Saturday, April 27, 2013

An academic giant retires

I well remember Donald Kagan, not as a professor at Yale because I'm pretty sure he was not on the faculty while I was there in the '50's, but as the Dean of the college under Fenno Schmidt's brief tenure in the 90's. As mentioned in this article, he (and Benno) were drummed out of power because they were conservatives and wanted a more rigorous and focussed curricula than the liberals who outnumbered them on the Yale faculty and everywhere else in academia were willing to countenance. And so he returned to full time teaching of the classics and is finally, at age 80, retiring. As discussed here, his vision may have been rejected back in the '90's, but the outcome certainly vindicated his worst fears. Ecucation today, at all levels, is a train wreck all because the moral relativists, politically correct value free liberals predominate. Where this ends is anyone's guess however it is not likely to be a pretty ending if this course prevails. He knew what he was talking about.

'Democracy May Have Had Its Day'

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

New Haven, Conn.

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."

Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education.

Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day at his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."

Zina Saunders

He means across academia, but that is also true in his case. Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship in April 1992, lobbing a parting bomb at the faculty that bucked his administration. His plans to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale—funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and Yale alum Lee Bass, who was inspired by the 1990 lecture—blew up three years later amid a political backlash. "I still cry when I think about it," says Mr. Kagan.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, "you can't find members of the faculty who have different opinions." I point at him. "Not anymore!" he says and laughs. The allure of "freedom" and "irresponsibility" were too strong to resist, he says.

His sharp tongue and easy sense of humor hearken to the Brooklyn of his youth. Born in 1932 in a Lithuanian shtetl, Mr. Kagan was raised in Brownsville, which was then a working-class Jewish neighborhood. He rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodgers turf—"everything you need to know about him," as his son Robert, the neoconservative writer, once said. He was a high school fullback. Mr. Kagan is personally warm, always tough and occasionally smart alecky. Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens. He has no patience for "nonsense" or "wrong ideas." He's a guy who'll tell you what's what and that's that. Generations of faculty and students came away bruised from Kagan encounters.

The tussles over course offerings and campus speech of course speak to something larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in "Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law. Mr. Kagan, who grew up a Truman Democrat, says that when he was young the U.S. needed to redress an imbalance by emphasizing equality. The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says.

The 1960s brought a shift and marked his own political awakening. Teaching at Cornell, Mr. Kagan watched armed black students occupy a university building in 1969. The administration caved to their demands without asking them to give up their rifles and bandoliers. He joined Allan Bloom and other colleagues in protest. In the fall of that year, he moved to Yale. Bloom ended up at the University of Chicago and in 1987 published "The Closing of the American Mind," his best-selling attack on the shortcomings of higher education.

In the decades since, faculties have gained "extraordinary authority" over universities, Mr. Kagan says. The changes in the universities were mirrored in the society at large. "The tendency in this century and in the previous century at least has been toward equality of result and every other kind of equality that could be claimed without much regard for liberty," he says. "Right now the menace is certainly to liberty."

Over lunch at the private Mory's club last week, we marvel over the first-ever NCAA championship for Yale's hockey team, the oldest program in the country. "Unbelievable!" says Mr. Kagan with the gleam of a sports obsessive. In 1987, he stepped in for a year to direct Yale's athletic department—probably the only classics professor ever to hold the post anywhere. His first initiative was to call to disband the NCAA or take Yale out of it. "I wish I had," he says. "It's so disgusting, it's so hypocritical, it's so wicked. The NCAA is just a trade organization meant to increase profits."

Whether athletics, democracy or war are the topics of discussion, Mr. Kagan can offer examples from the ancients. His lifelong passion is Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War—the epic clash between those former allies, militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, that closed out the fifth century B.C.

As Thucydides wrote, people go to war out of "honor, fear and interest." War, he also said, "is a violent teacher." Another enduring lesson from him, says Mr. Kagan, is "that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power"—then a slight pause—"unless they're Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can't be taken seriously."

These days the burden of seriousness among free states falls on America, a fickle and unusual power. The Romans had no qualms about quashing their enemies, big or small. While the U.S. won two global conflicts and imposed and protected the current global order, the recent record shows failed or inconclusive engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Some would argue that free societies are too soft to fight brutal wars too long. Mr. Kagan offers culture and political leadership as an explanation. "We're a certain kind of culture which makes it hard for us to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough," he says. "We can do it when we're scared to death and there seem to be no alternatives. When it's time to nail down something, we very often sneak away."

