The subtitle of Michael Barone's useful book, Hard America, Soft America, is "Competition Vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future."

I thought of the book yesterday while reading yesterday's Washington Post article on the latest trend in Soft America: Cuddling parties. Here's an excerpt (caution - read with an empty stomach):

If Reid Mihalko is right, nearly all of us are desperate for someone, anyone, even someone we've just met, to hold us, rub our feet, stroke our hair. And because this is about healing, this someone might give us a long, soul-baring kiss. Then, our needs fulfilled, we might venture back into the real world, boasting that we'd been to a cuddle party, the grandest social experiment since the 1970s brought us primal screams and group rebirthings.

If Reid Mihalko is wrong, then the scores of people who've been paying him for the privilege of letting strangers spoon with them are really, really weird.

But let's take the optimistic view. Let's celebrate the cuddle party, a six-month-old trend that started in Manhattan but feels decidedly West Coast. It hit Washington recently for the first time. It is run by Mihalko and his business partner -- two self-proclaimed (that is, uncredentialed) sex and romance coaches.

Everybody needs their "daily recommended allowance of touch," says Mihalko, standing in a suite in the Hotel George on Capitol Hill last Saturday with the blissed-out expression common among gurus. "We live in a very touch-deprived society."

Mihalko is a strapping blond fellow with big teeth and a superhero jaw. Today he is wearing a Superman T-shirt stretched across his muscled chest and a pair of orange flannel pajama bottoms. He keeps invoking his favorite word, "touch." He says that his mission is to encourage "touch-positive" behavior. He says things like "everybody has concerns regarding touch" and "affectionate touch doesn't need to lead to sex." He also likes the word "confronting," as in, "intimacy can be really confronting for people."

Thirteen people arrive, mostly in twos and fours, at 1 p.m. They change into pajamas and put on name tags. World music and jazz soften the mood. Mihalko asks them to gather in a "welcome circle" on the blankets arranged on the floor. He calls himself "your cuddle lifeguard" and introduces the other organizer, Marcia Baczynski, who wears thick-rimmed hipster glasses and pajama bottoms printed with a Froot Loops design.

Mihalko tells people to discuss their "cuddle boundaries" and turns them loose. Within minutes, he is bundled up with three women, his legs intertwined with theirs, his expression beatific. Elsewhere in the room, there is foot stroking and a four-person back-massage chain. An exotic dancer, Jade Patten, 25, massages the hand of a 28-year-old Web site developer named Robbe Richman. There is discussion about society's cuddling hang-ups, and someone makes reference to Plato being "touch-negative..."

Adult men and women groping each other in Froot Loops pajamas, moaning about being "touch-deprived" and testing their "cuddle boundaries" while calypso music plays softly in the background.

Have you heard of anything so self-indulgently 9/10? What will it take for these people to grow up?

You've heard about the two men who were busted for allegedly plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station. You may not have heard that one of the men, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani national living in Jackson Heights, New York, had run into problems with immigration authorities.

According to this article, Siraj was "jailed for three days in February in connection with an immigration matter."

And according to this article, Siraj's uncle said his nephew "would not do anything to hurt his family because the family is due in court Oct. 21 to fight a deportation proceeding."

A deportation officer e-mailed me to say, "I am now guessing that he either entered illegally or entered as a student and violated status (by working, etc) and was placed in removal proceedings - hard to tell. Either way, he doesn't appear to be here legally if in removal proceedings..."

It wouldn't be the first time a Middle Eastern militant NYC bomb plotter took advantage of our catch-and-release approach to immigration enforcement. As I noted in this column,

Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb-builder, entered the U.S. illegally through Canada in 1996 and 1997. He claimed political asylum based on alleged persecution by Israelis, was released on a reduced $5,000 bond posted by a man who was himself an illegal alien, and then skipped his asylum hearing after calling his attorney and lying about his whereabouts. In June 1997, after his lawyer withdrew Mezer's asylum claim, a federal immigration judge ordered Mezer to leave the country on a "voluntary departure order." Mezer ignored the useless piece of paper. He joined a New York City bombing plot before being arrested in July 1997 after a roommate tipped off local police.

For more on the deportation abyss, click here.

Daniel Pipes had a good piece earlier this week on a Muslim hoax crime. In a follow-up post on his blog, he notes that there have been at least four other instances in which American Muslims "won themselves vast sympathy as victims of 'hate crimes,' only to have it turn out that they were actually the perps."

Don't miss this hatchet job on our friends at powerline by Jim Boyd, deputy editorial page editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

As Paul Mirengoff ("Deacon") notes in his rebuttal, "Boyd spends half of his column attacking Rudy Boschwitz, Norm Coleman, and his fellow editors and then claims he's run out of space to respond to the key arguments of Rocket Man and Trunk."

Hugh Hewitt is spot on:

[P]oor, embarrassed Jim Boyd has performed a service, even in his humiliation. His exposure as a blustery, bullying and ultimately bitter hack is another warning sign in a month of such warnings to old media. The rules have changed. The monopoly is broken. You can't ignore the truth or the people who publicize it, and if you slander them, they have the tools of both rebuttal and exposure.

Interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about John O'Neill, co-author of Unfit for Command. Although many of John Kerry's defenders say the Swift Boat veterans are basically undercover Bush operatives, the Times reports that:

* O'Neill voted for Al Gore in 2000;
* he has described President Bush to several friends as an "empty suit;"
* of the leading candidates for national office, regardless of party, his favorite is Sen. John Edwards.

More on O'Neill in this morning's Washington Post.

