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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; David Forsmark</title>
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		<title>American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/american-dreamers-how-the-left-changed-a-nation-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=american-dreamers-how-the-left-changed-a-nation-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/american-dreamers-how-the-left-changed-a-nation-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:25:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kazin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Panthers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Kazin's new history of the American Left somehow skips the violence and destruction part.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/american-dreamers.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117272" title="american-dreamers" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/american-dreamers.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="492" /></a></p>
<p><em>You say you want a revolution </em><em><br />
<em>Well, you know</em><br />
<em>We all want to change the world</em><br />
<em>…But when you talk about destruction</em><br />
<em>Don&#8217;t you know that you can count me out</em><br />
<em>Don&#8217;t you know it&#8217;s gonna be all right </em></em></p>
<p><em>… You ask me for a contribution </em><em><br />
<em>Well, you know</em><br />
<em>We&#8217;re doing what we can</em><br />
<em>But when you want money</em><br />
<em>for people with minds that hate</em><br />
<em>All I can tell is brother you have to wait </em></em></p>
<p><em>&#8230;But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao</em><em><br />
<em>You ain&#8217;t going to make it with anyone anyhow </em></em></p>
<p>“Historian” Michael Kazin, who writes for such scholarly periodicals as <em>The Nation,</em><em> </em>has written a book purporting to tell the story of both the successes and failures of the American Left.  It is about how the Left “Changed a Nation” but failed to ever get a majority of Americans to back an all-out socialist or communist government. Kazin completely leaves out the most important point &#8212; one crystallized by John Lennon and Paul McCartney in their 1968 song<em> Revolution</em>: “<em>But when you talk about destruction/ Don&#8217;t you know that you can count me out…” </em>Indeed, the author completely ignores the violence and destruction that characterized the political Left, not only in the 1960s, but throughout the century.</p>
<p>E.J. Dionne loves Kazin&#8217;s new book, calling it a &#8220;masterwork&#8221; that can inspire young progressives about their noble heritage.  Eric Altermann calls it a &#8220;tour de force of good scholarship.&#8221; One can’t help but wonder, however, how the victims of the American Left will embrace Kazin&#8217;s tactic of whitewashing the violence out of the history of American leftism. To be sure, what will the family of Betty Van Patter, who was murdered by the Black Panthers, think? Kazin only reports that the Panthers &#8220;advocated violence, but discusses none of the actual crimes of this criminal gang – spelled out powerfully by David Horowitz in his memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1324914133&amp;sr=1-5" target="_blank"><em>Radical Son</em></a>.</p>
<p>My guess is that the neither the family of Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, the San Francisco police officer who was killed by a bomb set by the Weather Underground (run by Obama mentor Bill Ayers) nor Officer Robert Fogarty, who was severely wounded in the blast, would be amused by Kazin&#8217;s affectionate recounting of the terrorist group as the &#8220;most inept terrorists on the planet,&#8221; only mentioning the members who blew <em>themselves</em> up while making a bomb to plant at an upcoming Fort Dix dance to take out not only soldiers, but their families as well.</p>
<p>The people of Poland will also probably not consider the central tragedy of the Hitler-Stalin Pact to be the crisis of conscience and bad PR it caused for the American Communist Party.</p>
<p>This is not even mentioning the 150 million human beings murdered in the last century by the governments supported by the Communist Party USA, which Kazin romanticizes in &#8220;American Dreamers,&#8221; and without whom we would apparently be a society of slave-holders, surfs whose women would not be allowed to vote or get a job.</p>
<p>Under the guise of being frank about the political failures of the Left to rule under the banner of leftism due to&#8211; he would have us believe, romantic overreach&#8211; Kazin whitewashes the violence that also undercut their cause at every turn.  He omits one historical fact after another. For instance, he discusses early unions and is open about their socialist roots, but there is no mention of <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33937" target="_blank">the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building</a> by Iron Workers Union radicals that killed 21 people that was part of a concerted conspiracy of union intimidation.</p>
<p>Clarence Darrow also makes an appearance as a People’s Champion.  The inconvenient truth that the labor movement united behind defending the union terrorists and that Clarence Darrow was almost disbarred for trying to bribe jurors in the case probably kept what was for a long time one of the worst terrorist incidents on American soil on Kazin’s cutting room floor.</p>
<p>Margaret Sanger is lauded as a pioneer who “fought for the rights of women as well as the emancipation of the working class.” The fact that prominent Nazis were allowed to write about eugenics for her publication?  The fact that she wanted to limit numbers of people of particular ethnic backgrounds? Not worthy of mention.</p>
<p>Alger Hiss is described by Kazin as “the former diplomat convicted for lying about his communist past.”  This is technically true, but what goes unmentioned is that Hiss’s trial occurred because he was an <em>agent of the Soviet Union </em>who committed treason, <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35259" target="_blank">and declassified documents have proven</a> this to be an undeniable historical fact.</p>
<p>And the list goes on… and on.</p>
<p>Unforgivably, for a book written in 2011 that spends a big percentage of its space on American Communism, Kazin makes no mention of newly declassified material like the famed Venona transcripts, or any or source, foreign or domestic, that proves just how active Stalin and the Comintern were in the activities of these supposed idealists.</p>
<p>Kazin also mentions David Horowitz in passing, as an example of a former member of the Left who is now an active opponent of his former cause—but ignores the detailed <em>first hand accounts</em> of the criminality of the Panthers, contained in Horowitz’s milestone book with Peter Collier, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Generation-Second-Thoughts-Sixties/dp/1594030820/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1324913759&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank"><em>Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the 60s.</em></a><em>  </em>Read their account of the life and times of Huey P. Newton, <em>Baddest</em>, and then try to reconcile that with Kazin’s benign picture of anti-racist and anti-imperialist crusaders whose rhetoric went a bit too far.</p>
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		<title>Regulators Gone Wild</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/regulators-gone-wild/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=regulators-gone-wild</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/regulators-gone-wild/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:08:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmental protection agency]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=112741</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The green assault on America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Picture-8.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-112763" title="Picture-8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Picture-8.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p><em>Regulators Gone Wild:</em><br />
<em> How the EPA is Ruining American Industry</em><br />
<em> By Rich Trzupek</em><br />
<em> Encounter Books, $23.95, 160 pp.</em></p>
<p>During the 2008 campaign, I was at a John McCain rally where he dampened the enthusiasm of a crowd of cheering Republicans by trying to defend his poll-tested global warming position thusly: “So maybe man isn’t causing global warming.  Here’s how I look at it.  Even if they are wrong, we invent new technologies and our kids inherit a cleaner environment — so what’s the harm in that?”</p>
<p>That’s probably the most common reaction from Americans when they hear conservative arguments about the Environmental Protection Agency&#8217;s zealous strictures on American industry: So the rules make it a little more expensive for big business? Big deal. I don’t want to be harmed by pollution.</p>
<p>In his lively new book, <em>Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry, </em>environmental consultant Rich Trzupek tells us exactly what the harm is by ripping off the cover of the nice-sounding rhetoric and exposing the bureaucrats terrorizing American job creators for the boobs they are.</p>
<p>In essence, Trzupek reveals that federal environmental regulations no longer focus on preventing harm to people. He explains the regulatory process has become more important than the results, eco-bureaucrats look on industry as the enemy of human health, fear has replaced science in the policy-making arena and &#8212; perhaps most importantly &#8212; the punishments handed out by regulators are almost always wildly out of proportion to the seriousness of the “crimes.”</p>
<p>“We live longer than ever,&#8221; Trzupek writes. &#8220;We pollute less than ever. Need anyone say more?”</p>
<p>Maybe not, but nobody is saying it. Politicians don’t. Schoolteachers scaring kids into believing that if they don’t recycle the world will someday look like the landscape in <em>Wall-E</em> surely don’t. Environmentalists who should be crowing about their past clean-up successes definitely don’t. As Trzupek points out, the professional greens “depend on the unlikely specter of impending doom for their financial health.”</p>
<p>And the dominant picture of impending doom is global warming — or &#8220;climate change&#8221; as it’s become known after the last few record-setting cold winters. It&#8217;s no longer good enough to remove pollution in amounts that affect humans from the atmosphere; every molecule of carbon that enters the atmosphere is considered a threat to destroy the habitability of Spaceship Earth.</p>
<p>Unlike most authors of similar books, Trzupek is not an economist, but a scientist (chemist) who has spent his career working for sensible environmental regulations. He is not one of the usual libertarian suspects who contends that purely market solutions exist for keeping pollution levels low. He even argues that the Clean Air Act of 1970 was beneficial and successful (though I suspect the horror stories in <em>Regulators Gone Wild</em> could give ammo to conservatives who argued against it at the time since their slippery slope fears came true.)</p>
<p>But while the Clean Air Act of 1970, whatever its flaws, sought to regulate harmful toxins as a public health matter, Trzupek writes, “Instead of considering what we should do, legislators [in 1990] decided to expand their vision to what we <em>could</em> do.”</p>
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		<title>The Soccer Parent’s Rescue Guide</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/the-soccer-parent%e2%80%99s-rescue-guide/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-soccer-parent%25e2%2580%2599s-rescue-guide</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/the-soccer-parent%e2%80%99s-rescue-guide/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:15:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=103666</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A fall reading list to keep your mind from atrophying during some long, long after-school afternoons.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/oficers.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-103671" title="oficers" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/oficers.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="602" /></a></p>
<p>Many newspapers, magazines and websites publish summer reading lists, which is curious when you think about it. When you&#8217;re on summer vacation, aren’t you supposed to be doing interesting and fun things with your family?  Don’t you have more time to read in the winter?  (We sure do in my frozen neck of the woods.)</p>
<p>But as autumn approaches, one group of people exists that need a lifeline to excitement — soccer parents. They&#8217;re about to be stuck at a field for an hour and half (and that doesn’t even cover time for warm-ups and the post-game coach talk) of a “sport,” which as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226930/over-i-hill-i/david-forsmark">Hank Hill</a> memorably observed, “was invented by European housewives as a way to keep busy while their husbands did the cooking.”</p>
<p>So, here are a few ways to keep your mind from atrophying during some long, long after-school afternoons.</p>
<p><strong>The Officer’s Club<br />
by Ralph Peters<br />
Tor, $7.99,  384 pp.</strong></p>
<p>Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters is best known for his superb commentary on post-9/11 military strategy from Iraq to the Global War on Terror — both as one of the Obama administration’s most vocal critics and as one of the Bush administration’s most honest ones. But here is something that isn&#8217;t said enough about Ralph Peters: He is one of America’s literary treasures.</p>
<p>From his first novel, <em>Red Army</em> (which I described at the time as <em>Red Storm Rising</em> from the Soviet point of view) to his fine series of Civil War mysteries written under the pseudonym of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_21?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=owen+parry+abel+jones&amp;sprefix=owen+parry+abel+jones" target="_blank">Owen Parry</a>, Peters’ books are not just terrific thrillers; they are superb novels in every literary sense of the word.</p>
<p>His latest, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Officers-Club-Ralph-Peters/dp/0765365537/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313857463&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Officers’ Club</a>, is like nothing you&#8217;ve ever read; even when you&#8217;ve plowed through 100 pages, you&#8217;ll have no idea where it&#8217;s going. Still, you&#8217;ll be utterly absorbed in getting there.</p>
<p>Set in a remote desert military intelligence training base just after the Iran Hostage Crisis, the novel focuses on a U.S. military that is humiliated and demoralized, though the election of Ronald Reagan on a platform of rebuilding it offers a glimmer of hope to the post-Vietnam force.</p>
<p>The shocking murder of Lt. Jessica Lamoreaux in her quarters at Arizona’s Ft. Huachuca, where the war games being drawn up for a possible war with the Soviet Union are nowhere near as complex as those played by Lamoreaux with the hearts of the men stationed there.</p>
<p>From the career officer in the outwardly perfect military marriage to the young and sincere Christian shavetail, the only man seeimgly immune to her considerable charms is 2nd Lt. Roy Banks, the story’s narrator — though that’s because he&#8217;s already making bad romantic choices.</p>
<p>Banks, an up-and-coming military thinker, is a Farsi speaker who is trying to revolutionize the Army’s approach to war games focused on the Soviet threat, even as he worries about the growing tendency toward jihadism in the Muslim world. One guesses there is a more than a little of Peters in this character.</p>
<p>Peter’s vividly draws readers into a time and place and inhabits it with complex and vivid characters.  Though <em>The Officers’ Club</em> is driven more by its character than its plot, it is still a book where the less said about what happens in it, the better.</p>
<p>The closest comparison to this book I can think of is historian Thomas Fleming’s terrific 1970s bestselling epic, <em>Officer’s Wives</em>, which took Korean War officers and their families through the peacetime Army and into the Vietnam War, though <em>Club</em> is far more specific in its focus and even less predictable.  This was probably the book Nelson DeMille wanted to write when he penned <em>The General’s Daughter</em>, and it’s a measure of Peters’ skill that he was able to pull off in spectacular fashion what DeMille could only hint at.</p>
<p>Bing West argues that saddling the U.S. military with nation-building and social work roles is threatening to sap its “martial spirit.”  In <em>The Officer’s Club</em>, Peters takes us back to a time when that spirit had been all but sapped. As such, it’s a cautionary tale as well.</p>
<p><strong>The Fifth Witness<br />
by Michael Connelly<br />
Little, Brown, $27.99, 448 pp.</strong></p>
<p>If you want to know how the housing bubble started and who turned it into a crisis, check out Peter Schwiezer’s excellent <a href="../2009/11/10/architects-of-ruin-by-david-forsmark/" target="_blank">Architects of Ruin</a> or Matthew Vadum’s expose of ACORN, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/subversioninc" target="_blank">Subversion Inc</a>.</p>
<p>But if you&#8217;d like an entertaining look at why it won’t get better any time soon and the government-banking bureaucracy that keeps us mired in the housing recession, I have an offbeat suggestion for you: Michael Connelly’s latest Lincoln Lawyer novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Witness-Michael-Connelly/dp/0316069353/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313938038&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank"><em>The Fifth Witness</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p>Mystery fiction’s favorite defense lawyer, Mickey Haller, has a new client with big media potential: a single mom in foreclosure who is accused of killing the banker in charge of her case.</p>
<p>The evidence is pretty damning and the motive obvious. The fact that opportunity also presented itself has Haller going for a SODDI defense. (Some Other Dude Did It.)</p>
<p>And, indeed, another dude does raise his ugly head &#8212; the president of a <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-mers-foreclosure-idUSTRE76Q67L20110727" target="_blank">MERS</a>-like foreclosure mill who may or may not have Mob connections.</p>
<p><em>The Fifth Witness</em> takes us through the banking and government regulation maze of the current mortgage mess while establishing motive. But since this is a Michael Connelly book, don’t expect any liberal preaching about evil capitalist banks and poor victims who were trapped into buying houses. In fact, Connelly proposes deadbeats and those with other agendas have plenty of opportunity to exploit the crisis for their own ends.</p>
<p>This is one of the best books in the Haller series and easily the most topical. But Connelly, who continuously bolsters his reputation as the best mystery writer of his generation, never lets the information get in the way of good storytelling. Connelly’s signature killer twists and Haller’s sideways methods of justice pack a great punch, even though we have come to expect them.</p>
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		<title>Crazy U</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/crazy-u/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=crazy-u</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/crazy-u/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:05:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=103393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One dad’s crash course in getting his kid into college.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/crazy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-103396" title="crazy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/crazy.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="609" /></a></p>
<p>If you just sent your son or daughter off to college, unsure of your choice and wondering if you should have done more, spent more or prepared more to get them into a “better” or “more selective” institution, relax. You&#8217;re not alone.</p>
<p>If you have a junior in high school with good grades, be prepared. You are about to be bombarded with material and advice on how to help get your kid into the “right” university by spending more than an elite education used to cost.</p>
<p>In fact, as Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard’s points out in <em>Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College,</em> his latest superbly realized mix of reporting and memoir, the system is <em>designed</em> to make you feel guilty and inadequate. The very first consultant Ferguson interviewed as he started his research/college search even labeled him a “Baaaaaaad daaaaaad.”</p>
<p>Actually, “designed” may be too grandiose a description of the college search industry, which has sprouted a myriad of contradictory branches thanks to the combination of easily available money and the conviction of parents and teachers that every kid must go to college — and the direction of their life may be determined by <em>which</em> college they go to.</p>
<p>Ferguson’s signature style of humor and pathos is perfect for the personal nature of this topic as he looks at the college search and funding industry through the eyes of a father going through it himself. Like <em>Land of Lincoln</em>, his last great book, this is a pure piece of Americana: part-memoir and part-journalism that offers a trenchant look at a slice of the American identity.</p>
<p>But the book may be just as valuable as a look at the next big economic bubble about to burst in the U.S. economy.</p>
<p>At least the housing industry &#8212; whose bubble deflated the entire economy when it burst &#8212; was centered around something that was getting bigger and better, even though easy money caused prices to outpace value.  But, as Ferguson points out, can anyone really even say that much about higher education?</p>
<p>Ferguson starts by going to a seminar led by “Kat” Cohen, who sells a service for $40,000 (no, that’s not typo) that maps out a teenager’s life from sophomore year on. Covered are what classes to take, what causes to volunteer for and what jobs to seek out. He later finds equally confident “experts” who can contradict every point of the Cohen plan.</p>
<p>Before grinningly labeling Ferguson a “Baaaaaaad daaaaaad” in their interview because his son had not started on Kat’s track by the <em>beginning of his junior year</em>, Kat gleefully and systematically makes every parent who speaks up in her seminar feel inadequate.  For instance, one Super Kid is criticized because he hadn&#8217;t taken enough Advance Placement classes, but she calls another kid a “serial joiner” for taking plenty of them and compiling a resume of after-school activities as long as his arm.</p>
<p>Ferguson documents a process that — mostly inadvertently — corrupts everything it touches. For example:</p>
<p>[*] Schools openly deride the U.S. News and World Report college ratings, then consciously change their policies to compete for a better ranking. They then brag to high heaven when theirs improves.</p>
<p>[*] Some schools solicit applications from kids they know they will turn down because having a lower percentage of applicants accepted makes them “more selective.”</p>
<p>[*] The SATs, originally to ensure college admissions were based on merit, are now considered hopelessly biased, In the process, the tests have been watered down into near uselessness in an attempt to come up with something well-off kids won’t have an advantage in &#8212; as though that were even possible.</p>
<p>[*] Kids are encouraged to write wrenchingly self-revealing essays to present to total strangers in the admissions department — or they can pay a consultant to write that essay.</p>
<p>Of course, the worst thing is not what the process does to admissions departments or the anxiety in induces in parents, but what it does to the kids enduring it. As Ferguson writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;At its most intense the admissions process didn&#8217;t force kids to be Lisa Simpson; it turned them into Eddie Haskell. . . . It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive, while pretending they weren&#8217;t. It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity. Befriending people in hopes of a good rec letter; serving the community to advertise your big heart; studying hard just to puff up the GPA and climb the greasy poll of class rank — nothing was done for its own sake.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Easily the funniest chapter is the one in which Ferguson’s son must write his college essay. It&#8217;s sheer torture for a normal teenaged boy — not the most introspective species on the planet to start with — who has had a relatively happy life, to wrench angst out of his soul period, much less for the benefit of strangers.</p>
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		<title>The Real Malcolm X?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/the-real-malcolm-x/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-real-malcolm-x</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/the-real-malcolm-x/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:30:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A tale of two books. ]]></description>
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<p><em>Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention</em><br />
By Manning Marable<br />
Viking, $30, 594 pp.</p>
<p><em>Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America</em><br />
By Bruce Perry<br />
Station Hill, $18.95, 542 pp.</p>
<p>When Navy SEAL Team 6 recently disposed of Osama bin Laden, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan called Barack Obama an “assassin.” But according to a new biography of Farrakhan’s mentor, Malcolm X, that just may be the pot calling the kettle … well, you know.</p>
<p><em>Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention</em>, one of the summer’s bestselling books, surprisingly is less of a hagiography than one might expect from the recently deceased <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2229" target="_blank">Manning Marable</a> &#8212; a veteran leftie whose website on Malcolm X promoted the idea that the authorities were complicit in his assassination.</p>
<p>Every account of the life of the black militant who became known as Malcolm X follows the same basic outline — a dirt-poor upbringing with parents dedicated to Marcus Garvey’s black separatist movement; a youthful life of foster homes, crime, drugs and general ne’er-do-well activities; a conversion in prison to the Black Muslim movement led by Elijah Muhammad; his rise to being the sect&#8217;s most prominent spokesman; a broadening of his message to a more inclusive and orthodox form of Islam after a trip to Africa; and his alienation from and eventual assassination by the NOI.</p>
<p>While Marable’s magnum opus makes a stab at being a “warts and all” objective biography, it doesn&#8217;t include <em>all</em> the warts. Still, however, it does examine many of its subject’s flaws.</p>
<p>Marable simply takes too much of the slain Black Muslim leader’s “reinventions” at face value, even though the evidence strongly suggests that the demagogue once known as Malcolm Little was actually reinventing his history.</p>
<p>“Even those who rejected his politics recognized his sincerity,” Marable states. Aside from the obvious point that this is too broad a statement and gives the writer credit for a certain omniscience, it’s also rather meaningless. Does this mean that people who viewed Malcolm X as a hateful, racist demagogue &#8212; who meant every word when he hailed a plane crash because it was filled with white people and said JFK&#8217;s assassination was white America’s “chickens coming home to roost” &#8212; would call him “sincere&#8221;?</p>
<p>But this contention typifies Marable’s approach of taking Malcolm X at face value. This would be more forgivable had not most of the contradictions of Malcolm’s life been authoritatively covered in Bruce Perry’s acclaimed 1991 biography, <em>Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America.</em></p>
<p>Perhaps the stark difference between the books can best be illustrated by how the authors treat the supposed firebombing of Malcolm X’s house just a few days before his assassination.</p>
<p>Marable takes Malcolm at his word that he and his family were sleeping when Molotov cocktails were thrown at the house in the middle of the night. The author creates a façade of objectivity by mentioning all the possibilities of who set the fire: enraged white racists (as Malcolm claimed), the NOI as many suspected, or Malcolm X himself, as the police and fire investigators mostly believed. Marable firmly points his finger at the NOI and ridicules those who thought Malcolm X staged the firebombing for effect simply “because an exploded bottle of gasoline was found in the baby’s room.”</p>
<p>But what Marable fails to mention is that the fire inspectors claimed said the bottle was standing upright on the baby’s dresser, without even a wick in it.</p>
<p>Perry, meanwhile, asks a question that apparently did not trouble Marable: “Could a gasoline filled bottle land unbroken and upright after penetrating a window, a storm window and drawn venetian blinds?”</p>
<p>More importantly, Perry also connects this incident to another in Malcolm’s early life. His father, Earl Little, once claimed the house he was about to be evicted from was burned down by the racists who were enforcing a color code in the property deed.</p>
<p>Like his father, Malcolm had also just lost a court fight to stay in the house, which was owned by the Nation of Islam. Both the parallel of the other house fire in his subject’s life and the question of why the NOI would burn down a house it was about to regain possession of (something that also troubled inspectors in Earl Little’s case) seem to have escaped Marable.</p>
<p>Although each book has its strengths and weaknesses, the value of Perry’s book is it spends nearly three times as much time as Marable on Little&#8217;s life before he became Malcolm X. This enables Perry — and the reader &#8212; to examine patterns in Malcolm’s life that show while the facade may have changed, the man may not have, or at least not as much as his promoters would have us believe.</p>
<p>While he makes some attempts to pierce the “masks” Little constructed for himself on his way to becoming Malcolm X — and the past he reconstructed for himself along the way — Marable takes a more postmodern approach to the character, admiring how the autobiographical narrative appealed to “black folk culture”— presumably, whether or not it was true.</p>
<p>According to Marable, the Malcolm X character was effective as “the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.”</p>
<p>In the same passage, Marable writes that Malcolm exaggerated his criminal past as “Detroit Red” in order to present “an allegory documenting the destructive consequences of racism within the U.S. criminal justice and penal system. Self invention was an effective way for him to reach the most marginalized sectors of the black community, giving justification to their hopes.”</p>
<p>The problem with that lofty justification is that Malcolm Little exaggerated his criminal past while he was still openly a huckster in order to gain street cred in the lawless world he inhabited.</p>
<p>As Perry illustrates time and time again, Malcolm X’s stories about his <em>past</em> became whatever he needed them to be in order to further his <em>present</em>.</p>
<p>In his introduction to <em>Malcolm</em>, Perry states:</p>
<blockquote><p>“One cannot adequately understand the adult, political Malcolm without thoroughly understanding the youthful Malcolm and the legacy that was bequeathed to him by the people who raised him. … Despite his efforts to attribute his unhappiness and his youthful delinquency solely to white ‘society,’ they originated largely in his conflict-ridden home.”</p></blockquote>
<p>And that is the key difference between the two books.  Marable gives credence to any charge of racism or racist actions against Malcolm or his family because it fits his world view.  Perry holds each claim up to scrutiny and, more often than not, finds it wanting.</p>
<p>Thus, in the case of Earl Little&#8217;s death in Lansing, Michigan, Marable is willing to at least grant plausibility to the notion that Malcolm’s abusive and unfaithful father was killed by the Black Legion, an Ohio-based KKK-like group, because Malcolm and a few people in “oral histories” (a convenient term for rumors one wants to grant credibility) say it was so.</p>
<p>Marable thinks it’s a major counterpoint to the police theory of accidental death(and pretentiously calls it “forensic reconstruction” of the coroner’s narrative) merely to say that because Earl Little told the wife he was constantly cheating on that he was going one place and ended up dead in another, it raises sinister suspicions about the official story.</p>
<p>Perry thoroughly debunks these notions, showing it is far more likely that Earl Little was drunk and fell under the wheels of the streetcar he was trying to board. He also makes a strong case that the so-called Black Legion’s exploits in Michigan were largely, if not totally, mythical.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t always make for a compelling story of a lifetime of oppression and persecution by the white man, which is precisely the difference in the approach of the two books. Perry shows that Malcolm was his own worst enemy in both his public and private lives, while Marable is willing to present many of his subject’s contradictions but is heavily invested in the persecution narrative of American history, thus willing to grant credibility to some fairly unpersuasive stories.</p>
<p>Even when relating less-than-stellar moments in Malcolm’s life, Marable tends to shy away from details that might damage the iconic image. For instance, both authors tell the story about how Malcolm was part of a penny-ante burglary gang, and he was arrested because he arranged to have a stolen watch repaired in a shop where he had peddled stolen goods.</p>
<p>Only Perry, however, reports the telling detail that would have featured Malcolm in a Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” segment: The thief filled out the redemption ticket for the watch under his <em>own name.</em></p>
<p>This, however, does not mean that Marable’s book is without substantial merits. Marable was granted extraordinary access to Nation of Islam archives and even a lengthy interview with Farrakhan himself —and the NOI is decidedly <em>not</em> rewarded for its generosity.  Readers, however, are.</p>
<p>Farrakhan was not on Perry’s radar, but Calypso Louis Walcott, aka Louis X and Louis Farrakhan, played a major role in the NOI as an up-and-coming leader under Malcolm X, and he is a critical part of Marable’s narrative — particularly that of Malcolm’s assassination.</p>
<p>Still, the notion that Farrakhan was at least culpable of guilt by encouragement is hardly news. Over the years, depending on his mood, he has both bragged about and repented for that fact in several public statements.</p>
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		<title>The Wrong War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/the-wrong-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-wrong-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bing west]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Donald Rumsfeld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[indo china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[insurgency in iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[invasion of iraq]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Grit, strategy, and the way out of Afghanistan]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bing.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90557" title="bing" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bing.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="534" /></a></p>
