Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going on trial on Monday for his role in the attacks. The military tribunal starts Monday.

And a big chunk of the American body politic and landed punditry is pretty sure that Mohammed is the one being wronged, here:

On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.

The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.

Let’s make this perfectly clear: KSM is a foreign national, whom evidence points to having planned the 9/11 attacks, captured overseas, in action against Americans, America, and the West. The Constitution doesn’t apply to him, any more than it did to Masaharu Homma or Yomiuki Yamashita or Herman Goering. There are generally-accepted procedures, to be sure – and a society that cares about due process needs to ensure that they’re followed – but they have little to do with the Constitution.

He was not in uniform, not a member of a military group, and not a member of a partisan group fighting for its own nation against an occupier, so the Geneva Convention really doesn’t apply.

The military tribunal system is both legal and appropriate. Torture, I’m less sanguine about – but that’s really not the issue here.

The real issue, here, is that a good chunk of American opinion would rather indict the US than Mohammed:

Whether they intend it or not, KSM’s victimologists are dupes in his campaign to undermine the antiterror enterprise. They also risk tearing down the firewall between national security and the civilian courts, where Constitutional principles could easily bend after some future attack to the gravity of national self-defense.

The proceedings are likely to be transparent, with only a limited portion closed to observers. It is true that this could become a forum for claims of childhood trauma, or a platform for grievances against the U.S., as with Zacarias Moussaoui; they also could degenerate into a media carnival. But that has more or less already happened. One virtue of public proceedings is to show that the U.S. is not conducting the Star Chambers of liberal caricature. Another is to reveal the ideology that irrigates al Qaeda’s violence.

The ultimate purpose of the tribunals is to administer justice. It is a strange worldview that considers such tribunals and the death penalty inappropriate for the murders of 2,972 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and hundreds more world-wide. A society that would not tender justice to a human butcher like KSM is not serious about defending itself.

A guy could be forgiven for having his doubts about that last bit.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Chad,  John and Brian will talk with Dinesh D’Souza about his new book “What’s So Great About Christianity?”
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will no doubt talk about Hillary’s unraveling, the selling of McCain to conservatives, and pitchers and catchers reporting for Spring training! Among other things.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will have Erik Kaardal and Marty Seifert.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

(Along with the Stroms, from 9-11, natch).

Double-Income, No Kids Power Couples are the first people in history to discover that children will mess up your perfect designer house!

WHEN Jacqueline Brown and her husband, Gavin Friedman, were in their early 30s, they lived in a condominium in Santa Monica, Calif., with a black leather Ikea couch Mr. Friedman had bought for law school, a few modest pieces from Pier 1 Imports and assorted hand-me-down furnishings. Within a few years, though, having acquired professional and financial stability — both were litigation associates at prominent law firms — they bought a house in Cheviot Hills, an affluent neighborhood in West Los Angeles, and began remodeling and decorating.

During two renovations, each costing more than $100,000, they built a two-sided fireplace to separate the living and dining rooms, put in a wine cellar and installed a sleek maple and granite kitchen. They bought molded-wood chairs in the Arne Jacobsen style, Murano glass pendant lamps and a custom walnut entertainment unit. Ms. Brown, who had become obsessed with interior design in law school, poured heart and soul into the projects.

But just as Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman were establishing their first truly grown-up residence — she was 38, he 37 — Ms. Brown gave birth to their first child, Harrison, a boy who turned out as bouncing as most.

Suddenly they were confronted with a question that had never before occurred to them: given the way baby gear and toys take over households, the uncivilized habits of toddlers and the dangers posed by sharp-edged contemporary furniture, could Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman continue to live their high-design dream?

Hahahahahahahaha you can’t, yuppie slapnutzes! hahahahahahahaha!

…when the investment has been not in cribs or other nursery furniture but in the classic “double income, no kids” fantasy of a pristine, high-style home for grown-ups, the transition can be hardMs. Brown and Mr. Friedman — who of course were thrilled to have a child, like all the later-in-life parents interviewed for this article — were also determined not to let Harrison “take control of the house,”

Bwahahahaha!  “Determined”, were we?  Oh, you slay me.

OTHERS, like Debra Cherney, 49, and Hartley Bernstein, 56, were more resigned to giving up control…the couple realized that they would need to create a designated play space in their prewar Park Avenue apartment. Still, the room they sacrificed — the formal dining room — was tough.

“I’m pretty sensitive aesthetically, and it does something for me when I look at a pretty room,” Ms. Cherney said. “Looking at what the room used to be was the visual equivalent of listening to Bach or Mozart. Now it’s the visual equivalent of listening to Barney.

Well, Dammit all to hell!

She felt the full impact when she and Mr. Bernstein put their 18th-century mahogany dining table and chair set in storage. “When I bought the table I was envisioning these beautiful, lovely dinners with fine china,” she said. “Once you have kids and once you give up those things, it was like, ‘Who was I kidding?’ I remember thinking this room will look nice again — in about 18 years.”

Well, Deb and Hartley, that’s what boarding school is for, now, isn’t it?

