Ann Coulter is a lawyer and author of the best seller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. Her most recent book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, is a number one New York Times Best-Seller.

Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, Hannity and Colmes, The O’Reilly Factor, American Morning With Paula Zahn, Crossfire, ABC’s “This Week,” Good Morning America, the Leeza Show, and has been profiled in TV Guide, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and George Magazine. She was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.

Coulter clerked for the Honorable Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and was an attorney in the Department of Justice Honors Program for outstanding law school graduates.

After practicing law in private practice in New York City, Coulter worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, a public interest law firm dedicated to the defense of individual rights with particular emphasis on freedom of speech, civil rights, and the free exercise of religion.

A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

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>>Nell Husbands Martin Coulter (090422)

A lot of people claim to be my No. 1 fan -- God bless them -- but my true No. 1 fan left this world last week. My mother quietly stopped breathing last Tuesday, as she slept peacefully, holding my hand.

She was the biggest fan of all of us -- Father, me and my brothers John and Jim.

After reading the eulogy column I wrote for Father last year -- not to excess, probably only about 4,637 times -- Mother realized to her chagrin that she wouldn't be able to read the eulogy column I'd be writing for her, and started hinting that maybe I could rustle up a draft so she could take a peek.

But I couldn't do it, until I had to.

The only thing Mother wanted to be sure my brothers and I included in her remembrances were her contributions to the Republican Party, the New Canaan Republican Town Committee and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

She was a direct descendant of at least a dozen patriots who served the cause of the American Revolution and traced her lineage on both sides of her family to Puritan nonconformists who came to America in 1633 seeking religious freedom on a ship led by Pastor Thomas Hooker. Or, as Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano would call them, "A dangerous right-wing extremist hate group."

Even back in the Puritan days, Mother's female ancestors were brought up on charges for their heretical dressing styles (and then sassed the judge). During the Revolution, one female ancestor, Effie Ten Eyck Van Varick, contributed to the rebel cause by donating lead for bullets from the curtain weights in her home in what was, even then, traitorous, loyalist Manhattan.

Mother's deep-seated political activism saved me on more than one occasion.

At the 2004 Republican National Convention, I was taking my parents to a lot of the parties in New York and, at one of them, Herman Cain walked up to me and told me he was a big fan even though I probably didn't know who he was.

Cain was the former president and CEO of Godfather's Pizza who was then running for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. I had seen him on Fox News'

"Cavuto" -- but I couldn't remember his name for the life of me.

Luckily for me, Mother was standing next to me and she piped in, "I know who you are -- I donated to your campaign." Thank you, Mommy!

Mother probably contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to various conservative outfits over the years -- all in her little $20 checks -- especially to any organization that claimed it was going to stop Hillary. In fact, if they mentioned Hillary in their letter, Mother sometimes made it $25.

My brothers and I always figured we'd have no inheritance, but there would be a lovely memorial to Oliver North somewhere.

Mother may have thought her most notable characteristic was her Republican activism, but, for the rest of us, it was her constant, unconditional love. She was a little love machine, spreading warmth and joy wherever she went.

Every time she'd see me, even after just a few days' absence, she'd hug me as if I had been lost in the Himalayan Mountains for the past 20 years.

On Mother's birthday last year, I had a dinner party for her with Rush Limbaugh, Conrad Black and my friends Peter and Angie.

Mother was always delighted to be with people talking about politics -- actually she told me that, lately, she was delighted to be around any conversations that didn't involve who had a doctor's appointment or who had died that day.

So I let her stay up until 3 a.m. that night, well past her bedtime.

Mother was so happy that after I had her all tucked in and the lights out, I heard her singing herself to sleep.

Even on the rare occasions when I'd be cross with her, she'd completely forget about it, and within 10 seconds would be telling me what a wonderful, precious daughter I was. My brother Jimmy found out recently that she'd even forgotten that he had caused her to miss Reagan's first inauguration by getting in a car accident the night before we were leaving -- and she never should have forgotten that.

Everyone wanted my mother to be his mother. (The "his" in that sentence is grammatically correct and Mother would never let us forget it.) I'm sure everyone thinks he has the perfect mother, but we really did.

Since I was a little girl, friends, relatives and neighbors would bring their problems to Mother. She had a rare combination of being completely moral and completely nonjudgmental at the same time -- the exact opposite of liberals who have absolutely no morals and yet are ferociously judgmental.

You could tell Mother anything, get good counsel and not end up feeling worse about yourself.

Several of Mother's New Canaan friends sent us notes last week, calling her a "gentle lady" and remarking that she never had an unkind word for anyone.

As a family member, I can assure you that -- much to our annoyance -- she really did never have an unkind word for anyone. I mean, except Democrats, but not anyone she knew.

Whenever the rest of us would be making fun of someone -- trust me, always for good and sound reasons -- Mother would somehow manage to muster up a defense of the miscreant. Father would always smile and say, "Your mother defends everyone."

She was, in fact, such a "gentle lady" that I had to go to her doctors'

appointments and hospital visits with her and be her Mother Lion. If officious hospital administrators had told Mother to get off a gurney, go outside in the pouring rain and stand on one foot for three hours before the doctor would see her, she'd thank them profusely and apologize for being such a bother.

She viewed her doctors' appointments as social visits, which is the other reason I'd have to go with her, to make sure we eventually got around to the business end of the appointment.

When she began her final decline last fall, she had to go to her Connecticut doctor without me to find out what was wrong. This was the first time she didn't seem to be getting better after a chemo treatment.

So I had been worrying about her appointment all day, but when I called her that night, she immediately turned the subject to me and asked me how my book was going.

I insisted on knowing if she had seen the doctor and she perked up and brightly told me that, oh yes, she had seen him, he had all my books in his office, he was worried about Obama, too, and he has such beautiful children!

Before she launched into a spirited discussion of his children's extracurricular activities and triumphs on the athletic field, I had to ask her, "Mommy, did the doctor happen to say anything about why you're feeling lousy?"

It turned out, of course, that it was the ovarian cancer -- as well as the massive amounts of poison she had been receiving to kill the cancer over the past five years. That was the beginning of the end.

Now I'll never be able to introduce my Mother to friends and surprise them with her charming Southern accent.

And I'll never see my mother's beautiful face again, at least not for the next several decades here on Earth. I've been looking at her across the room in doctors' offices over the past few years, thinking to

myself: There will come a point when you won't see that face again.

Her angelic face always looked like home to me. My whole life, as soon as I'd see my mother's face I'd know I was safe, whether I was a little girl lost in a department store or a big girl with a problem, who needed her mother.

Thanks to the doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and mother's fighting Kentucky spirit, we got to see that face much longer than anyone ever expected.

So now she's with Daddy and Jesus. Every single day since Daddy died last year, Mother would say how much she missed him and gaze at his photo, telling us what an amazing man he was and repeating his little expressions and jokes. Even though I miss her, I'm glad they're together again.

I don't know about Jesus, but I think Daddy was getting impatient. But Mommy was always running a little bit late.

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Ann Coulter: Uncensored And Uncut

Columns that were too hot to print — plus the very best (and funniest) of her other political commentary

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)

She’s the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Slander, Treason, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. She’s the most high-profile and controversial conservative intellectual on the scene today. Yet most publications find her too hot to handle. Her syndicated column, although brimming with her trademark wit and incisive political observations, appears in only a handful of papers. But now, in How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Coulter collects the best of those columns, including some that no one dared to print before.

In this book, Coulter explains, are “bootlegs, never-released versions, NC-17 versions, lost classics, remixes, extended-play versions, and the director’s cut columns.” She has included here “columns too hot to be published until now - along with the editors’ rejections. These columns, as well as any columns that caused more than the usual ruckus (like my 9/11 ‘kill their leaders’ column) I preserved in their original form - so you can see what the fuss was about. Some columns I added a little to and some I added so much to that they grew from short columns to entire chapters (e.g., the Elian Gonzalez and Confederate flag chapters). Even the unretouched columns are my unretouched columns, as they live on my computer - which was not always the same as the published version.”

Here, then, is the unexpurgated Ann Coulter, unrestrained by cowering editors and politically correct publishers. How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) includes Coulter’s unvarnished take on everything from John Kerry to the essence of being a liberal (“The absolute conviction that there is one set of rules for you, and another, completely different set of rules for everyone else”), from the media’s war on guns to America’s war on terrorism (“I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever”), from the outrageous bias of the New York Times to the self-serving bloat of Bill Clinton’s memoirs.

A sampling of Ann Coulter’s riotous and dead-on wit on:

* The Iraq war and the Democrats: “John Kerry has said that we need to ‘de-Americanize’ the war — I guess on the theory that the ‘de-Americanizing’ process has worked so well for the Democratic Party”

* Gay marriage: “Gays usually bring up the argument about all the straight couples living in ‘sham’ marriages, but I see no point in dragging the Clintons into this”

* Liberals and the military: “The only time liberals pretend to like the military is when they claim to love soldiers so much they don’t want them to get hurt fighting a war”

* Media bias: “Fox News should agree to admit it is conservative if all other media outlets will admit they are liberal”

* Modern anti-Christian bias: “There is no surer proof of Christ’s divinity than that he is still so hated some 2,000 years after his death”

* Journalistic standards: “The only standard journalists respect is: Will this story promote the left-wing agenda?”

* Slick Willie: “What actually happened during the Clinton presidency? No one can remember anything about it except the bimbos, the lies, and the felonies”

* Hillary’s memoirs: “Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book — reportedly the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history”

* The Democrats: “The current Democratic Party is a crowd of idle, rich degenerates, the likes of which hasn’t existed since the czar’s court”

* Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl exhibitionism: “Even CBS executives were enraged by MTV’s halftime show, saying they could have gotten the identical show from National Geographic for a fraction of the price”

* The Confederate flag controversy: “It is outrageous for Northern liberals and race demagogues to try to turn the Confederate flag into a badge of shame, in the process spitting on America’s gallant warrior class”

* The Episcopal church: “The Episcopalians don’t demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages — it’s much like the New York Times editorial board”

* Kerry and tax cuts: “If Democrats want to talk about middle-class tax cuts, couldn’t they nominate someone who hasn’t been a poodle to rich women for the past thirty-three years?”

* Hugh Hefner: “Like the Democrats, Playboy just wants to liberate women to behave like pigs, have sex without consequences, prance about naked, and abort children”

* The New York Times’s war coverage: “Apparently, the Times’s stylebook now requires all reports of violence anywhere within 1,000 miles of Iraq to be dated from Bush’s speech declaring an end to ‘major combat’ operations”

* The Times and crime: “The only cop the New York Times likes is the one in the Village People”

* The parties: “Both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do”

* Islamic terrorism and liberals: “The Times was rushing to assure its readers that ‘prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions.’ (That’s if you set aside Muhammad’s many specific instructions to kill nonbelievers whenever possible)”

* Liberals and Christianity: “The only religion that can be constantly defamed and insulted is the one liberals pretend to be terrified of”

* Liberal eulogies for Reagan: “The lesson to draw from what liberals said about Reagan then and what they are forced to say about him now is that the electable Republican is always the one liberals are calling an extremist, Armageddon-believing religious zealot”

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The Color of Demagogy (020117)

THE NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT commissioned a statue of the famous photo of three magnificent firemen hoisting an American flag at Ground Zero on Sept. 11. The men in the photo were all Caucasians, but the statue will instead portray one white, one black and one Hispanic raising the flag.

We should probably be relieved it’s not going to be a statue of three Muslims in burkas raising the flag.

The decision to change the truth was made by the studio making the statue; Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta; along with Forest City Ratner Companies, which owns the property at FDNY headquarters where the statue will be located. Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon explained that two of the white men would be eliminated in order to more accurately reflect all of the firemen who died at the World Trade Center.

Except, like the statue, that’s a lie, too. A statue that accurately reflected the racial composition of the New York Fire Department – as well as those who died on Sept. 11 – would have to show 33 firemen raising the flag, one of whom would be Hispanic and one of whom would be black. (Blacks make up 2.7% of the NYFD, and Hispanics 3.2%.)

Liberals love erasing the truth. They call their lies “legally accurate,” “affirmative action,” “saving the Constitution” – and now, “art.” When the truth is gone, brute political power prevails. And manifestly, white men have no political power in modern America. They just rush in to save us when the nation is attacked.

But having emerged from months of therapy, Manhattan liberals have forgotten about planes flying into their buildings and can now cheerfully return to snarling about “angry white men,” “white male oppressors” and “dead white men.” After a few months of applause from terrified Manhattan liberals, firemen are no longer heroes. They are privileged white males again.

It is a privilege that allows them to be discriminated against in college admissions, jobs, government contracts, teaching positions, scholarships and so on.

Liberal race demagogues so love goading white men, they can’t get their story straight on the American flag. The last word on the flag out of the left was that blacks do not share in white America’s jingoistic flag-waving.

Four days after the attack, black firemen in Opa-Locka, Fla., refused to ride on a fire truck that displayed the American flag on the grounds that it was a symbol of the oppression of blacks.

Tennessee state representative Henri Brooks (D, needless to say) has refused to say the pledge of allegiance for nine years because “to stand up and salute that flag that waved over the colonies that enslaved us and did all the horrible things that the institution of slavery represented, would be a slap in the face to my ancestors.”

Syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux also refuses to say the pledge of allegiance, explaining “my lips can’t move ... I think of [those words] as nothing but a lie. Just a lie.”

In an interview two days after Sept. 11, black singer Alicia Keys said she was “torn” by seeing American flags all over New York. She, too, sees “lies in that flag. I can’t suddenly be all patriotic.”

Yet now, in that presumptuous way of theirs of always speaking for the black man, liberals simply assume that blacks would have wanted to hoist the American flag at Ground Zero. Who are these liberal honkies imputing patriotism to blacks? Haven’t we seen enough of this type of Jim Crow elitism from the left?

Liberals constantly want to have it every single way. They are indignant at the possibility that President Bush might have acted to help Enron. When it turns out he did not, they fume: What? He did nothing! He should have done something!

They hate the American flag, but on the other hand, demanding that two white men be ousted from the Fire Department statue also has its seditious attractions.

Who are they kidding? What they’d really like is a memorial showing a diverse group of Americans burning the flag. Isn’t that the essence of our freedom, really? The right to dissent and not some phony flag-waving?

Liberals are, at best, indifferent to America winning the war in Afghanistan. They falsely proclaim that “of course, everyone” is rooting for America, so they can stop talking about it and get back to stirring up class and race resentments at home.

Meanwhile, three men with real names raised that flag in that photo at Ground Zero: New York City firefighters Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Billy Eisengrein. We know what they’d do if the situation were reversed.

After World War II, a statue was made of six American servicemen raising the flag at Iwo Jima. (Three of the six raising the flag were killed in the battle.) White male patriarchs didn’t bleach Indian Ira Hayes off the Iwo Jima memorial. Back when the oppressors were white men rather than race demagogues, the truth still counted for something.

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Being Liberal Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry (020207)

DEAR PRESIDENT BUSH:

“[O]ur international problems are utterly intractable, and the sooner we recognize this, the better. ... We should figure out clever ways to declare victory at the first decent opportunity and remove our troops (from Afghanistan).”

Love,

Bruce Ackerman

Yale law professor

(from New York Times column dated Nov. 6, 2001)

Insistent that victory abroad was impossible – one week before Kabul fell – Professor Ackerman breezily invited Bush to engage in a hapless caper of putting Osama bin Laden on trial: “By all means, bring Osama bin Laden to justice and weaken or destroy the Taliban.”

He instructed that “we should satisfy ourselves with limited victories abroad” because “our domestic problems are manageable.” But “ridding the world of terrorism is quite another matter.”

Using the strategy of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost (he didn’t lose them there, but the light’s better), Ackerman recommended that the Bush administration leave al-Qaeda alone and concentrate on anti-choice extremists here in the United States.

Thus Ackerman explained: “We should be seriously engaged in anti-terrorism efforts at home. ... [O]ther attacks may well occur – perhaps committed by homegrown extremists.” Of course, other attacks may also well occur – perhaps committed by Yale law professors. Getting al Qaeda will be tricky, but locking up Ackerman is doable.

Feigning objectivity while trying to demoralize the country, Ackerman wrote: “Even if we catch and kill Osama bin Laden, others will take his place.”

It is a commonplace among men – and I do mean men – that civilian troops culled from a liberal democracy will always prevail over barbaric mercenaries with daggers between their teeth. But liberals have no confidence in a free nation. They are invariably mesmerized by the self-advertised brutality of savages.

Not surprisingly, many Times columnists subscribed to Ackerman’s two-part war strategy for America: 1) SURRENDER NOW! and 2) focus on anti-choice extremists at home.

After ceaseless warnings of a “quagmire,” the cover story on the Times’ Week in Review section the week after Kabul fell was titled: “Surprise: War Works After All.”

Point Two of the Ackerman war strategy has been championed most earnestly by Times columnist Frank Rich, providing continuity with his typical National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League press-release style. In October, Rich was denouncing the administration’s ham-handed approach to the war on terrorism on the grounds that Attorney General John Ashcroft had doggedly refused to meet with Planned Parenthood representatives after the anthrax mailings.

This, strangely, was despite the fact that anthrax has never been sent to an abortion clinic, and therefore Planned Parenthood could be of absolutely no help in tracking down the source of the mailings. But as Rich interpreted it, Ashcroft had “gone so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons.”

According to Rich, abortion clinics had plenty of experience with “such homegrown Talibans as the Army of God.” Planned Parenthood could have provided leads on “the convergence of international and domestic terrorism.”

The “Army of God” turned out to be one guy: a bank robber-cum-anti-abortionist who was already on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Since his escape from prison on bank robbery charges, he had been sending harmless white powder to abortion clinics.

Nonetheless, Rich blathered on, proclaiming that Planned Parenthood had “marshaled the medical and security expertise” to combat terrorism. Demonstrating some of that hard-earned expertise, the “director of security” for Planned Parenthood laughed at “the sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for anthrax terrorists.” It showed how “little grasp they have of the enemy.”

About one month later, the “Army of God” bank robber was caught, thanks to Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a different $50,000 reward on widely circulated wanted posters.

The SURRENDER NOW! strategy was given early moral succor by Maureen Dowd’s pre-war columns in which she repeatedly accused Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of being out of touch. In Aug. 2001, for example, she said “the urgent question” was “just how conscious of the world around him Rip Van Rummy is.”

Amid a lot of (similarly hilarious) sneering, Dowd snipped that Rumsfeld was “clueless about the press.” (If Dowd ran the Department of Defense instead of killing terrorists, it would be issuing catty press releases on Britney Spears’ underwear and the collapse of Talk magazine.)

Dowd was exultant. “I guess we can close the book on W.’s contention that the best way to run government is with the wisdom of corporate chieftains,” she said. In a ringing peroration, she declared that Rumsfeld – as well as Vice President Dick Cheney – do “not know anything about how the world works.” The “most striking thing is how out of touch they act.”

Al Qaeda must dearly wish it were so.

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Mineta’s Bataan Death March (020228)

According to initial buoyant reports in early February, enraged travelers rose up in a savage attack on the secretary of transportation. Hope was dashed when later reports indicated that the irritated travelers were actually rival warlords, the airport was the Kabul Airport, and Norman Mineta was still with us.

Thanks to the hard work of the Department of Transportation, which had already arrogated to itself responsibility for commercial air safety, 19 Muslim terrorists had absolutely no difficulty in turning four planes into cruise missiles almost simultaneously on Sept. 11, resulting in the death of thousands of Americans.

Outside of government work, that’s known as a “failure.” But in the government, it is grounds for greater responsibility. In its wisdom, Congress turned over yet more power to the Department of Transportation: Nice work – what else can you do for us?

Almost instantly, dreary, wrathful federal bureaucrats conceived of methods to make air travel still worse. Even those of us who burn with an all-consuming hatred for federal bureaucracies had to tip our hats.

First, the government prohibited airport screeners from looking for terrorists. Second, the government scrapped airline pricing systems that allow passengers to pay $2,000 to avoid 50-minute lines. Just like in the Soviet Union of beloved memory, “equality” was the important thing. (Except government officials like Cabinet official Tommy Thompson, who skip the airport lines.) We’ll all die, but at least we’ll all die together.

The only bright side is that in the government’s obsessive drive for “equality,” perhaps airport security guards will be forced to start searching Arabs now, too.

Ethnic profiling is the only reasonable security measure that has been thwarted in the war on terrorism. Every other anti-American, left-wing attack on the war has failed miserably. Liberals denounced military tribunals, FBI interviews with Arab student visitors, the detention of terrorism suspects, monitoring conversations of jailed terrorists and the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo.

All to no avail – except ethnic profiling.

The whole country knows that goosing little old ladies boarding planes is not going to make us any safer. Even left-wing lawyer Floyd Abrams had the sense to say: “There’s a big difference between being interned and being searched a little more at an airport.” But we can’t stop it. Transportation Secretary Mineta is angry and he wants America to suffer.

In early December, “60 Minutes” host Steve Kroft interviewed Mineta about his dogged refusal to permit an extra check of people who look like the next and last 50 terrorists.

Kroft noted that of 22 people on the most-wanted list right now: “[A]ll but one of them has complexion listed as olive. They all have dark hair and brown eyes. And more than half of them have the name Mohammed.” (They are also all males in their 20s and 30s.) Thus, he asked Mineta if such people should be subjected to a little extra scrutiny. “No,” Mineta responded, “not just on that basis alone.”

Other more important factors, Mineta explained, included asking “things like, ‘Did you pay cash for this ticket or charge it on a credit card? Do you have a one-way ticket or a round-trip?’”

Inasmuch as this was Steve Kroft and not Diane Sawyer conducting the interview, there was a relevant follow-up question: “Did the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center have one-way tickets?” No, Mineta admitted, the Sept. 11 hijackers all had round-trip tickets they bought with credit cards.

Let the record reflect that among President George Bush’s dazzling team of advisers, the only stink-bomb is the one Democratic holdover from the Clinton administration. It is absolutely contemptible that Bush will not rid us of this scourge.

It is safe to assume that it was not Mineta’s stellar accomplishment of having sat on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee for 18 years that has led both Republican and Democratic presidents to seek his services so ardently. He is given plumb government jobs solely and exclusively because he is a minority.

But Secretary Mineta is burning with hatred for America. He has taken the occasion of the most devastating attack on U.S. soil to drone on about how his baseball bat was taken from him as a child headed to one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps.

As Mineta has endlessly recounted in interviews of late: “I remember on the 29th of May, 1942” – note that he remembers the day – “when we boarded the train in San Jose under armed guard, the military guard, I was in my Cub Scout uniform carrying a baseball, baseball glove and a baseball bat. And as I boarded the train, the MPs confiscated the bat on the basis it could be used as a lethal weapon.”

Good God! A guard took Mineta’s baseball bat as a child, and as a result he’s subjecting all of America to the Bataan Death March! Someone please give him a baseball bat.

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Judge Posner Has the Last Word on 2000 Election Debacle (020307)

Democrats regularly insult the intelligence of half the public in order to win the votes of the terminally stupid. As long as their lies bamboozle enough clods to give them a political edge, they will say absolutely anything. The Easily Demagogued are a key Democratic constituency, right after Steely-Eyed Zealots.

Thus for example, even after Bill Clinton was exposed as a slightly tackier version of Jimmy Swaggart, the Democrats could not stop insulting our intelligence, sonorously intoning that it is not perjury if it’s “just about sex” or — contradictorily — it is also not perjury if the witness personally believed it wasn’t sex.

Further, during the Clintonized presidential election fiasco, the party’s law professor adjuncts fanned out across the airwaves to earnestly explain that the Florida Supreme Court was engaging in a perfectly ordinary act of judicial interpretation when it interpreted “seven days” in the statute to mean “17 days, or as long as it takes for Gore to steal the election.”

And most recently, Democrats have taken the position that the heroic performance of policemen, firemen and the military after 9-11 supports the Democrats’ love of big government. Inasmuch as liberals have spent 20 years relentlessly suing fire departments, police departments and the military, this is a very aggressive position to take. Indeed, every hero of Sept. 11 has been a favorite target of liberal lawsuits. There’s no better way to say “thank you” than to sue for sexual discrimination!

Watching Democrats in action often feels like being the target of a “Candid Camera” set-up. You constantly find yourself wanting to scream, <“Is anyone else watching this?”> As a class, one group that is not keeping tabs on Democratic shenanigans is the media. Thus, when Bill Clinton unleashed his signature weeping routine during a black church service in 1993, the Chicago Tribune factually reported that Clinton “appeared to feel every word and emotion deeply.”

Naturally, it always comes as a great relief when the left’s demagogic hokum is finally exposed despite the best efforts of the press. If the Alan Funt of the Bill Clinton spectacle was Monica Lewinsky, the Alan Funt of the election spectacle is at the opposite end of the IQ spectrum: It is Judge Richard Posner, author of “Breaking the Deadlock.”

Posner, a federal judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, goes through the Democrats’ every legal argument, every sneaky stratagem, every disingenuous claim, like William Tecumseh Sherman marching to Savannah. Point by point, by his relentless logic, he has them trapped whichever way they turn.

The election fracas is the perfect topic for Judge Posner’s analytical, computer-like brain. He is the most frequently cited federal judge. He was a founder of the Chicago Law and Economics movement. The late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called him one of only two geniuses he had ever met.

So you can pretty well imagine his reaction to the deep cogitations of SCOFLA — the Supreme Court of Florida. Though Posner is not the sort to come out and call SCOFLA a bunch of ambulance-chasers, his precise, unemotional style is far more devastating. Taking a clinical interest in his subject, Posner writes at one point simply that “(o)ne is mystified” by the SCOFLA’s reasoning.

In its first abrogation of clear statutory law, SCOFLA interpreted “seven days” to mean “17 days” and thus unlawfully extended the period before the election could be certified. That decision, Posner says, was “the catalyst for the legal and political broil that ensued.” And it was based on “an unreasonable and not merely unsound interpretation of the statute.”

SCOFLA had concluded that it was entitled to disregard Florida election law on the basis of a general provision in the Florida Constitution that states simply: “All political power is inherent in the people.” Posner treats as an odd curiosity the fact that the court “seems to have regarded” this “people power” clause as superior to the written law. Yet this was the “key” to its decision. Jane Goodall could not have described the SCOFLA’s rationale with greater dispassion.

The SCOFLA’s ludicrous power grab occasionally tries the patience of even this most circumspect academic: “The Constitution is not a brooding omnipresence,” Posner writes, nor do the courts function as a “council of revision” to ensure that statutes “reflect the ‘spirit’ of the Constitution.” Rather, he says: “The courts can invalidate a statute, or interpret it reasonably, but they are not to interpret it unreasonably merely because it does not embody the aspirations that the courts find limned in vague constitutional language.”

And consider that SCOFLA gets off easy in Posner’s account. As he says: “The participants most deserving of criticism, though as yet largely spared it, are the law professors who offered public comments on the unfolding drama.”

If you suspected that the Democrats and their legal and journalistic handmaidens were trying to steal an election in broad daylight, “Breaking the Deadlock” will not relieve your mind. There is no argument, no riposte, no silly liberal sentiment that Posner does not methodically deconstruct. This book is the complete antidote to 36 days of a Clintonized transfer of power.

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Parental Advisory: This Column Discusses ‘Speech’ (020425)

WHENEVER A SUPREME COURT OPINION IS BRISTLING with references to Renaissance paintings, classical mythology, and “art and literature throughout the ages,” you know the court is about to invoke the First Amendment to protect “Bisexual Schoolgirls’ Porn Pictures.”

Writing for the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy struck down a perfectly sensible federal child porn law last week. Though you might think the attorney general was preparing to rip “War and Peace” off the shelves, the law simply extended the reach of the federal child pornography laws to computer-generated “virtual” images of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Without this law, it will be impossible, in practice, to prosecute any child pornography cases.

