Professorfate, at Daily Kos, proposes a lesson for Americans.

As a nation the United States no longer has the remotest idea about what it really feels like to be part of a war zone. Americans have lost the empathy that is necessary to make an informed, meaningful, compassionate decision about whether or not war should be waged. While candidates fight over who has the required experience to properly oversee our republic’s international interests, none realize that none of them have ever felt what it is like to have war waged in their neighborhood and occupied by intruders. While they may claim to know when to wage wars and to know the horrors of war, they only know them intellectually. They can’t claim that they have emotionally felt them. No one who was born and raised in the United States can claim that and none can really feel it. We have allowed a Congress and an administration to encourage hate and to hi-jack our compassion. In fact, as a nation we have lost our compassion.

Unfortunately, America is at a point that to be able to really feel again, to regain that compassion, it needs to be invaded and occupied in the same way that we have invaded and occupied Iraq.

I think myself that Professorfate ought to advance that kind of thesis somewhere in the real America. There are a lot of people around who have a moral lesson to share with him.

H/T to SavannahWinslow via Charles Johnson.

I’m not crazy about McCain personally, but I recognize that all John McCain has to do is run this ad:

4:31 video

While the Republican Party also runs portions of this video (just to put things in perspective):

3:51 video

and it’s over for Obama.

Jules Crittenden thanks the democrats for a lesson in political correctness.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Democratic Party, its two remaining presidential candidates and their campaigns for the important lessons in sensitivity and political correctness they have offered in recent weeks.

Political correctness is not simply the denial and dispute of facts or subject matter, but more practically the denial of the right to speak them, due to their objectionable or politically inconvenient nature. It’s generally wielded as a weapon against opponents. But it is more fascinating to watch it swung as a cudgel against allies. And in a campaign in which the strongest points … hope, change, experience … have tended to be a little vague or tenuous at best, the most memorable moments turn out to be about what must not be said, when we’ve seen that cudgel come down.

Of course they have platforms. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have attempted to outbid each other with your money. There are subsidies for universal healthcare, giveaways to newborns, that kind of thing. It theoretically gets paid for by taking from the rich, but stopping the war. Though that of course depends on what your definition of rich is, and whether the war can stopped…

Read the whole thing.

Bill Siegel explains what Obama’s choice of churches and his close twenty-year association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright proves about Obama’s real ideology and agenda.

Barack Obama’s response to the outrageous views and statements of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A.Wright Jr., was that he should not be tagged with “guilt by association.” In addition, his surrogates and supporters quickly joined to recite the full gamut of distracting, misdirecting, and irrelevant defenses — that the pastor doesn’t really mean what he says but uses material to stir up his congregation, whites do not understand the context of the statements, he is permitted these views because of the oppression blacks have endured, if Obama was seeking any other job these statements be irrelevant so ignore them here, only a few of the Reverend’s statements are possibly objectionable, if Obama was white this would be a non-issue, this is not the first time a candidate has been burned by an endorsement, Bush and Reagan visited Bob Jones University, John Hagee has endorsed McCain, Wright is off the campaign now so case closed and so on.

First, the “guilt by association” approach admits guilt. It merely argues over who is guilty. Therefore, any in depth analysis of the virtues or truth of Reverend Wright’s charges is clearly a waste of time. Little could be clearer on its face than the racism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism spewed by the pastor. The only issue is whether Obama shares in any of this guilt.

The defense rides on the notion that “association” is an insufficient connector between the pastor and the candidate. In law, this defense is often sensible. We typically require significant evidence of connection between parties to pass guilt from one party to another but what constitutes significance depends upon the case. In many other cases, however, the defense does not work. Being members of the same organization can often do the trick. Under the recent Sarbanes-Oxley laws, a CEO can be charged with the offenses committed by a junior officer if he should have been aware. In conspiracy cases, one member of a conspiracy can be guilty of the offenses of another merely by agreeing to be in the conspiracy even if the former was completely unaware of the specific acts of the second and would not have intended those acts himself. …

Obama followers have been failing to accept what is right in front of their eyes. Obama had stated in a February debate “The implication is that the people who have been voting for me or involved in my campaign are somehow delusional” as a joke to convey that of course that is impossible. And the public bought the joke. Similarly, when Obama or his surrogates assert that this is merely “guilt by association,” the public seems to buy it as well. The hypnotic instruction seems to be that as long as Obama can stand up and offer a counter statement that takes the focus off of him, we can still believe in him.

