I woke to the sound of taps on the radio this morning, a world turned upside down for someone who served in the military. Reveille usually begins a soldier’s day and taps ends it. Taps in another time was also the bugle call to signal lights out, literally; or the end of a soldier’s life, figuratively. Before I could unscramble all those images in the morning fog, Anna’s cell phone alarm chirped. I hit “OK” and the text read; “It’s Veterans Day”.

I had forgotten, but she never does. She, who never had a whiff of gun powder, reminds herself to remind me of why it’s important to remember. So here again in another year where sons and daughters are in harm’s way, we should remember and give thanks. Give thanks to those who serve, give thanks to those who have served, and give thanks to “those who sit and wait”. And we say a prayer for those who wait no more; those who went in harm’s way and never returned.

Yes, say a prayer too for those who died or were wounded needlessly at Fort Hood the other day. Men and women who had every right to believe they were safe getting ready to make us safe. The Fort Hood warriors were twice burdened; dying for “diversity” and want of leadership.

Indeed, in this wet cold winter of national uncertainty we should all pray that George Orwell’s tribute to soldiers echoes across every breakfast table; “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men (and women) stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm”.

For this we should all say thank you.

Army General George Casey, set a new standard for flag officer pandering while making excuses for domestic terror on the Sunday talk circuit on 8 November. On three separate networks he seemed to be more concerned with “diversity” than troop safety. Casey you may recall was the failing field commander in Iraq who, like William Westmoreland before him, was kicked upstairs, in the middle of a war, to be Army Chief of Staff. Last Sunday, Casey was seconded by the White House when the president cautioned “against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts”.

This is the same Barak Hussien Obama who had no trouble jumping to conclusions about the Cambridge Police and charging them with “stupidity” for arresting an abusive and uncooperative Harvard professor; a presidential pal .So let’s look at those “facts” about Major Nidal Malik Hasan before we jump to any conclusions.

Hasan was an American citizen of Palestinian descent. He received all of his higher education at taxpayer expense in exchange for a limited tour of duty with the Army. He is a middle aged field grade officer, a doctor, and psychiatrist. He spent most of his military career at the notorious Walter Reed Medical Center, in Washington, DC, counseling combat veterans. He likes to argue with patients, proselytize them, and passes out copies of the Koran. Off duty, he is fond of donning Islamic garb and patronizing a radical mosque five miles from the capitol. He is an outspoken critic of the “war on terror” which he preferred to call the war on Islam – contradicting his commander-in- chief. He is known to have publicly asserted that his first loyalty was to Islam, not America. He, or his name sake, posted defenses of suicide bombers on radical Islamic web sites. He attempted and possibly contacted an iman, a jihad recruiter, linked to al Qaeda. His automobile sported a bumper sticker “Allah is Love!” His bizarre behavior was reported to his superiors to no avail. Other colleagues say they kept silent out of fears that any criticism of Hasan would violate unwritten Army rules of political correctness. Army brass “kicked the can” and transferred Hasan to Fort Hood, Texas where he received orders for his first overseas deployment. In protest, he claimed that he could not kill other Muslims; yet, he apparently had no problem murdering kafirs. On 5 November he shot and killed 13 unarmed fellow soldiers, including a pregnant mother, and wounded 31 – shouting “allahu akbar” in Arabic (God is great) as the massacre progressed.

Consider those facts; but let’s not jump to any conclusions. While you’re at it, consider the litany of false narratives that have followed yet another mass killing in the name of “Allah”. First was the characterization of Hasan as a victim; a victim of trash talk and having his automobile keyed, surely a racist slur. Then there was the post traumatic stress defense (PTSD). When it was revealed that Hasan had never been deployed anywhere near combat; apologists suggested he was stressed by the stress of his patients, stress by association if you will. And then the “lone wolf” defense appeared where solo actors apparently have immunity from being characterized as terrorists.

Consider also the facts in the unclassified Global Terrorism Database (GTD) maintained under federal contract at the University of Maryland which now contains the gory details of over 80,000 terrorist “incidents”; yes that number is eighty thousand worldwide since 1970. Also consider the unclassified data base maintained by US State Department, Country Reports on Terrorism, which tracks annual casualty figures from terror. Those casualties have grown by a factor of 15 since tracking began. In 2008 alone nearly 60,000 were kidnapped, killed, or injured worldwide.

And before we jump to any conclusions, we, like Senator Joe Lieberman, need the answers to some questions. How did Casey get to be a general? Where did he get the notion that diversity is more important than national security or the safety of the troops? How did Nadal Malik Hasan get a commission in the US Army? Who thought he should be promoted? How does the Army get to play “kick the can” or “pass the buck” with dangerous incompetents? And finally, how much longer do we ignore what Islamists and terrorists so obviously have in common?

Consider all of this before you come to any conclusions. And then add the Fort Hood slaughter to the data bases, those reservoirs of facts we are so keen to keep – and ignore. And then make the number of atrocities we are willing to tolerate, or excuse, eighty thousand and one.

General George Casey repeated the same mantra as he made the rounds on 8 November; “If our diversity becomes a casualty (of the Fort Hood massacre) then that’s worse”. Worse than what, general? We want to know what in the warped world of political correctness is worse than putting a bullet through an innocent pregnant girl and 43 of her innocent fellow soldiers.

Caroline Glick's 15 Oct piece in the Jerusalem Post, ”How Turkey was Lost”, is a cautionary tale about confusing elections with democracy. She describes Ankara’s back sliding since the election of Recep Tuyyip Erdogan, head of the formerly outlawed Islamist AKP. Since Erdogan came to power in 2002, Turkey has given Hamas a reception usually reserved for heads of state, eliminated the visa requirements for Syrian travelers to Turkey, and now cancelled air exercises with Israel and begun joint military maneuvers with Syria.

