What began as a controversy over the credibility of the New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" is morphing into questions about the integrity of Franklin Foer, editor of the venerable liberal magazine. The controversy began July 13 when the Diarist, a soldier in Iraq, wrote of three instances of shocking behavior.  The soldier has now been identified as Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp.  It is clear that he lied - either to Army investigators or to the magazine. But why was the liberal magazine's editor so eager to believe his lies? [Note by JW: Franklin Foer interviewed me at length for a story he was writing on the Reagan Doctrine in 2003.  The description and quotes of me are accurate, but the whole article turned out to be an anti-conservative screed.  The cover story, Founding Fakers, in the August 18, 2003 issue of The New Republic, demonstrates Foer's left-wing intellectual dishonesty.]

NBC News obtained last week a bulletin the Transportation Security Administration sent July 20 to airport officials and local law enforcement. "A surge in recent suspicious incidents at U.S. airports may indicate terrorists are conducting pre-attack security probes and 'dry runs' similar to dress rehearsals," the bulletin said. Passengers aboard United Air Lines Flight 93 almost certainly prevented either the U.S. Capitol building or the White House from destruction on 9/11.  The suspicions of a teenage clerk in a video store in New Jersey likely prevented a murderous attack on U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix. Our first line of defense against a terror attack is a vigilant public. Which is why it is puzzling that Democrats would seek to punish Americans who report suspicious behavior to the authorities.

CNN's Michael Ware said in a broadcast last January that Ramadi (capital of Iraq's Anbar province) is "the true al Qaeda national headquarters."  If that were true, al Qaeda is in bigger trouble in Iraq than most of us realize. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt devoted his show on July 11 to the (overwhelmingly negative) opinions of Iraq war veterans on the demands of Democrats that U.S. troops be pulled out.  One call was from "Bruce in Upland," whose son is a soldier currently serving in Iraq. "I will speak for my son who right now is bored out of his mind in Ramadi, because he hasn't heard a shot fired in combat now in about six or seven weeks," Bruce said.   There were about 22 enemy incidents per week in Ramadi in April, said Marine Major Jeff Pool, the public affairs chief for U.S. forces in western Iraq..  That's declined to "about two per week." (An enemy incident is any type of direct or indirect fire, from a sniper to a mortar or an IED attack.) "Anbar is returning to a state of normalcy, so I consider the soldier in Ramadi being bored a true measure of progress, said Maj. Pool. So why do Democrats in Congress keep insisting we're losing?

This Monday (7/16), the United Nations Security Council is scheduled to take up a report from Secretary General Ban Ki Moon which recommends the UN act to reduce the flow of arms from Syria to Hezbollah. That same day or next, the Security Council also is expected to receive a report from its International Investigation Commission about the 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which most Lebanese believe was orchestrated by Syria. How will Syria respond? Here's a clue: The Iranian news agency IRNA and several Arab newspapers have reported Syria has ordered all Syrian nationals residing in Lebanon to leave the country before Monday.

"Scooter" Libby will serve as much time in prison for lying under oath to a federal grand jury as Bill Clinton served for lying under oath to a federal grand jury. Democrats in Congress were outraged.  "As Independence Day nears, we are reminded that one of the principles our forefathers fought for was equal justice under law," said Sen. Charles Schumer of New York.  "This commutation completely tramples on that principle."   Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. said President Bush should be impeached for "crimes against the Constitution of the United States." That's rich, as in Marc Rich, the financier who fled the country to avoid prosecution for tax evasion, fraud and "trading with the enemy."  On his last day in office, President Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich after his ex-wife, Denise (with whom Mr. Clinton reportedly had been sleeping) donated $1 million to the Democratic party and $10,000 to the Clintons' legal defense fund.

PBS is the beau ideal of many liberals when it comes to free speech.  Their point of view is subsidized by the taxpayers.  Other points of view are suppressed. Now in yet another triumph for the liberal view of free speech (free for me but not for thee), the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled city officials may override the First Amendment if the exercise of free speech by some city employees offends the delicate sensibilities of liberals. Liberal intolerance of other than liberal opinions is behind efforts to reinstate the inaptly named "Fairness Doctrine" in radio. I see this every day at the very liberal newspaper where I work.  Conservatives often write angry letters to the editor, criticizing the arguments made in an editorial, or what they perceive as the slant in a news story.  Liberals unhappy with my columns often demand that I be fired.  They object not just to my point of view, but to the fact that it was expressed.  To paraphrase Napoleon...

