Diamond Dave

Dyn-O-Mite! TV Land Lists Catchphrases

Sometimes it takes only a word, or just a few, to become immortalized in television history.

The TV Land cable network has compiled a list of the 100 greatest catchphrases in TV, from the serious _ Walter Cronkite's nightly signoff "And that's the way it is" _ to the silly: "We are two wild and crazy guys!"

The greatest number of moments, 26, come from the 1970s. TV Land identified nine moments from this decade. Ten are from commercials, and 28 from comedies, including six from "Saturday Night Live."

In alphabetical order, TV Land's list:

_"Aaay" (Fonzie, "Happy Days")

_"And that's the way it is" (Walter Cronkite, "CBS Evening News")

_"Ask not what your country can do for you ..." (John F. Kennedy)

_"Baby, you're the greatest" (Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, "The Honeymooners")

_"Bam!" (Emeril Lagasse, "Emeril Live")

_"Book 'em, Danno" (Steve McGarrett, "Hawaii Five-O")

_"Come on down!" (Johnny Olson, "The Price is Right")

_"Danger, Will Robinson" (Robot, "Lost in Space")

_"De plane! De plane!" (Tattoo, "Fantasy Island")

_"Denny Crane" (Denny Crane, "Boston Legal")

_"Do you believe in miracles?" (Al Michaels, 1980 Winter Olympics)

_"D'oh!" (Homer Simpson, "The Simpsons")

_"Don't make me angry ..." (David Banner, "The Incredible Hulk")

_"Dyn-o-mite" (J.J., "Good Times")

_"Elizabeth, I'm coming!" (Fred Sanford, "Sanford and Son")

_"Gee, Mrs. Cleaver ..." (Eddie Haskell, "Leave it to Beaver")

_"God'll get you for that" (Maude, "Maude")

_"Good grief" (Charlie Brown, "Peanuts" specials)

_"Good night, and good luck" (Edward R. Murrow, "See It Now")

_"Good night, John Boy" ("The Waltons")

_"Have you no sense of decency?" (Joseph Welch to Sen. McCarthy)

_"Heh heh" (Beavis and Butt-head, "Beavis and Butthead")

_"Here it is, your moment of Zen" (Jon Stewart, "The Daily Show")

_"Here's Johnny!" (Ed McMahon, "The Tonight Show")

_"Hey now!" (Hank Kingsley, "The Larry Sanders Show")

_"Hey hey hey!" (Dwayne Nelson, "What's Happening!!")

_"Hey hey hey!" (Fat Albert, "Fat Albert")

_"Holy (whatever), Batman!" (Robin, "Batman")

_"Holy crap!" (Frank Barone, "Everybody Loves Raymond")

_"Homey don't play that!" (Homey the Clown, "In Living Color")

_"How sweet it is!" (Jackie Gleason, "The Jackie Gleason Show")

_"How you doin'?" (Joey Tribbiani, "Friends")

_"I can't believe I ate the whole thing" (Alka Seltzer ad)

_"I know nothing!" (Sgt. Schultz, "Hogan's Heroes")

_"I love it when a plan comes together" (Hannibal, "The A-Team")

_"I want my MTV!" (MTV ad)

_"I'm Larry, this is my brother Darryl ..." (Larry, "Newhart")

_"I'm not a crook ..." (Richard Nixon)

_"I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" (Vicks Formula 44 ad)

_"I'm Rick James, bitch!" (Dave Chappelle as Rick James, "Chappelle's Show")

_"If it weren't for you meddling kids!" (Various villains, "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?")

_"Is that your final answer?" (Regis Philbin, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire")

_"It keeps going and going and going ..." (Energizer Batteries ad)

_"It takes a licking ..." (Timex ad)

_"Jane, you ignorant slut" (Dan Aykroyd to Jane Curtin, "Saturday Night Live")

_"Just one more thing ..." (Columbo, "Columbo")

_"Let's be careful out there" (Sgt. Esterhaus, "Hill Street Blues")

_"Let's get ready to rumble!" (Michael Buffer, various sports events)

_"Live long and prosper" (Spock, "Star Trek")

_"Makin' whoopie" (Bob Eubanks, "The Newlywed Game")

_"Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! (Jan Brady, "The Brady Bunch")

_"Mom always liked you best" (Tommy Smothers, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

_"Never assume ..." (Felix Unger, "The Odd Couple")

_"Nip it!" (Barney Fife, "The Andy Griffith Show")

_"No soup for you!" (The Soup Nazi, "Seinfeld")

_"Norm!" ("Cheers")

_"Now cut that out!" (Jack Benny, "The Jack Benny Program")

_"Oh, my God! They killed Kenny!" (Stan and Kyle, "South Park")

_"Oh, my nose!" (Marcia Brady, "The Brady Bunch")

_"One small step for man ..." (Neil Armstrong)

_"Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?" (Grey Poupon ad)

_"Read my lips: No new taxes!" (George H.W. Bush)

_"Resistance is futile" (Picard as Borg, "Star Trek: The Next Generation")

_"Say good night, Gracie" (George Burns, "The Burns & Allen Show")

_"Schwing!" (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth, "Saturday Night Live")

_"Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" (Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle)

_"Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids" (Trix cereal ad)

_"Smile, you're on `Candid Camera'" ("Candid Camera")

_"Sock it to me" ("Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In")

_"Space, the final frontier ..." (Capt. Kirk, "Star Trek")

_"Stifle!" (Archie Bunker, "All in the Family")

_"Suit up!" (Barney Stinson, "How I Met Your Mother")

_"Tastes great! Less filling!" (Miller Lite beer ad)

_"Tell me what you don't like about yourself" (Dr. McNamara and Dr. Troy, "Nip/Tuck")

_"That's hot" (Paris Hilton, "The Simple Life")

_"The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat" (Jim McKay, "ABC's Wide World of Sports")

_"The tribe has spoken" (Jeff Probst, "Survivor")

_"The truth is out there" (Fox Mulder, "The X-Files")

_"This is the city ..." (Sgt. Joe Friday, "Dragnet")

_"Time to make the donuts" ("Dunkin' Donuts" ad)

_"Two thumbs up" (Siskel & Ebert, "Siskel & Ebert")

_"Up your nose with a rubber hose" (Vinnie Barbarino, "Welcome Back, Kotter")

_"We are two wild and crazy guys!" (Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as Czech playboys, "Saturday Night Live")

_"Welcome to the O.C., bitch" (Luke, "The O.C.")

_"Well, isn't that special?" (Dana Carvey as the Church Lady, "Saturday Night Live")

_"We've got a really big show!" (Ed Sullivan, "The Ed Sullivan Show")

_"Whassup?" (Budweiser ad)

_"What you see is what you get!" (Geraldine, "The Flip Wilson Show")

_"Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" (Arnold Drummond, "Diff'rent Strokes")

_"Where's the beef?" (Wendy's ad)

_"Who loves you, baby?" (Kojak, "Kojak")

_"Would you believe?" (Maxwell Smart, "Get Smart")

_"Yabba dabba do!" (Fred Flintstone, "The Flintstones")

_"Yada, yada, yada" ("Seinfeld")

_"Yeah, that's the ticket" (Jon Lovitz as the pathological liar, "Saturday Night Live")

_"You eeeediot!" (Ren, "Ren & Stimpy")

_"You look mahvelous!" (Billy Crystal as Fernando, "Saturday Night Live")

_"You rang?" (Lurch, "The Addams Family")

_"You're fired!" (Donald Trump, "The Apprentice")

_"You've got spunk ..." (Lou Grant, "The Mary Taylor Moore Show")

John Madden Arrested For Possession Of Turhumanheaducken
November 24, 2005 Onion Sports

GREEN BAY, WI—Football commentator John Madden, famous for his unique vocal stylings and his holiday presentations of unusual meats to winning teams, was taken into custody by Green Bay police after serving Minnesota Vikings players a large "turhumanheaducken" with all the trimmings following their 20-17 victory over the Packers Monday night. "Mr. Madden served the suspect item to the players immediately after the game and, although he referred to it by its full name, Vikings players were apparently too excited or hungry to realize that what they were eagerly devouring was, in fact, a roast turkey stuffed with a rotisserie chicken, a baked duck, and a deep-fried human head," Green Bay Police Chief Craig Van Schndyle told reporters. "Place-kicker Paul Edinger, safety Darren Sharper, and quarterback Brad Johnson are among those being held for medical observation while we analyze the marbled gray matter in the 'oyster' stuffing, the makeup of what we originally thought was cranberry sauce, and the head itself." Police are currently questioning Madden concerning how he obtained the head, whether or not he had help cooking the turhumanheaducken, and the current whereabouts of Monday Night Football statistician "Malibu" Kelly Hayes, who was last seen grocery shopping with Madden Saturday afternoon.

