Roger Cohen Watch

Here is an email I sent to Jack Shafer of Slate. One of his pet peeves is how Roger Cohen continues to be a New York Times columnist.

Subject: Cohen Watch

Today he waxes eloquent. Free association? Gibberish? Who knows?
Here are a few howlers, but really the entire thing has to be read to be (dis-)believed!
The column's title: "Beyond Conspiracy, Progress" (Say what?)
"Yet all this happened. Just as it happened that the Soviets were once our allies and Communists from Central Asia raised the hammer-and-sickle on the Reichstag as Hitler's Germany burned in 1945." (Is he talking Communist Muslims here?)
"And then, the Soviets became our enemies while the Japanese, despite Pearl Harbor, became our friends." (What about Hiroshima?) "And, at last, the Soviets became Russians who were no longer enemies but rivals." (What about all those Central Asians?)
"What we all want is pretty simple. Home about sums it up. The place they have to take you in." (Where, or in what?)
"European peace is a miracle; we forget too many miracles." (about?)

I can't go on. This guy's musings are not even amusing or bemusing. The real "miracle" is that they appear in the New York Times.

Greg Bachelis
(retired mathematician and would-be political blogger)

I've been Time-d out

I sent a letter to Time about Michael Kinsley's column in the December 17th edition, "Kidding Ourselves About Immigration". Several letters about that column appear in the December 31st edition, not including mine. For the record, here it is.

Michael Kinsley fails to distinguish between two kinds of illegal immigrants: Those who entered the country legally but overstayed their visa, hence becoming illegal, and those who entered without papers and hence were illegal from the moment they set foot inside the country. The former group is no doubt heterogeneous and no doubt deserving of some consideration. As for the latter group, why should proximity to the U.S. border be a valid reason, in and of itself, for allowing such people to "jump the line", no matter how much "gumption" they show, to use Kinsley's term.

Flippancy Should Not Trump Accuracy

In her column in today's Slate about the presidential candidates' legal advisers, Emily Bazelon writes:

"[Victoria Toensing] a supporter of Scooter Libby ...argued that the law couldn't have been broken when Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA agent was blown because her status wasn't really covert. The jury who convicted Libby disagreed."

The jury did no such thing! Libby was convicted of process crimes. I believe that very little evidence on Plame's covert status was even allowed in. Flippancy should not trump accuracy.

I posted the above quote and comment to Slates's The Fray. Why should sloppiness by columnists surprise me? Well, she is a lawyer, after all.

I have several earlier posts about Libby's sentence

Krugman and Herbert vs. Brooks

Today, I sent the following letter to the New York Times:

You seem to have a war raging between three of your columnists (Brooks, Herbert and Krugman) over the significance of Ronald Reagan's kicking off his 1980 campaign for president at the Neshoba County Fair, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, and the fact that he uttered the term "states' rights" during his speech.

To me this is somewhat a "tempest in a teapot". Since the early 1950's. Reagan was a reactionary, an apologist for big business and an enthusiast for small government. (I am old enough to have lived through all this.) Didn't he meet his second wife Nancy when he vetted her to see if she was THE Nancy Davis on some Hollywood blacklist? (She wasn't.)

To me, his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair was of a piece with all his other actions. His administration's domestic policies did a lot of damage to this country. His administration also nurtured a generation of young reactionaries who have since risen to high places such as the US Supreme Court. So let's not lose our perspective on all this. Like him or not, Reagan was for sure "Reagan." And anyhow, the last time I looked, Mississippi was still part of the United States. *******
(end of letter)

The Wall Street Journal has their take on this, which, while skewed as usual, is quite informative. The latest salvo was today's column by Bob Herbert.

I would like to expand a bit on what I said in my letter. Reagan was able to reach out to moderates, as he did while Governor of California (while also gutting the state's mental health system), when selecting George H. W. Bush to be his running mate (the latter had accurately characterized supply side economics as "voodoo economics"), and in selecting Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the US Supreme Court.

