Well, it looked good going into halftime.
#14 Virginia Tech blew an 18-point halftime lead, lost the momentum in the second half and never recovered in a 31-24 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in the Chick-fil-A Bowl. Using Virginia Tech's formula for success, Georgia mounted their comeback in the second half behind big plays by their special teams and defense, while their offense took care of the ball and took advantage of their opportunities.
Oh well...
For those who question the death penalty and the legitimacy of the execution of Saddam, David Pryce-Jones offers this.
In 1962 I attended portions of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann. The experience was bewildering. There, behind bullet-proof glass, sat Eichmann, intently listening through headphones to the ghastly evidence, and adding to it with every interjection he made. Apparently sane and self-possessed, he had no idea of the enormity of his crime, talking about it as though mass murder were a part of everyday life. The sight and sound of the man encased in bullet-proof glass misled Hannah Arendt into coining the phrase “The banality of evil.” This has a journalistic ring about it, but it has consistently irritated me. There was nothing banal about Eichmann and the solemnity of his trial was a milestone for humanity.
With Eichmann in front of me, I questioned the death penalty. To take a person’s life, even after due process and a fair trial, is a fearful deed, seeming to overpower taboo and the instinct to respect one’s fellow men. A day came when his appeal was heard. I was in court. The judge was quoting this and that precedent in international law, and suddenly, without ceremony or pause, he rejected the appeal. Eichmann was escorted away. Everyone else gathered in the small square outside the court, all of us silent, a few in tears. After quite a short time, the news came through, again without ceremony, that he had been hanged. To my surprise, the sun immediately seemed brighter, the sky more blue, the earth cleaner, and I realized that I do not in fact question the death penalty for mass murder.
These responses resurfaced this morning with a surge of emotion at the news that Saddam Hussein has gone to the gallows as once Eichmann had. In the course of his trial, he too had condemned himself with every word he spoke, equally oblivious to the enormity of his crimes, as though mass murder answered to his job description. Anyone who holds that such men really are banal, and shouldn’t pay with their lives for the evil they do, must further explain how justice is to be done to the victims.
Claudia Rosett has this to say.
Just what part of mass-murdering war-mongering terrorist-backing tyrant do the United Nations top brass not understand? Not only did the UN collaborate with Saddam, enrich itself off Saddam, and object to the overthrow of Saddam, but during Saddam’s final hours, up piped one of Kofi Annan’s appointees, the UN’s so-called High Commissioner for Human Rights (yes, that really is her title), Louise Arbour, doing her bit to the bitter end to raise doubts about Saddam’s trial and postpone his execution. Shortly before Saddam’s hanging, Arbour was hustling out a statement demanding that Saddam be kept around until, by Arbour’s standards, he had exhausted every possible avenue for leniency or amnesty.
The way the UN Human Rights gang has been going, maybe they hoped to sign on an amnestied Saddam as a special rapporteur on internally displaced ex-tyrants. Arbour’s protest comes from the same UN culture that had Libya in 2003 chairing the Human Rights Commission, and then “reformed” the commission into the current Israel-fixated Human Rights Council, with seats for the likes of Algeria, China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. This is the same UN system whence Kofi Annan felt free to call the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam “illegal,” but never applied that word to the activities of Saddam himself — or to his own secretariat’s strange and troubling (but lucrative) Oil-for-Food business partnership with this monster.
Saddam’s hanging was not only justice done; it was long overdue.
Barone posts about the situation in Iraq. Here is a tidbit.
I can remember reading a couple of years ago an argument that the reason George W. Bush followed the recommendations of the so-called neoconservatives–in Afghanistan as well as Iraq–is that the neoconservatives had an analysis of and a plan of action for dealing with Islamofascist terrorists and their state sponsors and aiders and abettors; and that no one else did.
In contrast, on the left we heard after September 11 some anguished voices asking, "Why do they hate us?" But many on the left immediately recognized that what they hated us for was our toleration and freedoms–the very things those on the left like most about our society. Shall we order women to wear veils and order the death by stoning of homosexuals in order to appease the perpetrators of September 11? Obviously not.
[...]
There are writers in Europe who argue that the threat of terrorism is just a nuisance. Sure, you get a 9/11 or a London 7/7 attack every so often and a bunch of people die; but your civilization goes on, and the Islamofascists aren't really going to take it over. We put up with a lot of deaths in traffic accidents and we can put up with a lot of deaths in terrorist attacks. So the argument goes. I think what it misses is that the terrorists may be able to get their hands on weapons that could inflict vastly more destruction than we saw on 9/11 or 7/7. And that any attempts at appeasing them–like the multicultural policies Britain and some European countries have been following–tend to take away our freedoms. Figuring out how to fight back and prevail is not easy and there will be errors along the way (as there have been in all our wars, and in great abundance). But it's better than sitting back and seeing what is the worst they can do to you.
