Volume 5

[Thorngrub]

What I want to know is: Who gives a shit if the white race is veering towards extinction? Whatever color our children happen to be . . . that's what color they fucking are. Who cares.

[chrisfan]

Bush Will Bury Kerry
The Democrat will be lucky to exceed Michael Dukakis's share of the popular vote.

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, September 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--For nearly four years now, we've been told this is a 50-50 nation, that red and blue America are so evenly divided that even a small misstep could swing this presidential election either way. The media may have their own reasons for sticking to the story line--drama is good for ratings, after all--but there's mounting evidence that the electorate is not nearly as evenly divided as it was in 2000; that come Nov. 2, newscasters are going to be putting a lot more red than blue on their electoral maps. I will make a prediction here: Mr. Kerry will be lucky to top the 45.7% of the popular vote Michael Dukakis got in 1988.

Perhaps my prediction is buoyed by the euphoric Republicans who flooded this city last week. Indeed, from the convention floor to lavish after-parties, the Republicans I met carried with them the presumption that of course there will be a second Bush administration--although I must point out that in floating my theory, I couldn't find anyone who agreed with the spread, and that one reason for the confidence among conventioneers is the feeling that there has to be a second term. That if the party loses this election, the nation will lose the war on terror. That sense of urgency is only heightened by the fact that Mr. Kerry will have a few more opportunities to turn things around on Mr. Bush--at the debates, for example. And there's always a chance that bad news out of Iraq or a terrorist attack in America could knock the legs out from under the president's campaign. But of course, it is this sense of urgency that is helping put the Republicans over the top.





The media may finally be catching up to the idea that the nation may have turned decidedly in Mr. Bush's favor. Coming out of the convention Time and Newsweek conducted separate polls, each of which found that the president had opened up an 11-point lead over Mr. Kerry. These surveys seem to have oversampled Republicans, but a new Gallup Poll puts Mr. Bush up by a still impressive seven points, 52% to 45%.
Even as convention euphoria fades, there are plenty of reasons to disbelieve the "50-50 nation" story line:

• Central to Mr. Kerry's campaign is his promise to raise taxes. Walter Mondale had a similar idea, and he went down in a landslide defeat at the hands of the last Republican president to be re-elected. Similarly, the last Republican president to lose his re-election bid, George H.W. Bush, lost partly because he raised taxes. When skeptical voters--otherwise known as independents--are worried about taxes, they are looking for an unequivocal position. They know that promises to only tax the "rich" almost always morph into taxes on the middle class. Mr. Bush is already capitalizing on this. In his speech Thursday night, he noted that Mr. Kerry is "running on a platform to increase taxes--and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps."

• Americans may be the most highly scrutinized and studied electorate in the world, but there's still plenty of activity going on under the radar. Voter turnout is going to be crucial to this election. Indeed, presidential adviser Karl Rove is banking on it. As many as four million evangelical Christians--a group that overwhelmingly supports Mr. Bush--sat out the 2000 election. Getting them to the polls will likely make the difference in several key states. Meanwhile perhaps another 80 million eligible voters didn't cast ballots in the last presidential election. After a close election in 2000 and a sense that this year will be a "historic election" because it will decide whether the nation aggressively pursues terrorists, many are predicting a record turnout in November. Mr. Kerry may be hoping for an anti-Bush surge, but concern for national security is a better motivator for new voters.

• The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform is a bigger factor in this election than most people realize. Everyone now knows that the law gave rise to the much-maligned "527s," named for the section of the tax code that allows them to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. With the gloves off, Democrats hoped these groups would beat Mr. Bush into unconsciousness or at least bloody him a little. Instead, it is Mr. Kerry who's been battered by a band of dissenting Vietnam veterans who spent just a few million dollars.

