Let's begin by examining a few incontrovertible basics:

1. When did the threat to the United States start? Many will say September 11, 2001. The most likely beginning was the 1972 Munich Olympics. The answer as far as the United State is concerned is 1979, 22 years prior to September 2001, with the following attacks on us:

* Iran Embassy Hostages, 1979
* Beirut, Lebanon Embassy 1983
* Beirut, Lebanon Marine Barracks 1983
* Lockerbie, Scotland Pan-Am flight to New York 1988
* First New York World Trade Center attack 1993
* Dhahran, Saudi Arabia Khobar Towers Military complex 1996
* Nairobi, Kenya US Embassy 1998
* Dares Salaam, Tanzania US Embassy 1998
* Aden, Yemen USS Cole 2000
* New York World Trade Center 2001
* Pentagon 2001

We should not forget all the airline hijackings in the 1980's including the TWA on the runway in Lebanon where a U.S. sailor trying to protect other passengers was shot in the head and dumped on the runway. Do you remember the kidnappings and murders in Lebanon that included William Casey and Col. Higgins, USMC plus the kidnappings of Terry Waite, Michael Anderson and others? Are you old enough to recall the piracy of the Achille Lauro and the murder of a crippled American citizen Leon Klinghoffer who was shot and thrown overboard, still in his wheelchair? Do you remember the Lybia-sponsored bombing of the discothèque in Germany near a U.S. Airbase in which Americans were killed by Muslim terrorists. There are more, hundreds more. These are just a few examples. Most of the incidents would br describe by a civilized human being as atrocities. Not coincidentally, most of the indicents were directed by Imad Mugniya, the CURRENT Iranian head of the Pasdaran's Special Directorate (foreign intelligence missions). While every American could add any number of Islamic terrorist incidents or atrocities to the above list, the list is intentionally abbreviated to maintain some control over the length of this article. Hopefully the incidents that are listed will make the point of the uncompromising seriousness and international urgency of the Islamic Wars. How many people, do you think, are aware that during the period from 1981 to 2001, there were 7,581 terrorist attacks worldwide - before September 11, 2001? How many victims of Islamic terrorism (killed or maimed innocent men, women and children) will be necessary before most Americans come to the realization that their life expectency may be far shorter than they had hoped? Do major cities in the United States have to resemble Baghdad before that realization finally sets in?

2. Why were we attacked? The answer is so elementary: envy, our nation’s success, our freedoms – and the Qur’an command it to the Muslim faithful. The attacks happened during the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. We cannot fault either the Republicans or Democrats as there were no provocations by any of the presidents or their immediate predecessors, Presidents Ford or Carter.

3. Who were the attackers? In each and every case, the attacks on the United States were carried out by Muslims.

4. What is the Muslim percentage population of the World? 20-25%.

5. Is the Muslim Religion peaceful? Hopefully, but the question is irrelevant. Claims that the large majority of Muslims are peaceful is sycophant propaganda and meaningless. There is no doubt that the predominately Christian population of Germany was peaceful too, but under the dictatorial leadership of Hitler (who was also Christian), that made no difference. You either went along with the administration or you were eliminated. There were 5 to 6 million Christians killed by the Nazis for political reasons (including 7,000 Polish priests). Today, you either go along with the ruling Imam or you are eliminated – that means exterminated.

Unknown to most who no longer study history, almost the same numbers of Christians were killed by the Nazis as the six million holocaust Jews. We seldom hear about anything other than the atrocities committed against the Jews, which is completely understandable. Jews have no intention of letting history forget. If only Christians had the same resolve. Although Hitler kept the world focused on exterminating the Jews, he had no hesitancy about killing anyone who got in his way of taking over the world - German, Christian or atheist. It’s the same with the Muslims. They have focused the world on the United States, but they gleefully kill in the name of Allah any and all who gets in their way – including their own people, the Spanish, French or anyone else. The point is this: peaceful Germans provided no protection to anyone from the Nazis. No matter how many peaceful Muslims there may be, they will provide no protection from Muslim terrorists. Muslim leaders are fanatical and bent on killing all of us “infidels,” just as they are commanded to do by the Qur’an. Their own pronouncements confirm their actions throughout recorded history and their future intentions. Peaceful Muslims are no less worrisome or benign than peaceful WWII Germans. Whether Muslims or Germans, their choice was to participate, shut up or die!

6. So who are we at war with? There is no way anyone can challenge reality. The world is at war with the adherents of the Muslim faith. What distinguishes the Muslim terrorists is that they are non-state, non-uniformed, uncivilized in their atrocities, and engage in a form of asymmetrical warfare. Trying to be politically correct and avoid verbalizing this conclusion will become fatal to tens of thousands - and without a coherent national response to Islam, possibly millions.

7. There is no way to win a conflict if you can't or refuse to clearly recognize and articulate who it is you are fighting. Then you have to respond accordingly, not focused on Political Correctness.

So with that background, the three major questions that will determine the outcome are:

1. Can we lose this war?
2. What does losing really mean?
3. What is required to win?

If we are to win, we must answer these questions without equivocation.

We can definitely lose this war, and as anomalous as it may sound, the major reason we can lose the war is that so many American citizens simply cannot fathom the answer to the second question - What does losing really mean? There is still one other unpleasant possibility. Our congressmen are so consumed by self interest and accumulating personal wealth and power that they don’t really care if we lose.

It would appear that a great many of us think that losing the war means hanging our heads, bringing the troops home after a media-engineered defeat and going on about our business, like post-Vietnam. This is as far from the truth as one can get.

What losing really means is: We would no longer be the premier country in the world. The attacks on American citizens and interests will not subside, but steadily increase in number and intensify in spectacular brutality. Remember, they want us dead, not just quiet. If they just wanted us quiet, they would not have orchestrated an escalating series of attacks against us over the past two decades. The Muslim plan is for terrorists to attack until all Western nations (civilized nations) are neutered and/or submissive to Islam. Secondly, we would have no future support from other nations. They would correctly fear Muslim reprisals. They would see we are pathetically impotent and cannot help them. For example, how much can we expect today from Spain or France, both of whom are held hostage? Muslims will continue to subvert other non-Muslim nations one at a time. It will become increasingly easy for them. It doesn't matter whether it was right or wrong for Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Spain did it because the Muslim terrorists bombed their trains and told them to withdraw their troops. It is a forgone conclusion that anything else Muslims want Spain to do will be done. Spain is finished. France is circling the drain and Germany is not far behind. Even Great Britain is in trouble. Try to imagine a world in which every one of the European nations is a Muslim dominated society that is the avowed religious, military and economic enemy of the United States.

