New Paltz Journal

Half-jokingly, but only half, at one point in the 1990s I began to refer to myself, with purposeful immodesty, as “the world’s greatest living detective.”

Why?

Well, that’s a complicated question. But a short answer is that I had drawn a detailed map of a very specific confluence of immediately present drug rings and the gendarmes, which was probably about 95% accurate. There is, of course, some good money to be made in drugs, and those with any sort of hand in the action need to be compensated. But, you see, I had had enough of dealers treating my neighborhood like it was their very own Oldsmobile dealership, and I began to pit the cleaner hands of authority against the dirtier hands of authority and what a lot of surprises that did bring.

Talk about the kabuki.

One thing that I learned is that cleaner authority, which is usually up the ladder, fears the praetorianism inherent to the authority on the street, so to speak. It’s quite remarkable how the contradictions multiply as the former tries to deal with the latter. And how the shadow commands that parallel the official structures know how to intimidate the official side.

Then came the intrepid Rudolph Giuliani (gosh, now I’ve given away the larger locale) and he danced the kabuki along the lines of “If you are dirty get clean or you’re gone and I am the Sheriff” and, of course, he meant it. The gendarmes were never purposely embarrassed, so as to not break their morale, but they were radically reformed. It required iron will and a real plan to get that done. While this corruption-reform thing is cyclical, Giuliani’s reform was built to last, and it pretty much has.

Why do I bring this up? Certainly not to discuss Giuliani and his success, but to emphasize that he knew what I knew about why the place was crumbling. He fixed it citywide, in fact, but in my neighborhood I was fixing it before he took office, and I had flung myself into it in ways that exposed me continuously to threats and harm.

In a way, I saw that not only as acts in self-interest, but as acts in service to civil society. And I saw that as something that I owed.

And during that time, one day in an empty church down the block, I asked God, politely but in blunt terms, why the hell I was doing what I was doing, and as soon as the question was formed in my mind an entire grade-school class of kids filed into the church from the adjoining school.

I didn’t know any of those kids, and wouldn’t recognize a single one of them if I ran into them today as adults, but they were in my neighborhood.

So, I stood the watch for them in that neighborhood for about four years, until the corruption was driven back into the shadows, off the sidewalks, and something happened that confirmed success: after a long absence mothers were again seen pushing strollers on the streets, taking their younger ones out and about. That was something that had all but disappeared a few years earlier.

You would probably never guess, to look at me, because I am a man of weak character, that I endured dozens of threats against my life and that the hang-up telephone call was a fixture in my daily routine. If you think some sort of purity played a role in it, think again. I often had to get goosed up with a few drinks before taking myself down to the street as I recited the Lord’s Prayer. I was always afraid, and no one was watching my back but me, and I did a lot of that.

But one thing that experience gave me was a peek over the side of civilization into that place where civilization has broken down. It doesn’t happen all at once, but it is always happening somewhere. In my case, it was happening right outside my door.

Friends would insist that Madam Vandam and I move, but we said no. That was our neighborhood. We lived there.

The cannibal pot finds its way into her column:

I guess we’re beginning to see the problem of basing a political platform on the passing fancies of “centrists.” These are people who have no opinions because they know nothing about national issues. They’re the ones who check the “not sure/no opinion” box on polls regarding the legalization of cannibalism.

* Leggy Babe Who Gives No Quarter

Congress can fix this, by passing legislation that reinstates the status quo ante (i.e., enemy combatants do not have any right to habeas review in U.S. courts) and in that legislation use its Constitutional authority to take jurisdiction over the matter away from the Supreme Court. But this Congress won’t do it because it is broken, it’s overextended and, in fact, this Congress is lost:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has departed for summer vacation, but what a mess he’s left behind, especially for the U.S. military. His 5-4 decision requiring habeas corpus review for foreign terrorists is already creating confusion and problems about how to handle these dangerous enemies.

Justice Kennedy rose to the level of the Supreme Court without understanding the difference between the requirements of civil justice and the requirements of military justice in the handling of captured enemy combatants. That’s just amazing, but what’s even more amazing is that there are four more justices with the same problem on the Court.

Those four other justices, who voted to extend a right to captured enemy combatants that they are not entitled to, are the same four justices who voted to deny the American people the right protected for them under the Second Amendment.

