Desecration

Socio-political nonsense turns church nave into shelter. St. Boniface, Brussels.

Picky readers pick The Editrix

When in London, do as the cretins

They could be moved to be inspired by the likes of one Erik Svane, and start “Israelis Anonymous.” From Adloyada:

- I expressly reject the policies of the actual Israeli government. (Bad Olmert! Bad!)
- I also reject retroactively the policies of the government of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Itzhak Rabin, Itzhak Shamir, all the way to Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, and the foolish ideas of Theodore Herzl and Ahad Aham.
- I accept gladly the Qassams that the sensible Palestinians launch at me.
- I will try not to control the media. (I am throwing away the remote)
- My nose doesn’t have a hooked shape. (Except when I laugh, which I promise not to do much in London)
- I agree that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.

May I apply for a PhD now, please?

Accept your basic, inherent, dare I say genetic wrongness, and join that diverse, accepting crowd. They do, after all live on an island that’s 92 percent Caucasian while Israelis only reflect virtually half the world of origin and ideas...

The fuse is lit!

Where’s the pipe to Africa, Minher?

It takes a certain suspension of common sense to be a greenie. When I hear people whipped up because of a paucity of drinking water in Jordan (Annual average rainfall: 41.2 mm) urging water conservation in Seattle (Annual average rainfall: 920 mm), I ask them where the pipe is. What will conservation of what is impossible to get rid of in, say, all of Canada, going to do for anyone 5 000 kilometers away.

As far as I know, you can’t drink empathy.

In the Netherlands sustainable use of water is obligatory by law. The latest findings and solutions are tried out in new housing development projects. In the centre of the Netherlands, for instance, an ingenious system of ditches, canals and wadis (a retention area for rain water) is used to save the new neighbourhoods from flooding after heavy rainfall, explains Wibo de Graaf of engineering office Grontmij.

"The neighbourhood is set up in such a way that it seeks balance. The wadi, at first sight a low lying patch of grass in the neighbourhood, combines a nice bit of greenery with water management. Previously, all rain water used to go straight into the sewage system. Now the water runs through drains to the grass plot. When it rains heavily the wadi is completely flooded. The water then gradually seeps into the soil and the advantage is that the sewage system can be a lot smaller."

Anyone who has ever wintered in the Netherlands (Annual average rainfall: 797 mm) knows that it rains often enough to make one forget what the sun looks like. All this is about is the desire of a state which likes to think that it can do everything for everyone - to do less, and still say that ‘their shit don’t stink.’

Why its called the boob tube

The fuse is lit!

Pollaganda

The mainstream print and television media are gleefully abuzz this week with headlines and lead broadcast stories touting President George W. Bush's latest, lowest public approval rating

writes Mark M Alexander in The Patriot Post as he describes the American MSM (emphasis mine), although he happens to describe the media in Europe just as well (or better!).

It seems Bush(43)'s degraded standing with Americans [31 percent] has dropped below even that of Bush(41)'s low of 33 percent back in August of 1992. Only three other presidents have registered lower approval ratings: Carter, Nixon and Truman.

Not to be outdone by the Executive Branch, however, is Congress, which boasts public approval marks a full eight points lower than those of President Bush.

There are two reasons that the performance ratings for the President and Congress are at record lows -- even among their Republican constituents.

The first is obvious. Republicans, who control both the White House and Congress, have managed not to live up to even the lowest expectations for politicians, particularly on domestic issues. Though some Republicans are still conservative, most have fallen into the "distinction without a difference" category: They have morphed into Republicrats. …

Their abysmal performance notwithstanding, there is a second more subtle and insidious reason that Republicans' standing among their own constituents, and the nation at large, is at a low point: Pollaganda. Better known as disinformation or dezinformatsia, we're referring to any campaign of political propaganda masquerading as "objective journalism" designed to advance a liberal bias.

For example, after weeks of relentlessly "reporting" bad news for Republicans, CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer led Tuesday night with "Bad news for the Republicans" and went on to proclaim that a new CBS News/New York Times poll foretells "a dramatic shift in the political landscape."

