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She is a black woman who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and said that she never experienced a day of racism in her life

This is a flat-out lie. Here is Dr. Rice speaking at Commencement at Stanford in 2002:

The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was meant to suck hope out of the future by showing that hope could be killed -- child by child. My neighborhood friend, Denise McNair, was killed in that bombing, and though I didn't see it, I heard it a few blocks away. And it is a sound that I can still hear today. [whole speech here].

More about the bombing:

Rice remembers being frightened, by not only the church bombing but many others before and after. By this time, Birmingham was known to the world as Bombingham. One bomb devastated the home of the Rices' friend Arthur Shores, a prominent black lawyer for civil rights causes. A firebomb was tossed in Titusville, but didn't go off. Rice's father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation. "They didn't investigate," she says. "They never investigated."

That story, likes the following anecdotes, is from a profile in WaPost [read the whole article here] :

LONG AGO, in segregated Birmingham, on the children's floor of a downtown department store, a white saleslady spotted an exquisitely dressed black mother heading with her young daughter for fitting rooms reserved for whites only. The year was 1961, and downtown Birmingham was an apartheid society, with blacks assigned inferior status in where they ate, where they relieved themselves, even where little girls tried on pretty dresses.

The saleslady stepped into the path of the mother and child, took the dress from the little girl and motioned to a storage room. "She'll have to try it on in there," she said.

No sooner had the clerk laid down the law than the black mother upped the ante. Stepping coolly out of her caste as a "colored" woman, she addressed the clerk as the hired help she was: "My daughter will try on this dress in a dressing room, or I'm not spending my money here."

This was not the only such episode:

Condi Rice recalls another shopping trip when she saw a pretty hat and was touching it admiringly, when a white saleswoman snapped, as if addressing a dog, "Get your hands off that!" In an instant, Angelena Rice was warning the woman through clenched teeth, "Don't talk to my daughter that way," then lovingly instructing her little girl, "Condoleezza, go touch every hat in this store." Rice happily complied.

More from the same article:

FROM INSIDE HER PARENTS' MODEST, two-bedroom bungalow at the corner of Center Way and Ninth Terrace, Condi Rice saw herself as just one of the girls. All her playmates lived in an all black, upwardly mobile world. From school to church to ballet classes, they all had the same watchwords – "twice as good," which meant you had to be twice as good as white kids to pull even (three times as good to pass them).

Racism was always there, "but so there – there all the time – that you ceased to notice its existence," Rice recalls. If children asked about it, she and her friends remember, grown-ups often responded, "Don't worry about it. It's not your problem."

The present-day race establishment can't forgive Dr. Rice's insistence that her family were not passive victims waiting for an elite to liberate them. Of course she supports the original goals of the Civil Rights Movement, but she still tells Booker T. Washington's version of the story about race in America: that black people had the potential to undermine the system through education, dignity, and hard work. She believes that Washington's program was working, and that the Civil Rights movement only hastened the inevitable. I have the impression that she believes that black people like her family made the Civil Rights Movement possible by decades of slow, patient labor.

It's ironic that her perspective is sometimes shrugged off as the viewpoint of "privileged" middle class blacks. How do they think that the Rices and Rays got to be middle class? The Booker T. Washington view was that ordinary black folk (like both of Dr. Rice's grandfathers!) could rise above the system by force of character. The dominant view today is that of WEB Du Bois, who always believed that ordinary "ignorant" black people needed to be rescued by an elite, whether by northern free blacks like himself or (at the end of his life) by the Communist Party.

...in the Arab press they're attacking with gas canisters...

Gosh, Reuters was slow off the mark on that one. But I'm sure they'll pick up on it by the end of the day.

By the way, has Reuters ever called a suicide bomber an "extremist"?

Why was my Biblical literalism such a concern?

Actually, sir, your Biblical literalism is of no interest to me whatsoever, except that you gratuitously intrude it into threads to which it has no relevance. If you want to express your opinions about liberals and Catholics, that is certainly all right with me. But please start a vanity thread and call it "Zionist Conspirator Takes On Liberals and Catholics," and please get off this thread, as some of us are interested in the actual article posted at the top.

The two women were thought to be his 40-year-old Christian wife and his daughter.... It was reported that the man had made previous threats against the church since two of his children were taken away from him and handed over to foster families. He allegedly warned that he would wreak havoc, and possibly even commit suicide.

