DISRAELI IN DUBAI
The 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) once commented on accusations that a political opponent of his was lying regarding an important issue before Parliament: "It is worse than a lie - it is a blunder."
We can be sure that the Earl of Beaconsfield (the peerage awarded to Disraeli by Queen Victoria) would make the same observation today over the travails of George Bush and the port scandal.
There is no secret deal here. CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that vets these things, ran it through 12 agencies including Defense, Treasury, State, Homeland Security, and the White House National Security Council. Their approval was unanimous. Had just one objected, it would have been put on a 45-day investigative hold.
Bush was blindsided on this out of sheer naiveté. He still can't accept as real the bottomless mendacity of Democrats. For Barbara Boxer and Chuck Schumer to foment in protest over a deal with America's closest Arab ally, when they have gone far more ballistic at any suggestion that Arabs be profiled at US airports - well, I guess it's standard liberal chutzpah.
Outdoing Bush in naiveté are Republicans in Congress being led with rings in their noses by Boxer and Schumer into an orgy of Bush-bashing. It would be nice if they all took a deep breath, switched on their brains, and began thinking of how to take advantage of this fiasco.THE GREATEST ONE WEEK ADVENTURE IN THE WORLD
This is K2, the second highest mountain in the world at 28,741 feet (8762 meters), and harder to climb than Everest. It isn't in the Himalayas, but an even remoter mountain range in Central Asia called the Karakorum.
In the center of the Karakorum range is a confluence of massive glaciers, a legendary uninhabited spot known to mountaineers as Concordia. Legendary because it is by consensus of professional mountaineers and adventurers to be the single most spectacularly scenic place on planet Earth.
At Concordia there are 41 peaks over 21,000 feet within a radius of nine miles. The highest mountains in the world are called "eight-thousanders," higher than 8,000 meters or 26,250 feet. There are 14 such giants, all in either the Himalayas or the Karakorum. At Concordia you can see four all at once. It is unique on earth.
It takes ten days of trekking from the last outpost of civilization - called Skardu - to reach Concordia. Then ten days back. But this July, I am going to take a dozen adventurers to Concordia in a single day - by helicopter.
And that's not all.
MOHAMMED MUST NOT BE THE PROPHET OF TERRORISTS
As a Moslem, I've followed with great agony and embarrassment the buildup of religious frenzy across the Moslem world in response to the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.
On the one side the show of force by Islamists underlined the extent to which Islam has been hijacked by radicals and on the other side it emphasized the vulnerability of open societies to the growing influence of militant Islam.
The demonstration of violence by the Islamists forced the democratic societies to face up to the reality that Moslems who do not reject some of the basic precepts of political Islam can never integrate in a secular society. They will always remain a hurdle in the development of a pluralist setup and intellectual progress.
The dance of insanity performed on the streets in the name of Prophet Mohammed's love and honor has also forced many Moslems to come out of their slumber and ponder as to why their faith and their prophet have suddenly become a subject of criticism and ridicule by non Moslems.THE PILLAR GANG
Today's (2/17) Wall Street Journal has an op-ed by a CIA intelligence officer, Guillermo Christensen, entitled Un-Intelligence. The article exposes the self-serving attack on President Bush and the War in Iraq by a fellow CIA officer named Paul Pillar in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
Pillar is now being lionized by the left for his anti-Bush screed - but you first learned about him here at To The Point in October 2004.
Porter At The Pass revealed that Paul Pillar and his left wing cabal at the CIA, which I named The Pillar Gang, was conducting a covert campaign of leaks and disclosures to damage George Bush's chances of re-election and help John Kerry's.
As explained in "Porter At The Pass":
YOGI IN IRAN
It's beginning to sink in to a lot of folks - from the State Department to the French Foreign Ministry to Egyptian intelligence - that Iran's Ahmadinejad is far more dangerous and wacko than the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Perhaps most interesting is that France is bellying up to the anti-Iran bar. There has been a major fallout, for example, between France and Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored terrorist outfit. Chirac is so worried now about a major Hezbollah terrorist attack in Paris that he threatened Iran he would retaliate with nuclear missiles.