It must be that “living Constitution” thing. That’s the Constitution where the Court makes the law instead of the Congress and when pressed to its limit the Court deliberately puts the elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution aside and does its own amending. Why, it’s alive!

But because this Congress is broken, overextended and, in fact, lost, this Congress prefers that the Supreme Court make the law and amend the Constitution.

Regrettably, the Administration will now have to let most enemy fighters go. The burden of gathering enough evidence to meet the habeas standards of U.S. federal courts is simply too great under battlefield conditions – and in any case is far too dangerous. This week a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the enemy combatant status of a Gitmo detainee captured after training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. The press has reported this as if the Bush Administration had invented a case against an innocent shepherd. But the truth is that in the fog of battle it is impossible to gather evidence the way a Manhattan cop can. There’s no “CSI: Kandahar.”

This is a short piece from The Wall Street Journal by Numan al Faddagh, an Iraqi writer who lives in Cairo. Iraqi expats in Cairo gather at a restaurant by the name of Le Grillion:

Owned by an Iraqi, it has become a hive for many of the Iraqi expatriates who fled their country seeking refuge in Egypt. The discussion is endless, with a couple of new faces every night.

Go read the whole thing.

I’ve never been shy about stating my unequivocal support for the American effort in Iraq. There were good arguments both for and against the mission, but most of the criticism that has come after the United States removed Saddam Hussein from power stinks so badly of canned KGB propaganda from the Cold War and the Vietnam era that I would laugh at it if it wasn’t so pathetic and dangerous. And I’m including in that much of what has come out of the mouths of elected leaders and their party spokesmen.

I’ve written so much about the war in Iraq (not so much at this venue) that it would take me weeks just to sort it out. I always believed that a reasonably modern civil society in Iraq would be the most important change in the Middle East since Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Islamic civilization today is characterized by a long decline over centuries (see Bernard Lewis’s timely book What Went Wrong? for a clear take on that decline) and by a rejectionist approach to modernity. Modernity is a Western accomplishment, which makes it suspect, with its civil institutions and orientation to individual rights. As Lewis points out, the traditional prescription within Islam for the problems of Islam has long been more Islam.

Iraq is the place where Islam and modernity will attempt a rapproachment, so to speak.

So far, Iraq has been a huge defeat for Osama bin Laden (critics constantly repeated that it was a boon for bin Laden), a killing field for terrorists, and a demonstration that Iraqis, at least, have a craving for freedom. It was obviously a defeat for Saddam Hussein and his mob, one of the most wildly dangerous outfits in the world when they held power and lots of cash at the same time.

We’ve stayed in Iraq to stave off a new thugocracy while the civil society and modern government form and take hold. Critics demanded that we drop our efforts, and then said all sorts of incredibly naive and willfully ignorant things about what would happen. I can’t get into that nonsense now, but suffice it to say we don’t hear much of that constant sort of blather nowadays, as the situation in Iraq continuously improves.

About some of the political leaders who started to echo the MoveOn.org sickness, I cannot really say what I think because it goes beyond even my perimeter of civility. Let me just remark that someone like Harry Reid tests the limits of my belief in America’s own civil society, and leave it at that.

Thomas Sowell takes a look at what happens when internationalism and pacifism erode the sense of patriotism. Naturally, he looks first to France, and the difference between its response to German aggression in World War I and World War II. Note which group took the lead:

In France, after the First World War, the teachers’ unions launched a systematic purge of textbooks, in order to promote internationalism and pacifism.

Books that depicted the courage and self-sacrifice of soldiers who had defended France against the German invaders were called “bellicose” books to be banished from the schools.

Textbook publishers caved in to the power of the teachers’ unions, rather than lose a large market for their books. History books were sharply revised to conform to internationalism and pacifism.

The once epic story of the French soldiers’ heroic defense against the German invaders at Verdun, despite the massive casualties suffered by the French, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun — French and German alike.

In short, soldiers once depicted as national heroes were now depicted as victims — and just like victims in other nations’ armies.

Children were bombarded with stories on the horrors of war. In some schools, children whose fathers had been killed during the war were asked to speak to the class and many of these children — as well as some of their classmates and teachers — broke down in tears.
…

Did it matter? Does patriotism matter?

France, where pacifism and internationalism were strongest, became a classic example of how much it can matter.

During the First World War, France fought on against the German invaders for four long years, despite having more of its soldiers killed than all the American soldiers killed in all the wars in the history of the United States, put together.

