Let me make that latter point plain. I am saying the words and attitudes conveyed in the reporting of a massacre can be, and in this case are, more consequential than the massacre itself.

Having said that, I must not leave the impression I think little of the loss of a dozen human beings, the perhaps permanent maiming of many more, and all the consequences of this horror in the lives of their families and friends. But we must not shed...]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Matthew Hoh, a U.S. foreign service officer, resigned recently from his commission in Afghanistan's Zabul province, writing a letter in which he expressed doubts, not about "how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The shades of Vietnam were presented in the letter itself. It was written Sept. 10, and the story fully surfaced this last week in the Washington Post.

Hoh was flown to an interview in Washington with Richard Holbrooke, the administration's "point man" for Afghanistan and Pakistan, after his superiors grasped the political implications of the letter: its potential for damage when further circulated. Inevitably, today, such letters are -- and this...]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not "rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way."

Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks.

And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and quick, unemotional decision-making process. After all, he announced his...]]> Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The significance of Israel to the west is out of all proportion to her size and in direct relation to her place, on the front line. The country is unambiguously western, and not only her institutions but the way they operate leave no doubt of this. When, for instance, there are allegations that Israeli troops have committed crimes, in the course of military operations, there is an investigation. The contents and conclusions of that investigation are invariably made known. There will most certainly be open public discussion, and Israel's press is remarkably free.

The country is full of what we can easily recognize as "liberal" people, indeed more than to my taste, and I am...]]> Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The American and British top commanders have recently grumbled, or more than grumbled, about indifferent political responses to their requests for more feet and equipment on the ground in Afghanistan.

U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and U.K. Lt.-Gen. Jim Dutton, respectively commander and deputy of the NATO force, made very clear that al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be pursued effectively with missile strikes. Both seem to have been called on the carpet for speaking this truth too publicly.

Yesterday, it appeared that the U.S. defence secretary, Robert Gates -- a holdover from the Bush administration, reappointed to assure U.S. allies and enemies of some continuity in...]]> Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 There is nothing new under the sun: and I mean, nothing. It is a point brought home to us with increasing force by the expansion of the Internet. Conceive of an "original idea." Now, select two or more keywords suggested by it. Use them as search terms, and you will soon find that, say, 438,000 other people have entertained said "original idea," and a dozen are currently blogging on it.

Before beginning today's column, my search terms were "Gorbachev" and "Obama."

Yes: a lot of people have entertained the idea, that Mikhail Gorbachev was to the late great Soviet Union, what Barack Obama is to the surviving United States -- the leader who reforms so many things so quickly...]]> Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The advice, "Don't worry about him, he's just crazy," may be sound, provided that the reference is to a man who is in fact neither crazy, nor armed.

This thought self-formulated 15 years ago, while I was sitting at an outdoor table with several local men, drinking tea in an outlying district of Lahore, in Pakistan. Suddenly they all scrambled away. By unhappy chance, I was stuck in the last scrambling position. A wild-eyed gentleman, curiously enough in a woman's frilly dress, had approached our table. He was declaiming some sort of angry rant, though smiling - rather in the way Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiles. He was also clutching the better part of a clay brick, and proposing by his...]]> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 What will Russia offer the U.S. in return for the Obama administration's decision to cancel the U.S. missile defence shield installations in the Czech Republic and Poland?

At least four nothings, maybe more.

For sure, Russia will now withdraw her own threat to install new missile batteries in retaliation for any Czech or Polish desire to be protected from Russia. This will sound very generous to persons of the peacenik persuasion: for after all, what's the difference between offensive and defensive arrangements? (The answer is, night and day.)

Moreover, Russia will be happy to offer increased cooperation with NATO in developing western anti-missile systems elsewhere....]]> Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Those who have played hockey will appreciate the need to keep an eye on the puck. And those who watch hockey through television are compelled by the cameras to fixate upon it.

