Thursday, March 27, 2003

Wilson, Bush, and History

Joe Sobran on the lessons to be drawn from the wars of the 20th Century.

He concludes: Like Wilson, Bush is a moralistic Protestant who feels he has a divine mission to change the world. Bush too is a product of the Ivy League, though unlike Wilson, a minister’s son who presided over Princeton University, he isn’t exactly a student of history. Wilson wrote more books than Bush has read, but that didn’t make him wise. Neither man should ever have been let near a Bible.

In fact Bush may be about to do for the twenty-first century what Wilson did for the twentieth. The two men seem pretty evenly matched in hubris. Bush has evidently exchanged the intoxication of liquor for the intoxication of power.

SportingNews.com - Baseball : TBS shakes up Braves' broadcast team

Next thing you know the Bulldogs will force the retirement of Larry Munson.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

From the New York Times:
In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant police forces of the entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark maneuvers. Al Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring. Just this month, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police agents, as I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin Laden himself, or so reports suggest.

Yet Al Qaeda has seemed unfazed. Its popularity, which was hard to imagine at first, has turned out to be large and genuine in more than a few countries. Al Qaeda upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview, according to which ''Crusaders and Zionists'' have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places -- a worldview that allowed many millions of people to regard the Sept. 11 attacks as an Israeli conspiracy, or perhaps a C.I.A. conspiracy, to undo Islam. Bin Laden's soulful, bearded face peers out from T-shirts and posters in a number of countries, quite as if he were the new Che Guevara, the mythic righter of cosmic wrongs.

Monday, March 24, 2003

Toronto Sun Columnist: Eric Margolis Whatever happens we have got


the Maxim gun and they have not.