided with Calderón’s strategists, who argue that the law does not allow for the packets to be opened unless tally sheets attached to the packets appear to have been altered. López Obrador said that only 2,600 vote packets were opened Tuesday and Wednesday during a marathon official count, which shrank Calderón’s lead from 400,000 votes after a preliminary vote to 230,000.

Thousands of López Obrador’s supporters, many of whom had marched across the city for hours, chanted “Voto por voto, casilla por casilla” — vote by vote, polling place by polling place — as they streamed into the Zocalo on Saturday. Many entered the square waving the yellow flags of López Obrador’s Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD.

When has the law ever stopped the left from getting what they want anywhere in the world? It’s “justice” that matters in the end. And “justice” is always defined as the lefty coming out on top and to hell with the law.

The Washington Post’s Ronald Klain demonstrates a myopia that’s breathtaking:

For Lopez Obrador, the clock is ticking loudly. If he wants to keep his candidacy alive, he must take decisive — and quite divisive — action. He must bring meaningful and documented claims of fraud in the election. He must call his supporters to the streets and question the legitimacy of the vote casting and counting process. He must demand that, notwithstanding Mexican law, every ballot be recounted, by hand, to ensure an accurate tally. Above all, he must reject any suggestion that Calderòn received more votes — indeed, he must insist that any fair count would show that he is the rightful winner.

“Notwithstanding Mexican law?” Just who does this moonbat think he is, Al Gore? Actually, Klain wishes Gore had followed exactly this strategy in 2000:

This, of course, was not the playbook that Gore followed in 2000. The vice president rejected advice to do these things. Instead of claiming victory, he limited himself to suggesting that the result was in doubt — and unknown — until a “full and fair” count could be completed. He urged calm among his supporters and called off street protests by progressive groups and allies. He never, ever questioned the legitimacy of the institutions — the courts or the canvassers — responsible for the tallies, and he forbade his lawyers and operatives from doing anything of the sort.

Gore may have “forbade” his operatives from questioning the legitimacy of the process but that didn’t seem to have much affect as party activists worked overtime to pull every trick in the book to circumvent Florida election law. We saw in the Washington State governor’s race what happens when Democrats are allowed to “count every vote.” Washington state Dems were actually able to not only count votes cast on election day, but also votes that mysteriously turned up several weeks after the election following two state mandated recounts that were held prior to the discovery of the “lost” votes in heavily Democratic King county.

This is why there are laws and procedures on the books that should be followed during election challenges. There was no law or procedure in Florida that mandated the kind of recounts ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. That body - a Democratic majority seated - created law on the spot in order to supersede the elected legislature who had diligently passed enabling legislation for election recounts. This is what the US Supreme Court overturned - the imaginary law created out of whole cloth by the Florida court. And I suppose it a footnote in history, but a consortium of media outlets did a recount anyway and confirmed Bush’s victory.

Why Obrador wants to trod this path is obvious; he thinks that he can manipulate his supporters into threatening the Mexican government with riots and unrest unless they do as he bids. This without any evidence of the kind of massive vote fraud that would enable him to overtake the self-declared winner Felipe Calderón. Since he’s already convinced his peasant supporters that he was the victor and that the election was stolen from him, Felipe Calderón will have an extraordinarily difficult time governing the country over the next 6 years. This is bad news for America as the instability could lead to greater numbers of illegals trying to cross the border to find work. And if Obrador were to win, what his socialist, redistributive policies would do to the Mexican economy can only be guessed at.

It is thought that Obrador’s policies would engender a massive flight of capital from Mexico. This would mean slower economic growth which in turn would mean fewer jobs. With an unemployment rate already approaching 20%, that would mean even more illegals making their way north to keep their families from starving to death.

Either way you look at it, Mexico is in for a rough ride for the next few years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: FROM THE “THAT WAS QUICK” DEPARTMENT

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

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

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

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

The loon is also playing the victim card:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE II: 7/9

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

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

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

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

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

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