"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

~ H. L. Mencken

One of the curiosities of 9/11 was that, despite decades of affirmative action, the New York Fire Department turned out still to be an Irish Catholic regiment (with a dash of Italian), charging without flinching as their priests gave General Absolution, a scene very familiar in British Army history. The solidarity of that vital unit may very well have derived from the fact that they were, in a [Steve] Sailerian sense [a relatively inbred, extended family, i. e., a "race"], a band of brothers.

~ Peter Brimelow, on www.vdare.com

The great Christian humanist, the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was famous for his hatred of war. In his Education of a Christian Prince, he wrote that any ruler contemplating a war should ask himself this:

Shall I, one person, be the cause of so many calamities? Shall I alone be charged with such an outpouring of human blood; with causing so many widows; with filling so many homes with lamentations and mourning; with robbing so many old men of their sons; with impoverishing so many who do not deserve such a fate; and with utter destruction of morals, law, and practical religion?

Of course, VP Cheney, wherever he may be at the moment, is far too busy to worry about such trivial matters, what with all those military-industrial interests he has to keep juggling. Secretary of defense von Rumsfeld also has an overflowing plate. As for that nice, supposedly moderate fellow, Colin Powell, even his autobiography shows that he long since signed on to the logic of Total War.

That leaves our president, George W. Bush. He seems a hale fellow well met and even claims to be some sort of Christian. Perhaps someone will ask him to take a good, this time very serious, look at the questions posed by Erasmus. But probably not.

~ Joseph R. Stromberg

Tonight on TV I saw a commercial for the Navy: "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of anyone who threatens them."

Somehow I liked Jefferson’s version better.

~ Roderick L. Long

The mainstream media have long ridiculed any challenge to the official account of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as emanating from the "fever swamps" of conspiracy theory. But here’s the Wall Street Journal devoting the entire op-ed section of its September 5, 2002 edition to a piece proposing that there was a John Doe #2 after all, and he was most likely – you guessed it – an Iraqi intelligence agent. 

Micah Morrison dutifully reports "eyewitness accounts" collected by an Oklahoma City TV reporter that identify Tim McVeigh’s accomplice as Iraqi immigrant Hussain al-Hussaini.

Anyone who followed the case knows that McVeigh almost certainly did not act alone. Doe #2 was probably Michael Brescia, an associate of McVeigh and of the German operative Andreas Strassmeir, who may himself have been a U.S. government agent.

The Journal shies away from those deplorable "fever swamps," yet Morrison’s piece resembles closely the sort of effort we’d expect an establishment organ to mock to bits. He provides no evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s man to McVeigh, nor does he consider alternative hypotheses on the identities of McVeigh’s likely accomplices. We can only make a wild guess at any conceivable motive Saddam might have had to blow up the Murrah Building, of all places. There are all sorts of loose threads and even a reference to the personal website of a previously unknown  "espionage writer." 

Perhaps this is a new standard at the WSJ. If so, I look forward to future exposés of Saddam Hussein’s role in the Waco massacre and the crash of TWA Flight 800.

~ Peter G. Klein

Here’s a good name for our coming mission in Iraq: Operation Creating Recruits for Al Qaeda.

~ Sheldon Richman

I’ve looked over Bill Buckley’s one-thousandth book, the novel Nuremberg: The Reckoning. 

I didn’t get much past page four, though, where Buckley refers to a character whose "father served as cultural attaché for Chancellor Hindenburg, in the last days of the Weimar Republic." 

Poor pretentious Bill.  Writing of "Chancellor Hindenburg" is roughly equivalent to writing of secretary of state Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Compared to that idiotic gaffe, it’s a minor point that in the Weimar Republic cultural attachés did not serve any of the many varying chancellors, but rather the German state. 

Imagine, writing a book of over 350 pages on German politics in the 30s and 40s and not knowing what office was held by Paul von Hindenburg, the man who appointed Hitler as chancellor. 

But Bill just goes on and on and on. And why not? After all, he’s "the conservative icon," isn’t he? But what does that say about today’s "conservatives"?

~ Ralph Raico

September 18, 2002

The Passing Scene is edited by Ralph Raico.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com