We're still not very serious about fighting this war:

Our elite commitment to multiculturalism also hamstrings us from taking the needed security steps. For 30 years, our schools have pounded home the creed that all cultures are of equal merit—or, more accurately perhaps, that no culture is worse than the West’s. Millions of Americans consequently aren’t sure whether radical Islam is just another legitimate alternative to the dominant Western narrative. Typical of this mind-set, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi, excusing the London subway terrorism, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that deliberately butchering commuters is no worse than accidentally killing civilians while targeting terrorists in a war zone. “American and British media have devoted hours to wondering what would drive a seemingly normal young Muslim to destroy himself and others,” Makdisi said. “No one has paused to ask what would cause a seemingly normal young Christian or Jew to strap himself into a warplane and drop bombs on a village, knowing full well his bombs will inevitably kill civilians (and, of course, soldiers).”

It is a tremendous historical irony that America’s liberal Left, embracing moral equivalence in this fashion, has all but refused to denounce the illiberal ideology of our enemies—an ideology that supports polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, hatred of homosexuals, and patriarchy. Sometimes, the terrorists even win outright praise: perhaps the most popular filmmaker of election year 2004 was Michael Moore, who celebrated the suicide bombers and terrorists of Iraq as “minutemen” akin to our own Founding Fathers.

If we are not sure as a nation that Islamists really are foes of Western values but instead see them as another persecuted group with legitimate gripes against us (occupied Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, colonialism, the Crusades), then it becomes increasingly hard to identify, let alone fight, the practitioners of Islamic fanaticism at home. Even the military bureaucracy seems to be having trouble naming the enemy: witness the rebranding by some Pentagon officials of “the war on terrorism” into the “global war against violent extremism.” While the original nomenclature was unsatisfactory—wars aren’t fought against a tactic but rather against those using it—the new name is even less helpful. Our fight against jihadists is different from our struggle with recalcitrant Serbian nationalists or Kim Jong-il’s crackpot extremism. We are at war with radical Islam, Islamic fascism, Islamism—the “radical Islamic polemic,” in the words of Sarkozy. We should never lose sight of this fact. President Bush’s October speech describing our struggle against Islamic terror—a first for the administration—is an encouraging, if belated, sign.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (14)
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More fair and balanced -- and tasteful! -- quetions from our professional information preisthood.

Good Lord All Mighty.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (28)
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Knock Yourselves Out.

Please don't miss the controversy over at Democratic Underground (I won't link to them).
The smell of Liberal pants-shitting is afloat everywhere. If you can't find the comments on DU funny, I don't know what to do for you.

Updates:

Ann Althouse thumbnails some of his more memorable decisions

Ideoblog: A business friendly justice.

David Bernstein: A "sweet" Scalia.

U.T.R: Alito's blend? Colombian, Java, New Guinea and a bit of espresso

David Bernstein (again): Alito Would Give Court A Catholic Majority

Posted by: LauraW. at 08:10 AM | Comments (48)
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New York Times article about "super precedents," a new legal concept of sorts. Super precedents are like normal precedents, except they are very important to the "fabric" of our law, and are thus not entitled to mere stare decisis, but super stare decisis.

Liberals used to call these sorts of precedents "liberal precedents." I don't remember them arguing that Bowers v. Hardwick, or the long list of precedents that one could execute a 17 year old cold-blooded killer, were "superprecedents," or really any sort of real precedent at all.

The New York Times, shockingly enough, tries to make trouble for potential Supreme Court nominee Michael Luttig:

An origin of the idea was a 2000 opinion written by J. Michael Luttig, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who regularly appears on short lists for the Supreme Court.

Striking down a Virginia ban on a procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion, Judge Luttig wrote, "I understand the Supreme Court to have intended its decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey," the case that reaffirmed Roe in 1992, "to be a decision of super-stare decisis with respect to a woman's fundamental right to choose whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy."

Let's nip this one in the bud: He was saying it was his opinion that, as a judge inferior to the Supreme Court and charged to apply its precedents as they intended, he thought the Court intended itself to esptablish "super-stare-decisis." Not that he believes in such a thing, necessarily. Just that it was his job to do what the Supreme Court, and that the then-current O'Connor-led goofballs on the Court intended to create this new weapon, a +5 Holy Precedent, double-damage vs. rightwing troglodytes.

As a Supreme Court judge, he'll be deciding himself if he believes in "super-precedents."

Prof. Randy Barnett, a member of the Volokh Conspiracy, splashes cold water on this silly spark of imagination:

"The fact that something is a superprecedent doesn't give us a reason to stick to it if it's wrongly decided," said Randy Barnett of Boston University Law School...