Glick seems to believe that the Turks have cast their lot with the Shiite Crescent. If what she suggests is true; we now have an Islamist fox in the NATO henhouse. Can membership in the European Union be far behind? Turkey has long been held up as an exemplar of a model Islamic state; secular, moderate, democratic, and collegial. The inherent contradictions of an “Islamic republic” may be coming home to roost - putting the lie to secular, moderate, and collegial.

The irony of elections in a country with an Islamist majority is that it often represents the camel’s nose under the tent; opening the door for opportunists to hold the one election that may be the last. On this score, Algeria evokes hot flashes of déjà vu. Islamists may be fanatics, but they're not morons; they will use Western institutions to undo apostates and infidels. Such are the vicissitudes of democracy.

And such is the dilemma also in Afghanistan; we have a choice between the corruptible Karzai and the incorruptible Taliban, Mullah Omar. Not too many good options in this neighborhood. If Omar ever ran in a UN supervised election; he might win in a landslide. The big problem with Afghanistan, like Iraq before, is its potential for distraction.

The only accomplishment of elections in Iraq was to reverse the sectarian poles – and assist Iraq in becoming the second Shiite nation in the Crescent, another potential ally for theocratic Tehran. Land-locked Afghanistan is not an immediate, or should we say proximate, threat to America or Israel. Afghanistan has six neighbors; five of which are Muslim states, all with a vested interest in neutering the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Bernard Lewis has reminded us so many times; Islamic fundamentalism is more of a threat to dar al Islam (the Muslim world) than it is to us. Elections in Turkey, Iraq, and Afghanistan may prove to be meaningless.

Another UN supervised circus proves nothing. We should turn nation building over to the natives. If we can't influence electoral probity in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or the Emirates; why do we think we can do it in Kabul? With Turkey now backsliding, the European Union pandering, and the White House apologizing; we have to ask ourselves why another American kid should die in any Muslim backwater to underwrite another election. Indeed, we need to know why we need to save Islam from itself.

The difference between the Bush and Obama brands of Islamic electoral illusion is negligible. Glick's analysis of Turkish irredentism is a cautionary tale. Turkey, on a larger scale, is similar to Algeria; Islamists will use elections to come to power, but their objective is not pluralism or any notion of democracy as we know it.

At the outset, let me explain my bias. I hate gerunds; and, I don’t care much for people who use them, those who take perfectly good nouns or turn them into verbs. Like euphemisms, gerunds obscure rather than illuminate; or worse still, are coined to impress not express. Indeed, many gerunds are nothing more than specialized jargon; code speak among the initiates. The education and psychology professions are especially fond of gerunds, words like “parenting”. We do many things to and for our children; we feed them, we cloth them, we bath them, we play with them, we change their knickers, we train them (as in toilet), we teach them (as in reading, writing, and arithmetic), we try to develop good morals by example, and we pray daily that they don’t grow up to be serial killers or socialists. Pardon any redundancies.

None of this rich context is captured by the word “parenting”. Parenting conveys two meanings; either your plumbing works or you have a good lawyer. Any idiot can be a parent. Adding an “ing” to what you do to your kids will not make you a good one. It doesn’t take a village and certainly it doesn’t take government at any level. Raising children requires the deuce that produced, leavened by common sense. The first full measure of devotion is time – your time. If we must have a verb form, “raise” or rear are much more descriptive terms. Raise suggests that we take something that is less and make it more.

Surely we all hope that all children will grow to become competent, functional adults. Yet, as the need to “raise” suggests, the beginning is not auspicious. Indeed, an infant is a loud, dependant, demanding, inarticulate, mean spirited, pink mass of wet libido – and they don’t smell that hot either. Or if we must use some psychobabble; a kid is Id wrapped in a very annoying ego. They eat, they make noise, they defecate, make more noise; and then, thank God, they sleep. And when they wake up again, they want you to change their napkins. In the naked interlude between wiped and rewrapped, they might pee on you – and laugh. The road from the joys of infancy to butcher, baker, or candlestick maker is lumpy and long. No mammal or primate in the animal kingdom spends more time in the womb or more time tied to apron strings.

Nonetheless, maturity is the process of moving from me to thee. Socialization is the process of going from taking a dump in your diaper, to sending your dump to a treatment plant. Education is the process of balancing your accounts between your ears instead of on your fingers and toes. Culture is the process of being able to distinguishing between Botox and Beaujolais. In life, process contains all the meaning we will ever need; we’re all headed for the same place. How we get there, competence if you will, is what makes us different – that and lipstick. Thank you, Sarah.

All of which brings us to the subject at hand, another “how to” book on raising children; Unconditional Parenting; Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn. We have already dealt with the title now let’s see if there’s any thing to salvage in the subtitle and text.

We might think of the whole process of maturation as a process of diminishing pleasure and increasing pain. No one wants to walk the dog before bed, but it’s less painful than scraping a wet pile off that nice Persian rug in the hall. Here we are talking about the pain for gain or achievement, not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Kohn is not too crazy about any process of rewards and punishments; he thinks such things are about manipulation and control, as if control were a bad thing.

The fatal assumption here is utopian. Control is what pack animals do. Civilization is the process of establishing norms; controlling behavior and manipulating the environment. Life is a compromise between what we want and what we need. The end game is simple; do you want your kids to live in your basement with a cell phone, a video game, and an I-Pod or do you need them to get out to the mall like the rest of us? A world without rewards and punishment is a lot like scoreless sports. Indeed, a baseball analogy might help.

Not long ago I watched several kids in front of my house attempting to play whiffle ball; one was an older lad who was here for the summer. The visitor didn’t seem to know much about the rules. When he finally hit the ball, he ran to third, reasoning and arguing that the rules were “stupid” because third was closer to home than first or second. I couldn’t fault his logic. He also argued that a foul ball could not be a strike because you are already punished by not being allowed to run to first. No double jeopardy in his version of baseball.

