Dennis Prager identifies a key benchmark.

I believe the Left has been wrong on virtually every great moral issue in the last 30 years…

In just about every instance, one could say that the Left was foolish, the Left was naive, the Left was wrong, even that the Left was dangerous. But in all of those cases, one could imagine a decent person holding any or even all of these positions.

But we now have a bright line that divides the decent — albeit usually wrong — Left from the indecent Left.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation…

Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three. There is no other explanation for morally condemning Israel’s war on Hezbollah.

Read the whole thing.

The Australian reports: Addressing an audience of schoolchildren in Brisbane, Australia, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, suffused with indignation at the violence in the Middle East, confessed, “Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.”

Deep thinker Arthur Silber notes the delivery of US precision-guided ordinance to Israel, wags his finger in our national face, and declares: They hate us because we kill them.

Digby throws one of his typical preschooler-style temper tantrums:

The Bush administration are monsters. That is not hyperbole. There can be no other explanation as to why the secretary of state, the person in charge of American diplomacy, would be so crude and stupid.

From Maureen Dowd:
Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,’’ she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,’’ which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver.

“I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do,” she said.

Keep more civilians from being killed? Or at least keep America from being even more despised in the Middle East and around the globe?

Jesus. They don’t even know how to fake it anymore. Isn’t it at least smart to pretend you care about the dying children?

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We obviously are providing Israel with precision-guided ordinance precisely so that Israel may protect her own people by eliminating well-deserving Hezbollah terrorists (and Iranians), while injuring as few Lebanese non-combatants as possible. Would it be better for Israel to employ undiscriminating wide area munitions, and simply carpet bomb everything in Lebanon? Or is Israel simply obliged to surrender at once?

Martin Rowson, Britain’s answer to Ted Rall, in the Guardian yesterday published the above cartoon, expressing the left’s irrational view of the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah terrorist operating out of Lebanon: Israel, having been attacked, is a knuckleduster-wielding bully for defending her own people. The Hezbollah-sympathising, rocket-harboring civilian population of Southern Lebanon is a helpless child, beaten by Israel who is being egged on by Bush. Hezbollah is an elusive hornet, depicted as too agile for clumsy Israel.

The shamelessly anti-Semitic imagery did cause the Guardian some embarassment, provoking this rather farcical “Who, us?” denial:

That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.

We all knew that Woodstock, New York and Berkeley, California have a demented moonbat problem, but Rolla, Missouri?

A local editorialist there named Dave Weinbaum is afraid that Bush is going to run again.

Yes, I know the 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Weinbaum has figured out a loophole.

Bush has finally done it.

He now acknowledges that Karl Rove stole two presidential elections in collusion with Diebold Corporation and the Supreme Court. He’s so repentant that he has decided to run once more for the presidency…legitimately.

You see, if he was never legally elected, term limits don’t apply to him.

Since he claims no knowledge of the actual crimes committed by Karl, learning of them after the fact, there’s no likelihood that he’ll be indicted, much less impeached. Republicans, if they maintain their control, can stop all Lib attempts at such feeble gestures…

The only way Dems can stop this from happening is to win the majority in Congress…or bribe enough Republicans to vote against the President.

And I thought the strongest US pot was grown up in Humboldt County….

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

It’s not easy to get to the bottom of all this, since elements of the moonbat left have targeted Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom with not one, but two, Denial of Service attacks (reported via Blackfive).

Evidently, one Deborah Frisch, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D., employed as an adjunct instructor in Psychology at the University of Arizona, a lady actually capable of defending Ward Churchill in these terms:

Hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Ward Churchill compared the victims to the Nazis. A professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he wrote in an essay that those killed at the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but “little Eichmanns.”

The analogy is so outrageous, one thinks, that surely he immediately got into trouble.

Actually, the analogy is extremely apt and not outrageous at all. It is clear from the context, that Professor Churchill was referring to Hannah Arendt’s comments about Eichmann.

