Past Ruminations...

May 22-31, 2002

Turning a blind eye. Most people remember the tenancy of William Jefferson Clinton as a time of partisan politics culminating in impeachment. Others will focus on moral failure or some other aspect of scandal. What most will miss is the issue that will carry the greatest historical import: the rampant politicizing of our culture and institutions with the cancer of political correctness. It is truly a cancer since like this devastating disease it removes the ability of an organ, and in our case an organization, to do its job, to meet it essential mandate. This has never been more clear than now as we work through the September 11th postmortem. In her Wall Street Journal column today Peggy Noonan succinctly nails the point in one specific example.

FBI officials didn't fail to connect the dots; they refused to see a pattern.

What needs to be made explicitly clear is that this refusal, this willful wearing of devastating blinders, was a direct result of the rampant river of political correctness that flowed out of the Clinton administration and infected everything. For eight years this vile cancer spread throughout the culture of government, academia, news organizations, and general thought and speech.

As a result we were left without able-minded investigators, politicians, teachers, clergy, and policemen where it most matters, in the middle management positions that control the flow of essential data through the information food chain. So while field agents could see a serious national security problem, their supervisors would turn a blind politically correct eye.

The full extent of this subterfuge may never be exposed. From Oklahoma City to Camp XRay, it has infected every decision that has been made, misdirecting investigations and tainting evidence, analysis, and resultant decision-making. However, like cancer once entrenched, political correctness and its pervasive effects are exceptionally difficult to treat and in many cases the treatment seems worse than the disease. This is now indeed, to echo Thomas Paine, a time that tries men's souls.

Celibacy and God. The Catholic Church continues to resist changing its position on celibacy and married clergy. The basic argument against clerical marriage is that celibacy allows a priest to focus on God and not be distracted by "earthly" issues of family and sexuality. Some point to Jesus' statement in Matthew 19:12. (emphasis added)

For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." 

Note the last sentence. It is not inconsequential.

Others point to Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 7:32-34a

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs--how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world--how he can please his wife--and his interests are divided.

The real question though, is what is the norm, not just what Paul wants but does not command? Is this renunciation the norm or is it a special calling for special circumstances and not to be expected of all who enter the ranks of the clergy? Well two New Testament scriptures answer that question while one Old Testament verse explains the actual need for wholesome marriage, even for most clergy.

Let's start with the Old Testament and Genesis 2:18.

The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 

To most people that is self explanatory, but two New Testament scriptures  from Paul, who I earlier quoted about the freedom of being single, add additional weight to the principal of marriage. The first is from 1 Timothy 3:1-5.1. (emphasis added)

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer [traditionally a bishop], he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?)

It is assumed a bishop will be married and that his conduct in administering his own family will show his worthiness in administering the family of God. The second, also from Paul, is from Titus 1:6. (emphasis added)

An elder [traditionally a priest] must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.

The first elders and overseers were the apostles, chosen by Jesus himself. Some of them were married and none left their wives (which would have been against the Mosaic law), bringing Paul to say in 1 Corinthians 9:5

Don't we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas [Peter]?

Jesus could have chosen only single men. He did not. So one must ask, what is lost by forcing celibacy on all clergy? Several important things. One is the right of choice, offered by both Jesus and Paul. Both argued for celibacy for those who could accept it, who were especially called to it. However, neither Moses nor Peter, the archetypes of priestly leaders were celibate. Both were married and had children.

Couple those fundamental biblical principals and practices with the fact that celibacy was not demanded of Roman priests until the 11th century, and when it was instituted it was not for spiritual reasons but because of the problems of inheritance and the growth of powerful rival clergy families, and you see a prescription for failure and the problems now facing the church.

Jamie Glaszov, in a recent article in FrontPage Magazine, discusses the same issues, though he focuses on the problems with homosexuality, misogyny, and fear of human sexuality, especially between a man and a woman, that plague the Church.

I have known three married Episcopal priests who have joined the Roman Church and now serve as parish priests and a fourth is in the process. It seems ludicrous to me to on one hand say the Church can accept a married Episcopal into the Roman priesthood but if you start out Roman you cannot be married.

I would venture to say that those Catholic parishes with married former Episcopal priests feel a lot more safe and secure these days than those populated only with their celibate Roman brethren.  Ý

Old friends and the rule of nines.  There is something about old friends. Even after not seeing them for months or years, when you get a chance to see each other again it is like putting on a favorite pair of shoes you find in your closet. At first things are a little stiff, but before you know it you have settled into old comfort and familiarity. I guess I would consider all friends, but especially old friends, one of God's special gifts.

