Once Borders blew itself up, Barnes & Noble’s future as the chief surviving national retail book chain was assured, right? Well, so much for that idea:

After a year spent signaling its commitment to build its business through its Nook division, Barnes & Noble on Thursday announced disappointing holiday sales figures, with steep declines that underscored the challenge it faces in transforming from its traditional retail format.

Retail sales from the company’s bookstores and its Web site, BN.com, decreased 10.9 percent from the comparable nine-week holiday period a year earlier, to $1.2 billion, the company reported. More worrisome for the long-term future of the company, sales in the Nook unit that includes e-readers, tablets, digital content and accessories decreased 12.6 percent over the same period, to $311 million.

“They are not selling the devices, they are not selling books and traffic is down,” said Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of Idea Logical, a consultant to publishers. “I’m looking for an optimistic sign and not seeing one. It is concerning.”

As the fourth year of Recovery Bummer drags on, will the last retail chain please turn out the lights — assuming some form of illumination — one that doesn’t cause cancer, if that’s not too much to ask for — is still legal, of course.

“The real issue here is not a false argument about diversity,” Jonathan S. Tobin writes at Commentary:

It is instead one about what it means to be a liberal in today’s media environment. As Alana noted yesterday, Gore refused to sell his channel to conservative Glenn Beck saying that he didn’t wish to see his vanity project fall into the hands of those who disagreed with his politics. Fair enough. But the fact that Gore sees Al Jazeera as a good match for his brand of American liberalism speaks volumes about the nature of that set of beliefs.

Most Americans still think of Al Jazeera as the network that was Osama bin Laden’s outlet to the world in the years after 9/11. Since then, it has earned a reputation in some quarters as the best source of news about the Arab and Muslim world, especially during the Arab Spring protests. But its perspective remains one in which the United States and Israel are routinely pilloried and where terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are depicted as freedom fighters.

I don’t worry about Al Jazeera being able to persuade most Americans to buy into this skewed view of the world. What is worrisome is that Gore and other liberals such as the editorial writers at the Times seem to think there is a connection between this perspective and contemporary American liberalism.

And it’s very much a reciprocated connection.

Related: “Global warming causes Al Gore to sell Current TV to oil-backed Al Jazeera.”

Heh. But why not? It’s certainly is capable of everything else — and then some.

Mona Charen asks, “Are We Becoming European?” And then answers her own question with an ominous: “We’re there:”

Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. “We’re always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not cut. We’ve got to get real about this. We’re headed down the road that Europe’s already on.”

There’s no “heading” about it. We’re there. Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in “National Affairs”, outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and our debt to GDP ratio is higher than most European states.

The United Kingdom, you say? For years, American Web surfers have seen plenty of articles of the infamously PC British school system run amok — and this headline in the Washington Post, “Boy, 6, suspended from Silver Spring school for pointing finger like a gun,” would be equally right at home across the pond. We should expect to see many more stories as America completes its transformation into the England of the 1970s.

And/or the England of George Orwell’s 1984, as Nancy Pelosi completes her transformation into Winston Smith: “Pelosi Photoshops Women into Photo.”

Apparently, she had to Photoshop the photo to see who was in it.

Update: Yet another American headline — “Illinois firefighters stand idle while man drowns” — which has its roots in the mother country.

Al Gore believes that the world is going to come an end in less than five years. Over the years, he professes to attempt to solve the “problem” of reducing the earth’s “carbon footprint” by expending plenty of carbon himself, with first a movie, and then a rock concert, and eventually a TV channel. He demands that the rest of us change our lifestyle to suit his worldview, but publicly vows not to change his, Al lives in a mansion, flies around in a private plane, and, this, along with his various business ventures, gives him an overall carbon footprint the size of well, one giant Manbearpig. Or as Ann Coulter once quipped, “I kind of respect [Al] more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

But that’s Coulter; Al’s long been a punchline for all of us on the right. Centrist blogger Ann Althouse piles on, adding, “Al Jazeera hands Al Gore the second-chakra-releasing sum of $100 million.”  But at what point does Al become a joke among liberal late-night comedians? Ace notes that the prominent socialist sold his business at the end of 2012 to avoid paying higher tax rates:

Al Gore tried to hurry up the sale so he could avoid the increased taxes beginning January 1st. Lot of interesting stories the media has no interest in, eh? The media justifies its intense coverage of Republican sexual affairs on grounds that they evidence hypocrisy, and so are more important than the affair itself; but when Al Gore tries to avoid the higher tax rates he agitates for, it’s a single sentence in dispatch.

And then there’s the hypocrisy of the world’s most visible environmentalist having sold out his pet cause to Eeeeeevil Big Oil. (A Forbes article from 2007 asked rather presciently in retrospect, “Is Al Gore A Fossil-Fuel Industry Mole?”) Or as John Nolte memorably puts it at Big Journalism today, “Al Gore Race-Baits $100 Million from 21st Century Axis Sally:”

Al Jazeera is an anti-Semitic, anti-American scourge throughout the Middle East, and it was one of our biggest enemies during the darkest days of the wars in Iraq an Afghanistan. But in order to secure $100 million he doesn’t need, Gore threatened to accuse providers of racism if they dared drop the channel, which would’ve most certainly resulted in a lower selling price.

Imagine a former United States’ vice president giving Axis Sally a platform just after the end WWII and threatening a radio or television network if they refused to hand over their airwaves as a platform for her. [If the Axis Sally allusion seems to over-the-top, "Imagine if LBJ had sold his wife’s station to the Viet Cong’s ‘Liberation Radio,’  Kathy Shaidle* writes today -- Ed]

That’s exactly what Al Gore’s done — all in the name of tolerance.

You see, we have to tolerate hate and intolerance directed towards America and Israel, in the name of diversity. But what will not be tolerated is intolerance of Al-Jazeera’s hate and intolerance, because not tolerating hate and intolerance directed towards America and Israel is its own form of hate and intolerance.

Got that?

Yes — as Mark Steyn once wrote, “Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists:”

I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of “tolerance” would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic “militants” have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you’re nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic “rebel forces.” You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and that’s just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don’t be surprised if the announcer goes, “Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president’s annual Ramadan banquet** saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . .”

But then, as fellow PJM Columnist Barry Rubin tells the Daily Caller, sanity left the skyscraper a decade ago:

Rubin said Al-Jazeera is a “radical media outlet run by people who are anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western.” (RELATED: Gore reportedly hoped to sell Current TV before fiscal cliff tax hikes)

“[I]t is an instrument of extremist revolutionary movements,” he added. “On a number of occasions it has lent itself to promote and be used by violent terrorist groups.”

Rubin said by lending his imprimatur to Al-Jazeera – and potentially personally reaping a sum of $100 million, according to reports — Gore is acting “disgracefully.”

“In former, sane, times, doing something like this would have finished Gore’s credibility forever,” Rubin said. “Needless to say, sanity has long since jumped out the window.”

Heh — though as a famous British hotelier likes to say, nobody mention the war.

* Incidentally, speaking of punching back against those with a tolerance of multicultural intolerance, Kathy and her husband could use your help.

** Speaking of prescience.

“I am proud to say that Al Gore finds my principles reprehensible but aligns his principles with Al-Jazeera.”

– Glenn Beck.

Related: At Commentary, Alana Goodman adds:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Glenn Beck–who approached Current TV about a sale last year–was too right-wing for the network to even consider his offer. But an authoritarian-Islamist government that has criminalized homosexuality, discriminates against non-Muslims, prosecutes journalists, and has a “Not Free” rating from Freedom House? That was fine.

Well, yes. Al didn’t title one of his books “The Assault on Reason” for nothing.

Our biggest tasks r 2 defeat the two ideological pillars of capitalism: 1) that we have to pay our debts and 2) that we have to have jobs

— Tidal (@occupytheory) December 28, 2012

“You get nothing,” the president said. “I get that for free.”

