HOLLYWOOD'S MOST RECENT FORAYS INTO POSTMODERNIST LEFTISM AND ITS CONCOMITANT ANTI-AMERICANISM

The first instance is a bit of a repeat - a new violent spy movie has come out and Hollywood and their leftist comrades at the NYTIMES/AP are touting it as the new anti-Bond. I guess they mean "new" because THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM is a month older. Here's how they pitch the new flick:

Owen Is the Anti - Bond in `Shoot `Em Up'

... [Clive] Owen, 42, plays Mr. Smith, an angry anti-hero who shoots every type of weapon in every way imaginable as he battles to protect a newborn baby from the bad guy, creepily and convincingly played by Paul Giamatti.

Owen's character is aided by a lactating prostitute (Monica Bellucci), with whom he shares a tenderly damaged love affair.

He has all the coolness of 007 -- a role Owen was once reportedly considered for -- but is as gritty and street-tough as an anti-Bond can get.

Damon and his director said the same crap and worse about Bond when they were promoting the latest Bourne movie.

WHAT'S WITH ALL THE BOND-BASHING?!

WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOND? HE'S A GOOD GUY! HE HAS ALWAYS DEFENDED US AND THE FREE WORLD!

(BTW: I don't care how leftist the movie is: IT HAS BELLUCCI IN IT (MORE OF HER HERE!), AND IS THEREFORE A MUST SEE.)

GATEWAY has another shocking instance of Hollywood collaboration with the enemy - SHOCKING EVEN BY HOLLYWOOD'S STANDARDS:

AHMADINEJAD Gives Oliver Stone Thumbs Up to Film Him!!

... Film director Oliver Stone, who has compared President Bush to Ahmadinejad, was not taking "no" for an answer this time. Director Stone reached out again to genocide-promoter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week to film his life story. ...

Fars News just reported that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has given Oliver Stone approval to film his biography:

"Stone’s publicist referred to the bad image that the U.S. media has given to Islam and Islamic countries and said that the documentary could assist in countering such negative propaganda.”

Would Hollywood've ever done a favorable bio-pic of Hitler in 1940!?!? NO WAY. At that time - Hollywood's Golden Age, Hollywood was run by 1st generation immigrants WHO LOVED AMERICA, and didn't take her for granted - or hate her.

This Stone movie is truly one of the all-time lows for the chic degenerati of H-wood. And that's saying a lot!

BARTERING UP TO A BETTER LIFE: HOW THE HECK DID KYLE MACDONALD PARLAY A PAPERCLIP INTO A HOUSE?

ONE RED PAPERCLIP - A BOOK BY ANDREW STARK:

Kyle MacDonald had a paperclip. One red paperclip, a dream...and bills to pay. Oh, and a very patient girlfriend who was paying the rent while he was once again “between jobs.”

Kyle wanted to be able to provide for himself and his girlfriend, Dominique. He wanted to own his own home. He wanted something bigger than a paperclip.

So he put an ad on Craigslist, the popular classifieds website, with the intention of trading that paperclip for something better.

A girl in Vancouver offered him a fish pen in exchange for his paperclip. He traded the fish pen for a doorknob and the doorknob for a camping stove. Before long he had traded the camping stove for a generator for a neon sign.

Not long after that, avid snow-globe collector, and television star Corbin Bernsen, and the small Canadian town of Kipling were involved, and Kyle was on to bigger and better things.

In One Red Paperclip, Kyle takes you on a journey around the globe as he moves from paperclip holder to homeowner in just fourteen trades.

... Quirky and inspirational, this story of a regular guy and a small, red, now-legendary paperclip will have you looking at your office supplies-and your life-in a whole new way.

When I read stuff like that I think there is something strange and wonderful about Americans. But, it also sounds very decadent to me. Frankly, it disturbs me a bit. You know what I mean? Are we just having fun, or are we laying the groundwork for the eventual collapse of all ground?

PUNDITARIAN COUNTERS: I don't get your take on this at all. What's decadent about free trade? How is this story fundamentally different from the story of Dick Whittington and His Cat?

Far from revealing decadence, this story highlights the vigor and vitality of the free market. At least that's how I see it.