Imagine it's June 7, 1944, the day after the D-Day invasion.  You pick up your newspaper.  There's no mention of Normandy on the front page, and only a brief reference to it in a roundup story on an inside page. The biggest battle since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime is under way in Iraq.  Its outcome could determine whether the war is won or lost.  But our news media have paid less attention to it than to Paris Hilton's legal troubles. The heart of the offensive is Operation Arrowhead Ripper, in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, involving some 8,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops.

In the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Tuesday, 69 percent of those polled think things in this country "are seriously off on the wrong track." The "wrong track" numbers haven't been this high since the late 1970s.  There were good reasons then for public discontent.  The economy was stagnant, but inflation was soaring. The Watergate scandal and our defeat in Vietnam were fresh in the public mind. But today the stock market is hitting record highs; inflation and unemployment are near record lows.  Our discontent is less with our circumstances than with our perception of our political "leadership." President Bush's polling numbers have been plumbing the political depths for quite some time. But he's less unpopular than...

Hamas "fighters" took gunmen captured from the rival Fatah organization from their headquarters in Rafah in the Gaza Strip and "shot them to death gangland style in the street in front of their families," the Associated Press reported Thursday. Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home dressed as a woman. "But when Abu Jadian arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles," the Jerusalem Post reported. That sort of behavior can sow mistrust between partners. At least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded in fighting between the rival Palestinian factions Wednesday, bringing the total for the week to...

President Bush has cast a huge, dark cloud over the Republican party.  But in that cloud's very size there may be a silver lining for the GOP. Most of those Americans who don't think President Bush made a mistake by going to war in Iraq are appalled by how clumsily the war has been conducted.  The president's strong backing for the "comprehensive" immigration reform bill now before the Senate, compounded by his attack on the character and motives of those who oppose it have split the GOP.   "Using advanced, hi-tech tools, Karl Rove has found the last pocket of support for Bush and destroyed it with laser-like efficiency," said Democratic Web logger Mickey Kaus of the illegal immigration controversy. If present trends continue, Mr. Bush may be fortunate that his dog, Barney, can't tell pollsters what he really thinks. But in Mr. Bush's uncanny ability to alienate Republicans nearly as much as he does Democrats may lie the GOP's salvation.

The FBI announced Saturday three Moslem men have been arrested for plotting to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at John F. Kennedy international airport. The New York Times ran a story about the plot in Sunday's paper.  On page 30.  The front page was reserved for a sympathetic story about Omar Ahmed Khadr, a suspected al Qaeda terrorist being held at Guantanamo Bay.  We learned early in that story that Mr. Khadr was only 15 when he was arrested in Afghanistan in 2002; that he is "nearly blind in one eye" from the firefight in which he killed one American soldier and maimed another, and that he "doesn't trust Americans."  Only much deeper in the story does reporter William Glaberson mention that young Mr. Khadr's father was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has stepped up his support for terror since he received a friendly visit from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in early April. Human rights advocates in Syria have gone into hiding. "Many Syrian... pro-democracy activists have privately expressed dismay at Ms. Pelosi's message of friendship to the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad," reported the New York Observer.  "They say that Ms. Pelosi's visit, no matter how well intentioned, has effectively pulled the rug out from under them." Ms. Pelosi's embrace of the Syrian dictator "made the regime feel that Americans were divided on how to deal with Syria," said a human rights advocate interviewed by reporter Katherine Zoepf.  "This sends a message to the regime that the pressure is off, that it can do what it likes." Shortly after Ms. Pelosi left Damascus, Syria's best known human rights lawyer, Anwar al-Bunni, was arrested on a trumped up charge.  He reportedly has been tortured.

For a pretty decent, mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy, George W. Bush sure has a knack for engendering rage. Liberals tend not to like the president because of what he's trying to do.  Conservatives are upset with him chiefly because of how frequently he botches what he tries to do. President Bush is a stubborn man.  This is both a strength, and a weakness.  When he thinks he's right, the president sticks to his guns, come Hell or high water.  That's basically how he faced down congressional Democrats (whose positions on issues are driven more by polls than by a sense of right and wrong) over funding for the war in Iraq. But the president is often wrong when he thinks he's right.  At a press conference in Slovenia in June, 2001, Mr. Bush famously said of Russian president Vladimir Putin: "I looked the man in the eye.  I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy...I was able to get a sense of his soul." Since then the former KGB officer has been dismantling democracy in Russia and working night and day to frustrate U.S. foreign policy. Many conservatives could have told Mr. Bush that if you look into Ted Kennedy's eyes, you won't see a soul much more trustworthy than Vladimir Putin's.   