Glenn Reynolds described the latter quote as “An entire governing philosophy in one sentence,” but there’s plenty of magical thinking to go around for everyone these days.

Update: Regarding the Tweet at the top of our post, “replace ‘capitalism’ with ‘adulthood’ and all becomes clear.”

“The culture war is over, and conservatives lost,” Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller writes in The Week:

We should have seen it coming. Back in 1999 — on the cusp of George W. Bush’s presidency, and as Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress — conservative leader Paul Weyrich issued a controversial open letter declaring that conservatives “probably have lost the culture war.”

As Weyrich wrote:

In looking at the long history of conservative politics, from the defeat of Robert Taft in 1952, to the nomination of Barry Goldwater, to the takeover of the Republican Party in 1994, I think it is fair to say that conservatives have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected.

But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.

In recent months, it has been especially depressing to be a conservative. In the past, one could more easily endure the ranting of liberal commentators by taking solace that — outside of New York City and Washington, D.C. — most of the country was center-right. Thus, whenever an elite liberal commentator said something fringy, one could always console himself by saying (or at least thinking): “I hope you push that idea, because you’ll keep losing elections in real America.”

Today, conservatives have made a shocking discovery: They are the ones in danger of appearing out of touch with middle America.

Weyrich, it turns out, might have been a Cassandra. At the time, of course, his letter was criticized by many of his conservative friends, who had, after all, toiled in the trenches for years to elect Ronald Reagan. They were still optimistic that we were on the verge of some sort of permanent governing majority that would allow a new leader to finish what Reagan started. But today, it looks as though Weyrich was quite prescient.

To be sure, his idea wasn’t entirely original. Years earlier, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” Years later, Andrew Breitbart would popularize this notion, and introduce it to a new generation of conservatives. But Weyrich was making an observation at a time when it would have been easy to dismiss such reflection as premature — or even pessimistic. (Indeed, many of his contemporaries did exactly that.)

Howard Kurtz, attempting to run interference for one of his employers, inadvertently provides a confirmation (at least of sorts) of Lewis’ diagnosis. Or as John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

During CNN’s live New Years Eve coverage, left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin dropped to her knees to kiss the crotch of co-host Anderson Cooper. Howard Kurtz asks “What was so awful about it?”

Let’s hope that Kurtz is merely selling out here. After all, he hosts “Reliable Sources” every week on CNN.

The thought of Kurtz flaking for his employer is much more comforting than attempting to grasp the fact that the most famous media reporter in the country can’t comprehend what’s wrong with a cable news network’s primetime host getting his crotch kissed on live television.

In many respects, this is a matter of a coarsening of tone, not politics — in terms of Griffin’s gesture, Cooper’s on-air acquiescence, and Kurtz’s ho-hum reaction. But ever since the late 1960s, coarsening of the culture seems to go hand-in-hand with politics moving further to the left, as Moynihan and (especially) Breitbart knew. As I said on Tuesday in my initial post on the topic, Walter Cronkite was as reactionary a liberal as Anderson Cooper — in some respects, perhaps even more so — but it’s difficult to imagine him being videotaped every year involved in an on-air train wreck such as this. And Cooper must be OK with it, since, as Noel Sheppard wrote at Newsbusters, Cooper and his producers at CNN keep bring Griffin back every year, perhaps so that somebody is talking about the network at the start of the year:

Consider that during the 2009 show, Griffin dropped an F-bomb. The year before she directed a vulgar oral sex reference to a heckler. Last year she stripped down to her underwear.

Yet CNN keeps inviting her back.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

As a Mr. A. Goldfinger once said, “Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’” And for CNN, their worst enemy is themselves.

(On the other hand, it could have been worse. Much worse. How much worse? Trust me — you don’t want to know.)

In the inbox today from Reason TV is this:

The 2012 bankruptcy of former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s Rhode Island-based video game company 38 Studios isn’t just a sad tale of a start-up tech company falling victim to the vagaries of a rough economy. It is a completely predictable story of crony capitalism, featuring star-struck legislators and the hubris of a larger-than-life athlete completely unprepared to compete in business.

