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authorized more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers and civilian police to protect civilians and humanitarian workers in Darfur. China abstained, and would have vetoed the measure had language not been inserted that “invited” the consent of the Khartoum regime. The National Islamic Front declined the “invitation” and refused to accept the U.N. peacekeeping force.

China’s motivation in all this can’t get any more basic: they have astronomically lucrative oil deals with the Sudanese government. These asymmetrical contracts permit China to suck the country dry of reserves claimed as their exclusive property in exchange for their promised veto. What’s more is that the oil relationship has fostered a secondary arrangement whereby the Sudanese government has contracted Chinese companies (many state-subsidized) to build bridges, roads and other infrastructure that facilitate the extraction and export of their purchased oil. Most sickening is that China’s not merely content to protect their death squad business partners in the UN; they also sell them the very weapons used in the ongoing slaughter. (At one time I could have sworn there was an army of Americans for whom “No Blood For Oil” seemed a mission statement. I’ve yet to see them or their placards swarm Union Square for an anti-China rally.) That’s China, but what about the rest of the UN? From the first Tribune story: “For the first time since 2004, the malnutrition rate, a gauge of the population's overall distress, has crossed what UN officials consider to be the emergency threshold.” A non-stop massacre has been running longer than the television series Lost and the UN just decided that it’s an emergency. The story goes on, “As a result, people in Darfur are beginning to lose hope, and that may be another factor taking a toll on their health, several aid officials said.” That reminds me of a line from Jimmy Breslin’s comic mobster novel, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight: "He died of natural causes as his heart stopped suddenly when six men stuck knives into it." What does this have to do with China’s “life-changing” products? The knives that China’s stuck into Darfur contribute to what’s known as the “China Price.” This is the low, low manufacturing cost China’s able to maintain and use to lure foreign investment. According to Business Week, “In general, it means 30% to 50% less than what you can possibly make something for in the U.S.” Obtaining their natural resources from countries that others refuse to patronize is one of the many unscrupulous ways that China keeps costs down. This contributes to their ability to sell cheap goods to their neighbors. From the second Tribune story:

Cheap Chinese products are flooding China's southern neighbors and consumers in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia are laying out the welcome mat. The products are transforming the lives of some of the poorest people in Asia, whose worldly possessions only a few years ago typically consisted of not much more than a set or two of clothes, cooking utensils and a thatch-roofed house built by hand.

The article is positively celebratory. It does allow this: “The enthusiasm for Chinese goods here is tempered by one commonly heard complaint: maintenance problems.” Well, there are a few more complaints. Aside from the Darfur genocide, here’s what else goes into the production of cheap Chinese goods: industrial slavery, intellectual piracy, environmental catastrophe, and an absolute disregard for health and safety standards. China is indeed awake. As for the staff of The International Herald Tribune –it’s hard to say. The paper is a hodgepodge of international stories, and is presented as a resource for the global community. In that way it’s sort of the United Nations of newspapers. Which explains everything.

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For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a skeptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

For those who missed the sarcasm, The New Statesman is anything but right wing. Their interest in the threat of global warming could only be journalistic. Whitehouse holds a doctorate in astrophysics, and is the former on-line science editor of the BBC—which, as far as I know, gives him two more scientific credentials than Al Gore. So, when he explains:

