The Best Protest Sign of All Times

Whoops! The picture below with the "Behead Those Who Say Islam is Violent" sign is a photoshop fake! But, take a look at this real, unmodified photo from the Times and you'll see why I was fooled:




"Slay Those Who Insult Islam" and

"Europe You Will Pay, Demolition Is On It's Way"

The one great thing about having Islamic Fascists for enemies is that they mean what they say and they say what they mean. Like this fine person in London today:



A scan of the British press finds much breathless prose about the "day of anger" sweeping the world over the cartoons, but no real focus on what these British Muslims are trying to say.

They must be wondering what they have to do to get us to understand they mean to kill us.

U.S. Gets It Wrong

President Bush's administration has finally spoken on the Mohammed Cartoons controversy:

The United States blasted the publication by European newspapers of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed as unacceptable incitement to religious or ethnic hatred.

"These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims," State Department spokesman Justin Higgins said when queried about the furore sparked by the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper.

"We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility," Higgins told AFP.

"Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices."

The cartoons have caused an international furore, with protests in many Muslim nations and from Muslim political leaders.

While many European newspapers have turned the publication into a free speech debate no major US newspaper has published the cartoons.

Editors at several US news organizations told AFP they were covering the escalating row but had decided not to reprint them or air them on television out of respect for their readers or viewers.

This call from the State Department is nothing less than a demand that Westerners self-censor their hard-won right to free speech to conform to whatever the Muslim mob finds "acceptable." This is a grievous and shameful position for the world's leading exponent of liberty to take. It is a black mark in our government's history, one that I think will go down in history as a harbinger of a steadily worsening conflict.

The Government of the United States is not an active institution. Now in supreme power for a number of decades, it has lost any pro-active capability, falling into a comfortable and supremely dangerous complacency that treats world events as matters for "damage control." No doubt this pronouncement was meant to cool tensions and to give Islamists no further cause to rally its legions to anti-Americanism.

The folly of this position is obvious. Nothing we can do, short of dropping dead or converting to Islam en masse, would stop the Islamists from hating us for who we are. Certainly, craven declarations of support of this type only whet the appetite for further concessions. The Islamists can only conclude from this that the West's most honored liberties are, in fact, negotiable, subject to a Muslim veto.

I am a proud American, but today I am deeply ashamed and scared for my country, a country that seems to have forgotten that caving in to a rampaging mob on a matter of deep principle only encourages further such acts.

Every day, more and more people are beginning to wake up to the danger we face, to see the scope of the threat. This depressing announcement throws cold water in the face of assuming that this fact means that a majority of the American people, let alone their government, understand the stakes.

Our work continues, but there is no escaping the conclusion that, politically, the anti-Islamist coalition remains in a position analogous to Churchill raving on the back benches circa 1935.

Our freedoms are not subject to the whims of the Muslim world, be they offended or no.

A battle cry is coming, slowing rising from the West. It's arrival is certain, as is its ultimate victory. An old flag, slowly will be unfurled:

Don't tread on me.

Sarko Stands Up

French Interior Minister, and likely next president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy had this to say yesterday about the Mohammed Cartoon controversy:

Freedom of expression is not an issue for negotiation and I see no reason to give one religion a special treatment.

Bravo, Sarko!

And how about you, President Bush? What do you think?

CNN Caves To Muslim Threats

CNN, in the spirit of Eason Jordan, has as its lead story right now the Mohammed Cartoons controversy. It reports the facts, then drops this bombshell:

Muslims consider it sacrilegious to produce a likeness of the Prophet Mohammad. CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.

In short, CNN is refusing to supply an image of the main topic of the story, critical to any understanding of the issue.

Let there be no confusion: a major U.S. news network was presented with a choice of fidelity to the mission of journalism and the principle of free speech and caving in to threats and intimidation. CNN chose to cave.