The protection and distance offered by two oceans gives America the idea—or delusion—of being able to stay out of the world's problems. Mr. Kagan also wonders about possible "geocultural" shifts at play. A hundred years ago, most people worked the land for themselves. Today they work for a paycheck, usually in an office. "Fundamentally we are dependent on people who pay our salaries," says Mr. Kagan. "In the liberal era, in our lifetime, we have come more to expect it is the job of the government to provide for the needs that we can't provide. Everything is negotiable. Everything is subject to talk." Maybe that has weakened the American will.

Also don't forget, says Mr. Kagan, "unsubtle Christianity" and its strong strain of pacifism. "Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball."

In 2000, Mr. Kagan and his younger son, Frederick, a military historian and analyst, published "While America Sleeps." The book argued for the reversal of the Clinton Cold War peace dividend to meet unforeseen but inevitable threats to come. The timing was uncanny. A year later, 9/11 forced the Pentagon to rearm.

With the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. is slashing defense again. "We do it every time," Mr. Kagan says. "Failing to understand the most elementary childish fact, which is: If you don't want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of."

Brownsville, not Thucydides, taught him that. "Any kid who grows up in a relatively tough neighborhood gets quick early lessons in what the realities are," he says. His 1995 book, "On the Origins of War," made a moral and strategic case to exert as much effort and money to safeguard peace as to win a war.

Thucydides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant or irresponsible to care. "When you allow yourself to think of it, you don't know whether you are going to laugh or cry," he says.

The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on. "There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

The infamous Pigford case

Since none of my liberal friends have ever heard of the Pigford case that has been around for 10 or more years (largely due to the non-interest in the case by the liberal MSM), this recent investigative reporting by the NYTimes will come as a very large shock. And, who knows, maybe the onset of just a little awareness of how we have come to our present plight of 17 trillion in federal debt, and more to come. reporting here

A brief summary of the consequences of the Pigford case as reported in NRO:

Pigford Forever | National Review Online

At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford, which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up. The Pigford case represented everything Breitbart raged against in the American political order — large-scale cronyism, corrosive and cynical identity politics, unrepentant hypocrisy, and the predictable indifference of the mainstream media. A handful of conservative outlets reported on the story at the time — including NR— and a handful of liberal outlets dedicated only as much ink to these stories as it took to dismiss them. But in Breitbart’s lifetime, Pigford never cracked into “the conversation”; it never came to be seen as emblematic of a deeper corruption endemic in Big Government.

Perhaps that will now change with the publication, by no less an arbiter of “the conversation” than the New York Times, of a deeply reported 5,000-word piece onPigford and its descendants that, if anything, reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought.

Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And “claim” might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford, it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory — and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time.

Unsurprisingly, this cash bonanza spawned a cottage industry of mountebanks and small-time frauds, including a few who toured the churches of the rural South recruiting “farmers” to stake their claims in lieu of reparations. And the number of claims exploded. Some claimants were as young as four years old; others had their forms filled out by lawyers just to “keep the line moving.” There were many reports of duplicative, even identical forms written in the same hand. In some towns, the number of claimants exceeded the number of farms there operated — by individuals of any race. The Times quotes several USDA employees whose job was to process — and ultimately rubber-stamp — these claims. “You couldn’t have designed it worse if you had tried,” one says of the process. “You knew it was wrong,” says another, “but what could you do? Who is going to listen to you?” “Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers,” says a third.

But as the Times reports in great depth, instead of closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration did not just acquiesce to, it spearheaded the expansion of, thePigford con on the taxpayer’s dime, and saw to it that not just black Americans, but any woman, Hispanic, or Native American who could so much as gesture at discrimination had access to a billion-dollar pool of easy money.

It did this over the objections of career lawyers in the Justice Department. It did this by dubiously tapping a Justice Department fund reserved for court-ordered, not politically dispensed, payouts. And it did this, in most cases, under evidentiary standards even looser than the ones governing the original settlement.