[W]e are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data,

You’d think people would listen. Why, then, is it a certainty that they won’t? For starters, the anti-Western trend in left wing thought is all-encompassing. The West, so the story goes, has exploited everything it could get its hands on in order to feed its rapacious capitalist machine. The victims include all non-Westerners and, now, the planet itself. This is a very attractive approach for those looking to make a quick judgment along history’s good guy-bad guy lines. Why not? After all, it’s not without some merit. It’s easy to point to the slave trade and colonial rule, and make a sound moral determination in the non-West’s favor. Deeper digging produces some compelling counter-arguments, but if you’re looking for a go-to stance then “the West is evil” is a lay-up. In regards to global warming, the logic proceeds as follows: atmospheric warming is caused by CO2 emissions; CO2 emissions are the result of industrialization; industry is synonymous with the West. Thus, global warming is caused by the West, (the U.S. in particular.) This is tailor-made for an anti-U.S. institution like the United Nations. It’s also compelling stuff for universities, where anti-Western doctrine, and climate data, are generated. (This should get interesting, as China is about to surpass the U.S. as an emissions offender and there are virtually no checks on Chinese industrial pollution.) Out of concern for their careers, university researchers are scared to speak up against standard global warming theories. The other engine driving the global warming scam is none-other than the evil lifeblood of industry itself: American capitalism. Al Gore and co. are fond of saying that when Americans find a model allowing them to make CO2 reduction profitable, they’ll lead the way in more considerate use of the planet. As it turns out, American marketers are far ahead of Al Gore. They’ve found that model. An article in the American Thinker has some interesting data comparing the countries that signed onto the lauded Kyoto treaty on emissions reductions to the U.S., who didn't sign: * Emissions worldwide increased 18 percent. * Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21 percent. * Emissions from non-signers increased 10 percent. * Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6 percent. Clearly, something other than a commitment to international treaties has landed the U.S. in the 6.6 category. A few weeks ago, I read this off the label on my Poland Spring bottle:

The lightest 1?2 liter bottle ever produced*, the new, 100% recyclable Poland Spring Eco-Shape bottle is not only less impactful on the environment, it’s purposely designed to be easy to carry and hold. And because it’s lighter, it requires less energy to make – resulting in a reduction of CO2 emissions.

What thrilling news. I had been so guilt-wracked (not to mention physically burdened) drinking Poland Spring in the past. The company has tapped into the decision making process that most well-meaning people adopt when out shopping. If there’s a regular bottle and a “less impactful” bottle next to it, shoppers will opt for the one that eases their conscience. It’s the same process that drives the casual thinker to choose non-West over West. “Why not?” And it’s a marketing phenomenon with millions, if not billions, behind it. The earth can’t afford to stop warming. Too much money’s riding on that mercury. A year ago, I was touring the Fox News newsroom (Fox News!) when my host told me with pride that they would soon be upgrading everything there to the most state-of-the-art environment-friendly equipment. Why not? Here’s why not. Because, as a letter sent to the UN Secretary General, and signed by 100 prominent scientists, stated, “Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems."

Problems even more real and pressing than how to satisfy our anti-Western self-righteousness. Or how to assuage our own Western guilt by choosing a different bottle of water at the supermarket. So, the planet cools while global warming fear mongers tell the corporations they despise exactly how best to get their dollar. Meanwhile, money and research that could be put towards the relief of a thousand genuine problems goes down the drain. There’s another casualty of the climate madness: the integrity of scientific methodology and debate. People say, “most scientists now agree . . .” having forgotten that consensus of opinion is not a valid factor in scientific determination. Or at least it wasn’t. Now, a show of hands is all it takes to determine that “the debate is over.” This, unlike climate change, is catastrophic. As Whitehouse puts it, “[T]he wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.” Whew! At least he didn’t say “any financial cause, however profitable.” It's Christmas, after all.

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Thus did matters stand until the phony Wolfowitz scandal blew up this spring. On April 18, the Washington Post ran a story under the headline, "Defense Eyes Wolfowitz Friend's Contract." The same day, National Public Radio followed up with "Wolfowitz Faces New Allegations of Favoritism," quoting Ms. Riza's former supervisor, Jean-Louis Sarbib, saying the trip was "unusual and not terribly above board." Graeme Wheeler, a bank managing director, also included the trip among the reasons for his widely publicized demand at the time that Mr. Wolfowitz resign. The very next day, however, Reuters reported that in 2005 the Pentagon's Inspector General had looked into Ms. Riza's trip and found there was "insufficient basis to warrant further investigation." The IG noted that Ms. Riza, who has long experience working with Arab reformers and is fluent in Arabic and Turkish, among other languages, was uniquely well qualified for the position. The New York Times confirmed the substance of the Reuters story on April 20, adding that the IG had found that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had "not exerted improper influence in Ms. Riza's hiring." Oddly, the Times chose to run this news under the misleading headline "Wolfowitz Backed Friend for Iraq Contract in '03.

