QOTD: Anne Coulter

Via RWN (http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2004_11_21.PHP)

Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute
for liberals and they can't stand the competition.

Why Not?

From an interview with Rafael Eitan in the 'Iton Tel Aviv' newspaper in January of this year:

'My opinion is that all these efforts [referring to Sharon's disengagement plan -- ed.] are for naught. With the Arabs, we will never be able to make peace... This is a struggle between civilizations. We are a foreign culture, and in my opinion, Islam will never make peace with our foreign entity, and with the fact that it has political independence and even defeats them in wars. They'll never agree...

'[President Moshe Katzav] is mistaken: Assad's hand is not outstretched in peace. He might be trying some tricks so that the Americans won't do to him what they did to Iraq. Nothing more. What, he'll make peace with us?... Does anyone really think that we should deposit our fate in the hands of a lone ruler, a dictator, who is alive today and tomorrow he's dead? ... I can prove that whoever thinks that concessions, compromises, 'Geneva,' Ami Ayalon's plan, are what will change the Middle East situation -- in my opinion is mistaken. The Arabs, very cleverly, bring our people to think that they have changed their ways... The Arabs wage negotiations with us in three ways: pretense, deception, and violence.'

Asked what would have to happen for him to change his mind, Raful said, 'If all the Arab leaders say, 'We're sick of you, we're taking some distance from you, we'll give you territories in exchange for peace, and leave us alone.' On that day, I'll admit that I was wrong [in saying that they would never make peace].'

'What, they should give us territories in exchange for peace?' he was asked.

"Why not?" Raful responded. "Why should we, who are so small, give land to those who are so big, for something uncertain? We should have said this from the outset. But did anyone ever think that this [Exile-like] leadership would make such a request?... A leadership that does not insist on its honor, and has no national honor. We should pay for having defeated them in wars that they started?! Where's the logic, the straight thinking?"

More on Bush IQ vs Kerry IQ

This site discovers that it is likely that Bush's IQ is higher than Kerry's (although I believe that high IQ is a poor requirement and predicter of success for a President).

And this related site covers the common IQ hoax that average state IQ is higher for blue states than red states. The author makes this interesting observation:

"Honest talk about IQ would expose some deeply personal inconsistencies among our most influential thinkers. Although the typical white liberal intellectual claims he wants to censor discussion of IQ to shield black self-esteem, his sometimes-berserk reactions reveal that he finds it a peril to his own. He considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] He constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; b] He has a high IQ, but they don't."

College Grads for Bush; High School Drop Outs for Kerry

CNN carries the following interesting data on the demographics of the 2004 Presidential election [Don't know why Blogger puts such a big space above the table. If you do, please let me know.]:

VOTE BY EDUCATION	BUSH			KERRY		NADER
TOTAL	2004	2000	2004		2004
No High School (4%)	49%	+10	50%		0%
H.S. Graduate (22%)	52%	+3	47%		0%
Some College (32%)	54%	+3	46%		0%
College Graduate (26%)	52%	+1	46%		1%
Postgrad Study (16%)	44%	+0	55%		1%

Iran going nuclear (or... I hope Paris is now in range of the Shahab-3 and Shahab-4)

Caroline B. Glick on the scary situation with Iran going nuclear (or it might be called "I hope Paris is now in range of the Shahab-3 and Shahab-4").

The agreement that France, Germany and Britain reached with Iran this week signals that the diplomatic option of dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program no longer exists. To understand why this is the case, we must look into the agreement and understand what is motivating the various parties to accede to its conditions.

The agreement stipulates that the European-3 will provide Iran with light water reactor fuel, enhanced trade relations and more nuclear reactors. In exchange, the Iranians agree that for the duration of the negotiations toward implementing the agreement – including a European push for Iranian ascension to the World Trade Organization – it will not develop centrifuges and will not enrich uranium. At the same time, the Europeans accepted Iran's claim that it has the legal right to complete the entire nuclear fuel cycle – meaning, it has the legal right to enrich uranium. Strangely, in a separate Iranian agreement with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranians announced that they would cease enriching uranium effective Monday, November 22, rather than immediately. This apparently annoyed the Europeans, but it wasn't a deal breaker.