He did eventually sign on to the extension of the Voting Rights Act and the Martin Luther King, Jr., birthday holiday. He was also quite capable of raising taxes, and he ran up huge deficits, which, Dick Cheney to the contrary notwithstanding, did matter. He may have been a great president, in that he knew what he stood for and how to communicate it, but, domestically at least, he was not a great president, but rather a great reactionary.

Novak, Carter and Israel

Bob Novak, in his column in today's Washington Post, "Carter's Clarity, Bush's Befuddlement", discusses the new documentary, "Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains", about Carter's book tour promoting his latest book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." Here are some of the last few paragraphs:

"In the movie, Carter repeatedly declares that Israel must end its occupation of Palestine for peace to have a chance. The hecklers at his appearances and confused interviewers only provoke a stubborn Carter, who says chopping up the West Bank is actually worse than apartheid, just as Palestinian peace-seekers told me this year in Jerusalem.

A broader, more detailed analysis can be found in the newly updated American version of 'Lords of the Land' by Professor Idith Zertal and leading Israeli columnist Akiva Eldar. This scathing account of the occupation, first published in Israel in 2005, declares that former prime minister Ariel Sharon's plan for a security wall was intended to 'take hold of as much West Bank territory as possible and block the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.'

As Israelis, Eldar and Zertal employ language that not even Carter dares use: ......

In 'Man From Plains,' Carter goes further in this direction than any other prominent American has to date, and people who wander into a movie theater to see the film may be shocked. It raises questions that must at least be asked for the contemplated [Middle East] conference at Annapolis to have any chance."
*******************
I agree with Novak's sentiments, although I was appalled by Carter's use of the "loaded" term "Apartheid" in his book's title. This couldn't do anything but inflame the debate, which is already hot enough as it is. I have always thought Carter had a "screw loose" somewhere, like the time he invited the President of Haiti to teach in his Sunday School class. But I digress.

I am (for the most part) a non-observant Jew, and I am also not a Zionist. (These two properties are logically independent of one another!) I have always been amazed that anyone who criticizes Israeli policies, except an Israeli, is almost automatically branded an anti-Semite, and that many American Jews are reflexive rather than reflective in their attitude towards Israel. Last summer, during the Israeli-Lebanese war, I had a post, "On Just Wars", which touched on the above issues. I also quit the Anti-Defamation League, which I had belonged to for years, because it had become such a Zionist cheerleader.

The group I support that is involved with Israeli-Palestinian issues, Americans for Peace Now, is about as even handed as one can get. They are very concerned about the proliferation of settlements, and illegal settlements, on the West Bank. Their Israeli counterpart, Shalom Achshav, supported the war last summer, up to a point anyway, as did virtually every other group in Israel.

How do you spell PERON ?

Well, Charles Krauthammer repeatedly spells it P-e-r-e-n in his column in today's Washington Post, "The Real Hill-Bill Problem." And we're not talking transliteration here, or leaving out a tilde or an accent. For a columnist and commentator as trenchant and "in your face" as Krauthammer is, he for sure should know how to spell Juan Peron's name, as Peron is no doubt in his pantheon of heroes.

Krauthammer is a good writer to be sure. He is logical (sometimes "faux logical") , clever, and can even be funny. And he is never plagued with self-doubt. He also cherry-picks facts and is at times devious. My favorite example of his deviousness is the time he quoted Senator Carl Levin (whom he respects) about changing our role in the Iraq War. He then added his own embellishments to what Levin had said, putting "words in his mouth", so to speak. Krauthammer then proceeded to criticize Levin's position, based on the embellishments he had added! Enough said.

PS. I sent him an email pointing out his error. I wonder if he'll read it?

update (1:PM) The spelling error has been corrected.

Thomas Friedman

A friend sent me a link to a column by Norman Solomon, bashing Thomas Friedman, which was published on September 6 by CommonDreams.org . I read the column, part of which I agreed with and part of which I thought was silly, and then I started reading the comments. Oh my God! And this was on CommonDreams no less. They should rename the site "Common Nightmares". Here is the comment I posted. (Seven weeks after the article appeared, so probably no one will see it.)

