Squaring the Culture

I want my country back.

I’ve heard dozens of leftists on the web chanting this sound bite to encourage each other. It’s based on the fantasy that the evil Republican Bush has “stolen” the nation and turned it into a totalitarian horror. It’s the way they recite their catechism of the liberties that they have lost through the various measures that the President has taken to root out Islamic terror cells. They can name no liberties that have been lost, other than the liberty to converse with a foreign enemy during a time of war without fear of surveillance. And of course, it’s 21st century metropolitan patriotism: patriotism expressed in the whine of a deprived 2-year-old. Such is the character of my generation. I am ashamed.

Still, I’m encouraged by their example to recite my own catechism of liberties lost.

Starting around 1960, libertines driven by a strange, self-absorbed philosophy started stealing my country and making it a strange place, and they’ve been stealing it ever since, by any means possible. They’ve used dishonest arguments, misguided administrative fiats, acquisitive judges. They’ve forced their agenda down everybody’s throats, avoiding any possibility of real debate. They’ve stolen my country. I want my country back.

You know, the country where children in school learned about William Tyndale, John Knox, James Madison, and Daniel Webster, rather than Chaka of the Zulus, Rachel Carson, and Margaret Sanger. Where the virtues taught to the young were universal truths like honesty, courage, fidelity, chastity, and loyalty, rather than political positions like environmental awareness, multiculturalism, and abortion rights. Where people who encouraged others to live moral lives were called pillars of the public good, not “haters” and “homophobes.” Where chastity was a virtue and sexual deviance a vice, where women were respected and men encouraged, where women who devoted their lives to raising their children were considered the backbone of civilization.

I want the country where immigrants learned English and worked toward a better future for their children, who would become the middle class of the next generation. Where an author’s words were taken for what they meant and not for what the reader wanted to see. Where the Constitution was a wall protecting citizens’ rights from government intrusion, and not a bit of clay to be reshaped by each generation of lawyers. Where charity was the voluntary work of churches and individuals, not a government imperitive. I want my country back.

I want the country where the government did not attempt to tell people how to run their businesses, who to hire, how much to pay their workers, where they could or could not build their factories. I want the country where a landlord could rent to whom he chose. Where a worker could not be forced to contribute to a union that stood for things he despised. Where a man was free to do as he chose with his own property, and the government could not take it just because they thought it could be used for something better for the tax base. Where a man could keep nearly all of what he earned, and not have to turn half of it over to the government. Where a man could pass his savings on to his children without them being confiscated by the government.

I want the country where faith was the cornerstone of every town, not an intrusive oddity to be driven into dark corners. Where religion was encouraged and not deprecated. Where piety was considered a positive qualification for holding office, not a disqualification. Where the church was expected to offer a prophetic voice to the body politic, not threatened with confiscatory taxes if they dare whisper an opinion.

I want my country back.

This week we’ve seen the Muslim world burst into flame over a 600-year-old comment quoted by Pope Benedict at Regensburg University, where he used to teach. The quote was from a debate between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II and an educated Persian. Here’s what Manuel said:

“Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached…”

The general point of the speech was to denounce violence as a means of settling religious disputes. However, Muslims demonstrated all over the world, several churches on the West Bank were firebombed, and a nun was murdered, execution-style, in Somalia. Article about the Pope’s comments here, details of some of the Muslim responses here, here, and here.

How are we to respond to such things? Clearly, Muslims today want the world to adhere to their rules, and they’re willing to resort to violence to make sure it happens. Just as clearly, if we’re going to retain our liberties, we have to resist that pressure, even if it comes in the form of a reasonable-sounding American leftist saying things like “We don’t want to deliberately offend the Muslims among us.”

So what do we do? start machine-gunning crowds of angry Muslims? It may come to something like that; if defending ourselves from an angry mob is the only alternative to refraining from violations of Sharia law, then we may actually have to defend ourselves physically.

Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, argues that Muslims will need to reform their religion or else there will be no economic progress in the Muslim world, here, and it’s discussed some more here. Ultimately, this is the goal: reformation of Islam to the point where it is capable of living peacefully next to other religions.

Lord Carey was clear on the essential point that it is not radical Islam that needs to change, but Islam itself. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that we’re not combating radicals, but one of the mainstream interpretations of Islam. This is a critical point. Let’s state this in terms of Christian elements, to compare the size and influence of the Jihadists: if this were Christianity becoming violent, we would not be dealing with the equivalent of abortion-clinic bombers, but rather with the equivalent of the entire Southern Baptist Convention — or perhaps with the entirety of Protestantism. It’s that big.