I'm From Barcelona

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmlc0_241-im-from-barcelona-were-from

Should We Copy Europe?

By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
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Some Americans look to European countries such as France, Germany and its Scandinavian neighbors and suggest that we adopt some of their economic policies. I agree, we should look at Europe for the lessons they can teach us. Dr. Daniel Mitchell, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, does just that in his paper titled "Fiscal Policy Lessons from Europe."
Government spending exceeds 50 percent of the GDP in France and Sweden and more than 45 percent in Germany and Italy , compared to U.S. federal, state and local spending of just under 36 percent. Government spending encourages people to rely on handouts rather than individual initiative, and the higher taxes to finance the handouts reduce incentives to work, save and invest. The European results shouldn't surprise anyone. U.S. per capita output in 2003 was $39,700, almost 40 percent higher than the average of $28,700 for European nations.
Over the last decade, the U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as European economies. In 2006, European unemployment averaged 8 percent while the U.S. average was 4.7 percent. What's more, the percentage of Americans without a job for more than 12 months was 12.7 percent while in Europe it was 42.6 percent. Since 1970, 57 million new jobs were created in the U.S., and just 4 million were created in Europe.
Dr. Mitchell cites a comparative study by Timbro, a Swedish think tank, showing that European countries rank with the poorest U.S. states in terms of living standards, roughly equal to Arkansas and Montana and only slightly ahead of West Virginia and Mississippi. Average living space in Europe is just under 1,000 square feet for the average household, while U.S. households enjoy an average of 1,875 square feet, and poor households 1,200 square feet. In terms of income levels, productivity, employment levels and R&D investment, according to Eurochambres (The Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry), it would take Europe about two decades to catch up with us, assuming we didn't grow further.
We don't have to rely on these statistics to make us not want to be like Europeans; just watch where the foot traffic and money flow. Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates live in the U.S. European migration to our country rose by 16 percent during the 1990s. In 1980, the Bureau of Economic Analysis put foreign direct investment in the U.S. at $127 billion. Today, it's more than $1.7 trillion. In 1980, there was $90 billion of foreign portfolio investment -- government and private securities -- in the U.S. Today, there's more than $4.6 trillion, much of it coming from Europeans who find our investment climate more attractive.
What's the European response to its self-made economic malaise? They don't repeal the laws that make for a poor investment climate. Instead, through the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), they attack low-tax jurisdictions. Why? To support its welfare state, European nations must have high taxes, but if Europeans, as private citizens and businessmen, relocate, invest and save in other jurisdictions, it means less money is available to be taxed.
Dr. Mitchell addresses this issue through his research at the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (www.freedomandprosperity.org). The OECD has a blacklist for countries they've identified as "tax havens." The blacklisted countries include Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia (Labuan) and Singapore. Also targeted are Andorra, Brunei, Costa Rica, Dubai, Guatemala, Liberia, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, the Philippines and Uruguay. The blacklisted jurisdictions have strong financial privacy laws and low or zero rates of tax.
The OECD member countries want the so-called tax havens to change their laws to help them identify the earnings of their citizens. Most of all, OECD wants these countries to legislate higher taxes so as to reduce their appeal. A suggestion that we should be more like Europe is the same as one suggesting that we should be poorer.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam
by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna. For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