In other words the Fox/AP headline (Three Jewish Attackers) and the Reuters headline (Extremist Jews) were wishful thinking. Notice the the Reuters story contains not one word that backs up the adjective "extremist."

Furthermore, even "three Israelis" is irrelevant. If a man and two women did this in the US would the wire services say "Three American Citizens Throw Fireworks..."? The accurate headline would have been:

NUTCASE THROWS FIRECRACKERS INTO ANCIENT CHURCH

Politicized hirings = the elected President wants (gasp!) to control the Executive Branch, rather than be at the mercy of leaks by tired old bureaucrats whose expertise in arms control has already got us nukes in North Korea and almost in Iran, and very nearly gave us uncontrollable nuclear proliferation out of Pakistan.

I grew up hearing about the crudity of the "Spoils System" and how we were rescued from it by highminded Civil Service reformers. Only in recent years has it dawned on me that the "Spoils System" is another name for popular government -- like, the guy who wins the election really gets to be President.

However, it is only through democracy that radical Islam can be shown to *be* a failure while giving Arab people a way out.

Exactly. No one likes radical Islam less than people who have been governed by it, i.e. the Afghans and the Iranians. There are a whole lot of unhappy people in Saudi Arabia too.

Hamas is no worse for Israel than Fatah. Israel has been isolating the Palis and it won't be easier for Hamas killers to get through the fence than Fatah killers.

As far as I can tell, the Palestinians were voting against Fatah more than they were voting for Hamas. Of course, commitment to terrorism was by no means a disadvantage, but it wasn't Hamas's main draw. People were tired of Fatah's corruption and incompetence.

That means Hamas is now in a position with the Palestinians where they've got to do more than kill Jews and run daycare centers. They're going to be expected to clean up Fatah's mess, and root out corruption, and run efficient social services. And of course they can't do it. I'm sure that being religious fanatics gives them an air of honesty among the yokels, but at bottom they are the same basic thugs as Fatah. Like the mullahs in Iran they are going to start stealing as soon as they get their hands on the till. And when people demand "How are you going to fix the sewage situation in Ramallah?" what are they going to say? "Uh, kill some more Jews?"

And I'm sure the considerable number of secular Palestinians is going to love Hamas's idea of sharia, and lots of people who think they would like it have got a surprise dcoming.

This will help kill off the remaining allure of Islamism in the Middle East, which is already fading. The important thing for the Palestinians is that there be another election down the line so that they can register their opinion of Hamas's rule.

You failed to list the most dangerous thing they may do. Give al Qaeda a haven from which to operate

There is no reason for that to be tolerated, and no likelihood that any imaginable Israeli government would tolerate it. Finding and targeting terroists in the Afghan-Pakistani mountains is one thing, finding them in the West Bank and Gaza is another. Mullah Omar is still at large, but Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Salah Shihada, Ibrahim al-Makadme, Mahmoud Madani, Ismail Abu Shanab, Yasser Taha, Yahya Ayyash, Wail Na’ssar, Mahmud Abu Hunud, Izz ed-Din al-Sheikh Khalil, among other Hamas leaders, have been dispatched to their reward.

Given the capacities and readiness of Israel, and the relatively small size of the PA, I would expect that to be the last place Al Qaeda would choose as a haven. In fact, I suspect that Ariel Sharon disabused the world of the notion that the PA could be a "haven" in the Spring of 2002.

I'd say that Palestinians voted for Hamas because they were sick of Fatah. Hamas's terrorism certainly wasn't a problem for the average Pali voter, but it isn't clear to me that it was the main reason Hamas won.

Now Hamas has to govern. Let them try to rev up the suicide bombing. Israel almost has the fence built, which will continue whether Netanyahu or Sharon's guy wins, and either of them will respond to attacks by going after their leaders and bases. I doubt that Hamas can do Israel a lot more harm just because they won this election.

In a year or two, what the Palis are going to have received from their government is (a) continued attempts at terrorism and a lot of extremist rhetoric; (b) continued corruption and incompetence; and (c) heavy-handed attempts to impose sharia a la the Taliban (exact same ideology).

That will be the important election, and it's important that the US and the Europeans insist it happens relatively freely and fairly. The Palis thought this time they could have decent government at home and terrorism across the green line. The next time they will have to decide what's really important to them. If they decide for terrorism, they can go on descending into squalor and being squeezed by the Israelis.

