Jay Reding.com

Apparently, in a shocking and unprecedented discovery, researchers have found that pretty women cause men to lose focus. Now this research is highly intrig… oooh… Natalie Portman!

Meryl Yourish has a powerful and chilling piece on the mechanics of suicide bombings. Her conclusion is a reminder of what we face in this war:

Shrapnel is what killed Phillip Balhasan, who stayed alive long enough to realize his children had survived, and to hug them tightly before he collapsed.

But even this is not enough for the terrorists. They also soak the shrapnel in rat poison, because it causes hemorrhaging — victims may bleed to death before they can get to the hospital.

Remember all of this, when you hear the world tell Israel to “use restraint” in responding to this attack. Remember all of this, when you read about the innocent metal shop owners who insist their shops were only making nails and screws for construction purposes.

Remember all of this, when Israel is the nation that is demonized by the blind, hateful people who wear checked kaffiyehs at anti-war protests, and call Israel an “apartheid state” for building a separation barrier — to keep out the monsters who would use bombs like I have just described.

Remember this, when you look at the pictures of the results of the bombing, and notice the thousands of dents in the metal surrounding the bombing area — the mark of the ball-bearings and other metal shrapnel.

These are the people with whom the world sympathizes: Those who create and set off the bombs. Not the victims. The bombers.

And that’s the worst evil of all.

As far as I’m concerned, the people who commit such acts, and especially the people evil enough to send a 17-year-old kid to blow himself up at a falafel stand have renounced any claim to humanity. There are acts which delineate a sense of absolute evil, acts which are so contrary to the most basic aspects of humanity that society must treat the perpetrators as a cancer upon this world. What human being would strap explosives to a child and send that child off to kill as many innocents as they can?

And these actions deserve a state?

There are days when I think that Israel should unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, announce that any further attacks against Israel will be an act of war. If another attack comes, Israel should engage in total war against the Palestinian state – utterly destroy anything used as a means of warfare – and given that includes mosques, madrassas, and schools, those should be destroyed as well. How do you purge a culture so steeped in barbarism of that evil? If there were an easy answer, we would have found it by now.

Of course, Israel cannot do those things, nor would it. First of all because Israel is the Jew among nations, a figure maligned by the hateful for the crime of merely existing, and secondly because the Israeli people want to be better than their enemies. They came out of a society that had nearly been exterminated, and they have no desire to do the same to anyone else.

When does “restraint” become an act that furthers evil? Is allowing the bomb-makers and the terrorists to lure more children into “martyrdom” an act of compassion or complicity with evil?

Yourish is right – to offer apologia to evil is to become part of it. The lessons of the 20th Century should be simple; those who do not stand up against genocide have the blood of millions on their hands. It’s sad that in the 21st Century, we still have those who would excuse such acts of barbarism.

The White House has announced some shakeups in staffing today. Press Secretary Scott McClellan is leaving, and Karl Rove is giving up his policy portfolio to concentrate on politics in advance of the 2006 elections.

These are all good changes. McClellan had an extremely difficult job, but always gave the impression that he was letting the White House Press Corps using him as a punching bag. He was no Ari Fleischer, who did a great job in Bush’s first years in office. Suggested replacements include FoxNews journalist Tony Snow, former DoD Press Secretary Victoria Clarke, and former White House press official Den Senor. Any one of the three would be a solid pick. Tony Snow has the journalistic connections to make nice with the press corps, Victoria Clarke has solid experience from her days at Defense, and Senor was the number two man to Fleischer and knows the job well. The Bush Administration’s press efforts have been lackluster at best, and hopefully this shakeup will result in more effective relations with the increasingly hostile press.

Karl Rove is an excellent political operator, which is why his move is a sound one. On policy matters, he’s been asleep at the wheel. The Bush Administration has made policy blunder after policy blunder after policy blunder, all on Rove’s watch. When it comes to pioneering techniques for numerical analysis in elections, Karl Rove is one of the world’s best political operatives. When it comes to sound policy, Rove doesn’t seem to measure up. The POTUS needs a strong hand in policy who will work with Capitol Hill to get an agenda through. Someone with strong conservative credentials, and a clear-headed view of policy issues. The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and other think tanks are full of people who would fit the bill. It’s just a matter of finding the right one.

Bush has needed to clear the decks for a while. The White House’s political and policy directions have both been rudderless on a storm of constant bad press and missteps. Bush needs to set the nation’s agenda, not let his political opponents do it for him. If he can’t do that, he’ll spend the next two-and-a-half years as a lame duck. Bush should have fought when he ran (Social Security reform), and run when he fought (Dubai, Harriet Miers). Bush runs the White House like an MBA would, relying on the expertise of his team, and his team hasn’t produced the results. Hopefully this team will do better in setting the White House on a strong course towards more fiscal responsibility, better public policy, and stronger public communications.

