Petrified Truth

Not the cure

Michael Ledeen cuts to the heart of the matter about Iraq, which is the under-addressed core issue behind the original decision to invade and the continuing crisis today: the role of state sponsors of terrorism.

The military have known for a long time that Iran is part of "the enemy" in Iraq, and now that we are having a bit of a policy debate, they are trying to nudge it in a truly "realist" direction: face the facts, stop trying to "solve" the wrong problem.

And so I insist that there is no imaginable level of troops that can provide decent security in Iraq so long as the Iranians, Syrians and Saudis have a free shot at us. Above all, it cannot be done so long as Assad and Khamenei et al rule in Damascus and Tehran. We have to go after them, which I insist is not a military mission, but support for the revolutionary forces that already exist in both countries. And instead of falling for the hoary myth of the "Saudi peace plan," which has failed more times than I can count, and is being resurrected (wrong word?) yet again—most recently in the Hadleygram—our proper policy toward the Royal Family is to insist they shut down the jihadi assembly line, which runs from their country, across North Africa and Europe, into Britain and finally here in the U.S.of A.

We must see the war plain. Calls for more troops in Baghdad, or Ramadi, or the Anbar desert, are like proposing aspirin for cancer. It will ease the pain but it's not a cure.

Run silent, run deep

The U.S. military evolves again for 21st century threats: this time it's the submariners of the Pacific Fleet.

[T]he primary targets of American submarines are terrorists, particularly those in Southeast Asia.

Officers at the Pacific Command and the Special Operations Command, also with headquarters in Hawaii, have pointed to the island chains stretching across the Sulu and Celebes seas as routes along which terrorists have traveled from training camps in the Philippines to targets in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Submarines have two attributes that make them effective against terrorists -- stealth and persistence. Unlike surface ships, submarines can stay concealed in the sea, rising to periscope depth to take pictures, listen to electronic transmissions and collect other intelligence. Unlike the airplanes or satellites that pass over a target, submarines can stay on station for weeks or months.

The fastattack submarines, in addition to traditional torpedoes, are armed with 12 cruise missiles with conventional warheads. The submarines can also land six-man special operations teams to collect intelligence or conduct raids, then return to pick up the teams.

The Pacific submarine fleet has had so many missions assigned to it recently that it no longer sends submarines to the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea to support the war in Iraq. That duty has been turned over to the Atlantic fleet.

Ralphie's world

December is almost upon us, which means continual showings of A Christmas Story, the movie of Jean Shepherd's eccentric tale of boyhood and twisted family life.

A Christmas Story hasn't just seeped into the culture — it has swamped it.

A tale with considerable anger is now so clearly thought of as lovable, one retail chain has issued gift cards with the tongue-on-the-flagpole scene. Pain and misery. Things to keep in your wallet all year long.

Still, while A Christmas Story — which debuted in 1983 — is also fall-down funny, the undercurrent of disappointment is central to its greatness....

Christmas is a gift best delivered in the real world. Many Christmas movies wrongly believe that an ideal ending is the best way to give the message of Christmas. In fact, it's better to find the smidgen of happiness Ralphie feels at the end because life isn't really all that much better.

• Jean Shepherd - A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film
• DVD - A Christmas Story (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)

Bad omen?

Unfortunately, we can't give thanks for this: the apparently devious manner in which President Bush sacked SecDef Donald Rumsfeld.

According to administration officials, only three or four people knew he would be fired -- and Rumsfeld was not one of them. His fellow presidential appointees, including some who did not applaud Rumsfeld's performance in office, were taken aback by his treatment....

The treatment of his war minister connotes something deeply wrong with George W. Bush's presidency in its sixth year. Apart from Rumsfeld's failures in personal relations, he never has been anything short of loyal in executing the president's wishes. But loyalty appears to be a one-way street for Bush. His shrouded decision to sack Rumsfeld after declaring that he would serve out the second term fits the pattern of a president who is secretive and impersonal....[T]he way George W. Bush handled Rumsfeld was not a good sign for his concluding years as president.

Admiration due

George F. Wills calls on the observations of British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson and offers thoughts on Thanksgiving.