In order to prohibit, say, “Youngest Teen Sluts in the World!” while leaving the Federalist Papers unmolested, the law carefully defined “sexually explicit” conduct as: “actual or simulated ... sexual intercourse ... bestiality ... masturbation ... sadistic or masochistic abuse ... or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.”

In response to this law, Justice Kennedy expounded on William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” – “the most famous pair of teen-age lovers.” He continued: “The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and ... speech is the beginning of thought.”

Oh, cut it out.

The last smut prosecutions for works with any redeeming value whatsoever took place almost four decades ago. Since then, pornographers have been running amok, producing the most degrading pornography imaginable – and then running to the Supreme Court to whine about threats to Shakespeare and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Some of the more respectable titles taken off the Internet include: “Preteen Pedophilia XXX,” “Kiddie Pix,” “Mary’s Pictures of Young Nude Girls,” “Lolita Angels,” “Preteen Nudist Camp,” “Naked Little School Girls,” “Kiddie Porn Lolitas,” “Rape Lolita,” “Preteen Incest Rape.”

Remember: I’m not the one who says “Preteen Sluts” is protected by the Constitution. Pornography defenders always insist on describing this particular constitutional right in vague euphemisms, such as “material dealing frankly with sex” and “sexually themed material.” If I have to endure Justice Kennedy’s pompous platitudes when we’re talking about “Lolita Angels,” then I’m not politely avoiding the topic.

The nation is swimming in pornography. You can’t turn on TV without seeing simulated sex scenes. And Kennedy is worried that a law banning computer-generated photos of children engaging in sexually explicit acts will put Shakespeare at risk?

If judges pretended to be this confused when interpreting other laws, there could be no laws about anything. Indeed, Depends undergarments would be a necessity on the high court, as justices struggled with whether that feeling in their bellies meant they had to go to the bathroom or needed to burp. Is it “Othello” or is it “Kiddie Pix”?

In addition to Shakespeare, Kennedy claims that if Congress were permitted to outlaw virtual images of children in explicit sex scenes, movies like “Traffic” and “American Beauty” might be made differently. “[L]egitimate movie producers,” Kennedy anxiously warns, might not “risk distributing images in or near the uncertain reach of this law.”

Justice William Rehnquist points out in his dissent that both “American Beauty” and “Traffic” were made (and given awards) while this precise child porno law was on the books. Not only that, but during that time, four of five federal appeals courts were upholding the law. As Rehnquist says: “The chill felt by the court ... has apparently never been felt by those who actually make movies.”

Moreover, the actress who played a teen-age girl in the crucially important simulated sex scene in “Traffic” was not, in fact, a minor. (Why does no one ever say, “‘Casablanca’ was a good movie – but what it really needed was simulated sex scenes with kids”?) Even high-priced lawyers for the porno industry couldn’t come up with more than one “legitimate” Hollywood movie that might possibly – theoretically – fall under the virtual child porn law.

Here is a description, courtesy of an Internet rating service, of just some of the sex scenes from “American Beauty”: “a couple has sex with thrusting, her legs up in the air ... a man is seen from behind masturbating in the shower ... a man masturbates next to his sleeping wife in bed ... a girl stands in front of boy, then takes her bra off and we see her breasts ... a man thinks a male couple is performing fellatio (they are not) ... a father kisses his daughter’s teen-age friend, caresses her clothed breasts and pulls off her jeans until she’s down to her underwear, and opens her shirt, exposing her bare breasts ... a man has several daydreams of a girl in a bathtub with rose petals covering her; he reaches his hand under the water at her crotch level as she puts her head back and moans.”

So Congress can’t ban virtual kiddie porn because the law might make producers think twice before making movies with scenes like that? This is the doomsday scenario? A little chilling might lead to “virtual” watchable movies.

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Forget Roe – What’s His Stand On Cow-Tipping? (020509)

THE CHAIRMAN of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, recently said: “To contend that [Miguel] Estrada, a young attorney with no judicial experience, is the only Hispanic who could be a nominee to a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court does a disservice to the many outstanding Hispanic judges serving in our federal and state courts.”

Actually Bush was just looking for top legal talent, not models for a Benetton ad. And not even a Supreme Court justice. Estrada has been nominated to a federal court of appeals by President Bush. It’s rather churlish for Leahy to complain that Estrada has no judicial experience. He can’t develop judicial experience until he’s on the bench, where the Democrats refuse to put him because he has no judicial experience.

It’s interesting that Leahy complained about Estrada’s youth. After an utterly undistinguished legal career prosecuting cow-tipping cases in Chittenden County, Vt., Leahy was, his Web site boasts, “also the youngest senator (34) elected from the Green Mountain State”!

To be sure, Estrada, 40, has no cow-tipping prosecutions under his belt. But he has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, often considered even better experience than practice before the Chittenden County bench. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Clinton, for example, the media briefly stopped hailing Hillary Clinton as the greatest legal mind in the universe in order to rave about Ginsburg’s six arguments before the Supreme Court.

Back when Estrada was first nominated – one year ago – Leahy said: “The nominees who were selected for their qualifications are likely to be confirmed. Those who were selected primarily for their ideology are not likely to be confirmed.” But in the succeeding year, Leahy has refused to grant hearings to a slew of lawyers with astonishing legal qualifications.

Almost 40,000 students graduate from law school every year. Each year, only 33 will clerk for the Supreme Court. Indeed, only three sitting members of the Supreme Court – also a good credential – did so. Estrada is among this elite group, as are at least three other of the nine lawyers Bush chose for appellate courts one year ago.

Estrada clerked for Justice Kennedy and has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court. John Roberts clerked for Justice Rehnquist and has argued more than 30 cases before the Supreme Court. Jeff Sutton clerked for Justice Scalia and has had 15 arguments before the Supreme Court. Michael McConnell clerked for Justice Brennan and has argued 11 cases before the Supreme Court. None of them have even been given hearings by Leahy.

It turns out what the Democrats mean by “selected primarily for their ideology” means the nominee went to top law schools, had prestigious federal clerkships, went on to distinguished legal careers – but are believed to be Republicans. Evidence of “extreme views” consists of association with the Federalist Society, a group of intellectuals that holds racy legal debates on the privileges and immunities clause, and issues publications with edgy titles like “Reciprocal Compensation Decision Resolves Little.”

As legal scholar Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., explained: “We don’t want this to be a judiciary jammed and packed with people who’ve come out of the Federalist Society with extreme views.”

Consequently, Bush had already purged his list of judicial nominees likely to incite a Democratic witch-hunt. He withdrew the names of two Harvard Law School graduates – one a Supreme Court clerk, one a U.S. congressman – after Democrats discovered with alarm that the two had suspicious associations with the Federalist Society. To get a fair shake from the Democrats, the Federalist Society should change its name to “Communist Party U.S.A.”

In addition to the first nine he chose, Bush even included two Clinton nominees – an unprecedented concession. The Senate Democrats responded to Bush’s olive branch by quickly confirming the two Democrats and refusing to confirm all but one of Bush’s nine nominees.

When that first batch of judicial nominees was announced one year ago, Democrats said they would refuse to hold hearings until the candidates had been vetted by the Democratic Party’s legal adjunct, the American Bar Association. OK: All four of these nominees have been reviewed by the ABA. Three received unanimous “well qualified” ratings (Estrada, McConnell, Roberts), and one received a mixed “well qualified/qualified rating (Sutton).

Still, no hearings.

When Bush recently complained about the massive resistance to his judicial nominees, Leahy angrily denied the accusation, saying: Republicans did it first! In point of fact, Republicans held up nominations of jurists like Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson of Philadelphia, who shouted obscenities at prosecutors from the bench. (“Shut your f***ing mouth,” she exclaimed.) Which Clinton nominee with a half-dozen arguments before the Supreme Court did Republicans refuse to confirm?

But moreover, even if it weren’t a lunatic comparison, what kind of argument is that? The Republicans did it too? This must be the sort of finely honed legal argument one develops prosecuting cow-tipping cases. Perhaps the Federalist Society could finally gain the admiration of Senate Democrats if it too began showcasing the legal logic of bratty 4-year-olds.

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Bush Pays Homage to the Fetishistic Rituals of Liberalism (020620)

INTERRUPTING THE ENDLESS 30-year Watergate retrospective and getting back to the war for a moment, I’ve noticed that liberals are having trouble making any good arguments against Bush, so I thought I’d help them out this week.

In the third presidential debate, George Bush responded to a question about racial profiling by spontaneously denouncing the profiling of Arabs at airports: “Arab Americans are racially profiled ... people are stopped, and we’ve got to do something about that.”

Admittedly, this was before Sept. 11. If Arabs were being stopped at airports before Sept. 11 – and that’s a big if – that was probably wrong. There had been only one terrorist attack here in America by Arabs – the bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993. (This is excluding Sirhan Sirhan, the first Muslim to bring the classic religion-of-peace protest to American shores, when, in support of the Palestinians, he assassinated Robert Kennedy.)

But now it’s after Sept. 11, we’re at war, and Bush is still vexed about profiling Arabs.

Last week, Bush’s Department of Transportation required airport security to search former Vice President Al Gore. There’s a lot not to like about Al Gore, but he’s not a terrorist. Gore said he was glad he was searched. Why? So that a potential terrorist could be spared the trouble?

Searching Al Gore is a purely religious act. It is the purposeless, fetishistic performance of rituals in accordance with the civic religion of liberalism.

It’s not just Bush’s Department of Transportation swearing fealty to the left’s civic religion. A few weeks ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “immediately after Sept. 11” when the FBI was trying to stop “a second wave of terrorists out there,” FBI policy was this: “We were not looking for individuals of any particular religion or from any particular country.”

Evidently, the only people the Bush administration thinks it appropriate to search are angry men with smoke pouring out of their trousers.

Fortunately, Fitzpatrick and O’Malley out on the street appear to have had a different idea about whom to roust after Sept. 11. If not, then valiant and hardworking FBI agents are to be commended for their rapid surveillance of 280 million Americans – cheerleaders, dentists, nursing-home residents, Amish, performance artists, professional baseball players and so on – before settling on about a thousand Muslim men to detain.

If it weren’t a laughable lie, Mueller should be fired for demanding that FBI agents chastely ignore religion and nationality when investigating terrorism.

But instead of calling for Mueller’s head, Democrats on the committee demanded that Mueller issue yet more ritualistic professions of faith in liberalism’s civic religion. Only a religious cult would require people to appear before committees and say things that are demonstrably false.

Mueller dutifully complied, repeatedly assuring the assembled clergy that “The bureau is against – has been and will be against – any form of profiling.” He said the new guidelines do not address “members of a particular group and not members of a particular political persuasion or anything along those lines.”

Galileo put up more of a fight.

In his inimitable Stalinist way, Sen. Russell Feingold demanded that no one at the FBI even consider whether racial profiling might have prevented 9-11. Liberals treat racial profiling like the Victorians treated sex. It is not a topic that may be discussed, except to recoil in horror at the practice.

Feingold said he was “very troubled” at seeing government officials “quoted in the press saying that they believe concerns of being accused of racial profiling led the FBI to not act on the Phoenix memo.”

The Phoenix memo was the one noting that a lot of Middle Eastern men were enrolled in American flight schools. Inasmuch as all of the leaders of the terrorist attack were Arabs in American flight schools, it’s not crazy to think that an aggressive investigation of Arabs in American flight schools might have thwarted the attack.

When Mueller came back with some flaccid response, saying he had heard an “indication” of “a possible concern” about racial profiling, Feingold imperiously informed the director: “I was hoping for a different answer.” Not the truth – just a different answer. The only thing he left out was “Comrade.”

Muslim terrorists are trying to nuke Manhattan, and the Senate is conducting Soviet show trials on whether anyone at the FBI is wistfully daydreaming about racial profiling.

Relentlessly pursuing incipient thought crimes at the FBI, Feingold pronounced it “a distortion” to suggest that acting on the Phoenix memo would have constituted racial profiling. The memo, he said, “contained specific information about specific individuals.”

The specific information was this: A lot of Middle Eastern men were attending American flight schools. Excising the portion of that statement that liberals refuse to consider – Middle Eastern men – the only “specific information” is: “People were attending flight schools.”

These are the lunatics the Bush administration is hoping to propitiate by refusing to engage in racial profiling. If an attack comes, I assure you: No one will be praising Bush for abiding by the rules of the cult and carefully searching Al Gore.

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Murdering the Bell Curve (020627)

AT LEAST WE finally have liberals on record admitting there is such a thing as IQ.

Six years ago, Eric Nesbitt, a U.S. airman assigned to Langley Air Force Base, was brutally murdered by Daryl Renard Atkins, a repeat violent criminal. It was a heinous and pointless murder: Atkins already had Nesbitt’s money and car when he unloaded his gun into the defenseless airman. According to a cellmate, Atkins later laughed about the murder.

After hearing the (overwhelming) evidence against him, a jury sentenced Atkins to death.

Last week, the Supreme Court overturned that sentence. The court ruled that the Constitution makes Atkins ineligible for the death penalty if he can prove he is “retarded.” In other words, Atkins avoids his capital sentence if he is at least smart enough to know how to fail an IQ test.

Consider what “retarded” means in this context. It does not mean that Atkins could not understand the difference between right and wrong. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal insanity. It does not mean he could not assist in his own defense. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal incompetence.

Nor, incidentally, does it mean that Atkins was so retarded that he could not plan a crime, murder a man and then hide the gun. (The police never retrieved the murder weapon.) Indeed, the jury heard the evidence that Atkins was retarded, but still voted to impose the death penalty.

He’s just dumb – not an uncommon trait among violent criminals. As far back as 1914, criminologist H.H. Goddard concluded that “25% to 50% of the people in our prisons are mentally defective and incapable of managing their affairs with ordinary prudence.” Crimes of violence in particular – murder, rape and assault – are all correlated with low IQs.

Thus, the Supreme Court has now prohibited the death penalty for precisely those people who are most likely to commit death-penalty level crimes.

As noted in the excellent new book, “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right,” liberals acknowledge the concept of IQ only when attacking Republican presidential candidates or trying to spring a criminal from death row. The court has prohibited IQ tests from being used in hiring as a violation of the Civil Rights Act (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.). But to limit a killer’s culpability, IQ tests are evidently completely reliable.

Back when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book “The Bell Curve” was released, liberals denounced the idea of intelligence as a sadistic ploy. Yale University psychologist Robert Sternberg was widely quoted as saying that IQ accounts for less than 10% of the variation in human behavior – including the tendency to commit crimes. “Would you want to make your entire national policy around something that has less than a 10% effect?” No, it turns out – only a national policy prohibiting the death penalty.

The New York Times made the sophisticated argument that one of the authors of “The Bell Curve” (Murray) was “a political ideologue.” While admitting that “The Bell Curve” had created “an aura of scientific certitude,” the Times warned that other scholars would soon “subject its findings to withering criticism.” (Not yet, but soon!) The Times was especially irritated that the book had “ignored the huge gaps in understanding the precise nature of intelligence” and dismissed arguments that low test scores proved only “biased testing.”

But now liberals are overjoyed that such a biased test purporting to measure “intelligence” – a subject that we don’t even vaguely understand – is going to be used to empty the nation’s death rows. In an editorial titled “The Court Gets It Right,” the Times gushed, “there are scores, perhaps even hundreds, of inmates whose low IQs will now qualify them for a sentence reduction to life in prison.”

Now that the topic of “The Bell Curve” is a matter of constitutional law, rather than “pseudo-scientific racism,” “indecent, philosophically shabby and politically ugly,” “disingenuous” and “creepy” – all quotes from the liberal New Republic on the book – let’s turn to the guys who were experts in the field before liberals admitted it was a field.

According to “The Bell Curve,” the truly retarded are far underrepresented in the criminal population because those with very low IQs “have trouble mustering the competence to commit most crimes.” As Justice Scalia put it in dissent, the court’s portrayal of the retarded as “willfully cruel” does not comport with experience. To the contrary, he said, “being childlike generally suggests innocence rather than brutality.”

But we’ve got liberals on the record: The New York Times claims that no matter how heinous their behavior, people with low IQs have “little understanding of their moral culpability.”

If IQ is such a reliable predictor of behavior, will liberals finally agree to use it as the sole basis for admission to University of Michigan Law School? Also, can we get the SAT scores of Times editor Pinch Sulzberger now?

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Liberalism And Terrorism: Different Stages Of Same Disease (020703)

THE NEW YORK TIMES editorial page was in a snit with the Supreme Court this week for its first ruling on the Bush administration’s wartime security procedures. Despite the hysteria at the Times for the assault on “constitutional rights” by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Supreme Court ruled for Ashcroft.

For now, at least, deportation hearings of suspected terrorists will not be open to the public. This, the Times said, was “troubling.” Sadly, the Constitution does not require that national security be compromised.

Like everything liberals oppose but don’t have a good argument for, all reasonable national security measures are called “unconstitutional.” Whenever liberals are losing on substance, they pretend to be upset about process.

Through their enervating dialogues and endless concerns with constitutional process, liberals have made themselves incapable of feeling hate for the enemy. Refusing to take sides in this war, they busy themselves wailing about every security precaution taken by the Bush administration.

Ashcroft has been incessantly attacked on the op-ed page of The New York Times by the same columnists who are now angrily demanding to know why the Bush administration didn’t imprison all Arabs before Sept. 11. He has been compared to the Taliban. (And you’re not a patriot in this war until a liberal has compared you to the Taliban.)

Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights called Attorney General John Ashcroft the Constitution’s “main enemy.” (As Andrew Ferguson said, evidently Osama Bin Laden comes in a close second.)

Sen. Patrick Do-Nothing Leahy has complained about Ashcroft’s “disappointing” failure to run all internal guideline changes past the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, Sen. Do-Nothing said, “we’re presented with a fait accompli reflecting no congressional input whatsoever.”

Ashcroft was probably worried Leahy would take as long with procedures for investigating terrorism as he is with Bush’s judicial nominees. If Speedy Gonzalez Leahy were required to review Justice Department guidelines, America would be an Islamic regime before Leahy got around to it.

No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100%, behind John Ashcroft 100%, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100%, behind surveillance of Arabs 100%. Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with “unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass.” This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America. Like all cartoons specially featured in the Times, there was nothing remotely funny about the cartoon. Its point was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans.

While hooting with laughter at patriotic Americans, liberals prattle on and on about the right to dissent as the true mark of patriotism and claim their unrelenting kvetching is a needed corrective to jingoism. (It’s not jingoism, and the only people who use that word are fifth columnists.)

After Sept. 11, liberals are appalled by patriotism with an edge of anger because that might lead America to defend itself. True patriotism, they believe, should consist of redoubled efforts at attacking George Bush.

Movie director Robert Altman (who won the Golden Globe for best director for “Gosford Park”) said, “When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke. This present government in America I just find disgusting.”

Columbia professor Eric Foner said: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” I think I know the answer! Thousands of our fellow countrymen dying in a fiery inferno, I’m pretty sure, is “more frightening” than the rhetoric emanating from the White House.

Liberals are angrier at John Ashcroft for questioning angry Arab immigrants applying for crop duster permits than they are about the terrorists. These people simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens. If you can rise above that, if you can move on from that, you weren’t angry in the first place.

During World War II, George Orwell said of England’s pacifists: “Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively, the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”

To paraphrase Orwell, in this war, those who cannot stay focused on fighting the enemy are objectively pro-terrorist.

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More Slander (020711)

ON THE BASIS of the logic on the New York Times editorial page, maybe Bill Clinton did kill Vince Foster. Evidently President Bush is responsible for Enron because he is from Texas and – it is insinuatingly noted – so is Enron! If the left’s physical proximity argument constitutes evidence, I take it back: There are boatloads of evidence that Clinton killed Foster.

Indeed, the entire Republican Party is evidently responsible for various rich liberal “Friends of Bill” who now stand accused of insider trading, such as Martha Stewart and ImClone chief Sam Waksal. Republicans are responsible on the basis of the fact that liberals have spent 20 years calling Republicans “the party of the rich.”

Liberals are like the monkeys in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” who explain: “We all say so, and so it must be true.” Republicans are responsible for Clinton’s pal Martha Stewart because liberals say so. Again, I note: If hysterical partisan insinuation constitutes proof, then we need to reopen the Vince Foster files.

Liberals have no real arguments – none that the American people would find palatable, anyway. So in lieu of actual argument, they accuse conservatives of every vice that pops into their heads, including their own mind-boggling elitism.

The Democratic Party has basically remade itself into a party of left-wing academics and Park Avenue matrons. And then they attack Republicans for being elitist snobs protecting “corporate interests.” It’s bad enough that these rich snobs want to raise our taxes all the time. Having to endure Malibu Marie Antoinettes calling Republicans “the rich” is more than working Americans should have to bear.

Howell Raines, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, described Ronald Reagan as “making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy.” Striking a manly tone, Raines woefully noted that this “saddened” him.

The idea that Reagan was a privileged overlord swatting down working-class wretches with his polo mallet is more delusional than some of Barbra Streisand’s wackier ideas. This was the same Reagan who cut taxes, bombed Libya, stood up to the left’s beloved Soviet Union, built up the military and restored pride in America. (Yes, that Reagan.) Who were these initiatives supposed to appeal to? Martha Stewart? I think not. Average, middle-class Americans voted Reagan back into office for a second term in the largest electoral landslide in history.

But 20 years of propaganda about Republicans being the party of “the rich” has created pre-programmed reflexes. The fact that propaganda works is demonstrated by the fact that people don’t laugh out loud when Democrats try to pin corporate malfeasance on the Republican Party.

Liberals also have many important and substantive backup arguments such as they hate Republicans.

In December 1998, the New York Post described talk-show host Phil Donahue exploding with rage at a Four Seasons party (where the Party of the People mingles) screaming about how he hated Republicans. His wife, Marlo Thomas, apologetically explained: “I don’t know why he’s saying that. He doesn’t really hate all Republicans.” (He probably likes Jim Jeffords, for example.)

In the alternative, liberals thoughtfully explain that Republicans are bigots. In a 1995 interview, Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders called Sen. Jesse Helms a “typical white, Southern male bigot.” It’s a little difficult to imagine a Republican presidential appointee referring to any congressman as being a “typical” member of his race without inciting a blizzard of protest.

But this is standard political debate for the left. It is simply not possible to disagree with liberals about constitutional interpretation, guns, abortion, immigration, racial quotas – or really, anything. Serious political dialogue becomes the exception when political discourse is littered with ad hominem land mines.

By contrast, when Republicans directly quote their opponents, all hell breaks loose. A Republican actually quoting a Democrat verbatim constitutes a McCarthyite witch hunt.

Thus, for example, in 1988, George Bush (41) pulled the old quote-your-opponent trick on Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. During the primaries, Dukakis had said: “I am a strong liberal Democrat. I am a card-carrying member of ACLU.” Those were Dukakis’ precise words. Bush quoted him during one of the debates.

Ten years later, liberals were still fuming about Bush’s dirty rat trick of quoting Dukakis. On July 4, 1999, CNN reporter Bruce Morton cited Bush’s low blow, saying it was a “echo of the late Joseph McCarthy’s card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but it seemed to help Bush.” They’ll stoop to anything to win, those Republicans, even quote their opponents.

Serious political debate evidently consists of randomly accusing your opponent of being a hateful bigot or having some vague ephemeral association with corporate crooks. Those are good arguments.

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Call her Mrs. – Phyllis Schlafly (020718)

EVEN TAKING INTO account the extraordinary capacity of the left for hallucinatory self-aggrandizement, the insipid blather about the feminists and the total radio silence on Phyllis Schlafly is astonishing.

The elite media cast about for women to praise, hailing any female who has achieved the amazing feat of having passed the bar exam, but treat the stunning accomplishments of Phyllis Schlafly like the publisher of the New York Times treats his SAT scores. (It is a dark secret that must not be revealed.) Schlafly simply cannot be mentioned – except for the occasional demeaning caricature.

About the time a young Hillary Rodham was serving as inspiration for the perfect little girl in the Hollywood thriller “The Bad Seed,” Schlafly was remaking the Republican Party.

In 1964, Schlafly wrote “A Choice, Not An Echo,” widely credited with winning Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president. The book sold an astounding 3 million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells 5,000 copies.) Goldwater lost badly in the general election, but the Republican Party would never be the same.

Goldwater’s nomination began the retreat of sellout, Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans who hoped to wreck the country with slightly less alacrity than the Democrats. Without Schlafly, without that book, it is very possible that Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president.

As the feminists spent 20 years engaged in a death-match debate over whether it is acceptable for feminists to wear lipstick, Schlafly was writing 10 books, most of them on military policy.

She co-authored “The Gravediggers,” accusing the elite foreign-policy establishment of cheerfully selling out the nation’s military superiority to the Soviet Union. That book sold 2 million copies. She also co-authored the extremely influential (and extremely long, at more than 800 pages) “Kissinger on the Couch,” methodically dissecting Kissinger’s foreign policy and attacking his beloved Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.

Meanwhile, the feminists moved on from the weighty lipstick debate to pornography. (As Irving Kristol has suggested, their primary area of agreement was that 18-year-old girls performing sex on stage should be paid the minimum wage.)

An early and vigorous proponent of a missile defense shield, Schlafly has written extensively about ICBMs and missile-defense treaties. Her work was a major factor in President Reagan’s decision to proceed with the High Frontier technology.

Having reached agreement on the necessity of a minimum wage for prostitutes (oops “sex workers”), feminists turned their inexplicable wrath on the titles “Mrs.” and “Miss.”

About the same time, Schlafly noticed that the Equal Rights Amendment was sailing toward ratification without anyone noticing. When Schlafly took up her battle against the ERA, the Senate had passed it by 84 to 8. The House had passed it by 354 to 23. The ERA was written in to both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. Thirty states had approved it in the first year after it was sent to the states for ratification. Only eight more states were needed.

But the ERA had not yet faced Phyllis Schlafly. Over the next eight years, thanks to Schlafly and her Eagle Forum, only five states ratified it – but five other states rescinded their earlier ratifications.

What the feminists lacked in linear thinking, they made up for in viciousness, control of the media and Hollywood glitz. As Schlafly said, feminists had “the movie star money and we have the voters.” With an army of women behind her, Schlafly defeated the ERA, beating both political parties, two presidents, the Senate, the House and a slew of Hollywood celebrities.

Soon feminists took up the issue of girl-firemen, demanding to know what possible arguments there were, pray tell, for women not to be firemen. (A short list: their inability to pick up the hose, their tendency to cry and panic when confronted with dangerous situations, the effect on families whose homes are on fire when they open the door and see the female equivalent of Michael Dukakis in a tank.)

Schlafly moved on to ludicrous United Nations treaties, the Violence Against Women Act, sexual harassment law, values-clarification programs and other monstrosities too numerous to catalog. People who dismiss her as a mere demagogue or rabble-rouser either don’t read her work or don’t have any idea what actual “scholarship” is.

She was nearly the first woman ever to attend Harvard Law School – though it did not then admit women, Schlafly’s Harvard professors found her so brilliant that they offered to make an exception for her. (She declined.) Instead, she married, raised six amazingly accomplished children and later attended law school in her 50s – all while fighting the establishment in her free time. She is brilliant, beautiful, principled, articulate, tireless and, most important, absolutely fearless.

That Phyllis Schlafly is the mortal enemy of a movement that claims to promote women tells you all you need to know about the feminists. That most people know more about Madeleine Albright’s brooch collection than Schlafly’s achievements tells you all you need to know about the media.

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Make Liberals Safe, Legal and Rare (020814)

WHENEVER A LIBERAL begins a peevish complaint with “of course, we all agree ...” your antennae should go up. This is how liberals couch statements they assume all Americans would demand they make, but which they secretly chafe at.

Liberal sophistry requires pretending they support, for example, sexual abstinence (for teenagers) and marriage (between heterosexuals); making abortion and drug use “rare”; America’s winning the war on terrorism — and before that, winning the Cold War. Fascinatingly, their proposals for achieving these goals are invariably the opposite of what any normal person might think would work.