What most people don't realize is that McCain-Feingold moved much of corporate America out of the business of writing large checks to the political parties and into the business of building grassroots support for candidates who share their concerns. In South Carolina, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, International Paper helped pro-trade candidate Jim DeMint win the Republican senatorial primary by e-mailing employees in the state to encourage them to vote and educate them on the value of free trade to the company. Mr. DeMint is happy the company used its resources this way rather than by writing checks to the party. "I'd rather have the voters," he told the Journal. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart gave similar support to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, because she's been a good friend to the retailer.

The Federal Election Commission keeps track of checks to politicians and parties, but keeping up with what's going on at the grassroots level is much harder. With corporate America now in the game and many churches helping to mobilize voter turnout (regular church attendees overwhelmingly vote Republican), Republicans may finally have found a counterweight to labor union get-out-the-vote efforts.

• Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are swing states with strong unions, but many of the union members there are actually Republicans or are the kind of Democrats who will find it hard to pull the lever for Mr. Kerry. These are the union Democrats who drink beer, watch Nascar and own guns. They have no cultural affinity for a Northeastern liberal who spends his time on the Idaho ski slopes outside one of his billionaire wife's many mansions or windsurfing off Nantucket. Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, picked up on this and told a reporter: "I might have gone windsurfing--you certainly have a right to clear your head. But I'm not sure I would have taken the press with me." Look for all three states to show up red on election night.

• The economy is actually pretty good in several swing states. In West Virginia, Mr. Bush told a cheering crowd recently that the state's unemployment rate of 5.2% is below the national average of 5.4%. In Ohio the unemployment rate is in line with national figures, but even that is lower than the average unemployment rate for the entire decade of the 1990s. With yet another hurricane pounding Florida, the economy there may not be in good shape come Election Day--but it's unlikely voters will punish Mr. Bush for that if he responds quickly with federal assistance.

• Even Mr. Kerry doesn't believe the nation is evenly split, despite the Democrats' public insistence that everyone who voted for Al Gore in 2000 will automatically vote against Mr. Bush this time. Mr. Kerry is flip-flopping in hopes of appealing to voters on both sides of the aisle. On the big issue--the war--Mr. Kerry at times is officially in line with Mr. Bush's policy goals. Indeed, he said last month that even knowing what he knows now, he would have voted for the war. Then, in an angry midnight speech last Thursday, Mr. Kerry sounded like Michael Moore when he accused the administration of having "misled the nation into Iraq." Mr. Kerry's fickleness on the most important issue of the day does not bespeak confidence about his own chances.

• Despite Mr. Kerry's war credentials, Democrats are now expressing doubt that he can win unless he changes the subject from national security to the economy. Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh told the New York Times this weekend that "so much of the [Democratic] convention was focused on national security--if that's where the election is, I don't think he can win. He has got to try to turn the election to domestic issues." Harold Ickes, who served as Bill Clinton's deputy White House chief of staff and is now running an anti-Bush 527, also thinks Mr. Kerry needs to turn the conversation away from national security. He told the New York Times that Mr. Kerry "just needs to hammer home jobs, the economy, health care and education."

cont

[chrisfan]

Other Democrats now doubt Mr. Kerry's ability to fight back in the political arena, let alone on far off battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. After weeks of punishing attacks on his Vietnam record with no effective response from the Kerry campaign, there's a hint of panic among Democrats that their guy may not know how to fight after all. That's one reason why, before heading into surgery, Bill Clinton counseled Mr. Kerry from his hospital bed and why several former Clinton hands joined the Kerry campaign over the weekend. Meanwhile Michigan's Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Florida's Sen. Bob Graham (both from important swing states) told reporters that Mr. Kerry needs to simplify his message so it will effectively reach voters. What these pols are trying to tell Mr. Kerry is that "nuance" doesn't translate into sound bites very well.

• Which brings us to the final reason Mr. Bush is probably going to walk away with the election: Mr. Kerry is not a very good politician. He's cultivated a reputation as a fighter, a good "closer," because of his last-minute surge past William Weld to win re-election in 1996. But that was in Massachusetts. Why was a two-term Democratic senator having trouble beating a Republican challenger in the only state George McGovern carried? One reason is that unlike Ted Kennedy, Mr. Kerry is not seen as a man who can get things done. No significant legislation bears his name.

