Osama bin Laden’s call for boycotts of the Iraqi and Palestinian elections may be very revealing, according to even Juan Cole this shows that bin Laden is desperate. He has shot himself in the foot.

In declaring "infidels" all who vote under the "infidel" interim constitution negotiated by Iraqi politicians with US civil administrator Paul Bremer last winter, Bin Laden is seeking to counter the decree of grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that Iraqis must vote in the upcoming elections or they will be consigned to hell. Bin Laden is arguing, according to the Aljazeera.net in Arabic, that the interim constitution that is the framework for elections is artificial and pagan ("jahili", pertaining to the Age of Ignorance before Islam) because it does not recognize Islam as the sole source of law.

Bin Laden’s intervention in Iraq was hamfisted and clumsy, and will benefit the United States and the Shiites enormously. Most Iraqi Muslims, Sunni or Shiite, dislike the Wahhabi branch of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and with which Bin Laden is associated. Nationalistic Iraqis will object to a foreigner interfering in their national affairs.

Bin Laden as much as declared Grand Ayatollah Sistani an infidel. But Sistani is almost universally loved by the 65% of Iraqis who are Shiites, and is widely respected among many Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, as well. Bin Laden, the Saudi engineer, makes himself look ridiculous trying to give a fatwa against the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf. If anything, to have al-Qaeda menacing the Shiites in this way would tend to strengthen the American-Shiite alliance

If Bin Laden had been politically clever, he would have phrased his message in the terms of Iraqi nationalism. By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he denied himself any real impact. By adopting Zarqawi, who has killed many more Iraqis (especially Shiites) than he has Americans, he simply tarnishes his own image inside Iraq.

Here’s a very helpful webpage, assembled by the DOJ for McConnell’s nomination to the Court of Appeals. The breadth of support for McConnell was impressive. Should he be nominated, it will be interesting to see if any of the legal luminaries on the Left who supported him then will join the opposition.

For the record, they include Akhil Amar, Stephen L. Carter, Michael Dorf, Lawrence Lessig, Sanford Levinson, Cass Sunstein, and Laurence Tribe.

In my last post, I said that McConnell’s record was "unassailable." Some have tried, including the People for the American Way, the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the National Abortion Rights Action League.

According to the Freedom from Religion Foundation website, the Department of Health and Human Services "is suspending the drawdown of federal funds until such time as we are confident that the MentorKids USA program is in compliance with all relevant federal rules, regulations and policies." The is the immediate fallout of the lawsuit about which I wrote here. Mentor Kids USA has until January 3rd, 2005 to submit a "Corrective Action Plan."

The great mentioner--in this case, Bill Kristol--has floated Michael McConnell as a potential Chief Justice. I’ve known Michael since our undergraduate days at Michigan State and have admired his legal scholarship (on the First Amendment religion clauses) for as long as I can remember. He’d be a distinguished and unassailable--famous last words, those--choice.

Respected military analyst Anthony Cordesman writes this in the New York Times:

The United States can win in Iraq only through offensive action. It cannot afford to make every American base a fortress, or to disperse scarce manpower and other military resources in force-protection missions. United States forces have to be mobile and able to redeploy where the threat is - even though such redeployments often mean moving forces to vulnerable areas. If the Pentagon concentrates on protecting troops in the short run, the war will last longer and total casualties will be greater. Worse, the United States will simply never win.

His conclusion:

There is no certainty that the United States will win in Iraq. The war after the war is a far more difficult one than the war against Saddam Hussein. If America overreacts to attacks and lets the enemy drive its agenda, losing the war in Iraq will become not just possible but almost certain.

I have the great misfortune of being "represented" in Congress by Cynthia McKinney. Again.

Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard explains the causes of my misfortune. McKinney, you might recall, was infamous for accusing the Bush Administration of having advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and concealing it in order to profit its friends and supporters in the defense industry. Her support of Palestinian terrorists--er, I mean freedom fighters--was also notorious, as was her father’s (and her?) anti-Semitism.

