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"There's a word for this kind of long-range, deep, subtle planning: Strategery"

The "Arab Spring" of 2010-11 — however bitter or sweet its fruits may grow in the fullness of time — didn't just happen. Bill Whittle makes a powerful case for GWB's foreign policy as a major catalyst in his latest YouTube sensation, "Memebusters! The Osama bin Laden Edition," where he asks "Why are all these Muslims in repressive regimes suddenly rising up for freedom and the right to vote? Why now, all of a sudden? That's why," he answers, pointing to the iconic image of a triumphant Iraqi woman who had just voted for the first time in her life in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"You know, there's a word for this kind of long-range, deep, subtle planning. It's called 'strategery,'" says Professor-at-Large of Memebuster University Bill Whittle, turning the memetic Saturday Night Live putdown of GW's Iraq strategy on its head in a Geography 101 lesson about why the 43rd President sent our forces into both Afganistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11: 

If you wanna know why there haven't been any large-scale attacks on the U.S. homeland since 9/11, 2001, just look at this map (below). Imagine if Mexico and Canada both became radical Muslim Nations like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Where do you think our attention would be? 

Armchair strategerist that we are, we'd noticed something similar — including the geographically strategic importance of Pakistan — way back in July of 2004 in "Between Iraq and a hard place":

"Could the President know something that the Media and the Left don't?" asks Speed of Thought (found 'em in our Site Meter stats). Iran is getting the squeeze as The Bush Doctrine makes slow but steady headway on the ground. The old board game of "Risk" comes to mind.

Something that the Media and the Left don't get. That's the larger subject of Bill Whittle's tutorial. Stumbling over their "all-about-oil" meme, BDS sufferers, then as now, missed the big picture:

Memes are cultural beliefs that were not [Ed note: Much thanks to Joy McCann aka Little Miss Atilla for typo correction] taught in school or in religion but that take on a life of their own because large numbers of people have emotional reasons for wanting them to be true …

My joy about hearing about the death of Osama bin Laden lasted for about 20 seconds until I turned on the TV to see Andrea Mitchell crowing about how this really was "Mission Accomplished," not the premature "Mission Accomplished" that Cowboy George Bush claimed during his speech on that aircraft carrier, which happened, coincidentally, eight years earlier to the day …

Only George Bush didn't claim "Mission Accomplished." In fact he said just the opposite.

"So, where did this meme come from?" asks Whittle:

Well, the press made it up out of whole cloth. They not only distorted, they actually reversed everything that George Bush said on the deck of that aircraft carrier …

"Now that day on the carrier, President Bush didn't say 'Mission Accomplished,'" but he did say this:

The advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world … Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope … When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life … American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty.

How ironic that even as American values are making inroads in distant lands where tyranny has long oppressed the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, a thuggish mindset worthy of any foreign tyrant — spawn of the insidious Gramscian march through the institutions — "has crept into our political life," as John of PowerLine explains in his must-read "The Politics of Personal Intimidation":

A disturbing new element has crept into our political life: organized efforts to intimidate private citizens who choose to support certain political causes or otherwise participate in civic affairs. This, as far as I know, is unprecedented in our modern history. Our democracy depends on citizen involvement, and until now, Americans have felt free to participate in public life and to support whatever causes, political and otherwise, they choose. But if the Left has its way, that may be about to change.

Update: Thank you, dear old friend Ed Driscoll, guest posting during Glenn's vacation, for the Instalanche!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Dreaming of a "nice moment for the country," Howard Kurtz misses the scoop

 

Rush caller former Navy Seal Greg says "I believe that President Obama's hand was forced in [assaulting Osama's compound], and this is just a crass, political decision. When I hear people say that this took courage, I just believe he was absolutely forced into doing this … I assure you the information would have been leaked prior to the election cycle, and he would have had to have dealt with that, and frankly, if that came to knowledge late in the election cycle, our next president would be either Hillary Clinton or whoever the Republicans run." Everybody on both sides of the aisle has an opinion about it. Update: "Did Wikileaks Force Obama's Hand?"