Our one hope is that some of these countries might see the light and realize that if the United States doesn’t win, they’re finished too. They can't resist the Muslim terrorists without us. It may already be too late for France. France is 20% Muslim, fading fast and hasn’t seen the light for several centuries!

If we lose the Islamic Wars, our production, income, exports (which are already diminishing fast) and our way of life will vanish as we know it. After losing, who would trade or deal with us if they were threatened by the Muslims. And they will be threatened by the Muslims. If the United States can't stop the Muslims, how can it stop anyone else? The Muslims know what is riding on this war, they’ve made huge inroads, and they’re completely committed to winning, “at any cost.” Muslim leaders know this has to be done quickly, before their oil revenues that are used to fund their weapons and terrorism are eliminated by alternative energy sources in the West, which until now Congress has mightily resisted at the behest of the petroleum lobby.

“At any cost” is the only words key to our survival. “At any cost.”

Are we united as a population and committed to winning “at any cost?” Are we committed to winning “at any cost” to our enemies? Not even remotely. Our nation’s fate will be sealed unless changes occur very soon. We don’t have 2-5 more years to debate the Neville Chamberlain standards of national defense and diplomacy, and a one-world order based on egalitarianism envisioned by President G.W. Bush. Muslims have as their goal an incredibly repressive one-world order firmly grounded in the “Religion of Death,” many elements of which you have already seen.

Until we collectively recognize the costs of losing, until our politicians recognize our nation’s peril, we will not unite. We will not put 100% of our thoughts and efforts into winning – at any cost. Until our elected representatives and the main stream media recognizes the costs of losing and elevates the nation above their own self interests, it won’t matter how many individual citizens recognize the costs of losing. Congress doesn’t listen to the “majority” now. It is going to take a 100%-effort to win the Islamic Wars, supported both by middle America and by every race-, gender-, religious-, media-, and ideologically-based fanatic currently wasting valuable national oxygen. What are the odds?

So, how can we lose the war? The answer is simple. We can lose the war by continuing what we’re doing, by culturally imploding, by defeating ourselves, by refusing to recognize the enemy and their purposes, and by not really digging in and lending full support to the war effort. If we’re united, and committed to winning “at any cost,” there is no way that we can lose. If we continue to be divided, and set arbitrary limits on the extent to which we are willing to go to win, then there is no way that we can win! With a liberal majority ruling Congress, any hope for a favorable outcome is currently nothing but a dream.

Let me give you a few examples of how we simply don't comprehend the life and death seriousness of this situation. Although all of the terrorist attacks for the last 30 years were committed by Muslim men between 17 and 40 years of age, the Democrats and the main stream media refuse to allow profiling. Does that sound like we’re taking this thing seriously? This is a war to the death – your death or conversion to Islam is the grand prize! If you don’t believe something as obvious as a hand in front of your face, ask Barrack Hussein Obama, Senator from Illinois.

For a specified and set duration of time, it is possible we may have to agree to give up some of the civil rights we’ve become accustomed to (and guaranteed under the Bill of Rights). We have a distinct choice, relinquish some of our civil rights temporarily or lose all of them permanently. Wait, you argue, recent administrations have been all too quick to deny Americans their civil rights – everything from speech to gun ownership. That is entirely true. However, if you open your eyes to reality, you will quickly realize that the erosion of our civil liberties was not as a result of the Islamic Wars, but the result of a liberal socialist agenda underway for 50-75 years. Now is the time to work the American magic and take the rights back. Begin by reinstituting full and total property rights, gun ownership and a universal flat tax. Agree to intelligence gathering and privacy compromises in the extremis of national defense. Put an end to institutionalized discrimination – once and for all - in a single stroke. And don't worry that it is a slippery slope. We gave up plenty of civil rights during WWII, and immediately forced the government to restore them after the victory in Europe and Japan. Those who are not willing to make the sacrifices right now - to facilitate winning - are those not willing to do what it takes to win. Take the risk. What is your selfish point. You already have a 100% certainty of losing if you don’t.

Do I blame President Bush or President Clinton before him? No, and you shouldn’t either. Presidents come and go. But by all means, blame Congress for 75 years of creeping socialist legislation, political correctness, assault on the Bill of Rights, judicial activism, abandonment of the rule of law and their unbridled corruption. That is where your civil liberties have gone.

There is no such thing as a clean, lawful and honorable war. If you are unwilling to accept that, then once again you will lose. A war, should it come to pass, and it has, is a time to kill people by the tens of thousands, without remorse, so that they will stop killing your sons and daughters.

Get any notion of egalitarianism and political correctness out of your head. Some politicians and the media have gone to such extremes in their blind self-indulgent criticism of the war and the current Administration that it seems they would like to see us lose. Well they do want the United States to lose, and that has not changed since the Spanish-American War before 1900. Not only don’t they recognize what losing means, they’re disloyal (feel no responsibility for anything but themselves). Nothing is more important to a liberal than “self,” including their own birthright. Forget Republican and Democrat political party labels. There are less than five conservatives (out of 535) in all of Congress and only one Libertarian.

Nevertheless, our liberal national conduct communicates to the enemy – correctly - that we are divided and weakening. Our immorality and lack of a value system concerns other nations deeply. It does great damage to our cause. When you hear that Europeans hate Americans, think disrespect and distrust for what Congress and the Supreme Court has caused our nation to become.

We have recently had an issue that bears mentioning, involving the treatment of Muslim prisoners of war by a small group of military police. These are the same prisoners who just months ago were throwing their own people off buildings, cutting off their hands, cutting out their tongues and otherwise murdering them just for disagreeing with Saddam Hussein. And just a few years ago these same type of prisoners chemically killed 400,000 of their own citizens for the same reason. They are the same enemy fighters who were recently burned the bodies of Americans and dragged their charred corpses through the streets of Iraq. And still more recently, the same enemy was providing videos to international news sources of the beheading of Americans.

Compare these atrocities with the posturing by some of our press and politicians, who for several months have talked about nothing else but the "humiliating" of some Muslim prisoners - not burning them, not dragging their charred corpses through the streets, not beheading them, but "humiliating" them. Can this be for real? The politicians and pundits even talked at one time about the impeachment of the Secretary of Defense. If this doesn't show the complete lack of comprehension and understanding of the seriousness of the enemy we are fighting, and the life and death struggle we are in, and the disastrous results of losing this war, nothing can. To bring our country to a virtual political standstill over the prisoner issue for no other reason that political self-interest makes us look like an insane Nero playing his fiddle as Rome burned -- totally oblivious and without concern for what is going on in the real world.

