A graduate of West Point and veteran of the first Gulf War writes to the Washington Post regarding its series on Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire.

Though it is not my goal to exonerate those who shot Tillman – particularly without all of the facts – it is worth pointing out that fratricide is a sad reality of war. Living under the constant threat of enemy fire, soldiers must learn to think and act quickly. What turned out to be Tillman and an Afghan militiaman on that ridge in Khost could have easily been members of an attacking force.

If we examine the chain of events that led to Tillman’s premature death, it is convenient to look at the decision to split the platoon, the botched communications and the pressure to get “boots on the ground” in a nearby sector. All of these, however, miss the mark. The reality of Tillman’s death is that he was on that desolate ridge in Afghanistan seeking out the murderer of thousands of innocent American civilians. If we are going to assign blame for the tragic loss of this American patriot, let’s start and end with Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists.

Now, this brings a whole new meaning to the term ”nanny state”.

What could be better than Victor Davis Hanson writing about J.R.R. Tolkien? Today he wonders if Europe will, like Tolkien’s Ents, wake up and discover that they still have strength left, after all.

Tolkien always denied an allegorical motif or any allusions to the contemporary dangers of appeasement or the leveling effects of modernism. And scholars bicker over whether he was lamenting the end of the old England, old Europe, or the old West – in the face of the American democratic colossus, the Soviet Union’s tentacles, or the un-chivalrous age of the bomb. But the notion of decline, past glory, and 11th-hour reawakening are nevertheless everywhere in the English philologist’s Lord of the Rings. Was he on to something?

More specifically, does the Ents analogy work for present-day Europe? Before you laugh at the silly comparison, remember that the Western military tradition is European. Today the continent is unarmed and weak, but deep within its collective mind and spirit still reside the ability to field technologically sophisticated and highly disciplined forces – if it were ever to really feel threatened. One murder began to arouse the Dutch; what would 3,000 dead and a toppled Eiffel Tower do to the French? Or how would the Italians take to a plane stuck into the dome of St. Peter? We are nursed now on the spectacle of Iranian mullahs, with their bought weapons and foreign-produced oil wealth, humiliating a convoy of European delegates begging and cajoling them not to make bombs – or at least to point what bombs they make at Israel and not at Berlin or Paris. But it was not always the case, and may not always be.

The Netherlands was a litmus test for Europe. Unlike Spain or Greece, which had historical grievances against Islam, the Dutch were the avatars of the new liberal Europe, without historical baggage. They were eager to unshackle Europe from the Church, from its class and gender constraints, and from any whiff of its racist or colonialist past. True, for a variety of reasons, Amsterdam may be a case study of how wrong Rousseau was about natural man, but for a Muslim immigrant the country was about as hospitable a foreign host as one can imagine. Thus, it was far safer for radical Islamic fascists to damn the West openly from a mosque in Rotterdam than for a moderate Christian to quietly worship in a church in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria. And yet we learn not just that the Netherlands has fostered a radical sect of Muslims who will kill and bomb, but, far more importantly, that they will do so after years of residency among, and indeed in utter contempt of, their Western hosts.

One of the big stories in the National Football League this year is Peyton Manning’s assault on Dan Marino’s single season record of 44 touchdown passes. Marino isn’t excited about the prospect of his record being surpassed this year.

The quarterback who threw 48 touchdown passes for the Dolphins in 1984 watches the Indianapolis Colts quarterback now and has accepted that one of his most cherished records likely will fall.

And Marino is not exactly loving the idea.

“I wouldn’t be human if I told you that I want to see someone else beat it,” Marino said of the record. “If anybody is going to do it, you’d like to see a guy like Peyton because of what he’s done and the type of person that he is.”

With 44 touchdown passes in the books already, and just four games to go, Manning needs only four more to tie the mark. He’s been averaging almost that many per game this season, so it is extremely likely that the record will fall. As somebody who grew up in South Florida watching Marino throw a bunch of touchdown passes for the Dolphins, and a fan who watched Peyton Manning during his career at Tennessee, I must admit to mixed feelings about Manning’s assault on the record book. I am sorry that Marino’s name will not be at the top of the list, but he is assured a spot in the Hall of Fame, and from my perspective, if the record is going to fall who better than Manning to own it.

In a question and answer format, Peggy Noonan shares her thoughts about Hillary Clinton.

So how will she spend her time the next two years or so?