Watch the saga unfold in Reason TV’s latest video, “38 Studios: Curt Schilling’s Crony Capitalism Debacle.”

And note this:

Schilling has been an outspoken “small government Republican” activist, who campaigned with President George W. Bush in 2004, but with his business in dire straits, he once again turned to the state for a bailout.

Unfortunately for him, Donald Carcieri had been succeeded as governor by Lincoln Chaffee, a Republican-turned- Independent and vocal opponent of the 38 Studios loan from its inception. Gov. Chafee sharply declined to to use any more taxpayer dollars on the foundering company, which Schilling described as a politically motivated “$100 million I-told-you-so.”

Read Watch the whole thing.

“Newsweek Alumni Wax Nostalgic About Magazine’s Sex-and-Booze-addled Halcyon Days,” Ken Shepard writes at Newsbusters:

While many of us can probably wax nostalgic about a job in our past that was thoroughly challenging and enjoyable, I’d venture to say not many of us would fondly recall unlimited expense accounts, much less free-flowing booze and a sexually promiscuous culture that treated female employees as ready-to-order mistresses. But then, you might if you worked for Newsweek in the 1960s and ’70s.

In his “oral history” interview feature that was compiled for the magazine’s final print edition, Newsweek.com staffer Andrew Romano chatted with some of the writers and editors from the Mad Men era of the weekly magazine. What particularly struck me was the almost wistful way in which many interview subjects fondly recalled sexual liaisons in the magazine’s Madison Avenue office. Also seemingly excused by Newsweek alumni was the blatant sexual harassment female staffers were shown. At one point, one justified the harassment by attributing it to the journalistic profession writ large, practically absolving offenders of any personal responsibility…

Read the whole thing for the excerpts, but then check out a new piece at the Daily Beast, Newsweek’s successor publication, which includes this eyebrow-raising moment:

The NFL is troubled. It’s not because of concussions or violence off the field or the league’s own politically correct, pussy-whipped ad campaign for improved safety.

Wow, who knew a magazine that gushes weekly about Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama and still waxes nostalgic for Princess Di could feign being so macho? (Not to mention being against political correctness.) Perhaps if Newsweek had demonstrated some of those qualities in the recent past, it might still be a going entity today.

As a follow-up to our earlier post, proof that Muggeridge’s Law, which posits that real life will always trump satire, is alive and well: “Osama bin Laden embraces his inner Al Gore,” the Washington Post noted in October of 2010, spotting one wealthy radical totalitarian quoting the precepts of another, before OBL died of a serious case of lead poisoning a few months later. Tonight, AP is reporting, “Al-Jazeera buys Current TV from Al Gore.”

And even AP is taking shots at AlGore these days:

Al-Jazeera, the Pan-Arab news channel that struggled to win space on American cable television, has acquired Current TV, boosting its reach nearly ninefold to about 40 million homes. With a focus on U.S. news, it plans to rebrand the left-leaning news network that cofounder Al Gore couldn’t make relevant.

The former vice president confirmed the sale Wednesday, saying in a statement that Al-Jazeera shares Current TV’s mission “to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling.”

The acquisition lifts Al-Jazeera’s reach beyond a few large U.S. metropolitan areas including New York and Washington, where about 4.7 million homes can now watch Al-Jazeera English.

Al-Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, plans to gradually transform Current into a new channel called Al-Jazeera America by adding five to 10 new U.S. bureaus beyond the five it has now and hiring more journalists.

You just know that Keith’s already got his resume sent in. Or perhaps he dropped it off way back in September of 2008, when someone with a wicked sense of humor placed MSNBC and Al-Jazeera side by side in the back of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy Center arena  for the Republican National Convention, with Al-Jazeera to the GE-owned network’s right:

Or perhaps newly-independent conservative’s conservative Andrew Sullivan might hop on board. “Al Jazeera: America’s Best News Network?” Sully gushed a year ago. Hey, compared with CNN, he could be right.