The more of this I see, the more impressed I am that the Bush administration saw the importance of a shift in Islamic thinking as early as 2002. They understood the issues a lot better than anybody else in the political arena.

Want to know why we’re in Iraq? Go here, and click on “thank you” at the bottom. Then view the other two clips. It’s incredibly healing.

Saddam Hussein targeted the Kurds for genocide. We stopped the genocide. They’re grateful. There’s no violence in Kurdistan. No “insurgency.” Only 200 coalition troops are stationed there, in the whole region. The Kurds are prospering.

If for no other reason (and there are plenty of other reasons) we did the right thing because of this.

..and we might actually have a peaceful world again.This apology appeared in the New York Post yesterday. It’s a Muslim who lives in America, admitting that what we saw on 9/11/2001 was Muslims acting on their religion. Read it. And then pray for this man, and all who are like him.

Excerpt:

WELL, here it is, five years late, but here just the same: an apology from an Arab-American for 9/11. No, I didn’t help organize the killers or contribute in any way to their terrible cause. However, I was one of millions of Arab-Americans who did the unspeakable on 9/11: nothing.

The only time I raised my voice in protest against these men who killed thousands of innocents in the name of Allah was behind closed doors, among the safety of friends and family. I did at one point write a very vitriolic essay condemning their actions, but fear of becoming another Salman Rushdie kept me from ever trying to publish it.

Well, I’m sick of saying the truth only in private – that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large.

Yes, our extremists and our culture.

Every single 9/11 hijacker was Arab and a Muslim. The apologists (including President Bush) tried to reassure us that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, but was a twisting of a great and noble religion. With all due respect, read the Koran, Mr. President. There’s enough there for someone of extreme tendencies to find their way to a global jihad.

There’s also enough there for someone of a different mindset to find a path to enlightenment and peace. Still, Rushdie had it right back in 2001: This does have to do with Islam.

This one said it. There are more who think it. If enough Muslims come to where this man has come, the war against Islamic Jihadism will have been won.

(Computer simulation photo from NIST’s Pentagon Building Performance Report, showing American Flight 77 superimposed over the section of the Pentagon’s facade that was damaged on 9/11/2001.)

The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 has generated an unusual volume of conspiracy theories, part of the general Bush Derangement.

Conspiracy theories can be valid, of course, and the questions they raise often deserve reasonable attention. Most often, though, they occur when bright but partisan people come to an incident with an agenda that creates a conclusion in their minds before they’ve viewed the facts. The preconception governs their analysis, and the “facts” they discover lead to the very conclusion they had in mind when they started. A little research usually uncovers the errors in their conclusions pretty quickly.

In this case, they come to the 9/11 attacks already believing that Bush is a puppet, Cheney is the devil, and the government manipulated everybody to create a cause for war that would allow their oil buddies to make billions. It’s no surprise that they find evidence that the Bush administration ordered the 9/11 attacks. It does not strike them as implausible in the least that a President could actually conspire to murder thousands of his own citizens. Republicans really are that evil, you see.

The problem is, the claim is hilariously wrong.

I don’t recall the name of the first 9/11 hoax video I viewed, but it focused on anomalies in the collapse of Building 7 of the WTC, which was not hit by planes. After watching a film that was obviously created by hard-core anti-government partisans, I agreed, at least tentatively, that they had a case for saying the building might have been destroyed deliberately by the owner, not by fires or accidental damage from the other WTC buildings. (They also concluded “the government did it,” but their support for that was laughable; nothing more convincing than “there were a bunch of secret government offices in that building.”) Of course, this was before I heard a demolitions expert describe the MONTHS of preparation necessary for a controlled demolition; but what did I know?

I didn’t research further until I read a post on a yahoo message board that contained a link to the official government report on the collapse of WTC Building 7. (See also the photos in the Interim Report.) Reading portions of the report made it clear that the building had suffered severe structural damage from the debris of other buildings, and that the collapse of WTC 7 in no way resembled a controlled demolition. They weren’t sure exactly why the building had collapsed, but the theories were plausible and did not involve demolitions.

To quote New York Magazine:

Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, head of the NIST’s Trade Center report, recently addressed many of the issues 9-11 conspiracy theorists have with the study. Dr. Sunder replied, “Yes. I am sympathetic. But our report . . . it is extensive. We consulted 80 public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who’s Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we can’t worry about that. Facts are facts.”

I took a lesson from this; read the official report before judging. They’re written by engineers, they’re usually pretty candid, and they contain information that doesn’t make it into the press or the conspiracy videos.

