Island Passage

Wretchard notes over at The Belmont Club: One of the more curious gaps in popular history is the lack of a first rate account of the Spanish Reconquista , the name given to the 800 year campaign by Christian kingdoms in Spain to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Writing a dramatic history of the Reconquista is hard because it went on for so long. So long, in fact, that both sides had changed character over the intervening 8 centuries, one side morphing from the tribal Visigoths to the kingly state of Ferdinand and Isabella and the other going through a succession of Islamic regimes. There is, of course the The Poem of the Cid which I haven't read, and the movie El Cid which I have seen. However, the most exciting and dramatic fictionalization of the Reconquista I have encountered is The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. I wait eagerly for the movie version .

Back in the late 1980s, there was a fascinating political indicator. It became very easy to tell which Republicans had presidential ambitions by listening to their "Come to Jesus" stories. What I mean is, everybody on the Republican bench was going around Lions and Kiwanis meetings giving much the same old rubber-chicken speeches of yesteryear, but adding a section where they described the moment they had become "born again." It was startling to read transcripts of Bob Dole, Alexander Haig , and many more telling how they had (figuratively) walked down that sawdust trail. Well, what is old in new again. John Kerry has trotted out his redemption story, and he's not alone : Kerry is the third high-profile Democrat to give a reflective, deeply personal speech on religion and politics in recent weeks, following Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Robert P. Casey Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. The addresses fit into a broader effort by lib...

Mirror of Justice , provides a snippet of an outtake of a review of Damon Linker's book " The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege ." ...If I follow Linker's story—stripped, that is, of its bombast—it goes rather like this: There is a group of articulate and influential thinkers in America who believe firmly in liberal democracy and free markets and things of that sort, but who also believe that the principles underlying modern democratic order are derived from a long history of European Christian thought regarding human authority. They are, moreover, convinced that the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being is grounded in something older than liberal tradition. They also think that an impermeable "wall of separation" between public policy and private faith is an extra-constitutional and misguided principle. They believe that the lives of the unborn ought to be protected in law, and that the Supreme Court's decisions pronouncing...

I don't think I am alone in feeling that I have become trapped in some kind of Bizarro World . Three items: The Pope calls Islam violent . Muslims attempt to prove the Pope wrong by murdering a nun . Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani: "T he pope's remarks emanated either from ignorance and lack of knowledge or were deliberately intended to distort Islam. Reason is the substance of Islam and its teachings ... Islam prohibited violence in human life." Maybe the Grand Mufti Sheik could spend a few moments to condemn his co-religionists from murdering helpless women. I really don't think that this kind of behavior can be accomodated. I don't think that you can blame the rest of the world for the loony, murderous acts of these people. We must condemn it. We must not excuse it. We must not say that it is in any way justified.

I'm having to mediate a dispute between Blogger Beta and the corporate firewall. So here are some blog posts that have been langushing.

Of the anniversary of 9/11, James Lileks writes about the upcoming movie The Path to 9/11 : Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I'm interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately? And on pessimism in our culture: The news is never good. If the economy's up, there's an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you? TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, we...

Wretchard comments on some re-thinking of the War on Terror: The genuine tone of amazement in the WSJ is a reminder of how poorly understood the military role of the War on Terror has been, especially in Iraq... The point is that from the beginning the Administration's War on Terror was never primarily military; it was always -- even from the days of the First Fallujah campaign -- fundamentally a political war and continues to be to this day, as the continued existence of Moqtada al-Sadr illustrates. ...The military's prosecution of a politico/military campaign can be viewed as an attempt to compensate for the failure of other aspects of American power (diplomatic, development and informational) to project themselves into the field. It's a Band-Aid to compensate for the absence of institutions which America, if it were truly an imperial power, would have had. But America will never have a BBC, which was itself the evolutionary product of Imperial Britain. Yet America has ...

Via Day at a Glance : Anglican dean compares terrorist bombers to the 'violent passion' of Jesus The Anglican Communion - seen by many Christians as being a sort of Huffington Post of Christendom - apparently has added another clerical eccentric to its ranks. After a series of well-publicized rifts, including some led by bishops who deny the Resurrection and at least one who is a practicing homosexual, the latest controversial pronouncement comes from the Rev. Canon Philip Gray, chaplain to the Bishop of Blackburn, who compared the actions of the London tube bombers to Jesus: We cannot simply ignore the violent passion of Jesus cleansing the temple with whips. We are never told of the collateral damage possibly resulting from his actions. In the Christian tradition we rejoice over the passionate commitment and bloody deaths of numerous martyrs. We need to consider deeply the fact that the same religious passion and spiritual single-mindedness lies at the heart of a London bomb...

The Constant Reader will know that I trace the decline of the Democratic Party to 1968. However, the recent crack-up of the party has a more proximate cause. The declining trend in the Democratic Party from 1968 to 1998 forced a crisis. The result of that crisis was the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, the Republican gain in Congressional seats in 2002, and the re-election of G.W.B. over John Kerry in 2004. The trend led to the crisis; the crisis led into the crack-up. So what were the trend, the crisis, and the crack-up? The trend was the Democrats gradualy slipping from being the majority party. The crisis was the collapse of the Clinton Presidency. The crack-up was the descent of the left-wing of the Democratic Party into conspriacy theory paranoia. David Limbaugh's new book, Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party , Mr. Limbaugh dissects the decline of the Democratic Party and discusses the trend, the crisis, and the crac...

As a follow-up to the story about the kidnapped journalists being freed , Mark Steyn muses on the importance of the conversion itself: It's striking how, for all this alleged multiculti sensitivity, we're mostly entirely insensitive to other cultures: We find it all but impossible to imagine how differently they view the world. Go back to that video in which Fox's Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig announced their conversion to Islam. The moment the men were released, the Western media and their colleagues wrote off the scene as a stunt, a cunning ruse, of no more consequence than yelling "Behind you! He's got a gun!" and then kicking your distracted kidnapper in the teeth. Indeed, a few Web sites seemed to see the Islamic conversion routine as a useful get-out-of-jail-free card. ...for the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither...