In the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal establishment, the justification for the US invasion of Iraq has been thoroughly exploded, its results labeled and inventoried in the lumber room of disaster, and a suitable location for the headmount of George W. Bush’s presidency selected on the wall above the foreign policy pundits’ bar.

The president’s poll numbers are decidedy unattractive, and Republican candidates are approaching the 2006 elections with the forlorn air of Emperor Valens’ legions advancing to meet the Gothic cavalry at Adrianople.

One of the highlights of last Sunday’s Times was Paul Berman‘s oleaginous review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads, a coat-reversal-cum-grovel appearing in public with a dust jacket.

It looks so much better to place one’s moment of conversion at a period in the past when the fortunes of the side one is rejoining did not appear quite so propitious as they do at present, and Fukuyama takes care to supply a story of his gasping aloud at the deluded optimism of the Neoconservative company he found himself in at a speech delivered by Charles Krauthammer in 2004.

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, Krauthammer reads the Sunday Times Book Review, and is only too eager to decline the role of strawman and debunk Fukuyama’s convenient account of feckless and provocative Neocon bragging.

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

One can only advise members of the liberal foreign policy establishment to listen very carefully at all their upcoming speeches over the next few years. You never know, the tide may turn in favor of the Bush Administration, and the United States, and you might hear Francis Fukuyama gasping again.

Harmee Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember

The “Christian Peacemakers,” held captive since last November, rescued yesterday by Coalition forces, have declined to provide information on their captors, reports the Telegraph.

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.

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The moonbats were apparently actually kidnapped by criminals, hoping to obtain a ransom, rather than by politically motivated insurgents.

It emerged that about 50 soldiers, led by the SAS, including men from 1 Bn the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, as well as American and Canadian special forces, entered the kidnap building at dawn.

A deal had been struck with a man detained the previous night who was one of the leaders of the kidnappers. He was allowed a telephone call to warn his henchmen to leave the kidnap house. When the troops moved in and found the prisoners alive, they also let him go as promised.

There is a quotation of unidentifiable origin, usually attributed to George Orwell, one version of which goes:

We sleep safely in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to visit unspeakable violence on those who wish to do us harm.

Rough men from Canada and the United States broke into a house on the outskirts of Baghdad today, where they freed, from a “kidnapping cell,” one British and two Canadian members of a Chicago-based Christian Peacemaking Team, kidnapped last November 26. The body of a fourth peacemaker, the American Tom Fox, was found March 9th, discarded along a railway line. Fox had been tortured, and then shot.

Coalition forces had learned the location of the kidnap victims only a few hours earlier as the result of the interrogation of a prisoner captured last night. Is it possible, do you suppose, that someone may possibly have employed violence and coercive methods, thus violating his human rights?

Associated Press reports:

The Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers have been in Iraq since October 2002, investigating allegations of abuse against Iraqi detainees by coalition forces.

And, see! They may actually have found just such a case.

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One would think that the Moonbat Galactic Central Headquarters web-site would have a comment on the rescue, and so they do. One notes that it contains not single word of thanks for the men, who obviously at some personal hazard and inconvenience, went out and saved these bleating moonbat imbeciles from painful death at the hands of evil men. On the contrary, the statement actually condemns their efforts generally.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end… We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

Michelle Malkin was pretty steamed over this one, and who can blame her?

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Wretchard is eloquent as usual.

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

So traumatic was the unanimous SCOTUS decision that, already, a variety of theories accounting for the discrepancy of opinion have been articulated:

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

We’ll vote for the latter. Uniformity of opinion allowed to thrive too long insulated from challenge inevitably breeds subjectivity and self indulgence.

Tom Wolfe in an interview by Joseh Rago discusses the bigoted politics of the American community of fashion.

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of “what a fashion liberalism is.” A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the “Charlotte Simmons” book. “I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing,” he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. “The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m a child molester.'” For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, “and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves.”

George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his “great decisiveness and willingness to fight.” But as to “this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say — ‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’ So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don’t go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They’re usually called blue states — they’re not blue states, the states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states — the entire country lies in between.”

Ben Stein had some comments in the American Spectator.

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars’ ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working class heroes to attack America — which has made it all possible for them. They are not. They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin. But someone might yell at them or even attack them with a knife if they said that, so they never will.

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I avoided watching the Awards show, but yesterday I read a comment by Ann Coulter noting that the award for Best Original Song went to a number titled It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. (I won’t quote it. You can read click the link and read the lyrics if you like.)

Anybody willing to take seriously the aesthetic judgements, political opinions, and moral perspective of a community prepared to treat the expression of the point of view of a practitioner of that particular occupation as suitable entertainment fare, let alone the subject of an award for excellence, is obviously some kind of an idiot.

Eric at Classical Values identifies the typical maneuver employed by statists to expand the definition of crime:

Existing laws don’t “work”! New laws are needed! I’m confused about what seems to be a recurrent pattern in this country. When there are laws against something, and these laws are not enforced, instead of enforcing the existing laws, there’s always a demand for new laws.Tougher laws.

It’s as if there’s some magical belief system that the tougher the law is, the stronger it is, and the more likely that human conduct will be deterred. Enforcement of existing laws never seems to enter anyone’s mind.