Nonetheless, then Bank vice president for human resources Xavier Coll, hired a Canadian law firm to investigate the “approval process” for Riza's trip. The Journal adds, “Mr. Coll is known to readers of this page for the dishonest account he gave of his role in authorizing Ms. Riza's raise.” Recently, the paper called and spoke to a bank representative. The investigation had been completed and they found "no basis to conclude misconduct occurred.” From the Journal: “The tab for this fishing expedition? The bank won't say, and Goodmans [the law firm] didn't return our calls. But a source estimates the cost to the bank runs north of $500,000.” The organization charged with determining the most beneficial way in which to distribute aid to the world’s neediest burned half a million dollars on a side dish of slime just to ensure the purging of Paul Wolfowitz. I don’t know what’s most sickening: the self-satisfied relish with which the world’s least needy applauded this spectacle or the fact that Riza’s name was cleared in a media vacuum. Actually, neither. My vote goes to the pathetic paralytic state of despot-coddling the bank so easily resumed after Wolfowitz was gone.

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For a month or so, a poster-sized advertisement emblazoned with the message “Make Games Not War” and bearing a cartoon hand forming a peace sign was pasted on walls of New York City subway stations. The ad, for the 2007 Video Game Awards, was paid for by Spike TV, who created the awards show in 2002. Samuel Jackson hosted the event on December 9.

Here are some results for any pacifists who were unable to catch the broadcast. BEST SHOOTER Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision/ Infinity Ward) BEST MILITARY GAME Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision/ Infinity Ward) GAME OF THE YEAR BioShock This last one in particular offers the most felicitous irony. It turns out that BioShock is an Ayn Rand-inspired shooter game in which players battle their way out of an under-water dystopia. That’s the same Ayn Rand who said:

Whatever rights the Palestinians may have had — I don't know the history of the Middle East well enough to know what started the trouble — they have lost all rights to anything: not only to land, but to human intercourse. If they lost land, and in response resorted to terrorism — to the slaughter of innocent citizens — they deserve whatever any commandos anywhere can do to them, and I hope the commandos succeed.

And also said:

If we go to war with Russia, I hope the 'innocent' are destroyed with the guilty. … Nobody has to put up with aggression, and surrender his right of self-defense, for fear of hurting somebody else, guilty or innocent. When someone comes at you with a gun, if you have an ounce of self-esteem, you answer with force, never mind who he is or who's standing behind him.

Had she only lived long enough to buy an Xbox and pretend to be at war I’m sure she’d have mellowed. As I heard a gray-bearded man put it to his friends while pulling out a hand-held video game on the 6 train, “This keeps me sane.” But isn’t there something slightly insane about an adult culture that thinks it can play pretend war games in lieu of war? Isn’t there something wrong with an adult culture with a video game habit period? After all, the award show ran on Spike TV, not Nickelodeon. Although, had it aired on Nickelodeon its home audience might have been the same. As Diana West points out in her book The Death of the Grown-Up, How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, "one third of the fifty-six million Americans sitting down to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month in 2002 were between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine.” That’s a mandate for idiocy nineteen million strong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adults playing video games or glazing out in front of the occasional cartoon, but clearly there’s a priority problem. Rapper XZIBIT, who was a presenter at the awards, said in a backstage interview: "I have an 11-year old who's a big gamer and I like to play whatever he's playing." Father-son time is a beautiful thing, but you’re not supposed to share your 11-year old’s tastes in recreation.* West argues that Western adults have co-opted more than their kids’ hobbies; they’ve accepted their adolescent world view—most critically, the doctrine of moral relativism. She makes a convincing case that the culture went from being grown-up-driven to adolescent-driven, not in the nineteen-sixties, but in the years immediately following World War II. This was the first time kids had their own money to spend and that established them as a targeted consumer group. An adolescent-directed marketplace blossomed up around them: West writes:

All this new stuff not only satisfied passing teen tastes, it validated them. It worked like this: If Western Electric manufactured Princess extension phones in “dreamy” colors, then teens should want Princess extension phones in “dreamy” colors. It also entrenched such immature tastes. That is, if manufacturers made Princess phones in “dreamy” colors, then, of teens should have Princess phones in “dreamy” colors. The retail relationship between consumer teens and their consumer dreams effectively derailed the adolescent trajectory toward adulthood, stalling and even blocking the transition to more mature tastes and interests.

