I am sorry to say that Henry Hyde, the former US representative from Illinois, has died at age 83. As a cub reporter, I was given the opportunity to spend some time with this kind, stately and honorable congressman working on a profile. And what a profile--his, I mean: memorably sharp and chiseled.

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At a closed-door session during the Munich Conference--I mean, the Annapolis Conference--Condoleezza Rice spoke of the empathy she feels for both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis due to her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama "at a time of separation and tension" in the segregated South. According to the Washington Post, Rice's remarks went like this:

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Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to give a talk at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, about my book, The Death of the Grown-Up. It was particularly nice event given that it was moderated by Heritage's Helle Dale who, back in the days when she, as they say, "helmed" the editorial page of the Washington Times, invited me to contribute a column to the op-ed page, thus beginning my incarnation as a weekly columnist. That was in 1999. She later hired me as an editorial writer as well, a job I much enjoyed before leaving it in 2002, basically, to settle down a little to try to write The Death of the Grown-Up...

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Every story about Saudi Arabia's participation in the Munich Conference--I mean, Annapolis Conference--reports the fact that the Saudis have pre-emptively trumpeted their refusal to shake hands with the Israelis. Well, who wants to shake hands with the Saudis? It's not only that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, that most of the foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudi, that its state-run mosques regularly demonize Jews, Americans and other infidels. It is a barbaric country, where freedom of conscience and equality before the law are denied, and where mercy and compassion have no place.

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Michelle Malkin runs down Mike Huckabee's open borders record here. Oh well. It's still a good quotation.

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Quote of the day from GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee: "Every time we put our credit card in the gas pump, we're paying so that the Saudis get rich - filthy, obscenely rich, and that money then ends up going to funding madrassas," schools "that train the terrorists," said Huckabee. "America has allowed itself to become enslaved to Saudi oil. It's absurd. It's embarrassing."

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Had a chance to catch "The Awful Truth" the other night for maybe the third time over the years. The 1937 screwball comedy with Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy (aces-high-larious as the Oklahoma oil man) still delights and would make a fine Thanksgiving weekend entertainment, although it's definitely not children's fare. We often assume that all "old movies" should be rated G for their lack of nudity, bad language, etc., etc., but the subject matter--in this case, infidelity/divorce among the black-tie-and-cocktails set--isn't for kids, even when leavened with witty dialogue (which also isn't really for most kids). Have some fun and watch a bona fide "adult" comedy.

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Read this if you want to find out how truly fortunate we all are that manners have been junked; "ladylike" eradicated; manliness smashed; and humanity makes a pen of pirahnas look like the lads of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

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As it plans to insert Israel into the meat-grinder at Annapolis next week and pull out a "legacy" on the other side, the Bush administration is sounding increasingly desparate in its rhetoric of justification for this perversely villlainous political act. The New York Times explains the Annapolis conference rationale: "The all-out push essentially speeds to the end of the now dormant 2003 `road map' for peace by insisting that the big issues once relegated to later discussion, like the status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees, be addressed immediately, even before the Palestinians begin to dismantle terrorist groups and networks."

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Granted, "Dhimm-information" is a bit of stretch when it comes to neologisms. But we need a new term for melding the concept of disinformation with the promotion of dhimmitude. Here is an example of how it works--or, rather, how it is working. First, here are the facts. Writing at the Counterterrorism Blog, Jeffrey Imm ruined my breakfast--I mean, reported on an upcoming Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal conference to be held in the United Arab Emirates (site of the new Ethipia-shaped home of Brangelina.

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Benazir Bhutto's niece, whose parliamentarian father was mysteriously assassinated while sister Benazir was prime minister, gives us a something to think about before awarding Benazir the democracy halo.

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Flash! Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have just bought a manmade island of the coast of Dubai in the shape of Ethiopia. News accounts tell us they plan to use the reclaimed piece of land to showcase....Guess what? The Dubai boycott of all things Israeli? The quaint effects of sharia law? The homey haunts of what Rep. Pete King once memorably called "Al Qaeda heartland"?

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...on "Lou Dobbs This Week" at 6 pm, and in Indiana tomorrow, speaking about The Death of the Grown-Up to a group at Ball State University.

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Thank you, Roger Kimball.

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As Russia, Iran and Venezuela join the Arab Middle East as wealthy oil powers, it should become panic-makingly obvious that without energy independence, we will have no independence. Period.