Instead of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, liberals often feel it is the better part of valor to reward bad behavior and punish good behavior. Of course, we all agree that Fidel Castro is a bad man. That’s why we need to lift travel restrictions and trade with Cuba! Of course, we all agree that abortion should be “rare.” That’s why all reasonable regulations of abortion must be fought against like wild banshees! (One proven method of making something “rare” is to make it illegal.)

Their comically counterintuitive positions are inevitably backed up with long, complicated explanations about the dire risk of encouraging “hard-liners,” the enemy’s “paranoia,” or clever points such as “teenagers will have sex anyway.” The arguments not only make no sense ab initio, but openly contradict one another.

While pretending to oppose drug use, The New York Times has supported programs to give addicts needles, referring in a 1998 editorial to “some interesting new ideas” such as “needle exchanges.” In the case of cigarettes, however, liberals enthusiastically embrace the otherwise mystifying concept of punishing bad behavior.

Thus, the Times has cheered on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s obsessive desire to outlaw smoking, referring to his proposed ban on smoking in bars as an attempt to close “a major loophole in the city’s anti-smoking law.” Aren’t people going to smoke anyway? Why not make smoking “safe, legal and rare” — just like abortion?

The liberal clergy at the Times has criticized sex education programs that purport to discourage sexual activity among teenagers, while unaccountably neglecting to hand out condoms and scented candles.

Times theater critic Frank Rich has rhapsodically supported Joycelyn Elders’ genius idea of teaching children to masturbate: “The more people talk about masturbation, the more fears can be dispelled among those young people.” (Thirteen-year-old boys could probably teach him a few tricks.)

So it was striking that a recent op-ed piece in the Times opposed a Bush administration’s plan to encourage marriage. Needless to say, it included the ritualistic disclaimer: “Of course, none of this is to say that marriage is not a wonderful institution.” It seems that, in this one case, “we don’t need government programs to convince people ... that marriage is good for them.”

We do, however, urgently need government programs to teach them that dying of AIDS is bad for them. (At least we finally have the left on record opposing some federal government program other than national defense and an independent counsel investigating a Democrat.)

Currently, liberals pretend to be rooting for America in the war on terrorism. To show their support, they oppose America doing anything. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said: “We are all prepared to give the men and women in law enforcement the latitude necessary to protect our nation.” Despite what “we all” support, Durbin said using appearance to sort potential terrorists from non-terrorists “reflects not only poor judgment, but poor law enforcement.”

Really? Which law enforcement experts concluded that surveilling angry Middle Eastern men with smoke pouring out of their trousers would be “poor law enforcement”? Seems unlikely. For some reason, liberals think it’s fun to give Arab terrorists a chance.

Democrats claim to support invading Iraq — just not yet! As the AP recently reported, “the Democrats always preface comments on Iraq with a general statement that Saddam must go.” Of course we all agree that Saddam must go. But first — there are many worthless objections to be raised.

Sore loser Al Gore has said that before invading Iraq we need to establish peace in the Mideast, create a perfect Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, and get the American-hating French and Germans on board. Also invent cold fusion and put a man on Mars. Then will the time be ripe for a pre-emptive attack!

Liberals also carped pointlessly about the war in Afghanistan last fall. Their principal complaint was that we were going to lose. Among many, many other liberals, columnist Maureen Dowd raised the specter of Vietnam and called Afghanistan “another quagmire.” She said that Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem “may be the last to know that Afghanistan is a stubborn and durable place.”

After we routed the Taliban approximately five minutes later, Dowd said, “The liberation of Afghanistan is a wonderful thing, of course.” Of course. And something you said we couldn’t do.

“Of course we all agree” always means liberals don’t agree, but are under no illusions about the popularity of what they really believe.

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Deploying The Marines For Gay Rights, Feminism And Peacekeeping (020821)

ON A BREAK from lachrymose accounts of Palestinian women weeping for their children, The New York Times has been trying to induce hysteria over the shocking Bush policy of deploying American troops in order to protect American interests. Such self-interested behavior is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.

The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake. Liberals warm to the idea of American mothers weeping for their sons, but only if their deaths will not make America any safer.

Thus the Times and various McTimes across the nation have touted the idea that invading Iraq “only” to produce a regime change is unjustifiable, contrary to international law, and a grievous affront to the peace-loving Europeans.

As the left’s new pet, Henry No-Longer-a-War-Criminal Kissinger, put it: “Regime change as a goal for military intervention challenges the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. ... And the notion of justified pre-emption runs counter to modern international law, which sanctions the use of force in self-defense only against actual, not potential, threats.”

The idea that America would be transgressing the laws of man and God by invading Iraq (unless and until Saddam nukes Manhattan) is absurd.

Does no one remember Clinton’s misadventure in the Balkans? Liberals loved that war because Slobodan Milosevic posed no conceivable threat to the United States. To the contrary, as President Clinton put it: “This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain; we seek no political advantage.”

Deposing Milosevic, Clinton explained, vindicated no national interest, but was urgent because it was akin to stopping a “hate crime.” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said our purpose in the Balkans was “ending ethnic strife” and creating “multiethnic societies.”

One searches in vain for some description of an American interest in the Balkans.

Instead, Milosevic was denounced — by Clinton, Albright, Tony Blair and the whole croaking chorus — for “genocide.” Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, estimated that 100,000 Albanian civilians “may have been murdered.”

Liberal enthusiasts for our “humanitarian” war in the Balkans, it turned out, were over-hasty in their use of the word “genocide” in connection with Milosevic. In the end, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found fewer than 3,000 bodies, most of them men of military age.

Commentators were soon rushing in to explain that these “new details” did not change the fact that Milosevic had engaged in ethnic cleansing and the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

That doesn’t make Milosevic a hero, but he’s a piker compared to Saddam, who has gassed tens of thousands of his own people and killed almost a million enemy troops in the war with Iran. Liberals oppose a war with Iraq, despite Saddam’s far more impressive credentials as a mass murderer, because acting against Saddam is in the self-interest of the United States.

The left’s theory of a just war is that: (1) military force must never be deployed in America’s self-interest; and (2) we must first receive approval from the Europeans, especially the Germans. (Good thing we didn’t have that rule in 1941!)

By liberal logic, preventing Saddam Hussein from nuking Manhattan is not sufficient justification for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq because the United States has a special self-interest in not being nuked and therefore can’t be trusted.

Similarly, Israel has less claim to act against Yasser Arafat than NATO did against Milosevic because actual Israelis are getting killed by the terror forces they are battling — so they are self-interested. The Times was warmly enthusiastic about Clinton’s humanitarian effort in Kosovo, but is indignant about Israeli self-defense in Gaza.

Moreover, if forced deportation (aka “ethnic cleansing”) is grounds for a war crimes trial of Milosevic, what is Arafat doing when he demands that all Israeli settlements be removed from the disputed territories of the West Bank? Milosevic gets a trial at the Hague for forced deportations. Arafat stages terrorist attacks to compel the forced deportation of Israelis, and he’s a martyr if Israel messes up his office furniture in Ramallah.

The point — which is always the same point — is that we must not protect ourselves but should just let liberals run the world. Liberals believe they are best qualified in war and peace and forced busing because they aren’t going to suffer the consequences. Thus, they can act freely for “humanity.” If it turns sour, like their adventure in Vietnam, they can always drop it and pin the blame on others.

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Battered Republican Syndrome (020828)

FOR MY ESCAPIST summer reading at the beach this week, I’ve been flipping through Sean Hannity’s fabulous new book, “Let Freedom Ring.” It’s a fine book, with many excellent illustrations of how consistently wrong liberals have been for half a century, give or take a few years. But I must take issue with Sean on one point.

Perplexingly, he writes: “The vast majority of liberals are good, sincere, well-meaning people.” This cheery bonhomie is beginning to sound like the mantra about the “vast majority” of Muslims being peaceful. (And has produced the same good results!) I think it’s time to drop the infernal nonsense about liberals being well-intentioned but misguided. In the spirit of Hannityesque magnanimity, I will say that there is only one thing wrong with liberals: They’re no good.

As Hannity notes, liberals never reciprocate the love conservatives keep sending their way. They don’t like us. They don’t even think we’re human. Of this, I am eternally grateful.

Some of the other things liberals believe are:

* to move beyond discrimination, we must discriminate;

* girls would make excellent Marines;

* running gay marriage announcements in the wedding pages will lead to greater acceptance of homosexuality.

They are wrong about everything. Why would anyone want to be liked by these people?

It’s sort of cute when Sean’s hail-fellow-well-met approach toward liberals is greeted with dismissive grunts. For one thing, I think well enough of Sean to believe he doesn’t really mean it. But how many times must we endure a Republican politician droning on about what a fine human being some heinous Democrat is and what a pleasure it was to work with him, only to have the heinous Democrat grudgingly issue some backhanded compliment about the Republican finally seeing the light on this “one issue”?

In the 1996 vice presidential debates, for example, Al Gore said of his opponent Jack Kemp: “Now I want to congratulate Mr. Kemp for being a lonely voice in the Republican Party over the years on this question” of racism and affirmative action. Kemp responded to this demagogic and baseless slander of the Republican Party by saying: “Affirmative action should be predicated upon need, not equality of reward, blah, blah, blah.” Gee, thanks, Jack.

President Bush, too, has repeatedly set himself up as the test case of what happens when you try to play nice with a Democrat. After the dignified staff of the dignified former president trashed the White House on their dignified exit, Bush downplayed the property damage, saying: “There might have been a prank or two. Maybe somebody put a cartoon on the wall, but that’s OK.”

Anyone who knew anyone moving into the Bush White House knew that it was more than a “prank or two.” But instead of stopping while they were ahead, pocketing Bush’s gracefulness and moving on, the Democrats aggressively attacked Republicans for having falsely accused the Clinton staff of trashing the White House. They cited Bush’s magnanimity as evidence that this was a lie. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., demanded an apology from the White House. USA Today ran a snippy article titled “Ex-Clinton staffers on vandalism: Got proof?” Former Clinton press secretary Jake Siewert insinuatingly asked why there were no records of the alleged damage.

And then the full GAO report came back: The Party of the People had done $15,000 worth of property damage to the People’s House. Extend an olive branch to Democrats and they bite your hand off.

Bush has invited Sen. Teddy Kennedy to the White House for movie night (to watch the Kennedy hagiography “Thirteen Days”), brought him over to discuss education several times, named a federal building after one brother and gushingly praised the other.

The adulterous drunk who cheated at Harvard and killed a girl at Chappaquiddick responded to these overtures by attacking Bush. “It takes more than good intentions to make a difference,” Kennedy said. Asked about Bush’s intelligence (a meaningless concept in college admissions but a scientifically provable quality in the cases of Republican presidents and death-row inmates), Kennedy pointedly said only that he found Bush, “engaging and personable.”

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., dismissed Bush’s overtures toward Kennedy as calculated political gamesmanship.

(Pop quiz: Did a Republican or Democrat say this about a member of the opposing party – “Your thoughtfulness truly amazes me. ... Thank you, my friend, for your many courtesies. If the world only knew.” Answer: That was Sen. Trent Lott on Teddy Kennedy.)

When Bush named the Department of Justice building after Robert Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo displayed the renowned Kennedy graciousness by viciously attacking the Bush administration at a pre-dedication ceremony. Noting that her daughter was in the audience, Kennedy Cuomo said: “Kara, if anyone tries to tell you this is the type of justice system your grandpa embraced, you just don’t believe it.”

This is as we have come to expect from a family of heroin addicts, statutory rapists, convicted and unconvicted female-killers, cheaters, bootleggers and dissolute drunks known as “Camelot.” Why would anyone want such people as their “good friends”?

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Murder For Fun and Prophet (020904)

IN “THE TRUST” by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, a fawning historical account of the New York Times and the family behind it, the authors describe how the Newspaper of Record conspired to hide information about the Holocaust:

“A July 2, 1944, dispatch citing ‘authoritative information’ that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported to their deaths and an additional 350,000 were to be killed in the next three weeks received only four column inches on Page 12, while that same day a story about Fourth of July holiday crowds ran on the front page.”

To find out what the enemy is up to in the current war, you keep having to turn to obscure little boxes at the bottom of Page A-9 of the Newspaper of Record.

In a little-noticed story almost exactly one year after Muslims staged the most horrific terrorist attack the world has ever seen, a Muslim en route from Germany to Kosovo emerged from the airplane bathroom and tried to strangle a stewardess with his shoelaces. (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

That story was squirreled away in small box at the very bottom of Page A-9 of the Times. In the entire Lexis Nexis archives, only three newspapers reported the incident. Not one mentioned that the attacker was a Muslim. It was a rather captivating story, too. Earlier in the flight, the Muslim responded to the stewardess’s offer of refreshments by saying, “I’d like to drink your blood.” (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

Also last week, another practitioner of the Religion of Peace, this one with ties to al-Qaida, tried to board a plane in Sweden with a gun. This story did not merit front-page coverage at The New York Times.

On July 4 this year, an Egyptian living in California — who had complained about his neighbors flying a U.S. flag, had a “Read the Koran” sticker on his front door, and expressed virulent hatred for Jews — walked into an El Al terminal at the Los Angeles airport and started shooting Jews. (Not that there’s anything unpeaceful about that.)

The Times casually reported the possibility that his motive was a fare dispute. Four days after the shooting, the story vanished amid an embarrassed recognition of the fact that any Muslim could snap at any moment and start shooting.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (generally found around Page A-12 of the Times), Americans have been cowed into perseverating that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Candid conversations about Islam are beyond the pale in a country that deems Screw magazine part of our precious constitutional freedoms.

If the 9/11 terrorists had been Christians, the shoelace strangler a Christian, the gun-toting Swedish Muslim a Christian, the Los Angeles airport killer a Christian and scores of suicide bombers Christians, I assure you we would not be pussyfooting around whether maybe there was something wrong with Christianity.

In a fascinating book written by two Arab Muslims who converted to Christianity, Ergun Mehmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner give an eye-opening account of Islam’s prophet in “Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs.”

Citing passages from the Hadith, the collected sayings of Muhammad, the Caners note that, by his own account, the founder of Islam was often possessed by Satan. The phrase “Satanic Verses” refers to words that Muhammad first claimed had come from God, but which he later concluded were spoken by Satan.

Muhammad married 11 women, kept two others as concubines and recommended wife-beating (but only as a last resort!). His third wife was 6 years old when he married her and 9 when he consummated the marriage.

To say that Muhammad was a demon-possessed pedophile is not an attack. It’s a fact. (And for the record, Timothy McVeigh is not the founder of Christianity. He wasn’t even a Christian. He was an atheist who happened to be a gentile.)

Muslims argue against the Caners’ book the way liberals argue against all incontrovertible facts. They deny the meaning of words, posit irrelevant counterpoints, and attack the Caners’ motives.

Ibrahim Hooper, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says that by “6 years old” the Hadith really means “16 years old” and “9” means “19” — numbers as similar in Arabic as they are in English. Hooper also makes the compelling argument that the Caner brothers — who say they wrote their book out of love for Muslims whom they want to see in heaven — are full of “hate.”

Other Islamic scholars concede the facts but argue that Muhammad’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl was an anomaly. Oh, OK, never mind. Still others explain that Muhammad’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl was of great benefit to her education and served to reinforce political allegiances.

So was she really 16, or was it terrific that he had sex with a 9-year-old to improve her education? This is like listening to some Muslims’ earlier argument-in-the-alternative that the Zionists attacked the World Trade Center, but America brought the attack on itself anyway.

Muhammad makes L. Ron Hubbard look like Jesus Christ. Most people think nothing of assuming every Scientologist is a crackpot. Why should Islam be subject to presumption of respect because it’s a religion? Liberals bar the most benign expressions of religion by little America. Only a religion that is highly correlated with fascistic attacks on the U.S. demands their respect and protection.

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So Three Arabs Walk Into A Bar ... (020918)

AN AMERICAN CITIZEN overheard three Muslims at a Shoney’s restaurant laughing about Sept. 11 over breakfast.

“If people thought Sept. 11 was something, wait till Sept. 13.”

“Do you think that will bring it down?”

“Well, if that won’t bring it down, I have contacts. I’ll get enough to bring it down.”

Patriot Eunice Stone took down their license plate numbers and called the police as the mirthful Muslims left. (I’d give you the names, but they’re too complicated. There’s a reason they use numbers at Guantanamo.) Despite the racist hysteria sweeping the nation, the police did not rush out and start rounding up Arabs. They interviewed Stone in person to evaluate her credibility and corroborate her story.

That night, a little after midnight, one of the two cars being driven by the Muslims ran a toll booth — at least according to everyone but these beacons of truth. Law enforcement officials soon descended on the cars. According to accounts in The New York Times, the men were uncooperative, refused to answer basic questions, gave false information and told contradictory stories. A bomb-sniffing dog reacted to the presence of explosives in both vehicles. After a careful search, however, no explosives were found and the men were released.

Naturally, therefore, the men and their families accused Americans, especially Southerners, of being ignorant racists. “Just because of the way we look or the way we choose to live our lives, we’re persecuted,” said the sister of one. Demonstrating her own open-mindedness, she explained the entire incident by saying, “Unfortunately, they stopped in a restaurant in Georgia.” No prejudice in that.

It’s interesting that the Muslims’ denial of Stone’s account was instantly and universally treated as having precisely the same credibility as Bill Clinton denying he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Even the Islamic Al Sharptons simply assume these guys are lying. The Muslims now say they didn’t do it. Their defenders say they were joking. (Who knew the Religion of Peace was so darn funny? Did you hear the one about the release of VX gas in Disneyland?)

By my count, the Muslims have given at least five versions of what happened. Eunice Stone has given one consistent story. She has been interrogated by law enforcement officials and is corroborated by another witness.

According to the Boston Globe, the Three Stooges first told law enforcement officers they did it on purpose. Stone, they said, was watching them too closely and this got the poor little darlings’ undies in a bundle. So they decided to scare her. One year after Muslims murdered thousands of people on American soil, evidently it’s rude to look at three Muslim men decked out in Arabic garb.

Next, the Muslims told reporters that Stone had “put a little salt and pepper into her story.” A stunned CNN correspondent blurted out: “Salt and pepper?” He reminded them what Stone had heard them say. “Well, yes, whatever,” came the reply.

Third, they tried out the hysterical-woman defense — used to great effect by Democrats in the Clinton era. One of the Muslims tauntingly demanded to know “how many other people witnessed this event that supposedly took place, first of all?” Well, at least one other person. Stone’s son was there and he heard the conversation exactly the same way. He just thought the men were playing his mother and him for suckers. (The Muslims might want to try the Clintonian “she wants to write a book” defense.)

Fourth, the Muslims leapt to their very favorite explanation, the one they haul out at the slightest provocation for almost any occasion: Pogrom-oriented Americans were victimizing them. In a stirring sermon, one of the Arabs advised Americans to “read about other people and read about what they believe before we jump to conclusions.”

Yes, it’s manifestly absurd for anyone to think Muslims might blow something up. In point of fact, it is only by not reading that Americans have been deluded into spouting the Soccer-Momism about Islam being a “religion of peace.” Actually, reading would provide dozens upon dozens of contrary examples from the last year alone.

While I could be jumping the gun — the night is still young — it now appears that their final answer is: They were talking about a car. They didn’t say anything about 9/11 or 9/13, but the “bring it down” bon mot referred to bringing a car down to Florida. This occurred to them only after meeting with their lawyers. Oh, OK.

No one in the press has bothered to investigate the “car” story further. No one believes them, so what’s the point? It would be like chasing down Gennifer Flowers to ask her if it really happened only “once.”

Non-terrorist Muslims are crying wolf when they play these games — talking about blowing up buildings in restaurants, taking a lighter to their sneakers on commercial aircraft, and spending a long time shaving in airplane bathrooms. Intentionally or not, they are giving the real terrorists a cushion for the next attack.

Instead of preying on America’s hatred of prejudice, these aspiring Scottsboro Boys should capitalize on America’s capacity for forgiveness, admit they did something really stupid, and stop lying.

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Dems to Torch: Only Crooks Who Can Win (021002)

DEMOCRATIC SEN. ROBERT TORRICELLI’S announcement that he was pulling out of the New Jersey Senate race this week looked like a confession of guilt in a Soviet show trial. In the reflection of his dewy eyes, you could almost see Terry McAuliffe mouthing the words to him from the audience. Especially the part where he paid tribute to the great Bill Clinton, to whom Torricelli evidently owes his deeply ingrained sense of ethics.

Torricelli will leave public office with just the clothes on his back, a Rolex watch and other assorted jewelry, a TV set, a couple of racks of Italian suits, some Jets tickets, a grandfather clock and three paper sacks filled with small, unmarked bills.

But the Democrats had no qualms with the gifted senator (get it?) until he fell behind in the polls. Only then did the call come for Torricelli to withdraw. It had to be done. A woman’s right to kill a child is on the line! If Torricelli loses, the Senate could tip to the Republicans, which would be a disaster of unspeakable consequence.

Specifically, Democrats will not be able to obstruct the president in performing his constitutional duty to appoint judges. A vacancy on the Supreme Court could materialize and, against overwhelming historical odds, Bush’s appointee might be one of five votes to strike down Roe v. Wade. Then – God forbid – the public would be allowed to vote on an important issue! In some of the less-enlightened states, the public might not recognize the fundamental human right to suck the brains out of little babies.

Apart from treason, this is all the Democratic Party stands for anymore.

Republicans can only marvel at the Democrats’ gall and Stalinist party discipline. Vernon Jordan is probably on the phone to Revlon right now trying to get Torricelli that nice job once designated for Monica. If Republicans played like Democrats, President Bush would have offered Torricelli an ambassadorship not to withdraw from the race.

The Democrats’ 11th-hour switch is in violation of state election law, which puts a 51-day limit on withdrawing from an election. This is not a random filing requirement. Torricelli’s Republican opponent, Douglas R. Forrester, has designed an entire campaign – polls, advertisements, issues – on the assumption that he was running against a specific candidate. As soon as his campaign against that candidate began to work and he pulled ahead, Democrats switched the candidate.

One may assume that violating the law did not even break the Democrats’ stride. The nettlesome part must have been explaining to Torricelli that he was to be replaced by former Sen. Frank Lautenberg – whom Torricelli famously, and not without justice, despises.

This entire spectacle is a sham. If Lautenberg is elected, he will resign so that the Democratic governor can appoint a replacement. Torricelli was a place-holder for the campaign, and now Lautenberg will be a place-holder for the election.

Democrats wail about every vote counting when they need to steal votes after an election. But in New Jersey they won’t even tell the voters who the candidate is. If Democrats could get away with it, they’d claim to be running “Ronald Reagan” in all elections and then fill the seats with the equivalent of James Carville.

(Perhaps the Democratic governor could recycle another of his appointees, New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka, who has been causing a stir lately with poems about how the Jews bombed the World Trade Center.)

When Strom Thurmond was approximately 150 years old, the Republicans couldn’t get him to resign just two years early to ensure that a Republican governor would appoint his successor. Republicans couldn’t even get all Republican senators on board to remove a Democratic president who was a known felon and probable rapist. Meanwhile, not one Democratic senator diverged from the party line on Clinton.

Democrats insist that their losing candidates be taken off the ballot 38 days before an election – if that will help them win a majority in Congress. They keep dead candidates on the ballot – if that will help them win a majority in Congress. They put conservative candidates on the ballot in the South and Midwest – if that will help Democrats win a majority in Congress.

Two days before Torricelli “decided” to pull out of the New Jersey race, Patsy Mink, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, died of pneumonia. Unlike Torricelli, Mink is evidently irreplaceable. The Democrats have insisted that her name remain on the ballot. It will cost the taxpayers of Hawaii millions of dollars to run a special election if she wins.

When Democratic Senate candidate Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash just three weeks before the 2000 election, his wife, Jean, volunteered to be appointed to the seat if he won. Carnahan was behind in the polls before the plane went down, but in an outpouring of sympathy for the grieving widow, the dead man won an upset victory.

Now, two years later, the widow is again campaigning on the slogan: “Keep the flame alive.” That’s considered a good issue in a Senate campaign. Talking about the war is a dirty campaign trick.

While Democrats encourage voters to ignore the Democrats’ position on the war in the upcoming congressional elections and instead to concentrate on tiny local issues – such as sympathy for the candidate’s deceased husband – it is they who have nationalized all congressional elections. As the New Jersey scam proves, it’s all about control of Congress.

In a gallant statement celebrated as The New York Times’ Quote of the Day, Torricelli said: “I will not be responsible for the loss of the Democratic majority in the United States Senate.” He also won’t end up on the Clinton death list now either. Nor will Saddam Hussein if Democrats have their way. The only items remaining on the Democrats’ death list are honest elections and a million unborn babies.

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Media Muslim Makeovers! (021030)

AFTER ALL THE speculation about the sniper terrorizing Maryland and Virginia, at last we have some cold hard facts. He is a Muslim. He converted to Islam 17 years ago. He changed his name to John Muhammad. He belonged to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. He cheered the terrorist attack of Sept. 11. He registered his getaway vehicle with the DMV on the anniversary of Sept. 11 – writing down the time of registration as 8:52 a.m.

Naturally, therefore, the mainstream media have decided the crucial, salient fact about sniper John Muhammad is that he is a Gulf War veteran. Thus, the New York times described the snipers as: “John Allen Muhammad, 41, a Gulf War veteran, and John Lee Malvo, 17, a Jamaican.”

They are now hot on the trail of whether Osama bin Laden ever served with the U.S. military in the Gulf War.

“The good part of being a Democrat is that you can commit crimes, sell out your base, bomb foreigners, and rape women, and the Democratic faithful will still think you’re the greatest.”

To review recent events, last year, 19 Muslims slaughtered thousands of Americans on U.S. soil. Since then, one Muslim tried to blow up a U.S. commercial jet with a shoe bomb and another Muslim shot up Los Angeles airport. The Religion of Peace has also been active abroad, decapitating an American journalist and blowing up a French tanker. In the last few weeks alone, Muslims bombed a nightclub in Bali and were narrowly prevented from slaughtering hundreds of theater-goers in Moscow.

Inasmuch as the nation is at war with Islamic terrorists, you might think it would be of passing interest that the sniper is a Muslim. But you need a New York Times decoder ring to figure out that GULF WAR VETERAN John Muhammad is a Muslim. The main clue is the Times’ repeated insistence that Islam had absolutely nothing to do with the shootings.

Wrestling with the freakish development that a practitioner of the Religion of Peace is a killer, the Times has even rushed to print with the completely unsubstantiated speculation that John Muhammad had recently rejected Islam. Experts explained that a “rapid and bizarre change in religious beliefs” is common among “serial killers.” One doctor said a change in religious beliefs before committing violent crimes is “a fairly well-known phenomenon in clinical psychiatry,” adding that he “was not diagnosing Mr. Muhammad’s condition.”

His condition? He’s a Muslim. That’s his condition and his diagnosis. It may be time to update the DSM-IV by adding “Jihad Impulse-Control Disorder” to its index of official diagnoses.

In addition to copious articles intimating that John Muhammad was practically not even a Muslim, the media have universally concluded that there is “no evidence” connecting him to al-Qaida. Of course, it will be difficult to find any evidence, having instantly pronounced the case closed.

In one hard-hitting investigative piece on Muhammad, for example, the Times produced amazing details from his life, including conversations with relatives, neighbors, friends and ex-girlfriends. The article droned on about how he met one ex-girlfriend – her job, her hobbies, her hopes and dreams. But when she said, “We stopped talking after he asked me about religion,” the Times dropped the subject and moved on to the next topic.

After weeks of blithe theorizing that the sniper was an “angry white male” – based on invidious and offensive stereotypes – aren’t we entitled to a little theorizing about Muhammad’s terrorist ties? There is surely more evidence that he was a member of al-Qaida than that he abandoned Islam before carrying out the sniper attacks.