Go to the arena, however, and one soon discovers dimensions of the game invisible to the TV viewer. Much of what happens is in the background, away from this "front line."

One begins to anticipate such things as passes, a potential breakaway, the risk of an offside.

One begins to grasp, for instance, that a player who is an offensive star may be useless defensively when the play turns; that others have gifts never previously noticed.

As a kid in small-town Ontario, I had a coach who...]]> Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Today is the eighth anniversary of the day after 9/11. This newspaper being an artifact of modern printing, I am of course filing this column on the anniversary of the day itself. In my first column on the terror attacks, written on the day, for the day after, I quoted Rudyard Kipling:

"Our world has passed away, / In wantonness o'er-thrown. / There is nothing left today, / But steel and fire and stone."

It is from a poem written at the outset of the First World War. Kipling was prophetic.

That poem begins (and is entitled) For All We Have and Are. It was quite frankly a call to arms, such that the line immediately preceding the passage I quoted reads: "The Hun is at...]]> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It is hard to say whether the decision announced Wednesday by Athanasios Hadjis, the quasi-judge of the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal, is a victory for free speech in Canada. He ruled that Marc Lemire, webmaster of Freedomsite.org, should not be punished for exercising his right to free speech, nor for allowing others who contributed unmoderated comments for exercising theirs.

He found only one act of Lemire's sufficiently bitter to constitute "hate speech" -- namely his posting of an article entitled "AIDS Secrets" by an American neo-Nazi, that went on rather tendentiously about blacks and homosexuals. But he let that pass, too, on the interesting argument that Section 13(1)...]]> Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Several readers actually complained when I did not write about the late Edward Kennedy on the weekend. "In a week when one of the most important politicians of our time dies, who happens to be a fellow Catholic as well," says one, "you chose to write about tree huggers. It seems to me that your writing tendencies have become quite narcissistic and that, my friend, is a grave sin."

Perhaps there is something in the complaint. One drinks narcissism in the water, these days, mixed with the chlorine. A more charitable interpretation might have been, however, that with the passage of time, I grow more convinced by the old adage, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Of the dead, speak nothing but...]]> Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It is insulting to be told an obvious lie; more insulting when the lie is insisted upon, in the face of undeniable facts. Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians seem to grasp this, yet they do not always pay for it in the polls. It appears from this distance that at least Gordon Brown, the current U.K. prime minister, will not be returned to office when the British have their next chance to vote, and that his Labour Party will be annihilated. But I wish I could be sure.

Now, Brown had a great deal counting against him even before the British electorate, and media consumers worldwide, got to see the hero's welcome in Libya for the terrorist the British had released on...]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Just three weeks ago, I was writing in the Ottawa Citizen against niceness. I have pursued the theme recently with praise (sometimes backhanded) not only for the politics, but for the tone, of such as Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin in the United States. They are by no means the only practitioners of what we'll call the "not nice" style in contemporary politics. Newt Gingrich is usually mentioned in such dispatches; and I could list a selection of Barack Obama's "policy czars" with demonstrated shoot-from-the-lip propensities. But I would like to preserve a "nice" (in the logical sense) distinction between candour and thuggery.

Candour is when you tell a truth that is disturbing, in...]]> Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Sarah Palin celebrated Bastille Day Tuesday with an op-ed against "cap and trade" in the Washington Post. Bless the editors of that newspaper for permitting it. Predictably, even Pavlovianly liberal, as they may be on almost any issue, there is a little streak of "wicked" mischief in them that makes their paper worth reading occasionally. Their op-ed policy is to run real conservatives from time to time -- including Charles Krauthammer, currently the doyen of "no we can't" opposition to the whole agenda of Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress.

Whereas, other liberal newspapers -- the New York Times comes to mind -- feel comfortable only when fitting disguised liberals into...]]> Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 One of the charms of print journalism is that columns must be filed in advance of publication. This affords the reader an opportunity to judge how well they have stood up to the last evening's breaking news. Whereas, by the time the live television commentator's remarks have been overtaken, no one can remember what he said anyway. He can now say something else.