As the locals became more frustrated, I tried to intervene as an umpire or adult arbiter of the rules, to no avail. That idyllic summer evening ended badly with most of kids muttering their way home while the visiting kid complained loudly that no one liked him, no one wanted to play with him. Clearly he came from a place where argumentation and tedious rationalizations were the order of the day. All interactions with peers and adults were some kind of negotiation where anything arbitrary might be skewered on his brand of logic. By this metric, he was successful. There were no arbitrary rules or restrictions, no give and take – and apparently no friends.

He was born this way, as are we all. His problem now is arrested development. He still thinks he is the center of the universe; someone is still changing his knickers. He has not even started the trip from me to thee. His universe has been padded with acceptance or “unconditional love” and his mind given over to tedious arguments. For him, reason is not just a tool; it is an instrument of torture. Every contact with an arbitrary world requires some semi chaotic confrontation. His ego has been cultivated at the expense of his character.

At the advanced age of eleven, he does not know that life is a team sport. With no boundaries at home; everything outside that bubble is an obstacle. This is Mr. Kohn’s new world, unconditional love and reason triumphant over rewards and punishment. Unfortunately, the fact that you might have unconditional affection for someone or something does not make them loveable – certainly not for the rest of us. The real value of “unconditional” support is when it is granted by peers not indulgent parents.

Kohn’s understanding of reason is another cipher. He seems to confuse it with collaboration, discussion, or consultation – as if these things were synonymous. Reason is rule based thinking, nothing more; philosophers from Aristotle to Pascal to Marx have understood this. Reason is not the discussion of alternatives; it is the application of rules. Balancing your checkbook and calculating the load bearing capacity of a toilet seat are examples. If you believe the rules are arbitrary, you do so at your peril. We live in rule based societies; our language, grammar, laws, science, religion, and even our manners are governed by rules. We do not belch in a quiet church nor do we pick our nose at the sushi bar.

The author also seems to be more than a revisionist on the subject. He not only believes that children can reason, he seems to think that by some magic kids can reason their way to the correct answer with more support and less control. Someone must have slept through Piaget. Almost every society on the face of the earth has some version of a coming of age ritual. The significance of these rituals is the recognition that children are not adults. Kids require experience and training before they are burdened with responsibility and choices. This age varies from place to place, but for the most part, the spread is from eight to fourteen years of age. In many cultures, it is called “the age of reason”. Other echoes of this universal wisdom are legal driving, drinking, voting ages and at least ten years of mandatory schooling? The purpose of all this tradition and attendant controls is the near universal belief that youngsters must learn to follow before they can solo - or be expected to lead. Nobody follows the nitwit who goes to third before rounding first and second. Parents who encourage such misguided independence and mischief ought to be given a time out.

The pee-wee league may give every player a trophy, but in an adult world, rewards are earned. Allowing children to make their own choices, when most are clearly not equipped to do so, is another nugget of new age nonsense. Choice is one of the rewards of success. Achievement, not affection, is the arbiter of choices, for children and adults. If you are good at something, you get to choose all the rewards that success begets. Only an idiot will give a good grade, a place on a sports team, a good job or a promotion just to make you feel better.

Being good at something is more important than feeling good. No kid is well served by parents who worry more about feelings than competence. In the end all losers feel bad about themselves. Love is not enough. And feeling bad about your self is not necessarily a bad thing. No pain, no gain; as the jocks are wont to say. Indeed, regret is the engine of progress. Without regrets no change is possible. If you can’t follow the rules, if you don’t learn to play, the ump gets to say “out” or toss your sorry butt off the field – talk about feeling bad.

Kohn also tells us that “because I said so” is never a good reason to give the rug rats; we must be less controlling and more supportive – less “to them” and more “with them”. To this we should all say balderdash; or maybe two other four letter words would do. Consistency is not just the hobgoblin of little minds; that and repetition is the foundation of all learning. For those who don’t believe in consistency and control, I recommend story time.

Tell or read stories to your children. After a while give them a choice of what they would like to hear. Nine out of ten times kids will ask for their favorite, over and over. Try changing Goldie to a brunette. You will be met with a barrage of indignation; the kid wants to hear the original, not some revision. Ask your children what they would like to eat, if its buttered noodles or macaroni and cheese, chances are he or she will eat it seven days a week if allowed. Left to their own devices many youngsters develop a kind of gastronomic autism, the symptom of which is the ready made litany of things they “will not eat”. Unrestricted choice is the villain behind every autocrat of the breakfast table.

Remember when the little dears learned a new word or sound and you had to hear it a thousand times a day. On such days mothers contemplate the virtues of vasectomies. Kids need controls and they actually seek consistency and predictability; like Linus’s blanket; it’s a comfort. If you don’t give or create sensible boundaries, they will create their own.

I know a guy with two and a half degrees who is still living with his parents and two birds; he’s fifty years of age. Success for this guy will be two dead parents; and the fruits of their labors. He created his own boundaries.

The number of recognized and diagnosable psychological aliments has grown a hundred fold since 1950. Indeed, many practitioners claim the number of autistic kids is one in a hundred and the number of children with a “deficit” disorder of some sort is one in ten. Maybe our kids are catching these things from public toilet seats, or maybe it is something closer to home. Or maybe today’s behavioral problem is tomorrow’s pathology.

This new age epidemic of juvenile neurosis suggests that medical science has given us longer life just so we might be tortured by psychiatry. Yet, the aim of psychology, like litigation, is to keep the ball in play. You may win or lose; therapists and litigators get paid either way. And the pharmacies are doing nicely too, thank you. Those who shun “controls” for their little darlings seldom reject the chemical variety. Indeed, “controlled substance” is now our most infamous oxymoron.

Contrary to what Kohn and others suggest; rewards, punishments, and controls for children are good things. Indeed, they are pillars of civilization. Flooding a child’s world with choices is not a good thing; most kids do not have the experience or maturity to deal with too many options. And choice and freedom are not synonymous; true freedom comes from success. Indeed, success equates to options. Feeling good is a really a function of being good – at something. An immature kid, with too many choices and no controls, can only become one thing; a lord of the flies.