Canadian writer Mark Steyn thinks “The future belongs to Islam.” The main reason for this, according to him, is demography, with massive population growth in Islamic countries and low birth rates in infidel nations. He makes some assertions I agree with, such as that big government is a national security threat since “it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it.”According to Steyn, “Four years into the ‘war on terror,’ the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: ‘the long war.’ Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower.”Critics would claim that Mr. Steyn isn’t contributing to maintaining Western willpower by suggesting that we’ve already lost. Still, I shouldn’t be too hard on him. The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced his article as “Islamophobic, inflammatory and offensive.” If CAIR dislikes you, you know you must be doing something right.But he makes other assertions I strongly disagree with, such as indicating that the United States should remain in Iraq to spread democracy: “What does it mean when the world’s hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet’s military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists?”Here, Mark Steyn is wrong, which indicates that he doesn’t fully understand Islam. The entire project of “spreading democracy” was a mistake from the very beginning, because democracy cannot be exported to an Islamic country such as Iraq. It is stupidity to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on Muslims while Islamization continues apace in the West.Steyn also does not fully understand the issue of demography. Islamic countries are parasitical. Even the massive population growth is only an advantage as long as Muslims are allowed to export it to infidel lands. Deprived of this opportunity, and of Western aid, the Islamic world would quickly sink into a quagmire of overpopulation. This is a long-term solution, to demonstrate to Muslims the failure of Islam.- - - - - - - - - -According to Srdja Trifkovic, the author of Defeating Jihad, “The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable. (…) There is a direct, empirically verifiable correlation between the percentage of Muslims in a country and the increase of terrorist violence in that country (not to mention the general decline in the quality of life and civilized discourse).”Sooner or later, we have to deal with the implications of this fact. The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should completely stop Muslim immigration. This could be done in indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations known to be engaged in terrorism. All Muslim non-citizens in the West should be removed. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” etc should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult. Muslim citizens should be forced to accept our secular ways or leave if they desire sharia. Much of this can be done in a non-discriminatory way, by simply refusing to allow special pleading to Muslims. Do not allow Islamic public calls to prayer as this is offensive to other faiths. Both boys and girls should take part in all sporting and social activities of the school and the community. The veil should be banned in public institutions, thus contributing to breaking the traditional subjugation of women. Companies and public buildings should not be forced to build prayer rooms for Muslims. Enact laws to eliminate the abuse of family reunification laws. Do not permit major investments by Muslims in Western media or universities.It is conceivable that some infidel nations will copy the Benes Decrees from Czechoslovakia in 1946, when most of the so-called Sudeten Germans had shown themselves to be a dangerous fifth column. The Czech government thus expelled them from its land. As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch has demonstrated, there is a much better case for a Benes Decree for parts of Europe’s Muslim population now than there ever was for the Sudeten Germans.Is that racism and Fascism you say? Muslims themselves in poll after poll state that their loyalty lies with the Islamic Umma, not with the country they live in. “I’m a Muslim living in Britain, I’m not British” is the sentiment. Well, if Muslims themselves state that their citizenship is not worth the paper it is printed upon, why not take their word for it?David Selbourne, author of The Losing Battle with Islam thinks that “Islam’s swift progress is easily explained. For the West — but not China or India — is as politically and ideologically weak as the world of Islam is strong. The West is handicapped by many factors: its over-benign liberalism, the lost moral status of the Christian faith, the vacillations of its judiciaries and the incoherence of their judgments, political and military hesitations over strategy and tactics, poor intelligence (in both senses), and the complicities of the ‘Left’.”Can the West defeat the Islamic threat? Selbourne states ten reasons why not, including the extent of political division in the non-Muslim world about what is afoot, the confusion of Leftist “progressives” about the Islamic advance, anti-Americanism and the vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses, as well as the West’s dependency on the oil and material resources of Arab and Muslim countries.According to him, Islam will not be defeated because “the strengths of the world community of Muslims are being underestimated.” Yet another indication that Islam’s advance will continue lies in “the skilful use being made of the media and of the world wide web in the service both of the ‘electronic jihad’”I agree with him that the cultural weakness of the West is a major disadvantage, and has been one important reason behind the recent resurgence of Jihad. It was never inevitable that we allowed millions of Muslims to settle in our lands. This was the result of Multiculturalism and the weakening of our cultural identity, and in Europe with the deliberate help of Eurabians.The impact of globalization and modern mass media is more complicated and has contradictory results. As one pundit at ex-Muslim Ali Sina’s website put it: “Rituals are important as brainwashing tools to instill discipline and loyalty. Islam’s focus on rituals remind me of the rituals in the military. (...) But what worked well for a medieval war machine is disastrous for Muslims in the modern world. The Arab war machine was supported by the blind obedience, brotherhood, courage, hatred and high birth rates inspired by Islam. (...) But these same qualities are handicaps for Muslims in the age of the microchip. Today they lead to poverty, belligerency, war and defeat.”Islam was perfect for medieval warfare, but gradually lost out to the West, especially after the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, which could never have taken place in Islamic lands because of their lack of freedom and their cult of authority. Ironically, history has now gone full circle. Muslims are still useless in developing anything new, but as a result of migration, modern communications, the presence of Muslims in infidel lands and Arab oil revenues, they can more readily buy or expropriate technology from others. The Iranian Revolution was aided by audio cassettes of speeches by the Ayatollah Khomeini.In the book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Roger Scruton argues that globalization “offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe.” It has created “a true Islamic umma, which identifies itself across borders in terms of a global form of legitimacy, and which attaches itself like a parasite to global institutions and techniques that are the by-products of Western democracy.”The “techniques and infrastructure on which al Qaeda depends are the gifts of the new global institutions. It is Wall Street and Zurich that produced the network of international finance that enables Osama bin Laden to conceal his wealth and to deploy it anywhere in the world. It is Western enterprise with its multinational outreach that produced the technology that bin Laden has exploited so effectively against us. And it is Western science that developed the weapons of mass destruction he would dearly like to obtain. His wealth, too, would be inconceivable without the vast oil revenues brought to Saudi Arabia from the West, there to precipitate the building boom from which his father profited.”While Scruton gives some support to the idea that the Internet and modern communications technology have strengthened Islam, there are some contradictory views worth listening to.Theodore Dalrymple thinks that “Islam has nothing whatever to say to the modern world,” and states that “Personally, I believe that all forms of Islam are very vulnerable in the modern world to rational criticism, which is why the Islamists are so ferocious in trying to suppress such criticism. They have instinctively understood that Islam itself, while strong, is exceedingly brittle, as communism once was. They understand that, at the present time in human history, it is all or nothing. (…) Islamism is a last gasp, not a renaissance, of the religion; but, as anyone who has watched a person die will attest, last gasps can last a surprisingly long time.”Although some of the tensions we are seeing now are caused by Western cultural weakness, part of it is also related to the impersonal forces of technological globalization. Previously, Muslims and non-Muslims could for the most part ignore each other on a daily basis. This is no longer possible, because Muslims see the Western world on TV every day. And if somebody in, say, Denmark says something “insulting” about Muhammad — which in the 19th century would have gone unnoticed in Pakistan or Egypt — thanks to email, mobile phones and satellite TV, millions of Muslims will know about it within hours. However, this can potentially be good for non-Muslims.Contrary to what Selbourne claims, the Internet has in fact emerged as an important, perhaps crucial factor in the Western resistance, as author Bruce Bawer has noticed: “Thank God for the [Inter]Net. I tremble at the thought of all the things that have happened during the past years that I would never have known about without it. The bloggers have in some cases reported about things that the mainstream media has left out, and in other cases pointed out omissions and distortions in the media coverage. Frequently, the mass media has felt compelled by the bloggers to pay attention to stories they would otherwise have ignored. The blogosphere is a fantastic way to spread news. If an important event has been reported in just a single, insignificant local paper, one blogger somewhere will have written about it, other bloggers will have linked to him etc. so that the news story is passed on to blog readers around the world. If Europe is saved, it will be because of the Internet.”Columnist Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post praises the blogosphere and states that: “The responsibility of protecting our nations and societies from internal disintegration has passed to the hands of individuals, often working alone, who refuse to accept the degradation of their societies and so fight with the innovative tools of liberty to protect our way of life.”J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale the Lord of the Rings is a story about the little people, the Hobbits, saving the day in the end. The most powerful enemy within in Tolkien’s story is the wizard Saruman. In the West now, Saruman corresponds to a whole class of people in politics, the media and academia. The Sarumans of the West are met with resistance from thousands of little hobbits in cyberspace, and they don’t like it. Pessimists claim that this era is merely the Wild West period of the Internet, which will gradually become tamed and censored. That is possible, but even if events should turn out that way, the Internet will still have given an important contribution to the Western resistance of our time.Seaborne believes that many people are underestimating the strength of Islam. Perhaps, but some observers, including Mark Steyn and Mr. Seaborne himself, may be overestimating it. They overlook the fact that Islam has many weaknesses, too. Don’t underestimate your enemy. Muslims should be credited for making clever use of our weaknesses, but this “we’re all doomed and have already lost” theme is overblown.We should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world. I’m not saying that containment is all that we will ever need to do, but it is the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear weapons technology, the darkest side of globalization, will trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to avoid this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of such technology.We should restrain their ability to hurt us physically. We can’t prevent it completely, but we should limit it as much as possible. Muslims try to wear us down through terrorism. They should be worn down through mockery and criticism. We should also make clear that for every Islamic terror attack we will increase these efforts, which Muslims fear more than our weapons. It’s the new balance of terror.Dr Koenraad Elst, one of Belgium’s best orientalists, thinks “Islam is in decline, despite its impressive demographic and military surge” – which according to Dr Elst is merely a “last upheaval.” He acknowledges, however, that this decline can take some time (at least in terms of the individual human life span) and that it is possible that Islam will succeed in becoming the majority religion in Europe before collapsing.Dalrymple is probably correct when he says that Islam is an “all or nothing” religion which cannot be secularized. The future may not belong to Islam, as Mark Steyn suggests. It is conceivable that Islam in some generations will cease to be a global force of any significance, but in the meantime it will be a constant source of danger to its neighbors, from Europe through India to Southeast Asia. The good news is that Islam may not be able to achieve the world dominance it desires. The bad news is that it may be able to achieve a world war. We can only cage it as much as possible and try to prevent this from happening.

Baron Bodissey 11/21/2006 03:12:00 PM

Oregonian set to break into record books this morning with giant rubber band ball

Now here’s a guy with some time on his hands. Eugene resident Steve Milton is bound for the record books this morning. His creation -- a mammoth rubber band ball -- will be weighed in Chicago by the record-keepers at Guinness World Records. According to Milton’s myspace page, the ball weighs 4,600 pounds and has a circumference of a whopping 19 feet. You’re probably wondering just how many rubber bands it takes to muscle into the record books. Try 176,000. His ball is so big, he’s even landed a sponsor.

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris criticizes the ethical propositions that lead Chomsky to direct his rhetoric towards the United States foreign policy (as opposed to the tenants of radical Islam):

Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, cold not be more distinct... For [Chomsky], intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

The Game

This year, the University of Michigan sent an e-mail to fans traveling to Columbus. It reads like a State Department warning to tourists visiting a hostile Third World country. Some of the advice:

- Try carpooling to the game; if possible, drive a car with non-Michigan license plates.
- Keep your Michigan gear to a minimum, or wait until you are inside the stadium to display it.
- Stay with a group.
- Stay low-key; don't draw unnecessary attention to yourself.
- If verbally harassed by opposing fans, don't take the bait.
- Avoid High Street in Columbus.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods-

Milton Friedman, R.I.P.
By Michelle Malkin · November 16, 2006 01:57 PM

One of America's greatest intellectual heroes of freedom passed away last night.
Here's the Friedman Foundation's statement:

Today, upon news of the death of Nobel Laureate economist Dr. Milton Friedman, Gordon St. Angelo, president and CEO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, offered the following statement:
America has lost a true visionary and advocate for human freedom. And I have lost a great friend.
Milton’s passion for freedom and liberty has influenced more lives than he ever could possibly know. His writings and ideas have transformed the minds of U.S. Presidents, world leaders, entrepreneurs and freshmen economic majors alike. The loss of his passion, incisive mind and dedication to freedom are all national treasures that we mourn for today.
Milton never chose to slow down; even at 94 he kept fighting to bring educational equality to all of America’s children. And it’s this vision, this drive for educational liberty that the Friedman Foundation will continue to bring to families throughout America.
His impact on my life over the last 33 years was significant. His impact on the world was momentous. Without a doubt, few people have done more to advance civil and economic liberties throughout the world during their lifetime than Dr. Milton Friedman.

Here's President Bush's 2002 tribute on Friedman's 90th birthday.
Here's Friedman's tribute to Ronald Reagan.
Allah has video of Friedman from the "Open Mind" program.
The "Free to Choose" website has a fabulous archive of Friedman's video appearances--including his famous gigs on the Dinah Shore and Phil Donahue shows.
Mary Katharine has another of my favorite Milton Friedman vids--taking off from Leonard Read's classic "I, Pencil" essay.
Friedman's work on educational choice had the most profound impact on me. Consider making a donation to the Friedman Foundation, which continues to carry the torch for free-market alternatives to the government school monopoly, here.