The issue of safety, too, can pose vexing choices for parents in thrall to design. Even before Kipp Cheng and his partner of 15 years, Mark Jarecke, arrived home with their son, Beckett, last March, they could see that many of the furnishings in their Maplewood, N.J., colonial house, including a set of four Barcelona chairs and a glass-top Noguchi coffee table, were accidents waiting to happen. But they weren’t eager to act.

“We are both small-town guys who lived in the city and tried to establish an aesthetic point of view that was largely modernist and minimalist,” said Mr. Cheng, 40, a playwright and a publicist for the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “But when you become parents, you kind of have to throw that out the window.”

Or raise a modernist, minimalist kid.  Y’know.

As for the coffee table, they avoided doing anything until Beckett gave them no choice: while learning to walk last summer, he used it as his main training prop. “He’d cruise and trip and hit his face on the table’s edge,” Mr. Cheng recalled.

Mr. Jarecke initially refused to discuss parting with or altering the table in any way, but they eventually compromised and decided to wrap the edge of the top in foam. “As I’m taping it,” Mr. Cheng said, “I’m saying, ‘I’m taping over what makes the difference between this being a Noguchi table and a Kmart table.’ ” Mr. Jarecke was even more distraught. “It transformed this beautiful modernist piece of furniture into a piece you’d find in a ’70s rec room,” he said.

Simply ghastly!  The Horror!

THE HOR-ROR!

FOR some design-minded parents, certain compromises are too much.

In 2004, Bob Stratton, a design technologist who specializes in home automation, and his wife, Sandra McLean, 50, a food activist and writer, bought a former tool and die factory in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and set about turning it into a two-story, 4,000-square-foot loftlike home appropriate for themselves and their son, Vin, and daughter, Fia, then 2 and 5….“They can play with a toy in the main living area, but it has to go away when they’re done,” Ms. McLean said. “I’m very concerned with what’s in my visual space.

Just as a matter of principle, I think people who refer to their “crap” as their “visual space” need to be beaten with sticks.

She also refused to babyproof furniture when the children were younger. She was “never one of those mothers” who put safety corners on coffee tables, she said. “That stuff is just gross, and I don’t feel you have to sacrifice living space to that degree.” And she decided not to install wire railings on the open side of the floating walnut staircase Mr. Stratton designed to connect the first- and second-floor living spaces.

“We couldn’t bear it,” she said. “It was too ugly. So basically what we did was we trained the kids to hold onto the handrail, and it’s worked. No one’s ever fallen off.”

I’d love to interview those kids in twenty years.

“What’s it like, growing up feeling like a museum piece?”

SCENE:  Dingy warehouse in seedy neighborhood.  Five dead terrorist – three shot, one head-butted, and one with a head bitten clean off – lie just to the left of the establishing shot.

BAUER is frantically working on a nuclear weapon, whose digital clock is ominously ticking below 1:00 minute.  He’s talking on a cell phone with one hand, using a pocket knife with the other.

BAUER:  I’ve got under one minute, or this thing’s gonna blow.

BUCHANAN:  Jack, the President called.  He said to get the bomb defused.

BAUER:  I understand.

BUCHANAN:  No, Jack.  He said to defuse it now.

BAUER.  Er, yeah.  OK, I cut the red wire.

MORRIS:  OK, Jack.  Now, wrap the wire from the “544C” socket around the neutral pole at least 34 times to create enough resistance…

BAUER: Dammit, Morris, there’s no time!

CHLOE:  Actually, Jack, if you hit the big green “reset” button, it’ll give you an entire ‘nother 24 hours.

BAUER: (Shakes head in disbelief).  Say again!

CHLOE:  The clock has a big green reset button.  If it’s not going well press it once, and it’ll put 24 more hours on the clock.  We can send a truck and a NEST team.  It’ll be a piece of cake.

BAUER:  Really?

CHLOE:  Pinkie swear.

(BAUER presses button.  Clock resets to “24:00:00”)

BAUER:  Ow.  Wow.  Cool.

CHLOE:  You’re welcome.

Tracy and the Anti-Strib gang have the market cornered on “Hot Chick Friday” – where they take a moment to post pictures of gorgeous women that I’ve nailed – so it’d be unseemly to horn in on their act.

And I love being unseemly.

It’s a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Standard, one of perhaps the three most sought-after electric guitars in the business. I recall reading that they went for $279, brand new out of the Gibson catalog, during Ike’s second term. When I first started playing guitar during the Carter administration – before the guitar collectors market went insane – they were already going for a stellar $3,000; thirty years later, some of them fetch mid-to-high five figures.

The tiger-stripe lacquer finish and the brick-heavy body create an afternoon’s worth of sustain. The action, like most Gibsons, is nice and low; your fingers just race, which is disconcerting to a Fender player like me. Even thirty years ago, the whole assembly – aged nicely even then – yielded a sweet, round, weathered tone that was the tonal equivalent of James Earl Jones’ voice; it had credibility just because of how it sounded.