Let us all draw the necessary conclusions from this. What is CNN's Israel correspondent not telling us due to Islamist threats? What are they hiding from us in CNN's Saudi bureau?

And why does CNN and other liberal news outlets pose as defenders of the faith when presented with a President properly prosecuting a war while at the same time shrinking from a true test of its self-stated ideals?

I think we all know the answer to that, don't we?

Le Monde Steps Up

I have just received word that French daily Le Monde will be publishing the cartoons now cynically enraging Muslims world-wide in its Saturday edition. Meanwhile, it's lead editorial cartoonist, Plantu, has also stepped up:



(Translation: "I am not allowed to draw Mohammed")

Where is the American media now that freedom of speech is actually under a real direct assault and not from just some hypothetical threat from the Bush Administration?

I guess pissing off Karl Rove is one thing, while actually exposing your foreign correspondents to danger in the Muslim world...well, they're brave and all, principle and all that, but no one really wants to be the next Van Gogh, do they?

American Voices

Sometimes The Onion is funny. Sometimes, not so much.

They nailed this one, though. From its American Voices man-on-the-street series:

West Wing Canceled

NBC canceled its critically acclaimed show The West Wing after seven seasons. What do you think?

"The Democrats are even out of fake power?"

-- Janelle Peterson, Social Worker

No! Anything But That!

A lot of good conservative commentators, like Michelle Malkin and Peggy Noonan, have taken Democrats to task for becoming unhinged in their anger. As for me, I'm inclined to give them a break. After all, if you believe, as many Democrats do, that the current Administration is damaging America you'd be angry. I think I'd be more worried if they weren't upset.

Even so, the extent to which many prominent liberals have become separated from reality is disturbing. Also disturbing is that it seems that the more intelligent the commentator is, the more unhinged they have become.

Take noted Duke Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, for example. Speaking on Hugh Hewitt's radio show regarding the swearing-in of Justice Alito, Professor Chemerinsky had this to say:

HH: Erwin?

EC: I strongly disagree. I think what is polarizing here is that President Bush carried out his campaign promise to pick a conservative like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. He didn't pick somebody more towards the middle-right. He picked more from the far-right. Not surprisingly, the most liberal members of the Senate said we're going to filibuster. It's extraordinary, as both of you have said over and over, to try to filibuster a nomination for the Supreme Court. I'm not surprised the Democrats couldn't do it. I wish they'd been able to do it, but I don't think it ways what the mainstream is, and 68% of people believe that Roe V. Wade was rightly decided. Judge Alito and George Bush are out of the mainstream on abortion. I just think you can't get forty votes to block someone for the Supreme Court, when it takes a filibuster right now. (Emphasis added).

Let me see if I got this right. There was an election for President. One of the candidates set forth his judicial philosophy and pledged to nominate justices in accordance with that philosophy. He even went so far as to name some of the sitting justices he thought most fit that philosophy, as examples of the type of judge he would be looking for if he were elected.

On election day, that candidate received over 62 million votes, 50.7% of those cast. No Democratic president has received that level of popular vote support since FDR in 1944.

In our electoral system, that candidate received 286 electoral votes, representing the majority support of 31 of the 50 states.

And in acting on that clear pledge, which won the support of the American people, the President is now accused of acting in a "polarizing" manner.

Advice to liberals: win elections.

You won't nearly be as concerned with "polarizing" America as you are now. I promise.

Why I Love Derbyshire, #52 in an Occassional Series

As a patriotic American who truly believes all that stuff about liberty and freedom, I really, really wish I could disagree with the following post (a reply to NRO's Andy McCarthy) by John Derbyshire. As they said back in those crazy Goldwater days, though, in my heart I know he is right:

Andy: You are of course right that open societies are fertile soil for terrorism. The War on Terror, though, is not really a war to stamp out terrorism, a thing that probably can't be done, as our leaders very likely know. It is a war on terrorists getting nukes. ("WMD" if you like, but that is really just a synonym for nukes. Chemical and biological terrorism, in the present state of the dark arts, are minor threats by comparison.) Nukes can only be made by biggish, stable--whether under dictatorship or law--well-organized nations. Any such nation friendly to terrorists, hostile to us, and looking as if it is on the way to getting nukes, demands action.