The Weekly Standard this week explained that light water reactor fuel of the type that the Europeans have agreed to give Iran can be used to produce bomb material within nine weeks. Since the IAEA inspectors only visit Iran every three months, it would be a simple matter to divert enough light water fuel to produce a bomb between inspections. And so, the agreement itself holds the promise of direct European assistance to Iran's nuclear weapons program.

While the Europeans were congratulating themselves for their feckless diplomacy, the Iranians were taking to the airwaves and arguing that they gave up nothing in the deal and received everything. Hamid Reza Asefi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the suspension of nuclear activities would last only until Iran and the Europeans reached a long-term agreement. For his part, Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani said that enriching uranium is "Iran's right, and Iran will never give up its right to enrich uranium."

Iran's interest in making the deal is clear. The IAEA governing board is set to meet next week to discuss Iran's nuclear program. By agreeing to the deal with the Europeans, Iran has effectively foreclosed the option, favored by the US, of transferring Iran's nuclear program to the UN Security Council for discussions that could lead to sanctions on Iran.

Aside from that, all along, Iran has been gaming the system. It has pushed to the limits all feasible interpretation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, of which it is a signatory, to enable it to reach the cusp of nuclear weapons development without breaking its ties or diminishing its leverage over the Europeans as well as the Russians and Chinese. In so doing, it has isolated the US and Israel – which have both gone on record that Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons – from the rest of the international community, which is ready to enable Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capabilities.

In the meantime, as Iran has negotiated the deal with the Europeans, it has moved quickly to develop its nuclear weapons delivery systems. Its recent Shihab-3 ballistic missiles tests seem to have demonstrated that Iran can now launch missiles to as far away as Europe. In addition, last week's launching of an Iranian drone, as well as this week's Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel, have shown that Iran has developed a panoply of delivery options for using its nuclear (as well as chemical and biological) arsenals to physically destroy Israel.

For their part, the European powers must know that this deal is a lie. The ink had not dried on their signatures when Iran announced that it wasn't obligated by the agreement to end its uranium enrichment. As well, on Wednesday, just two days after the deal was announced formally, the Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance – the political front for the People's Mujahedeen (which the deal stipulates must be treated as a terrorist organization comparable to al-Qaida) – held press conferences in Paris and Vienna where its representatives stated that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium at a Defense Ministry facility in Teheran and that it bought blueprints for nuclear bombs three years ago from Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear bomb store. The Council of Resistance is the same organization that blew the whistle on Iran's nuclear program in 2002, when it exposed satellite imagery of Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz.

Aside from this, European leaders themselves have said that in their view there is no military option for taking out Iran's nuclear facilities. In an interview with the BBC this week, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, "I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop." Straw made this statement the same week that French President Jacques Chirac made an all-out diplomatic assault against British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his alliance with US President George W. Bush. Speaking to British reporters on Monday, Chirac said, "Britain gave its support [to the US in Iraq] but I did not see much in return. I am not sure that it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favors." Chirac added that he had told Blair that his friendship with Bush could be of use if the US adopted the EU position on Israel and the Palestinians. Since Bush has refused to do so, Chirac argued, Bush has played Blair for a fool.

From these statements, two things about the European agenda become clear. First, by bringing Britain into the talks with Iran, the French have managed to ensure that the Americans, if they decide to do something about Iran's nuclear weapons programs, will be forced to act without British backing and at the expense of the British government, thus causing a serious fissure in the Anglo-American alliance. Straw's statement is breathtaking in that it shows that on the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons, the British prefer to see Iran gain nuclear weapons to having anyone act to prevent them from doing so.

Chirac's statement exposes, once again, France's main interest in international affairs today. To wit: France wishes only to box in the US to the point that the Americans will not be able to continue to fight the war against terrorism. The French do this not because they necessarily like terrorists. They do this because as Chirac has said many times, he views the central challenge of our time as developing a "multipolar" world. France's obsession with multipolarity stems from Chirac's perception that his country's primary aim is not to free the world from Islamic terror, but to weaken the US.

Given this state of affairs, it is clear that the newest deal with the mullahs has removed diplomacy from the box of tools that can be used against Iran. In the unlikely event that the issue is ever turned over to the Security Council, France will veto sanctions even if Russia and China could be bought off to abstain. As the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has shown, even if sanctions were to be levied, there is no credible way to enforce them.