I played a ’57 once – not a tiger-stripe, but a Gold-Top, its first cousin – that a friend of the bass player in my very first band had picked up ten years earlier for maybe $100, before the collectors value became established. I’d been playing guitar for maybe two years; I had a long way to go. And yet strapping that bad boy on was like sitting in an F1 Lotus after learning how to drive a combine; it’s hard not to feel like a guitar hero playing a ’57.

I’m a speech junkie – a veritable connoisseur of oratory.

And Barack Obama is, undeniably, an excellent speaker, with great physical presence and perfect pitch – at least, in the short, measured clips I’ve caught of him.

I’ve not yet been exposed to a full speech.

But Daniel Henninger has – and it’s not all roses for Obama or his acolytes.

Oh, the speech starts with a bang – sort of like Obama’s political career itself…:

The speech was classic Obama. Beautifully written and beautifully delivered, the words soaring to the rafters of a Madison, Wis., auditorium filled mostly with 17,000 cheering students. The rookie senator had just come off blowouts of Hillary in Virginia and Maryland.

The senator’s charisma and appeal has been undeniable. He is almost insanely eloquent.

Cool

But then…: 

Still, about halfway into this (very long) speech, the feeling was hard to shake: This is getting hard to listen to. Again and again. 

A few weeks ago, we noted that Obama “gets” Reagan – at least, the basics; put out a message of hope, delivered with passion, without talking down to the listener.

Some say he really does get it.  On the other hand, Henninger notices something else:

Up to now, the force of Sen. Obama’s physical presentation has so dazzled audiences that it has been hard to focus on precisely what he is saying. “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” Can what?

Listen closely to that Tuesday night Wisconsin speech. Unhinge yourself from the mesmerizing voice. What one hears is a message that is largely negative, illustrated with anecdotes of unremitting bleakness. Heavy with class warfare, it is a speech that could have been delivered by a Democrat in 1968, or even 1928.

Here is the edited version, stripped of the flying surfboard:

“Our road will not be easy . . . the cynics. . . where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits . . . That’s what happens when lobbyists set the agenda. . . It’s a game where trade deals like Nafta ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart . . . It’s a game . . . CEO bonuses . . . while another mother goes without health care for her sick child . . . We can’t keep driving a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace . . . even if they’re not rich . . .”

Here’s his America: “lies awake at night wondering how he’s going to pay the bills . . . she works the night shift after a full day of college and still can’t afford health care for a sister who’s ill . . . the senior I met who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt . . . the teacher who works at Dunkin’ Donuts after school just to make ends meet . . . I was not born into money or status . . . I’ve fought to bring jobs to the jobless in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant . . . to make sure people weren’t denied their rights because of what they looked like or where they came from . . . Now we carry our message to farms and factories.”

It ends: “We can cast off our doubts and fears and cynicism because our dream will not be deferred; our future will not be denied; and our time for change has come.”

I am not saying all of this is false. But it is a depressing message to ride all the way to the White House

Wrapping Jimmy Carter’s message in Ronald-Reagan-style rhetoric, in other words.

I’ll have to try to dig out some transcripts.

Dale Carpenter on the gay rights case for the Individual Right interpretation of the Second Amendment.  Carpenter is counsel for a number of gay civil rights groups (or, more accurately, civil rights groups comprising gay people), who is involved in one of the amicus curiae briefs supporting the Individual Rights interpretation of the Heller case.

He makes the usual points…:

It’s true that gun possession does not guarantee protection from violent crime. The gun may be incompetently used, for example. But where the Constitution itself protects an individual right, it is not for the government to say the citizen may not enjoy the right simply because she may not make effective use of it. 

…as well as one I’d not heard before (emphasis added):

Second, the gay gun-rights brief points out that unless the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms, gay Americans are effectively disqualified from any exercise of the right. That’s because under the current prevailing interpretation of the Constitution, the government may entirely exclude gays and lesbians from military service (“the militia”).

If the Second Amendment protects only the collective right of a state’s citizens to possess arms within a militia, and if gays may be excluded from that militia, then the Second Amendment is a dead letter for gay Americans. They have no rights on the subject the government is bound to respect.

Of course, to a genuine libertarian, or even a stolid construtionist, the notion that the “militia” is the regular military is noxious…

…but it is an inevitable result of the “Collective Right” interpretation that Heller seeks to scupper.

Another multiple victim shooting at an American post-secondary school. This time, possibly zero dead; some reports say the shooter killed himself:

Several people have been shot on the Northern Illinois University campus. The suspect reportedly killed himself and officials say the danger has passed.

Officials confirmed that several people were shot at Cole Hall, a large lecture hall on campus, shortly after 3 p.m. and the campus was immediately placed on lockdown. Kishwaukee Hospital reported that up to 15 people were being brought to the hospital.

While I can’t find a specific policy on the NIU website yet, Illinois has among the “toughest” gun laws in the country (where “onerous to the law-abiding” = “tough”).

Looks like they’ve done yet another fine job.