Hannah Arendt was a journalist for the newspaper “The New Yorker” when she saw the Eichmann Trial in Israel in 1961. Her book is based on a series of articles she wrote about the trial.

In the article, she coined the term “banality of evil.” Hitler’s henchmen who had behaved monstrously did not look like monsters. Instead, they were bland and benign. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s character flaw was mindless obedience to authority, not a sadistic or psychopathic personality.

This, of course, is even scarier than finding that Eichmann and other Nazis were crazy in some way. Arendt’s analysis inspired Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority at Yale University and Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Study at Stanford University.

So there is nothing absurd or outrageous about using the term “Eichmann” to refer to the stockbrokers who died that day. It’s a little strange to completely ignore the firefighters, secretaries and building maintenance workers who died that day. And singling out the stockbrokers and ignoring the firefighters dehumanizes them the same way Nazis dehumanized Jews.

I agree with Churchill that America was not an “innocent victim” on 911. I’m tempted to agree that “titans” of finance are more guilty than the rest of us. But even though they’re better compensated than the rest of us, they’re no more guilty, really. We’re all little Eichmanns. Only the far left is willing to admit it.

made a series of postings in the Comments section of Goldstein’s blog of an irrational and highly inappropriate character. Some readers thought these postings might actually constitute a threat to Mr. Goldstein’s child, and a number of people lodged complaints with the University of Arizona and the authorities.

Having provoked a firestorm, La Frisch prudently resigned her teaching position, and asked for the whole thing to stop.

Goldstein, posting on another site, denied feeling victimized.

1) I don’t feel victimized. Debbie Frisch is as nutty as the ring around a squirrel’s crapper, but I don’t think she’s a threat. She’s more of an object lesson in having too many cats.
2) I allowed Debbie to continue commenting here because she was (paraphrase: making a fool of herself).
3) (parahrase: She did make a fool of herself: a big one.)
4) But no matter. I don’t want apologies.
5) On the other hand, pie would be nice.
6) Or a bottle of really good tequila.
7) Blue agave, Deb.
8) None of that cheapass rail shit you were huffing the other night.
9) Go on, I’ll wait…

Deborah Frisch seems to have a long record of posting less-than-civil comments to blogs she disagrees with. I found another case early in 2005 at Professor Bainbridge.

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UPDATE

This unseemly affair started 7/3 with Frisch posting comments in response to criticism of the New York Times’ publication of the SWIFT program.

Frisch’s academic career.

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FURTHER UPDATE

All this unseemly correspondence, and denial of service attacks on Protein Wisdom, are still continuing Sunday night. link

It’s not like he’s all that conservative, really. (He spends money like a democrat, and he added another major entitlement program.)

And it’s not like he’s done such a great job managing the war. (He’s invaded only two lousy Islamic countries and he has not even interned the antiwar radicals.)

But he does have one great quality: He is absolutely fabulous at upsetting and irritating the left. When the typical moonbat starts talking about George W. Bush, he turns positively purple with rage, and emits a fine spray of spit as the pace of his hysterical rant accelerates.

Mark Morford demonstrates the correct technique in today’s SF Chronicle:

It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.

Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.

George W. Bush is just like that.

Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.

You do have to love Bush.

Some people living on the West Coast do. They may soon find themselves within range of North Korean missiles.

The SF Examiner is grateful that President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system is as operational as it is today, and it knows who resisted its development.

North Korea’s threatening spate of missile launches — including an unsuccessful try with an advanced version of its Taepodong 2 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile that is capable of hitting the United States — has sparked a cacophony of talk from leaders and foreign policy experts around the world.

As they debate and discuss various options at the United Nations and in capitals around the globe, the rudimentary U.S. missile defense system is poised to shoot down anything launched from North Korea that threatens the American homeland or the critical interests of our regional allies like Japan and Australia.