Javier Bardem cast as Anton Chigurh

"Unreliable Narrator"

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE
by Ambrose Bierce
THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION, 1988

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking downinto the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled hisneck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon theties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for himand his executioners--two private soldiers of the Federal army,directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputysheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. Asentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in theposition known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straightacross the chest--a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these twomen to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; theymerely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, waslost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. Theother bank of the stream was open ground--a gentle slope topped witha stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannoncommanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the bridge andfort were the spectators--a single company of infantry in line, at"parade rest," the butts of their rifles on the ground, the barrelsinclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the handscrossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line,the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon hisright. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not aman moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless.The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statuesto adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent,observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is adignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formalmanifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. Inthe code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms ofdeference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge fromhis habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good--astraight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, darkhair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collarof his well fitting frock coat. He wore a moustache and pointedbeard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had akindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whoseneck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. Theliberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds ofpersons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers steppedaside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing.The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himselfimmediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing onthe two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-tiesof the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but notquite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by theweight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At asignal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank wouldtilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangementcommended itself to his judgement as simple and effective. His facehad not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his"unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling waterof the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancingdriftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down thecurrent. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife andchildren. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the broodingmists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, thesoldiers, the piece of drift--all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thoughtof his dear ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke ofa blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality.He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by--it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatienceand--he knew not why--apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greaterinfrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurthis ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What heheard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I couldfree my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and springinto the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. Myhome, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and littleones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, wereflashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highlyrespected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slaveowners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist andardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperiousnature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him fromtaking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under theinglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, thelarger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. Thatopportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him toperform in the aid of the South, no adventure to perilous for him toundertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was atheart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic benchnear the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happyto serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerlyfor news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and aregetting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creekbridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. Thecommandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaringthat any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges,tunnels, or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Farquhar asked.
"About thirty miles."
"Is there no force on this side of the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a singlesentinel at this end of the bridge."
"Suppose a man--a civilian and student of hanging--should elude thepicket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel," said Farquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"
The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It isnow dry and would burn like tinder."
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. Hethanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. Anhour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, goingnorthward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federalscout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lostconsciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened--ages later, it seemed to him--by the pain of a sharppressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen,poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through everyfiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along welldefined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapidperiodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating himto an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious ofnothing but a feeling of fullness--of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his naturewas already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud,of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like avast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightfulroaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he hadfallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the waterfrom his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!--the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and sawabove him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was amere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that hewas rising toward the surface--knew it with reluctance, for he was nowvery comfortable. "To be hanged and drowned," he thought, "that isnot so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot;that is not fair."
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wristapprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave thestruggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of ajuggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!--whatmagnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor!Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, thehands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched themwith a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon thenoose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside,its undulations resembling those of a water snake. "Put it back, putit back!" He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for theundoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he hadyet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, hisheart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying toforce itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenchedwith an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heedto the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downwardstrokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; hiseyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively,and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a greatdraught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were,indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awfuldisturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them thatthey made record of things never before perceived. He felt theripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck.He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individualtrees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--he saw the veryinsects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted theprismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass.The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream,the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the waterspiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these madeaudible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard therush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment thevisible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point,and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, thecaptain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They werein silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated,pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire;the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible,their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the watersmartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face withspray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels withhis rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from themuzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridgegazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed thatit was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes werekeenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this onehad missed.
A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he wasagain looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The soundof a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behindhim and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears.Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dreadsignificance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; thelieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning's work. How coldly and pitilessly--with what an even, calm intonation, presaging,and enforcing tranquility in the men--with what accurately measured interval fell those cruel words:
"Company! . . . Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready!. . .Aim! . . . Fire!"
Farquhar dived--dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in hisears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dull thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits ofmetal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some ofthem touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuingtheir descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it wasuncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had beena long time under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream--nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn fromthe barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. Thetwo sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his armsand legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning:
"The officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error asecond time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. Hehas probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me,I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud,rushing sound, DIMINUENDO, which seemed to travel back through the airto the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river toits deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken an hand in thegame. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, andin an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forestbeyond.
"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they willuse a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smokewill apprise me--the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round--spinning like a top.The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men, all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented bytheir colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color--that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with avelocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank ofthe stream--the southern bank--and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, theabrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himselfin handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies,emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did notresemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noteda definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of theirblooms. A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of AEolian harps.He had not wish to perfect his escape--he was content to remain inthat enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and a rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above hishead roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him arandom farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank,and plunged into the forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. Theforest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, noteven a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild aregion. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famished. The thought of hiswife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led himin what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide andstraight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fieldsbordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of adog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formeda straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point,like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked upthrough this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars lookingunfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure theywere arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises,among which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers inan unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope hadbruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them.His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrustingit forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly theturf had carpeted the untraveled avenue--he could no longer feel theroadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking,for now he sees another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from adelirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He musthave traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passesup the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda tomeet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smileof ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, howbeautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he isabout to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck;a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon--then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gentlyfrom side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Mark Steyn: U.S. must prove it’s a staying power.
Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn’t have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it’s a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It’s difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee’s Senate seat. The president’s firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.
Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to “accept defeat,” as it did in Vietnam. Didn’t work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.
What does it mean when the world’s hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet’s military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it “redeployment” or “exit strategy” or “peace with honor” but, by the time it’s announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it’s announced on “Good Morning Pyongyang” and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.
For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn’t about Iraq; it’s about America, and American will.

Class Warrior Beaten by Lower Class

Breaking news: Cyclist in Well-Publicized Scrape with TriMet Awarded $601
BY ALICE JOY ajoy at wweek.com

[November 8th, 2006]

In a case closely watched by Portland's biking community, a cyclist beaten up by a TriMet passenger was awarded $601 by an arbitrator Thursday.
Cyclist Randy Albright had sought about 80 times that amount—about $48,000—in pain-and-suffering damages from TriMet. He contended the agency was negligent because one of its bus drivers encouraged a passenger to beat up Albright and then let the passenger back on the bus.
The attack left Albright with a split lip requiring an emergency-room visit.
But arbitrator Gregory K. Zeuthen found that both TriMet and Albright were at fault for the incident and Albright's injuries.
The cyclist was punched by the unidentified passenger while Albright was riding his bike Jan. 22, 2004, on the Hawthorne Bridge.
Albright had been biking to work when, according to his testimony, he was nearly sideswiped by the bus driven by Harold R. Cooper. (The driver died last year.)
Albright caught up with the bus and pulled in front of it, demanding an apology.
The assailant exited the bus and proceeded to punch Albright repeatedly. He then reentered the bus. According to several witnesses, Cooper cheered on the action.
Zeuthen found that, although Cooper may not have known that the assailant would act violently towards Albright, the driver's action in letting the man get back on the bus after the attack, and not reporting the incident until later, was negligent.

Directory > Words > Idioms
egg in your beer
A bonus, something for nothing, as in What do you want--egg in your beer? This expression dates from about 1940 and became widespread during World War II. The origin is unknown, since adding egg to beer does not improve the taste.

