[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 31, 2006]

Why are the San Francisco Chronicle and other mainstream media avoiding any mention that Omeed Aziz Popal is a Muslim?  Mr. Popal, 29, formerly of Afghanistan and now of Fremont, apparently was angry over his recent marriage, which had been arranged in the Afghan tradition.  He expressed his rage by trying to kill 14 strangers with his automobile.  Maybe the Chronicle thought the man's name said it all, since the paper didn't reveal it until paragraph fifty-five! 

The news editors in this case might argue that Mr. Popal's religion had nothing to do with his murderous rampage.  Other reports say he declared himself a "terrorist" as he emerged from his car, perhaps so the police wouldn't think he was a nut.

The "liberal" media probably believes mentioning Mr. Popal's religion might anger other Muslims into a similar murderous frenzy, which the media seem to accept as the natural course of things.  Reporters can get away with insulting Judaism and Christianity, because they're not likely to be assassinated for it. 

Despite the liberal media's cowardly fear of retaliation for the slightest misperception of an insult to Islam, perhaps there's a shed of journalistic integrity in the way they honor their condescending tradition of deciding for their readers what is newsworthy.  What I mean by this is that they might simply believe that mentioning the Islamic connection to a terrorist is no longer newsworthy because everyone has come to EXPECT the slaughter of innocents from Muslims.  But if Mr. Popal had NOT been a Muslim—now that would have been a story rivaling "Man Bites Dog!"  The only trouble is, whenever non-Muslims murder people, it's usually because the perpetrators are out of their minds.  In contrast, radical Muslims have no such excuse, because their natural state of mind is to murder non-Muslims.

The United States and the rest of the free world is in a mortal battle with people from a culture that encourages blaming all their problems on non-Muslims and killing as many of them as possible.  As much as the liberal media enjoy war as a source of poignant stories, they also use every available excuse not to mention the connection between terrorism and Islam, because to do so would give credibility to the claim that we're actually at war.  That's what President Bush keeps trying to remind us, and liberals must portray him as a liar at all costs.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 30, 2006]

Hasan Nazrallah, the head thug of Hezballah, said recently that if he had known Israel would respond with such force, he never would have ordered the abduction of two Israeli soldiers.  After all, there was no reason to expect any significant retaliation, because Hezballah had been firing missiles into Israel with impunity for quite a while.  The Western media reported Nazrallah's statement, but apparently did not appreciate its significance:  One of civilization's most barbaric enemies had just admitted that Islamofascist attacks can be deterred by a credible threat of retaliation.  (A credible threat, by definition, is one that can be believed, as opposed to an idle threat, such as the pronouncements by the United Nations and other appeasement organizations like the American Democratic Party.)

Apparently the Islamofascists are not mindless, bloodthirsty automatons after all.  They may be evil, but not completely irrational.  They do cost-benefit analyses.  They can be deterred by visions of what they would consider their own ignoble destruction.

I would argue that the threat of retaliation insured by genuine retaliation ALWAYS deters antisocial behavior, whether one is training a puppy, rearing a child, enforcing the law, or conducting diplomacy. All that is required is that a person does what he says he will do. If you do X, I'll do Y, so you'll never be able to do X again.  Doesn't that end the discussion about fighting this enemy? Threats not followed through are like crying wolf, worse than meaningless and ultimately perilous.

Self-styled liberals fear that if civilized peoples respond with destructive force to acts of war by barbaric mass murderers who are commanded by their god to kill us, it will make the murderers "mad" and "not like us," as if such a concern is even relevant.  The extension of that logic is supposed to go this way:  If we ignore our enemies, they will leave us alone, and if we give them what they want, they will like us.  I'm sure that if we infidels all committed suicide, our would-be murderers at first would grudgingly appreciate our saving them the trouble, but ultimately would curse our corpses for denying them a chance to hitch a quick ride to Heaven on any body parts that otherwise would have been blasted into that lofty neighborhood.  

