Now they say, “Yes, Virginia, there really is a Jamil Hussein!”

It’s too soon to reach any firm conclusions, I think, about the authenticity of the alleged source of more than 60 so-far-unconfirmed AP stories attributed to Jamil Hussein; but, in the meantime, Michelle Malkin (as usual) has the best collection of links to the blogosphere’s reaction to this bombshell.

Robert Tracinski thinks Bush needs to widen his approach beyond the insurgents in Iraq and go after their state sponsors.

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran–and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq.

Going wide means recognizing that the conflict in Iraq is fueled and magnified by the intervention of Iran and Syria. One of the reasons the Iraq Study Group report flopped was that its key recommendation–its one unique idea–was for America to negotiate with Iran and Syria in order to convince these countries to aid in the “stabilization” of Iraq. This proposal wasn’t so much argued to death as it was laughed to death, because it is clear that Iran and Syria have done everything they can to de-stabilize Iraq, supporting both sides of the sectarian conflict there.

It is obvious that both regimes have a profound interest in an American failure and retreat in Iraq. After all, if America can successfully use force to replace a hostile dictatorship with a free society, then the Iranian and Syrian regimes are doomed. So as a matter of elementary self-preservation, they have done everything they can to plunge Iraq into chaos, supporting guerrillas and militias on all sides of the sectarian conflict. Just today, a US official confirmed new evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups.” Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias–who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories–and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government.

How can we quell the conflict in Iraq, further suppress the Sunni insurgents, and begin to dismantle the Shiite militias–if we don’t to anything to stop those who are funding, training, and supporting these enemies? Just as we can’t eliminate terrorism without confronting the states who sponsor terrorism, so we can’t suppress the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq without confronting the outside powers who support these insurgents.

Every day, we see the disastrous results of fighting this war narrowly inside Iraq while ignoring the external forces that are helping to drive it. To fight one Shiite militia tied to Iran–Sadr’s Mahdi Army–we have recently signaled our support for an Iraqi political coalition that includes another Shiite militia tied to Iran, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Brigades. And so it should be no surprise that a US military raid on Hakim’s headquarters last week netted two Iranian diplomats and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards–the outfit responsible for supporting global terrorism. That’s what happens when we fight the symptoms in Iraq rather than fighting the disease.

Going wide also means recognizing that more is at stake in this war than just the fate of Iraq. This is a war to determine who and what will dominate the Middle East. Will this vital region be dominated by a nuclear-armed Iran, working to spread Islamic fascism? Or will America be able to exert its military influence and political ideals in the region?

He’s clearly right, but he isn’t going wide enough.

Behind Syria and Iran, you find China fishing in troubled waters in order to thwart American “hegemony.” China is Iran’s arms supplier (often via North Korea) and soon to be leading trading partner. But we are China’s number 1 trading partner.

We have a far more powerful weapon to use against China to force her to withdraw support from her surrogates operating against the US than arms. We can threaten to deny China our trade.

And John J. Miller, at the Wall Street Journal, agrees with us that the local public library has evolved in a direction which makes it a highly questionable use of public funds.

A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren’t. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded — permanently. “We’re being very ruthless,” boasts library director Sam Clay.

As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway’s classic. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.

Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that’s removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson — the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.

But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There’s a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.

Christopher Hitchens basically agrees with our own position on the disgraceful business, though he is a dreadful Euro-sissy on the subject of capital punishment in general.

Americans, unlike Europeans, typically understand that some people just need killing. There is a certain type of defective individual, in whose case it’s far better for all concerned if he is simply taken out behind the barn and shot.

The problem with hanging Saddam is the cowardly manner in which it was done, the turning over of a helpless wretch to an equally despicable mob to be done to death, and its timing: far too late, and during Christmas.

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein’s last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against “the Persians” and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

The Washington Post thinks it’s really cool that Keith Ellison (formerly “Keith Hakim”) the ridiculous black poseur Muslim elected by an utterly irresponsible one-party district in Minneapolis is going to become the first Representative in United States history to take his oath of office on a copy of the Koran, and is planning to borrow a copy from the Library of Congress once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

African American conversions to Mohammedanism are, in reality, preposterous examples of flamboyant identity display, pitifully evidencing the historical illiteracy and downright bad taste of the conversos. Christianity, the European religion and cultural identity being rejected by the rebellious black man, twice abolished Slavery. Slavery has always been a fundamental institution in Islam, was spread everywhere that religion flourishes, and exists throughout the Islamic world (sometimes faintly terminologically concealed) today.

The most famous African American converso, the illustrious boxer, changed his name from that of a renowned American Abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay to Muhammad Ali, the name of more than one prominent slave-trader.