Neither we, nor any other country, can survive this level of internal strife fueled by disloyal citizens (politicians) consumed by their own point of view, self-interest and personal ambitions. They are absolutely oblivious to the magnitude of the situation we are in and into which the Muslim terrorists have been pushing us for many years. They have no solutions, just criticisms. They have no alternatives, just disloyal rhetoric. They vote to start the war without the will to win decisively, without the will to win quickly, and without the will to win at any cost to the enemy.

Remember, the Muslim terrorist’s stated goal is to kill all infidels! That translates into ALL non-Muslims -- not just in the United States, but throughout the world. Like it or not, we in the United States are the last bastion of defense and “can’t we all just get along” isn’t going to cut it.

Americans have been criticized for many years for being 'arrogant.' That charge is valid in at least one respect. We genuinely believe that we are so good, so powerful and so smart, that liberals believe we can win the hearts and minds of all those who attack us, and that with both hands tied behind our back, we can defeat anything bad in the world! Well, that is arrogant, and we can't, and only a fool will drink that Jonestown Kool-Aid!

If we don't recognize this liberal arrogance for what it is, a pervasive and consummate ignorance of our enemy, our nation as we know it will not survive. It is an absolute certainty that no other free country in the world will survive if we are defeated. Can the stakes be any greater? Can liberal politicians, Hollywood wonks and the main stream media do any more harm if they tried? Yet liberal politicians and the media continue to spew hateful rhetoric at our Armed Forces, doing everything possible to undermine the United States in the Islamic Wars. Once again, it is an absolute certainty that no other free nation in the world will survive if we are defeated. Is this the unspoken goal of the Democratic Party, the main stream media and this administration.

Our national security and immigration policies on the southern border of the United States are making more reasonable Americans wonder aloud (as reflected in approval ratings of both the President and Congress).

And finally, I challenge each and every American to name a single Muslim country throughout the world that will allow freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equal opportunity for anyone let alone everyone, equal status (or any status) for women, or any Muslim nation that has been productive and contributed in one single way to the good of the world.

This has been a long way of saying that we are not united in the defense of the United States of America, either in these Islamic Wars or national security. Our opportunity to regain our national unity has the trajectory of a gliding anvil that has been falling for some time. It appears that it is Congress’ wish and the media’s goal that the United States of America be equated in history books to the self-inflicted fall of the Roman Empire - assuming that is, if the Muslim leaders will allow history books to be written or read?

If we don't win the Islamic Wars, decisively, right now, by doing whatever it takes, at any cost to the enemy, then you should keep a close eye on how the Muslims take over the Middle East and France in the next five years. They will continue to increase their population in France and continue to encroach little by little on the established French traditions and into their political and legal process. In the meantime, the French will be fighting among themselves over what should or should not be done, which will continue to weaken their nation and prevent any united resolve, until it is too late.

Does that sound eerily familiar? Democracies don't have their freedoms taken away from them by some external military force. Consumed by self-interest instead of unity, they give away their civil liberties, politically correct piece by politically correct piece. We who should know better are giving those freedoms away to Muslims who have shown worldwide that they abhor freedom. They will not permit civil liberties for you or even for themselves. Muslims have shown throughout history that when they have taken over, they start brutally killing any non-conforming person, and then begin killing each other in competition to determine who among them will be the next Imam that will control the masses.

I wonder if we will we ever stop hearing from the most ignorant among us (the politically correct) about the oxymoron "peaceful Muslims?" Your resolve to prevail, our national unity and all-important personal commitment are your children’s future – and ours. Without it, our children have no future. What does losing really mean?

Red State Patriot

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When Reagan left office, the Supreme Court was still controlled by a majority of activist justices, as it is today.

I believe the Supreme Court is so broken it cannot be fixed simply by naming seemingly good candidates to the court, then hoping they vote like originalists during their life-long terms.

Institutional Reform

The Supreme Court needs to be reformed as an institution. It needs systemic solutions. Two I favor are limiting the terms of justices and giving Congress the power to veto a Supreme Court decision with a super-majority vote in both houses. Both reforms would require constitutional amendments. But it is time for conservative political leaders to start advocating them aggressively and making the case for why they are needed to the voters.

Originalists in the Reagan mold believe the federal government possesses only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the role of the courts is strictly limited. Their job is neither to make laws nor amend the Constitution but to interpret the laws and the Constitution as written, guided by the plain meaning of the words and the intent of the Framers.

“Judges are not to overturn the will of legislative majorities absent a violation of a constitutional right, as those rights were understood by the Framers,” Judge Robert Bork once explained. “[J]udges may look to the text, structure, and history of the Constitution, but are prohibited from inventing extra-constitutional rights.”

Bork himself paid a high price for fidelity to this principle, and the Reagan Administration’s experience with his nomination helps illustrate why reform of the Supreme Court itself is needed.

When Reagan nominated Bork to the Court in 1987, liberal politicians and their allies in the media and in special-interest groups targeted him for character assassination. His views were systematically mischaracterized and maligned.

Even though Bork had been a law professor at Yale and had served with distinction as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, four members of an American Bar Association review panel had the audacity to rate him “not qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court.

What they really meant is that they feared Bork’s intellectual power and commitment to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

Left's Desperation

The liberal elite are desperate to keep the Supreme Court on their side to advance liberal policy priorities that lack the popular support to win approval from state legislatures or Congress. It was not elected lawmakers who expelled God from the public square, conferred due process rights on al Qaeda terrorists and forced states to educate illegal aliens. It was unelected justices on the Supreme Court. For decades, this is the way the American left has won its most important political battles—not at the ballot box, but in court.

Because this is so, the liberal establishment will do whatever it can to stop the confirmation of originalist justices. If it cannot stop the confirmation, it will attempt to seduce the justice into its own ranks once he is sitting on the court. As I wrote in Men in Black, President Nixon clearly understood this when he was trying to decide whether to nominate Harry Blackmun to replace Justice Abe Fortas after the Senate had rejected Nixon’s first two choices for that vacancy.

Blackmun later recalled that Nixon asked him, “What kind of woman is Mrs. Blackmun?” When Blackmun wondered what this question was getting at, Nixon said, “She will be wooed by the Georgetown crowd. Can she withstand that kind of wooing?”