The question is: What action? My answer would be, has always been: Attack them, smash up their assets, kill their leaders if you can, cripple their military. Then leave them in rubble and chaos. They're not going to be making any nukes in that condition. Mission accomplished. That was what I hoped we would do to Iraq, and why I supported the war. It is what I believe we should now do to Iran. The reduced-to-rubble nation might indeed "breed terrorists"; but then, as you pointed out, so might New Zealand or Spain. Rubble nations are not a threat to us. Africa has a score of them; none threatens us.

The administration has taken another course, one of "spreading American values," "building democracy," and so on. This won't work. It will end in tears. Any leaders of Iraq installed under any system we set up will be lynched by ululating mobs within a month of our departure. We can't export our system, even to small, cheap, near places like Haiti (where we have been trying for nigh on a century).

This is bad news for the many people living in the sphere of barbarism who would like a quiet, middle-class, law-governed, Western style of life, but it's not especially bad news for **us**, if we can just acknowledge it frankly and act accordingly.

Incidentally, the best argument for the proposition that democracies don't make war on each other is Spencer Weart's Never at War. Weart patiently chronicles every counterexample you could come up with, trying to prove that proposition, mainly by slicing'n'dicing the definition of "democracy" to make it fit. I wasn't 100 percent convinced; but it is clear at any rate that free nations go to war with each other only grudgingly, under exceptional circumstances, and never with the annihilatory total-war mindset.

Sigh. I'm more and more afraid he is right on this point the more I think about it. What do you think?

What Abu Ghraib Means

CW2 Hugh Thompson, U.S. Army, died of cancer last Thursday. You may not have heard of him, but chances are you are aware of an incident he played a critical part in: the massacre of civilians by American soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam, in 1968. Back in 2000, a CNN story recounted Thompson's tale:

In My Lai, American soldiers killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, many younger than 12 or over age 70. The massacre would have been worse if not for Thompson and his crew. While on his way to another mission, Thompson spotted something terribly wrong in the South Vietnamese village.

“We just noticed a vast number of dead bodies: old women, old men, babies, infants that were dead or wounded,” said Thompson, who was 24 at the time.

Thompson and his crew, 19-year-old gunner Larry Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta, 18, flew closer to the ground and what they saw there confirmed their fears. They watched a fellow American shoot a Vietnamese woman at point-blank range.

Thompson landed his helicopter, determined to stop the killing. Then he and his crew did something that could have cost them their own lives or military careers: They turned their guns on fellow Americans and ordered them to stop shooting.

I will never forget the day, back when I was in U.S. Navy boot camp at Great Lakes RTC, when we seamen recruits received training on orders, what they mean, how to obey them, what to do when you are given contradictory orders and, most importantly, what to do when given illegal orders. It was explained to me then that an illegal order is not a proper order at all; it imposes no duty to obey. In fact, our instructor went on, the illegal order imposes a duty of a different sort: the duty not only to refuse to follow it but to take the officer or senior enlisted person who issued the illegal order under arrest, immediately and without question. Our instructor hammered home this point, even going so far as to make it clear that rank did not matter one bit in this calculation. If an admiral came by and ordered an E-3 to open fire for no legitimate reason on a civilian fishing boat, that E-3 was to place that admiral under arrest, right then, right there.

This is the American way, the way of our military.

We have never claimed immunity from bad acts nor that somehow we Americans are special creatures and can never do wrong. While I would stack the overall record in terms of war crimes or human rights abuses of the U.S. military against any other military in the world, past or present, the sad fact is that horrific events have taken place.