I visited some old friends last night, a husband and wife that I knew separately and then as a married couple. It was an unplanned encounter. I was in the area and on the spur of the moment I decided to stop by. Grace would have it that Jeff and Julie were out front of their house with two of their three children.

It didn't take long to catch up and settle into the comfortable ways of interacting that one has with friends. As we talked about things going on in our lives, Julie reminded me of one of my aphorisms that I had forgotten, but was something that she had always remembered. It was my "rule of nines". When she reminded me of it, the idea came back to life and settled into a familiar spot in my mind. I used to tell her that I didn't worry about succeeding, because I operated by the "rule of nines". I always had at least nine things in process, nine ideas I was developing. If one didn't pan out it would be replaced by something new and eventually a few of them would succeed. You just had to keep moving forward and success would happen.

That is definitely the view of an optimist, of someone who trusts the future. It is rooted in my perception of Christianity as a reliable truth for living a life grounded in trust. At its core this idea postulates that there is a providential underpinning to everything that makes up one's life.

As I thought over the idea on the way home I saw how I had lost sight of that simple strategy which had moved me forward for so many years and across so many difficult times. As a plan of action it crosses so many boundaries, nexus points, and decisions, while allowing the interaction with the future to remain open and flexible.

Some might argue that it is a flawed approach to life, leaving too much to chance or providence, a sort of haphazard plan, if it is a plan at all. It may be true that the outcomes of many of the things you are working on may depend on things beyond your control but then that's the nature of life, no matter how well organized or prepared for. What to me is essential is what things you choose to put into play. While you may not be able to fully control the outcome, you can control what you choose to allow to have a possible outcome.

Thank you Julie. It is time to put a few more things into play, to get past this inertia that has gotten a hold of me. God does work in mysterious ways.
 

To know, that is the issue.  I make my living in the information technology arena. I build and solve problems with information systems, help systems, just-in-time knowledge systems. The catch word of the information age is that knowledge is power. Why then were we so powerless to know what was happening last year when we have the most sophisticated information gathering systems in existence?  In discussing this problem in a press briefing, Condoleezza Rice, the President's National Security Advisor, blamed "a lot of chatter in the system."

That is not unique. There is always a lot of chatter in the system. It is the nature of a changing information landscape. Ask any CIO at any large company. Organizations spend an inordinate amount of money for data mining on their databases trying to get useful information from the mass of the details they can reasonably control, while an untold amount of soft data: reports, white papers, field rep's emails, and other such ad hoc information gets buried in the general surge, no matter how significant it might be.

You say a better review system is needed. Well, part of the problem is bureaucracy and all of the turf battles that it creates. In most organizations, the Balkanization of information is a direct result of ownership and prioritizing by lower management. This even happens at the FBI and CIA.

Rocking the boat is not the way to maintain your little administrative fiefdom and makes you a target for takeover. But even more than that, soft data, like the FBI report from the Phoenix Arizona field office, is founded on research, opinion, and analysis (read "my reasoned opinion"), all of which require specific talents, not just to produce, but to understand and fit into larger picture up the chain of command. Each person in the food chain has to accept responsibility for the position taken and any one in the path can shunt it to the side for any reason, good, bad, or just plain stupid.

This is not unique to us. Everyone has the same problem, whether is the FBI or al Qaeda. No one is immune. Part of the chain of command problem can be laid at the feet of the Clinton administration, who in their crusade against the perceived threat from the American extreme right, which led to things like the Branch Davidian massacre and the Ruby Ridge shootings, downplayed Islamic extremists in favor of right wing elements in the American heartland. There is credible evidence (one example) to suggest that there was a foreign connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. But going outside of a domestic solution to the situation would rock the politically correct boat and everything that pointed elsewhere was routinely dismissed, ignored, or just sent to file 13.

There is no easy solution that will guarantee that we will "know" what we need to know for the next time. Systems are only as good as the people running them. The problem is not information, it is responsible understanding, which requires the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and to do, as it were, good analysis. Then that responsible understanding must exist throughout the information food chain. It must be free from political correctness, which is like a fog to the reasoning process, and be able to see the truth in the midst of a torrent of lies. We need "men for all seasons", people of talent and honor and duty to step up and do the job.

Where will we find them?

