zenpundit.com

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE DEPARTMENT:

In a rare gesture of graciousness seldom seen among Democratic leaders in recent years – or in Washington in general for that matter – Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Dasche had this to say:

“Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said Bush deserved “great credit” for his leadership during the war and praised the work of the military. Days before the war began, Daschle had blamed Bush’s failed diplomacy for making the fighting necessary and was criticized for his remarks.

“In 21 days, we eliminated somebody who for 20 years has repressed and tortured his own people and posed a serious security risk,” Daschle said.”

NEO-COMMUNISTS PART II by David Horowitz

RITING ON THE WALL:

Had the following cogent comment about Iraqi Shiites in response to the Tom Friedman column:

Friedman wrote: “This is the most important power struggle in the Middle East today. For now, the Iraqi Shiite clergy in Najaf are weak. They don’t have many senior clerics. I kept it that way. But you can’t just install your own Iraqi Shiite leaders. They will have to emerge on their own. You need to create the conditions in Najaf whereby students can come back and the natural Iraqi-Arab Shiite traditions can flower again to counter the Iranians.”

RITING responded:

easier said than done, mind you, but he’s right. the seminaries need to be up and running even faster than the government. this will serve a dual purpose: first, laying the groundwork for a new generation of shi’a clerics not trained in qom that follow afghani more closely than, say, khomeini and, second, it will distract those pesky clerics who apparently do want to run things right now. they’ll have to play academic politics. and god knows that takes enough time and energy that you can’t possibly run a country simultaneous to it.

THE NEO-COMMUNISTS:

David Horowitz assails the post-Cold War, post-9/11 Hard Left.

ASSESSING THE ORIGINS OF GENIUS

A scientist postulates that Albert Einstein and Sir Issac Newton may have been suffereing from Asperger’s Syndrome. Einstein was a late talker as a child but the region of his brain that dealt with mathematical reasoning was found to be after his death 15 % larger than normal. Later in life Newton, the inventor of the physics that reigned supreme until the coming of Einstein and Heisenberg, became quite obsessed with theological issues not unlike Einstein’s colleague, the great mathematician Kurt Godel who died paranoid and consumed with demonological studies.

An interesting question is to ask if the most profoundly gifted among us, the tiny fraction of 1 % of the population whose I.Q.’s measure at least 180 or surpass our current psychometric capabilities to even assess accurately, have brains that are phsyiologically different from the rest of us but alike to each other.

Flowers for Algernon anyone ?