Emerging as al-Qaida’s leading spokesman in America, the Times has also blacked out the information that the terrorists who seized a Moscow theater last week were practitioners of the Religion of Peace.

I note again: America is at war with Islamic fanatics. But in a prolix front-page article about the “hostage siege” in Russia, the Times referred to the Islamic fanatics who stormed the theater exclusively as the “captors,” the “separatists” and the “guerrillas.” One searches in vain for a clear statement that the Moscow hostage crisis was yet another enterprise of the Religion of Peace.

The only hint that the “captors” were even Muslims was the Times’ dismissive description of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reaction to the terrorists’ demands. Instead of acquiescing, Putin “cho(se) to cast the rebels as international Islamic terrorists.” The Times knows a cheap political ploy when it sees one.

In one of the oddest attempts to soften depictions of Islam – the one religion the media respects – the Times has apparently banned the word “burka” from its pages. (Burkas have gotten such a bad name recently!) Instead, one reads only about the “burka-style gowns” of the Islamic terrorists in Moscow or the “burka-like robes” of women in Bahrain. (How about: The swastika-like adornment on the skinhead’s forearm.)

Not to be outdone by the Times, CNN has valiantly insisted on calling John Muhammad by his Christian name. The night the snipers’ names were first released, CNN’s Jeanne Meserve repeatedly called Muhammad two names he does not answer to: “Here are the names. John Allen Williams, aka Muhammad Williams, and also a John Lee Malvo.” Williams isn’t his name. It’s not even “Muhammad Williams.” It is John Allen Muhammad.

After assuring viewers “we will deal with this carefully,” Aaron Brown summed up Meserve’s report, saying, “We will say again that these two men, John Allen Williams and John Malvo – and I’m not clear on the spelling on Malvo ...” While telling whoppers about Muhammad’s name, he’s fretting about spelling issues.

The next night Brown slipped and mistakenly called Muhammad by his actual name. He was quickly corrected by Kelli Arena:

BROWN: “And then it was sometime later that they got the second name, Muhammad or Williams, I guess.”

ARENA: “Right, Williams.”

Perhaps CNN should go whole hog and start describing Muhammad as a member of the “religious right” whose name is “Jerry Falwell.”

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The Democratic Party: The Gift That Keeps On Giving! (021113)

AFTER LAST WEEK’S drubbing in the midterm elections, the Abortion Party (formerly known as the Democratic Party) is looking for direction. Happily, both the party brass and base are coalescing around the idea that the Democrats were not adequately insane.

Thus, for example, discussing the Democrats’ bloodbath on National Pubic Radio, Robert Kuttner said the Democrats had “blurred their differences with President Bush on key issues like whether to have a tax cut ... whether to have a social outlay that benefits ordinary people. They tried to blur their differences with the president on the war ...”

I can only say: Get that man a microphone! I wholeheartedly agree. What this last election proves, as the New York Times has clearly explained, is that the people want expensive ‘60s-style government programs, a mammoth tax increase, a depleted, anemic military and an enormous welfare state. (Duh.)

Hauling poor old Walter Mondale out of retirement to defend Jimmy Carter’s record was definitely a step in the right direction. (New slogan idea – “The Democratic Party: The Gift That Keeps On Giving!”) But it’s not enough. In the interest of good sportsmanship, I have some other suggestions to help the Democrats clarify their differences with the Republicans.

First, the Democratic Party needs to have a lot more anti-war rallies in which Jesse Jackson embraces Ramsey Clark and liberals go around calling one another “comrade.” The public cries out for the opinions of doddering old Stalinists in berets. Do not fall for the canard about left-wing kooks undermining the work of liberals who look normal.

That’s what Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., thought, and look what happened to him. Of the three Democrats arguably responsible for the election fiasco – Terry McAuliffe, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt – surely the least culpable was Gephardt, the original phony “NASCAR Democrat.” But picking up on the Clinton strategy of blame the innocent and promote the guilty, only Gephardt resigned.

Second, the Democrats definitely need to speak out more forcefully against the Boy Scouts. So far, their hatred of the Boy Scouts has been frankly weak-kneed. Two years ago, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., introduced a bill to revoke the Boy Scouts 84-year-old federal charter because they discriminate against gays. Despite the votes of several Democrats, the bill was narrowly rejected in a 362-12 vote.

It’s a hopeful sign that Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is on track to succeed Gephardt as House minority leader. She signed a letter to President Clinton frantically urging him to resign as honorary president of the Boy Scouts. But to really uncompact the Democrats’ message, they need to take a two-fisted approach toward this wholesome, all-American organization. This is no time for subtlety: The Democrats need to present a clear alternative. Demand that the Boy Scouts be outlawed. Go after the Boy Scouts like you’re going after the Klan!

Third, there is still plenty of room to curry more favor with the teachers’ unions. Democrats should start demanding really, REALLY small class sizes. Right now the critical ratio is supposed to be 20 students to 1 teacher. Hundreds of studies have failed to produce any correlation between class size and student achievement. In fact, the United States has far smaller class sizes than Japan and far worse test scores.

But don’t let that slow you down! A clear message for the Democratic Party is at stake. Democrats need to start demanding one teacher, one teacher’s assistant, one backup teacher’s assistant and one auxiliary backup teacher’s assistant for every student. Instead of a ratio of 20 students to 1 teacher, they should insist on .03 students for every teacher.

Fourth, it’s time to roll out Hillary’s national health-care plan again. Desperate times call for desperate measures. But this time, it should not be limited to American citizens. Let the Republicans oppose extending a prescription-drug program to the citizens of all nations!

Fifth, it’s not enough to oppose a missile-defense system because it “won’t work.” Everyone knows Democrats haven’t the first idea how a squirt gun operates, much less complicated missile technology. It’s time to oppose Star Wars on the grounds that – even if it works – it will protect only the top 1% of earners.

Sixth, the Muslim snipers terrorizing Maryland and Virginia present a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to promote voter registration for felons. Now is the time to rush Jesse Jackson to their holding cells with voter-registration cards. Also, the lead gunman was 17 years old. Refer to him as a “child” while hysterically denouncing the death penalty for “juveniles.” Perhaps the French could even make the younger sniper an honorary citizen, like Mumia. I only regret that Leonard Bernstein isn’t around to throw a cocktail party for them.

Finally, as Hillary Kessler-Godin (New York!) wrote in a letter to the New York Times last Thursday: “The party needs to bring out the two best weapons in its arsenal, Bill and Hillary Clinton.” No question about it. In fact, it ought to be part of the Democratic Party platform that Bill Clinton is required to campaign with every Democratic candidate running for any office in the land. Also, Ms. Kessler-Godin has to start attending the anti-war rallies.

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Journalism: Where Even The Men Are Women (021231)

MOST JOURNALISTS are so stupid, the fact that they are also catty, lazy, vengeful and humorless is often overlooked. I generally avoid mentioning even widely published lies about me, or I’d never have time to do the things that provoke liberals to lie about me. But inasmuch as one of the media’s favorite pastimes is to invent inane quotes and attribute them to me, I thought we could use a few examples to probe the need for lithium among the scribbling profession.

One apocryphal quote that has long perplexed me was the one falsely attributed to me in Salon.com by Christina Valhouli, renowned expert on “fat farms” and “squishy tummies.” (See www.curve-film.com.) What I never said, but fat-farm expert Valhouli thinks I should have said, and that has now appeared in the Washington Monthly, The Washington Post and hundreds of Web sites, is this: “Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let’s just call it for what it is. They’re whores.” (Aren’t all women somewhat similar “from the waist down”? No wonder liberals are so eager for sex education classes.)

I have wracked my brain to understand why a fat-farm expert and “plus size” historian would do me such a bad turn. Readers? Anyone?

One of my favorite fabricated statements was the one created for me by Andrew Grossman of The Hollywood Reporter. He was reporting an exchange on the “Today” show about my 9/11 column in which I said of the terrorists and their sympathizers: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” “Today” host Katie Couric asked me if I thought that was the best way to battle terrorism.

Here is my precise answer: “Well, point one and point two, by the end of the week, had become official government policy. As for converting them to Christianity, I think it might be a good idea to get them on some sort of hobby other than slaughtering infidels. I mean, perhaps that’s the Peace Corps, perhaps it’s working for Planned Parenthood, but I’ve never seen the transforming effect of anything like Christianity.”

Grossman’s full account of this exchange in The Hollywood Reporter was: “‘Do you still believe that’s the best way to fight terrorism?’ Couric demanded. That quote was taken out of context, Coulter insisted.”

My parents are still waiting for the day that I formulate an argument as succinct and elegant as: “That was taken out of context. Now I’ll go back to eating my turkey.” Even my worst enemies would not believe I was a nonparticipant in an argument about me. This is the form of stupidity I admire the most: How should I know how to work Lexis Nexis? Apart from being a college professor, there is no easier job in the universe than being a journalist. For 99.999% of writers, there is no heavy lifting, no physical danger, no honest day’s work. Andrew Grossman has found a way to make it even easier. No research!

At the other end of the spectrum are energetic journalists who missed the class on “editing.” They think all Ann Coulter quotes are one long ticker tape that may be cut up and strung together at random to produce any imaginable point.

On Dec. 8, 1998, the topic on “Rivera Live” was how long an impeachment trial would take. Alan Dershowitz said it would take up to 10 months. Geraldo Rivera said three months. Lawyer Roy Black offered the important and persuasive point that “people with a brain” wanted me to stop talking.

This is the relevant exchange about the length of the impeachment trial (which took about one week):

MS. COULTER: The idea that a Senate trial would go on and on and on is absurd. It would take about a week. ...

PROF. DERSHOWITZ: Can you make a tape of that? Yeah, Geraldo, make a tape of that and replay that over and over again as we get into the sixth week, the 10th week, the 20th week, the 30th week, the 40th week. We’ll have Ann Coulter saying, “It will take a week. It will take a week.”

Ms. COULTER: Well, I don’t know. So far, I could be quoted back to myself many times, like on the Secret Service privilege, the attorney-client privilege, the dead man’s privilege. Really, my track record is pretty good on predictions.

On another TV show the following March, about the time Hillary Clinton was first thinking about running for Senate and her presumed opponent was Rudolph Giuliani, I said I thought Whitewater would prevent Hillary from challenging Giuliani. Now we’ll never know.

The Washington Monthly reported my quotes as: “I think (Whitewater)’s going to prevent the first lady from running for Senate. ... My track record is pretty good on predictions.”

They get an A for effort on that one. Little Andrew Grossman wouldn’t even look up the show he was writing about. These people found two different quotes, in two different places, on two different TV shows, on two different topics, three months apart, and patched them together without dates to try to make a monkey out of me. I’ve also said “yes.” How about stringing these sentences together to make me look brilliant: Will Jimmy Carter win the Nobel Peace Prize, Madonna make a movie that bombs and North Korea develop nuclear weapons? Ann Coulter: “Yes.” I think I’m owed that.

Finally, for an example of journalists’ fine-tuned sense of humor, the winner is this e-mail sent out by CBSNews.com a few weeks ago, which requires no comment: “Quote of the Day: ‘I’m just glad Strom Thurmond isn’t around to see this.’ — conservative syndicated columnist Ann Coulter’s take on the Trent Lott controversy. At last check by CBS News, the world’s most famous 100-year-old was doing fine.”

From their commitment to exactitude to their terrific sense of humor, all of the feminists’ very best qualities now dominate the profession of journalism. Journalists’ quotes are as accurate as feminists’ statistics about anorexia.

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Axis Of Stupidity (030108)

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH included North Korea in the axis of evil last year, foreign policy experts concluded that he was a moron. On the basis of years of scholarship and close study, the experts pointed out that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were — I quote — “different countries.” As Tony Cordesman, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained, “these are three very different countries here.” USA Today sniffed that there was no axis because, “The countries have more differences than similarities.” Koreans don’t even look like Iranians.

Moreover, as the ponderer class repeatedly reminded us, President Clinton had struck up a brilliant agreement with the North Koreans in 1994, with guidance from Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter. The deal consisted of this fair trade: The Clinton administration promised North Korea 500,000 tons of fuel oil annually and $4 billion to construct a pair of nuclear reactors for “electricity”; in exchange, North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

We were assured that the North Koreans had been peaceful little lambs since then. As Clinton himself said of North Korea, “I figure I left the next administration with a big foreign policy win.” Alas, he said, Bush had squandered that “win.” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, concurred: “When we left office, we left on the table the potential of a verifiable agreement to stop the export (from North Korea) of missile technology.”

USA Today said that “even critics concede the regime seems to have kept its promises so far regarding nuclear weapons and missile tests.” But Bush had botched the peace agreement with his “hot-war posturing” — “a simplistic policy of hubris that alienates allies and inflames problems that can be managed more benignly.”

The principal area of disagreement among the ponderers was what on earth could have provoked Bush to call North Korea part of the axis of evil in the first place. One popular explanation was ... Enron! Antony Blinken, a Clinton national security staffer, said Bush’s axis of evil gambit was intended to distract the public’s attention from “things less comfortable, like the economy and the Enron scandal.”

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, took a break from denouncing America’s treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo to opine that “Bush’s State of the Union speech was best understood by the fact that there are mid-term congressional elections coming up in November.”

Robert Scheer wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s axis of evil drivel was the “rationale for a grossly expanded military budget.” Throwing North Korea into the mix was an obvious scam, Scheer said, because, “North Korea is a tottering relic of a state whose nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled leadership of the South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal.”

And then in October 2002, the North Koreans admitted that immediately after signing Clinton’s 1994 “peace” agreement, they had set to work building nuclear weapons. A few months after that, U.S. intelligence forces tracked an unmarked ship carrying Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen.

It was beginning to look like an “axis of evil.” The experts had never paused to consider the possibility that Bush had called North Korea part of an “axis of evil” because North Korea was part of an axis of evil.

With impeccable timing, just two weeks before North Korea admitted it had been feverishly developing nuclear weapons since the mid-’90s, New York Times columnist Bill Keller snootily referred to North Korea as among “the countries the White House insists on calling the axis of evil.”

A week later — or one week before North Korea owned up to its nuclear weapons program — Keller’s op-ed rival at the Times, Nicholas Kristof, wrote: “In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military confrontation with North Korea. ... In retrospect, it is clear that the hawks were wrong about confronting North Korea. Containment and deterrence so far have worked instead, kind of, just as they have kind-of worked to restrain Iraq over the last 11 years, and we saved thousands of lives by pressing diplomatic solutions.”

Instead of owning up to their ludicrous attacks on Bush and unrestrained praise for Clinton’s “peace” agreement, the ponderers once again concluded that Bush was a moron. Bush, it seems, had somehow provoked the North Koreans to build nuclear weapons by being mean to them. Robert J. Einhorn, who helped negotiate Clinton’s masterful 1994 peace deal, said Bush’s “tough rhetoric” had “unnerved the North Koreans.” Derek Mitchell, another veteran of the Clinton administration, agreed: “We did call them the ‘axis of evil.’”

Time magazine was a rare voice of honesty amid the claptrap. “In January, Bush said the three states were seeking weapons of mass destruction and posed a grave and growing danger.” On the evidence, Time said, “he’s right.”

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Democrats Don’t Have The Constitution For Racial Equality (030122)

ALL THE BLATHER about the University of Michigan race discrimination case has at least proved one thing: The Supreme Court’s abandonment of legal reasoning has taken the public by storm! Now everyone treats constitutional law as if it is an ongoing referendum about various public policy issues. Pundits simply assume state colleges are allowed to create a racial stew. It’s just a question of whether this or that system is desirable as a public policy matter. We hear about stigmas, legacies, SAT scores, athletes – all of which have nothing to do with the Constitution.

Even the wackiest Supreme Court rulings always make a big show of pretending to consult the Constitution before announcing, for example, that Christmas displays must have a particular ratio of reindeer to virgins. I don’t know whom the Supreme Court thought it was fooling, but Americans were not fooled. The Growing Constitution has grown into a collection of primal urges, devoid of law. People believe their wild irrational appetites should find expression in Supreme Court opinions. We await Supreme Court rulings like primitives waiting for a wart healer’s cure. Liberals love this system of pretend-law, because it allows them to get away with murder – sometimes literally, as in Roe v. Wade.

Like everyone else in the universe, I too have strong opinions about how universities should run their admissions systems. But there is no Ann’s Opinion Clause in the Constitution. There is, however, an Equal Protection Clause.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits states from discriminating on the basis of race. It says: Nor shall any state “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That amendment grew out of the Republicans’ first big dust-up with the Democrats over race – the Civil War. Then, as now, Democrats demanded the right to discriminate on the basis of race. The 14th Amendment sternly informed Democrats that they would have to stop. Democrats dropped slavery but desperately clung to state-sanctioned race discrimination for another hundred years.

It took a Supreme Court ruling in 1954 and a Republican president sending in the National Guard to force Democrats to stop their infernal race discrimination. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause prohibited the states from engaging in race discrimination in education. Democrats responded with massive resistance.

Ten years later, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expanding upon the nondiscrimination principle of the Equal Protection Clause. Among other things, the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits any institution that receives federal funds – i.e., Harvard – from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. Though only a bare majority of Democrats voted for the act, it seemed as if the Democrats were finally going to mend their ways and truly embrace a color-blind society.

Alas, they were just resting up for the next battle. After taking a few years off, the Democrats got back into race discrimination in a big way. They apparently thought they could fool us by switching which race they thought should be discriminated against. It must be something in Democratic genes. They just love race discrimination.

So now we have idiots like Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., saying race discrimination is no different than colleges admitting legacies. One difference is – as Terry Eastland famously said – we didn’t fight a civil war to stop colleges from giving a preference to the children of alumni. But Biden says colleges shouldn’t stop obsessing with race “unless we’re going to eliminate it all, all incentives, like, for example, in the case in Michigan everybody is talking about now. You know you get four points if you’re a legacy ...” Sure, that’s just like getting 20 points for being black.

Biden thinks if he gets applause from a student audience, he must have made a legal argument. He seems to imagine he is actually learning law from watching Court TV. His next irrelevant point was: “Give me a break. I mean how many people would get into Harvard, Yale and the rest of these places if their father had not gone?” There’s an answer to that! This columnist did the math! On the basis of their SAT scores, 82% of legacies admitted to Harvard would have been admitted to Harvard even if they were not legacies. Only 45% of blacks admitted to Harvard would have been admitted to Harvard if they were not black.

But I’ve been tricked into arguing a nonissue by Biden’s imbecility. If colleges wanted to admit only legacies, or only tuba players, or only people who got astonishingly low SAT scores – to ensure some of their graduates would be U.S. senators one day – the Constitution wouldn’t stop them.

What the states, including state colleges, cannot do under the Constitution is discriminate on the basis of race. What even private colleges cannot do under federal law – if they accept federal funds – is discriminate on the basis of race. Neither the Constitution nor federal law says anything about discrimination on the basis of SAT scores, legacies or athletic ability. We’ve had a civil war, a constitutional amendment, a Supreme Court ruling, a National Guard mobilization and a federal civil rights law to try to get the Democrats to stop with the race discrimination. All we can do now is sit back and wait for the wart healers to speak.

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Liberals Trade Crusading Anger For Hardheaded Realism (030312)

SINCE NEW competitive media have forced liberals to confront opposing points of view, they seem to have abandoned emotionalism as their main argument. Their new posture is mock hardheaded realism. Liberals flex their spindly little muscles and announce that everything that used to make them cry – guns, racial profiling, torturing suspects – simply doesn’t work: The fact is, it doesn’t work, this is according to several studies, and no, you can’t see them, why would you ask?

Thus, for example, after decades of womanly hysteria about guns, we started getting statements like this from Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes to Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America: “Let’s talk about some hard and cold facts, Larry. The fact of the matter is, Larry, that the odds that a home will be the scene of a homicide are much greater if there’s a gun in the home.” Soccer moms across America shot up straight at that one and said: I did not know that!

As the inestimable economist John Lott has shown, the study behind this flagrantly dishonest “cold hard fact” assumed that anyone killed by a gun in or near a home where anyone owned a gun was, therefore, killed by “a gun in the home.” The study merely attests to the fact that people who live in high-crime neighborhoods tend to own guns. This is like the joke about diets causing people to be fat because most people on diets are fat. Or, as Lott says, on that theory of causation, hospitals must cause people to die because lots of people who die have been hospitalized recently. (Lott exposes dozens of such phony “studies” and shibboleths about guns in his splendid new book, “The Bias Against Guns.”)

After 19 nearly identical-looking Muslim men hijacked four airplanes and murdered 3,000 Americans, people weren’t in much of a mood for liberal preachiness about racial profiling. So instead of screaming and trying to make Americans feel guilty, liberals took a hardheaded realist approach. Asked if there was anything wrong with ethnic profiling at airports after 9-11, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said: “Yes, it doesn’t work.” Other, better ideas, he said, were face-recognition technology and national ID cards. These would work great – assuming we know who the terrorists are. But if we knew who the terrorists were, the only plane they’d be boarding would be on its way to Guantanamo.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said that using appearance as a factor in screening airplane passengers “reflects not only poor judgment, but poor law enforcement.” Good law enforcement apparently consists of goosing white paraplegics before they fly. On CNN, Juliette Kayyem, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, assured viewers that “no one is disagreeing with” extra scrutiny for potential terrorists. But profiling “won’t work.” Al-Qaida, she said, “exists in places from Algeria to Zimbabwe.” Since we’re in America, wouldn’t it be a big help if we could screen out the Americans? Liberals think “it doesn’t work” has such a nice ring to it that the patent falsity of what they’re saying should not detract from their argument.

After Sen. Teddy Kennedy tried to block federal funding for the government’s program to fingerprint and photograph people entering the country from 25 Muslim nations, his sleazy back-door maneuver was defended on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” by Sarah Eltantawi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Eltantawi said it was a “huge mischaracterization” to think she was going to complain about racial profiling. “That’s not the argument I’m here to make.” To the contrary, her objection – and Kennedy’s objection – was that fingerprinting and photographing immigrants from terrorist-producing countries is “completely inefficient.” And we all know Teddy Kennedy cannot abide inefficiency!

The recent capture of al-Qaida leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has led to an epidemic of “it doesn’t work” claims with regard to torture. Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former legal counsel to the CIA, National Security Agency and State Department, has been quoted as saying, “We don’t use torture because it doesn’t work.” Torture indisputably works when you know you’ve got the right guy. We know who Mohammed is; we know he has information we want. There may be good and sufficient moral reasons for not torturing people for information, but efficacy is not among them.

It’s as if liberals held focus groups on how to best present their ridiculous ideas and were told: Passion you’ve got! But what respondents say you lack is: intellection, thinking things through, understanding elementary human nature, and a basic awareness of what people are like. If conservatives have not yet persuaded liberals to give up on socialism and treason, we have at least gotten them to fake linear thinking. The next hurdle is substance.

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Shock And Awe Campaign Routs Liberals (030409)

LIBERALS ARE NO longer a threat to the nation. The new media have defeated them with free speech – the very freedom these fifth columnists hide behind whenever their speech gets them in hot water with the American people. Today, the truth is instantly available on the Internet, talk radio and Fox News Channel. No wonder liberals accuse Matt Drudge of absurd sodomic acts, call Rush Limbaugh a “big fat idiot,” and say “really stupid people” watch Fox News Channel – as anti-war actress Janeane Garofalo said between assuring us that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction.

After the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer, Natalie Maines, informed a concert hall on foreign soil that “just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” the New York Times reported that for several days there was not “a ripple about the remark.”

Then Matt Drudge posted it on his website. The Drudge Report has been getting 11 million hits a day recently. In response to the instant uproar, including radio boycotts and public CD burnings, Maines was forced to issue a written apology for the remark. Then Maines explained it was a “joke,” which is only slightly less enraging than being told to “chill out.” At the Country Music Television awards last Monday, the very mention of the Dixie Chicks prompted booing.

Weeks after the Dixie Chicks imploded, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder showed he’s still got a way with words by repeatedly smashing a George W. Bush mask against the stage during a concert. Predictable heckling and booing broke out – robust even by Pearl Jam concert standards. Vedder asked in astonishment: “You’re booing the story, right? You’re not booing me?” Published claims that dozens of fans walked out at this point seem dubious, since that would require Pearl Jam’s fan base to still number in the dozens.

Vedder continued with a rambling diatribe against the war, during which he announced – in a worldwide exclusive – that next year Americans will no longer be allowed to speak. When someone yelled at him to shut up, Vedder shouted down the dissenters with a microphone and 50,000 amps, saying, “I don’t know if you heard about this thing called freedom of speech, man.” This qualified as one of the most profound public statements ever punctuated with the term “man.”

Soon, Vedder was backpedaling faster than a Dixie Chick: “Just to clarify ... we support the troops.” To prove it, he cited his short haircut: “How could we not be for the military? I mean, look at this [expletive] haircut.” Vedder said his remarks had been “misconstrued.” The band issued a statement saying Vedder was just talking about “freedom of speech.”

Also celebrating “free speech” recently was Columbia University professor Nicholas De Genova. Speaking at a “teach-in” a few weeks ago, he said patriots were white supremacists and that the “only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.” Most charmingly, De Genova said: “I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus,” referring to the dismembered bodies of American servicemen being dragged through the streets of Somalia in 1993. De Genova was given rousing applause from the college audience when he said: “If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine.”

The speech by this esteemed member of our nation’s higher education system was followed by other Columbia professors, such as Eric Foner, who tepidly took exception only to De Genova’s description of patriots as white supremacists. (Has anything good ever come of a “teach-in”? Even the promisingly titled “die-ins” always fail to deliver.)

The university initially responded to complaints about De Genova by issuing the usual traitors’ dodge: free speech! But the uproar continued, eventually propelling the president of the university, Lee Bollinger, to say that De Genova’s “million Mogadishus” comment “crosses the line.”

Most auspiciously, Peter Arnett was fired from NBC for pinch-hitting for Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s minister of propaganda. Consider that Arnett has retailed propaganda for the Iraqi regime about a “milk factory” being bombed by the Americans in 1991 – and that didn’t get him fired. He has bragged that he would allow American servicemen to die rather than reveal enemy war plans he had acquired as a journalist – that didn’t get him fired. Arnett once falsely reported that the U.S. military used poison gas on American defectors – and then hid behind his producers’ skirts when CNN was forced to retract the report and fire the producers. That didn’t get him fired.

Like Columbia University, NBC initially tried to stand by Tokyo Pete this time, issuing a statement that called his reporting “outstanding” and saying simply that his interview with Iraqi TV “was done as a professional courtesy.” By 7 o’clock the next morning, deluged with thousands of e-mails demanding Arnett’s head, NBC fired him.

Freedom of speech isn’t working out so well for liberals now that they aren’t the only ones with a microphone. It’s not so much fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.

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Liberals Meet Unexpected Resistance (030430)

THOUGH MANY had anticipated a cakewalk for the media in undermining the war on terrorism, instead liberals are caught in a quagmire of good news about the war. Predictions that liberals would have an easy time embarrassing President Bush have met unexpected resistance. They’re still looking for the bad news they said was there. Experts believe the media’s quagmire results from severely reduced troops. The left’s current force is less than half the size of the coalition media that undermined the Vietnam War.

It’s been a tough few weeks all around for the anti-war crowd. On Sunday, the London Telegraph reported that documents had been discovered in Baghdad linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. Hussein and bin Laden had a working relationship as far back as 1998, based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. As we go to print, it’s Day Four of the New York Times’ refusal to mention these documents.

Government documents have also been found in Iraq showing that a leading anti-war spokesman in Britain, Member of Parliament George Galloway, was in Saddam Hussein’s pay. Scott Ritter, former U.N. arms inspector turned peacenik turned suspected pederast, immediately defended Galloway in a column in the London Guardian. With any luck, Tariq Aziz will now step in to defend Ritter.