Here's an example of the false advertising for the Senate immigration bill. Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher asked an immigration lawyer friend what he thought of the bill.  This was his reply: "This bill has no enforcement at all.  It says, in effect, that no Y (guest worker) or Z (amnesty) visas will be issued to anybody until the following steps are taken.  But in the meantime, provisional Y and Z visas will be issued, with exactly the same effects and benefits except they can't be turned into green card status." This is madness.  To grant an amnesty before the border is secure is to invite another massive influx of illegals. It gets worse. 

I'm against abortion under most circumstances.  So why does Rudy Giuliani's firm declaration of support for a procedure I abominate make me more likely to support him for the Republican nomination for president? I'll be a single issue voter in 2008.  If we don't win the war on Islamic terror, nothing else will matter very much.  All of the "top tier" Republicans who seem today to have a realistic chance of winning say the right things about the war on terror.  So does George W. Bush.  Mr. Bush is an honest, brave, compassionate man whose heart is in the right place.  But his head's been somewhere else.  The mistakes his administration have made have put our mission in Iraq in serious jeopardy.  After over six years of the Bush administration, I yearn for competence in the White House.  I want a president who will run the government, instead of being intimidated by his own bureaucracies.  I want a president who will appoint competent people to key positions, not the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Michael Brown.  I want a president who not only understands what's at stake in the war on Islamic terror, but who can communicate those stakes effectively to the American people.  Which is why I'm attracted to Rudy.

The arrest of six young Moslem men for planning to murder soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey made me think of Salman Rushdie. In 1988, Mr. Rushdie published a novel which received, arguably, the most negative review in history.  The Ayatollah Khomeini, then ruling Iran, issued a fatwa condemning Mr. Rushdie to death.  Khomeini's beef was more with its title, The Satanic Verses, than with its contents.  The title refers to three short verses in Sura (chapter) 53 of the Koran - and they are the thread which could unravel radical Islam, which is why Islamists want them dropped down the memory hole. What's this got to do with the Fort Dix Six?  Maybe plenty.

How do you say "Ronald Reagan" in French?  Many in Europe's establishment fear it might be "Nicolas Sarkozy." Mr. Sarkozy was elected president of France last Sunday (5/6) by a comfortable margin (53-47 percent) over the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royale.  Voter turnout was an eye-popping 85 percent. "Sarko" is not your typical French politician.  He had a picture taken of himself shaking hands with President Bush, something some of the GOP candidates for president are leery of doing. It's a welcome change from recent, and not so recent, history.  There would have been no United States of America were it not for the French.  When Lord Cornwallis marched his troops out of Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781 to surrender to General Washington, he did so because a French fleet prevented the evacuation of the British.    The army to which Cornwallis surrendered had nearly as many French soldiers in it as Americans. Things have gone downhill since then. 

The experience FBI Director Robert Mueller had two weeks ago when he tried to give a speech at Harvard seems typical of many colleges campuses these days. "Mueller, who was set to speak before a full crowd managed by tight security detail, had just begun his prepared remarks when the first protestor interrupted with screams," reported the Harvard Crimson. Yet recently I went to a college campus to hear a controversial speaker on a hot button topic in a lecture hall packed with students. The speaker (my friend Ralph Peters) had no security, and needed none. No attempt was made to disrupt his remarks.  The questions the students asked were polite, respectful, and intelligent, indicating both a familiarity with the topic and a desire to learn more about it. Obviously, I wasn't at Harvard - or, say, at Columbia, where the administration let off with wrist slaps students who physically assaulted a speaker last semester.

Washington memoirs tend to be self serving, but ex-CIA Director George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm is remarkable even for the genre.    Michael Scheuer, the first head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, said the book "seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party."  Mr. Tenet's reputation is in need of rehabilitation because it was he who assured President Bush the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk."  And there was that 9/11 thing the CIA missed on his watch. None of this was his fault, Mr. Tenet assures us.  It was the neocons who screwed up Iraq.  Intelligence collection and analysis about 9/11 would have been better if President Clinton hadn't slashed his budget.  Book stores should serve cheese with this whine.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are demonstrating they are not ready for prime time.  This could cloud what looks now like rosy Democratic electoral prospects next year. Democrats in Congress have sent to the president a supplemental appropriations bill calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq beginning in October, which they know he will veto, raising substantially the already high profile of the issue. It's remarkable that Democrats, as a matter of policy, are siding with America's enemies in time of war.  It didn't work so well for them when they did that during the Civil War.  And it is questionable political strategy to make a swift retreat from Iraq the centerpiece of their legislative agenda.  But more remarkable is how clumsily Democrats are executing the strategy they've chosen.