Schieffer continued, "Are we about to see a dramatic shift in the political landscape? If the findings of a new CBS News/New York Times poll are accurate, the answer may well be yes. President Bush's ratings have hit another all-time low at only 31 percent and the Republican-controlled Congress gets even lower marks, an approval rating of only 23 percent. That's just a little better than 1994, when dissatisfaction was running so high that Republicans wrested control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years from Democrats."

Gloria Borger added, "Our new poll shows ... that change is in the air. By wide margins, the public says Democrats would do a better job of handling most all issues. Democrats are viewed favorably by 55 percent of Americans. Just 37 percent favor Republicans. That's a complete turnaround from 1994 when Republicans dominated public opinion just before taking control of the Congress."

Wednesday morning, The New York Times' top headline was, "Poll Gives Bush His Worst Marks Yet." In the first paragraph, the writer notes, "Americans have a bleaker view of the country's direction than at any time in more than two decades, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Sharp disapproval of President Bush's handling of gasoline prices has combined with intensified unhappiness about Iraq to create a grim political environment for the White House and Congressional Republicans. Mr. Bush's approval ratings for his management of foreign policy, Iraq and the economy have fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency. ... The Times/CBS News poll contained few if any bright notes for Mr. Bush or Congress."

Of course, months of Times headlines and CBS reports prior to this poll had "few if any bright notes for Mr. Bush or Congress."

To be fair, the last paragraph of this 1,480 word Bush-bashing diatribe includes this tidbit: "Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was Mr. Bush's opponent in 2004, had a lower approval rating than Mr. Bush: 26 percent, down from 40 percent in a poll conducted right after the election. And just 28 percent said they had a favorable view of Al Gore, one of Mr. Bush's more vocal critics." In other words, with all the favorable mainstream media coverage Kerry and Gore get, Bush still comes out on top. Perhaps The Times should have headlined this article, "Bush more popular than Kerry or Gore."

The MSM's relentless propagation of Democrat-generated dezinformatsia has portrayed Operation Iraqi Freedom as a quagmire, the booming economy as an unjust bust and the President as a lawless spy and has even suggested that George Bush is at fault for high fuel prices. All this certainly has taken its toll in the polls. These polls become self-fulfilling when the MSM incessantly pushes a particular perspective, polls the indoctrinated masses in search of that perspective and then reports the results as "news."

Americans who agree to answer public-opinion polls about political performance are not political analysts, national-security specialists, economists or policy experts. They are folks who hold common labor and professional jobs in order to support their families and make ends meet. They are the backbone of our nation. Unfortunately, a large measure of their perspective on politics, national security, the economy and public policy is not reality based, but shaped by the MSM.

What The Times and CBS, along with other MSM outlets, are really doing is polling on the media's effectiveness at indoctrinating readers and TV viewers with opinion-shaping propaganda -- or in The Patriot's parlance, "pollaganda."

Pollaganda is outcome-based opinion samples (polling instruments designed to generate a preferential outcome) based on prior-opinion indoctrination or cultivation by the media, the results of which are then used to manipulate public opinion further by advancing the perception that a particular opinion on an issue has majority support, and then presenting this "data" as if it were "news."

We say "outcome-based" because most polls reflect intentional propagation of a particular bias by Leftmedia television and print outlets to manipulate public opinion. They accomplish this by first saturating viewers with "reporting" that reflects a particular bias. After a thorough indoctrination, the media outlets then conduct "opinion polls" which, of course, reflect that indoctrination. Then they use the poll results to further proselytize by treating the results as "news." This in turn induces "bandwagon psychology" -- the human tendency of those who do not have a strong ideological foundation to aspire to the side perceived to be in the majority -- and thus further drives public opinion toward the original media bias, ad infinitum.

Pollaganda, then, is self-perpetuating.

Polls are so often manipulated for this purpose that The Patriot NEVER reports polling (conservative or liberal) as legitimate news because virtually all polling is nothing more than a well-crafted lie used to propagate a particular opinion or bias. This is not to say that polls don't provide an accurate account of public sentiment. It is simply to say that such sentiment is largely a reflection of MSM indoctrination -- and thus comports with a liberal viewpoint.