My last column was filed, for instance, before Sarah Palin announced her impending resignation as Governor of Alaska. It follows that my passing mention of her was not, as might seem to the Saturday morning reader, an allusion to...]]> Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Dow has been tanking again, and new figures show the U.S. economy shedding jobs at an accelerating rate. One might criticize the U.S. government for the first trillion or two of "stimulus" spending, by observing that it hasn't worked. But that would be too easy.

Yes, it was crazy, in the middle of a crisis created by debt, to see how far they could run up debt. It was crazy to shore up nearly worthless assets, in the face of irresistible market forces. At a time when the entire investment system desperately needs to be de-leveraged, it was crazy to oil the gears.

But it gets crazier. In the middle of this economic mess, the U.S. politicians are debating not one, but two...]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Everything is on the line in Iran, at present -- not only the future of the Iranian regime, but also of the Middle East, and by extension, the most tangible western interests.

Consider: if the Iranian regime were to fall, by far the largest organized threat to peace in the region would be removed. This includes not only a fairly proximate nuclear threat to Israel (for all we know North Korea's second nuclear test was actually Iran's first), but sponsorship of the most efficient part of the world's Islamist terror apparatus.

Hezbollah and Hamas are both, today, for all practical purposes, Iranian proxies. Through them, and through other channels, the regime of the ayatollahs...]]> Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When a politician announces, at the beginning of a major speech, that he is going to be entirely honest with you, you should stop trying to protect your wallet. For it is time to defend your soul.

This aphorism occurred as I listened to the opening of Barack Obama's major speech in Cairo. As I have argued previously, he is not an honest man but, instead, a demagogue. He plays games with reality in the course of weaving his rhetorical spells. To be clear: he is no Hitler, no Mussolini, with some vision of national or racial glory, cynically manipulating the crowds to purposes that are ultimately violent. Far from that.

Nor is he a Trudeau, precisely, with an inner contempt...]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 We have two important anniversaries this week: tomorrow is the 20th of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Saturday will be the 65th of D-Day. Both events retain "educational value," and today I shall try to remember why.

I was not around for D-Day. Recently I buried a father who was, and at an age to make me realize that the Second World War will soon exist only as book knowledge. Include, in that book, what was incised in stone over the battlefields of France, where Western leaders will gather on the weekend for verbal tributes, and where a few surviving veterans will recall the comrades of their vanished youth.

Much is forgotten, but nothing is lost. The whole history of...]]> Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It must be good for any President of the United States, or other freshly-minted leader, to be free of his "first 100 days." For this is the period through which he faces his most forensic examination, by journalists and others who may be genuinely curious about what makes him tick. It is also the period for which he can be least prepared, and through which his allies are most anxious.

On the other hand, the new president has the benefit of a "honeymoon," in which hope may still have the advantage over reason. Many who voted against him are now hedging: maybe he won't be as bad as they feared. After all, he must lead the whole country now, not just one very interested Party. And...]]> Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Special envoys were meanwhile in Pakistan to evince deep concern about the trajectory of events there. They were told that Pakistan would not cooperate with the latest proposed U.S. anti-terror efforts, notwithstanding billions in fresh U.S. aid.

Those who have noticed that the U.S. hold on superpower status is loosening before our eyes should know that Clinton feels our pain.

Her president, Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word "surge" is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase "war on terror" and...]]> Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent."

Sowell is superb when apothegmatic. The value in such assertions as these -- made free of the encumbering apparatus of careful qualification on which he usually depends -- is that they light a dark landscape with lightning. They are the pure electric charge of insight.