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While we wrangle over supporting Musharraf or supporting democracy in our dealings with Pakistan, there's another question to consider: Are we, the US, in a war, or aren't we? There is an air of unserious surrealism to our struggle to neutralize the blackmailing threat of terrorism emanating from the Islamic world--something the crisis in Pakistan exposes all too clearly. In my column this week, I noted the deeply pro-sharia sentiments of Pakistanis, as consistently revealed by periodic polling and news analysis.

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All too many of the trials our courageous forbears underwent in facing down the tyrants of the past are lost to us--comfortable, forgetful, irresponsible heirs that we are. But failing to appreciate and understand their sacrifice puts our own liberty at risk.

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Tomorrow's column takes a look at the conservative split on Pakistan: the Support the Lesser Evil (Musharraf) crowd vs: Democracy Is the Answer crowd. With every day a reminder of Jimmy Carter's catastrophic abandonment of the Shah of Iran in 1978--thus unleashing jihadism in the region (and, not incidentally, empowering Ayatollah Khomeini, a far more repressive leader than the Shah ever was), I go with the Lesser Evil crowd--particularly after watching ballot-box diplomacy yield nothing but gains for radicalism across the Muslim Middle East.

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One phrase that always sticks in my craw is "the Saudi monarch." What monarchy is that--the House of Crude? The Kingdom of Jihad? If we called "King" Abdullah "the Saudi oil-igarch" instead of "the Saudi monarch" would we continue to bow and scrape and generally prostrate our nations before this barbarian?

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Because Israel has spent its entire modern history in a state of siege, surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction, what we tend to think of as "culture wars" over identity and point of view have a dire connection to reality in Israel that our own culture wars have traditionally not had. (For an explanation of how the so-called culture wars in this country became "The Real Culture War" after 9/11, see Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up.)

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WorldNetDaily,com reports: "Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has taken thousands of dollars in cash donations from Islamists under federal investigation for terror-financing, money laundering and tax fraud." If this is the Clinton campaign's idea of how to make us forget about all the Other Crooked Donors So Far--Abdul Rehman Jinnah ($30K, Norman Hsu ($850K Chinatown ($380K, etc., I think they think we're pretty stupid. Are we?

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Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets passed away yesterday. He was 92. Having served his country in the military for three decades, he is famous for one day in particular: August 6, 1945, when, piloting the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, he dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The single blast killed tens of thousands of people. Japan refused to surrender. On August 9, President Truman order a second nuclear strike on Nagasaki, a mission piloted by Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, who passed away in 2004. That explosion killed tens of thousands more.

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..on "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer at about 7:30 p.m.

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In a way, "Oklahoma!" exemplifies the perfect melding of different aspects of America. With music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the show transforms the idiom of the Great Plains into a soaring, folkloric Broadway musical. It is a testament not only to that rich idiom, but also to the genius of the show's creators. They, of course, did not belong to land that was grand, but rather were extremely urbane New Yorkers--Rodgers coming from a prosperous Jewish family, and Hammerstein, of Jewish and Scottish descent, from a prominent theatrical family.

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More Halloween fun. The Sun (UK) reports: "A school was yesterday accused of making teachers dress up as Asians for a day – to celebrate a Muslim festival. "Kids at the 257-pupil primary have also been told to don ethnic garb even though most are Christians.

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Halloween seems like the appropriate day to bring up the eternal masquerade of Hollywood's communists and fellow-travellers as freedom-loving small-"d" democrats. And this Halloween is particularly timely given we are at the 60th anniversary of the House Committee of Un-American Activities hearings (HCUA, by the way, not HUAC, as it is commonly called, I really do think, because HUAC carries a more sinister sound than HCUA). Turner Classic Movies marked the occasion last night with an all-night festival of movies by the Hollywood Ten, who, of course, remain eternal icons of the Left for "refusing to name names" of members of a world communist movement--a movement which the same Left adamantly refuses to admit the existence of. Oh well. That's history, Hollywood-style, for you.

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Lady Justice herself wears a blindfold to ensure impartiality, but today her newest acolytes today are scrutinizing race, gender and sexual orientation before they'll even write a brief. Of course, these new lawyers coming out of Stanford Law School aren't scrutinizing their prospective clients--at least, not that we know of. They're looking hard at their prospective employers. According to an Orwell-transcendent story in the New York Times, these students are ranking the nations top law firms according to "how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have."

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Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, is still running for president, but he's announced he won't be seeking re-election to his congressional seat. Too bad for the country, although I'm sure he'll find far pleasanter things to do--unless, that is, he makes it to the Oval Office. But what a congressional legacy he leaves. Having entered Congress in 1999 to bring America back to its immigration senses, Tancredo had given himself a seemingly impossible task: persuading the nation that there was an illegal ...

