KILLERS IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui's killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment, and bitterness? Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing. A look at the websites of Virginia Tech's English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don't yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these. Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp's senior seminar called "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature?" Indeed, that could serve as his own self-portrait. Did Cho take a course from Professor Paul Heilker, author of another peculiar piece called "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)?" Or maybe Cho preferred the undiluted Marxism espoused by English instructor Allen Brizee, who wrote: "Everyday, the capitalist system exploits millions of people. ... Our role in the capitalist system makes us guilty of oppression!"
QUELLING QUALMS ABOUT RUDY
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.
A PRESIDENTIAL FREAK SHOW?
A nosy, hectoring, busy-body, anti-smoking, anti-trans fat, social engineering, lifestyle blue-nosing, freedom-crushing, nanny-state enthusiast announced this week he's ready to spend a billion dollars of his vast wealth to run for president of our country. Currently Michael Bloomberg is Mayor of New York. The leading Democrat contender is Hillary Milhous Clinton, an anti-military radical feminist Euro-Socialist-cum-Trotskyite who is masquerading as a pro-military, pro-free-market, religious centrist. But should Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist/publicly centrist Hillary Milhous a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Moslem, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained ersatz Kennedyesque candidate. This is turning into a freak show. And I haven't even started with the Republicans.
ASIA MINOR (Part One)
The appropriate way to read this article is print it out, then take it in hand and relax in your favorite reading chair with your feet up on the settee. Most important, be sure you have a glass of your favorite fermented beverage at hand. Now, if you really want to do this right, make it a glass of Midas Touch Golden Elixir produced by the Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Delaware. You'll be drinking history while you read it. You remember from Greek mythology the legend of King Midas, to whom the god Dionysius mischievously granted his wish that everything he touched turn to gold? Well, he really lived. His tomb has been discovered, his bones excavated, together with the residues of the funerary feast held by his mourners. It turns out they drank a lot of booze. The residue was enough for molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern (author of Ancient Wine) to figure out the formula, a combination of honey mead, wine, and beer. After a bottle of Golden Elixir, you'll agree. 2,700 years ago, they knew how to make really good stuff. I'm enjoying a glass of it as I write this, and I can assure you that's true. Let me warn you, though - at 9%, it packs a marvelous wallop. Midas was King of Phrygia, venerated as the founder of the city of Ankyra (Greek for anchor) in 700 BC. But the place was already old by his time, for the Bronze Age Hittites in 1400 BC knew it as Ankuwash. Today, it's called Ankara - the capital of Turkey.
A PRESIDENT TO WATCH AMERICA’S SIX
Last Friday (5/11), I had dinner with a friend. Ever hear of the expression, "Watch your six"? It's a fighter-jock term, meaning watch for enemies behind your back (directionally "six o'clock"). If there is anyone I would trust to watch America's Six, it would be my friend. Good grief, I wish Duncan Hunter could get elected President of the United States. I've known him for over 20 years. We still talk about the time we went quail hunting back in the 80s - he even remembers the location (near Mount Palomar north of San Diego). He was in his second term as a Congressman then. Now he's into his 14th, and last. In 2008, expect his son, Duncan D., a US Marine now on his third tour of active duty in Iraq, to succeed him. Duncan is the real McCoy, a true man's man. He's the antithesis of the left's cartoon caricature of masculinity, as afraid of masculinity as the feminized left is. Talking with Duncan is always fun because he's quick and bright, street-smart shrewd, and never pulls a punch - he says what he thinks.
THOMPSON BUMMER
Say goodnight, Fred. Last night, Saturday (5/12), in a huge ballroom at a hotel in Washington I can't name at a meeting of a group I can't mention, Fred Thompson was the dinner speaker to 500 of conservatism's crème de la crème. The energy in the room was crackling. Here's the guy, everyone was either thinking or hoping - the big man who could fill Reagan's shoes, a true conservative who could electrify Republicans and sweep them to victory in 2008. There were cheers and yells when he was introduced, as everyone stood in sustained applause, then sat down in quiet excited anticipation. I'm not at liberty to reveal what he said, as this was a closed meeting, a private off the record address. But I can tell you my reaction and that of the several dozen folks I talked to afterwards. What a bummer.
NUTSHELL REQUESTS
Well, I asked for it. I'm the guy who chided the Chinese last week for ignoring the proverb about being careful what you wish for - then promptly proceeded to ask what you wanted the next TTP Nutshell History to be. You folks gave me enough assignments to keep me busy until there's peace in the Middle East. It's exciting, frankly, for it shows just how interested in the world TTPers are. Yet where do I begin? Here's a compendium of your requests, in no particular order:
THE BRAVEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times. To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles: To force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women, And to force the Islamic world to account for it. A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief.
A BETTER CIA BOOK THAN GEORGE “SLAM DUNK” TENET’S
It had been a while since I'd roused my old friend James Jesus Angleton, the late chief of CIA counterintelligence, and it was clearly time to do that, what with two recent books out about the CIA. The one by George Tenet is all over the media, but the one by Tennent "Pete" Bagley, one of Angleton's colleagues, has been hardly mentioned. Bagley's book, Spy Wars, contains lots of new information - much of it based on conversations with former (?) KGB officers and some stuff from Soviet archives - and a very important reflection on how CIA judgments are reached. Who better to navigate these still-churning waters than JJA himself? So I revved up my old ouija board, and after several failed efforts I got him loud and clear.
MOSLEMS NEED AN ISLAMIC VACCINE
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.