What really disturbs me about many comments, here and elsewhere, are their profanity, vulgarity, and "in your face" nastiness. What is this supposed to accomplish? Whatever happened to civil discourse? Who are people that make such comments hoping to convince? Answer: no one. They just want to get things off their chest. I think such rancor and shrillness debases the seriousness of the issues being discussed. It reduces the debate to locker room level.

As for Thomas Friedman, I have always thought of him as an intellectual lightweight with a "gee whiz" adolescent view of things. Sometimes he gets things right, but often not. He has undue influence, which is sad, since for sure he is no Walter Lippmann!
************(end of my comment)

Why do people want to blame Friedman for everything? He is just one voice. For sure he was "rolled" on the Iraq War, but so were a lot of other people. There are a number of columnists at the New York Times who aren't so easily "rolled", such as Rich, Krugman, Kristof and Dowd. The trouble with Friedman, as with many other journalists, as that he assumes he is entitled to a certain amount of gravitas, when in fact he is not. The most famous example is when Walter Cronkite decided that winning the war in Vietnam was hopeless after the "Tet Offensive" in early 1968, when in fact that offensive was a big military defeat for the Viet Cong (or whatever their proper name was.)

Don't get me wrong, I was a rabid opponent of that war, but I think journalists should know their limitations and clearly separate fact from opinion. Recently, we have the example of Lou Dobbs, who has morphed into an anti-immigration demagogue.

My favorite example of a distinguished journalist was Walter Lippmann. He opposed the Vietnam War, and after Idaho Senator Frank Church became an opponent early on, LBJ was supposed to have told Church that the next time he wanted a bridge built in Idaho, he should go see Walter Lippmann.

You are wrong, Mr. Robinson

In his column in today's Washington Post, " Republican Hot Flashes", Eugene Robinson states the following:

"The latest [example of Republican 'male menopause'] was the Senate vote Wednesday in which Republicans, supported by a handful of red-state Democrats, narrowly scuttled the Dream Act, a bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for some young undocumented immigrants -- but only those who did everything this country once found worthy and admirable in pursuit of the American dream.

Under the proposal, men and women who fulfilled several conditions -- they had to be under 30, had to have been brought into the country illegally before they were 16, had to have been in the United States for at least five years and had to be graduates of U.S. high schools -- would have been given conditional legal status. If they went on to complete two years of college or two years of military service, they would have been eligible for permanent residency.

Let's see. Here was a way to encourage a bunch of kids to go to college rather than melt into the shadows as off-the-books day laborers -- or maybe even gang members. And here was a way to boost enlistment in our overtaxed armed forces. Aren't education and global competitiveness supposed to be vital issues? Aren't we fighting open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The vote against the Dream Act was so irrational, so counterproductive, that it seemed the product of some sort of hormonal imbalance."

*****************

Here is the comment I posted:

"I believe a legitimate argument against the Dream Act is that it would encourage illegal immigration for people wanting to ensure a better future for their children. Most legal immigrants have that desire as well. I don't think we should validate illegal immigration in such a way."

*******************

Part of living the American Dream is that people aren't supposed to get the chance to realize it by cutting in front of the line of those waiting to get into the country. I don't believe that there should be laws validating illegal immigration. One could argue for exceptions in cases that are in the national interest: critical skills or willingness to serve in the armed forces, for example. I believe the former is already the case for legal immigration. As for the latter, to be fair we would have to set up military recruiting centers in all US embassies and consulates. We would also have to amend the Statue of Liberty's famous call:


"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free or to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States ..."


I had an earlier post on this topic at the time the Senate was debating the Immigration bill.

Does the New York Times know a Caucasian when it sees one?

In an article in today's New York Times, "A Son of Immigrants Rises in a Southern State", the author states the following: "[Bobby Jindal] is a highly unusual politician, having become the nation’s first Indian-American governor in a Southern state where race is inseparable from politics. "

Not to make too fine a point of it, but if we're talking about race, then he isn't so unusual, since Indian-Americans, as opposed to American Indians, are, after all, Caucasian. As in "Indo-European". A more accurate term for the author to have used is "color"

George Will loses it!