It would seem, then, that the liberal appeasers' view of the inaccurately named war on terror has been blown to smithereens like so many Israeli school children.  Still, some sincere thinkers suggested that Nazrallah's comments might actually vindicate the liberal thinking that hostile actions make enemies mad:  The kidnapping made Israel so mad that she retaliated.  Of course, the same silly liberals who would say this also accused Israel of responding disproportionately, as though the only proper response would have been to kidnap two Hezbos in return.  But it's the rational fear of disproportionate response that makes violence such a powerful deterrent.  Nothing deters certain behaviors in an organism more than the guaranteed destruction of the things it values most: its own life, the lives of its beneficiaries, and its way of life.

Just kidnapping two Hezbos in retaliation would have accomplished nothing.  The limited retaliation that did occur hurt Hezbollah somewhat, but Hezbollah's utter destruction would have solved the problem.  That does not mean other problems won't arise in the future, but letting Hezbollah live guarantees the death of many more innocent people.

Perhaps Mr. Nazrallah's apology to the non-Hezbo Lebanese was cynically tossing them a bone:  "Look, folks, you know that we exist for one reason and one reason only, and that is to destroy Western Civilization and kill all the infidels, pushing Israel into the sea on our way westward.  Had we known our efforts would make the decadent Infidels mad—mad enough to actually do something to stop us, then we would not have bothered."

Does it matter why Nazrallah said he would not have committed an act of war against Israel if he had known Israel would retaliate?  If he can be deterred by the threat of retaliation, fine.  In any case, he must believe the retaliation weakened his strategic relationship with his Lebanese hosts.

Whether Nazrallah is posturing for the good graces of the better people of Lebabon who cannot stand up to his bullies (which makes one wonder why Nazrallah is even apologizing in the first place), this fact remains: Force deters force.  If war isn't the answer (as our enemies obviously believe it is), then the right questions aren't being asked.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 16, 2006]

To maintain their integrity, post-Watergate journalists began fancying themselves adopting the objectivity of scientists:  Anything heard or observed, no matter how obvious, was not to be believed unless it was corroborated by other sources.  I said "fancying themselves" because the objectivity of journalists really is nothing like the meticulous methods of scientists, who usually tend to believe what they see and, in general, are more interested in being right than in publishing something that's embarrassingly wrong.

But the problem with this—and one I encountered every day when reporters came to me as a source—is that most reporters are ordered to go out and learn all they can about a subject they know nothing about and then explain it to the world before the afternoon deadline.  Such rushed research by harried and uninterested reporters yields inaccurate stories, but that's the way most people learn not only what their government is doing but also what else is going on in the world.  Factual inaccuracy is ensured by the system.  Will Rogers joked that all he knew was what he read in the papers.  In his day, there were plenty of journalistic shenanigans to complain about.  But if he had lived into his 90s, which would have been during the decade of he 1970s, he would have wondered whether everything he knew was wrong.  

For a branch of government, as John Chancellor pompously anointed his industry, the news media don't do a very good job.  

With mainstream media as the gatekeeper of information flow from the government to the people, the media took it upon themselves to verify the truth of the information as well.  But a systemic arrogance befell the media: In controlling the flow of information, they found that they could manipulate not only the flow, but also the information itself.  

As the world's population increases, so does the amount of information about what they're doing.  It's impossible for the media to report everything that's going on all the time.  Besides, some facts are more interesting than others, depending on who's reading them.  It's the duty of the highly trained professional journalist to decide for his readers what they should be reading, isn't it?  

The incestuous nature of journalism schools and their graduates promotes a type of groupthink that finds them putting a spin on everything even as they deny doing so.  "I'm an objective journalist who lives only to provide information needed by the people, my audience, my consumers, my customers, and, even though they proved that they 'just don't get it' by stupidly electing that dummy Bush, I will continue to educate them for their own good."  Journalists are humans, and they want to be believed when they speak.  When they sense they are not being believed they respond in kind, and with hostility.

