Finally, we’re learning one of Israel’s two best lessons in fighting terrorists. Israel, Sharon in particular, figured out a long time ago, that the enemy wasn’t a phenomenon, it was individuals: terrorists, not “terrorism.” So the solution was to forget about defeating some “ism” and hunt down and kill specific terrorists personally.The latest example took place this Sunday, September 26, when Israeli agents planted a bomb under the driver’s seat of Izz al-Deen Sheik Khalil’s SUV, and blew the senior Hamas leader up to the Moslem Bordello in the Sky.Taking this lesson to heart, US forces have begun targeting specific terrorists in Iraq. On September 22, US fighter jets nailed the “grand mufti” or spiritual leader of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawid and Jihad terrorists, Omar Youssef Jumah. Using the nom de guerre Abu Annas al-Shami, Jumah was fond of issuing fatwas proclaiming that Allah approved of beheading infidels. No more fatwas for you, Omar. You’re a good terrorist now.We’re learning at last to give Islamofascists what they want. They say their greatest strength is that they prefer death to life, while our greatest weakness is to love life more than death. If they love death, hey, no problem, happy to oblige.Now it’s time to learn the second great lesson in national security we can learn from Israel.

This is the text of a briefing I am giving to Senate and Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill this morning.The Reagan Doctrine was above all a paradigm-shift. We weren’t going to try and outlast the Soviets anymore, we were going after them. We didn’t want peace with them, we didn’t want to get along with them, we wanted them gone, history, da svedanya, adios and goodbye. Support of various anti-Soviet insurgencies was a conscious assault on the structure of the Soviet Empire. The goal wasn’t simply freedom for this or that Soviet colony, but the full collapse of the Empire as a whole, which ultimately meant the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.This strategy… worked. The Reagan Doctrine is the most spectacularly successful geopolitical strategy of modern times. The question now is: where and how can such a strategy be best applied to the War on Islamofascism?I think the “where” is Iran. Iraq is a job for the United States Military. Iran is not -- not in the sense of the 3rd ID taking Tehran. During the Cold War, we needed US and NATO forces in Europe capable of blocking a Soviet invasion, say through the Fulda Gap. But we didn’t need US soldiers to fight in the jungles of Nicaragua or protest in the streets of Prague and Budapest. What we needed - and what we had -- were large numbers of people living in these countries willing to struggle for their own freedom. This is what we need, and this is what we have, today in Iran.The main obstacle in implementing a Reagan Doctrine for Iran is the same we had with implementing a Reagan Doctrine for the Soviets: Squishes in the White House and the State Department. In the 1980s they were Michael Deaver, Dick Darman, Jim Baker, and George Shultz. Today they are Robert Blackwill, Richard Armitage, and the entire Near East Bureau at State.Thus to implement a policy of regime change in Iran, there must be a strategy of regime change in the National Security Council and the State Department.

I used to live in Washington DC. But for the past while now, I, like so many millions of other Americans, have been residing in Rotflmao City. It’s a fun place to be, but it can be exhausting. A number of my muscles, such as those attached to my rib cage, have become achingly sore. It’s a very distracting place to be. You keep losing your focus, and keep being uncontrollably seized by convulsive behavior. Yet I, like so many others, don’t have a choice. We’re all going to be living here for the next several weeks.Moving to Rotflmao City is easy. All you have to do is read a news item like this:Datelined September 21, 2004, ABC News ended its story on the activities of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates for the day with this closing line:

President Bush will address the UN at 10:30 a.m. All day long, he will be meeting with world leaders. John Kerry appears on "Live with Regis and Kelly," before moving on to Florida for more campaigning.

Comfortable? Have a bucket of buttered popcorn and a cold beer at the ready? (If you were my friend Otto, you’d have instead a Grey Goose martini.) All set for the greatest political fireworks show of your life? Showtime is about to begin.Those SwiftVet ads, you see, have been just the pre-lims to warm the audience up. The main acts will be much more entertaining. They’ll begin with signs appearing at Kerry campaign rallies saying:Ho, ho, ho - Kerry must sign the One-Eight-OhWhat does that mean, you ask? It is the demand that Kerry sign a DoD (Defense Dept.) Form 180, which authorizes the release to the public of all military records the Pentagon possesses on him.

Ask anybody who knows how to street fight, and they’ll tell you the most important thing is not to get mad. Lose your temper, act out of rage, and you lose your emotional intelligence, your capacity to think calmly and react quickly - so you get the crap beat out of you. This is why Hollywood casting directors are proposing that actors Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels be replaced in the coming sequel to the 1994 movie Dumb & Dumber with… John Kerry and Dan Rather.Oh, excuse the typo. It’s Dan Rather.No kidding, folks - the characters of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in Dumb & Dumber are Einsteins compared to Hanoi John and Frequency Dan. Let’s take Danny first.

