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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

America’s first Muslim Congressman has obviously been the beneficiary of the conspicuous American tradition of tolerance, but to Minnesota’s Rep. Ellison tolerance is clearly a one way street.

The Hill reports Ellison’s Office called the Capital police to report a colleague for smoking.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) believes it is his right as a Muslim to be sworn into Congress with the Quran. But apparently, the freshman lawmaker doesn’t believe it’s Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) right to smoke a cigar in his congressional office.

Ellison’s office called the Capitol Hill Police on Tancredo last Wednesday night as Tancredo was in his office smoking a cigar. The lawmakers have neighboring offices on the first floor of the Longworth House Office Building.

Tancredo was still stunned a day later. “It’s very bizarre,” said Tancredo, who has never met Ellison. “Seemed to me not a good way to say hello.”

And let’s face it. Calling the cops on a colleague takes the cake for the nerviest behavior so far among members of this year’s freshman class of Congress.

This is how it all went down. On Wednesday evening, around 6 p.m., Tancredo was preparing for his trip to Mississippi. And as he so often does, he was unwinding with a cigar.

Soon enough, however, a police officer walked in to check on the smoke. The officer told Tancredo that the officer came because he was required to do so and not because the officer wanted to. The officer had already told Ellison that Tancredo was permitted to smoke in his office. The visit was more a formality.

Tancredo said he would not stop smoking in his office. “Heck, no!” he said. “If he [Ellison] would have [had] the courtesy to say something I’m sure I would have been more accommodating to his wishes.”

To help keep his office free of impurities, Tancredo has three air purifiers. And he has no plans to meet Ellison anytime soon. “I’m sure we will, but I’m not going to make a point [of it],” the presidential hopeful said, adding that he supported Ellison’s right to be sworn in with the Quran.

Pascal Bruckner has harsh words for the multiculturalism of elites.

After Heidegger, a whole run of thinkers from Gadamer to Derrida have contested the claims of the Enlightenment to embody a new age of self-conscious history. On the contrary, they say, all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. For them, criticism of prejudices is nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection. For them, the chimeras of certain men of letters who were keen to make a clean slate of God and revelation, were responsible for plunging Europe into darkness. In an abominable dialectic, the dawn of reason gave birth to nothing but monsters (Horkheimer, Adorno)…

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go…

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

One of my classmates today quoted veteran New Yorker political commentator Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books:

Almost everyone in Washington understands, even if they don’t say it, that there is no real solution to what now seems to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history. It’s now a matter of how to bring America’s involvement to an end with the fewest bad consequences. Despite all the studies and reports and amendments, events in Iraq itself will likely define the outcome.

US deaths in Iraq have amounted to 3064 over nearly four years.

Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, which cost the lives of 10,000 Union soldiers (from a population of 26 million) in twenty minutes was a disaster. The loss of three thousand citizens of a nation of 300 million, a country which loses 26,000 lives annually in traffic accidents, over the course of nearly four years is something very different from Cold Harbor.

Iraq has not been a military disaster. US forces have suffered no battlefield defeat. Our troops are not demoralized. And there is no possibility whatsoever of our enemies achieving victory by military means.

Their only hope for victory, for bringing about the disaster of US withdrawal which has not yet occurred, is via the cowardice, defeatism, and disloyalty of our own chattering class elite.

Shalom Auslander has a less-than-peaceful encounter with one of the peace-loving and enlightened inhabitants of Woodstock, New York, land of trust-fund bolshies, burned-out rockers, and navel-gazing whackos of every description, who are always organizing and demonstrating against something.

War makes us weak! Wage peace! War sucks!

And that was just his rear bumper. Green Subaru was doing 12 miles an hour in a 40; I had been stuck behind him for 15 miles and was now, thank you very much, officially late for work.

I hate war! Violence is not the answer! Coexist!

I wanted to kill him.

Our Ann definitely wins this particular girlfight.

New York Times theater critic Frank Rich made headlines on the Drudge Report last week by announcing: “We have lost in Iraq.” Of course, Rich was saying we had lost in Iraq more than six months before we went into Iraq.