There is something which provokes distinct psychic unease at the very idea of the rise of the influence of Islam in the United States to the point where the first representative of that lamentable sect will be taking his place in the Congress of the United States, in the same house where Randolph, Webster, and Clay once sat. How can America’s culture and identity have grown so flaccid and deracinated that even a parasitical and malcontent urban welfare community would abandon its own identity and traditions in time of war, in order to elect a coreligionist of the 9/11 hijackers?

There’s a lot more which is illuminating and agreeable in the culture of Japan than in that of the True Believers, but it is difficult to imagine even the most delinquent and corrupt congressional district of the WWII era sending a Shinto-ist to Congress to take his oath on what? a sharp katana? or a bale of rice?

I find the image of an unsympathetic translation of the Alcoran, once perused with ironic skepticism by Mr. Jefferson, translated by time into the hands of a former Catholic convert to superstititous creed of the enemies of the West amusing, to say the least. Offering Jefferson’s Alcoran to Mr. Ellison-Hakim is rather in the character of inviting the newly elected Count Dracula to take his oath of office upon an early tract on vampire-hunting.

Stung by Byron Calame’s insufficiently fulsome flattery and inadequately obsequious bootlicking, Times editor Bill Keller is not sure he’s willing to take it anymore.

The New York Times will soon decide whether it will do away with its public editor.

The two-year term of the current public editor, Byron (Barney) Calame, will conclude in May. There may, or may not, be another.

“Over the next couple of months, as Barney’s term enters the home stretch, I’ll be taking soundings from the staff, talking it over with the masthead, and consulting with Arthur,” meaning publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., wrote Bill Keller, The Times’ executive editor, in an e-mail to The Observer.

Mr. Calame is the paper’s second public editor since Mr. Keller announced the job on his first day as executive editor in July 2003.

Mr. Keller wrote in his e-mail that “some of my colleagues believe the greater accessibility afforded by features like ‘Talk to the Newsroom’ has diminished the need for an autonomous ombudsman, or at least has opened the way for a somewhat different definition of the job.”

Under the new job definition, the Times’ ombudsman will be a eunuch charged with fanning Editor Keller with ostrich plumes, while warbling his praises in falsetto.

It’s really pretty funny that Keller is actually offended by Calame’s criticism, when its pretty hard to imagine a flabbier pretence at some sort of objectivity.

Earlier posting.

Keller should just go over to Macy’s or Bloomies and get himself a mannequin to appoint “public editor,” and write all the columns himself.

A number of readers have disagreed with my previous post disapproving of the then-impending execution of Saddam, which provokes further reflection on the subject.

I must confess that I thought allowing the execution right in the middle of our own Christmas season was in execrable taste.

It’s true that old Saddam was a brigand, and I’ve remarked before that the United States would have been justified in executing the old scoundrel out of hand when we reduced him to possession in the aftermath of the second war he provoked. But, the difference is, at the time, it would have been in hot blood.

I find the practice of housing and feeding and medicating a prisoner for years, and then cold-bloodedly turning him over to his approximately equally barbarous political adversaries for a farce of a show trial, followed by a rapid hanging, shabby behavior for a great power.

Saddam’s regime doubtless was a ruthless dictatorship, which suppressed revolts with brutal violence, but our own experience in Iraq seems to suggest that Iraqis are in general a bunch of belligerent and bloodthirsty primitives, bigoted, unruly, and inclined to violence. Preventing wholesale participation in the favorite local sport of homicidal feuding probably would require anyone in charge to resort to a fair quantity of brutal violence just to get the locals’ attention.

Saddam was, doubtless, a bloody-handed villain, but there do not seem to be a lot of leaders from the school of non-violence operating successfully in the Islamic Middle East these days. As thugs and villains go, Saddam was not really the worst of the lot. Nobody hanged Yassir Arafat (which seems a great pity to me). They gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Compared to the Ayatollas of Iran or Arafat, Saddam struck me as rather comical. He loved weapons, and obviously delighted in posing as a military leader, but he was spectacularly incompetent. Saddam resembled the perennial “loudest Mick in the bar.” He was the kind of overly-keen, self-admiring bully who makes a point of picking fights with larger and more talented opponents.

In his wars with the United States, Saddam presented a truly remarkable combination of hyperbolic braggadocio and complete military non-performance. He would say everything possible to provoke his adversary’s uttermost wrath, then do absolutely nothing effective at fighting. But, like Monty Python’s Black Knight (to whom Armed Liberal yesterday compared AP), Saddam persistently refused to acknowledge that he was defeated.

When you’ve knocked your adversary flat, and he is at your mercy, and time has gone by, and your temper cooled down, it seems unchivalrous to me to do what was done here.

If the US really wanted to execute Saddam, we should have done it ourselves, and we should have done it right away.

Turning a helpless old man over to his cowardly political rivals to be slaughtered, so as to spare oneself responsibility was, I thought, a cowardly form of trimming typical of leaders of modern democracies.

