Category: Networks

This piece by Howard Fineman on The Plame Game provides some vital background on Lyin’ Joe Wilson and his wife’s cronies in the CIA:

Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq—Saddam Hussein and his Baathists—as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.

The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.

Perhaps Fitzgerald is investigating whether Wilson was an agent of Saddam, given their close ties.

The University of California signaled its intention to become a haven of mediocrity by withdrawing from the National Merit Scholarship program:

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale said some UC chancellors initially might have harbored concerns that, if they scrapped the National Merit program, they would lose out on talented students and be punished in the rankings published by such magazines as U.S. News & World Report. He called the decision “another move in the direction of doing what you think makes the most sense rather than be concerned about what it will mean for the rankings.”

Elaine S. Detweiler, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Merit Scholarship Corp. in Evanston, Ill., dismissed speculation by Carnesale and other academics that some of the 200 other participating universities might follow UC’s path. Detweiler called the PSAT “the most equitable way” to identify academically talented students from around the country, noting that the same exam is given to students at 22,000 high schools in all 50 states.

“We regret that finalists in the extremely competitive National Merit program who may wish to attend a UC campus will no longer have the opportunity to earn a Merit Scholarship sponsored by the university and, more importantly, receive the recognition for academic excellence that accompanies a Merit Scholarship,” she said.

Other defenders of the National Merit program, including other universities that actively recruit the winners and the winning students themselves, say it remains a helpful way to identify talented candidates even if the selection process is flawed. Some have pointed out, for example, that students are less likely to have taken test preparation courses before the PSAT than before the SAT.

The message is very clear: smart kids better avoid UC.

With apologies to the moonbats of the left, this story shows why we need to stick around in Iraq a while longer:

Baghdad — Inside the morgue at Kindi Hospital lay the remains of Amjad Kudeer. He was 13 when fragments from a suicide car bomb struck him in the head and chest Wednesday, killing him instantly.

Outside the door to the refrigerated room, Amjad’s sobbing mother called his name over and over, as if to summon him back to life. Then she looked up and asked: “What did he do to deserve this? They are killing children. Why? Why?”

Amjad and more than a dozen other children from east Baghdad’s al-Khalij neighborhood made up the majority of the 27 people killed when a suicide bomber drove into a crowd that had gathered around U.S. soldiers who were handing out candy and small toys, police said. The attack also killed one soldier, according to the U.S. military, and wounded at least 50 people.

Rove or no Rove, there are serious things going on in the world and we need to deal with them.

Media pacifists are jumping all over Mark Yost for complaining about the biased coverage of the war in Iraq, but the good people aren’t just rolling over and taking it. Here’s an excellent defense of Yost:

Anytime someone dares to call into question the motives of the media, we can count on Lovelady to come to the defense of the far-left extreme — anyone out there remember the Eason Jordan affair? Easongate was all the fault of the “wacko neo-fascist bloggers,” or so Lovelady would have had us believe in the dozens of posts he made in cyberspace.

I don’t doubt for one moment that President Bush and his advisers made mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war. I do not, for one minute, believe that he purposefully lied to the American public about the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power or the importance of introducing democracy in the Middle East as a way to stem radical Islamist terrorism. I believe with all my heart that the Iraqi people are better off today and will be better off in the future because of the American intervention to remove Saddam. Just peer into the dozens of mass graves uncovered in the last couple of years and tell me you disagree with me, Steve.

What America is attempting to do in the Middle East is nothing short of revolutionary. After years of supporting regimes that were friendly to our interests but suppressed their own people, President Bush has decided that the only course of action is for America to do all it can to foster self-determination in a vital region of the world. Not American-style democracy, mind you, but true local self-determination. And each day, on the ground in Iraq, there are dozens of small steps taken toward that goal. Yes, there are missteps and miscalculations … yes, there are setbacks as today’s suicide bombing of U.S. soldiers giving candy to Iraqi CHILDREN, but the ultimate success of the mission is not in doubt in my mind because of the determination of this president.

