In another display of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American left, an Israeli-American college student tells of being called a Nazi at a protest against neo-Nazis, because she proudly carried an Israeli flag.

I must admit that I, like many young Jews and Zionists my age, feel betrayed by American liberals. With regards to the Middle East, there seems to be no appreciation of the moral ambiguity, the political nuances, the multiple layers of media spin. Faced with such a complex situation, young people too often ask others to chew it, swallow it and digest it for them, and then tell them in absolute terms which side is most appropriate to their general belief structure.

Are you in favor of affirmative action? Are you for civil liberties and women’s rights? Why, then, you must be pro-Palestinian! Anti-Globalization? Humanitarian? Pro- Palestinian! Ever voted Democratic/ Libertarian/Socialist or even abstained from voting for a Republican? Then Palestine is the side for you!

No one would believe me if I tried making this stuff up.

I hope that Jeb’s decision to keep the polls open later will allow more idiotarians time to get there, and figure out how to vote for Reno.

Sorry, Yoko, but we already gave peace a chance. We saw where it got us a year ago. Now, as Hawkgirl says, it’s time to give war a chance. The Afghans seem to be glad we did.

I got an email about this earlier today, but now Instantman has the link. I’m not generally in favor of fisticuffs, but knowing Buzz, I’m sure that he had had more than he could reasonably take from this idiot.

Clowns like this, who go around impugning the honor of the men who walked on the Moon, and the men and women who sent them there, have freedom of speech, but it’s distressing that their wacko theories get press attention. Fox network should be ashamed of themselves for ever airing his tripe, and lending it any credence at all.

Unfortunately, the nutball will probably continue to try to press charges for assault. I hope that the Beverly Hills cops ignore him.

[Update at 2:34 PM PDT]

Over at sci.space.policy, Mark Whittington notes that it brings a whole new meaning to Ralph Kramden’s old lines from The Honeymooners, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days. I hope they like your little jokes on the Moon, because that’s where you’re gonna be going. Bang, Zoom!”

[Another update at 5 PM]

A couple of the folks at this forum (thanks to Alan Boyle for the link) have a great idea.

If the case goes to trial, Buzz should just claim that it’s all a hoax, and that it never actually happened. It’s not physically possible for a seventy-two-year-old man to deck a much younger man like that.

You say there’s video evidence? Faked in a sound studio, with an artificial fist…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Jonah takes issue with Susan Sontag’s editorial, in which she frets about “war without end.”

But wars never have a certain ending at the beginning, now do they? That?s why they?re so scary; we never know when they?ll end. Who knew when ? or how — World War Two was going to end? Does that mean it wasn?t a “real war” until it ended? The Hundred Years War must have seemed pretty endless to a few people with life-expectancies under 40. My dictionary?s definition of war doesn?t mention anything about a deadline.

He misses the point (surprising, because it’s one that he’s made himself in the past). While he’s right in arguing with her notion that this isn’t a real war, she isn’t demanding a schedule–she’s asking for a condition that will determine when the war is over. So am I.

A “war on terrorism,” which Jonah has rightly said is a misnomer, truly does have no end, because there will always be terrorists, just as we can never win a “war on drugs,” because there will always be some people who use drugs, regardless of how much of the Bill of Rights we shred.

As I said a couple of posts down, this war is really very similar to World War II–it just has different tactics (well, and strategies). If we declare war on Iraq, or on Saudi Arabia, or even on the ideologies that drive the current governments of those nations, then the war will be over when those governments that support those ideologies are defeated and overthrown.

There are individual Nazis and communists (and even Communists) still in the world, but there’s a broad consensus that Nazism and Communism have been defeated, and the war with them over, because we defeated their power and their expression, their instantiation, in the form of the Nazi regime of Germany and the Communist regime of the former Soviet Union.

Similarly, when we have defeated Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and any other regimes that continue to harbor the toxic ideologies that support, encourage, and succor terrorists, then the war will be over, even if terrorism per se has not been eradicated from the earth (as it probably never will be, in any society with human liberties). But in order to do that, we must clarify who the real enemy is. As long as the simplistic answer is “terrorist,” then it will truly be a war without end, and a continuing danger to our civil liberties at home.

Amidst pointing out why the Soviet Union was deterrable, and Saddam may not be, Eugene Volokh makes an important point this morning on the subject of deterring Iraq.

Finally, we should recognize that while deterrence worked during the Cold War, it was a very high-risk strategy. We relied on deterrence because we had no choice. Right now, it seems like we do have a choice; we can preemptively strike against Iraq much more cheaply than we could have preemptively struck against the USSR. And if we miss this opportunity, we might be placed in a situation where deterrence won’t work nearly as well as it fortunately did work against the Soviets.

I’ve posted before on the problem with the argument that toppling Saddam puts us on a slippery slope (e.g., if Saddam, why not Mugabe, who is apparently as vicious, or Pakistan, which also has nukes), and that the response to this is that a number of factors go into the decision–no single one can justify it.

Professor Volokh points out one more. In addition to all the other reasons, like the dog that licks his own privates, we should take out Saddam because we can.

If we could have defeated the Soviet Union earlier at an acceptable cost and risk to ourselves, the Cold War would, and should, have been a hot one. We lived for over forty years in a very high-risk state (which also prevented us from decisively defending, for example, the people of northern Korea from communism) because we had no other choice, not because we had no cause to defeat the Soviets. Because they had nukes and the ability to deliver them, we could not risk an actual war with them. Had Hitler gotten them, we might very well have ended up with a stalemate in Europe just as long-lasting as the one with the Soviets.

The longer we wait to take out Saddam (and the other toxic governments of the region) the greater the risk that the risk of taking him out will become unacceptable. The notion that we should wait until he is closer to having nuclear weapons, or actually has them, before we respond to him, is simply bizarre.

Many of us in the Blogosphere have argued for months that we are not at war with “terror,” which is just a tactic, but rather with a particularly virulent sect of one of the world’s major religions–Wahhabism. While true, it opens us up to the charge that this means that we are therefore not justified in going after Saddam’s Iraq, which is after all a secular state, and the enemy of the Wahhabis to the south.

In today’s London Times, Michael Gove has come up with a sort of “unified field theory” of the Middle East, which helps square this circle. We are at war with two toxic ideologies, fundamentalist Islam, and Ba’athism in Iraq and Syria, both of which find a very fertile petri dish in the corrupt governance and culture of the present Middle East. He compares them to Nazism and Communism, two ideologies opposed to each other, but even more implacably sharing a hatred of the West.

Against these evils there can be no effective containment, just as there could be no lasting appeasement of the Nazis or no meaningful detente with Communists. Weakness in the face of evil only encourages its practitioners.

The events of September 11 did not follow assertions of Western strength. They were the acts of extremists emboldened by our irresolution in the face of terror, our preference for peace processes and bombing aspirin factories over the hard business of tackling evil at its source.

The enduring tragedy of that day is that we did not act before, to save the West from terror by saving the Middle East from tyranny. The enduring legacy of that day is that we cannot rest until that work is done, until we dismantle the cultures in which the poison still ferments.

[Via Jim Bennett email]