Blackmun contended she could. But, later, when Blackmun was contemplating whether the Constitution protected a right to privacy that encompassed a right to abortion, Mrs. Blackmun turned out to be the best-placed lobbyist for the pro-abortion movement. As Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong revealed in The Brethren, the justice’s wife told one of Blackmun’s pro-abortion clerks: “You and I are working on the same thing. Me at home and you at work.”

The result was Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade opinion, which took the abortion issue away from state legislatures, where it had always been, and elevated abortion to a constitutional right.

After the eventually disappointing nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the first Supreme Court vacancy of the Reagan presidency, the Reagan Administration developed a very good system for vetting judges. But even this system did not always succeed.

Potential Reagan nominees were not subjected to a litmus test, but they were carefully interviewed about their overall judicial philosophy. The guide for this interview was the Constitution itself. Anthony Kennedy got through the interview.

On the surface, Kennedy looked good. He was an intelligent man who had compiled a good record serving in the hostile, liberal environment of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is based in San Francisco. On the West Coast, Kennedy hadn’t drifted noticeably left. But in Washington, D.C., he did. He wrote the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas—holding that same-sex sodomy was a protected constitutional right. As part of his reasoning, Kennedy pointed to the European Court of Human Rights view on the subject.

Kennedy’s decision in that case was a classic example of judicial activism. He started with the result he wanted, and then went looking for a basis to justify it. In the end, he manufactured one.

Senate Democrats have made it even more difficult to achieve a majority originalist court with their widespread and unconstitutional use of the filibuster. Republicans will likely need a 60-vote Senate majority, or more, which would be a very difficult accomplishment.

While I believe the Supreme Court is long overdue for systemic reform, the requirement of amending the Constitution to achieve both term limits and the legislative veto would be a very difficult task. But unless we begin making the case now, explaining the necessity of the amendments to the public, we will never solve this threat to the system and process of government enshrined in the Constitution.

Putting term limits on justices is not a radical idea. It would actually help restore the balance the Constitution envisioned between the three branches of the federal government. With term limits, the Supreme Court would remain an independent body, but they would allow for the replacement of justices on a timely basis, rather than waiting for them to die or set their own retirement date. And if justices are going to use their positions to set policy and, in essence, participate in the political process without the benefit of standing for election, there really is no reason for them to serve for life.

Giving Congress a veto over Supreme Court decisions would also help restore the balance between the court and the legislature. If it took a two-thirds majority vote in both houses to veto a decision, such vetoes would not happen often. But it does allow the people, through their elected branches, to have the last say. For example, I believe the horrendous Kelo v. New London decision, which said local governments can seize private homes and turn them over to private developers for the purpose of raising the tax base, may have garnered the bicameral two-thirds needed for a veto. Were the court to misuse the 14th Amendment to create a right to same-sex marriage, as I suspect it might, that, too, might secure the two-thirds votes necessary for a congressional veto.

There was no greater advocate of representative, constitutional government than Ronald Reagan, and no more outspoken opponent of unbridled judicial activism. If we are to preserve the Constitution as he and the framers understood it, then the Supreme Court must be reigned in through these modest reforms that also respect the independence of the court.

Mark R. Levin served as chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese in Reagan’s Justice Department
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18508

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Yet that is hardly the system we have had imposed upon us by our federal government—for many skilled computer programmers from India are kept out while they await their visas. Educated Chinese scientists cannot find cash-only jobs in our aerospace industry. And the honest of all nations are kept outside our country by their very honesty, except for the small portion of aspiring legal immigrants that, after much paperwork and time and expense, are admitted properly.

And while those who know they will pass background checks wait for them to be performed, while those who would bring the most value to our economy are held up in legal bureaucracy, and while the honest are shocked by the idea of paying criminal gangs to smuggle them across desperate deserts, our current system selects perfectly for their demographic opposites.

For those who are criminals, the border is open.

For those without degrees, the border is open.

For the violent, the dishonest, the unskilled, the destitute, the illiterate … the border is open.

And so they flow in by the millions each year—unfettered by the compunctions that keep out their moral betters, and undaunted by the need for unforged documents that keeps out their intellectual betters (for high tech businesses have too much at stake to play the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” game with fake IDs and random Social Security numbers).

No, we do not have an open border. We have an anti-border.

Where a real border is designed to keep out the bad of the world and let flow in all its good, our anti-border keeps out the good and drowns us in the bad.

Where a real border is intended to politically define a distinct nation, our anti-border is intended to redefine that nation into something indistinct.

Where a real border is supposed to declare to the outsider and the would-be entrant, “Here begins a new set of laws,” our anti-border declares to them “Here begins whatever lawlessness you need to get by.”

With this selection process in place, we are supposed to believe that our economy is benefited?

It would be as if a world-class company suddenly stopped interviewing applicants for new positions and simply gave the jobs to whomever managed to break into the building the night before. While titans of industry brag that much of their success is attributable to picking good people and letting them work their talents in service of the common good (Jack Welch, I believe, once jokingly claimed to be the Chief Human Resources Officer of GE), our nation is pursuing the opposite approach.

We most heavily add to our national organization those that first break laws, fake their resumes, pay bribes, evade their taxes, communicate poorly, have few legitimate skills and disrespect our culture.

For people such as these, our borders are open, and amnesty is a civil right.

For the people we really need, however, our border is mockingly closed, and amnesty is just a word for their place being taken by some lesser man.

We have, in short, the worst of all possible systems.

by Mac Johnson

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Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Koran because it showed that "a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.

There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Koran. At the time Jefferson owned the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic "Barbary" states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.

Ellison's use of Jefferson's Koran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.

Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African and Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.

The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal villages had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to kill off as many of the "non-Muslim" older men and women as possible so the preferred "booty" of only young women and children could be collected.

Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as concubines in Islamic markets. Islamic law provides for the sexual interests of Muslim men by allowing them to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as their fortunes allow.

Boys, as young as 9 or 10 years old, were often mutilated to create eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the Middle East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along major African slave routes so the necessary surgery could be performed. It was estimated that only a small number of the boys subjected to the mutilation survived after the surgery.

When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the "Dey of Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.

Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate treaties with the four Barbary States. Congress appointed a special commission consisting of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.

Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the new America government tried to appease the Muslim slavers by agreeing to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve seized American ships and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.

Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers" ambassador to Britain.

The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress' vote to appease.

During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress.

Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.

The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.

In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves.