For the sake of a few dollars more, NBC has brought closer the day of the next public mass killing in America. "This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this," acknowledged NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams of his network's decision to air portions of the "multimedia manifesto" Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC in the interval between his murder sprees on the Virginia Tech campus. It was indeed a sick business decision.  Mass killings inspire copycats. "School campuses in at least 10 states were locked down or evacuated in the aftermath of a Virginia Tech student's shooting rampage," the AP reported Wednesday. NBC is not alone in its guilt.  Every news organization which rebroadcast portions of the video, or newspapers (like mine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for which I write a column) which published still photographs of Mr. Cho posing with his weapons is complicit. We say we do this to protect "the people's right to know."  The real reason, of course, is we hope the titillation will increase our number of viewers or readers. But as we fatten our bottom lines, we send a message to every sociopathic loser: Wanna be famous?  Go kill a lot of people.  We'll put your face and your story and your alleged grievances into every home in America.

Both supporters and opponents of gun control are shoe-horning the tragedy at Virginia Tech into their pre-established templates.  Both have ammunition. On the one hand, Mr. Cho was able to purchase the firearms he used in the murder spree -- Glock 19 and Walther P-22 handguns -- lawfully at a local gun shop. On the other, the Virginia Tech campus is a "gun free zone," where students, faculty and staff are forbidden to have firearms, even if they have concealed carry permits.  Mr. Cho lived in a dorm on campus, where he stored his weapons and ammunition.  The school's policy banning guns wasn't very effective in Mr. Cho's case. A fundamental difference between supporters and opponents of gun control is their attitude toward personal responsibility.  Liberals tend to offer excuses for the perpetrators of violent acts (he was poor; his mother drank; his daddy beat him), and to assume that potential victims have no right to play a role in their own defense. Those who think the law abiding should be permitted to carry firearms argue that if some of the students, faculty, or staff had been armed, they could have cut Mr. Cho's murder spree short.

Danny Dietz understood these words of British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing that is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept free by the exertions of other men better than himself." Linda Cuesta and Emily Fuchs are among the "miserable creatures" to whom Mill was referring.  They're trying to keep the city of Littleton, Colorado from erecting a statue in honor of Danny Dietz, a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. Petty Officer Dietz was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest decoration for valor, because, though badly wounded, he fought on to permit his team mates to escape from an ambush.  Ms. Cuesta and Ms. Fuchs are among a small group of parents who want to keep his home town from honoring Petty Officer Dietz because the statue depicts him with his weapon.

The 15 British sailors and marines held hostage by Iran, and the members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team both have achieved the highest status contemporary liberalism offers: victimhood. Writing in 1852 about the "emperor" Napoleon III (son of Napoleon's younger brother, who ruled France from 1848 to 1870), Karl Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.  The British hostage crisis moved seamlessly from the one to the other. Just like the Imus-Rutgers crisis.

Patricia Hewitt, Health Secretary in Tony Blair's cabinet, was upset by pictures broadcast from Iran of the 15 captive British sailors and marines, reported Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph. "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking," Ms. Hewitt said.  "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people." When liberals cower when petty thugs make threats (which is pretty much whenever petty thugs make threats), conservatives,  understandably, suspect them of cowardice.  But Ms. Hewitt's bizarre response to her country's humiliation suggest something else is at work. The most remarkable aspect of this most recent Iranian hostage crisis is the lengths to which so many prominent people in the West have gone to make excuses for inexcusable Iranian behavior.

Insight magazine reports that Al Gore is contemplating running for president...as the nominee of the Green Party. Both he and Ralph Nader are evidently convinced that Hillary Clinton will get the Democrat nomination, and Mr. Nader is urging Mr. Gore to take her on under the Green banner. There is little love lost between Mr. Gore and the Clintons, and if you're living in a fantasy world (as Mr. Gore largely has been since his shattering defeat), there are two good reasons to convince yourself you could win as a third party candidate, or accomplish something important even if you didn't.

Two female explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, planned a trek across the Arctic Ocean earlier this month to highlight the dangers of global warming.  They had to call the expedition off because it was too cold. "One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times," Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition, told the Associated Press. "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Ms. Atwood acknowledged.  "One of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability," she said. Uh, Ms. Atwood, one thing people who haven't drunk the Kool Aid can predict is that it'll be mighty cold in the Arctic in winter. (Jack Wheeler, who has been to the North Pole 21 times, told me he fell out of his chair laughing at this news item.  "What ditzes," he observed.) The Jim Jones of this Kool Aid testified on Capitol Hill last Wednesday. 

