ABC News:

PINELLAS COUNTY, FL (Clearwater/Tampa area)– An Eastlake Woodlands woman made a beeline for the door when she saw what was next to her refrigerator Monday night.

According to deputies, 69-year-old Sandra Frosti heard a noise coming from her kitchen. When she went to check what it was, she saw the head of a large alligator.

Frosti called 911, “There’s an alligator in my kitchen!” she explained. The emergency operator reportedly suggested it might be an Iguana. Frosti suggested otherwise and left the house.

Deputies showed up at the home a short time later and then called a trapper.

Deputies believe the 8-foot 8-inch (2.64 meter) gator was after the family cat. It apparently broke through the back porch screen door, entered the home through an open sliding glass door, and then made its way in through the living room, down the hall, and into the kitchen.

The gator was slightly injured as it was being trapped, when a plate was knocked to the ground cutting the alligator.

video

Other saurian attempts at trespass:

posting 29 May 2007

posting – 25 June 2006

Meanwhile, in today’s Britain, Bradford has cancelled its St. George’s Day Parade in order to avoid offending Muslims.

Daily Mail:

A St George’s Day parade through an inner-city area hit by race riots has been cancelled following police advice.

Community groups had planned to stage the multi-cultural event in Bradford and 1,500 schoolchildren were due to take part.

Many of the youngsters had already made flags of St George to carry on the parade on April 23, which was designed to boost community cohesion.

But last week police and council chiefs told the organisers that the event could not go ahead as planned for ‘health and safety’ reasons. At a meeting, police demanded a shorter route which avoided two streets at the centre of the race riots in 2001.

As a result, organisers have decided to call off the event, which was due to attract more than 10,000 people.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

Butler, the historian of the Romish calendar, repudiates George of Cappadocia, and will have it that the famous saint was born of noble Christian parents, that he entered the army, and rose to a high grade in its ranks, until the persecution of his co-religionists by Diocletian compelled him to throw up his commission, and upbraid the emperor for his cruelty, by which bold conduct he lost his head and won his saintship. Whatever the real character of St. George might have been, he was held in great honour in England from a very early period. While in the calendars of the Greek and Latin churches he shared the twenty-third of April with other saints, a Saxon Martyrology declares the day dedicated to him alone; and after the Conquest his festival was celebrated after the approved fashion of Englishmen.

In 1344, this feast was made memorable by the creation of the noble Order of St. George, or the Blue Garter, the institution being inaugurated by a grand joust, in which forty of England’s best and bravest knights held the lists against the foreign chivalry attracted by the proclamation of the challenge through France, Burgundy, Hainault, Brabant, Flanders, and Germany. In the first year of the reign of Henry V, a council held at London decreed, at the instance of the king himself, that henceforth the feast of St. George should be observed by a double service; and for many years the festival was kept with great splendour at Windsor and other towns. Shakspeare, in Henry VI, makes the Regent Bedford say, on receiving the news of disasters in France:

Bonfires in France I am forthwith to make
To keep our great St. George’s feast withal!’

Edward VI promulgated certain statutes severing the connection between the ‘noble order’ and the saint; but on his death, Mary at once abrogated them as ‘impertinent, and tending to novelty.’ The festival continued to be observed until 1567, when, the ceremonies being thought incompatible with the reformed religion, Elizabeth ordered its discontinuance. James I, however, kept the 23rd of April to some extent, and the revival of the feast in all its glories was only prevented by the Civil War. So late as 1614, it was the custom for fashionable gentlemen to wear blue coats on St. George’s day, probably in imitation of the blue mantle worn by the Knights of the Garter.

In olden times, the standard of St. George was borne before our English kings in battle, and his name was the rallying cry of English warriors. According to Shakspeare, Henry V led the attack on Harfleur to the battle-cry of ‘God for Harry! England! and St. George!’ and ‘God and St. George’ was Talbot’s slogan on the fatal field of Patay. Edward of Wales exhorts his peace-loving parents to

‘Cheer these noble lords,
And hearten those that fight in your defence;
Unsheath your sword, good father, cry St. George!’

The fiery Richard invokes the same saint, and his rival can think of no better name to excite the ardour of his adherents:

‘Advance our standards, set upon our foes,
Our ancient word of courage, fair St. George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons.’

England was not the only nation that fought under the banner of St. George, nor was the Order of the Garter the only chivalric institution in his honour. Sicily, Arragon, Valencia, Genoa, Malta, Barcelona, looked up to him as their guardian saint; and as to knightly orders bearing his name, a Venetian Order of St. George was created in 1200, a Spanish in 1317, an Austrian in 1470, a Genoese in 1472, and a Roman in 1492, to say nothing of the more modern ones of Bavaria (1729), Russia (1767), and Hanover (1839).