In 2002, her record caught up with her. Offered a respectable opponent, the increasingly middle class African-American Democratic voters in her district (with the strategic assistance of "malicious" cross-over voting by Republicans in the primary) threw her out and nominated Denise Majette, who coasted to victory in the general election.

Inexplicably, Majette abandoned what would have been a safe seat at virtually the first word of a McKinney comeback, choosing instead a suicide mission, seeking to succeed Georgia political icon Zell Miller in the U.S. Senate. So we in Georgia’s 4th Congressional District are once again saddled with McKinney, clearly friendlier to radical Islam than any other member of Congress. She kept a low profile during the campaign, confident in the ability of her organization to turn out voters on her behalf, and in the relative dearth of Republicans in the district. But, as Continetti demonstrates and her own campaign website reveals, she hasn’t backed away from the stances that put her in the small company of Americans to the left of Michael Moore.

Click on the final hyperlink in this poem. Turn on your speakers. Enjoy.

Why didn’t the Oglethorpe Admissions Office think of this?

This is a nice piece on the American writer Washington Irving, and his appreciation of the traditional English celebration Christmas.

Why do these sketches of Christmas long past still speak so directly to us? Washington Irving himself gave the answer: "There is a tone of sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality, and lifts the spirit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment."

Here’s Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne’s latest rant, entitled "The true values of the day." Beginning with a quotation from Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a proponent of liberation theology, Dionne basically argues that unless you support the Democratic social welfare agenda, you’re Scrooge. There’s of course no room at his inn for any argument that there are other ways of promoting the general welfare, i.e., by reasonable means of encouraging economic growth (tax cuts, free trade, and reducing regulatory burdens come to mind) and by supporting the efforts of faith-based and community groups.

Dionne makes a lot of a talk given by the other Kerrey, the former Nebraska Senator and current president of New School University, the transcript of which you can find here. Dionne’s favorite point by the man he calls "President Kerrey" is this one:

[O]n January 1, the quotas on American textile and apparel are going to go off, and over a 12-month period, 3 or 4 million jobs that are currently paying $8 to $10 an hour are going bye-bye unless those jobs are protected. Now, I hazard to guess that most of those individuals will move into the ranks of poverty. They’ll move to minimum wage jobs, which is 20 or 30 percent under poverty today. They’ll move into poverty – and I don’t have the statistics on this, but I’ll bet you the number of abortions in America has gone up over the last three years, and I’ll bet you that those 3 or 4 million people that are out of work – if it’s a young woman who gets pregnant and says, I don’t have health insurance anymore; I can’t – it’s expensive to raise a baby right today – that they’re more likely to choose an abortion even if Bush appoints anti-Roe v. Wade justices that overturn it, because they’re going to make what I consider to be a tragic choice out of economic necessity.

Dionne himself cites an op-ed written by Notre Dame’s Mark W. Roche. Here’s the money quote from Roche:

During the eight years of the Reagan presidency, the number of legal abortions increased by more than 5 percent; during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, the number dropped by 36 percent. The overall abortion rate (calculated as the number of abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44) was more or less stable during the Reagan years, but during the Clinton presidency it dropped by 11 percent.

There are many reasons for this shift. Yet surely the traditional Democratic concern with the social safety net makes it easier for pregnant women to make responsible decisions and for young life to flourish; among the most economically disadvantaged, abortion rates have always been and remain the highest. The world’s lowest abortion rates are in Belgium and the Netherlands, where abortion is legal but where the welfare state is strong. Latin America, where almost all abortions are illegal, has one of the highest rates in the world.

And here’s the absolutely devasting response by Robert P. George and Gerard V. Bradley:

The truth is that Clinton and the Democrats cannot fairly be credited for the decline in the abortion rate in the 1990s. All that Clinton can legitimately claim on this score is that he generated a voter backlash resulting in a Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Thus, he unwittingly paved the way for actions that have indeed had a positive effect on both the rate of abortions and our national debate. Above all, by raising the issue of partial-birth abortion and enacting a ban on this horrific practice (a ban twice vetoed by Clinton himself — a veto upheld only because of near Democratic unanimity in its support in the Senate) the Republicans placed the focus on the victim of abortion, and awakened the conscience of many Americans to the homicidal nature of the practice.