Lawrence Altman of the New York Times reports that Brazilian health officials have stopped using Chiron's vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella after "an unexpectedly high number of children who received it experienced serious allergic reactions in an immunization program last week. The reactions included rashes and anaphylactic shock, a potentially fatal allergic condition." At least 125 children experienced the reactions.

The experience in Brazil offers lessons here in the U.S. While scientific studies have not established a link between MMR and autism, other side effects from MMR are well documented. Even pro-vaccination organizations acknowledge this. Meanwhile, measles, mumps and rubella are extremely rare in the U.S. These diseases usually do not lead to horrible adverse health outcomes.

Of course, vaccination is primarily responsible for the low incidence rates. There is no question that it is in society's interest to have a high vaccination rate. Any parent who is interested in doing what is best for society should make sure his or her child gets the MMR vaccine. But the interests of society and the individual sometimes diverge.

Dr. Eugene Robin, who before his death was a professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine, provided some reflections on the vaccine benefit/risk tradeoff here. An excerpt:

[I]n the case of vaccines, there is another problem, the shifting of the ratio of number of cases of the given disease to the complications caused by the vaccine. This process can be called the cross-over point and can be illustrated as follows. Consider that a highly effective vaccine becomes available and as a result, with the passage oftime, there is a progressive decrease in the incidence of the disease and, thus, in the mortality and other complications associated with the disease. However, all things being equal, the percent of adverse events (complications) associated with the vaccine remains constant.

A point will be reached, the cross over point, where the complication rate of the vaccine for individual patients will be higher than the adverse effects of the disease. At this point, for individuals, the wise thing might be to refuse the vaccine.

I can't speak to the risk/benefit tradeoff in Brazil, but if you live in the U.S., the risk of experiencing serious side effects from MMR exceeds the risk of a serious adverse health outcome from mumps, measles, or rubella.

An officer who served with John Kerry in Vietnam said Thursday in his first on-the-record interview about the Swift boat controversy that John Kerry's first Purple Heart was awarded for self-inflicted wounds.

Retired Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. told columnist Bob Novak that Kerry wasn't wounded by hostile fire and wasn't even under fire by the enemy. Rather, he "nicked himself with a M-79 (grenade launcher)."

Acocrding to Novak, Schachte "was in command of the small Boston whaler or skimmer, with Kerry aboard in his first combat mission in the Vietnam War."

If Schachte is telling the truth, it would appear that Kerry should not have been given the Purple Heart for the incident in question. As Andy Soltis notes in the New York Post, "To win a Purple Heart, military personnel must have a wound that requires medical treatment, and it must have been received during the course of an engagement with the enemy, even if the wound was not a result of hostile fire."

Paul Krugman has a column in today's New York Times decrying America's health care system. He supports--surprise!--a single payer approach.

I have commented before on the problems with central planning in health care. I certainly am not convinced that a government-run system is the answer, but I do agree with Krugman that there are serious problems with our health insurance system, particularly in the market for individually-purchased (non-group) coverage.

After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland's individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that "choice" wasn't much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.

We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland's individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage--a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.

With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.

In the end, we decided to purchase a very high-deductible plan (sold by Golden Rule Insurance Co.) coupled with a tax-sheltered Medical Savings Account (MSA). We couldn't qualify for the preferred rate because Golden Rule says I am underweight. Hmph! In any case, while Krugman and most Democrats don't seem to like MSAs, in our case we were glad they were an option.

Update: The Times reports that the proportion of Americans without health insurance is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, says the proportion has remained steady. (Both are right; it depends on which timeframe one is talking about.) The WSJ editorial writers suggest:

States like New York could do a lot for [those who cannot obtain health insurance] merely by getting rid of the state insurance regulations that make a basic policy roughly 10 times more expensive than it is in neighboring Connecticut. Better still, Congress could save poor New Yorkers from the tyranny of Albany by putting an end to our Balkanized and anachronistic 50-state insurance market and simply decreeing that there shall be nationwide commerce in health insurance. They could then buy policies issued in saner states or over the Internet.

Update II: A reader questions Golden Rule's decision to classify me as underweight:

They need Asian Women Weight Tables at the insurance companies! Not tables made for all the BIG Americans who are now suing McDonalds!

Update III: How much of the increased in uninsured is due to illegal immigration?

The latest news on the book front:

* I will be speaking about the book in Houston today, at an event sponsored by The Houston Forum. My next public appearances will be at U.C. Berkeley (145 Dwinelle Hall) at 7 pm on Weds Sep 8th, Borders Books in Puyallup, Wash., at 7 pm on Friday Sep 10th, American University in Washington DC on Monday Sep 13th at 7 pm, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on Weds Sep 15th at 8 pm.

* Muslim leaders are starting to pay attention. Ahmed Maher wrote an article about the book in Islam Online. Hussein Ibish wrote an article in The Daily Star (a major newspaper in Lebanon and other Arab countries).

* Burl Burlingame, a feature writer for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, writes that "feathers flew" in his newsroom after the paper ran an op-ed by me defending internment. One staffer wrote, "Shame on us!" in a staff e-mail condemning the decision to publish my piece. Burlingame responded:

Apparently, "enlightened thinkers" refuse to allow the opinions of others to be heard? Even in a forum that makes an attempt to be openminded and evenhanded, such as the OpEd page? Should we only quote those we personally agree with? What happened to being objective journalists and having basic standards of fairness? Remember, the "Op" in OpEd stands for opinion.

* There will be no more Malkin opinions in MidWeek, a Honolulu paper that had been a satisfied client of my syndicated column for several years. In an e-mail to a Midweek reader, the editor, Don Chapman, explained his decision to drop my column as follows: "[I]n light of her new book and guest column in the Star-Bulletin justifying the internment of Japanese-American families in WWII, we felt she had become a detriment to our reputation and to our business." I suppose this sort of thing is to be expected. I hope Chapman did not receive pressure or reprisals, and wish him only the best.