UPDATE: I had a bad feeling it couldn’t last. Four dead, plus the shooter.

Good thing Illinois is the most anti-gun state in the Union; goodness knows what would have happened.

…and piss off a terrorist!

(As a special Val’s day present, I direct you to one of my favorite Valentine’s Day stories)

…is over.

Begone, Basketball.  Hie thee away, Hockey.  Fuhgeddaboutit, Football.  You served your purpose – keeping the kids occupied during the winter.

Now, you can all just retire from the stage until October.

I’d have rather seen Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney – in that order – get the GOP nomination.

It ain’t gonna happen, of course.  And so we have John McCain – as imperfect and mercurial a conservative as exists, with a lifetime ACU rating just a shade higher than Jim Ramstad.  Which, to be fair, is still head, shoulders, ankles and bunions better than either of the Tic candidates.

Noodles from the Dogs refers us to this piece by Kim Du Toit – perhaps the most paleo of the blogosphere’s paleos – who just plain gets it (emphasis added by me):

By not voting Republican—even one as flawed as McCain—we will handing this country over to the peaceniks, and on this I am absolutely certain…Furthermore, if we wake up on November 5th to President-Elect Obama or President-Elect Clinton, and then we turn on the TV to see joyous street demonstrations all over the Arab world, how will we feel then?

And when, in 2009, President Obama/Clinton nominates some pinko jurist with a love for a Silly Putty Constitution (or maybe two pinko jurists), the Supreme Court will swing sharply Left, for decades.

There’s only one thing to do: elect McCain, and at the same time, elect conservative Republicans to Congress, in 2008, in 2010, and in 2012.

I know; McCain’s a total shit, and I loathe him. But in the end, I love my country more than I hate John McCain—and handing over the reins of power to the Left will, with absolute certainty, bring this country down—just as the Left has brought down Britain, France and the rest of Europe.

Not gonna happen. Not while I draw breath.

This is not the time to pout. This, my friends, is our last stand. If we don’t win this one, the job is going to be incalculably more difficult in the future, both for us and for our kids.

Noodles expands on Kim’s point:

I’ve decided that I can not stay home in protest or even write in a preferred candidate.  It is readily apparent that the system by which we get our candidates is not perfect and that compromise often leaves many unhappy, in this instance the more conservative Republicans have definately gotten the shaft.   That being said every time the pendulum swung toward sitting this election out the vision of Hildebeast or Obama being sworn in on a cold day in January made it swing right back.

This blog’s mission – well, one of several missions for this next eight months, actually – is going to be to find every one of you conservatives who’s planning on sitting this one out, and changing your mind.

I’ve said it before – Tim Pawlenty is pretty much the best stump speaker in Minnesota politics.

And I wish I could have been there for this:

In a State of the State address rich in tributes to Minnesota’s pioneering spirit, Pawlenty urged cooperation across party lines to improve the state’s transportation system. But he drew perhaps his strongest response when he brandished his pen and declared his determination to “restrain taxes and spending,” a message that has been at the center of his tenure as governor.

“I call it the taxpayer protection pen, otherwise known as the veto pen,” Pawlenty said, pulling the pen from his left breast pocket. “As you know I will not hesitate to use it. …”

The threat was a shot across the bow to DFL majorities in both houses of the Legislature, whose leaders have in recent days declared their own intentions to quickly pass several measures to increase taxes, particularly for transportation funding.

For those of you not from Minnesota, the story is simple.

• When times are good, the DFL tries to raise taxes.  See:  The nineties.  There were surpluses (in other words, the people of Minnesota were over-taxed every year; taxes took in more than the budget called for.  In every case, up through the end of the Ventura administration (which was a DFL administration with a big, shaven-headed “Independence” party figurehead), the DFL spent every last nickel of every surplus.
• When times  are  tougher,  the DFL on the other hand tries to raise taxes.

Nothing new here:

DFL leaders faulted the Republican governor for providing few specifics on how to respond to weakening economic conditions.

“It was disappointing that the governor did not address more straight on how we can produce more jobs in this state and do our part together to reverse the 23,000 lost jobs in this state in the last six months. That was a real disappointment today,” said House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis.

But then, either did Kelliher – also known as “the best Speaker of the House the GOP could have asked for”.

House and Senate Republican leaders heralded one of the few new initiatives proposed in the speech — the idea of a tax reform commission to consider changes in tax law to spur job growth.”If we can’t grow Minnesota business we can’t sustain all the services that government wants to do and perhaps needs to do,” said Senate Minority Leader Dave Senjem, R-Rochester.

What?  Taxes?

You’d think a good DFLer would…er…um…

But the proposal of a tax commission fell flat for Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis.

Pogemiller said the state’s tax system has grown increasingly less fair by forcing property tax increases on homeowners, renters and businesses and by failing to close corporate loopholes.

“I think continually admiring the problem is probably not the most productive thing to do. Anybody can cut things. It takes creativity and leadership to bring revenue to the table,” Pogemiller said.