"Bush declines Obama invitation to visit Ground Zero with him," twittered Howard Kurtz this evening, more in sorrow than in anger:

I wish he'd accepted. Would have been a nice moment for the country

"Wow," we twittered back. A "nice moment for the country"? Gak. We ourselves had been on alert for the JournoList spin machine to go into high gear crediting the President and discrediting his predecessor the moment news broke that our guys had bagged Osama bin Laden over there on Sunday:

Hadn't realized how naive a sophisticated journalist could be. It's all about spinning the narrative, Howard. #JournoList #Soros #JohnPodesta #CenterForAmericanProgress

Mr. Kurtz seems like a well-intentioned fellow, quick on his feet, amusing to read at The Daily Beast and listen to as host of "Reliable Sources" on CNN, but what kind of navel-gazing kumbaya bubble does the nation's "most influential media reporter" inhabit to have missed the story of the century? As we twittered this morning, citing Andrew Breitbart's appearance on Hugh Hewitt's radio show:

It's the narrative, stupid.

Hewitt quotes from Andrew's book — the one we just read in the Kindle app on our desktop — Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! currently Number 1 best seller on Amazon:

The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn't have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. The narrative is everything.

"You're saying you've seen through it," says Hugh. "Does the rest of the country see through it?" Here's Andrew:

We can't let them weigh the narrative down. If you just sit back and say oh, it's just twitter, oh it's just Think Progress … Twitter and Think Progress certainly feed the MSNBC beast so we can't play by Marquess of Queensbury Rules, we can't expect that George Will, Charles Krauthammer columns are going to win the day. Those are afterthoughts. We have to fight at the moment that these people start to lay their vile narrative.

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update II: Michelle and others are making the argument that GW should have accepted President Obama's invitation to join him tomorrow at Ground Zero, but we're inclined to agree with Pat Dollard's argument on twitter:

Every time you try to appease a liberal with your speech you live a lie and you betray Conservatism.

What would Andrew Breitbart do?

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Ayman al-Zawahiri "wouldn't even look at a woman if she was wearing a short skirt"

When Ayman met Osama

"He was very religious, and he didn't greet women. He wouldn't even look at a woman if she was wearing a short skirt," wrote Lawrence Wright in a September 2002 New Yorker article on Ayman al-Zawahiri, "The Man Behind Bin Laden: How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror." With talk of al-Zawahiri as likely successor to the late Osama, sent to his great reward yesterday by America's finest, we are pleased to republish our January 2, 2004 "The woman made me do it, Lord," the top blog entry in a Google News search this morning:

January 2, 2004. Is that all it really comes down to?  A man's fear of his own feelings towards women?  We were struck with the thought today in reading Art & Literature's "Articles of Note" reprieve of a September 2002 The New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright on Ayman Zawahiri, "The Man behind Bin Laden:  How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror."

Here's what caught our eye: 

. . . In 1950, the year before Ayman al-Zawahiri was born, Sayyid Qutb, a well-known literary critic in Cairo, returned home after spending two years at Colorado State College of Education, in Greeley.

. . . "It is astonishing to realize, despite his advanced education and his perfectionism, how primitive the American really is in his views on life," Qutb wrote upon his return to Egypt. "His behavior reminds us of the era of the caveman. He is primitive in the way he lusts after power, ignoring ideals and manners and principles."  Qutb was impressed by the number of churches in America—there were more than twenty in Greeley alone—and yet the Americans he met seemed completely uninterested in spiritual matters. He was appalled to witness a dance in a church recreation hall, during which the minister, setting the mood for the couples, dimmed the lights and played "Baby, It's Cold Outside." "It is difficult to differentiate between a church and any other place that is set up for entertainment, or what they call in their language, 'fun,' " he wrote. . . The American was primitive in his art as well. "Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires," he concluded.

. . . Qutb returned to Egypt a radically changed man. In what he saw as the spiritual wasteland of America, he re-created himself as a militant Muslim, and he came back to Egypt with the vision of an Islam that would throw off the vulgar influences of the West. Islamic society had to be purified, and the only mechanism powerful enough to cleanse it was the ancient and bloody instrument of jihad. "Qutb was the most prominent theoretician of the fundamentalist movements," Zawahiri later wrote . . . "Qutb said, 'Brother push ahead, for your path is soaked in blood. Do not turn your head right or left but look only up to Heaven.' "

Similarly, when Zawahiri was in the market for a wife, "He had made a favorable impression on the Nowair family, who were a little dazzled by his distinguished ancestry. 'He was polite and agreeable,'" Essam says. "'He was very religious, and he didn't greet women. He wouldn't even look at a woman if she was wearing a short skirt.'"

Hey, guys, lighten up.