Nonetheless, Obama’s connections with the reverend are considerably close and meaningful. He calls Wright his “uncle” and a “sounding board.” He chose the pastor as his “spiritual advisor” who helped him “find Christ” and included him, until now, in his campaign. He has been a member of the church for roughly twenty years. He had the pastor oversee various personal occasions including his own marriage and children’s baptisms.

He has involved Wright in his political life. The title “Audacity of Hope” came from Wright. He only made any attempt to appear to disconnect from Wright following his decision to run for President.

Conversely, Wright has involved Obama as well. Wright referred to Obama in one of his diatribes of which we have been made aware: “Barack knows what it means to be a black man controlled by rich white people.” It seems the reverend knows Obama quite well. Is he telling us Obama is like the other cheering congregants who clearly accept and identify with the picture Wright paints of blacks?

And, as reported recently on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, Obama and Wright had one or more conversations in which they agreed that Obama might have to distance himself from Wright in a national campaign. Which — directly and clearly — calls into question Obama’s sincerity in supposedly distancing himself from Wright. If he planned to distance himself from Wright during the campaign it is logical to infer that Obama plans to embrace Wright again after it.

It is difficult to trust Obama’s responses. He has tried to frame the issue as concerning these specific “statements” of Wright’s, as if these are rare utterances that occurred outside of Obama’s presence. He says he hadn’t heard these statements and repudiates them and that now that he has heard them he does reject them. He has even tried to suggest that what he has heard from Wright over twenty years is simple talk about helping the poor and Jesus and so forth, subliminally suggesting to his consuming audience that the typical Wright speech is similar to any decent sermon that could be heard across the nation. It is simply disingenuous to assert that a man filled with these points of view accompanied by the rage that flows out of him in these appearances gives no hint in any of the services Obama attends or in their frequent “uncle-nephew”, “spiritual advising”, or “sounding board” interactions.

What is even more incredible is the notion that any person of reasonable judgment could walk into that church over twenty years and not know exactly what is being communicated, the radical far left bias of the pastor, and the rage-filled leanings of the entire congregation. The joy and excitement seen throughout the congregation does not come forth only after brute sublimation. This reverend knows exactly what to say to elicit that response and it is and has been exactly his job to do so. It is far more likely that these hate America views are central to what holds the entire church together rather than simple incidental slips of a pastor’s private views which were inadvertently leaked. If the Obamas are so completely in the dark as to this pastor’s sentiments, they have no judgment whatsoever. The more likely reality is that they know exactly what is happening and that is why they have been supporters for years.

Wright’s statements also give a fuller picture to Michelle Obama’s comment that she had never before been proud of America. Having Wright as one’s teacher of what America is would destroy anyone’s pride in their country. The problem, then, is that we run the risk of electing a couple whose understanding of America should probably bar them from even taking a White House tour.

To oversimplify Shelby Steele’s extremely valuable theory in A Bound Man, Obama is in the untenable position of having to keep the real Obama hidden from the public. In short, it is part of the negotiation arrangement Obama has chosen with whites — that of what Steele calls a “bargainer” — in which whites turn over power to Obama so long as he does not in any manner use his blackness as a means to make whites act as if they feel guilty. Yet in a presidential campaign, it is virtually impossible to stay hidden.