* Cathy Young e-mailed me to ask whether Richard Kotoshirodo actually received a reparations check, as I asserted in Part 2 of my Aug. 6 blog entry. I made a mistake here. What I should have said was that, unlike Atta, Kotoshirodo was eligible for reparations money. The original Aug. 6 entry now includes a correction.

By the way, Kotoshirodo may still be alive (he spoke to Hawaii historian John Stephan in the late 1990s and is currently listed in a Hawaiian telephone directory but did not return my phone call). Any reporter or blogger who is able to nail down an interview would get a great story.

* My book hit #31 on the New York Times bestseller list. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who bought it.

* The Japanese-American Citizens League, which supported evacuation and relocation in 1942, has issued a formal statement denouncing the book. See below.

Read More »

In Manhattan yesterday, a judge ruled that "United for Peace and Justice," organizers of the largest protest planned during the week of the Republican National Convention, may not hold a rally in Central Park on Sunday. The New York Times (registration required) reports:

Yesterday's decision was the second this week in which a group of protesters were denied permission to use the Great Lawn at Central Park for a rally before the convention. On Monday, a federal judge upheld a decision barring a group, the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, from holding a rally there on Saturday.

In Justice Silbermann's 13-page decision released yesterday, she chided the group for waiting until Aug. 18 to file the lawsuit challenging the permit denial; she also wrote that there was no evidence the decision by the Parks Department had been politically motivated. While she did not rule on the constitutional issue raised by the protest group, she said the group "cannot clearly demonstrate a constitutional violation..."

...Justice Silbermann said there was "no credible evidence'' that the denial of an application "was based on the content or viewpoint'' of the group's message. "Rather,'' she wrote, "the evidence established that the department's determination was based on entirely content-neutral factors, to wit: that the Great Lawn was not an appropriate venue for a demonstration of this magnitude."

The city had argued against a permit for United for Peace and Justice to hold a rally in Central Park, saying that so large a demonstration would cause enormous damage to the park, particularly to the Great Lawn and the North Meadow...

Demonstrating the Left's contempt for the rule of law, Jeffrey Fogel, the lead lawyer in United for Peace and Justice's lawsuit, suggested that the judge's ruling is an invitation to go ahead and trash Central Park anyway:

This should be encouragement to people who otherwise might not have come out, to come out and make that demonstration.

Columnist Froma Harrop gets to the bottom of the tantrum-throwers' mindset:

Why would the group even want its demonstrators — whose numbers could reach 250,000 — stomping every blade of the Great Lawn's grass into compost? The answer is simple: They want it because ... because ... because people in authority told them not to.

The New York Post's take is here.

One irony in all this is that the demonstrators' predicament is of the Left's own making. Their free speech is being curtailed because of zero-tolerance green space laws protecting Central Park.

Reap what you sow, rabble-rousers.

The State Department, after consultation with the Department of Homeland Security, has revoked the visa of a Muslim scholar with possible links to terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda:

Russ Knocke, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, told Reuters on Tuesday, that the work visa was taken back because of a section in federal law applying to aliens who have used a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity."

He said the revocation was based on "public safety or national security interests".

Islamic groups, naturally, are whining about the visa revocation. Islam Online reports:

[The] Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the DHS decision to revoke a visa previously granted to Tariq Ramadan sends the wrong message to the Islamic world about America's willingness to listen to what Muslims have to say.

No. It sends the right message: Coming to America is a privilege, not a right. Nobody has an entitlement to get a visa to come here and peddle Islamofascist dogma. It's about time we pulled out the welcome mat.

CAIR continues:

"The best way to improve deteriorating relations with the Muslim world is by listening to mainstream Islamic political and religious voices, not by censoring respected scholars whose views are apparently feared by those who seek a monopoly on intellectual debate," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad.

"Mainstream?" John Little at Blogs of War has done some digging into Ramadan's teachings here and discovers the name of one of Ramadan's courses: "A Faith to Die For."

Meanwhile, Robert Cox at The National Debate reports that White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is being pressured to intervene in the Ramadan case.

Hang tough, Dr. Rice. The world is watching.

You are not going to believe this latest entry into the annals of Stupid Public School Tricks. (Hat tip: Right Wing News.) According to the Boston Globe, teachers are no longer grading papers with red ink because it is too "scary" and "frightening" for children:

When it comes to correcting papers and grading tests, purple is emerging as the new red.

"If you see a whole paper of red, it looks pretty frightening," said Sharon Carlson, a health and physical education teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton. "Purple stands out, but it doesn't look as scary as red."

That's the cue pen makers and office supply superstores say they have gotten from teachers as the $15 billion back-to-school retail season kicks off. They say focus groups and conversations with teachers have led them to conclude that a growing number of the nation's educators are switching to purple, a color they perceive as "friendlier" than red...

The creation of a generation of snivelers continues...

Blogger Eric Muller, believes it's time to start "winding the back-and-forth down." This desire is apparently shared by his co-critic, author Greg Robinson. I can see why.