<p><em>The Wrong War:<br />
Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan</em><br />
By Bing West<br />
Random House, $28.00, 307pp.<br />
Review by David Forsmark</p>
<p>When Bing West talks about war, wise people listen.  When Bing West says an American war effort isn’t working, we <em>better</em> listen.</p>
<p>West is no reflexive anti-war critic.  If anything, this Marine’s reflexes go the other way.  This grandfather (and father of a Force Recon Marine), still can’t stay away from the action, spending more time within the sound of the guns than few others not still wearing the uniform.</p>
<p>There is possibly no one in the world more qualified than Bing West to write a sobering account of the failure of counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. First, he was a legendary Marine in his own right in Vietnam. Second, he wrote what many consider THE book on counter-insurgency in Vietnam, <em>The Village</em>. Third, he has served his country at the strategic level besides being on the front lines (look up Operation Stingray sometime).</p>
<p>And fourth, and most importantly, West has consistently provided an objective look at military operations since 9/11, through books and articles that are neither blind cheerleading, nor fatalistic anti-war agitprop—and his reporting an analysis have proved spot on.</p>
<p>In <em>The Way Up</em>, West lauded the successful invasion of Iraq, but in <em>No True Glory</em>, he showed both the valor of the troops and the folly of much of the command structure in the battles for Fallujah. In <em>The Strongest Tribe</em>, West showed the value of counter-insurgency in Iraq, while hammering Donald Rumsfeld for a lack of leadership, Bush for siding too long with Bremer, but finally detailing Petraeus&#8217;s eventual success.</p>
<p>But when the author of <em>The Village</em> says that counter-insurgency is less successful in Afghanistan than Vietnam, that there is even less connection in remote Afghan villages to any central government or notion of one than there was in the darkest jungle in Indo-China, he speaks with authority.</p>
<blockquote><p>“In Vietnam in the 1960s the set, the central government had well-established links connecting to the province and district levels. In Iraq after 2003, although the US military had to prop up district and provincial appointees for several years, thousands of educated and qualified Iraqis competed for the posts. Such pre-existing conditions  for central governance were absent in Afghanistan.”</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s not that West thinks we should abandon Afghanistan or should not have gone in the first place. The title <em>The Wrong War</em> refers to the <em>kind</em> of war we have chosen to fight in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>West chronicles how we have treated Afghanistan like welfare clients before welfare reform and given Afghans little incentive to do anything but hold their hands out. He gives credit where it&#8217;s due, pointing out there has been some success with training Afghan forces, but that the basic COIN doctrine of hearts and minds has utterly failed with idiotic incentives&#8211; and might not have worked even if perfectly executed.</p>
<blockquote><p>“For years, soldiers like Cahir, had projected goodwill and brought resources. In return, the villagers were expected to reject the insurgents, or to risk death by informing against them. Instead, people like the mullah accepted the aid and remained neutral, waiting to see who would win on the field of battle. By giving away billions, we created a culture of entitlement rather than a rebellion against the radicals.</p>
<p>Preventing a terrorist takeover in Afghanistan is a sound goal. It would severely damage America&#8217;s credibility if the Taliban reseized Kabul. If chaos spread into Pakistan, terrorists might seize one of Pakistan&#8217;s nuclear bombs. Although the chances of that were slight, one bomb would incinerate tens of thousands of American civilians.</p>
<p>&#8230; Mistakenly, the generals agreed that defeating insurgency required our soldiers to be nation builders as well as war fighters.</p>
<p>Thus, our military became a gigantic Peace Corps, holding millions of <em>shuras</em>, drinking billions of cups of tea, and handing out billions of dollars for projects. Risk in battle was avoided because generals proclaimed that killing the enemy could not win the war. Senior officials fantasized that the war would be won by protecting and winning over the population. The tribes however, were determined to remain neutral, while the Afghan president tolerated corruption and ineffectiveness. The futile effort to build a democracy diverted the energies of our soldiers and weakened their martial spirit.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But even nation building does not require the ridiculous extremes the generals have gone to with Rules of Engagement that make war fighting next to impossible.  In story after story, West chronicles how soldiers and Marines are required to put themselves at a tactical disadvantage, or allow the enemy to escape, rather than risk—not guarantee, but risk—civilian casualties.  In fact, the rules create an incentive to use human shields—and for the populace to cooperate with the enemy as it’s the only risk free strategy for them</p>
<blockquote><p>“Under the rules of engagement, the insurgents were free to commute to work safely, often bringing women and children in the van. Some fighters, while talking on Icoms, stood in the open surrounded by women, knowing the Americans wouldn&#8217;t shoot. To attack a vehicle required two independent sources &#8212; say, a visual sighting of a weapon and a voice intercept from inside the van. This was practically impossible.”</p>
<p>“Afghanistan was singularly different from any prior insurgency. Far from employing sticks of coercion of any sort, the Western coalition offered only aid in sympathy to hostile villagers. The United States possessed precision firepower, with sensors that tracked any individual out-of-doors. Yet in 2010, less than 5% of aircraft sorties dropped a single bomb, despite over 100 reports of troops in contact daily. This forbearance was without historical precedent. The coalition imposed upon itself the strictest rules in the history of insurgent warfare.”</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Bloody Crimes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/bloody-crimes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bloody-crimes</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:15:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The chase for Jefferson Davis and the death pageant for Lincoln’s corpse.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fors.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84604" title="fors" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fors.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="568" /></a></p>
<p><em>Bloody Crimes:<br />
The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse</em><br />
By James Swanson<br />
Morrow, $27.99, 464pp.</p>
<p>In the modern media era, we have become accustomed to every Democrat presidential candidate being considered smarter, more sophisticated, and urbane and accomplished than his Republican counterpart.  From Eisenhower and Stevenson, to Kennedy and Nixon, Reagan and both Carter and Mondale, certainly both Bush presidents and each opponent they faced.</p>
<p>But it started with the very first Republican president, according to the latest compulsively readable history from James Swanson, who burst onto the scene with his terrifically exciting bestseller, <em>Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer</em>, which won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.</p>
<p>While Lincoln never stood for election against Jefferson Davis, Swanson thinks that it is likely Davis would have won had he been the Democrat nominee.  With Lincoln having reached demigod status in most Americans’ minds now, it’s hard to imagine that by Washington D.C. standards at the time, Davis, an experienced and well-spoken Washington hand, West Point graduate, war hero and successful businessman (even if it took slaves to make it happen) would have been considered a much more accomplished man than a plainspoken backwoods lawyer—with ties to radical freedom lovers.</p>
<p>Talk about the more things change…</p>
<p>Swanson’s latest book <em>Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse</em> takes a more obscure, but nonetheless just as fascinating look at April of 1865 as his huge bestselling debut—and it’s such a great story, and obvious parallel, that I bet it has Civil War historians all over the country slapping their foreheads and saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”  (Though in lesser hands, it might have come across as grotesque.)</p>
<p><em>Bloody Crimes</em> follows the last major journeys of Lincoln and Davis—the magnificent funeral procession for the slain president that covered 1,600 miles and attended by millions of Americans; and the flight by Jefferson Davis, trying to slip away unnoticed into Mexico, even as his armies led by first Lee and then Johnston were surrendering.</p>
<p>While one might think that Davis’s flight from capture would easily be the best part of Bloody Crimes, the details of the Lincoln funeral procession are not only fascinating, they are a bit mind-boggling—and may constitute the most ingenious bit of political stagecraft in American history.</p>
<p>Secretary of War Edwin Stanton arranged for not only the biggest state funeral in nation’s history, he gave much of the rest of the country a chance to join in, with a 1,600 mile train trip with stops in every major city along a circuitous route from Washington D.C. as far northeast as Albany, before heading across the Midwest to Lincoln’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.</p>
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		<title>Much to Savor in The Collected Writings of Sarah Rose Horowitz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/davidforsmark/much-to-savor-in-the-collected-writings-of-sarah-rose-horowitz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=much-to-savor-in-the-collected-writings-of-sarah-rose-horowitz</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:46:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An indomitable spirit shines through in a new and rich literary collection.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sarah.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84434" title="sarah" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sarah.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="234" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com">Pajamas Media</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Of all the books written by conservative activist and Frontpage  Magazine founder David Horowitz, there is no doubt that his most  heartfelt and poignant is <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em>, a tribute to his daughter, Sarah Rose Horowitz, who passed from this life in March 2008 at the age of 44.</p>
<p>In his tribute, Horowitz recounted how his daughter’s absolute  generosity of spirit affected his life and those around her — despite  her many physical afflictions brought on by Turner syndrome, which  tragically shortened her life. This excerpt from Horowitz’s eulogy  profoundly touched on that shining character trait that Sarah possessed:</p>
<blockquote><p>Many people would have been depressed and then  overwhelmed by the difficulties Sarah faced in the ordinary business of  her life; the medical procedures she was put through, which often did  not work … she packed more interests and more travels, more experiences  and more learning, more friends, and more projects, more people that she  touched in her brief lifetime than most people do in earthly journeys  that are twice as long. And she left a greater vacancy behind. …</p>
<p>A born candidate for dependency, Sarah never allowed herself to  become anyone’s burden but her own … never mind the difficulties she  might encounter. …</p>
<p>But most of all, her father was proud of her heart, and her  generosity of spirit, even toward those with whom she vehemently  disagreed.</p></blockquote>
<p>Thus, Sarah Rose Horowitz has been well spoken for — but now she gets the chance to speak for herself.</p>
<p>Anyone who read <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em> and fell in love  with Sarah’s indomitable spirit and indefatigable good will should round  out the picture by picking up the newly published <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=P74LWSP3E4IN"><em>The Collected Writings of Sarah Rose Horowitz</em></a>.  The collection consists of a novelette, short stories, poems, Torah  commentaries, letters about Sarah’s involvement with the Jewish tribes  in Uganda known as the Abayudaya, and her last radio interview.  Her  father’s eulogy appropriately rounds out the book.</p>
<p>The extremely engaging novella, <em>The Family of Man</em>, opens the collection, and it alone is worth the price of the book.</p>
<p>This is the story of a Jewish “hippie” family, the Friedmans, with  two girls and a boy, moving away from the politically charged atmosphere  of ’70s Berkley and back to the mother’s middle class home after the  parents split.  It obviously has autobiographical aspects; but someone  with no idea of the author’s background would still find it emotionally  potent, with vivid and likable characters and a sense of time and place  that draws the reader into the world of this family.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/much-to-savor-in-the-collected-writings-of-sarah-rose-horowitz/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan Writes Thillers for Our Age—and for All Ages</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/andrew-klavan-writes-thillers-for-our-age%e2%80%94and-for-all-ages/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-writes-thillers-for-our-age%25e2%2580%2594and-for-all-ages</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 04:09:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Two superb new novels out --one for both the adult and the younger reader on your Christmas list.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/identity.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-79407" title="identity" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/identity.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="600" /></a></p>
<p>Perhaps no thriller writer captures our uneasy and dangerous times like Andrew Klavan.   He combines the social observation of Tom Wolfe with the relentless narrative drive and pinpoint characterization of Colin Harrison into an unsettling—yet thoroughly rewarding—reading experience.</p>
<p>While Klavan has always been a captivating suspense writer (I confess that once as a salesman on the road, I burned a whole afternoon because I started <em>Don’t Say a Word</em> on my lunch hour and couldn’t stop reading), he has really come into his own in the post 9/11 world of terror, big government and culture wars.</p>
<p>Klavan has two superb new novels out, and conveniently, there is one for both the adult and the younger reader on your Christmas list.</p>
<p><strong><em>Identity Man</em></strong></p>
<p>When I finished Klavan’s last thriller, <a href="http://www.davidforsmark.com/4609/our-winter-of-no-pc-content"><em>Empire of Lies</em></a>, I remarked that I had never read anything quite like it.  His latest, <em>Identity Man,</em> (Houghton Miflin Harcourt, $25.00) is so strikingly original, it makes <em>Empire</em> seem like it’s from a template.</p>
<p>Klavan believes there is good and evil in the world—or at least he <em>hopes</em> there is good.  His books usually feature unlikely heroes, pressed into service to fight evil.  He takes this even farther in <em>Identity Man</em>, a slightly futuristic noir fable in which good and evil are all but characters in the plot.</p>
<p>Take a thief on the run framed for murders he didn’t commit, given a new identity (face and all) by a mysterious benefactor, drop him in a flood and riot-ravaged thoroughly corrupt city, mix in a charismatic black politician being prepared for a messianic entrance on the national stage, a preacher who sees through the politician, a guilt-ridden cop willing to do anything to protect the politician’s legend&#8211;  and of course a good girl who falls for the anti-hero, (this one the widow of a war hero)—mix them all together and what do you get?  Klavan’s masterwork to date.</p>
<p>By using parallels to contemporary figures and events like the New Orleans flood and the rise of the Community Organizer in Chief, Klavan strikes a chord with current readers; but with its timeless themes, this book will survive for future generations of readers, as well.</p>
<p>Here is how the corrupt cop, Ramsey, ruminates on the politician, Augie Lancaster, and the rhetoric he used in his rise to power, in a passage worthy of Ralph Ellison:</p>
<blockquote><p>All those times he had called these people his brothers. All those times he had told them that the white man was their enemy, that only he could save them &#8212; look! &#8212; in his dreams. All those beautiful speeches &#8212; <em>City of Hope, City of Justice</em> &#8212; spurring them on to this protest or that, to boycott a Jew store owner who had shot a neighborhood thief, or to picket a radio station where some DJ had made some racial crack, or to protest a white jury&#8217;s verdict that had sent some black mad-dog to prison.  All those times he had inspired them to bare their chests and display the scars of injustice, mobilizing them as an army of victims to blackmail another dollar out of the citadels of white guilt and fear. It was all good &#8212; all good for the king of the city kings, but for the brothers? Useless, meaningless diversions while their fatherless children [probably roamed the] streets in drooling coyote crews and their fatherless mothers smoked bone for crack cocaine which their fathers&#8217; fathers sold to them in the broken buildings that all the spangly gold from his fingertips somehow never did rebuild.</p></blockquote>