Willeford

A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided
The first nine pages

In hospital language a patient does not urinate, micturate, pee, piss, or take a leak. He voids. Or, as in my case, he is unable to void.
Hospital jargon is mid-Victorian. My hemorrhoids were not chopped out, hacked away, or operated upon. Instead, my asshole was dilated and debrided. There is no sex talk in a hospital either. Sex organs, male and female, when they are mentioned at all, are discussed formally, as elimination tools; nor is there, apparently, any distinction made between toilets for men and women. Whoever gets inside first has possession, and then there are no locks on the doors. If the doors were labeled, one suspects they would be called "Necessary Rooms," the euphemism for the toilets of our Gilded Age.
Several years ago, before I ever thought of entering a hospital, a friend told me that a nurse's aide would give a man a slow handjob for five bucks. Unsurprised at the time, I filed the information away, thinking I might be able to use it in a novel some day. I have been sorry since that I failed to press my friend for details. On the disinterested outside, I had no reason to disbelieve him. But on the inside, watching these harried, grimly smiling nurse's aides - probably the lowest I.Q. occupational group of employees in the nation - rushing about inefficiently, but earning every cent of their $2.40 an hour, I wondered vaguely how my friend had gone about getting his slow handjob. He would have had to draw them a picture. However, discounting the denseness of the nurse's aides' understanding, the lack of privacy, the hospital stench and the permeating reek of indignant death - these factors in combination - drove all thoughts of and about sex from my mind during the two weeks of my stay.
My friend, I believe, now, lied to me. On the morning they brought the old man into the four-bed ward to die, I was trying to void, straining slightly at irregular intervals, right hand holding my limp cock, my left holding the clammy metal "duck" beneath a covering sheet. And at ten a.m., when they brought the old man in to die, I had been engaged in this heroic project for about twelve hours. Three packs of cigarettes, six minutes for each three-cent cigarette, had gone up in smoke, and the pressure on my bladder was intolerable. Any moment I expected the distended membrane to burst inside me like a wickedly pricked balloon which, in turn, would bloat me terribly with uremic poisoning, sudden death, and a happy release at last from suffering. Such was my fervent hope. A filled bladder can, or at least has been known to, burst after only eight swollen hours. At the twelve-hour mark, I knew that I was literally tolerating the intolerable.
Placed in an intolerable situation a man amplifies every advantage, no matter how slight, searching his mind for any ideas that he can undredge to persuade himself that his predicament could be worse. For example, I had the four-bed ward to myself, and because the other three beds had been empty all night I had been able to whimper and sob noisily, and, for a lovely half-hour, shed some sincere tears over my plight without disturbing anyone or being sneered at by some bedridden stoical sonofabitch whose pain might conceivably be worse than my own. I did not believe then, nor do I now, that there could possibly be any pain worse than mine was at the time, except, perhaps, for another patient awaking immediately after a similar operation.
Some twenty hours before they brought the old man into the ward to die, my internal and external hemorrhoids had been lopped off. Unconscious during the operation, I had felt nothing. Despite the horrible stories told me by other victims of hemorrhoid amputation, the shot preceding the anesthetic had lulled me into the optimistic belief that I could put up with a little post-operative pain for a few minutes. What the hell? There were pain-killers like morphine they could give a man; right? And were there not drugs, new and wonderful, around nowadays I had never heard of that could do practically anything?
I was wrong and there were none. I woke up screaming.
My screams, in fact, awakened me. I was supine on a four-wheeled operating table in the Recovery Room ($15.00 extra rent on my hospital bill for the hour I spent in this pain-wracked room); the burning dingle between my buttocks was packed with gauze and taped over with adhesive, and there was a long length of rubber hose dangling from my rectum, with more tape wrapped about it at the base to hold it in place. The reason for so much exterior hose (about fourteen inches), I discovered two days later, was for my surgeon's grip: he wrapped the limber hose around his right hand and jerked it out!
The pain caused by this single cruelly calculated action was so excruciating that, if I had known how bad it would be in advance, I would never have had the operation. I also believe now, some two months later, that I would rather be dead, or still have the fourteen inches of hose dangling from my ass, instead of having it jerked out like that again. No choice could be simpler. Any person who dismisses "excruciating" as an exaggeration is either short on imagination or has well below the average of what sociologists call native American intelligence.
I will make this statement at once and at least once: if a man is past thirty, it is not worth his while to have a hemorrhoidectomy. I say this flatly and categorically because there are not, simply, enough good years remaining to any man past thirty to make the pain of this operation worth it. Moreover, any young man under thirty, especially young men who have relatively dim futures anyway, should realistically and judiciously examine his post-operative prospects before submitting his ass to the proctologist's knife.
"Good God!" I thought, between caterwauling screams, "Why won't someone help me? "
Spasmodically, and of its own volition, my violated, outraged anus clamped down again and again on this fucking hose, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do to prevent it. Wounded quickly, blood-raw from the razor-edged scalpel, each succeeding convulsive grip was worse than the last, until, between shuddering screams I reverted to the pleading baby-talk of a tortured, terrified child.
"Nursie! Nursie!" I cried. "Please help me! "
An old soldier, fifty years old, scarred from old war wounds, and here I was, reduced by the extremity of pain to using a word like "Nursie! " for God's sake. In front of a woman who did not care, I abased and humiliated myself. But I did not care at the time. Nor do I believe now, perspiring as I remember, that I could have done otherwise, even if I had known then, as I know now, that I was wasting my time. My expensive surgeon, who might have helped me, was either operating on some other poor bastard or having coffee and donuts in the Resident's Lounge.
Two other post-operative patients shared the small Recovery Room with me. They were not as persistent or as insistent as I was in their demands for help but they were by no means suffering in silence. One of them groaned gruffly at irregular intervals, and the other, a Cuban or Puerto Rican, reiterated the Spanish equivalent of our deep-throated Anglo-Saxon "Oh's!" - "Aie!" - "Aie! " - "Aie! " My Protestant bawl of pain, beginning with a long rattling "Ohhhhh" brought up from the diaphragm, is more satisfying than the quick-lipped two syllabled "Aie!" The latter, a broad "a" followed by the "ie" as a diphthong, sounds like one syllable to the uninitiated, but such is not the case. No matter how great the Latin's pain, there is always a definite glottal segue from the "Ahh" to "ee." Later on in the night I tried a few "Aie's" myself, but they sounded insincere, probably because the exclamation is made with the mouth and the lips instead of coming from the heart. I soon returned to the equally useless, but somehow richer, Anglo-Saxon "Ohhh!"
When the Recovery Room nurse finally got around to paying some attention to me she told me to shut up because I was disturbing the other patients. Keeping my eyes squeezed tight against the overhead light and the blinding pain, I rolled my head back and forth on the hard pillow. Perhaps she was busy doing things to and for the other patients, but she did nothing for me. A few minutes later she telephoned someone, telling whoever it was that she was snowed under in the Recovery Room and needed some assistance. Not long thereafter someone, perhaps the same nurse, shot a needle into my right tricep.
Almost immediately I got some relief.
The spasms were just as bad as before but they were now spaced about a minute apart, and the breather was long enough for me to quit hollering and to brace myself for the next involuntary clamp-down on the hose. That torturing clutch, however, when it came, was still bad enough to goose a yell out of me. But I no longer begged and wept for help.
For the rest of the day and well into the night the intervals between convulsive embraces lengthened. By the following morning the time- span between them was so long (a half-hour or more), and such an unhappy surprise when they came, that I would let out an astonished yelp each time, like a sleeping dog inadvertently stomped on in the dark.
Back in my ward and bed once more, I asked a candystriper to elevate my bed a little and to bring me a duck. To my surprise I could not void, but the desire was so great I kept the duck in the bed with me, deciding to try again in a few minutes. I was unaware of the long ordeal ahead.
Lunch arrived ("Low Residue Diet: No Pepper"). There was a bowl of vegetable soup, a roll with a pat of margarine, a small dish of applesauce, a broiled hamburger patty, and a small dish of strained spinach. One mouthful of the applesauce and I was finished. Nothing was wrong with the food, but I had no desire to eat. The reason for my loss of appetite was, of course, the knowledge that anything I ate would turn to excrement, and there was a day of reckoning ahead when I would have to pay my dues for every mouthful of food in the form of a scalding bowel movement. I lost a pound a day for fourteen days. At two p.m. an intern and a nurse came in and set up the rack to give me another pint of blood and a fifth of intravenous glucose and water. My bed movements were limited and I had to lie quietly on my right side for the three hours it took for all of this liquid to drip, a drop at a time, into my veins. This was my third pint of blood (Type 0+, $35.00 per pint). I had had two pints before the operation and was to get two more after this third pint in the days to follow.
Also, this was my second Miami hospital in four days' time. And, because it has some bearing on this narrative, I will explain the reason for the switch from a secular hospital to a Roman Catholic hospital.
I entered the secular hospital on a late Sunday afternoon, ate a huge dinner and, even though I was scheduled for the hemorrhoidectomy on Monday afternoon, slept well that night. The next morning, immediately after breakfast, I was wheelchaired to the X-Ray lab for a barium enema and X-Rays. I suspected that something was wrong with this procedure at the time. Five years before I had had a barium enema and X-Rays, and had not been allowed to eat the evening before or have breakfast in the morning. I had also been given a prescription for some chalky tasting castor oil to take as well. However, I didn't question the young girl who wheeled me out of this room; she wouldn't have known anything about it anyway. I had been losing blood steadily for more than a month. And
I was so weak and listless when I entered the hospital, finally, after weeks of importuning by my wife to "have the operation and get it over with, for Christ's sake," I could hardly think at all.
The barium enema alone is a nasty bit of business. One must somehow retain all this white gooey stuff in the lower intestine until the fluoroscoping is finished and X-Ray plates are snapped. I managed, barely, and then, weak and trembling, I was led down the hall by a Cuban lab technician to a toilet where I could, at last, squirt out the white fluid. I did, and promptly passed out, sagging dreamlike to the cold concrete floor. The technician found me on the floor, broke an ammonia capsule ($.30 on my hospital bill) under my nose to bring me around, and took me back to the X-Ray room. He told me to lie down on the freezing metal table again, which I did, thinking he meant for me to rest there for a few minutes before being wheeled back to my room. But I observed him as he mixed up another batch of white powder and water and realized, or suspected, that this might be for me.
"That isn't for me, is it?" I asked, smiling weakly.
He nodded. "The X-Rays didn't come out. We've got to take them again."

