Can you imagine a U.S. newspaper publishing this: a devastating story on the decline and emerging Zimbabwefication of the much-touted “New South Africa”—Wounded Nation, by Fred Bridgland, Glasgow Sunday Herald, February 9, 2008

The subhead and lead say it all:

The lights are literally and figuratively going out all over South Africa as crime, corruption and mismanagement push the rainbow country towards becoming another failed African state.

AFTER BATHING in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South Africans today are deeply demoralized people. The lights are going out in homes, mines, factories and shopping malls as the national power authority, Eskom—suffering from mismanagement, lack of foresight, a failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled engineers to other countries—implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos.

VDARE.COM readers will not be surprised by this news. But it must be puzzling to anyone still dependent on the MSM.

The NYT has a long article [Supplier Under Scrutiny on Arms for Afghans, By C. J. Chivers, March 27, 2008]on a Miami Beach company that has gotten a big contract from the U.S. government to supply Afghan government forces with ammunition, although it is run by a 22-year-old. (Here’s Efraim Diveroli’s MySpace profile.) Most of the ammo has turned out to be junk scrounged from ex-Soviet supplies.

What’s not explained in the article is: “Who are these people?”

With fighting in Basra between the Iranian-aligned Shi’ite government (who we’re backing) and Mookie Sadr’s less-Iranian-aligned Shi’ite militia (who we’re fighting), I’ve got a dumb question that I should know the answer to but I don’t:

Who’s pocketing Iraq’s oil money these days?

About 2 million barrels a day are pumped in the Basra province, so that’s roughly $200 million dollars per day or $73 billion per year. That’s a lot. Who gets it?

The cover story “Oil for War” by Robert Bryce in the American Conservative says:

“As A.F. Alhajji, energy economist and professor at Ohio Northern University, has said, “whoever controls Iraq’s oil, controls Iraq.” For the last five years, it’s never been exactly clear who controls Iraq’s oil.”

I presume that’s what the Shiite vs. Shiite fighting in Basra is over, right? I mean, $73 billion per year–that’s a lot of money. Can you imagine what Cortez would have done for $73 billion per year? (Indeed, the U.S. is lucky that some military genius hasn’t emerged out of the chaos in Iraq over the last five years, the way the wars of the French Revolution shook things up enough for Bonaparte to appear.)

The Bush Administration has done a tremendous job of boosting Iraq’s oil revenues. Unfortunately, that has come about not by boosting production, which is up only modestly, but by seeing the world price of oil more than triple since the invasion.

By the way, the U.S. military is spending almost $1,000,000,000 per week on fuel for Iraq, with most of that going to pay for the 5,500 tanker trucks that deliver fuel to our 3-mpg armor-plated Hummers. We’re spending $42 to deliver each gallon of gas to the boys in the field. That’s almost the kind of fuel economics you saw with a Saturn V moon rocket.

In my new VDARE.com column, I offer Sen. Obama a free suggestion about how he could relieve his festering Rev. Dr. Wright problem by turning to one of his own supporters for aid. I’m not going to tell you who it is here so that you go read the whole thing.

The Wright problem didn’t get any better for Obama today when he came back from vacation with a new and even less plausible spin:

“This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down … into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country.”

Oh, come off it. This is somebody who visited Gadaffi in 1984 and gave Louis Farrakhan his “Lifetime Achievement” award in 2007. This is somebody whose first sermon Obama ever heard, according to his own memoir, included the line, “where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” This is somebody who boasted of his church’s “black liberation theology” and its similarities to the ideology of 1970s Nicaraguan Marxists.

By the way, how come Hillary gets roasted alive for embellishing an old [non]war story, while Obama’s flat-out lie of a couple of weeks ago in response to the toughest question of his campaign — his lie that he wasn’t in church for controversial comments by Wright–is forgotten, dead and buried under his 5,000 words of thoughtful nuance and nuanced thoughtfulness?

Here’s some of the opening of my new column:

At VDARE.COM. we’ve never been in the business of endorsing Presidential candidates. And considering who’s left in the running in 2008, we’re certainly not going to start now.

But by publishing revelations about one candidate, aren’t we tacitly just helping the others?

For example, when Sen. Barack Obama, who has been running largely on his autobiography, makes campaign claims about his relationship with his pastor or his grandmother and I point out that his 1995 autobiography says something very different, I always receive messages denouncing me for being culpable for electing Hillary Clinton and/or John McCain. …

In this view, a presidential campaign is a zero-sum contest. Somebody has to win and everybody else has to lose. So any revelation about Candidate X is seen, not as contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, but as a dirty trick intended to elect Candidate Y or Z.