One would think that the Muslims would be up in arms defending their own honor about how the Western news media portray the way the sons of Islam fight the West.  What's that, you say?  Why would one think that?  It's very simple, really:  Any thinking person can see the Western media's seemingly perverse bias toward the enemy and against their own survival, always highlighting the atrocities of the forces defending modernity and liberty, such as, say, the accidental killing an "innocent Muslim civilian" during a military operation.  The reason for this apparent irrationality is that when Muslims act like savages and deliberately murder as many children as they can—bonus points for Jews!—all in the name of Allah, who allegedly runs a brothel in the clouds, it's simply not newsworthy.  It's not newsworthy because everyone has come to expect Muslims to behave like savages.  On the other hand, when a Western military force accidentally kills a civilian, it's big news because it's as rare as a man biting a dog.

But for all the talk of honor from a group of fighting men who sucker punch Jewish toddlers and then retreat behind the skirts of their own women, the Islamic strategists know exactly how to exploit the thinking of Western news professionals, even if it means making themselves look bad to achieve victory.  Too many Westerners have a warped, narcissistic sense of "looking good," which deters them from doing what it takes to survive if it makes them look so bad that they fear losing the goodwill of their enemies.  Jihadists, on the other hand, care only about one aspect of their worldly appearance, namely, whether media coverage of their activities works as planned to erode the infidels' will to fight.  Beyond that, what the Western world thinks is irrelevant, because when victory comes, all infidels will be dead.

After Watergate, journalism, or at least journalists, changed in ways that seemed profound at the time.  They claimed to be objective reporters, but privately hoped to be crusading reporters.  They told themselves that they were crusading for the truth, but their Vietnam disillusions made them seek certain results regardless of the truth.  In addition to teaching their students to ask the traditional questions (who, what, where, when, how, and why), journalism schools began teaching their students to assume the answers to the questions were probably lies.  After all, if President Nixon had something to hide, then certainly Joe Citizen did too.  And who in his right mind would deliberately say anything to a reporter to make himself look bad?  If reporters badgered their interviewees long enough by asking the same questions over and over as rudely as possible, they would eventually get an answer that could be made out to seem inconsistent with the previous answers.  This inconsistency could be evidence that the reporter's target had really been lying all along, as expected, or that he was merely becoming fatigued, frustrated, and annoyed.  The reporter could then write a story focusing on the inconsistency, confusing readers and whetting their appetite for more stories that might yield a scandal (and a Pulitzer for the reporter).

Esteemed NBC newsman John Chancellor famously referred to the "news media" as the fourth branch of government.  What he meant by this was that in our democratic republic, where citizens must make informed decisions in order to govern themselves, the source of almost all their information is what is today called the mainstream media.  Providing information made the mainstream media indispensable to the functioning of our free society.  

In a sense, there is indeed a valid relationship between journalism and government, particularly between big journalism and big government:  Both thrive on telling the people how to live and what to think.  

This is really nothing new, if one checks original sources, as did Bill Bennett in his nifty little history, America, The Last Best Hope, one sees that even the best newspapers throughout history published rubbish.  In his letter turning down the mayor of Atlanta's request to spare the city, General Sherman noted the problem: "You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better."

Maybe if something like today's blogs had existed in 1864, Atlanta wouldn't have burned.

Dennis Prager changed his radio show's format recently, initiating a special hour every Tuesday focusing on the "big issues."  He asked his listeners what they thought, and this is what I told him:

"Your new Tuesday feature focusing on the 'big' issues is a needed spoonful of medicine. The world works the way it does because most folks go through the day preoccupied about whether their clothes are color-coordinated, what they'll have for dinner, and where their next dollar is coming from.  Thinking about what's right and what's wrong and why we exist and why we should care is an idle man's luxury for most of them—for most of them, that is, who, for whatever reason, do not think that life as they know it is being seriously threatened by anything they might hear about on the news (unless it's global warming, cigarette smoke, or Mel Gibson).
 
"'Sure, the Nazis were a threat back in the day,' I hear, 'but the scimitar-rattling of a few Islamic primitives is not the same thing!  Today, everyone is entitled to his own opinion—even Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad, if we truly believed in the principles we were taught in school.'  And therein lies the root of the need for your new feature:  If our school system had been doing its job, the two most pressing questions consuming most Westerners after 9/11 would not be 'Why do they hate us?' and 'What on earth do we do now?'"