Obama has done a great job to date in hiding behind his mesmerizing speeches, his charm, his affable humor, and gentle persona, just to mention a few of his gifts and tactics. He loves to claim he is a bringing in a new politics and is “transcending” the old. It sounds wonderful to his deluded audience yet what he transcends is merely his being tagged with exactly who he is. “Transcendence” is most often used by him as an escape, an excuse to wiggle away from some charge. Yet, as he approaches nomination, much is starting to leak out. It is precisely for this reason that Obama’s associations are all the more relevant and need to be amplified. They are precisely the best window into what is behind his curtain.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

LEGENDARY HISTORY OF ST. PATRICK

The principal enemies that St. Patrick found to the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, were the Druidical priests of the more ancient faith, who, as might naturally be supposed, were exceedingly adverse to any innovation. These Druids, being great magicians, would have been formidable antagonists to any one of less miraculous and saintly powers than Patrick. Their obstinate antagonism was so great, that, in spite of his benevolent disposition, he was compelled to curse their fertile lands, so that they became dreary bogs: to curse their rivers, so that they produced no fish: to curse their very kettles, so that with no amount of fire and patience could they ever be made to boil; and, as a last resort, to curse the Druids themselves, so that the earth opened and swallowed them up.

A popular legend relates that the saint and his followers found themselves, one cold morning, on a mountain, without a fire to cook their break-fast, or warm their frozen limbs. Unheeding their complaints, Patrick desired them to collect a pile of ice and snow-balls: which having been done, he breathed upon it, and it instantaneously became a pleasant fire—a fire that long after served to point a poet’s conceit in these lines:

‘Saint Patrick, as in legends told,
The morning being very cold,
In order to assuage the weather,
Collected bits of ice together;
Then gently breathed upon the pyre,
When every fragment blazed on fire.
Oh! if the saint had been so kind,
As to have left the gift behind
To such a lovelorn wretch as me,
Who daily struggles to be free:
I’d be content—content with part,
I’d only ask to thaw the heart,
The frozen heart, of Polly Roe.’

The greatest of St. Patrick’s miracles was that of driving the venomous reptiles out of Ireland, and rendering the Irish soil, for ever after, so obnoxious to the serpent race, that they instantaneously die on touching it. Colgan seriously relates that St. Patrick accomplished this feat by beating a drum, which he struck with such fervour that he knocked a hole in it, thereby endangering the success of the miracle. But an angel appearing mended the drum: and the patched instrument was long exhibited as a holy relic.

In 1831, Mr. James Cleland, an Irish gentleman, being curious to ascertain whether the climate or soil of Ireland was naturally destructive to the serpent tribe, purchased half-a-dozen of the common harmless English snake (matrix torqueta), in Covent Garden market in London. Bringing them to Ireland, he turned them out in his garden at Rathgael, in the county of Down: and in a week afterwards, one of them was killed at Milecross, about three miles distant. The persons into whose hands this strange monster fell, had not the slightest suspicion that it was a snake, but, considering it a curious kind of eel, they took it to Dr. J. L. Drummond, a celebrated Irish naturalist, who at once pronounced the animal to be a reptile and not a fish. The idea of a ‘rale living sarpint’ having been killed within a short distance of the very burial-place of St. Patrick, caused an extraordinary sensation of alarm among the country people. The most absurd rumours were freely circulated, and credited. One far-seeing clergyman preached a sermon, in which he cited this unfortunate snake as a token of the immediate commencement of the millennium: while another saw in it a type of the approach of the cholera morbus. Old prophecies were raked up, and all parties and sects, for once, united in believing that the snake fore-shadowed. ‘the beginning of the end,’ though they very widely differed as to what that end was to be. Some more practically minded persons, however, subscribed a considerable sum of money, which they offered in rewards for the destruction of any other snakes that might be found in the district. And three more of the snakes were not long afterwards killed, within a few miles of the garden where they were liberated. The remaining two snakes were never very clearly accounted for; but no doubt they also fell victims to the reward. The writer, who resided in that part of the country at the time, well remembers the wild rumours, among the more illiterate classes, on the appearance of those snakes: and the bitter feelings of angry indignation expressed by educated persons against the—very fortunately then unknown—person, who had dared to bring them to Ireland.

