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Pickings has devoted much space to the al-Dura affair which is the modern day version of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Those Protocols were created for the Czar’s secret police in 1903 and have become a staple of anti-Semitism since. (Hitler referred to them in Mein Kampf) Later today we devote a lot of space to a Weekly Standard article debunking the al-Dura myth.

Before we get to news items, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College reminds us of the document and the birthday we celebrate tomorrow.

… We might remember then, this Fourth of July, that our nation may not be perfect, but it can make a claim available to no other: in the name of the rights of all, it was built from the first to belong to its people and not to their rulers. …

A week ago Victor Davis Hanson wrote on our “can’t do” mentality. Daniel Henninger has the theme today with the World Trade Center site as back drop.

James Taranto has interesting background to the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from FARC rebels in Colombia.

We’ll spend some time today on Wesley Clark. Jennifer Rubin starts us off with three posts from Contentions.

Barack Obama can’t figure out why it should be a top priority to cough up an apology to John McCain for the Wesley Clark slur. Let’s see: 1) it is burying his patriotism defense and making a mockery of Monday’s speech; 2) it is convincing the political establishment that he is tone deaf or arrogant or both; 3) no one will believe his squishy words distancing him from this and future attacks; and 4) New Politics is now fodder for parody. Oh–and he turned a one day story into a week-long blunder. …

… So we have Obama’s entirely self-created blunder where even the MSM is virtually slack-jawed at the sight of the Obama campaign’s determination to inflict more and more damage upon itself. His atrocious judgment in perpetuating a horrible storyline for himself defies the pre-existing media narrative — that Obama is smart, savvy, world-wise, and adept. Not the Obama we have seen lately: he is either paralyzed by indecision or in such a cocoon of liberal elitism that he sees nothing wrong with attacking a war hero’s military service. …

While Rubin concentrated on Obama, Victor Davis Hanson turns towards the perpetrator – Wesley Clark.

… But how can a former four-star general suggest that piloting a jet fighter-bomber under fire  can be reduced to “riding in a fighter plane” (as in a Sunday spin above the base?).  And isn’t the ability to repeatedly pilot a vulnerable aircraft over enemy territory, and then survive years of unimaginable savagery precisely “a qualification to be president” (note the indefinite article “a” that Clark employed, as in one of many that might make a successful President). …

Power Line has spotted the root of the problem – Wesley’s ego.

Wesley Clark has made the rounds of just about every talk show on television over the last 24 hours, repeating his attack on John McCain as lacking the executive experience needed to be President. It’s pretty funny, actually, if you listen to Clark, because whenever he describes the precise military experience needed to equip a candidate for the Presidency, it turns out to be exactly what Clark himself did. Right up until the time he got fired. …

There’s manifest evidence of that ego in Slate’s 2001 review of his book. (2001, mind you. A couple of light years in internet time)

… But at the book’s core is an agenda of score-settling and ass-covering–and there’s plenty of both to do. I don’t really see the difference between “modern war,” as Clark describes it, and a cynical kind of media savvy. (“For large democracies, the home front is the critical theater of war, and words and images are the key weapons.”) Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain’s, in particular). This won Clark a reputation for flexibility with Holbrooke and Albright and the esteem of both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and British Prime Minister Tony Blair–so much esteem, in the latter case, that Clark was recently knighted.

But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, “Get your f–king face off the TV.” Shelton didn’t trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen–with no objection from President Clinton–ended Clark’s tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. …

Back to the real campaign, Karl Rove has a recap of the money war.

On the money front, how do Sens. Obama and McCain stack up? No contest, it seems. Since the campaign began, Mr. Obama has raised a staggering $295-plus million, versus Mr. McCain’s almost $122 million. But that’s misleading.

Mr. Obama spent a lot to win the nomination. So how much cash did he and his rival have when the general election effectively began in June? As of May 31, Mr. Obama had $43.1 million on hand while Mr. McCain had $31.6 million – a significant but not overwhelming advantage.