Leave aside for a moment the related, but distinct, issue of crime. U.S. servicemen have raped, have murdered, have committed robbery, theft and assault in every war from the Revolutionary War to the Iraq War. Many commentators seem to forget that even in the so-called "good war" fought in World War II, the U.S. caught and hung a number of uniformed rapists and murderers. There is evil everywhere, and, by everywhere, I mean even in honorable and decent institutions peopled largely by good men and women.

Leave aside also for a moment the sad fact that since World War II, the American soldier has not faced one enemy in the battlefield--from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Somalia to Afghanistan--that recognized the basic rules of war, let alone the Geneva Convention. The U.S. has had to keep to its standards even during decades of fighting a ruthless enemy who gave us no quarter and subjected our POWs to torture and rape.

By acting as he did, CW2 Thompson vindicated the rule of law in our armed forces, the rule that makes a criminal out of former comrades if they cross the line. He not only stopped a massacre, he held up our honor.

Leftists and anti-Americans scour the news to find the worst in America. Despite the fact that the U.S. has held more than 100,000 Iraqis without incident since the first Gulf War, the focus for them will always be Abu Ghraib, as if that incident says something profound about America.

It does, actually. Officers of the President of the United States caught the people who did it, investigated them, prosecuted them and are now sending them to jail for their crimes.

We admit to not being perfect. We admit that horrible acts have been done in our name, but we face them, stop them, hold those responsible to account. We turn the guns on our own people and make them stop.

That's what Abu Ghraib means.

Our Liberties are Our Liberties, Even If, and Especially if, That Pisses Mohammed Off

** Please See Update Below **

I still remember, vividly, what my initial thoughts were upon learning that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of the Islamic Republic had pronounced an order of death and offered a three million dollar bounty to anyone who carried it out by killing British author Salman Rushdie. In his fatwa, Khomeini decreed:

In the name of God Almighty. There is only one God, to whom we shall all return. I would like to inform all intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare insult the Islamic sanctities. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing. In addition, anyone who has access to the author of the book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should refer him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God's blessing be on you all.

This was in 1989. At the time I was an over-aged undergrad at Cal, living in Berkeley, attending class, working hard waiting tables at two jobs and, whenever I could, haunting my home-away-from-home, the Cafe Milano. (You could smoke on the upper deck back then; that's how long ago it was). To the extent I thought about Islam at all, it was in the context of the Iranian Revolution. At that time I saw myself as a staunch democratic socialist, a secularist, a member of Michael Harrington's DSA and very much the model of a liberal.

Which is why, looking back, my reaction to the news of the Ayatollah's fatwa was so odd. In its essence my reaction was: "well now, buddy, I'm sure your religion is important to you, but you don't have the right to declare death sentences on British citizens. Our belief in freedom of speech and our liberty is as important to us as your Koran is to you and you won't find us bending in to threats like this so easily. Who does this pipsqueak priest think he is?!? This guy has seriously over-stepped his bounds and is in for a terrible thumping, both culturally and probably militarily as well."

Which just goes to show you how much Conservatism is actually a question of temperament. Here I was, Mr. Berkeley Radical, just assuming that Tehran was in a heap of trouble with the U.K. and the U.S. for presuming to usurp its most cherished rights.

I was, as you can imagine, quickly disabused of such a naive notion.

First, I noticed that my friends and acquaintances, to the extent that they thought the matter worth commenting about at all, largely condemned Rushdie for opening this can of worms. "He should have known better," was the standard stance. After all, we all know these people are fanatics, so what good can come of provoking them? More reasoned commentators took this a step further by asking what good could possibly come of Western governments standing up to Tehran on the issue. "He wrote the bloody book and it's not our responsibility to shield him from the consequences of his act," seemed to sum it up.

When Cody's, the famous Berkeley bookstore, was fire-bombed for carrying The Satanic Verses, the reaction was not what I would have then expected, yet another nail in the coffin of my leftism. I tried to imagine if the muted reaction would have been the same if a militant Christian sect had bombed the store for carrying Chomsky and found myself laughing at the very thought.