In his column in today's Washington Post, "The Unforgotten Man", George Will states:

"Politics often operates on the Humpty Dumpty Rule (in 'Through the Looking Glass,' he says, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less'). But the people currently preening about their compassion should have some for the English language.

Clinton's idea for helping Americans save for retirement is this: .... . She proposes to pay for this by taxing people who will be stoical about this -- dead people -- by freezing the estate tax exemption at its 2009 level. "

I posted the following comment to his column:

"Come on George. You know better! The Estate Tax is not a tax on dead people. It is a tax on their estate. A very different entity. It was instituted 100 years ago to prevent the concentration of wealth in a few people's hands. A legitimate use of the tax code. You should include yourself in the list of people using the 'Humpty Dumpty Rule.' Shame on you."

It has always been one purpose of the tax code to redistribute wealth. One major complaint about the Estate Tax was that, in order to pay it, the heirs often had to give up the "family farm". This problem can be handled by increasing exemptions, or whatever. In today's day and age, a bigger problem seems to be that no one wants to inherit the "family farm". George W. Bush doesn't mind using the tax code to redistribute wealth, except in the wrong direction.

Krugman Plays the Race Card

In an otherwise excellent column($) in today's New York Times. "Snow Job in the Desert", Paul Krugman says the following:

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But many people in the political and media establishments swooned: they admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.
Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became apparent that none of his assertions had been true.
********
I believe that the use of the term "masters" in this context is racist (and, believe me, I don't throw the term "racist" around lightly). The pairing, after all, is master-slave. To me, it is just a polite way of saying what Harry Belafonte said a number of years ago when he called Colin Powell a "house nigger". Belafonte later apologized, and Powell said something to the effect that " I told Harry I hoped we could get past using terms like that." I hope Krugman can get past it too.

By the way, there was some evidence. I believe there was a phone intercept talking about "cleaning things up before the inspectors come." It turned out they were talking about old stuff that might still have traces of whatever. Don't forget, Saddam did at one time have WMD's, some of them supplied by us, in which Donald Rumsfeld played a leading role.

All this vilification of Colin Powell makes me understand all the more why he didn't want to run for President. Barack Obama is feeling the heat now, and I think he should get out of the Presidential race, as I fear for his safety. I also feel there was some racism and sexism, not to mention intellectual snobbery, in the criticisms of Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, but I will save this for a future post.

Krugman vs the Republicans

Below is a comment I emailed to Paul Krugman about his column($) in today's New York Times, "Seeking Willie Horton". I have sent several before, but he only posts the ones he responds to, and mine have never seen the light of day.

I enjoy your columns, but today I thought you were shooting from the hip a bit. Is it the Republican base, or the leaders, who you were aiming at? Certainly your comments don't apply to George W. Bush. Dreadful as he is, one has to admit he is genuinely inclusive when it comes to his administration (to a fault when it comes to Gonzales). But then I've thought for a long time that Bush isn't really a Republican, although not for that reason. As for Dukakis, he ran a dreadful campaign, was programmed at all times, and he never fought back, when he was asked what he would do if his wife was raped and murdered, or about the Willie Horton ads. He could have pointed out that most governors-including Reagan-give furloughs to prisoners. As for Reagan, I don't think he we was a racist and certainly not homophobic, at least on a personal level. True, he did pander, but I think one of the big reasons for all the "Reagan Democrats" was because of all the "political correctness" in the Democratic Party. And I'm afraid that this will be coming back full blast if Hillary is elected.
************
To elaborate on my last sentence: One big reason I won't vote for Hillary is that she has an agenda, spoken or not, to take us back to the 1970's, with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and all the rest. Look what happened when Bill got elected: gays in the military, there has to be a female Attorney General, not to mention the health care fiasco and her channeling of Eleanor Roosevelt. Hillary, I knew Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was a friend of mine. (well not really) And believe me, you're no Eleanor Roosevelt.