There is also the cash raised by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Each candidate depends on the party committees for certain expenditures – registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote drives, materials distributed by volunteers, even some advertising. Here, the Republicans had $53.5 million in hand on May 31, versus the Democrats’ paltry $4 million. Thus Mr. McCain and the RNC have $38 million more than Mr. Obama and the DNC. …

In 2000 a new blood libel against the Jews was created in the Gaza strip. The Weekly Standard tells us how it was done.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.

So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel’s regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.

In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The “child martyr’s” picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings. The Israeli authorities at first took the French report more or less at face value and blandly deplored the child’s death in a hasty release (“To the best of our knowledge, the boy was hit by our fire”). Others, however, were not so sure.

They parsed and scoured each of the 59 seconds of the film and every corner of the location for clues, ballistic angles, improbable moves, and hidden motivations. The film showed the two figures first seeking cover from gunfire, then later slumped over, though with no sign of blood or wounds. When increasingly convincing voices came to question, at the very least, the point of origin of the shots-the location of the small Israeli garrison made it pretty much impossible for Muhammad and his father, who was allegedly wounded, to have been hit by Israeli bullets-it took six weeks for the Israeli army spokesman to state in an interview that “both versions of the incident [are] possible,” and two more months for an official investigation to be launched.

Meanwhile, Enderlin and his bosses at the state-run France 2, who had distributed their news item free worldwide, were refusing to answer questions. They flatly declined to provide the complete 27 minutes of footage taken that afternoon by the cameraman, or to concede any possible error, ping-ponging in the classical obfuscating pattern of bureaucracies everywhere. (“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” hasn’t yet made it to France.) …

The Economist reviews a book on Communist jokes.

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Daily Telegraph blogger says the left is responsible for Mugabe.

A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an “Africa expert” who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.

White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. …

Contemplating Zimbabwe, Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff wonders if the UN is worth anything.

… Following Mugabe’s Stalinesque triumph, the U.N. Security Council expressed “deep regrets” that the election was conducted “in these circumstances.” That language would have been a tad more critical, but South Africa, not wanting to hurt Mugabe’s feelings, objected to describing the elections as “illegitimate.”

On the very day before, hospitals in Harare, the capital, were overflowing, as there weren’t enough doctors. Some hospitals, responding to threats by the military, refused to take any more victims of torture.

Not at all surprisingly, the U.N. Human Rights Council has yet to even put on its agenda Mugabe’s extended version of the Nazis’ “Kristillnacht” that presaged the Holocaust, when the world also declined to intervene. …

Mark’s on hiatus and we need a Steyn fix. Here’s a column from the end of March when Hillary’s demise was becoming clear.

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply.

Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available – his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back in the mid-Nineties when she visited New Zealand and met Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, and for some reason decided to tell him he was the guy her parents had named her after.

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and a somewhat unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. If any of the bigshot U.S. newspaper correspondents on the trip noticed this inconsistency, they kept it to themselves. I mentioned it in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph at the time, but like so many other improbabilities in the Clinton record it sailed on indestructibly for years. By 2004 it was preserved for the ages in Bill Clinton’s autobiography, on page (gulp) 870:

“Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for.”

Eventually, when it was noticed that Hillary was born six years before the ascent of Everest, Clinton aides tried assuring skeptics that her parents had seen a press interview with Sir Edmund in his beekeeping days, Mr. and Mrs. Rodham apparently being the only Illinois subscribers to The New Zealand Apiarist. Then, in the early days of her presidential campaign, Sen. Clinton quietly withdrew the story, by which time the damage was done. …

Politico’s James Kirchick asks who’s smearing whom?

