Wedged in between Christmas and New Year came this item from The Washington Times' Bill Gertz. Looking ahead to 2008, I believe it will  develop into one of important stories of the year. 

Muslim pressure

Pro-Muslim officials at the Pentagon are putting political pressure on one of the U.S. military's most important specialists on Islamist extremism, according to defense officials.

Stephen Coughlin, a specialist on Islamic law on the Joint Staff, met recently with Hasham Islam, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England's close aide. The officials said Mr. Islam, a Muslim who is leading efforts for the Defense Department's outreach to Muslim groups, sought to convince Mr. Coughlin to take a softer line on Islam and Islamic law elements that promote extremism.

There is also evidence that a whispering campaign is under way to try and discredit Mr. Coughlin as a "Chri ...

I agree with my good friend Michelle Malkin that the American infusion of troops into  Iraq, well known as "the surge,"  was The Story of 2007. Certainly not the Virginia Tech massacre, and not the Barry Bonds steroid scandal, as MSM organizations maintain.

And I agree with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard that Gen. David Petraeus is the Man of the Year--not Vladimir Putin as determined by Time magazine.

That doesn't mean, of course, that The Story of the Year  has an ending, or that The Man of the Year's hour is  over.

Clearly, what happens next in and around Iraq will be the story of 2008 just as much---and in a way more so--than the selection of the next president.

I just reread my own columns discussing the surge to reconsider my perceptions and reservations, and see how they have fared as events have unfolded.

The first surge column dates ...

Michael Kidd is the man at the back of this photo, the one behind,  from L to R, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse, Dolores Gray and Gene Kelley. The picture is a publicity still from one of my  all-time favorite movies,   "It's Always Fair Weather," a positively brilliant musical comedy about postwar America told through the lives of  three ex-GIs who reunite in New York City ten years after the war's end.

Playing one of the GIs was Michael Kidd. It was his debut in front of the camera. But he made his remarkable career behind the scenes, both on the stage  ("Guys and Dolls," among many others) and on the screen ("The Band Wagon,& ...

Just got a Christmas greeting from my favorite Army colonel, LTC Allen West (ret.), recently back from Afghanistan. You may remember Col. West--I guess I should say at this point "no relation" except, of course, friendship.

Col. West is the commander who, back in the early days of Iraq, came to national attention for having fired off his gun near the head of a suspected insurgent in order to extract information about  ambush and assassination plots targeting him and his men. After this interrogation, there were no more attacks on Col. West or his men.

But there was a big. fat, PC controversy. The New York Times recounted it thus: "Expressing concern that his behavior could send the signal that abuse was acceptable as a means to an end, the Army relieved Colone ...

I've heard various stories about how insistent Daniel Peterson, a West Indian immigrant to Canada, was when it came to making sure his five children got musical educations. One of those children was Oscar Peterson, the magnificent jazz pianist, who died today at age 82. How exceedingly fortunate the entire world is that Daniel Peterson was such a good father.

Time to give the Christmas carols a rest and listen to Oscar. Me, I'm heading first for "You Stepped Out of a Dream."

Oscar Peterson, RIP.

..."Lou Dobbs Tonight," tonight , which starts at 7pm EST on CNN.

There is something sick and lunatic about our lawmakers' and media's obsession with the destructon of CIA tapes of  waterboarding  a couple of senior jihadist leaders--tapes the CIA was under no obligation to make in the first place.

But there is a greater problem here.

What does it say about our desire to survive as a nation when our leaders are more concerned with protecting our mortal enemies from temporary duress (35 seconds of waterboarding is considered a long session) than with saving American lives?

They say they are concerned with America's continued moral well-being. There is no degradation of our precious moral high ground (if that's what they want to talk about) in coercing actionable intelligence from jihad leaders. Such coercion, including waterboarding, is not undertaken to procure phoney testimonies in a show trial, to punish political opposition, or for sadistic delight. It is undertaken to save American li ...

That's the title of Chapter 4 of my book The Death of the Grown-Up. Too bad I couldn't have included the following report out of North Carolina, where a Christmas pageant erupted into a melee... among the parents in the audience. According to the principal:

...chairs were thrown, obscenities were yelled and three mothers physically punched each other while two other mothers attempted to break up the fight.

Several people called police, but the twin sisters [parents] involved in the fight had left by the time they arrived, according to Roberts.

An e-mail from Superintendent Terry Grier to media Wednesday morning said that the three female parents involved had a history of disliking each other.

Oh. Well, that explains it.

The full story is here;

http://www.myfoxwghp.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=5257845&version=10 ...

Lawrence Auster at View from the Right offers some  trenchant  analysis  pertaining to my interview with Pat Buchanan on C-SPAN BookTV's "After Words" show last weekend:

As for Buchanan, on the positive side, Buchanan's central theme is in my view the central theme, namely that if a country fails to make its own countryhood primary in its politics, its economics, and its moral system, everything that the country does only serves its own undoing.

On the negative side, Buchanan remains deeply naive on the subject of Islam, refusing to see it as a threat to America; or, like the neocons, he says that Islam is an existential danger to Europe, but not to America. As though the Islamization of Europe would not represent the most profound threat to America. In my view Buchanan's blindness to the real nature and program of Islam is explained by his long-standing animus against Israel. To speak of Islam as a ...

Daniel Pipes has written a must-read analysis demonstrating the correlation between infusions of Western aid into the Palestinian Authority and spikes in Palestinian homicides (both terrorist and criminal, both Israeli and Palestinian victims). While the West clings to a tattered faith in the belief that any amount of money spent on the PA is worth it if it buys "moderate" behavior from Palestians, Pipes shows, using a stunning set of graphs prepared by research analyst Stephen Stotsky of CAMERA, this faith in money buying moderation is delusional.

He writes: If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, "occupation," and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.
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