Well, great weekend for the Yankees . . . five in a row up at Fenway Park. It was exhausting to watch at times, but I can't help but feel really proud of my Yankees right about now.

You know, when people get on camera these days, I think there's a certain percentage of them who fall in love with the sight and sound of themselves and wind up saying dumb things or making stuff up just so they appear important, knowledgeable . . . or whatever. Maybe they're just liars. That happens all too often.

The problem, of course is that at the end of the day, we learn a lot of things about the person involved and in this case, the institution he works for. In this case, it's certainly not pretty. Here's some digging from the former New York City mayor Ed Koch. Read Koch's letter (Thanks to Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner) about one Mr. Tom Ricks and then the one line response from Executive Editor of the Washington Post, Len Downie:

Can we all agree that Ricks deliberately executed a clever (if blatently false) cheap shot on national television against Israel and then tried to cover his tracks with a disingenuous response to his newspaper's ombudsman? I think so.

Does it not appear as if his boss, Len Downie, is now caught like a dear in the headlights and wants this whole thing to go away as quickly as possible? I think we can agree on that as well.

The problem is, there's no real punishment for a guy who goes on TV and delivers a false cheap shot with the intention of swaying public opinion. He's not accountable. Howard Kurtz should be made responsible for cleaning up the mess. What chance do you think there is of that happening? I agree, not much.

In my post below, I equate the situation that's happening in the mideast as analogous to the late 40s . . . as Iran is running a proxy conflict in Lebanon the same way that the Russians did in the years following World War II, most notably in Greece. More to the point, Iran is the main sponsor of radical Islamist adventurism and chicanery, as the Soviets were with the rapid emergence and spread of Communist regimes in the wake of World War II. Ed Koch, correctly I think, compares the resolve of George Bush to that of Harry Truman, who recognized the menace of Soviet Communism like Bush has recognized the evil of an Iran-dominated Hezbollah.

In contrast, many writers in the blogosphere say that we're seeing a replay of the late 30s . . . the concept being that Iran is testing the western world the way Hitler tested the rest of Europe prior to World War II.

I still go with the 40s analogy, but the reason I think people look to the 30s for perspective is that the world wound up in a very bloody war that ravaged Europe and Asia. People are convinced that it will happen and are now essentially counting down to war between the U.S. and Iran.

I must confess that I too see a wider war coming and I wonder where it will all end.

As a conservative, from spending to immigration to social policies, there's lots to disagree with when it comes to appraising the tenure of George Bush as President. Given what's happened over the course of the last couple of days however, much of that criticism suddenly seems irrelevant to me.

Why?

The recent revelations of a terror plot to blow multiple planes out of the sky next week (next week!!) and the arrests of the would-be perpetrators gives me pause. We're in a horrible war, a silent one, a deadly one its the kind of war we need to be prepared to fight over the course of many years. I'm glad we have George Bush at the helm right now, and I pray we as citizens have the courage to elect someone who'll continue his good works when 2008 rolls around.

There's another phase of what I think is really the same war going on in Israel . . . and there's another critic of the Bush administration who's a long-time successful democrat and former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, who understands what's going on as well. He writes on George Bush in this morning's Real Clear Politics. Here's one part of his message:

The Islamic terrorism represented by Hezbollah and others will one day threaten the entire world. Islamic fanatics have already engaged in terrorist acts in the U.S., England, Spain, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Argentina, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan and others. Israel should be applauded for fighting international terrorism and using its military forces in Lebanon to confront the terrorist infrastructure after Hezbollah launched a military attack across the Lebanese-Israeli border on July 12th.

It's a long and ever-growing list of countries. Koch has also recognized that Israel is doing the right thing by going after Hezbollah to make sure they won't be able to attack in so wanton a manner next time. Here's what else Koch recognizes:

Instead, Israel has been criticized by a number of countries in the European Union that seek to make it difficult for the Israeli army to degrade or eliminate Hezbollah. You can count on the French government to try to deliver Israel into the hands of its enemies. British Prime Minister Tony Blair deserves enormous credit for standing with the U.S. against those in and out of his government who have opposed his willingness to fight international terrorism and his support for the right of Israel to defend itself against Hezbollah.

I have no doubt, however, that if it were not for the support of the United States, led by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, many European states would be even more active in trying to snatch victory from the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Amen to that, Ed. Here are a few key points to reiterate:

1. Koch recognizes and identifies France as a leading anti-semitic player on the world stage.

2. He recognizes that Great Britain is a force for truth under the wise leadership (for international affairs) by Tony Blair.