… the fears of Obama supporters that their candidate lies eternally vulnerable to GOP smears exists only in their fevered imaginations. The evidence of dirty Republican tricks has been utterly absent this campaign season. And if anyone has tried to smear Barack Obama in the way that Thomas, Wolfe and other Democratic partisans allege, it was not the Republican National Committee, but rather Hillary Rodham Clinton and her surrogates. In February, the Drudge Report claimed that the Clinton campaign circulated photos of Obama in a traditional East African turban and robe, with the message that the images showed him “dressed.” Asked if there was any truth to the smear that Obama is a Muslim, she infamously replied, “As far as I know,” it wasn’t the case. After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, she said the results showed that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

The belief that “the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968” is a comforting salve for Democrats. After all, it’s much easier for them to demonize conservatives than consider that the reason for their electoral defeats may lie with liberal ideas. Please don’t take that as a “smear.”

Phil Gramm, McCain’s shadow cabinet Treasury secretary, interviewed by WSJ’s Stephen Moore.

John Stossel on the media’s campaign for a recession.

“It’s been described as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. And it brings with it grave dangers for all American families … ,” said Martin Bashir on “Nightline.” “Recession looms …. “

On the “Today” show June 20, David Faber referred to “the recession … these tough economic times.” Yet that very day first-quarter GDP was revised upward again to 1 percent.

America is not in recession, and who knows — maybe we’ll be less likely to have one if my compatriots would just chill. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. We haven’t even had one quarter of negative growth.

Yes, growth has slowed, and many people are suffering because of falling home prices and higher food and energy prices. These are real problems, but watching TV, you’d think we were in a recession so severe it must be compared to the Great Depression. …

Walter Williams says we need more people and less government.

… Contrary to the myths we hear about how overpopulation causes poverty, poor health, unemployment, malnutrition and overcrowding, human beings are the most valuable resource and the more of them the better. There is absolutely no relationship between high populations and economic despair. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has a meager population density of 22 people per square kilometer while Hong Kong has a massive population density of 6,571 people per square kilometer. Hong Kong is 300 times more crowded than the Congo. If there were any merit to the population control crowd’s hysteria, Hong Kong would be in abject poverty while the Congo flourishes. Yet Hong Kong’s annual per capita income is $28,000 while the Congo’s is $309, making it the world’s poorest country. …

… The greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity is government. A recent example is Zimbabwe’s increasing misery. Like our country, Zimbabwe had a flourishing agriculture sector, so much so it was called the breadbasket of southern Africa. Today, its people are on the brink of starvation as a result of its government. It’s the same story in many countries — government interference with mankind’s natural tendency to engage in wealth-producing activities. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook; it encourages the enactment of harmful policies.

The Economist on the fate of wild mustangs in the not so wild west.

IN 1964 a new car was launched at the New York World’s Fair: the Ford Mustang. Both its name and its galloping horse logo, adapted from Frederic Remington’s portraits of the Old West, epitomised a peculiarly American dream about a land of cowboys and big skies. More than 8m Mustangs have been sold. But on America’s old frontier, the free-roaming wild horses now struggle for survival.

Deanne Stillman, a journalist, began researching this history in 1998 after 34 wild horses were massacred in the Virginia Range of mountains near Reno, Nevada. The horse began evolving on the North American continent 55m years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe. …

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Onions will help us fight economic nonsense today. Fortune has a short piece on the lack of an onion futures market and the subsequent wild ride for prices.

Before the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission starts scrutinizing the role that speculators may have played in driving up fuel and food prices, investigators may want to take a look at price swings in a commodity not in today’s news: onions.

The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands. …

And Robert Samuelson helps out with “Let’s shoot the speculators.”

Tired of high gasoline prices and rising food costs? Well, here’s a solution. Let’s shoot the speculators. A chorus of politicians, including John McCain and Barack Obama, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels. Gosh, if only it were that simple. Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don’t understand what’s happening or don’t want to acknowledge their own complicity.

Granted, raw materials prices have exploded across the board. From 2002 to 2007, oil rose 177 percent, corn 70 percent, copper 360 percent and aluminum 95 percent. But that’s just the point. Did “speculators” really cause all those increases? If so, why did some prices go up more than others? And what about steel? It rose 117 percent — and has increased further in 2008 — even though it isn’t traded on commodities futures markets.