Update: We love this from twitterbuddy dustbury:

Obviously I have no future in an Islamic terrorist organization. :)

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

The grave robbers of Ground Zero revisited

As if anticipating the left's insidious attempts to steal their fire — by turning their sacred precinct into an anti-American bully pulpit — the angry gods of Ground Zero blew up a sandstorm of warning on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (Merlin-Net Photo)

In remembrance of the 9/11 jihadi attacks nine years ago today, excerpts from our June 2005 post "The grave robbers of Ground Zero." The Ground-Zero-mosque and Koran-burning controversies that have dominated the "narrative" of late come to mind. Plus ça change …

June 8, 2004. Contemptuous of everyday Americans' ability to decide what's best for themselves -- and afraid to admit what they're really up to — fire-and-brimstone lay preachers of the anti-American left are working furiously behind the scenes to rob Ground Zero of its genius loci (spirit of the place). "A Blame America Monument is not what we need or deserve. But it looks like one is already in the works," writes a justifiably outraged Michelle Malkin in "The desecration of Ground Zero" at Town Hall:

In a startling op-ed printed in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday [now available to all at Opinion Journal], Debra Burlingame exposed "The Great Ground Zero Heist" … She reports that the World Trade Center memorial will encompass a "cultural complex" whose primary tenant will be something called the "International Freedom Center."

Burlingame explains:

The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona [exactly the same comparison made in 2010 regarding the proposed Ground Zero mosque].

We are reminded of Daniel Henninger's call a couple of years back for honoring the spirit of the place at Ground Zero by leaving it mostly open. His sentiments resonate a hundredfold now in light of leftists' attempts to fill the space with their p.c. chatter and appropriate the spiritual power of this hallowed ground for their cheap, anti-American political agenda. It calls to mind the "sympathetic magic" of cannibals who believe they take on the strength of slain enemies by eating them.

Bush-Hater-in-Chief George Soros' "spirit infuses this grievance-mongering enterprise," says Michelle Malkin. (Photo from Soros website)

If you think we — and the immediate right half of the blogosphere — are getting hysterical over nothing, Michelle advises us to "take a closer look at the chief movers and shakers behind the project."

It's those forces of darkness again, lurking just beyond the campfire of civilization. Freedom isn't free, and we must be forever vigilant …

Update: InstaLinked in the same paragraph with the Pajamas Media Meister. Yah!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Obama: "Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground, but"

Shadows of Palestinian women are seen at Qalandiya checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Ramalla August 28, 2009, on their way to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on the first Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. (Reuters, Fadi Arouri)

"Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground, but let me make clear," said the president at "a White House dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan" today, spinning effortlessly 180 degrees from his previous position that the Ground Zero Mosque controversy was a "local issue" which he would not weigh in on:

As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.

Is that inspiring, or what? We are now being asked to believe that Mr. Obama had embraced the idea all along but was waiting for someone else to cast the first stone the locals to weigh in. Who woulda thunk it, a statist deferring to subsidiarity?

Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the proposed community center and mosque. But the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

We can only guess at what polling entrails revealed to the Leader of the Free World that it was okay to spit in the face of the overwhelming majority of his fellow Americans who oppose the building of an Islamic tower in the psychological shadow of what once was the Twin Towers. Perhaps it was an attempt to appease an angry base recently dissed by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as "crazy" and in need of drug testing.

Update: Instalanche!

It’s the return of the "damning but.”

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: This story is not going to go away. Obama's speech and the old and new media's reportage/reaction top Memeorandum Saturday morning.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Ground Zero Mosque: It's not easy being green

Central Park, Manhattan, USA.

"Parks are for the public. Parks are fun. Parks are green. And parks are not controversial," gushes Ibrahim Abdul-Matin in a Daily Beast "Exclusive: Ground Zero Mosque Goes Green," telling the online publication's readership — card-carrying members of Angelo Codevilla's "America's Ruling Class" — what they want to hear. According to his DB blurb, Ibrahim is "author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet," as well as "an environmental policy consultant" who has worked for something called "Interfaith Leaders for Environmental Justice." Buzzword alert alarm! Here's the Taqiyya — the Qur'an-sanctioned practice of misdirecting the Infidel's attention away from the faithful's insidious mission of imposing Shari'ah law on "the planet" — they're peddling:

Amid the uproar over the Cordoba House project, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin reveals that it will be the country's first certified "green mosque," named Park51 to connect faith and the environment.

Court of the Lions, The Alhambra, Spain.