A more natural story than the extirpation of the serpents, has afforded material for the pencil of the painter, as well as the pen of the poet. When baptizing an Irish chieftain, the venerable saint leaned heavily on his crozier, the steel-spiked point of which he had unwittingly placed on the great toe of the converted heathen. The pious chief, in his ignorance of Christian rites, believing this to be an essential part of the ceremony, bore the pain without flinching or murmur; though the blood flowed so freely from the wound, that the Irish named the place St. fhuil (stream of blood), now pronounced Struill, the name of a well-known place near Downpatrick. And here we are reminded of a very remarkable fact in connection with geographical appellations, that the footsteps of St. Patrick can be traced, almost from his cradle to his grave, by the names of places called after him.

Thus, assuming his Scottish origin, he was born at Kilpatrick (the cell or church of Patrick), in Dumbartonshire. He resided for some time at Dalpatrick (the district or division of Patrick), in Lanarkshire; and visited Crag-phadrig (the rock of Patrick), near Inverness. He founded two churches, Kirkpatrick at Irongray, in Kireudbright; and Kirkpatrick at Fleming, in Dumfries: and ultimately sailed from Portpatrick, leaving behind him such an odour of sanctity, that among the most distinguished families of the Scottish aristocracy, Patrick has been a favourite name down to the present day.

Arriving in England, he preached in Patterdale (Patrick’s dale), in Westmoreland: and founded the church of Kirkpatrick, in Durham. Visiting Wales, he walked over Sarn-badrig (Patrick’s causeway), which, now covered by the sea, forms a dangerous shoal in Carnarvon Bay: and departing for the Continent, sailed from Llan-badrig (the church of Patrick), in the island of Anglesea. Undertaking his mission to convert the Irish, he first landed at Innis-patrick (the island of Patrick), and next at Holmpatrick, on the opposite shore of the mainland, in the county of Dublin. Sailing northwards, he touched at the Isle of Man, sometimes since, also, called. Innis-patrick, where he founded another church of Kirkpatrick, near the town of Peel. Again landing on the coast of Ireland, in the county of Down, he converted and baptized the chieftain Dichu, on his own threshing-floor. The name of the parish of Saul, derived from Sabbal-patrick (the barn of Patrick), perpetuates the event. He then proceeded to Temple-patrick, in Antrim, and from thence to a lofty mountain in Mayo, ever since called Croagh-patrick.

He founded an abbey in East Meath, called Domnach-Padraig (the house of Patrick), and built a church in Dublin on the spot where St. Patrick’s Cathedral now stands. In an island of Lough Deng, in the county of Donegal, there is St. Patrick’s Purgatory: in Leinster, St. Patrick’s Wood; at Cashel, St. Patrick’s Rock; the St. Patrick’s Wells, at which the holy man is said to have quenched his thirst, may be counted by dozens. He is commonly stated to have died at Saul on the 17^th of March 493, in the one hundred and twenty-first year of his age.

Poteen, a favourite beverage in Ireland, is also said to have derived its name from St. Patrick: he, according to legend, being the first who instructed the Irish in the art of distillation. This, however, is, to say the least, doubtful: the most authentic historians representing the saint as a very strict promoter of temperance, if not exactly a teetotaller. We read that in 445 he commanded his disciples to abstain from drink in the day-time, until the bell rang for vespers in the evening. One Colman, though busily engaged in the severe labours of the field, exhausted with heat, fatigue, and intolerable thirst, obeyed so literally the injunction of his revered preceptor, that he refrained from indulging himself with one drop of water during a long sultry harvest day. But human endurance has its limits: when the vesper bell at last rang for evensong, Colman dropped down dead—a martyr to thirst. Irishmen can well appreciate such a martyrdom; and the name of Colman, to this day, is frequently cited, with the added epithet of Shadhack—the Thirsty.