Earlier I had written about rooting for the underdog, an American tradition that goes back to when the underdog colonists defeated the mighty British.  My point was that however much sympathy the underdog might engender in neutral observers, that alone does not entitle him to victory.

More often than not, the strong are strong and the weak are weak because they deserve to be.  Some members of a species are stronger than others.  This is unavoidable and probably necessary and desirable for life to flourish.  Whether it is unfair is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but an arbitrary presumption of unfairness motivates leftist political ideologues, officious humanitarians, and crusading journalists.  Admittedly there is something romantic about the weak beating the strong, even if the strong are benevolent and not bullies.  (To the Left, this is an oxymoron except in the one case that is an oxymoron to the Right, namely, when the government is strong.)

In golf, a handicap system is institutionalized in the rules, so that weaker players can have a sporting chance against stronger players.  But at the professional level and in other situations, like war, where "it's not just a game" and the stakes are significant, a handicap system is nonsensical.  Particularly in a struggle for survival, it is immoral for the stronger side to handicap itself in favor of a weaker opponent, because to do so arbitrarily causes human death for sport.  Since the days of the war in Vietnam, the toll of unnecessary deaths has mounted unconscionably because the United States fights with one hand tied behind its back.  This is not sporting, it's immoral and suicidal.  Those who favor the weaker over the stronger as a matter of course are the same people who incongruously, though enthusiastically and even blindly, embrace Darwinism even though one of Darwin's central tenets is that life depends on the survival of the fittest (strongest).  It's good for a society to look after its weakest members, but unless the strongest prevail to form the society, the weak will have no one to look after them.

When people participate in games, sports, wars, or contests of any kind where they have something of value at stake, e.g., their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, they prefer such contests to be lopsided in their favor. Stakeholders can tolerate some uncertainty as long as they win.  Non-stakeholders will take interest if and only if the contest is entertaining.   Except in the sport of women's beach volleyball, uncertainty of outcome is the most important quality that attracts the attention of the otherwise disinterested and uninterested.  Close contests are simply more interesting than lopsided ones.  This is why well written novels compel readers to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next—and why people don't like it when the ending is "spoiled" by being revealed too early.

This is also why people who have no interest in football will stay tuned to the Super Bowl between commercials:  The pitting of the two strongest contenders usually makes the outcome uncertain and, therefore, potentially more entertaining than usual.  With money and a championship at stake for the players, their level of performance is usually inspired to higher levels of artistry anyway, but the commercial sponsors of the Super Bowl (or the World Series or the NBA finals) spend millions of dollars specifically to promote how closely the teams are matched (even if they're not, thus increasing the perception of uncertainty of the outcome) to attract as many viewers as possible.

One might say, so what?  As hinted above, promoting uncertainty has become an important business tactic of the mainstream media, and this has profound cultural consequences, which I will discuss next time.

Many liberals and leftists see world politics as a game, either underestimating what's really at stake or, in the case of leftists who know exactly what they're doing, wishing the defeat of American interests.  In a contest between two contenders, political enemies and self-styled liberal "supporters" of the stronger contender are effectively on the same side:  They try to "make the game fairer and more interesting" by making the stronger power fight with one hand tied behind its back.  

Rooting for the underdog is an American tradition, but handicapping our own nation as it fights for survival is suicidal.  Perhaps the sports-obsessed public who prefer superficial contests with nothing at stake but bragging rights are so spoiled that they want all contests to follow that pattern, where no one really gets hurt.

The Geneva Convention is not followed by our Islamic foes, and even if it were, our civilian-garbed Gitmo prisoners would not fall under the Geneva Convention anyway.  Even without the protections of the Geneva Convention, the standard of living of the average Middle Eastern Muslim probably improves when he comes to Gitmo.

It is patently unjust, not to mention absurd, for American courts to hold that people who cheat, i.e., who do not play by the rules, should be treated the same as those who don't.  We see examples where higher levels of cheating have become tolerated in our own society, from academia to marriages.  Nothing good has come from this except to make the cheaters feel less stigmatized for the sake of—what? Politlcal correctness? As though that were an end in itself?