And the rest is history. Almost. The other necessary component was the consent of the greatest generation. And consent they did. West quotes David Reisman’s famous 1950 study The Lonely Crowd:

Children are more heavily cultivated in their own terms than ever before. But while the educator in earlier eras might use the child’s language to put across an adult message, today the child’s language may be used to put across the advertiser’s and storyteller’s idea of what children are like. No longer is it thought to be the child’s job to understand the adult world as the adult sees it. . . Instead, the mass media ask the child to see the world as [the mass media imagines] “the” child sees it.

West maintains that it was also in the post WWII era that the seeds of cultural and moral relativism were planted. Having just defeated Nazi Germany, the U.S. was understandably loath to adopt any posture or policy that could be said to have the slightest whiff of xenophobia. So, “anything goes” became the guiding principle in a youth-centered world. It’s the noxious simultaneity of moral relativism and adolescent insecurity, fueled by educators and marketing gurus, that, West maintains, is hastening the downfall of Western civilization. So we arrive at history’s most decadent advertising slogan: “Make Games Not War.” Peace-loving Spike TV are also known for airing movie marathons featuring that delightfully sociopathic cold-warrior James Bond. That “delightfully” wasn’t sarcastic; Bond movies are great. But there’s something about the perpetual adolescent sensibility of outlets like Spike TV that seems to require the relegation of survival and war to the realm of pure fantasy. Everyone would be happier if war only existed on movie sets or inside an Xbox, but only a special kind of childish mindset could think it’s so: our decadent Western one. The problem with “Make Games Not War” is that only one side espouses it. There’s another side, and they know no such choice exists. For them, that well-meaning poster is nothing but cause for celebration. West quotes anthropologist Bryan Page, from sometime in the nineteen-fifties: “Play has become the primary purpose and value in many adult lives. It now borders on the sacred.” And what do our enemies hold sacred?

* This piece has been edited and expanded since its original posting.

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From “Piano Man”: Now Paul is a real estate novelist Who never had time for a wife And he’s talkin to Davy who’s still in the navy And probably will be for life That’s not a lyric; it’s a census. And an unremarkable one, at that. A real estate agent who writes and a career military man hardly rise to the level of barstool tragedy. The funny thing is, after about 25 years of trying to prove he’s a rock singer he found, in retirement, something like rock and roll authenticity. As a wine-soaked dumpling of a man with a penchant for wrapping his Mercedes around trees in the Hamptons, he was as close to Keith Moon as he was ever going to get. He even drank after rehab and married a pretty young thing. So, why are we now subjected to a Joel-penned holiday single entitled “Christmas in Fallujah” with lyrics like these?