This year, when one of the Transportation Security Administration's 43,000 airport security screeners (perhaps two times more numerous than were Native Americans in 1620 in what is now eastern Massachusetts) confiscated a traveler's too-large tube of toothpaste, the traveler perhaps thought: Life is hard. So it is timely for Hodgson to remind us of the admiration that is due "as a tiny band of men and women, determined to follow what they believe to be the ordinances of their God, entrust themselves to the wild freezing ocean; confront disease, starvation, ferocious enemies and justified fear."

Thanksgiving, Hodgson notes, is an echo of the breaking of bread at the heart of Christian worship, and of a Jewish Seder. It also is a continuation, in today's abundance, of harvest festivals around the world, which began millennia ago, when abundance was so rare as to seem miraculous. Hodgson thinks Thanksgiving expresses "the deepest of all American national feelings" — gratitude. It is the inclusive gratitude "of a nation of immigrants who have lived for the most part in peace and plenty under the rule of law as established with the consent of the governed." Celebrated by turning inward with family, Thanksgiving is, Hodgson thinks, a counterpoint to Americans' other great civic festival, the Fourth of July:

"It is good to celebrate the public glories and the promise of American life with fireworks and speeches, better still to celebrate the mysterious cycle of life, the parade of the generations, and the fragile miracle of plenty, in the small warm circle of family, the building brick of which all prouder towers have always been constructed."

Thanksgiving 2006

Happy Thanksgiving! This will be a relatively quiet day here at Bedlam Manor, since today's feast is being hosted elsewhere. Just some baking to do before piling into the car to drive a few miles over hill and dale... well, here in our flat Gulf Coast topography, more like down the freeway with an overpass or two.

For your consideration, here's the Houston Chronicle on Thanksgiving, the holiday Walgreen's forgot:

It is for many people the best of all worlds: A spiritual holiday that doesn't require you to go to church or synagogue. A holiday whose pressures are confined to a few days in the kitchen, ending with wondrous protestations of wholly sated senses. A day when most of us are expected to show up for dinner with little more than good cheer and a green bean casserole.

You might also pause to think of others in need. The Star of Hope Mission is busy today feeding the homeless and the hungry. They deserve our support and could use a quick and easy online donation from you.

WKRP - Turkeys Away

In honor of tomorrow's big day, here's the immortal WKRP in Cincinnatti and the infamous "turkey drop."

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Watch for the boomerang

A generous church in Memphis has had kindness thrown in its face. What a world.

A church that wanted to do something special for Hurricane Katrina victims gave a $75,000 house, free and clear, to a couple who said they were left homeless by the storm. But the couple turned around and sold the place without ever moving in, and went back to New Orleans.

"Take it up with God," Joshua Thompson told a TV reporter after it was learned that he and the woman he identified as his wife had flipped the home for $88,000.

Church members said they feel their generosity was abused by scam artists. They are no longer even sure that the couple were left homeless by Katrina or that they were a couple at all.

"They came in humble like they really needed a new start, and our hearts went out to them," said Jean Phillips, a real estate agent and member of the Temple of Deliverance Church of God in Christ. "They actually begged for the home."

The church was also shocked by an ungrateful interview the couple gave with WHBQ (Channel 13) in Memphis.

"I really don't like this area," said Delores Thompson. "I really didn't, and I didn't know anybody, so that's why I didn't move in and I sold it."

Rebuilding

It appears that responsible adults on both sides of the Atlantic are working to tidy up the mess created by the nitwit editors of the New York Times, who mindlessly exposed a critical anti-terrorism program earlier this year.

As European privacy watchdogs step up their criticism of a U.S. counterterrorism program that monitors global bank-transfer data, U.S. and European Union officials are quietly exploring ways to preserve the program while allaying privacy concerns.

An EU committee this week is expected to back recent findings by Belgium's privacy regulator that Swift, a global banking-telecommunications network, violated European privacy laws when it gave information on cross-border wire transfers by EU citizens to the Treasury Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Backers of the once-classified intelligence program say it has helped avert terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The nonprofit Belgium cooperative is hoping for a political solution to the controversy, rather than facing possible regulatory action, top executives say....