Look at the bright side, Minnesota.  With people like Kelliher and Pogemiller in charge on the DFL side of the aisle, we’re probably safe from the spectre of a whole lot of DFL achievements.

Fact: I support free speech more than anyone in the Twin Cities. Along with being the Twin Cities’ best feminist, it is one of my major superlatives.

So it’s not so much that I oppose this idea…:

True Blue Minnesota is lighting up the night sky with giant Jumbotrons, where we hold the Republicans to their record, let them hang themselves with their own words, show people a better future and do it in a way that DRAWS PEOPLE TO US! True Blue owns the night sky.

…as that I wonder how many Saint Paulites – Republican or Tic – really want anyone “owning” their night sky.

And we will own the national media with it.

They make this sound like it’ll be a conflict.

And this next line grabbed me:

True Blue will also be able to drive what happens on the street by setting the tone and the message.

Giant Jumbotrons setting the tone and the message? Like this? Or, really, this? (Scroll about 2:30 into the clip and tell me you don’t think about exactly what these people are after…)

Oh, well, More of George Soros (*) money well-spent!

* Plural, not singular.

I was a 20 year old college kid working a grindingly-boring Sunday afternoon shift at KQDJ Radio in Jamestown, ND on February 13, 1983.

I was doing what I usually did on those boring Sunday shifts; playing records, doing homework, taking transmitter readings.

Then, the police scanner in the “newsroom” next door, which normally burbled with the desultory reports of DWIs and bar fights and traffic stops that make up the lives of most small town cops, suddenly erupted.  There’d been a shootout; officers were down; cops and sheriff’s deputies were being dispatched to Medina, a town of about 400 people about 35 miles west of Jamestown on I94.

It took hours to untangle the story, which became perhaps the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.

Two US Marshals, dispatched from Fargo to try to arrest a group of tax-protesters affiliated with the neo-Nazi-sympathetic “Posse Comitatus”, had been killed in the shootout that ensued.  Their leader, Gordon Kahl, and several others fled the scene.  The scanner reported ambulances on their way to the hospital in Jamestown bringing the wounded, which included Yorie Kahl, criticially injured by a gunshot; in one of the many ironies that day, Kahl’s life was saved by the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room that day, Dr. Evan Kostick, father of my high school pal David (himself a doctor today), and one of Jamestown’s tiny Jewish community.

News organizations in North Dakota today are remembering the 25th anniversary of the shootout – the Fargo Forum led and leads the coverage; others from the Bismark Trib pitched in; former Forum staffer James Corcoran wrote “Bitter Harvest”, the definitive book on the event, relating not only the shootout and the apocalyptic trial of the survivors, but the social sturm und drang that the event caused on the Northern Plains.

———-

Times were brutally tough in the Dakotas in the early ’80s.  The rest of the US was slowly recovering from a recession; it’d be hard to call what happened on the Plains anything less than a depression.  What the foreclosure crisis is to the inner city today, the farm crisis of the ’80s was to the Great Plains.

Some farmers – and some of the workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture, which in North Dakota back then accounted for pretty much every job in the place – did what human nature naturally bids some people to do; blame someone else.  And for some – like Kahl and a thin film of like-minded people – it wasn’t a big leap from “losing your farm to the bank” and “losing your farm to Jewish Bankers”.  The Times’ review of “Bitter Harvest” notes:

The book that turned his head at an early age was ”The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” and it was written by Henry Ford.

It is based on a 1918 treatise called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to be the minutes of a cabal of Russian Jews plotting to destroy Christianity and the white race and take over the world. Ford wrote ”The International Jew” in 1920, and it was not until 1929 that he finally conceded that ”The Protocols” was a fabrication concocted by czarist Russian anti-Semites.

Even so, as a young man in the 1940’s, Mr. Kahl believed it totally. He had considerable encouragement. He came of age at a time when the velvet voice of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who reached into almost as many homes with his weekly radio show as Fred Allen, broadcast some of the nastiest anti-Semitic propaganda ever heard on the airwaves; when Gerald L. K. Smith established the Jew-baiting Christian Nationalist Crusade in Arkansas and gained a national following, and when Gerald Winrod, an apocalyptic fundamentalist preacher in central Kansas gained tens of thousands of adherents to a movement that came to be known as the Jayhawk Nazis.

Winrod’s son, George Gordon Winrod, kept the ministry alive.  I remember his followers leaving corrosively anti-semitic leaflets under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot when I was in ninth grade.

Nobody in my circle bought into it, of course – but we all knew people for whom it rang true.  There was an audience, out there.

And they – like Kahl – weren’t necessarily easily identifiable:

When Mr. Kahl came home from World War II, he was 25 years old, and he was regarded as a hero. He had shot down 10 enemy planes as a turret gunner on B-25’s, and he had won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two air medals, a Presidential unit citation and two Purple Hearts. That was not all the metal he brought home. Surgeons never did get out all the shrapnel he took in the jaw, chest and hip.

So the combination of hard times and ready scapegoats found some adherents.