Duh.

Seems to me Plessey v. Fergussen's separate-but-equal standard was a superprecedent with a long, multiply-reaffirmed history before, it you know, wasn't.

Posted by: Ace at 03:49 PM | Comments (25)
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I have no idea if this one's any good, but the first Saw was one of those zero-expectations impulse-PPV-orders that turned out to be, well, pretty damn good. Kind of a locked-room version of Seven.

Posted by: Ace at 02:23 PM | Comments (11)
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Larry Niven? Who's that?

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 02:14 PM | Comments (17)
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Good news.

They're not going to fully give up supporting terrorism as a tactic. But, as the experience of the IRA tells us, as a "political wing" of a terrorist movement advances, the actual terrorist wing declines in emphasis, and deadliness.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (15)
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You know how the Palestinian terrorists are always saying they have no choice other than suicide bombers? Some crap about it being unfair that the Jews have tanks and they only have donkey carts. Well what is the logic behind beheading school girls?

WARNING! EXTREMELY GRAPHIC!

Posted by: Tanker at 08:17 AM | Comments (24)
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SULAWESI, Indonesia -- Muslim warriors scored yet another heroic military victory, this time against a well-trained trio of special-ops teenaged girls from a Christian school.

"Allah be praised for delivering us this magnificent triumph," an unknown brave warrior in a face-obscuring mask announced. "Those 105-pound teenaged girls fought like tigers, using all the weapons and trickery they learned at a Special Forces clinic at the 4-H Club. They also employed advanced martial arts techiques from the legendary fighting form known as 'Jazzercize.'"

The glorious Islamic heroes stated that they identified the co-ed covert operatives by their open display of the famous credo of SOCOM (the special operations command), "N'SYNC = N'STINK."

Having captured the dangerous commandos, the Muslim warriors afforded them with the full panoply of rights granted to them by the Geneva Protocols, including the invioble rights of POW's to have their heads sawed from their still-living bodies, a right which applies only upon capture by Muslims. WARNING: Extremely Graphic Pictures of the International Red Cross-approved treatment of Western prisoners.

The gay-panic murder-cultists of the Muslim world rejoiced that the three operatives had been captured while carrying the weapon most feared in the Muslim world-- vaginas.

Courageous Muslim proudly displayed "high-tech infidel weaponry" recovered from the special-ops babysitters' club, including a cellphone with its ringer set to play Britney Spears' Hit Me Baby One More Time, a "special CIA pen" with purple ink that smelled strongly of artifical grapes, and an eraser shaped like a crazy-haired troll, said by the Muslim warriors to be some sort of "psy-ops" device.

Although the girls were not identified as Jewish per se, at least one was captured with a Barbra Streisand CD in her possession. "Close enough," one glorious Muslim warrior said. "People Who Need People is a notorious propaganda hymn of the Jew Mossad."

Western journalists reacted with shock to the incident. "How dare those infidels tresspass in Muslim lands," British journalist John Pilger seethed. "This is yet another sign of the American neo-con cabal's utter disdain for the principle of freedom of religion."

Robert Fisk, on the other hand, noted that the Muslims had been careful enough to not inflict any "so-called 'collateral damage'" while taking out what he called "legitimate military targets." "Had this attack been conducted by George Bush," he wrote, "we might have expected upwards of 200 dead innocent Muslim sporting-gun enthusiasts, who had peacefully gathered in a mosque to engage in the cherished Islamic holy ritual of indiscriminate sniper fire."

Note: Looks like Tanker and I stumbled on this at the same time. We're just "flooding the zone," as Howell Raines said of his wall-to-wall coverage of women being banned from the Augusta National golf course. A slightly more important story, I admit, but I think this one has some amount of significance as well.

Posted by: Ace at 08:17 AM | Comments (20)
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Hussein himself agreed to the plan of peaceful exile to avoid the war. "Leaders" of Arab countries vetoed it. The US indicated its support of the plan (indeed, George W. Bush specifically gave Saddam the option of peaceful exile in his prewar ultimatum).

Under the plan, Saddam & Co. would have departed Iraq for the UAE, with the promise of freedom of prosecution for their myriad crimes.

So if Arabs don't like the war, they can blame the tyrants who rule them.

It is not explained why the deal was rejected. The obvious theory is that the other tyrants in the Arab world did not want the precedent of one of their own being forced into exile by a US ultimatum, and wanted the removal, if unavoidable, to be costly and bloody, so as to make it the last one.

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (18)
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