During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.

Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn, with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."

It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put and end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a "visionary" wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim book of jihad.

By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch January 2007

Hat tip: Richard Polk

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Jeannie and Greg Bandy were shocked to discover that their son was charged with possession of child pornography.

One December morning two years ago, Matthew's life took a dramatic turn. In an exclusive interview with "20/20," the Bandy family reveals how the world as they knew it came crumbling down, and how Matthew's life has since changed.

A Family Shattered

It has been two years since police officers stood at the doorstep of the Bandy home with a search warrant bearing a devastating charge -- possession of child pornography.

"It was 6 a.m. It was still dark.there was this pounding at the door," Jeannie Bandy said. "I was petrified."

Police officers stormed into the house with guns pointed. "The first thing I thought was, someone's trying to break in our house," Matthew said. "And then there [were] police officers with guns pointed at me, telling me to get downstairs."

Greg Bandy was handed the search warrant and informed that the central suspect was Matthew. According to the warrant, nine images of young girls in suggestive poses were found on the Bandy family computer. Yahoo monitors chat rooms for suspicious content and reported that child porn was uploaded from the computer at the Bandys' home address.

"When they asked me have you ever looked up or uploaded or downloaded erotic images of minors, I was just taken aback and I said, 'No,'" says Matthew.

Nevertheless, Matthew did have an embarrassing confession. He had been sneaking peaks at adult erotic photos on the family computer. "I got the Web site from a bunch of friends at school. [It was] just adult pornography Playboy-like images."

Difficult to admit, but not illegal -- or so it seemed. Still, it didn't look good for Matt, as police confiscated the computer and left the house that December day. A family was shattered.

"I still remember when they were cleaning up and leaving and of course I was still in my pajamas and my bathrobe and my fuzzy slippers," Jeannie Bandy said. "I said, 'What do we do now? Should I contact a lawyer?' [The police officer] said, 'Well, they are felonies that the state takes very serious.'"

The Bandys would soon find out just how serious the charges against Matthew were. The family hired Ed Novak, a well-respected attorney from a large law firm in downtown Phoenix.

"20/20" correspondent Jim Avila asked Novak what the family was up against.
"We faced 10 years per count, there were nine counts," said Novak. "If Matt was convicted, those sentences would have to be served consecutively. In other words, he would have been sentenced to 90 years in prison. He would have served time until he died."

Greg and Jeannie Bandy knew their son well. They were shocked at the serious charges against him and frightened by the prospect of such a serious sentence.

"He's never done any drugs," Greg said. "He never drank a drop of alcohol. He's never been a problem, never stayed out late and gotten into trouble or anything like that."
A Sex Offender?

Arizona child pornography laws are among the harshest in the country. As soon as Matthew was charged, he was put on virtual house arrest, and an electronic bracelet was attached to his ankle to monitor his movements 24 hours a day.

"It was just terrifying. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know why it was happening," Matthew recalled.

Matthew was in an awful predicament, and he tried to keep his house arrest a secret. He wore longer pants to hide the ankle bracelet, but he was scared he would be discovered.

"Yes, I was very scared," he said. "If they found out that I was wearing an ankle bracelet all of a sudden they would be wondering, why are you wearing that? And I had no good answer for them."

The shy young boy could not explain how such pictures appeared on his computer hard drive. The stress of the situation got so bad for Matthew that he told his parents the charges hanging over his head made high school impossible.

"He said 'Mom, I'm hurting,'" said Jeannie. "'I can't sleep. I don't want to disappoint anybody, but I just can't go on anymore.'"

Matt's dreams had been destroyed and his mother was crushed. And even though there was no proof that Matthew personally downloaded those nine pictures, it would be difficult to prove his innocence. Novak said that the pictures alone were practically all the evidence the police needed.

"I thought his chances of winning were probably 20 percent," said Novak. "They didn't care that I denied it," Matthew said. "They just kept on asking me and kept on thinking that I did it. They just had it built into their mind that this kid is guilty."

What is so frightening about Matt's case? It could happen to anyone.

"The computer had accessed a 'Yahoo' account where there was child pornography," Andrew Thomas, Maricopa County district attorney said. "That was the basis for the search warrants issued by a court."

Yet, the evidence submitted by the Phoenix police department did not identify a specific user. Matt's clean reputation, his good grades and protective family could not stand up to the cold fact that child porn was on that computer. The police and the district attorney had the incriminating photos from the Bandys' computer and the prosecutors were determined to send Matt away.

A Family Fights Back

Matthew Bandy found himself outmatched in the national campaign against child pornography -- harsh laws designed to keep track of pedophiles and punish them severely.

"They didn't care that I denied it, they just kept on asking me and kept on thinking that I did it," he said. "They just had it built in their mind that this kid is guilty, and we're going to make sure that he's convicted. No matter what the means are."

The Bandy family contends that Thomas was on a mission and that his desire to convict was so strong that he ignored important evidence -- like the fact that Matthew passed a lie detector test. The fact that the test indicated that Matt was telling the truth wasn't taken into account.

And that's when the Bandy family really began to fight back. They hired two polygraph examiners who confirmed Matthew was telling the truth. Then they ordered two psychiatric evaluations which concluded that Matthew had no perverted tendencies.

ABC's Jim Avila asked Thomas about the results of the lie detectors tests and Matt's psychiatric evaluations.

"Quite frankly, criminal defendants are not famous for being forthcoming with the facts," Thomas explained. "I'm not a big believer in polygraph tests. And certainly, they're not admissible in court. At the end of the day, we certainly felt there was a good faith reason to go forward with the prosecution." (To read excerpts of Jim Avila's interview with Thomas, see: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2791529&page=1)

Despite the positive polygraphs and psychiatric exams, the district attorney pressed on. So the Bandys and their attorney tackled the most difficult question on the table. If Matthew didn't put the pictures on the computer, how did they get there?

For that answer, they turned to computer forensic expert Tammi Loehrs.

"If you have an Internet connection, high speed, through, let's say, your cable company, or through the phone company, that computer is always on, and basically you have an open doorway to the outside," Loehrs said. "So the home user has no idea who's coming into their computer."

Loehrs went into the Bandys' computer and what she found could frighten any parent -- more than 200 infected files, so-called backdoors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations, no where near Matthew's house.

"They could be on your computer and you'd never know it," she said.

Loehrs says she does not believe that Matthew uploaded those images onto his computer "based on everything I know and everything I've seen on that hard drive."