‘In Burgo Duno, tumulo tumulantur in uno,
Brigida, Patricius, atque Columba pins.’

Which may be thus rendered:

‘In the hill of Down, buried in one tomb,
Were Bridget and Patricius, with Columba the pious.’

One of the strangest recollections of a strange childhood is the writer having been taken, by a servant, unknown to his parents, to see a silver case, containing, as was said, the jaw-bone of St. Patrick. The writer was very young at the time, but remembers seeing one much younger, a baby, on the same occasion, and has an indistinct idea that the jaw-bone was considered to have had a very salutary effect on the baby’s safe introduction into the world. This jaw-bone, and the silver shrine enclosing it, has been, for many years, in the possession of a family in humble life near Belfast. In the memory of persons living, it contained five teeth, but now retains only one—three having been given to members of the family, when emigrating to America; and the fourth was deposited under the altar of the Roman Catholic Chapel of Derriaghy, when rebuilt some years ago.

The curiously embossed case has a very antique appearance, and is said to be of an immense age: but it is, though certainly old, not so very old as reported, for it carries the Hallmark ‘plainly impressed upon it.’ This remarkable relic has long been used for a kind of extra-judicial trial, similar to the Saxon corsnet, a test of guilt or innocence of very great antiquity; accused or suspected persons freeing themselves from the suspicion of crime, by placing the right hand on the reliquary, and declaring their innocence, in a certain form of words, supposed to be an asseveration of the greatest solemnity, and liable to instantaneous, supernatural, and frightful punishment, if falsely spoken, even by suppressio veri, or suygestio falsi. It was also supposed to assist women in labour, relieve epileptic fits, counteract the diabolical machinations of witches and fairies, and avert the baleful influence of the evil eye. We have been informed, however, that of late years it has rarely been applied to such uses, though it is still considered a most welcome visitor to a household, where an immediate addition to the family is expected.

The shamrock, or small white clover (trifolium repens of botanists), is almost universally worn in the hat over all Ireland, on St. Patrick’s day. The popular notion is, that when St. Patrick was preaching the doctrine of the Trinity to the pagan Irish, he used this plant, bearing three leaves upon one stem, as a symbol or illustration of the great mystery. To suppose, as some absurdly hold, that he used it as an argument, would be derogatory to the saint’s high reputation for orthodoxy and good sense: but it is certainly a curious coincidence, if nothing more, that the trefoil in Arabic is called skamrakh, and was held sacred in Iran as emblematical of the Persian Triads. Pliny, too, in his Natural History, says that serpents are never seen upon trefoil, and it prevails against the stings of snakes and scorpions. This, considering St. Patrick’s connexion with snakes, is really remarkable, and we may reasonably imagine that, previous to his arrival, the Irish had ascribed mystical virtues to the trefoil or shamrock, and on hearing of the Trinity for the first time, they fancied some peculiar fitness in their already sacred plant to shadow forth the newly revealed and mysterious doctrine. And we may conclude, in the words of the poet, long may the shamrock,

‘The plant that blooms for ever,
With the rose combined,
And the thistle twined,
Defy the strength of foes to sever.
Firm be the triple league they form,
Despite all change of weather:
In sunshine, darkness, calm, or storm,
Still may they fondly grow together.’
W. P.

The serpent every Monday morning calls out in Irish, ‘It is a long Monday, Patrick.’

That St Patrick chained the serpent in Lough Dilveen, and that the serpent calls out to him every Monday morning, is firmly believed by the lower orders who live in the neighbourhood of the Lough.

Residents of the university town of Oxford are evidently still resisting efforts of Muslims to reverse the results of the Battle of Tours, using the politics of political correctness in place of scimitars.

AFP reports:

Famous for its university and quintessentially English “dreaming spires,” the city of Oxford has been plunged into controversy over the sound of Muslim call to prayer from a local mosque.