3. George Bush is doing his job and doing it well when it comes to dealing with the Israel-Hezbollah crisis.

Koch's conclusions are worthwhile reading for all:

In an effort to limit Israel's victory, the Arab League is seeking to have the proposed Security Council resolution order Israel to vacate southern Lebanon before Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese army and a multinational force is placed there as required by U.N. Resolution 1559. Israel cannot protect its population from a renewal of Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israeli cities and towns if it were to quit Lebanon before both Lebanon's army and a U.N.-mandated military force are in place to keep the peace and disarm Hezbollah.

According to The New York Times, President Bush made the U.S. position clear, "Speaking to reporters from his ranch in Crawford, Tex., President Bush called for the resolution's speedy adoption, but made clear that the main sticking point -- Lebanese insistence that the draft be altered to require Israel to withdraw troops immediately -- was nonnegotiable."

In my judgment, when history evaluates George W. Bush's position in the pantheon of presidents, he will be compared with Harry S. Truman. Bush's fortitude in recognizing the danger of Islamic fundamentalism to the U.S. and, indeed, the Western world, and his awareness of the need to win this war of civilizations is remarkable. He deserves the applause of all Americans and in time he will receive it.

When will people in this country wake up and see that the situation in Israel and Lebanon is our century's version of the late 40s in Europe. I was tempted to say late 30s, but the threat from Hezbollah and radical Islam in general is more analogous to the Soviet Union's sabre rattling and proxy conflicts following World War II than it is to Hitler and his quest for domination of Europe.

Harry Truman recognized the Communist menace and set our nation on the right path. It was a long forty-year plus struggle, mostly bloodless, but with plenty of fighting when and where necessary.  I fear this struggle, which George Bush has identified all too clearly for us, will be just as long . . . and probably a lot bloodier as well.

USA Today writer Peter Schweizer has a great time exposing Al Gore as the not necessarily so green green guy he claims to be. Read all about it here. From large stock holdings in Occidental Petroleum, to the zinc mine under his property he gets paid $20,000 a year for (and the company that mines it that happens to be poplluting a nearby river evidently) to the fact that Gore to this point has evidently choosen not to pay a couple of extra cents per kilowatt hour for green electricity for his 10,000 square foot home (isn't 10,000 sq. ft. more like a mansion?), Gore is not quite the "carbon-neutral" citizen he claims to be.

I have no doubt that Gore is much better than just about any politician (and probably better than most citizens as well) on the subject of living a "carbon-neutral" lifestyle, although I'll bet that if he added up the real cost to live such a lifestyle. he would probably need to sell some of that Oxy stock.

However, this is one funny article that exposes what happens when you make a sincere claim that comes back to bite you in the ass . . . both cheeks.

Well, anybody rmember "Win Ben Stein's Money" that used to play on Comedy Central? It was a great show, which can now occasionally be seen I think on the Game Show Network. The premise was that Ben's smart and when you go head to head with him on questions that cover any number of subjects, he'll get more of them right than you will and he'll stake his own money to prove it. It was lots of fun. Jimmy Kimmel was Ben's sidekick for the first few years and together they were really great and really funny. If I'm not mistaken, one year they actually won an Emmy Award for best game show.

Well, there's nothing funny about his latest column from THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR. Entitled, "A Few More Little Facts", it's a sobering look at what's really at stake when Israel is attacked by the Hezbolla thugs. I was more interested in Stein's conclusion, however. We're fighting a clash of civilizations according to Stein, and the Israeli/Lebanon border is the front line of the battle.

For anyone with even a sliver of sensitivity to see this happening to a people who have already suffered more than any other people in history, is torture. To see George W. Bush stand up for Israel while the left whines about totally meaningless multilateralism -- which means asking France to defend Israel, sort of like asking Martin Bormann to defend Israel -- is to see clear decency versus a waffling, age-old anti-Semitic sickness.

Isn't that the truth? It's a convenient and favorite critique from those on the left to scoff at our "unilateral" approach to foreign policy. The problem of course, is that nobody's willing to do anything and the defense of the free world has been left to the United States to handle. Once we stand up and do something, we're villified for actually having the bad manners to stand up and fight for what we believe.

Stein's conclusion is brilliant. I write for a living but I wish I were half as eloquent as Ben Stein.   

