Good tidings

Pondering Christmas Carols with Rick Brookhiser. I have my own carol ponerings. "The Carol of the Bells" is haunting, almost sinister, to me and makes me want to look over my shoulder. It seems impossible to me to know the words to "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" even though I do, in fact, know the words. Lately, it seems like people only sing the first verse of "Joy to the World" -- even when they singe the third verse, they just sing the first one twice in a row before moving on. I know it has a second verse. I have sung it myself, but not lately. And all of those old forties songs -- "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," "The Christmas Song," "Let It Snow," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- seem like children's songs to me, and I love singing them, but they're not real Christmas songs, they're just preparation.

Good question

Is Maureen Dowd necessary?

No.

I think Michael Crichton wrote this

The brave reporting from the UN conference on global warming and the destruction of mankind through free markets, of Roy Spencer on TCS (h/t RealClearPolitics):

I wonder whether this is where all Miss America contestants end up, following through on their collective desire to make the world a better place? There are also so many Ph.D.'s here -- speakers citing their credentials in order to push nostra that are little more than good intentions wrapped in a surfeit of economic ignorance (garnished with a touch of elitism). If only everyone in the world would follow the advice of these experts, our problems would obviously be solved.

[snip]

The people at COP-11 are well-fed, well-dressed, have been transported half way around the world by fossil-fueled aircraft, and are totally dependent upon myriad goods and services that require access to affordable energy. But that hasn't seemed to cross their minds. If it has, they are under the illusion that the world can live on a whole lot less energy than it is right now. I look around and wonder how all of these people would contribute to life on Earth if they were not so busy trying to save it.

As I listen to the opinions and arguments expressed here, I am struck by the lack of interest in exactly how much (or should I say, how little?) the currently proposed policies are going to stave off any future warming trends. Instead, what seems to be the most important are the good intentions of the policy pushers-consequences be damned. To examine whether we can actually "get there from here" would involve some math and science skills. I suspect many of these college graduates barely made it through those courses. It is sufficient at COP-11 simply to believe that if a policy is good for business it is bad for the Earth. Since business interests are only out for themselves, business success couldn't be related to the material needs and desires of those served by businesses.

Able Danger reloaded

Andy McCarthy has an article on NRO reviving the Able Danger story, something that has been conspivuously absent from most of the blogs I've read. After the immediate surge of interest in it, many in the right blogosphere got spooked when Weldon was attacked and seemed to back off his story. So when he came throttling back with witness names and evidence (six officials now, plus Louis Freeh and some documentation), they were still a little leery of picking it up. But Louis Freeh's article about a month ago and now McCarthy's should stir the waters again. This was an irresponsible, reprehensible, spotlight-chasing, butt-covering schill of a committee which apparently became little more than a bipartisan effort to defend Jamie Gorelick, her "wall" of protection and citizenship rights which were extended to casual travellers, and the Clinton administration. These are the people who had Osama bin Laden. They had Mohammed Atta, and possibly two other 9/11 hijackers. They ignored the first WTC bombing, the Khobar Towers, USS Cole, and embassy bombings. They extended a "wall" with the sole effect of protecting foreign actors with designs on the US. And then they put key architects of that policy on the commission created to investigate it. And then they covered the evidence, smeared the dissenters, and started holding regular press conferences to announce their virtue and wisdom.

McCarthy:

The 9/11 Commission .... didn't report the dissent [of Able Danger] at all. Not in the text, not in the footnotes, not anywhere. It tried, Pravda-like, to erase completely from historical memory any version of events but its own.

Think about that. The commission's mandate was to conduct a thorough investigation and tell us exactly what it found. Its job was not to produce a carefully marketed narrative so media-starved commissioners would have a best-selling launch-pad from which to score sugary interviews. This panel was not supposed to have a vested interest in a single, definitive, air-brushed version of events. It was supposed to give us the facts as it found them, including on disputed issues it could not resolve. Why on earth did it decide to kill Able Danger?

[Emphasis mine.]

This is a woman (Gorelick) who should wake up every morning with the knowledge that her idealistic incompetence directly caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans and, subsequently, two wars and the deaths of American servicemen and contractors, hostages, foreign armies, and Afghan and Iraqi civilians (not to mention the bad guys). I would pity her if she weren't too arrogant and dense to recognize it, and so now I'm pretty close to despising her and the atrocious committee that protects her and the administration she worked for. Have these people no principles?

