The Bosque Boys

From the First Battle of Fallujah. Story from the Rott.

Operation Al Fajr, the final battle of Fallujah, is well known. Lesser known is that seven months before the Marines had fought the insurgents to a bloody stalemate in the city in what has been called the First Battle of Fallujah. In March and April of 2004, 2nd Bn. 1st Marines, among others, fought bloody block to block battles in the Jolan district, pushing the growing numbers of insurgents away from the city outskirts. Eventually the Marines were held back while local Iraqis attempted a negotiated settlement, but not before some of the fiercest fighting to date in the Iraqi theater.

Major Doug Zembiec, then a Captain, led Echo Company 2/1 during the heavy fighting of March and April, but the culmination was a ferocious fight on April 26. On that day, Capt. Zembiec became a hero leading a company full of them.


Starting as a normal day, the company had just cleared a mosque from which it had earlier received fire when the enemy launched a coordinated assault that would last three hours. One Marine was killed and 10 others wounded in the initial fusillade and the Marines were hit with barrages of machine gun and RPG fire as waves of between 100 and 150 insurgents charged them. The engagement range was at times less than 25 yards.
Read the whole story.

Smithsonian Folkways records all kinds of music, in all kinds of places. My favorite recordings are Appalachian, recording equipment taken up into the hills, and the Old Time music recorded around dining tables and on front porches. But I also like the recordings from the Delta. Blues sung as an expression of living.

A lot of other music is available on Smithsonian Folkways. An American treasure.

Play some samples from these recordings below.

Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge Mountains: Persistence and Change
Various Artists


37th Old Time Fiddler's Convention at Union Grove North Carolina
Various Artists

Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky
Indian Bottom Association

Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways
Various artists

This collection includes the full verson of Oh, Death made popular by the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? The old version is longer, and much bleaker than what you heard in the movie. Classic Mountain Songs from Smithsonian Folkways
Various Artists

Clear-headed thinking by Ralph Peters on Russia's conquest of Georgia, and on Vladimir Putin. Essay here. From the New York Post.

Seven years after 9/11 and Saudi Arabia remains the largest exporter of hatred against the West. No wonder when we examine Saudi textbooks.

What a miserable excuse for a country. And what an illuminating example of what hard-core Arab Islam produces.

Story here.

From Eugene Robinson's column in the Washington Post:

Here come the goons, right on schedule.

The "author," and I use the term loosely, whose vicious lies damaged John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign has crawled back out from under his rock to spew vicious lies about Barack Obama. Right-wing radio talk-show hosts are dutifully transmitting this concocted venom. This presidential campaign has officially gotten ugly.

Mr. Robinson finds himself livid at the prospect of right-wing hoodlums coarsening the political discourse in America and, presumably, contributing to the decline of civility in campaign polemics.

Of course, along the way Robinson describes Jerome Corsi, author of the 2004 attack on John Kerry, Unfit to Command, and the recently published Obama Nation, as a "paranoid and delusional" right-wing blogger, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim, cog in the "right-wing smear machine."

So much for measured tones.

If Mr. Robinson's point was that we should be more judicious in the way we talk to one another, the lesson seems lost somehow in translation. Actually, the thrust of the Robinson piece is clear: lay off my anointed candidate, Barack "say his middle name and you're a racist" Obama.

Granted, Eugene Robinson is not the most incisive thinker of his generation--but his breathless screed against screeds is actually fairly emblematic of the recent spate of angry rejoinders from the prObama political pundits.

The general refrain against Corsi is Al Franken-esque: "lies and the lying liar who tells them."

I do not write in defense of Jerome Corsi. I do not know Jerome Corsi. I have never read a book by Jerome Corsi (nor do I intend to start with this one). However, I keep reading these articles asserting that Corsi traffics in inaccuracies and innuendos, waiting for the specifics--but, ironically, they never seem to arrive.

Beneath all the sound and fury, Robinson (like many others I have read) objects to two main Obama Nation assertions.

Robinson (1):

Corsi's new volume of vitriol...seeks to smear Obama as a "leftist" and add fuel to the false and discredited rumor that he is secretly a radical Muslim, or at least has "extensive connections to Islam."

Note: I am not counting "leftist." Robinson throws that label (in quotes) out there and abandons it as a line of argument. Dictionary.com defines leftist as "a member of the political Left or a person sympathetic to its views." Sure, at one time, "leftist" clearly meant socialist. On the other hand, I am not sure that under the evolving definition of leftist, even Obama would disagree with the characterization.

If Corsi actually accuses Obama of being "secretly a radical Muslim," I cannot find that phrase in any of the articles taking him to task. The closest construction seems to be the line Robinson quotes: "extensive connections to Islam."

Barack Obama was born Muslim (to a Muslim father). He briefly attended an Islamic school as a youth. He then tried desperately to find himself within the context of his African-Muslim family.

Technically speaking, those connections to Islam are arguably quite extensive.

Does that mean Obama is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate? I personally am convinced that he is not. I am personally 100 percent convinced that Barack Obama came to Christ and is a practicing Christian, just as he claims to be.

However, does that mean his "extensive connections to Islam" are off limits to voters, reporters, and political opponents? That sounds pretty restrictive.

Robinson (2):

Corsi repeats the charge, thoroughly disproved, that Obama was in church for one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's most incendiary sermons.