A better explanation is basic supply and demand. Despite the U.S. slowdown, the world economy has boomed. Since 2002, annual growth has averaged 4.6 percent, the highest sustained rate since the 1960s, says economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute. By their nature, raw materials (food, energy, minerals) sustain the broader economy. They’re not just frills. When unexpectedly high demand strains existing production, prices rise sharply as buyers scramble for scarce supplies. That’s what happened. …

Martin Peretz wonders what the UN is worth.

Christopher Hitchens on how you can clean your home and help democracy in Iraq. Got some books around you don’t need? The Kurds have a library.

It’s quite common to read, usually from liberal opponents of the engagement in Iraq, that George W. Bush’s administration hasn’t asked the American people to make any sacrifices. I must confess that I never quite understand this criticism. As a society, we collectively contribute a great deal from our common treasury to give Iraq a fighting chance to recover from three decades of war and fascism and to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemies of civilization. And as fellow citizens, we experience the agony of loss when our soldiers, aid workers, civil servants, and others are murdered. (That each of these is a volunteer is a great cause for national pride.)

However, I do believe that many people wish they could do something positive and make a contribution, however small, to the effort to build democracy in Iraq. And I have a suggestion. In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University of Iraq has just opened its doors. And it is appealing for people to donate books. …

Paul Greenberg on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette takes up the problem of Obama’s ignorance of history.

Barack Obama now has cited the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War as a model of the way Osama bin Laden should be tried in the (unlikely) event he’s ever taken alive. He recommends Nuremberg as an example to follow because, he says, those trials embodied universal legal principles.

The Nuremberg trials a model of international law? Those stone-faced judges in Red Army uniforms peering down from the bench at Nuremberg, shoulder boards in place and guilty verdicts at the ready, must have been there as representatives of Comrade Stalin’s well-known devotion to universally accepted legal principles.

This is not to say that the judges at Nuremberg couldn’t demonstrate exquisite tact. For example, not a one noted the Soviets’ responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, a war crime none dared accuse them of at the time.

In 1946, the Soviets were still Our Fighting Russian Allies. And so the mass execution of the Polish army’s officer corps in the Katyn forest was pinned on the Nazis, who were conveniently at hand. What would one more war crime matter in a record already so monstrous? …

Speaking of ignorance, James Kirchick in Contentions writes on Wesley Clark.

One would think that the Democratic Party would have locked Wesley Clark away somewhere after his infamous “New York Money People” remark last year. But he was on the Face the Nation yesterday morning, …

Kirchick referred to Clark’s toe to toe confrontation with Russians at the end of the war in Kosovo. Here’s the story from BBC.

… ‘Third World War’

General Wesley Clark, Nato’s supreme commander, immediately ordered 500 British and French paratroopers to be put on standby to occupy the airport. ”I called the [Nato] Secretary General [Javier Solana] and told him what the circumstances were,” General Clark tells the BBC programme Moral Combat: Nato at War.

”He talked about what the risks were and what might happen if the Russian’s got there first, and he said: ‘Of course you have to get to the airport’. ”I said: ‘Do you consider I have the authority to do so?’ He said: ‘Of course you do, you have transfer of authority’.”

But General Clark’s plan was blocked by General Sir Mike Jackson, K-For’s British commander. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark during one heated exchange. General Jackson tells the BBC: ”We were [looking at] a possibility….of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.” …

Ed Morrissey wonders just how stupid Wesley Clark is.

David Harsanyi says to Clark and the Obama campaign, “Go ahead, make McCain’s day!”

Ilya Somin posts in Volokh on why campaign finance laws protect incumbents.

Bret Stephens on the religious aspects of globalony.

Reason on how gun control lost.

The Economist says you might be twice as smart.

Forget the stuff that informs, Dilbert went to Branson, Missouri.