In yesterday's post, I pointed out that Robinson had failed to correct more than a half-dozen factual errors that I called to his attention in my Aug. 6 entry:

* His false assertion that most of the [MAGIC] cables discussed in my book came from Tokyo or Mexico City and referred to areas outside the United States;

* His false assertion that those cables that do speak of the United States list Japan's "hopes" or "intentions" rather than actions or results;

* His incorrect statement that I implied that the primary push for evacuation came from President Roosevelt;

* His false assertion that I failed to explain why immediate loyalty hearings were not granted to people of Japanese ancestry;

* His false assertion that I said that the opinion of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Japanese Americans was not reliable or relied upon;

* He false statement that I dared not touch the question of why the Canadian government went through the process of relocating and incarcerating their ethnic Japanese residents; and

* His false assertion that the Office of Naval Intelligence opposed mass evacuation.

It has now been 19 days since I pointed out these errors. Robinson has posted multiple entries about my book on Muller's site, including his "final word" on the subject, but he has not acknowledged any of the above errors. Not one.

In addition, my entry from yesterday identified more than a half-dozen new factual errors made by Robinson in his more recent posts on Muller's site:

* He falsely stated that I said that racial bigotry played no factor in the evacuation;

* He falsely stated that there were no shellings or attacks by Japanese submarines on or near the West Coast after December 1941;

* He falsely stated that the U.S. Navy opposed evacuation;

* He falsely accused me of arguing that the decision to sign Executive Order 9066 was based in part on the shelling of the Goleta oil fields (which occurred after EO 9066 was signed);

* He mischaracterized the views of ONI officer Kenneth Ringle;

* He falsely stated that dual citizenship among Nisei was a "canard;" and

* He falsely stated that Japan’s Honolulu spy ring was shut down before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Robinson has not corrected any of these mistakes either.

Robinson has accused me of arguing in "bad faith" and of trying to "elide" his points. But I have corrected every factual error that has been brought to my attention. Robinson has acknowledged virtually none of his.

I wonder, too, what Muller thinks about this. Does he stand by the false statements described above, all of which he posted on his site or on The Volokh Conspiracy blog?

In addition, Muller and Robinson have tossed out baseless charges of "plagiarism" and "slander" against me, only to retreat from those accusations while leaving a pile of falsehoods uncorrected.

The American Historical Association's statement on standards of professional conduct dictates that historians "must not be indifferent to error or efforts to ignore or conceal it."

Final words, gentlemen?

Update: Muller's lame non-response speaks for itself.

Update II: A commenter on Muller's site accuses me of nitpicking. "[S]he mentioned somewhere before that nit picking facts or goofs should not be the basis of refuting a whole argument, namely that a broad thesis does not simply fal (sic) apart when a handful of factual ianccuracies (sic) happen."

I am not nitpicking. Some of Robinson's errors concern major substantive issues. Take his repeated assertion that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) opposed evacuation and relocation. ONI was the premiere intelligence agency at the time.
Its opinion undoubtedly carried considerable weight. Yet, ONI not only did not oppose evacuation, it actually expressed grave concerns about the Japanese espionage network on the West Coast. In one post-Pearl Harbor memo, ONI cited dozens of ethnic Japanese by name (some of whom were U.S. citizens) who were suspected Japanese agents (see www.michellemalkin.com/docs.htm). Robinson's mischaracterization of ONI's views is not a harmless little "goof." It is a major distortion. His ongoing unwillingness to correct himself is a breach of academic ethics and good reasearch practices.

Update III:Muller still has not addressed the factual inaccuracies outlined above, but he found time to repeat his accusation that I libeled Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga when I wrote in my book that she surreptitiously gave confidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians papers to Peter Irons. Muller says the documents were neither classified, secret, private, nor confidential since Irons was allowed to view them. As I noted, these records, however, had not been cleared for public use, and Iron's request to copy them had been explicitly denied. By the way, this was not the only time Irons engaged in these sort of shenanigans.

Update IV: I corrected the name of the American Historical Association above. (In my initial post, I incorrectly referred to this organization as the American Historical Society.)

Unlike the Philippines, Italy is apparently standing firm against terrorists who have kidnapped an Italian journalist:

The Italian government said Tuesday it would maintain its 3,000 troops in Iraq despite an ultimatum from a radical Muslim group holding an Italian journalist and demanding that Rome withdraw its forces within 48 hours.

A statement from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office said the government is prepared to make every effort to secure the release of Enzo Baldoni, a 56-year-old journalist who disappeared last week, but insisted Italian troops would remain in Iraq to help maintain order and security...

Hat tip: Armies of Liberation

My latest column, keying off of this blog post on George P. Bush's shameful remarks about the Border Patrol while campaigning for his uncle in Mexico, is here.

The National Border Patrol Council's new survey, which reports on the demoralization of immigration enforcement agents, is here.

For more general info on how the feds have undermined interior enforcement efforts in southern California, tune in to KFI's John and Ken Show and check their blog. Their efforts to hold Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Asa Hutchinson's feet to the fire are unparalleled.

Update: It was bound to happen. Mexico may now be planning to sue the U.S. over the Border Patrol's use of pepper-ball guns.

Today at 10am, I'll be discussing my book on Philadelphia's public radio station, WHYY. UNC law professor and blogger Eric Muller of Is That Legal? will take up the debate. More info here. Listen live here.

Judge Richard Posner is guest-blogging at Larry Lessig's site. Though he hasn't yet read my book, he defends the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Korematsu ruling in a recent entry:

...the wisdom of hindsight is treacherous. In March of 1942 when [Executive Order 9066] was issued, just three months after Pearl Harbor, there was not only fear that Japan would attack the continental United States, but also a need to demonstrate resoluteness in a war for which the nation was not prepared.

Jeff Quinton is liveblogging the crash of one Russian airplane south of Moscow and the disappearance of another between Moscow and the Black Sea. Check in here.