But police still had those pictures, and the harsh child porn laws made going to court risky for Matthew.

"All the jury would know is that there were these images on the computer," Matthew said. "And here's me sitting in the courtroom. Let's blame him because he was on the computer, obviously he did it."

'We Had No Faith'

Even if he was only convicted on one count, Matthew would have faced 10 years in jail, and have his "life ruined," said Novak.

"We had no faith," said Jeannie Bandy. "Our lawyers had no faith. We were told he more than likely would end up in jail."

So the Bandys took a deal from the prosecution. In exchange for dropping all counts of child pornography, Matthew pleaded guilty to the strange charge of distributing obscene materials to minors -- a "Playboy" magazine to his classmates.

"To be precise, he was charged with showing [a Playboy magazine to other 16-year-olds] before school, at lunch and after school," Greg Bandy said.

But the Bandy family nightmare was not over. While the prosecution deal offered no jail time for Matthew, he would still be labeled a sex offender. Under Arizona law and in most states around the country, sex crimes carry with them a life of branding. Matthew would be forced to register as a sex offender everywhere he lived, for the rest of his life.
"I have to stay away from children," said Matthew. "I cannot be around any area where there might be minors, including the mall, or the movies, or restaurants or even church. To go to church I have to have written consent from our priest, I have to sit in a different pew, one that doesn't have a child sitting in it."

'Computers Are Not Safe'

The judge couldn't believe the prosecution was insisting on sex offender status and invited Matthew to appeal. "20/20" was there when two years of fear and misery finally ended. A message arrived from the judge, ironically on the computer, informing them that Matthew would not be labeled a sex offender. Matt and his parents had won his life back.

In the den of the Bandy home sits the family computer, now unplugged from the Internet. The Bandys learned that, for them, the Web is simply too dangerous.

"It means that computers are not safe," said Jeannie. "I don't want to have one in my house. Under even under the strictest rules and the strictest security, your computer is vulnerable."

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Related: How To Protect Your Computer!
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2791407&page=1

Hat tip: Frank Cuccia

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This is not a speculative question either. The current situation is a carbon copy of that facing the U.S. in the spring of 1975, when this country ran out on our Southeast Asian allies in general, and South Vietnam in particular. In mid-April 1975 (I believe the date was the 15th, but I'm not absolutely certain) Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times' Cambodia correspondent, published an op-ed giving a seasoned reporter's view as to what would happen in the region now that the U.S. was out. Simply put, a blanket of peace not witnessed since Eden would descend across Southeast Asia. With the U.S. gone, all hostilities and violence would cease. The locals, peaceful folk all, would pick up the threads of their lives and, unmolested by arrogant Yankees, would create a society that would act as a shining example to the world at large, Americans in particular.

This is hegemonist doctrine in almost chemically pure form. The U.S. as a demon among nations, violence and depravity the sole results of its policies. The only such actor on the world stage, with all other nations serving as victims, with no course open to them beyond reacting to American provocations. With the U.S. removed from the equation, the world will then immediately right itself and roll on with not a single problem, conundrum, or challenge - at least not that any American need pay attention to. This was the doctrine as it stood in 1975, and if Nancy Pelosi's recent remark that, "If we leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq," is any indication, it has not changed in a single particular in the thirty years since. (Further exploration of the connections between Iraq and the Vietnam epoch is well detailed in this recent piece by Noel Sheppard.)

So much for the hegemonist vision. As for the real world... Even as Schanberg's words appeared, the Khmer Rouge, in the service of a vision we will never be able to grasp, were emptying out the Cambodian capitol of Phnom Penh. What followed was one of the worst massacres of the 20th century, exceeded in sheer inhumanity only by the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. Within three years, something on the order of one to three million people ("over one million" as Schanberg's paper helpfully puts it) had been murdered. The Khmer Rouge were enemies of technology, and most of those who didn't starve were beaten to death with bamboo staves. When the last victims in an area were dispatched and all that was left were the cadres, they turned on each other, far past the point where they were capable of understanding anything else. It was atrocity
carried to its ultimate degree, an event with the stench of damnation about it. The world has hurried on with scarcely a glance back. (To my knowledge, Schanberg has never repudiated his statement of April 1975. This too is typical of hegemonist doctrine, which is in many ways a postmodern construct: if you don't acknowledge your errors, then they
never happened.)

The Vietnamese ordeal was not as deadly. It was also slower in unfolding. Several years passed before the appearance of the Boat People, common Vietnamese who had grown so desperate as to entrust themselves to makeshift rafts and boats on the South China Sea in an effort to get anywhere - Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia - beyond the reach of the Party. We have no idea how many fled, and how many died on the high seas of thirst, starvation, in storms, slaughtered by pirates, drowned when their rickety craft disintegrated around them. The UN, and the world at large, ignored them, in the same fashion as we see today concerning Darfur. Since they were fleeing communism, the Boat People were not legitimate victims, in the same sense that the Christians of Sudan deserve nothing in the way of sympathy either.

And that was only the beginning. The latter part of the 1970s developed into a global Walpurgisnacht in which low-lying fruit of the international system were knocked off by Soviet-funded Marxists one after the other. Ethiopia, Nicaragua, the twin Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique (and very nearly the mother country itself, with
incalculable consequences for Europe, but for the actions of Ramalho Eanes, one of the unsung heroes of the Cold War), Grenada, Afghanistan - it was the most successful decade for the communists since the late 1940s. And with their fall, these small states were plunged into chaos, starvation, and endless warfare. As with the Boat People, the final toll is unknown. As with the Boat People, the world showed no concern whatsoever.

This record in and of itself makes it abundantly clear that the hegemonist doctrine is fantasy, and widespread as it has become, an extraordinarily dangerous fantasy. The U.S. is not, and has never been, the snake in an international Eden. Quite the contrary: when the United States retreats, the tyrants, bandits, and ideologues are unleashed. The rule of blood returns, and genocide and horror walk the streets and highways of this
civilization.

The record in recent years serves only to underline this fact. In Yugoslavia, a situation that a relatively small European expeditionary force, consisting at most of a few divisions, could have sorted out in a matter of months, was allowed to fester for the larger part of a decade. Thousands died in repeated offensives, sieges, ethnic-cleansing campaigns, and outright massacres until the U.S. broke the Serbian grip by main force.