(Headline inspired by the comments at Hot Air.)

Update: “Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1.”

Robert Conquest, call your office.

More: “Glenn Beck has confirmed that he had approached Current TV about buying the cable channel but was turned down because he was not “aligned” with the network’s point of view. So is it any surprise that Al Jazeera was given the go-ahead?”

We’re always fond of quoting H.L. Mencken’s line that “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.” If you truly hold yourself out as an objective media source, as numerous individual journalists still profess, and even an entire news agency or two, it seems like a pretty useful way of doing business.

We all know in 2013 it’s a lie, of course. Or as Ace writes today, “Liberal Media Gloated About Suspicions That Hilary’s Concussion Wasn’t a Concussion; Now Clam Up.” And along the way, explores how the knees reflectively jerk at the modern MSM:

Thus, when a conservative expresses skepticism, the intellectually-insecure liberal must vehemently take the position of absolute guilelessness, absolute credulity. If a conservative doubts the word of a liberal politician, the insecure liberal demonstrates how rational he is by assuming — nay, insisting– that everything a liberal politician tells him is 100% true.

In an effort, then, to define themselves against the Other, they have taken an unfortunate tendency of the out-party to engage in conspiracy-theorizing (as the left engaged in under George W. Bush, by the way) and made themselves into reflexive skeptics against the skeptics, or, more accurately, reflexive paranoids against the ostensibly paranoid.

But this puts them in a remarkable, risible position, far more incredible and lunatic than any position they’re seeking to define themselves against: postulating, incredibly, that there is an alien species upon the earth, a species which looks human but in fact is otherworldly, and which simply does not have the human capacity for deception or self-dealing behavior, and this strange absolutely-ethically-pure alien species is commonly known as “Liberal Politicians.”

Is the conservative paranoia about Obama being a Manchurian candidate with malice in his heart excessive and unhinged? Perhaps. But is the liberal reverse paranoia — what is the word? — that Obama is constitutionally incapable of selfishness, deception, and self-dealing any more reasonable?

It is in fact less reasonable: For we know many humans who are in fact selfish and dishonest, but we know of not a single person still living on earth who is by definition incapable of either sin, to the point where, as their claims carry them, to simply question Obama’s, or Hillary”s honesty is to give evidence of a form of mania.

What a remarkable transformation of liberal views on the ethics with which political power is exercised — just 5-6 years ago they considered the theory that the American President had deliberately permitted the murder of 3000 citizens in order to secure a short-term political advantage a theory which, while unproven, was no strong mark against its proponent, to a new theory, upon the Apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, that the American President and his lesser ministers have simply not told a single untruth in their lives and to suspect them of doing so is a mark of lunacy.

Yeah, that always ends up well — or as Ace notes at the conclusion of his post, “This is a dangerous moment. I keep saying this, but I do think Tyranny is in the air. When the press decides that our Dear Leaders are above suspicion, and any suspicion is evidence of both mental illness and treason simultaneously, we’re living on the cusp of Chavez-like times.”

Read the whole thing — and then check out Michael Walsh at the Corner, who takes us on a very-much related “Voyage to Laputa.”

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

● “Katie Couric [then still with CBS] Uses Christmas Poem To Campaign For ObamaCare.”

– Headline, Newsbusters, November 23, 2009.

● “CBS ‘Evening News’ Report: Is ObamaCare Bad For Business?”

– Headline, Real Clear Politics, yesterday:

Most parts of Obamacare will take effect next year, but a lot of small businesses are already making plans.

At the Five Guys restaurant in New York City, burgers and fries are the specialties, but owner John Rigos worries he’ll have to cook up some cost savings when the affordable care act is fully implemented.

“It’ll likely affect the number of people we can hire,” Rigos said.

Rigos, who has 10 New York franchises and 250 employees, was waiting until after the election to confront the new health care legislation — officially called the Affordable Care Act — which will force him to provide insurance for all his full time workers, or face hefty fines.