Dr. Gordon Hahn’s analysis of the Caucuses Jihad in the Moscow Times (27 Apr 09) is a timely addition to the literature on a growing world-wide movement. Unfortunately, he is preaching to the choir. The Russian government and the Russian people seem to have a realistic contemporary and historical appreciation of the threat. The current American administration and American Press do not share that view. Hahn’s thoughts would probably not see the light of day in the United States. Such assessments are not politically correct.

The Obama administration and a compliant domestic Press have officially proscribed such terms as jihad, Islamist and terrorist. Our overseas combat fronts are now to be known as “overseas contingencies” and the enemy is not to be associated with Islam, the religion of “peace”. As everyone knows, the theology and culture that most terrorists share has nothing to do with what they have in common. These Orwellian contortions suggest that the US crisis management team thinks they can jawbone their way out of the gathering storm. Surely this is a great comfort to the jihad clergy and their many “fringe” followers.

Russia and America may cooperate on the reduction of nuclear weapons stocks, but this will be driven by mutual strategic and economic self-interest. Indeed, we both have enough weapons for overkill. We do not need to make the “rubble bounce”.

The Islam bomb is another kettle of fish. The Sunni sect already has the weapon and Pakistan is one bullet away from theocracy. The Shia sect already has the theocracy and Iran is a few tests away from a bomb. Both factions have targets in common; the first ground zero for either would be Israel. I see no evidence of a strategy of “mutual assured deterrence” in Arabic or Islamic literature. The prospects for any meaningful cooperation between Russia and America on theocratic or emerging nuclear threats are dim as long as America believes the hazard comes from an insignificant “fringe group”.

Our current dilemma reminds me of Blaise Pascal’s gambit; a risk assessment method that should be applied to national security. If we overestimate the threat and it does not materialize; we lose nothing but treasure and possibly some credibility. If we underestimate the threat, we could lose everything. Underestimates are always dangerous and frequently fatal.

Bernard Lewis at Princeton, arguably America’s most prominent Islamic scholar, has said that a “dark future” awaits the world if it fails to deal with the spreading threat of militant Islamic theocracy. Dark indeed! That future of which Dr. Lewis speaks is a return to a medieval world, a second Dark Age.

Another dinosaur just bit the dust. After nearly a quarter century with the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., like Ben Bradlee before him, has been kicked upstairs with a sinecure. Old editors never die; they just become vice presidents without portfolio. Downie has been making the rounds on the gas bag circuit to flack his first mystery novel. The real mystery here is why ageing journalists think they can make the transition from advocacy to art on the 19th hole.

Inevitably in these soft ball sessions, the subject of journalism gets more play than the book promotion. And so it should be. What editors say or permit others to say every day is ultimately more important than any permanent seduction by fiction.

Downie (and his colleague Howard Kurtz) express a heliographic view of the state of print journalism in general and his tenure at the Post in particular. Like Bradlee before him, Downie seems to be incapable of reflection about his profession or his performance at the top of the fish wrap food chain. Hal Raines at the NY Times suffered from similar delusions before he got fired. These guys presided over the collapse of journalism as we knew it. In less than a generation, the ‘mainstream’ has flushed itself downstream. This is a reality that they choose to ignore, or minimize.

Instead, they celebrate those Pulitzers and gold medals; overlooking that these media prizes have become incestuous; a kind of Special Olympics or T-Ball for the politically correct. Even Janet Cooke has a Pulitzer. Jason Blair, Stone Phillips, and Dan Rather weren’t far behind.

The daily circulation of the Post is down to a half million and their daily on-line hits are less than that. Other urban dailies like the NY Times and the Los Angeles Times are suffering similar losses. Network and Public Television news have comparable woes. No network news broadcast makes the top 20 of most watched television programs. Indeed, reality retreads like American (nee British) Idol have more than five times the daily viewers of any prime time news broadcast.

Yet in the news and commentary business not all the news is bad. A small college broad sheet (six to eight pages) called Imprimis has a circulation of nearly two million. The Fox Network and the Excellence in Broadcasting (EIB) Network are expanding exponentially as the “mainstream” slides into the crapper. Fox News appears to be up 26% since November of 08’. Indeed, a single daily broadcast of Rush Limbaugh now reaches 15-30 million listeners depending on which statistics you trust. Even Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post says that Limbaugh’s numbers may have doubled since the last presidential election. Limbaugh’s ratings are even more astounding because his mid-day broadcast would hardly qualify as “prime time”.

If you listen to Mister Downie and others you would think that the decline of traditional Media was due to some  vague amalgam of digital competition, ad revenue flight and cultural flux. The explanation that the dinosaurs are unwilling to explore is the possibility that rust bucket journalists are trying to sell us a product that nobody wants to buy anymore. For traditional scribblers and broadcasters, denial is still a river in North Africa.

There are only two reasons for people to support any public institution; trust and regret. Without trust, no relationship is possible; without regret, no progress is possible. Mainstream journalists have lost our trust because they are biased, incestuous, and lazy.

Let’s start with bias. According to Ben Bradlee, John Kennedy’s dangerous liaisons with gangster gals and Hollywood bimbos was not news, yet according to Leonard Downie, a single vintage Bob Dole affair made the grade. According to Howard Kurtz, Senator Bob Packwood’s fanny pinching was news but Bill Clinton’s sexual exploitation of an intern could be defended as private behavior between consenting adults. For the Post, Dick Cheney’s use of the “F” word was news, but the Obama campaign’s use of the “C” word to describe Sarah Palin was ignored. Don Imus was run out of Dodge for using the expression “nappy ho’s” while Senator Byrd’s use of the expression “white niggers” hardly merits any ink no less editorial indignation.

More currently, the recent blitz of euphemisms from the White House has been reported and repeated uncritically. Debt and deficits are now “investments”; pork and earmarks are “stimuli”; war is an “overseas contingency;” and the enemy is now to be called “a radical fringe” not terrorists or Islamic theocrats. This is the Sally Quinn school of Journalism at its worst. Only fawning sycophants would not hold such Orwellian nonsense up to ridicule. Yet many Press spokesmen still claim that Media bias is a “myth”. Indeed! A myth is not something that does not occur so much as it is something that happens over and over again.

