Mayor Bloomberg, meet Pastor Jones

The wonderfully named Dove World Outreach Center plans to burn one or more Korans on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities at Ground Zero and the Pentagon (and an aborted one over Pennsylvania). The man behind this scheme is a certain Pastor Terry Jones, who also wouldn't mind selling you a book entitled (or a coffee mug inscribed) Islam Is of the Devil.

I think we owe Pastor Jones a great debt for clarifying the matter of the Ground Zero mosque. Let's run through it briefly: does he have a right to burn the Koran? Absolutely! It's in the First Amendment, as understood by the U.S. Supreme Court. Burning stuff is protected speech.

So where are Mayor Bloomberg and the New York Times on this matter?  Are they supporting Pastor Jones's First Amendment rights? Hell, no. They find his proposal offensive and injurious to American interests--which of course it is.

And the same of course is true of the Ground Zero mosque. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Not So Lone Eagle

Good grief. It seems that Charles Lindbergh led a double (triple? quadruple?) family life, with three DNA-certified children in Germany with one woman and uncertified others with her sister and with a woman  who was his "private secretary" in Germany.

How does it feel to have written a 628-page biography of a very public man, one that follows the current convention of giving almost equal weight to the man's family life, and then to discover that you have missed half or perhaps three-quarters of his wives?

Even more amazing, how in the world did Lindbergh pull it off? Scott Berg calls him "the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth." Yet year after year this very public man donned a beret, rented a Volkswagen, and drove up to the homes of his common-law wives in Germany and Switzerland. If all the kids attributed to him are truly his, he fathered seven of them in eight years, meanwhile micromanaging the lives of his own five children by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and all the while being tracked by paparazzi. Really, it's a feat that relegates his New York - Paris flight to comparative insignificance. I look forward to reading Reeve Lindbergh's Forward From Here, which tells of meeting her half-siblings. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

DVD recommendation

For My Father is at once sweet, utterly convincing, and hugely depressing. The hero is a Palestinian suicide bomber who somehow gets through most of a weekend with a defective load of explosives strapped to his chest. (He can't buy a replacement trigger switch because it's the Sabbat!) Don't let the title put you off. This is one of the all-time great war flicks, along with Katyn and Paths of Glory. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The chaplain's assistant

There's a wonderful story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: A Chaplain and an Atheist Go to War. The chaplain is Navy lieutenant Terry Morna, right; the atheist is Religious Programs Specialist 2nd Class Philip Chute, on the left with the assault rifle. "We're here for security," RP2 Chute explains. "We're not junior chaplains." They are a wonderfully mismatched pair. Not only is the chaplain a believer; he really seems to think he's bullet-proof. And not only is RP2 Chute an unbeliever; he's a committed atheist who will quote scripture to correct the chaplain on matters of faith.

My favorite line in the story (by Michael Philips) is the anguished cry by a Marine gunnery sergeant when Lt. Moran dallies before taking cover: "Tell the [expletive] chaplain to get behind the goddamn vehicle!" Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lindbergh

After I reviewed The Flight of the Century, Scott Berg mailed me a copy of Lindbergh, his 1999 biography of the Lone Eagle.

Lindbergh was our first mega-celebrity, adored in the 1920s for showing that America was inextricably linked to Europe, and reviled in the 1940s for having urged that America stay out of Europe's wars. (Roosevelt so hated him that he wouldn't let Lindbergh serve in uniform during WWII.) He was quite a prophet. As he wrote in 1938:

... the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler's destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot, and barbarism of Soviet Russia's forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.

Western Civ would survive, but it was a bad forty years for that portion of it that fell behind the Iron Curtain.

And after the German army and air force blitzed Poland in September 1939, Lindbergh wrote:

We must either keep out of European wars entirely or stay in European affairs permanently.

Seventy-one years later, we remain very much involved in European affairs. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let's remember pearl harbor!

I see that the New York Times now regards "ground zero" as a generic phrase, akin to band-aid, so there's no need to capitalize the initial letters. What's next, the holocaust? The u.s. army? Not al-qaeda, I shouldn't think--that would be disrespectful to muslims, wouldn't it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Final Gulp or Two as the Party Winds Down

Pity the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper but now is a collage of liberal pieties, some feebly muted (those are called news stories) and some screamed at full volume (the editorials and op-eds). But what about the obligation to review automobiles for its wealthy readers, especially those who want something stronger than Starbucks coffee to start the day? Today's paper offers a hilarious example: the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG. The reviewer just loves driving it, but feels he must alternate his praise with disgust at its road-muscling, gas-guzzling ways: the Benz, he says, "feels like a two-ton burrito in habanero sauce: driving it is akin to the last gas-spewing binge before the diet begins." As St. Paul might have said, give me 50 mpg, Lord, but not just yet.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford