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Pakistanis Reject Tyranny, Terrorists and the “Terror War”

Winter Patriot explains how the crushing poll defeat suffered by Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf is also a punch in the solar plexus of George W. Bush and his many sycophants and enablers amongst the race-panicking anti-Islamofascism crowd. As WP notes, not only has Musharraf’s kowtowing to Bush’s policies been roundly rejected by the Pakistani people, the electorate’s overwhelming support for secular and/or non-fundamentalist, non-extremist parties undermines the Bush/Hitchens/Steyn/Amis fantasy of a billion breeding Muslims yoked together in a dark conspiracy to impose a Talibanic caliphate on all the

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Hundred-Year Hangover: Betrayal and Blindness in the Making of the Modern World

The unlikely figure of Woodrow Wilson has come to occupy a central place in the mindset that has for decades guided America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment. A priggish, racist, stiff-necked schoolteacher possessed of an unbending conviction of his own moral rectitude and a messianic urge to impose the values of his small elitist class on the entire world, Wilson now serves as a lodestone for both the “humanitarian interventionists” of the Barack Obama school and the neo-conservatives who dominate the Right.

Over and over, across

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The Courtier’s Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

(UPDATED BELOW.)

The late Arthur Schlesinger was long regarded as one of the leading lights of the American Establishment: a great public intellectual, a prize-winning historian of the nation’s political heritage, a much sought-after commentator on current affairs, and a liberal lion of the old school – stalwart of the New Deal, anti-communist left; keeper of the Kennedy flame, etc. In short, one of the great and good, the meritocratic elite who keep the flame burning in the “shining city on the hill” that is America.

But there is one

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Ain’t Gonna Let No Cyber-Thugs Turn Me Around: Empire Burlesque Returns

(UPDATED BELOW.)
(UPDATED AGAIN.)

It will not have escaped your notice that we have had some technical difficulties here of late. The site was hijacked by a vicious group of hackers twice this week and was knocked out of action for several days. Once again, heroic efforts by webmaster Rich Kastelein have rescued the site from the clutches of these nasty little techno-twerps, and we are taking measures to bolster security, although it may take some time before they are all in place. This was a particularly destructive attack, one of the worst yet,

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Let Us Now Praise Judge Scalia, Who Gives Us Hope in This Dark Hour

I must take issue with the voices now being raised against Judge Antonin Scalia’s contention that torture is not prohibited by the U.S. Constitution’s explicit ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Critics such as Scott Horton have offered withering denunciations of Scalia’s claims, which were offered up in an interview with BBC radio this week. But I think they have underestimated the exquisite subtlety of Scalia’s argument. Indeed, instead of rejecting this interpretation by a jurist widely praised for the sweaty muscularity of his

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If the Republic Had Not Died a Long Time Ago….

…This Would Indeed Be the Death of the Republic.

Senate Moves to Shield Phone Companies on Eavesdropping (NYT):
After more than a year of heated political wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless [i.e., openly, flagrantly, boastfully illegal] eavesdropping program….

Beyond the immunity provision, the Senate measure would also widen

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Invisible Empire: America’s Unseen Atrocity in Somalia

As we have often noted here before, there is a third major military front in the “War on Terror”: Somalia, where the Bush Administration and its proxies have spawned yet another living hell of chaos, corruption, mass death and displacement – while greatly exacerbating the very extremism and terrorism that the invasion was ostensibly designed to quell.

Yet despite the fact that George W. Bush and his henchman, Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, have created what many experts call the greatest humanitarian disaster on Earth in Somalia, their “regime change” invasion remains

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Old War, New War, Deathporn, Disillusion: Some Quick Takes on a Late Night

1. Arthur Silber finds it’s business as usual amongst the bipartisan elite with the latest outrage: the “InfraGard” program that enrolls selected businessfolk as spying eyes in their communities — and as shoot-to-kill enforcers of martial law when (not if, they’re told) the word comes down from the Commander-in-Chief. Scary stuff; but as Silber notes, not only did this program begin under the “progressive” Bill Clinton, it has deep roots going back almost 100 years amongst the great and good. Silber, as always, is required reading, and he’s back with a vengeance after a

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