“It’ll probably have to reduce the staff to some degree, and again, focus on building smaller stronger team rather than being as aggressive in opening up new stores and creating new jobs,” Rigos said.

Of course, just because it’s bad for business, the economy, and healthcare, that doesn’t mean that anyone at CBS actually disapproves of the idea.

There has to be a metaphor for the state of contemporary culture in here somewhere.

“Al Jazeera is putting the final touches on a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago,” the New York Times claims:

If the deal is completed, Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel based in New York, according to people with knowledge of the deal negotiations. The channel may be called Al Jazeera America. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Al Jazeera may absorb some Current TV staff members, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring.

The plan will bring Al Jazeera, which is financed by the government of Qatar, into closer competition with CNN and other news channels in the United States.

“But-but-but, wherever will failed and disgraced Democrat governors go to find work?”, Breitbart News quips.

I suspect they’d certainly feel at home there, as England’s David Frost did, when he made his own lateral move, leaving the BBC for Al Jazeera back in 2005.

Similarly, this headline at Free Republic from April could be remarkably prescient: “Keith Olbermann: Machine Gun for Hire (Next stop: Al Jazeera?)”

Not surprisingly, Twitter is having lots of fun with this news, including hashtags such as “#CurrentAlJazeeraShowPitches” and comments such as this:

So it will become more pro-Israel? // Al Jazeera is finalizing a deal to take over Current TV. nyti.ms/VvhxMe

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 2, 2013

 Update: “I really don’t like the idea of an extremist propaganda outlet that seeks the destruction of America airing on U.S. cable. Fortunately, sounds like Al Jazeera’s about to get rid of it,” Allahpundit deadpans.

More: Done deal? “AP Says It’s Official: Muslim Network Devours ManBearPig.”

Cal Thomas visits Vietnam where, “It has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy ordered U.S. ‘advisers’ to South Vietnam to help battle the communist North and 37 years since the end of that divisive war and the country’s unification under Communism.  Today, Vietnam is fighting a war with itself:”

As in many other one-party states, the Internet remains a powerful counterforce to managed information. The U.S. Embassy provides, and the government mostly allows, an information center where students and others can log onto iPads and search for information that is often counter to the government line.

The old guard remains suspicious about American objectives, seeing economic and political liberalization as a strategy to achieve among the Vietnamese people what America failed to in pursuing their “hearts and minds” in the war.

Professor Carlyle A. Thayer of the University of New South Wales, an expert on Vietnam, said recently, “Vietnam is motivated to keep the U.S. engaged in Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea in particular, as a balance to China,” which claims some territorial rights in conflict with Vietnam and is a formidable economic and military power on its northern border.

Vietnam is in transition, and it is unrealistic to expect too much progress too quickly. Considering where it was when the U.S. left in 1975, the country appears to be inching in a positive direction. Those Americans who died here left behind the seeds of democracy, capitalism and a desire for prosperity and freedom. Whatever one’s view of that war, it can be said they did not die in vain.

As America keeps “progressing” in a continually backward direction, I wonder how we’ll look in 40 years?

“Lights to be turned off in France to save money and show ‘sobriety,’” the London Daily Mail reported on December 31st.

Fortunately, it didn’t long for a substitute to be “unexpectedly” discovered: “French Youths Celebrate New Year by Torching 1,193 Cars.”

Ahh, those unfortunate French youth of indeterminate background.

