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Spengler looks at the reasons for the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.
…A million and a quarter Americans have rotated through Afghanistan and Iraq, moreover, and what they have seen horrifies them. For the first time, very large numbers of Americans have had direct exposure to the Muslim world. American servicemen returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are the main source of Americans’ first-hand knowledge of the Muslim world.
Iraq is the first American war in which soldiers stationed overseas are not fraternizing with the locals. Americans are not hostile to foreigners. On the contrary, American soldiers abroad used to fall for the local girls in huge numbers. American soldiers have brought three quarters of a million brides home since World War II. Only a few hundred American soldiers …have requested visas for Iraqi spouses or fiancées, by contrast, a vanishingly small number. Unlike all previous American wars, American boys and Iraqi girls don’t fall in love. Part of the problem is security – it’s harder for Americans to fraternize with the locals than in previous wars – but the bigger issue is cultural. Americans and Arab Muslims come from worlds far less compatible than Americans and say, Vietnamese or Japanese.
…The Global Terrorism Database lists 1,868 attacks on religious figures and institutions through December 2008, including 848 bombings – all but a handful perpetrated by Muslims. It is not only that Muslims seem just as willing to kill one another as to kill Christians or Jews, but that they choose to do so in a fashion intended to horrify their enemies and the world. …
Thomas Sowell discusses the importance of defending the Constitution.
…The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge– to this day– to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.
…It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?
To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members. …
Daniel Hannan, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, blogs about Obama’s declining poll numbers.
…Most damagingly of all, Obama has disappointed those in the middle: voters who initially gave him the benefit of the doubt, but who have been stunned by the rapidity and thoroughness with which he has expanded the federal government. Out-of-control borrowing, state healthcare, government daycare, re-federalisation of welfare, eco-statism, regulation of private-sector remuneration, seizure of industries, alienation of old allies – can this really be the presidential candidate who presented himself as being beyond partisanship and who promised tax cuts?…
…Americans, like most people, are wiser than their leaders. They know perfectly well that the money has run out. They understand that recovery depends on rediscovering the ideas of independence, enterprise and devolution encoded at Philadelphia. My guess is that, come November, they will vote accordingly.
The liberal Roger Simon writes on the Mosque Mess. Being a leftie, he doesn’t get that the president’s big mistake was the equivocation.
Q: Will Barack Obama be a one-term president?
A: Yes, he might last that long.
Honest to goodness, the man just does not get it. He might be forced to pull a Palin and resign before his first term is over. He could go off and write his memoirs and build his presidential library. (Both would be half-size, of course.)
Scott Adams is hooked on a website.
…Consider that Newser has access to the same raw ingredients as anyone else. Newser’s website design is little more than a grid of boxes. The photos – and this fascinates me – are nothing but stock photos that have at best a casual relationship to the story they are summarizing. I mention this site because I am psychologically addicted to it. I feel a need to check it twenty times a day. WTF?
Newser’s business reminds me of cooking in the sense that there is no barrier to entry. Everyone has access to the same ingredients, which in this case is content from the Internet. Anyone can summarize that content and put it in little boxes on a website. Anyone can buy stock photos. But there’s something else going on.
Editors are the chefs of the Internet. Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There’s some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That’s why I return so often. It’s a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site. …
And we have NRO Shorts. Here are two:
Al-Qaeda has a new chief of operations, according to the FBI, and he knows the U.S. very well. Adnan Shukrijumah, now 35 years old, came here as a child from his native Saudi Arabia. He lived in Brooklyn, where his father was imam of a mosque. Then the family moved to Florida, where Shukrijumah took some college courses, and where his mother still lives. Shukrijumah left the U.S. early in 2001 and was tagged by the FBI as a threat in 2003. Now thought to be in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border badlands, Shukrijumah has been decisively identified from old videos and photographs by would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, who had met him at a training camp, and by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his former boss. Shukrijumah’s promotion comes with some risks to his health. Until recently he shared operational planning duties with two colleagues, but both fell victim to U.S. drone attacks. Let’s hope for a trifecta.
President Obama has prescribed a surge for Afghanistan. Like the surge in Iraq, this surge requires the trust and help of the local population, who will be killed by extremists if their support of the Coalition becomes known. Hugely complicating, if not defeating, our effort has been the release of tens of thousands of classified documents by a group called WikiLeaks: a group of people who fancy themselves righteous whistleblowers. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said that his goal is to “end the war in Afghanistan.” The released documents include the names and locations of many Afghans who have aided the Coalition. The Taliban is studying these documents closely, vowing death to informants. As a Taliban spokesman said, “America is not a good protector of spies.” There is now “a panic among many Afghans,” in the words of one report. WikiLeaks has done grave damage to the American interest, and grave damage to the Afghan people. The person or persons who gave the classified material to WikiLeaks, of course, have done the same. Whether or not WikiLeaks is beyond our legal reach, the leakers presumably are not. The U.S. government should find them and throw the heaviest possible book at them.