People familiar with the discussions between U.S. and EU security officials say there are a number of options that may satisfy EU officials, such as the sharing of information regarding outside oversight of the program.

Both the U.S. and many European governments have long engaged in financial surveillance, particularly of international transactions, and the Swift program enjoys wide support among European counterterrorism officials.

The Hobbit - bad news

Uh-oh. New Line Cinema is, at best, playing chicken with director Peter Jackson over The Hobbit. Either that or its management has already committed to a dumb decision.

Casino Royale

Add another voice to those praising the new Casino Royale. It's by far the best James Bond movie since the early Sean Connery editions; as a series "re-boot" the film is entirely successful. Fresh, gritty and exciting, Casing Royale is an intricate thriller but also a character drama, and well-grounded in Ian Fleming's original novel. Daniel Craig is the epitome of Fleming's "blunt instrument," and more: a 21st century, one-man wrecking crew who bleeds.

Casino Royale is a winner. We may go again. Here's hoping that Daniel Craig's next installment is just as good.

(Watch this video for an exciting sample from the much lower budget District B13.)

Devolution

Victor Davis Hanson examines the pathology of mindlessly negative media coverage of the War on Terror, and asks "Why?"

The one common denominator? Whatever the United States does is suspect; and journalists without responsibility for governance, either for setting policy or for its implementation, are always brighter than generals, politicians, and policy planners saddled with it.

The truth is that wealthy Western elites in the media have evolved beyond worry over the basics of their civilization. They are so insulated, even after September 11, that they don’t believe there is much connection between liberty, freedom, consensual government, freedom of expression, and the everyday mundane things they depend on — whether excellent medical care, clean water, nice cars, neat electronic gadgets, eating out, or safety in their streets. A nuclear Iran, a missile-laden North Korea, a theocracy in oil-rich Iraq, an unleashed terrorist-sponsoring Syria, and an emboldened Hezbollah — all these still could still never quite take away their good life, so strong is the assurance of their never-ending comfort zone that they could not conceive of ever losing it.

And thus the most vehement and angry critics find it possible, even desirable, to nibble away at their own civilization’s efforts, on the understanding that a loss in Iraq would be only an apparent loss. That defeat would not entail any material detriment to themselves, but surely would enhance their own sense of contrarian self-righteousness and self-worth, as they boldly caricature the very culture that so empowered them.

Nonsense

Yep, those Democrats sure know how to pick winning positions: Rangel poised to introduce military draft bill.

Tolkien notes

Composer Howard Shore reveals some interesting things about his work on The Lord of the Rings scores in an interview with film music site Tracksounds. He's discovering new meaning in his own music.

When I was recording THE TWO TOWERS, we recorded it section by section. I never heard the music in total until I saw the finished film. But even the film doesn't have the complete score in it. The original soundtrack we put out was only an hour or seventy minutes, so that wasn't complete either. It wasn't until I put all the music together and took the time to listen to those three hours of music that I began to understand how it was really shaped, what the form was. It started to make more sense to me the more I listened to it. Now, having listened to it all many, many times, I have begun to understand it in a different way. Even though I had created it and wrote it...it was like writing chapters but not reading the whole book....

[B]ecause the composition is based on Tolkien and the intricacy, the complexity of it is due to the complexity of the book. Even I didn't really see it all because it was like I was looking at in very small pieces. It wasn't until I assembled it all that I began to understand how it all related.... It's like we are discovering it now more than when I was actually writing it! It wasn't that it was perfectly planned. It's because the composition is describing Tolkien's world. It's inherent, then, that the music has the same complexity that Tolkien put into the book. It wouldn't be written correctly to his book if it were otherwise.

Meanwhile, plans for additional films may be starting to take shape, according to Variety.

As for "The Hobbit," [MGM chief Harry] Sloan confirmed MGM was in talks with Peter Jackson to make two movies based on J.R.R. Tolkein's [sic] "prequel" to "The Lord of the Rings."

However, making the film is contingent on negotiations with New Line, which owns the right to produce "The Hobbit" (MGM owns only the right to distribute the films). And people close to Jackson say that until his ongoing lawsuit with New Line -- over monies he says are owed him from the "Lord of the Rings" franchise -- is settled, a serious conversation over "The Hobbit" cannot proceed.