Sum of yours, mine, or all fears. We all have things we are afraid of, and along with the general things, there are our specific phobias. For some it is claustrophobia (fear of tight places or being closed in) while for others it is arachnophobia (fear of spiders). A new movie, The Sum of All Fears, coming out Friday, is based on a 1991 novel by Tom Clancy, and it postulates that all of those individual and social fears rolled into one don't equal the fear of a terrorist nuclear explosion leading to possible nuclear war.

Whether or not that is true, I find it interesting that it is Baltimore (my town) that gets blown up in the movie. Turning to professional assessments, Col. David Hackwork states matter-of-factly in an unnerving article in WorldNetDaily

Russian and U.S. intelligence have both reported that since the end of the Cold War, at least 164 highly transportable former Soviet nuclear warheads have gone south. A retired Soviet general and a former defense minister confirmed this report.

The next two paragraphs of his article are the biggies, however, given this post 9-11 world.

A federal report stated that nearly two years ago, "Bin Laden allegedly has already purchased a number of nuclear suitcase bombs from the Chechen Mafia." In addition, there've been numerous busts of smugglers moving nuke devices or weapons-grade material in Europe, the former Soviet Union republics and Southwest Asia.

The same federal report said, "Following the August 1998 (U.S.) Cruise missile attack, (an Islamic religious leader) stated 'the time is not far off' when the White House will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. A horrendous scenario consonant with al-Qaida's mind-set would be its use of a nuclear suitcase bomb against any number of targets in the nation's capital."

Taking that seriously is enough to give one pause as you go about your day. So, what do you do? Move? Go to the Ozarks or up to the mountains? As a Christian two passages come to mind. The first is Luke 21:26 where it talks about fear of what is coming.

...men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world

The second is  Matthew 16:24-26

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?

Failing hearts and running away to save oneself. Doesn't sound too appealing. Now I must state that Jesus isn't talking against being prudent here. When that car veers into my lane I am not going to panic or faint, but I am going to get out of the way. In addition, I own enough firearms to protect myself and my family, along with an Akita, though he may lick you to death, but that doesn't mean I seek out a chance to use them. What Jesus does means is that we are called to follow him, even if it is into the maw of "the sum of all fears". Our fear of losing our life should not be the thing that prevents us from do what he has called us to do.

While there is a delicate balance in a decision to leave a place or to stay, as we assess the danger or lack thereof, it really boils down to an attitude of the heart (doesn't everything?). Why are you choosing? What are you really afraid of? This is something that each person must decide for themselves, because as I sincerely believe, it is not a matter of if, only a matter of when before "the sum of all fears" gets added to our list of experiences.   Ý

Special days. Today is my wife and my 25th anniversary. A long time, yet so short. I know her well, yet I hardly know her at all. Marriage is a voyage of discovery and we are entering a new phase. It is so rare for someone who holds to the significance of symbolism, like myself, to be so separated from his life and soul mate on such an occasion. She is in Tallahassee, Florida, having just arrived for a new job, and I am here, holding down the home front.

It is a metaphor for the realities of life. Things don't always go according to plan so you adjust and make due. Far from giving up, you always engage the struggle, in a way mirroring Paul in Philippians 4:11-13:

I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

So rejoice with us that in these modern times of easy outs and unkept promises, my wife and I are able, though by circumstance apart, to celebrate our 25th anniversary.
 

Memorial Day. This is the day we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. My younger brother, Alan, died in August 1968, during the Tet offensive in Vietnam. He was a Ranger, and a member of the 101st Airborne. He was very proud of the screaming eagle patch he wore on his shoulder. He had taken over point man for his patrol and tripped a booby trap on a sweep.

We have rubbed his name on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial and I periodically visit his Airborne memorial site. They are right, freedom is not free.

Housekeeping. I moved the site today to its new permanent location--meisheid.com. Now that I have separated this effort from my business, I feel free to pursue the developing goals I have for the site. I have added a discussion function for dialog about anything reasonable. The posts will be moderated.
 

Stress test. Pressure reveals weaknesses. That is why they call it a stress test. As the events of the recent past and their resulting demands have placed stress on America, on its government, economy, and social structures, we have placed our searchlights not only on the enemy, but on ourselves and we see cracks, cracks in our institutions and in our own lives. Whether it is the FBI or the Catholic Church, everywhere we turn their are problems.

The optimist sees all of this as good--you can't fix what you can't see. The pessimist sees the beginning of the end. Which are you?

Compulsion and virtue.  What really makes the historic American dream and the nature of the country and society it has nurtured different from the goals of Islam and the nature of the countries and societies it has spawned? This is an important issue facing America, indeed all Western societies, as they deal with the Islamic terrorist threat facing them.