Isn't that special? Ibrahim Abdul-Matin paints pretty pictures for our friends on the left side of the aisle who would accuse us of bigotry for fighting back against the grave robbers of Ground Zero:

In the midst of the drama around the mosque that’s being erected two blocks from Ground Zero, a few details have been left out that provide some clarity as to the purpose of this project. Specifically, the project will be the country’s first certified “green mosque,” in full compliance with stringent LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, which is why organizers have named the project Park51, rather than the oft-cited "Cordoba House."

The mosque (which is more accurately a community center with a prayer space) is located on Park Place in Downtown Manhattan, but the new name also reflects a desire to emphasize the intricate (though widely unknown) connections between Islamic teachings and environmentalism. For example, Islam calls upon people to be "stewards of the Earth" and to treat all things in nature as sacred.

All things in nature except the Infidel, not to mention the female of the species, of whatever faith. Why can't we all just get along? Al "Sex-Crazed Poodle" Gore was unavailable for comment.

Update: Sunday morning, trending on Memeorandum.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Greg Gutfeld and the Grave Robbers of Ground Zero

We're glad Rebecca Grunewald, who twitters as Duchess Rebecca, set her DVR to record Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld in the wee hours this morning. It's going to be a keeper! During his Post-Game Wrap-up Andy Levy picked her inspired "Ba'ath House" as the best of the twitter in yesterday's #gutfeldgaybarnames wordplay. For the funnyman's proposed gay bar in the shadow of Cordoba House, aka Ground Zero mosque, we're suggesting tastefully atmospheric interiors along the lines of Hammam años Árabes en Córdoba, above and below.

"I, personally, think it's a brilliant idea. I absolutely abhor all of this anti-mosque nonsense currently going on in this country," sniffs cocksure Mediaite columnist Jon Bershad, utterly missing the larger point of Greg Gutfeld's proposal to build "the first gay bar that caters not only to the west, but also Islamic gay men" next to the mosque Park51 near Ground Zero. Even as he praises the Red Eye ringmaster's wit, Bershad struts about, dissing us low-lifes who beg to differ with him on the appropriateness of constructing a towering Islamic center-cum-mosque on sacred ground that was desecrated by avowed adherents of Islam:

It’s disgusting bigotry plain and simple. However, just because I support Muslim Americans in their fight against anti-Islam prejudice, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get a few dings for their religion’s own prejudice against homosexuals. If you want to be treated fairly, you should treat others fairly as well. Still though, the only thing that would make this plan perfect would be if Gutfeld created a chain of gay bars and plopped them down next to churches and synagogues since it’s not like those religions have been super open-minded.

"And also, it's a fear of debate, " Greg Gutfeld gutted opponents' playing of the tattered "race card": "Rather than argue against my point that it's simply obnoxious to build the mosque, they'd rather belch 'race!' It's a reflex."

The siren song of political correctness beckons Mediaite's Bershad onto the shoals of moral equivalence and irrelevance. He should read the DC Examiner's editorial on the horrors of Shari'a law, as most recently and obscenely exemplified in the story of Aisha, that Afghani girl we blogged about the other day, whose nose and ears were sliced off for "shaming" her arranged husband's parents by running away from their cruelty:

Such barbarities remind us that no place must be given for moral equivalence on these issues. If our civil law doesn't permit Mormon polygamy, Fundamentalist snake handling or Christian Scientist denial of medical care for children, even less can it tolerate Muslim mutilation and murder of women. Those who can't — or won't — see the difference between a murderous intolerance and the intolerance of murder should be pitied and ignored.

One more must-read for Bershad and others who share his distaste for "all of this anti-mosque nonsense," Robert VerBruggen at NRO, who quotes from "yet another interview in which Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leading figure behind the Cordoba House (the “Ground Zero mosque”), explains away terrorism":

"They feel the need to conflagrate," he says of Muslims who feel they've been "humiliated" and ignored."

The interview was conducted for a Malaysia Matters podcast during the 2008 presidential campaign. (The Cordoba Initiative website references the podcast, but the provided link is dead.) While Rauf repeatedly positions himself as someone “trying to bridge the divide” between the West and the Muslim world, he also offers comments regarding the West’s culpability for terror against it …

When asked whether the U.S. bears “ultimate responsibility” for “any reactions,” Rauf responds, “I wouldn’t say ultimate. It’s the one who leads in the dance” …

Also: “In order to bridge the divide, we have to understand the dynamics, that there’s a certain — there’s a psychology … If you do this, you get this reaction” …

As argued on NRO and elsewhere, there is nothing the government can or should do to disrupt the construction or operation of the Cordoba House. But as the project’s supporters press on in the face of overwhelming public outcry, and as Rauf’s beliefs come increasingly into the light, arguments that the community center and mosque are meant as anything but a finger in the eye of America become less believable.

