Antioch College, long-time collegiate exemplar of ultra-liberalism, has evidently run out of money and is “temporarily” closing down, reports Henry P. Wickham Jr.

According to a statement released on June 12, 2007 by the Antioch College Board of Trustees, the College in Yellow Springs, Ohio will suspend operations on July 1, 2008. The Trustees announced that the “College’s resources are inadequate” to continue its operations in Yellow Springs.

The statement from the Trustees refers to the College’s “low enrollment and lack of adequate funding.” It refers to all of the cutbacks that the College has made, which have “eroded the confidence students and parents have in the College’s academic program.”

The statement mentions the long-term goal of reopening the campus at some point in the future. However, given the College’s declining enrollment, decrepit facilities, and low endowment, one wonders how the College can resurrect itself, absent a sugar daddy like George Soros.

At American Thinker, Amil Imani argues that Islam should be treated Constitutionally as a hostile totalitarian power, not a religion. He has a point, but liberals always used to think that actual agents and allies of literal hostile totalitarian countries engaged in espionage and subversion ought to be treated Constitutionally as exercising rights of free speech and opinion, so the odds of mustering a consensus in favor of Mr. Imani’s proposal seem poor.

But while it doesn’t seem very plausible that we could possibly succeed in passing laws banning the building of Wahabi mosques in the United States, I do think we could stop allowing Muslims to enter the country. There is certainly precedent. During the last major period of immigration around the turn of the last century, persons seeking admission to the United States were required to affirm that that they were not members of a hereditary aristocracy, Anarchists, or Polygamists (i.e., Mormons).

The people of that Commonwealth will not endorse Gay Marriage, so the greasy pols in the democrat-controlled legislature have again blocked a popular vote on a Constitutional Amendment intended to reverse the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s absurd decision.

You hear a lot of talk about “democracy” from democrats, and about “voting,” until the time comes to deliver the goods to one of their pet constituencies, then so much for democracy, so much for voting.

AP

AP reports that Judge Walton has turned down Lewis Libby’s attorneys’ request for a prison delay to allow for appeal.

A federal judge said Thursday he will not delay a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a ruling that could send the former White House aide to prison within weeks.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton’s decision will send Libby’s attorneys rushing to an appeals court to block the sentence and could force President Bush to consider calls from Libby’s supporters to pardon the former aide.

No date was set for Libby to report to prison but it’s expected to be within six to eight weeks. That will be left up to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which will also select a facility.

Now we will have a chance to see what George W. Bush is made of. Will he allow a loyal subordinate to serve actual prison time as the result a ridiculous, purely partisan criminalization-of-policy-disputes affair which he himself could have, and should have, prevented ever occurring in the first place?

If he does that, conservative Republicans should withdraw their support from such a president.

Mark Taibbi is extremely amusing, reflecting upon — and criticizing — the contradictions of American leftism.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position its in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the American left,” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important). “But you re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

David Sirota, … a guy who frequently appears on television news programs defending the “left” in TV’s typical Crossfire -style left-right rock-em -sock-‘em format. Like a lot of people who make their living in this world, he s sometimes frustrated with the lack of discipline and purpose in American liberalism. And like Sanders, he worries that there is a wide chasm between the people who speak for the left and sponsor left-leaning political organizations, and the actual people they supposedly represent.

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. …

Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal -Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna. …

..having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. Its also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

Read the whole article.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Back on February 13th, the Telegraph (CY refers to March 12th, presumably via a typo) reported that more than a 100 Steyr Mannlicher HS50 .50 caliber sniper rifles sold to Iran had been captured by US forces in raids on insurgent arms caches and safe houses.

The story was widely repeated by media outlets and blogs, and obviously did considerable harm to the public image and reputation of the renowned Austrian arm maker.

Steyr Mannlicher issued a rebuttal on March 29th, which I unfortunately have not previously seen.

But Confederate Yankee more recently looked into the matter, interviewing informed US military sources, and has debunked the story completely.

Personally, I’m delighted to learn that the history of the company succeeding as manufacturer of the illustrious Mannlicher Schonauer remains unblemished, and that we Americans can buy Jeff Cooper-designed Steyr Scout rifles anytime we want without a qualm.

Never Yet Melted extends apologies and best wishes to Steyr Mannlicher GmbH. & Co KG

and to

Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher.

Original erroneous post

Overlawyered has an update on this hilarious affair.