Incest is also part of the problem. Media stars and political pimps are interchangeable; as if you could be a political hack one day and then an objective journalist the next. The so called “journalists” in this category are legendary; Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, Dan Rather, and Tony Snow – just to name the celebutantes.

Distaff journalists are the worst. Daytime television may have lowered the collective IQ of American women by twenty points in the last ten years. One day Katie Couric or Barbara Walters is interviewing a psychic or a transvestite and then the next evening we are to take them seriously as they report real news? Oprah, the doyenne of bimbo television, recently hosted a segment on an eight year girl who was having sex with dogs. The line between information and entertainment is not obscured; it’s gone!

Incest is evident at almost every news round table, all unalterably populated by the same politicians who say nothing and the same pundits who will say anything – usually all at once. The hosts of the venerable Meet the Press actually boast about how often the same guests appear, as if repetition were a virtue. Most journalists who pose as commentators have little or no expertise, yet they pontificate with abandon on almost anything. Your panel gets extra points if it recruits an androgenous, bi-coastal, cross dressing member of an approved racial minority who limps or votes Republican.

The final nail in the mainstream coffin is inertia. A less generous synonym might be sloth. Newspaper editors and network producers are too lazy to seek new voices or real expertise or real diversity. The first hired, usually an idealistic Liberal, is the last fired. The  cold dead hand of tenure lays on all decaying enterprises. Editors seem to behave like pollsters; it’s always easiest to go back to the people who answer; or better still, give the answers you like to hear. Janet Cooke and Dan Rather could be poster children here.

The internet has had a profound impact on print and broadcast media. Folks like Bradlee, Downie, and Raines can no longer cook the books without lighting up an indignant blogosphere. Guys like Downie have been poor stewards because their editorial judgment is on a par with their business acumen, or lack of it. On the one hand, the NY Times and the "wannabe" Washington Post claim to national newspapers of record. At the same time their staff, editorial, and story selection policies pander to liberal urban elites and the larger entitlements lobby. The excluded middle hasn't stopped reading, they have been abandoned; they have been gifted to the Right.

Ironically, while loopy Left leaning editors and producers are putting traditional Media outlets in the toilet; they have at the same time created a this new phenomenon on the Right. If there were any justice, Rush Limbaugh would send a sympathy card to Leonard Downie Jr. and thank him and his colleagues for their services to the EIB Network. Say what you will about the thunder on the Right; none of these guys are dumb enough to patronize, insult or abandon their audience.

This discussion of Fascism and the American Left reminds me of Bill Clinton squirming under oath; trying to parse his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Everyone pretty much knew what happened but we wanted every salacious detail. Ironically, the microscopic scrutiny and clinical detail eventually backfired and made the pathetic sympathetic - a villain morphed into a victim.

The parsing of Fascism and Totalitarianism in the wake of Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, is starting to reflect a similar if not tedious potential. The danger for conservatives is two fold; the arguments are a distraction from the real threat and perceived rhetorical excess makes it look like conservatives might be adopting the tactics of the Left. The wrong label is often accurate, correct and counterproductive at the same time.

The late great semantic squabble over the word Islamofascism is illustrative. There may be similarities between fascists and orthodox Islam but this pairing is more notable for differences. Theocracy is not just another variant of Fascism. There are many kinds of Fascism which might be considered more benign than malignant; the Roman, Spanish and Argentine types come to mind. There are no benign Theocracies (see Taliban). Sharia is a modern synonym for Medievalism; theocracy is the polar opposite of Democracy.

Neither National Socialism, nor Communism, nor secular Fascism is a growth business. Even the ascendant American Left eschews these labels. In contrast, Islam and many of its many medieval sects are growing like wildfire. Comparing Islamists to old school villains is not just a semantic problem; it is not simply a distraction. Indeed, it is dangerous!

Every competent national security estimate has some degree of prudent inflation. The rationale is simple. If you overstate the threat and it does not materialize, you have lost nothing but treasure and some credibility. If you underestimate, and the worst comes to pass, you could lose everything. Indeed, all sensible national security analysis should contain a political version of Pascal’s Gambit. The expected value of belief should always outweigh the potential return of skepticism.

The real threat today comes from within and without. Domestically, democratic capitalism is under siege. Democracy and capitalism are not the same things, yet one is impossible without the other. Internationally, we are at war with theocratic Islamists. To call the enemy Fascists or, worse still, a “fringe group” doesn’t just miss the point; it changes the subject. Underestimating your opponents is a chronic if not fatal disease.

The most worrisome development is convergence. The American Left and the Islamic Right seemed to have joined forces – if their targets provide any clues. Both movements have democratic, capitalist, Judaic-Christian and European/American law and values in their cross hairs. We need to keep our eye on them and the ball.

On the battlefield, the deadliest threats come from within or over the horizon. More soldiers are laid low by bugs than bullets. And when the bullets fly; the greatest danger comes from an unseen enemy; mines, artillery or bombs - airborne or remote controlled devices. We seldom see or hear things that wound and kill. Too often the last thing a modern warrior hears is silence – or the shout “incoming”!

The internal and external threats facing America today require more than a shout. Internally, if we can believe the ‘experts’, we are faced with the prospects of immediate economic collapse or a slow and painful hemorrhage. Indeed, we have exhumed Karl Marx and Maynard Keynes to orchestrate the assault on prosperity. Our strategy, as Daniel Hannan so aptly put it, seems to be to ‘spend our way out of recession and borrow our way out of debt;’ squeezing the productive and engorging the ‘needy’ in the process. The tactics include vilifying Wall Street and industry while funding the invective and ire of the angry and underemployed. If we had to give this political strategy a name we could call it piñata politics; rewarding every frivolous constituent whim with public monies and justifying them as “investments”.