<p><em><strong>Fighting to Save His City</strong></em></p>
<p>&#8220;Sure. Because the journalists had their daydreams, too, the guilty white journalists made gullible by their desperate yearning for virtue…&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Telling It Like It Is</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/telling-it-like-it-is/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=telling-it-like-it-is</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Dec 2010 04:42:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Vince Flynn's latest thriller boldly separates the good guys from the bad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/flynn-cover2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-78619" title="flynn-cover2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/flynn-cover2-674x1024.jpg" alt="" width="362" height="551" /></a></p>
<p>“Because I believe there are good guys and bad guys.”</p>
<p>So explains a wealthy benefactor to American covert operative Mitch Rapp in Vince Flynn’s latest blockbuster, <em>American Assassin.</em></p>
<p>That not only serves as a good enough summary theme for all of Flynn’s novels but also is the moral foundation for one of our other finest thriller writers: Michael Connelly. Like Winston Churchill, neither Flynn nor Connelly finds any moral equivalence between the arsonist and the fireman.</p>
<p><strong><em>American Assassin</em></strong><strong> </strong><strong>by Vince Flynn</strong></p>
<p>There is no hotter thriller writer than Flynn, one of the few writers of action yarns to understand exactly what American readers want post-9/11.  Not nuance, not “Why do they hate us?” thumbsucking. Just kicking jihadist butt.</p>
<p>Actually, half the thrill of a Flynn novel is watching Mitch Rapp knock the heads together of liberal and timid PC politicians and bureaucrats who are foolish enough to try and stop him from killing as many terrorists as possible.</p>
<p>Fans who are looking for Rapp’s continuing efforts against the current Islamofascist threat will have to wait a while; Flynn&#8217;s latest offering  has a slightly different treat in store.</p>
<p><em>American Assassin</em> (Atria, $27.99) recounts the hitherto-untold story about how superagent Mitch Rapp came to be super-agent Mitch Rapp. The tale follows new prize CIA recruit Rapp &#8211; motivated by his fiancé&#8217;s death in the terrorist bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland &#8211; as he enters training. (Maybe Flynn’s next book should have Rapp taking out the Libyan terrorist supposedly dying of prostate cancer who was released by the Scots but seems to have made a remarkable recovery.)</p>
<p>Flynn gives a co-starring role to Stan Hurley, a great minor character from a previous novel. A legendary Cold War and Middle East operative, Hurley butts heads with Rapp as his trainer. He may be the old man molding the new boots, but Hurley has enough of an edge and a wild unpredictability that I couldn’t help think that it’s too bad a spinoff series is unlikely &#8211; unless Flynn wants to write more thrillers set in days of yore.</p>
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		<title>American Warrior</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/american-warrior/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=american-warrior</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:06:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The voice of Ace Robins Olds calls out from every page of the legendary fighter pilot's memoir.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Fighter_Pilot_The_Memoirs_of_Legendary_Ace_Robin_Olds-64672.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-68256" title="Fighter_Pilot_The_Memoirs_of_Legendary_Ace_Robin_Olds-64672" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Fighter_Pilot_The_Memoirs_of_Legendary_Ace_Robin_Olds-64672.jpg" alt="" width="325" height="500" /></a></p>
<p><em>Fighter Pilot:<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Pilot-Memoirs-Legendary-Robin/dp/0312560230"> The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds</a></em><br />
By Robin Olds,<br />
with Christina Olds and Ed Rasimus<br />
St. Martin&#8217;s, $26.99, 400 pp.</p>
<p>It’s hard to imagine a life story more overdue for the full book treatment than that of Robin Olds, one of the great American warriors of the 20th century.</p>
<p>His career ran the gamut of the development of modern air war and makes one heck of a story. If you enjoyed Chuck Yeager’s autobiography in the slightest, <em>Fighter Pilot</em> is about to become one of your all time favorite books.</p>
<p>It’s not just that Olds had an extraordinary career as a near-triple ace flying P-38s and P-51s in World War II, then finished his combat flying days as the top fighter pilot of the Vietnam War.  The story of Olds&#8217; larger-than life reads like the plot of an overreaching TV miniseries based on one of those fat Herman Wouk novels where the hero is involved in an impossible amount of history.</p>
<p>An All-American football player at West Point, Olds assumed command of his WWII squadron in Europe after a mere nine months of service. He was  part of the first jet demo team, placed second in the Thompson Trophy Race, was the only American ever to command an RAF squadron, had more kills than any other Air Force pilot in Vietnam, commanded the Air Force Academy, told LBJ off on Vietnam and married movie star Ella Raines, whose most famous role was costarring in <em>Tall in the Saddle</em> with John Wayne (who probably would have been the ideal choice to play the flamboyant and oversized fighter pilot in a film bio).</p>
<p>Olds lusted for combat, pulling every string to get into the fight and chafing when he missed out. He would hate his commander in the 1950s for decades until he found out it was his wife’s lobbying, not his CO, that kept him out of the Korea War. As the commander of the famed Wolfpack in Vietnam, Olds was told that once he either became an ace or logged 100 missions, he was going to be taken out of combat and sent on a PR tour; as a result, he began flying off the books and setting up his wingmen to log the kills.</p>
<p>How much did Olds long to be a fighter pilot?  When he was assigned to flight training in 1942, the base finance office had to seek the young second lieutenant out.  He was happy flying for room and board; it never occurred to him he would be <em>paid</em> <em>money</em> to fly.</p>
<p>Like biographies of such great fighter pilots as Robert Johnson, Dick Bong and Douglas Bader, Olds&#8217; is filled with great air combat stories. The one that stood out for me, however, was a tale of an air-to-ground attack.  While Olds’ squadron was still flying P-38s, it was assigned to take out a bridge in Holland. Although separated from his mates in bad weather, Olds completed the mission and took out the bridge. The rest of the squadron never found the target.</p>
<p>Olds finished his career as a brigadier general, but he was perhaps the least promotion-oriented officer in the Army and later Air Force. Several times, he refers to himself as being “threatened” with a promotion, and he dreaded the idea of flying a desk.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Olds was a maverick who was impatient with bureaucracy, especially if it kept him out of the air or got between him and the enemy. When he was assigned to a jet squadron after the war, he was not slotted for flying time. Without even being checked out in the plane, he walked onto the tarmac, bluffed his way into an F-80 Shooting Star and learned to fly it on his own before anyone realized what he had done.</p>
<p>In Vietnam, Olds bucked the system constantly, fighting for effective tactics and effective weapons. He constantly lobbied to put guns on his F-4 Phantom jets &#8212; which the desk jockeys had dumped because they thought the old days of dogfighting were over. Then, when the Pentagon changed from the very effective Sidewinder missile to the Sparrow (which malfunctioned about as often as early WWII torpedoes), Olds had his planes refitted against regulations to carry the older missile.</p>
<p>But there were two things he was powerless to change: the targets selected by Washington and the rules of engagement.  Thus, his men went on missions to take out power plants that powered the factories they weren’t allowed to bomb, and they engaged MiGs only under proscribed circumstances.</p>
<p>He confesses in the book that his famed RAF-style mustache was not a style choice but his little act of rebellion, a “middle finger I couldn’t raise in PR photographs” to the brass that was choking the war effort with all its restrictions on targets and tactics.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most maddening example of how the pencil-pushers cost American lives and hindered the war effort came when Olds found out that intelligence learned the North Vietnamese did not fire SAMs below a certain altitude but never shared that with American pilots so they would operate at the right altitude.  Another time, after a mission in which Olds lost six pilots, he found that intelligence knew MiGs had been practicing a certain tactic for weeks but never notified him. When he demanded to know why, he was told, “It’s too sensitive. It’s classified.” That very nearly earned a cowed intel geek a beating.</p>
<p>But despite his heroism in combat, Olds came to the public’s attention mostly because of his outspoken nature when he was forced to return home to do his victory roll publicity tour as America’s top (near) ace.</p>
<p>When President Johnson asked Olds about what to do about Vietnam, he didn’t give the standard rah-rah pap usually delivered to the commander-in-chief; instead, he offered a detailed list of the targets being neglected and the tactics not being employed.</p>
<p>He ended by telling a startled LBJ, “It’s simple sir, and with all due respect, the way to end this war is to just win the damned thing!”  Then he went out and told a hostile and combative press corps the same thing.</p>
<p>Olds never finished his manuscript before his death in 2007. He had tinkered with it for years, however, and left his daughter Christina plenty of material to work with.  She partnered with author Ed Rasimus &#8211; an F-105 pilot whose Vietnam air combat memoirs are classics in their own right &#8212; to complete this superb memoir.  Olds’ unforgettable voice comes through loud and clear on every page of <em>Fighter Pilot</em>.</p>
<p>And regardless of the book&#8217;s unique perspective, breadth of scope and historical value, Olds’ voice is what makes this book one of the greatest pilot memoirs ever published.</p>
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		<title>Hellhound on His Trail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/hellhound-on-his-trail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hellhound-on-his-trail</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:04:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A new book brings the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to life in stunning detail.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;"><em> </em></a><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;"><em> </em></a><br />
<em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/0385523920.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-64421" title="0385523920" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/0385523920-197x300.jpg" alt="" width="197" height="300" /></a></em><br />
<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;">Hellhound on His Trail:<br />
The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin</a></em><br />
<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;"></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;">By Hampton Sides</a></span></em><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;"> Doubleday, $28.95, 459 pp. </a></p>
<p>No matter how much &#8212; or how little &#8212; you already know about James Earl Ray&#8217;s assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., you will be spellbound by Hampton Sides&#8217; superb new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523920?tag=fronmaga-20&amp;camp=213381&amp;creative=390973&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=0385523920&amp;adid=083AF9VJZ6XE7C1V0X5Y&amp;"><em>Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin.</em></a></p>
<p>Sides focuses on storytelling, fashioning a narrative that, like a nonfiction <em>Day of the Jackal</em>, is made no less fascinating or suspenseful by the fact that we know the outcome of events.</p>
<p>Some criticism has been leveled at Sides, in fact, for his novelistic approach &#8212; telling us, for instance, what he deduces a character must have been thinking at the time.  However, he certainly seems to have done an incredible amount of research from primary sources. If pure scholarship might suffer a bit, the reader does <em>not</em>, racing through the pages as quickly as any popular summer read.</p>
<p>And what a story and cast of characters it is.  Featured are such iconic figures as King himself, LBJ, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with a supporting cast of Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Clark, Joseph Lowery and Andrew Young. Then there is the looming, mysterious fugitive gunman lurking in the background, drifting under different names and guises, but inexorably making his way toward that fateful meeting in Memphis.</p>
<p>Sides opens his story with prisoner 416-J, a convicted armed robber, escaping from the Missouri State Prison. Periodically, we return to the implacable drifter as he hides out among bordellos in Mexico, joins a cult in California, and eventually returns to the South and finally decides on a sinister direction for his life.</p>
<p>In the meantime, Martin Luther King Jr. himself was searching for direction and trying to get back on track.  After the historic victories of the civil rights movement, King was being overshadowed by black power advocates.  With the fight against legal segregation all but won, King was beginning what he called “the Poor People’s Campaign.”</p>
<p>Sides&#8217; portrait of a tired, fatalistic King near the end of his rope and transitioning from the fight for racial equality to a fight for economic equality -– aka democratic socialism -– will surprise some conservatives who forget where King was heading at the time of his assassination.</p>
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		<title>Review: Falcon 7</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/review-falcon-7/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=review-falcon-7</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 May 2010 04:04:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adolf Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[big game hunter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conrad the secret agent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[criminal defense attorney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Doug Rawlins]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Falcon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geoffrey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geoffrey household]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HAIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ICC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international criminal court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international thriller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jack Caskey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Huston]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Buchan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joseph Conrad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[joseph conrad the secret agent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Male]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Newt Gingrich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[power]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prosecutor while]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[RIO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[RIO Bill Duncan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scene]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Speaker]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What would Obama do if U.S. fliers were attacked? Author James Huston tells the tale. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312364326?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312364326"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-61131" title="9780312364328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/9780312364328-198x300.jpg" alt="" width="198" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>James Huston burst onto what used to be called the techno-thriller scene in 1988 with <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061703206?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061703206" target="_blank">Balance of Power</a>, </em>a military/legal actioner about a constitutional crisis that erupts when a conservative speaker of the House takes matters into his own hands because a spineless president refuses to retaliate against Indonesian Islamist terrorists.</p>
<p>Rush Limbaugh loved the book, and many compared the novel’s characters to Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, then holding power in Washington. Huston, however, followed the time-honored tradition of veiling real people by adding notable differences, such as a Speaker who was a veteran.</p>