Athena at Terrorism Unveiled has an analysis here. She notes:

Chechen elections are this Sunday, and we know what the implications of that can be. Terrorism is a form of theatrical violence that plays all too well alonside political processes in an attempt to create chaos, the means to an end. (The end being a greater ability to create fear which crushes dissent and is a quicker road to political power. With Islamism intertwining politics and religion, political power creates the atmosphere where a Muslim community, Ummah, is created where there is strict adherence to Islamic law or Sharia.)

It is clear that Russia can be and still is a target of terrorism. I doubt this is one big coincidence and where two planes are lost this close together (with witnesses on the ground saying a large explosion took down one).

We know that terrorists have been doing dry-runs and attempting to assemble bombs while in the air on planes. One was successful and blew up part of the plane and killed the man unfortunate enough to sit in the seat later in the day of the terrorist who assembled the bomb. If the first reports are true, and indeed TWO PLANES have been lost, then terrorism it is.

Stay tuned...

Here's a letter I received today from Terry Sater, a Vietnam Vet who served with the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta during 1968 and 1969. He writes that "I'm not part of a 527. I voted for McGovern, Perot and Bush. I didn't volunteer for Nam. I didn't want to go. I am not a hero. I served with heroes. Kerry has dishonored all of us."

Sater said he sent the letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but doesn't expect it will run. It it is reprinted here in its entirety:

People don't get it. They point out how "suspicious" it is that the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" are "only now" coming out with their charges, as though they should have formed their organization to refute John Kerry when he was a twenty-six year old nobody. Kerry has made his service in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. He has only himself to blame that his service has been questioned. Michael Moore and Whoopie Goldberg spew their venom. The "MoveOn.org" website carries the motto "Democracy in Action". The Swift Boat Veterans are supposed to shut up.

I served twelve months with the Mobile Riverine Force, in the Mekong Delta, during 1968 and 1969, manning automatic weapons on an Armored Troop Carrier. During the first three months of 1969, I operated in and around the little village of Ha Tien, at times, with Kerry's Coastal Division 11 Swift Boats. If one of the men I served with was running for President, I would be extremely proud. If there was any way I could support him for President, I would. The bonds that are formed in combat are special. They are strong. For the men that served in Kerry's unit to state that he is unfit for command cannot and should not be brushed off as "partisan politics." It is not a "Republican vs. Democrat", or "conservative vs. liberal" issue. They aren't doing it for money. It is personal. The Swift Boat Vets are men who came to know John Kerry in the crucible of war and saw things in John Kerry that are so disturbing, that they cannot sit quietly. They also saw and heard one of their own come back from Vietnam and trash the legacy of everyone who served honorably. John Kerry's lies of atrocities are largely responsible for the terrible reputation Vietnam veterans have lived with for their entire lives. He testified that we were murdering, raping and torturing, with the consent and direction of the entire chain of command. Now, John Kerry is angry that these 254 men dare to question him.

I haven't read "Unfit for Command", yet. I have read John Kerry's "Tour of Duty." He reminds me of a popular cartoon in Vietnam, the "Saigon Warrior". The "Saigon Warrior" cartoon figure had his helmet pushed down over his shaded eyes, ammunition belts crossing his puffed out chest, a sword in one hand and his M-16 in the other. He was a caricature.

If you served in Vietnam, you don't have to read "Unfit for Command" to question Kerry's record. His own book; "Tour of Duty" will do that. I will only point out a few things in his book that stood out, to me.

A photo caption in Kerry's book states; "A Swift boat convoy heading up the Bo De River." If Kerry had spent more than four months in Vietnam, he may have known the picture was actually a column of "PBR's" (Patrol Boat, River), not his swift boats.

The book often refers to his four month stint on the Swifts as Kerry's "second tour", since he had spent time on "the guided-missile frigate U.S.S. Gridley, aboard which he visited Vietnam for the first time in March 1968." He states in his book; "Every day that the Gridley patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin an enemy attack was remotely possible." The Gridley steamed in the Gulf of Tonkin, also known as "Yankee Station." I served on the U.S.S. Enterprise, in the Gulf of Tonkin. No self-respecting sailor who served "in-country" would have considered a tour at "Yankee Station" as a tour of duty in Vietnam, unless you were a Navy pilot.

A lot has been made of John Kerry volunteering for combat. On page 104 of his book, it reads; "John Kerry would be training in San Diego for what he thought would be purely coastal patrolling of Operation Market Time, whose objective was to establish a barrier along the coast of Vietnam to interdict the infiltration of insurgent supplies by sea."

On pages 171 and 172, Kerry describes the base for Coastal Division 11, at An Thoi. First, he described the beauty of An Thoi, which was a small village on Phu Quoc Island, good distance off the coast of Vietnam. "But to the U.S. servicemen who fought in the area and had some awareness of such ghastly guerrilla tactics as booby traps, underwater mines, and sniper nests, all An Thoi signified was danger." While I must admit the possibility that my boat crew may have been painfully ignorant and subjected ourselves to mindless risk, we viewed our occasional trips to An Thoi as the closest thing we could find to "R&R;". We swam in the crystal clear waters near the village of An Thoi. We fished with percussion grenades and watched as the villagers swam out to scoop up the stunned fish. We drank and played on the beach, with the dogs that roamed the island, at night.

On page 176, he describes his Swift Boat; "Horne neglected to mention that that hull might not be able to stop a BB at a thousand yards." Even his strongest supports must admit he has a tendency to exaggerate.

