It’s been half a century, and many good people died or were imprisoned in the attempt to liberate themselves from one of the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. But they won, eventually, no thanks to the US State Department. Or perhaps even the CIA, which seems in many ways to be our greatest enemy these days.

By Mark Steyn:

…it wasn’t until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry’s pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush’s Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he’s still down there. It’s gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can’t attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you’ve got most of your arms and legs and he hasn’t. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn’t have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry’s speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, “If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards.”

“What crackpot argument can’t be immunized by the Left’s invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?” wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. “If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we’re allowed to respond to?”

Why not, indeed?

I will note that I haven’t read Coulter’s book, and don’t intend to. It’s sad that she couldn’t make her many legitimate points about the secular religion of the left without dragging science and Darwin into it. Unfortunately, though, it’s the inevitable pushback from evangelizing against God by the likes of Dawkins and Dennett.

After a long hiatus, Bill Whittle has a new essay up. Well, actually it’s the introduction to a new book. About the American civilization.

I have a mental map of the world. So do you. So did Lenin, and al-Zarqawi, and Winston Churchill, and Attila, and Ronald Reagan. Everyone has an internal map of how the world works.

The problem is that we get rather fond of these maps. Some people get so fond of these maps that they do nothing but sit around in the dark depths of the chart room and compare maps. If they see something on another map that seems to agree, more or less, with what they have sketched out on their own, they feel vindicated. This is human nature. I do it, and you do it too.

People will sit in the chartroom, and argue about their maps, while the ship of history rips out her keel. But as the arguments rage hither and yon down in the chartroom, as maps and cartographers are bandied back and forth like trading cards and people come to blows over mapmakers dead a century or a millennium before, there does remain one small, unassuming little token of hope. Not much really — just an action so simple and obvious that we overlook it time and time again. What can we do to end this arguing about which way to sail and on what map? How can we tell where the reefs and channels really are? Dear God, is there nothing we can do to get an answer among all these authorities?

Well, there is something we can do. We can get up from the chartroom of theory, this dungeon of pointless debate and argumentation, and go and stand on the bridge. We can look at the world as it really is, and draw new maps as we go on.

When you use your common sense, your personal experience, over any of the so-called

Just listening to Fox News Sunday, and Juan Williams is wondering why William Jefferson (you know, the guy who had ninety grand in his freezer?) lost his committee post when other Democrats weren’t treated similarly. He used as an example Gary Condit (remember him?–Just before September 11th?), who was investigated for months but was never punished by the party (though he did lose his primary in the next election, IIRC).

I wish that Brit Hume or Bill Kristol had asked Juan what he thought would have happened had Chandra Levy’s body been found in Condit’s freezer.

With Greg Gutfeld:

How do you define your politics? When and why did you become a conservative?

I was a lefty in high school

For left-wing nostalgiasts. As Michael Barone says, no matter how fervently they may wish it, Iraq is not Vietnam, “Plamegate” is not Watergate, and Bush is not Nixon redux.

For left-wing nostalgiasts. As Michael Barone says, no matter how fervently they may wish it, Iraq is not Vietnam, “Plamegate” is not Watergate, and Bush is not Nixon redux.

For left-wing nostalgiasts. As Michael Barone says, no matter how fervently they may wish it, Iraq is not Vietnam, “Plamegate” is not Watergate, and Bush is not Nixon redux.

Natalie Maines continues to inflict her ignorant political opinions on an indifferent world:

“The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism,” Maines resumes, through gritted teeth. “Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country

Jonah Goldberg says that we should have installed liberalism in Iraq, not democracy. There is a confusion between the two, and as he points out, introducing democracy in an illiberal society will not necessarily provide helpful results.

…many on the left see no problem singing the praises of leftwing regimes which put “equality” ahead of democracy. As Derb once put it, “Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.” But regimes which put liberty and the rule of law ahead of democracy and the like are always immediately derided as dictatorial “strong-man” regimes. I’m not saying that such criticism isn’t sometimes accurate. After all, democracy is good and tends to innoculate against tyranny and without democracy enlightened regimes often go bad. But I would still have preferred to live under Pinochet than Castro or Lee Kuan Yew instead of Hugo Chavez (or, heh, the Hapsburgs than the Soviets).

As someone who still considers himself a classical liberal, that makes a lot of sense to me, given the often ugly choices of the real (as opposed to ivory-tower) world. It’s easy to overrate and overemphasize democracy. As Churchill once said, it’s the worst possible system, except for all the others.