iowahawk has the latest in his “First Drafts Found Behind the Dumpster” series. The latest installment lampoons David Bell’s L.A. Times piece questioning whether 9/11 was really that bad. Here’s how iowahawk’s piece opens:

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. Okay, I know we’re talking a fantasy here, but just roll with it. Guess what? This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and I don’t remember Uncle Joe Stalin getting his panties in a bunch about it. Maybe these stoic Bolsheviks could teach us crybaby Americans a thing or two about perspective in our current “war” “against” “terrorism.”

Does it get better? Why, yes it does.

No disrespect to the victims of 9/11 or to the men and women of our armed forces, but by the standards of past wars, 3000 yuppie bond traders and a couple of high-rise developments is basically geopolitical chump change. Okay, so the widdle Jihadis want to level an occasional Manhattan office building, let the baby have his bottle. As the big star on the international stage, the United States needs to show it is secure enough to take a few zingers from the B-list comedians at the annual global Friars Club Roast. When we nuked Hiroshima, did the Japanese whine and bitch and send their armies to invade us out of spite? No, they made a couple of Godzilla movies, got over it, and moved on to making transistor radios and Toyotas. In the history biz, we call this “making lemons into lemonade.”

As always, read it all.

Confederate Yankee is soliciting comments about whether he should reveal the actual name of the man who may have been quoted by the AP as Jamil Hussein.

I’m going to assume that this is a rhetorical question, but it’s not completely obvious from the post itself. If it really is a serious question — which I doubt –then the answer is obviously “no.”

I understand that a lot of leftist lunatics jumped around like screaming, poo-flinging monkeys claiming that any conservative who ever questioned Jamil Hussein’s existence and/or identity was a Bonafide Idiot. I understand that these monkey-displays were completely inconsistent with the claim that revealing Jamil Hussein’s “real” name is somehow a danger to him. If the claims of the fringe left were correct — and if the conservatives in question were really Morons, and Jamil Hussein was really who he said he was — then, the argument goes, what’s the harm in releasing the name of a different person? And if releasing his name really would harm him, then yes, the AP was either duped or unethical.

The left can’t maintain both claims at the same time. And yes, many of them are. And yes, many of them are genuinely stupid and illogical.

Shocking, I know.

But because one of the possibilities entails the theory that the AP used a pseudonym for Hussein (knowingly or not), releasing his actual name could kill him.

So Bob, if you’re making a point — and if that point is that certain vocal elements of the fringe left are often shrill, stupid, and illogical — then I suggest that the point is already obvious.

But if you’re serious in your question, then the answer is: don’t do it. There’s no need to risk anyone’s life to provide more proof of the fringe left’s lunacy.

A piece in Slate is titled The Irrational 18-Year-Old Criminal. Its subtitle is: “Evidence that prison doesn’t deter crime.”

That headline should have you chuckling. But you’ll chuckle even harder if you read the article and understand the pseudo-science forming the evidentiary basis for this ridiculous conclusion.

If the only point of the article were to discuss the possible effect of increased penalties on criminals, that would be one thing. But the study described in the piece, as it is described, doesn’t even come close to supporting the broader claim that “prison doesn’t deter crime” as to society at large.

Details in the extended entry.

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