Rocky

AP:

A grizzly bear that appeared in a recent Will Ferrell movie killed a 39-year-old trainer with a bite to his neck Tuesday and had to be subdued with pepper spray.

Three experienced handlers were working with the bear at Randy Miller’s Predators in Action facility when the bear bit 39-year-old Stephan Miller on the neck, said San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. Stephan Miller is Randy’s cousin, she said.

The center’s staff used pepper spray to subdue and contain the bear and there were no other injuries, she said.

A county Fire Department traumatic injury response unit responded about 3 p.m., but could not revive Miller.

The Department of Fish and Game will decide the bear’s fate after an investigation, Tiffany Swantek, a spokeswoman for the Big Bear Sheriff’s Station, told the San Bernardino Sun Tuesday.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Phelps said the bear was a 5-year-old male named Rocky. The Predators in Action Web site says Rocky is 7 1/2 feet tall, weighs 700 pounds and appeared in a scene in “Semi-Pro” in which Will Ferrell’s character wrestles a bear to promote his basketball team.

Complete story.

the ineffable Michael Pollan

The New York Times rather outdid itself on Sunday in serving up its traditional ration of stupidity and cant, but Earth Day occurs this week and provided the occasion for the Times to devote the entire Sunday Magazine to an Enviro-PC-Fest of preening libs.

Michael Pollan, for instance, took a long, hard look into his own navel, and understood that changing the world, the choices, habits, lifestyles, and behavior of all of the world’s 6 and a half billion inhabitants, reversing the course of history, and rejecting capitalism, consumerism, and modern industrial civilization might be only a matter of setting a personal good example.

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. …

f you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on.

And even if what you do personally doesn’t actually have any real impact on the world, you should, of course, do all this goofy green stuff anyway, since even if you can’t meaningfully change the world, you can change yourself into an environmentally-PC member of the more-enlightened-than-thou elite, a nobler, finer being, capable of experiencing the orgasmic sense of narcissistic self-righteousness that only comes from composting.

Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

Rick Moran watches with dismay the American Left’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Dali once famously said “The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” Something similar could be said for the differences between the Obama on the stump and Obama the real person. This became abundantly clear last night when the largest campaign crowd yet – more than 35,000 by most estimates – thronged to the park in front of Independence Hall to hear the probable/potential/possible next President of the United States chant his “hope and change” mantra while totally ignoring the reality of a man whose past associations include an incredible group of hate mongering anti-Americans, racist pastors, crooked “fixers,” and “politics as usual” politicians who give the lie to his pretty words and noble sentiments. ..

Have we become so cynical that despite all the evidence to the contrary – his lack of any track record in effecting change (even eschewing opportunities to do so when the presented themselves), his accepting help from politicians who practice the very kind of politics he rails against, his association with people who have no desire to “unite” the country, only tear it down – that so many would become besotted with “Obamamania” that they deliberately look the other way at this hypocrisy coming from their candidate?

This disconnect became all too visible the last few days as left wing blogs supporting Obama were beside themselves over the efforts by ABC debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephenopolous to pull back the curtain and reveal Obama as the hypocrite he truly is. Their primary beef with ABC? The moderators asked questions the candidate didn’t want to answer and his supporters didn’t want to hear. As long as the press coverage limits itself to the “issues,” only the Obama on the stump will be highlighted. As long as the press reports on the incredible crowds, the adoring fans, the candidate’s rhetorical gifts (not “issues” in any sense of the word but hey! – no one ever accused the left of being consistent about anything), Obama’s Legions are satisfied.

But let the press actually do their jobs and ask the candidate why he is on a first name basis with someone who is “proud” he tried to blow up the Pentagon and the crap hits the fan in Obamaland. Any attempt to reveal the life Obama has led outside of politics isn’t relevant. Not because it has nothing to do with why someone would cast their vote for their candidate – an incredibly stupid assumption that bespeaks an ignorance of why people vote – but simply because they don’t want to know and more importantly, they don’t want the rest of us to know.

The last debate having not worked out to to the satisfaction of the Obama campaign, the North Carolina debate scheduled for April 27 has been cancelled.

And, as Jay Newton-Small reports, Obama is currently avoiding the press and hiding behind his waffle.

This morning at a diner in Scranton Obama sat down at the counter to enjoy a waffle breakfast with Senator Bob Casey. He’d already spent more than 30 minutes glad handing the restaurant’s denizens, and with the 15+ press pool crammed behind the counter before him Obama dug in. Which is when one of the network reporters took the advantage of the close proximity to ask a question about Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas and Obama irritably answered: “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?”

