Europe and the War.

Mark Steyn, Death wish.

Lileks on George Clooney (the Schmuck) and teaching peace to 2-1/2 year olds.

Five Lessons from Iraq. (Paul Johnson)

E.Nough, why Iraq?

France Who?
Krauthammer:

That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.

First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.

Rest in Peace, Mrrogers!

A comment on this at Dailypundit:

The god these savages worship is small, petty, ignorant, thin-skinned, petulant, self-absorbed and insecure, and they are fanatically eager to die- and to kill- in his service.
Posted by Dave D. at February 2, 2003 10:57 AM

And this from Donald Sensing:

I haven't read or heard any commentary about the most penetrating quote in the president's SOTU speech Tuesday night. It's this one, that came in the penultimate paragraph:

The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.
That sentence defines the chasm between the West generally, including America specifically, and Islam generally, including Arabic Islam specifically.

[Donald verbalizes something I've been thinking. Our God is a loving God who wants freedom, friends, theirs is a demanding god who only wants slaves. Ours wants to be loved, theirs wants to be feared.]

David Frum:

Much commentary everywhere on the 30th anniversary of America’s most bitterly disputed Supreme Court decision. I have little to add, except this one thought: It’s worth pausing to consider just how long 30 years is in the life of the law. Brown v. Board of Education was bitterly controversial in its day. But by the time it turned 30, it was accepted almost unanimously. Ditto for the hotly contested decisions of the New Deal courts: by 1968, those once impassioned debates were ancient history. It’s a good bet that if a court decision cannot get itself accepted in three decades, it will never get itself accepted.

Which is pretty ironic, since the main defense that legal philosophers make of highly activist decisions like Roe is that even if they are not justified by the text of the Constitution, they somehow express society’s emerging moral consensus. But what if that moral consensus fails to emerge? Isn’t the inability of a society to digest a highly activist judicial decision in itself a powerful indicator that the decision must be wrong?

"warheads"

Heston shoots back at Clooney:

The Left Coast Report believes if the guy keeps talking, he'll end up where he belongs - right next to Alec Baldwin on Hollywood Squares.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

Deborah Orin, Dim Dems Playing Politics:

If you support Bush on Iraq and he wins, you gain zip," explained a Democratic strategist. "If you support him and he loses, you lose along with him. But if you oppose him and things go bad, you stand to be a big winner."

That is both breathtaking and revolting.

At a time when U.S. troops seem headed in harm's way, this strategist - and several other Democrats who are disgusted with their own party - suggest some Dems are calculating they could gain politically if there are body bags.

Lileks, Jan. 29:

The line that clarified everything: I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

It brought to mind Susan Sarandon’s ad, in which she argues against a military effort to depose Saddam. “What,” she asks, “has Iraq done to us?”

Aside from shoot at our pilots, and attempt to kill an ex-President, I’ll grant that they’ve done no more to us than Hitler did to the US in the 30s. But that’s not the point. Sarandon has turned into the very thing her ilk decries: an insular self-satisfied wealthy Westerner who couldn’t care less what happens in other countries, as long as no Americans get a nick.

I don’t believe this war is being fought because Saddam kills his own people. Saddam is a particularly egregious example of a common tyrant; he stands out because he rules a land with great strategic importance, and because his particular brand of megalomaniacal sociopathy makes him an unpredictable actor. It’s not the torture, the war against Iran, the war against Kuwait, the destruction of the oil fields, the gassing of his own people, the starvation of his people to divert resources for palaces and mosques designed to make Robin Leach swoon. It’s the torture and the wars and the oil-field fires and the gassing and the starvation and the palaces and the big grinning fark-you to the terms that ended the last war. Oh, and also the germs, and the gas, and the rockets, and the nukes. And more, which I expect we’ll learn after Powell’s appearance before the UN.
...
we had this: If this is not evil, then evil has no name. This will occasion another round of eye-rolling among those who are less worried about the 200,000 than they are about the role Bush played in downing Wellstone’s plane, but even in European capitals some learned men may have felt a twinge in that empty socket where their conscience once resided.
...
Defeating Iraq isn’t the camel’s nose in the tent - it’s the camel’s head in the bed of every other Arab leader.