UPDATE: Joel Kaplan will be taking over Karl Rove’s policy portfolio. He’s a former Marine and a Harvard J.D. I’m not sure how deep his policy background goes, but hopefully he’ll be able to keep the White House on the right policy track.

The Boston Phoenix has named the world’s “unsexiest” men.

Dick Morris says that President Bush is becoming a Republican Jimmy Carter – which is about the worst insult one can give to a Commander in Chief. Morris argues:

Even when he seeks to develop an issue, his approach is half-hearted and ineffective. It seems that on any issue other than taxes and terrorism, he has attention-deficit disorder. He squandered his re-election “political capital” on a Social Security reform he spent six months pushing and a year and a half running away from…

And so, with no political immune system, he is subject to the infection du jour, be it the Dubai ports deal or the Iraq leaking scandal. In the meantime, his party is wallowing in a massive public perception of congressional corruption.

When Dick Morris is wrong, he’s wrong. When Dick Morris is right, he’s right. Sadly for the President, on this account, he does have it right. President Bush has basically allowed himself to become a human punching bag for his critics. A good politician knows how to get in front of the issues, and Bush has utterly failed to do that. Hopefully the upcoming White House shake-up will make the Administration less painfully reactive and more proactive in dealing with the constant political fire they’re taking from the relentlessly hostile media.

Morris suggests a few initiatives that might help the President, much in the Clintonian style of midnight basketball and other touchy-feely triangulations. Those may help, but what Bush needs to show now is real leadership. Bush rightly rejects the Clinton Administrations fixation with the polls, but they’ve also been completely asleep at the wheel when it comes to the political side of being President. They have the bully pulpit, but they’ve utterly failed to use it. Bush’s plummeting numbers are a direct result of the Administration’s lack of political pushback. Morris is right, on the war, on Social Security, on taxes, and on a whole host of other issues, the President has virtually surrendered to his critics. When the nation only gets one side of the story, it’s hardly surprising that the President’s poll numbers will start to sink.

A coherent energy policy would be a good start. The President should push forward with a crash program to develop safe nuclear technologies to augment and eventually replace coal. (Of course, that should be paired with economic development for key coal-producing states like West Virginia who might otherwise see such a program as putting them out of their jobs.) If the Chinese can work towards developing a network of advanced pebble-bed reactors to meet their energy needs, we can too – and we can do it better.

The President must push back on the economy. The perception of the US economy is bleak, while the reality of the economy is that unemployment is low and the jobs being created are well-paying jobs. The President has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the economy by letting the narrative be written by his critics. Elections, especially local elections, are decided largely on pocketbook issues, and if Bush can’t sell a booming economy, how politically effective can he be?

The First Law of Politics is always be on the offensive – the Bush team needs to learn this or they could well end up spending the next two and half years as lame ducks. Given the challenges we face, from Iranian nukes to entitlement reform, the last thing we need is a malaise hanging over the White House. Bush must fight back, and he needs to fight back hard, or Morris’ warnings may yet come to pass.

Mark Steyn has an excellent, but chilling, piece on the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. The West has almost never correctly understood the intentions of the Iranians. Western intelligence utterly missed the downfall of the Shah, which was one of the most crucial events in the history of Islamist terrorism. Now, Steyn worries that we’re miscalculating the Iranian’s intentions about acquiring and using nuclear weapons:

The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.

Sadly, I think Steyn is largely right. We cannot allow the Iranian regime to possess nuclear weapons – the chances that they’ll use such weapons is intolerably high. We can’t just assume that when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks of “wiping Israel off the map” he’s just playing around. The Iranians are probably the world’s most prolific supporters of terrorism. They are the main source of funding for Hizb’Allah and almost certainly sheltered members of al-Qaeda, including Saad bin Laden and Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. Iran is not a stable state governed by rational actors – Ahmadinejad’s radical views had to have been known to Iran’s Guardian Council. Even “moderates” like former President Khatami have spoken openly about the need to utterly destroy Israel.

Our options in regards to Iran are limited – invasion has never been a viable military option, and wouldn’t have been even if we weren’t otherwise engaged in Iraq. Precision airstrikes may not be enough to stop the Iranian’s hardened nuclear facilities. Using bunker-busting low-yield nukes would be more effective, but would lead to massive repercussions against the United States. We can only hope that conventional weaponry can do the job well enough to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons.

Every year we delay puts the world closer and closer towards disaster. The idea that it will take Iran 10 years or more to develop a working nuclear weapon is hopelessly naïve – Ahmadinejad has admitted to developing a more efficient P-2 centrifuge design that would vastly accelerate Iran’s enrichment program.

Sooner or later, the world will have to do something about Iran – either taking out the regime or taking out the weapons. A diplomatic solution is always preferable, but there are no diplomatic avenues when you have a country that is in the iron grip of a group of committed fanatics. Ahmadinejad learned early on that the West can be easily cowed into submission through the use of violence. If we continue to send that message it is only a matter of time before an Iranian nuclear weapon is detonated in a Western city.

“My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?”

Indeed.