Civilization Watch first appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC
By Orson Scott Card
October 29, 2006

The Only Issue This Election Day
There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.
And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.
If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.
Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.
But at least there will be a chance.
I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.
But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.
To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- the party I joined back in the 1970s -- is dead. Of suicide.
The "War on Terror"
I recently read an opinion piece in which the author ridiculed the very concept of a "war on terror," saying that it makes as much sense as if, after Pearl Harbor, FDR had declared a "war on aviation."
Without belaboring the obvious shortcomings of the analogy, I will agree with the central premise. The name "war on terror" clearly conceals the fact that we are really at war with specific groups and specific nations; we can no more make war on a methodology than we can make war on nitrogen.
However, there are several excellent reasons why "War on Terror" is the only possible name for this war.
1. This is not a war that can be named for any particular nation or region. To call it "The Iraq War" or the "Afghanistan War" would lead to the horrible mistake of thinking that victory would consist of toppling certain governments and then going home.
In fact, it is precisely the name "War in Iraq" that is leading to the deep misconceptions that drive the Democratic position on the war. If this were in fact a war on Iraq, then in one sense we won precisely when President Bush declared victory right after we occupied Baghdad. And in another sense, we might not see victory for another five years, or even a decade -- a decade in which Americans will be dying alongside Iraqis. For a "War in Iraq" to linger this way is almost too painful to contemplate.
But we are not waging a "War in Iraq." We are waging a world war, in which the campaigns to topple the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan were brilliantly successful, and the current "lukewarm" war demands great patience and determination from the American people as we ready ourselves for the next phase.
2. We cannot name this war for our actual enemies, either, because there is no way to name them accurately without including some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."
It is our enemies who want to identify this as a war between Islam and the West. If we allow this to happen, we run the risk of achieving the worst of all possible outcomes: The unification of one or both of the great factions of worldwide Islam under a single banner.
President Bush and his administration have shown their grasp of our present danger by stoutly resisting all attempts to rename this war. We call it a "War on Terror" because that allows us to cast it, not as a war against the Muslim people, with all their frustrations and hopes, but a war in which most Muslims are not our enemies at all.
That can be galling for many Americans. When, after the fall of the towers on 9/11, Palestinians and others poured into the streets, rejoicing, it was tempting to say, A plague on all of them!
But it is precisely those people -- the common people of the Muslim world, most of whom hate us (or claim to hate us, when asked by pollsters in police states) -- whom we must treat as if they were not our enemies. They are the ones we must win over for us to have any hope of victory without a bloodbath poured out on most of the nations of the world.
Nation Building
Another charge against the Bush administration's conduct of the war is that they are engaged in the hopeless task of "nation-building." And this is true -- except for the word "hopeless."
But what is the alternative? I've heard several, each more disastrous and impossible and even shameful than the one before.
In the New Testament, Jesus once used the analogy of a person who was possessed by a devil. When you cast out the devil, don't you leave an empty house, swept clean, to which seven devils will now come to live, making things worse than ever?
No matter which miserable dictatorship we moved against after the Taliban -- and we had no choice but to keep moving on if we were to eradicate the grave danger we faced (and face) -- we would have faced the same problem in Syria or Iraq or Sudan that we had in Afghanistan: We had to establish order in a nation that had never actually become a nation.
The boundaries on the ground in the Middle East were not formed in the traditional way -- by compromise or war. Instead, European powers drew lines that pleased their fancy. The lines did not create the hatreds that plague the region, but they guaranteed that traditional enemies would have to face each other within these boundaries.
It is in part because of the resulting chaos and oppression that groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and the Shiite fundamentalists of Iran have been given an opportunity to offer the solution of returning to the core values of Islam -- as defined, of course, to their private advantage.
If we topple one government and then walk away, the result in any Middle Eastern nation would be civil war, and the probable winner would be the well-funded international terrorist groups that do not shrink from wholesale murder in pursuing their cause.
Just as Kerensky's attempt at a liberal government in revolutionary Russia was almost instantly snuffed out by Lenin's Bolshevik thugs in 1917, so also would any attempt at unified democratic government in Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Afghanistan be quickly converted into Islamo-fascism of one stripe or another.
And if that happened, Islamicist puritanism would be seen in every nation as the "wave of the future." Just as, when Nazi Germany was in the ascendant, the nations of southeastern Europe quickly made their accommodation with Hitler, since the alternative was to be swept away like Poland, France, or Yugoslavia, so also would nominally democratic nations adopt the trappings of Islamicism -- if they weren't already toppled by puritan revolutions from within.
Democracy -- the Other Hope
Wherever Islamicism has been tried, the result has been identical to Communism's miserable track record. The people are oppressed; the worst sort of vigilantes and thugs terrorize the population; the new power elite, regardless of their supposed piety and dedication to a holy cause, is quickly corrupted and comes to love the wealth and privileges of power.
When there is no hope of deliverance, the people have no choice but to bow under the tyrant's lash, pretending to be true believers while yearning for relief. In Russia it came ... after more than seventy years. China and Cuba are still waiting -- but then, they started later.
So it would be in the Muslim world -- if Islamicism were ever able to come to seem inevitable and irresistible.
You know: If America withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and exposed everyone who had cooperated with us to reprisals.
As happened in South Vietnam. The negotiated peace was more or less holding after American withdrawal. But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government. No more armaments. No more budget.
In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies, while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers. The message was clear: Those who rely on America are fools. We didn't even have the decency to arrange for the evacuation of the people who had trusted us and risked the most in supporting what they thought was our mutual cause.
We did it again, this time in the Muslim world, in 1991, when Bush Senior encouraged a revolt against Saddam. He meant for the senior military officers to get rid of him in a coup; instead, the common people in the Shiite south rose up against Saddam.
Bush Senior did nothing as Saddam moved in and slaughtered them. The tragedy is that all it would have taken is a show of force on our part in support of the rebels, and Saddam's officers would have toppled him. Only when it became clear that we would do nothing did it become impossible for any high-ranking officials to take action. For the price of the relatively easy military action that would have made Saddam turn his troops around and leave the Shiite south, we could have gotten rid of him then -- and had grateful friends, perhaps, in the Shiite south.
That is part of our track record: Two times we persuaded people to commit themselves to action against oppressive enemies, only to abandon them. Do you think that would-be rebels in Iran and Syria and North Korea don't remember those lessons?
Fortunately, there are other lessons as well: West Germany and Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, where liberated nations were protected. In the first two, we took on the task of nation building and transformed both political cultures into democracies. In the latter two, we tolerated strongman dictatorships for many years, but eventually we made it clear that it was time for democracy, and under our protective umbrella, the governments were transformed and oppression ended.
So ... which America is operating now in the Muslim world?
In Iraq and Afghanistan -- but especially Iraq -- President Bush is behaving according to America's best and most honorable tradition. We did not come to destroy, we came to liberate and rescue, he says -- by word and deed. We bring freedom and opportunity. Our money will help rebuild your devastated (or never built-up) economies; our expertise will help train your most talented people to be ready for prosperity and self-government; and our military will keep enemies from overwhelming you as you reinvent yourselves.
Instead of leaving an empty house, swept clean but unprotected, waiting for the devils of Islamic puritanism to come take over, President Bush has sworn that America will bring democracy, and that American soldiers will do their best to protect the decent, ordinary people until they are able to protect themselves.
The Competing Stories
Here's the story the Islamic puritans are telling: The West is full of terrible evils -- atheism, sexual filth of all kinds -- in defiance of God's will. So seductive are the wiles of Shaitan that many Muslims aspire to dress, act, and live like westerners. Only by turning to full enforcement of ancient Muslim law can Islam purify itself and resist the blandishments of the west. It's evil on one side, God on the other.
