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No more passes and excuses for the Middle East What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for...

[Tape plays.] Senator Kerry, in the clearest terms, what would be the principal difference between the foreign policy of your administration and that of the Bush administration? Kerry: Brian, the principle difference will be almost everything. This administration has been arrogant. I think they have been reckless. They have been overly ideological. They have pushed our allies away. I will bring our allies back to us. I will respect the international community — not that we're tying ourselves to it in a way that doesn't allow us to make decisions and protect our own security. But it's important to try...

The headline on the Washington Post review sums it up: “‘Passion’ Is A Gory Take On A Gentle Teacher’s Violent End”. Somebody’s confusing their Gospel with Godspell. A few days before the “violent end”, the gentle teacher had been hurling tables around in the temple. And, even if you overlook the rough stuff, rhetorically Christ was as forceful as He was gentle. That’s the real argument over The Passion Of The Christ. It’s not between Christians and Jews, but between believing Christians and the broader post-Christian culture, a term that covers a large swathe from the media to your average...

Fractured as the bones of the body politic may be, we can all agree on one thing: This will be the longest, grimmest, harshest campaign in living memory. Right? That's the conventional wisdom: It's going negative sooner than ever before, and the mud being slung is particularly disgusting. Blame, of course, the Republican Slime Machine, which will stop at nothing. Just look at how it attacked Richard Clarke — by sending out operatives to point out Clarke's contradictions. Heavens. Decent people everywhere took to their fainting couches over that one. Slimy? No. Saying your opponent dates a goat and likes...

When I was young, my parents in the early 1960s told me to ignore stories about the “Jews.” Of course, out here in rural California, I never met such distant persons, but only heard about them from disgruntled farmers (who, I wager, had never met any either). These pesky “Jews” apparently in some secretive cabal controlled the entire fruit-market of the United States! “They” — not the paradoxes of interstate commerce and the cutthroat nature of American marketing — explained why we got $3 a box for plums while “they” took $20. Middle men, market manipulators, and secret smart guys...

Oil production is back to where it was before the war started. So is electrical power generation. Thousands of police and teachers have been trained. New scouting programs for boys and girls have even taken root. And, most important, a new interim constitution is now in place. One year after President Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Iraq, evidence mounts that the nation is headed in the direction Bush has promised — toward a fully functioning democracy that is at peace with its neighbors and that honors individual rights. Attacks on American soldiers have eased. Unemployment has declined. Food...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday challenged Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to name the foreign leaders whom the Massachusetts senator claims want him as the next U.S. president. Kerry, the all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee, said at a fund-raiser last week in Florida that he's heard from some world leaders who quietly back his candidacy and hope he defeats President Bush in November. Powell expressed skepticism on ``Fox News Sunday'' when asked about Kerry's assertion. ``I don't know what foreign leaders Senator Kerry is talking about. It's an easy charge, an easy assertion to make. But...

NEW YORK, March 11, 2004 - Mainstream news organizations may "filter" the news, as President George W. Bush claimed late last year, but not to omit good stories from their Iraq coverage, but to broadcast more negative news about the president himself, according to a report released today by MediaChannel.org and Media Tenor. The report reveals a strong negative cast to ABC, CBS and NBC news coverage of the president thus far in 2004. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry, Bush's certain opponent for November, has received more positive coverage by the same three networks. According to data compiled for MediaChannel.org by...

Gnat’s bouncing on the bed with a rabbit, which is really a kangaroo, while the radio restates the death toll: 150 dead, and an unimaginable number of wounded. I dread the day when she starts to listen to the radio, and understand; I wonder what she will think about the world outside Jasperwood. Right now she knows that we live in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, on the Earth. It’s a pretty good place. It has seasons and it has ice cream and it has spring, soon, and it’s where her room is. But at some point kids realize that when daddy...

Why don't we just pencil in a Haiti invasion for 2014? That seems to be the pattern: Every 10 years or so, it's off to Port-au-Prince to clean up the old mess and help the benighted island get a fresh start on an entirely new mess. Haiti makes everyone go nuts. Exhibit 1 is John Kerry, who has identified the real threat to American security: Haitian rebels. "President Kerry would never have allowed that to get where it is," Kerry said, speaking in that odd third-person style used by popes, kings and rap stars. A Kerry administration would have presented...

