The McCain campaign has some very professionally produced videos on its website, which are worth a look. Some of the left blogs are screaming in indignation about them.

The tribute to Reagan (and to Goldwater) is very nice indeed. Pity that John McCain is not a Reagan and Goldwater Republican after all.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, has a son who wanted a WWII-themed birthday party last Fall, and some of their suburban neighbors were not amused.

His wife, Brigid Schulte, described the responses in the Washington Post last December 11th:

How do you explain to your neighbors in Alexandria that you’re hosting a war party? More, why are you hosting a war party? I wasn’t sure myself. I only knew that Liam had his heart set on it.

One mother said no right away. “We’re trying to get him away from guns.”

Others were wary. I assured them that the Germans would be an imaginary enemy. We’d have boot camp, a map-finding activity — granted, for a sniper’s nest, ammo dump and secret war plans — and have them jump off picnic tables for the parachute drop.

I promised it would be an, uh, “educational experience.” I had Liam write a short “Road to D-Day” history that he would read to his troops in the ratline. We wrote up the military alphabet, cleaned up the words to the airborne infantry song, downloaded Glenn Miller tunes to play in the mess hall and even printed out a program for the party.

One mother worried that her daughter would be left out. No, no, I assured her, she was going to be a medic, and a friend was building a cool field hospital and ripping up sheets for bandages.

“In that case,” she said, “I’ll bring the blood.”

Turley reflects on the reactions in USAToday this week.

As soon as the invitations went out, a couple of parents politely declined to let their children come to a war-themed party. Afterward, Brigid — a Washington Post reporter — wrote a short piece about the party, and the response from outraged readers was fast and furious. Describing the whole affair as deeply disturbing, one reader chastised Brigid for giving into the base, violent inclinations of her son: “Here’s a novel idea: Say no. Tell him that war is sad and horrible and should never be a cause for celebration.”

There is a palpable sense among such playground objectors that boys harbor some deep dormant monster that, once awakened, inevitably ends with the invasion of Poland or a massacre at My Lai. Of course, millions of men played war games as kids without becoming war criminals. To the contrary, playing war was for most men an early type of morality play, defining values of sacrifice and selflessness. George Orwell once observed that a war-weary parent “who sees his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

To teach that all war is immoral is to deny the absolute values that frame a truly moral life. Arguably, the view of all war as immoral is itself amoral. Whether it is World War II or the first Gulf War, there are wars worth fighting and causes worth dying — and yes, killing — for. The failure of the world to fight in Rwanda and Darfur are, in my view, amoral acts of omission.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg has fun scaring himself, and the rest of us, thinking about a democrat winning in 2008, and being in charge of defending America against Islamic terrorism. Hillary is certainly ruthless enough, but still…

There is an idea out there. Perhaps not a fully formed one. Perhaps more like the whisper of one gusting like a sudden draft through the rafters of the conservative house, causing some to look toward the attic and ask fearfully, “What was that?”

This wisp of a notion is simply this: Maybe a Democrat should win in 2008…

The idea goes something like this: If you believe that the war on terror is real — really real — then you think it is inevitable that more and bloodier conflicts with radical Islam are on the way, regardless of who is in the White House. If the clash of civilizations is afoot, then the issues separating Democrats and Republicans are as pressing as whether the captain of the Titanic is going to have fish or chicken for dinner…

..if you really think that we are in an existential conflict with a deadly enemy, there’s a good case for the Democrats to take the reins. Not because Democrats are better, wiser or more responsible about foreign policy. That’s a case for Democrats to make about themselves and certainly not one many on the right believe. No, the argument, felt in places we don’t talk about at cocktail parties, is that the Democrats have been such irresponsible backseat drivers that they have to be forced to take the wheel to grasp how treacherous the road ahead is.

Try sleeping tonight after thinking about that!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to David Larkin.

Too cowardly to take an open stand insisting upon American defeat and withdrawal, which might have political consequences, the democrat leadership in the House of Representatives has devised a strategy in which John Murtha, now Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, will bring to bear the same low cunning which served him so well during theAbscam investigation, when he declined to accept a bribe (while being taped) “at this point.”

At this point, Murtha will not try to defund the US military effort in Iraq, he will simply attach a variety of restrictions on spending and troop deployments, threatening Republicans with a complete cutoff of funds if they try to oppose such restrictions.

The Politico reports:

new restrictions on how the president can deploy combat forces from the United States to Iraq, allow combat veterans to have at least one year stateside before returning to the frontlines and prevent the Pentagon from keeping soldiers and Marines already in Iraq in uniform after their enlistments expire.

“This vote will limit the options of the president and should stop the surge,” Murtha predicted of next month’s floor fight over the wartime supplemental appropriation. “We’re trying to force redeployment [of troops outside Iraq], not by taking money away but by redirecting it.”