At least Tariq Aziz knows he lost the war. American liberals are still hoping for a comeback. But the war was so successful, they don’t have any arguments left. They can’t even sound busy. In their usual parody of patriotism, liberals are masters of the long-winded statement that amounts to nothing. They can’t go on TV and say nothing. But all they have are some broken figurines to complain about.

They said chemical weapons would be used against our troops. That didn’t happen. They predicted huge civilian casualties. That didn’t happen. They said Americans would turn against the war as our troops came home in body bags. That didn’t happen. They warned of a mammoth terrorist attack in America if we invaded Iraq. That didn’t happen. Just two weeks ago, they claimed American troops were caught in another Vietnam quagmire. That didn’t happen.

Now the biggest mishap liberals can seize on is that some figurines from an Iraqi museum were broken – a relief to college students everywhere who have ever been forced to gaze upon Mesopotamian pottery. We’re not talking about Rodins here. So the Iraqis looted. Oh well. Wars are messy. Liberalism is part of a religious disorder that demands a belief that life is controllable.

At least we finally got liberals on the record against looting. It seems the looting in Iraq compared unfavorably with the “rebellion” in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. When “rebels” in Los Angeles began looting, liberals said it was a sign of frustration – they were poor and hungry. As someone noted at the time, apparently they were thirsty as well, since they hit a lot of liquor stores. Meanwhile, the Iraqis were pretty careful about targeting the precise source of their oppression. Their looting concentrated on Saddam’s palace, official government buildings – and the French cultural center.

However many precious pots were stolen, it has to be said: The Iraqi people behaved considerably better than the French did after Americans liberated Paris. Thousands of Frenchmen were killed by other Frenchmen on allegations of collaboration with the Nazis. Subsequent scholarship has shown that charges of “collaboration” were often nothing more than a settling of personal grudges and family feuds. This was made simple by the fact that so many Frenchmen really did collaborate with the Nazis. The French didn’t seem to resent the Nazi occupation very much. Nazi occupation is their default position. They began squirming only after Americans came in and imposed democracy on them.

Despondent over the success of the war in Iraq, liberals tried to cheer themselves up with the politics of personal destruction – their second favorite hobby after defending Saddam Hussein. Responding to the question of whether the Supreme Court should hold sodomy to be a fundamental constitutional right, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum made the blindingly obvious point that a general right to engage in consensual sex would logically include adultery, polygamy and any number of sex acts prohibited by the states.

For the limited purpose of attacking Santorum, liberals agreed to stipulate that adultery is bad. After spending all of 1998 ferociously defending adultery as something “everyone” does and “everyone” lies about, liberals claimed to be shocked to the core that anyone would compare homosexuality to such a morally black sin as adultery. (While we’re in a sensitive mood, how about the name “the DIXIE Chicks”? Isn’t that name provocative to African-Americans?)

When you get liberals to come out against both looting and adultery in the same week, you know the left is in a state of total disarray. They shouldn’t feel so bad. Their boys put up a good fight in Iraq for 17 days.

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Global Warming: The French Connection (030528)

INASMUCH AS June is around the corner and it’s still winter, it is time to revisit the issue of “global warming.” A sparrow does not a spring make, but in the Druid religion of environmentalism, every warm summer’s breeze prompts apocalyptic demands for a ban on aerosol spray and paper bags. So where is global warming when we need it?

In 1998, President Clinton denounced Republicans for opposing his environmental policies, citing Florida’s inordinately warm weather: “June was the hottest month they had ever had – hotter than any July or August they had ever had.” This, after the Senate rejected the Kyoto Treaty by the slender margin of 95-0. In fact, all the world’s major industrial powers initially rejected the treaty, including Japan. That’s right: Even Kyoto rejected Kyoto.

That same year, CNN’s Margaret Carlson remarked that when her neighbors experienced temperate weather at Christmas, global warming was the word on everyone’s lips. Adding to the world’s supply of hot air, she said global warming was the big sleeper issue.

Well, this year, Washington, D.C., had the coldest February in a quarter-century. What are the scientific conclusions of Ms. Carlson’s neighbors now? In a single day in February, New York got its fourth-deepest snowfall since 1869. Baltimore got more snow in February than in any other month in recorded history. I wish there were global warming.

In 1995, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a computer model purportedly proving “a discernible human influence on global climate.” According to the U.N., there was not enough evidence to determine if Saddam Hussein was a threat, but the evidence is in on global warming.

The key to the U.N.’s global warming study was man’s use of aerosol spray. You have to know the French were involved in a study concluding that Arrid Extra Dry is destroying the Earth. In a world in which everyone smelled, the French would be at no disadvantage. Aerosol spray. How convenient.

According to global-warming hysterics, global warming would begin at the poles, melt the ice caps, and then the oceans would rise. On the basis of such fatuous theories, in August 1998, the host of NPR’s “Science Friday,” Ira Flatow, told his listeners to look out their windows and imagine the ocean in their own back yards. Explaining that receding glaciers in Antarctica would dramatically lift sea levels, he warned that their grandchildren could be “hanging fishing poles out of New York skyscrapers,” thus qualifying as the world’s all-time greatest “fishing story.”

Since then, evidence disproving “global warming” has been pouring in. God knows how many trees had to be sacrificed to print new data refuting global warming.

In January 2002, the journal Science published the findings of scientists who had been measuring the vast West Antarctic ice sheet. Far from melting, it turns out the ice sheet is growing thicker. The researchers were Dr. Ian R. Joughin, an engineer at the jet propulsion laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, Calif., and Dr. Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

About the same time, the journal Nature published the findings of scientist Peter Doran and his colleagues at the University of Illinois. Rather than using the U.N.’s “computer models,” the researchers took actual temperature readings. It turned out temperatures in the Antarctic have been getting slightly colder – not warmer – for the last 30 years.

The chief scientist for Environmental Defense, Michael Oppenheimer, responded to the new findings by urging caution and warning that “there is simply not enough data to make a broad statement about all of Antarctica.” That’s interesting. We didn’t have to wait for more data when lunatics curtailed the use of nuclear energy in this country on the basis of the movie “The China Syndrome.” That was hard scientific evidence.

We didn’t wait for more data when DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was banned on the basis of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which brainwashed children into believing DDT would kill all the birds. American soldiers in World War II were bathed in DDT. Jews rescued from Nazi death camps were doused in DDT. It was a miracle invention: Tiny amounts of DDT kill disease-carrying insects with no harm to humans, protecting them from malaria, dengue and typhus. But in 1972, the U.S. banned one of the greatest inventions in modern history.

Now environmentalists are in a panic that African nations will use DDT to save millions of lives. Last year, 80,000 people in Uganda alone died of malaria, half of them children. The United States and Europe have threatened to ban Ugandan imports if they use DDT to stop this scourge. Environmentalists would prefer that millions of Africans die so that white liberals may continue gazing upon rare birds.

Liberals don’t care about the environment. The core of environmentalism is a hatred for mankind. They want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living and vegetarianism. Most crucially, they want Americans to stop with their infernal deodorant use.

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We Don’t Care (030604)

SEETHING WITH RAGE and frustration at the success of the war in Iraq, liberals have started in with their female taunting about weapons of mass destruction. The way they carry on, you would think they had caught the Bush administration in some shocking mendacity. (You know how the left hates a liar.)

For the sake of their tiresome argument, let’s stipulate that we will find no weapons of mass destruction – or, to be accurate, no more weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps Hussein was using the three trucks capable of assembling poison gases to sell ice cream under some heretofore undisclosed U.N. “Oil For Popsicles” program.

Should we apologize and return the country to Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons? Should we have him on “Designer’s Challenge” to put his palaces back in all their ‘80s Vegas splendor? Or maybe Uday and Qusay could spruce up each other’s rape rooms on a very special episode of “Trading Spaces”? What is liberals’ point?

No one cares.

In fact, the question was never whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We know he had weapons of mass destruction. He used weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds, against the Iranians and against his own people.

The United Nations weapons inspectors repeatedly found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, right up until Saddam threw them out in 1998. Justifying his impeachment-day bombing, Clinton cited the Iraqi regime’s “nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.” (Indeed, this constitutes the only evidence that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction: Bill Clinton said he did.)

Liberals are now pretending that their position all along was that Saddam had secretly disarmed in the last few years without telling anyone. This would finally explain the devilish question of why Saddam thwarted inspectors every inch of the way for 12 years, issued phony reports to the U.N., and wouldn’t allow flyovers or unannounced inspections: It was because he had nothing to hide!

But that wasn’t liberals’ position.

Liberals also have to pretend that the only justification for war given by the Bush administration was that Iraq was knee-deep in nukes, anthrax, biological weapons and chemical weapons – so much so, that even Hans Blix couldn’t help but notice them.

But that wasn’t the Bush administration’s position.

Rather, it was that there were lots of reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein and none to keep him. When President Bush gave the Hussein regime 48 hours’ notice to quit Iraq, he said: “(A)ll the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end.” He said there would be “no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.”

Liberals kept saying that’s too many reasons. The New York Times’ leading hysteric, Frank Rich, complained: “We know Saddam Hussein is a thug and we want him gone. But the administration has never stuck to a single story in arguing the case for urgent pre-emptive action now.” Since liberals never print retractions, they can say anything. What they said in the past is never admissible.

Contrary to their current self-advertisements, it was liberals who were citing Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction – and with gusto – in order to argue against war with Iraq. They said America would suffer retaliatory strikes, there would be mass casualties, Israel would be nuked, our troops would be hit with Saddam’s chemical weapons, it would be a Vietnam quagmire.

They said “all” we needed to do was disarm him. This would have required a military occupation of Iraq and a systematic inspection of the 1,000 or so known Iraqi weapons sites without interference from the Hussein regime. In other words, pretty much what we’re doing right now.

Remember? That’s why liberals were so smitten with the idea of relying on U.N. weapons inspectors. As their title indicates, “weapons inspectors” inspect weapons. They don’t stop torture, abolish rape rooms, feed the people, topple Saddam’s statues or impose democracy.

In January this year, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof cited the sort of dismal CIA report that always turns up in the hands of New York Times reporters, warning that Saddam might order attacks with weapons of mass destruction as “his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.” He said he opposed invading Iraq as a pure matter of the “costs and benefits” of an invasion, concluding we should not invade because there was “clearly a significant risk” that it would make America less safe.

In his native tongue, weaselese, Kristof claimed he would be gung-ho for war if only he were convinced we could “oust Saddam with minimal casualties and quickly establish a democratic Iraq.” We’ve done that, and now he’s blaming the Bush administration for his own idiotic predictions of disaster. Somehow, that’s Bush’s fault, too. Kristof says Bush manipulated evidence of weapons of mass destruction – an act of duplicity he calls “just as alarming” as a dictator who has weapons of mass destruction.

If Americans were lied to, they were lied to by liberals who warned we would be annihilated if we attacked Iraq. The left’s leading intellectual light, Janeane Garofalo, was featured in an anti-war commercial before the war, saying: “If we invade Iraq, there’s a United Nations estimate that says, ‘There will be up to a half a million people killed or wounded.’” Now they’re testy because they fear Saddam may never have had even a sporting chance to unleash dastardly weapons against Americans.

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I Dare Call It Treason (030625)

THE MYTH OF “McCarthyism” is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren’t hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy’s name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis. As Whittaker Chambers said: “Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.”

At the time, half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy’s charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of “McCarthyism.” They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.

Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party. The Democrats had unpardonably connived with the greatest evil of the 20th century. This could not be nullified. But liberals could at least hope to redeem the Democratic Party by dedicating themselves to rewriting history and blackening reputations. This is what liberals had done repeatedly throughout the Cold War. At every strategic moment this century, liberals would wage a campaign of horrendous lies and disinformation simply to dull the discovery the American people had made. They had gotten good at it.

There were, admittedly, a few rare and striking exceptions to the left’s overall obtuseness to communist totalitarianism. John F. Kennedy’s pronouncements on communism could have been spoken by Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, Truman unquestionably loved his country. He was a completely different breed from today’s Democrats. Through the years, there were various epiphanic moments creating yet more anti-communist Democrats. The Stalin-Hitler pact, Alger Hiss’ prothonotary warbler, information about the purges and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” – all these had their effect.

But after World War II, the Democratic Party suffered a form of what France had succumbed to after World War I. The entire party had lost its nerve for sacrifice, heroism and bravery. Beginning in the ‘50s, there was a real battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late ‘60s, the battle was over. The anti-communist Democrats had lost.

In 1972, George McGovern, darling of left-wing radicals, was the Democratic presidential candidate. Tom Hayden, leader of Students for a Democratic Society and an instigator of the Chicago riots, became a Democratic state senator in California. (In 1968, Staughton Lynd wrote of Tom Hayden: “On Monday, Wednesday and Friday he was a National Liberation Front guerilla, and on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, he ... was on the left wing of the Democratic Party.”) Black Panther Bobby Rush would go on to become a Democratic congressman. Todd Gitlin, a former president of SDS, would soon be a frequent op-ed columnist for the New York Times. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, only 10 Senate Democrats voted with President Bush to use troops against Saddam Hussein. If the old Democratic Party was merely obtuse, the new Democratic Party was a beachhead of domestic anti-Americanism. This was the new Democratic Party.

Clinton was the left’s last best hope for proving they could too handle the presidency. Having tricked the American people into entrusting a Democrat with the White House (on a plurality vote), they had to defend him from any lie, any felony, any reprehensible, contemptible conduct he threw their way. When Clinton first showed his fat oleaginous mug to the nation, the Republicans screamed he was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking flim-flam artist. Had the Republicans turned out to be right again, it would have sounded the death knell for the Democratic Party.

So the Democrats lied. Through their infernal politics of personal destruction, liberals stayed in the game for a few more years.

Unless we fight for proper treatment of history and counter the nonsense images of McCarthy, no history can be safe from the liberal noise machine. Someday, school children will be taught that all of America cringed with terror at Ken Starr, whose evil designs on the nation were frustrated only through the sacrifice of brave liberals. People will have vivid images of the pounding boots of Starr’s subpoena-servers and the Gestapo-like wails of alarms as Ken Starr arrived to kick in the doors of innocent Americans and storm through their bedrooms. It will be the Reign of Terror under Ken Starr.

Bill Clinton will be revered in high school history books as the George Washington of his day who, along with patriots Larry Flynt and James Carville, “saved the Constitution.” He will be honored with a memorial larger than the Washington Monument (though probably with the same general design).

People will believe that. And liberals will continue unabashedly invoking a lie in order to shield their ongoing traitorous behavior.

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Liberal Alternative Patriotism (030702)

ON OUR NATION’S birthday, it is appropriate to honor the five men who did the most to defend our freedom in the last century. The names are easy to remember – they are the five men most loathed by liberals: Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers and Ronald Reagan.

McCarthy died censured and despised at 48 years old, his name a malediction. Hoover is maligned for having been a mad spymaster and is lyingly smeared as a cross-dresser – by people who admire cross-dressers. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. Though persecuted in his day, Whittaker Chambers is not hated today only on a technicality: The MTV generation doesn’t know who he is. They’d hate him too, but it would take research. By contrast, Ronald Reagan has prevailed over the left’s campaign of lies only because the American people do remember him – so far.

Notwithstanding the left’s fantastic lies, these men won a 50-year war because of the abiding anti-communism of the American people. These are the heroes of the Cold War, and all have been personally reviled for their trouble.

The left’s shameful refusal to admit collaboration with one of the great totalitarian regimes of the last century – like their defense of Bill Clinton – quickly transformed into a vicious slander campaign against those who bore witness against them. Caught absolutely red-handed, liberals started in with their typical bellicose counterattacks. Half a century ago, Louis Budenz, an ex-communist informant, warned investigators that if they dared go after the Communist Party, they would be subjected to savage attacks, never “honest rebuttal.” Unless the American people understood that, he said, all was lost.

Absurdly, liberals claim to hate J. Edgar Hoover because of their passion for civil liberties. The left’s exquisite concern for civil liberties apparently did not extend to the Japanese. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese for the internment camps, liberals were awed by his genius. The Japanese internment was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. Joseph Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action – and celebrated foe of “McCarthyism” – supported the internment.

There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment – that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast.

Liberals deemed it appropriate to throw Japanese citizens into internment camps on the basis of no evidence of subversive activity whatsoever. But it was outrageous for the FBI director to spy on high government officials taking their orders from Moscow. As we now know, Hoover didn’t need to engage in much surveillance to know who the Soviet agents were – he already knew from decrypted Soviet cables.

Liberals sheltered communists, Hoover was on to them, so they called him a fag. With precisely as much evidence as they had for McCarthy’s alleged homosexuality, the left giddily “gay”-baited J. Edgar Hoover. Their sensitivity to homophobia was matched only by their sensitivity to the civil rights of Japanese.

While Hoover was alive, any journalist who could have proved he was “gay” would have won a Pulitzer Prize. But they couldn’t get Hoover on a jaywalking charge. Only after he was dead did liberals go hog-wild inventing lurid fantasies about Hoover showing up at Washington cocktail parties in drag (perhaps not recognizing their own Pamela Harriman).

In 2003, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival put on a musical comedy about Hoover’s apocryphal homosexuality in “J. Edgar! The Musical,” written by Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold. While slandering a dead man with impunity, rich celebrities – in Aspen, Colo., no less – paid tribute to their own dauntless courage. For the second year in a row, the festival celebrated the First Amendment, giving its “Freedom of Speech Award” to millionaire leftist Michael Moore, in an event hosted by Joe Lockhart, former press secretary to a president whose IRS audited people who engaged in free speech against him. The executive director of the festival, Stu Smiley, said the purpose of the festival was “to reacquaint ourselves with people who have sacrificed for their right to express themselves.”

Liberals’ conception of sacrifice is rather broad, including:

* to work for up to three weeks for less than $1 million;

* and to not be showered with praise by Veterans of Foreign Wars while burning the American flag.

Americans should thank God that McCarthy, Hoover, Nixon, Chambers and Reagan were men enough to make real sacrifices.

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No Quagmire Here! (030903)

ANOTHER PRESIDENT began a war promising a “chance to test our weapons, to try our energy and ideas and imagination for the many battles yet to come.” He said that as conditions change, “we will be prepared to modify our strategy.” The heralded modifications never came, nor did an end to the war. President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty turned out to be a bigger quagmire than Vietnam. Would that the Democrats would give the war in Iraq as much time to succeed as they are willing to give the “War on Poverty,” now entering its 40th year.

Instead of poor people with hope and possibility, we now have a permanent underclass of aspiring criminals knifing one another between having illegitimate children and collecting welfare checks. It is an ironclad law of economics that if you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it. But liberals were shocked and bewildered to discover that when they subsidized illegitimacy, they got more of it.

The War on Poverty took a crisis-level illegitimacy rate among blacks in the mid-1960s (22%) and tripled it to 69%. It transformed a negligible illegitimacy rate among whites (2%) to emergency proportions (22.5%) – higher than the black illegitimacy rate when Daniel Patrick Moynihan heralded the War on Poverty with his alarmist report on black families, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” (Demonstrating the sort of on-the job-training that has so impressed Hollywood elites, the state with the second highest rate of white illegitimacy is Howard Dean’s Vermont.) Overall, the illegitimacy rate has skyrocketed from about 8% to 33.8%.

If George Bush’s war on terrorism were to go as well as the Democrats’ war on poverty, in a few decades we could have four times as many angry Muslims worldwide plotting terrorist violence against Americans.

Or how about an “exit strategy” for New York City’s war on high rents? Rent control was introduced as a temporary wartime measure during World War II. Sixty years later, the Germans have been subdued – but government bureaucrats in New York are still setting rents, leading to the surplus of affordable housing for which the city is duly famous. The anointed live in lush five-bedroom apartments in marquee buildings for $350 a month while newcomers are forced to bid up the few units in what’s left of the housing market, paying thousands of dollars per month to live in rat-infested tenements.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently upheld a 25-year failed experiment in race discrimination for college admissions. She breezily announced a pull-out date of 2028. Liberals admired O’Connor’s Solomon-like resolution of a festering national problem and did not concern themselves with the absence of an “exit strategy.”

But George Bush – with the widespread support of the American people and the U.S. Congress – acts to take out a lunatic supporting Islamic terrorism, and within six months, all the Democratic presidential candidates are clamoring for an “exit strategy.” Bush should promise the Democrats that there will be peace and democracy in Iraq long before the Democrats conceive of an exit strategy to the war on poverty, the war on high rents, and the war on white kids applying to Michigan Law School.

The party of diversity is in lockstep in supporting all those idiotic programs. They’re working just great. But our servicemen come under attack while clearing out a swamp of murderous fanatics who seek the death of all Americans and the Democrats have had enough.

To be fair, encouraging Democrats to come up with new ideas is fraught with danger. One Democrat who has recently demonstrated her out-of-the-box thinking is Mattie Hunter, a Democratic state senator in Illinois. (You knew she was a Democrat when the New York Times neglected to provide a party affiliation.) After a fired employee returned to the auto supply warehouse in Hunter’s district to gun down six of his former colleagues, she demanded an investigation into ... the circumstances of the gunman’s firing. “How did they do it?” she said. “Did they just say, ‘We’re going to fire you’? Was it done professionally? In today’s day, everyone is under a lot of pressure. When someone loses their job, it’s a shock and tragedy in itself.”

Perhaps Hunter could propose a War on Firing Employees. In 50 years, 69% of all employees will be shooting up their workplaces, but the Democrats will urge patience in working out the bugs.

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Here’s A Traitor! (030917)

DURING MY recent book tour, I resisted the persistent, illiterate request that I name traitors. With a great deal of charity – and suspension of disbelief – I was willing to concede that many liberals were merely fatuous idiots. (In addition, I was loathe to name names for fear that liberals would start jumping out of windows.) But after the Times’ despicable editorial on the two-year anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack, I am prepared – just this once – to name a traitor: Pinch Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times.

To be sure, if any liberal could legitimately use the stupid defense, it is the one Sulzberger who couldn’t get in to Columbia University. At a minimum, Columbia has 400 faculty members who start each day by thinking about how to get their kooky ideas onto the Times’ op-ed page. For an heir to the Times not to attend Columbia, those must have been some low SAT scores.

But the clincher was an editorial on the two-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack, in which the Times endorsed the principle of moral equivalence between the United States and the 9-11 terrorists. In the Times’ meandering, mind-numbing prose, it explained that the terrorists may have slaughtered thousands of Americans in a bloody attack on U.S. soil – but the U.S. has had imperialistic depredations of its own!

By not opposing a military coup by the great Augusto Pinochet against a Chilean Marxist, Salvador Allende, the Times implied, the U.S. was party to a terrorist act similar to the 9-11 attack on America. This is how the Times describes Pinochet’s 1973 coup: “A building – a symbol of the nation – collapsed in flames in an act of terror that would lead to the deaths of 3,000 people. It was Sept. 11.”

Allende was an avowed Marxist, who, like Clinton, got into office on a plurality vote. He instantly hosted a months-long visit from Castro, allowing Castro to distribute arms to Chilean leftists. He began destroying Chile’s economy at a pace that makes Gray Davis look like a piker. No less an authority than Chou En-lai warned Allende that he was pursuing a program that was too extreme for his region.

When Gen. Pinochet staged his coup against a Marxist strongman, the U.S. did not stop him – as if Latin American generals were incapable of doing coups on their own. And – I quote – “It was Sept. 11.” Parsed to its essentials, the Times’ position is: We deserved it.

This from a paper that has become America’s leading spokesman for the deposed Baathist regime in Iraq. Interestingly, we started to lose this war only after the embedded reporters pulled out. Back when we got the news directly from Iraq, there was victory and optimism. Now that the news is filtered through the mainstream media here in America, all we hear is death and destruction and quagmire – along with obsessive references to the date on which Bush declared an end to major combat operations.

See if you can detect a pattern:

* “Since the beginning of the Iraq war, 292 soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Kuwait, including 152 since President Bush declared on May 1 that major American combat operations had ended.” (Sept. 13, 2003)

* “So far, 290 American troops have died in Iraq or Kuwait since the beginning of the Iraq war, including 150 since President Bush declared on May 1 that major American combat operations had ended.” (Sept. 12, 2003)

* “It was impossible to watch Mr. Bush’s somber speech without remembering that four months ago, when the president made his ‘Top Gun’ landing on an aircraft carrier and declared an end to ‘major combat operations,’ ...” (Sept. 8, 2003)

* “The speech was Mr. Bush’s first extended address about Iraq since he declared an end to major combat operations in a May 1 speech.” (Sept. 8, 2003)

* “When President Bush declared an official end to major hostilities in Iraq in May, Reuters moved (a reporter) to Baghdad to give him a safer assignment.” (Sept. 7, 2003)

* “Since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, hundreds of violent and disruptive attacks have been waged by an array of forces ...” (Sept. 7, 2003)

* “Eleven British soldiers have been killed since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.” (Sept. 5, 2003)

Hey – does anyone know when Bush declared major combat operations had ended? Because I think there may have been one article in the sports section of the Times last week that didn’t mention it. The Times is even taking shots at the war in the Arts section, stating authoritatively in a recent movie review: “And with the war in Iraq threatening to turn into a Vietnam-like quagmire ...” (How about getting some decent, impartial reporters embedded at the Times?)

Apparently, the Times’ stylebook now requires all reports of violence anyplace within 1,000 miles of Iraq to be dated from Bush’s speech declaring an end to “major combat” operations. How about dating everything from the number of months since Jayson Blair was fired or the number of years since Pinch Sulzberger got his SAT scores back and realized he wasn’t going to Columbia?

I gather the Times is trying to convey something by the infernal references to Bush’s speech declaring an end to major combat in Iraq – but what? That we haven’t turned a savage fascist nation into a peace-loving democracy overnight? Iraq is considerably better off than Chile was under Salvador Allende – the Times’ second favorite world leader after Saddam Hussein.

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I Guess You’re Right: There Is No Liberal Media Bias (031008)

RESPONSE TO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS OF EDWARD NAWOTKA FOR PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

QUESTION: FRANKEN CLAIMS THAT THERE ARE NUMEROUS FALSEHOODS IN YOUR BOOK, ESPECIALLY BURIED IN THE FOOTNOTES. . . . WHO IS ULTIMATELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ERRORS, YOU, THE PUBLISHER, OR BOTH?

I see we’re off to a good start! In your interview with Al Franken, after suggesting that some readers may want Franken to run for president, you ask him hardball questions like:

— “It’s got to be a little grating to see your book on the same New York Times bestseller list as the Ann Coulter book.”

— “You fact checked Ann Coulter’s book and found a lot of inconsistencies, outright lies, and quotes that are taken out of context. Who is responsible for those kinds of errors, the author or the editors?”

— “How should booksellers deal with this?”

You ask me questions like these:

— “[W]ho is ultimately responsible for the errors [in your book], you, the publisher, or both?”

— “What gives—was this an honest mistake or malfeasance as he suggests?”

— “Why all the name calling?”

Apparently, Ed, it never occurred to you that Franken’s allegations of errors in my book — or “outright lies” as you put it — are false.

It’s interesting that the most devastating examples of my alleged “lies” keep changing. As soon as one is disproved, I’m asked to respond to another. This is behavior normally associated with tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorists. One crackpot argument after another is shot down — but the conspiracy theorists just move on to the next crackpot argument without pause or reconsideration. Certainly without apology.

So before responding to the two alleged “lies” you cite from Franken — the source of all wisdom — I shall run through a few of the alleged “lies” from Franken’s book that I have already been asked to respond to — and which have now been dropped by the Coulter hysterics as they barrel ahead to the next inane charge.

FRANKEN’S VERY FIRST CHARGE AGAINST ME IS THAT I TOLD A REPORTER FROM THE OBSERVER THAT I WAS “FRIENDLY” WITH FRANKEN, WHEN IN FACT, WE ARE NOT “FRIENDLY.”

Needless to say, I never claimed to be friendly with Al Franken. Inasmuch as I barely know Franken, a normal person might have looked at that and realized the reporter misunderstood me. But apparently Franken thinks he has a pretty cool name to drop — the oddest case of reverse name-dropping I’ve ever heard of.