Even so, Sloan remains optimistic. He said the first "Hobbit" pic would be a direct adaptation of "The Hobbit," and the second would be drawn from footnotes and source material connecting "The Hobbit" with "The Lord of the Rings."

That last bit is very intriguing. Which "footnotes and source material" exactly? The lode is rich for sure.

Less than victory?

Austin Bay reminds us that one reason things are so difficult in Iraq is that both our enemies and our friends have good reason to believe we won't stick around long enough to finish the job. They may right.

"Phased withdrawal" of coalition forces has always been the goal. The issue is a realistic "when."

The Iraqi government confronts extraordinary challenges. Are there rotten Iraqi military units? Yes — but there are also some very good ones. Do Iran and Syria support terrorists and militias? Yes. The dictators want the world to conclude that democracy is culturally and politically alien to the Middle East. They want the world to conclude, like British and French imperialists did in 1919, that Arabs can't handle democracy.

But despite the public stumbles and bloody learning curve, Maliki's government says otherwise.

Enter the James Baker and Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group. It's my bet that it will produce nothing original in terms of strategic and operational thinking. It may well produce a set of policy recommendations palatable to Democrats and Republicans — in other words, consensus political cover that allows the sober and wise to continue to support Iraq's war for freedom and modernity.

James Baker was secretary of state in 1991, when the Iraqi people were consigned to the depredations of their tyrant. Baker needs to remember that, if he — an old master of Realpolitik — counsels a policy that leads to anything less than victory.

George F. Will, no supporter of the Iraq war, makes a crass but valid political point, one that will work inexorably against a victory strategy:

[B]oth parties know that, for all the arguments about whether there should be a deadline for disengagement from Iraq, the Constitution, in effect, sets a deadline for setting a deadline.

There will be—the Constitution is persnickety about this—a presidential election in 24 months. Republicans do not want to run in 2008 with 150,000 U.S. forces still caught in the crossfire of Iraq's sectarian strife. Democrats know that if Iraq is still aboil and the U.S. presence essentially unchanged, their 2008 presidential candidate will have to offer what their 2006 congressional candidates were not required to offer—an actual plan for dealing with the problem. And each party's nominee would dread the possibility that his or her presidency would be instantly entangled in an inherited war.

Not Scowcroft

Fred Barnes reports that most of the press has been completely off base in interpreting the choice of Robert Gates to succeed SecDef Rumsfeld. If so, it would be greatly encouraging.

Rarely has the press gotten a story so wrong. Robert Gates, President Bush's choice to replace Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, is not the point man for a boarding party of former national security officials from the elder President Bush's administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son's administration. The media buzz about the realists of Bush 41, so cautious and practical, supplanting the idealists of Bush 43, whose grandiose, neoconservative thinking got us stuck in Iraq, is wrong.

President Bush--the current one--decided to hire Gates two days before the November 7 election. He didn't consult his father. He didn't talk to James Baker, his father's secretary of state and now co-head of the Iraq Study Group, whose official advice on Iraq is expected in December. Nor did he tell Rumsfeld that he was lining up someone to take his job.

Before hiring him, Bush had to make sure Gates didn't think America's intervention in Iraq was a mistake and wasn't deeply skeptical of Bush's decision to make democracy promotion a fundamental theme of American foreign policy. With Gates, it came down to this: "The fundamental question was, was he Brent Scowcroft or not?" a Bush aide says....

Two days before the election, the president summoned Gates to his ranch near Waco, Texas. It was the first time they'd talked about the Pentagon position. Bush had houseguests for the weekend to celebrate his wife's sixtieth birthday and their twenty-ninth anniversary. He left the guests to spend nearly two hours questioning Gates in his private office at the ranch. It was only the two of them. No aides participated in the meeting.

The president wanted "clarity" on Gates's views, especially on Iraq and the pursuit of democracy. He asked if Gates shared the goal of victory in Iraq and would be determined to pursue it aggressively as defense chief. He asked if Gates agreed democracy should be the aim of American foreign policy and not merely the stability of pro-American regimes, notably in the Middle East. Bush also wanted to know Gates's "philosophy" of America's role in the world, an aide says, and his take on the pitfalls America faces. "The president got good vibes," according to the Bush official.

