Today, April 22, Gagdad mentioned this important piece at
Townhall by Dennis Prager , radio show host, contributing columnist for Townhall.com, and author of 4 books including Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.
Just so that you don't miss reading it all.

"The state of the liberal mind is on display on this week's cover of Time magazine.

The already notorious cover takes the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima and substitutes a tree for the flag. Why Time's editors did this explains much about contemporary liberalism.


Stephen Colbert arrives at a dinner to celebrate Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in this, May 8, 2006, file photo in New York. The host of "The Colbert Report" revealed on Thursday July 26, 2007 night's show that he broke his left wrist while running around the New York studio before taping a recent episode. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, file)

The first thing it explains is that liberals, not to mention the left as a whole, stopped fighting evil during the Vietnam War. As I wrote in my last column, whereas liberals had led the fight against Nazism before and during World War II, and against Communism after the War, the liberal will to fight Communism, the greatest organized evil of the post-War world, collapsed during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War did to American liberals what World War I did to most Europeans -- it rendered them anti-war rather than anti-evil.

That is why liberals have gone AWOL in the fight against Islamic totalitarianism. As during the post-Vietnam Cold War, when liberals fought anti-Communists much more than they fought Communists, they fight anti-Islamists much more than they fight Islamists. Thus, Democrats routinely dismiss the Bush administration's talk about the threat of Islamic terror as "scare tactics."

But -- and this is a primary reason for Time's cover -- liberals know that they have largely opted out of the fight against Islamists; their only passion on this matter is abandoning the war against Islamists in Iraq. But like nearly all people who believe in a cause, they know that they have to fight some evil -- after all, the world really seems threatened by something. So they have channeled their desire to fight threats to the world to fighting an enemy that will not hurt them or their loved ones -- man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil. You will be celebrated at Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the BBC and throughout the media world, no one will threaten your life, there are huge grants available to scientists and others who fight real or exaggerated environmental problems, and you may even receive an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. Individuals who fight Islamists get fatwas.

The Time cover is cheap heroism. It is a liberal attempt to depict as equally heroic those who fight carbon emissions and those who fought Japanese fascists and Nazis.

Second, for much of the left, the cover reflects the primacy of environmental concerns over moral concerns. For example, the left seemed never to care about the millions of Africans who continued to die from malaria largely because of the environmentalists' worldwide ban on the use of DDT as pesticide. The same holds true for another leftwing environmentalist fantasy. Changing corn into biofuels is causing a surge in food prices throughout the world. The European Union continues this policy despite warnings even from some environmentalists that food shortages, starvation and food riots are imminent. But human suffering is not as significant as environmental degradation.

Third, the left is far more internationalist -- global, if you will -- in its orientation than national. As the Time article states, "Going green: What could be redder, whiter and bluer than that?" Whereas, for most Americans patriotism remains red, white and blue, for much of the left it is green.

Fourth, the further left you go, the more inclined you are to hysteria. From the threat of DDT to the threat of heterosexual AIDS in America to that mass killer secondhand smoke, the left believes and spreads threats that, unlike the threat of Islamic terror, really are "scare tactics."

Years from now, Time's cover will be regarded as another silly media-induced fear. But, as with Time's 1974 article warning its readers about "another ice age" and its many articles on the threat of heterosexual AIDS in America, Time will just let public amnesia deal with credibility problems. Until then, however, one fact remains: Today, conservatives fight evil and liberals fight carbon emissions. That's what this week's cover of Time is about."

God Bless the Ground: Pope Benedict at Ground Zero @ AMERICAN DIGEST

From American Digest the Pope's visit to Ground Zero:
God Bless the Ground: Pope Benedict at Ground Zero @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Don't miss this rendition by the army of the
Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Saber Point: Battle Hymn of the Republic - Pope's Visit to USA 4/16/2008

YouTube - Muslims in America part 2

In case you are not aware of the religion of peace's out reach in America, here is a nice American girl who will explain it all to you.


YouTube - Muslims in America Part 1

Mark Steyn

"American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post's Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he's been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He's guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it'll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer's computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he'll be able to keep it hushed up until he's 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

But that's what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive." The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was 6, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? Sixteen months ago, a school official in Texas accused a 4-year-old of sexual harassment after the boy was observed pressing his face into the breasts of a teacher's aide when he hugged her before boarding the school bus. Fortunately, the school took decisive action and suspended the sick freak.

By the way, is that the first recorded use in the history of the English language of the phrase "accused a 4-year-old of sexual harassment"? Well, it won't be the last: In the state of Maryland last year, 16 kindergartners were suspended for sexual harassment, as were three preschoolers.

School officials declined to comment to the Washington Post on Master Castro's case on the grounds of student confidentiality. However, they did say that the decision to call the cops was "the result of a misunderstanding." And it's not like he was Tasered or anything.