In the final analysis, conservatives are forced to run a considerable and unrelenting MSM opinion gauntlet. Still, if President Bush and Republican leaders would merely listen to their conservative constituents and act accordingly, they would be in a stronger position to defend themselves against MSM pollaganda -- and they would enjoy a more favorable standing with the American people. …

Typical leftish casus dwelli

An email from a reader gave me a good reason to look into the pedigree of this story which this blog has posted on below. Come to think of it, it also provides insight into the quality of their (one sided) scholarship of a Le Monde writer.

The latest revival of the story (for which Le Monde does not provide any hint of the origin of) dates back to 1997 and an anonymous writer in Connecticut. The yarn made the ‘big time’ in February of 2000 (just as is was becoming obvious that George W. would be the Republican party candidate.) Oddly enough the FEB-2000 story seems to have vanished from the Washington Post online archive.

Vanished! Who smells a conspiracy?

There is, however, an even murkier swamp to this département: the Larouche cult has been parroting it throughout the 90s. This fun loving bunch has been known to promote conspiracy theories involving the British Royal Family being part of an illuminati, and when George H. W. Bush came along, added him to their decades-long hissy-fit of improbably huge secrets.

All of their efforts have one thing in common – they are selected to stoke up gullible 16-25 year olds who don’t know enough about history to realize that the long-winded Larouchistas aren’t flattering them with big, serious looking words that would lead a dim reader to think that we found the secret to sounding smart.
It’s why on finds in their marches and gatherings a lot of adolescents who, by virtue of their great percentage, end up “growing out” of the scam well after it cost them every weekend of their college years. Guiding these naïfs waif is always a small core of the least accomplished “40 and up” types you will ever meet.

Their current fixations include racist conspiracies (reflecting their inability to find non-white supporters,) and Dick Cheney who seems to have a special place in their hearts.

As for Le Monde – they ate the whole tub or kool-aid, taking questionable stories in college papers as a source. The entire thing hinges on a parenthetical note in a letter written in 1933 about Geronimo’s head having been said to be stolen by an officer named Bush, and the suspicion that a 1933 photograph shows him with Geronimo’s head.

The letter emerged in the fall of 1983. I suspect that the only reason any such story emerged was because George H. W. Bush was the vice president and the time with an election in the following year, and to the shame of some, he was not Jimmy Carter.

Senator Prescott Bush served in the US Army between 1917 and 1919. Another history of Geronimo (which Le Monde cites) states that his grave was not identified until 1918, while Prescott Bush was stationed in Europe.

The whole story has about the same relevance as the following statement: Jimmy Carter was the first US president to have a boy’s name.

The fuse is lit!

al-Queda approved

The left seem to not like to know that it’s playing into Al-Queda’s hands

Former Soviet shill turns bongmeister into ‘humble superhacker’

The Grauiad cracks me up. Can you tell why there’s a difference in tone in these two articles?

The humble superhacker

“Gary McKinnon worries about the Guantánamo jumpsuits clashing with his hair if the US succeeds in extraditing him.”

“He undertook most of his hacking activities at his girlfriend's aunt's house in a genteel north London suburb, where he would sit for hours at the computer drinking cans of beer and smoking cannabis. He puts his vagueness about exactly what he uncovered down to the possibility that he was "smoking too much dope" at the time.”

Viruses and hackers cost UK business £10bn a year

“Larger firms saw the number of security breaches fall, but the average cost of each incident rose to £65,000-£130,000 in disruption.”

“Small companies saw a big rise in the number of attacks, with average losses of £8,000-£17,000.”

Apart from the fact that the first didn’t count as “an attack” the way the hacking in the second article does, there is one distinction.

There’s only one thing that can cause that sort of lack of concern at the Graun. One evil, nasty, icky-poo thing that makes them normally want to stamp their feet like Yosemite Sam. It’s his inherently evil twin “Uncle” Sam. Bear in mind that we're talking about a paper that was one of the only foreign papers which was permitted to be sold in the Soviet Union, took the BBC's advertizing money, but refused to run BBC adverts listing their broadcast frequencies and schedules, and still seem incapable of understanding free speech:

From the gentle beat of the butterfly's wing grows the meteorological monster of Hurricane Katrina. This can be extended to today's media environment of turbulence and volatility, in which news travels faster and further than ever before. The Iranian president again calls for the annihilation of Israel, and Bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi disseminate new messages on the internet and to satellite TV channels. Events in one part of the world feed back instantly into the politics of another, and linear, machine models of top-down cultural control no longer explain very much.

