Iran, the enemy

I've said this before, Iran is the wellspring of most of the world's terrorism. Now Time is reporting that the 9/11 Commission will be reporting that Iran had closer ties to those attacks than Iraq.

This is actually good. I've been saying it for a while as has such luminaries as Michael Ledeen. And note, we have hundreds of thousand of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, effectively surrounding Iran. Perhaps now, if President Bush can vanquish Senator Lurch, I mean Sen. John Kerry in the November election, th US can finally undo that most lasting of Jimmy Carter's stain on America, the Iranian hostage crisis.

Martha Stewart (Penitentiary) Living

Of all of the useless New York celebrities exports to flyover country, Martha Stewart has to be the worst. This dominatrix of domesticity has empowered the tastelessly upwardly mobile to clad themselves in a veneer of faux New England-ness. Never mind that what she did was a felony (darling, didn't you learn from Bill Clinton that you can't lie to The Feds?).

So now she goes to jail in Danbury, Connecticut. You do the crime, you do the time.

But now, in an ABC - Barbara Walters interview, she compares herself to -- get this -- Nelson Mandela.

Now lemme get this straight: Nelson Mandela was jailed because he stood up for racial equality under the law. You went to jail because you lied to the feds about a crooked stock trade.

I guess that she will never know that her real sin was hubris. As was true with Bill, she has yet to learn that laws aren't for other people.

A brilliant distillation of the 2004 Presidential race

From Real Clear Politics:

We've seen the same pattern from most Democrats this time around. First, we saw near universal acceptance of US intelligence estimates (which we've since come to learn were badly flawed), followed by grandiose speeches in late 2002 full of sharp rhetoric and talk of consequences for Hussein, followed by.......absolute and utter outrage at the President of the United States for actually taking action.

That is indeed what it comes down to: a choice between somebody who would actually take action in a crisis and somebody who would waffle and try to triangulate his way out of the problem. President Bush gambled everything to do what he and everybodty else including the Democrats thought was the right thing: whacking Saddam Hussien.I argued persausively in this space that it was the right thing to do regardless of the WMD arguement.Sen. John Kerry once voted for the war in Iraq, then came out against the war on 60 Minutes Sunday night. In a post-9/11, post-Clinton world, being a thoughtful "intelligent" wimp, is not going to cut it in Flyover America. The world is too dangerous.

A genuinely interesting view of Islamic fascism

I always wondered why the American Left so hates President Bush and so opposed the wars in both Afganistan and Iraq. I mean, they were both oppressed people living in poverty. The Afgans were living in the kind of religeous theocracy that the Left always complains Republican want for the US. As of Saddam's Iraq, well, that was the sort of place Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to create here as well. So why do they bitch so?

Well, maybe the Left and Osama Bin Ladin are kindred spirits: both are Marxist that think that the west is totally corrupt and should be destroyed in order to purify it. It would also go a long way to explain why the French are so hesitant to get involved (aside for the river of cash they were getting from Saddam) Great quote:

MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything through a postcolonial prism."

Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.

And why the French didn't support our efforts, going back to Ronald Reagan's attack on Libya for the 1984 disco bombing in germany in which one American Serviceman died:

THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist hegemony.

Read the whole thing here.