In August 2002, he wrote that Bush did not have the support of the American people for war in Iraq and without that he would “mimic another hubristic Texan president who took a backdoor route into pre-emptive warfare.”

In April 2003, one month after we invaded, Rich said the looting of Iraqi museums by Iraqis showed “our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East.”

About six months into the war he wrote a column about Iraq titled: “Why Are We Back in Vietnam?” You can imagine how writing those words must have brought back memories of Frank Rich’s own valiant service in Vietnam.

In January 2004, less than a year after the invasion, he wrote: “The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq.” Historians noted that this is the first time Rich ever panned something containing the word “follies.”

A month later, he was again comparing Iraq to Vietnam, saying Bush had forced the comparison “by wearing the fly boy uniform of his own disputed guard duty” when he landed on the aircraft carrier. Did Frank Rich win three purple hearts in combat, or was it four? I always forget.

In May 2004, Rich accused Bush of throwing “underprepared and underprotected” American troops in harm’s way in Iraq. OK, I was kidding before. The closest Frank Rich has come to serving in the military was reviewing a revival of “The Caine Mutiny.” Though he does know the words to “In the Navy” by heart.

Even after transitioning from musical reviewer to hard-bitten military analyst, Rich couldn’t resist tossing in a quick dance review. He gleefully described “pictures of Marines retreating from Fallujah and of that city’s citizens dancing in the streets to celebrate their victory over the American liberators.”

This too, reminded Rich of Vietnam. Right now I’m trying to think of something that doesn’t remind liberals of Vietnam … hmmm … drawing a blank…

Liberals are like people with stale breath talking into your face at a party. You try backing away from them or offering them gum, but then they just start whimpering. They’ve been using the exact same talking points about how we’re losing in Iraq since before we invaded.

It seems they’ve finally succeeded in exhausting Americans and, thereby, handing a victory to al-Qaida.

The weakest members of the herd are rapidly capitulating…

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in confusion and defeat, it will not be because our armed forces were outnumbered, out of supply, or faced by a better-armed or equipped enemy. It will not be because the enemy was braver, better organized, more disciplined or determined than our soldiers. It will not be because the enemy had better generals, or better tactics, or a better strategy. And it will not be because American forces were ever defeated on the battlefield. There will no great enemy victory like Blenheim or Yorktown or Waterloo, which decided the struggle.

American forces will retire again, undefeated by the enemy in the field, stabbed in the back by domestic traitors. The privileged American intelligentsia occupying the decisive high ground of communications, dominating the American media and academic communities, will for the second time in the lifetimes of many Americans misuse its power and prestige to destroy America’s confidence in the justice of her cause, and in the success of her arms.

American military power is more than adequate to deal with this country’s foreign enemies in open battle, but our military forces have no defense against the tactics and forces of domestic defeatism, against the New York Times and the Washington Post, against CBS and CNN, against The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, against Yale and against Harvard.

In Newsweek, Michael Gerson argues that the GOP needs to turn in the direction of statist paternalism.

My low point with the Republican Party came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina…

Campaigning on the size of government in 2008, while opponents talk about health care, education and poverty, will seem, and be, procedural, small-minded, cold and uninspired. The moral stakes are even higher. What does antigovernment conservatism offer to inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism—an idealism that strangles mercy.

But Jonah Goldberg retorts with perfect accuracy:

the social gospel and the state cannot be married because the government cannot love you. This is not a metaphysical point but a practical one. States cannot love individuals in much the same way deck furniture cannot write poetry: it is not in their nature. It cannot be done. And when people attempt otherwise, horrible folly ensues. Gerson thinks the victims of Katrina got that way because of the indifference of the State. I would argue that a more likely culprit (or at least accomplice) was a State that tried to love them and hurt them in the process.

