Slideshow of Iraqi election – Photographs from Iraq’s election set to Aaron Copland’s ”Fanfare for the Common Man”. Via King of Fools

World’s smallest Pacman game – Via King of Fools from a post suitably titled “Timewaster of the Day”

It’s official – North Korea has admitted that it has produced nuclear weapons. Talk about the world’s worst kept secret.

Has President Bush transformed the electorate? – Michael Barone, perhaps the most knowledgeable source regarding the American electorate, thinks he has. Via Betsy’s Page

Mark Steyn rains on Europe’s parade – From LGF

Now I take the point that “democracy” - as in elections - isn’t every thing. In the development of successful nations, the universal franchise is usually the last piece of the puzzle, as it was in Britain. Anyone can hold an election: Mugabe did; so did Charles Taylor, the recently retired Psycho-for-Life of Liberia. The world’s thugocracies have got rather skilled at being just democratic enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the international observers: they kill a ton of people, put it on hold for six weeks and then, when the UN monitors have moved on, pick up their machetes and resume business as usual.

I prefer to speak of “liberty” or, as Bush says, “freedom”, or, as neither of us is quite bold enough to put it, capitalism - free market, property rights, law of contract, etc. That’s why Hong Kong is freer than Liberia, if less “democratic”. If I had six or seven centuries to work on things, I wouldn’t do it this way in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the “war on terror” is more accurately a race against time - to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they’re spending so much time doing so, they’ve left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about.

The Boxer Metaphor – Victor Davis Hanson reflects on Barbara Boxer and her treatment of Condi Rice

This is all haywire. According to the 1950s Democratic mythology that we all grew up with, the stereotypical aggressor in such an unfair exchange should have been a senior Southern reactionary male, replete with drawl and barely contained racist anger, who ambushes the upstart and distorts the record in an act of name-calling—before hitting the airwaves to besmirch her further and, finally, to cut and paste the exchange into crass political ads to raise money for his own entrenched sinecure.

What in the world has happened to us?

Democratic idealism that once alone gave the nation its needed social safety net, civil rights legislation, and environmental protection is becoming ossified and in danger of ensuring a permanent party of strident second-guessing and deductive furor at the loss of almost all political power. A majority of the state legislatures and governorships is lost. The Senate is lost. The House is lost. The Presidency is lost—the Supreme Court almost. Whether Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, ‘minorities’ no longer have any need of liberal gate-keepers—or of a particular patron like Barbara Boxer.

Good news from Afghanistan, Part 9 – Arthur Chrenkoff rounds up a month’s worth of good news from Iraq.

I’ve added some photographs from my trip to Bryce Canyon National Park in September 2001. Rachelle and I spent a week visiting National Parks and Monuments in southern Utah and Northern Arizona. Bryce Canyon was our first stop.

I plan to continue adding photos of my older trips as well as adding some pictures from my more recent trips.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Global Throng – An amalysis of the efforts of liberal elites to discredit America’s progress since 9/11

Then there was our media’s hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam’s gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world’s far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.

What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Hard Road to Democracy

The world after September 11 has reminded us of three other lessons as well. Democracies rarely attack each other and thus the greater the number of them, the less likely is war itself. Citizens vent better through ballots than bullets. And freedom is innate to all born into this world rather than the sole domain of the West.

If the past is any guide to the future, that hard road to democracy in the Middle East will create as much immediate chaos and caricature of President Bush’s new idealism as it does enduring stability and eventual praise—but only long after he is gone.