I don’t hear about this “lie” so much anymore.

FRANKEN HYSTERICALLY ACCUSES ME OF “LYING” FOR CALLING MY “ENDNOTES,” “FOOTNOTES” IN INTERVIEWS ON MY BOOK.

Yes, notes at the end of a book are technically “endnotes,” not “footnotes.” Franken will have to take his case up with the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post and the rest of the universe — all of which referred to my 780 endnotes as “FOOTNOTES.” Also God, for inventing the concept of “colloquial speech.”

I don’t hear so much about this “lie” anymore.

FRANKEN CLAIMS I COMPLAIN THAT CONSERVATIVES DON’T GET ON TV ENOUGH.

Inasmuch as I am on TV a lot, this would be an hilarious point. Too bad I never said it. My book Slander — which Franken seems to have gone over with a fine-toothed comb — would have been a good place to make that point if I wanted to make it. Slander contains an entire chapter on the media, and yet I never claim that conservatives are not on TV enough. What I say is: “Democrats in the media are editors, national correspondents, news anchors, and reporters. Republicans are ‘from the right’ polemicists grudgingly tolerated within the liberal behemoth.”

By the way, I also say: “The distinction between opinion journalism and objective news coverage is seemingly impossible for liberals to grasp.” Franken’s absurd description of my point proves it.

I haven’t heard so much about this “lie” anymore.

I CLAIM EVAN THOMAS’S FATHER WAS THE SOCIALIST PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, NORMAN THOMAS.

Franken drones on and on for a page and a half about how Norman Thomas was not Evan Thomas’s father — without saying that he was Evan’s grandfather. This was one of about five inconsequential errors quickly corrected in Slander — and cited one million times by liberals as a “LIE.” Confusing “father” with “grandfather” is a mistake. Franken’s deliberate implication that there was no relationship whatsoever between Norman and Evan Thomas is intentional dishonesty.

I haven’t heard so much about this “lie” anymore.

I INCORRECTLY CLAIMED DALE EARNHARDT’S DEATH WAS NOT MENTIONED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE NYT THE DAY AFTER HIS DEATH.

In my three bestselling books — making the case for a president’s impeachment, accusing liberals of systematic lying and propagandizing, arguing that Joe McCarthy was a great American patriot, and detailing 50 years of treachery by the Democratic Party — this is the only vaguely substantive error the Ann Coulter hysterics have been able to produce, corrected soon after publication.

CONGRATULATIONS LIBERALS!!!

The Columbia Journalism Review was crowing about this great victory over Ann Coulter a year ago. A search of “coulter” and “earnhardt” on Google turns up over 1,000 hits. Now Franken dedicates another two pages in his book to it. I believe this triumph of theirs has been sufficiently revisited by now. At least I didn’t miss the Ukrainian famine. <Cf.> Pulitzer prize winning New York Times reporter Walter Duranty.

I don’t heard so much about this “lie” anymore.

FRAZIER MOORE, A FANTASIST FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, WROTE AN ARTICLE ACCUSING ME OF USING “ROUTINELY SLOPPY” RESEARCH AND “CONTRIVED” FACTS. LIKE YOU, THE AP FANTASIST TREATS FRANKEN AS THE SOURCE OF ALL WISDOM, CITING ONE KILLER EXAMPLE FROM FRANKEN:

“Here’s one: On pages 265-266, Coulter blasts New York Times writer Thomas Friedman for opposing racial profiling in a December 2001 column. She quotes (and credits) several passages that seem to back up her complaint. But it turns out that Coulter misappropriated Friedman’s words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column, as anyone who reads it will discover. His column actually drew the less-than-startling conclusion that a new age of terrorism threatens our personal safety and our free society.”

This is what is known as “bicycle accident reporting.” I defy anyone to explain what head-injury boy is trying to convey in his crucial, accusatory sentence: “Coulter misappropriated Friedman’s words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column.”Huh? The AP could throw a deck of cards out the window and wait to see who picks up the four of clubs to find someone who writes better than Frazier Moore.

But as long as I’m already breaking my rule about not responding to meritless, overwrought attacks, I’ll go for broke and break my rule about not responding to gibberish. Apparently, head-injury-boy here is very upset about how I characterize a Friedman column and it has something or other to do with racial profiling.

In the column at issue, titled “Fly Naked,”Friedman spends 6 of 10 paragraphs discussing airport security after 9-11 and concludes that flying naked is the only solution, because, inter alia: “It’s much more civilized than racial profiling.” I wrote: “New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sniffed that racial profiling was not ‘civilized.’” I’m really trying to grasp the lie in that statement, but I don’t see it.

Incidentally, contrary to head-injury boy’s characterization, only four paragraphs at the end of the Friedman column discuss “personal safety and our free society” — as anyone who reads it will discover! I salute the AP’s unorthodox affirmative action program, but they might want to assign reporters who are not developmentally disabled to write the articles accusing me of “sloppy” research and “contrived” facts.

I haven’t heard much about this “lie” since the AP article came out and normal people took the trouble to look up Friedman’s column and post it on the internet.

Now you spring two all-new alleged “outright lies” on me. I shall respond to these two, and then I’m through. Henceforth, I shall rely on sensible people to see that I have answered the liberal hate groups’ first 17 rounds of indignant charges against me. If they had a better example out there, we would have heard it before the 18th round.

First, you say: “AT ONE POINT [FRANKEN] ACCUSES YOU OF HAVING TAKEN A QUOTE FROM A BOOK REVIEW QUOTING A BOOK (P. 14 OF FRANKEN’S BOOK) TO ARGUE YOUR POINT. DO YOU FEEL THIS IS AN ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF WHAT YOU WROTE? AN ACCURATE USE OF A QUOTE? IF NOT, THEN WHY? IF YES, THEN WHO IS ULTIMATELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ERRORS, YOU, THE PUBLISHER, OR BOTH?”

I’m not sure I grasp the accusation here and I’m sure you do not. I wrote: “For decades, the New York Times had allowed loose associations between Nazis and Christians to be made in its pages.” Among the quotes I cited, one came from a New York Times book review. The quote made a loose association between Nazis and Christians. New York Times book reviews are printed in the pages of the New York Times. The Times allowed that quote to run in its pages. How else, exactly, are you suggesting I should have phrased this, Ed?

Second, you say: “LIKEWISE, [FRANKEN] ACCUSES YOU OF SLOPPY RESEARCH, IN SO FAR AS YOU APPEAR TO HAVE MISSED A NUMBER OF NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLES CITING SUCH THINGS AS SPEECHES BY JESSE JACKSON. WHAT GIVES—WAS THIS AN HONEST MISTAKE OR MALFEASANCE AS HE SUGGESTS?

It was neither, but thanks for asking. I wrote: “In an upbeat message delivered on British TV on Christmas Day, 1994, Jesse Jackson compared conservatives in the U.S. and Great Britain to Nazis: “In South Africa, the status quo was called racism. We rebelled against it. In Germany, it was called fascism. Now in Britain and the U.S. it is called conservatism.’ The New York Times did not report the speech.”

The New York Times did not, in fact, report the speech. Franken does not say otherwise. My guess is — and this is just a stab in the dark — Franken doesn’t say otherwise because he can’t say otherwise, inasmuch as . . . THE NEW YORK TIMES DID NOT REPORT THE SPEECH. What Franken says is that my search method was faulty — though, somehow, it still managed to produce the truth! (To wit: The New York Times did not report the speech.)

Among my searches, I searched the New York Times database for all of December, 1994 and January 1995 for: “Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa.”(In my footnotes, I often give my readers clear descriptions of some of the Lexis-Nexis searches I ran — something, as far as I know, no other writer does.)

Franken does not mention the lines I had just quoted from Jackson’s speech — you know, the one that was NOT reported in the New York Times — but refers to it only as a “controversial speech.”He then acts incredulous that I would run a search for “Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa,” as if I tossed in the terms “Germany”“fascism”and “South Africa”for no reason whatsoever. To my observation that this search turned up no documents, he says sarcastically: “Well, yeah.”

To borrow a line from a trained journalist: What gives, Ed? Was this an honest mistake or malfeasance?

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Massachusetts Supreme Court Abolishes Capitalism! (031127)

LAST WEEK, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court discovered that the state constitution – written in 1780 – requires the state to allow gay marriages. The court gave the legislature six months to rewrite the law to comply with the heretofore unnoticed gay marriage provision in a 223-year-old constitution, leaving countless gay couples a scant six months to select a silverware pattern. Out of respect for my gay male readers, I’ll resist the temptation to characterize this ruling as “shoving gay marriage down our throats.”

The Massachusetts Constitution was written by John Adams, who was quite religious. It is the most explicitly Christian document since the New Testament, with lots of references to “the great Legislator of the universe.” Adams certainly would have been astonished to discover that the constitution he wrote provided for gay marriage – though one can see how a reference to two men marrying might get lost among the minutiae about the common good and “duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.”

The main lesson from the court’s discovery of the hidden gay-marriage clause is that these judges are in the wrong job. If they can find a right to gay marriage in the Massachusetts Constitution – never before detected by any human being – we need to get them looking for Osama bin Laden. These guys can find anything!

And if we don’t get Massachusetts judges out of the country soon, we could start reading headlines like: Mass. Supreme Court Abolishes Capitalism; Gives Legislature 6 months to Nationalize All Industry.

The Democratic presidential candidates reacted with glee to the court’s gay-marriage ruling, relieved that they could talk about gay marriage instead of their insane ideas on national defense. But then they realized this meant they would have to talk about gay marriage.

Except for the nut candidates who always forget to lie about their positions, all the Democratic presidential candidates earnestly insist that they oppose gay marriage. They are for “civil unions” with all the legal rights of marriage. But not marriage! No sir.

As governor of Vermont, Howard Dean actually signed a bill providing for these magical “civil unions.” Having already been forgiven for his remarks about the Confederate flag by both of the black people currently living in Vermont, now Dean wants to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their flower shops. But even Dean emphasized that Vermont’s civil union law does not legalize gay “marriage.”

And even in Ben-and-Jerryville, it took a court to force the state to recognize civil unions by discovering that right in the Vermont Constitution. (WHERE’S OSAMA?)

The big argument for “civil unions” – but not marriage! – is that gays are denied ordinary civil rights here in the American Taliban. This is where gays usually bring up the argument about all the straight couples living in “sham” marriages, but I see no point in dragging the Clintons into this.

The classic formulation was given by John Kerry in the Democratic debate earlier this week: “What we’re talking about is somebody’s right to be able to visit a loved one in a hospital, somebody’s right to be able to pass on property, somebody’s right to live equally under the state laws as other people in the country.” You would think there were “Straights Only” water fountains, the way Democrats carry on so (as if any gay man would drink non-bottled water).

Apparently, health care in this country is better than we’ve been led to believe if so few Americans have ever been to a hospital that they think there’s a guest list. In case you don’t know: Gays already can visit loved ones in hospitals. They can also visit neighbors, random acquaintances and total strangers in hospitals – just like everyone else.

Gays can also pass on property to whomever they would like, including their cats. Every few years you read about some daft rich widow leaving her entire estate to a cat. It’s perfectly legal. You just need to write a will. Liberals have figured out how to get abortions for 13-year-old girls without their parents’ permission. But we’re supposed to believe that they just can’t get their heads around how a gay guy could leave property to his partner.

As for “living equally under the state laws as other people in the country,” unless Kerry is referring to the precise thing he claims to oppose – gay marriage – gays do live equally under the state laws as other people in the country. There are no special speed-limit laws or trespassing laws or murder laws for gays. There is, however, some evidence of gay profiling with regard to the enforcement of fashion “don’ts.”

What gays can’t do is get married – something all Democrats swear up and down to oppose. Instead, the Democrats demand “civil unions” and then throw out a series of red herrings to explain why. In fact, the only difference between what the Democrats claim to support (civil unions) and what they claim to oppose (gay marriage) is the word “marriage.” As John Kerry explained: “I think the term ‘marriage’ gets in the way of what is really being talked about here.”

Republicans ought to try that: We don’t support “guns” – the term “gun” gets in the way of what is really being talked about here – we want choice in personal security devices. We don’t want a “ban” on partial-birth abortions; we just don’t want there to be any of them. We don’t support “tax cuts”; we support a “union” between people and about 60 to 70% of their money. We don’t support “war” with Iraq; we are talking about somebody’s right to be able to visit a loved one in a hospital. (Huh?)

Except the difference is: All those positions are popular with voters, so Republicans don’t have to lie. The Democrats’ purported opposition to gay marriage is like all their other phony policy statements that are the opposite of what they really believe.

When they’re running for office, all Democrats claim to support tax cuts (for the middle class), to support gun rights (for hunters) and to “personally oppose” abortion. And then they get into office and vote to raise taxes, ban guns and allow abortions if a girl can’t fit into her prom dress.

The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

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How To Talk To A Liberal (010222)

WHEN I BEGAN swooning for George W. Bush during the Republican primaries, my friends warned me that I was going to have to eat my words. It’s now a month into his presidency, and I’m even more doe-eyed about Bush than ever. Among other feats, Bush has figured out how to talk to liberals. This has solved one of life’s eternal mysteries, like “How high is up?”

The liberal’s highly complex and intellectual argument against principled conservatism is this: Republicans are mean. Republicans always figured that since they weren’t mean, that should be enough. But the facts were irrelevant. These were devil words muttered by a political cult, not reasoned arguments.

One of the most arresting examples of the sophisticated Republicans Are Mean argument occurred in reference to Pat Buchanan. If you ever actually tuned in to CNN’s “Crossfire” when Buchanan was on, he’d be smiling, laughing, telling jokes — generally while sitting next to a scowling, bitter Bill Press. (In the interest of not only honesty but also irony, I should rush to add that off-air, Bill Press is one of the nicest people on TV.)

But for reasons that only the faithful can understand, it simply became a part of the liberal orthodoxy that Buchanan was an “angry white man.” In case any of the cult members missed the memo on Pat being angry, William Schneider used the word “angry” four times to describe either Pat or his supporters in one single short column in the National Journal.

So we knew liberals would not believe their own eyes if what they saw conflicted with their political orthodoxy. Since actual evidence wouldn’t suffice, and arguments citing facts and evidence were even more useless, it was difficult for Republicans to know where to begin with these liberals.

This put conservatives at a distinct disadvantage. For the last couple of decades now, name-calling has been the principal argument liberals have deployed against conservative arguments.

If Republicans opposed the National Endowment for the Arts, they were said to hate art. If Republicans opposed the Department of Education, they were said to hate teachers. If Republicans opposed the Environmental Protection Agency, they were said to hate the environment. Opposition to the government spending money on anything was invariably attacked as hatred for the thing money was to be spent on.

What it took George Bush to figure out was that to counter the left’s intricate Republicans Are Mean argument, all you had to do was to go around calling yourself nice.

I could have thought about that for 50 years and still have been stumped.

Not only does George Bush’s strategy have the virtue of simplicity, but it is also a distinct improvement over the typical Republican method of wooing Democrats, which is to give away the store.

To the contrary, President Bush has been like a runaway train pushing through his campaign promises to support tax cuts, a missile defense system and faith-based social service programs. When one of his conservative Cabinet nominees came under attack and was forced to withdraw, Bush found yet another minority female for the post — even more conservative than the last.

As a New York Times reporter described Bush’s approach to political opponents: “Mr. Bush is a bipartisan love machine.” At the same time, his tax cut proposal “does not bow even a millimeter to many Democrats’ concerns,” and it is not clear “whether all his smooth, sweet talk truly signals any inclination toward ideological flexibility” — a.k.a., giving away the store.

Admittedly, when Bush first began with the “compassionate conservatism” theme, many of us took umbrage. In a typical soliloquy on “compassionate conservatism,” Bush said: “I know this approach has been criticized. But why? Is compassion beneath us? Is mercy below us? Should our party be led by someone who boasts of a hard heart?”

If you didn’t happen to be a Democrat, you were likely to sit back scratching your head wondering what the heck Bush was talking about. Who criticizes compassion? Who exactly boasts of having a hard heart? Which Republican candidate maintains compassion is beneath us? Of whom, pray tell, was he speaking?

The answer, of course, was: no one. No real corporeal being, that is. He was referring to Republican ghosts haunting liberal imaginations. Bush treats liberals like small children having their first nightmare: Don’t worry, honey, I’ll just wave a magic wand and make all the ghosts go away. I’m a compassionate conservative.

And darn if it didn’t work. As evidence that it did work, observe that liberals still use their second favorite principled epithet against Republicans: They call Bush dumb — just like Dwight Eisenhower and that old bumbling guy who won the Cold War. But they don’t call Bush mean.

It was always so simple. The mistake Republicans have been making was to treat liberals like adults. It took George Bush to treat them in an age-appropriate manner and start arguing with liberals at their own level.

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Racial Profiling In University Admissions (010405)

LAST WEEK, my old law firm won a spectacular court victory against my law school prohibiting it from engaging in racial discrimination in admissions. Thank heaven I’ve graduated. I don’t think I could take the piety and hysteria now engulfing the University of Michigan.

Explaining the importance of discriminating against citizens on the basis of their race, Michigan President Lee Bollinger told The New Yorker magazine: “I happen to be rereading ‘Richard II.’ ... There’s an exchange between Gaunt and Bolingbroke, father and son, just as the son is being banished. The advice the father gives the son — how utterly, utterly poignant and convincing it is. The father says, ‘Just think of it as a vacation.’”

And that, boys and girls, is why Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter had to be rejected from the University of Michigan. This is the academic equivalent of “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

Q: Did you have sexual relations with that woman?

A: As Polonius says, “I will go seek the king.”

Of course, Bollinger’s “think of it as a vacation” argument is no less compelling than the many — and I mean many — other arguments for racial discrimination. It’s a constantly changing tableau of justifications for the unjustifiable. Just when you finally defeat one liberal sophistry for “affirmative action,” it drops it into the Orwellian memory hole and a new sophistry appears in its place. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

About a decade ago the argument for race discrimination was the role-model theory: Blacks could only learn from other blacks. But that was no standard at all — presumably everybody could use a role model. Even the Supreme Court refused to endorse a “role model” exception to the 14th Amendment. That was displaced with an argument that was almost its precise opposite: Blacks can only learn if they are sitting next to whites. This was abandoned when it turned out to be too embarrassing an argument for anyone but federal judges to make.

Then the argument was that discriminating against whites would put more doctors, lawyers and bankers in black neighborhoods. But admission to college isn’t a commission with the Peace Corps, and black professionals wanted to make money as much as the next guy.

Not only that, but the “giving back to the community” theory suffered a serious setback when it turned out the affirmative-action doctor celebrated for taking Allen Bakke’s place at medical school was “giving back to the community” by maiming and killing his black patients.

At one time, discrimination against whites was said to be a remedy for 400 years of slavery. Twenty years later, it was evident that this supposed “remedy” was incapable of ever producing a cure.

Then it had nothing to do with 400 years of slavery at all. Reverse discrimination — or “discrimination” — was merely an offset for bad schools in poor communities. (All white people are assumed to have attended fancy schools in affluent neighborhoods.) This was an obvious lie since the black beneficiaries of affirmative action were often the children of doctors and lawyers, while poor whites from Appalachia were still being excluded.

Defense of the Indefensible, Argument No. 17: Racial discrimination against whites is intended to compensate blacks for general societal discrimination. That argument disappeared under the specter of a flood of Asians who presumably face discrimination, too. A perennial favorite was: “Suppose you have two equally qualified applicants ...” That bubble burst when it was revealed that universities were admitting blacks with scores about three standard deviations below the whites who were rejected.

Then it was claimed that racial preferences were no different from preferences for the children of alumni. In undergraduate admissions at Michigan (we also sued them), four points are awarded for being the child of an alumnus, three points for a good essay, and a hefty 12 points for a perfect SAT score.

Being born black is worth 20 points. Thus, an applicant with perfect SATs, an excellent essay and alumni parents gets fewer points for all that than simply for being black. So The Washington Post was not being precisely accurate when it described Michigan’s affirmative action program as merely “giving an edge” to minorities — “as it does to the children of alumni.”

Finally — the rationalization that won’t go away — racial discrimination against whites is necessary to promote “diversity.” Stipulating to the incredibly racist assumption that skin color predetermines opinions, 20 years of affirmative action has produced college campuses with more uniformity of opinion than a Stalinist re-education camp.

After a student protester at Michigan denounced the recent prohibition on race discrimination at the law school (“Diversity is a good thing for everybody”!), someone offered a counterargument. The protester cut him off, saying “I hate devils.” That’s “diversity” in action.

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All The News We Get From the ACLU (010426)

IN CASE YOU aren’t able to read ACLU press releases for yourself, The Associated Press and The New York Times will helpfully restate them for you as important, breaking “news.”

Describing the criminal alien provisions being reviewed by the Supreme Court this week, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Web site calls them “anti-immigrant laws” that in 1996 “tore down our national welcome sign to immigrants.” The New York Times touts the provisions as “actions Congress took against legal aliens at the height of the national anti-immigrant fervor in 1996.” The AP says the law was “enacted five years ago amid what critics call an anti-immigrant fervor.”

These amazingly similar descriptions wouldn’t necessarily be suspicious, except that they are comically false. It is a hard, cold fact that the criminal alien provisions at issue emanated from the most pro-immigrant office on Capitol Hill — Sen. Spencer Abraham’s office. Indeed, it was Sen. Abraham who spearheaded the fight against restrictions on legal immigration that same session.

Evidently, Abraham did not assume “immigrant” was synonymous with “felon.” Nor did the Senate Judiciary Committee, which passed Abraham’s criminal alien amendments in lopsided votes.

The ACLU claims the change effected by the 1996 law required that immigrants convicted of certain felonies be deported. No longer, the ACLU says, could criminal aliens simply “pay their debt to society” and “go on with their lives.” The New York Times repeated the claim, stating: “The legislation Congress approved ... required the deportation of immigrants convicted of certain crimes.”

Suppose you were just born yesterday. Would you believe that immigrants who commit felonies in this country were not subject to deportation until the 1996 Congress thought of it? In fact, noncitizens whose conception of the American dream was to come here and commit felonies had always been subject to deportation.

The problem was: Deportable criminal aliens weren’t being deported. Legal legerdemain had so bollixed up the system that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was deporting only about 4% of convicted criminal aliens per year.

Consequently, by 1996, roughly half a million deportable criminal aliens were happily residing in the United States, committing new crimes and having illegitimate children — whom the criminals would then cite as “family” to avoid deportation. Just a few years ago, a California congressman stated that “in Los Angeles County, more than half of incarcerated illegal aliens are rearrested within one year.”

At the rate the INS was deporting criminal aliens, it would have taken 23 years to deport all the criminal aliens living in the United States — assuming no immigrant ever committed another felony. (Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper than reading the ACLU’s press release to get the all facts.)

What the 1996 law did was reduce the copious “review” for orders of deportation entered against convicted criminals. The criminal conviction itself was still subject to every pointless, dilatory tactic permitted felons who are U.S. citizens. But the order of deportation could no longer be gamed to avoid deportation without end.

The AP insanely claimed that the “legal question basically boils down to this: Do immigrants living in the United States legally but without citizenship have the same rights in federal courts as U.S. citizens?” Um, actually, we don’t need the Supreme Court to answer that. You just need to think about it for two seconds to realize — the answer is no. Immigrants can be deported. Citizens — even extremely undesirable citizens like reporters — can’t be.

The only question before the Supreme Court is whether Congress really meant to limit the number of time-consuming administrative and court hearings that could be demanded by criminal aliens before the INS deports them.

Also straight from the ACLU Web site, the Times and AP recount various sob stories about harmless felons about to be deported under a cruel and heartless law. Typically the criminal offense is described as a “minor drug charge” committed many years ago on a dare.

News stories about criminals of any sort always have to be read like Manhattan real estate ads. If an elevator is not mentioned, it’s a fifth-floor walk-up. If the ad does not expressly say “grt vu,” the apartment looks onto a brick wall. If it doesn’t state “bathtub,” there isn’t one.

The ACLU’s lead plaintiff — the man the ACLU chose for their test case to challenge the law — is one Enrico St. Cyr. According to the Times, Enrico “entered the United States legally in 1986 but was convicted of a drug charge early in 1996.” You can search the entire Lexis-Nexis archive and you won’t get more information than that on Enrico’s crime.

In fact, despite his notable accomplishment of having “entered the United States legally,” Enrico is a major narcotics trafficker. He was already serving time on one drug trafficking charge when he was sentenced to 10 years on another.

But you’d have to look beyond the ACLU press release to know that.

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‘Centrist’ In Liberal-Speak (010510)

THE NEW YORK TIMES has demanded that Senate Democrats block Bush’s “judicial ideologues,” whom, the Times predicts, will compare unfavorably to “Clinton’s centrist judicial choices.”

As one Clinton “centrist” nominee said to a female prosecutor appearing in her courtroom: “Shut your f***ing mouth.” Another lawyer received this admonition from the centrist judge: “I don’t give a s**t.” That was the criminal’s messiah: Judge Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

One time, Massiah-Jackson betrayed the identity of two undercover officers in her courtroom, announcing to the assembled criminals — “take a good look at these guys ... and be careful out there.”

When asked about this episode by a stunned Senate Judiciary Committee, Massiah-Jackson first said she did not recall the incident, twice refused to comment, once categorically denied it (despite contemporaneous news accounts), and finally gave a cockamamy account of having been misunderstood.

Only after the undercover officers had submitted statements to the committee describing how Massiah-Jackson had flamboyantly exposed them in open court did the judge begin to recall the incident with greater clarity. In “reconstructing the incident,” she said she had been instructing school children present in the courtroom to respect police officers.

The story didn’t really hang together because, on account of being undercover and all, undercover officers would not be identifiable to schoolchildren as police officers.

Be that as it may, it turned out Massiah-Jackson had already stated on the record that she was talking to criminal defendants, not any alleged school children in the courtroom. At a later hearing, the D.A. had raised the incident with Massiah-Jackson, and she cavalierly dismissed the D.A.’s outrage, saying: “I do say that to certain defendants.”

In another classic Massiah-Jackson moment, Commonwealth vs. Johnson, the judge sentenced the brutal rapist of a 10-year-old girl to the statutory minimum. She apologized to the rapist for even that much time: “I just don’t think the five to 10 years is appropriate in this case even assuming you were found guilty.” She refused the D.A.’s offer to present a pre-sentence report and victim-impact statement, saying: “What would be the point of that?” (The five-year sentence was not crippling. After his release, the defendant was re-arrested for raping a 9-year-old boy.)

In another special moment for the whole Rainbow Coalition, when Massiah-Jackson was informed that both the defendant and victim in a rape case had AIDS, she said: “Why are we having a trial? We are talking about life expectancy of three years for both of them. What difference? What kind of punishment can we give (the defendant)? ... What’s the purpose of the trial long range?”

In light of the fact that Massiah-Jackson had just announced there was no purpose in trying the defendant, the prosecutor requested that the judge recuse herself. She refused, and the victim died while the recusal motion was on appeal. The trial proceeded before Massiah-Jackson, who sentenced the defendant to one year of probation, allowing him to serve no time for a vicious rape and beating. (“What’s the purpose?”)

Sentencing a defendant who had slashed a woman in the face with a straight razor while stealing her purse, Massiah-Jackson refused to apply a sentence enhancement for use of a deadly weapon. When the D.A. noted that the enhancement was required, the centrist judge accused her of being “vindictive.” Massiah-Jackson was reversed on appeal for ignoring the enhancement.

Indeed, Massiah-Jackson was reversed in a number of criminal cases. But in response to the Judiciary Committee request that she provide a list of her reversals — a pro forma request — she repeatedly claimed she had not been reversed in a single criminal case.