Mr. Kerry's problem is much worse than having phoned it in for 20 years in the Senate. Somehow he has built a political career without ever developing the skill of connecting with people or being able to read the pulse of the electorate. In the 1980s, he opposed nearly every new weapons system the Reagan administration rolled out. In the 1990s he fought to slash intelligence funding. Both look like clear mistakes now. On Vietnam, he misread how the electorate would react to his antiwar record. Some Democrats actually argued Mr. Kerry would be popular among veterans. So Mr. Kerry thought he was giving voters what they wanted to hear when he responded to the GOP convention by getting on TV at midnight to talk about Vietnam and whine about imagined attacks on his patriotism. Democrats politely say that he's not very charismatic, but the truth is that he's like a tone-deaf musician who stumbles into a gig at Carnegie Hall and can't understand why the crowd doesn't cheer.

[Galactus]

Chrisfan, I believe we are looking at the same thing from different angles. We really don't disagree on a lot of points, but we do disgree on alot of the big ones. I also realise I don't express my views very well sometimes, I am sorry if I'm confusing.

I don't give a shit about "the white race". We don't care very much for preserving other peoples cultures unless we can turn it into a museum. If their not just like us we'd prefer to look at them through a peice of glass.

[Galactus]

I just found out my theatre is getting Farenheit 9/11 and Resident Evil 2 this weekend. While that's not as much fun as having The Passion Of The Christ and Dawn Of The Dead at the same time, it's close.

[chrisfan]

That has to be good news for a guy whose fighting to keep lies and distortions out of politics.

[Galactus]

I want to see RE2 quite abit so that's good news and I want to see F 9/11 because I'll heard so much about it...I don't know what I'll think of it. I think everybody in politics should start lying...oh wait they already do...

[Galactus]

I'll leave you with some Randy Newman...

www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/political.php

[stratman19]

Did I hear right? Has John Kerry changed his view on the war in Iraq again? Yesterday I heard him say at a rally "It was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time". Shit, not only has he changed his position yet again, he's resorted to quoting his formal rival, Howard Dean!

Query: Can one pick up a core set of beliefs down at the Home Depot? If so, perhaps Kerry's advisors can watch the Sunday sales inserts, and pick up a core set on the cheap.

[stratman19]

DED said:

I'll leave you with some Randy Newman...

www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/political.php

That's a snappy tune there, DED.

[melon1]

Zell Miller: An American War Hero
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 7, 2004

Michael Kinsley once remarked that a mistake in Washington is when someone tells the truth. What he forgot to mention is that when someone tells the truth, they are made to pay a price for it in political blood, which is why such occasions are so rare. Although there were several stellar speeches given at the Republican convention, including the President’s own inspiring finale, it was Zell Miller’s stem-winder about his fellow Democrats’ partisanship in a time of war, which made the event for me.


This was the first time in the campaign that any speaker on the Republican side had summoned the courage to hold the Democrats to account for what they had actually done: for their feckless flight from the field battle the moment Baghdad was liberated; and for the disgraceful campaign they waged for an entire year to defame and discredit, and ultimately cripple, the commander-in-chief of America’s forces, still fighting terrorist armies in Iraqi streets. This is what made Zell Miller angry; this is what should make anyone who cares about the outcome of the war in Iraq, or the security of 300 million Americans, or the American future, angry as well. This is why Miller got the ovation he did. And this is why he has been so savagely and vilely attacked by anti-war “liberals” who can’t handle the truth.