The message of Jihadism

This testimony from a former true believer succinctly summarizes a lot of reality.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn't tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It's safer that way. It's only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.

He's a disarmingly gentle and courteous man. But he's determined to tell a complacent North America what he knows about fundamentalist Muslim imperialism.

"Yes, 'imperialism,' " he tells me. "The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe."

Hamid drank in the message of Jihadism while at medical school in Cairo, and devoted himself to the cause. His group began meeting in a small room. Then a larger one. Then a Mosque reserved for followers of al-Zawahiri. By the time Hamid left the movement, its members were intimidating other students who were unsympathetic.

He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. "The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education," he says. "I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine.

"I've heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims -- and never poor Christians -- who become suicide bombers in Palestine."

His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.

"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys."

... I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"

He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."

The omniscient InstaPundit calls this "a wake-up call that will probably go unheeded." That's unfortunately true, since it's not new news and the American people chose badly last week anyway.

Again, prepare yourself for the coming storm.

What's next

Here are just some of the many learned opinions about what's next with President Bush and Iraq, post-election and imminently post-Rumsfeld.

Jim Hoagland:

President Bush lost more than a midterm election and a cantankerous defense secretary on Tuesday. He also abandoned any lingering chance of remaking U.S. foreign policy into a radical force for democratic change in the Middle East and elsewhere.

He had to. The American electorate showed emphatically that it had lost faith in his party and his promises. Bush's refreshing generic denunciations of foreign dictators — including those who played ball with Washington — could not make up for his failure to produce positive visible results to support the rhetoric. He needed an immediate firebreak, and so he named Bob Gates to replace Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon....

For better and for worse, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and the bloody breakdown of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians have accelerated a profound radicalization of the Middle East that had already been unleashed by the pressures of globalization. Trying to get back to the 1990s is another bridge to nowhere....

But Bush's going on the defensive does not mean that the radical positive changes he had hoped for cannot come about on their own, even if on a different timetable and with much greater costs than he ever imagined. True realism lies in recognizing that his diagnosis of a crumbling order in the Middle East was sound, even if his prescriptions were disastrous.

George F. Will:

Last Tuesday, 12 years of Republican control of the House ended because of the Bush administration's foreign policy equivalent of the Clinton administration's overreaching regarding health care. Republicans should feel relieved: Considering that in November 1942, 11 months after war was thrust upon America, President Roosevelt's party lost 45 House and nine Senate seats (there were then just 96 senators), Tuesday's losses were not excessive punishment for the party that has presided over what is arguably the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history.

Subsequent elections will reveal whether this election is a harbinger of a new and chronic Republican weakness. For nearly two generations — since the Democratic Party fractured over Vietnam in 1968 and nominated George McGovern in 1972 — the Republican Party has benefited from a presumption of superior realism regarding the essential presidential competence, national security.

Time — actually, 2008 — will tell if Iraq will do the kind of lingering damage to the Republican Party that was done by the Depression, which made the party suspect for a generation regarding the conduct of domestic policy.

Daniel Henninger:

[W]hat has distinguished Mr. Bush's foreign policy, more than the Bush Doctrine itself, was the sense and belief that he would not abandon an ally. You may not like that, and may have just voted against it, but this country's global reputation is as allied with the people of Iraq as it was with the left-behind people of Vietnam. Or in 1991, the Shiites in southern Iraq.

On Feb. 15 of that year, after routing Saddam's army in the south, President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi generals and people to "take matters into their own hands" against Saddam. Then on Feb. 27 came the White House order to Gen. Schwarzkopf to stand down and thus forgo the destruction of Saddam's tank army. The Bush 41 team expected Saddam's Baathist generals to finish him off and "stabilize" Iraq. That was realism. The secretary of state was Jim Baker and the deputy national security advisor to Brent Scowcroft was Robert Gates. Shortly, Saddam's systematic, tank-led slaughter began of the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. In April, U.N. Resolution 688 said the attacks "threaten international peace and security in the region." Mr. Gates acknowledged the miscalculation in the New Yorker last year.

