A few months ago I had lunch with a US army officer who told me that the Germans were “basically running Afghanistan for us.” No doubt having the “Germans in Afghanistan”:http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1067481,00.html is somewhat useful when the US wants to get on with other projects. I was reminded of this when reading the “latest egregious anti-European outpourings from the Victor Davis Hanson”:http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200401090840.asp . The French come in for most of his venom, but the Germans get it too, and then this:

bq. We are in a race for civilization like none other since World War II. And yet, due *solely* to the courage and skill of an amazing generation of American professional soldiers battling in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are winning — as this difficult war is beginning to resemble 1944 far more than 1939.

Such gratitude! No wonder Hanson Davis finishes by calling for

bq. a much-needed honesty that will soon curtail both the deceitful rhetoric and hypocritical behavior that have insidiously warped us all in the West during the last 20 years.

Chris Brooke has “another snippet on Hanson Davis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_01_01_archive.html#107374838360931087 .

I came across the following quote recently, the person uttering it is described by blogger Michael Totten as articulating a “moral dilemma” and the following words are uttered as part of the elaboration of that dilemma:

bq. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

Karl Marx expresses similar sentiments at the very end of his “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (different Indians) but it isn’t him. And no, it isn’t Lenin or Stalin or Mao.

I don’t want to say The Age, my daily newspaper of choice, is sex-obsessed, but four of the five featured story on the sidebar this morning are:

Okey-Blokey, a story about drag kings.
Condoms ‘not sinful’ says a Belgian Cardinal.
Girls Say No to Sex
The return of the Bunny? on the rerise of the Playboy icon.

Pretty soon my hometown newspaper will be getting blocked by anti-porn filters.

Many aeons ago I posted on a controversy about crime and the new urbanism (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000761.html ). David Sucher has “an update on that argument over at City Comforts Blog”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2004/01/welcome_to_new_.html .

Ted asks:

bq. O’Reilly has repeatedly lied about the interview in which he told Jeremy Glick to “shut up” and cut off his microphone. As it turns out, transcripts can be checked on this intergummy thing. Someone should make up a phrase about that.

I propose that Bill is here speaking a dialect we shall call reverse transcriptese.

From the NY Times:

Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department, said a vehicle either met the specific technical requirements of being a light truck, or it did not.