Bill Moyer’s The American Prospect, a magazine that speaks for the Democratic Party left called Miller’s speech a “fascist tirade” (I’m cribbing this and the quotes that follow from Jonah Goldberg’s half-hearted defense of Miller in National Review. Like several other conservatives, Goldberg has gone wobbly under the left’s assault.) The normally sober New Republic compared Miller adversely to Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan (“Buchanan’s speech, after all, was an assault on decency [but] last night Miller declared war on democracy.”) Clinton maven Joe Klein declared, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything as angry or as ugly as Miller’s speech.” I guess Joe hasn’t been watching Al Gore, or Ted Kennedy or Howard Dean lately -- or for that matter John Kerry, himself, who called the policy that toppled Saddam and liberated 25 million Iraqis, “the most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological foreign policy in modern history.” More inept than Jimmy Carter? More ideological than Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy? But then one of the generic problems of the left is its inability to smell its own bad breath or make even the most modest accounting of its own mistakes.



I won’t spend much time on the wretched accusation by Miller’s “liberal” detractors that he was once a Dixiecrat. Coming from a crowd that embraces its current racists (and defends racial preferences) and that is ready to bellow MCCARTHYISM! anytime anyone so much as mentions a past position or association reflecting negatively on one of their own, why should anyone stoop to answer such smears? Liberals abhor the “politics of personal destruction” except when they’re practicing it themselves.



One unexpected critic who joined this crowd of low-minded mudslingers is Andrew Sullivan, who should know better. Sullivan dredged up a forty-year-old segregationist quote of Miller’s, presenting it as though it were current news. It might well be current news if Miller were still a segregationist in the way say that Jane Fonda or John Kerry are still leftists defending their attacks on American soldiers in Vietnam. If Miller had not had second thoughts about his youthful positions on segregation, then dredging up the past could be appropriate. As it happens, he has changed his positions and it is not. It is just the same nasty political discourse, which the anti-Miller chorus pretends to be offended by.



Andrew Sullivan has been one of the most interesting commentators on the war in Iraq, defending the President’s policy while others turned their backs on the battle. But lately he has had second thoughts. These seem to have been prompted by his sharp and understandable dissent from the President’s domestic policy on gay marriage, a subject which is not only a cause with Sullivan but a passion. It has prompted him to abandon his support for the President in the coming election. Reading his most recent commentaries on the Bush presidency, including the outburst against Miller, one is struck by their lack of the very clarity that once distinguished his columns and one cannot help but think that the emotional nature of the domestic issue has colored his judgments on other policies, including the war, as well. On the other hand, because Sullivan once understood the nature of the war both at home and abroad with such acuity, his critique of Miller is the one that I will address. Doing so will cover a multitude of sins, since the issues Sullivan raises are also generic to those Miller attackers who simply hate the fact that he has called them to account.



Sullivan begins his critique on a false note, adversely comparing Miller’s powerful speech to Barack Obama’s empty boilerplate at the Democratic convention: “I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats’ keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift.” Miller of course was mean-spirited and “angry.” Everybody loves Barack Obama because he is black and a Democrat and yet not a racial charlatan like Sharpton and Jackson. Democrats are thrilled that they finally have a political star who comes across like a Colin Powell or a Condoleeza Rice so that they can catch up to Republicans on this frontier of racial equality and progress. Everyone else is relieved.



With regard to substance, however, Obama’s speech was quite empty, full of feel good sentimentality and politician “uplift.” He took no discernible political risks and made no marks requiring even a modicum of courage in the way that Colin Powell did at the 2000 Republican convention when threw down the gauntlet to his own party on the issues of affirmative action and abortion. Obama said absolutely nothing that would challenge his Party’s orthodoxies in order to help the constituencies of inner city poor that he claims as his own: no demurral from the Democrats’ destructive racial quota systems, no challenge to the corrupt inner city public schools his Party runs to the detriment of millions of poor black and Hispanic children who are forced to attend them.



I have dwelt on this false of note comparison only to show how easy it is to celebrate a politician whose only achievements are to be not as bad as someone else or to provide an occasion for people to feel good about themselves by feeling good about him, without having to make any difficult real world choices. It is just as easy and commonplace for pundits on political matters to smear a man for telling unpleasant truths.