It's evening in the desert I'm tired and I'm cold But I am just a soldier I do what I am told We came with the crusaders To save the holy land It's Christmas in Fallujah And no one gives a damn The answer comes in the next verse: And I just got your letter And this is what I read You said I'm fading from your memory So I'm just as good as dead Billy Joel claims he received letters from fans of his fighting in Iraq. Soldiers disgusted with the war reached out to him and told of their pain. I believe him and I believe them, but perhaps some Care packages and a USO tour would have been more appropriate. “This song is totally, completely, historically, inaccurate,” Joel said. Except he was talking about his “Ballad of Billy The Kid” from 1973. You’d think he owed his soldier fans a little more, but there isn’t a single concept about the war and the history of the region that’s not conflated beyond meaning in his grab-bag of placard slogans. We came with the crusaders To save the holy land So this is an Israel thing. We are the armies of the empire We are the legionnaires of Rome And an imperial thing. We came to bring these people freedom We came to fight the infidel And a . . .wait, what? They say Osama's in the mountains Deep in a cave near Pakistan But there's a sea of blood in Baghdad A sea of oil in the sand Actually, that’s a fair summation of the state of things before the coalition invaded Baghdad. Now, we can say that Saddam is no longer slaughtering his citizenry and depositing them in mass graves and that the sea of oil is being tapped by Iraqis for Iraqis. And I, for one, am not convinced that Osama is in a cave anywhere anymore. For this song Joel managed to find a young imitation rock singer—a Colin Farrel look-alike with a moniker constructed out of the names of two rock icons. One Cass Dillon has the unfortunate task of being Billy Joel’s mouthpiece for this wrongheaded endeavor. When Joel himself was about Dillon’s age he released his first album “Cold Spring Harbor.” The second song on the record is a lovely faux McCartney number called “You Can Make Me Free.” Looking around pop music today, it’s depressing to note that a watered-down realist isolationism (think Neil Young’s "Living With The War") has overtaken the supposed sound of revolution. Amazingly, Billy Joel never had to worry about being a real rock and roller. It turns out he just had to wait until rock and roll slowed down to his pace.

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In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies.

So, is that “flagrant Islamophobia” or a tragically prescient summation of the predicament in which Steyn now finds himself (sooner than “in a few years” I may add)? In fact, this case is more than a potential misstep for Canadian lawmakers; it’s also an example of “tolerant” Europe’s ability to team up with “tolerant” Canada and “tolerantly” force Canadians to be more “tolerant.” The London Free Press reports that London lawyer Faisal Joseph is leading the complaint against Maclean's. If nothing else, one begins to see why Steyn titled his book America Alone. But, ultimately, this kind of legal leveling of opinion spells disaster for the U.S. too. In a recent response to the CIC charges, Steyn praises America for its First Amendment. It’s true, legislated speech codes may be hard to pass here, but then again they may not be necessary. A few years ago, in another life, I was involved in the writing of a social studies book for South Carolingian third graders. The text was to start with the native tribes of the region and go all the way to the present day. This covered, obviously, slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. One day, after we were well into the creation of the book I received, straight from the local education board, an alarming directive that would require us to go back and revisit a good deal of the work we’d already done. It turned out the word slave was not to be used anywhere in the text. Government sanctioned “tolerance” spreads by osmosis, and if Steyn and Maclean’s are silenced a few miles north of the state of Washington it won’t have far to travel. Soft and cuddly Canada is already the fetish destination of so many enthusiastic multiculturalists in the U.S. I can think of at least fifteen people who swore to me personally they were northbound in the event of Bush’ reelection. I doubt any of them made good on it, but if they did they better watch what they say. Recently I heard comedian George Carlin on a radio show dispensing his yawn-inducing brand of scorned hippie pop-nihilism. In talking about how the world had “jumped off the cliff” and was now in “freefall,” he said he was always on the lookout for censorship coming from the right, but had never expected the PC variety to overtake us from the left. Funny that Mr. Seven-Words-You-Can't-Say was blindsided, because quite a number of fussy right-wing thinkers saw it coming ages in advance. Allan Bloom wrote about it twenty years ago. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz wrote about it decades earlier. This silliness moves so swiftly that Steyn’s ended up writing about his own troubles in real-time. (Note: The Cabal’s own Ali Eteraz has done an unimprovable job, over at comment is free, pointing out the counter-productivity of the CIC’s approach and its net effect on the West’s perception of Islam. He also takes Steyn to task.)

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Russians will never allow for the development of the country along a destructive path, the way it happened in some countries in the post-Soviet space . . . and this sense of responsibility of citizens for their own country is, in my view, the most important index of the fact that our country is strengthening not only economically, not only socially, but also in terms of its domestic politics.