At the White house we’d often shout questions at Bush, especially in his first term when press conferences were few and far between. His choice to answer them sometimes led to scenes like in Fahrenheit 911 when Bush, about to tee off on the golf course, called on all nations to do everything they can to stop terrorist killers and then smirked “Now, watch this drive.” Journalists in general don’t relish asking politicians questions in awkward situations, like on a golf course or over a waffle. But sometimes our hands are forced: Obama hasn’t given a press conference in 10 days and the questions, some of them — like Hamas — rather important, are starting to build up.

Wafflegate 0:18 video

BBC:

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.

Captain Francis Stockdale in Waziristan, 1919

The BBC reports that the privately-printed memoir of a British officer deserves wider contemporary circulation, proving that, in that particular inclement corner of the world, little has changed in nearly a century, beyond precisely who it is the locals are sniping at.

In 1919, a young British army officer, Francis Stockdale, was deployed to the Waziristan area of British India.

The title of his book, “Walk Warily in Waziristan” seems no less appropriate now than it did 90 years ago, because today the autonomous Pakistani tribal region of North and South Waziristan is the centre of militancy orchestrated by pro-Taleban and al-Qaeda militants.

It is also an area where many believe the al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, may be hiding after the September 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Capt Stockdale’s family published a handful of copies of the book, only a few of which survive. But because or renewed interest in the region, the family in the English county of Norfolk are considering reprinting it.

The book provides a fascinating account of what was regarded then – as it is today – as a thoroughly dangerous area.

One of the main towns close to Waziristan is Tank. Capt Stockdale describes it as being “the worst station in British India”.

“It was known as ‘Hell’s door knocker’ because in the summer the temperature would rise so high that a village nearby rejoiced in the highest temperature in the world – a modest 131 degrees in the shade.

“But it was also an area where hostile tribesman waited, watched and pounced,” he wrote.

“My memories of Tank are characterised by sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire by night and spasmodic outbreaks of cholera during the day. The town fully deserved its poor reputation.”

Capt Stockdale goes on to describe just how dangerous the “hostile tribesmen” were in the Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, when a sniper infiltrated a British camp.

“Like all tribesmen in this area, he was a marvellous shot,” Capt Stockdale wrote, “and he killed the commanding officer with his first shot.

“He killed or wounded 11 other men before his hiding place was discovered.”

Ninety years ago, it seemed that British troops in Waziristan faced the same kind of dangers as Pakistani troops in the region do today.

Read the whole thing.

Michelle Malkin defined “Swiftboating” correctly

But democrats still insist on pretending that charges about John Kerry made in the course of the 2004 Presidential Campaign by Naval veterans were either inaccurate or somehow unfair, despite Kerry’s only too manifest failure to refute them.

“Swiftboating” is back in the news as a term of art today used by the Obama campaign to preemptively stigmatize as “unfair” the possibility of Republicans raising questions about Obama’s radical leftwing history and associations.

ABC News reports that one of the leaders of the Machinists’ Union is concerned:

Rick Sloan says he doesn’t want to see the Democrats get “Swift Boated” again this time. So the communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has sent a couple of dozen friends — union leaders and Democratic activists, mainly — an urgent plea to pay attention to Sen. Barack Obama’s connections with the 1960s anti-war group, the Weather Underground, and other leftist thinkers.

Democrats “can’t be an ostrich on this” with their heads buried in the sand, Sloan said in an interview.

He sent a copy of the memo to ABC News by e-mail.

Titled “What Is Rove Up To?,” Sloan writes that Rove will seek to redefine Obama’s signature slogan “Change We Can Believe In” and brand it instead as “revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”

Sloan has cause to be concerned.

Sophisticated commentators on the Right, like myself, are perfectly well aware, that just as “progressive” is a carefully chosen alternative term for “Marxist,” Barack Obama’s campaign mantra “Change” does not necessarily simply constitute a conventional campaign season bromide. “Change” is commonly used in “progressive” circles to mean “the achievement of leftist goals.”

“Change” means a lot more to members of the democrat party’s activist base than a promise to raise taxes or impose new emissions regulations. A promise of Change in the language of the Left may, indeed, imply revolutionary change.

In other words, electing someone like Barack Obama promising Change, can be interpreted as the candidate’s promise that one will not be electing another Jimmy Carter, but rather electing Hugo Chavez.

——————————————————

Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff hastily responded to the left’s alarms, and are already on the job, preempting away, with a feature exculpatorily subtitled:
Seeing Ghosts: Obama’s ties to Ayers and Auchi are distant, but his foes plan to pounce.

Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won’t let himself be “Swift Boated” like John Kerry in 2004. “He’s not going to sit there and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the missiles are raining in,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come.” The move appears to be an acknowledgment that the Obama campaign may not have moved aggressively enough when questions about Ayers and Rezko first arose, and it comes amid fresh indications that conservative groups are preparing a wave of attack ads over the links.

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week’s debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago’s Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers’s house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. “Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them ‘detestable’,” says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood “but has not seen him for months.”