After having been caught in this and other lies, “centrist” Massiah-Jackson decided to withdraw her nomination. The New York Times was in a high dudgeon. Not because Massiah-Jackson had sneered at AIDS victims and rape victims, shouted obscenities from the bench or outed undercover cops, but because of the “judicial mugging” the Senate had put her through. The judge at least would return to the state bench “with her honor intact,” the Times editorialized. “Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Senate.”

Indeed, even after all this came out about Massiah-Jackson (despite the encumbrance of the judge’s tendency to lie), she was avidly supported for a life-tenured federal judgeship by: The New York Times, top Philadelphia law firms, judges, Philadelphia Mayor Edward G. Rendell, the NAACP, the Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia Inc., the Hispanic Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of the Delaware Valley and — surprise — the Philadelphia Bar Association.

When Bush’s judicial nominees come under attack from the same groups for failing to be duly “centrist,” remember what they mean by that.

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Disestablish The Cult Of Liberalism (010615)

THIS WEEK the Supreme Court upheld the right of religious groups to participate in the beautiful mosaic of after-school activities. No new territory was broken: The case was almost identical to another case in which the Supreme Court reversed the exact same court years ago. This was massive resistance.

Justice Clarence Thomas remarked on the oddity of having to reverse the same court twice, noting that while the appellate courts aren’t required to cite all the Supreme Court’s precedents, they might want to cite the last time they were reversed on the same facts.

At least the 6-3 decision gives us an accurate count of the atheists on the court, probably as accurate as my dream of giving them all polygraph tests someday. (“Do you believe in a Higher Being ... no, seriously.”) Concerned someone might be reading Leviticus during school hours, Justice David Souter dissented in a hair-splitting exegesis about the precise time classes let out (2:56 p.m.), vs. the time the organizers would enter school property (2:30 p.m.).

The New York Times’ obligatory hysterical denunciation of the decision revealingly complained: “(C)hildren that young are unlikely to discern that the religious message of authority figures who come to the school each day to teach does not carry the school’s endorsement.”

It is simply taken for granted that it’s desirable for children to revere “authority figures” at government schools. Normally those authority figures are teaching the youngsters to put condoms on zucchini or training them in the catechism of recycling. Sending a mixed message about government “authority figures” might interfere with the state’s ability to turn small children into Good Germans inculcated in the liberal religion.

It’s well past time for liberalism to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. Allowing Christians to be one of many after-school groups induces hysteria not just because liberals hate religion. It’s because the public school is their temple. Children must be taught to love Big Brother, welcoming him to take over our schools, our bank accounts, our property, even our toilet bowls.

We’re told the First Amendment requires a separation of church and state, which, just as an incidental matter, is completely false. The whole point of the Constitution is to separate the federal government from the individual.

In keeping with the general theme, the First Amendment provides that Congress cannot establish a religion — but nor can it stop the states from establishing religions. That’s why it says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Dear Congress: You may be eligible for a free country. You do nothing.

The only thing that tempers my annoyance with the canard about states not being allowed to establish religions is imagining the kind of established religion we’d have in New York. We’d be doing daily devotionals to Saint Hillary.

Still, it is a fact that when the First Amendment was ratified, several states had established religions. Fortunately for the burgeoning minority religions in those states, the established religions were things like “Episcopalianism” and “Congregationalism” rather than “Liberalism.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but before the official government religion was liberalism — devoted to class warfare, ethnic hatred and intolerance — Americans were kind to one another. They managed to get along even without ACLU lawsuits. Thus, when there were enough practitioners of other faiths in a state to be bothered by the established religion, the majority just disestablished themselves.

Back to the New Country: Two malcontents at the Virginia Military Institute recently sued to ban VMI’s tradition of saying a non-denominational prayer at mealtime. The cadets are not required to recite the prayer or even bow their heads. Merely having to stand while listening to an invocation of God is apparently very upsetting for them. (I’d hate to see these guys under fire.)

A typical rendition of the VMI dinner prayer goes like this: “Almighty God, we give our thanks for VMI, for its reputation, spirit and ideals. Let your favor continue toward our school and your grace be abundantly supplied to the Corps. Now, O God, we receive this food and share this meal together with thanksgiving.”

It doesn’t get any more sectarian than that. How about: “Designer of the Universe (if you’re out there) ...”

Religious people keep cheerfully going back and trying to formulate some prayer that won’t make liberals angry. But the problem won’t go away. No prayer that assumes a belief in a Higher Being will ever be acceptable. God has no part in the religion of sex education, environmentalism, feminism, Marxism and loving Big Brother.

In a totally unsurprising development, liberals finally suspended their opposition to the death penalty in the case of Timothy McVeigh. He was the sworn enemy of the established religion of Big Brother. Too bad he never stumbled into one of those after-school Christian meetings.

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National Organization For Worms (010720)

WHY ARE FEMINISTS the principal lobbying group for Congressmen Who Had Affairs With Missing Interns? In the case of missing intern Chandra Levy, they’re not even covering for a president who will save their precious Roe v. Wade.

Indeed, Rep. Gary Condit has been so successfully portrayed as a “CONSERVATIVE RIGHT-WING Democrat” that it would probably be safe even for Dan Rather to mention the story on CBS News. Really clearing the way for Rather, Condit was apparently a member of a congressional Bible study group. (Can anybody make heads or tails of this commandment?)

The feminist enthusiasm for Condit goes something like this: Feminists have always stood for freedom of “choice” (unless it involves something other than abortion, adultery or sodomy), and isn’t it wonderful that Chandra Levy was able to choose to have an affair with a married man? Congratulations, Chandra!

If you think I’m making this up, here is what Gloria Jacobs, editor of Ms. Magazine said about Chandra on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor”: “I think the idea is that what feminism always wanted for women is the right to choose their partners, their own sexuality, whether they’re young women or older women. ... I think it’s really that one would have hoped that as women had more access to power that this wouldn’t be the way they would have to go about it. But everybody makes their own choices.”

Feminists are actually trying to claim credit for the dumb decision of a girl who is now missing. Anyone who sees a connection between Chandra’s choice of sexual partners and her disappearance is probably the sort who thinks promiscuous sexual behavior has some metaphysical link to venereal disease, abortion and divorce, too. If rumors are correct that Chandra was pregnant, a very broad definition of the “right to choose” could be at work. Another triumph for feminism!

It wasn’t just the Ms. magazine editor. The airwaves are lousy with liberal women putting in a kind word for adultery these days.

On Fox News Channel’s “The Edge With Paula Zahn,” Eleanor Clift said: “Congressman Condit, so far, is guilty of having extramarital affairs, and that is something that a number of congressmen are probably familiar with.”

On “The O’Reilly Factor,” Geraldine Ferraro said: “If every member of Congress or every public official in Washington were to resign because they’ve been having an affair, dear God ...”

On “CNN Late Edition,” Rep. Chris “Rape Is Not Impeachable” Shays, “R”-Conn., said: “I mean, if infidelity is a test, there would be a number of members of Congress that should resign.”

I love the idea that a mass exodus from the U.S. Congress would constitute some terrible tragedy. How could we ever replace these Titans! But what’s with the neurotic compulsion to assert that half of Washington is committing adultery? How do these girls know what’s going on in other people’s “zones of privacy”?

There has been only one serious sex survey ever conducted in America, released in 1994. (Time magazine called it “the first truly scientific survey of who does what with whom in America.”) Using peer-approved methods, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago surveyed thousands of respondents over several years. They concluded that 75% of married men and 85% of married women have never been unfaithful.

By contrast, Alfred Kinsey’s purported “study” in the ‘40s concluded that 50% of men cheat. The reason his study is discounted by scientists — but revered at Playboy magazine — is that his sample group consisted of prostitutes, prisoners and inmates in mental institutions.

I can understand why I would want to lump members of Congress in with this crowd, as a measure of my esteem. But why do liberals want to make that argument? They’re the ones who think we should be sending more of our money to these clowns. What are the feminists up to?

I put the question to a leading scholar of feminism, the author of the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “feminism.” She explained that 30 years ago what bugged feminists was that men had affairs and everyone thought it was cute, whereas women had affairs and they were sluts. It wasn’t the immorality but the double standard that had them hopping mad. And there are two ways of eliminating a double standard. Since feminists figured they couldn’t change men, their goal was simply to even the score.

So in a maniacal pursuit of equality — we’ve fully transitioned into my analysis now — these querulous little feminists stripped women of the sense that they can rely on the institution of marriage and gave men license to discard their wives. But at least women can choose to be pigs now, too! This is what happens when you allow women to think about public policy. It’s also what happens when you start assuming the whole country has the mores of prostitutes, criminals, mental patients and, evidently, congressmen.

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The ACLU’s Speech Exception To The Pornography Amendment (010810)

THE ACLU is getting a lot of credit these days for defending our precious First Amendment right to scribble sadistic child pornography. Convicted child pornographer Brian Dalton recently pleaded guilty in an Ohio court to a second pandering offense. He later claimed his journal was intended to be used exclusively as his private masturbatory aid, winning the undying devotion of self-proclaimed civil libertarians.

People seem to take enormous psychic satisfaction in defending Brian Dalton’s creepy journal. Oh sure, we get the dutiful statements of personal revulsion at Dalton’s fantasies. But, oddly, the more repellent his writings are, the more they give Dalton’s defenders the self-satisfying sensation of rising above the angry mob calling for his head.

It doesn’t matter that there is no angry mob, since everyone is with Dalton. Still, there could be an angry mob.

Defending counterintuitive positions makes people feel like abstract intellectuals, capable of grasping the larger point beyond the ken of the little people. But just because something is counterintuitive doesn’t make it true. (College students everywhere, just beginning to practice this annoying pretension, are staring blankly at that last sentence.)

Acceding to the nonexistent pressure from hoi polloi and punishing Dalton for his journal, the argument goes, would be the first step on a slippery slope to fascist thought police banning all controversial opinion.

Slippery slope arguments are always stupid. Please stop making them. What people think they mean by “slippery slope” is that the principle at the top of the slope is indistinguishable from the principle at the bottom of the slope. That’s a bad principle argument, not a “slippery slope” argument.

For a slippery slope argument to work, what is at the bottom of the slope must be more horrifying than what is at the top of the slope. Obviously, therefore, there’s a difference between the top and the bottom. If you can see a difference, so can the law. That’s how we end up with exceptions to general rules.

At this very moment, for example, you are prohibited from engaging in speech that: expropriates the official NBC logo, reveals Coca-Cola’s secret formula, defames a private person, would likely incite violence, unduly exploits someone else’s work, is a false boast about a product, gives investment advice without registering with the SEC, is too loud, or rebroadcasts Hugo Zacchini’s entire human cannonball act (see Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co.).

And yet somehow the dark night of fascism has not descended over America. Indeed, no one gives these speech exceptions a moment’s thought. They are not sufficiently counterintuitive to tweak the pseudo-intellectual instinct.

Dalton’s journal is obscene — an exception to free speech with a longer pedigree than many other exceptions. If criminalizing Dalton’s journal today means the thought police will be confiscating Republican Party pamphlets tomorrow, why didn’t prohibiting the Gay Olympics from using the Olympic trademark do the same?

Even more galling than the intellectual pretensions and annoying arguments of Dalton’s defenders is hearing the ACLU praised for its stalwart defense of the First Amendment. This is on the order of congratulating William Tecumseh Sherman for his defense of the South.

In its take-no-prisoners approach to the First Amendment, the ACLU brought a lawsuit against the Lubbock Independent School District demanding that high school students’ extracurricular, private religious speech be banned. The ACLU’s anti-speech position has been repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court, including just last term in Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

The ACLU won a prior restraint prohibiting an Avis employee from using a specified set of derogatory words in the workplace in Aguilar v. Avis Rent A Car System. The late Justice Stanley Mosk, a liberal, dissented from the California Supreme Court’s endorsement of this novel interpretation of the First Amendment, noting that the injunction banned speech that other employees would never even hear. It was mind control, pure and simple.

The ACLU has argued that a private employer’s irritating religious statements to an employee were not protected expression and could be banned as a violation of the establishment clause. The Oregon Supreme Court unanimously rejected the ACLU’s position in Meltebeke v. Bureau of Labor and Industries.

Taking another “absolutist” view of the free speech clause, the ACLU argued that the University of Virginia was required to deny student activity funds to a religious magazine, Wide Awake. In Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia, the Supreme Court held that the denial violated religious students’ free-speech rights.

The Massachusetts ACLU argued that the organizers of a St. Patrick’s Day parade did not have free-speech rights to exclude a contingent of gay marchers. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston. (The national ACLU, realizing the jig was up, filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court taking no clear position).

Listening to the ACLU on speech may not be a “slippery slope,” but it’s a bad principle. The ACLU would see that Dalton’s journal is obscene only if it mentioned God or referred to females as “broads.”

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This Is War (010912)

[Kwing Hung: so much emotion!!]

BARBARA OLSON kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI — the plane had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the Pentagon.

Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist attack. She was a patriot to the very end.

This is not to engage in the media’s typical hallucinatory overstatement about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not, we’d be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air travel.)

The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast.

I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren’t. (And some who don’t seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful, ebullient self. “Nice” is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason to be secure.

Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary — the latter being a subject of Barbara’s appropriately biting bestseller, Hell to Pay. Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted and Barbara really did talk politics — and really did have breakfast together.

It’s “Ted and Barbara” just like it’s Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends were as happy as they were on their wedding day. This is more than the death of a great person and patriotic American. It’s a human amputation.

Third, since Barbara’s compliment, I’ve been writing my columns for Ted and Barbara. I’m always writing to someone in my head. Now I don’t know who to write to. Ted-and-Barbara were a good muse.

Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan — and then updated the report to say they weren’t our bombs.

They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.

This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.

We don’t need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don’t need an “international coalition.” We don’t need a study on “terrorism.” We certainly didn’t need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.

The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or “religious” profiling.

People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.

“All of our lives” don’t need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack — or a plane crashes because of pilot error — Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.

The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers “packed their own bags,” and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

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Attack France! (011220)

AS PUNDITS MULL whether America’s next target in the war on terrorism should be Iraq or a smaller quarry first – such as the Sudan or Somalia – it’s time to consider another petri dish of ferocious anti-American hatred and terrorist activity. The Bush doctrine is: We are at war not only with the terrorists, but also with those who harbor them.

We’ve got to attack France.

Having exhausted itself in a spirited fight with the Nazis in the last war, France cannot work up the energy to oppose terrorism. For decades now, France has nurtured, coddled and funded Islamic terrorists. (Moreover, the Great Satan is getting a little sick of our McDonald’s franchises being attacked on behalf of notoriously inefficient French dairy farmers.)

At the 1972 Olympics, Muslim terrorists assassinated 11 Israeli athletes and one German policeman. Five years later, acting on intelligence from Israeli secret police, French counterespionage agents arrested the reputed mastermind of the massacre, Abu Daoud. Both Israel and West Germany sought the extradition of Daoud. Afraid of upsetting Muslim terrorists, France refused on technical grounds and set him free.

In 1986, Libyan agents of Moammar Gadhafi planted a bomb in a West Berlin discotheque, killing an American serviceman and a Turkish woman. Hundreds more were injured. President Reagan retaliated with air strikes against Libyan military targets – including Gadhafi’s living quarters.

Quaking in the face of this show of manly force, France denied America the use of its airspace. As a consequence, American pilots were required to begin their missions from airbases in Britain. When the pilots finally made it to Tripoli, tired from the long flights and showing a puckish sense of humor, they bombed the French embassy by mistake. POW! So sorry, our mistake.

France has repeatedly decried economic sanctions against Iraq and has accused the United Nations of manufacturing evidence against Saddam Hussein. The U.N., not even the Great Satan. The French U.N. ambassador dismissed aerial photographs of Iraqi military trucks fleeing inspection sites just before U.N. weapons inspectors arrived as – quote – “perhaps a truckers’ picnic.”

Along with the rest of the European Union, France sends millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority every year. Sucking up to the P.A. has really paid dividends to the craven butterbellies. While visiting Arafat in Gaza last year to announce several million more dollars in aid, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was attacked by angry, stone-throwing Palestinian students.

Earlier this year, France connived with human-rights champions China and Cuba to toss the United States off the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Sudan took America’s place, and, if its diplomats are not too bogged down with human torture and slave trading, they are very much looking forward to attending the meetings.

This summer, Paris made Mumia Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen of Paris. In America’s cowboy, bloodlust, rush-to-judgment approach to the death penalty, this convicted Philadelphia cop-killer has been sitting on death row – and giving radio interviews and college commencement addresses – for 20 years. Since “Mumia” sounds like a Muslim terrorist, Parisians can use the same bumper stickers for the war.

Two weeks into America’s war on terrorism, Le Figaro began calling for “American restraint.” In polls, 47% of the French said they believed the U.S. military action was failing. Seventeen percent thought it was working (which was – admittedly – 17% more than on the New York Times editorial page). Flaunting France’s well-established reputation as a fearsome fighting machine, the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, immediately advised the United States to stop bombing Afghanistan.

The first indictment to come out of the Sept. 11 attacks was of a French national, Zacarias Moussaoui. He is believed to be the intended 20th hijacker on Bloody Tuesday. France quickly moved to extend consular protection for Moussaoui. Intriguingly, French Justice Minister Marylise Lebranchu has demanded that Moussaoui not be executed.

Mlle. Lebranchu seems to have forgotten, but WE ARE THE GREAT SATAN! We also have Moussaoui. It’s annoying enough when these celebrated Nazi slayers refuse to extradite terrorists on the grounds that America does not observe the pristine judicial formalities of their pals, China, Cuba and the Sudan. But under what zany theory of international law does France think it can tell us what to do with a terrorist we caught right here on U.S. soil?

The Great Satan is wearying of this reverse hegemony, in which little pipsqueak nations try to impose their pipsqueak values on us. Aren’t we the ones who should be arrogantly oppressing countries that unaccountably do not have the death penalty?

And now, as America goes about building support for an attack on Iraq – guess who’s complaining? The turtlenecked chickens are terrified of offending fanatical Muslims and inviting a terrorist attack, but Arab leaders are supposed to face down the vastly larger populations of crazies living in their own countries. While France whines, Turkey – a predominantly Muslim country, I note – is preparing its airstrips for a possible U.S. attack on Iraq.

If this is a war against terrorism and not a Eurocentric war against Islam, the conclusion is ineluctable: We must attack France. What are they going to do? Fight us?

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We’ll Pay Them Reparations Later (011227)

IN RESPONSE TO THE attempted bombing last week of an American Airlines jet by Tariq Raja — aka Abdel Rahim, aka Richard “Saltonstall” Reid IV, aka “Biff” — the airlines sprang to action with random passenger shoe checks.

According to The New York Times, there is no discernible pattern in the airlines’ choice of fliers targeted for aggressive footwear examination. At the Atlanta airport, for example, the passengers whose shoes were searched “included a flight attendant, an elderly black man, a white man wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and an Asian woman with two small children.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman responded to this latest attack by summarily announcing that our only choices are to “become less open as a society” or simply “to live with much higher levels of risk.”

I think I have another solution. It’s something I like to call “ethnic profiling.” My logic is this: There is a common thread hidden within 20 years of relentless attacks on America by Muslim extremists: In every one of these attacks by Muslim extremists, there appears to be one or more Muslim extremists involved. This ought to help the airlines engage in more accurate risk assessment.

Tariq “Biff” Raja attended the same mosque as Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attack. (The New York Times has yet to report Tariq’s connection to the mosque, though the paper will surely print that fact before any of the media will ever breathe a word about the story reported in the San Francisco Examiner that American jihadist John Walker’s father left Mrs. Walker for another man.)

The men who used passenger jets to attack America on Sept. 11 were Muslim extremists.

Last year, our warship, the USS Cole, was attacked by Muslim extremists.

In 1998, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim extremists, killing 212 people and wounding thousands.

In 1996, Muslim extremists exploded a truck bomb outside an Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 and injuring hundreds more.

In 1995, five Americans were killed in a car bomb explosion executed by Muslim extremists.

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by Muslim extremists, killing six and injuring thousands.

Also in 1993, Muslim extremists plotted to assassinate then U.S. President George Bush. (Intriguingly, the word “assassin” comes from a Muslim sect active in the 11th to 13th centuries known as “the Assassins” for their religious practice of murdering infidels.)

In 1988, another passenger jet, Pan Am flight 103, was bombed by Muslim extremists, killing 270 people.

In 1986, Muslim extremists bombed a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen.

In 1985, Muslim extremists seized an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound American.

In 1983, Muslim extremists blew up U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen.

In 1982, Muslim extremists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 49 people, including 17 Americans.

In 1979, Muslim extremists stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran and held American Embassy staff hostage for 444 days.

So naturally, it took the airlines completely by surprise last week when the passenger who tried to detonate a sneaker bomb on a passenger jet turned out to be a Muslim extremist. Doggedly imitating an Alzheimer’s joke, the airlines instantly began ever more intrusive examinations of elderly black men, cowboys and Asian women with small children.

Meanwhile, al-Qaida just keeps on coming. The chairman of the London mosque attended by Moussaoui and Raja told the British Broadcasting Corp. he believes there are hundreds more Islamic extremists in Britain lying in wait for their chance to become suicide bombers. He expressed incredulity at the idea that Rahim could have planned the sneaker bomb plot on his own.

Yet the Times’ Friedman, in a commonplace formulation, sniffs that ethnic profiling is not “civilized” and then gratuitously attacks “religious fundamentalists of any stripe.”

I don’t know. Amish extremists have been rather quiescent lately. If all this carnage and murder had been executed by anti-abortion extremists rather than Muslim extremists, it is unlikely that Friedman would be pussyfooting around the issue by referring to the culprits as “political extremists of any stripe.”

The refusal to make a connection between Muslim extremists and unending violence by Muslim extremists borders on psychopathological disturbance. Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.

In 1996, Osama bin Laden mocked the United States, saying: “Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting.”

Our “youths” have taken Kabul, dropped daisy-cutters on Osama’s cave, and are now sleeping in their boots in the middle of an Afghan winter while dreaming of Iraq.

But on another front — the commercial aircraft war-zone opened by al-Qaida — bin Laden is right: We refuse to fight. Bedraggled smelly men who make Talibanist John Walker look like Beaver Cleaver are getting on airplanes with C4 explosive material, and we commend ourselves for being so “civilized.”

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Supreme Court Opinions Not Private Enough (031203)

THE FIRST killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going.

The nation embarked on its abortion holocaust in 1973, when the Supreme Court astonished the nation by suddenly discovering that the Constitution mandated a right to abortion, despite there being nothing anyplace in the Constitution vaguely hinting at abortion.

Everyone knew the decision in Roe v. Wade was a joke. The decision hinged on the convenient notion of “privacy,” which, oddly enough, still fails to protect my right to manufacture methamphetamine, saw off shotgun barrels or euthanize the elderly, privately or otherwise. Even Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz has said the decision was wrong.

During oral argument in Roe, the entire courtroom laughed when the lawyer arguing for abortion law ticked off a string of constitutional provisions allegedly violated by Texas’ abortion law – the due process clause, the equal protection clause, the Ninth Amendment “and a variety of others.” According to the “The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court” by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, the law clerks felt as if they were witnessing “something embarrassing and dishonest” about the decision-making process in Roe, with the justices brokering trimesters and medical judgments like a group of legislators. Never has the phrase “judge, jury and executioner” been more apt than with regard to this landmark ruling.

The nation was so shocked and enraged by the ruling in Roe that ... state legislatures meekly rewrote their laws in accordance with the decision. The Supreme Court building wasn’t burned down. No abortion doctors were killed for the next two decades. No state dared ignore the ruling in Roe. Even when dealing with lawless tyrants, conservatives have a fetish about following the law.

Instead, Americans who opposed abortion spent the next 20 years working within the system, electing two presidents, patiently waiting for Supreme Court justices to retire, fighting bruising nomination battles to get three Reagan nominees and two Bush nominees on the court. Then they passed an abortion law in Pennsylvania that was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. At that point, Republican presidents had made 10 consecutive appointments to the Supreme Court. Surely, now, at long last, Americans would finally be allowed to have a say on the nation’s abortion policy.

But the Supreme Court upheld the “constitutional right” to abortion announced in Roe. The decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey was written by Reagan’s biggest mistake, Sandra Day O’Connor, his third-choice candidate Anthony Kennedy, and “stealth nominee” David Hackett Souter. The court’s opinion declared that it was calling “the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Eight months later, the first abortion doctor was killed.

Meanwhile, conservatives responded the way conservatives always do. They went back to the drawing board and came up with a plan. It was the same plan that hasn’t worked for 30 years: Elect a Republican president, wait for openings on the court and keep your fingers crossed. It’s been going swimmingly so far. We can’t even get the stunningly brilliant Harvard law graduate and Honduran immigrant Miguel Estrada a spot on a court of appeals.

Having literally gotten away with murder for a quarter century, the court is getting wilder and wilder, deferring to “international law” and issuing nutty pronouncements more appropriate to a NAMBLA newsletter.

In the past few years, federal courts have proclaimed a right to sodomy (not in the Constitution), a right to partial-birth abortion (not in the Constitution), a right not to have a Democratic governor recalled (not in the Constitution), a right not to gaze upon the Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse (not in the Constitution), a ban on the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (not in the Constitution), and a ban on voluntary student prayers at high-school football games (not in the Constitution).

These bizarre rulings illustrate the notion of the Constitution as a “living document,” one which rejects timeless moral principles so as to better reflect the storylines in this week’s episode of “Ally McBeal.” You may like or dislike the end result of these rulings, but – as subtly alluded to above – none of these rulings come from anything written in the Constitution.

In response to the court’s sodomy ruling last term, conservatives are talking about passing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. It’s really touching how conservatives keep trying to figure out what constitutional mechanisms are available to force the courts to acknowledge the existence of the Constitution. But what is the point of a constitutional amendment when judges won’t read the Constitution we already have? What will the amendment say? “OK, no fooling around – we really mean it this time!”

While conservatives keep pretending we live in a democracy, liberals are operating on the rule of the jungle. The idea of the rule of law is that if your daughter is raped and murdered, you won’t go out and kill the guy who did it. In return for your forbearance, you get to vote for the rulers who will see that justice is done. But liberals cheat. They won’t let us vote on an increasingly large number of issues by defining the entire universe – abortion, gay marriage, high-school convocations – as a “constitutional” issue.

In what weird parallel universe would Americans vote for abortion on demand, affirmative action, forced busing, licensing of gun owners and a ban on the death penalty? Whatever dangers lurk in a self-governing democracy, the American people have never, ever passed a law that led to the murder of 30 million unborn children.

Judges are not our dictators. The only reason the nation defers to rulings of the Supreme Court is because of the very Constitution the justices choose to ignore. At what point has the court made itself so ridiculous that we ignore it? What if the Supreme Court finds a constitutional right to cannibalism? How about fascism? Does the nation respond by passing a constitutional amendment clearly articulating that there is no right to cannibalism or fascism in the Constitution?

Is there nothing five justices on the Supreme Court could proclaim that would finally lead a president to say: I refuse to pretend this is a legitimate ruling. Either the answer is no, and we are already living under a judicial dictatorship, or the answer is yes, and – as Churchill said – we’re just bickering over the price.

It would be nice to return to our federalist system of government with three equal branches of government and 50 states, but one branch refuses to live within that system. How about taking our chances with a president and the Congress? Two branches are better than one.

There may be practical difficulties with the president and the states ignoring the court’s abortion rulings – though there’s nothing unlawful about following the Constitution and I for one would love to see it. But there is absolutely no excuse for the Massachusetts legislature jumping when Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall says “jump.”

Marshall, immigrant and wife of New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, has recently proclaimed a right to gay marriage for all of Massachusetts. She has further demanded that the legislature rewrite the law in accordance with her wishes. One imagines Marshall leaping off the boat at Ellis Island and announcing: “I know just what this country needs! Anthony! Stop defending Pol Pot for five minutes and get me on a court!”