To its enemies, the most endearing quality of the Bush administration must be the frequency with which the Bushies act as if they've done something wrong, even when they haven't. President Bush caused himself no end of grief when he apologized for saying in his 2003 state of the union address "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," even though every word of it was true.  That blunder may have been topped by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at his news conference last Wednesday.  The "senior Justice Department official" who told reporters Mr. Gonzales' performance was "disastrous" was being kind.

Only President Bush, with his apparently boundless enthusiasm for mediocrities (Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job), imagined that Mr. Gonzales was a good choice to be attorney general, and he has lived down to the expectations most held for him. 

These are good times for moonbats, hard times for wingnuts.  This bodes ill for Democratic prospects in 2008. "Moonbat" is a term popularized by the Web logger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) to describe people on the extreme left.  "Wingnut" is a term coined by liberals to describe those on the extreme right. Most of us learn by the third grade the difference between addition and subtraction.  But both moonbats and wingnuts think a majority can be built by driving away everyone who doesn't agree with them totally on everything. Little better illustrates the rising influence of moonbats than the on again, off again efforts by Democratic leaders in Congress to hamstring the war effort in Iraq by imposing crippling conditions on the defense appropriations bill.

Rudy Giuliani is casting a long shadow over the Democratic as well as the Republican presidential races.  Opinion polls indicate the former New York mayor has a large lead not only among likely GOP voters, but in match ups with the leading Democratic contenders as well. It defies conventional wisdom that a candidate who is pro-choice on abortion and pro-gay rights could be a serious contender for the Republican nomination.  But two events have stood the conventional wisdom on its head. For most conservatives, winning the war on terror is the paramount issue, because nothing else matters much if we lose.  Mr. Giuliani arguably has the best credentials on the paramount issue. 

It doesn't take much to be the funniest moment in an Academy Awards show that Washington Post television critic Tom Shales described as "alternately a bore and a horror."  But I thought it hilarious when Algore won the Oscar for best documentary for "An Inconvenient Truth." Documentaries ought to bear some relationship to reality.  "An Inconvenient Truth" is a cheesy propaganda film. Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, who is to climate science what Tom Brady is to football, has described it as "shrill alarmism." "You'd think that a science-based, call to action film from a guy who flunked out of divinity school...would be received with a certain amount of skepticism, but in officially atheist Hollywood, Albert Arnold Algore Jr. is the second coming of Moses, Maimonides, Martin Luther, all rolled into one," wrote "David Kahane," a nom de plume for a screenwriter in Hollywood.

What if we win in Iraq?  If the thought makes you break out in a cold sweat, you could be a Democrat candidate for president. American history has a grave lesson for the Democrats.  They need to be reminded that their Democrat Party clamored for a U.S. defeat during the Civil War.  Back then, the leaders of their party called themselves "Peace Democrats," who urged Union soldiers to desert and hated Abraham Lincoln as much as their political descendants hate George Bush today.  They were confident of capturing the White House in 1864. Then Sherman captured Atlanta two months before the 1864 elections.  The "Copperheads," as the Republicans called the Democrats after a venomous snake, got creamed by the voters who thought victory was nigh.  And it was: at Appomattox five months later (April 9, 1865). President Bush may have his Atlanta before the primaries begin.

Scooter Libby must feel as if he were a character in a Seinfeld episode written by Franz Kafka. Seinfeld was the fabulously successful  1990s sitcom "about nothing."  In Kafka's novels, his protagonists are trapped in situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical. The fate of Mr. Libby, who used to be chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is now in the hands of the jury.  He is charged by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald with having lied about something that isn't a crime, because his memory of an event differs from that of journalists, whose memories also are faulty. Cross examination revealed that virtually every prosecution witness has serious memory problems.  But only Mr. Libby's memory is on trial.

The Mother of All Corrections issued by the Washington Post Saturday (2/10) illustrates what is wrong with our intelligence agencies, and -- especially -- with news coverage of them. The inspector general of the Department of Defense had been asked by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (and now, alas, its chairman), to determine whether the intelligence analysis on Iraq done by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans under then Under Secretary Douglas Feith violated the law. On Feb. 8, acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble issued his report.  Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith wrote a story about it, which appeared on the front page of last Friday's paper.  They managed to confuse the IG report with a press release sent out by Sen. Levin over two years ago.

