In City Journal, Heather MacDonald points out that the incessant war protests, mostly anti, but also pro, are diverting police resources at a time of particularly serious risks to security.

It has been fairly obvious that the anti-war protests are mostly exercises in narcissism. MacDonald points out just how dangerous they are. MacDonald thinks this is unintentional. I wonder.

Probably not intended but rejoiced in as a bonus.

At least by those whose participation in the so-called "anti-war demonstrations" is motivated chiefly by hatred of the US and a wish to see it harmed.

Fascinating program on the Think Tank talk show on PBS this Saturday morning (http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/):

A group of scholars debated the US-Euro confrontation as an extension of the Cold War, which began from two different historical roots: French enlightenment and revolutionary politics, and Scottish free-market liberalism. They traced the influence of Scottish thinkers, such as Hume and Adam Smith, on the American Founding Fathers. These Scots developed their thinking as a reaction to the British crown's attempts at domination. After the British dissolved the Scottish parliament in 1707, there was an exodus of Scots to the New World, who brought their values and concepts with them, especially those dealing with mercantilism and property law. The French Enlightenment, in contrast, was seen as a reaction from Louis XIV's (ol' l'etat, c'est moi) statism, to notions of the state as being responsive to social change, to revolutionary politics, which in turn inspired Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao, and social democracy.

It was pretty indicative of how American intellectuals see the French today to characterize the Cold War as being inspired by a contest between Scottish liberalism, and French statism! One of them said, essentially, that French thinking inspired the Cold War.

Two other comments were interesting: globalization is an extension of Scottish liberalism, and that "the genie is out of the bottle" - meaning that as soon as people in the developing world have tasted the fruits of that liberalism, there's no going back.

Here's the complete transcript:

http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1107.html

What's you can't see, though, is the cutaways the producers edited in: when the talking heads were talking about French thinking, they cutaway to period etchings of people being guillotined! I Laughed-Out-Loud!