I call this cultural chaos.

Its roots lie first in the destabilising impact of digital communication technologies.

That’s how you get to the point where it makes perfect sense to magically transformed a 40 year old delusional dopehead (whacked out over UFOs) into a ‘cuddly, harmless’ criminal who’s just a kid after all, and needs protection because he fears being tortured.

Gary McKinnon's search turned into an obsession, an addiction. As he probed high-level computer systems in the United States, his life in Britain fell apart. He lost his job, and his girlfriend dumped him. Friends told him to stop hacking, but to no avail.
"I'd stopped washing at one point. I wasn't looking after myself. I wasn't eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night."

Lost in the delerium whipped up over Gitmo is that it's for mostly stateless combatants under whom military, not civil law falls. Combatants who don't wear uniforms have to be handled in some legal way, and the left seems to be tacitly urging the nations of the world to declare pan-islam a nation-state by incessantly demading the deletion of this legal category.

As for our "2600" chappy, it looks like he had been passing the doochie by the left hand side for a while. Being a guest of the federal prison system may give hime a chance to question his need for the rope, but Graun readers are sure to expect him to be “Supermaxed”

The fuse is lit!

Popular mobs making shallow assumptions

Le Monde features a portfolio celebrating the election victory of the Le Front populaire 70 years ago. They were coalition of leftists with admiration for a variety of types of cruelty, they were what one could later characterize as the Labour/TUC complex which ran the UK into the ground from a post-war to the ‘70s. Mercifully the election of the late Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher ended the misery of endless striking, electricity cuts, and animal-farm-like politics despite the fact that their terms were more like a meaningful interregnum between socialist trends.

Le Monde manages to get weepy over strikers, of course. Seize the nap!

Odder still is the further dwelling on the America that they think they know, and sure to provide an ceremonious aggreeing nod from the readership: the world of the Native American. They even managed to work George Bush and an absurd theory that reduces history to “cowboys and Indians” and a screed about WASPs and “bonesmen”. The missing artifact? Geronimo’s missing scalp. Surely it’s “the Bush crime family’s” fault...

Mais où est donc le crâne de Geronimo ?

Cette dernière hypothèse suscite régulièrement, depuis une vingtaine d'années, la polémique. Parmi les jeunes universitaires soupçonnés d'avoir volé le crâne du chef indien, figure en effet Prescott Bush, père de George H. et grand-père de George W. , respectivement 41e et 43e président des Etats-Unis, tous deux membres du même club que leur ancêtre.

Just where is Geronimo’s Head?

Is it in the “Tomb”, a vault in the middle of the campus of Yale University, seat of very mysterious Skull and Bones society (Cranium and bone) which attracts the richest and well born of the university? This latest assumption repeated regularly for the past polemical decade is that the young academics are suspected to have stolen the Indian chief’s head. Indeed it appears Prescott Bush, father of George H. and grandfather of George W., respectively 41st and 43rd Presidents of the United States, were both members of this club.

The inference is surely enough to launch a thousand screeds. At least they didn’t call him “Georges” again.

The fuse is lit!

“...If Mahmood left that crap out, it would be much more palatable.”

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.

-Mahmood Ahmedinejad

If Monkey-boy’s admonition to George Bush about his liberalism isn’t a hint at who the enemy is, an even clearer indicator is the “side” taken by lefties when it comes to their sympathies. In short, if you see them the take a side, it’s not hard to do the opposite and avoid the moral repugnance.

What deep-seeded beliefs could they have when they’ll be sympathetic to Ahmedenajad at the moment that he’s attacking their world view, and defending that of the object of their distractingly suicidal fixation and hatred? After all, it takes a certain lack of coldness to someone’s ideas to start referring to Ahmedenajad by his first name – or at least a secret desire to see him succeed.

Liberals opposing liberties. How cute. Why do they seem so eager to go to bat for people who do this?

Berlin - While she was walking home and holding a conversation in Hebrew with a friend from Israel on her cellular phone, the student passed by a group of young women.