Obama, of course, didn’t just “attend an event” at Bill Ayers’ house. He launched his state senate campaign at an event held at Bill Ayers’ house. And he didn’t just serve on a non-profit board with Ayres. He served with Ayres on the board of the Woods foundation, where along with Ayres, he is known (so far) to have funneled money to radical Palestinian Rashid Khalidi‘s Arab American Action Network.

Max Boot had a spot-on response to the New York Times’ Sunday Big Story.

Hold the front page! Heck, on second thought, hold three full inside pages as well. Notify the Pulitzer jurors. The New York Times has a blockbuster scoop. Its ace reporter, David Barstow, has uncovered shocking evidence that . . . the Pentagon tries to get out its side of the story about Iraq to the news media.

Are you surprised? Outraged? Furious? Apparently the Times is: it’s found a new wrinkle in what it views as an insidious military propaganda campaign. You see, the Defense Department isn’t content to try to present its views simply to full-time reporters who are paid employees of organizations like the New York Times. It actually has the temerity to brief retired military officers directly, who then opine on TV and in print about matters such as the Iraq War.

As I read and read and read this seemingly endless report, I kept trying to figure out what the news was here. Why did the Times decide this story is so important? After all, it’s no secret that the Pentagon–and every other branch of government–routinely provides background briefings to journalists (including columnists and other purveyors of opinion), and tries to influence their coverage by carefully doling out access. …

I think I got to the nub of the problem when I read, buried deep in this article, Barstow’s complaint that the Pentagon’s campaign to brief military analysts “recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” But the Times would laugh at anyone who claimed that activities “subversive” of America’s national interest are at all problematic. After all, aren’t we constantly told that criticism–even “subversive” criticism–is the highest form of patriotism? Apparently it’s one thing to subvert one’s country and another thing to subvert the MSM. We can’t have that!

How dare the Pentagon try to break the media monopoly traditionally held by full-time journalists of reliably “progressive” views! The gall of those guys to try to shape public opinion through the words of retired officers who might have a different perspective! Who might even be, as the article darkly warns, “in sync with the administration’s neo-conservative brain trust.”

The implicit purpose of the Times’s article is obvious: to elevate this perfectly normal practice into a scandal in the hopes of quashing it. Thus leaving the Times and its fellow MSM organs–conveniently enough–as the dominant shapers of public opinion.

Mark Steyn has a few choice words for the democrat party front-runner.

Our lesson today comes from the songwriter Frank Loesser:

“Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.”

Or as Barack Obama and his San Francisco pals would put it: God and guns. Loesser got the phrase from Howell Forgy, a naval chaplain at Pearl Harbor, who walked the decks of the USS New Orleans under Japanese bombardment, exhorting his comrades. When the line came to Loesser’s ears, he turned it into a big hit song of the Second World War:

“Praise the Lord and swing into position

Can’t afford to sit around a-wishin’…” – which some folks sang as “Can’t afford to be a politician.” Indeed. Sen. Obama’s remarks about poor dumb, bitter rural losers “clinging to” guns and God certainly testify to the instinctive snobbery of a big segment of the political class. But we shouldn’t let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly – it’s more than just another dreary “-gate”) is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It’s an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God ‘n’ guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion.

How’s that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States.

Has it made them any less “bitter,” as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No. …
‘
Europeans did “vote for their own best interests” – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that’s left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they’re being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (forgive the expression) that America’s loser gun nuts don’t share the same sophisticated rational calculation of “their best interests” as do Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment.

As for “gun-totin’,” large numbers of Americans tote guns because they’re assertive, self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. The Second Amendment is philosophically consistent with the First Amendment, for which I’ve become more grateful since the Canadian Islamic Congress decided to sue me for “hate speech” up north. Both amendments embody the American view that liberty is not the gift of the state, and its defense cannot be outsourced exclusively to the government.

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.

A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. …

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

P.J. O’Rourke visits an aircraft carrier and becomes a fan of John McCain’s.

Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do–voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it’s full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you’re sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets at a make-believe political tea party. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.

And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can’t. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts–yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can’t hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can’t do that. Really, they communicate by “training telepathy.” They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. “These are the same kids,” a chief petty officer said, “who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they’re in charge of $35 million airplanes.”

The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks–and they do–half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there’s no ejection seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the Theodore Roosevelt a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were 20?

Supposedly the “youth vote” is all for Obama. But it’s John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the “women’s vote” is . . . well, let’s not go too far with this. I can speak to John’s honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I’m not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he’d been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary’s attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill’s life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the “women’s vote.”

These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.

Back on the COD you’re buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it’s over. You’re in steady, level flight.

A strange flight it is–from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters–who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick–presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

I think PJ is getting a bit overenthusiastic about McCain, but he’s right enough on Hillary and Obama.