Saddam was, I thought, at his best, at his execution. He held up manfully in the face of death, and I liked his final contemptuous snort of derision at the hostile crowd’s chanting of the name of that jackanapes “Muqtada.”

Personally, I think hanging Muqtada, and breaking up that Mahdi Army of his, would have been a great deal more to the point than taking poor old Saddam out of his cell and dispatching him.

Saddam may have been guilty of sufficient crimes against the United States to justify our executing him. But we neither immediately condemned him upon capture, nor tried him and proved a case against him ourselves. He may have been guilty of crime against Iraq, but this Iraqi government is full of homicidal criminals, and it is the sheerest hypocrisy to treat that trial as a meaningful process. The shouting mob at the hanging, and the shouting mob at the trial, the hangmen, and the court official were all the same mob.

Of course, it’s not just the replacement of liberally-educated librarians by a new generation trained “professionally” which is responsible for the American town library’s new policy of purging the classics in order to make space for items in active demand, i.e., new best-sellers, career guides and test preparation texts, and videos.

The old-fashioned library was a quiet place, typically with one librarian on hand, and modest traffic. Most of the books were generations old, and had been sitting unread on their shelves for decades. Obviously, there’s no money in that sort of thing.

If an enterprizing and up-to-date librarian gives the old heave-ho to Hazlitt, discards Dickens, and purges Pope, replacing all those unread classics with multiple copies of the latest John Grisham, or Harry Potter, or the freshest video release, this strategy of responding directly to public demand will reliably increase library use, thus justifying increased staffing, facilities expansion, and… raised budgets!

The old-style librarian served the timeless cause of culture disinterestedly. The modern librarian is in business for herself (in direct competition with retailers), and is building and expanding a personal empire, all at the public expense. The cost to the public is actually twofold. Not only is the town library becoming another massive public extravagance and tax burden with ever-increasing staffing and perennial building and expansion. But the American town has also lost a unique cultural repository and educational resource. A few decades ago, a young person could find the documentary record of American reading culture for generations prior to his own carefully preserved and readily available for examination. Today, the same shelves offer twelve copies of the same number one item on this week’s New York Times best seller list, the same item available down the street at the chain book store and in the local supermarket. A few decades ago, the poorest child in America could undertake a very serious program of personal education for free at his local library. Today, he can prep for a licensing exam, or read the latest Clive Cussler.

It seems obvious that the public library is doomed to become an objectionable travesty of its former self (and socialist boondoggle). The hope of future autodidacts will not be free public libraries, but the Internet combined with ever cheaper and more numerous reprint editions.

AP is demonstrating all over again the characteristic incapacity of the Antique Media to resist the temptation to abuse its power, to resist its own biases, or even to recognize when the game is up.

Armed Liberal describes AP’s continued stonewalling on the Jamail Hussein scandal as

a display of clueless arrogance unmatched since the Black Knight refused to yield to King Arthur.

Magna est veritas et prævalet.

Local libraries today are commonly staffed by low-grade morons with professional degrees in “library science.” How the Dewey Decimal System can possibly be elevated into a field of academic study and a degree-program remains a mystery to some of us. Visions of courses titled “Advanced Book Stamping II” and “Alternatives to Alphabetical Shelving” dance through one’s head.

But, consequently, for more than a decade now, a retail-inventory model of tailoring libraries’ holding to books frequently checked out has been supplanting the idea of the town library as cultural repository of the classics. Librarians have (for years) been busily purging infrequently-borrowed canonical classics in order to maximize shelf space for high demand choices, i.e., current best-sellers and career references.

The Washington Post just noticed.

You can’t find “Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings” at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or “The Education of Henry Adams” at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s “Final Harvest”? Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.

It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region’s largest library system is taking turnover to a new level.

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves — and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone — even if they are classics.

“We’re being very ruthless,” said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. “A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.”

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books.

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

When American society allowed “professional” forms of credentialization to replace liberal education as the means of entry to a career as librarian (just as was the case with primary and secondary level teaching), educated people vanished from the profession, being replaced by the dimmest species of fonctionnaires and bureaucrats.

So, instead of serving as the place the poor kid can access the important books and educate himself for free (as so many American writers and intellectuals in the past have done), the modern local library has become a tax-funded way for cheapskates to get their hands on the latest Grisham or Stephen King, without actually paying for it. My former town library in Newtown, Connecticut, back in the 1990s, had already purged the English poets in order to make space available to offer popular movies on videotape, in active competition with Blockbuster.

Jules Crittenden compares the New York Times report of 16,273 Iraqi deaths by violence in 2006 to the infamous Lancet study which estimated 655,000 Iraqi deaths in three years, and wonders: doesn’t this mean that the Iraqi casualty rate has dramatically declined from more than 200,000 per year to 16,000? And doesn’t this mean we’re winning?

It’s good to have a little dog to run those tigers out of your village, before they get into the garbage cans!

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