Take a moment to read Jeff Jacoby's piece today in the Boston Globe on two stories of anti-semitism.

Incident A involved a guy spewing crude anti-Semitic slurs when he was arrested for drunk driving; after sobering up, he publicly and profusely apologized. Incident B involved a Muslim gunman's premeditated assault on a prominent Jewish institution; his attack left one woman dead and sent five to the hospital, three of them in critical condition.

Which would you say was the bigger story?

Unless you've spent the past week submersed in the Mariana Trench, you know that the intoxicated driver in Incident A was Hollywood's Mel Gibson, who railed at a Los Angeles County police officer about the ``[expletive] Jews" and how ``the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." The story was soon everywhere. In the first six days after his arrest, the media database Nexis logged 888 stories mentioning ``Mel Gibson" and ``Jews." And that didn't include the countless websites, talk shows, and smaller publications that also took it up.

By any rational calculus, Incident B was far more significant. According to police and eyewitness reports, the killer forced his way into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle by holding a gun to the head of a 13-year-old girl. Once inside, Naveed Haq announced, ``I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel," and opened fire with two semiautomatic pistols. Pam Waechter died on the spot; five other women were shot in the abdomen, knee, or arm. When one of the women managed to call 911, Haq took the phone and told the dispatcher: ``These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."

At a time when jihadist murder is a global threat and some of the most malevolent figures in the Islamic world -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, to name just two -- openly incite violence against Americans and Jews, the attack in Seattle should have been a huge story everywhere. Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson's drunken outburst. Why the disparity?

Well, I think the answer has something to do with a word called "Schadenfreude", that is to say the delight one takes at the misfortune of another. Mel is certainly due his dose of schadenfreude . . . drunken bigots don't engender much sympathy these days, and Mel Gibson's current situation will certainly give lie to the proposition in Hollywood that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

But why, indeed, is there such a disparity? I think it reasonable to assume that the E! channel is more used to covering Mel Gibson than it is covering a murder and shooting investigation in Seattle. But why is the mainstream press not jumping all over this story?  Perhaps the media doesn't wish to follow this story more closely, but I can't unnderstand why. Can't we handle the truth? I wonder. Here's Jacoby's conclusion:

If the Catholic Gibson's nonviolent bigotry is a legitimate subject of media scrutiny, all the more so is the animus that spurs Muslims like Haq and the others to jihadist murder. As The New York Sun asked the other day, how many more Haqs must erupt in a homicidal rage before we open our eyes ``to the possibility that they are part of a war in which understanding the enemy is a prerequisite for victory?"

If you want to feel better about things, go with the schadenfreude. Otherwise, we need to start asking ourselves some very hard questions about the nature of terrorism, of true evil and what could possibly motivate a man to take a young girl hostage, use her as a shield and begin a shooting rampage. He says it was anger at Israel and the Jews. I say that's terrorism.

Mel Gibson is just schadenfreude.

Here are a couple of quotes from Mark Steyn's latest column discussing the concept of proportionality when it comes to Hezbollah and the Israelis. Mark Steyn is my favorite columnist and he's always well worth reading.

Disproportion" is the concept of the moment. Do you know how to play? Let's say 150 missiles are lobbed at northern Israel from the Lebanese village of Qana and the Israelis respond with missiles of their own that kill 28 people. Whoa, man, that's way "disproportionate."

But let's say you're a northwestern American municipality -- Seattle, for example -- and you haven't lobbed missiles at anybody, but a Muslim male shows up anyway and shoots six Jewish women, one of whom tries to flee up the stairs, but he spots her, leans over the railing, fires again and kills her. He describes himself as "an American Muslim angry at Israel" and tells 911 dispatchers: ''These are Jews. I want these Jews to get out. I'm tired of getting pushed around, and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.''

Well, that's apparently entirely "proportionate," so "proportionate" that the event is barely reported in the American media, or (if it is) it's portrayed as some kind of random convenience-store drive-by shooting. Pamela Waechter's killer informed his victims that "I'm only doing this for a statement," but the world couldn't be less interested in his statement, not compared to his lawyer's statement that he's suffering from "bipolar disorder.'' And the local FBI guy, like the Mounties in Toronto a month or so back, took the usual no-jihad-to-see-here line. ''There's nothing to indicate it's terrorism related,'' said Special Assistant Agent-In-Charge David Gomez. In America, terrorism is like dentistry and hairdressing: It doesn't count unless you're officially credentialed.