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A few choice Oklahoma blogs are buzzing over the way in which the No-Koran 24--the two dozen Oklahoma legislators who have declined gifts of personalized, state-seal-embossed Korans from a government Muslim group--appear to have been set up for their media fall into a vat of PC hogwash. For turning down the gift of a Koran (the book at the basis of Islamic law, which denies all Western notions of human rights), the Oklahoma 24 are being subjected to charges of bigotry and mean-spiritedness. Such charges are as absurd as witchcraft accusations in 17th-century-Salem, but that, of course, doesn't stop our high priests of PC.

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One of the epic successes of the Communist and fellow-travelling Left in this country was its suppression of the Cold War in the popular culture. I refer to to near-total blackout on movies and TV that chronicle the primary struggle of the last century between Freedom and totalitarian Communism.

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Today's column looks at 24 Oklahoma lawmakers who declined to receive a gift of a personalized, state-seal-stamped Koran from an all-Muslim state advisory body. This is surely a surreal confluence of not church and state, but mosque and state, which, under Islam, are always fused in the system of sharia law--a system that denies all Western-style human rights.

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The Washington Post's Terri Sapienza identifies a new culprit in the ongoing investigation into the death of the grown-up: Halloween. In an article called, "From Boo to Eeeww: When did Halloween get so ghastly gruesome," she reveals that adult involvement helps explain the intense gore-ification and even the pornification of the of the holiday. Once upon a time, jack 'o' lanterns and Casper the Friendly Ghost made Halloween about as sweet as candycorns. Now, with bloody and severed limb props and maggots, it's got another vibe going. Apparently, things changed around 1978, the year "Halloween" came out.

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Naivete on a college campus may be indulged or rationalized as "idealism"--behavior or thought based on a conception of how things ought to be, and even seem to be while dreaming beside a well-manicured quadrangle. Naivete on a battlefield, however, is something else again--irresponsible. wasteful and dangerous monkeying around with people's lives and nation's fortunes. I was struck by this on reading a recent New York Times report about a new American effort to "break corruption," as a military commander put it, in Afghanistan.

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About those Hannah Montana tickets for 'tweens averaging $250 a pop (as much as a month's worth of one-hour private music lessons): What has gone haywire is the parental conception of proportion. Between the repressed "Children should be seen and not heard," and the indulged "Children should be showered with fabulously expensive pop concert tickets," there is another way. But it is another way that has become lost to all too many adults of America's vast middle class today.

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When we think of decadence ripe for the overthrow, we usually think of the twisted excess of Ancient Rome, the self-indulgence of the Ancien Regime, the louche years of Weimar. We don't usually think of death by treacle. But that--if this article about the frantic parental bloodletting of cash and emotion into "Hannah Montana," the latest "tween" craze, is to be believed (and, alas, there is no reason not to believe it)--looks to be our sugary downfall.

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One April day this year, the Los Angeles Times reports, Hillary Clinton collected $380,000 from a fund-raiser in just about the poorest section of New York City. That section is Chinatown, where dishwashers and busboys who, in the main, don't speak much English and often work for sub-minimum wages, were somehow able to find, say, $1,000 in their pockets--tips?--for Mrs. Clinton. (By contrast, John Kerry netted $24,000 in 2004. )

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"Counterculture McGoverniks" was what Newt Gingrich aptly called Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton on his becoming Speaker of the House in 1994, as Harvard's Harvey Mansfield reminded us in one of the most lucid essays ever written on the1960s. His essay is called "The Legacy of the Late Sixties," and it appears in a 1997 collection edited by Stephen Macedo called Reassessing the Sixties. (Professor Mansfield warns his readers "not to expect a nonjudgmental treatment framed in the weasel words of social science," so you know it's going to be good.) The New York Times sprang to the Clintons' defense, Mansfield noted, with a flowery editorial "in praise of the counterculture." This editorial, he explained, revealed "by its very appearance in the nation's most prestigious newspaper how far the counterculture had become regnant."

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Back from New Haven where I spoke at a Master's tea to a pleasantly attentive group which--following my D of the G presentation about what happens when an infantilized society that PC-censors itself meets an expansionist Islam that demands such censorship as a point of law--surprised me. Where I expected to hear the undergraduates tell me that, say, Islam wasn't all bad, that I had oversimplified, what emerged instead was a consensus that the West wasn't all good, that I had oversimplified. As the Yale Daily News later put it, "Some students said West blamed Americans for censoring themselves in thought but ignored the censorship she exploys in her own speech by concentrating only on the positive aspects of Western civilization."