It’s a comment to an article in Canada’s National Post, but the message is universal — or at the least, applicable here in the States as well:

There is a substantial difference between assimilation into a specific culture or dominant group and integration into the mainstream of socio-economic life. No one is forced to assimilate in Canada. Given the diversity of our demographics, I’d be hardpressed to imagine what you might assimilate with. We are not a homogeneous society that one might find in European countries or the Middle East or even, to a somewhat lesser extent, the US. Integration is another matter. It relates to joining and participating in the economic system with a view to pursuing economic stability (at minimum) and, for those who choose, pursuing economic prosperity. What you pursue and for what reasons is your choice and you are free to practice your culture and believe in whatever you want while you’re at it. Every group that has come to this country from anywhere has done this and achieved some measure of success,

In my view Canadian Natives need to recognize the difference between assimilation and integration and actively pursue the latter. This is essential if you want to have decent living standards, good health, stability for your children and the ability to influence and have an impact on the broader social and political landscape. All the commissions, studies, treaties, white papers and working groups in the world will not achieve this for you. Nor will protests and media events. On the other hand if you choose to live outside the mainstream and not integrate, then you will live forever in the margins and not much will ever change. It is possible to live outside the mainstream successfully but it takes a great deal of self-reliance, self-discipline and talent. It’s for the few, not the many.

If you continue to try to leverage guilt, historical grievances or a sense of entitlement, nothing will change. Politicians will continue pay lip service to you. They’ll come out for the photo opps and say some supportive words, maybe promise a committee or study but that’s about all you’ll get. The mainstream has little interest in your issues and no appetite for what are seen largely as demands for special treatment. You don’t have the political clout to drive change at the political level and won’t until you integrate. That’s just the reality of socio-economic systems. Integration means participation. If you don’t play you will watch from the sidelines.

Progress is made by those who show up, participate and contribute. If you want the benefits of our economic system, you have to get on board the train. You can practice your culture from the inside and have the best of both worlds.

Found via Kate of Small Dead Animals who writes, “The best stuff is usually found in the comments.”

Victor Davis Hanson isn’t known as “fisking” kind of guy, but in his latest article at PJM, he really takes a chainsaw to the op-ed the New York Times recently published on tossing out the Constitution. At one point, VDH writes:

Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.”  Ginsburg obviously vacations in Johannesburg, goes to Cape Town for her medical treatment, and has a vacation home and bank account in the scenic South African countryside.

Seidman looks fondly on Roosevelt’s war against the Constitution (especially the notion that law is essentially what an elected president who has proper “aspirations” says it is):

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation.

No doubt.

Not to mention offhandedly calling the other party Nazis, and believing, as he expressed in his 1944 State of the Union speech to Congress, that a return to the pre-New Deal America would mean “that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.” (Paging Mr. Orwell to the White Courtesy Phone please.)

But to get back to the fox in the 21st century hen house aspect that VDH wrote above, don’t many self-professed “liberals” or “progressives” who teach in academia loathe the subjects they’re teaching? History has largely become what an Australian professor once dubbed “Black Armband History” — from Columbus landing in the New World to the founding of the Constitution to winning World War II, it’s nothing but the story of oppression of “the other guy’s country” by evil white men. (Even those who built MSNBC.) Science and technology? Shouldn’t we have stayed noble savages? Besides, civilization leads to global warming. Sociology? Who are those strange bitter clingers in the heartland?

It must be fascinating to observe a world whose last 150 years, for good and bad, has been shaped by various offshoots of “Progressivism” and socialism, your own ideologies,  wonder why it all seems so terrible — and then wonder, OK, parents are paying thousands and thousands of dollars to send the poor little buggers here. I guess I better teach them something. But how, when I loathe the very subject I’m paid to teach?

(Once again, I’m sure the Frisbee Ion plays a role in all of this, somehow.)

“Recipe for a long life: overweight people have LOWER death risk,” the UK Independent notes. Insert obligatory reference to the Sleeper diet edging closer to becoming FDA-approved here:

Update: “Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating,” Fox DC reports. But overeating could lead to longer life, so this is all good news, right? (And lends further credence to the Sleeper diet.)

It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.

– “The Times and Iraq,” published May 26, 2004.

Iraq had a formidable arsenal of chemical weapons. Yielding to American warnings, the Iraqis did not employ poison gas. But nobody on the American side could be sure it would not be used.

– “1991 Victory Over Iraq Was Swift, but Hardly Flawless,” published today.