I lived through the Seventies, and I don't want to have to relive them. "Political correctness" still thrives in academe, which is one reason I'm glad to be out of there. The main organization for academic mathematicians, the American Mathematical Society (AMS), is in step with the colleges and universities on this issue. In the 1970's they decided not to hold their annual meeting in a state that had not ratified the ERA -there went Chicago- and in 1995 they moved the annual meeting out of Denver because Colorado had passed some anti-gay rights legislation, not withstanding the fact that Denver had passed some pro-gay rights legislation.

Lest you think I was an old fuddy-duddy back then, I should mention that in the late Sixties and early Seventies I was the parliamentarian for the "Mathematicians Action Group", which did plenty of rabble rousing at AMS annual and summer meetings.

If I were more mischievous, I would send a letter to the AMS Notices pointing out the following: There is a classical theorem in Number Theory called the "Chinese Remainder Theorem." I always thought it was titled that way because they didn't know which Chinese mathematician had proved it. It turns out that the name of the person is known, but hey (and here I jest) he's Chinese, and who could pronounce the name anyway? The height of political incorrectness! I suspect that such a letter would really get the "politically correct" crowd going.

A bit too Rich for my thoughts

In his (understandably) emotional charge to trash everything about the Bush Administration, I believe that Frank Rich has at times taken leave of his thinking senses. He has always been a bit "over the top", so this is to be expected, I guess. Nevertheless, this bears commenting upon, since there are certainly other villains of this piece besides Bush, Cheney & Co. In his column($) in today's New York Times about the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence, he says
"But if those die-hards [in Bush's base] haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. " But his last sentence runs counter to his argument. If they viewed the leak as a non-event, then they would be more likely to be whipped into a frenzy by Libby's incarceration.

In last week's column, "When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal" , he says that "hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House's guilt in ginning up its false case for war. " But why was this executive order "hiding in plain sight"? It wasn't kept a secret, it's just that few people took note of it or realized its importance.

Later on in his column Rich says "Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if "a vice president has the authority to declassify information," Mr. Cheney replied, "There is an executive order to that effect." He was referring to the order of March 2003."
Now, how does Rich know that this was an "unguarded moment"? My feeling all along has been that the Bush Administration was not really hiding its ginning up of the war. It's just that few people were paying attention to the signs of this, and those who did were not listened to. I'll never forget Paul Wolfowitz being quoted as saying "We've decided to go with WMD's as the best reason," or something to that effect. This was the subject of the infamous "Downing Street Memo," but it wasn't a surprise to me when that memo surfaced.

The sad truth is that Bush, Cheney & Co. have had plenty of enablers -in Congress, the media, and the mostly apathetic American public when it comes to anything other than entertainment, celebrities and sports. I applaud the efforts of Rich and others to get people better focused on the important issues as we deal with the fallout from the "Mushroom Cloud" of the Bush-Cheney Calamity.

Rush to Limbaugh

Well, the battle in the Senate over the immigration bill is coming down to the wire, but is it a rush to justice or a rush to injustice? According to right-wing talk radio and many cable news programs, it is the latter, and they are marshaling the troops as never before. One interesting question is this. Are dittoheads (aka Limbaugh's loyal listeners) capable of independent thought, or are they just pawns in the hands of El Rushbo? Having listened to Limbaugh's show - less and less in recent years as he has gotten shriller and shriller - my answer to that question is a qualified "the latter." I will give an example. He rails against the "drive-by liberal media", but then he will quote them with approbation when they say something he agrees with. This inconsistency doesn't seem to bother the dittoheads. Well, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
In my opinion, at the core of the immigration mess is the fact that illegals do menial jobs that can't be outsourced -in construction, agriculture, home maintenance, etc. - and often for low wages. So employers in these areas resort to "insourcing." For citizens affected by this, it is happening not in some far away third world country, but right in their own backyards!

What do I think about this? I think we should enforce existing immigration laws and secure our southern border, before anything else happens. And let's have price supports for agricultural products. We can afford it, and the workers deserve a living wage. Our grocer won't end up having to sing "Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas for sale."