Then, searching the British press (a much more difficult task in those days, involving 9-day old copies of the Times bought at five times its cover price), one learned of Muslim demonstrations in Britain, including book burnings and hangings in effigy, being met with statements of solidarity by Members of Parliament, usually from those in constituencies with large Muslim populations. Rushdie went into hiding and those responsible for the foreign affairs of the U.K. pronounced themselves still committed to "engagement" of the radical Islamist regime. British analysts tried to figure out what this meant for the Muslim vote and Labour's prospects. Any mention of the underlying principle escaped my attention.

Looking back, it is as clear as day that the Rushdie affair marked one of the opening battles in what has come to be a larger war, a battle that the Islamists could not have done anything but walk away from with their view on the matter vindicated. Oil and confident power were shown to be worth much, much more than abstract principles like "liberty" or "freedom." Can we really blame them if they took from this affair a reasoned judgment that we were unable to respond in kind to their programme?

Since that time, of course, this grand game of "Chicken" has reached epic proportions. Again and again, Islamists of many stripes have presented a challenge to the West, only to find that, when pushed, we in the West were likely to prefer our illusions and our comforts to the terrible prospect of an actual counter-response.

And, so, the famous Bin Laden Myth of the Paper Tiger was born. Kill their soldiers, bomb their diplomats, blow holes in their warships, demand that they kow-tow to our beliefs, craft respect for the Islamist political programme as an issue of "civil rights," murder their men while they are bringing food to a starving Muslim nation, murder sailors during hijackings, use any counter-reaction by Westerners as a ploy for international sympathy, use war in Bosnia and Kosovo as a method to advance the cause in Europe itself--none of it provoked anything but the feeblest responses, mostly symbolic and costing in the millions of dollars. And how could they fail to notice our self-flagellation after even such a weak reaction? One can blame the Islamists for much, but certainly not for their underwhelming judgment of the West's resolve.

In the era just prior to 9.11 Bin Laden and his compatriots must have wondered what they needed to do to get the West to take them seriously.

All of which famously led to September 11, 2001, an event which, for a moment, backlighted the underlying grander issue with the same sort of crystal clarity that fine Autumn morning itself is now famous for.

But old habits die hard and I was never one of those who thought that the moment of clarity would last or that it would "change everything." What I did think, however, was that it pretty decisively dealt a body-blow to the "let's just apologize" school of American foreign relations. It was, frankly, a joy to see America rise as one and not only refuse to apologize and revel in its new-found role as international victim but to fight back, hard and fast. Conservatives don't like to talk about it (except for the admirable Jonah Goldberg, as far as I can tell) but another reason aside from the obvious for taking the war to Iraq was to continue to demonstrate that the apology phase of our relations with the Islamic world were at an end.

As Eban used to say, the Arabs can have peace or they can have war, but the one thing we will not allow them is to wage war on us while having peace at home. There is more wisdom in that one statement than a year's worth of editorials out of the New Republic, and we'd all do well to remember that in these dark times. Like they said at the beginning of Fallout: war never changes. One either prevails or one does not.

(Side note: Eban is a fantastic source for quotes. One of my other favorites also concerns the Arabs, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War: "I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.")

Having through the years learned to manipulate Western prejudices and concerns, especially with regard to religion, the Islamists continue to conjure up controversies and slights for which we owe them apologies. The latest concerns a series of cartoon interpretations of the figure of Mohammed that appeared in a Danish newspaper. Like the faux rage brought up every year about waging war during the Most Holy Month of Ramadan Which Does Not Allow Fighting (Unless We Launch The Attack) And Especially Does Not Allow Fighting If We Are Getting Our Sorry Asses Kicked, the worldwide Muslim rage over the cartoons has now risen to the level of a serious international incident.