Sir Thomas Gresham, who lived from 1519 to 1579, was Queen Elizabeth’s financial advisor. He was so good at it that he paid off all of England’s European debts by playing the Antwerp stock market in Belgium and made himself the richest man in Britain. But his greatest contribution was reviving the debased English shilling by convincing Elizabeth of the truth of what history calls Gresham’s Law: that bad money, if allowed to exist, will wipe out the value of good money.

The ghastly series of events in the past weeks -- two commercial airliners blown out of the sky in Russia on August 24, two buses blown up by suicide bombers in Israel on August 31, the threat to behead two French hostages unless France rescinds its school ban on Moslem head scarves, the threat to behead two Italian women unless Italy retreats from Iraq, the genocide in Sudan, the hideous butchery of hundreds of Russian children in Beslan last week, the car bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta today - make it quite clear that Gresham’s Law now needs to be applied to Islam.

If Sir Thomas were alive today, he would explain that his law pertains to the validity not just of monetary institutions, but political, social, cultural, and economic institutions as well. All issue their own “currencies” - the measure of their moral worth and practical value. The moral worth and practical value of the currency of Islam has become so debased that it may be unredeemable.

This is a speech I am delivering to the Council For National Policy in New York on the eve of the Republican Convention.One surefire way to make yourself really stupid is to acquire an overload of what the Greeks called hubris, the overweening pride that leads to one’s doom. The ancient Greeks had observed time and again the causal connection between hubris and stupidity. If they were with us today, they would tell us that anyone possessed of this self-destructive synthesis needs psychiatric counseling instead of trying to be President of the United States.

In the spring of 2000, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of business leaders from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, held in Cartagena, Colombia. The fellows from Venezuela all had the same question: What can we do about Hugo Chavez?I told them they had to face reality. As an admirer and protégé of Fidel Castro, there is one way and one way only he will leave office: in a coffin. This was not what they wanted to hear...Democracy is not only the best guarantor of peace between countries, but the best guarantor of peace within a country as well. When people can choose their government with ballots they do not have to - nor have any moral right to - resort to bullets.Here’s the flip side: When people cannot choose their government with ballots, then they do have to resort to bullets - and they have a moral right to.Democracy is institutionalized peace. Dictatorship is institutionalized violence. So let’s state it clearly: A dictator has no right to life. By his violent and murderous suppression of freedom, the people so suppressed have the moral right to terminate his existence.

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico this week, George Bush assured America: “I know what I’m doing” regarding winning the war against Moslem terrorists in Iraq and threatening our country. Although the Pogo Press is doing its best to prevent voters from figuring it out, GW is right. He is conducting a full court press right now, and rolling the terrorists up in a ball.Let’s start with Afghanistan. The Taliban is breaking apart. About one-third of the Taliban remnants still fighting in Afghanistan have broken away from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, who has now lost control of a number of his senior commanders. The pressure of 18,000 American and NATO soldiers relentlessly hunting them down and killing them has precipitated the dissolution of the Taliban.Then there are all the contract guys across the border in Pakistan.

My friend and neighbor, well-known economist Richard Rahn, summarizes the Republicans’ greatest political weakness thus:

The Democrats are good at selling falsehoods, and the Republicans are lousy at selling the truth.

It was 30 years ago, during a conversation at his brownstone in Brooklyn, that Dennis “The Wizard” Turner concisely explained to me what he thought of liberals. “I honestly think,” he said, “that Liberals are more disgusting than Communists.” Dennis’s observation was brought to mind when I read a message from Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition . Lou was telling me about acts of depravity so unimaginable that I thought not even liberals were capable of them. I was wrong.

Let’s hope Medicare slipped in its ruling on July 15 that obesity will now be looked upon as a government-recognized illness while George Bush’s attention was distracted elsewhere (like dealing with the latest Al Qaeda threats) - so that GW will squash it before it goes into effect. Such a ruling is true fascism at work.Such rulings would be expected under a Kerry-Edwards Trial Lawyer Presidency, giving trial lawyers carte blanche to sue any number of food providers. But it’s fascism in any presidency. Fascism is characterized not by government ownership of industries (that’s socialism), but stifling over-regulation of industries - and with the collusion of the regulated industries for the purpose of throttling competition from upstarts.The perfect case of such fascist collusion is between the FDA and the big pharmaceutical companies. The FDA conducts an unending war upon dietary supplements because they are so much cheaper than pharmaceutical alternatives. Here’s an example.