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What is new under the sun? Supposedly, the "odyssey years." This is the stretch of time, according to social scientists cited in a column by the New York Times' David Brooks, between adolescence and adulthood--say, between age 20 and age 35--during which careers are tried, commitments are deferred, and no one wants to be called "Mister." If that sounds a little bit like the phenomenon analyzed in my book, The Death of the Grown-Up, it is--but only a little bit. I finally crystallized the difference for myself, but after being interviewed for a Times of London article on the subject, so here it is:

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The Nobel Prize for Peace should be renamed the Nobel Prize for Virtue--with virtue being defined as a set of left-wing attitudes and opinions. Consolation prize for the Gore-itated: A British High Court ruled this week that his magnus opus, "An Inconvenient Truth," contained to many errors to be used as a teaching aid in the British schools without also teaching about the errors. (This judge counted nine.)

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Who thinks this would have happened if Islamic terrorists hadn't destroyed the Twin Towers?

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On October 11, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the following: “I believe that there could be no greater legacy for America than to help to bring into being a Palestinian state for a people who have suffered too long, who have been humiliated too long, who have not reached their potential for too long, and who have so much to give to the international community and to all of us."

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I know the media has pronounced last night's GOP debate "gaffeless," but, while reading up on the event for an appearance on WNYC this a.m., I discovered a massive hole in most of these GOP heads. The issue is the proposed sale of 20 percent of NASDAQ to Dubai Borse, the stock exchange owned by the government of Dubai. The question was straightforward: Should a Dubai company be able to own 20 percent of NASDAQ?

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True confession: I have never followed local politics closely enough. I've always been drawn more to the interplay of nations than of neighbors. But now, as our federal government has renegged on its solemn duty to preserve and protect our border--the baseline of the interplay of nations--I find that the Board of Supervisors, the local planning commission, the county clerk's office, is increasingly where the action is.

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Running through my book, The Death of the Grown-Up, is an examination of what happens to us, to our society, as the boundaries on human behavior shift or disappear altogether. This effects us on a personal level in terms of our own identity--sexual, national, married name or not. It continues in our homes, which are increasingly permeable to the toxic seepage of television and the Internet. It extends to our national borders, which are increasingly porous to aliens and terrorists. And it goes to church, where the world's Catholics, for example, have had to confront secret, line-crossing sexual crimes.

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Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of addressing the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Enders Wimbush was my gallant moderator, and John O'Sullivan was my gracious commentator. The audio is available here.

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wrote a column this week about Ramadan at the White House, but it was really Ramadan at the Pentagon that got me going again. (This is my fourth or fifth annual column touching on official Washington’s post-9/11 “tradition” of Ramadan celebrations.) It was a Washington Times story about the military’s Ramadan service that actually caught my eye. Or, rather, it was the name of the presiding imam, Navy Chaplain Abuhena M. Saifulislam. “Saifulislam” means “Sword of Islam.” It seems that Lieutenant Commander “Sword of Islam” led 100 Islamic faithful, kneeling toward Mecca, in prayer to Allah to celebrate Ramadan at the Pentagon. And that was about it as far as the story went.

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The conclusion of my book interview with Michelle Malkin is up at Hot Air. In this segment, we discuss the links between "the death of the grown-up" and the war we have yet to face up to against expansionist Islam, which, even peacefully, is always accompanied by anti-liberty sharia, or Islamic law.

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The reports out of Burma are devastatingly bleak. Mass killings and incarcerations of monks by the military dictatorship appear to have brought this short season of pro-democracy protest to a bloody halt. Looking back at the pictures--unarmed monks and other Burmese filling city streets by the thousands to march for democracy--I am struck anew by how unprotected these people were against the guns and ruthlessness of the regime, and still they marched. The bravery and evident desparation on display are equally poignant.

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There is something ghastly-surreal about the spectacle of the violent governement assault on anti-junta protestors in Burma: about khaki-clad violence vs. saffron-robed idealism. But the clash is also numbingly familiar. echoing too many other conflicts pitting peoples against brutish dictators, as in Tiananmen Square, 1989. Like the Chinese democracy activists then, the Burmese democracy protestors are looking for help from the outside world. Here's an eye-witness account from the British ambassador to Burma, as relayed by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Wednesday:

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