William F. Buckley, Jr. gets the final word.
We are reminded that there is no mathematically satisfying way to measure the life of Saddam up against all the lives he destroyed. As well suggest that an execution of Hitler or Stalin or Mao could ever have balanced the scales on what they had done. Capital punishment is exacted, in modern law, as punishment for taking a single life. Taking hundreds, thousands, millions of lives mocks the very idea of executable justice. But the symbol of Saddam on the gallows is a symbol of justice pursued, even if plenary satisfaction is not possible.
Nothing can be said for Saddam except that he knew no better than the rule of the gun under which he had always lived. He was to make the most of the opportunities for crime open in the circumstances to anyone of vicious character like him. He was barely adult when revolutionary nationalists staged a coup, and killed virtually all the members of the family hitherto ruling Iraq. At that same time, Saddam declared himself a revolutionary nationalist, but in reality he too was a glorified hit man like the others. In due course, purposefully, he murdered his way to absolute power. As he went to his death, he may have recalled the 22 colleagues and rivals whom he accused of conspiracy with “U.S. imperialism” and whose hanging he one day personally supervised.
Arab despotism is a fearsome phenomenon, renewing itself from within each and every time yet another glorified hit man sets out on his bloody career. In the spirit of pure self-aggrandizement, Saddam invaded Iran and Kuwait, fired missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, decimated his own population and in the process resorted to poison gas, manipulated the great powers, and made a special mockery of the United Nations. And perhaps none of that matched in vileness the way that he deceived the husbands of two daughters of his into returning from exile under safe conduct, only to send a squad of gunmen under his son Uday to kill these fathers of his own grandchildren.
Captain Ed gets it right.
The dictator has met his end, at the hands of the people he tormented for decades. He received more justice in a single day of his trial than he ever gave anyone during his reign of terror. Yet the American media covered that trial as if it were the Saddam show, rather than provide coverage of the many witnesses to his genocides and crimes against humanity. This was the most consequential and historic trial of a mass murderer since Nuremberg, and the only points of interest to the American media were the self-serving disruptions of the defendants -- and they questioned the fairness of the trial because the monsters tried turning the trial into a circus.
Ever wonder how the Earth stacks up with other stars and planets in the Universe?
Daniel Pipes thinks that the West can fall to Islamic fundamentalists.
After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now defeat the Islamists?
On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?
Yet, more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it's not so simple. Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia) might in fact do better than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That's because, however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them – pacifism, self-hatred, complacency – deserve attention.
Pacifism: Among the educated, the conviction has widely taken hold that "there is no military solution" to current problems, a mantra applied in every Middle East problem – Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Kurds, terrorism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this pragmatic pacifism overlooks the fact that modern history abounds with military solutions. What were the defeats of the Axis, the United States in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, if not military solutions?
Self-hatred: Significant elements in several Western countries – especially the United States, Great Britain, and Israel – believe their own governments to be repositories of evil, and see terrorism as just punishment for past sins. This "we have met the enemy and he is us" attitude replaces an effective response with appeasement, including a readiness to give up traditions and achievements. Osama bin Laden celebrates by name such leftists as Robert Fisk and William Blum. Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists' auxiliary mujahideen.
Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine imbues many Westerners, especially on the left, with a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war – with its men in uniform, its ships, tanks, and planes, and its bloody battles for land and resources – is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. With John Kerry, too many dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."
I like the "hardware / software" analogy.
Gerard Alexander writes that conservatives have some hope in 2007.
Conservatives can look forward to three things in 2007 that haven’t received enough attention:
First, whether Democrats understand it — much less like it — or not, the American people will now hold them partly responsible for Iraq policy. This is as it should be, since congressional majorities bestow responsibility. But this will highlight the deep divisions that exist among Democrats over foreign policy, divisions that go much deeper than just Iraq.Second, conservatives get to watch the Democrats try to paint the Republicans as a rump Southern party that’s out of step with the rest of the country. But it was the Democrats themselves who lopped off the only Southerner in the top tier of 2008 GOP presidential candidates, Senator George Allen. All the currently leading GOP candidates are emphatically non-Southern and well-positioned to reach out to voters in the West, Midwest, and even Northeast.
And third, conservatives should appreciate a sea-change that the 2006 elections revealed in American politics. Today, many Democrats are clearly afraid that their new officeholders will screw up their recent victories, which is why they are treading so cautiously. This shows that many liberals have abandoned the sense of entitlement to govern that characterized them for so long. That is the result of decades of legitimizing of conservative ideas, leaders, and policies. Since most conservatives don’t have a sense of entitlement either, we’re seeing what amounts to the most level political playing-field that modern conservatives have ever seen.