Noticeably absent are the voices of those who, since President Reagan first proposed such a system in 1984, have fought development and deployment of the missile defense system the U.S. must now depend upon in dealing with North Korea. These folks have claimed over and over that the system they derisively call “Star Wars” can’t possibly work, would be too expensive, would incite a new world arms race, etc., etc. Names that come to mind in this regard include senators like Joe Biden, D-Del., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., and the Clinton-Gore administration that delayed and dilly-dallied with work on missile defense for most of the ’90s.

It is important that the American people understand two aspects of the current crisis as it relates to missile defense. First, the system President Bush recently ordered advanced from its testing stage to operational status when the North Koreans began preparing the Taepodong 2 launch is extremely rudimentary because it is still being developed. The system now includes only 11 ground-based launch sites in Alaska and California capable of knocking out long-range missiles like the Taepodong 2, and four Aegis-class Navy destroyers equipped with missile defense battle management systems and Standard-3 missiles capable of hitting medium range threats.

Second, they will no doubt protest to high heaven, but “Star Wars” critics must bear the major burden of responsibility for the delays and setbacks that have prevented the missile defense system from becoming fully operational long before the present crisis with North Korea. There have been technological problems, especially in the very early stages, but those were temporary and subject to American technological prowess.

Far more serious have been the setbacks engineered by the critics — like then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell’s maneuvers to kill the first Bush administration’s Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (G-PALS) plan, the Clinton-Gore gutting of the Strategic Defense Initiative office in 1993 and the delaying tactics used by Senate Democrats in the first years of this decade to reduce the current program’s funding.

It is a sobering thought to wonder how much more secure the United States and its allies would be today in the face of madness like North Korea’s launches if instead of a limited defense still in development we could depend upon the robust protection first proposed many years ago.

Frank McCullough, and his listener Frank from Staten Island, think those liberals are going to get us all killed.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero explains in Human Events:

Why does the Times do whatever it can to demoralize our troops, cast them as blood-thirsty, bring about humiliation of President Bush and America, and even offer its pages for op-eds by a known al Qaeda terrorist, romanticizing the jihadist cause? Why is it helping our enemies and imperiling our safety and the safety of our children?

It is because the New York Times is not some inanimate object but the propaganda organ of a particular crowd, real people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who wish to run the country and control our domestic and foreign policy even though they have not been elected to do so. Because this crowd sees itself as superior to the rest of us and our institutions, and smugly scorns that which was once termed “the American Way,” they have placed themselves in a battle mode hostile and counter to all we hold dear. Our defeat is their victory.

If they can bring down the military, they can force the United States to go the negotiation route where they, not the generals, hold sway. If they can demonize the soldier, they assume we will look to them for “working things out” with the outside forces. If America can be defeated, then “the American Way” of strength against our enemies will be discredited, thereby opening the way for them, the cosmopolitans and transnationalists, to determine within their international fraternity the destiny of America. Bottom line: they wish to control America’s destiny…

What type of person possesses such arrogance? Elitists, like the New York Times crowd who know they are superior. A crowd that does not accept you as an intellectual, social and political equal. They “care” for you only as their ward, with they above and you below — all in the name of compassion and equality.

This crowd points to America as the source of all trouble in the world, as do the Europeans, because they think like Europeans, not Americans. They admire Paris, not Peoria. They live here, get rich here and gain power here, but respect the “sophistication” of Stockholm more than the “plainness” of Missouri. They want to reshape America into a Europeanism. Michael Wolff of New York Magazine bragged: “I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” In other words, they are cosmopolitans of the world, above the plebians in Witchita.

The liberalism of the New York Times is different, for example, than that of the millions of individual liberals across the country or even that of, say, the Washington Post. The New York Times expresses the views of a specific crowd that congregates in a physical location primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and, now, upper east side. It is a crowd that has never been comfortable with mainstream America and Americanism. Thus its anti-Americanism comes naturally, and easily. The anti-Americanism that horrifies us is part of their decades-old mindset. It comes with that neighborhood.