A sampler from John Hawkins at Right Wing News:

25) “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” — Rosie O’Donnell

24) “When I asked Gore Vidal at dinner why the White House seemed so serene and at ease about the vote, he replied that, this time around, the Bush-Cheney henchmen could simply call on martial law. He glumly noted that we are so far down the road toward totalitarianism that, even if Democrats do win back the Congress, it would take at least two generations before the last six years of damage to the nation could be reversed.” — Lyn Davis Lear at The Huffington Post

23) “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel.” — Representative John Dingell

22) “We are living in terrorism as black people in America. And it has been that way since the dawning of slavery….If we are having problems with finding our own inner souls and dignity to live out a life that is honorable, what is it that has put us in this position? We didn’t volunteer for it. And those who have put us here and chosen to keep us here are people who deal in terror.” — Harry Belafonte

21) “(George Bush) is ten times the terrorist that Osama ever was.” — Cindy Sheehan

20) “It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more–if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.” — Johnathan Chait

19) “I think the news of the loss of any human being is a tragedy. I think al-Zarqawi’s death is a double tragedy. His death will incite a new wave of revenge.” — Michael Berg

Scientific fact threatening primitive superstition poses a hazard to remote indigenous tribes, proclaims this Sunday’s Times, in this weekly front-page sob story.

At issue is whether scientists who need DNA from aboriginal populations to fashion a window on the past are underselling the risks to present-day donors. Geographic origin stories told by DNA can clash with long-held beliefs, threatening a world view some indigenous leaders see as vital to preserving their culture.

They argue that genetic ancestry information could also jeopardize land rights and other benefits that are based on the notion that their people have lived in a place since the beginning of time.

Liberal egalitarianism rates not only naked savagery as equal to modern civilization, it also considers primitive cultures’ self-deluding myths as privileged from the challenge of fact.

J.R. Dunn explains how leftist ideology delegitimizes American military effort and ensures defeat.

It began with Afghanistan, starting only a month after the attacks, and built up from there. Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Durbin, Murtha… The list could go on for page after page, all of them speaking in identical terms, all repeating the same code words – Halliburton, blood for oil, Abu Ghraib – all tearing into their country in a fashion unseen even in the Vietnam era.

And where the trendsetters have led, the public has followed. If the polls can be trusted (a bit of a leap, it’s true) something like over half the American people believe that the War on Terror, far from being a response to an unprovoked and atrocious attack, is a war of aggression fought on behalf on industrial capitalism in the form of George W’s oil buddies.

This is not a natural response. Countries fighting legitimate defensive wars don’t suffer this kind of erosion of public support in the midst of hostilities. Particularly as involves a war that began with an atrocity committed against fellow countrymen, an atrocity that could be (and eventually will be) repeated at any time. Such a reaction should not have occurred.

The reason it happened this time was the result of fifty years of conditioning that any and all American activities overseas, whether diplomatic, commercial, or military, are fundamentally illegitimate. American wars, no matter what their cause or nature, are viewed through the same prism, one created on the left for the purpose of undermining the country’s commitment to the Cold War, but useful in any context. Call it the “Imperial” or “Hegemonist” doctrine. Simply put, it holds that no American war (and little in the way of any interaction on the international level) is ever justified. All such ventures are wars of imperialist aggression, commonly carried out against helpless innocents in defiance of the wishes of the American people (at least the true American people – that is, left-wing Democrats), on behalf of secretive, sinister interest groups…

Unlike most left-wing doctrines, this one is not a European import but fully home-grown. It was incubated in the universities, developing over several decades in response to U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union.

Our fatal flaw involves our national will, our apparent inability to take on any necessary task, however lengthy, dirty or unpromising, and finish it satisfactorily. Our enemies have noted this and target it as a matter of course. Our friends – to perhaps stretch a term – have learned to manipulate it to their advantage.

As we have seen, this is no natural turn of events. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable about it. It is entirely synthetic, the byproduct of an effort by our intellectual elite to serve an ideology now long dead. Our belief in ourselves as a nation, in our role and mission on the international stage, has been undermined for fifty years and more. There is not a level of society, from day laborer to corporate CEO, who has not been touched by this dogma. Not a single institution (with the professional military perhaps excepted) has been unaffected.

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, a psychiatrist, diagnoses liberalism as a psychopathology.

The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes… Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.

And John Perazzo identifies one of the most seriously afflicted of our contemporaries:

Every so often, a public figure will speak a sentence that succinctly sums up his or her entire worldview in just a few words, exposing the core belief that is the wellspring of his or her every position on matters of consequence. Consider, for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent assertion: “If we [the U.S. military] leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq.”