From this false step, Sullivan plunges into the heart of his argument as to why Miller’s was a deplorable performance: “Miller’s … assertion was that any dissent from aspects of the war on terror is equivalent to treason. He accused all war critics of essentially attacking the very troops of the United States. He conflated the ranting of Michael Moore with the leaders of the Democrats.” Beware of declarative sentences that slip in weasel words like “essentially.” Sullivan’s reading of what Miller said is not only off the mark; it is unequivocally false.



Here is the quote from Miller’s speech, that Sullivan references to prove his point: “Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.”



Sullivan describes this posing of the issue as “gob-smackingly vile.” To refute it, Sullivan refers to the fact that he himself believes that America has liberated Afghanistan and Iraq yet has used the term “occupation” to describe the American presence. He concludes that Miller’s intent is thus “to [claim] that the Democrats were the enemies of the troops, traitors, quislings and wimps…” But these are all Sullivan’s terms and do not appear anywhere in Miller’s speech.



Let’s begin by disposing of the canard -- repeated ad nauseam by Miller’s Democrat critics -- that the rhetorical contrast between those who regard America as occupying Iraq and those who regard America as liberating Iraq is in fact a false and misleading dichotomy. Of course America is occupying Iraq and would have to occupy any country, including Iraq, that it intended to liberate. The issue is not the terminology but the substance. If America’s mission in Iraq is liberating, then it is noble and deserves to be supported. How is it, then, that the Democratic Party leadership, starting in July 2003 the third month of the U.S. occupation -- with American soldiers still dying in the field, while terrorists streamed into the country for a holy war against them – launched a relentless campaign to denounce the commander-in-chief of America’s forces as a liar, a fraud, a misleader of the American people, a traitor and, worst of all, a reckless, cold-hearted killer of American youth? These were the accusations made not by Michael Moore (though no member the Democratic leadership stepped forward to repudiate Moore) but by Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and … John Kerry. That is the issue. That is the source of the anger. And, like every other Miller critic, Andrew Sullivan doesn’t address it.

[melon1]

Continued...

If you believe that America – and her troops – are a liberating force in Iraq, you will not proclaim that America has resurrected Saddam’s gulag (as Ted Kennedy did), a claim trumpeted on al-Jazeera TV to the entire Muslim world. If you want America to win the war in Iraq, because you believe that it is a liberating – and not an occupying force -- then you do not feature a minor prison scandal on the front pages of your world-influencing national media every day, for forty-five straight days. Everyone is aware that there is a propaganda war that is part of this war, including Democratic politicians whose exploitation of these chinks in America’s armor has been as shameless as that of the American media, which is apparently 90% Democrat and pro-Kerry.



The most central – and generally unarticulated – fact about the war in Iraq is the way the Democrats have broken a tradition of bi-partisanship in war which has been the central pillar of American foreign policy going back at least to World War II and Wendell Wilkie, a figure with whom Zell Miller began his speech. In 1940, with Hitler marching across Europe and 70% of the American people demanding that America stay out of the war, Wendell Wilkie gave Roosevelt support for an unpopular military draft -- because it was the right thing to do. Wilkie knew it was not the political thing to do. He knew that it might cost him the presidency. But before he died, as Zell Miller recounted, “Wilkie told a friend that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between ‘here lies a president’ or ‘here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,’ he would prefer the latter.” Then Miller asked, “Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bi-partisanship in this country when we need it most?”



If one were to fault Zell Miller, it would be to point out that there is such a Democrat who put his country above his party. His name is Joe Lieberman. As a former vice presidential candidate and the conscience of his party during the Clinton impeachment, Joe Lieberman was the Democratic heir apparent. An acknowledged statesman and much larger figure than any of his Democratic rivals, Joe Lieberman should have won the nomination. But unlike John Kerry, who turned his coat in mid-course, Joe Lieberman refused to back away from his support for the war to liberate Iraq. He sacrificed his bid to be president because he preferred the epitaph of “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom.” Today, Joe Lieberman is the invisible man of the Democratic Party and that is why Zell Miller’s charge is so telling and so true: “Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief.”



