Why Feminism is AWOL about Islam:

“But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.'

Nope, they never learn.

Wesley Dabney on Donks, Clintoon, and NorK.

It's all right to offend Catholics but not Muslims.

Midwest Conservative Journal:

Around here, "to gephardt" means to take both sides of every issue, sometimes at the same time.

Steyn is still worried.

. One of the peculiarities of this conflict is that we right-wing crazies are now the idealists and the Left are the realpolitik cynics. I mentioned the other week John Pilger’s pitiful performance on Australian TV, where he couldn’t seem to grapple with the idea that al-Qa’eda had blown up Bali in part because of the West’s support for East Timor. Last weekend’s marchers were effectively consigning another of their sometime pet causes, the Kurds, to the garbage can. Anti-Americanism trumps all. Tough luck, Kurds. John le Carré claims he would ‘love’ to see Saddam’s downfall, but he’s not prepared to do anything to make it happen, and so, if left to him, it never will.

Conversely, we on the Right have been the ones arguing that the peoples of the Middle East deserve their freedom. This isn’t because we’re starry-eyed, but because, being hard-hearted right-wingers, we understand that there’s no alternative. As long as the Arab states are such comprehensive failures, their leaders will have a vested interest in making sure their wretched subjects remain mired in a grievance culture that blames that failure on others — i.e., us.
...
If the Left were really as progressive as they claim to be, these [Democratic Kurds] are the fellows they’d be talking up. Instead, the ‘peace’ crowd’s committed to keeping the Iraqi people in a prison state of arbitrary barbarism.
...
This phoney war began round about the time of Abdullah’s last non-starter of a peace plan — the Palestinian one. It has been a dispiriting period for Bush backers, who don’t understand why he allowed himself to lose control of the timetable. It has been incredibly damaging in all but the most narrow partisan sense (November’s elections). But we can forgive Bush the phoney war as long as it’s followed by a blitzkrieg (might as well stick with the Bushitler talk). The US has to hit Iraq hard — not by killing civilians but by killing Saddam and a big chunk of his acolytes.

Celebrities:

It should also be noted that Woody Harrelson is a well-known Hemp Activist. Yes, when people come to their senses once again, and realize that they can get a rope of twice the weight at a quarter the strength of nylon for only three times the price, well, prepare for gridlock in the Home Depot parking lots across the fair republic. Perhaps he’s advocating burlap and burlap accessories. Or perhaps it’s the entire hemp family that he is advocating.
...
Viggo was invited to the show to talk about Lord of the Rings. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion, which seems to be: Does fighting and killing the Orc Armies make us any safer? Does slaughtering them make us more loved or appreciated in Mordor? Will this be forgotten? In other words, won’t all these swords and arrows just make the Orcs angrier then they already are?

Viggo, when you are bombing people publicly sworn to your violent death, then the answer to your first question -- Does bombing people make us safer? -- is, uh YES. Does bombing make us more loved and appreciated overseas? No. Do we want to be loved and appreciated by those who stone women for the crime of being raped by a male relative? I don’t. I’d be ashamed to be admired by the likes of them. Finally, Will this be forgotten? I hope not, Viggo. I really do. After eight years of ineffective, token responses to the murder and dismemberment of our people, I hope to God they do not forget what we did to them in Afghanistan.
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I also reflect on what [Osama] said in his own words on his Al Qaeda recruitment tapes: that the US is a paper tiger, weak and without the will or stomach for a fight. Having taken the measure of a president beloved by Hollywood Actors for his compassion and articulation, he took the same bet that the Imperial Japanese took half a century earlier; namely, that we are nothing but a bunch of weak, vacillating, self-hating cowards; militarily mighty but morally crippled, a whimpering giant to be mocked and attacked at will. Wonder where he got that idea?

People like Viggo Mortensen embolden people like Bin Laden, Saddam, and Kim Jong Il. America baffles them; dissent and debate gives them the same look as you see on a dog staring at a cartoon on TV. So they watch us like hawks, looking for what they know. Weakness. They know what weakness looks like. They can hear moral cowardice, lack of resolve, unwillingness to sacrifice, to get our hands dirty, or worse, to get our hands bloody. They can sense weakness like a shark senses weak and dying fish - unerringly and from a long way away. The ability to accurately gauge an opponent’s strength or weakness is THE survival skill for larval dictators.
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I will happily forgive the Great Lady the spelling and factual errors, and even the rampant greed…but there are three things that I find unforgivable about people like her and Warren Beatty and Alec Baldwin, and those are these:

First: try, if you can, to disabuse yourselves of the pernicious idea that your lives are worth more than those of your fellow citizens, for it is the engine of your hypocrisy in many telling instances
....
And would it also be too much to ask, just as a common courtesy to those who pay for your mansions and limousines, to every once in a while assume that perhaps this freely elected, multi-racial, multi-cultural democracy is not automatically in the wrong when confronting dictators, murderers and terrorists? Will you abide by this reasonable request, or do we have to write it into your next contract?