The point here is not whether I happen to agree with the laws. It’s just a recurrent pattern. The drug laws started as a tax measure in 1914, and ever since, they have become ever more draconian. Examples aren’t really needed, although the latest trend (now that they’ve run out of drugs to make illegal) is to criminalize precursor ingredients. So Americans are no longer allowed to buy cold medicine over the counter — all because it might be used to manufacture illegal drugs. What’s next? Glassware which might be used to cook drugs…

The pattern seems to be pass laws, ignore them, wait until the problem is huge, then pass draconian laws, plus new laws against conduct which resulted from the previous climate of non-enforcement.

It has long been illegal for felons to buy or possess guns, and to buy, sell, or transfer a gun to a felon. But felons buy guns all the time illegally. Which means that we need a crackdown on what? On perfectly legal purchases of guns by ordinary citizens.

Add to this the trend of sending in SWAT teams to perform routine law enforcement, and it’s fair to wonder whether the goal is to create a police state.

I hate police states — and I’m just wondering whether neglecting to enforce the law is one of the precursor ingredients.

Katherine DeBrecht has published another of her satirical children’s books. The new one evidently features various leftwing Hollywood celebrities popping out the hamper to tell the kids what to do and think, while urging them to buy expensive consumer goods. This is a sequel to her earlier Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

Vasko Kohlmayer argues (not unpersuasively) that Leftism represents Western civilization’s death wish:

History unambiguously shows that all great civilizations collapsed as a result of internal weakness. Coming to their end by self-destructing, they in effect committed suicide. Sigmund Freud posited the existence of a death drive in individuals. It is my contention that a death drive also runs through whole civilizations.

Everything we see around us indicates that the Left is the West’s instrument of self-destruction and, in fact, the incarnation in our time of the deleterious force that ultimately brings down great civilizations. The Left is the material manifestation of the West’s death drive.

Even as individuals commit suicide by drowning or shooting or some other such means, so the West is in the process of committing suicide by the Left.

An editorial by William F. Buckley, Jr., who turned 80 last November, appeared yesterday in which the author declared that the “American objective in Iraq has failed” and that there should be an “acknowledgement of defeat.” It is very sad that these sorts of embarassing statements were published, and those of us who have long been associated with Mr. Buckley in the conservative movement are terribly sorry to learn of his condition in this way. Our best wishes to Mr. Buckley and his family.

Ethel Fenig at the American Thinker quotes Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s analysis of the subtext of the MSM obsessive coverage of Dick Cheney’s accident. To the metrosexual journalists writing the stories:

…skiing is well, normal, while hunting is alien. Not only have most liberals never gone hunting, most don’t even know anyone who goes hunting. In fact most wouldn’t know a Browning A-Bolt long action Stalker from an office stapler. They simply cannot believe that someone who hunts actually made it to the White House. It reminds me of that New York matron talking to her friend in November 1984. Ronald Reagan had just won every state except his opponent’s home state of Minnesota and she said, “I can’t believe that man won. I don’t know a single soul who voted for him.”

Liberals regard people who own firearms and who go hunting as weird. Repeatedly telling the Cheney hunting story proves that Republicans are not fit to govern a civilized country. Liberal news media really believe that reminding Americans that they have a hunter for a vice president will bring a Democratic victory. . . .

Like WWII Medal of Honor winner alumnus Pappy Boyington, at least, in the opinion of one of the members of its Student Senate.

WorldNetDaily reports:

The University of Washington’s student senate rejected a memorial for alumnus Gregory “Pappy” Boyington of “Black Sheep Squadron” fame amid concerns a military hero who shot down enemy planes was not the right kind of person to represent the school.

Student senator Jill Edwards, according to minutes of the student government’s meeting last week, said she “didn’t believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce.”

Ashley Miller, another senator, argued “many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men.”

Senate member Karl Smith amended the resolution to eliminate a clause that said Boyington “was credited with destroying 26 enemy aircraft, tying the record for most aircraft destroyed by a pilot in American Uniform,” for which he was awarded the Navy Cross.

Smith, according to the minutes, said “the resolution should commend Colonel Boyington’s service, not his killing of others.”

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Student Senate Minutes

Previously noticed by The Jawa Report

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This is absolutely appalling, of course, but what makes it worse is the consideration that these students’ values and opinions (and level of historical understanding) are typical of the products of just about all our universities today. Jill Edwards and Ashley Miller could be representative spokespersons for pretty much any enclave of the American university-educated upper middle class from Brookline, Massachusetts to Berkeley, California. It is enough to make one wish it were possible for the rest of us to stand aside, and let the representatives of the New Caliphate pay a visit to the University of Washington.

At least, we can smile at the million dollars worth of free publicity this story is going to be worth to that university, and the thought of how its administration will squirm. I will wager that Pappy Boyington will get a really nice memorial at his alma mater out of this before this is true. He certainly deserves one.

Historical sidelight: Greg Boyington was renowned not only for his skills as a fighter pilot, but for his abilities as a ladies’ man as well. If Jill and Ashley could somehow have had the opportunity to run into him (on terms of age and generational equality), one suspects a good time would have been had by all, and the young ladies would emerge from the experience with a much more positive opinion of the desirability of University of Washington marines.