Sullivan’s retort is no answer at all: “It is a calumny against Democrats who voted for war in Afghanistan and Iraq and whose sincerity …. should not be in question.” This is not about Democrats’ sincerity; it is about their judgment. Voting for the war in Iraq in November 2002 is of no help to Americans fighting terrorists in Fallujah and Najaf in 2003 and 2004. The same Democratic leadership that voted for the war has taken half the American people out of the war in the middle of the war. Never before in American history has an opposition led such a scorched earth campaign against a sitting Commander-in-Chief in the midst of a war, let alone a good war, let alone a war that we were winning, let alone a war that we have to win.



This is the difference between thinking that your country is the problem – and therefore an occupier – and thinking that your country is a liberator that is capable of making mistakes. There is no way on earth to interpret the vicious assaults on the President by Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and John Kerry – assaults that go to the heart of his decency and sincerity in conducting this war, and not just to his policies as any honorable criticism would.



Every intelligence agency in the world – including the UN inspectors – reported that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. What policy issue is involved in saying – as every Democratic leader has said – that the President “misled” the nation into war? If the President was mistaken so was every Democrat who supported the war. If the President misled the country, so did John Kerry who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is privy to all the facts. How can he accuse the President of something he is equally liable for and not be guilty of bad faith? What does it mean to vote for a war and then to oppose it when the going gets tough – and to oppose it not on the grounds of what was done in the war but because the reasons for going to war were allegedly wrong? If the war is a liberation (and not merely an occupation) then that should be reason enough to support it. The fact that 90% of the Democrats at the Boston convention were against the war is ample evidence that they do not consider the war in Iraq a war of liberation, but an imperial occupation.



The sixteen words in the President’s State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire fissionable uranium in Niger have now been verified by a bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. They were true at the time. Yet every national leader of the Democratic Party (Bill Clinton excepted) took the flimsiest excuse provided by a now discredited diplomat to call the President a liar in the middle of a war of noble intentions over this trivial issue. In doing so, they were fully aware as John Edwards said (while making the accusation himself): “The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility — his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world.” If the Commander-in-Chief’s most important asset is his credibility, what justification can Democrats offer for undermining and attempting to destroy this asset while our troops were in harm's way? What indeed but rank partisanship and reckless disregard for the security of the American people and the saving of freedom? That is the charge against the Democrats and it is a charge that will stick.



Far from going over the top in confronting the Democrats’ betrayal of the President, of the country he serves, and of the young men and women in harm's way in Iraq who are risking their lives to serve both, Zell Miller was in fact too kind.

[chrisfan]

stratman19 said:

Query: Can one pick up a core set of beliefs down at the Home Depot? If so, perhaps Kerry's advisors can watch the Sunday sales inserts, and pick up a core set on the cheap.

LMAO! I'm totally baffled at this point by people who say they're voting for Kerry because "Bush is wrong on the war". I want to ask each of them "So, Kerry's position on the war is better?" "Yes" "Great, so you know what it is. What is it?"

[chrisfan]

Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2004

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

[Proud]

now i'm hearing bush's convention bounce is only 5 points. personally, i think the reports of 7 are closest to correct... i think 11 was more or less time (dunno about newsweek either way) pushing their candidate and/or wanting to make a splash. or the fact that it was taken during the convention made the numbers seem so high. it's a known fact that if you convince people that a candidate will win, some will change their vote because they want to be on the "winning side". silly, yes. but it's true. i don't know why...

oh yeah, on the subject of ralph nader... he's a has been, and i expect him to get 1, maybe 2 percent (if he's lucky) of the popular vote. he won't be much of a factor on nov. 2.