The word choice is arresting: “Russians will never allow for the development of the country . . .” While the elections were almost certainly crooked, one looks at the state of Russia, of Russian identity, and wonders if the not-so-former KGB man is right. Is Russia hopelessly defined by deadly extremes (enormity, cold, submission, starvation, revolution, extermination)? And is the progress of Russian history doomed to be a chain of horrors? Novelist Martin Amis would have us believe it is so. Twelve pages into his fierce novel House of Meetings, the book’s protagonist-narrator casually remembers to head-off a potential semantic misunderstanding:

Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It’s not the USSR I don’t like. What I don’t like is the northern Eurasian Plain. I don’t like the ‘directed democracy’, and I don’t like Soviet power, and I don’t like the tsars, and I don’t like the Mongol overlords, and I don’t like the theocratic dynasts of old Moscow and old Kiev. I don’t like the multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire. I don’t like the northern Eurasian Plain.

House of Meetings is written as a last testament from a crusty Russian émigré to the U.S. and addressed to his American stepdaughter. His indictment of a collective geography and an entire history establishes one of the narrator’s main themes. The Russian experience is total—stretching back in time, straddling a continent, and saturating a mass-psychology. “I worship generalizations,” he says. “And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.” One only need look at the recent headlines about Amis and his criticism of Islamism to realize that narrator and author are, in this case, of like mind. Amis’ narrator repeatedly cites Russia’s alarming demographic trends. Particularly, the fact that the rising death rate has overtaken the plunging birth rate. He calls this telling X the “Russian cross,” and says:

Yes, so far as the individual is concerned, Venus [his stepdaughter], it may very well be true that character is destiny. And the other way round. But on the larger scale character means nothing. On the larger scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster. When you look into it, when you look into the Russian case, you feel the stirrings of a massive force, a force not only blind but altogether insentient, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

It’s Russia in a death spiral. But Amis doesn’t quite believe “character means nothing.” House of Meetings' narrator is planning his suicide and proclaims, “Call me a literalist, but I am only doing what Russia is doing." In other words, the “Russian Cross” is the fulfillment of a long-held national death wish. If Putin has his way with Russia’s constitution, it may be a response to Russians’ constitution. Garry Kasparov, jailed for protesting this last election, wrote of his lock-up experience recently in The Wall Street Journal: “My other concern was food, since it was out of the question to consume anything provided by the staff. (Nor do I fly Aeroflot. "Paranoia" long ago became an obsolete concept among those in opposition to the Putin regime.)” What’s the flip-side of this atrophied paranoia? If you’ve ceased to doubt that you can be watched, intruded upon and violated at every turn might you not just as easily, depending on your disposition, lose your skepticism about an omnipotent savior? This is the at the heart of all religious belief, and I think the case can be made that thrall to Russian leadership has always been a religious matter. It was no less a figure than Mr. Glasnost himself, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came out in support for Putin’s party before Sunday’s election. Gorbachev said, “It is a fact that within Russia Putin is supported by up to 80 per cent of the population. For me that is a more persuasive argument as I live in Russia.” It is a persuasive argument, indeed. Next we move on to . . .

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During the video, bin Laden's image moves for only a total of about 3 1/2 minutes in two segments, staying frozen the rest of the time while his remarks continue.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it might have resulted from a technical glitch while Al Qaeda passed the video through a variety of computer sites to mask its cyber trail.

What’s not mentioned is that the "freezes" occur several times, and only while current events are being discussed. In other words, there isn’t a second during which Osama bin Laden can be seen talking about anything after 2004. If I was in charge of A/V the day that tape was shot I’d have been pretty thorough about making sure it was glitch-free. Since then, there’s been more audiotapes and narration over still pictures. Dr. Zawahiri, on the other hand, practically has his own vlog. He’s turned out a long series of up-to-the-minute videos, some as long as an hour and, as far as I know, absent of glitches. Does al Qaeda’s number two have better equipment and more capable videographers than the world’s most wanted man? At this point, I concede I have no answers to questions 1 and 2. I don’t begin to have a technical explanation as to how recordings may have been doctored, etc. And if I see a clip of Osama bin Laden actually talking about, say, Iraq’s al-Maliki government or Annapolis I’ll readily accept the fact. I merely find it all a bit curious. As to question 3, the only people who would make a big deal of bin Laden’s being dead (or not provably alive) are in the Bush administration. But after “mission accomplished” and “last throes” maybe they have learned something about hubris after all.

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