THE GREAT-SOULED MAN
In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading. The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced. Then he caught us by surprise.
A WONDERFUL REGISTRY CLEANER
Those of you who regularly read my column know I’ve been looking for the very best registry cleaner that doesn’t delete important or crucial entries. I’ve discussed this matter in various forums and found one I’m now certain to buy, after testing the trial version. It can be found at Macecraft Software - http://www.jv16.org/ - and the name of the product is jv16 Power Tools. An odd name but a fine registry cleaner.
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ROOTS OF ISLAMIC TERRORISM
Despite enormous and continuing denial on the part of left and liberal ideologues and the media, we are facing an exceedingly pathological strain of Islamofascist terrorism. So a crucial question must be asked: from a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge? According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF TERRORISM
The Saudi royal family has prepared a detailed plan to run abroad if the situation gets much worse, and that knowledge of the royal family's intentions is a major component in the recent rise in the price of oil. Meanwhile, the Saudis are buying insurance by supporting the terrorists in Iraq.
TENET DOWN, POWELL TO GO
Here’s my initial take on CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation today (June 3). I think this is very good news. It shows that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld in particular, is fighting back. Remember - as was discussed last week in The Real Problem in Iraq - the real war in Iraq is between the State Department and the CIA on one side (that of the UN and Arab rulers like the Saudi Royal Family) and the Pentagon on the other (America and freedom-democracy for Arabs and Iraqis).The focus of the war is now over the Oil-For-Food scandal, with State-CIA trying to squelch it, the Pentagon trying to expose it. As the fellow who discovered the scandal - some $5 billion in bribes paid by Saddam to dozens of the world’s most powerful people - and who has the incriminating documents, Ahmad Chalabi had to be destroyed.As of last week, State/CIA was winning. Then they overplayed their hand - twice.
SOPHISTICATED STUPIDITY
As an Army General, Colin Powell knows how to wage war. Unfortunately, the kind of war he knows how to wage best is bureaucratic, not military. Worse than unfortunately, the war he is waging is against his own president.It is tempting to hurl accusations of treason or something close to it in the face of the State Department’s chronic obsession of coddling America’s enemies. But with rare exceptions, the Pinstripes are far from traitors and look upon themselves as loyal Americans. Conservatives need to resist the urge to question their patriotism, and examine instead their method of diplomatic reasoning - which can be characterized as Sophisticated Stupidity.
DON’T EXPECT ARAB APOLOGIES
In Moslem culture, during the Daheyah (Sacrifice) feast, Moslems bring a lamb into the home for a ritual slaughter accompanied by the invocation Allahu Akbar, “God is great,” in the presence of the family and the children. Now we see the Daheyah of radical Islam to be Jews such as Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, who were beheaded with no mercy, accompanied by the same pious invocation. This is a perversion of Islam, but don’t expect an apology. To expect the Arab and Moslem leadership to apologize for the barbaric murder of Nick Berg is a reflection of the West’s naive and wrong expectations of Arab culture. In the Arab world to take responsibility and say “sorry” is taken as an unmanly sign of weakness that may get one into more trouble.
THE DISGRACE OF KARPINSKI
We received a deluge of comments regarding
NO WAY OUT: Iran is at war with us
Meet Hassan Abbasi, a well-known Iranian political scientist, longtime top official of the Revolutionary Guards, and currently "theoretician" in the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (how does one get a job description like that, I wonder) and the head of the National Security and Strategic Research Center. Abbasi holds special responsibility for North American affairs.Speaking at the Technical College of Tehran last Sunday, May 23, he proclaimed:"We have identified some 29 weak points for attacks in the U.S. and in the West, we intend to explode some 6,000 American atomic warheads, we have shared our intelligence with other guerilla groups and we shall utilize them as well. We have set up a department to cover England and we have had discussions regarding them. We have contacted the Mexicans and the Argentineans and will work with anyone who has an axe to grind with America."
THE REAL SCANDAL IN IRAQ
In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq - and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.Here’s the sordid deal.