Ann Coulter - Hatemonger

Excerpts from an article in today's New York Times:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Elizabeth Edwards pleaded Tuesday with Ann Coulter to ''stop the personal attacks,'' a day after the conservative commentator said she wished Edwards' husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, had been killed by terrorists.
''The things she has said over the years, not just about John but about other candidates, lowers the political dialogue at precisely the time we need to raise it,'' Edwards said by phone on MSNBC's ''Hardball'' program, where Coulter was a guest. .....
Coulter responded with a laugh and charged that Edwards was calling on her to stop speaking altogether. ''I don't think I need to be told to stop writing by Elizabeth Edwards, thank you,'' Coulter said. ....
On ABC's ''Good Morning America'' on Monday, Coulter was asked about a March speech in which she used a gay slur to refer to Edwards. ''If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,'' Coulter said, picking up on remarks made by HBO's Bill Maher. Maher suggested in March that ''people wouldn't be dying needlessly'' if Vice President Dick Cheney had been killed in an insurgent attack in Afghanistan.
(end of excerpts)
There are two points worth making. First, Maher is a comedian, which I suppose cuts him some slack. Second, and more importantly, he was referring to something that had actually happened (the insurgent attack) while Cheney was visiting Afghanistan. Coulter's wish, on the other hand, was for something that has not occurred, but was merely a figment of her imagination. This is inciting and hateful. She does not deserve a seat at the media table any more then Pat Buchanan does. (See my earlier post.)

My favorite story about comedians making threats concerns Groucho Marx. When Nixon was President, and Groucho was in his 80's, he evidently said that the only alternative left was assassination. The Secret Service considered whether to bring charges against him (Arrest Groucho Marx?), but finally decided to treat his remark as a joke.

Making Salaries Public?

There was a fairly silly Op-Ed column "Show Us the Money" in today's New York Times, arguing that it is in the public interest that salaries be made public, and giving the Supreme Court as an example. Here is a letter to the editor I sent in response.

The author seems unable to distinguish between private corporations and publicly funded entities such as the Supreme Court, where salaries are not based on merit. Now it is true that in publicly traded companies, the salaries of the top officials are public knowledge, but do we want all salaries to be public? A lot of organizations use a "grade" or "rank" system, and usually one's grade or rank is known by fellow employees. School teachers are sometimes paid by a matrix method: If you have this or that degree, and if you have worked this or that many years, then your salary is X. This is totally transparent, but based more on longevity than on merit. If it is unfair to pay two people different salaries for the same job, do we now want to add humiliation into the mix by making this fact public? There must be better and more confidential remedies for this problem.

Pat Buchanan

I must confess that I occasionally read Pat Buchanan's columns online, even though I know him to be a soft core Holocaust Denier, an anti-Semite (denounced as such by none other than Norman Podhoretz), a xenophobe, and yes, a racist. I find that he often can be witty and make solid arguments for his views.

In 1992 he gave a very divisive "culture wars" speech at the Republican National Convention, and his Presidential Campaign was applauded for minimizing the impact of David Duke. Yes, but to replace Duke with what? I think that a recent column Buchanan wrote, excerpted below, is so full of racism, hate and outright lies, that it should disqualify him from a seat at any political forum on television or radio, from the McLaughlin group on down. (I make further comments at the end of the excerpt.)
**********

The Dark Side of Diversity
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: 05/01/2007
Since the massacre of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, the mainstream media have obsessed over the fact the crazed gunmen was able to buy a Glock in the state of Virginia.
Little attention has been paid to the Richmond legislators who voted to make "Hokie Nation," a Middle American campus of 26,000 kids, a gun-free zone where only the madman had a semi-automatic. Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.
What was Cho doing here? How did he get in?

Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation's doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.
Cho was one of them.
In stories about him, we learn he had no friends, rarely spoke, and was a loner, isolated from classmates and roommates. Cho was the alien in Hokie Nation. And to vent his rage at those with whom he could not communicate, he decided to kill in cold blood dozens of us.
What happened in Blacksburg cannot be divorced from what's been happening to America since the immigration act brought tens of millions of strangers to these shores, even as the old bonds of national community began to disintegrate and dissolve in the social revolutions of the 1960s.