And from Rich Lowry, editor of National Review Magazine:

The Obama/Clinton Reparations | National Review Online

Abraham Carpenter Jr., a farmer in Grady, Ark., has more insight into human nature than the average sociologist. “Anytime you are going to throw money up in the air,” he told the New York Times, “you are going to have people acting crazy.”
Carpenter is quoted in an astonishing 5,000-word Times exposé on the federal government’s wildly profligate program to compensate minority and women farmers for alleged discrimination. The government rigged the game against itself and in favor of anyone claiming taxpayers’ dollars. It was like a gambling house that fixed its slot machines to always come up triple cherries (and pay out other people’s money).

The enormous scam was set in motion by a 1997 class-action lawsuit called Pigford v. Glickman, with black farmers alleging that the Department of Agriculture discriminated against them in allocating loans. The Government Accountability Office and the Agriculture Department found no evidence of ongoing discrimination, but that black farmers had been treated unfairly in the past. This injustice became the predicate for officially sanctioned fraud amounting to reparations for non-white, non-male farmers.
The Clinton administration decided on a $1 billion settlement, “more a political decision than a litigation decision,” one lawyer told the Times. The presiding judge expanded the definition of claimants to include anyone who had “attempted to farm,” and no written complaint of discrimination was necessary. The judge wanted to set up a mechanism to provide “those class members with little or no documentary evidence with a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000.”
He succeeded brilliantly. Staff from lawyers’ offices filled out forms for claimants at mass meetings. People filled out applications for their kids. Entire families filled out applications. Most applicants had never received any loans, making it impossible to check the record to verify their claims.
The Times examined 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, and found that “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.” In Little Rock, Ark., ten members of one extended family reaped a cool half a million dollars.
Tens of thousands of applicants missed the 1999 deadline of the original suit. Their claims were probably even weaker than the original ones. But as a senator, Barack Obama supported paying the late applicants, and as president, he successfully sought another $1.15 billion for the purpose.
Other groups felt left out of the bonanza. Lawyers at the Justice Department thought that they were winning a court battle with Hispanic and female farmers. That didn’t matter. “Political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments,” the Times writes, “engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.”
The government settled for another $760 million with Native Americans, even though it appeared to have a strong case. Even with the lure of this cash, the government could only give away $300 million. Another $400 million will go to Native American nonprofits, if appropriate ones can be found. And $60 million to the plaintiffs’ lawyers for the service of helping fleece the U.S. government.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the Times that the blowout means at his department “we celebrate diversity instead of discriminate against it.” Couldn’t he find a cheaper way to do it? The settlements altogether could cost more than $4.4 billion.
The Pigford case is like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel. It would be hard to invent a more damning fable of modern government. It is a tale of special-interest pleading and of the politicians who give in to it (at first, Barack Obama wanted to pander to rural blacks, then he needed to do catch-up pandering to Hispanics). It is a story of greedy lawyers and hapless bureaucrats. It is equally ludicrous and dismaying. Take a good long look, and then recoil.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2013 King Features Syndicate

Andrew McCarthy, the federal prosecutor of the blind sheik of the first Trade Center bombing, doesn't think much of the way the Obama Justice Department has handled the interrogation of the Tsarnaev killer now being held as a prisoner. He argues that it was a major mistake to read him his Miranda rights and allow him to get lawyered up, and what's more it was a mistake to try him in the criminal court system rather than as an enemy combatant.

Obama’s National-Security Fraud

Unlike you, federal government officials are immune from charges of fraud. The executive branch, vested with all of the government’s prosecutorial authority and discretion, is not going to investigate its own operatives for carrying out its own mendacious policies.

That is the story of last week’s Boston Marathon bombing and the frantic efforts of the bombers, the brothers Tsarnaev, to evade capture, shoot it out with police (one of whom they killed, and another of whom they wounded), and — we’re now told — detonate more bombs in Times Square.

The Times Square non-attack is quite interesting. The specter of it, projected in the immediate wake of the Marathon murders and maimings, is horrific . . . so horrific that the government, in leaking this tidbit from its botched interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, knew that news media were certain to lead their broadcasts with it. The press would never wonder why they, and thus we, were being told about it.