Those church spires have been joined by a minaret, with a loudspeaker on top which has triggered protests from locals concerned about the influx of a foreign culture.

“I don’t have any problem with Islam but don’t force it on people,” said Oxford University historian Allan Chapman, whose typically English house has a view of both the minaret and the nearby Church of Saint Mary and Saint John.

The Central Mosque was built in the east of the city, the “other Oxford”, which is home to a poorer population and more immigrants than the historic centre of ancient, sandstone colleges, libraries and students on bicycles.

Cutting through the area is the main, multi-ethnic thoroughfare of Cowley Road, where Pakistani men in traditional tunics and other immigrants rub shoulders with the city’s student intelligentsia going to and from their digs. …

The mosque itself — which can hold up to 700 of the town’s 6,000 Muslims — is little more than a 15-minute walk from Oxford’s colleges, many of which were founded by Christian religious scholars as long ago as the 12th century.

But while the city’s history is marked by Christianity’s influence, some believe the mosque’s imposing minaret defiles the city’s famous skyline, which has remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Those feelings have been brought to a head since last November when mosque authorities expressed a desire to broadcast via loudspeaker the Muslim prayer call, the Adhan, sparking controversy that has not yet died down.

Wearing a three-piece suit with a bow tie and a gold chain hanging out of his jacket pocket, Chapman describes himself as “profoundly English” but rejects suggestions that he is taking an extreme view.

“I’m a liberal… I want to be inclusive but I don’t want to be walked over,” he said.

For him, the issue goes above and beyond the noise created by the call to prayer, which goes out five times daily in Muslim countries, and instead challenges English tolerance and threatens Britain’s values and history.

“If Oxford accepts it, it would be used right across the country,” he said.

Charlie Cleverly, the rector of the Saint Aldates church, in the heart of Oxford, says the city has long represented “the essence of Englishness”.

“It is common knowledge, though few will say it, that ‘radical Islam’ has a programme to ‘take Europe, take England and take Oxford’,” he said.

“In this strategy, some say the prayer call is like a bridgehead, spreading to other mosques in the city.”

The local Oxford Mail newspaper quoted locals in the area as fearing the creation of a “Muslim ghetto”. The counter argument runs that the pealing of church bells is also a call to prayer.

To calm the mood, Central Mosque’s treasurer Masood Ahmed insisted that the desire to issue a call to prayer was still only a proposal which required the approval of Oxford’s mayor.

“We’ll get their views, what they feel,” he said.

The Church of England Bishop of Oxford, the Right Reverend John Pritchard, has entered the row, but supports plans to broadcast the Adhan, calling for people to “relax” and “enjoy community diversity”.

“I believe we have good relationships with the Muslim community here in Oxford and I am personally very happy for the mosque to call the faithful to prayer in east Oxford,” he said in January.

But he accepted that the number of times the call went out and its volume still needed to be resolved.

Chapman, though, is less accommodating, pledging to seek compensation from the mayor for “discrimination” if the proposal is approved.

For the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the debate is as futile as its direction is inevitable, as a debate rages over the extent to which cultural diversity is affecting the traditionally British way of life.

“The call to prayer will be part of Britain and Europe in the future,” said Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB’s assistant secretary general.

Earlier posting.

Telegraph:

A rare portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been unearthed which gives a true picture of the famous composer’s looks at the height of his fame.

It shows him in 1783, aged 27, dressed in a red tunic and a white ruff, with a wig of grey hair and an elegant but slightly hooked nose. …

The picture has been authenticated by Professor Cliff Eisen, a music scholar at King’s College London. He described it as “arguably the most important Mozart portrait to be discovered” since the composer’s death in 1791.

Prof Eisen, who is to present his findings to academics at the Royal Musical Association on Saturday, said: “It is only the fourth known authentic portrait of him from the Vienna years, the period of his greatest professional successes and greatest compositional achievements.”

Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, aged 25, and died a decade later.