Murtha is not pushing a total cutoff of funds for the war in Iraq…

The strategy being employed by Murtha and other House Democratic leaders would force Bush and Republican congressional leaders to accept the new troop restrictions, or face the possibility the supplemental spending bill would falter, thus cutting off all funding for the war.

Democrats are betting that Bush and the Republicans won’t take that risk and will go along with the Democratic proposals. And Republican leaders are not taking Murtha’s threats lightly.

The Telegraph finally reaches the conclusion which has been obvious to many Americans all along: Gun control laws impact only law-abiding citizens. The criminal, who has already decided to commit robbery or murder, will hardly shrink from the footling addition of an additional charge of illegal gun possession.

For James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, Michael Dosunmu, 15, and Billy Cox, 15, the hand-wringing by police and politicians over the escalation of gun crime comes a little late: all three have been shot dead in south London over the past 10 days…

We have… the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

… what a price we are paying.

The University of Illinois is declining to fight NCAA sanctions, and is surrendering its 81 year old mascot Chief Illiniwek.

Of course, the poltroons running the University of Illinois are a long way from the first academic administrators to bow to the forces of political correctness. Indian mascots have been dropped by a great many colleges, universities, and high schools all over the United States. The most famous examples are probably those of Dartmouth and Stanford who gave up mascots completely when they dropped their beloved Indians.

Why do the PC busybodies always get to win these things?

There seems to be a basic rule of life that to become a college president or high school principal, you have to be a small-minded conformist, coward, and lickspittle, who can be relied upon to cringe and kowtow in the face of any fashionable cause.

They abolished the Newtown (Fairfield County, Connecticut) Indian back in the 1990s. The Indian mascot had been selected by the Newtown High School’s predecessor, the Newtown Community School, in 1919, as part of a whole body of symbolism adopted in enthusiastic identification with the supposedly virtuous characteristics of pre-18th century Indian residents of Newtown’s immediate Connecticut environs.

The Indian was replaced with a wholly imaginary and entirely bogus mascot called “the Night Hawk,” a choice based obviously entirely upon alliteration. I wrote a letter to the local paper (including illustrations) explaining that no actual nocturnal raptors which were not owls, in fact, existed, and that the nighthawk was, in reality, a name conventionally applied to Chordeiles minor, one of the Caprimulgidae, wide-mouthed, insect-devouring relatives of the whippoorwill, traditionally called “goatsuckers,” on the basis of a folk belief in the purpose of their wide and hairy mouths.

Before long, Newtown students were appearing at games, attired in “Newtown Goatsuckers” t-shirts.

The school administration responded by banning the wearing of Goatsucker, as well as Indian, mascot devices.

photo by Linda Davidson — The Washington Post

Today’s Washington Post profiles the Conservative blogosphere’s female answer to George Patton, our own lovely and talented Michelle Malkin, offering this (overly mild) representative quotation:

The donkey party,” she wrote last fall, “is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me. Put simply: There are no grown-ups in the Democrat Party.”

Read the whole thing.

Paolo Uccello. The Hunt in the Forest. c. 1465-70. Oil on canvas. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

(above) 15th century Italian gentlemen hunting the roebuck.

Like the blade of grass pushing through the concrete sidewalk, natural human instincts, well known and understood in the past, continue to assert themselves even in today’s deracinated urban sprawl.

In contemporary Glasgow, for instance, young men are secretly breeding and training dogs (lurcher and greyhound crosses), and going out early in the morning in organized groups, just as their ancestors once did, to hunt the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), who, long unhunted, have adapted to life in modern suburbs and grown numerous and bold.

Being deprived of the right to own and carry more useful and practical arms, they have nothing beyond airguns, pocket knives, and their boots and hands to use to kill a deer. And being unschooled in venery or sportsmanship, these covert hunters dispatch their quarry crudely when it is brought to bay.

Regrettably as well, they evidently have not learned how to unmake the deer and how to prepare him for the table. Nor, I fear, has anyone taught them to reward the hounds, as William Twiti advised, with “bowellis and fete” (bowels and feet).

As one might expect, the organized do-gooder organizations are howling, and the British Press, e.g., the Telegraph and the BBC, is suitably outraged and alarmed by the discovery of sporting activity by British youths.

All this is ironically occurring at the same time in which an excess population of rural red deer is leading British academics, environmentalists, and journalists to loudly advocate the reintroduction of the wolf (!) to curb their numbers.

Deer poaching, in defiance of authority, has a long and famous tradition in Britain, including not only Robin Hood but even Shakespeare himself.

Long may Glasgow’s Geordies divert themselves by the manly pursuit of the swift and ingenious roebuck, say I. Over time, it is likely that with greater experience there will evolve among the more skillful sportsmen the same sort of better practices and aesthetic code which naturally evolved among their predecessors.

Unfortunately, better sportsmanship is far more likely to evolve in circumstances in which sport is openly and proudly pursued, rather than in those in which sport is inevitably stigmatised and equated by bigots and Puritans with crime.