At the heart of the issues surrounding the differences as I see them is the nature of virtue and whether compulsion is a means to achieve it. My view of this subject is from a large view perspective and I have to admit that there has been a change in my opinion as I have grown in my life as a Christian. I started out being very much on the side of compulsion, but over the years I have tempered my view. Dinesh S'Souza, an immigrant who arrived at the age seventeen from India, in a recent book about America (What's So Great About America) wrote

Compulsion cannot produce virtue: it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.

This premise is at the heart of how American democracy and its root, historic Christianity, works and it effects all of our decisions about how to direct or change the nature and course of our country and culture, as well as our response to things like Islamic terrorism or European anti-Americanism.

You might rightfully remind me that compulsion is often necessary, as is demonstrated by the enduring institutions of courts, police, armed forces, and government itself. You would be right but you would miss the point. While those are the accoutrements of all functional societies, in the history of American democracy (as different from communism or European socialism), they only constrain the outward edges of behavioral boundaries. Historically, police kept general public order, the courts enforced the minimum laws necessary to make the society work, which citizen government passed only as needed, and armed forces were primarily defensive in nature.

Traditionally America was governed primarily by social mores, agreed morality, and community norms that generally determined the extent of our compulsive efforts. American experiments with more draconian efforts proved destructive to society and did little to change the behavior of most of us. The criminalization of drugs and alcohol did not prevent their use. We gave up on alcohol, but not until it had succeeded in creating an entrenched criminal class, financed by profits from illegal booze sales, which also corrupted everything else, including those very institutions who were supposed to be enforcing the compulsion. The same cycle has repeated itself with drugs, building not just an expanded American criminal class but a worldwide criminal underworld financed by the sale of illicit substances that compulsion cannot eradicate.

That said, how are we different from Islam and its means of compulsion, Sharia law. As I said, American democratic principals, formulated from Roman common law and tempered by basic Christian theology touched only the edges of compulsion, while Islam seeks to control, with the force of law, every aspect of human existence. It not only sets the outer boundaries of behavior but it defines everything inside. Since in true Islam there is no separation of church and state, Islamic societies are at their heart theocracies. But not theocracies in the Holy Roman Empire sense, in which mercy still had a place. In Islam there is no mercy because no man can forgive another's sin or pay another's debt. At the heart of America and its Christian heritage is mercy and forgiveness, atonement and freeing of those held by the bonds of their failure. It is no accident that slavery was abolished in the West and America, while it is still practiced within Islam in the subcontinent of Africa and in some sense encouraged when considering women of conquered enemies. This has been seen recently in the Islamic religious opinions arguing that conquered Jewish woman will be Arab sex slaves.

This all encompassing absolute demand of Islamic law, embodied in the state and untempered by mercy, causes an ongoing progression that taken to its logical extreme means that the law is absolute and not just proscriptive, but prescriptive, invading even such common physical actions about what side to sleep on and how to wash upon arising. As fatwa is added to fatwa, the prescriptive nature of Islam eventually finds it expression in the extremes of the Taliban, which far from being an aberration to Islam is the natural progression and expression of its fundamental requirements.

We Americans, still holding the memory of our Christian heritage within our national soul, want to forgive Islam for its excess, to extend mercy to our enemy. We seek not to compel them, only doing so as a last resort. We seek to meet them in reason and mercy. However, they cannot really return the favor. There is no forgiveness for us. They cannot offer it, for they do not posses it. They only have compulsive judgment available to them to offer as expressions of Sharia law, which they must extended where ever they place their foot.

It is coming. The corner has been turned and there is no going back, no giving up. Armageddon calls from the heart of darkness and no forgiveness can be offered. Only have judgment and slavery and death is offered.

Rejecting victimhood. There are numerous reasons given why various groups in America support Israel, but Mugger (Russ Smith), a columnist for the New York Press, surmises that it is because Israelis have rejected victimhood and many in America still respect that. He takes his cue from an article in the Weekly Standard by David Gelernter whom he quotes.

Today it is no accident that America and Israel tend to understand each other–even to empathize with one another–not invariably, but on the whole. To see why, you don’t have be Bishop [Desmond] Tutu or some eminent Frenchman resurrecting tired but ever-popular Nazi theories about the satanically persuasive Jew. There is an easier explanation. The founding settlers of America and of modern Israel were offered victimhood on easy terms, and turned it down cold. They chose to create new nations out of nothing instead.