The oil, which measures 19 inches by 14 inches, was bought by an American collector in 2005 from a descendent of Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, a close friend of the composer’s father Leopold Mozart. The collector has insured it for £2 million.

It was probably painted by Joseph Hickel, a painter to the Imperial Court of Austria.

Prof Eisen said there was strong documentary evidence to suggest the subject was Mozart, including a letter he wrote to one of his patrons in September 1782 describing his desire for a “beautiful red coat” that matches the one painted.

with the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass, who finds himself unable to take a leap of faith.

Barack Obama looked me straight in the eye. I heard him speak. Yet unlike some other pundits, I felt no thrill going up my leg.

I did feel a twinge of Rezko, though, and figured Obama could feel it, too, like when the bottom of your foot cramps up inside your shoe and you can’t dance.

That’s “hardball” the Chicago way, as Barack visited the Tribune on Friday to discuss his old friend, fundraiser and real estate fairy, indicted political fixer Tony Rezko. Rezko himself was quite busy, in federal custody, preparing for this week’s testimony in his corruption trial. …

Obama asks us to believe he can swim in the sewers of Illinois politics without catching a cold. He tells us that Rezko helped him scope out his dream house, yet Obama never thought he’d get a call from Tony saying his back was itchy.

“No,” Obama said. “Because I had known him for a long time, and so I would have assumed I would have seen a pattern [of Rezko asking for favors] over the course of 15 years.”

I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.

At issue is the purchase of the Obama dream house on the South Side in 2005. The Rezkos bought the lot next door from the same owners on the same day, even as Tony was leprous with federal subpoenas. The Obamas paid $300,000 less than the asking price. The Rezkos paid the full list for the lot. Everybody was happy until Tony got indicted.

Was it a favor, with a bigger payout intended for later?

“No,” Obama said again, reiterating that I was wrong for writing that he needed Rezko’s help to buy his home.

Obama said he asked Rezko about the federal investigations, if Rezko had any problems, and Tony said no, and Barack believed it.

What will he say when Vladimir Putin of Russia asks President Obama to believe him? President Bush has already looked into Putin’s eyes, thought he saw a soul in there, and was greatly mistaken.

(* punchline to a proposed “Why does a Republican cross the street” joke. The famous Ernest Hemingway version of the “Why Does the Chicken” joke, you see, ends with: “To die… alone… in the rain.”)

Peggy Noonan thinks the two parties these days are like two very different houses:

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

Personally, I think the cops will soon be arriving in large numbers to suppress the donnybrook going on in that nice new house, and to take a significant portion of the tenants away in paddy wagons.

We Republicans?

The base is tired. Republicans feel their own kind of unease at Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Talk about wanting to stand athwart history yelling stop. They’re not in a mood to give money. Remember the phrase “broken glass Republicans?” The number of Republicans so offended, so wounded, actually, as citizens, by the Clinton years, that they’d crawl across broken glass to elect George Bush? They existed in 2004, too. Now a lot of them wouldn’t crawl across a plush weave carpet to vote for a Republican.

Not if he’s John McCain, we wouldn’t.

But Peggy has one crumb of good news about McCain. He likes Hemingway. A lot.

Who has he read besides Hemingway? (And he’s read him—he loves him to an almost scary degree.)

Maybe he’s not all bad, after all.

Pro-Clinton Kos Kid Alegre declared herself on strike from Daily Kos, frustrated at management’s refusal to enforce standards of civility or factuality with respect to postings attacking Hillary.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of a portion of the flung feces representing the typical negative response the Kos community.

Kos himself was unsympathetic. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper:

First, these people should read up on the definition of ‘strike.’ What they’re doing is a ‘boycott.’ But whatever they call it, I think it’s great. It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

The conflict between Obama and Clinton supporters has already become bitter and ugly, and there is every reason to expect that things will only grow worse through the convention.

Michael Barone sees the same conflict between the permanent government and Bush at work in the case of Admiral Fallon.