I love Sowell, because he can "do" desolation...]]> Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 What the polls can't say directly, and thus perhaps the White House can't yet hear, is that the policies themselves are diminishing Mr. Obama's appeal. There are indications of this in the polls themselves, but they are subtle. On one issue after another, from bail-outs to the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, the polls now tend to confirm what this pundit and a few other incorrigible reactionaries knew from the outset: that a plurality of American voters had embraced Mr. Obama not because of, but despite the policies he was signalling. They most certainly liked the man and his "temperament," and they most certainly wanted the Republicans out. But it did not follow that...]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 That he may well be as good as his word, on the "green" issues among others, is an appalling thought, given the present economic fragility.

The series of gestures on moral issues with which he has begun his presidency (executive orders made or impending on taxpayer funding to promote abortions, and on stem cells that require the destruction of human embryos), and the recklessness with which the "stimulus bill" was rammed through Congress (loaded with funding for various Left-Democrat causes despite Republican outrage), should help us to realize that only his promise of bipartisanship was misleading.

But while I might argue there is no moral justification for the new...]]> Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Unlike most of the celebrated figures in the history of science, Darwin was not a fox. He was a hedgehog. I refer to the ancient epigram of Archilochus, famously misunderstood by Isaiah Berlin. Archilochus actually said that "the fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but it's a good one" (i.e. curl into a ball so the fox can't get him).

Darwin was an honest, capable, plodding man. Alas, of his great hypothesis of "the origin of species, by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life," it must be said that what was true in it was not original, and what was original was not true.

The basic notion of evolution -- that all...]]> Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Guantanamo was selected, by the Bush administration, to intern terrorists, because no better solution could be found. The military commissions were created, ditto. Under actual international and American law, the inmates have no certain rights whatever: they were not proper soldiers, and therefore not legitimate prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. They may thank their stars they were not shot upon capture. The worst they could face under established interrogation procedures was "waterboarding," which is not nice, but hardly rises to the condition of real torture.

I know the preceding remark will offend many delicate souls, but that is not the only reason I made it. As...]]> Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Both Barack Obama in the U.S., and Stephen Harper up here, are on the cusp of announcing ambitious new "climate" plans founded upon last decade's laughably "settled climate science." They may be chastened by the economic downturn, and even by the progressive disintegration of the global warming lobby, but the bureaucratic machinery to fight "global warming" is a very great ship, and it is too late to steer her off the shoals. The only new thing will be the excuses.

The current excuse is that governments are on the verge of legislating millions of new "green jobs." This imposture will work only as long as people refuse to devote the necessary four minutes to thinking the matter...]]> Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Still vaguely remember: the attitudes among such of my elders as did not like or trust him, in the moments immediately before the Great Man took power, and the foreseeable catastrophe began. People think, "Nah, this isn't going to be so bad. In fact he's going to be like every other prime minister." And anyway, the whole thing happens in slow motion.

Let us complete the highly unoriginal observation. The lobster hardly notices the temperature rising in his pot. Time passes. And what has changed, after all? Before he was green, afterwards orange. But it's the same lobster!

Not everyone agrees that the Trudeau years were a disaster for Canada. My own view is based on a candid...]]> Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 What has happened in Gaza is horrible. It is not even necessary to look at the sentimentalized atrocity pictures, which are the specialty of Gaza's freelance photographers, to understand how horrible. Of course we condemn war, and do so most effectively through literature and art. But it is trite to condemn war without qualification -- when everyone knows that war is hell. And, trite moral posturing is itself an evil.

Moreover, in the case of recent Israeli operations in Gaza, it is not enough to justify them, by mentioning the (literally) thousands of rockets Hamas has been pumping into every Israeli town within their range, expressly to massacre the defenceless. This, and this...]]> Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 I'd rather retract that sentence for a different reason: it did not make my point well enough. My point -- and it is one worth frequent repetition when discussing politicians, especially on the left -- is that the citizen-voter should look at a candidate's life experience. Everyone has some, by the age of four, but the question is whether the candidate has done anything as an adult besides running for and holding political office -- or, in the case of candidates farthest left, engaging in agitprop activities such as "community organizer," or boffering in the academic trenches, which amount to the same thing.