ISRAELI THINK-TANK SLAMS UK FOR ALLOWING HAMAS SAFE HAVEN

In a followup to this previous post, an Israeli think-tank has spoken out against the British government for letting Hamas operate freely in their country:

Just a short time after former British prime minister Tony Blair assumed the role of Middle East envoy, The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Herzelia, Israel, considered to be the "public face of Israeli intelligence," issued a scathing report in which it accused Britain of being a "major source of publishing and distribution of Hamas incitement."

It condemned the British government for not stopping "the distribution of hateful propaganda against Israel and the West and publications glorifying suicide terrorism," adding that "British authorities have yet to take effective action to put an end to the exploitation of their country by Hamas for spreading incitement? that could strike a chord not only with Palestinian or Arab/Muslim target audiences worldwide but also with the Muslim community in Britain itself."

I just don't see it changing anytime soon, and I don't see any reason [for Israel] to maintain political relations with Britain's government.

Reliapundit adds: Maybe Israel can recall its Ambassador for a few weeks, in protest. After all, the UK does sell the IDF a lot of weaponry she needs; (while canceling 1/3rd of the sales for idiotic reasons).

EDWARD'S: AMERICANS SHOULD SACRIFICE THEIR SUV'S

From ABC News (via Drudge):

Edwards: Americans Should Sacrifice Their SUV's

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles.

The former North Carolina senator told a forum by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, yesterday he thinks Americans are willing to sacrifice.

Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs.

Reliapundit adds: What has he EVER sacrificed? He's nothing but a leftist hypocrite. And a would-be dictator. If there were no SUV's on the road we'd reduce gas consumption by about 2%. THIS IS NOTHING.

If rich folks like him gave up their 2nd and 3rd homes and their AC we'd save MORE. And how about him giving up JETS. We know his wife would give up fruit.

THESE HYPOCRITICAL LEFTISTS ALWAYS SEEM TO WANT US TO SACRIFICE. FOR THE COMMON GOOD: higher taxes - for the common good; a draft - for the common good; nationalization of industry - for the common good.

I'd like leftists to STFU - for the common good.

This policy put forward by Edwards is typical leftist thinking: They are bossy utopianists. And hypocrites. Don't fall for it.

UPDATE: An hour after this was first posted VDH weighs in - nearly exactly echoing TAB:

SUVs Again [Victor Davis Hanson]

Doesn't John Edwards know that the one taboo subject for elite Democratic candidates-is the SUV? We all know that they like them for themselves and hate them for others, and somewhere tucked in the their multi-door garages one sits hidden behind the Priuses.

John Kerry, once upon a time, got into trouble, saying he was against them before he owned (more than one of) them. And now Edwards apparently wants everyone to give them up. There's an argument to be made that they guzzle too much fuel and should, and must, be made more efficient—the market is already doing that—but the logical question then follows:

Can't Americans give up their 30,000 sq.ft homes, or private jet rides, as some small token of their commitment to energy efficiency?

08/29 11:31 AM

BREAKING: SADR ANNOUNCES SUSPENSION OF MEHDI MILITIA

BBC:

The radical Iraqi Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr, has suspended his Mehdi Army militia for six months in order to "rehabilitate" it, an aide has said.

Sheikh Hazim al-Araji said the re-organisation would "safeguard its ideological image", in a statement broadcast on Iraqi television.

Correspondents say the Mehdi Army has recently broken into factions.

AP/GUARDIAN:

Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered a six-month suspension of activities by his Mahdi Army militia in order to reorganize the force, an aide said Wednesday.

The aide, Sheik Hazim al-Araji, said on Iraqi state television that the goal was to ``rehabilitate'' the organization, which has reportedly broken into factions, some of which the U.S. maintains are trained and supplied by Iran.

``We declare the freezing of the Mahdi Army without exception in order to rehabilitate it in a way that will safeguard its ideological image within a maximum period of six months starting from the day this statement is issued,'' al-Araji said, reading from a statement by al-Sadr.

IHT:

A spokesman for al-Sadr, Ahmed al-Shaibani, denied that the Mahdi Army was involved in the Karbala fighting. Al-Sadr called for an independent inquiry into the clashes and urged his supporters to cooperate with the authorities "to calm the situation down," al-Shaibani said.

Tensions have been rising in southern Iraq as rival Shiite groups maneuver for power, especially in the oil-rich area around Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

IC: [SADR:]

"I direct the Mahdi Army to suspend all its acitivites for six months until it is restructured in a way that helps honour the principles for which it is formed," Sadr said in a statement issued by his office in the city of Najaf.