If a libertarian genie granted me the power to eliminate one and only one agency of the federal government, I would choose the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration, which more properly should be named the Federal Death Agency. It would be a tough choice, I know - passing up the chance to get rid of such bureaucratic pestilences as the IRS or the EPA. The FDA, however, has caused the death of countless millions of people by preventing the development or approval of medicines that could have saved their lives - and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. That means you and I will die prematurely due to the FDA’s perverse blocking the path to medical progress.The FDA is the penultimate case of government having the uncanny ability to pose as the solution to society’s problems while in reality making them vastly worse. The US Senate’s current efforts to give the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco products provides a perfect example.What the Senate is attempting to do is enable the FDA to wage war upon nicotine - which it will do by ordering the amount of nicotine progressively reduced in tobacco products. This will create a black market for high nicotine content cigarettes smuggled from overseas. As government attempts to stop the smuggling escalate, the smugglers will look for ways to reduce the bulk of their illicit goods - and will soon discover the ideal value-to-volume ratio in an unbelievably dangerous form: crack nicotine.

Who are your heroes? Those of us on the right have plenty to choose from. Two who come first to my mind are Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. I’m sure it would be easy for you to list others.What about the heroes of the left? Remember when the left idolized Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas? That’s history now, sad and gone. Castro and Ortega are still around, but they’re has-beens just like the rest.What did all the heroes have in common - what was it that made them heroic in the eyes of the left? Not that they were Communists (which they were), but that they hated and were fighting against America. The left’s insuperable problem now is that the world’s primary America-haters can’t be their heroes. They can’t idolize Moslem terrorists. Not even Noam Chomsky can wear an I Love Osama t-shirt. No campus revolutionary can replace his passé Che poster with one of Osama. Such embracing of undeniable evil is too much even for them.Thus the lefties no longer have any heroes. All they have left is their hate, their hate for America, for Western Civilization, for white males - which is distilled into hate for one white male in particular: George W. Bush.

July 4th is Freedom’s Birthday. July 6th is George W. Bush’s - this year his 58th. Take the time on July 6th to give a toast or say a prayer of thankfulness that America is so fortunate to have this extraordinary man as her president in these parlous times.Bush-hatred among the left has reached levels of true derangement and pathology - particularly so because the left hate George Bush for his virtues. They hate him because he is the moral antithesis of Bill Clinton. They hate him because he has the courage to defend America without apology. They call him a liar because he is not. They call him stupid because they are terrified that he is brilliant.The reality is that George W. Bush is scary smart - and has cajones the size of Texas.

July 4th is Freedom’s Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which is great - that you take the time to feel good about America.Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what’s wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn’t exist.One reason is that for all your worries about America’s culture and morality - you and all your fellow conservatives can feel good about your country. Liberals can’t. One of the defining characteristics of leftie-liberals is an inability to feel truly proud of their country - proud to the bone.You cannot be a liberal without feeling apologetic and embarrassed over being an American. You cannot be a conservative without lacking any such embarrassment or compulsion to apologize at all.Being an American is simply the coolest thing in the world. Wherever I have traveled in the world - it’s over 180 countries now - whenever someone asks me, “Where are you from?”, it’s always such a thrill to answer, “America - I’m an American.”I’m an American. Say it to yourself. Doesn’t it feel fantastic? It’s a feeling liberals can never have.

It is startlingly instructive to see Bill Clinton seize the public limelight again immediately after the funeral rites for Ronald Reagan, to juxtapose the dignity of those rites with the deception of Clinton’s book, the national outpouring of grief and admiration for Ronald Reagan with the adolescent infatuation for Slick Willie.Bill Clinton’s intelligence and abilities exceeded Ronald Reagan’s - but they don’t count. It was their choices that made the difference between Clinton’s sleaze and Reagan’s nobility.This month, June 2004, the American people have been pulled between two poles: the positive of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to the best within them, and the negative of Bill Clinton’s appeal to irresponsibility and depravity. I am confident the pull of Ronald Reagan will be the stronger.One reason is that it’s too blindingly obvious that Bill Clinton’s book should have been entitled My Lie.

Last April, famed theoretical physicist Haim Harari, Chairman of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and former president (1988-2001) of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, gave a speech entitled “View from the Eye of the Storm.” It is a fascinating discursion by a brilliant mind on the conflict between Western Civilization and Islam.Dr. Harari singled out Iran as "the number one danger to the world today." Yes, Iran is waging war upon the United States, is the primary sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, and will soon be capable of indulging in nuclear blackmail and terror. Yet it is not Iran that is the world’s primary danger. It is Colin Powell’s State Department which is waging war against George W. Bush and is doing everything it can to keep Iran’s Islamofascist regime in power.