There are "credentials," and then there is "cred." It is sometimes...]]> Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Now, paradoxically, the dream of going to Oxford -- specifically, to Magdalen College, to study classics and philosophy -- had been among my more vivid ambitions in later childhood. But as I learned in Georgetown, "You can't get there from here" -- sadly, but luckily, for I later learned that Magdalen College is yet another place where academic standards have subsided, and the scholars devote themselves to attitudinizing, instead.

Well, OK: Oxford still knocks Lakebottom University into a cocked hat, but my point about "attitudinizing" -- an important Johnsonian term, dimly grasped when I was adolescent -- has come to apply universally. There are some areas, such as advanced...]]> Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 I had doubts about John McCain -- not as a man, but as a presidential candidate -- from the beginning. I preferred George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of 2000, because he was not McCain. I preferred Rudy Giuliani at the beginning of this year's cycle, despite my considerable distaste for his views on social issues. But given a choice between McCain and Obama -- were I entitled to vote in an American election -- I would now pull the lever for the Republican slate without the slightest compunction.

Moreover, McCain has grown in my estimation, as circumstances have changed. He has in many ways earned his maverick reputation, together with a reputation for incorruptible...]]> Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 For, with all but one seat reporting before midnight, the Tories were then elected or leading in 140-plus, and quite unchallengeable. Most of those seats were settled away, without risk of nasty overnight swings, and the ones that weren't didn't really matter. All Tories I half-way liked had been re-elected, together with a selection of backbenchers I half-liked in other parties. And overall, the best available result: all party leaders farther away from power, except Stephen Harper, who wasn't any nearer.

A boring election; an unsurprising result; no serious consequences. A vindication of everything our nation stands for.

A (seeming) century into the American campaign, where...]]> Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The phenomenon we call "Red Toryism" -- that is, the strange combination of snooty, upper-class paternalism with whacky socialist proposals for "reform" -- is ultimately a product of that distant age and of that early Victorian reality, largely misrepresented at the time, and now at least a century-and-a-half beyond its stale-date. To my mind, as a source of intellectual debilitation it ranks with the communism to which it was presented as an alternative.

"Red Toryism" is our Canadian term; there are parallels in every other Western country. The creation of the modern welfare or Nanny State was not achieved by communists, but by men who feared communism so much that they would not...]]> Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Stephen Harper, all parties, and all mainstream media agree, that this was a fait accompli. It was nothing of the kind. The alternative was to mount a crash program to expand our military capabilities, not only to meet our solemn commitments in Afghanistan, but to make us ready for any other role we might be called upon to play in this volatile world.

Each of these issues is a potential vote-loser, if tossed out on its own. Each is a potential vote-winner, in the hands of a politician with real dignity and force, capable of explaining to us what the consequences may be of not acting. We need politicians with the starch to tell us that the "easiest way out" is the time-honoured path...]]> Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 It is not for a Canadian to lecture Americans on U.S. constitutional niceties, but I'm going to do it anyway. Money bills in that country are supposed to originate in the Lower House, as they do in all civilized national jurisdictions. This one effectively originated in the Upper House. In order to disguise this irregularity, the senators had to dress the thing up as a non-money bill. That is how the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act" became the more aptly-named "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act" -- by taking a bill already on the floor of the Senate, stripping out its text, and substituting the text of the bailout bill.

"The letter killeth, but the spirit...]]> Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 (Most readers won't know this because they are not being told by the mainstream media: but yes, McCain began pleading with the Senate Banking Committee to act on huge irregularities discovered in the accounts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, back in May 2006, two years after a Bush administration initiative to improve their regulation died in Congress. McCain's efforts were ridiculed, then stifled by ranking Democrats, including the committee chairman, Chris Dodd, the leading recipient of financial contributions from lobbyists for the very banks McCain said were "gaming the system." Senator Barack Obama is incidentally the second-biggest recipient of political contributions from these...]]> Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 What did I admire? First, the modesty of these people. No matter how wealthy and powerful, each was incapable of forgetting, for example, the Swatow noodle shop from which he rose. I met, for instance, a man who commanded a substantial fleet of cargo ships. He worked in the tropical heat, under an oil-dripping ceiling fan -- in a singlet, at an ancient splintered school desk. He had always used that for his table, and saw no need to replace it. It had brought him very good luck, after all. Its small surface area was further reduced by an abacus.