When are we all going to wake up?

I think I've figured out what the problem is. Here in the U.S. when a politician says something or when a person makes a political statement that gets reported in the mainstream media, people instinctively turn on their hidden bullshit filter and the rhetoric most often goes in one ear and out the other. This thug up in Seattle is no different than a small city mayor looking to gain attention for himself and get his name in the paper, at least as far as communicating his message is concerned.

If the message doesn't work well for the mayor, he/she usually tries a different one until something actually sticks in the minds of at least some of the constituents. Candid truthtelling isn't usually something we all associate with the average politician. Here's one big difference  that we should all remember. The murderer in Seattle, while making a political statment, was most likely actually telling the truth. Read those words again . . .

    'These are Jews. I want these Jews to get out. I'm tired of getting pushed around, and our people     getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.''

    "I'm only doing this for a statement,"

When your local politician speaks you take it with a grain of salt. The terrorist however seems to be now accorded the same level of respect as your everyday politician. Maybe we take his statement with a grain of salt. After all, we rationalize, he's not a member of a terrorist organization we've been tracking. He's just fooling around and looking for atttention.

Wake up.

When a Muslim individual kills six people in cold blood and says it's a political statement maybe we should take him at his word.

Perhaps we don't want to admit that religious fanatics have begun a Holy War that will determine the kind of future that both yours and my kids will be living in. When the Muslims are done killing Jews, who do you think will be next?

Victor Davis Hanson's riveting article this morning in NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE should be required reading for all. Here's the link.  Entitled, "The Brink of Madness", it pulls together and frames well the threat from radical Islam that we all face.

Early in the article, Hanson describes a disturbingly long list all of the hot spots in the world where Islamic terrorism has struck, or where chaos reigns on a daily basis. He then goes on to say:

In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.

Yet the present Western apology to all this is often to deal piecemeal with these perceived Muslim grievances: India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon. Therefore we are to believe that “freedom fighters” commit terror for political purposes of “liberation.” At the most extreme, some think there is absolutely no pattern to global terrorism, and the mere suggestion that there is constitutes “Islamaphobia.”

Damn right.

Radical Islam is the greatest threat to our civilization and way of life as we go forward in the 21st Century. I'm not Islamophobic. However, I do object to those who would enslave or kill me for my beliefs. There's going to come a day, and quite soon I think, when Muslims will feel forced to stand up and say, "Enough. Stop the madness." If they don't, they'll wind up signing on to the Radical islam program the way the German populace did in the late 30s and then, by God, we will have a 21st century Holy war that will make the Crusades look like a picnic . . . and we'll be luvky to live through it.

I could quote the entire article, but please read it for yourself. Hanson's conclusion could not be more devastating in its candidness and logic:

It is now a cliché to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government — and never more so than in the general public’s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel.

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7^th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

Moral relativism is a scourge in our modern-day society when we're faced with tyranny. Who among our leaders today will stand up and say, "Enough. Stop the Madnerss." The list is few. I can't think of one leading Democrat who would be willing to do so. What's worse, how many Republican leaders outside of our President are willing to stand up and do what's right to save us? The list isn't very long. I'll say that.

I read a very powerful article today (hat tip: Corner). It comes from THE NEW YORK OBSERVER and here's the link. The article goes on and on mentioning all the potential problems conservatives would have with a Giuliani presidential candidacy, but concludes with a very powerful point: when it's showtime, when there's a crisis, Giuliani already has the track record no other Republican (or Democrat, I guess) has . . . and that's worth a lot.

I'm kind of bewildered about the pansies at the United Nations calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon. Why does it seem that terrorist thugs can kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers, shoot rockets into Israel and use civilians and UN Peacekeepers (now there's my new favorite oxymoron) as human shields but Israel is made to look like a bunch of murderers when they go after Hezbollah and there is collateral damage.

I hope Israel doesn't stand pat, but finds the wherewithal to stay the course and make Hezbollah pay. I think they will. When I was in high school back in the early 70s, Egypt, acting as a proxy of the Soviets, eventually got the crap kicked out of them in the Yom Kippur war. I dearly hope that Hezbollah (and maybe Syria, too), acting as proxies of Iran suffer the same fate.

You know, these thugs won't be happy until the last Jewish man, woman or child is shot or stabbed in the back as they flee from Israel. I dearly hope that day never comes.