Interesting News - 5 January 2008

A tribute to Major Andrew Olmsted, first American killed in Iraq in 2008, who wrote his last message to be published in the event of his demise.

Explaining the left: "It is inconceivable to paranoid persons that people actually exist who view the situation differently from them. It is inconceivable that they could be wrong about their perception of reality. Con men always think others are out to con them. In fact, most paranoids consider themselves the ONLY reality-based community, because they get to define what reality is and it is always what they happen to feel. And it is always about making sure they feel good and virtuous and self-righteous." It’s a good thing we have Dr. Sanity to give us a road map into the swamp that is the mind of the left. What set this off was an article in HuffPo that kind of ignores that Bobby Kennedy was not killed by the vast right wing conspiracy, but rather by a radical Islamist.

Crusader Rabbit in NZ ponders just how slender is the thread on which hang our individual rights, while Australia ponders drafting a Bill of Rights. There is concern that this might turn into a morass.

It’s a good thing Bush just signed an energy bill mandating the next generation of light bulbs. I wonder if the money we save will be less than the costs of medical treatment.

Hang ‘em. Hang ‘em high. The Supreme Court will review whether the death penalty can be constitutionally imposed for the rape of a child. Some interesting thoughts on this at Big Lizards.

Hear the howls and lamentations of a social conservative starting into the morass of a Huckabee candidacy. I think Rick is absolutely correct that a sorting out of the social and religious conservative strains of the Republican Party is inevitable and indeed, may be upon us.

There is wisdom at the bottom of truisms, one of which is never grab a tiger by the tail.

NRO on the possible appointment of disbarred attorney William Jefforson Clinton to the position of Justice on the Supreme Court: "Presumably the Supreme Court needs to do something about our draconian sexual harassment laws." (h/t Instapundit)

The Fall of the House of Clinton discussed at Powerline.

Dr. Helen wants a few questions answered by the tabula rosa that is Obama before casting her vote in November.

Approving of foreign investment on the theory of South Parkenomics.

What the hell is Arkin still doing at the Washington Post beyond providing Iraqpundit an opportunity to shoot idiots in an idiot-barrel.

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Iran on the Couch

There is a fascinating round table discussion at FrontPage Magazine of the Khomeinist theocracy’s major crackdown on morals. One of round table participants is psychologist and political analyst, Nancy Korbin, who opines:

Terrorists always tell you what they are going to do and they do it. Ahmadinejad and his cronies should be taken seriously. Yet, they are also tone deaf. The list of vices is extremely revealing. They lack psychological insight and are clueless about reverse psychology.

They are purity obsessed, which means that they seek control of the "other," whom they experience as female, even if the enemy is male. They seek to strip the "other" of all senses -- throwing them back into a kind of autistic state of utter terror.

But the list shows that cracks are appearing in the Shia Islamist code. The mass, the Iranian domestic opposition, is huge and the Islamists won’t be able to maintain control. Mr. Schippert is right in that we should have done more, but better late than never.

The potential for political violence arising out of the nuclear agenda of the Shia repeats the pattern of getting away with murder literally. Rarely have limits been set. They have no boundaries. Such grandiosity and omnipotence is a lethal mix with their perpetual victimhood that they did not get the inheritance from the Prophet Muhammad, their deprivation in southern Lebanon and a peculiar recalcitrant anti-Semitism.

Seeking the annihilation of the Jew as Ultimate Other embodies the obsession for purity. The belief is that if a Jew goes out in the rain, the Jew contaminates the water. Coupled with Shia apocalyptic thinking, it is a horrific hysteria.
I used to joke in the clinic about how to diagnose hysteria in a Latin culture and now I add Shia culture. No wonder why they have been in Latin America for so long. . .

Ahmadinejad’s political paranoia is classic paranoia dressed up in Iranian Revolutionary rhetoric. Paranoia is about being obsessed with the female body while seeking a fictional purity of the prenatal mother. They can not reconcile that they are born from their mother’s contaminated/devalued female body. Unity and purity mean pre-birth, the antithesis to the apocalyptic. In the code of the maternal, "nuclear" means unity and purity with the mother through fusion. When dealing with the reality of nuclear weapons, such an unconscious seeks annihilation.
Alas we are left with not only the list of vices but a growing list of Sunni Jihadi proxies, expressed by the troubling Iran-Hamas Alliance (Meyrav Wurmser, in Focus: Gaza, Fall 2007, p. 24-26). While Israel is the stepping stone for going global, they will ultimately turn on their proxies. In my crystal ball I don’t see an effective truth and reconciliation conference occurring between Shias and Sunnis in the near future – precisely because Muslim women are not able to participate on an equal footing and they are at the eye of this unspoken Shia Islamist storm.

Read the article here. Other participants with worthy comments include Robert Spencer. Iran’s theocracy came to power on the piety of Ayatollah Khomenei. But over the last thirty years, the vast wealth of the nation has gone into the pockets of these pious clerics and their praetorian guard, the IRGC, while a booming population has become both secularized and disillusioned. It is a mark of the ineffectiveness of our clandestine services and political leadership that we have, apparently, been unable to mine this field of discontent. The school solution to Iran is not an American military strike to end the nuclear threat, but fanning the flames of another Iranian revolution.

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