But during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. At the bitter moment of defeat the head of the French teachers’ union was told, “You are partially responsible for the defeat.”

Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mauriac, and other Frenchmen blamed a lack of national will or general moral decay, for the sudden and humiliating collapse of France in 1940.

At the outset of the invasion, both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes.

Now, here’s what Sowell has seen happen here in the United States, today:

Most Americans today are unaware of how much our schools have followed in the footsteps of the French schools of the 1920s and 1930s, or how much our intellectuals have become citizens of the world instead of American patriots.

Our media are busy verbally transforming American combat troops from heroes into victims, just as the French intelligentsia did — with the added twist of calling this “supporting the troops.”

See that bit about “citizens of the world instead of American partiots?”

Take a look at this “vision statement” for the New Paltz school system:

Our school community - students, staff, families, and community members - are citizens of the world, passionate about learning and empowered to achieve their dreams.

Citizens of the world: Responsible, ethical, contributing, participating members of local, national and global communities who value all peoples and care about each other…

Isn’t that nice? We’re all “citizens of the world” here in New Paltz, but no mention of the great and wonderful country that we are actually citizens of, you know, the one that guarantees our rights and joins together in the nation’s defense and stands alone as the guarantor of strategic peace in the world? There are you school taxes at work, my fellow “citizens of the world.”

From the European edition of The Wall Street Journal comes this latest shovel of dirt into the U.K.’s sad grave:

Franz Kafka never lived in the British capital. But the Central London employment tribunal paid his life’s work inadvertent tribute the other day, with a post-post-modern multicultural legal twist.

That place, the U.K., is such a bloody mess. This is just one in a long line of absurdities that are burying the former empire upon which the sun never set.

Go read it, but take your stronger stomach with you.

Spengler’s forum had that link.

Last week, as I read through Scalia’s opinion in the Second Amendment case, I thought that I detected the same thing that Hadley Arkes is seeing at First Things: Scalia is edging toward acknowledging the natural law. As an “originalist,” Scalia has one if not both legs in legal positivism, which is diametrically opposed to natural law.

The problem with originialism as legal positivism is that the Framers were swimming in natural law; Independence itself had been justified by an appeal to natural law. So, to be a Constitutional originalist requires cognizance of whence the Framers were drawing some of their basic principles. And going deeper into “tradition,” as Scalia does, to find original meanings leads to products of reason that both move from and toward natural law.

Go read Arkes. He’s reading Scalia as a late bloomer.

Scalia writes the opinion.

I was prepared to see this go the other way, with Justice Kennedy (who virtually owns the 5-4 decisions) choosing to ignore the fact that the right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment clearly runs to the people. It just as clearly does not run exclusively to the militia, which is the argument of the anti-gun zealots.

Much of Scalia’s opinion is devoted to unravelling the sophistic reasoning of the dissenting Justices, and there’s plenty of that to unravel.

Soja takes up the theme of our time.

(Note to New Paltzers: Over the next decade the school district will throw more than a half billion dollars into its roiling pot, and many of you along with it.)

Having successfully moved from the light-heavyweight division into the heavyweight limelight with his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg knocks out poor old Pat Buchanan (most recently KO’ed in the second round by Victor Hanson).

As one of the great brawlers of yesteryear, Buchanan’s new book on World War II, a what-if history that apparently (I haven’t read it) attempts to normalize Adolph Hitler’s foreign policy goals to argue against the Allies having fought him, has turned out to be that “one fight too many” that aging pugilists take with the dream of recapturing their heyday.

I note that in recent appearances with the idiot Chris Matthews on MSNBC that Buchanan has been touched by Chris with the cattle prod on more than one occasion when he, Pat, has deviated too far from the racing Matthews narrative. It must be difficult for Pat to sit there and actually perform as stupidly as Matthews demands, but when Pat accepts a club-fighter venue where he occasionally finds himself in the ring with Butch Maddow, he must know that the days are gone when he got to negotiate the rules.

It’s always a touch and go kind of thing. Victor Davis Hanson just went through it:

I put on a wedding for my daughter this Saturday at 6PM at the farmhouse for about 180 guests. At 5PM it seemed like an utter disaster. The temperature in the garden was 109 and it was unbearable. Last minute runs into town to get umbrellas, fans, misters, and ice water didn’t seem like they would do much. At 5:30 suddenly a hot Valley-type wind came up—the sort of tropical blasts that often come in unexpectedly when the temperature soars over 105.