Class warfare is the only way to describe the rapidly escalating economic struggle on the home front. With one Party in control of the legislative and administrative apparatus, the domestic outlook is grim. Their internal tactics include a kind of entitlements blitzkrieg where every social need, real or imagined, is to be funded as rapidly as possible before any opposition can mobilize. So called “shovel ready projects” will be the first to benefit; no matter that those shovels will not be carried by Americans.

So far these shock tactics are working; a Democrat Congress is plowing money off Capitol Hill before the authorization bills can be read. Instead of letting markets do what they do best, all moral hazards have been cast aside. The federal government has gone into the business of buying businesses. In the process, white collars are set against blue collars; insurance and financials are too important and too well connected to fail while blue collar auto workers seem to be disposable. How an incontinent government oligarchy could possibly manage a swirling private economy has yet to be explained. The politicians who created this mess are fingering all the usual suspects while granting immunity to them selves. “Mismanagement” of the previous administration is the mantra du jour. Heretofore; big government was merely a problem; now it looks more like a fatal disease.

Externally, where those real bullets are flying, the outlook is worse. We are now told that we “are not at war with Islam” and the war, if there is one, should be called “overseas contingency operations” (nee War on Terror). Beyond abusing the English language, these euphemisms don’t just beg the question, they are designed to change the subject. If we are not a war with orthodox Islamists, who or what is the enemy? So far the specifics amount to a vague target called “fringe ideology”, not further defined. If “fringe” is supposed to imply small, let’s do the math.

The Muslim population world-wide is approximately 1.6 billion. If the radical fringe is only five percent; that’s 80 million people, or a number equal to 25 percent of the US population. If the radical fringe is only one percent; the number of potential combatants is still 16 million; that would be a figure at least ten times the size of the US military. Opinion surveys in the Muslim world consistently show a majority of Muslims are sympathetic to terrorists as long as the targets are the Western democracies. These surveys also reveal that this same population is overwhelmingly anti-Israel if not anti-Semitic. If this were the only sentiment the Muslim “fringe” had in common with fascists; it’s enough.

Anti-Semitism may be the least of our worries. The majority Muslim population does not share our core political or cultural values. The great divide is the separation of church and state or more precisely, the lack of separation. The anti-democratic preeminence of religious law is not a “fringe” belief among Muslims; Sharia is a threat to internal apostates and foreign infidels alike. The notion of a secular Islamic society is an oxymoron. So-called secular Muslim governments, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan for example, serve at the whim of generals and warlords; such societies are always one bullet away from theocracy.

In the cultural arena, the issue of human rights for women is not a divide between East and West; it’s a chasm. Do we need to review the long list of atrocities; gang rapes, genital mutilations, girl school massacres and female suicide bombers? All committed in God’s name. Suffice it to say that “honor” killings, where the victim is usually female, have now moved as far west as Michigan. Misogyny is more than the moral equivalent of racism. Even if a majority of Muslim women are resigned to their fate, is this a justification democracies should live with?

President Obama’s declaration that “we are not at war with Islam” is a rhetorical strawman, a distortion of reality. A significant portion of the Islamic world is at war with us. Their targets include apostates (i.e. Islamic collaborators), Israel, the European democracies and the United States, also known as the “Great Satan”. Obama’s Muslim “fringe” and their supporters make such declarations routinely. This Jihad is political, cultural and lethal. Call their strategy “cake and eat it”. So-called ‘moderate’ Islamists ritually condemn violence and terror on the one hand, and with the other hand provide financial, political and moral support to the bomb throwers.

Stalin used to speak of American Communists as “useful idiots”. Islamists probably have a similar belief about the American Left. The Muslim religious Right and the American political Left are now joined by strategy and target. The targets include capitalism, secular democracy, Israel and American exceptionalism. Internally, democratic capitalism is not just under siege but the domestic crisis has provided the cover for creeping Socialism to become a communal stampede.

Externally, the shooting war with “fringe” Muslims has been relegated to second chair by a blizzard of euphemisms; new ways to mask an ugly fight; a war that’s likely to get worse. A premature withdrawal from Iraq and an imprudent escalation in Afghanistan is not a formula for military success on either front – just to fulfill a campaign promise. This is the kind of change that only “fringe” fanatics and social “activists” can believe in.

There is no industry, except maybe women’s cosmetics, that makes more false or misleading claims than the food industry. The most egregious are the words natural and organic. The first has no useful meaning and the second is has more to do with ideology than nutrition. The ‘natural’ train left the station when our ancestors turned from hunting and gathering to herding and farming.

Since then we have been altering plants and livestock to give us the most productive food economy in the history of history. The first requirement for any government is to create the conditions for the marketplace to feed the populace. This is the baseline definition of national security. After Uncle puts a chicken in every pot then things like panty hose, public television, Viagra, U Tube and Sally Quinn are possible.

There are many nouns that might be adorned with the adjective ‘natural’; rats, bubonic plague, ticks, lime disease, cockroaches, mosquitoes, yellow fever, poison ivy and snake bite - just to name a few. ‘Organic’ is pretty much an extension of the natural nonsense. The problem with the organic movement is twofold; there’s no way to prove or monitor what they claim; and then there’s the suspicion that ‘organic’ is just another word for higher price. Food chains have already jumped on this gambit. Yet, even with a home chemistry kit, there is no practical way for consumers to distinguish between that which is raised organically and that which is not. This food fad exploits our insecurities about pollution; the real science of organic is “trust me”.

At the moment, the organic community is at war with itself; industrial organic (Whole Foods) versus boutique farmers and neighborhood vendors. This is a classic “holier than thou” food fight. By comparison, religious dietary law is a testament to experience and common sense – cause and effect, if you will. In the not too dismal past, pork and shellfish that fed and bred in an unsanitary environment were dangerous to eat. Long before modern science, pesticides, and hygiene; observant (pardon the pun) leaders recognized the threat. Rabbis and priests couldn’t alter the behavior of pigs or lobsters, but they could alter the law. The purpose of all law, after all, is to protect the flock.