When school officials call 911 because of a "misunderstanding" with a 6-year-old, the fault is theirs: He's a kid; and they're school officials who are supposedly trained and handsomely remunerated to know how to deal with children. Incidentally, the phrase "school officials" isn't quite as rare as "37-year-old teacher's aide accuses 4-year-old of sexual harassment" but it would still ring foreign to your average old-school schoolmarm in a one-room schoolhouse. Back then, schools had schoolchildren and schoolteachers and that was pretty much it. But now grade schools are full of "officials," just like the Department of Homeland Security.

So who does get a little breast and butt action in American schools these days? Obviously not your 4-year-old gropers and 6-year-old predators: The system's doing an admirable job of cracking down on those perverts.

No, if you want to get up close and personal with body parts you've got to be a "school official." The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard oral arguments in the case of Savana Redding. Back in 2003, Savana was an eighth grader at Safford Middle School in Safford, Ariz., when the vice principal, Kerry Wilson, "acting on a tip," discovered a fellow student to have a handful of ibuprofen tablets in her pocket. The other girl said she got them from Savana, who denied it. She had no tablets in her own pockets or in her backpack. Vice Principal Wilson, whose mind works in interesting ways, then decided that Savana might be hiding the ibuprofen in her cleavage or her crotch.

So, without contacting the girl's parents, he ordered a school official to strip-search Savana. She was obliged to expose her breasts and "her pelvic area." If Vice Principal Wilson were a 4-year-old preschooler who had been involved in a stunt like that, he'd now be a registered sex offender for life. But fortunately he's a "school official" so if he decides to apply search techniques associated with international narcotics traffic he pretty much has a free hand to do so. After all, ibuprofen is serious stuff. As Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum put it, "It's a good thing the school took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from menstrual cramps."

The policies of these "school officials" are dignified by the name of "zero tolerance." "Zero sanity" would be a more accurate description. One day we'll look back at this period of government-instituted madness and wonder why those entrusted with the care of minors (or, to be more accurate, those who enjoy a de facto state monopoly over the care of minors) were unable to do what teachers in civilized societies have been able to do throughout human history – exercise individual human judgment.

Michelle Obama called last week for Americans to pony up even more dough for their public school system. The United States already spends more per student than any other developed nation except Switzerland, and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. By any reasonable measure, at least a third of the cash dumped into American schools is entirely wasted. And, if we simply shipped every youngster to boarding school in the Alps instead, the kindergartners might have a sporting chance of making it to second grade before being designated as sexual abusers.

But I don't expect Michelle Obama to see it like that. Last week, an Obama delegate was revealed to have told her next-door neighbor's kids to come down from the tree and quit playing "like monkeys". Unfortunately for her, they were African American, so she was "ticketed" for racist speech by the Carpentersville police, and, after issuing the usual solemn statements deploring such derisive remarks, Sen. Obama removed the delegate from his campaign, had her encased in a cement overcoat and lowered into the Chicago River. He, too, operates a "zero tolerance" policy.

Amid the debris of human lives caught up in these idiocies, you can also find the ruins of an indispensable element of civilized society: a sense of proportion."

©MARK STEYN

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Gagdad Bob nails it once again in today's post. Go read it all.
"The odd thing about liberals is that if they were to come out and just say how they really feel -- like, say, a daily kos diarist -- they could never get elected. So liberalism either breeds a kind of duplicitous soul pathology, or else it pre-selects individuals who are already divided against themselves and have no problem leading double lives, so long as they can gain political power. To put it another way, the great problem for Republicans is hypocrisy, that is, publicly embracing principles they are not prepared to defend. The great problem for Democrats is the opposite (hypercrisy?), covertly defending principles they are not prepared to publicly embrace, like surrender, appeasement, high taxes, a large and intrusive federal government, etc.

Often the debate between left and right is between what we actually believe and what they pretend to believe. Again, it has to be that way, because if the leftist takes off his mask and shows how he really feels, he will be too frightening or repulsive to the electorate. For example, Al Gore would now be unelectable, because in the past five years he has removed the mask and shown himself to be a delusional environmental fanatic. Likewise, a Jimmy Carter is an unapologetic anti-Semite and terror-enabler. If you want to know what liberals really think beneath the mask, you generally have to listen to the words of a congressman from a safe district, or to the left-wing media/blogosphere, or to academia.

Most mainstream Democrats are not even aware of this. The average American is just not as politically engaged as most people think. It's not so much that they are easily manipulated. It's just that they go about their lives, and only hear of the big political rumors and fracases in a distorted way, as they bubble up and filter through the MSM'.

My little blog is too time consuming on the computer that resides in the slackatorium on the sea so until that situation is remedied I suggest to my seven readers that you go peruse the writers I've told you to read like Dr.Robert Godwin and Petey at One Cosmos and Vanderleun over at American Digest.
I have some serious slacking to catch up on and the painfully slow computer here cuts in on that. And, there are other good writers to read if you scroll down to the links like the cyberwarriors, for example. As one of my favs, Joan of Arrggh
might say," Do I have to do everything for you people?"