To intellectuals, what makes America a nation is ideas -- ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
But documents no matter how eloquent and words no matter how lovely do not a nation make. Before 1970, we were a people, a community, a country. Students would have said aloud of Cho: "Who is this guy? What's the matter with him?" Teachers would have taken action to get him help -- or get him out.

Since the 1960s, we have become alienated from one another even as millions of strangers arrive every year. And as Americans no longer share the old ties of history, heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture, music, myth or morality, how can immigrants share those ties?
Many immigrants do not assimilate. Many do not wish to. They seek community in their separate subdivisions of our multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual mammoth mall of a nation. And in numbers higher than our native born, some are going berserk here. ...
The 1993 bombers of the World Trade Center and the killers of 9-11 were all immigrants or illegals. ..., ..., ..., ..., ..., Juan Corona, who murdered 25 people in California to be ranked with the likes of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, was a Mexican.

Where does one find such facts? On VDARE.com, a Website that covers the dark side of diversity covered up by a politically correct media, which seem to believe it is socially unhealthy for us Americans to see any correlation at all between mass migrations and mass murder.
"In our diversity is our strength!" So we are endlessly lectured. But are we really a better, safer, freer, happier, more united and caring country than we were before, against our will, we became what Theodore Roosevelt called "a polyglot boarding house for the world."
******************

The outright lie concerns the reactions of students and teachers at Virginia Tech to Cho. They DID react the way Pat Buchanan says would have happened only before 1970. As for Korean Immigrants, a lot of them are Roman Catholics. and the Moonies own the Washington Times. As for mass murderers, one could mention McVeigh and Koczynski. As for things accomplished by immigrants, does Buchanan object to Einstein? Fermi? Yang and Lee? S.S. Chern? Yo Yo Ma? Wang? Murdoch? Schwarzenegger? Not to mention countless Canadians.

Buchanan is entitled to speak his mind, and I don't think Holocaust Deniers should be put in jail. But does one have to be wearing a white hood or sporting a swastika symbol before being denied a seat at the table of political discourse in the Media? I think not. What comes out of Buchanan's mouth is often far more dangerous and insidious than anything Don Imus could ever mutter. Let's get real. Words matter. The truth matters

On Novak's Column in the Washington Post (4/16/07)

I posted this comment about his column.

Good try Bob! For one who has always been skeptical, if not downright cynical, you seem to have suddenly become rather gullible. For Shaer to equate Hamas influence with that of a right wing Israeli nutcake is laughable. As for the Oslo accords, Arafat ignored them for years with impunity. That being said, I applaud you for trying to get a dialogue started. George W. Bush even undercuts his own secretary of state in this regard. Remember during one of Ike's summits, they didn't know what to do with Khruschev, because he was a Communist Party Official but not a Government official? They managed to find him a seat at the table.

Albom the All-Seeing

I sent this letter to the Detroit Free Press in 2005. Albom had written an article one day before a sports event (to be published after it) stating that certain people had attended who in fact had not.
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The only thing that bothers me about Mitch Albom is his sense of infallibility. Once, years ago, he misused the term "Death Takes a Holiday". I was unable to get any response at all to my pointing out this fairly blatant error from either him or the Free Press. If Mitch wanted to turn a colloquial expression upside down, that was his right!Now he has added predicting the future to his repertoire, and this lands on the front page when his assertion doesn't pan out.But over what? President Bush makes up news stories to distribute, mocks the social security trust fund, and as we all know by now, cooked the books for reasons to invade Iraq. Isn't this bigger news? Is the identities of attendees at sports events such a vital issue?The Free Press has caved to the sports-mad ethos of this town. You cater to and promote mediocrity, just as President Bush does. The editors have no moral high ground from which to attack Albom or anyone else. You have squandered your legacy, and the reasons for that are what someone should be looking into.