Apparently, the plaintiff was moved to tears when he testified about the loss of those trousers by his neighborhood dry cleaner.

Previous posting

Christopher J. Fettweis puts America on the couch for a session of (slightly premature) Post-traumatic Iraq Syndrome counseling in the La Times.

Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This simple maxim applies with equal power to virtually all areas of human interaction: sports, finance, love. And war. …

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. …

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history. …

Perhaps at some point we will come to recognize that the United States can afford to be much more restrained in its foreign policy adventures. Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recrimination that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neoconservatism’s parting gift to America.

——————————

Thank you, Neocons, for returning the USA to the grand old pre-WWII philosophy of Isolationism.

——————————

It seems curious to this reader that Mr. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, in his eagerness to snatch defeat, never actually identifies when and where the US defeat occurred.

Where exactly did the American Blenheim, the American Retreat from Moscow, the American Stalingrad, or the American Dien Bien Phu take place and when did it occur?

Traditionally, nations lose wars when they suffer a major defeat in battle resulting in the destruction or surrender of an entire army.

Alternatively, nations lose wars the way the Confederacy did in 1865 and Germany did in WWI via drastic prolonged losses of manpower, economic exhaustion, and civilian starvation.

We lost 3513 men in Iraq over four years, not the 10-13 thousand Grant lost at Cold Harbor, the 100,000 each France and Germany lost at Verdun, not even the 7000 we lost in less than a month at Iwo Jima.

It can hardly be contended that the loss of 3500 men over four years has brought a nation of 300 million to its knees. The United States lost 3% of its population in the Civil War before one side lost the will to continue the fight. Germany lost more than 1,700,000 in WWI before accepting the Armistice. We lose 26,000 lives in highway fatalities per annum, and we’re not withdrawing from the nation’s roads.

We are obviously not really running out of manpower. Have we exhausted our financial resources?

We’re running a deficit, it’s true, but the deficit as percentage of GDP is low: 1.4%. The average since 1970 is 2.3%.

We haven’t lost any battles. No US army has been annihilated or surrendered. We are hardly running out of manpower. We are neither starving, nor broke. So why are we defeated?

What we are running out of is conviction in the justness of our cause and confidence in our success. Those losses did not occur in Iraq. Those losses were inflicted on the homefront in a highly successful propaganda operation which inflicted the death of a thousand cuts upon American support for the War in Iraq by lovingly detailed news coverage of every American casualty, by the systematic magnification of the enemy’s every trivial ambush or booby trap into a major victory, by the obfuscation and denigration of America’s causus belli and war aims.

American military forces cannot possibly be defeated on the battlefield by the inferior numbers of lightly armed irregular adversaries. But we have been brought very close to defeat, with withdrawal not difficult to imagine, by domestic defeatism and treason.

Before Mr. Fettweis undertakes to talk about Post-Traumatic Defeat Syndrome, he is under an obligation to identify the real character of that defeat.

Aaron Hanscom finds comedy in 21st century leftist Europe’s unwillingness to defend itself against apes or Islam.

To gauge the extent of the demise of Europe, look no further than the story of the male gorilla that escaped at a Rotterdam zoo last month. After managing to get over a moat, the 400-pound primate brutally attacked a woman who had been visiting the zoo regularly to see the animal. Because female gorillas establish prolonged eye contact when they want to mate, biologists concluded that the woman was responsible for the attack. Taking moral relativism to its illogical conclusion, the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium now has signs warning visitors not to stare at the apes.

Al Gore criticizes George Bush’s policy on Iraq: for disregarding Iraq’s ties to terrorism and ignoring Iraq’s attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

9:27 video

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

Richmond’s 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Bush Administration cannot do what Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1 and 2 ) did in time of war, that the Bush Administration cannot detain as a military prisoner one Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, an individual arrested in the United States, who had trained at Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, who met with Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, in the Summer of 2001, and then entered the United States just before September 11th attacks to serve as an Al Qaeda sleeper agent.

The opinion was written by Judge Diana Motz and joined by Judge Roger Gregory, both Clinton appointees.

Al-Marri v. Wright

Jules Crittenden takes the occasion of the failure of the Gonzalez No Confidence vote, Harry Reid’s 19% Favorable Rating, and the democrat Congress’s 27% Approval Rating (a 10 Year Low) to remind Americans that it is actually possible to be doing worse than George W. Bush.

Mark Tapscott says the unpopularity of both Republicans and democrats proves it’s time for a new Party.