Though everyone involved denies it, Fallon was kicked out for insubordination, or something very close to it. His conduct became impossible to overlook after the publication of a jauntily written article in Esquire by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of “The Pentagon’s New Map.”

Barnett paints Fallon as a seasoned officer who coolly and wisely has been frustrating George W. Bush’s desire to invade Iran. He points out that Fallon opposed the surge in Iraq ordered by Bush in January 2007 and that he has tried to rein in Gen. David Petraeus, whose leadership of the surge has produced such impressive results. He seems to take it for granted that readers will applaud Fallon for opposing a move that converted likely defeat to a high chance of success.

Fallon also made it plain that he wants to withdraw troops from Iraq, as soon as possible — even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved Petraeus’ request for a pause after currently scheduled troop withdrawals end in July.

Fallon is not the first subordinate to work openly to undercut the commander in chief. The authors of the National Intelligence Estimate headlined a conclusion that Iran had abandoned part of its nuclear program, while underplaying the more important news that the mullahs were continuing the critical parts of the nuclear program and retained the capacity to rev up the rest quickly at any time. Leaks from the State Department and CIA have been clearly designed to frustrate administration policy.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation’s interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right.

Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native. As head of Pacific Command, Fallon (at least as Barnett paints him) seemed transfixed on cooperating with China; at Central Command, he came to believe that pressuring Israel toward a settlement with Palestinians was the way to solve every problem in the region. After all, those are the things the Chinese and Arab military officers he’s been interfacing with have told him.

In my view, George W. Bush has been unduly tolerant of the efforts of civilian career professionals to undercut his policies. But Fallon’s abrupt resignation suggests that he and-or Gates decided that things had gone too far when a commanding military officer was lionized for opposing the president’s policies in the pages of Esquire.

Bush’s entrenched opponents within the admnistration fabricate another sophistical analysis denying the obvious and leak it to the Press, and George W. Bush fails to answer them. Bill Kristol explains why the Bush Administration is again ducking debating the case against Saddam.

Late last week, the Defense Department released an analysis of 600,000 documents captured in Iraq prepared by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded think tank. Here’s the attention-grabbing sentence from the report’s executive summary: “This study found no ‘smoking gun’ (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.”

Relying on a leak of the executive summary, ABC News reported that the study was “the first official acknowledgment from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.” There followed a brief item in the Washington Post that ran under the headline “Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link.” The New York Times announced: “Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie.” NPR agreed: “Study Finds No Link Between Saddam, bin Laden.”

And the Bush administration reacted with an apparently guilty silence.

But here’s the truth. The executive summary of the report is extraordinarily misleading. …

Take a look …at the documents showing links between Saddam Hussein and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Apparently whoever wrote the executive summary didn’t consider the link between Saddam and al Zawahiri a “direct connection” because Egyptian Islamic Jihad had not yet, in the early 1990s, fully been incorporated into al Qaeda. Of course, by that standard, evidence of support provided to Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s might not be deemed a “direct connection” because al Qaeda as we know it today did not yet exist.

If you talk to people in the Bush administration, they know the truth about the report. They know that it makes the case convincingly for Saddam’s terror connections. But they’ll tell you (off the record) it’s too hard to try to set the record straight. Any reengagement on the case for war is a loser, they’ll say. Furthermore, once the first wave of coverage is bad, you can never catch up: You give the misleading stories more life and your opponents further chances to beat you up in the media. And as for trying to prevent misleading summaries and press leaks in the first place–that’s hopeless. Someone will tell the media you’re behaving like Scooter Libby, and God knows what might happen next.

So, this week’s fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war will bring us countless news stories reexamining the case for war, with the White House essentially pleading nolo contendere. Even though there is abundant evidence that Iraq was a serious state sponsor of terrorism–and would almost certainly have become a greater one if Saddam had been left in power–most Americans will assume there was no real Saddam-terror connection. After all, they haven’t heard the Bush administration say otherwise.