When they recognized the language the student was speaking as Hebrew, one of the girls suddenly walked up to the Israeli woman and slapped her in the face. The other women then joined in, pulled her hair, beat her up and kicked her. The abuse eventually stopped when the attackers thought they heard a police car approaching, and they fled the scene.

h/t to: Justify This

Any American who has had to put up with a European jump down his throat about the US because they are American will readily recognize the fact that they don’t much care what you think – it’s what you represent to them that counts, along with your usefulness as a straw-man to let them vent about.

The fuse is lit!

“Reconciliation” Nudge, nudge. wink, wink.

One where you have to actually develop a common envy and hatred of a far-away nation.

Vidéo: report from Le Figaro

The Atlantic Review, a press digest on transatlantic affairs run by a bunch of brainiacs has looked into the program of reconciliation between France and Germany. It is, after all never too late, I suppose. What they found was that it also involves re-writing textbooks. We all know what happens when you mention the Holocaust these days – you get a flurry of spittle about ‘Zionism’... But have we reached that Fawlty Towers-esque point where you can’t “mention the war?” among the many other unmentionables?

Atlantic Review:

Guillaume Le Quintrec, who headed the French team, told The Times that the book contained "unashamedly pro-European ideology" and an underlying distrust of the United States. The textbook:

starts in 1945, a convenient date that enables the authors to focus on "memories" of the Second World War rather than its causes. "The patriotic cult of victory has given way to a universal demand to remember the victims of the war," the work says. The next stage is the Cold War, where the US and the USSR are presented as broadly equivalent in moral terms. Both were engaged in an arms race described as "the balance of terror" and both sought to "impose themselves by an omnipresent propaganda" that involved "gross exaggerations and simplifications".

Further, they describe the future of their own poverty which will be, of course, necessary to completely and consistently make a straw-man out of the US:

A substantial section of the work is devoted to the EU -- a startling success story and a beacon for the rest of the world, according to the five German and five French scholars who worked on the project. "Through its willingness to co-operate with the Third World, its attachment to multilateralism, its dialogue with other regions, the EU appears as a model on the international scene," it says. By contrast, modern American unilateralism "enshrined by George W. Bush is widely criticised throughout the world", it says. Music, cinema and other forms of culture are "dominated by American multinational firms, which are the main beneficiaries of the free trade".

A world-beating formula for sure. The Tangy Tango Atlantico gets even more interesting when the The Atlantic Review mentions one of this blogs favorite sources of amusement: the monumental stupidity of Foreign Minister Phillipe Douste-Blazy who apart from knowing less about geography than an American 7th grader, is best known for this exchange while attempting to be diplomatic in Israel:

"Were there no Jews killed in Britain?" he asked [at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem]. "But Mr. Minister, Britain was never occupied by the Nazis," the curator replied. To which Douste-Blazy shot back: "But were no Jews expelled from Britain?"

You’ve come a long way, baby!

The fuse is lit!

The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe

For skeptics of democratic capitalism, the United States is, quite simply, the enemy

wrote Jean-François Revel, who died last week, in an extended text that summarized his thoughts on anti-Americanism.

For many years, and still today, a principal function of anti-Americanism has been to discredit the nation that stands as the supreme alternative to socialism. More recently, Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others have taken to pillorying the U.S. for the same reason. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist society is a way of proclaiming: Look what happens when modern democratic capitalism is implemented!

This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites.

… In some European capitals, the sense of grievance has been raised to the status of an idée fixe, virtually the guiding principle of foreign policy. Thus the U.S. is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict humanity, from the falling price of beef in France to AIDS in Africa and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

… The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto the monster scapegoat, the United States of America. For stupidity and bloodshed to vanish from Europe, the U.S. must be identified as the singular threat to democracy (contrary to every lesson of actual history). Thus, during the Cold War, it was dogma among Europeans from Sweden to Sicily, from Athens to Paris, that the "imperialistic" power was America, even though it was the USSR that annexed Eastern Europe, made satellites out of several African countries, and invaded Afghanistan, even though it was the People's Republic of China that marched into Tibet, attacked South Korea, and subjugated three Indochinese countries. A similar dynamic applies today in the war on terror.

Read the entire article…

“I had to say I hate you in a song”

Père de Fofana

Dieudo's prayer: 'Let a thousand Fofana's bloom.'