<p>Back when guys like John Buchan (<em>The 39 Steps</em>) and Joseph Conrad (<em>The Secret Agent</em>) invented the modern international thriller, the names of enemy countries and odious leaders were merely hinted at, not named. Even Geoffrey Household, author of the classic <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590172434?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1590172434" target="_blank">Rogue Male</a></em>, did not expressly name Adolf Hitler as the target of his hero&#8217;s big-game hunter protagonist&#8211; although he did deliver plenty of obvious hints.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312364326?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312364326" target="_blank">Falcon 7</a></em>, a thriller about two Navy fliers hauled before the International Criminal Court for dropping a bomb on the wrong target in Pakistan, Huston doesn’t bother creating pseudonyms or crafting a fictional president likely to genuflect before international institutions.</p>
<p>Instead, he tackles the question of what would happen if U.S. fliers were to face a radical anti-American ICC prosecutor while their commander-in-chief is none other than Barack Hussein Obama.</p>
<p>Doug Rawlins, an F-18 pilot, and his RIO Bill Duncan sit in a prison in The Hague, charged with war crimes after dropping a bomb on what was supposed to be an al Qaeda meeting place but turned out to be a clinic for refugees.</p>
<p>The Obama administration wants the fliers defended but doesn&#8217;t want to put the full weight of the Justice Department behind them.  So, through a back channel they call on criminal defense attorney and former Navy SEAL Jack Caskey to provide their defense.</p>
<p>Caskey smells a setup, and immediately focuses on the fliers’ dizzying &#8212; and suspiciously quick — capture and repatriation to the Netherlands.  The prosecutor, within a day, has his captives and depositions from tribesman in a remote and violent part of Pakistan in hand, thanks to a conveniently handy multi-million-dollar Falcon 7 jet that just happened to be hanging around the backward hellhole.</p>
<p>Knowing he needs bodies and talent to help him fight a possibly hopelessly stacked deck at the ICC, Caskey enlists Eric Holder’s former New York law firm by threatening to go on every news show and blast them for going out of their way to defend murderous terrorists but turning their nose up at America’s heroes.  But that’s nowhere near the biggest stunt Caskey has to pull in order to successfully defend his clients.</p>
<p>He knows the task may well be hopeless, so he undertakes a succession of Hail Mary plays, including a trip to the scene in the Taliban- and al Qaeda-infested mountain regions of Pakistan.</p>
<p>Caskey even publically challenges Obama to free his clients by force, invoking a little-known law passed by Congress after 9/11 in response to the possibility of the ICC trying American soldiers. The law states that the President is authorized to invade <em>any </em>country holding American military personnel, friendly or not.</p>
<p>This tactic doesn’t exactly meet with the approval of Caskey’s beautiful second chair, a law school almost-flame whose legal brilliance is almost matched by her personal liberalism and was much more comfortable working for the causes Holder championed at her firm.</p>
<p>But, for Caskey, the idea of a rescue mission is more than just a threat or rhetorical device &#8212; no matter what the president might think.  Even as he runs rhetorical and evidentiary circles around the prosecution, Caskey has no confidence that the airmen have any shot at a fair trial in The Hague and believes such a mission may be their only hope.</p>
<p>Huston, a former F-14 RIO himself and now a big-time trial lawyer, certainly knows his stuff, and <em>Falcon 7 </em>rings true at every turn, whether it’s a courtroom twist, an ambush on a Pakistani mountain road or, even worse, a political ambush by political appointees who just want the case to get out of the headlines.</p>
<p>More importantly, Huston is a superb storyteller, and <em>Falcon 7</em> rockets along at the speed of the F-18 in the opening sequence and hits its target with just as much power.  The result is a perfect summer read &#8212; a terrific, thought-provoking, suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining and highly educational thriller.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0000ee; text-decoration: underline;"><br />
</span></p>
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		<title>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/the-only-thing-worth-dying-for/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-only-thing-worth-dying-for</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 04:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How eleven Green Berets forged a new Afghanistan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59992" title="blehm" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/blehm.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="517" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228" target="_blank"><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For:<br />
How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan</em><br />
By Eric Behm<br />
Harper, $25.99, 375pp.<br />
Review by David Forsmark</a></p>
<p>If you Google “Karzai” and “corruption,” you are given somewhere around 6,650,000 results.  In fact, when you Google the name “Karzai,” Google’s autocomplete function gives you “Karzai corruption” as the 4<sup>th</sup> choice.</p>
<p>But you can complete the search parameter for “Karzai courage” without Google’s autocomplete ever kicking in&#8211; even when you get as far as, “Karzai courag.”  And the search results tend to be either articles that encourage the President of Afghanistan to show some, or are at least 5 years old.</p>
<p>But as Eric Behm’s terrific new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061661228?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061661228" target="_blank"><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan,</em></a> illustrates, the warriors of the Special Forces A-Team ODA 574 would offer a completely different assessment.</p>
<p>It’s also hard to find a good word from President Obama about Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.  Before his visit this week, the Administration treated Karzai with the contempt they usually reserved for right of center Israeli Prime Ministers.   But while Hillary Clinton had kind words for the Afghan leader, Obama, in the <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/05/grinning-through-clenched-teeth-the-white-house-rolls-out-the-red-carpet-for-karzai.html">words of ABC’s Jake Tapper</a>, delivered his smiles through “clenched teeth.”</p>
<p>Obama’s media microphone have picked up the refrain, using words like “puppet” and acting as though Karzai played no role in the liberation of his country other than acting as our surrogate after we did all the hard work.  Chris Matthews, (ever on the lookout for the Vietnam or Watergate comparisons which are the touchstone of his life) recently compared Karzai to South Vietnamese President Diem.</p>
<p>I wonder if any of the cavalier commentators have a clue that Hamid Karzai went into the Kandahar region solo&#8211; while the Northern  Alliance and Special Forces A-Teams waged war in the north&#8211; to rally tribes and towns against the Taliban.  Or that Karzai put himself in such danger that Delta Force had to rescue him; and later assured victory in the south and probably headed off a civil war in Afghanistan by going back with an 11-man Special Forces team and routing the Taliban while uniting the tribes to the liberation cause.</p>
<p>More importantly, I wonder if <em>Barack Obama</em> knows it.</p>
<p>Behm does a nice job with the warrior camaraderie of the Special Forces Team in the book’s subtitle; but the central relationship in <em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> is between Hamid Karzai and Army Captain Jason Amerine, commander of OD-574.  Together, they form an almost (but not quite) Washington and Lafayette team, as Karzai rallies the populace and Amerine calls in the heavy firepower.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, thanks to the success of the <a href="Downloads/For%20more%20detailed%20commentary%20on%20the%20trial,%20check%20out%20Navy%20Chiefs%20running%20commentary%20here.">Horse Soldiers</a> in the North, the same Army brass who had to be cajoled&#8211; if not tricked&#8211; into letting the Special Forces handle the war in Afghanistan, decided it was time to get involved and share in the glory.</p>
<p>Just as victory was almost in hand, Amerine was saddled with a dozen rear-echolon types who arrived in camp, outnumbering the members of OD-574, themselves.  The Pentagon was nervous at just how much the War in Afghanistan in general&#8211; and the effort concerned with Karzai who was on track to be the next leader of Afghanistan in particular&#8211; was being managed by captains and non-coms.</p>
<p>All the while assuring Amerine that he still had control over the operation on the ground, the brass couldn’t resist taking their own turn at calling in air strikes, while the frustrated Amerine tried to decide if it was worth the trouble—or even possible—to reign them in.</p>
<p>The devastating result, however, gives new insight into why Hamid Karzai might have a particular aversion to collateral damage and misguided airstrikes.</p>
<p>The book also puts the Karzai presidency in context.  By showing the fragility of the alliance among the tribes, and the light touch required from Karzai to make it happen, one can’t help think that the very qualities that the Obama Administration is ripping Karzai for today are what make a central government in Afghanistan—for all its admitted weakness&#8211; even remotely possible.</p>
<p>Karzai was selected by the international community and a coalition of Afghans precisely <em>because</em> of his light touch, along with his credibility on the ground.   A heavy-handed effort at “reform” is likely to not only fail, but lead to a splintering of the coalition, if not outright rebellion in the wild outlying regions.  One could argue that Karzai has been exactly what we needed him to be, rather than what utopian perfectionists pretend he should be.</p>
<p>Some might perceive some irony in the title, as the heavy price paid by OD-574 was not caused by the enemy.  The press and politicians seem to treat “friendly fire” casualties as somehow more of a waste than a noble sacrifice.  But professional soldiers know they are an inevitable part of the chaos of combat—no matter how avoidable they seem in hindsight.  Behm—and the Green Berets—appropriately honor their dead in the same way they would had they been killed in a massive Taliban counter-attack.</p>
<p>Victor Davis Hanson regularly writes that one of the great strengths of the United States military is the ability of the soldier on the ground to make combat decisions.  A Special Forces master sergeant has more authority to call in an airstrike, for instance, than a Russian full bird colonel.  <em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> offers a prime example of that attribute—and a cautionary tale of what happens when the warriors on the scene are not given <em>enough</em> autonomy.</p>
<p><em>The Only Thing Worth Dying For</em> is not as action-packed as <em>Horse Soldiers</em>, or <em>Kill bin Laden</em>, nor is it as controversial as <em>Jawbreaker</em>; but it stands with those three fine books as a must read for anyone who wants to understand the war in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Best of all, it’s also a terrific story of valiant men at arms, and exceedingly well told.</p>
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		<title>The Generals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/the-generals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-generals</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new book tells the stories of four generals who changed the modern U.S. Army.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Star-Generals-Struggle-Future/dp/0307409066"><strong><em><strong><em> </em></strong></em></strong></a><strong><em><strong><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/petraeus1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54840" title="petraeus1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/petraeus1.jpg" alt="" width="480" height="319" /></a></em></strong></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Star-Generals-Struggle-Future/dp/0307409066"><strong><em>The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army</em></strong></a><strong><br />
By David Cloud and Greg Jaffe<br />
Crown, $28, 330 pp.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/CBC47C2B-2539-457C-AA57-6490E2E743E4Img100.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-54842" title="{CBC47C2B-2539-457C-AA57-6490E2E743E4}Img100" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/CBC47C2B-2539-457C-AA57-6490E2E743E4Img100.jpg" alt="" width="306" height="408" /></a><br />
</strong></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a dusty axiom that generals have the bad habit of fighting the last war, rather than the one they&#8217;re engaged in.</p>
<p>After Vietnam, the U.S. Army took the opposite approach. From the quagmire of &#8216;Nam, the Army took the &#8220;lesson&#8221; that it should never again engage in another counter-insurgency effort —or even study <em>how</em> to fight one.  (This, despite the fact that the U.S. had won the fight against the Viet Cong guerrillas by 1972, and its Special Forces knew exactly how to conduct such a war.)</p>
<p>This combination of arrogance and head-in-the-sand flight from reality became embedded in the command bureaucracy, which refused to train troops for counter-insurgency or even to compose contingency plans on how to fight such a war.</p>
<p>In <em>The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, </em>a superb new book by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, the authors contend that such an approach nearly led to disaster in Iraq.</p>
<p>During the Cold War, the Army was very well prepared for the Big Invasion (think Grenada, Panama and the first Gulf War), but it had no doctrine for dealing with guerrilla fighting.</p>
<p>At the core of this ostrich-like approach was the Powell Doctrine &#8212; a comforting bit of pabulum that became conventional wisdom even outside the military.  In short, the doctrine stated the U.S. should engage in a war only when vital (key word) national interests are threatened; that overwhelming force should be exercised in an all-out effort to win; and that a clear exit strategy should be drafted for when the pre-defined goal is met.</p>
<p>Conservatives liked the Powell Doctrine because it proposed engagement only when the U.S. used its massive military advantage, while liberals used it to argue every war was not a “vital” national security threat and no exit strategy ever was good enough to meet the standard.  (The universal acceptance of this policy was probably part of the reason the Bush administration focused so heavily on the WMD argument for taking out Saddam Hussein.)</p>
<p>But Powell merely gave the Army intellectual cover to not prepare for anything as messy as the aftermath of the Iraq War; and many in the Pentagon and the White House held to it, or something like it, for far too long, especially with the doctrine&#8217;s author sitting as secretary of state. (In contrast but along the same pendulum-swing kind of thinking, it is starting to look like the Army has over-learned the lessons of counter-insurgency in Iraq in today’s Afghanistan, where the restrictive rules of engagement make the conflict far too problematic.)</p>
<p>Years into the occupation of Iraq, when General George Casey Jr. assumed command in Baghdad, he asked the sensible question: “Who is my counter-insurgency expert?”  Stunningly, an Air Force officer whose hands-on experience came at 20,000 feet mumbled, “I guess that would be me.”</p>
<p><em>The Fourth Star</em><em> </em>ingeniously and engagingly tells the story of how the Army re-invented itself on the fly and under fire though the parallel biographies of four 4-star generals</p>
<ul>
<li><strong> </strong>George Casey Jr.: a solid “muddy boots” commander who refused to challenge civilian authority and assumptions, was determined not to “repeat the mistakes of Vietnam” and tried to work within standard Army doctrine to accomplish a limited mission in Iraq – which he genuinely seemed to think he was accomplishing.</li>
<li>John Abizaid: A brilliant academic, he made himself an expert in the Middle East. He knew enough to doubt the Pentagon’s strategy and assumptions about Iraq but not enough to devise a strategy for victory.</li>
<li>Peter Chiarelli: The no-nonsense commander of Baghdad recognized that the key to victory was to make the population’s life better.  Chiarelli implemented his own successful counter-insurgency tactics over the objections of civilian planners. He had epic battles with his own command but ultimately was unable to bring the Army to adopt his tactics.<strong> </strong></li>
<li>David Petraeus: The brilliant thinker initially was an awkward commander, but he eventually persuaded President Bush to his way of thinking. Petraeus transformed Big Army into a flexible, quick-reacting force capable of successful defeating the insurgency.</li>
</ul>
<p>While Cloud and Jaffe are frank about each general’s shortcomings — particularly Casey’s —readers, in the end, will admire each of these men for their dedication and service.</p>
<p>It may surprise many to learn, for instance, that Casey — whose media statements the last few years have verged on the pusillanimous, such as when he said about the Ft. Hood massacre, &#8220;As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.&#8221; – was a tough and skilled warrior who passed Delta Force training and was invited to join that elite commando unit.  It’s also telling that he turned the billet down over family considerations, and followed a much safer and standard course for promotions.</p>
<p>Any reasonable book on the Iraq War must deal with the awful tenure of Ambassador Paul Bremer. The authors reveal Petraeus had a civil government and consensus administration set up in Mosul but had to fight Bremer — and even ignore some of his directives — to keep things from breaking down as they did in the rest of Iraq. (The situation eventually fell apart after Petraeus was rotated stateside.)</p>