Surely no sensible person who eats or drinks celebrates pollution. Yet, the idea that the world will be fed without genetic engineering, chemicals or pesticides is just as threatening if not nihilistic. A country with a free market and a free press tends to correct any excess; moderation in all things, including moderation.

The charge of the natural and organic zealots is that somehow traditional food producers and processors have failed us. There is some truth to this; but their sins have more to do with taste than toxins. Indeed, food has been engineered to improve appearance and shelf life at the expense of flavor. Taste and nutrition is reason enough to patronize small farmer’s and their markets. But, all this blather about natural and organic is just another marketing gimmick.

Food quality fights are just an extension of the quality of life debate. For most of us, this ship has sailed. Ignorance and indifference are soul mates; we don’t know much about food or how it’s produced and as long as enough is available, we don’t care. This apathy is the divide that separates urban and country life styles.

Farmers don’t like arrogant urban yuppies; and city dwellers sneer at denim clad bumpkins. Urbanites who presume to lecture farmers about toxins and pollution are often the same folks who allow their children to graze at McDonald’s thrice a week; all the while thinking that the odd foray to the farmer’s market or Whole Foods balances the scale.

Ironically, it was farmers who made cities possible. Agriculture was the death knell for nomads, hunters and gatherers. Some anthropologists also argue that when primates started eating meat and vegetables, the die was cast. Omnivores don’t need as big a stomach as vegetarians and do not need to spend that much time looking for a meal, thereby clearing the way for a larger brain. Indeed, we might amend the Cartesian adage “I think therefore I am” to “I eat therefore I think”. Unfortunately, too much thinking seems to be as big a problem as too much bad food.

Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, the book,  and Bill Maher’s Religulous, the film, are hysterical, not hysterically funny, just frenzied. If you didn’t know better, you might think that rabbis and priests were pursuing these guys through the salons of Georgetown and the gin mills of West Hollywood threatening them with bris, baptism and brimstone. They protest too much. Indeed, they seem to be self anointed; bi-coastal evangelists for nihilism.

So let us review their arguments for rational atheism, their theology if you will. In the first instance, they reject the historical consensus on God. Never mind that every culture, large or small, has believed in some sort of deity. Secondly, they reject the common consensus (and common sense); that is, the faith of their peers. As a practical matter, see Pascal’s Gambit, the vast majority of people believe in some kind of superior being. They do so, not out of fear or ignorance, but also out of the certainty that humans can not be ‘as good as it gets’. Experience and common sense tells them that Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens can not be the apex of evolution.

Another axiom for militant atheists is invective; laying the history of bad behavior at the feet of traditional religion. This is more than a little like blaming war on soldiers and crime on cops. The corollary of invective is ad hominem attacks; cherry picking religious figures to vilify. The Pope and Mother Teresa come to mind; every contemporary liberal’s favorite whipping posts – as if name calling were an argument.

Yet, Hitchens saves the best of his worst for Blaise Pascal, the brilliant 17th Century mathematician and physicist who questioned the uses of reason, especially in matters of faith. Pascal celebrated and defended “the expected value of faith” and the “infinite” value of belief against any utility of relying on reason alone. Pascal argued that reason provides neither certainty nor truth. Hitchens calls this “sordid” and likens Pascal to “hypocrites and frauds” who abound in the “Talmudic Jewish” tradition.

Polemicists like Maher and Hitchens confuse God with religion. Our entire ethical, legal and democratic tradition is a direct descendant of Judaism and Christianity. A Church is only one of many public institutions; each is populated with saints and sinners. Yet, without these influences, democratic capitalism is impossible. Indeed, it was an Augustinian monk who raised the most profound and lasting defense of free will and choice. Rational atheism is a kind of moral anarchy.

Ethical autism has a long history with science; now compounded by the electronic autism of Eric Schmidt (Google as God). George Orwell could take another bow!

Many missionary atheists, unlike Pascal, are not tempered by the humility of doubt. They can not say; I do not know. The can not say; I may never know. What they do say is that all that will be known shall be known by people like me; an enlightened, progressive, liberal, rational, scientific, intellectual elite. This group will take all of the credit and none of the blame for the mixed record of humanity and science since the Enlightenment. The ABC’s of modern warfare (atomic, biological and chemical weapons) were not created by nuns and rabbis.

The heart of evangelical atheism is cowardice. What many can not say is what they truly believe: they believe that they and only they know the way forward – all else is backward; they believe that they should not be constrained by “arbitrary” ethics, morality or law; sounds too much like religion. Hitchens uses the phrase “unfettered scientific inquiry” to describe his vision of the future. Josef Mengele would be comfortable this euphemism.

A profound, some would say fatal, conceit infects secular rationalists; the belief that there could not be any intelligence that is superior to their intelligence. They also believe what tyrants and oligarchs have always believed since the birth of philosophy; they are the philosopher kings (Plato); they are the vanguard (Lenin); and they are the master race (Hitler). They believe that they should do the thinking for the rest of us. They believe that men like Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky are as godlike as it gets. Hobbes called them necessary and Nietzsche called them supermen.

Hitchens disinters Marx, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg in his rant against religion. This is typical Left logic; one which confuses secular saints with significance. The only possible service Trotsky and Red Rosie provide is to illustrate how the Left usually deals with apostates. Someone might also point out to Hitchens that Marx was not so much a descendant of the "rabbinical line" as he was a product of Teutonic philosophy and a virulent anti-Semite to boot.

Things get very unscientific very quickly when you ask many atheists to define objectivity and reason. How do we separate our minds from the things we try to understand? Are rationalists capable of some out of body experience where they are devoid of inherited knowledge, historic influences, emotions, bias, prejudice and all the other sensibilities and tangential influences that plague ordinary mortals? If you listen carefully, you would never know that reason is just one tool, like arithmetic, that we use to understand. And you will seldom hear that most scientific method is a smoke screen for junk science – derivative research. Original research and controlled experiments are rare, very expensive and time consuming. Yet as long as academics get something into print, nobody seems to give a damn.