I agree with Republicanus_Tyrannus that the Congressional resolutions authorizing the President to use force against terrorists and Iraq have the force of a declaration of war. A declaration of war is in any case a matter of substance, not form. The Constitution says that the Congress has the power to "declare war," not "issue pieces of paper specially marked 'Declaration of War.'"

As early as 1800, the Supreme Court held in Bas v. Tingy that we were in a state of war with France even though no formal declaration had been issued. Congress had "declared war" precisely because it authorized acts of war against French shipping, such as taking "prizes," which just means "captured enemy ships." Thus it is a long-standing constitutional doctrine that legislative intent to declare war is judged materially, by the specific acts Congress authorizes, not formally, by the title or style of the authorizing document.

Justice Samuel Chase, a stalwart Jeffersonian, even suggested that Congress's failure to title its authorization "A Declaration of War" demonstrated "the circumspection and prudence of the legislature." He wrote that considering "our national prepossessions in favour of the French republic, congress had an arduous task to perform, even in preparing for necessary defence, and just retaliation." Popular feeling might not have been ready for a formal declaration of war, even though armed deterrence of the French had become necessary.

Professors who can't keep their politics out of the classroom need to be addressed by the administration, not by student and alumni censors.

We're all for reform, just as long as all power remains in the hands of the Party.

a nation that has not attacked us

This is a lie, and Buchanan surely knows it's a lie. Here's a statement by former hostage William J. Daugherty to set the record straight:

The undeniable truth is that the United States Government has utterly failed to hold Iran accountable in any sustained and effective manner for its direct role in the deaths of over 275 American citizens and the wounding of over 600 more. Moreover, the United States Government has failed to undertake any action with the force or impact sufficient to deter that the Iranian Government from conducting terrorism against our interests. The absence of any credible response has served only to encourage the continuation of Iranian sponsored terrorism. Nor have those of us who are victims of Iranian terrorism received any justice from those acts.

The real situation is that a regime that has been in a self-declared war with us since November 4, 1979 is about to acquire nuclear weapons. For over twenty-five years they have consistently harmed us as far as their resources would go. They are about to increase their resources significantly. They have certainly harmed more Americans, and provoked us more gravely, than the Barbary pirates ever did.

How do we explain otherwise a so-called American nationalist who now worries because they don't like us in Pakistan and quotes UN officials with reverent submission? It's like reading old-time Communist writers who reversed themselves over and over again to follow the party line without the least embarrassment. If he's not on the Arab take, then I suspect his hatred for Israel and for the really-existing non-ideal United States has become so passionate that he follows the informal anti-American party-line the way Communists followed the official party line.

It seems ever more significant to me that Buchanan described present-day America in The Death of the West as "a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for--their country, not ours." His recent words and actions seem consistent with that statement.

Karl Marx was Lutheran.

Both Marx's parents were Jewish, but his father brought the family into the Lutheran Church for social-professional reasons when he was six years old. In 19th century Germany, he would never have been allowed to forget this.

Leftists starting with the Jewish antisemite Marx have frequently applied traditional antisemitic slurs to capitalism. But that never means they're no longer antisemitic; it means that they are trying to slur capitalism by associating it with Jews. Leftist antisemitism has always been about "the Jew" as capitalist archetype and therefore the capitalist as symbolic Jew.

Israel-haters today just expand this a bit: the Jew-in-Israel is the archetypal western/American intruder into pure, unspoiled non-western cultures (like the so-called "traditionally tolerant" Arab Middle East), and therefore Americans become symbolic pushy Jews. Jew-hatred and America-hatred blend together for the Left today just as Jew-hatred and capitalism-hatred blended together for the Left of the past.

Iran said that Israel should be destroyed. They never said they intend to destroy Israel with nukes, nor did our President say that they intend to destroy Israel with nukes.

I'm afraid we'll have to disagree about this one. To say that destroying Israel is "an important part of their agenda" means the same thing as "they intend to destroy Israel." And to say developing nuclear weapons would bring them "a step closer to achieving that objective" certainly seems to imply that the nukes would be used to achieve the objective. There is a bit of interpretation in the NewsMax headline, but it seems a reasonable interpretation to me, and certainly not a distortion of what the President said.

I'm not a big fan of NewsMax, but in this case, according to the White House transcript, Bush said exactly what NewsMax quoted him as saying. NewsMax did leave off a sentence. The whole quote is:

I want to remind you that the current President of Iran has announced that the destruction of Israel is an important part of their agenda. And that's unacceptable. And the development of a nuclear weapon seems like to me would make them a step closer to achieving that objective. And we have an obligation in order to keep the peace to work together to achieve the objective that we're trying to achieve through the current diplomatic process.