The disintegration of our foes is a good thing.
I hope we take advantage of this "break" in his force resolution.

King Tut Exhibit Prompts Debate on His Skin Color

Egyptian frescoes all show a clear color distinction between Egyptians and the Nubians ("Africans") to their south. There is no reason to think that the Egyptians had anything but the off-white skin color still normally found among Mediterranean people -- including other North African people in modern Libya, Algeria, etc. North Africa has always been racially different from the rest of Africa. Excerpt:

The King Tut exhibition has drawn millions of visitors to museums across the country since it opened two years ago. But some African-American scholars believe the exhibition makes King Tut look too white. The debate over Tut's race led the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, where the show is on display, to sponsor a conference on the subject.

The show, Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs has drawn a steady stream of protesters since it opened in Los Angeles. But nowhere have they been as persistent or vocal as in Philadelphia. More than 500 people showed up to hear scholars discuss Tut's race at the Franklin Institute. The auditorium couldn't hold them all, so the museum had to set up big-screen TVs in the lobby. The three speakers said the exhibition on display upstairs gives the false impression that King Tut was white. And worse, says Temple University professor Molefi Asante, it implies that Egypt is not a part of Africa. "We asked the students as they were coming out of the museum, you've seen the exhibition of King Tut, 'Where is he from?'" Asante said. "You would discover that people can see the exhibition of Tutankhamen, and come out and not know that they have seen Africa."

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Ohio Democrats PROTECT racial segregation

A return to Jim Crow? It appears that OPPOSING racial segregation is a grave sin in the Democratic party. I guess they would kick Martin Luther King out.

"Like a Communist apparatchik who fell out of favor, Megan Pappada has seen her employment with the Ohio Democratic Party (ODP) quietly erased. The ODP blog post and podcast announcing her hire as Director of Women's Outreach has vanished as quickly as a Soviet political prisoner disappeared forever into the KGB abyss.

Megan Pappada was hired a few weeks ago by the ODP, then she was promptly fired later that same day. According to the ODP overlords, she had committed a grave political thought crime years ago when she was a college freshman: opposing racially segregated on-campus housing. You read that correctly - opposing racial segregation. And she had the audacity to infect others with such thoughts by having them published as a letter to the editor in the Ohio State University student newspaper, The Lantern - several years earlier in 2000. For that thought crime and making her thoughts public, she lost her job and was forced to renounce her past views.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

TERMINATING MARRIAGE

Remember our recent post about how a homosexual activist group has declared the family and straight men to be 'oppressive' to women and homosexual men?

Well, it looks like they will have their way in California with the help of Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown who intend to abolish marriage.

Yes, that's right. In order to equalize the partnership of homosexual couples, these two men have set in motion an initiative which will take the rights of heterosexual married couples.

INDULGENCES

JONAH, CRAIG AND CARBON.

WE'RE KICKING THE ENEMY'S ASS IN AFGHANISTAN

BBC:

US-led forces in Afghanistan say they have been involved in a major battle against suspected Afghan insurgents in the southern Kandahar province.

More than 100 militants were reported to have been killed, but there was no independent confirmation of the figure.

A statement said fighting erupted when insurgents ambushed a joint Afghan-US force in Shah Wali Kot. Aircraft bombed the insurgents' positions.

Lookit folks: it's going well in Iraq and Afghanistan. We demolish the enemy whenever and wherever we make contact with him.

Which is why we're gonna be hearing an awful lot about the "panic" in the credit markets for the next few months... it's all the Dems and their leftist allies in the MSM can smear us with...

OH: AND WE'LL HEAR A LOT ABOUT "AGW", TOO!

More on Afghanistan here.

BRITISH GUNS MORE LIKELY TO KILL PEOPLE THAN AMERICAN GUNS

America is the most armed country in the world. There are 90 guns per hundred people in America. Scary, huh?

From my friend BL at the shadowy organization, Big Tobacco, Wal-Mart Apologizing, Global Warming-Supporters, Who Are Doing It All To Kill Innocent Iraqis:

Time to get all mathematical.

We have about 10,000 annual gun homicides in the USA.

That means, in any given year, the odds that any given American firearm will be kill someone is 1 in 27,000.

The British have, in England and Wales, about 75 a year. But that's out of only 125,000 firearms. The odds that in any given year, a British firearm will kill someone is 1 in 1,666.

Conclusion: A British gun is more than 16 times as likely to kill as an American gun.