Portraits of Influential Frenchmen (and -Women)

While Isabelle Mandraud, Raphaëlle Bacqué, and Stéphane Foucart paint portraits of, respectively, Ségolène Royal aide Sophie Bouchet-Petersen, Dominique de Villepin aide Pierre Mongin, and Nobel Prize winner Yves Chauvin, Ariane Chemin takes on Jean-Louis Gergorin, who may prove to be the central piece in the Clearstream scandal.

The hobgoblin of small minds

And the “brave” anti-semites of academe seem to have the smallest minds. Remember that apoplectically stupid stand taken by the AUT “because I don’t like them” boycott of Israel (apartheid-concentration-camp-wall-nazi-occupiers/ how dare they try to stop suicidal murders...) of last year. Well the same lot is warming up again.

True to form as revolutionary aspirants have for 40 years, they find another organization or just another name – just like Palestinians in west Beirut did in the 1980s. In this case the University and College Lecturer’s Union (NATFHE) acting in the stead of the AUT to take sides in a foreign political quarrel. Unless one steps back, it’s easy to forget that their leadership is not matched by any sort of responsibility for their statements and actions. They are not speaking as individuals when they act as part of an organization, and no-one elected them as political representatives or even as social ‘tastemakers’ for this matter they’re so ardent about.

Adloyada has waded through this particular patch of muck (to spare the rest of us) and reports on what the blue-in-the-face set is up to:

The original boycott resolution of 2005 was passed by the AUT and overturned only because a Special Council was called, which included people who weren't just the usual union core activists.
I commented that Engage, the leading activist group against the boycott, had limited the fightback to being one about how best to work for "solidarity with the Palestinians". It had helped to frame the struggle as one in which both the proponents of the boycott and the main group of opposers agreed that it was the supposedly racist policies of the Israeli government and the occupation that were the real problem. And unfortunately, the whole debate at the Special Council revolved round these two issues, and not around the issue of why a union of academics should be seeking to single out Israel as the one country subjected to a boycott of this kind.

Further on their “hiding the weenie” so as to convince themselves that all is above board:

Yes, John Pike did acknowledge that there would be attempts to push boycotting through semi-formal mechanisms which would avoid the legal challenges which both NATFHE and AUT faced last year in relation to their boycott motions.
However, in that article he claimed that AUT, unlike NATFHE, was decisively clear of any boycott threat because of the policy document, drafted and agreed unanimously by a group of which he was a member, which he argues, is unlikely to result in any boycotts.

Except for THIS boycott, I suppose, eh?

The fuse is lit!

Coming to a Bookstore Near You on May 22…

Italie, XVe siècle. A 32 ans, Leonardo est un artiste réputé, menant une vie foisonnante et s'adonnant aussi bien à la peinture qu'à des inventions en tout genre. Le Vatican découvre avec enthousiasme les machines de guerre novatrices imaginées par le jeune florentin. Il décide de se servir de ces fameux engins pour lancer une nouvelle croisade...

Baghdad and Grozny — A Tale of Double Standards

While the world wrings its hands about Iraq and the unspeakable tragedies that has followed in the footsteps of the GIs in Baghdad, the planet ignores the situation in Grozny — except for the odd token article or TV show now and then — as well as the behaviour of the Russian troops in Chechnya.

When will the left give Ahemdinajad the “Hate is not a family value” finger wag?

Ahmadinejad gives Bush a long lecture on Christian values

The New York Times even parotted this bit of indulgant nonsense:

"It would be a big mistake if the United States dismissed it or if they only consider it as a philosophical, religious, historical letter," Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University, said. "It would be a good idea if President Bush responds to it. It can open up some space."

Anyone doubting the generalized treason in the superscilious statements of the western left have to look at their bewilderment and fascination with “the letter.” The press were nearly peeing their hemp undies in anticipation, and seems to have found it’s dwelling on religion a curve ball they don’t seem to have much intellectual access to. I imagine that other that the séance-like interfaith meetings at the local Unitarian “thing” they wouldn’t recognize real religious intolerance if it bit them.

Retreating to their “happy place”, repetition becomes their friend - a sort of harkening back to their childhoods in 2003.

So when Iranian bloggers and their readers think the international press’ coverage sucks, it’s yet another sign that the elevator isn’t quite going up to the top floor in media manor.

Chirac never had an account atJapan's Sowa Bank ...

... because he had it at Nomura.