I’ve since seen two other conspiracy videos: Loose Change and In Plane Sight. My experience with these followed my pattern with the first. Loose Change asked, among other things, “How could a building collapse solely from fire?” Then I read the official report, and it explained that the plane severed several of the building’s structural supports as well as the outer shell, which also served a structural role. In Plane Sight asked, “How could an airplane hit the Pentagon and leave such a small hole?” Then I read the official report, and it explained exactly what damage was done to the facade, what damage was done to interior columns, and how. Lots of their questions are answered in the official report.

By all means, watch these videos if you have time (they’re about 90 minutes each.) But then, by all means, visit Popular Mechanics’ Myth Debunking site, and the Loose Change debunking site, Screw Loose Change . Or do what I did: READ THE OFFICIAL REPORT. It will answer lots of questions for you.

In general, conspiracy tales make a leap from “there are unanswered questions” to “the government must have done it.” Addressing them, you have to remember that while the questions are often worth asking, the existence of outstanding questions does not warrant discarding facts that have been established clearly already.

Take, for example, the silly theories in In Plane Sight that the planes that hit WTC 1 & 2 were government drones, not commercial airliners. They have some photos showing an unexplained “pod” underneath the fuselage of one plane, and unexplained flashes when the radomes of the planes hit the buildings. Very interesting.

The problem is, the paths of the commercial airliners are easy to establish. Air traffic controllers watched the planes leave their planned routes, turn around, and head into Manhattan, following them until they dropped below the radar perhaps 3 minutes before hitting the towers. (I heard Tom Brokaw interview half a dozen air traffic controllers on NBC from 9 to 10 on 9/10/06, but could not find a link online, so check here instead for support.) We also have phone calls from the planes (cell and airphone), forensic evidence from the crash sites (e.g. body parts), eyewitness accounts, photos and such. So, while it’s perfectly reasonable to ask “What are those flashes?” and “What’s that pod?”, you still have to live with the fact that American Airlines flight 11 hit the North WTC tower at 8:46 AM, and United flight 175 hit the south tower 17 minutes later. Those are facts. They’re not debatable.

This, also, is a fact: a large percentage of the American people, for whatever reason, believe deep in their guts that the President and his administration are slavering demons who eat babies for breakfast. There’s no logic to it, but they believe it anyhow, and it drives them to believe lots of other implausible things. Stick to the facts, do your homework, and calmly rebut them wherever you find them. It will be obvious to whoever’s watching who’s got the facts, and who’s got the right character.

I was reading the Volokh Conspiracy, a serious blog site dedicated to legal issues, when I happened across a note about some Internet game programmer who had reproduced the entire US Patent code in dactylic verse. Following it were comments by lawyers about metric feet in poetry (the names of different types of rhythms found in poetic verse.) I guess lawyers need to come up for air now and then.

One gave us the following gem from Isaac Asimov. (Note: dactylic meter is a phrase of three syllables with the first syllable accented: DAH dah dah. Dactylic tetrameter is four of those strung together. Think of the phrase from “Row, row, row your boat” that goes “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.”)

I recall reading, many years ago, an essay by Isaac Asimov in which he claimed that any chemical named in accordance with the standard protocols for organic compounds could be sung to the tune of The Irish Washerwoman (dactylic tetrameter?). The example he gave (IIRC) was para-dichloro-amino-benzaldehyde.

And he was followed by this limerick, which I just love:

A mosquito once cried out in pain
“A chemist has poisoned my brain!”
The cause of his sorrow
was para-dichloro
diphenyl-trichloro-ethane

Sorry. I just couldn’t help myself.

I’ve written the following letter to both of the Senators from my state:

Dear Senator [name]:

Today’s news carried a copy of a letter sent by Democrats in the Senate to the President and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, asking him to cancel the airing of a program entitled “The Path to 9/11.”

The letter was disturbing in that it could easily be construed as a threat to remove the broadcast license of the Disney Corporation should they choose to air this program.

Disagreements over political points of view are part of the robust exchange of ideas that a free republic requires in order to remain free and healthy. When that disagreement becomes a veiled threat from the government, however, a line has been crossed. Threaten to boycott. threaten to demonstrate, threaten to stop watching programs: fine. Threaten to have the GOVERNMENT REMOVE THEIR LICENSE? Not fine; that’s censorship, and completely unacceptable.

I urge you and your fellow Senators to object in the strongest language possible to ANY suggestion that a political disagreement over the content of programming could IN ANY WAY endanger the Disney Company’s right to use the airwaves. Please make the Democrat Senators acknowledge that they intend no such violation of the public’s right to criticize freely.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Philip K. Weingart

I request all who read this blog to likewise write to both of the Senators from your state and ask them to object to the language of the letter to the Disney Company. I posted a link to their letter earlier, but in case you missed that, here it is again. In case you don’t know how to reach your Senator, the information can be found at http://www.senate.gov/ in the upper right-hand corner of their web site.