Fortunately, the blogosphere and Twitter are alive with mockery, top tactic in Glenn Reynolds's list of ways to thwart the "good intentions" of "America's Ruling Class," in this case elitists like Bershad, Mayor Bloomberg & Company who would accuse us of bigotry for fighting back against the grave robbers of Ground Zero. Not to mention those crusading — yes, that word! — frontline warriors like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who are leading the charge in the war of words to defeat creeping Shari'a.

This just in on Twitter from David Burge of Iowahawkblog:

#Gutfeldgaybarnames TGIFriday Prayers

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

An increasingly impotent chattering class of credulous Chris Matthewses

"Palin isn't a feminist — not in the slightest," huffs card-carrying postmodern feminist Jessica Valenti of the blog Feministing, stumbling inadvertently onto the truth that will soon send her and her sob sisters tumbling into the dustbin of history: "What she calls 'the emerging conservative feminist identity' isn't a structural analysis of patriarchal norms. It's an empty rallying call to women who are disdainful of or apathetic to women's rights."

"Hitler despised Christianity for its weakness and admired Islam for its aggressiveness," writes Ipso Facto in the comments of William Kilpatrick's provocative but flawed FrontPage essay, "The Warrior Code vs. The Da Vinci Code," quoting Albert Speer:

Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking : 'You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?'"

Fast forward to today's Global War on Terror. "As it did in the seventh century, Islam is taking on the appearance of an unstoppable masculine force," writes Kilpatrick, arguing that an excess of "feminization" has eviscerated both Christianity and our nation's resolve. Try telling that to the Tea Partiers and fearless woman warriors like Sarah Palin, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Liz Cheney, for starters. It doesn't fly. First a few excerpts, and then our critique:

But in the West the masculine spirit looks more like a ghost. In The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris puts the matter in stark biological terms: “While we in the West are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless.”

Sounds like Harris is talking war, but in reality his book is more about cultural conflict than armed conflict …

Of course, feminization is not just a problem for Christians, but also for the culture as a whole. If Islam is all about submission, Western culture, of late, seems to be all about submissiveness. Each day brings news of some abject accommodation to Islamic law or practices. The latest is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision (now apparently reversed) to sanction a less radical form of female genital cutting as a concession to Islamic cultural traditions.

It isn't "feminization" at all, but, rather, postmodern, identity-politics "feminism" — one of a cascade of unfortunate byproducts of the Gramscian march through the institutions — that has given us an increasingly impotent chattering class of credulous Chris Matthewses of both sexes, "pols, journos and 'thinkers'" who have "surrendered to an Islamist plot more effective than any Bali bomb," as Andrew Bolt so brilliantly explains in his must-read Melbourne Herald Sun column "How Hamas fooled the West." [h/t spot the dog on Twitter].

Related: "Is Sarah Palin Allowed To Call Herself A Feminist?" and our own post on Harvey Mansfield's discourse on manliness, "In spring a young man's fancy."

Update: Instalanche! Thank you, Professor Reynolds!

Update II: "You nailed it perfectly, Sissy, with the Gramscian reference," says Jeff S. in the comments, echoing so much that we are forever flogging here:

It's all about the oppressor/oppressed relationship and identity politics: it's impossible be a racist if you're black (they say), because by definition you're a member of the oppressed class. Likewise, by the lights of Marxist theorists like Jessica Valenti, Palin simply cannot be a feminist because she doesn't belong to the correct group in the correct relationship. The Gramscian Marxist connection can't be stressed enough — it seems to me to underlie vast stretches of liberal arts academia, and thus it leaches slowly but constantly into our everyday consciousness.

As we blogged quite awhile back in "The Tocquevillians strike back":

While America slept — or rather, while it was going about its business — Gramscian thinking, like sewage leaking out of a cracked drainpipe into the surrounding soil, has seeped into major sectors of our civil society — the law, foundations, universities and corporations among others. Fonte provides horrifying examples of how "major American social policy has come to be based not on Judeo-Christian precepts nor on Kantian-Enlightenment ethics, but on Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concepts of group power."