<p>Bremer’s policy of absolute de-Baathification and the State Department’s electoral process by which Iraqis voted for ethnic leadership, rather than representatives by territory or district, certainly created chaos. However, Cloud and Jaffe show this was the policy of the Bush insiders as well, and Bremer was acting under Bush&#8217;s direction more than some books give credit (or blame) for.</p>
<p>In a teleconference related in the book, we see Abizaid raised doubts about the de-Baathification policy and was shot down cold by Douglas Feith, a prominent conservative at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s reluctance to “nation build” &#8212; which sounded just like the kind of long-term slog he wanted to avoid &#8212; led to a vacuum of leadership on the counter-insurgency strategy.  Despite his efforts to reform the military bureaucracy, Rumsfeld was influenced by the Powell Doctrine and Big Army reluctance to engage in what he might have called &#8220;the war we have.&#8221;</p>
<p>The book also touches on the importance of a little-known “tribe” in the Army — officers who attended or taught at the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, generally referred to as “Sosh.”   At Sosh, the generals-in-waiting were taught economics and diplomacy as well as military strategy, and their big picture thinking was extended beyond just the battlefield.</p>
<p>Petraeus and Chiarelli, the generals most apt to recommend workable solutions in Iraq, were heavily influenced by their time at Sosh, while Casey took a combat/weapons systems-oriented route to his promotions.</p>
<p>Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the Army you have.” <em>The Fourth Star</em> tells how we got from the Army we had <em>then</em> to the Army we have <em>now</em>.</p>
<p>By taking their unique biographical approach to their subject, Cloud and Jaffe keep <em>The Fourth Star</em> from being a dry tome about military strategy that only an attendee at the War  College would read.  Instead, this compelling and incredibly accessible book will fascinate even the lay person interested in military issues — or even anyone who enjoys well-told biographies.</p>
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		<title>Politically Incorrect Fiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=politically-incorrect-fiction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:04:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[New novels challenge the liberal mainstream narrative. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;amp;linkCode=as2&amp;amp;camp=1789&amp;amp;creative=390957&amp;amp;creativeASIN=0399156208"><img class="size-full wp-image-54196 alignnone" title="I, Sniper" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/isniper.png" alt="" width="375" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>In <em>I, Sniper</em>, Stephen Hunter’s latest thriller, a Vietnam War hero is assumed to be a crazed killer, but a veteran FBI agent smells a rat.</p>
<p>As the agent and his colleague dare to challenge the media&#8217;s &#8220;narrative,” he delivers a wonderful rant that combines critiques of the mainstream press that Thomas Sowell and Bernard Goldberg have advanced:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It&#8217;s so powerful because it&#8217;s unconscious. It&#8217;s not like they get together every morning and decide &#8216;these are the lies we tell today.&#8217; No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it&#8217;s a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality they&#8217;ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they&#8217;ve chosen to live their lives. It&#8217;s their way of arranging things a certain way what they all believe in without ever really addressing it carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They <em>know,</em> for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They <em>know</em> Communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They <em>know</em>Saddam didn&#8217;t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f&#8212;-ed up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. &#8230;The story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair&#8217;s made-up stories and Dan Rather&#8217;s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin-stroy anybody who makes them question all that. &#8230;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And this from a fellow who&#8217;s not only a former journalist but also a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his film criticism).</p>
<p>As this long, hard winter (sorry, Al Gore) winds down, here are a few red-hot reading choices to help you stave off that last bit of cabin fever by five authors who dare to challenge the intelligentsia’s conventional wisdom.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416565159?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1416565159">I, Sniper</a><img style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fronmaga-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1416565159" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></strong> by Stephen Hunter</p>
<p>“Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as ‘something with a mistake in it.’&#8221;</p>
<p>While <em>I, Sniper</em> (Simon &amp; Schuster, $26) ostensibly is about iconic hero Bob Lee Swagger taking down snipers who have killed several Vietnam-era radicals and framed a war hero for the crime, Hunter’s crosshairs are really on the mainstream media in general and the New York Times in particular.</p>
<p>Hunter, a former film critic for the Washington Post, obviously is fed up with the media’s narrative about Americans who love their guns and the warriors who fight for our freedom.</p>
<p>After someone has taken out an actress who collaborated with the North Vietnamese and made a fortune out of exercise videos, then shot two Chicago academics who were &#8217;60s domestic terrorists (yes, the resemblance is intentional), FBI agent Nick Memphis has this exchange at a press conference:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Do you have any opinions, special agent, on the use of &#8216;trained killers&#8217; in the military and the risks such men pose for society when they return to civilian world? I mean this seems to dovetail neatly with the report released by the Homeland Security Agency some months ago that &#8211;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;You must be from the <em>New York Times</em>.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes sir,&#8221; the young man said.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is Hunter’s sixth novel featuring Bob Lee Swagger, a combination of Sergeant York and Jack Bauer whom Hunter uses as an archetype of the small town, gun-handy American who does his duty as a matter of course and confounds the bad guys with toughness and know-how.</p>
<p>While the political jabs and media commentary are fun, <em>I, Sniper</em>’s main goal is to entertain, and it does.  In many ways this could be considered the ultimate Swagger tale. If this, indeed, is the final adventure for the 60-something hero with the stainless steel hip, it would be a fitting sendoff.</p>
<p>Though if Bob goes into retirement, I will certainly miss lines like this:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I sure wouldn&#8217;t want to be in your shoes,&#8221; said Bob. &#8220;I can&#8217;t help out with the papers. Never read ‘em. I get my news from Fox.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156208" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Midnight House</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Alex Berenson</strong></p>
<p>Speaking of New York&#8217;s Old Gray Lady, former Timesman Alex Berenson certainly hasn&#8217;t adopted the paper’s narrative that the United   States under George W. Bush became a lawless nation of torturing and liberties-violating rogues.</p>
<p>In the press material for <em>The Midnight House</em> (Putnam, $25.95), his latest best-seller, Berenson says:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If you take a fair-minded view of what the United States has actually been doing the last eight to ten years, you really can’t conclude that is torture.  When you’ve got one set of lawyers arguing that someone can be held in a room that is 46 degrees, while another set of lawyers argue it must be at least 48 degrees, you’d be hard pressed to say we’re torturing people.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Berenson also doesn&#8217;t cotton to the so-called experts&#8217; insistence that harsh interrogation techniques don’t work on terrorists.  In <em>The Midnight House</em>, he proposes an effective secret interrogation base in Poland where a group of interrogators goes considerably farther than Americans have actually gone — and his main concern is what the adverse effects might be on the good guys, not the bad &#8216;uns.</p>
<p>The Midnight House has been disbanded by the “new administration,” and someone is killing the retired interrogators one by one. CIA agent John Wells, on a well-deserved vacation after saving the nation from yet another big terrorist strike is put on their trail.</p>
<p>Like all of Berenson’s books, <em>The Midnight House</em> is well-researched, intelligent and suspenseful.  Unlike the others, this is not an action-packed yarn where Wells saves the world from terrorists. Rather, this is more of a whodunit with a jaded look at the bureaucracy that “Homeland Security” has become.</p>
<p>This book is less Vince Flynn and more John LeCarre — if LeCarre weren&#8217;t such a pedantic bore, that is.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156135?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156135" target="_blank"><strong><em>The First Rule</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Robert Crais</strong></p>
<p>Under the media&#8217;s current narrative, private military companies like Blackwater are the bad guys du jour. In Robert Crais’ excellent series of private eye novels, PMC contractor Joe Pike has mostly served as the dark Doc Holliday to series hero Elvis Cole’s Wyatt Earp.</p>
<p><em>The First Rule</em><em> </em>(Simon &amp; Schuster, $26.95) is the second novel featuring Pike, an ex-LAPD patrolman, former Marine, current gun shop owner and sometime mercenary whose protective instincts would even impress Sandra Bullock’s character in <em>The Blind Side.</em></p>
<p>Crais’ recent books have tended to stress the human need for family and the vital role of fatherhood, but Pike here takes on Serbian mobsters whose first rule is the direct opposite &#8212; family is nothing next to the criminal brotherhood.  But when the criminals kill a family that Pike loves, they learn a new primary rule: don’t incur Pike&#8217;s wrath.</p>
<p>The first rule for mystery or suspense fans should be read all the Robert Crais you can get your hands on.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316045187?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316045187" target="_blank"><strong><em>Hollywood</em></strong><strong><em> Moon</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Joseph Wambaugh</strong></p>
<p>In the dark days of the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s, when “pig” was the word of choice for police among elite radicals, real-life L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh changed the mainstream narrative with such powerful novels as <em>The New Centurions</em> and nonfiction masterpieces like <em>The Onion Field</em>.  The books were dark enough to appeal to critics but also told the truth about policing in a turbulent era. Wambaugh helped restore cops to their rightful place as American literary heroes (and led to a lot of cops taking writing classes hoping to emulate him.)</p>
<p><em>Hollywood Moon</em> (Little, Brown, $26.99) is the third book in his series about the LAPD&#8217;s wild and woolly Hollywood Station. As Wambaugh examines the near-impossibility of doing good police work under the federal oversight placed on the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, he offers a collection of riotous, bawdy, tawdry and tragic vignettes that one might hear a few beers into a good night in a cop bar; the yarns ofter are tied together with one overriding crime or group of criminals.</p>
<p>In <em>Moon</em>, a hen-pecked identity thief decides to recruit his clueless gopher to kidnap his ruthless wife and find out where she’s been hiding all the money they’ve been scamming.</p>
<p>Think of the usual Wambaugh antics taking place under a full moon, and you’ll get the picture.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061929379?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061929379" target="_blank"><strong><em>Pirate Latitudes</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Michael Crichton</strong></p>
<p>I had to laugh at some of the critics who lamented that <em>Pirate Latitudes </em>(Harper $27.99), Michael Crichton’s last novel, which was posthumously discovered in his computer, was “not up to his usual standards.”  Most of these were the same blowhards who lambasted Crichton for trashing their narrative of man-made global warming in his provocative bestseller, <em>State of Fear</em>.</p>
<p>Crichton’s final novel, however, contains neither a political point nor a warning about the dangers of arrogant technology.  Instead, it’s just a swashbuckling entertainment about a British privateer attacking a Spanish stronghold for king, country&#8211;and a 50 percent share of the booty.</p>
<p><em>Pirate Latitudes</em> has the feel of a very polished first draft or the novelization of an action-packed miniseries, rather than a completed Crichton novel — which makes sense, since it wasn’t.  Still, it&#8217;s a fast moving, thoroughly enjoyable adventure; think <em>The Guns of Navarone</em> meets a Wilbur Smith sea-going swashbuckler. While it may not be as good as either, or up to Crichton’s normal standards, it’s a good, if imperfect, way to say bon voyage to one of the more dominant writers of his generation.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312380429?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312380429" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Lock Artist</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Steve Hamilton</strong></p>
<p>As long as we’re talking about books that have no relation to the topic at hand, I&#8217;d like to take a point of personal privilege. I’ve long been an admirer of Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight mystery series set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, describing it as Travis McGee in a cold climate.</p>
<p>After a lackluster stand-alone novel set in upstate New York, Hamilton returns to Michigan for an utterly original thriller set in Milford, one of my favorite small towns in the Detroit metro area.</p>
<p>In <em>The Lock Artist</em> (Minotaur, $25.96) Mike, a mute teenager, is known as “The Miracle Boy” since surviving an infamous atrocity as a toddler. He comes to the attention of an organized crime boss because a high school prank reveals his skill with locks of all kinds to the wrong people.  (On the plus side, it also brings him into contact with the girl of his dreams.)</p>
<p>Like all top thriller writers, Hamilton takes this unusual situation and relates it to everyday emotions and common fears and insecurities, from the longing to fit in, to the satisfaction of being really good at something.</p>
<p>As silent Mike tells his story in flashback from his prison cell, the reader finds an uncommon connection with this anti-hero and will root for him to find redemption.  Even the most jaded mystery readers who think they’ve seen it all will love this one.</p>
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		<title>Indicting the Anointed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/indicting-the-anointed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=indicting-the-anointed</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/indicting-the-anointed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell shows that people known as “intellects” might just not be that very smart.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em> </em></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/intellecutuals.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51989" title="intellecutuals" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/intellecutuals.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="497" /></a></p>
<p><em>Intellectuals and Society</em><br />
By Thomas Sowell<br />
Basic Books, $29.95,<br />
Review by David Forsmark</p>
<p>George Orwell famously said some things are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.</p>
<p>Thomas Sowell has made a career out of debunking those very things—most famously elite assumptions about racism and economics in classic books like <em>Ethnic America</em>, <em>Race and Culture</em>, <em>Knowledge and Decisions</em>, and <em>The Vision of the Annointed.</em></p>
<p>I’ve often defined a postmodern intellectual as someone who is trained to be sure he knows better.  Thomas Sowell, however, is a true intellectual in the best sense.  His mind is not only open to the fact that he might <em>not</em> know better, his superb new book explains why it is impossible for one dictator or a small group of elites to know better than the great unwashed how to run their lives.</p>
<p>A constant theme of Sowell’s work is that elites regularly—and with disastrous effect—substitute their assumptions for the actual on the ground knowledge of the masses of people.  In <em>Intellectuals and Society</em>, he singles out so-called “intellectuals,” those whose profession is trafficking in ideas, and the echo chamber they tend to inhabit.</p>