The predictability of Steve Lovelady and the Columbia Journalism Review has become something of a joke over the course of the last few years. They’re preaching to the choir while lecturing a public that increasingly writes off both of them as useless relics.

The media can’t play the same game with Iraq they played with Vietnam because there are too many alternate routes for news to take these days, but they’re certainly trying, relics that they are.

Sepia Mutiny, a blog for second-generation Indo-Americans, is pretty anguished over the identity of the London terrorists. Here’s a bit of analysis:

When I was a child my mother told me a story that her mother had told her. I can only re-tell the story as it was told to me:

Once when mami was young she was at a train station. There was a strange man there who simply looked at her and hypnotized her. The man was a Fakir. She followed him unable to control herself as he led her away. Fakir’s have magical powers. Really Abhi (I was shaking my head in disbelief). They are Muslim and they kidnap and convert you to Islam. Luckily the family got her back before she walked too far off. She didn’t remember anything that happened afterward and said she couldn’t control herself. A Fakir can just look at you and you’ll forget everything, your whole life.

Now bear in mind that my family is from Gujarat, where bigotry has persisted for generations. My mom is not a bigot but she believed (and still does) that a Fakir has mystical powers that can brainwash a normal person and get them to walk away from their life and convert to Islam (even though not all Fakirs are Muslim and the Sufi order is the least fundamental). I actually asked her to tell me this story again when I went home just last month.

Most of us know at least one person that is a “born-again” into some religion. Various things motivate these people. Many of them (like at least one of these bombers) were described as being out-of-control before their conversion (or re-discovery of their family religion). Others feel overwhelmed by the influence of the world they live in and retreat back to a basic set of instructions that they think will bring order to the chaos they feel. Some take this “order” too far by trying to impose their interpretation of that order on others. Most born-agains however are perfectly sane and choose to practice their new beliefs in private without a harmful thought toward anyone. How do we recognize in our second generation peers which path they have chosen to walk?

Commenters note that the fanaticism evinced in the terror bombings is more commonly Islamic than Hindu.

They were all second-generation Pakistani-Brits, and didn’t fit the profile that we generally associate with West-hating religious nuts. They were educated and into sports:

Shehzad Tanweer, 22, was an outwardly ordinary young British man, a university graduate who studied sports science and loved cricket and football.

and employed in the caring professions:

Like Tanweer, Khan seemed an unlikely suicide bomber. Friends said he was married with an eight-month-old baby girl and that he worked with disabled children in a primary school.

but very religious anyhow:

Hussain lived with his parents and neighbours said he had become “very religious” two years ago.

I would hope that their mosque is heavily investigated.

A revisionist theory is floating around to the effect that suicide terror isn’t about religion but some sort of reaction to American occupation. This is a load of bunk, of course. The USA has had troops in Germany for 60 years and the Germans haven’t sent us any suicide bombers. Let’s get real, OK?

Juan Cole, of course, said this about the terrorist bombers: “…this bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community.” What a genius.

But he’s changed his tune

Legislators in democratic societies who are thinking about how to respond to this problem should give serious thought to RICO-like laws that could be used to curb religious cults, which typically isolate members, indoctrinate them, manipulate them, and sometimes coerce them. Cults avoid scrutiny by harassing critics and whistleblowers, often in ways that police find it difficult to respond to. The enormous problems modern societies have had with groups like Christian Identity, the Koreishites, Aum Shinrikyo, and now al-Qaeda, suggests that current legal frameworks are inadequate to address this problem. Ex-members, victims and critics of cults need a legal basis for protection from the cults. The American Family Foundation is doing excellent work in this regard.

Cole is fundamentally correct, and I agree with his prescription completely. We can’t allow destructive cults to operate freely under “freedom of religion” protection when they’re functionally the same as organized crime. Sorry, Tom Cruise, but you’re busted.

Parkinson’s drugs can mess you up big time:

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, have found that certain drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease can cause patients to become addicted to gambling. The drugs, called dopamine agonists, also have been found to boost patients’ appetites for sex, food, and alcohol.