But why were they told? Remember, the Times Square bombing not only never happened, it never came close to happening. It was, at most, a passing jihadist fantasy, one that the jihadists in question peremptorily dismissed as implausible. The threat was no more real than those that regularly stream out of Islamic-supremacist mosques and, just as regularly, go studiously unreported.

Mind you, there is nothing inappropriate about government officials’ speaking about matters on the public record — such as the allegations lodged in criminal complaints. But the Times Square non-attack is not mentioned in the complaintfiled against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, the complaint includes no information from Tsarnaev’s interrogation.

Yet somehow the airwaves are now full of startling revelations from his Miranda-aborted 16-hour post-arrest interview, including not least his confession, and, of course, his assurance, as Allah is his witness, that no one other than he and his Svengali older brother — and certainly no foreign Islamic terrorist organization — had anything to do with their terror spree.

Strange, isn’t it? We are governed by leftists given to finger-wagging about their commitment to due process and the rule of law — they’re not like those bad old warmongering Bushies. Still, here we are in the post-arrest phase of the civilian prosecution the administration was hell-bent on commencing — the phase when due process obliges government officials to remain mum about non-public investigative information that could taint the jury pool and undermine the defendant’s right to a fair trial — and we’re being inundated with stunning confession evidence.

Remember, this is the same crowd that labels the Fort Hood massacre “workplace violence” and won’t honor its victims with Purple Heart medals. To do so, they sniff, might prejudice the objectivity of the trial of a jihadist mass murderer who has publicly announced he’d like to plead guilty. Now, though, in Tsarnaev’s case, government agencies are leaking like sieves.

Why?

Because you are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols.

That is why Eric Holder’s Justice Department, together with the FBI, darted into federal court in Boston last Sunday evening to file the complaint against Tsarnaev. Obama was determined to end the public debate over whether the jihadist is a wartime enemy combatant or a mere criminal defendant. As in the case of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and al-Qaeda’s alleged “consigliere,” who was whisked into the country and into civilian court before anyone even realized he’d been captured, the administration calculated that a fait accompli is the best way to impose the president’s deeply unpopular preferences.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Safe or sorry?

All hail profiling and political incorrectness! Do we really want to continue with government tolerance and moral relativism, or do we want to be safe in our own homeland? It seems that the choice demands that we get real about who is blowing us up and wants us all dead. We could begin to surveil any Muslims in the country who are naturalized citizens with focus on recent immigrants. We also need to listen to what's being said and what's going on in the mosques around the country, which apparently the police are in NYC. No, not every Muslim is an islamist radical, however, it is apparent many of them are. Michael Continnetti lists the reasons to make that assertion here:

Mugged by Reality

Medical workers aid injured people at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon / AP

BY: Matthew Continetti
April 26, 2013 5:00 am

You have heard the words. You know the narrative. Let’s not rush to judgment. These were lone wolves. They were self-radicalized. The system worked. The dots were connected. Osama Bin Laden is dead; GM is alive. Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. It is time for nation building at home.

Add up all of those lone wolves, however, and pretty soon you have a pack. Which may be one reason the reaction of some liberals to last week’s terror attack has been so bizarre: The bombing of the Boston Marathon by two radical Muslim immigrants to the United States, in which three innocent bystanders were killed, including an eight-year-old boy, and more than 260 other innocents were wounded, many of them maimed grievously, interrupted certain narratives that have dominated national security discourse since the election of President Barack Obama.

The underlying assumption of those narratives is that the counterterrorism strategy pursued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, was self-destructive. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mobilized the Islamic world against America. The existence of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, the scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the reports of harsh interrogation of detainees eroded our moral high ground. Bush betrayed our values. He exploited fear for political gain.

The appropriate response, it was said, was to do the opposite of Bush. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. Narrow the war to drones and Special Forces targeted against al Qaeda leadership. Close Gitmo. Ban “torture.” Extend a hand to the Muslim Middle East. Diminish the threat by suggesting its commonality not with ideologies such as fascism or communism or anarchism, but with unlawful activities such as organized crime, narcotics trafficking, and psychopathic rampage killing.

This narrative could hold sway as long as terrorist plots were disrupted or failed or could be dismissed as something other than terrorism. Such was the case for four years. In May 2009 the New York Police Department disrupted a plot to bomb Jewish landmarks in the Bronx and attack a local airport. The next month Carlos Bledsoe, aka Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, fired on an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., killing one and wounding another.