———-

Kahl escaped that day; with two federal agents dead, the federal law-enforcement machinery sprung into place.  Two blocks from the house where my father still lives in Jamestown, in Stutsman County’s then-brand-new courthouse, the FBI and an alphabet soup of other federal law-enforcement agencies set up their command post; local hotels were jammed with brusque men and women in sharp suits and/or, occasionally, battledress utilities.

And they were not happy.  Rumors began to circulate; the Feds were tramping about the prairie with big, nasty boots; they were conducting no-knock raids, presuming the locals guilty until proven innocent, acting like a hostile occupying power – or so said the rumors.

The previous summer, I’d worked at KDAK, a little station in Carrington, a town of about 2,000 about 40 miles north of Jamestown.   The station had also just hired a new “News Director”, a pretty mid-20-something named Peggy Polreis who’d just come from Carrington’s newspaper.  One of my jobs had been to make her broadcast-worthy.  I did a good job.

One day, a few days after the shootout, Peggy got a tip from a source that the Feds were going to search a farmhouse near nearby Fessenden.  She arrived on the scene to find that the press were being cordoned away from a farmhouse located a solid half-mile up the road, behind a shelter belt.

Peggy slipped away from the group, and crawled – so the story went – a quarter of a mile along the shelter belt, keeping out of sight of the cops.  She was, apparently, the only non-cop to see what happened.

The police – and, as I recall, a North Dakota National Guard armored personnel carrier – had surrounded the farmhouse.  A dog darted from an outbuilding; a policeman shot the dog dead.  The gunshot sparked more gunfire, and before long the farmhouse was completely riddled with bullet holes.  Finally, the police moved in…

…to discover the farmhouse empty.

It was one of many incidents that angered, and occasionally alienated, the locals from the Feds.

———-

How you look at the events of that winter (and the ensuing spring and summer, when the manhunt for Kahl led to a final shootout in Arkansas that left Kahl and another Christian Identity supporter dead) depends on who, and where, you were back then.

If you were a local, you knew that North Dakotans tend to be good, law-abiding people; they’ve voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election since statehood, making them marginally less conservative than Utah.  And yet the Posse, and Christian Identity, found recruits and adherents – and it was no mystery why.  Radical fringes were no stranger to the plains; the Non-Partisan League, the Grangers, the Bund and other fevered activists had gestated in the area in response to other crises since the 1890’s.

So we weren’t surprised that some of the locals were sympathetic.  It was a minority – a small one – but it drew attention.  One of them even wrote and recorded – on a home cassette player, I think – a song praising and rooting for Kahl, during the manhunt and before the final fatal shootout in Arkansas.  It got a little play – mostly from news organizations who were reporting on the acceptance Kahl, the Posse and other extremists got from the area.

If you weren’t from the area, and didn’t understand it, it must have seemed odd.  And maybe a little scary.

———-

Hollywood certainly knows nothing of the area, and understands less about it.  But that didn’t stop it from making a made-for-TV movie, based rather loosely on Bitter Harvest, in 1991.  Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas starred Rod Steiger as Kahl, and Michael “Family Ties” Gross as an FBI agent from New York who flew to the state to help solve the crime.

The show got the basic facts right; the names, the places (most of the show was putatively set in Jamestown), the timeline (sort of).

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (“Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance.

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”‘s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

It was crap, of course, factually (no station in the state played the song, except as news) as well as socially (Jamestown is a college town of 16,000 that hosts a state hospital, and a school for the profoundly disabled, where Kahl had little traction; Kahl’s base of support was out on the isolated drift prairie).  But it was interesting, seeing how inscrutable “flyover land” was to the people who actually produce these things, and the almost-superstitious fear the place engenders.

———-

That part of North Dakota is a huge place in terms of the land and the sky; the human geography is much smaller.  In the 22-odd years since I left the place, whenever I meet other expats, it’s hard to go more than thirty seconds without finding a common acquaintance.

It’s the same with events.  Besides Dr. Kostick, and Peggy Polreis, I knew Darrell Graf – Medina’s police chief at the time (and Graf has actually turned up on this blog) and people in his family.  Scott Kopp was another – a guy I remember as a Stutsman County deputy who lost a finger from a Kahl shot that could have done much worse.  Another guy – a Medina cop who was on the periphery of the action – was my friend’s sister’s boyfriend (and, the last I checked, husband of about twenty years).

The internet can make you acquainted with even more people.  Scott Faul – one of the Posse members who was arrested, tried and did prison time for his role in the shootout – has a blog.

Twenty five years is a long time, even out there.  But memories are longer still.

First Ringer on the possible boomerang effect on the DFL’s witchhunt of Carol Molnau:

With Pawlenty’s peripheral vision directed slightly south of the Capitol towards the Xcel Center, site of the Republican National Convention, the DFL might not be free of Molnau should they fire her.  A Governor Carol Molnau, post November, might be more than happy to exact a little legislative revenge, providing for an even more contentious atmosphere in St. Paul.  But should the DFL stay the execution, it will be less because of any potential repercussions and more likely out of hopes in hanging Molnau as an albatross around Pawlenty’s neck.  The tactic hasn’t worked so far.