Fun Update III: Melissa Clouthier, first among equals at Liberty Pundits, names our post "read of the day":

Sissy Willis, who I am honored to have blogging with me.

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

"The media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting"

As temperatures hovered in the low thirties early morning, Tiny kept warm atop the kitchen counter register while Cat Whisperer Tuck murmured sweet nothings.

"Twitter makes it almost impossible to surprise people with breaking news because they all already know about it," twitters Patrick Ruffini. That's how events unfolded in the Fort Hood shooting yesterday as early error-laced reports and theories gave way, in waves, to the facts ma'am, just the facts. It was duly noted by Mark Steyn that the usual suspects on the left quickly lockstepped into politically-correct, see-no-evil mode:

Andy, you're right that there's something deeply weird about the media's instinctive avoidance of the M-word or the T-word and the careless abandon with which they speculate about "post-traumatic stress disorder."

Better to blame "man-caused disasters" on a US-foreign-policy-induced psychological affliction beyond the victim's perpetrator's control than call a spade a spade. In the light of day today, Michelle Malkin and Ralph Peters win top honors for best/most concise analyses of what's really going on behind the curtain. Malkin:

Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror.

Peters:

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting "Allahu Akbar!" committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

The Gramscian march through the institutions has well prepared susceptible self-loathing citizens of the once Shining City Upon a Hill to bow down in dhimmitude to creeping militant Islamicism.

Update: Danny Boy links.

Update II: Stoutcat links with "An Unsustainable Narrative."

The warring tribes of post-9/11

Republication of our September 11, 2006 post "A virtual lamp beside the golden door, revisited": "It’s been nearly three years since 9/11," wrote Michele of A Small Victory two years back, inviting her readers to add their own two cents' worth to her Voices 2004. "Where do you stand right now as far as emotional recovery goes? Have you moved on? Healed? How does your emotional view of 9/11 differ now from three years ago? Do you find yourself more hopeful than you were then?" We're republishing our response, which seems to have stood the test of time, in that we still agree with ourselves.

How would Osama answer the question "Do you find yourself more hopeful than you were then?" We think he would be of two minds: 1) Yes and 2) No.

1) Yes. Surely the evil genius whose own demons made him wake the sleeping giant* must be gratified to see the Orwellian inversion that has taken place in some large portion of the popular imagination, where the lunatic ravings of homegrown academics blinded by their hatred of America — the Susan Sontags and Noam Chomskys of this world — have metastacized into a toxic worldwide anti-American hysteria that threatens to derail the War on Islamic Extremism (Condi Rice's term for the War on Terror). We could write volumes about that. We have, in fact, written blog volumes about that. Listen to Sontag's solipsistic, a-historical, hyperventilating pontifications from her New Yorker essay published in the aftermath of 9/11:

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. [Note to Ms. Sontag: Our response was our own. It was visceral. We didn't wait for some public figure to tell us what to think or how to feel.] Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? [Note to Ms. Sontag: You haven't a clue re the terrorists' motives. See Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer et al.]

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall.

2) No. Despite the appeal of Sontag & Company's "arguments" to all who would blame America first, Osama must be worried about our country's pesky refusal to cut and run.  9/11 was, in fact, like Pearl Harbor in that the enemy realized he had awakened a sleeping giant.* In fact, the enemy has awakened two sleeping giants. America stands taller than ever on the world stage, staring down the nattering appeasement crowd on the one hand, and tearing down the terrorist networks and support systems on the other, thanks to the great leadership of President George W. Bush, his remarkable team of seasoned advisors, our superb military and the Coalition of the Willing.

But 9/11 awoke another sleeping giant, one that may have been slouching towards some kind of cyberBethlehem waiting to be born even as world attention was focused elsewhere. We're speaking, of course, of the blogosphere. A virtual lamp beside the golden door, this new medium was a beacon to the virtual "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" in the wake of 9/11, giving voice to those who had been voiceless — Iraqi bloggers, milbloggers, homefront bloggers and bloggers of every stripe, seekers of wisdom and truth who weren't buying what effete academic elites and mainstream media pack journalists were selling anymore

Update: Antivenin links.

*Note. "In the movies Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor, [Japanese naval commander] Yamamoto's character says, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 'I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.' Considerable doubt exists, though, whether he actually ever said (or wrote) anything like that; it was probably invented for the movies, although it may well have encapsulated some of his real feelings about it," according to Nationmaster Encyclopedia. Update post 2004 election: False but accurate?