Proving once again that they don't understand the West one bit, major Muslim governments demanded that the Government of Denmark apologize and grovel. Of course, the GoD has absolutely nothing to do with the matter and couldn't prevent a newspaper from publishing the cartoons in question even if it wanted to, which it should not.

With the requisite apology not forthcoming, the leading lights of Europe pulled a Rushdie and immediately began blaming Denmark for this "regrettable" incident. And now, from Davos, we have word that a President of the United States has joined this shameful chorus. Said Clinton:

"None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions ... there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark ... these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam,"

Does this man even begin to understand the scope of his responsibilities? The importance of the principle of free speech? Is he seriously saying that "outrageous cartoons" appearing in a newspaper is a matter for a national government to apologize for? Does he not understand that we are free people and that we are even free to say things people don't like, even if it's along the line of "Islam is a load of horse shit"?

This man is a President of the United States, not some toothy-grinned, back-slapping Southern con-man telling his audience of marks what they want to hear so as to ingratiate himself with his benefactors.....

Oh, wait.


UPDATE: Speaking of Eban, I found the following excerpt from a speech of his to the United Nations during the Yom Kippur War. Looks like nothing much has changed in the Arab world since that time, which both illustrates the state of political stagnation in that world and the scope of the problem:

Finally, pending the further elaboration of our position at a meeting, which I understand has been requested, of the Security Council, I want to say something about the lessons of this experience. First, about the nature of the hostility that we face. The nature of that hostility is such that no security concern can be exaggerated. When President Sadat said in an Egyptian newspaper that he admired Hitler, all the world smiled indulgently. The Soviet Union, which had resisted Hitler, heroically but belatedly, went on supplying arms. Other nations shrugged their shoulders. When the Egyptian Prime Minister praised the murder of pilgrims and tourists at Lod, we were told "it is only propaganda". Anti-semitic literature abounds in Cairo, a spiritual heroin, fraught with death and decay.

There is too much international indulgence for that hostility. There was indulgence for it at the Algiers Conference. There was indulgence in a speech in which a fine continental tradition of peace, fidelity and friendship was violated by the President of Zaire on this platform.

There is too much indulgence of this hostility. We really must take Egyptian and Syrian statements of hostility at their face value.

The same blind hatred, the same international indulgence, the same war.

A Prairie Home Patriot

I don't like Garrison Keillor. At all. To me, he typifies that oh-so-enlightened and taxpayer subsidized liberal that has become the insufferable hallmark of National Public Radio.

But, in this day and age, it's like pure gold to be treated to a liberal who is also a patriot. The Left has become so frothingly anti-American these days that it's sometimes hard to remember an older, more honorable liberal tradition, one that wasn't uncomfortable with sticking up for America against over-intellectual European posing.

Which is why Keillor's review of Bernard-Henri Levy's "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Toqueville" is so remarkably refreshing. For those of you spared the long excerpts of Levy's book published in the Atlantic Monthly this past year, Levy's book is a chronicle of his travels in the U.S., in which the author sees what he wants to see, has every prejudice re-affirmed and generally concludes that it's a very good thing indeed that he is not American. It was insufferable, yet compelling, reading that reminded me of my time in Paris, when I discovered to my horror that the "United States" that exists in the popular French imagination was not any America that I would recognize.

Keillor just takes this guy to the cleaners. Here's a sample:

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz -you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

You can find the whole beautiful review here. Enjoy and merci.