To say the earth is as warm as its ever been since the invention of the thermometer isn't as scary as alarmists think.  The mercury thermometer was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. That was in the middle of the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1900). Of course temperatures are warmer now than they were then.  Dr. Bob Carter, a paleoclimate researcher at James Cook University in Australia, notes that for most of the last six million years, average global temperatures were as much as five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. As each new piece of evidence weakens their argument, global warming alarmists try to shut off debate. They claim a consensus which does not exist.  The National Registry of Environmental Professionals took a survey last November, which indicated two thirds of its members think global warming is a serious problem.  That means a third do not. So much for consensus. Skeptics are, global warming alarmists say, a "fringe" who are paid by CO2-spewing corporations to express doubt.  But numbered among the skeptics are some of the world's most renowned climatologists, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia.  All have better credentials than does the divinity school dropout who invented the Internet and from whom alarmists take their cues.

On January 20, Iranian agents kidnapped five US soldiers in Karbala, Iraq.  They killed one immediately. The bodies of the four other Americans were found later. President Bush's subsequent decision to permit U.S. troops to kill Iranians who are trying to kill them came shortly after the Karbala attack, which in earlier times would have been recognized by one and all for the act of war that it was. But as evidence mounted over the weekend of Iranian involvement in the terror in Iraq, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, describing his country as an "international pariah" for fighting it. Sen. Kerry followed to the podium former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, whose speech he praised.  Sen. Kerry's remarks were front page news in Iranian newspapers. In the "War Crimes" museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), there is a photo of Sen. Kerry greeting the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist party.  Perhaps Sen. Kerry is angling for similar recognition in Tehran.

For the last two weeks the weather in Pittsburgh has been typical for January -- it's snowed almost every day.  And for the first time this winter I've heard complaints about the weather at work.  I heard none during our unseasonably warm December. I note this to put in perspective the latest scare report on global warming from the United Nations:  Hypothetical piled upon hypothetical,  based on computer models which cannot duplicate the actual climate of the present or the recent past. Alarmists attribute warming to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  But CO2 accounts for only about 0.03 percent of the earth's atmosphere, and less than 10 percent of the greenhouse effect.  Only about 14 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from burning fossil fuels. That means all of Algore's hysteria, all the economy-destroying restrictions of the Kyoto Treaty, are about stopping carbon emissions responsible for 1.4% of the greenhouse effect.

Three interesting things have happened since President Bush announced plans to "surge" U.S. troops. First, al Qaeda appears to be retreating from Baghdad.  Second, the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr is retreating.  Third, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is retreating from his support of al Sadr. And the surge has barely begun.  Yet the Democrats say it has to fail.

The FBI's bumbling in the war on terror, and the tendency of the FBI to promote the bumblers, has made it one of our weakest links in the chain of agencies tasked with protecting America's security. Foreign spies have been eating the FBI's lunch for years.  Katrina Leung, for example, was permitted to pass along critical national secrets for years after she'd confessed to being a spy for Red China because the two FBI agents who were supposed to be monitoring her were sleeping with her.  Neither of those agents was punished. The ghastly reality is that, for many senior people in the FBI, their careers come first, the reputation of the FBI second.  The security of the United States is a distant third.

[One of the most infuriating aspects to the Duke Rape Case is the media's refusal to disclose the name of the woman involved.  She is only identified as "the accuser," while the real victims in the case, the Duke lacrosse players, have had their names and pictures broadcast to every inhabitant of the planet. Not in this article.  The woman's name is Crystal Gail Mangum.  Google her name and you will get 16,000 hits.  There is even a Wikipedia entry on her.  So we are hereby happy to end the journalistic conspiracy and insert her name along with "accuser." ---JW] CBS's "Sixty Minutes" broadcast Sunday (1/14) showed many people the gross abuse of prosecutorial power in the Duke rape case. Durham district attorney Michael Nifong indicted three Duke University lacrosse players last April after a stripper who performed at a team party claimed she had been raped. The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, picked the three defendants from a photo lineup consisting only of lacrosse players, a violation of police procedures.  (Clearly innocent people are supposed to be mixed in with suspects.) Liberals rushed to condemn the Duke lacrosse players because they loved the narrative: rich white guys abuse poor black woman.  Some furious backtracking is taking place as evidence of their innocence mounts.  A new verb, to "nifong," has been coined.  It's a synonym for "to frame."