Read the whole – as the kids say – thing.

Ask a Saint Paul DFLer about the potential for violent demonstrations at the Convention this fall, and most of them will say “oh, they’re just a lunatic fringe.  Mainstream Tics won’t stand for that kind of thing” (not to mention “the rioters are just a strawman”).
If only it were true.  I got this from a Saint Paul politics discussion forum:

When considering the feasibility and likelihood of unlawfulness and
property destruction at the RNC this summer, a number of posters here have
presumed that riots are counter-productive to the interests of
protesters, and that the Seattle experience was a failure for those protesting
the WTO. Let’s look at the these presumptions again.

Since the WTO debacle in Seattle, there has not been single new
multilateral trade agreement signed between North American or European powers and the Third World, and several attempts of advancing the WTO agenda through the Doha round of talks has failed. In view of this, the
Seattle protests, including the “brick-throwing” tactics, should be seen as
an unqualified success for the organizers of the protests, both lawful
and unlawful, not a failure.

Likewise, the civil rights riots following the death of Martin Luther
King are largely credited with providing Washington with a sense of
urgency for reforming and funding the urban renewal and anti-poverty
programs of the 1970’s, such as the Community Development Block Grants
(CDBG), a federal form of Minnesota’s LGA.

Brick-throwing, under certain circumstances, does work, particularly
when employed by groups who have few other options for exercising
political power over a given policy question. In light of this, and the
unpopularity and powerlessness many feel regarding the war in Iraq, it seems
pretty reasonable to expect that more radical forms of action will
occur than merely exercising one’s right to free expression.

In other words, “they may be thugs, but they’re our thugs”.

I don’t know how representative the writer is of Tic opinion in Saint Paul – you be the judge, but he appears to be a garden-variety lefty rather than a spittle-flecked radical.

I think – and this is just my opinion – that the majority of DFLers are opposed to the brick-throwers.  But I think there are a few, like the writer, who can think of all sorts of obtuse rationalizations – and a bigger minority who’ll look at the convention like a hockey game or a NASCAR race or a Britney Spears appearance, looking for the spectacle.  Perhaps they’re wistful for their lost youth forty years ago; perhaps they’re teenagers (literally or emotionally) who love drama.  Whatever.  A riot, to these people, might be counteproductive – but it’d sure be fun, woonit?

I’m not sure why this event got gavel to gavel (?) coverage (albeit only on the USA Network), or front-page coverage in the Strib…:

A sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden that called and chanted Uno’s name stood and roared when he was picked as numero uno. He got right into the act, jumping on Wilkerson and confirming his other title: noisiest in show.

Years from now, it’ll be known as the “ah-roo!” heard ’round the ring.

But I have known a few dog-show people in my day.  And from what I’ve seen, Best in Show wasn’t a comedy; it was a documentary that just used fictional people.
And I know at least two of them are going to be barbering about the whole “the beagle won” thing for years.

…but they sound so neat, and even though I’ll never ever meet ’em, I wish ’em the best!

(Via Sheila)

Malkin:

The SFChron reports that “some council members added that they felt they owed U.S. troops an apology as well the many Berkeley residents who were ashamed and offended by their position. ‘To err is human but to really screw up it takes the Berkeley City Council,’ said council member Gordon Wozniak. ‘We failed our city. We embarrassed our city.’”

But.

The council refused to officially apologize. And the troop-haters remain unrepentantly bigoted.

Read the whole thing.  It’s huge.

It’s something Americans don’t have much of.

Years ago, I read The Tunnels of Cu Chi, which told the story of the Viet Cong/North Vietnamese who built the immense labyrinth of tunnels in South Vietnam during their 35 years of war.  The line that’s stuck with me was from one of the officers who fought against the Americans in the tunnels; “to Americans, a year is ancient history; to us, 25 years is like yesterday”.

America’s enemies can count on the fact that America’s attention span is short, and getting worse.

And that’s got Michael Chertoff worried:

Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff‘s eyes narrow and his voice develops a stern, urgent tone as he reveals America’s biggest vulnerability to terrorism.

“The great weapon they have is persistence and patience, and the one weakness that we have is the tendency to lose patience and become complacent,” Chertoff tells WTOP.

“It strikes me as hard to accept that anybody would believe the threat is over. There is nothing these terrorists are doing or saying that could lead a reasonable person to believe that they have somehow lost interest. Our biggest challenge is making sure we do not drop our guard because time passes.”

Chertoff recognizes it has been more than six years since al Qaida launched the Sept. 11 attacks, but some experts say that’s how long it took to plan them, suggesting the U.S. may close in on another spectacular attempt by Osama bin Laden to topple the U.S. economy.

It’s like needing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor every couple of years to keep people on track.

I’ve been convinced – chagrinned, but convinced – for years that the only thing that’s going to cause Americans to take this seriously is another 9/11.  And then another, five years after that.  Lather, rinse and repeat.

We’ll see.