Sad, hollow men

Mark Steyn, as usual, is pretty and apt: "These sad hollow men may yet get their way -- which is to say they may succeed in persuading the American people that a remarkable victory in the Middle East is in fact a humiliating defeat."

This sort of happened already in Vietnam; we hadn't won, but we were winning until the whole Winter Soldier thing. John Kerry's most enduring foreign policy contribution.

But I digress. One of his other points is "while the media were eager to promote Murtha as the most incisively insightful military expert on the planet, this guy Lieberman's evidently some nobody no one need pay any attention to. ... It must be awful lonely being Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party these days." Um, yeah, I can imagine that. I really think that Joe Lieberman will be the next Zell Miller. After the education bill, I began thinking that Bush wouold drive the country to the right; he would seduce the ignorant moderates into a moderately conservative voting block, and he would drive pure-hearted but previously passionless conservatives to find true conservative alternatives. The country is spinning to the right because of Bush, but it was unintentional, I'm sure. It's drifting right by default; the left has been so vehemently, viscerally opposed to Bush that, in the course of driving themselves deranged, they have catapaulted themselves leftward; even old school liberals look "right" by comparison. Unfortunately, this hasn't resulted in the GOP and affiliates getting more conservative and I think ultimately it's not going to be a big help in any kind of rightward drift to moderates; they may vote "R" for celebrated liberal mavericks like McCain and Guiliani and Hagel, but they won't be attracted to conservatives like Santorum or Coburn the way they were to Reagan and even Goldwater.

Traditional liberals like Lieberman may soon find themselves men without a country as the Democratic party whirls into insanity; the GOP may be there to pick them off. I'd hoped for a bigger, righter tent; still doesn't get me quite where I was hoping.

It's all hype

Instapundit has a poll on avian flu. So far, only 11% agree with me, that it is a bogus hype from people who got bored. Remember the flu shot shortage hysteria of last year? Well, not only can you not get flu shots anymore, THE MENACE IS BIGGER AND DEADLIER THAN EVER! And it is a subject only to be discussed in appropriately breathless capslock. See, that makes it relevant.

Seriously, you could pick any one of a dozen exotic, old school, or standby diseases and have just as good a chance of these one day becoming a millions-dead pandemic. SARS, bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, mad cow (good God, remember the panic on that one? and it involved food, too!), malaria, dengue fever. Anthrax -- that's a livestock one. Lots and lots of things can kill you. I can tell you now, of anyway I could die, a flu epidemic is just not in my cards.

Because this isn't the kind of thing you comment on

I'm flipped by CSPAN a couple fo minutes ago, and I caught an interview with Samar Assad, the executive director of the Palestine Center, and there was a comment (natch) from California from a man with an accent that Israel was nothing but a terrorist organization that was set up as a puppet by five Zionist-controlled powers (China, Russia, the US, Great Britain, and, um, one more). This went on a for about a minute, and elicited aboslutely no comment from either Assad or the host. Not one,single word. The next caller, from Texas, said he didn't see the point in real talks as long as Palestinians wouldn't disavow or disarm terror groups like Hezbollah. Assad countered back, a little miffed, that her group had no association with Hezbollah (which hadn't been hinted), and Hezbollah was a reistance group defying the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, not Palestine. So it's totally separate and unrelated.

Bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracies -- cool beans. Stop Muslim terror -- how dare you question my patriotism to the one state of Palestine!

Still listening -- now she wants a "one-state" solution" which scares Israelis because they don't want to give equal rights to Palestinians. Of course. (The current state of Israel, I note, does not count.)

UPDATE, 8:59am: A man just called her on not responding to the crazy Zionist-entity guy and for not decrying Islamic (not political, as she tried to say earlier) terrorist groups. Her answer -- it's still Israel's fault. We've been nothing but compliant since 1993, and they still won't recognize our right to exist. Blah, blah, blah. At least his was the last question.

UPDATE II: The link to the Palestine Center isn't working; I did a web search, and it's the right one; it's also the one the Washington Journal host gave. Don't know what else to say, I'll check it out.

Yep.

To borrow from Love's Labors Lost, pithy and apt:

SCISSORS AND SHARP OBJECTS TO BE PERMITTED ON PLANES [Cliff May]
Under the latest plan by the Transportation Security Administration.

I’m reminded of something I heard from an Israeli security expert: “We do it differently than you do. You look for weapons. We look for terrorists.”