Granted, one can imagine how a woman married to the likes of Anthony Lewis might long for the sanctuary of a same-sex union. But that’s no reason to foist it on Massachusetts.

Ms. Marshall has as much right to proclaim a right to gay marriage from the Massachusetts Supreme Court as I do to proclaim it from my column. The Massachusetts legislature ought to ignore the court’s frivolous ruling – and cut the justices’ salaries if they try it again.

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The Party Of Ideas (031120)

WITH ECONOMIC growth and name recognition of the average Democratic presidential candidate both running at about 7%, the Democrats are in trouble. Unable to rouse more than the Saddam-supporting left with their kooky foreign-policy ideas, the Democrats had been counting on a lousy economy.

It turns out that, given a choice between “shock and awe” and “run and hide,” the American people prefer the former. Now that the Bush tax cuts have already started to kick in and boost the economy, it was beginning to look as if the Treason Lobby would have nothing to run on.

But the Democrats have discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family. Not only that, but many Democrats have cracker-barrel humble origins stories and a Jew or lesbian in the family. Dick Gephardt’s campaign platform is that his father was a milkman, his son almost died and his daughter is a lesbian. Vote for me!

So don’t say the Democrats aren’t the party of ideas. As they keep reminding us, their ideas are just too darn complex to fit on a bumper sticker. Consequently, the Democrats can’t tell us their ideas until after the election. Instead, their version of a political campaign is to stage a “Queen for a Day” extravaganza – which has special resonance in the case of the Democrats.

Al Gore famously inaugurated the family tragedy routine at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, where his idea of an inspiring political speech was to recount the story of his son being hit by a car. At the 1996 convention, Gore told a tear-jerker about his sister’s long, painful death from lung cancer. It got to the point that Gore’s family members had to fear any more runs for higher office.

In the current campaign, Gephardt has taken to spinning out a long, pitiful tale of his son’s near-death three decades ago. If a lingering family medical tragedy is the main qualification for becoming a Democratic presidential candidate, what’s Michael Schiavo waiting for?

At dozens of campaign stops, Mrs. Gephardt weeps anew as her husband tells the same gut-wrenching story over and over again. The relevance of his son’s illness to Gephardt’s run for the presidency is this: It inspired Gephardt’s call for national health insurance. With his wife softly weeping in the background, he intones, “I get it.”

At least when Gephardt exploits a family tragedy, he doesn’t expect praise for not exploiting a family tragedy. John Edwards injects his son’s fatal car accident into his campaign by demanding that everyone notice how he refuses to inject his son’s fatal car accident into his campaign.

Edwards has talked about his son’s death in a 1996 car accident on “Good Morning America,” in dozens of profiles and in his new book. (“It was and is the most important fact of my life.”) His 1998 Senate campaign ads featured film footage of Edwards at a learning lab he founded in honor of his son, titled “The Wade Edwards Learning Lab.” He wears his son’s Outward Bound pin on his suit lapel. He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too “on the nose.”

If you want points for not using your son’s death politically, don’t you have to take down all those “Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident” bumper stickers? Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent’s criminal record for partisan political advantage. I absolutely refuse to mention the name of my dearly beloved and recently departed son killed horribly in a car accident, which affected me deeply, to score cheap political points.

I wouldn’t want John Edwards to be president, but I think even Karl Rove would be willing to stipulate that the death of a son is a terrible thing.

Howard Dean talks about his brother Charlie’s murder at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. Bizarrely, after working on the failed George McGovern campaign, Charlie Dean went to Indochina in 1974 to witness the ravages of the war he had opposed. Not long after he arrived, the apparently ungrateful communists captured and killed him. Hey fellas! I’m on your s— CLUNK!

Howard Dean wears his brother’s battered 1960s belt every day. (By contrast, Ted Kennedy honors the memory of his deceased family members with several belts every day.) Dean told Dan Rather about his brother’s death at some length on CBS News: “It gave me a sense that you ought to live for the moment with people; that you really – you really need to tell people you love them if you love them. It was certainly the most awful thing that ever happened to our family. It was terrible for my parents; it was even worse for them than it was for us.”

Dammit, if a man wants to be my president, I have a right to know where he stands on the issue of when to tell the people you love that you love them! Couldn’t the Democratic Party go back to plagiarizing British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock like Sen. Joe Biden, rather than plagiarizing “Lifetime: TV for Women”? Do any men at all vote for the Democrats anymore?

Carol Moseley Braun’s personal tragedy is that she’s being forced to run for president even though it turns out the Democrats won’t need her to split the black vote anyway. Please, can I drop out now? Al Sharpton is only polling at 2%. I hate this!

Sharpton is the counterpoint to his sob sisters in the Democratic Party. Sharpton libeled innocent men in the Tawana Brawley case. He inflamed angry mobs in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, leading to the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. He incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, Freddy’s, ending in a blaze of bullets and fire that left several employees dead. So while the other Democrats talk about their personal tragedies, Sharpton goes around creating personal tragedies.

In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats’ other big idea – too nuanced for a bumper sticker – is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There’s Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew – along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering.

Clark said that when he discovered he was half-Jewish, he remembered growing up in Arkansas and feeling “a certain kinship” with Jewish families in the dry-goods business. (I, too, have always felt a certain kinship with Calvin Trillin.)

The Democrats’ urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum. Their perverse desire to discuss the deaths and near-deaths of their children is designed to disguise the fact that they support the killing of more than a million unborn children every year. (Oh, by the way, what did their milkman and millworker fathers think about abortion?)

If the Democrats start extolling you – get a gun.

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The ‘Mainstream’ Is Located In France (031029)

THE NEWSPAPER that almost missed the war in Iraq because its reporters were in Georgia covering the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club has declared another one of President George Bush’s judicial nominees as “out of the mainstream.” The New York Times has proclaimed so many Bush nominees “out of the mainstream” that the editorial calling California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown “out of the mainstream” was literally titled: “Out of the Mainstream, Again.”

Among Bush’s “many unworthy judicial nominees,” the Times said, Brown is “among the very worst” – more “out of the mainstream” than all the rest! Even Teddy Kennedy, who might be well advised to withhold comment on a woman’s position relative to a moving body of water, has described Brown as “out of the mainstream,” adding, “Let’s just hope this one can swim.”

Liberals are hysterical about Justice Brown principally because she is black. Nothing enrages them so much as a minority who does not spend her days saying hosannas to liberals.

On the basis of its editorial positions, the Times seems to have called a bunch of racist Southern election supervisors out of retirement to cover judicial nominations for the paper. The only difference is, instead of phony “literacy” tests, now we have phony “mainstream” tests. Amazingly, no matter how many conservative minorities Bush sends up, the Times has not been able to find a single one who is “qualified.” The Times thinks Justice Brown should be the maid and Miguel Estrada the pool boy.

According to the Times, Brown has “declared war on the mainstream legal values that most Americans hold dear.” What the Times means by “mainstream legal values” is: off-the-charts unpopular positions favored by NAMBLA, the ACLU and The New York Times editorial page.

Thus, for example, opposition to partial-birth abortion – opposed by 70% of the American people – is “out of the mainstream.”

Support for the death penalty – supported by 70% of the American people – is “out of the mainstream.”

Opposition to government-sanctioned race discrimination – which voters in the largest state in the nation put on an initiative titled Proposition 209 and enacted into law – is “out of the mainstream.”

Opposition to gay marriage – opposed by 60% of the American people – is “out of the mainstream.”

Failing to recognize that totally nude dancing is “speech” is “out of the mainstream.”

Questioning whether gay Scoutmasters should be taking 14-year-old boys on overnight sleepovers in the woods is “out of the mainstream.”

I guess if your “mainstream” includes Roman Polanski, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and Jacques Chirac, then Brown really is “out of the mainstream.” This proverbial “stream” they’re constantly referring to is evidently located somewhere in France.

Liberals are always complaining that they haven’t figured out how to distill their message to slogans and bumper stickers – as they allege Republicans have. Though it can’t be easy to fit the entire Communist Manifesto on a bumper sticker, I beg to differ. (Bumper sticker version of the current Democratic platform: “Ask me about how I’m going to raise your taxes.”)

The problem is, if Democrats ever dared speak coherently, the American people would lynch them. Fortunately for liberals, soccer moms hear that a nominee is “extreme” and “out the mainstream” and are too frightened to ask for details. (Ironically, based on ticket sales and TV ratings, soccer is also out of the mainstream.)

In addition to the fact that she is black and “out of the mainstream,” the first item in the Times’ bill of particulars against Brown was this:

“She regularly stakes out extreme positions, often dissenting alone. In one case, her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented, arguing that doing so violated the company’s free-speech rights.”

Despite the Times’ implication that Brown was “dissenting alone” in this case, she was not. The opinion of the California Supreme Court in the case, Aguilar v. Avis, was as closely divided as it gets: 4-3. Among the dissenters was Stanley Mosk, who was once described by the Los Angeles Times as “the court’s most liberal member.” When Mosk died in 2001, his obituary in The New York Times described him as “the only liberal on the seven-member court.” I suppose if the Times had mentioned that a prominent liberal jurist had agreed with Brown in Aguilar, it would be harder to frighten silly women with that “out of the mainstream” babble.

But the real beauty part of Brown’s dissent in Aguilar is that she was vindicating a constitutional principle that is second in importance only to abortion for liberals: no prior restraints on speech.

In a major victory for Avis, the jury rejected almost all of the claims against Avis by Hispanic employees, but did find that two managers – only one of whom still worked at Avis – had called Hispanics names. So the lower-court judge got the idea to issue an injunction prohibiting one single Avis manager from ever using derogatory language about Avis’ Hispanic employees.

The injunction was broad enough to prevent the manager from using such language in his home, out of earshot of his employees, in a joking or friendly manner, as part of a hypothetical example, or even if his speech were incapable of creating a “hostile environment” under the law. Questions were also raised about whether he was even allowed to chuckle at the little dog in those “Yo quiero Taco Bell” TV commercials. It was basically a bill of attainder against this one manager (who was himself married to a Hispanic).

I note that liberals laughed at the idea that a “hostile environment” could be created by a single incident of a governor dropping his pants and asking a subordinate to “kiss it.” But the mere speculative threat of a manager saying “wetback” – one time – was such a threat to the stability of the nation that the Times backed a prior restraint on the manager’s speech.

Usually The New York Times is citing the law’s antagonism to prior restraints on speech in order to wax eloquent about the Supreme Court’s “landmark decision in the Pentagon Papers case.” In a ruling that celebrated the very essence of the First Amendment, the court ruled that the government couldn’t stop the Treason Times from publishing classified national-security documents. As the Times put it, that case had “made it clear that only a showing of concrete, immediate risk to the nation could justify a judicial order imposing a prior restraint on any kind of publication.”

But apparently, there is one interest even more vital than preventing an immediate risk to the nation: stopping a supervisor someplace in America from ever using the word “spic.” Anyone who disagrees is “out of the mainstream.” And any minority who is not duly grateful to liberals for supporting prior restraints against certain words is only qualified to be the maid.

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With Half His Brain Tied Behind His Back (031015)

SO LIBERALS have finally found a drug addict they don’t like. And unlike the Lackawanna Six – those high-spirited young lads innocently seeking adventure in an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan – liberals could find no excuses for Rush Limbaugh.

After years of the mainstream media assuring us that Rush was a has-been, a nobody, yesterday’s news – the Rush painkiller story was front-page news last week. (Would anyone care if Howell Raines committed murder?) The airwaves and print media were on red alert with Rush’s admission that, after an unsuccessful spinal operation a few years ago, he became addicted to powerful prescription painkillers.

Rush Limbaugh’s misfortune is apparently a bigger story than his nearly $300 million radio contract signed two years ago. That was the biggest radio contract in broadcasting history. Yet there are only 12 documents on LexisNexis that reported it. The New York Times didn’t take notice of Rush’s $300 million radio contract, but a few weeks later, put Bill Clinton’s comparatively measly $10 million book contract on its front page. Meanwhile, in the past week alone, LexisNexis has accumulated more than 50 documents with the words “Rush Limbaugh and hypocrisy.” That should make up for the 12 documents on his $300 million radio contract.

The reason any conservative’s failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.

At least Rush wasn’t walking into church carrying a 10-pound Bible before rushing back to the Oval Office for sodomy with Monica Lewinsky. He wasn’t enforcing absurd sexual harassment guidelines while dropping his pants in front of a half-dozen subordinates. (Evidently, Clinton wasn’t a hypocrite because no one was supposed to take seriously the notion that he respected women or believed in God.)

Rush has hardly been the anti-drug crusader liberals suggest. Indeed, Rush hasn’t had much to say about drugs at all since that spinal operation. The Rush Limbaugh quote that has been endlessly recited in the last week to prove Rush’s rank “hypocrisy” is this, made eight years ago: “Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. ... And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”

What precisely are liberals proposing that Rush should have said to avoid their indignant squeals of “hypocrisy”? Announce his support for the wide and legal availability of a prescription painkiller that may have caused him to go deaf and nearly ruined his career and wrecked his life? I believe that would have been both evil and hypocritical.

Or is it simply that Rush should not have become addicted to painkillers in the first place? Well, no, I suppose not. You’ve caught us: Rush has a flaw. And yet, the wily hypocrite does not support flaws!

When a conservative can be the biggest thing in talk radio, earning $30 million a year and attracting 20 million devoted listeners every week – all while addicted to drugs – I’ll admit liberals have reason to believe that conservatives are some sort of super-race, incorruptible by original sin. But the only perfect man hasn’t walked the Earth for 2,000 years. In liberals’ worldview, any conservative who is not Jesus Christ is ipso facto a “hypocrite” for not publicly embracing dissolute behavior the way liberals do.

In fact, Rush’s behavior was not all that dissolute. There is a fundamental difference between taking any drug – legal, illegal, prescription, protected by the 21st Amendment or banned by Michael Bloomberg – for kicks and taking a painkiller for pain.

There is a difference morally and a difference legally. While slamming Rush, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz recently told Wolf Blitzer, “Generally, people who illegally buy prescription drugs are not prosecuted, whereas people who illegally buy cocaine and heroin are prosecuted.” What would the point be? Just say no to back surgery?

I haven’t checked with any Harvard Law professors, but I’m pretty sure that, generally, adulterous drunks who drive off bridges and kill girls are prosecuted. Ah, but Teddy Kennedy supports adultery and public drunkenness – so at least you can’t call him a hypocrite! That must provide great consolation to Mary Jo Kopechne’s parents.

I have a rule about not feeling sorry for people worth $300 million, but I’m feeling sentimental. Evan Thomas wrote a cover story on Rush for Newsweek this week that was so vicious it read like conservative satire. Thomas called Rush a “schlub,” “socially ill at ease,” an Elmer Gantry, an actor whose “act has won over, or fooled, a lot of people.” He compared Rush to the phony TV evangelist Jim Bakker and recommended that Rush start to “make a virtue out of honesty.” (Liberals can lie under oath in legal proceedings and it’s a “personal matter.” Conservatives must scream their every failing from the rooftops or they are “liars.”)

As is standard procedure for profiles of conservatives, Newsweek gathered quotes on Rush from liberals, ex-wives and dumped dates. Covering himself, Thomas ruefully remarked that “it’s hard to find many people who really know him.” Well, there was me, Evan! But I guess Newsweek didn’t have room for the quotes I promptly sent back to the Newsweek researchers. I could have even corrected Newsweek’s absurd account of how Rush met his current wife. (It’s kind of cute, too: She was a fan who began arguing with him about something he said on air.)

Thomas also made the astute observation that “Rush Limbaugh has always had far more followers than friends.” Needless to say, this floored those of us who were shocked to discover that Rush does not have 20 million friends.

So the guy I really feel sorry for is Evan Thomas. How would little Evan fare in any competitive media? Any followers? Any fans? Any readers at all? And he’s not even addicted to painkillers! This week, Rush proved his motto: He really can beat liberals with half his brain tied behind his back.

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It’s The Winter Solstice, Charlie Brown! (030924)

DAVID LIMBAUGH’S new book, “Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity,” will make you cry for your country. (But don’t pray for your country if you’re anywhere near a public school!) Released this week, Limbaugh’s copiously researched book documents how the courts, the universities, the media, Hollywood and government institutions react to any mention of Christianity like Superman recoiling from kryptonite, Dracula from sunlight, or Madonna from soap and water. His straight, factual narrative of what is happening in our public schools makes you wonder how much longer America can survive liberalism.

In a public school in St. Louis, a teacher spotted the suspect, fourth-grader Raymond Raines, bowing his head in prayer before lunch. The teacher stormed to Raymond’s table, ordered him to stop immediately and sent him to the principal’s office. The principal informed the young malefactor that praying was not allowed in school. When Raymond was again caught praying before meals on three separate occasions, he was segregated from other students, ridiculed in front of his classmates, and finally sentenced to a week’s detention.

Before snack time in her kindergarten class in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., little Kayla Broadus held hands with two of her classmates and recited this prayer: “God is good, God is great, thank you, God, for my food.” The alert teacher pounced on Kayla, severely reprimanded her, and reported her to the school administration. In short order, the principal sent a sternly worded letter to Kayla’s parents advising them that Kayla was not allowed to pray in school, aloud or with others.

The school board then issued a triumphant press release crowing about its victory over a kindergartner praying before snack time. Thus was creeping theocracy in Saratoga Springs stopped dead in its tracks! Kayla’s mother brought a lawsuit, winning Kayla the right to pray out loud. But she was still prohibited from holding hands with others while she prayed. Hearing the G-word in kindergarten might interfere with the school’s efforts to teach proper sexual techniques in the first grade.

Thanks to the vigilance of an alert teacher at Lynn Lucas Middle School outside of Houston, two sisters carrying Bibles were prevented from bringing their vile material into a classroom. The teacher stopped the students at the classroom door and marched them to the principal’s office. (Maybe it was just the sight of public school students carrying a book of any kind that set off alarm bells.) The sisters’ mother was called and warned that the school intended to report her to Child Protective Services. When the mother arrived, the teacher threw the Bibles in the wastebasket, shouting, “This is garbage!”

In another display of tolerance at Lynn Lucas Middle School, school administrators snatched three students’ books with covers displaying the Ten Commandments, ripped the covers off, threw them in the garbage, and told the students that the Ten Commandments constituted “hate speech.” (Also, it would be insensitive to expose the Ten Commandments to students who had never been taught to count to 10.)

After the massacre at Columbine High School, students and families were invited to paint tiles above student lockers. The school district had taken all reasonable precautions, immediately deploying an army of secular “grief counselors” with teddy bears to descend on the school after the attack. Nonetheless, some students painted their tiles with “objectionable” messages, such as: “4/20/99: Jesus Wept” and “God Is Love.” This would not stand: The school removed 90 tiles with offending religious messages.

A federal court upheld the school’s censorship of the religious tiles. Of course, Columbine school officials had earned a measure of deference after having inculcated such a fine sense of morality in their students that two boys could walk into school one day and stage a bloody massacre. You don’t argue with a track record like that.

Not all mentions of religion constitute “hate speech.” In Tupelo, Miss., school administrators methodically purged all Christmas carols of any religious content – and then led the children in a chant of: “Celebrate Kwanzaa!” At Pattison Elementary school in Katy, Texas, Christmas songs are banned, but students are threatened with grade reductions for refusing to sing songs celebrating other religious faiths.

In New York City, the chancellor of the Department of Education prohibited the display of Nativity scenes in public schools, while expressly allowing the Jewish menorah and the Islamic star and crescent to be displayed. Some would say that was overkill inasmuch as New York City is already the home of the world’s largest public display built in commemoration of Islam: Ground Zero.

Between issuing laws prohibiting discrimination against transgendered individuals and running up a $38 billion deficit, the California Legislature mandated a three-week immersion course in Islam for all seventh-graders. A “crash course” in Islam, you might call it, if that weren’t so ironic. Students are required to adopt Muslim names, plan a trip to Mecca, play a jihad game, pray to “Allah, the Compassionate” and to chant “Praise to Allah! Lord of Creation!” They are encouraged to dress in Muslim garb. Students are discouraged, however, from stoning girls at the school dances, abusing their “Jew” math teachers or blowing up their classmates.

A popular student textbook, “Across the Centuries,” treats the Inquisition and Salem witch-hunts as typical of Christianity, but never gets around to mentioning the Muslims’ conquest of Spain, the Battle of Tours, or the execution of Jews in Qurayza. Or 9-11.

There is no surer proof of Christ’s divinity than that he is still so hated some 2,000 years after his death. Limbaugh’s “Persecution” covers it all in staggering, heartbreaking detail. His methodical description of what is happening in our public schools alone will call to mind the hate speech banned in Columbine: “Jesus Wept.”

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It’s Like Christmas In December! (031217)

SAY, HAS ANYONE asked Dick Gephardt if this falls under “miserable failure”?

Obviously we’ll have to wait for all the politics to play out, but at this stage it’s hard to say which was worse for Howard Dean: the capture of Saddam Hussein or Al Gore’s endorsement. Until Sunday, Gov. Mean’s big applause line in speeches has been to sneer about the Bush administration’s failure to catch Saddam Hussein. It seems the governor is better at prescribing bitter pills than at swallowing them.

In a speech to the Pacific Council the day after Saddam was captured, Dean nearly choked on the words, “The capture of Saddam is a good thing,” and then quickly added, “but the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.” (Possible headline: “Dean Says Saddam’s Capture Good Thing, Just Not Really Good Thing.”) If George W. Bush announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered, Democrats would complain about unemployed laboratory rats.

On Fox News Sunday, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., said of Saddam’s capture: “This is a great opportunity for this president to get it right for the long term. And I hope he will be magnanimous, reach out to the U.N., to allies who’ve stood away from us.”

It’s as if he were reading my mind! After listening to all the bellyaching from European leftists for the past eight months, I think I speak for all Americans when I say I’ve been on tenterhooks waiting for the right opportunity to grovel to the French. And now we have it – a major win is the perfect opportunity! That Kerry has an uncanny sense for what the average American is thinking.

Actually, he lost me with that one. Maybe it’s a good opportunity for the French and the United Nations to reach out to us, but by what logic is this an opportunity for us to reach out to them? As I understand it, the situation is: We caught Saddam. So the obvious next move is ...

(a) Put him on trial.

(b) Get information from him.

(d) Turn him over to the Iraqis.

(e) Appeal to the French.

What was interesting about Kerry’s suggestion was that it was the exact same suggestion liberals were making when they claimed the war was going badly. The day before Saddam’s capture, the New York Times editorialized: “The way to deal with all that is going wrong in Iraq remains as clear as it was on the day that Mr. Bush declared an end to major combat operations. ... Instead of driving away France, Germany, Russia and Canada with financial sanctions, the president should be creating the room for compromise ...” Damn that Bush. He squandered the good will of a bunch of people who hate our guts.

Apparently, this is what liberals mean by “a plan”:

Military setback: Appeal to the French.

Military victory: Appeal to the French.

Saddam captured: Appeal to the French.

Osama captured: Appeal to the French.

Osama catches Saddam: Appeal to the French.

In 24 months, Bush has perceptibly degraded terrorist operations throughout the world. The rebuilding in Iraq is going better than could possibly be expected. Liberals don’t care. They just want to turn everything over to the French. (And, apparently, the recent capture of Saddam presents us with a golden opportunity to do so!) The Birchers were right about these people. They believe in world government more than they believe in the United States.

One strongly suspects that the White House sat on the story of Saddam’s arrest for a day so the Times could put out its regular Sunday bad news: “A Baghdad Neighborhood, Once Hopeful, Now Reels As Iraq’s Turmoil Persists,” “Saboteurs, Looters and Old Equipment Work Against Efforts to Restart Iraqi Oil Fields,” “It’s Going to Be a Bloody Christmas,” “Dean Strives for a Nuanced Approach to Foreign Policy.” The New York Times hasn’t looked this foolish ... well, I guess since the day before.

Liberals should perk up. It’s not all bad news. True, Saddam Hussein has been captured. But Norman Mineta is still at large.

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Vegan Computer Geeks For Dean (031210)

THE COVER STORY in this week’s New York Times magazine described Howard Dean’s hardcore support as consisting primarily of impotent nosepickers hoping to make some friends and unsuccessful auditioners for Gap commercials. That is to say, the followers (as opposed to leaders) of tomorrow.

Their passion for Dean was aptly summarized by 24-year-old Lauren Popper – the “official representative” at a Dean campaign office one particular night. Though she “broke into tears several times while trying to explain” the allure of the Dean campaign, Popper managed to convey that she was first attracted to Dean based on his policy of having a state social worker visit every new mother in Vermont (not to be confused with the Arkansas policy from the 1980s in which the governor would visit every woman who was hoping to become pregnant). Not that I’m trying to privatize anything here, but in my home state of Connecticut, a new mother is traditionally visited by her own mother.

Popper added that Dean’s becoming president was “a side effect” of the Dean campaign. Cold comfort to the candidate, I imagine. Rather, she said: “This campaign is about allowing people to come together and tell their life stories.”

With quotes like that, it’s not going to be easy to tone down the Republicans’ overconfidence in the coming presidential campaign. But lately I’ve noticed that a lot of Democrats are comparing inevitable nominee Howard Dean to George McGovern and wearily predicting a landslide for Bush. That’s not the fighting spirit we expect from the party that will go to the smallest town in North Dakota to remove the Ten Commandments!

Whenever liberals all start singing from the same hymnal, they are up to no good. (Or since we’re talking about American liberals here, maybe I should say, “when they all start reading from the same Quran.”)

I believe the game plan is this: The Democrats will spend the next 11 months ruefully admitting that it’s going to be a 50-state landslide for Bush. Republicans will engage in their normal partisan cheerleading, and everyone will seem to be agreed that Bush is going to win a 50-state landslide. Then, if the final tally is anything short of that – if it’s a 40-state landslide for Bush – the New York Times will be able to crow about Bush’s poor showing and run headlines like: “Americans Still Deeply Divided on War.”

This is precisely what happened in the 1998 midterm elections. That year, Republicans made history by winning a majority in both Houses of Congress for the third straight time. Just four years earlier, millions of Americans who had never voted Republican in their entire lives did it for the first time. In 1998, they did it a third time. Though Republicans lost five seats in the House, they held their majority. The Democrats half-century stranglehold on the House was over.

The Los Angeles Times headline the next day was typical: “Democrats Exult in Victories as GOP Takes Stock of Losses; Elections: Republicans Retain Control of Congress, But Their Leadership There Is Weakened. Defeats Undercut Impeachment Drive and Reopen Party Divisions.”

I suppose it’s possible the Democrats’ predictions of catastrophe and ruin in the upcoming presidential election are genuine. It is beyond dispute that Howard Dean is a more appalling candidate than George McGovern ever was.

McGovern was an authentic war hero in World War II. Howard Dean showed up at the Army recruiting office with a note from his doctor and a fake limp to get out of serving in Vietnam – before repairing to Aspen for several months of skiing. In Dean’s defense, I suppose that, technically speaking, “spinelessness” would be considered a debilitating back condition. (According to the New York Times, this is the same as taking off in jets that fly at the speed of sound while training to be a fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard.)

Moreover, the North Vietnamese were savage beasts, but they never attacked America on its own soil. It’s a little different to be anti-war now.

But we live in a different country. Apparently, some Americans think choosing the leader of the free world should be a process of people coming together to tell their life stories. (At least that’s a step up from the Democrats’ 1996 presidential campaign, which, if I remember correctly, was about people telling their stories to grand juries.)

In case Al Gore hasn’t called you personally at home in the last 10 minutes to remind you: In the last election, this country gave a slight plurality of the popular vote to Al Gore. A plurality voted for Bill Clinton – twice. In the middle of a titanic struggle with a Soviet totalitarianism, this country elected Jimmy Carter president. If that’s not enough to keep you up at night, here’s one more: Hillary Clinton’s “disapproval” rating has yet to reach 100%.

Forget landslides: It’s a wonder that Republicans ever win any elections at all.

Consider that ap