So where does this leave the Jews who, in the event that Iran goes nuclear, will face the threat of annihilation? Crunch time has arrived. It is time for Israel's leaders to go to Washington and ask the Americans point blank if they plan to defend Europe as Europe defends Iran's ability to attain the wherewithal to destroy the Jewish state. It must be made very clear to the White House that the hour of diplomacy faded away with the European Trio's latest ridiculous agreement with the mullahs. There is no UN option. Europe has cast its lot with the enemy of civilization itself.

The prevailing wisdom in Washington these days seems to be that the US is waiting for an Israeli attack on Iran. There is some logic to such a policy. No doubt, the Arabs and the Iranians will all blame America anyway, but they are not America's chief concern here. Britain and Germany are.

What the US needs is plausible deniability regarding an Israeli strike vis- -vis Britain and Germany, in order to get itself out of the trap that Paris has set for it. An Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program will leave Germany in an uncomfortable public position. Berlin cannot condemn the Jews for doing what we can to prevent another Holocaust without losing whatever crumbs of moral credibility it has built up over the past 50 years.

As for Britain, if Israel were to conduct the attack on its own, the British would be hard-pressed to abandon the Americans; thus, the danger that British involvement with the Paris-based multipolarists on Iran will breach the Anglo-American alliance could be somewhat mitigated.

On the other hand, if the Bush administration does not accept Israeli reasoning, the fact will still remain: Israel cannot accept a nuclear Iran.

QOTD: Orde Wingate

Orde Wingate on the failure of Jewish pre-emptive action in the yishuv:

[Orde Wingate said,] 'Somewhere in those hills are men who will one day come down and wipe you out.'

[Jewish settler Zvi] Brenna replied: 'They will not overrun us so easily. We will be waiting for them when they come.'

Wingate turned angrily upon him. `That is the trouble with the Jews. Always so calm and patient. Always waiting for disaster to come. You are a race of masochists crying: `Hurt me, hurt me! I cannot raise my hand against you until you have killed my brother and raped my sister and thrown my father and mother into the ditch.' The Jews of Palestine are in bad condition. So long as you all sit in your settlements and wait to fight and die, you will die before you have a chance to fight.'

'What else can we do?' asked Brenna.

'Why doesn't Hagana go out and fight?'

'I don't know,' replied Brenna.'

Arafat's True Colors

What Must Be Done for Peace: The Phased Plan for Israel's Destruction

In a closed meeting with Arab diplomats in Stockholm he made the following statement (which was leaked by one person present and reported by Cal Thomas in the Washington Times, also by the Middle East Digest, March 7, 1996):
'Within five years we will have 6 to 7 million Arabs living on the West Bank and in Jerusalem.... We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. Jews will not want to live among Arabs. I have no use for Jews....We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.'

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

OpinionJournal carries an excellent examination of the big picture of the Battle of Fallujah.

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?

The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat.

Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of London:

'In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month.'

When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?

Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.

In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites.

We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.

QOTD: Christopher Hitchens

The WSJ quotes Christopher Hitchens, writing in the online magazine Slate.com on Nov. 9:

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. . . .

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he -- and the U.S. armed forces -- have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al Qaeda network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The 'antiwar' faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary -- that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Edgar Bronfman is wrong on intermarriage

Edgar Bronfman is an idiot. Of course, let's wait and see how his own great-grandchildren will turn out.

It is time to abandon "racist" ideas and encourage intermarried couples to raise their children as Jews, according to World Jewish Congress leader Edgar Bronfman.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, to be published in London on Friday, he said he believed "the whole concept of Jewish peoplehood, and the lines being pure, begins to sound a bit like Nazism, meaning racism."

..."It was fine 100 years ago," and it can probably be stopped at its current level, "but we're certainly not going to turn it off.

"Now we have a choice. We can double the amount of Jews that there are, or we can irritate everybody who's intermarried and lose them all." It was not necessary to insist on the non-Jewish partner converting, he continued: "I think the only condition we should make is that should bring up their children as Jewish." Some might convert in time, but "the rabbi who refuses to marry such couples is turning people off," he said. "My answer to 'who is a Jew' is 'anybody who wants to be.'" People did not emigrate to America to become better Jews but to have a better life: "And now we have five generations of that... The price of becoming successful in America is that people have forgone their Judaism.

"I don't want to give up on secular Jews. I want them to become more Jewish." All seven of his children from five marriages were brought up as Jews, he said, but only one, Matthew, is an observant Jew. "That was his choice."

"My answer to 'who is a Jew' is 'anybody who wants to be.'"? That's a healthy standard...Idiot...


Here is what JewishPress.com >The Jewish Press had to say:

Once one gets over Bronfman`s invective -- the idea that halachic standards for Judaic integrity are a form of Nazism or racism is really beyond comment -- his discourse is merely a restatement of Reform doctrine that there is no such thing as normative Judaism reflective of a transcendent, Divine set of principles designed to make us 'a light unto the nations.'

Judaism, rather, is, according to Bronfman and those wit similar insight, whatever anyone says it is. One suspects that Bronfman`s motivation was tied in significant ways to his own and his family`s extensive experience with intermarriage and a desire for acceptance and communal legitimacy. Even taking him at his word, he plainly is advocating the destruction of Judaism in order to save it.

Numbers Don't Lie

Best of the Web from the WSJ points out this interesting fact:

We'd just like to point out these numbers (hat tip: blogger Patrick Ruffini):

Bush voters	60,515,255
Total population of France	59,900,268

Weasel Watch

Best of the Web quotes The Jerusalem Post. But their comment on the situation is the funniest...

Several French municipalities governed by communist and left-wing majorities are considering naming a street or a square after Yasser Arafat," the Jerusalem Post reports. In fairness, we should note that the French are far from unanimous:

The French police intelligence service, Renseignements Generaux, reportedly warned the Ministry of Interior that such initiatives might trigger heated polemics and tensions between Jews and Muslims, especially neighborhoods ridden by ethnic violence.

Somehow this reminds us of that joke about how Germans like to march in the shade.

QOTD: Heinrich Heine

Dennis Prager quotes Heinrich Heine:

In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the great German poet Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew, predicted what would happen if Christianity ever weakened in Germany:

'A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless walk in the park. Christianity restrained the marshal ardor of the Germans for a time, but it did not destroy it; once the restraining guard is shattered, savagery will rise again . . . the mad fury of the berserk of which Nordic poets sing and speak.'

The Israeli Economics of Socialism

The WSJ reveals the extent of the drag of socialism on the Israeli economy. It's worse than Europe!

...the bursting of the technology bubble combined with four years of intifada have brought serious economic pain [To Israel]. But in the end these developments have only accentuated a structural problem long in the making. In the last 30 years, GDP per capita in the G-7 countries has risen by 82%. In Israel, it increased just 48%, a consequence of Israel's years of unproductive socialist experimentation, overregulation, underdeveloped financial market and high transfer payments and taxes. Even excluding Israel's high military spending, public expenditure accounts for about 46% of GDP, compared to an average of only 40% in the OECD.

Yuch

Arutz Sheva carries this tidbit on Arafat

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, wrote [Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2002 ],
'... I am not surprised to see that Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania's foreign intelligence service. I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB... Gen. Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB bringing Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters secretly to the Soviet Union via Romania, in order for them to be indoctrinated and trained. During that same year, the Soviets maneuvered to have Arafat named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with public help from Egypt's ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

'When I first met Arafat, I was stunned by the ideological similarity between him and his KGB mentor. Arafat's broken record was that American 'imperial Zionism' was the 'rabid dog of the world,' and there was only one way to deal with a rabid dog: 'Kill it!' ... Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy...

'On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the [above] demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid. In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation... James Welsh, a former intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, has told U.S. journalists that the NSA had secretly intercepted the radio communications between Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad during the PLO operation against the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, including Arafat's order to kill Ambassador Noel..."

Pacepa also wrote about PLO murders against its own people:
"In January 1978, the PLO representative in London was assassinated at his office. Soon after that, convincing pieces of evidence started to come to light showing that the crime was committed by the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, who had recently broken with Arafat and built his own organization. "That wasn't a Nidal operation. It was ours," Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's liaison officer for Romania, told me. Even Ceausescu's adviser to Arafat, who was well familiar with his craftiness, was taken by surprise. "Why kill your own people?" Col. Constantin Olcescu asked. "We want to mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the chairman of becoming too conciliatory and moderate," Salameh explained..."

Not so evenly divided

Michael Medved writes that the election was more lopsided than it appeared.

An honest examination of election results rebuts conventional wisdom about an evenly divided electorate.

First, the numbers show that Bush's final percentage of the popular vote is closer to 52% than 51%, giving him a margin approaching 5% -- well beyond most predictions.

Second, Bush proved competitive in every corner of the country, while Kerry emphatically did not. Bush received at least 44% of the vote in 45 of the 50 states -- including such Democratic bastions as California, New Jersey and Connecticut -- but Kerry fell below 44% in twenty states, and below 40% in thirteen of those!

Moreover, Kerry's support came disproportionately from four instinctively, unshakably Democratic groups -- blacks, Jews, gays, and Muslims -- who portrayed themselves as menaced victims and voted for Kerry nearly 9 to 1, despite disagreements on most issues.

Among the 80% of the voting population that's neither black, Jewish, Muslim nor gay, Bush carried an overwhelming 63% of the vote.

The long reach of liberalism

Marty Nemko explains liberalisms long reach.

According to the nonpartisan National Journal, John Kerry's voting record, over his 20 years in the Senate. was the #1 most liberal, moreso even than Edward Kennedy's. Liberalism's key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots. That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations than create jobs, invent life-saving medicines, etc) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.

Bill's quite far from normal

George Will on who is the real paranoid in American politics.

On election night on public television — your tax dollars at work — Bill Moyers said: "I think if Kerry were to win this in a — in a tight race, I think there'd be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. . . . I mean that the right wing is not going to accept it." Moyers, the emblematic face of public television, is an intellectual icon in the sort of deep blue precincts that think red America is paranoid.

Bush voters may not be so stupid

Marty Nemko on the election results [emphasis mine].

"Watch or read the media and you get the sense that the only people who voted for Bush were tobacco-chewin', gun-totin', G-d-fearin' simpletons. Every clip of a Bush voter sounds like an idiot: 'Well, I sorta kinda liked Bush, well, just because I just sorta kinda trust him.'

Then, how do you explain this: Buried at the bottom of hundreds of election statistics on CNN's website is this: 52% of college graduates voted for Bush vs. only 46% for Kerry. Not surprisingly, the liberal media couldn't find time amid all the ridiculing of Bush voters to mention that little untidy fact.

Europe's political establishment is hostile to Christianity

Rocco Buttiglione in the WSJ

If you consider that Mr. Bush won re-election in part because of his firm stand on family values and other moral issues, it becomes apparent that Europe and United States are drifting apart not only on foreign policy but also on their vision of a democratic society and of the proper relationship between politics and ethics.

One of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, was convinced that politics needed values it could not produce itself and had to rely on other agencies (mainly the churches) to nurture the virtues civil life needs. The state could therefore not privilege any church in particular but had to maintain a positive attitude to religion in general.

Jean Jacques Rousseau thought, on the contrary, that the state needed a kind of civil religion of its own and the existing churches had to bow to this civil religion by incorporating its commandments in their theology. Many scholars see in this idea of Rousseau's the seminal principle of totalitarianism. The tradition of Rousseau and of the Jacobins has survived in Europe in less virulent forms than in the not too distant past, but it's still part of the European political and ideological landscape.

Wrong?

Cal Thomas on liberal elitism:

The condescension and elitism expressed by the left displays intolerance at its worst. The left is again exposed as hypocritical, preaching tolerance and inclusion, but practicing intolerance and exclusion of all ideas not in conformity with their own. Has it never occurred to liberals that they might be objectively wrong?

Oh, Yeah!

Eglin Studying Massive 30,000-Pound Bomb
Bomb Would Be 40 Percent Bigger Than MOAB
via The Associated Press

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. -- The Air Force built a weapon so big it was nicknamed "Mother of All Bombs" on the eve of the war with Iraq, but MOAB would be dwarfed by a much larger munition now under study.

The proposed Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, would weigh 30,000 pounds, nearly 40 percent more than the 21,000 pound MOAB -- officially Massive Ordnance Air Blast -- that never saw combat.