Reliapundit adds: Gun ownership restriction laws have no relation to gun crime. Not anywhere in the world. Violent crime is cultural, not weapons-based. The violent criminal will use whatever weapon he feels is sufficient to get the job done. If he thinks you're unarmed, then you are a more likely target. So gun ownership by law-abiding citizens is actually a deterrent. Since no law can disarm the criminals we are more likely to reduce gun crime by arming people.
Crimes are stopped and criminals are caught by armed citizens everyday.

PHOTOS OF HILLARY'S BEST DONORS

HERE. HEH.

WHERE IN THE HECK DID CRAIG THINK HE WAS!?

HE SAYS HE'S NOT GAY.

WHERE IN THE HECK DID HE THINK HE WAS... IN THE GIRL'S ROOM!?

BTW: Can anybody find out how many times Craig "transited" through this airport? Or other where this kind of "stuff" happens? Was it a regular thing? Wasn't some other Congressman caught doing this in a train station recently? What is it about airports and train stations - is the transience of the "contact" and doing it in a public place where people urinate and defecate part of the thrill? Are there any perverts out there who can answer these questions?

BIRDS OF A FEATHER PART 43 - CASTRO AND THE LIB DEMS

REUTERS:

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.

Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination.

"The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate," he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

... Castro said former President Bill Clinton was "really kind" when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to "rescue" shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle....

He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter, another Democrat, because he was not an "accomplice" to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.

Sixteen years after Dwight Eisenhower broke off diplomatic ties with Cuba, Carter restored low-level relations in 1977 when interest sections were opened in each country's capital.

Castro is a tyrannical murderer whose "revolution" plunged Cuba - at the time the second richest nation in the Caribbean - into poverty. Now - after 50 years of SOCIALISM, only Haiti is poorer.

Yet, he is still the darling of the leftist chic degenerati of Hollywood WHO ALSO LOVE OBAMA AND HILLARY.

Naturally; they're birds of a feather. MORE HERE.

LEFTIST IDIOTARIAN ACTORS PRAISING TERRORISTS: EUROPEAN VERSION

Belafonte, Glover, Sarandon, Robbins, Moore, Stone and Penn are not alone - BBC:

French actress Fanny Ardant is being sued by the son of a former Italian policeman killed by the extremist Red Brigades group in the 1970s.

... Ardant said she admired the founder of the Red Brigades group, Renato Curcio, because he had never abandoned his leftist ideals, adding she "considered the Red Brigades phenomenon to be very moving and passionate"...

In Italy it is illegal to praise someone who has committed a crime. ...

The Red Brigades murdered Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1976.

Ardant later said: "My words have caused suffering to those who have suffered and for that I ask for forgiveness."

Mr Mazzola, a lawyer whose father was shot along with a colleague near Venice in 1974, said her apologies were not enough. "Curcio was convicted for killing my father, among other crimes. So, together with my family, I have filed legal proceedings against Ardant because she is praising a murderer," Mr Mazzola told Reuters news agency.

"I just can't see how killing people can be called heroism," he said. "She may see the Red Brigades as passionate while sipping champagne in Paris, but for us it's very different."

Ardant is due to attend this week's Venice Film Festival as the lead actress in the Italian film L'Ora di Punta. But the president of Italy's Veneto region, Giancarlo Galan, has asked her not to come to the festival and Italian media reports that Ardant may cancel her trip for fear of overshadowing the film's release.

The Marxist Red Brigades group, whose aim was to overthrow capitalist Italy, attacked government and business targets in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was largely disbanded in the 1980s but an offshoot of the group, which calls itself the Red Brigades-Communist Combatant Party, carried out an assassination of a government advisor in 2002.

Castro, Che, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and the Red Brigades have all be lionized by the left despite the fact that they were all totalitarians - and some advocated and even carried out genocide.

Bush - who has liberated 50 MILLION people, cut poverty, cut unemployment, lowered taxes and increased domestic non-defense discretionary spending by more than any president since LBJ - has been demonized by these same leftists.

THIS ALONE PROVES THESE LEFTISTS ARE IDIOTS.

KITTY GENOVESE SYNDROME IN MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL

And it's got what to do with Islam. As Front Page Mag once predicted, Muslim rape would become a problem in the US, but worse is that nobody came to the defense of the victim here. From the Pioneer Press (via Michelle Malkin):

As many as 10 people witnessed a man raping and beating a woman early Tuesday in the hallway of a St. Paul apartment building, police said Wednesday.