It’s not a new observation that the Olympics have become a joke; even when I was a kid, watching the ’72 games in Munich (before the massacre), I remember hearing complaints about the doping, the commercialism, the professionalization of the Eastern Bloc athletes, the jingoism the games spawned, and on, and on, and on.

But for anyone who thinks the Olympics’ shameful, politicized nature is a new thing, I present for your review this photo:

When the subject of the ’36 Berlin Olympics comes up, most Americans think Jesse Owens, the black runner who went toe to toe with the “master race” and said “you got no game, beeyotch” (or words to that effect).

Not all of the games’ spectacles were so ennobling. The photo above is a shot of the British soccer team, giving the Nazi salute at an exhibition game in Berlin’s Olympiastadium in 1938, on the orders of one of Britain’s Foreign Office and “Football Association”, who wanted to mollify Hitler in the interest of lace-undie diplomatic nicety.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. David Mellor writes for the UK Daily Mail:

    Was Hitler made more reasonable by that salute, or by the willingness of the world to offer him a massive propaganda boost two years earlier at the Berlin Olympics by turning up without a squeak of protest? Of course not, which leads to some interesting parallels with today.

    In 1936, persecution of the Jews was stopped briefly, dissidents were rounded up and kept out of the way and Nazi Germany put on its best face for the Games.

Why bring it up today?

Because it’s happening again – this time in China:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The move – which raises the spectre of the order given to the England football team to give a Nazi salute in Berlin in 1938 – immediately provoked a storm of protest.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team…The clause, in section 4 of the contract, simply states: “[Athletes] are not to comment on any politically sensitive issues.”

It then refers competitors to Section 51 of the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

In other words, Beijing is putting all Olympic athletes under a gag order.

Oh – and for what it’s worth, my opinion of Prince Charles just jumped from “Hold” to “Buy”:

Prince Charles has already let it be known that he will not be going to China, even if he is invited by Games organisers.

His views on the Communist dictatorship are well known, after this newspaper revealed how he described China’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks” in a journal written after he attended the handover of Hong Kong. The Prince is also a long-time supporter of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader.

Why is the US participating in this sham, which serves only to legitimize the brutal, lethal Beijing regime?

The Bad News:  Al Quaeda is using mentally-handicapped people as involuntary suicide bombers.

The Worse News:  According to the Britain’s environment minister, their tradition of arranged marriages between close relatives – even first cousins – might create a bumper crop:

A government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects – comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society.

Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

The minister, whose views were supported by medical experts this weekend, said: “The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children].”

Ew.  Just…ew.

The reliability and justice of the death penalty is only as the integrity of the prosecutors who press for it.

And as we see in this case, we have a way to go:

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced that 51-year-old Albert Johnson had been arrested for the brutal rape and murder of two three-year-old girls in the 1990s. Johnson had been an early suspect in both cases, but despite the fact that the state had samples of his DNA on file for more than a decade, it never bothered to test it against the DNA found in the little girls.

That’s because Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood decided early on in both cases that he had his man, and little could convince him otherwise. One of those men is Kennedy Brewer, a mentally handicapped man who served more than a decade on Mississippi’s Death Row, then served another five years even after DNA evidence had cleared him. Allgood insisted on retrying Brewer anyway, arguing that bite marks on the little girl’s body matched Brewer’s teeth.

Curiously, Allgood resisted testing the DNA from the crime scene against that of a man he had earlier convicted of an eerily similar crime—another rape and murder of a young girl in the same area. It now seems clear why Allgood resisted the test. As it turns out, the man he’d convicted for that crime, Levon Brooks, is innocent, too. Brooks had been sentenced to life in prison.

Hood is expected to announce on Thursday that Brewer has been completely exonerated. A similar announcement for Brooks could also come Thursday, or perhaps a few days after.

Science – DNA testing, in this case – might be a cure for human imperfection.  But as we’ve seen, it takes more than science to fight duplicity and depravity.

PShort writing at Truth v. The Machine notes that some non-establishment conservatives are getting on board with McCain:

Over the past few days, John McCain received three endorsements that will be very hard for the hard-core anti-McCain conservatives to dismiss: Gary Bauer, John Bolton, and Congressman Jeb Hensarling…When principled conservatives like these say, in effect, “despite our differences, it’s ok to get on the McCain bus,” many conservatives are going to listen.

Pat notes that Bauer, Bolton and Hensarling are hardly Beltway insiders – which at least chips away at one of Mac’s big poison pills.

When even liberal Democrats get the picture on the Second Amendment, there’s hope.

In this case, it’s center-left Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who Tis among the leaders of the move in Congress in support of euthanizing the DC Gun Ban (which I wrote about last week):

Tester also touched on how 2nd Amendment protects our rights and on how gun law ban hurts law abiding citizens. Tester is one of 55 Senators and 250 Representatives to sign an amicus brief arguing the Second Amendment is an individual right.

One vote at a time.

(Assuming we can keep sanity in the near-majority in the Supreme Court, anyway. More on that later).