The bishop and the governor. The article doesn't mention the standing ovation for Kavanaugh, the Monsignor who wouldn't allow Davis to come use his kids as a photo-op unless he recanted.

A spokesman for Davis criticized the bishop for "telling the faithful how to practice their faith."

Excuse me? That's a bishop's JOB!

Amy Welborn has a number of pro-life posts.

January 22: Forty-two Million Babies

42 million babies in 30 years is 1,400,000 babies per year killed, though the "good" news is the rate is slowing.

Peggy Noonan:

It seems realistic to assume the 40 million would have included your average mix of heroes, villains and those undistinguished by recognizable gifts.

But actually I wonder about that. It has seemed to me over the years that so many of the 40 million were the children of bright or educated or affluent parents, lucky young people and, in the way of things, might likely have gone on to--well, we might have lost more curers of cancer than we know. In any case, whatever these individuals would have become, they were all unique, blessed. They all deserved the same thing, life, and all suffered the same fate.

Looked at in this way, abortion might seem not a completely private choice but one that has had a profound public impact on our country. If you want to be cold and actuarial about it, you can note that in the next five to 10 years tens of millions of baby boomers will retire, and their futures would be more secure if they were benefiting from the financial support of the missing 40 million, many of whom would be paying into Social Security right now. But they're gone, so they can't help.

If you want to be less actuarial than cultural in your thinking, it's hard to believe that we don't all know, down deep, that abortion has not made our country a gentler place. I believe we haven't begun to appreciate the effect on our children and their developing understanding of life that they are told every day, on television and in magazines, in advertisements and news stories, that we allow the killing of children. It's not good for them to know that, not good for them to be told over and over that they live in a place where life is not necessarily respected and inconvenient life can be whisked away. Knowledge like that has a chilling effect on the soul.

....

Abortion is now the glue that holds the Democratic Party together. Without abortion to keep them together, the Democrats would fly apart into 50 small parties--Dems for free trade, Dems for protectionism; for quotas, for merit. All parties have divisions, the Republicans famously so, but Republicans have general philosophical views that keep them together and supported by groups that share their views. They're all united by, say, hostility to high taxes, but sometimes they have different reasons for opposing tax increases.

The Democratic Party, in contrast, has exhausted its great reasons for being, having achieved so many of them during the past 75 years. The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less.

....

[T]he pro-abortion forces keep the party together, but they also tie it down. They keep the Democratic Party on the defensive--the lockstep pro-abortion party that won't even back parental notification, the party of unbending orthodoxy that will fight tooth and nail against banning abortions on babies eight months old, babies who look and seem and act exactly like human beings because they are.

No party can long endure, or could possibly flourish, with the unfettered killing of young humans as the thing that holds it together. And so a prediction on this grim anniversary: Someday years from now we will see abortion's final victim, and it will turn out to be the once-great Democratic Party, which was left at the end deformed, bloody and desperately trying to kick away from death, but unable to save itself.

Andrew Sullivan:

The facts don't seem to matter. America is portrayed as an imperial force dedicated to what a Harvard professor recently described as "the crushing and total humiliation of the Palestinians." Yet it was an American president, Bill Clinton, who only two years ago brokered a deal that offered the Palestinians sovereignty over 98 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. (Arafat said no and his people are still living with the consequences.) America is described as waging a war against Muslims. Yet in almost every recent American intervention - in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan - it was for the sake of the security of Muslims that American soldiers risked their lives. America is described as relentlessly pro-Israel. But America gives almost as much foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan. America is described as imperialist. But in Afghanistan, recently liberated by the U.S., the Americans have done all they can to set up an indigenous government, capable of self-rule, and are pouring millions of dollars into reconstruction. America is described as unilateralist. Yet, after the worst terrorist attack in modern history, the U.S. patiently assembled a coalition to rid the world of al Qaeda's Afghan bases, and has waited eleven years while Saddam has violated almost every term of the 1991 truce. Even now, the U.S. has gone painstakingly through a U.N. route to achieve its goals. These are simply the facts. But in the new cult of anti-Americanism, facts don't seem to matter.

Comment on Daily Pundit (about approval ratings):

I have this terrible feeling that if Bill Clinton had a chance to do it all over, he would have bombed North Korea and Iraq.

He did bomb Iraq. Right on the eve of the Senate conviction vote -- it was called "Operation Desert Eagle". Supposedly it was in retaliation for Saddam kicking the inspectors out, and was intended to "degrade" Saddam's WMD programs, but most of the sites hit had bugger-all to do with WMD.

Of course, the bombing was stopped after the Senate voted as soon as it started to destabilize Saddam before Ramadan started.

Posted by Robert Crawford at January 17, 2003 11:49 AM