Thoroughly disproved by whom? But, more importantly, so what? Obama worshipped at Trinity under the pastoral care of Reverend Wright for twenty years. Implying that Obama missed the service where Wright offered some specifically egregiously offensive and somehow out of character statement strains our credulity. Is Robinson really positing that Obama was somehow ignorant of the real Jeremiah Wright?

This line of argument is much more disingenuous than the "insinuations" to which Robinson objects.

I can find the calumny and the overheated righteous indignation in these condemnations of Corsi, but where are the purported lies?

Shouldn't this story be getting more national coverage? Link from Drudge.

The Denver coroner said Thursday a man found dead in a downtown hotel room with a pound of highly toxic sodium cyanide nearby died from cyanide poisoning.

However, the medical examiner's office could not say if 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, of Ottawa, Canada killed himself.

His body was found Monday inside Room 408 at The Burnsley Hotel, which is about four blocks from the state Capitol.

Denver, site of the upcoming Democratic Convention. Enough cyanide to kill hundreds of people. Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, not a common Buddhist name.

Why isn't this wall-to-wall on cable?

Jerry Falwell inherited the older fundamentalist/evangelical outlook: fight hard to save America from liberalism/modernism in all its forms. His innovations included working with Roman Catholics and Mormons in The Moral Majority, and adding military preparedness to the issues list. Today's most prominent evangelical leader, according to some, is Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California. And his approach differs. Warren stresses global issues of compassion such as poverty and AIDS. And he advocates civility in political discourse. Both McCain and Obama are to appear on the campus of Warren's megachurch.

Article from the Los Angeles Times, link from Religion News Headlines.

I'll say it again: the Washington Post stands alone as our one great national newspaper, consistently demonstrating the most integrity, and consistently placing the best interest of America over ideology and/or partisanship.

Today in the Post:

If the criticism is correct [from foreign policy sophisticates and serial critics of the Bush administration who blame America for encouraging dangerous delusions of democracy in a young nation at risk], a fundamental and generations-old tenet of American foreign policy is wrong, so we should be clear about what is at stake.

Amen.

There are some strange politics brewing in the United States of America this week in response to a mighty roar from the Russian bear, signaling that a long hibernation is over. Does anybody remember George F. Kennan?

The Post again:

Now we are told that Russia's invasion last weekend proves the improvidence of this policy [promoting democracy]: The United States should have helped Georgia to understand that it lies in Russia's "sphere of influence," beyond the reach of American help.

But for the United States to counsel a "realistic" acceptance of vassal status to any nation would mark a radical departure from past principles and practices.

Changing Gears. The Domestic Politics:

If Obama-Democrats admit that Russia is a threat (or that Russia was even an aggressor in this conflict), they place their 2008 political fortunes at risk. If we truly do live in a dangerous world, and there really are bad actors on the world stage, perhaps a rock-ribbed, hard-eyed, ancient anticommunist realist like John McCain might be a wiser choice for leader of the free world. This explains the massive reluctance on the Left to admit the obvious about a resurgent Russia. Very bad timing for Obama.

On the other hand, the good news for Obama--and the bad news for the world--not many voters seem to have much of an interest in this historic event.

Kudos to the small coterie of traditionally Democratic Party foreign policy wise men who are not averting their eyes this week and adopting the party line. Kudos also to the Washington Post. Their editorial today was not the best or last word on this international crisis, but, considering the long-standing Post political persuasion, it is the most astoundingly courageous.

Read in full here.

On the Road Again, 6 with links to the other posts in this series.

We drove through the Nevada desert toward Hoover Dam in the evening twilight, the western sky a show worth buting a ticket for. All peaceful, the oppressive sun now below the horizon with the prospect of night breezes. The only jarring blot on the landscape the signs alongside the road telling one and all that commercial truck traffic and buses were prohibited from crossing Hoover Dam.

As we neared the dam we were forced to detour to a checkpoint alongside the road. Looking at our 98 Crown Vic loaded to the max the guard waved us on.

I was angry again. Not with the almost sick, nearly homicidal rage I was on 9/11. More of a depressive anger. Those Islamic terrorist scumbags, those s.o.b.s, those religious zealots obsessed with restoring the glory of the Caliphate, had changed our world.

After 9/11 the federal government closed the dam to truck traffic, and it remains so.

Detouring truck traffic away from Hoover Dam is perhaps a minor thing, but we cannot learn to accept it. We need to keep our focus, our fire, and remember that the war still is on.

The continued existence of Hoover Dam is one of many, many silent tributes to the leadership of George W. Bush after the World Trade Center attacks.

According to Rev. Canon George Conger of the Diocese of Central Florida the answer is "Yes." There no longer is an Anglican communion in a meaningful sense. For evidence he points to the recent Lambeth Conference in which Anglican bishops would not take communion together because of the (mostly) American actions on ordaining practicing homosexuals. Also, he points to the fact that within the Episcopal Church (Anglicanism in the U.S.) conservative priests would not be allowed to serve in a liberal diocese nor liberal priests in a conservative diocese.

The future of Episcopalianism as he sees it: litigation. Lawsuits over property as parishes and dioceses disassociate.

The cause: the belief by the Episcopal leadership that God's path forward is through recognition of same-sex orientation and practice as a blessing, and the providential role the American Church is to play by introducing to the world this new revelation. Another form of American exceptionalism.

Interview here.