She will continue as the peerless fund-raiser of her party. She very much believes in money and its power to ensure success. She will continue to reach out to conservative opinion makers. She likes to surprise them by asking them to come by or go to lunch. This is bold and shrewd; it leaves them “surprised” and “curious,” the first step toward “more impressed than I wanted to be.” It won’t change their minds, but to some small degree she hopes it will declaw them. She will continue to quietly pork-barrel the left and push base-friendly issues while speaking more and more about improving the military and national security.

But wait a second, she can’t win her party’s nomination that way. The primary voting base of the Democratic Party is leftist.

Yes, but in her case it doesn’t matter. The base of the party will be with her, for two reasons. First, they know her history and know her. They believe she sees the world as they do but does certain things to survive. She was woven into the left and knew everyone on the left for 25 years.

Second and just as important, after the trauma of the Kerry loss, after the morass of doubt and depression in which the party now finds itself, she will seem to be one thing they really want: the person who can win. Because she is a winner. She always has been. The base will make a calculation not unlike the one she has made: We can play moderate to win, no problem.

You make it sound like a Hillary candidacy is inevitable.

She is inevitable as a candidate, but not as a president. There will be serious drawbacks and problems with her candidacy. When she speaks in a large hall she shouts and it is shrill; she sounds like some boomer wife from hell who’s unpacking the grocery bags and telling you that you forgot not just the mayo but the mustard.

That’s fixable, to some degree. What may not be fixable is that many voters associate her with a time of scandal and bad behavior. I mean not Monica, which the Clintons always pretend is The Scandal, but every other scandal of the Clinton era: FBI files, illegal fund-raising, sleazy pardons, the whole ugly mess. There will be some who associate her with the cultural disaster that was the Clinton presidency. There will be those who remember she and he led the country down a path both dark and merry while Osama tapped out his plans on a laptop in a cave.

Old media will attempt to insulate a Clinton campaign from these criticisms and her other negatives, just as it tried to shield John Kerry in this year’s election. This time around, the blogosphere stayed on the stories the media tried to spike and kept the pressure on until the MSM covered them. Next election could be different, however. Old media has four years to plan for Hillary’s campaign, and four years to plan for how to combat the blogosphere and its citizen journalists. To a certain degree, I think this has already started with MSM attack pieces coming after the election criticizing the entire blogosphere for the actions of a few. Also, throughout the election, old media constantly referred to bloggers as “right-wing” and “unprofessional”. Look for more attempts like these to occur and the frequency increase, as the MSM seeks to save itself and its chosen candidates.

Yes, orange is contagious. And I don’t say that just because of where I work.

JustOneMinute linked to an NRO editorial on the crisis in Ukraine.

But make no mistake, good feeling should rule the day. We say to the democratic demonstrators of Ukraine: We are proud of what you have wrought, and in recent weeks, everyone around the world who truly prizes liberty has been Orange.

So in that spirit, I am joining JustOneMinute and The Myopist in changing my header color to orange to show my support for the protesters in Ukraine.

Arthur Chrenkoff links to a post on Iraq the Model, where Omar explains how he became acquainted with the sides of the blogosphere. Chrenkoff then goes on to explain his own introduction to the West.

Living for the first fifteen years of my life behind the Iron Curtain, I - and many others, even those older and wiser - had a somewhat skewed view of the world. For us, the world was divided into the communist part and the capitalist part, the East and the West. The communist world was dreadful, and 90 per cent of us imprisoned inside desired nothing more than to see the Evil Empire crumble and fall. Then there was the legendary West, the world of democracy, freedom and capitalism, inhabited by happy people who enjoyed their liberty and prosperity and were as hostile to communism as indeed we were. The Party told us the West was the Enemy. But we knew that was not the case; since we wanted to be like the West, The West couldn’t be our enemy, it was only the enemy of our communist overlords, and therefore our friend. The world seemed so simple then.

I was sixteen and a half years old when I arrived in Australia in November 1988. I had so many other things to do with my time (like learn the language, for starters) that the political reality did not hit me straight away. It dawned on me slowly over time: my old Polish world-view was a sham. Or at least half of it was. The part about the overwhelming majority of my fellow residents of the Evil Empire wanting freedom and democracy was still right. The part about the West being full of… well, Westerners, wasn’t.