In their hearts, these intellectuals do not believe in consensus; they do not believe in the wisdom of crowds; they do not believe in history or tradition; and if you have visited any modern American university campus recently, you will understand that they sure as hell do not believe in tolerance or democracy – at least not in any form you would recognize.

Truth is what we choose to believe. The most difficult challenge for all study is to bridge that gap between analysis and acceptance. Any belief is more potent than any idea. And what we believe always has more to do with faith than reason; we can not test every premise for every action. We believe in something or trip over everything. The alternatives are chaos and autism.

Here’s a common sense test for all those who think that reason trumps faith. If you have a choice between a committed rationalist with a PHD and a nun with a high school diploma; who would you trust to instruct your child? Sister Mary Wisteria wins this contest every time. Even community organizers send their kids to ‘religulous’ schools. Faith is just another word for trust; civilization is impossible without it.

Thank God!

On a daily basis we are told that draconian measures are necessary to recover from the “mismanagement of the last eight years”. Never mind that Nancy, Harry, Barney, Chris and Maxine were our management in that decade. Does Congress still propose and the President still dispose? If representative Waters (D-Calif.) prevails and we nationalize everything; we will still be the most prosperous nation on earth – until Halloween.

All this economic heat is more notable for smoke than fire. And national security seems to be receding into the miasma. Wars with real bullets have fallen off the radar. Some might argue that the first priority of national security is the domestic piñata. Fair enough, but those gifts are already on their way. Our domestic vector is set. We are going to pig out as far as the eye can see and then make a date with Jenny Craig – a date uncertain. We have launched the War on Prosperity and that’s that!

But what about those other wars that were so worrisome during the late great campaign? Is it two or three wars? Harry said we lost one. We need to do the math. There is the bad war in Iraq that the President ran against; and the good war in Afghanistan he says we should be fighting. Never mind that many of Obamas’s acolytes never met any war they approve of. Then there is the “War on Terror” which apparently has fronts in places like New York, Karachi, London, Madrid, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Bali, Aden, Somalia, and recently, Mumbai. Check that; we can’t call it the war on terror any more; nobody makes war on a tactic. We are now told to call it ‘global contingency operations’. Indeed, we could also call it the War on the English Language.

Beware of those who speak euphemism; they say not what they mean nor mean what they say. We can’t call it the war on Islamofascists. That’s an affront to National Socialists and Communists every where. After all, Fascism has been in decline while ‘you know what’ has been growing like, well, the Later Day Saints. National security mavens such as Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn assure us that terrorists are just a small minority of ‘you know who’, not representative of ‘you know what’ – never mind that a certain theology is exactly what they all have in common. Nobody ever asks Mr. Meacham or Ms. Quinn how many followers the Bolsheviks had in 1916 or the Nazis had in 1932.

Now that the Congress and the White House have Democracy, Capitalism and our mother tongue on the run, what are we going to do about the enemy whose name we dare not speak? America may be suffering from sacrifice fatigue. What with going from jumbos to hail Mary mortgages, Hummers to hybrids, Deer Valley to the Delaware Shore, Feragamo to flip flops and most worrisome of all, from plastic back to paper. If the President opens another front on the Great Salt Lake, we should put down our latte, pull up our panty hose and just say no!

Enough is enough!

Politicians have a lot of annoying habits. Presuming to tell us what we think and then validating that opinion with some selective poll are two of the worst. Before the election, the senator from Illinois told us that "corruption" was the grievance most frequently cited by voters (Washington Post, 04 Jan 08). By that account, you might think the economy and the war were small potatoes.

Since then, the President has frequently said; "it's not enough to change the players, we have to change the game." Game is the key word in the argument. Hearing about ethics from a chap who represented a state where his vacant Senate was put up for auction is a little like hearing from Harry Reid about the evils of gambling and prostitution. Whenever politicians start to preach about ethics and accountability, we need to recall Mark Twain's observation that politicians are the only permanent class of organized criminals.

We are told daily that draconian measures are necessary to “recover from the mismanagement of the last eight years”. Pelosi, Reid, Frank, and Dodd were the financial management of the last decade. Where’s the accountability in this group? Congress proposes; a president merely disposes. The recovery plan (aka bailouts) has drop-kicked all moral hazards out of the financial arena. To be replaced with what? The fatal flaw of all government roles in commerce is the assumption that politicians or federal bureaucrats are moral and competent; at least more so than entrepreneurs and the titans of industry. All those who believe politicians and integrity belong in the same sentence, raise your hand!

In short, on the oversight front, President Obama wouldn't do more with less; he would do less with more. The “unprecedented effort” to be led by the Vice President is a cipher. Biden’s first effort was to strong arm governors into accepting funds the do not want. Surely the President knows that a deeper oversight matrix makes any corrective action less likely. Joe Biden has spent his entire career inside the Beltway. Should we believe he’s about to have an epiphany?

Here's a thought. Instead of new bureaucracies, boards and commissions; let's disband all the inert oversight and ethics monitors that aren't doing the job and let the Justice Department do its job. Revive the ABSCAM stings if you will, with apologies to Representative Murtha and Senator McCain of course. If we must have another "people's public watchdog," let's keep the varmints out of the hen house - no politicians on the oversight dais. The solution isn’t bipartisanship; the answer to oversight is no partisans - citizens who have never held office. It's hard to believe that smart people like Obama and Pelosi do not understand all of the above.

We are left to conclude that, like the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform, we can look forward to a lot of moral sizzle, but no steak. Creepier still is the similarity of Obama's proposals to Marion Barry's recent stunt. Councilman Barry introduced legislation, since withdrawn, to the DC Council that would prohibit employment discrimination against ex- convicts. Presumably that would mean the guy who gave your neighbor a lead pipe lobotomy might someday return to your street as the beat cop. When Pelosi and Obama have their, way, the folks who stole your chickens will get to watch the hen house.