That September, the NYPD disrupted a plot to bomb the subway on the anniversary of 9/11. That November, Maj. Nidal Hasan, an acolyte of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire inside Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 29. His attack was labeled “workplace violence.” That Christmas, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to detonate the explosives he had smuggled in his underpants onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit. There were 289 people on the plane.

In May 2010 a man named Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. He, too, was under the sway of al-Awlaki, an American citizen later killed by a drone attack. In November 2010 the FBI arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud for plotting to detonate a car bomb at a Portland, Ore., Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

NYPD disrupted two plots during 2011. One targeted a synagogue; the other sought to plant small bombs throughout the city. This second attacker, NYPD relates, learned how to make the bombs from al Qaeda’s English-language magazine Inspire.

On Sept. 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, Islamic militants launched a coordinated assault on U.S. embassies throughout the Greater Middle East. One of those assaults, against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador to that country.

The initial explanation from our government was that the attack was “blowback” from an “anti-Islam” video produced in the United States. That was not the case. To the extent the video mattered, it was part of an al Qaeda information operation to stoke Muslim discord and riot. And to that extent, it succeeded.

In October 2012 the NYPD apprehended a Bangladeshi national residing in the United States on a student visa. He was attempting to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

One month later, federal agents arrested two Pakistani immigrants who were plotting to bomb locations throughout New York City. And in January 2013, a cell of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb invaded the Tigantourine natural gas facility in In Amenas, Algeria, taking more than 800 hostages and killing 39, including three Americans.

This is by no means an inclusive list of the Islamic terrorist plots against the United States, her citizens, and her interests at home and abroad that have been organized or perpetrated since 2009. Nor does it include plots that were hatched or occurred during the same time against those nations once defined as “Christendom,” or the plots against the state of Israel, or the innumerable violent acts of al Qaeda affiliates against American and coalition forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world.

What is most striking as one reads over the list is the ease with which we compartmentalized and discarded each plot as it was revealed, how simple it was to return to “normal” life in the midst of an ongoing and global terrorist campaign, how lazy to reason that these “isolated incidents” were nothing more than the false echoes of an organization “decimated” by presidential action.

But Boston was impossible to ignore. Two brothers, granted asylum and residency and citizenship and welfare benefits by the United States, who attended American schools and one of whom married an American girl, viciously turned against the country that had sheltered them. Before they were stopped, they killed four and shut down a major city. But these were not the only consequences of their actions. The insouciance with which Islamic radicalism was downplayed or dismissed or ascribed to “Islamophobia” in the halls of the executive branch and on air on MSNBC became another casualty of the attack.

The prejudiced individuals who said or wrote of their suspicions and hopes that the Boston bombers would turn out to be Tea Party activists or gun nuts or pro-lifers were exposed as fools. The writers who ostentatiously dismissed early reporting that instructions for pressure cooker bombs could be learned from the pages of the al Qaeda webzine looked willfully blind. The spokesmen for liberalism who said on television that the brothers Tsarnaev were more like Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine killers than like al-Awlaki or Bin Laden seemed naïve if not dishonest. I say dishonest because to downplay the obvious religious dimension to the Boston bombing is to obfuscate the known facts of the case. The surviving brother himself says he and his accomplice were motivated by religious belief.

The commentators who argued over whether Chechens are “white” were engaging in academic babble that put medieval scholastics to shame. The civil libertarians who falsely said terrorists have continued to talk to authorities after being read Miranda rights were shown to be dupes when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shut up as soon he was charged. The self-congratulatory bureaucrats who insisted everything was under control found it difficult to explain why the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev was present in two government databases prior to the attack, or what made the Russians so worried enough to alert the FBI and CIA, or how Tamerlan could be interviewed once by the FBI and then disappear into a cloud of militant religious fervor. The media that so fastidiously examined every aspect of Dzhokhar’s life and personality, interviewing acquaintances who pronounced his goodness and in a preposterous search for what American society might have done to provoke his jihad, insulted the men and women whose lives have been irrevocably altered by this Millennial barbarian. And those who, before all the facts are known, so desperately denied that the Tsarnaevs may have had additional accomplices or overseas connections were openly evading the global aspect of brothers’ origin and ideology.