You can imagine my shock and disappointment upon discovering that only a minority of the inhabitants of the Free World were truly committed to the ideas of liberal democracy, capitalism and anti-communism. Another minority was in various shades and degrees opposed to, or critical of, one or more of these concepts, and the group in the middle was largely indifferent and disinterested - not quite alienated from their own society, but too busy or too bored to fight against its enemies.

It is truly sad that some people can’t lay aside politics long enough to see that building democracy and bringing freedom to Iraq is a good thing. If it happens to make this country safer or put a brutal dictator out of power, then so much the better. And even if it doesn’t achieve these goals, it was still the right thing to do.

Dean Esmay has some thoughts of his own about this, too.

Grandpa might be misguided about the war in Iraq, but on this he is right: when you give your word, you need to honor it.

While my wife and I were visiting my folks in South Florida for Thanksgiving, we spent some time at Everglades National Park. We went to Shark Valley on the northern edge of the park, which gets its name from the Shark River Slough, a broad watery plain, which drains into the Shark River. Water from Lake Okeechobee flows through this area from the north-northeast to the southwest into Florida Bay. The Shark River Slough is commonly called “the river of grass”, for the tall sawgrass marsh which covers the Florida limestone. Shark Valley features a 15 mile loop road, open to hiking and bicycling, and a tram tour of the loop.

Shark Valley

The Red-shouldered Hawk is the most common hawk found in the Everglades.

The Great White Heron is a tropical wading bird related to the Great Blue Heron, and in North America is most often found in South Florida. Great Egrets are found throughout the world. The North American subspecies can be found as far north as Southern Canada. [Note: I originally misidentified this bird. See this comment for details.]

An Anhinga suns itself to dry its wings. It dives underwater to catch fish. This one is male; female Anhingas have a lighter colored neck.

The Great Blue Heron is found throughout the United States. It is a wading bird closely related to the Great White Heron.

A Great Blue Heron spreads its wings.

Tri-color Herons are a cross breed of the Great Blue and White Herons.

The king of the Everglades: the American Alligator. We watched as this alligator swam gracefully through the water.

The alligator is central to the survival of the Everglades. Alligators dig out pockets in the limestone, known as “Gator holes”. During the dry season which occurs from December through April, these holes become an oasis for many of the park’s insects, turtles, fish, and birds.

The American Alligator is no longer an endangered species in Florida. They are commonly found in the fresh water sawgrass marshes of the park.

Also, found within the park’s boundaries is the American Crocodile, an endangered species whose only remaining habitat in the United States is the Southern tip of Florida. Everglades National Park is the only place in the world where both alligators and crocodiles exist in close proximity. Crocodiles in the Everglades are located along the coastal areas in the brackish waters of Florida Bay.

The landscape of the Florida Everglades. Taken from atop the viewing tower at the mid-point of the tram tour. The clumps of trees that can be seen in the distance are hardwood hammocks. The hammocks are pockets of limestone rising above the sawgrass prairie which have been built up over time with sediment deposited by the water flowing through Shark River Slough. South Florida is a sub-tropical region, so the hammocks support both tropical trees, such as mahogany, gumbo limbo, and cocoplum, and temperate trees, like live oak, red maple, and hackberry. Many types of orchids and ferns grow under the shade of the tall trees of the hardwood hammock.

Another alligator along the side of the road.

A Purple Gallinule walks upon the spatterdock.

Big Cypress National Preserve

Next, we decided to drive a bit farther down Tamiami Trail to Big Cypress National Preserve Visitor Center. In front of the Visitor Center, the park service has built a viewing platform, which overlooks a stretch of the canal alongside Tamiami Trail. I took the next series of photographs from this vantage point.

Florida Gar is a freshwater fish found mostly in the lakes, rivers and canals of South Florida.

The body temperature of an alligator is dependent upon the temperature of its environment. To maintain a constant body temperature, alligators will move in and out of the water, sunlight and shade, remaining motionless for long periods of time. This behavior allows an alligator to survive on less food. This can be especially important if the dry season in the Everglades is extended, resulting in fewer food sources. An alligator’s diet includes insects, crabs, crayfish, fish, frogs, snails, turtles, snakes, wading birds, raccoons, otters, deer, and other alligators.

A Great Blue Heron observes as an alligator swims to the opposite bank of the canal.

One last photograph of a Great Blue Heron.

My wife and I drove to my parent’s home on our recent trip to Florida. I am glad we didn’t run into one of these.