"The reason it's heavier than MOAB is that it has to penetrate a target," said Fred Davis, technical director for assessment and demonstrations at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Munitions Directorate.

MOP would be designed to explode deep in the ground or inside a structure to destroy tunnels and bunkers or topple tall buildings.

MOAB, on the other hand, explodes just above the ground. It is a larger version of the BLU-84 "Daisy Cutter" that was used during the Vietnam War to blast out helicopter landing zones in jungle areas.

The 15,000-pound Daisy Cutter also was dropped during the 1991 Persian Gulf War to clear minefields and more recently to blast caves believed to be hiding terrorists in Afghanistan.

MOAB can be against similar targets and structures or vehicles susceptible to surface blast damage. Both also are seen as psychological weapons that can demoralize an enemy.

During the next 16 months the Munitions Directorate at this Florida Panhandle base will look at everything from MOP's shape to its guidance. The Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency is providing $500,000 in initial research money.

If the project gets beyond the initial research and development phase, MOP probably won't see its first armed drop until 2006 or later.

MOP would have inertial and satellite guidance, just like MOAB, but it would have a more slender shape so it could be dropped from high altitude by a B-52 or a B-2 stealth bomber.

The Daisy Cutter and MOAB are too bulky to be carried by sleek bombers and must be pushed out of the rear door of lower-flying and slower cargo planes.

Right <> Left

Michael Ledeen on the right-left equivalence

I did not believe that "policy would be more or less the same" with the Democrats in charge. I believed they would rush toward reconciliation with our European critics, U.N.-ify our Middle East policy, stand by while Iran acquired and tested atomic bombs, and then appease the mullahs — setting the war back by at least two years.

The Most Important Election of Our Lives

via Jack Kelly

"People are telling you [this] will be the most important election of our lives," wrote former Air Force pilot and web logger Bill Whittle, a Gore supporter in 2000, a few days before the vote. "That is not true. The most important election of your lives was held on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2000. You just didn't know it. Neither did I.

"What happened on that day led to one man being in the White House these last four years, rather than the other one," Whittle said. "George W. Bush was commander in chief when we needed him most."

Who will replace Arafat?

Zev Chafets

Who will replace Arafat? There are two answers. Western
diplomats almost certainly will seize on one Abu or another as their designated statesman. But eventually this figurehead will run up against the local reality that Arafat both fostered and accepted: The majority of Palestinians do not want peace if it requires a compromise with Israel.

Top Israeli rabbi says Jews should vote for Bush

Associated Press via THE JERUSALEM POST

A senior Israeli rabbi with influence among almost 150,000 American Jews ruled Tuesday that they should vote for President George W. Bush in the upcoming US elections, his office said.

Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashiv, responding to queries from Americans residing in Israel, has decided that Bush is better for Israel than his competitor, John Kerry, said an assistant to the rabbi, Haim Cohen.

Elyashiv's opinions are respected by large ultra-Orthodox communities, especially in Israel and the US. Elyashiv has strong influence over about half of all haredi Jews of European origin.

"Apparently George Bush loves Israel and thus we need to vote for him," the rabbi said Tuesday, according to Cohen.

The rabbi does not usually rule on political matters, especially those that don't directly concern Israel. But Elyashiv decided that the US is a "kingdom of grace," or great friend to Israel, and thus the elections there can directly influence the Jewish state, Cohen said.

About 140,000 American Orthodox Jews will probably abide by Elyashiv's decision, said Sam Heilman, an expert on American Jews at Queens College in New York. But Elyashiv is just confirming the theories of many analysts who believe most haredi Jews in the US vote Republican, Heilman said in a telephone interview from his office.

"What's extraordinary is that the rabbi is addressing non-Israelis in a sense," Heilman said. "This confirms that the Orthodox community, by and large, is supporting Bush more than Kerry."

But those Orthodox Jews who are already dead set on Kerry will not necessarily change their minds, despite Elyashiv's ruling, Heilman said.

The rabbi's decision will influence the vote of at least 10,000 American Jews currently residing in Israel, at least 700 of whom are from the battleground state of Florida, he said.

Most American Jews typically vote Democrat and, in 2000, the community voted 4-to-1 for Al Gore. But Kerry faces a tougher battle among Jews this election since Bush has built a reputation as a strong backer of Israel.