If all we had to answer them was Hollywood movies, politically correct anti-religious dogmas, and the other trappings of a West that is almost as decadent as the Islamicists claim, then we would only prove their point.
Instead, President Bush has offered something quite different. We don't want to turn you into mini-Americas, he says. We offer you, instead, democracy, in which you can choose for yourselves what parts of western culture to adopt. You will govern yourselves. It isn't a choice between wickedness and righteousness, it's a choice between freedom and oppression.
In other words, through nation-building, through the promise of democracy, Bush has created a rallying point with far stronger resonance than anything the Islamic puritans have to offer.
What is their program, after all? We'll take your sons and get them to blow themselves up in order to murder westerners! Forget the rhetoric -- Muslim parents are human beings, and there is nothing more devastating than to lose a child. The only consolation is when it seems to be in a noble cause. But because of President Bush's promise of democracy, the Muslim puritan cause does not seem noble to more and more Muslims.
Even if they live in countries (or neighborhoods) where they dare not speak up -- yet -- they do not want any of their children to die just so that the rest of them can live and suffer in slavery to a privileged, selfish class of elitist tyrants.
President Bush's story offers the common people hope of living decent lives and seeing their children live to adulthood, to grow old surrounded by grandchildren.
The Al-Qaeda, Ayatollah story promises them dead children and the lash.
There are, of course, fanatics who will embrace Islamic terrorism because they choose to blind themselves to the truth and embrace the noble-seeming lies of the tyrants. Al-Qaeda does not lack for recruits.
But it also does not lack for people who fear and hate them. There are few pro-Al-Qaeda demonstrations on the Arab street. The people remember the images of liberated Iraqis tearing down the images of Saddam. And they know -- because they have relatives and friends, they hear from merchants and travelers -- that in most of Iraq, there is freedom and prosperity like never before.
They're getting the story, at the level of gossip and personal anecdote, that the anti-American media -- you know, Al-Jazirah and the New York Times -- never report: The Americans really mean to give the Iraqis self-government.
You hear about the power outages in Iraq and it's always somehow Bush's fault. What nobody points out is that these outages come in places where Saddam barely offered electricity at all. The reason the new power systems can't cope is because the newly prosperous Iraqi people are buying -- and plugging in -- vast quantities of electrical appliances they could never afford to buy before! When a town that used to have two dozen refrigerators and washing machines now has two thousand of each, the old power supply is never going to do the job.
"Americans Won't Stay"
How do the Islamicist tyrants answer the obvious success and growing appeal of Bush's democracy program?
They kill people, of course.
But they also tell the story, over and over: "America will never stick it out. We'll keep killing Americans till they give up and go away, and then you will answer to us!"
Until they believe that the Islamofascists are never coming into power, many people will remain afraid to commit themselves to democracy.
Under those circumstances, the remarkable thing is how courageously the Shiites of the south have embraced democracy, and how many of them are beginning to trust that we mean what they say.
But against Bush's promises and the actions of our brave and decent soldiers, the tyrants can set the behavior of Bush's political opponents, who are doing their best to promote the propaganda of the tyrants. Every Congressman who says "We must set a timetable for departure" is providing ammunition to the tyrants in their campaign of terror.
Because even more than they fear terrorist bombs, the pro-democracy forces within Iraq and Afghanistan fear American withdrawal. Every speech threatening withdrawal is a bomb going off in Baghdad, killing, not people, but the will to resist the tyrants.
Bin Laden predicted it. The Democratic Party in America is following his script exactly.
Can We Win?
That is certainly not what most who call for withdrawal intend. They see Americans dying and they have no hope of victory. The Iraq War (as they call it) is costing lives and shows no sign of ending. Meanwhile, Iran is getting nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them, Syria and Iran are sponsoring continuing and escalating attacks on Israel -- how can we possibly "win" a war that threatens constantly to widen? Let's cut our losses, retire to our shores, and ...
And will you please stop and think for a moment?
There is no withdrawal to our shores. American prosperity requires free trade throughout most of the world. Free trade has depended for decades on American might. If we withdraw now, we announce to the world that if you just kill enough Americans, the big boys will go home and let you do whatever you want.
Every American in the world then becomes a target. And, because we have announced that we will do nothing to protect them, we will soon be trading only with nations that have enough strength to protect their own shores and borders.
Only ... what nations are those? Not Taiwan. If they saw us abandon Iraq, what conclusion could they reach except this one: They'd better accommodate with China now, when they can still get decent terms, than wait for America to walk away from them the way we walked away from Vietnam and Iraq.
We cannot win by going home. In a short time, "home" would become a very different place, as our own prosperity and safety steadily diminished. Isolationism is a dead end. If we lose our will to protect the things that support our own prosperity, then what can we expect but the end of that prosperity -- and of any vestige of safety, as well?
The frustrating thing is that if people would just look, honestly, at the readily available data from the Muslim world, they would realize that we are winning and that the course President Bush is pursuing is, in fact, the wisest one.
Mistakes
Critics of Bush love to cite the many "mistakes" his administration has made. Most of these "mistakes" are arguable -- are they mistakes at all? -- and when you sum up the others, with any kind of rational understanding of military history, the only possible conclusion is that this is the best-run war in history, with the fewest mistakes. And most of the mistakes we've made are the kind that become clear to morning-after quarterbacks but were difficult to avoid in the fog of war.
Worse yet, Bush's opponents invariably depict these mistakes as being the result of deliberately chosen policies -- a ludicrous charge, but one that is taken seriously by an astonishing number of people who should know better. The game, you see, is blame. It's not enough to say, Bush made a mistake. You have to say, Bush deliberately did it wrong for evil purposes and he must be punished.
But let's accept the fairy tale that this war has been badly run. That still does not change the fact that on all of the biggest points, Bush has made exactly the right choice -- and he has been the only one who has even seen the need to make those choices!
Take North Korea, for instance. Bush recognized instantly that North Korea, with China as its sponsor and protector, is simply beyond the reach of American power at this time. This will not always be true, but his administration is pursuing a careful, quiet, firm policy of diplomatic pressure on China to do what must be done to curb North Korean insanity.
What about Iran? The idea of a ground war in Iran -- especially when we're still fighting in Iraq -- seems impossible.
But it is also probably unnecessary. Because Iran's present government is not just hated, it is also losing its grip on power.
Not on the trappings of power -- they control the "elections" to such a point that nobody can be nominated without the approval of the ayatollahs.
But government power -- even in democracies -- depends absolutely on the will of the people to obey. And when you rule by tyranny and oppression, the obedience of the people comes from the credibility of the threat of violence from the government.
The obvious examples are Red Square in Moscow and Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In Moscow, when Yeltsin and the pro-democracy demonstrators defied the tanks, the Russian Army did not open fire. Why not? Either they refused to obey the order to shoot, or the order was not given -- but if it was not given, it was almost certainly because the tyrants knew that it would not be obeyed.
In other words, the government had lost the ability to inflict deadly force on its own population.
In Tiananmen Square, however, the government gave the order and the troops did fire. As a result, the tyranny continued -- and continues to this day.
Tyrannies only continue in power when they can give the order to kill their own people and be obeyed.
In Iran, there have been several incidents in the past months and years where troops refused to fire on demonstrators. This is huge news (virtually unreported in the West, of course), because of what it means: The ayatollahs' days are numbered.
If President Bush invaded Iran on the ground, bombing Iranian cities and killing Iranian soldiers, he would accomplish only what Hitler did by invading Russia -- uniting an oppressed people in support of a hated tyrant.
But, as was pointed out in a pair of excellent analytical pieces in the most recent Commentary magazine, we don't have to do anything of the kind.
Oil Is Our Weapon, Too
Iran's ace-in-the-hole is not its nuclear weapon -- in their rational moments, even the most rabid of the ayatollahs must understand that if they ever used (or allowed someone else to use) a nuclear weapon, we would destroy them, period. That nuke is meant only as a deterrent -- it can't be used any other way -- and while there's a remote chance that Iran might allow their nukes to be put into the hands of some terrorist group, it would have to be a group they control absolutely. In other words, it would not be Al-Qaeda. (Though Hezbollah would be bad enough.)