Unlike the liberalism of ideology seen in other parts of America, the anti-American leftism of the Upper West Side/New York Times crowd is akin to a heritage, passed down from generation to generation within the families living there. Additionally, contra-Americanism is their identity, a raison d’etre of this particular community. With all its wealth, power and privilege, it still feels alien to historic America and hopes and works for historic America to be replaced by a different America.

For them, it is not a hobby or pastime but a mission. They will never stop nor be satisfied. As the country becomes more permissive, this crowd keeps redefining what it means to be moral and tolerant so as to continually remain “above” the rest of America. It is a one-upmanship. This has led, for example, to their silly new definition of torture: playing loud music in front of Islamic terrorists.

More than mere liberalism, unique to the Upper West Side crowd is a haughty anti-Americanism reinforced by members living in a cocooned, chosen ghetto apart from and disdainful of the American people and “the American way.” This crowd routinely snickers at regular Americans and views the military as unrefined, as red-neck types.

Its university-educated youth redrink what they already imbibed from mother’s milk, namely, that America is racist and imperialistic. It finds, therefore, common cause and political identity with any group — be it domestic or foreign — that condemns American society or the American people. For them, groups that are anti-American are comrades.

I think the rabbi’s indictment is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t restrict its applicability to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Members of the Trans-Atlantic intelligentsia today live unprecedently comfortable and domesticated lives, and enjoy such affluence and personal security that instead of worrying about the basics of survival (like people in the past) they are apt to seek the perfection of their selves. They take care to obtain the finest educations, they select and pursue the most prestigious and gratifying careers, they exercise and jog, and they contemplate with great care all questions of ethics. Even ordinary and banal matters, like cooking lobsters, to them commonly rise to levels of grave and serious concern.

So exquisite and precieux have become the souls of our contemporary elites that they simply cannot bear to contemplate the idea of themselves (or anyone else) inflicting suffering on human or animal, crustacean or terrorist.

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When I was a little boy, I once had a dog I loved very much, but who was unfortunately a very bad dog. You couldn’t walk him on a leash: he was strong, willful, and could pull even an adult off his feet.

My dog would obey no one. He terrorized the neighborhood, and frequently treed one neighbor’s cat. One day, he escaped from our backyard, and proceeded to the unimaginable atrocity of attacking a neighbor’s freshly washed sheets drying outdoors on a clothes-line. He tore most of them to shreds, and soiled the rest. My father had to face a female neighbor’s righteous wrath, and he had to make expensive restitution.

I woke up one morning shortly afterward to find my beloved dog missing.

I was heartbroken, but my parents explained that, though he was a wonderful dog, he had not really been happy living in a town (where he would get into trouble playing with people’s bed sheets). So they decided it would be best for him to go and live on a farm in the country, a place where dogs could run free.

The farm was a wonderful place, and a dog could have fun all day doing all the things he liked to do. The farmer was delighted to own such a wonderful dog, and this was the best possible arrangement for everyone. I missed my dog, of course, but I was happy to think of him happy, safe, and enjoying himself.

Many years later, when I was an adult, my father admitted to me that he took that dog up on the mountain, fired both barrels of his 12 gauge shotgun into him, and walked away.

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In a lot of ways, our intelligentsia today are like children. They have no first hand experience commonly of the harsh and difficult choices adults have to make. And, like children, they are naive and sentimental, and do not understand evil.

What the rest of us need to do for Justice Stevens, Andrew Sullivan, and the Trans-Atlantic chattering classes generally is just explain that those Islamic terrorists weren’t happy in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanamo Bay. They were only getting into trouble. So we had to let them all go off and live on the farm, where they could run free, set off all the bombs they like, and do all those other fun Islamic things they like to do. The farmer had never seen such wonderful terrorists, he said. He used to raise terrorists, he said. He loved terrorists, and he was delighted to adopt these.