No one stopped it.

At one point, the 26-year-old victim knocked on a door, yelling for the occupants to call police. A man inside told police he didn't open the door or look out, though he said he called police. Police found no record of the call, according to an affidavit for a search warrant filed in Ramsey County District Court.

St. Paul police arrested Rage Ibrahim, 25, on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct Tuesday. He hasn't been charged.

"It was horrifying. I can't describe how it sent chills up my back, watching this woman getting assaulted and people turning their backs and doing nothing," said St. Paul police Cmdr. Shari Gray, who oversees the department's sex crimes unit.

She saw surveillance video that recorded the attack in the Highwood neighborhood.

Notice how the rapist's name is "Rage"? But most shocking of all is how the witnesses and neighbors did nothing about it.

And a Somali advocacy group is even defending the scum for his crime. The spokesperson, Omar Jamal, has been dubbed an Al Sharpton of the Somali community, and appears to have also committed immigration fraud.

Just a week ago, the Star Tribune had an article about violence in the Somali Muslim community of the Twin Cities and the silence that goes with it.

THE MENENDEZ-LICAUSI SCANDAL: THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS SCOOPS THE MSM AND THE BLOGOSPHERE BY TWO YEARS

This blog got mucho hits today from folks looking for more info/background/links on the burgeoning scandal surrounding DEMOCRAT Senator Bob Menendez and his "acquaintance" Kay LiCausi.

WHY? Well, several supoenas were issued today and in the coming weeks there might be indictments. (MORE HERE.)

WE COVERED THIS IN 2005 - WHEN DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR CORZINE APPOINTED MENENDEZ TO FILL OUT CORZINE'S TERM.

This is no surprise for regulars readers of this blog; we scoop the biggies all the time because we are committed to covering under-reported news and not just following the herd.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

BLOGROLL US!

UPDATED AND BUMPED: 7 ARRESTED FOR ARSON IN GREEK FIRES -NEW YORK TIMES ON GREECE'S POSSIBLY TERRORIST-DRIVEN FIRES: ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT

From the AFP, by way of Atlas Shrugs:


GREECE FIRES RULED ARSON - "Greece's 9/11" Seven arrested
A woman and her four children killed Friday, their charred bodies found with the woman's arms around the youngsters, might have been safe if they had stayed at home.

DAY 4 of deadly fires: Fires rage in Greece as SEVEN PEOPLE CHARGED WITH ARSON.
They remain nameless. Why? Those depraved savages set a country on fire, the public deserves to know no matter who it is. I have searched all news sources. Any Atlas readers have a clue?


Forty-four fires in Greece, started by aronist's - time-coordinated indendiary devices triggered by cell-phones - and this is all the New York Times has to say:


The government, seeking to deflect criticism, has meantime blamed arson, reportedly arresting seven people for setting various fires, which have flared around the nation, most here on the Peloponnese peninsula and on Evia island north of Athens. Adding to conspiracy theories blasted over an alarmist Greek news media — including the possibility that the fires were started as a hostile act from abroad — a Greek prosecutor on Monday ordered an investigation into whether the fires might be prosecuted under the nation’s antiterrorism laws.

BRITISH JOURNALISTS WALLOW IN ANTI-ISRAEL MYTHS, IGNORE PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS' PLEAS FOR HELP AGAINST FATAH AND HAMAS

There's a bile-inducing pamphlet being passed around the left, the point of which is that an anti-Israel boycott just around the corner. It's what you'd expect, but if you want to track them down this Google News search will produce four or five different versions. The main point is that the pro-boycott vote by British journalists - where they blamed Israel for interfering with the work of reporters in the Gaza Strip and West Bank - was a dramatic turning point. We're not sure about the conclusions of the article. But it's undeniable that the votes of British journalists had a drip-drip-drip effect on global sentiment - the kind of "change what people can reasonably say out loud" tactic that Ahmadinejad has exploited so successfully to deny the Holocaust. It's also undeniable that there's something a little strange about the obsession that British journalists have with the Jewish State. For instance, if they were genuinely concerned about reporters - well, one would think that this might matter a little bit more:

Palestinian journalists on Sunday announced a series of protests to demand that Hamas and Fatah stop targeting them. The announcement... came after a crackdown on newsmen in both the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Embattled Palestinian reporters said such attacks had become the norm in the Palestinian territories. "Both Hamas and Fatah are targeting journalists," said a Ramallah-based journalist. "We are caught in the cross fire between Hamas and Fatah." Another member of the press from Jenin said he had been receiving death threats on an almost daily basis in recent months. "One day it's from Fatah, and another day the threats come from Hamas," he told The Jerusalem Post. "For the past month, I haven't been able to write anything under my name out of fear for my life."

