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Who would have thought Texas would lead the way?

All Derb All the Time

What a month of heroism for John Derbyshire. First he outwitted his Iranian captors, then he prevented that massacre at Virginia Tech.

Hide the Mails

The least transparent administration in memory:

The White House is being accused of improperly trying to hide e-mails about government business by using unofficial e-mail accounts.
...
Those e-mails were discovered on a Republican National Committee e-mail domain called gwb43.com. That domain is not part of the official White House communication system.
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"They wanted to make sure that no record could ever be found of what they were really up to in the White House," Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN.

Wonkette has posted on this earlier.

Cowardice

Apparently uncertain if people were paying attention to yesterday's demented outburst, Derbyshire is back at it today, calling the British soldiers cowards and calling for them to be punished when and if they're freed:

Once again, it's me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran. When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who'd shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides (which, believe me—I've been there—have a LOT of rocks). Now, I confess, I wouldn't shed a tear if some worse fate befell them.

The Ralph Peters piece he refers to is in The New York Post. Peters take the same basic view as Derbyshire, but additionally aruges that US and Australian Mariners would never be so weak as the British.

THE greatest shock from the Middle East this year hasn't been terrorist ruthlessness or the latest Iranian tantrum. It's that members of Britain's Royal Marines wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors.

Jingoism aside, I can't imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would've resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.

Derbyshire tries to brush aside criticisms that he doesn't know what they've gone through and are still going through and therefore can't expect them to do what he perhaps could not:

I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine. Whether or not I would, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to.

Keep nursing that quiet hope, Derbyshire. This is one of the worst examples of armchair war-mongering I've seen. He's got a lot of nerve to support our troops being over over there and yet to call them cowards when they're captured. When's the next episode of Keyboard Kommandos?

Kerry-McCain

Fresh from the Baghdad walkabout fiasco, here's news that McCain approached Kerry about being on the 2004 Democratic ticket. As if Republicans didn't have enough reasons to be suspicious of McCain. His campaign is nearly done, I think, although it might take him a while to realize it.

Crosscut

Cascadia has a new online news magazine. I'll be checking back periodically to see if it's any good. Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster is the major force behind it, and Knute Berger's on board too.

Lament of the Derb

John Derbyshire outdoes himself:

“15 British Agressors [sic] must be EXECUTED.” That was the placard being held up by some beetle-browed Iranian outside the British Embassy in Tehran. Well, I don’t entirely disagree. I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so.
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What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries.

Apparently Derbyshire will be happy if the Iranians just go ahead and execute the hostages, as he thinks those soldiers are spineless and unBritish anyway.

Teaching the Holocaust

Well this sounds ridiculous:

Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging "charged" versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.

Pelosi in Syria

The right-wing uproar about Pelosi visiting Syria sure is strange, especially considering that a Republican delegation has just been visiting Syria as well.

And these types of responses are mind-bogglingly deranged:

She's off to meet with Dictator Assad of Syria.

That pretty much sums up the Dems these days, doesn't it? Go make deals with our enemies and diss our friends. You can't invent these people.

God forbid that our foreign policy should involve visiting people with whom we have differences, and that we should invest any time in talking. These folks of Ledeen's ilk really have no idea how to govern.

Pittsburgh

I think the Derb might have hired Andy Rooney as his ghost-writer.

Incidentally, I think I stayed in the same hotel where he is. I was in Pittsburgh for the first time last Fall, and was staying directly across the river from the baseball stadium, where the Mets and Pirates were playing. My view was astounding, such that I could look right into the stadium.

Contra Derb, I loved that their bridges were named after people like Warhol, Carson and Clemente.

Goldberg and Chait

There are a lot of problems with this post and The Editors dissect it with more wit and thoroughness than I can muster at the moment, but I do want to take issue with one thing in particular:

The liberals treat the hard leftist icons — say Saul Alinsky — reverentially and with warm nostalgia. They welcome former radicals into the ranks of respectable liberalism with open arms, very rarely offering a hint of concern that they once cheered the Black Panthers or some such.

The problem is that the entire cornerstone of the neoconservative movement is a contingent of former Trotskyists who have been embraced by the greater conservative movement (though the embrace seems to be weakening quickly). Not only were figures such as Burnham and Kristol radicals in a past life, they became radicals in a new life - espousing a new kind of 'permanent revolution' on the international scale. Now, I'm all for giving people a chance to renounce their past if their past was indeed an unsavoury one, but it's worth pointing out that the original neoconservatives never renounced their radicalism.

And if you want to try to taint an entire movement by pointing out its worst members, as Goldberg is trying to do to liberalism, you could counter by questioning why mainstream conservatives treat Limbaugh, Coulter and Malkin as serious thinkers who deserve to be listened to.

Gonzales Lied

It's now clear that Alberto Gonzales lied about his involvement in discussions to remove US attorneys. The guy has got to go. He has no credibility.

Knut

My new favorite bear.

Letter from America

Episcopal Statement on Homosexuality

Very cool:

After a five-day meeting in Texas, the US bishops said: "We proclaim a gospel that welcomes diversity of thought and encourages free and open theological debate as a way of seeking God's truth. If that means others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision."

AG

If you have some time and want to help TPM comb through the document dump, head here.

McCain

This is interesting. On the one hand, it seems that McCain has sold his soul to win the nomination (a seemingly fruitless endeavour) and will say anything to please the Republican religious base. On the other hand, he's snubbed two of the most powerful conservative groups in the past weeks. What is the rhyme or reason for when he decides to be a pragmatist and when he decides to stand up for what he thinks is right?

Marshall and Co

The TPM franchise gets some well-deserved respect.

Jonah's "Liberal Fascism" Tome

From Roger Ailes:

It's taking longer than expected for Jonah Goldberg's ghostwriter to finish his long awaited worstseller, I Heart Hitler: Without You, Adolf, I'm Nothing. Back in 2003, the Pantload's publisher was promising a 2005 release date. As 2005 passed, Goldberg promised a March 2007 release date, and then a September 11, 2007 (!) release date.

The dupes at Doubleday are now announcing a December 26, 2007 release date which, no doubt, will roll over to a 2008 date by the end of Spring.

Maybe the universally harsh reception to D'Souza's book has given Goldberg cold feet.

Goldberg on D'Souza and Liberals

I don't know how Goldberg gets this so wrong. Here's an email I just sent him:

Jonah,

You say:

"As O'Donnell succinctly puts it, "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America." A spate of new books touting atheism, well received on the left, gild the same lily.

Anyway, along comes Dinesh's book, which makes a similar comparison, only this time it's the left which is the real Taliban wing in American politics. In response, Alan Wolfe famously insisted in The New York Times that D'Souza be shunned like an Amish tart for his anti-American..."

D'Souza isn't comparing the American left to the Taliban. He's saying that the Taliban (and international jihadis in general) are right to loathe the American left, that American liberals have brought terror upon themselves by a supposedly decadent and corrupt culture we espouse. So...the opposite of what you are saying. Rather than accusing liberals of being like the Taliban, he's saying that the Taliban is justly opposed to liberal America. Thus, Dinesh's book is evidence of what Sullivan and O'Donnell and others mention in your first paragraph, i.e. that Dinesh is finding common cause with the Taliban. In what way do you think that D'Souza's accusation is similar to liberals pointing out that some Christians find common cause with Islamists? If liberals were saying that conservatives brought 9/11 upon themselves and somehow deserved it, then you'd have a point and liberals should be apologizing for something. As it is, D'Souza is simply providing proof of the liberal accusation that some conservatives have a Talib
viewpoint.

Gabriel