Darfur, in which hundreds are being slaughtered at this moment, could be controlled with a few squadrons of helicopter gunships reinforced with Predator-class drones to establish a cordon across which no horsemen would be allowed to venture. But the U.S. is entangled elsewhere, and no one else is willing to step in. Not a single European state, not a single African country. Not even Kofi Annan, himself an African, was willing to bestir his underlings, instead contenting himself with tirades at the Truman Library condemning the United States for the temerity of interfering with other countries.

Rwanda we have saved for last, since it comprises a special case, the example that in and of itself exposes the bankruptcy of a self-policing international system. Rwanda was the worst massacre since the Cambodian Year Zero, and the only one to match it for sheer lunacy. (There was a kind of sanity, in a debased and repellent form, about the Holocaust and the Ukrainian Famine. If you want to destroy a domestic enemy, you wipe
them out to the last infant. So says the style of rationalism unbound embodied by Nazism and communism.) In the past few weeks, a dozen years after the slaughter, it has at last been revealed by the new Rwandan government that the massacre was planned and overseen in the chambers of the French embassy. That the militia that triggered the butchery was trained by French officers. That the mobile radio transmitter that goaded the Hutu into turning on their neighbors was maintained and operated by French engineers. All to carry out a foreign policy whose raison d'etre is that no French-speaking state can ever be allowed to fall under the control of Anglophones (the Tutsis, God help them, are English-speakers). For this, a million died under the most horrifying
circumstances conceivable. For France, the cradle of civilization. France, the exemplar of culture. France, the nation that we – vulgar Yanks in particular - should all strive to imitate.

Well, something went wrong with France somewhere along the line – the Revolution of 1789, more than likely - and they are now the exemplar of nothing. They are yet another pirate state, with a record including Algeria, Vietnam, Bokassa's cannibal empire, and Rwanda. (Their recent actions in central Africa, consisting of air strikes on the Sudanese
border that evidently killed mostly civilians, serve only to round this series out.) This is a record perhaps second only to that of the USSR itself. France is a state that, like Serbia or Libya, must be watched closely and if necessary kept in check. And what power is capable of carrying out such a policy? France has nuclear weapons. It has aircraft carriers. It has its own domestic military industry.

In all the wide world, there is only one such nation. For an international system to work, the dominant state must act the role. When it stands aside no one takes its place. The marginal states deteriorate below the medieval level, while the more "civilized" nations behave in a manner they would probably not even contemplate under other circumstances. The dominant power does not lead through strict application of force but by example and unvoiced threat as much as anything else. Its hand should be light, its intentions benevolent, as was generally (apart from Ireland) the case with Great Britain. But even a harsh overlordship, as in the case of the Ottomans and Rome, is better than the anarchy that reigns when the superpower declines its role.

If the U.S. is guilty of any crime in its international relations, it is in the repeated attempts to evade its responsibility as the world's leading power. WW I dragged on for years due to U.S. refusal to join the fight against German reaction. A similar action guaranteed a near-total Allied collapse against the most sinister and powerful enemy ever faced
by the civilized West during the first two years of WW II. We have already covered the 70s. The 90s were a similar period, when the United States decided to take the decade off under the impression that its job was done (of course, Bill Clinton has apologized for all that during one of his bongo-playing expeditions). Different names have been used for what was essentially the same policy: normalcy, isolationism, detente, the end of history. We don't yet know what the name for next hiatus will be.

We do know that the impulse behind it is the hegemonist doctrine. No other force is keeping the U.S. from playing its international role. No outside element could possibly succeed in holding the country back. Only internal pressure from the media, the educational establishment, the universities, the Democrats. They call themselves idealists, and we can give them that. But American left-wing idealism is hollow, creating not the conditions for a global utopia, but for more wars, more brutality, more genocides, more bloodshed.

It follows that the hegemonist doctrine has to go. This is a dogma that has no beneficial aspect. It presents itself as infinitely virtuous while enabling the most evil aspects of the era. (The majority of its adherents - the kind of leftists who have adopted the label of "liberal" - would no doubt be deeply offended to hear that they are supporters of the Khmer Rouge and the Rwandan murderers -- but there's no ducking this.) It is accepted without thought or consideration, as simply the way educated people think. It is a doctrine that inveigles decent individuals to turn their backs on grotesque suffering, to shut the blinds and close their ears when they hear screams of pain and terror out in the darkness, in the conviction that the police are, if anything, worse than the rapists and murderers.

It is also a doctrine held - if not very seriously or very deeply - by a vast number of people, which raises the question of how such a thing can be challenged. In past decades, the center right has all too often allowed leftist premises to stand unchallenged. The reasons are varied - concentration on easier issues, a sense of hopelessness, an inability to recognize such ideas when they appear - and are not important. What is important is realizing that this stance is always an error. It has
allowed the left to set the terms of debate, to define the issues, to prepare the ground before the fight even begins. The result has been much more effort and frustration in conservative efforts than has been strictly called for.

This is nowhere more true than of hegemonist doctrine. In debates concerning foreign policy, it has been treated as an axiom, something inarguable and untouchable. In going along with this charade, conservatives have effectively relegated all their own arguments to the "yes, but..." category. Such a consistent and long-lived tendency to undercut their own premises would be difficult to credit if it wasn't true of many other conservative positions as well.

Three methods would prove effective in breaking the hold of hegemonist doctrine: identifying it for what it is; discrediting its contentions; and replacing it with a healthy, serious conception of national feeling.

Identification - most people have no idea anything like hegemonism exists as a distinct concept, attributing its effects to the general climate of opinion. Since the collapse of Stalinism, the radical left has been very careful not to closely associate itself with the spread of its own ideas, instead depending on sympathetic or naive outsiders (in a
previous epoch known as "transmission belts"), a tactic that has proven quite successful. Identifying hegemonism as leftist in its origins, methods, and aims would go a long way toward undermining it. Most people do not care to be intellectually manipulated, which is what this doctrine amounts to.

Identifying it as a distinct doctrine will also force the left to defend it as a doctrine, rather than simply acting as if it's what any sane person believes. (It's amazing, when you think about it, how many aspects of left-wing ideology are defended in those terms, and none
other. Amazing, and frustrating, in that they've been able to get away with it for so long.)

Disparagement - This should be easy enough. In truth, few dogmas have been more discredited in recent years than this one. As we have seen, it was discredited first by the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as the world at large careened down the road to Hell without any assistance from the United States. It was discredited once more at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S., at its peak moment of triumph, turned away from any form of imperialist design.