Finally we have arrived at Yogi Berra's fork in the road. Yogi advised that, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." When both France and the US agree that the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran has to be removed, you know we've arrived.AL GORE: CRAZY, STUPID, TREASONOUS, OR ALL THREE?
Former Vice President Al Gore is bitterly disappointed he was not elected president. Periodically, he expresses his disappointment in ways that gives us reason to be thankful he wasn't.
The most recent was last weekend, when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to make a speech denouncing the United States. The occasion was the annual Jeddah economic forum, which is sponsored in part by the family of Osama bin Laden (which claims to have distanced itself from the family black sheep).
Mr. Gore has not disclosed how much he was paid for his words of wisdom. It probably is less than the $267,000 former president Bill Clinton was paid for speaking to the group in 2002, but odds are his fee was in six figures.
Whatever Mr. Gore's speaking fee was, his hosts likely thought it a bargain, considering what the former vice president had to say.Chapter Twenty One: THE TRAP OF CHOLULA
The Jade Steps
Chapter Twenty One: The Trap of Cholula
They spent most of the siesta, the Spaniards' period of rest after the mid-day meal, having fun turning Spanish words into Nahuatl. Malinali was having so much fun it made her forgetful. She shook her head. "I must leave," she told them. "Our Mesheeka guests have come for their daily ceremony of complaining to Captain Cortez, and I must be there, for it is through me that they address their complaints."
"Have fun," Aguilar joked. Malinali sighed. "Our talking - that was fun. But ‘fun' and ‘Mesheeka' are two words that don't go together - in Spanish or Nahuatl."
Today is the nineteenth day here in Tlaxcala, she thought as she walked to Cortez's quarters, and for every one of those days, the Mesheeka emissaries who had accompanied them from Xocotlan had come to complain to Cortez about what terrible people the Tlaxcalans were, how they were all traitors and thieves and poor and wicked and not fit even to be slaves. It was so tiresome to hear and translate, and how Cortez could pretend to always be courteous and polite, or even stay awake, during the daily moaning, she didn't know.
When she saw the crowd of soldiers in front of Cortez's quarters, she realized something was different.
COMING TO YOUR CAR SOON: 3-D NAVIGATION
Do drivers want to see a photorealistic image of the road ahead on their navigation displays? Google, Volkswagen, and nVidia think so, and they're working on a mapping and navigation system that could present Google Earth satellite images of highways and buildings. Since 2005, Volkswagen of America's Electronic Research Lab in Palo Alto, California, has been developing prototype vehicles with the system. While there’s no projected date for the concept to become reality in production vehicles, it’s not far off.
GLOBAL WARMING FREEZES UP
On the heels of record freezing weather in Europe, there was a story this week (carried by the Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily so you may have seen it) about a Russian scientist predicting global cooling. Russian astronomer Khabibulo Absudamatov expects a “decrease in the flow of the Sun’s radiation,” over the next several years which will lead to cooling, not continued warming of the planet. While his prediction may be right, he is wrong about the cause. As discussed in Solar Warming last September, it’s not the sun’s heat radiation causing a warmer earth, it’s the sun’s magnetic activity. In Solar Warming, we discussed the cost-free solution to global warming: Let the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel while flying at cruise altitude. The solution to global cooling is the mirror image of this: Have international jetliners burn their fuel “rich” at altitude. Give them a tax credit as an inducement.
LIBERTY VS. DEMOCRACY
Would you prefer to live in a country that has: (1) The rule of law with an honest civil service, strong protection of private property and minority rights, free trade, free markets, very low taxes, and full freedom of the speech, press and religion, but not a democracy? (2) Democracy and a corrupt court and civil service, many restrictions on economic freedom, including very high taxes, with limited rights for minority religions, peoples and speech? Many mistakenly believe democracy means liberty, but a quick review of world democracies show that is not true. Almost all democracies restrict economic liberties more than necessary. Many have corrupt court and civil service systems, inhibit women's rights, constrain press freedom and do not protect minority rights and views.