Another example from Gelernter's article gets to the point for me.

Both are pick-up nations created out of ideas, with populations drawn from all over the globe; they are self-made nations in a world where most nations had nationhood handed to them on a silver platter. A Frenchman or Japanese is so far removed from nation-building that he no longer has any moral stake in it; the energy and struggle that created France or Japan are none of his business. He washes his hands of them. Americans and Israelis still remember that nations do not create themselves.

If their premise is true, there are some serious issues undermining these sustentative beginnings to our nation. While victimhood may have been unfashionable early in the American experience, being "self-made" doesn't support it, it is becoming extremely fashionable as of late. I think the main reason is money and the fact that our out of whack tort system has become a chief means of getting it.

Victims sue, others get on with life. That is not to say there aren't times to sue or that forced redress isn't sometimes absolutely necessary, though in the end those times should be rare. Instead they seem to have become the norm. When litigation becomes the model for dealing with even the slightest offense and the prime method of redressing one's complaints, something is seriously amiss with our social moorings. 

This cult of victimhood is infecting every area of our national life. From the offense taken at certain types of team mascots to the extralegal reparations movement, it pays to be a victim, even if being a victim is offensive to those most represented. In an interesting turnabout, David Yeagley, who calls himself a Comanche patriot, decries the whole mascot brouhaha as a means of turning Indians into victims and Indian men into matriarchal pacifists, denying their warrior heritage.

An interesting interpretation of Jesus' statements on the sermon on the mount, (Matthew 5:38-40) dealing with the person who turns the other cheek or hands over his cloak to the one demanding his tunic, is that they are called to reject victimhood. Victims are controlled by their victimizers and Jesus was telling his followers that as Children of God no one controlled them, no matter what the circumstances. They were not victims and they shouldn't act like it. It appears to be a lesson we have lost.

It may not be an accident that the strongest supporters of Israel come from the areas of our culture that most reject victimhood. That is something to ponder over.
 

Breaking trust. There are many reasons not to sin, the primary being that God said no. There are too many secondary reasons to count, but the most effective of those are generally unique to each individual. On May 28th, my wife and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary. I have been faithful for those 25 years in both the literal physical sense and in the Sermon on the Mount, mental fantasy sense. It has been hard and sometimes the temptations have been difficult, but one thing above all others has assisted me. I have refused to break trust.

Over the years I have had many women confide in me. Often it was because they were in a class or group I was teaching, though sometimes it was work or friendship related. In a few of those cases, woman have suggested the possibility of more. Most of the time they were in difficult circumstances and vulnerable, which may have been at the root of the situation. I hope I have always been successful in turning aside these furtive advances without hurting the women involved or breaking their trust.

My wife jokes that I am "knight in shining armor, looking for damsels in distress." That may be true, but knights have a responsibility to be honorable and never, and I mean never, break trust. What could be worst than taking advantage of a vulnerable person when you are in a position of trust? Not much.

Why is this an issue that needs public discussion? In response to the recent publicity about abuse problems in the Catholic Church, Andrew Sullivan, in today's posting (May 23, 2002: THE ABUSE OF MINORS - GIRLS), has decried the inconsistency of the right's attacking homosexuals who take advantage of male minors in their charge while not expressing the same outrage at heterosexuals who abuse young girls in their care. His example is the problem of male coaches taking advantage of young girls on their sports teams, specifically a problem brought to light in Texas last year.

What I want to know is why there isn't a debate about banning straight teachers from coaching opposite-sex students. I want to know why this hasn't been debated or discussed by social conservatives who allegedly care about the problem of minor abuse, but only seem to really care when they can use it as a weapon to tarnish gays.

Sullivan has a point. While I disagree with his homosexual positions and I believe there is more to the same sex abuse issues than he admits to, he does have a valid argument. Coaches and other youth leaders have a burden of trust second only to parents and for many children from broken homes, the coach is the surrogate parent.

The understanding of faith within Christianity comes from the root meaning of the Greek word for faith - pistis. At its root, pistis means trust. We have faith in God because we trust Him. If we lose that trust, we lose our faith. Parents who fall away from their faith after the death of child are basically reacting to a sense of broken trust. They believe God broke trust with them and let their child die. While the specifics of that issue would require a full book to explore, you can see the importance of trust to the proper functioning of fundamental relationships: us and God, husband and wife, parent and child, mentor and disciple, and to deal with Sullivan's point, clergy and coach and those in their care.