It was discredited again during the 90s, when many of the pathologies of the 70s reappeared in limited form due to American sloth. It needs to be pointed out - over and over again, as many times as is necessary – that the hegemonist "backstory" is pure mythology, that the U.S., far from acting as an imperial state, has walked out of the global arena time and again in the past century, on each occasion leaving abject chaos behind.

Human instinct is on our side - nobody cares to believe that they live in a psychopathic country, and the facts back us up on this. They should be reiterated constantly. At least as often as the left repeats their little yarns.

Replacement - The form of patriotism disdained by the left as "my country, right or wrong" is long gone, if it ever existed in the first place. What is needed to put up against hegemonic nihilism is a new form, in which skepticism of acting government is balanced by love of country, faith in its ideals, and both pride and understanding of its history, embracing both triumphs and errors. In other words, a style of patriotism much as it exists in the center right today. The left is commonly allowed to dismiss the patriotism of conservatives as the howling of Strangelovian maniacs. They need to be corrected, as firmly as the situation calls for.

We must keep in mind how easily Ronald Reagan overturned the doctrine when it was at its most powerful, only a few years after the collapse of Vietnam. Reagan achieved this because he believed in his vision of America, and was able to communicate that belief. As in so much else, we need to look back on how the Gipper did it. Above all, we need to keep in mind what has been done before, can be accomplished again.

There's a great irony involved in all this in that even as the hegemonist viewpoint became the consensus, the U.S. was correcting domestic faults and achieving international victories that would have been impossible if the doctrine had any basis in truth. The odious institution of legal segregation was overthrown with no serious
bloodshed, a social revolution in the role of women was encompassed in less than a generation, and new industries unimaginable in the last century transformed first the American, and then the global economy. Internationally, the U.S. brought about the collapse of communism, the most efficient system for human degradation ever devised, oversaw the rise of a new Europe that in large part left behind the abattoir politics responsible for the deaths of millions within living memory, and aided in establishing a network of young democracies across the Asian littoral.

Yet despite all this - a record unmatched by any other state in the modern era, perhaps any state in history -- we're supposed to turn our backs and instead brood over ancient wrongs and phantasms dreamed up by fearful, isolated academics ignorant of the very society that supported them.

In fact, the U.S. is pioneering a new method by which a great power relates to the world - as a combination of trading partner, lifeguard, and sheriff. There has been nothing quite like it before, although the British Empire pioneered some aspects (particularly those having to do with trade). Whether it succeeds is the core question of our era. If it does not... the example of Rome lies in reserve.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Americans - many of them - have been deprived of a vision of their country for many decades by an ideological construct designed to make patriotism and love of country appear malignant. No society can thrive, much less fight a war, under such a burden of cynicism and self-doubt.

None of these dogmas last forever, and this form of inverted patriotism, this dispensable survival of the heyday of American leftism, has lived past its time, kept alive by misfits who had nothing else to sustain them.

Dispensing with it should be at the top of our agenda. It may be more important than tactics, more important than strategy, more important than anything that happens overseas, since without it being accomplished, nothing else can possibly work.

J.R. Dunn

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/01/hegemonism.html
Hat tip: D.R.

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The two agents are scheduled to start 11- and 12-year prison terms, respectively, on January 17, for the crime of putting one bullet in the buttocks of the admitted drug smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, and failing to report the discharge of their firearms. The non-fatal bullet didn't stop the smuggler from running to escape in a van waiting for him on the Mexican side of the border.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher called the two agents heroes. "Because of their actions, more than a million dollars in illegal drugs were stopped from being sold to our children. Bringing felony charges against them is a travesty of justice beyond description."

The White House and the U.S. Department of Justice are stonewalling requests for a presidential pardon from 55 Members of Congress and U.S. citizens who have sent at least 160,000 petitions and 15,000 faxes. When the Bush Administration deigns to respond at all, the official line is that the Border Patrol agents got a fair trial.

But that's not true; they didn't get a fair trial. They were convicted because the Justice Department sent investigators into Mexico, tracked down the drug smuggler, and gave him immunity from all prosecution for his drug smuggling crimes if he would please come back and testify against Ramos and Compean.

It was massively unfair to give immunity to an illegal alien narcotics trafficker while destroying the lives and families of two Border Patrol agents who risked their lives to stop him. Ramos and Compean were convicted mainly on the testimony of the immunity-sheltered drug smuggler, whose integrity should have been called into question, but Ramos and Compean were forbidden to do that during the trial.

The prosecutor even tried to get Ramos and Compean convicted of attempted murder! The jury acquitted them of that outlandish charge, but the government still asked for a sentence of 20 years for the other counts on which they were convicted.

How did the prosecution go from an administrative violation for failing to report a firearm discharge, with the penalty of perhaps a 5-day suspension, to prosecution for intent to commit murder?

After the trial, two jurors gave sworn statements that they had been pressured to render a guilty verdict and did not understand that a hung jury was possible.

A major argument used by the prosecution during the trial was that our government has a policy forbidding agents from chasing suspected drug smugglers without first getting permission from supervisors. That sounds like a no-arrest policy; by the time an agent gets permission, a smuggler can be out of sight and safely back over the border.

There were a couple of factual discrepancies between the smuggler's story and the agents' testimony, but the government chose to believe the immunity-motivated repeat drug smuggler rather than Border Patrol agents with clean records. Ramos was nominated for Border Patrol Agent of the year in 2005, and Compean served honorably in the U.S. Navy before joining the Border Patrol.

The Bush Administration tidied up Aldrete's wound at a U.S. hospital at our expense and opened the way for him to sue the U.S. government for $5 million for violating his civil rights, which he is now doing.

This case exposes the misplaced priorities of the Bush Administration. The case also reminds us that our Border Patrol agents are in daily danger from hardened criminals.

The Department of Homeland Security issued this Officer Safety Alert on December 21, 2005: "Unidentified Mexican alien smugglers . . . have agreed that the best way to deal with U.S. Border Patrol agents is to hire a group of contract killers." The alert cautions that, to perform the killings, the smugglers intend to use the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) street gang, known for its unspeakable atrocities and torture.

T.J. Bonner, national Border Patrol Council. said: "There is a palpable sense of outrage and betrayal. Here, you have five convicted drug dealers being pardoned, and two border patrol agents, who were doing their job, fighting the war on drugs on the front lines, and they're going to prison."

This case is a test of George Bush's character, compassion, and concern for drugs coming across our border. He can't duck responsibility: the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, and the judge, Kathleen Cardone, are both Bush appointees.

http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2007/jan07/07-01-03.html

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