The democrats in the House of Representatives, and a disgraceful handful of soi disant Republicans, are supporting the following disgraceful Resolution, specifically crafted to allow lawmakers to “support the troops” and to lend aid and comfort to the enemy at the same time.

Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq;

and Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

Let’s hope that real Republicans in these people’s home districts remember their names in 2008.

At American Thinker, Noel Shepherd explains the fundamental necessity of Global Warming for the socialist left.

In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats’ weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet…

.. by cleverly claiming that seas are going to rise and begin killing innocent people in ten years if nothing is done to stop it, the liberals have created an urgency about global warming that the Bush administration failed to with Social Security. As a result, the population is now ripe for listening to solutions for a problem that is significantly more a figment of the imagination than the mathematical certainty that America’s largest entitlement program will go bankrupt if changes aren’t enacted.

Put another way, two years ago, the left and the media were able to convince the American people that there was no consensus about when Social Security would run out of money, and though they agreed it will certainly happen at some point, Americans were more than happy to defer concern for this seemingly distant problem. Yet, two years later, these same politicians and press representatives have created an hysteria over an unproven theory, professing a consensus that they advertise as incontrovertible even though none exists, all over a calamity that might never actually occur.

Isn’t that extraordinary?

Read the whole thing.

One of the banes of country life in recent decades has been the arrival in Paradise of the urbanite seeking the rural life style, but who brings his urban attitudes and outlook with him, including the fortress mentality. As soon as the ink dries on the deed to his five acres, up goes the No Trespassing / No Hunting signs.

The aboriginal Yankees in Vermont have found a solution to thwart the inclination of flatlanders to wall off passage to their neighbors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, they are resurrecting town claims to forgotten (“sleeping”) roads.

Vermont has scores of old public roads that haven’t been used as such for decades and haven’t been kept up. Some resemble paths through the woods or private driveways, while others, at least to the casual observer, are indistinguishable from their surroundings. Now, with more retirees and second-home buyers acquiring Vermont real estate, some towns are rushing to stake claims to these “sleeping roads.”

Disputes center on differing perceptions of public and private property here. Known for its woodlands and rolling hills, Vermont has vast networks of trails, some of which run through people’s land. And Vermonters have a long tradition of letting people pass through their property for snowmobiling, hunting, hiking, and other forms of recreation. Locals worry that some of the outsiders now moving to the state are less open to that idea and are too fond of no-trespassing signs.

Some Vermonters are helping to guard this trail network by combing through old records to show that some of these roads are, in fact, still public. The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, which represents about 38,000 snowmobilers, has been giving PowerPoint presentations to members on how to compare road atlases from the 1850s with today’s highway maps to find roads that might have gotten lost over the years.

That alarms some property owners and has spooked the state’s biggest title insurer, which threatened to stop writing policies in three towns where a number of old-road cases have cropped up.

Some folks think those land-posting flatlanders have a certain amount of highbindery of this kind coming to them.

Carlos Alberto Montaner identifies the true identity of the sides fighting the battle over Global Warming, and proposes that the liberals, like Al Gore, who want to save us from Global Warming need to give up automobiles, electricity, and private jets first, before we start letting them apply new taxes to us.

On the surface the topic is global warming, but the issue goes a lot deeper. It is another modality of the near-cosmic debate that collectivists and individualists have engaged in for at least two centuries. The collectivists — in this case, those who look after the interests of the collective — assume that, because of industrial activities and the combustion of fossil fuels, the planet’s temperature will rise several degrees, bringing catastrophic consequences: a polar meltdown, coastline flooding, extinction of species, and the rapid expansion of deserts over large areas of the planet.

Individualists, for their part, affirm that climate predictions are closer to witchcraft than to science. Not long ago, for instance, Ãlvaro Vargas Llosa recalled sardonically that three decades ago the prevailing fear was the inevitable beginning of a glacial period that would freeze our bones, while George F. Will wondered which was better: today’s frozen and inhospitable Greenland, or the warmer and more hospitable island discovered by the Vikings one thousand years ago, where they established settlements and planted vineyards…

After the barely scientific debate — because it is based on educated guesses or questionable statistical probabilities, not on proven cause-and-effect relations — what remains is another form of the ideological and moral battle between the left and the right, or, broadly speaking, between those who defend society in the abstract (they usually write Mankind with a capital M) and those who focus their discourse on protecting human beings of flesh and bone.

That is why it is not surprising that in the ranks of the environmentalist collectivists, the Greens, you’ll find socialists of every ilk, the communists who survived the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, their clothes still covered with ideological rubble, and, in general, all the members of the happy-go-lucky, vast and illusional family of the “progressives,” while on the other side, the side of the individualists, you’ll find the liberals (in the European and Latin American sense of the word) who are more interested in the rights of people here and now than in the unforeseeable fate of future generations.

Read the whole thing.