Jesus was very explicit about his indictment of those who harmed children in their care (Matthew 18:6). While Jesus is specifically talking about those young in the Christian faith and harming them is breaking trust that deserves the harshest of punishments, this principal can be extrapolated to breaking trust in the larger sense of all those who are vulnerable and in our care.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan in this, breaking a child's trust and abusing them sexually is beyond contempt, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, whether it is men on boys or men on girls, or in the rarer cases of women on girls or boys. All should be equally condemned.
 

Adding insult to injury. Hal Lindsey takes a hard tack in his assessment of the recent "who knew what when?" flap. While he agrees Bush has to take the heat, since it happened on his watch, he argues that Bush is not the one who gutted the intelligence services in the name of the "peace dividend." What he does find dishonorable is those who take credit for the economic boom of the 90's, fueled in part by defense "savings" being plowed elsewhere, including deficit reduction, now complaining about the failure of their downsized and politicized apparatus.

The injury was Sept. 11. The insult comes from listening to the same people that took credit for the economic miracle – while it was good – trying to pass the bill to the present administration now that the check has arrived.

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have both begun backing away from the previous statements once they saw that their cries of "scandal" and demands for an "investigation" would end up at their doorsteps instead of at the White House. (How long does it take to gut an intelligence apparatus, anyway?)

The U.S. has not been in a major, dangerous war since World War II, and because of successive "police actions" (Korea, Vietnam) and pseudo wars (Granada, Gulf), we think that we can continue peacetime politics in the midst of wartime situations.

Some people might want to argue that we are not in a major, dangerous war. Right, and my name is Scoobie Doo. That is a self-serving argument at best, in an attempt not to have to pay the piper and still operate like nothing has changed. No one is saying that investigations and oversight are not necessary, but the use of public showboating for political expediency is not just stupid, its dangerous.

We are in a life and death struggle, not some Korea or Vietnam where we can sit safely at home and debate in snug safety over policy disagreements. No, the battlefield is New York as well as Kabul, Washington, and soon your town, as well as Baghdad and Tehran. This fight is not going to go away. The enemy is an ideology and the weapons are those willing to die. Both are readily available. The next escalation will be suicide bombers in our streets, stadiums, movie theaters, malls, and apartment buildings. It is not if, it is when and where.

Some people seem to think that you can just press a button and wallah, instant intelligence and defense. Not so. Take it from a former home improvement contractor, it is much easier to dismantle things than to rebuild them. Bill Clinton spent eight years dismantling wherever he could on the defense side of the government. After all, peace had arrived. Our only enemies were relatively ineffective terrorists who mainly operated on foreign soil. Well that proved to be a Pollyanna view of the real world and now the bill for Bill has come due.

Sure, let's keep a keen eye on those defending us to make sure they are doing the right things. Let's be very vigilant about our exceptional constitutional rights, doing our damnedest to defend them, but let's not be stupid, political, and self-serving or we may be what gets served.

Chicken Little.  Are they or aren't they. It seems that the uproar over who knew what when is now slid over to accusations of playing "Chicken Little". Andrew Sullivan feels Thomas Friedman is "too blithe" when tells the Bush administration to "Cool It!" with their current openness about possible attacks.

Sullivan sees this as a two pronged liberal attack against Bush. First you imply he knew but didn't tell and then you say he is telling too much. Some of this is just human nature and the assignment of blame. We love to assign blame, of course to anyone but ourselves. I think that is part of Jesus' admonition in Matthew 7:1-3 about judgment.

What I see is someone who is really scared, especially when that someone is living in New York City.

Let's make a deal: We won't criticize the administration for not anticipating 9/11 if it won't terrorize the country by now predicting every possible nightmare scenario, but no specific ones, post-9/11. Not only are these "warnings" just unnerving the public when people were finally starting to calm down, but they are also obscuring something very important: We are winning this war.

Read "unnerving the public" as unnerving me and you get the gist of the article's Zeitgeist. New York is a vulnerable place when you start talking tools of mass destruction, such as a dirty nuclear bomb. Here is a Yahoo News link to some of the current FBI threat warnings.

Heck, even last night's episode of JAG was about a group of renegade ex Russian submariners being used by Al-Qaida, with the help of Iran, in a dirty nuclear bomb plot to cripple the U.S. battle group off the coast of Afghanistan. They beat it off, but the problem is on everyone's mind. Let's hope that reality will mimic television and not Clancy's Sum of All Fears, about to be released as a movie by Paramount.  Ý