This is serious. It’s one thing to dislike an opponent’s tactics. It’s quite another to threaten to use the power of government to silence them. We must publicly, loudly, protect the right of the Disney Company to air whatever point of view they choose, regardless of how badly it wads President Clinton’s boxer shorts.

At the recommendation of Allahpundit at HotAirBlog, I’m providing this link to the best roundup I’ve seen yet of the facts revelant to the Democrats’ public tantrum over ABC’s “The Path to 9/11.” It contains the denials by the relevant Democrats, followed by the text of the relevant passages from the 9/11 Commission Report. Hint: the Democrats aren’t looking so good…

The link is to a site called Texas Rainmaker. I’ve never read him before, but I might start. His tag line, at the top of his site, reads:

Every morning when I wake up I read the Bible and the newspaper… because I want to know what both sides are up to.

I have nothing to add.

I’ve had it.

Democrats in the Senate — the SENATE — have written to ABC in an attempt to get them to stop the showing of a miniseries about the plot to destroy the World Trade Center towers.

Democrats are upset that the program might show the Clinton administration in a bad light. They claim the program is misleading, that it is partisan, and that it serves the public ill.

In other words, the Democrats, who have enjoyed precisely this sort of bias in their favor for FIFTY YEARS, nonstop, cannot stand to have a single broadcast that might – might — be interpreted as uncomplimentary to Democrats.

The words do not exist to describe the depth of hypocricy in the souls of those Democrats.

The worst irony is that for once, we’re looking at a program, not that leans to the right, but that actually attempts to hold a centrist view, rather than a leftist view. The program is allegedly based on the findings of the 9/11 Commission; ABC hired Tom Kean, the Commission’s chairman and former New Jersey Governor, as a consultant on the project. In fact, a number of us feel that the Commission was a Democratic whitewash, with members on the committee whose unspoken agenda was to divert attention from the Clinton administration. But at least publicly, the 9/11 Commission was non-partisan; and Democrats are going berserk over an attempt at OBJECTIVITY.

I’m experiencing serious frustration here. How am I supposed to act when faced with such thorough-going dishonesty? My emotions want me to grab a broadsword and remove the head of the next Democrat I meet. I’m not going to do that, obviously, but how am I supposed to deal with the disgust I feel for the entire party at this moment?

Guys: this is AMERICA. We’re guaranteed freedom of speech here, and that includes speech that (gasp) finds fault with Democrats. If you don’t like what ABC is saying, tough. Some of us have had to put up with what you’re feeling right now, for our entire adult lives. You’re such wusses that you can’t stand it for two nights. GROW THE HELL UP.

If you think what they’re saying is wrong enough to constitute libel, then sue. PLEASE, PLEASE sue. PLEASE. Then the truth about these things that you guys have been trying to hide for the past 10 years will come out, and will be in the public record. Or more likely, the court will throw your asses out on the street without making ABC even having to mount a defense, because living with what the opposition says about you from their point of view (which isn’t even what’s happening here) is what you should expect when you enter politics.

Now I need to go talk myself down from spitting on the next 20 Democrats I meet. My GOD, these guys are disgusting…

Columnist Paul Weyrich wondered why Hollywood never has anything to say about the most horrific mass murder in human history, the murders by the Soviet Union of possibly 100 million of its own citizens in the name of protecting the Socialist government. I’ll let Mr. Weyrich speak for himself:

When the Soviet Union was disintegrating, President Boris Yeltsin appointed a free-market economist, Igor Gaidar, as his Premier. At that time I was a virtual commuter to Moscow so on one of those trips my close friend Arkady Murashev arranged for me to meet with Gaidar. I was confused. I had been not just in Moscow and Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, but all over the Soviet Empire. In the American media I kept on reading about how the Russian people were starving, that ordinary household items were beyond their reach and that the streets were filled with beggars trying to sell a family heirloom for an American dollar. I saw none of this and, mind you, I was covering some of the backwater streets as I was photographing Moscow’s tramway system. So I asked Gaidar why it was that he thought free-market efforts in the Soviet Union were being trashed by American media when the reality was far different from what I was seeing.

He replied with a stinging answer, one I never will forget. He said, “Well, the Soviets spent millions of dollars infiltrating your media. Just because the Soviet Union went away doesn’t mean these people have gone away. They are still there.”

Read Weyrich’s column here.

They’re still there.

Do not assume everything you see is factual. Check the facts for yourself.