Month: September 2006

It’s a new term, coined in Denmark, about an inability to confront the threat that radical Islam presents to the West. It’s now being used by liberals and centrists finally waking up to the danger that Islamism poses. I’m glad the left is waking up from its own delusions. Now how about the right?

The editor of National Review is thrilled that torture will now continue with Congressional backing. What can I add? Notice how he uses C. S. Lewis’ brilliant euphemism for what he favors: "coercive interrogation." By the way, I’ve been very clear from the beginning what I’m against: "no severe mental or physical pain or suffering," the clear legal definition of torture as proscribed by the Geneva Conventions, and followed by the U.S. for generations. Therefore: no "waterboarding", no "hypothermia", no "stress positions", no "long-time-standing." Nothing but actually good interrogation; and an intelligence effort that is the real thing: careful, long-term infiltration of terror networks, human intelligence, the NSA program (with court oversight). Torture is the lazy, brutal man’s way of getting intelligence. And we have had few presidents as lazy or as callous as this one.

Lowry, of course, doesn’t believe that what Stalin’s thugs did to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulags was "torture". It was just one of many ‘alternative methods". He doesn’t believe that what the Japanese did to Americans in Singapore was "torture". It was all just "coercive interrogation." And fine by him. Isn’t it amazing that that the most prominent moral relativists of our time are on what’s left of the right?

If I have any message for the students of today, it is this: you cannot trust the word of this president or anyone in this administration. They have either lied or told you things that turned out not to be true. Finally, someone says it on the floor of the House – Democrat Tim Ryan. He’s wrong, alas. Bush will never impose a draft, even if we needed one. It would mean admitting he was wrong. He will torture and lie but he will not concede error.

A conservative challenges the theocons.

Commonweal magazine asks someone who knows the Pope – president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome – what on earth Benedict was driving at in his address on Islam.

A November 2004 Atlantic article shows that Frank Rich still can’t get his facts right. Money quote:

Everyone knows about the looting of Iraq’s museums during last year’s war. What almost no one knows is that most of the museums’ holdings had been stolen and sold years before ‚Äî and not by mobs of Iraqis off the street.

For the record, I tracked down my initial comments on the looting of the Iraq museum. Frank Rich claimed the following:

Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld’s critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq.

My post of April 22, 2003, says:

I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear.

It seems to me that a blogger who wrote about the looting of the museum as "damn-near indefensible," does not deserve the moniker "cheerleader" of Rumsfeld’s acquiescence to looting. I got a lot of things wrong. But it’s not fair to blame me for saying something I didn’t.

"As we face the issues that we are facing today, I don’t think there’s anything more important out there than the marriage issue," – Marilyn Musgrave, seeking re-election in Colorado.

Fairmont, West Virginia, 1 pm.

Not so much, it seems.

Signs of progress.