August 28, 2006

True Grit



As a member of the discussion panel on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume, Washington managing editor and host of ‘Special Report’, is free to speak his mind. On Sunday he did just that. Hume doesn’t exactly pull his punches when referencing the criminals who kidnapped two of his employees and colleagues Olaf Whig and Steve Centanni (who had just been realeased minutes before the broadcast of Fox news Sunday). Everything Hume states is exactly correct, however Juan Williams, taking a turn for the worse, defends the kidnappers as members of a larger ‘victim’ body of people, the Palestinians. This, coming from a guy (Williams) who has a book out decrying the victim mentality that African American leaders and democrats perpetuate here in America. Brit Hume: up, Juan Williams: down.

MSUnderestimated.com has the transcipt and video of this compelling exchange.

August 17, 2006

Profiling


Yesterday I heard an exceedingly interesting and eminently reasonable defense of terrorist profiling on NPR of all places. During the radio segment "Marketplace" the audience was treated to an appeal to reason presented by National Review Commentator David Frum. (Click the above title to download the audio of the segment and/or read the transcript).

I find Frum's commentary to be an eloquent advocacy of what he calls "risk profiling". Among other things, he essentially points out that the recently foiled terrorist plot in England would possibly have not been thwarted here in America because of our own politically correct "randomized" scrutiny and screening at airports whereas an eighty year old grandmother traveling for the first time from Arkansas receives the same level of scrutiny as a twenty something year old Muslim man with a criminal record and traveling to the U.S. from Syria via Pakistan.

Frum joins a chorus of other conservative voices that I have heard recently on this very subject and to me it is becoming clear that America will have to shrug off some of the shackles of liberalism and politically correctness in order to more effectively protect ourselves from the fanatics that seek to kill us.