On the same page he states; "For those boats stationed near the Mekong Delta, a fine source of entertainment presented itself: making hell-for-leather dashes up the Viet Cong infested rivers through "free fire zones", with guns blazing, mostly for kicks and to have something dramatic to write home about." Think about it. You are in "Viet Cong infested rivers." Would you risk low ammo to fire at nothing, "for kicks"? My boat was an armored troop carrier. We carried four .30cal machine guns, two .50cal machine guns, two 20mm cannons and a "Mark 19" grenade launcher. We kept our guns clean. We plugged the ends of the barrels with grease, so that moisture didn't get into the barrel. We kept plenty of ammunition on hand. We did not want to put ourselves at risk by running out of ammunition. We were not allowed to fire freely. During one operation, the last boat in our column was taking sniper fire. The boat captain requested permission to fire back. His request was denied. We could not fire at will, for fun and entertainment.

On page 179, there is a reference to an incident that occurred on October 14th. Page 181 begins with; "Only a few weeks later, Kerry, on a PCF-44 patrol, observed four troop battalions from the Ninth Infantry Division at Dong Tam and five Mobile Riverine Force squadrons staging an assault for the benefit of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. "To facilitate putting on a good show, an area was picked out for the landing where the chance of guerilla contact was minimal." Kerry sneered. "Nothing was to mess up the show for the secretary of defense." I was with River Assault Squadron 13 during this time period. Melvin Laird was the secretary of defense from January 22, 1969 to January 29, 1973. At the high point, there were only four squadrons of the Mobile Riverine Force. The four squadrons were split into two larger groups; "Group Alpha" and "Group Bravo", in early summer, of 1968, spread out over different parts of the Mekong Delta. All four squadrons were never pulled together to put on a show for Melvin Laird.

Kerry renewed his decades old smearing of Viet Nam veterans, on page 211, describing Cobra gunship pilots; "Yet Kerry found himself troubled by the realization that some of these wild boys could kill innocent people from a distance and not be bothered by it. He was no pacifist - far from it- and understood that "accidental atrocities" were a part of war. But it disturbed him that even a few trigger happy American yahoos considered killing Vietnamese civilians a sport."

Page 218 relates that Kerry wrote in his notebook, from Sa Dec; ""Merry Christmas from the most inland market time unit." He meant to be clever and point out to his superiors the incongruity on a river canal not far from the Cambodian border northwest of Saigon." In truth, Sa Dec isn't near the Cambodian border. Look at a map. Second, hundreds of various types of Navy craft were all over the Mekong Delta, many in much worse places than Kerry. The "Saigon Warrior" would like everyone to think that he was the lone "Rambo", sitting in VC territory, all alone.

I hope that the whole truth comes out. I believe it will if people read "Tour of Duty", "Unfit for Command," and Kerry signs the "180" form which will allow the Navy to release all of his records, not just the ones he has selected.

Terry Sater
Eureka, MO

From Ralph Peters' column, "Heroes Don't Shout," in today's New York Post:

...[R]eal heroes don't call themselves heroes. Honorable soldiers or sailors don't brag. They let their deeds speak for themselves. Some of the most off-putting words any veteran can utter are "I'm a war hero."

Real heroes (and I've been honored to know some) never portray their service in grandiose terms, telling TV cameras that they're reporting for duty. Real heroes may be proud of the sacrifices they offered, but they don't shout for attention.

This is so profoundly a part of the military code of behavior that it cannot be over-emphasized. The rule is that those who brag about being heroes usually aren't heroes at all. Bragging is for drunks at the end of the bar, not for real vets. And certainly not for anyone who wishes to trade on his service to become our commander-in-chief.

Belmont Club has a trenchant analysis of the battle underlying the "Kerry vs Swiftvets bout." The veterans' story is not only a threat to the Kerry campaign, but also to the control freaks in the mainstream media. Excerpt:

The power of the Mainstream Media lay in the fact that they controlled the generation of news objects; how they arose, what they did, how they ran their course. They were the news object foundry; able to make them "type safe"; define what they could do, and what they could not. And that power was enormous. Glenn Reynolds intuitively understood this when he wrote:

Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the "Fourth Estate" is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians.

So when the Swiftvets story shouldered its way into the public consciousness despite the best efforts of the "gatekeepers" to consign it to oblivion, it posed an existential challenge to the news foundries. For where one could come, more would follow. The Mainstream Media responded to accusations by Swiftvets that Kerry had misrepresented his combat record in Vietnam by creating their own alternative news object, whose methods were restricted to OutrageAgainstBush( ) and SympathyForKerry( ), with read only properties Responsible and Respectable. They could no longer block the data, but they could still transform it...

So well put.

A perfect example of this is what happened last Thursday night on Hardball, where I was scheduled to talk about my book and, at the last minute, the Swift Boat Vets and their book. In a hysterical effort to "block the data"--i.e., the questions about Kerry's self-inflicted wounds raised in Unfit for Command--Chris Matthews transformed my words into "shooting himself on purpose." Gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, journalistic dumpster diver, picks up on this mainstream media-manufactured meme today and selectively quotes from the show transcript in support of Matthews. Some viewers say I should have clarified the military vs. civilian interpretation of "self-inflicted wounds." Most fair-minded viewers saw that this is exactly what I was trying to do--against gale force winds.

Despite all of Matthews' huffing and puffing and belittling of me (he referred to me last night on his show as "Michelle Malkin or something" after admitting watching our exchange "12 times"...how ridiculously insecure is that?), and despite all of the rest of the MSM's stonewalling, the SwiftBoat story continues to unfold. Here's the latest on Kerry's apparent backtracking on his first Purple Heart Wound and here's a new piece at FrontPageMag taking a critical look at Kerry's Silver Star citations.

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Jeff Jacoby has related thoughts on Kerry's biggest fawning fans in the press. And on his new blog (welcome aboard!), David Limbaugh reports on more underhanded Lefty tactics against the Swiftees during ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulous (scroll down) on Sunday. See also Jack Kelly at Jewish World Review on the role of the blogosphere.