It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the state of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current issue of American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First worldview. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic. Richard Perle, co-author with Frum of "An End to Evil," old acquaintances remember as being for many years on the public scene as an adamant opponent...

A former Special Forces green beret who served in Vietnam has touched a nerve with fellow veterans after penning a scathing column hammering Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. In the article, he calls Kerry "...a bald-faced, unprincipled liar and a disgrace, and you have dishonored me and all my fellow Vietnam veterans."

Government officials outlined details of the Bush administration's sweeping plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws on Thursday, saying that the proposed guest worker program would grant legal status to illegal immigrants who were living in the United States on Jan. 7. The officials, from the Department of Homeland Security, said legal status would also be granted to the families of immigrants participating in the program as long as the workers earned enough to provide for their relatives...

A long day got longer as we headed north on the Point Reyes Peninsula. We all suffered from “scope-eye,” that strange affliction known to birders and photographers who spend inordinate amounts of time staring with one eye through a spotting scope or viewfinder. Afternoon birding can be slow, but we hoped a visit to Teal Pond would perk things up a bit. Maybe we would see Blue-winged Teal loafing at the water’s edge or Wilson’s Snipe probing the muddy shoreline....(snip) We instantly pulled off the paved road and fixed our eyes on this scene of utter chaos in the adjacent...

Chancellor was a 'prisoner' of French president in 'catastrophic' opposition to war to topple Saddam Germany is seeking to distance itself from France's tight embrace and realign itself more closely to Britain and America, senior German officials signalled yesterday. They said the row with Washington over Iraq had been "catastrophic" for Berlin and Chancellor Gerhard Schröderhad become "a prisoner" of President Jacques Chirac's campaign to oppose the war to topple Saddam Hussein last year. "We were more dependent on the French in that situation. But this will not be a permanent situation," said one authoritative source. Another official explained: "We...

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 30 — The Mars rover Opportunity may have detected the iron oxide — a possible sign of water from Mars' ancient past — that was the original motivation for sending it to a broad plain near the planet's equator, some scientists involved in the project said. Scientists have been examining data from an instrument called the mini-thermal emission spectrometer, or mini-TES for short, that looks at infrared light radiated from the rocks and soil. The mix of infrared wavelengths identifies certain minerals.

Grown-ups had a hard time figuring out how Brittany Hutchinson survived being hit and run over by a school bus Tuesday afternoon, but the 5-year-old White Bear Lake girl had an easy explanation. "The angels were with me, they keepded me safe," Brittany, a kindergartner at St. Mary of the Lake School, said Wednesday night. "If the angels weren't with me, I wouldn't be alive." Brittany was hit seconds after she left the bus at her day-care center in Vadnais Heights. The entire length of it passed over her, but the wheels missed her. "I saw just a little bit...

I love New Hampshire!’ I forget which candidate opened his Tuesday night speech with that line. Oh, hang on, they all did. Except Joe Lieberman, the ever optimistic Yiddisher pixie, who beamed at the crowd and said: ‘Is New Hampshire a great state or what?’ Senator Lieberman, the only unabashedly pro-war Democrat on the ballot, had been claiming at every campaign stop for the last week to have something called ‘Joe-mentum’, which is like ‘momentum’, but apparently much smaller, if not entirely undetectable. Nonetheless, running into him in the final hours, I caught the Joe-mentum fever and rashly predicted he’d...

The news from Afghanistan yesterday should have been the enactment of the new national constitution, painfully agreed by the Loya Jirga ("grand assembly") that met in Kabul through December, which ratified it on Jan. 4th. The constitution became law Monday, by the decree of President Hamid Karzai, signing beside the former king, Zaher Shah, in an old palace now occupied by the Afghan foreign ministry. Such modest media coverage as it drew was quickly overtaken by the latest terrorist blast in the city, which claimed the life of one Canadian. There will be national elections in June; they will be...

Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina – Listening to Richard Perle on the radio recently was a little hard for a European like me. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, stated that European nations "do not have the most courageous of instincts," with the implication that America has to intervene in international affairs because Europeans are afraid to. Perle's comments take place against a chorus of similar sentiments to be heard on America's airwaves in recent months. An average listener would be forgiven for believing that Europeans are a cowardly bunch of ungrateful wimps, whose anti-American bombast is a...