They’re reviving a 17th Century recipe for a super-strong whisky in Scotland. Money quote:
"The US Secret Service admitted in 2003 that it had been monitoring the distillery because the difference between distilling a fine whisky and making chemical weapons was ‘just a small tweak’."
The alcohol content is 92 percent. And we have to wait for ten years to drink it? No fair.
Michael Totten is blogging from Kurdistan in Northern Iraq. It’s peaceful, prosperous, and pro-West. New construction is booming. Michael calls it the Utah of the Middle East. Money quote:
"I’m not cherry-picking these photos. I spent almost a week in the city. Every neighborhood I saw, from one end of Suleimaniya to the other, looked either lower middle-class or amazingly wealthy.
Some Kurds are returning home from the diaspora loaded with cash. Others are making money off the surging economy. Iraqi Kurds who remain in the West remit money back to family members who never left.
Real poverty, of the grinding Third World variety, did not appear to exist. If it does exist, it is very well hidden, at least in the cities. (The countryside is still primitive.)"
A useful perspective. Remember that we liberated these people from Saddam and made their security possible. Remember also that for a decade, we provided air-cover to allow their society to be born again. A decade. These things take time. Islam can indeed reconcile itself with the West. Even in the Middle East. Keep hope alive.
I’m glad the NYT gave Antony Lagouranis a chance to explain how abuse and torture of detainees was a function of Bush-Cheney policy and not some improvised gambit on the part of a few rogues on the night shift. But the important point Lagouranis makes – and it’s one not made enough – is that the military command structure insists that superiors take responsibility for abuses on their watch, even if they were unaware of them. What we’ve seen in the Bush administration is a betrayal of that command responsibility, in which underlings take responsibility for the decisions and incompetence of their superiors. We’ve seen a calculated political bid to up-end a fundamental ethical principle in the U.S. military. Meanwhile, a reader writes:
"The backwardness and uselessness of the administration’s torture policy really hit me hard during a recent trip to Cambodia. I visited Cambodia’s most notorious prison, S-21 or Tuol Sleng, in Phnom Penh. Everyone sent to this prison during the worst days of the Khmer Rouge, with the exception of around a dozen people, were eventually murdered in a nearby killing field. There were at least 8,000 victims. Among other horrors that these people endured before finally having their skulls bashed in out in the killing field was a torture technique that looked a lot like water-boarding. When I saw the Tuol Sleng museum’s illustration of this tactic, surrounded by a haunting exhibit of pictures of the inmates, tears filled my eyes. My tears were for the victims and also for my country and its victims. I had never felt so ashamed of being American. I couldn’t believe that my country is engaging in the same tactics the Khmer Rouge used during its darkest days."
In the past, a soldier caught waterboarding a detainee was subject to a court martial. These days, the defense secretary sanctions it.
I’ve never seen such a stout, courageous, unadorned defense of the West – and the Jewish people – as that from this secular Arab-American woman on al Jazeera, and now, Memri TV. Her name is Wafa Sultan, a psychologist in L.A. She reveals that the best remedy in our current situation is to speak the truth about the failure of extremist parts of the Muslim world to respect basic human norms of civilization. There really is nothing to discuss until they rejoin the ranks of sane humanity. She throws it back in their faces. It’s a wonder to watch. More of the transcript here.
Several readers have objected to my suggestion that Fred Barnes has recently regained his critical faculties. To wit:
"I understand why you say this based on this column, but must beg to differ. It’s all wrapped up in one sentence:
‘Bush made one strategic error in 2005, guessing wrongly that the country was adult and serious enough to reform Social Security.’
Think about this. Barnes thinks Bush made ONE strategic error in all of 2005 (one of the worst years ever for an American administration). That alone still shows severe Kool-Aid addiction. To make matters worse, the error is basically blaming the American public for not blindly accepting the terrible Social Security "reform plan" put forth.
I thought it was the liberals who thought so poorly of the collective American public? That they aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to understand a complicated issue. I guess only 34% of this country is smart enough to know what a great President we have."
He’s not just great. He’s a world-historical genius. Here’s Powerline’s John Hinderaker, from July last year:
"It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile."
It is always a mark of failing ideologies and cults that their first response to acknowledging reality is to blame the press – then the people. We appear to be in the second phase.
"And they say there is no sectarian war? What do you call this?" – an Iraqi, reacting to the massive casualties of the past few days. 1300 dead in a few days is not a portent of civil war. It is civil war. The question is whether it can now be stopped. Imagine if 16,000 Americans had been slaughtered in a few days in sectarian conflict. Would you call it peace?
George W. Bush isn’t the only national leader with contempt for democratic processes, checks and balances, and the rule of law. Tony Blair has never seen a free act he doesn’t want to constrain, subsidize, tax, regulate or inspire. The appalling sight of an elected mayor of London being suspended by an unelected bureaucrat because he upset some journalist is a function of Blair’s meddling ways. In yesterday’s Times of London, William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the paper, let rip:
"The Prime Minister knows what the issue is. He is against due process as such. He has written a most extraordinary attack on the whole concept in yesterday’s Observer. The article is so incautious that he must have written it himself.
‘In theory,’ Tony Blair writes, ‘traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.’ This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Minister’s conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law."
It’s time for free people to tell these meddling monarchs where to stick it.
People are always telling you that a rise in the gas-tax – unchanged since 1993! – is impossible to sell to the American people. I don’t buy it. A new poll suggests that all it might need is a little political leadership.
We should wait and see what further polls say. But 34 percent is about what this president deserves. Even Fred Barnes seems to have recovered some critical faculties.
Thanks for the emails. I should say, I guess, that one of Robert George’s great strengths is his unflinching defense of his own position. He is unafraid to speak what he believes, even if it means he favors banning all abortions and, in principle, favoring laws that would make wanking a criminal offense. Ponnuru is a more slippery character, because he has to navigate the shoals of his own extremism with Beltway political maneuvring. One reader comments on the vacuousness of one of his arguments:
"What’s funny to me in Ponnuru’s post is his insistence that he did some sort of moral exploration in his essay. (He says he "goes through several moral distinctions that separate abortion from the murder of an adult.") While I did note a few strange exculpatory notes on the "social" distinctions between abortion and the murder of an adult, these were couched in such a way as to clearly imply that these distinctions should only be applied in the most legalistic of ways. The moral ramifications of abortion and its definition (killing of a human being) were not changed. In fact, in several instances he seemed to be saying that part of the reasoning behind the proposed lowering of criminal sentences for women and abortionists was not by dint of any moral distinction at all but merely for assuring a conviction from a wavering jury – similar to his disingenuous denouncing of the S. Dakota bill. And he says you write in bad faith…"
Ahem. I think the personal viciousness of Ponnuru is a sign that I have cut a little close to the bone. Good.
The Dish 