<p>He charges that such people may be “intellects,” but that doesn’t mean they are very smart.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.  Wisdom is the rarest quality of all &#8212; the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, once you have spent a lifetime debunking things that are accepted as Gospel by the “intellectual class,” and prove Orwell’s thesis on a daily basis, the term “pseudo- intellectual&#8221; starts to lose its meaning:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>The term “pseudo- intellectual&#8221; has sometimes been applied to less intelligent or less knowledgeable members of this profession. But just as a bad cop is still a cop &#8212; no matter how much we may regret it &#8212; so a shallow, confused, or dishonest intellectual is just as much a member of that occupation as is a paragon of the profession.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Recently, Boston College’s Alan Wolfe, a prime example of the above definition&#8211; wrote an intellectually dishonest pseudo-review of <em>Intellectuals and Society </em>for the usually rigorous <em>New</em><em> </em><em>Republic</em>—<a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/10/the-closing-of-the-liberal-mind-tnr-attacks-thomas-sowell/">which David Horowitz dispatched quite nicely</a>.</p>
<p>Wolfe’s review might as well have been titled, “I Represent That Remark.”  (I have done a couple of radio interviews with Wolfe, and found him to be less than impressive.) While Horowitz doubted that Wolfe, who protested the lack of musicians and novelists in Sowells’ discussion, had read the parameters of the discussion on page 2, I think it’s more likely Wolfe made it to the page 4 definition of pseudo-intellectuals, felt the pang of self-recognition, and then went on his <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-joyless-mind">very personal rant</a> against Sowell.</p>
<p>Wolfe, ironically supplies the perfect example of how intellectuals who share the currently anointed vision of the world make what Sowell calls “Arguments without Arguments:”</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Although many intellectuals are especially well-equipped by talent and training to engage in logically structured arguments using empirical evidence to analyze contending ideas, many of their political or ideological views are promoted by verbal virtuosity and evading structured arguments and empirical evidence. Among the many arguments without arguments are claims that opposing views are &#8220;simplistic&#8221; and opposing individuals unworthy, as well as assertion of &#8220;rights&#8221; and attributing to adversaries a belief and panaceas or golden ages.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>…Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.  But often the fact that some explanation seems to simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Usually, economists who discuss Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” do so in the context of business and the economy.  In<em> Intellectuals and Society</em>, Sowell not only gives the best explanation of why the invisible hand of self-interest works better than a central plan, he then applies it to subjects as far afield from economics as war and police shootings.</p>
<p>Sowell argues that the intelligentsia devalue “mundane knowledge” in favor of special knowledge.  However, mundane knowledge is what it takes to actually get anything done.</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Someone who is considered to be a &#8216;knowledgeable&#8217; person usually has a special kind of knowledge &#8212; perhaps academic or other kinds of knowledge not widely found in the population at large. Someone who has even more knowledge of more mudane things &#8212; plumbing, carpentry, or baseball, for example &#8212; is less likely to be called &#8220;knowledgeable&#8221; by those intellectuals, for what they don&#8217;t know isn&#8217;t knowledge.. .. It is by no means certain that the kind of knowledge mastered by intellectuals is necessarily more consequential in its effect in the real world.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>For instance, it may be impressive that a physicist understands Bernoulli’s principles of aerodynamic lift, but you wouldn’t want him in the cockpit second guessing your pilot.  Sowell argues that the smartest man cannot know even 1% of what would be required to run the lives of the people in a community, but that is what experts, politicians and intellectuals attempt in their hubris.<em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Despite the often expressed dichotomy between chaos and planning, what is called &#8220;planning&#8221; is the forcible suppression of millions of people&#8217;s plans by government imposed plan.</em></p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><em>&#8230;.what is called &#8220;social&#8221; planning are in fact government orders over writing the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of other people.</em></p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>That is why free markets, judicial restraint, and reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experiences of the many &#8212; rather than the presumptions of elite few &#8212; are so important to those who do not share the social vision prevalent among intellectual elites.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>The intellectuals’ exultation of “reason&#8221; often comes at the expense of experience, allowing them to have sweeping confidence about things in which they have little or no knowledge or experience.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Intellectuals and Society</em> is one of those books you want to read with a red pencil, to highlight nuggets like those above for later use.</p>
<p>While intellectuals’ visions cause social and economic disruption in many areas, none are so immediately deadly as their approach to war and foreign relations.  Sowell indicts the anointed for ignoring all empirical evidence and experience to the contrary, and insisting that the next dictator—from Hitler to Ahmadinejad—is the one who can be dealt with diplomatically.</p>
<p>Sowell concludes with a list of the anointed intelligentsia’s assumptions which have turned the world upside down, of which, he says, a complete refutation would fill volumes. “More important,” he says ruefully<em>, “It fills our schools and colleges.”</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>The intelligentsia have treated the conclusions of their vision as axioms to be followed, rather than hypotheses to be tested.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Some among the intelligentsia have treated reality itself as objective or illusory, thereby putting current intellectual fashions and fads on the same plane as verified knowledge and the cultural wisdom distilled from generations of experience…</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>They have filtered information in the media, in the schools, and in academia, who to leave out things that threaten their vision of the world.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Above all, they exalt themselves by denigrating the society in which they live and turning its members against each other.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Of course, as he points out early in the book, an intellectual is someone who can lecture a police department on how many shots are sufficient to bring down an armed suspect under stressful conditions—when he himself has never even fired a pistol on a range.</p>
<p>Long before the<em> Freakonomics </em>phenomenon<em>, </em>Thomas Sowell was making this kind of real life critique from an economist’s point of view.<em> Intellectuals and Society</em> is accessible, witty, practical, brilliantly argued, and essential reading.  It’s sure to infuriate self-important elites.</p>
<p>In other words, it’s a typical Thomas Sowell book.</p>
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		<title>Socialism is Great! (And Other Chinese Fables)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/socialism-is-great-and-other-chinese-fables/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=socialism-is-great-and-other-chinese-fables</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:00:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Two new books detail the brutalities of daily life in Mao’s worker’s paradise. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><em><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47151" title="6a00d8341c91bb53ef0105359b785a970c-800wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/6a00d8341c91bb53ef0105359b785a970c-800wi.jpg" alt="6a00d8341c91bb53ef0105359b785a970c-800wi" width="480" height="280" /></em></strong></p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Search-My-Homeland-Memoir-Chinese/dp/0060881267">In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp </a><br />
</strong></em><strong>By Er Tai Gao<br />
</strong><strong>Harper Collins, $22.99, 260 pp.</strong></p>
<p><strong><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Great-Workers-Memoir-China/dp/0977743373">“Socialism is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China </a><br />
</em></strong><strong>By Lijia Zhang<br />
</strong><strong>Anchor, $15, 364 pp.</strong></p>
<p>In a time when a <a href="http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/25/anita-dunn-were-you-also-joking-about-mother-theresa-by-jamie-glazov/" target="_blank">White House Communications Director lists Red Chinese dictator Mao as a major</a> influence in her life, it’s worth taking a look at the society that Mao established through mass murder and terror.</p>
<p>Two very different new memoirs by Chinese authors do just that. Anita Dunn, then President Obama&#8217;s director of communications, last fall held up Mao as an example of individualism. In reality, under Mao’s regime, the communist government was so intent on wiping out individuality that it even demanded ideological allegiance from those it had branded enemies of the state — as it was killing them.</p>
<p>Even in the time of “reform” after Mao’s death, during the great “liberalization” of the 1980s, Chinese female workers were required to report their menstrual cycles and sex lives to factory apparatchiks in charge of population control. Evidently, this is Anita Dunn’s idea of how the individual can make a difference in society.</p>
<p>In <em>In Search of My Homeland</em>, his eloquent and tragic memoir, artist Er Tai Goa records that as the Chinese government worked its prisoners to death, those in Mao’s gulags were continuously tested for ideological rigor. In fact, the inmates, much like the rest of the country, monitored each other through “mutual supervision,” complete with the infamous group criticism sessions and punishments. As Goa recounts, the prisoners were required to endure all this with a state-enforced smile on their faces, a strenuous effort that added another torment to their daily agony.</p>
<p>While prisoners were dropping like flies in the camps, life could still be made worse by the commandant. Even whole-heartedly embracing the process of personal “reforming through labor” and taking a vocal lead in ideological discussions — and “mutual supervision” — did not spare one from arbitrary punishment.</p>
<p>If this seems unbelievably Orwellian, consider this: During China&#8217;s Cultural Revolution in the &#8217;60s, most of the people sent to their deaths in labor camps weren&#8217;t dissidents at all. In fact, most were as devoted to Mao as the people who denounced them and sent them away.</p>
<p>Er Tai Gao, however, did commit an ideological crime in the eyes of the regime, even though he had no political motive. As a young, naïve art teacher, Gao published an essay, “On Beauty,” in which he argued that beauty was subjective and dependent on context. Essentially, he wrote, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To Western readers, the premise of Goa’s essay, which is included as an appendix, seems self-evident. But Lenin had held that beauty was objective and materialistic. So, in Mao&#8217;s eyes, Gao&#8217;s position was a crime against the Chinese State.</p>
<p>Gao published his essay in 1957, the time of “openness,” when Mao suckered his country’s intellectuals into expressing heresy openly so he could purge them in the Cultural Revolution. Gao was sent to the Jiabiangou “Farm” in the Gobi Desert, where the prisoners dug and filled in ditches through every kinds of brutal weather until they collapsed and died.</p>
<p>Goa, who survived more than two years in Jiabiangou, was released to a restrictive work environment, only to be denounced again and publically beaten; and was sent to another camp until he was released in 1962. He found a job after his release in China’s famed Mogoa Caves, a treasure trove of archeology and art, where he was able to lose himself in his work despite constant deprivation and threat.</p>
<p><em>In Search of My Homeland</em> is a spare and beautifully written book. But it&#8217;s not necessarily a hopeful one. Gao says his survival was not due to any great inner strength of his own, or the kindness of strangers, but was entirely “capricious.”</p>
<p>He may give himself too little credit. This book is the result of a secret diary he kept hidden on his person as he kept himself sane by writing. The discovery of the document would probably have led to his death. However foolish the risk was, readers are the beneficiaries of his foolhardy courage in providing us this extraordinary document.</p>
<p><strong>“Socialism is Great!”</strong></p>
<p>While not a political dissident in any sense we would recognize, Gao at least was an intellectual of some consequence who expressed an opinion that clashed with state orthodoxy. But as Lijia Zhang recounts in her extremely engaging memoir, <em>“Socialism is Great!,”</em> her parents were basically anonymous workers, cogs in the machine of China’s vast labor force, who endured persecution during the Cultural Revolution.</p>
<p>For Zhang, however, neither Cultural Revolution nor Mao himself is the primary focus. Her story begins when her mother ends the school career of young Lijia and bequeaths the budding 16-year-old scholar a mind-numbing job in a Nanjing rocket factory — presumably a life sentence.</p>
<p>Lijia discovers an environment where the “workers” are anything but dedicated laborers and find innumerable ways to get through the day without effort. Production is secondary to ideological purity in the late 1970s, and the plant&#8217;s political instructor gathers them daily for what amounted to Communist chapel sermons:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Wang loved to talk up the latest political movement: today, a campaign against burgeois liberalism symbolized by bell-bottoms, called ‘trumpet trousers’ in Chinese.</p>
<p>&#8220;&#8216;Unable to distinguish between flagrant flowers and poisonous weeds, these young people pick up capitalist trash like &#8220;trumpet trousers and rotten music,&#8217;;’ Wang spat through a southern accent. &#8220;‘We must resolutely defend the “four cardinal principles&#8221; of socialism and firmly oppose bourgeois liberalism!’&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>But Lijia was a free spirit to a fault &#8212; and ambitious to boot. She first exercised rebellion by soaking up as much Western culture and literature as possible, such as secretly reading <em>Jane Eyre</em> and <em>Great Expectations</em>, and eventually through forbidden meetings with lovers (recounted in such frank detail that one hopes at least some were given pseudonyms).</p>
<p>While many in the West have heard of China’s one-child policy, which led to millions of cases of infanticide and forced abortions, it is rarely recounted just how thoroughly the Communist Party regulated the love life of average citizens.</p>
<p>China in the 1980s was a nation where married women could be forced to have an abortion at the same time a single woman could not legally obtain one. In a society nearly as sexually regulated as one under Islamic Sharia Law, an unmarried pregnant woman suffered not just social stigma but also civil sanctions—but so-called “pro-choice” and “feminist” groups on the American Left still lauded communist China’s “family planning” regime as a model for the Third World.</p>
<p>The limiting of offspring was not the only way in which married couples’ lives were regulated by the State. Lijia’s mother, for instance, lived as a virtual widow for most of her adult life for daring to marry a man from another city who was never given permission to permanently join her in Nanjing, giving them less than two weeks a year to be together.</p>
<p>In the rocket plant Lijia, and the other women are forced to submit to examinations by “the period police” in the factory hygiene office, a humiliation she recounts in chilling detail.</p>
<p>The book’s title comes from a hilariously stilted song the party gave the workers to boost morale. <em>“Socialism is Great!”</em> is filled with wry observations and a delicious sense of the ridiculous. While the totalitarian weight of the Chinese state is ever-present, Zhang tells her story with a sense of humor that is unique in dystopian memoirs.</p>
<p>The book ends on a serious note, however. Lijia, who organizes China’s largest pro-freedom rally outside of Tienanmen Square, is arrested for questioning even while her personal life takes a potentially disastrous and poignant turn.</p>
<p><em>In Search of My Homeland</em> and <em>“Socialism is Great”</em> could not be more different books that examine the same society. Gao’s book may be more of a literary masterpiece, but Zhang’s effort fills the more needed gap in our understanding by covering a much more neglected period of Chinese political history.</p>
<p>Despite all the talk of progress, the more things changed, the more the underlying totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist state has stayed the same.</p>
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		<title>Seven Miracles that Saved America &#8211; by David Forsmark</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/seven-miracles-that-saved-america-by-david-forsmark/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=seven-miracles-that-saved-america-by-david-forsmark</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:10:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new book examines the overwhelming odds the U.S. beat to become a nation.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44481" title="miracle" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/miracle.gif" alt="miracle" width="450" height="473" /></p>