The real threat from Iran is their ability to shut down the Persian Gulf and cut off the world's supply of oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf nations.
That would not really bother the United States -- gas prices would shoot up on the open market, of course, but we can get by on oil provided by non-Gulf sources.
Not so for the rest of the world, though. And Iran is poised, with small boats and thousands of missiles, to shut down all oil production and transportation in the Persian Gulf.
What few seem to realize (according to the article in Commentary) is that Iran is far more dependent on oil revenues than we are on getting their oil. When President Bush determines that he has given the Iranians ample chance to demonstrate to the few rational statesmen left in Europe that there is no possibility of meaningful negotiations with the tyrants of Tehran, his obvious course of action is to shut down Iranian power in the gulf and seize their oil assets.
If we strike first, we can eliminate their ability to do mischief in the gulf quite readily. Their forces, however numerous, are pathetically vulnerable. Unlike their dispersed and shielded nuclear development capability, their military forces in the gulf are in obvious and accessible positions.
So are their own oil assets. They are as dependent on the Gulf to reach the world oil market as any of their neighbors. If we seize their oil platforms, destroy their shipping, and impose an absolute blockade on Iranian shipping in the Gulf -- while eliminating their ability to damage anybody else's shipping -- how long do you think the tyranny would remain in power?
Here's a hint: They'd run out of money very, very quickly.
Here's another hint: Their military is already refusing to obey their most outrageous orders. When the military finds themselves saddled with a government that has brought the destruction of most of their oil revenues, all because of their insane determination to take on the United States, how long before the ayatollahs are arrested and sent home? Or else made irrelevant by placing a "committee of public safety" above them, to veto their decisions and make peace with the West?
Maybe it wouldn't turn out that way. But it's our best chance -- and that's the chance that Bush is obviously preparing for. He has made no attempt to prepare the American people for an invasion of Iran. But he has made it crystal clear that Iranian misbehavior will not be tolerated -- and that regime change is the desired outcome.
If Iran's ayatollahs were toppled, how long would Syria continue to misbehave? Answer: About fifteen minutes. Syria is a poor country. They are only able to make trouble because they have Iran's support.
Shiites and Sunnis
Here's the other asset we have that no one seems to take into account when judging Bush's conduct of the War on Terror: We are really caught up in an ancient civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.
Al-Qaeda on the Sunni side and Iran's ayatollahs on the Shiite side have both been playing the same game all along. They don't seriously think that they can conquer the United States (yet) -- so why have they been provoking us?
Because they're belling the cat. Or poking the bull with sticks. Why? Because they are performing on the stage of world Islam, putting on rival plays. Both plays have the same message: Look, we're the heroes who have God on our side, because we're the ones who have provoked the great Shaitan and gotten away with it!
Iran's Shiites had the upper hand for quite a while, bringing down one U.S. President (Carter) and getting another -- tough-guy Reagan -- to withdraw the Marines from Lebanon and then come begging to Iran's door in his stupid, cowardly arms-for-hostages deal.
Then Al-Qaeda had the upper hand in their play, showing the Muslim world that it was the Sunnis who were blowing up American boats and embassies and, finally, the twin towers in New York City itself.
It's all theatre. It's all an effort by Bin Laden to restore the Caliphate with himself, of course, as Caliph -- spiritual dictator of the Muslim world. The goal? Not just to unite Sunni Islam under a Caliph again, but to then make war on and crush Shiite resistance. That is the prize. Only when it is won would a united Islam be ready to conquer the rest of the world, finishing the task that was left unfinished by previous waves of Muslim conquest.
Meanwhile, Iran's ayatollahs are trying to show the Muslim world that it is they, the Shiite leaders, who have God on their side. That was what the recent campaign in Lebanon was all about -- to steal the glory back from Al-Qaeda.
But wait. It's even more complicated than that. Because there are other divisions within the Muslim world. Iraqi Shiites have no love for, and do not accept the authority of, the Persian clerics. Arabic-speaking Shiites have no desire to have Farsi-speaking Shiites rule over them.
So we have an amazingly convoluted situation in the middle east. Iran and its puppet, Syria, are cooperating support of the Sunni resistance in Iraq. Why? It's not because Syria's rulers are nominally Baathist as Saddam was -- Baathism is dead. Instead, it's the ancient tribalism that is at the fore. Syria's rulers are members of a tiny religious minority that is an offshoot of Shia, and thus they help Iran maintain access to its Shiite allies in Lebanon partly in order to shore up their own position vis-a-vis their own mostly-Sunni population.
So why are these Shiites and crypto-Shiites supporting the Sunnis in Baghdad?
Because anything that keeps America distracted is good for them. And if the Americans do pack up and go home, then the Shiites can claim the victory -- even though it's mostly Sunnis who are blowing themselves up in Israel and Baghdad.
Besides, the Sunni insurgents in Iraq are keeping the Iraqi Shiites off balance. The last thing the Iranian ayatollahs want is for Iraq to become a democratic nation with a Shiite majority, because at that moment it will be the Iraqi Shiite leaders who will have the most credibility as leaders of the Shiite wing of Islam.
So the leadership of the Iraqi Shiites are perceived as rivals by the ayatollahs of Iran. Thus the Iranians support the Iraqi Shiites' enemies -- providing the weapons that are used to murder Shiites in Iraq.
It's an astonishingly twisted game -- and as long as we don't do anything really, really stupid, like withdrawing from Iraq, all these various treacheries will inevitably lead to the fall of the tyrants in Iran, and therefore in Syria, and therefore the taming of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Bush's game is to keep from letting any of these faction unite, while preparing to deliver strategic blows that can bring down the ayatollahs at relatively little cost.
Every action has repercussions. Just as our withdrawal from Iraq would terrify and silence our allies everywhere, and embolden our enemies, so also would the fall of the ayatollahs -- particularly if it is as the result of an American intervention in the Gulf -- make waves everywhere. Democracy would be perceived as the wave of the future. Our friends in many countries would feel free to speak up for democracy and pro-American policies -- and their enemies would be afraid to silence them.
North Korea might go through a paroxysm of defiance -- but they would still understand the lesson. America will not be bullied by tyrants. We will stand for democracy, destroying our enemies at the "time and place of our choosing." Negotiations with North Korea would instantly take on a very different tone; and China's attitude, too, would become considerably more cooperative with us.
This is the victory that awaits us -- and it remains possible for two reasons only:
1. America's brilliant, brave, and well-trained military, which projects not just power but decency and compassion wherever our soldiers go, and
2. President George W. Bush, who, regardless of his critics and detractors, has steadfastly pursued the only course that holds the hope of victory without plunging us into a worldwide war with a united Islam or isolating America in a world torn by chaos.
Those are the scylla and charybdis that threaten us on either hand. If we do not win this containable war now, following the plan President Bush has set forth, we will surely end up fighting far bloodier wars for the next generation.
And the rhetoric of this election proves that we have precious few politicians in either party who have the brains, will, or courage to be taken seriously as alternatives to George W. Bush in the guidance of our nation through this dangerous, complicated world.
If we, the American people, are stupid enough to give control of either or both houses of Congress to the Democratic Party in this election, we will deserve the world we find ourselves in five years from now.
But Bush, being the wise and moderate politician that he is, may actually be able to continue his foreign policy despite the opposition of a Democratic Congress.
What really scares me is the 2008 election. The Democratic Party is hopeless -- only clowns seem to be able to rise to prominence there these days, while they boot out the only Democrats serious about keeping America's future safe. But the Republicans are almost equally foolish, trying to find somebody who is farther right than Bush -- somebody who will follow the conservative line far better than the moderate Bush has ever attempted -- and somebody who will "kick butt" in foreign policy.
So if we get one of the leading Democrats as our new President in 2009, we'll be on the road to pusillanimous withdrawal and the resulting chaos in the world.
While if we elect any of the Republicans who are extremist enough to please the Hannity wing of the party, our resulting belligerence will likely provoke Islam into unifying behind one of the tyrants, which is every bit as terrifying an outcome.
I hope somebody emerges in one of the parties, at least, who commits himself or herself to continuing Bush's careful, wise, moderate, and so-far-successful policies in the War on Terror.
Meanwhile, we have this election. You have your vote. For the sake of our children's future -- and for the sake of all good people in the world who don't get to vote in the only election that matters to their future, too -- vote for no Congressional candidate who even hints at withdrawing from Iraq or opposing Bush's leadership in the war. And vote for no candidate who will hand control of the House of Representatives to those who are sworn to undo Bush's restrained but steadfast foreign policy in this time of war.