At the very same time, technological developments — above all prenatal sonography — vividly revealed to Americans, including expecting parents and grandparents, the beautiful and undeniably human life of the child in the womb. Clinton didn’t invent the sonogram, nor did he join the pro-life effort to save babies by distributing sonographic equipment as widely as possible.

Clinton’s efforts on abortion were in an entirely different direction. He supported a so called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) that would have overturned even modest state restrictions on abortion, and proposed federal taxpayer funding of abortions via his wife’s planned nationalization of the health-care system.

And then there’s the issue of equipment for the troops in Iraq. Here’s Dionne:

In Iraq, young men and women serving their country complain of equipment shortages and wonder why their leaders didn’t send enough troops in the first place. Could it be that acknowledging the true cost of the Iraqi invasion at the outset might have endangered all those tax cuts -- and might have reduced support for the war? Isn’t that a question of values?

Here’s one response. Here’s another. Of course, there are issues about the size and configuration of our armed forces, but, as the Weekly Standard has shown, it’s possible to discuss them sanely and rationally.

Shouldn’t a columnist of Dionne’s stature take the time to dig a little and think a little, rather than just parroting discredited liberal talking points?

Update:

Here’s something else E. J. Dionne won’t read.

The Liberal Rick Perlstein, writing for The Village Voice, goes--as far as I can tell--absolutely bonkers. This confusing and indignant essay seems to argue that "elections in America are indeed broken, badly, and vulnerable to fraud. That fact is not politically neutral: The problems in America’s election system have advantaged the Republicans, in significant and consistent ways." It’s a big old conspiracy, that’s what it is. That’s why--under the same system that allowed the Dems to dominate American politics--the GOP is now establishing itself as the dominant party. Therefore, change the whole system. Karl Rove is an evile genius, Ohio’s Secretray of State Ken Blackwell is a "cad," etc., etc. This confusing piece is an example "progressive" thinking at its best, unless you want to note the Daily Kos’ response to the mess hall bombing in Mosul: "Bush destroys another 22 families." He should be ashamed of himself! Maybe I’m just irritated after having to dig my car out from eighteen inches of snow this morning, and on my birthday!

But here is a somewhat more rational Progressive thought from John B. Judis & Ruy Teixeira, in which they try to show that Demos should not despair about the election, there is no sign of a realignment. Bush’s victory is merely a "Reagan-lite" coalition that can be overcome. Here is how it starts:

There were certainly reasons to despair after the 2004 election -- chiefly, the awful thought that George W. Bush and a Republican Congress could find the means to exceed the egregious irresponsibility, the xenophobia, the sheer partisan pettiness, and the callous disregard for life and law of Bush’s first term. But the election itself, and Bush’s margin of victory over Democrat John Kerry, were not reasons to despair. Bush won re-election by a smaller margin than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, or Dwight Eisenhower -- and against a deeply flawed Democratic opponent.

And there was little sign of a party realignment. In the great realigning elections of 1932 and ’36, and ’80 and ’84, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, respectively, created majorities by winning over new blocs of voters from their opponents. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, Bush and the Republicans had to patch together what remained of Reagan’s older coalition -- without those states and voters that had earlier begun moving toward the Democrats. Bush’s victory in 2004 didn’t represent the onset of a new majority but the survival of an older one.

I received the following press release from Multi-National Forces Public Affairs office this morning:

TIKRIT, Iraq -- A suspected anti-Iraqi forces member was killed at about 7:35 a.m. on Dec. 23 when the improvised explosive device he was preparing exploded prematurely south of Baqubah.First Infantry Division attack helicopters surprised the individual while he was preparing the IED and an explosion followed.