At first it provided relief, then in minutes it blew table cloths into the wind, blasted off all the table place settings, and whipped up lighting cables. Suddenly a dirt storm was more the danger than heat prostration.

But then as if by magic, at 6:00 PM, five minutes before the ceremony began, suddenly the wind died down after doing its best to cool temperatures, and the wedding went off without a hitch, followed by a lovely nighttime dinner with pleasant breezes.

In the space of 30 minutes, one guest said, “I’m dying. See what happens when you try to have a outside wedding in late June in the Valley,” followed by one that smiled, “This was a great idea to eat out here in this pleasant breeze.”

All the other wedding problems—like blown circuit breakers taking out fans and lights just before the wedding music started—were the normal minor glitches compared to the weather. My daughter got married in the same house where her grandmother had in 1947, and her great-grandmother had in 1911—and was the sixth continuous generation to live in the same bedroom.

So, with nature, expect the unexpected.

Jonah Goldberg offers an excerpt from his recent best-selling book Liberal Fascism (recommended here several times). The passage is about one of the most ghastly Americans who ever lived, who has of course become a hero of the Left. Here’s the first paragraph to induce a full reading:

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

So much, at least, for all that stuff about a post-racial candidacy:

JACKSONVILLE, Florida (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him.

How does one “highlight” the fact that Obama is black when he’s been campaigning for the past eighteen months as a black man? Is there possibly a sector of the American population who think that Obama is white? (Other than maybe his white relatives?)

He sounds like a candidate who is jumpy about something out there that he knows could come crashing through the window like a lawn chair in a ferocious thunderstorm.

John Pitney takes the more mundane view of this as a tactic:

A few months ago, historian Sean Wilentz dubbed this tactic the “race-baiter card.” Smear your opponents as racists, and if there’s no evidence for the claim, accuse them of using “coded language.” There is no authoritative racial codebook, so the charge is easy to lodge. The campaign need not make such accusations directly, since sympathetic writers will do so.

This also sounds a bit like a return to the interview of the Obamas back in February of last year when Michelle said that “as a black man Barack can get shot going to the gas station.”

That got me wondering about how many men, black or white, have gotten shot at gas stations in recent years. Maybe that’s something that happens in Chicago a lot. I don’t know.

But why go in this direction now? Could be just what Pitney says it is, but I’ll stick with my theory that Obama has left a big “mistake” or “mistakes” out there that he’s worried about, and he’s going to shake the race stick to see if that can scare any would-be revelations off.

That might work for something on the milder side, but for the “holy grail” YouTube? I don’t think so.

A fixture on the exclusive New Paltz Journal blogroll, The Belmont Club, has moved to Pajamas Media.

Richard Fernandez has dropped his “Wretchard” nom de plume, and is now writing as himself.

…Olbermann had dragged Russert’s metaphysical corpse back to his madhouse and had arranged it there on-air for his own advantage. I’m sure the attendants around the place saw it. I’m not sure that they cared. Caring about it seems out of their reach.

By tonight, after Russert’s funeral this afternoon, Olbermann had taken full possession of Russert’s legacy and spirit and was busy devouring them, like Renfield stealing a spider into his mouth under a staircase.

I’ve never seen a situation spiraling downward as fast as NBC News, and because it’s not a physical thing, but rather metaphysical, it could easily accelerate beyond the speed of light. The question isn’t so much whether or when it will find a bottom, but rather if in this metaphysical collapse of ethics and standards there is a bottom.

With Olbermann in the lead the only logical place this can land is in outright on-the-air cannibalism. Maybe the best that can be hoped for is auto-cannibalism. A 28 Days sequel, with a twist.

What you see with Olbermann is another example of why reality is so often less believable than fiction.

Someone (Richard Fernandez, aka Wretchard of The Belmont Club) has been doing actual investigative reporting on Barack Obama’s changing positions on the war in Iraq.

That’s so out of line! What does Fernandez think he’s trying to do? Show up The New York Times?

Look, Fernandez, don’t be asking any questions you don’t think the Times would ask with their crack team of editors and reporters trained by the best Ivy League schools. If they haven’t found the answers, then those questions don’t exist.