The response to Boston on the part of so many intellectuals, inside and outside government, was a sign of perplexity. They had been concussed when mugged by reality. Doing the opposite of what Bush had done did not, in the end, improve the global situation or make America safer. On the contrary, it may have made the situation worse. The plots against America continue. The ideology that motivates them has not died. Indeed, the space in which that ideology’s adherents operate is expanding: From Mali, to Libya, to Sinai, to Somalia, to Yemen, to Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, those who act in the name of al Qaeda have more room to maneuver. Presidential outreach has not mattered. It has been dismissed. The Muslim world is growing more violent, and it is exporting that violence and conflict overseas.

What Boston showed was that some problems defy the easy answers proffered by American politicians, and that some problems cannot be hid from for long. Such problems include what to do about the Greater Middle East and the global jihad. In other news this week Iran, which continues its nuclear program, stands accused of complicity in the recently revealed plot against the Canadian rail system. The U.S. government said it has evidence Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people. The Muslim Brotherhood strengthened its grip on Egypt. Ethno-sectarian conflict reemerged in Iraq.

The tide of war is receding, Obama says. But that is the old narrative, the narrative of the last four years, the narrative of peace and comity, the narrative being pulled apart by events. We know now that you cannot control the tide.

Poster boy for crony capitalism

Watchdog.org has exposed crony capitalism to full view of the world in this article and those related to it highlighted in blue at the end of the piece. Terry McAullife a Democrat fund raiser and henchman for the Clintons for years, is a poster child for this perversion of capitalism. As the story intimates crony capitalism describes China's version of capitalism. Fully 100% of China's economy is driven by this perversion of real capitalism while probably a much smaller percent of our own economy is so infected. The danger, of course, is that this small percentage grows to become the dominant force as the Democrats would like.

McAuliffe hones China’s crony-capitalism model in U.S.

By Steven Greenhut / April 23, 2013 / 2 Comments

Part 11 of 13 in the series Terry McAuliffe, gubernatorial candidate and carmogul

ON TOUR: Terry McAuliffe points the way for Haley Barbour, center, and Bill Clinton at GreenTech facility in Mississippi last year. McAuliffe now says he resigned from the company on Dec. 1.

By Steven Greenhut| Watchdog.org

As he runs for Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe has touted his efforts to start a “green car” company in Mississippi as a prime example of his old-fashioned American entrepreneurial know-how. Yet McAuliffe really is a master of the Chinese-style “crony capitalist” model. It’s a system where political connections, government favors and even some thuggery determine the success of an enterprise.

The politically well-connected McAuliffe – a former Democratic National Committee chairman described this week by the Washington Post as someone who “made a fortune in an array of businesses, often by using his political contacts” – apparently purchased GreenTech Automotive in 2009 from the Chinese government, which seems like a match made in heaven.

McAuliffe quietly resigned as chairman of the company in December — so quietly the public only learned about it on April 5 —but was still championing his role with the company as recently as this month, when one of its funding sources turned into a campaign disaster. That financing mechanism is the EB-5 program, whereby foreigners are offered green cards in exchange for investments in U.S. companies.

In short, McAuliffe, who helped Bill Clinton raise campaign cash by selling $100,000 sleepovers at the White House, was building a car company based on $500,000 “investments” from foreigners seeking to live in the United States. “GTA counts among its allies Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham, who shares an office with GTA and is CEO of Gulf Coast Funds Management, an EB-5 center that raises visa-investor money for GTA,” according to a Watchdog.org story.

The Associated Press featured a photograph of Bill Clinton at the unveiling of the MyCar at the Horn Lake, Miss., facility where thousands of cars would supposedly be produced in its first year of production. Crony capitalism is bipartisan, of course, and Mississippi’s used-car-salesman-like governor, Haley Barbour, former Republican National Committee chairman, was in on the action, too. His development authority pledged more than $8 million in taxpayer-funded freebies so that GTA could build a plant on a still-vacant parcel in Tunica County.

In a real market enterprise, investors pledge private dollars based on the hopes of making profits on the sale of the product. That tends to focus the mind more on, say, the fundamentals of the product than on the political connections and subsidies surrounding “the deal.”