<p><em>Seven Miracles that Saved </em><em>America<br />
Why they Matter, Why We Should Have Hope</em></p>
<p>By Chris Stewart and Ted Stewart<br />
Shadow Mountain, $27.95, 311 pp.<br />
Review by David Forsmark</p>
<p><em>“In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine protection &#8212; Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. &#8230; I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs the affairs of men!&#8221;</em></p>
<p align="right"><strong><em>—Benjamin Franklin, 1787</em></strong></p>
<p><em>&#8220;There is no overwhelming proof, but deep inside we know. And to those who believe, it also seems clear that these events took place with the direction and purpose. Despite our weaknesses, which are many, and our failings, which have existed since our inception, God has been willing to intervene so that this nation might survive.” </em></p>
<p align="right"><strong><em>&#8211; Chris and Ted Stewart, 2009</em></strong></p>
<p>The Founding Fathers regularly wrote that they considered themselves to be doing God’s work in establishing the United States. This habit was not just confined to the conspicuously devout, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams but also to such secular saints as Jefferson and Franklin, the so-called Deists.  More to the point, they fervently believed &#8212; and often asserted &#8212; that God in his Providence actively intervened in events to make their efforts successful.</p>
<p>Today, we often dismiss such rhetoric as “just the way people talked back then” and explain how politicians of a certain era used it to rally an overwhelmingly religious populace behind them.</p>
<p>In their terrific new book, <em>Seven Miracles that Saved America: Why they Matter, Why We Should Have Hope, </em>former Air Force officer Chris Stewart and his brother, U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart, argue forcefully that the Founders not only <em>meant</em> what they said, but they were <em>right</em>.</p>
<p>The Stewarts look at seven instances in which overwhelming odds had to be beaten for the United States to exist in its current form. While some might argue over their meaning or the significance of some of their “miracles,” the unlikely circumstances that saved the day in several cases will have even a hardcore secularist taking a second look:</p>
<p>·         The extraordinary unlikelihood that America was colonized due to the efforts of an ambitious navigator with humble beginnings  &#8211; rather than perhaps the greatest fleet ever assembled for just such a purpose&#8211; which “discovered” North America about 70 years before Columbus.</p>
<p>·         The million-to-one odds that saved the English colonization of America as a fleet crossing the Atlantic arrives in Jamestown minutes before it was to be abandoned.</p>
<p>·         The fortuitous fog that saved Washington’s army that was as well-timed &#8212; and accurate &#8212; as any artillery smokescreen.</p>
<p>·         The discovery of the Japanese fleet heading toward Midway in the vastness of the Pacific during World War II by an American reconnaissance airplane extending its search well beyond its operational range.</p>
<p>While this book makes a theological and political point, the emphasis in <em>Seven Miracles that Saved America </em>is on storytelling. The Stewarts employ an unusual device &#8212; novelizing part of each chapter, much like the Shaaras or Alan Eckert — while sticking to known facts and actual quotes. This makes for an extremely engaging, if rather quirky, narrative.</p>
<p>The authors open with the fascinating — and not well known account &#8212; of how America should have been colonized by the Chinese, rather than by Western Europeans.  Even if the Chinese did not discover the American continents, though it seems likely they <em>should</em> have, with their massive fleet and more advanced technology.</p>
<p>However, the glorious fleet that was sent on a mission of discovery, returned to a China that had changed and become inward-focused and xenophobic. The records of the exploration were burned, and the fabled fleet was left to rot, along with China’s expansionist ambitions.  (For more on this, check out last year’s interesting, if flawed, book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1261012960&amp;sr=8-1">1421</a>.)</em></p>
<p>The next chapter, <em>The Miracle at Jamestown</em>, continues the discussion of the religious and cultural nature of those who colonized America and why it was important. While the Stewarts propose the obvious, that those who followed Columbus were culturally very different than the navy of Zheng He, the authors assert it was also very important that a Protestant presence be established in America. They contend the competition among Christian sects led to the religious diversity and tolerance that formed the basis of the United States.</p>
<p>Their story of how close Jamestown came to failure and abandonment is gripping reading.  How it was saved is one of the more convincing cases for the word “miracle” in the book—along with the “mysterious fog” that saved Washington’s army in New York in the Revolutionary War, allowing him to pull off a Dunkirk-like evacuation and live to fight another day.</p>
<p>Many might put the circumstances of extraordinary events down to the American character that results from free men, for the first time in history, being allowed to operate on principles of liberty.  It’s not unusual, for instance, to hear the term “the miracle of the Constitution.”  It’s just unusual — today, at least — for it to be meant as literally as the Stewarts’ assert.</p>
<p>This is particularly true in the chapters in which the authors see the hand of God in the timing of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan assuming the presidency in times of crisis.</p>
<p>Easily the most controversial chapter &#8212; and the most likely to raise the ire of some country club Republicans, much less Democrats — is the chapter saying that Ronald Reagan not only won the Cold War but also saved America.</p>
<p>The Stewarts, however, point out that George H.W. Bush, while a good man, <em>did</em> call the Reagan economic agenda “voodoo economics” during the Republican primaries. Even if Bush 41 truly was aboard, he would not have had the political oomph to push it through a Democrat-controlled Congress.</p>
<p>More importantly, Bush was from the “realist” foreign policy tradition, which would have looked for “stability” and détente over real change. The most persuasive point the authors make here is to remind us that, after all of Reagan’s successes in putting the USSR on the ropes, Bush ordered a “reassessment” of U.S. relations with the Soviets upon taking office.</p>
<p>While the first Bush administration was “reassessing,” communism collapsed, and 41 was too surprised to even celebrate the Berlin Wall coming down, as Reagan had predicted.</p>
<p>Of course, such pivotal battles as Gettysburg and Midway had hundreds of little moments that one could argue “changed the course of history.” In the case of Midway, for example, the authors are persuasive in their argument that nearly every one of those moments miraculously went the Americans’ way.</p>
<p>In the case of Gettysburg, for instance, they could easily have titled the chapter, “The Miracle of Friendly Fire.”  Had Stonewall Jackson, the South’s best tactician and Lee’s greatest commander been with him at Gettysburg … who knows?  Jackson was easily the most important figure in American military history to be mistakenly shot by his own troops.</p>
<p>Those of a determinedly secular mindset may be apt to dismiss this book too quickly.  Even if you reject the premise out of hand and prefer to think of it as “<em>Seven Statistically Wildly Improbable Coincidences that Saved </em><em>America</em><em>,”</em> this book is worth your time.</p>
<p>In each case, the Stewarts do a masterful job of setting the stage of not only why the odds were stacked against the outcome we take for granted but also in reminding us of what was at stake.  Each chapter, it could be argued, is as good a one-chapter treatment of a momentous time as you are likely to find anywhere—particularly setting the stage for the Civil War, and demolishing the notion that slavery was a side issue.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the authors’ ultimate point. As bad as things seem now, America has been much closer to the precipice in its history. The Stewarts write that if God did not let the nation fail, or fall to its enemies then, there is no reason to suppose he is done with America yet.</p>
<p>The end may not be near after all.</p>
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		<title>Frontpage&#8217;s Man of the Year: Glenn Beck &#8211; by David Forsmark</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:09:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The rising star of the Right has kept Obama in check and spearheaded the conservative revival.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44269" title="beck" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/beck.jpg" alt="beck" width="450" height="539" /></p>
<p>The year of Obamarific “change” quickly became the year of dissent as Americans grew disillusioned with the “trillion here and a trillion there” spending of President Barack Obama even as unemployment rose. The so-called “Stimulus Package,” which promised to cap unemployment at 8%, did nothing to generate private sector jobs. The only area that seemed to be stimulated was joblessness, which soared above 10%.</p>
<p>Despite an economic disaster, the Democrats in Congress and the White House focused on socializing American health care and an economy-busting “cap and trade” scheme to hike energy taxes.  To top it off, it seemed every day brought revelations about radicals with unconscionable views who either held high offices in the new administration or were funded with taxpayer money.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the loudmouths of the Left and the poobahs of the Lame-Stream Media &#8212; who had deemed dissent to be “the highest form of patriotism” when George W. Bush occupied the White House &#8212; whistled another tune. They began savaging of opponents of the Obama regime as Nazis, racists and ignorant rubes. Their targets weren&#8217;t just public figures who stood in the way of their agenda; rather, they viciously attacked <em>ordinary</em> Americans, the tea partiers, to whom they gave a sobriquet (tea-baggers) that no network censors would have allowed just a few years ago.</p>
<p>For our Man of the Year issue, we justifiably could have taken the cheap and easy route (such as <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html" target="_blank">Time circa 2006</a>) and said it was the year of the “ordinary citizen.” After all, the anti-Obama Tea Party movement shook the foundations of the political establishment this summer.</p>
<p>All of our nominees contributed mightily to the informed dissent that gave hope for the right kind of change in the next few election cycles. Here are the nominees:</p>
<p><strong>Dick Cheney</strong></p>
<p>Ex-Veep Cheney, the man most hated (and feared) by the Left, won every argument he picked with Obama, scoring huge in the public arena on Attorney General Eric Holder&#8217;s ridiculous persecution of the CIA staffers who interrogated suspected terrorists; and he has been effective in all other national security debates.  Almost as important as the vice president&#8217;s comeback is the emergence of daughter Liz Cheney as one of conservatism’s most articulate defenders.  If this award were for Family of the Year, the Cheneys would be the hands-down winners.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Breitbart</strong></p>
<p>Orginally known as Matt Drudge&#8217;s lieutenant in compiling the still-essential Drudge Report, Breitbart became the most influential conservative figure on the Internet this year.  His smash hit site <a href="http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/" target="_blank">Big Hollywood</a> immediately became a must-read on a daily basis, and he launched <a href="http://biggovernment.com/" target="_blank">Big Government</a> with the Story of the Year — the ACORN prostitution sting videos.  With more sites on the way, Breitbart will continue to be one of the brightest lights in the conservative movement.</p>
<p><strong>Sarah Palin</strong></p>
<p>Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008, deserves a slot on this list just for the self-revealing rage she generates with the liberal establishment. The former Alaska governor also is the most beloved figure among the ordinary people who are newly minted activists in the wake of Obama&#8217;s big government excess.  Is there any other person who can change the debate and the political lexicon with a mere Facebook entry?  Death Panel is certainly the phrase of the year.</p>
<p><strong>Rush Limbaugh</strong></p>
<p>One could make the case that Limbaugh has been the conservative MVP &#8212; most valuable player or politico &#8212; every year since 1994.  It’s doubtful Obama &#8216;s approval rating would be under 50% and Obamacare would hover at about 60% disapproval without El  Rushbo. Instead of a routine annual update on Rush’s contribution to the debate, however, it’s time to just name the trophy after him and move on.</p>
<p><strong>And the winner is…</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Glenn Beck</strong></p>
<p>Whether you love him or hate him, or consider him to be a must-see TV or DVR necessity, radio and TV talker Beck is a bright new star in the conservative firmament. You might get fired up by his calls to action or wince at his emotional outbursts &#8211; you even might tune in today only to see if this is when his head finally explodes—but you have to admit, this was the Year of the Beck.</p>
<p>In the past 12 months, Beck rose from hosting an obscure TV show on CNN Headline News to a terrible time slot on Fox News&#8217; cable juggernaut.  Regardless, his show at 5 p.m. became a ratings smash hit and attracted direct angry response from the White House.</p>
<p>Beck’s show now attracts a far bigger audience than his competitors on CNN, MSNBC and Headline News <em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">combined</span></em>. In fact, he doesn’t really have any competition &#8211; on any given day, Beck can attracts 20 <em>times</em> the audience of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC.</p>
<p>This, indeed, was the Year of the Beck. In NBA terms, Limbaugh is the 30-points-per game superstar with several championship rings, who last year played for an otherwise pathetic team.  Beck is the team’s rookie draft pick who exceeded expectations and brought fresh energy that caught the other team flat-footed and changed the game.</p>
<p>Beck is such a major part of the political landscape today that it’s hard to remember he was still a minor factor just a year ago. Sure, his books sold very well, and his radio show was making a move to the top tier of the market; but during the 2008 election, the Left and the MSM were not sneering and using the term, “Limbaugh/Hannity /Beck,” and Obama was not calling him out by name.</p>
<p>In one short year, the epithet has become “Limbaugh/Beck/Palin,” and the White House is responding defensively.</p>
<p>Beck made the cover of Time magazine, was one of Barbara Walters’ &#8220;10 Most Fascinating People of 2009&#8243; and makes an almost nightly appearance as one of Keith Olbermann’s “Worst People in the World.” (A great honor, no doubt.)</p>
<p>Probably no other broadcaster in any medium is as in tune with the feisty mood of the times.  While other talk show hosts certainly connect with the Tea Partiers, and I’m sure the vast majority of them listen to Limbaugh and watch a certain amount of Hannity, no media figure has the direct connection to the Tea Party dissidents that Glenn Beck enjoys.  <em>No</em> one.</p>
<p>Only Sarah Palin gets that kind of love from the crowds that have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shaking in fear, and making up wild accusations on the while the cameras roll.</p>
<p>In his rookie year on live television, Beck has the White House reeling. He already has two major scalps dangling from his lance—self-proclaimed communist Van Jones, the green jobs czar, and White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, a devout fan of Maso Tse-Tung.</p>
<p>Leftist Cass Sunstein, the proposed “Regulatory Czar” who puts animal rights on a par with human rights,  and  Keith Jennings, a pedophilic Activist ironically named as Obama&#8217;s “Safe Schools Czar,&#8221; are also in his sights. While Breitbart deserves the lion’s share of the credit if ACORN goes down, no one has supplied more context on the community activist/con job organization and its tentacles into the Obama a Administration than Beck.</p>
<p>So where does Beck go from here?  His meteoric rise in 2009 will be a tough act to follow.  He obviously cannot again increase his TV audience tenfold &#8212; that would put him in “Who Shot J.R.” territory.  He has gained an audience and, for now, seems to be holding it.</p>
<p>The cheap and easy analysis would be to suppose that Beck’s emotional approach will wear on the audience or he will burn out.  However, as I learned when <a href="../2009/10/12/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-glenn-beck%E2%80%99s-idiots-by-david-forsmark/">reviewing Beck’s latest bestseller, <em>Arguing with Idiots</em></a><em>,</em> (still sitting at No. 3 as of this writing), Beck’s antics may draw people in, but there is a deep well of substance behind his act.</p>
<p>Beck, to be sure, is a performer and a showman.  He takes risks, and enough of them pay off to make up for his small mistakes.  Beck is attuned to the times, perfectly situated to benefit from the Obama backlash.  However, he has the substance for the long haul.</p>
<p>Whether 2010 is another Year of the Beck, or not, it is poised to be a comeback year for conservatism.  If it is, then Glenn Beck will have been a major part of the reason — and my bet is that is what will matter most to him.</p>
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