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Meanwhile, thanks to several readers who sent this column by the incomparable Thomas Sowell on the "bait and switch media." Here's an excerpt:

Readers sometimes ask why I am seldom seen or heard on television or radio. Mainly it is because I turn down 90 percent of the invitations I get. A recent radio interview shows why.

I was invited on as a guest to talk about my new book, "Affirmative Action Around the World." But when I phoned in for the interview while the program was on the air, I discovered that another guest was already waiting in ambush, talking about a wholly different topic, minimum wage laws.

When I asked the hostess whether I was on the program to discuss minimum wage laws and she said that I was, I knew that this was the old bait-and-switch game that I had encountered many times over the years.

It goes like this: An author is invited on the program to talk about his book but, when he gets there, he finds that the interview is actually about something else. Most guests, being polite, will just go along and the program gets an interview on something they want to talk about, with someone who might never have bothered to be interviewed by them otherwise.

Having another guest on, talking about a different topic, makes this game work even better. In this case, the other guest talked on and on until finally I asked if she were going to be allowed to filibuster.

I had no objection to discussing minimum wage laws, a subject on which I had written many times. But that was not why I was there.

So I hung up the phone...

Sowell rocks.

Update: Drudge is reporting that "Kerry's campaign now says is possible first Purple Heart was awarded for unintentional self-inflicted wound..."

Strengthen The Good's first charity recommendation is the The Gulf Coast Community Foundation Of Venice Hurricane Charley Disaster Relief Fund. If you have a buck or two to spare, please stop by!

For those who are interested, I have uploaded a follow-up response to professors Eric Muller and Greg Robinson, two principal critics of my new book. You can read the whole thing here. Part I of my response to Muller and Robinson, posted a few weeks ago, is here.

I appreciate the extensive effort that these two men have made to try and refute the arguments in In Defense of Internment. The blogosphere has given us the space to engage in a substantive debate, rather than a three-minute shoutfest, and I hope readers will take the time to check out our exchanges—which show that people can disagree vehemently without resorting to spittle-spattered harangues.

That said, let me spell out the fundamental failure in Muller and Robinson’s case against my book. After some two dozen posts and nearly 18,000 words they still have not explained why, if internment, evacuation, and relocation were driven primarily by racism and wartime hysteria, our intelligence agencies were so concerned about Japanese espionage on the West Coast (see Appendix C of my book and additional documents here). Muller and Robinson have provided no analysis whatsoever of the intelligence agencies’ memos included in my book—memos from MID, ONI, and FBI that were clearly derived, sometimes verbatim, from MAGIC decrypts and that reveal the rigorous attention that military intelligence and FBI officials were paying to Japan’s spy operations and activities in the U.S. and elsewhere. To ignore these reports while advancing the view that the Roosevelt Administration’s decisions were rooted primarily or solely in wartime hysteria and racism is shoddy scholarship at best and academic malpractice at worst.

It is worth highlighting here at the start that in one of his most recent posts, Muller makes a monumental concession without referencing the memos. He quibbles not with the case I lay out about the existence of an ethnic Japanese espionage network on the West Coast, but whether it was “vast” (as I describe it) or not. Muller breezily downplays MAGIC and completely ignores the pre- and post-Pearl Harbor intelligence memos warning about Japan's espionage network. Instead, he hides behind an Army historian's book review of the late David Lowman's book, MAGIC--which also ignores the intelligence memos.

Readers can look at both the MAGIC messages and intelligence memos in my book and judge for themselves whether my description of the espionage network as “vast” is fair. But notice Muller’s shift here. We are no longer arguing about whether a military rationale existed—and remember, the vast majority of critics of the WWII evacuation/relocation/internment policies argue that no military necessity existed whatsoever—but how large it was.

Whose thesis is shrinking?

Muller is quoted in a critical review of my book by Cathy Young in the Boston Globe conceding that:

..."there were valid reasons, both in intelligence information and from what was generally known, for the government to take some sort of protective action touching Japanese aliens and most probably at least some of the so-called "Kibei," American citizens who had been sent to Japan for their education" -- but no basis for the nature and scope of the actions that were taken...

Fascinating. As I note in my book, the public officials who opposed mass evacuation and relocation in early 1942 supported the indefinite detention of thousands of Kibei who had not been charged with a crime. Since the Kibei were U.S. citizens, locking them up presumably would have required suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and/or a declaration of martial law. Is Muller suggesting that such actions would have been justified?

I do not plan on making a lifetime hobby out of responding to every new blog post from Muller and Robinson about my book, but I will continue to reply when time permits.

***

John Hawkins, Deacon at Powerline Blog, David Limbaugh, and Dale Franks share their varying thoughts on the book.

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Cathy Young's critical review in the Boston Globe can be viewed here. Young, a committed open borders libertarian who panned my first book, Invasion, tries to persuade conservatives that In Defense of Internment is "harmful" because it "is likely to promote anti-immigrant bias, contempt for civil liberties, and the attitude that acknowledging the racism of our past is for namby-pamby liberals or America-hating lefties." She ends by bemoaning:

And that's a shame. It was President Reagan, a great conservative, who first authorized reparations for Japanese-American internees and issued an apology for the injustice done to them. For conservatives to embrace Malkin's extremism is a betrayal of his legacy.