Second, such a man could be counted on. His yea meant yea, his nay meant nay, and his handshake bound him better than any contract...]]> Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Let me now tell an anecdote which, I think, bears directly on the market phenomena we are witnessing, and have witnessed so many times before in history.

My magazine was called The Idler, and in its early days, a quarter-century ago, I realized that we would have to buy some basic computer equipment. For this would enable us to perform some functions so much more efficiently, that the equipment would quickly pay for itself. I wasted a lot of time trying to demonstrate this on paper to an unsympathetic bank manager. I was impressed by the amount of time he invested in analyzing and then declining my request.

So I went to another table in the bank and asked for the same amount...]]> Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Regardless of his political persuasions, I doubt any reader is himself in doubt about the views of McCain and Palin on, say, abortion, or same-sex marriage, or the ramifications of the U.S. First Amendment. Messrs Obama and Biden have more "nuanced" views -- i.e. more likely to say one thing and do another -- and yet their own positions are clear enough, when the lights are trained on them.

If I were a woman, and the most important issue to me were the preservation of my unfettered legal right to kill my unborn children, I would have no difficulty in choosing the Democrat ticket. Whereas, up here in Canada, it really wouldn't matter if I voted Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat,...]]> Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 One begins to understand why women other than Hillary Clinton are seldom considered for such positions. For the American liberal media grant themselves a free pass on all traditional principles of decency, and every feminist talking point besides, when they are confronted with a woman not in the feminist stereotype. Similarly, should a black man be put forward for an important office, who is not ideologically one of theirs, he will be received, journalistically, as Judge Clarence Thomas was -- i.e. publicly lynched -- back in 1991.

I cannot think of better illustrations of the way women and blacks are reduced to stereotype (and "marginalized") by the American media, and all the...]]> Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 In some respects, the invasion only confirmed and completed Russian control (like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979). For Moscow had long since intervened through its "peacekeepers" and putative "foreign aid" programmes, in support of Russian nationals and separatists in the two districts. Both had mixed populations, with ethnically Georgian and other villages scattered across the landscape. The ethnic cleansing began with Russian-sponsored civil war in 1992-93 in Abkhazia, which created a huge flight of Georgian refugees.

Thus, when Putin and Russia's official president, Dmitry Medvedev, declare that they entered the districts to stop Georgian acts of genocide, they are...]]> Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Canada's taxpayer-supported "human rights" apparatchiks have decided that it is not yet time to directly challenge freedom of the press. They will bide their time, and return to the routine business of staging quasi-legal proceedings against defenceless victims (the sort who have no resources for lawyers, and no access to media publicity), until they have acquired more power.

That power is on the way. For instance, Dalton McGuinty's government has recently committed many millions to a huge expansion of the Ontario kangaroo-court system, opening new star chamber facilities across the province, and providing a fresh supply of publicly-funded lawyers and activists to assist the...]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The most laughable part of the campaign is the new, first-ever, "I am the world" tour, currently in progress. Obama, realizing he has no credentials in this field, but is even more a rock star abroad than at home, seeks photo ops looking presidential in front of backdrops such as the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, he cannot get all the backdrops he wants, since his demand for them as a mere candidate for office is unprecedented, and leaves foreign leaders embarrassed that he asked.

Still, there he was yesterday, chatting with e.g. Iraq's tribal leaders, in shirtsleeves to their decorous Western suits, and perhaps unknowingly projecting across the Middle East the subtly comic notion...]]>