Mitch Berg has finally moved over to Movable Type – and it looks good. No more random Blogger outages, no more permalinks disappearing, no more Haloscan – not to knock Blogger, as it’s a great tool for getting your feet wet, but once you get serious about blogging you quickly run up to its limitations.

Just a note that the great Northern Alliance of bloggers is hosting the Hugh Hewitt show today – you can listen live on the Internet for those of us who don’t yet get the show on the airwaves.

The One Blog To Rule Them All, InstaPundit.com has a great new look. I rather like it, although I suspect that it doesn’t quite work on small-resolution displays.

I’m actually planning to implement the same type of style-sheet changer for this site in the near future, including some more display/navigation options through JavaScript.

Unfortunately it still uses tables for layout rather than pure CSS. (That’s bad!) – if I were feeling ambitious I might try a pure-CSS mockup of the new design just for the hell of it, but right now I’m too stuffed with Easter ham to think of such things.

Via Spoons, I’ve come across another excellent blog – LeanWRITE – a blog by a Bush Democrat. It’s interesting seeing how many Democrats are quietly (and not so quietly) moving over to the Bush side. Sen. Zell Miller and former NYC mayor Ed Koch are only the most visible parts of what may well be a real movement. The hardcore Bush-haters of the Democratic Party may get all the press, but I suspect the weakness of Kerry as a candidate, the Democrat’s feckless foreign policy, and the absolute viciousness of the Bush-haters are turning off many moderate Democrats. Even if this movement represents less than 5% of the Democratic base it could easily be enough to put George W. Bush back in for a second term.

If nothing else, LeanWRITE shows that not all Democrats are stricken with terminal cases of Bush Derangement Syndome.

Mitch Berg’s ISP apparently went the way of Howard Dean’s candidacy, taking his domain with it (I know all too well how that goes)- but fortunately Shot in the Dark is back at a new address. Now, if we can only get him to dump Blogger and run MT…

The brilliant Alistair Cooke, known for his BBC programs Masterpiece Theatre and In America has passed away at the age of 95.

CBS is flogging a book by former Clinton Administration official Richard Clarke that supposedly shows the incoming Bush Administration didn’t care about al-Qaeda before September 11 and tried to pin it on Iraq afterwards. Except Clarke’s claims don’t make sense, and are clearly politically motivated. Deacon at Power Line has an excellent evisceration of Clarke and his claims and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice sets the record straight on the pre-September 11 antiterrorist activities of the Bush Administration.

If Clinton thought that al-Qaeda was such a threat, he did scarce little to do anything about it. From the Khobar Towers to the USS Cole the Clinton Administration’s reaction to terrorism was to sit on its hands and do nothing more than lob a few cruise missiles at a series of empty camps.

Attacking a US warship and killing members of its crew is an act of war – yet Clinton did nothing. Attacking US diplomatic personnel in Africa is an act of war – yet Clinton did nothing. Attacking military servicemen and women overseas is an act of war – yet Clinton did nothing.

And Clarke has the pure unadulterated audacity to argue that Bush is the one who was negligent in fighting terrorism. If that is not an idiotic argument on a prima facie basis, I fail to see what is.

The Clinton legacy? 3,000 dead from a terrorist threat that was allowed to gather for years. The Bush legacy? 50 million living in freedom. al-Qaeda on the run. Saddam Hussein in jail, his sons in Hell. Threats that could have killed 30,000 or 3 million will never have the chance.

That’s how you fight terrorism – not through the kind of Clintonian appeasement that Clarke offers.

Mitch Berg has a vigorous fisking on the concept of appeasement in the war on terrorism. He’s right on when he notes:

Saying the “war on terror” begins and ends with Bin Laden and Al Quada is like treating the flu by putting a cork in your throat so you can’t throw up; it treats an obvious symptom without addressing ANY of the causes.

That’s exactly the point. When the fires were still burning against Ground Zero, the anti-war left argued that we needed to address the “root causes” or we’d just be “creating more terrorists”.

They were right, but for the wrong reasons.

The argument was that we were the root causes – by American action (supporting Israel) we had “created” bin Laden and al-Qaeda. (As a side note, the CIA did not give money to bin Laden. He neither needed it, nor would have taken it from us. We did not fund the so-called “Afghan Arabs”, but the native mujihadeen. We did give money to people like Ahmed Shah Masood – who later formed the Northern Alliance that once again fought for freedom with us in Operation Enduring Freedom.)

This argument is not only defeatist, but specious. If American action causes terrorism it should have been Chileans piloting planes into the World Trade Center – but Chile is a relatively well-functioning country right now. We have intervened far more in our own hemisphere than we ever have in the Middle East, but terrorism is largely a Middle Eastern/Muslim issue.

The real root causes is the cultural failure of the Arab world which has produced a culture of death throughout the Middle East that has slowly metastasized across the world. This cultural failure has left the Middle East a basketcase of theocracy and autocracy where once the greatest center of learning in the world was once located. Scholars like Bernard Lewis have done an excellent job of elucidating the causes of this failure, but the most salient point is that the status quo cannot be allowed to continue.

As Berg notes, what if we captured bin Laden tomorrow? Would the war be over?

The answer is no – and it would be dangerous to argue that it would. Bin Laden is but the symptom of the larger problem. Bin Ladenism doesn’t end with bin Laden – it thrives in places like Karachi and Gaza, Tehran and Damascus. Unless we fight it there, we will have given ourselves an entirely fradulent sense of security.

Another terrorist attack would not only claim thousands more lives, it would shatter our economy once again. Those who think that the economy is more important than terrorism should consider that terrorism has dire economic effects – ask someone who worked in the travel industry after September 11. Those attacks drained over a trillion dollars from our economy when all was said and done. Another, deadlier attack could be even more catastrophic.

Either we end the doctrine of Islamofascism as we did with Nazism and fascism in World War II or we damn ourselves to decades of perpetual terrorism and perpetual war. We damn millions in the Middle East to theocratic and autocratic slavery. We would be turning our back on the most fundamental values of human rights and world peace. If we sell out Israel and the process we would be party to a second Holocaust.

This doesn’t mean we need to invade the entire Middle East. We neither could nor would we want to do so. That does means supporting the freedom of the Iraqi people. It means giving as much aid as we can to the Iranian democracy movement. It means ensuring that nuclear proliferation does not spread to the region. It means supporting the one functional democracy in the region – Israel. It means that the old doctrine of supporting terrorists as legitimate leaders must be thrown out the window. It means that countries like Syria know that supporting terrorism is no longer acceptable.

It means electing leaders who see this war for what it is rather than a police action.

We can not – we dare not – engage in such dangerous and idiotic delusions. We either prosecute this war as a war, or we risk the lives of those who will have to clean up after the mess we didn’t have the courage to touch. The costs of doing so then would be incalculably higher.

Stephen Green has an interesting little game – fire up your music collection and hit shuffle, then see what the ten first songs are. Well, I’ve nothing better to do, so here’s whatever iTunes happens to cough up…

“Thunderball” from The Best of Bond
“Youkali” – Patricia O’Callaghan
“My Way” – Frank Sinatra
“The Smokey Life” – Patricia O’Callaghan
“Silk Road” from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” soundtrack – Tan Dun and Yo-Yo Ma
“The Taming of Sméagol” – from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” soundtrack – Howard Shore
“Wintersun (Bobby D’Ambrosio Mix)” – Bond
“Sunrise” – Norah Jones
“White Flag” – Dido
“Concerto for 2 Violins, Strings, and Continuo in D minor – 1. Vivace” – J.S. Bach – Hillary Hahn

I seem to have a large number of soundtracks in my library… also, my tastes in music are less eclectic than schitzophrenic…

Rex Hammock was lucky enough to meet with George W. Bush at the White House and be featured in a Bush speech about small business. As always, the blogosphere provides an interesting first-hand account that would be rarely seen in the mainstream media.