“This is a striking effect,” said J. Eric Ahlskog, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. “Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual.”

In one case, a 54-year-old married pastor gambled daily at the local casino, hiding his losses from his wife.

In another, a 41-year-old computer programmer who had never gambled in his life became “consumed” with Internet gambling.

In a third, a 68-year-old man with no history of gambling lost more than U.S. $200,000 at casinos over a six-month period.

I wonder if that’s this guy’s problem, or this guy’s, or this ones; this guy for sure.

Uh-oh:

THEY may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities.

The startling figures emerge from studies into toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost all the country’s feline population. They show that half of Britain’s human population carry the parasite in their brains, and that infected people may undergo slow but crucial changes in their behaviour.

Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the “sex kitten” effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun-loving and possibly more promiscuous.

Interestingly, for those who draw glib conclusions about national stereotypes, the number of people infected in France is much higher than in the UK.

Time to kill the damn cat.

It strikes me that the calls for the prosecution and/or firing of Karl Rove are a bit premature. At most, we have reason to believe that Rove may have committed a technical violation of a law regarding covert agents, not a substantial one, by mentioning that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA employee.

It’s certainly not clear that Rove knew that Plame had at one time been in covert ops, or that he made the connection between her and her husband in order to damage her career in any way. And it’s not even clear that Rove technically violated the law, as Plame was a desk-jockey at the time of Rove’s converstations with Matt Cooper and Rove apparently didn’t know of her former role as a covert agent.

So once again, our conspiratorial friends have failed to deliver the goods after attributing nefarious motives and dire consequences* to Rove. Rather than seeking retaliation against Plame, Rove was simply trying to cut Wilson down to size in the face of claims that Cheney selected him for the mission that confirmed Saddam’s attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

(*On Air Anti-America, RFK Jr. claimed that at least one agent was killed as a result of Plame’s blown cover.)

There are two major theories about the roots of Jihadi terrorism. One theory, subscribed to by the anti-American left, holds that jihadis are mainly upset about US foreign policy choices such as support for the continued existence of Israel and the Jewish people generally, rejection of the Kyoto Treaty, historic support for anti-democratic regimes in the Islamic world, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, and for generally being a capitalistic, imperialist entity that exploits Third World people and prevents the emergence of the ideal Socialist Utopia.

The other point of view (held by Neo-Cons and others) holds that religiously-based terrorism arises in the Middle East because the economies and social structures of ME nations don’t provide anything like full employment for young men, village life is crumbing, there is a massive flight to the cities by unemployed young men without roots or affiliations in the cities, and there’s an enormous jealousy of the West where standards of living are higher, morals are looser, women have rights, etc. According to this view, the young jihadis join together at the mosques since they’re without family or friends, where they’re lead by members of professional-class families who were educated in the West where they were radicalized in mosques run by mullahs who blame the sad condition of ME societies on Zionists and Crusaders who keep the Muslim down. The children of the professional class and the villagers share the same dilemma: they can’t find work, and without it they’re unable to marry.

Peaceniks propose to win the war on terror by appeasement, often proposing the notion that simply accelerating the two-state solution and driving more hybrid cars will do it. Critics maintain that appeasement implies the extermination of the Jewish people (or at least the destruction of Israel), the elimination of women’s rights in the West, mass conversion of Christians to Islam, and the imposition of Sharia Law on the West. Proponents of development, especially the Neo-Cons, propose to inject market dynamics into the ME and to replace autocratic political structures with representative government. Their opponents accuse them of seeking simply to line Halliburton’s pockets with lucrative oil contracts.

Of course, nobody knows which side is right as we don’t really have the data one way or another to conclusively disprove either theory. But supposing that the Neo-Cons are wrong and spreading liberal democracy to the ME doesn’t reduce terrorism, at least we’ve exported our best values and improved some lives a bit. If the other side is wrong, we’ve destroyed the basis of our civilization for nothing.

It’s not a hard choice, really, and you don’t have to worry about flypaper theories or WMDs to decide where you stand.