In contrast, I believe that the more that voters know about the candidates, the better. Of course, I would say that: as a nonfiction writer, that’s my professional bias.

Still, I do believe the zero-sum model is simplistic….

For example, for over a year, I’ve been pointing out that Obama isn’t the centrist post racial conciliator he plays on television. His campaign has been as disingenuous as if Ronald Reagan had run for President in 1980, not as a proud conservative, but as a bipartisan middle-of-the-roader.

In truth, Obama is a liberal somewhat to the left of the Democratic median, and with a recent radical background. And slowly, the MainStream Media [MSM] is starting to wake up to the phoniness of Obama’s marketing of himself. This week, the New York Times [Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?, By Robin Toner, March 25, 2008] and Washington Post [In Obama's New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism, By Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, March 26, 2008]have finally gotten around to admitting in major stories that Obama is well to the left of where many imagine him to be.

This slow debunking of Obama might have crucial implications for his Vice Presidential selection. The more people who understand who Obama really is, the more pressure he will be under to pick as a ticket-balancing running mate an anti-Obama, such as Sen. James Webb (D-VA).

Moreover, within a President Obama, there would always be an ongoing struggle between his cautious head and his radical heart. The more a gullible press and public persist in imagining him the equally loving son of a happy biracial home, the more leftist actions his heart will be able to get away with. But the more we are alert to the two sides of this complicated man, the more likely his intelligent prudence would triumph over the passion to prove himself “black enough” that is the remnant of his psychologically-damaging childhood.

For example, the more he is seen, correctly, as a man who chose to devote much of his adult life to pursuing political power in order to take from whites and give to blacks, the more scrutiny a President Obama would receive over seemingly minor questions such as appointments to jobs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the civil rights section of the Justice Department.

These obscure offices can be tremendously important.

[More]

The Geert Wilders video referred to by Allan Wall below is now available on LiveLeak.com. Warning–contains images of the 9/11 attacks.

Geert Wilders is the Dutch politician on the verge of a releasing a short film called “Fitna” which is critical of Islam and even unreleased has already made many people uncomfortable.

There’s an interesting interview available on YouTube, in which Wilders is interviewed by Tine Goetzsche on Danish TV . The interview is in English, with Danish subtitles and you can watch it here .

I don’t agree with Wilders 100%, for one thing he wants to ban the Koran as hate speech. But I think the more Westerners become aware of the Koran’s contents, the better informed they are.

Nevertheless, Wilders is light-years ahead of most Western politicians, including our own leaders, in coming to grips with Islamization. The Dutch politician sees it as a clear threat to the Netherlands, Europe and the entire West.

Wilders also recognizes that both the Islamic ideology and the sheer numbers of Muslim immigrants are problems and wants to stop Muslim immigration into the Netherlands.

When Wilders was assured by the show’s hostess that most Muslims don’t want Sharia and are integrated in the West, he responded “I wish you were right”, pointing out that in a recent Dutch poll, 48% of Dutch Moroccans under the age of 21 said they wanted Sharia law.

When asked if his “Fitna” movie would provoke violence, Wilders turned the tables and laid the blame on the Muslim protestors who actually use violence–”it proves my point”–which is exactly right.

It’s an interesting interview, with a courageous man who has to have around the clock protection to avoid the fate of other Dutchmen, Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who were killed for criticizing Islam.

Richard Widmark died yesterday–he was 93, and I didn’t know he was still alive. His first memorable role was as the psychotic killer Tommy Udo in Kiss Of Death, (1947) who commits a shocking murder while laughing like a maniac.

But another movie he made probably couldn’t be made today. It was called Panic In The Streets, (1950) and he starred as Dr. Clint Reed, a uniformed officer of the United States Public Health Service.

Here’s the plot:

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. Next morning, Dr. Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren, despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empty the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try.

That  movie couldn’t be made today,  even though the infectious  illegal immigrant is the victim.  It is considered officially hateful to suggest that immigrants carry disease, although since the US is approximately the richest, cleanest, and healthiest country in the world, it only makes logical sense the outsiders aren’t as healthy as Americans.

Nowadays, movies about disease tend to blame the US Government for inventing it, spreading it, or covering it up–just like Jeremiah Wright does.