It’s hard to envision a huge market for $18,000 “neighborhood electric vehicles” with a top speed of 35 miles per hour and the appearance of a circus car. For perspective, that’s roughly the same price as my new V8 pickup truck that could probably – and accidentally, I note – drive over a few of these mini cars without even noticing.

McAuliffe and his fellow GreenTech executives went to job-desperate Mississippi after Virginia officials scoffed at the plan. In 2009, a Virginia economic development official, Jeffrey Anderson, reviewed the project for then-Gov. Tim Kaine’s administration. His conclusions were devastating.

“Since GTA will need the funds to develop the plant, it will need the funds largely upfront,” he wrote. “The EB-5 program requires that the jobs be created within about 2.5 years. … Even with a significant multiplier, it is unlikely that GTA will put enough folks to work quickly enough to satisfy the requirements of the EB-5 program.” He also questioned its cronyism: “We believe that having the principals of the regional center be the same as the principals of the company benefiting from the investment creates a conflict of interest.”

Not that much is happening in Mississippi. GTA was late on its property tax bill in Mississippi because it hadn’t started construction of its permanent plant. A Memphis Business Journal reported visited the leased facility and noted that there were only six cars on an assembly line. Automotive News said the project “doesn’t add up” and declared it “dead on arrival.”

This gets is to the “thuggery” part of the picture. The Chinese may have opened up their economy, but their political system remains repressive. Chinese journalists who report on these self-enrichment deals are harassed by the authorities. Their publications are censored or shut down.

Even though McAuliffe imported the Chinese business model, he still has to contend with First Amendment issues. After Watchdog.org, produced investigative reports about GreenTech and its reliance on EB-5 financing – and quoted analysts who made the same points as those made in the media and by Virginia officials – GreenTech slapped Watchdog’s parent company (the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, where I am vice president) with a massive lawsuit, for $85 million.

The goal is to stop us from writing our stories. GreenTech sent a copy of the suit to other news publications as a warning. They figured they would pick on a small media outlet and try to tamp down on the story elsewhere. It’s pure intimidation, but it hasn’t worked. We are gearing up for a legal battle and have stepped up our coverage. Other media outlets have stood up for us.

But what does this approach say about the man who hopes to be the next Virginia governor?

In China, the children and grandchildren of Communist China’s revolutionary leaders, called “princelings,” used their family and political connections to become the country’s new robber barons and use political force to shut down critics. In America, political princelings such as McAuliffe are trying to copy that strategy. Let’s hope a free press can at least expose what’s going on.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Write to him at steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

Part of 13 in the series Terry McAuliffe, gubernatorial candidate and carmogul

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Steven Greenhut

Thursday, April 25, 2013

More on Political correctness

yBill Mayer is a loud-mouthed so-called Progressive comedian who to most Conservatives is mostly a turn-off. However he apparently has been awakened to some truths by the events last week in Boston and actually attacks one of his fellow lefties in this description of an interview on his program. Would that more people would wake up before more of us are blown up by Islamists.

Bill Maher Exposes the Leftist Islamophobia Ruse for Even Leftists to See

By William Sullivan

On Friday's Real Time program on HBO, Bill Maher hosted an interview with Brian Levin, the director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism. It became clear within thirty seconds that Levin was not attending the religious parity party he had expected.

One can understand why Levin might harbor such expectations. Maher has a pretty apparent disdain for religious adherents of all stripes. But in that first thirty seconds, Maher spoke, with a pointedly singular focus, of the hypocrisy we witness in such fanatical terrorists as the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon last week. "If you read what the older brother wrote on his, uh, on the internet," Maher began, "it says his worldview: Islam. Personal priorities: career and money. And we see a lot of this; I mean, the 9/11 hijackers went to strip clubs the night before they got on the plane."

Two references to notorious acts of Islamic terrorism were enough for Levin. He interjected by saying that "it's not like people who are Muslims who do wacky things have a monopoly on it. We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian, who say they're out for God and end up doing not-so-nice things."

Before he could even finish this rather boilerplate attempt to draw religious equivalency between the "not-so-nice things" religious people do and acts of murder and terror sanctified by Islamic groups, Maher had written him off, replying, "You know what, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's liberal b------- right there."

Levin, seemingly blindsided, appealed to the fact that Maher's pointing out hypocrisy in all religion is how he makes his living, but Maher refused to relent.

There's only one faith that kills you, or wants to kill you, if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There's only one faith that kills you, or wants to kill you, if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So I'm just saying, let's keep it real.

This is the moment where Levin's agenda was exposed, and anti-jihadists like Pamela Geller were thoroughly vindicated, even if not explicitly. "Well," Levin dawdled, "I guess I have a girl for you, Pam Geller, you could maybe meet," in an attempt to be funny. Maher, confusedly turning to the audience, replied, "Uh, I don't know what that means."

"Well, she's an Islamophobe," Levin said. There it is. To those in the in the audience who were paying attention, it became pretty apparent that when presented with these uncomfortable facts by someone who cannot readily be denounced as a hateful Islamophobe, the Islamic apologist can do nothing more than reach into his Islamophobia rolodex for an example to get his point across. And in this case, that example is a figure who is possibly obscure to Maher, and entirely abstract to the conversation.

If Maher could have readily recalled exactly who Pamela Geller is and reference her work, he would likely have explained to Levin that juxtaposing Islamists who would bless the murder of apostates with Pamela Geller, who has never advocated that her readers commit murder, is a silly, slanderous thing to do. But though Maher didn't specifically discuss Geller here, he did vindicate her in terms of the anti-jihad message she works to disseminate. And here's why.

Much of what leaves Bill Maher's mouth after this point encapsulates Geller's message in such a way that it will be understood by an audience that might otherwise write it off if a figure like Geller had said it. To the progressive audience members who know who Geller is, or maybe have watched the many propaganda charades disguised as documentaries against her, Geller has the letter I branded on her -- so her words would likely be immediately dismissed as hate.

So Maher gets to say what Geller does and would say, without having Levin immediately dismiss the truth as Islamophobia, which follows:

I am not an Islamophobe, that's wrong. I am a truth lover. [Approving applause] All religions are not alike. As many people have pointed out, The Book of Mormon, did you see the show? [Levin says no, as he's unable to get tickets.] Okay. Can you imagine if they did The Book of Islam? [Pause.] Could they do that? There is only one religion that threatens violence and carries it out for things like that. Could they do The Book of Islam on Broadway?

Levin replied with an unconvincing "Possibly so," looking to quickly change the subject. But before he could, Maher sardonically demanded, "Tell me what color the sky is in your world."

Visibly flustered, Levin continued, grasping the only arrow left in his quiver. He suggested that there are 1.4 billion Muslims in the world, and yes, a lot of them are extremists "who would slit your throats," but "there are also folks that are fine, upstanding people." So he's worried that this national audience might be being exposed to "hatred" of Muslims.

Unmoved, Maher simply said, "No, you're wrong about that. And you're wrong about your facts. Obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world -- if you insult the prophet, do you have what's coming to you? It's more than just a fringe element."

There it is. Truth, wrapped with a bow for the leftists who might otherwise reject it, which advances the national dialogue in a positive direction.

There is more to a message than its content -- delivery is essential. The problem with the debate regarding Islam is that the channels for dialogue, which should be open and honest, are closed and selectively directed by social engineers, like Brian Levin, who value political correctness over truth. Generally speaking, the right does not believe these social engineers at all, and the left far too blindly accepts their nonsense.

This is the reason for the profundity I found in the interview with Ruslav Tsarni, the Tsarnaev brothers' Muslim uncle who, convincingly, I believe, denounced armed jihad and expressed a genuine devotion to American values. Americans are free to view Tsarni's testimony as taqiyya (a religiously sanctified lie to advance Islam, as many Comments on the article apparently believe), but the point is, the message that there are Muslims who abhor Islamic violence and value freedom is much better-received by such an example than being told what to believe by a leftist opinion-maker.

Likewise, hearing a leftist opponent of religion denounce the notion of religious parity while speaking the truth about Islam's role as a uniquely malignant contributor to global terrorism is much better-received by leftists when heard from Bill Maher than from Pamela Geller, who, in my opinion, has been wrongfully ostracized from the discussion among leftists.

So, thanks to Bill Maher, the anti-jihadists' message may have found a new audience. And truth, when allowed to permeate any dialogue, is never a bad thing.

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com and can be followed on Twitter.