I don't think the omitted sentence changes the meaning. In fact, it's interesting that he did not say simply that we have to keep up the diplomatic process; he said that we have to achieve the objective that we are currently trying to achieve diplomatically. In his best Dubya fashion, he put the emphasis on the objective, not the process.

The destruction of Israel would mark the end to life as we know it in the ME.

May I propose an amendment?

"The destruction of Israel would mark the end to the one clear bright spot in life as we know it in the ME."

My estimate is that there are two things to remember about Abdullah: first, he probably lives in something nearer the real world than most Arab leaders, and second, he is the son of one of the survival masters of the 20th century. Hussein knew at least after '67 that Israel was not going to go away and I'm sure Abdullah knows that Islamism is a doomed delusionary "fantasy ideology." However, he and his old man have both had to deal with the fact that the majority of their subjects identify themselves as "Palestinians" and are not living in the real world. Hussein took the chance he got in '71 to throw Arafat out of Jordan, and if Abdullah is as smart as he seems he will take the chance to get his Palestinian subjects on board against Islamism.

One encouraging note is the number of the slain with family/clan networks extending into the West Bank. Family networks is how lost of stuff happens in the Middle East, and it could be that the effects of this will be felt beyond Jordan.

Often tough and ambitious are code words for arrogant and ruthless.

And sometimes they aren't.

Fascinating to watch the Miers-o-phobes attempt to make the bricks of malice without the straw of fact.

Note how the Miers-o-phobes on this thread are skewing the point. Hewitt says: how could she work at vetting nominees for three years and the President not know her judicial philosophy? And the whole pack starts baying: "Just because she was good at picking judges doesn't mean she'll be a good judge! Just because she picked judges Bush liked, doesn't mean she agrees with them!" Both responses are beside the point: the question is whether it is plausible to think she worked hands on for three years in a central role in a detailed vetting process for judicial nominees and still the people who worked with her don't know what her own beliefs are? D-n-d unlikely, I'd say.

What this refutes is the "Bush-doesn't-know-she's-just-a-crony-I-work-with-lots-of-people-whose-judicial-philosophy-I-don't know" line. The answer is: Yeah, but have you worked with them on judicial nominations?

But what's remarkable is that the anti-Miers goalpost has not been in the same place for five minutes since the appointment was announced. The Beltway crowd most certainly did start out sneering at her law school, but as soon as that was answered it became "Who? me? elitist? that was never the issue." It's been a little like being in a Monty Python routine.

1. That Miers gave money to Democrats in the '80's, when she headed a large law firm, following an established business practice, means nothing. Note that in '88 Gore was considered the most conservative Democrat in the race and as recently as '86 had made a big public splash of being prolife. You omit to mention that since 1990 all her political donations have been to 100% prolife candidates, including a relatively recent out-of-state contribution to the Indiana Attorney General who was defeated before the Supreme Court in the big partial birth abortion case. If the conservative spoils system is to exclude everyone who was a Democrat in the '80's, then you might as well come out and say that Southerners need not apply.

There is no evidence that Miers has had any control over the program of the SMU series. If you exclude everyone whose gifts to a university were used to promote a Leftist agenda, that's another huge swatch of the population that's cut out.

For a city council member say that, as a matter of prudence, a particular fire department in a particular city would be well-served by expanding its minority membership, does not begin to establish a general commitment to Affirmative Action.

I have not seen the LA Times story, though I would think that a little discretion in accepting anything from that source would be in order. If the implication is that she sleeps around, that would contradict everything else that has been said about her by other people who know her well. The most conservative justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a conservative evangelical and fellow-church member, is the only person I have heard about her "dating" since the seventies, and he has described their relationship as "Platonic." It is possible for someone to believe themselves not called to marriage without being a slut.

I simply disagree with you that rehashing the Bork hearings would be a wonderful educational experience for the country. On your reading, the Bork hearings should have already made it easy to appoint a known hardline conservative to the Court. The mainstream media still have to much control of the framing of the story for that to work. You also seem to be saying that it is more important to fight than to win, which is a widespread attitude among conservative, but one which I think dooms us to permanent status as self-appointed losers.

The best candidate is a candidate who can be confirmed whom the President has well-grounded confidence will uphold constitutionalist principles. No argument I have seen makes any strong case that Miers is not that candidate.