In warfare, where the stakes are higher than in sports, tolerating cheaters, as though they were children who change the rules whenever they are losing, is suicidal.

Underdogs are underdogs for a reason, and whether one roots for them or not, they don't always deserve to win.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings."

from Through the Looking-glass by Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898

The time has come indeed.  On these pages I will talk of many things.  Whether pigs have wings doesn't concern me as much as the disturbing evidence that our porky pals are, metaphorically at least, flying—certainly insofar as "liberals" try to cast the unthinkable as mainstream.  We'll discuss the whole ball of wax, sealing and otherwise.

Your comments will be welcome, provided that you think twice before you write and that you maintain civility.  (Civility is unrelated to the linguistic and social abominations of "political correctness," by the way.)  Good humor and good cheer will enhance the discussion.  Whether you agree or disagree with me is not as important as that we agree on where we disagree.  If you think I'm wrong about something, please tell me, for there's a chance (though slight) that you might just be right.  

Objective truths exist, and it's only natural to want to know what they are.  Facts are truths demonstrable.  To ignore facts is dangerous enough.  When people in power ignore them, entire civilizations are in peril.  Relative or "convenient" truths ("wishful thinking") might be good enough for some folks, but such lazy souls need not linger on these pages unless they really want to learn something and become better people (a term they're not likely to understand yet).  

Hoover Institution Research Fellow and fellow Dartmouth alum Peter Robinson wrote a charming little memoir of his days writing speeches in the White House: How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Regan Books, 2003).  Of all people who have changed my life, I have to say, the most notable was the Speaker of the House, the Honorable Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill.

"Politics stops at the water's edge" was something the formidable Tip would say so often that he practically owned the phrase when he was Speaker.  But guess what?  He didn't mean it.  What changed my life was something else he apparently DID mean.  A letter to his flock of Democratic House members arrived in my office on November 7, 1980, the Friday of the week Ronald Reagan was elected president.  The Speaker said that the American people obviously had been fooled into electing the wrong man President, and he exhorted his colleagues thus:  "It is the duty of every Democrat to make sure Ronald Reagan's programs fail so that the Democratic Party will take back the White House in 1984." (I no longer have this letter in my possession, so I'll admit to the possibility of slight inaccuracy in the quote.  The letter was on Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stationery, so the quote might have been made up for the Speaker's approval.  As a guy who put things in politicians' mouths for a living, I knew it didn't matter either way: O'Neill signed off on it.)

This was really the last straw for me, because it brought to mind the words Milton attributed to Satan in Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in H-ll, than serve in Heav'n."  Winning was the only thing.  Power was the prize.  The nation be damned.  This attitude explains why the Democrats have said increasingly outrageous things to get votes in the years since.  As the party moved to the left, it left its conscience in the center. There was no longer any penalty for lying (unless you feared the wrath of people who had consciences, and apparently the Democrats did not).  Whatever you say, you can always deny it later.

I already knew that openly underestimating the intelligence of the American people would push the pendulum leftward into unexplored territory, even to the zone of porcine aviation.  The professional Democrats have stayed in their little zone, while the American people have made the Republicans the party of ideas.  Senator Zell Miller and I had similar experiences:  I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Party left me.  Notice how the right's most articulate spokesmen today used to be Democrats back when Democrats were centrists.  Today, to be in the center is to be called a right-wing nut by the leadership of the once-great Democrat party.

I think of the Tip O'Neill story every time I hear that blowhard Chris Matthews spout his half-formed thoughts on the air.  Mr. Matthews was writing speeches for President Carter back in 1979 and 1980, no doubt contributing greatly to the president's powerful ability to induce malaise and national self-loathing.  Fleeing the Reagan Revolution, Mr. Matthews took refuge as Speaker O'Neill's press secretary.

As George Will and others have noted, the last three decades have seen political philosophies and political parties come into alignment so closely that party differences are more apparent than ever.  The days when moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans were essentially the same animal are over for the time being.