The Return of Gaming Sunday

Well, it's been a while, but Heaven knows I need to change the topic a bit, if only for my own sanity. You see, it's been a tough week here for your humble host. Looking back on what is happening in the wider world this past week, I'm growing increasingly convinced that we (and by "we" I mean the wider West and not just the United States) are at one of those historical crossroads and all paths seem fraught with danger. And when the going gets tough, then it's time for the return of Gaming Sunday:

-- My "sneak peak" at Turbine's upcoming Dungeons and Dragons Online left me with some strong impressions of the game, none of them very good. The game suffers from a lack of polish, an over-reliance on the Asheron's Call 2 model, a severe lack of content and, what's worse, a play style model that calls for mandatory grouping on the one hand and content seemingly designed to discourage good group play on the other. Poor chat channels, a week LFG model and content along the lines of Diablo (break barrel, repeat, break crate, repeat) all conspire to sink casual groups. If one plays with a group of friends, especially if voice chat is used, these problems recede somewhat. But the bottom line here is that Turbine apparently did not learn enough lessons from the failure of AC2. This could change by the late February launch, but right now the polished beta is a disappointment.

-- Of course, this also doesn't bode well for Turbine's other major release this year: Lord of the Rings Online (formerly known as Middle Earth Online). Still, given the power of these two titles, I would expect both to do reasonably well out of the gate and then dwindle. Like Asheron's Call 2, now that I think about it.

-- Bethesda Softworks' highly-anticipated Oblivion is currently scheduled for a March release. Like the earlier Morrowind, Oblivion will be released for both the new X-Box and PCs. Usually I avoid cross-platform titles like the plague, but the Elder Scrolls series has been a notable exception to that general rule of thumb. The screen shots, trailers and the buzz on this game have all been incredible. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Bethesda has quietly become the leader in single-player CRPGs.

-- Another quiet developer on the top of its game right now is Firaxis. Civilization IV is the best version of the game since the original, with the same kind of repeatability and intense playability one now expects of the title. Firaxis has always believed (though never openly admitted) that one way to make up for our technology's still-weak A.I. abilities is to give the computer "players" unspoken and hidden advantages. This is disputed on the official forums, but my playing experience leads me to believe this is true.

What do I mean by that? Simple: the computer cheats. If the player is doing well in the early years, barbarian cities pop up right in the logical path of the next enlargement. If a player opts for butter over guns, over-powered barbarian armies will make a beeline for the least-defended player city. If the player is fighting an offensive war, the target civilization's defending units will be suddenly and completely upgraded to the next level of advancement; for example, a city defended by three units of archers may turn, overnight, into a city defended by three units of longbowmen.

There is a fine line between challenging a player and frustrating him and Civ IV straddles that line closely. Still, one must be thankful in this day and age that there are still games one can't learn to beat in one month, though, of course, there are those number-crunchers and extreme strategizers out there who have done just that.

-- On the lighter side of Firaxis is their remake of founder Sid Meier's classic Pirates! This is more than just a fun game, though it is that. It is also a loving homage not only to the original but to old-time gaming in general. It plays literally like an old-time game upgraded to modern specs.

Buy cannon, outfit your ship, attend to your crew, obtain a letter of marque, dazzle the colonial governor's daughter with your dance moves, duel a rival captain with cutlasses and single-shot pistols, raid Spanish garrisons and watch for rumors of the silver galleons. At $29.99, Pirates is a steal and a ton o' fun.

-- The battle continues. Which is better: EQII or WoW? In many ways, this is a false choice, like asking if a Big Mac or a fine dinner are better. Each has it's place. EQII is a widely underappreciated masterpiece, a game for those who don't want their content spoon-fed and like a high challenge. WoW, on the other hand, offers instant gratification. It's a matter of taste and mood, largely, though I will say this: the caliber of person one meets playing in EQII is generally much higher than those in WoW. For mature gamers, this fact alone has left many loyal to SOE.

-- Vanguard is coming and I just can't wait. Combining the team that brought us the original Everquest with the marketing and money of Microsoft looks like a good idea to me. The game's forum has a massive FAQ, though right now it's all just speculation fed by developer statements and hints. Even so, I can't shake the feeling this game is going to be a winner. Might be hope talking, though.

-- Speaking of hope and Bethesda Softworks: where's my Fallout 3?

-- That's all for now! Back to our regularly scheduled doom n' gloom tomorrow! See you there....