If Young read my book, she knows that her statement is inaccurate. Reagan, who signed the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, was not the first to authorize reparations for Japanese-Americans. As I note on pp. 115-116, the American-Japanese Evacuations Claim Act was signed into law in 1948 and eight more compensation-related laws were passed between 1951 and 1978. These included benefits for federal employees of Japanese ancestry; a Social Security Act amendment deeming Japanese Americans over the age of eighteen to have earned and contributed to the government retirement syste during their relocation; and amendments to the federal civil service retirement provisions giving Japanese Americans credit for the time spent in relocation centers after the age of eighteen.

Young also states that no American citizens of German or Italian ancestry were forced out of the West Coast. This is untrue. As I note in my book, hundreds of American citizens of German ancestry were among those excluded.

Echoing Muller , Young writes the following regarding my debunking of the myth of America's "concentration camps:"

"The Case for Internment" also assails the "myth" that the internment and relocation camps were "Nazi-style death camps." But who claims that they were? This is a classic straw man. Malkin has waxed indignant at the charge that she whitewashes conditions in the camps. Yet she devotes exactly three sentences to the shootings of residents by guards, while extensively discussing the camps' various amenities and the petty complaints of some internees.

I address this argument here--see part 4(a). You can read the chapter in question for yourself here.

Young and I agree on one thing: President Reagan was a great conservative. But even great conservatives sometimes err. Two of Reagan's big bungles were the signing of the 1986 mass amnesty for illegal aliens and the 1988 reparations law which singled out ethnic Japanese evacuees, relocatees, and internees but provided no acknowledgement of or compensation for the internees of European descent who lived side by side with ethnic Japanese internees during the war. Pointing out Reagan's mistakes is not a "betrayal of his legacy." Pointing out his mistakes is...pointing out his mistakes.

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The rest of the criticism of the book by lesser detractors is mostly uninformed and irrelevant noise. I do want to address one typical attack from some bloggers and other blowhard critics who don’t have enough brain cells to muster up a coherent case against my book: that I’m a self-loathing sellout.

The idea that since I am an Asian-American who has defended the so-called Japanese-American internment, I must therefore hate myself, is absurd. What in the world does my ethnic heritage (Filipino) have to do with the book’s thesis? And, notwithstanding the goons at UNITY Journalists of Color Inc., why in the world is it assumed that Americans of Asian/Pacific Island descent should adhere to a single political orthodoxy on all matters of race and ethnicity? Eugene Volokh reveals the illogic and psychobabble behind those who employ the “self-hating” smear here.

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For other reviews and upcoming appearances, check my book section here.

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New visitors to the blog should note that I have an online errata page for my book here. Everybody makes mistakes. Few like to admit it. But I think it’s a good idea to keep track of factual errors and I encourage readers to bring any others to my attention.

Some will seize on admissions of errors as a reason to cast doubt on my book research and journalism career. This is ridiculous. Show me a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper that has never had to make a correction. Sparkey at Sgt. Stryker has a good post here on empty and hypocritical ad hominem attacks by those who gloat over minor errors.

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I’ll close out this entry with excerpts from an insightful letter I received from Burl Burlingame, author of a great book, Advance-Force Pearl Harbor, published by the Naval Institute Press. Burlingame is a Honolulu-based journalist and military historian who generously shared photos of the Niihau Incident for my book. Ultimately, he disagrees with my conclusions, but he made the following pointed observations:

…I think internment [the West Coast evacuation/relocation] was a dumb idea that backfired and was counterproductive. It also invited criticism that, no matter how well-founded, still resonates. In a free society, guilt can be used as weapon.

On the other hand, second-guessing is a scholarly sport these days. Decisions made under the stress of crisis never consider the long-range implications, particularly those made by military personnel, who are trained to act, not react. It "seemed like a good idea at the time" to relocate Japanese-Americans, and just let the Constitutional chips fall where they lay. There was a coast to protect and inadequate resources to do so.

Here's a simple point often overlooked -- internment would never have happened if Japan had not attacked the United States.

Some of the responders on your website downplay the presence of Japanese submarines off the West Coast. As my book "Advance Force" points out, these craft did not have the incredible success the German subs did off the East Coast, but they also had incredible distances to travel, fewer resources to prosecute attacks and a battle plan that, for the most part, ignored commercial traffic. Still, the Imperial Japanese Navy was sinking shipping right up to the end of the war-- and let's not forget the mission to destroy the Panama Canal in the summer of 1945, nor the thousands of balloon bombs that carried incendiary weapons and were being readied to carry anthrax when the war ended.

War is a mean business. It is directed by people who want to kill the enemy. It is not spun for long-term public-relations value…No one was in any mood to assuage armchair critics 60 years in the future.

The FBI is warning that terrorists are targeting military recruiters, according to the Associated Press.

The AP article was published on the same day that American Patrol reported this rumor: "According to a reliable source, three terrorists crossed the border into the United States from Mexico yesterday. Two were apprehended. The FBI learned that the terrorists came to assassinate the military personnel who work in store-front recruiting offices in the Sierra Vista mall in Sierra Vista, Arizona."

Over at The Corner, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes that the use of the RICO statute in the latest Hamas indictments is historically significant. The indictment can be downloaded here.

This is the second Hamas indictment in less than one month.

Bernadette Malone rightly excoriates NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg for playing nice with anti-Bush demonstrators.

According to an Associated Press article describing a new addendum released by the 9/11 Commission, two of the 9/11 hijackers "lied on their applications 'in detectable ways' but were not questioned about those lies. And all 19 of the hijackers' applications had data fields left blank, or were incomplete in some other way."

Columnist Joel Mowbray first raised concerns about the 9/11 hijackers' visa applications nearly two years ago in a cover story for National Review. His conclusion: If our immigration laws had been enforced, at least 15 of the 19 hijackers would have been denied visas.