ELSEWHERE

Comment from a reader: "I don't know if you had a chance to see the Condi Rice testimony this week. I thought the Democrats' treatment of her was rather revealing. Ms Rice is an extremely accomplished person - at one time she was the youngest Provost of Stanford University, and she worked in the previous Bush administration as a Soviet expert. She is intelligent, eloquent, attractive, modest, and a strong advocate for her positions. She is at this moment the most powerful black woman in the world, and to my knowledge has not gotten anything via affirmative action. I would have thought that the Democrat left would view her as an example of exactly the kind of people they hoped would emerge from the black community after they forced down the barriers of discrimination. Instead, they attacked her credibility. Cartoonists mocked her. It demonstrated vividly that Leftists really don't care about black people, or any of the other groups they claim to champion. They are only tools the Left uses to gain and hold power".

Gutless Bishop: "Democrat John Kerry -- a pro-choice Catholic whose abortion views have prompted some Catholic leaders to say they want to bar him from Communion -- yesterday received the sacrament during Easter Mass in Boston. ... St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke and Nebraska Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz say they'd refuse Communion to Kerry. Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley has said all pro-choice officials should voluntarily 'refrain' from Communion but has refused to comment on Kerry specifically." Not a patch on Thomas a Beckett.

Falluja: "The United States last night robustly defended its controversial siege of Falluja which has cost the lives of more than 600 people over the past week, by claiming most of those who died were militants picked off with precision by US marines.

Leftist racism: "another form of not-so-crypto-racism: the tendency of Western liberals to lower the moral bar for Palestinians and others in the Middle East. How else can we explain the dearth of speechless outrage in the face of recent events? When Fallujah erupts, when "insurgents" (read: savages) threaten to burn innocent people alive, the response in the New York Times is an op-ed sneering at the administration"

Revel: "The anti-American cult provides its legions of drooling adherents with the crucial element of any faith: the illusion of meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. That priceless psychological salve, in this case, is the comforting delusion that, no matter how hypocritical, backward, bigoted, ignorant, corrupt or cowardly the cult's followers might otherwise be, at least they are better than those awful Americans..... Thirty-four years ago, Revel was "astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the US was false"; sadly, this situation has not changed in the slightest in the intervening time".