The opinion of the American people matters, and this week's election reflected fatigue with Iraq. We may be seeking a "way out," but if the Iraq Survey Group proposes a solution with the merest whiff of selling out Iraq's popularly elected Shiites, expect crudely realistic leaders in Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to conclude they too can downgrade, or obliterate, their own U.S.-oriented democratic groups. Then we can roll back the real end to notions of democratic possibility to the end of World War II. And with Democratic Party assent.

George Bush's foreign policy is at a tipping point. The administration's thinking on Iran and North Korea looks stalemated. He has taken to talking about the need for "fresh eyes" on Iraq. Looking back over the roster of the Iraq Survey Group, I'd say the eyes focused on his foreign-policy legacy, all essentially retired from public life, are anything but fresh.

Peggy Noonan:

We are in a 30-year war. It is no good for it to be led by, identified with, one party. It is no good for half the nation to feel estranged from its government's decisions. It's no good for us to be broken up more than a nation normally would be. And straight down the middle is a bad break, the kind that snaps.

We all have things we would say to the new Congress if we could. We are a country that makes as many speeches in the shower as it sings songs. I would say this: Focus on the age you live in. Know what it is. Know what's coming. The old way is over; the old days are over; the old facts and habits of mind do not pertain, or no longer fully pertain.

This is the age we live in: One day in the future either New York or Washington or both will be hit again, hard. It will be more deadly than 9/11. And on that day, those who experience it, who see the flash or hear the alarms, will try to help each other. They'll be good to each other. An elderly conservative congresswoman will be unable to make it down those big old Capitol steps, and a young liberal congressman will come by and pick her up in his arms and carry her. (I witnessed a moment somewhat like this during a Capitol alarm two years ago, when we were told to run for our lives.) I would say: Keep that picture in mind. Cut to the chase, be good to each other now.

Make believe it's already happened. That's the only attitude that will help us get through it when it does. I do not mean think like Rodney King. We can't all get along, not on this earth. But we can know what time it is. We can be serious, and humane. We can realize that we're all in this together and owe each other an assumption of good faith.

There are rogue states and rogue actors, there are forces and nations aligned against us, and they have nukes and other weapons of mass destruction, and some of them are mad. Know this. Walk to work each day knowing it, not in a pointlessly fearful way but in a spirit of "What can I do to make it better?"

What can you do in two years? The common wisdom says not much. But here's a governing attitude: First things first.

The choices made over the next few weeks will show us one important thing: whether or not George W. Bush is in actuality a conventional politician, in which case his attention is even now shifting to his "legacy" or if he himself is willing and able to perservere in the face of profound challenges. It's a personal moment of truth for him, and therefore for us all.

Voting yes for schools

It's a relief to see this morning that our local school bond passed, but also dismaying to note the slim margin: 53.5% yes, 46.5% no. I had hoped that there were not so many yahoos in the district.

Katy ISD needs to work on its community relations. That vote was way too close.

Divertimento

Looks like the Dems are close to running the table tonight in the northeast and Rust Belt states, and perhaps more. That's very bad news for the War on Terror, which is far and away our most important national issue. Prepare yourself for the coming storm.

Brendan Miniter wrote today about a little-discussed dimension of a prospective Democratic victory.

A look at the margin needed to tip the scales of power tells the full story. In six states alone--Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island--Democrats expect to pick up two Senate seats and perhaps 14 House seats. That's nearly enough to gain control of the House (they need 15 seats) and a third of what the Democrats need to retake the Senate.... [T]he political story not yet absorbed by either party is that in a narrowly divided Congress, the Northeast is becoming the balance of power....

Republicans have largely ceded the battle of ideas in the Northeast and are now paying for it at the polls. With no local conservative policies to stand on (and few national policies to point to) incumbent Republicans have left themselves vulnerable to being swept out of office in a Democratic year. That year has finally come in.

So it's back to the wilderness for the GOP. We'll see how they react.

If tonight's unfolding news is a downer, think about something else for a few minutes: Pancakes.

Obsession: Radical Islam

Fox News and E.D. Hill have just finished providing invaluable visibility tonight to the important new documentary by Wayne Kopping, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.