The reason British journalists are targeting Israel is because Israel is the one interfering with reporters in Gaza and the West Bank. Obviously.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER RULES OUT IRAQ TIMETABLE

Likely, he's up for a position on the Board at Halliburton:


Gordon Brown refused to set out an exit timetable for troops Gordon Brown has ruled out setting a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, saying they still have "an important job to do".

The prime minister said in a letter to Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell the military still had "clear obligations to discharge".

He insisted setting a timetable would undermine those efforts.

WALT AND MEARSHEIMER PUBLISH THEIR INSIPID, ANTI-SEMITICISH BOOK

The full Walt and Mearsheimer book is now out, over a year after the pair first radically distanced themselves from the rest of the academic world by putting their disdain for the Jewish State into print. Do you think they took so long with the second half of the book because they had trouble translating it out of the original German?

Here's the New York Times story. It is different in absolutely no way from what you expect it to be. This is where we'd usually link to some careful point by point refutation of their scholarship, but honestly... eh. Why go through the motions of even pretending that reasons or arguments have anything to do with the on-the-ground dynamics of anti-Israel animus?

When a distinguished professor insists that he believes in an untenable conspiracy - one that happens to sound remarkably similar to vicious anti-Semitism - because of laughably disprovable assertions like "Al Qaeda's grievances regarding US/Israeli ties are suppressed by the US media"... You're supposed to do what? Show him the thousands of articles in the US media about the degree to which US/Israeli ties are a motivation for Al Qaeda? When he utters insipid nonsense like "you can tell that Israeli interests are hostile to the US because if they weren't then Israel wouldn't need a lobby"… you're supposed to do what? Bring in a 16 year old high school student to tell him that every interest on the planet is represented in DC - and on both sides of every issue? This isn't about arguments or evidence. These are not naturally stupid people - they must have a sense of their position. And if they don't - if they're really that deep in conspiracy theory "we're the sane ones everyone else is crazy" land - then whatever has made them stupid is far beyond the reach of mere logic.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

HEY, WHERE'S ALL THAT HAMAS LAW AND ORDER WE WERE PROMISED?

We've been hearing a lot of "at least Hamas has brought law and order to the streets of Gaza." Yeah? Let's see how that's going:

Hamas security men scuffled with rowdy Fatah supporters, fired in the air and briefly detained journalists at a protest against the Islamic group's rule in the Strip.... The protesters converged on a former Fatah compound in Gaza City now occupied by Hamas, chanting pro-Fatah slogans, throwing stones and empty bottles and waving yellow Fatah flags. It was the second time in recent weeks that Hamas men have clashed violently with Fatah protesters - and could signal possible cracks in Hamas's two-month-old ironclad rule of Gaza... When several Hamas security men roughed up a Reuters TV cameraman filming the protest and tried to confiscate his camera, protesters surrounded the Hamas men, beat them to the ground and prevented the cameraman's arrest. The demonstrators cursed the Hamas men, calling them "Shiites" - a derogatory allusion to Hamas' alliance with the hardline Shiite Muslim regime in Iran.

Notice that even the relatively uneducated Gaza residents - with their relative lack of Western media - know enough to think that the center-left "Shiites and Sunnis don't cooperate" meme is idiotic. So there are two ways to take this post. One is to play up the education angle, and punchline with something like "apparently even the most hysterical criticisms of the American educational system are true: a total lack of schooling really does leave you smarter than any amount of what passes as advantaged education." The other way is to go with the Western media angle, and make is something like "we're not saying that the absence of CNN and the NYT makes Gaza residents not totally misguided about the reality of the Middle East. That would be a post hoc fallacy, and we've got exams on argumentation theory coming up later this afternoon. But there does appear to be, as the social scientists say, something of a correlation". But it's shaping up to be an incredibly long week, and it's way too early in the morning to be making tough decisions. So on this one, you get to choose your own adventure.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]