Maybe it has become time to get our entire country in a little more of a black and white focus when looking at the problems in the Middle East.  The first task is to define what is an enemy of the United States?  If one cannot define one's enemies, how can you hope to have an adequate defense?

Iran has declared "Death to America!".  President Ahmedinejad has done so in public in front of thousands of chanting Iranian citizens.  Anyone who does not define Iran as our enemy is feckless.  Syria is training and supporting the infiltration of foreign Al Qaeda members into Iraq for the express purpose of killing American soldiers and Iraqi citizens.  Iran imports (at no charge, probably) the effective penetrating IEDs for the express purpose of killing American soldiers.  Roadside bombs are used exclusively against military and police authorities.

Iran and Syria are actively supporting those who are killing Americans.  Can it be more plain that they are our enemy?  Yet what do we do?  We engage.  By engaging that means we talk endlessly and do nothing.  That only emboldens our enemy.  It especially emboldens enemies from an aggressively masculine culture.  They see only engaging in discussions as a weakness. 

North Korea continually dupes us into making agreements and comittments with them only for them to ignore their side of the agreements.  Yet does this make them our enemy?  Here the answer is not precise.  We are being conned by North Korea.  They are not as much our enemy as they are engaged in criminal activity.   Is a common criminal our enemy?  No.  We can get into a discussion of good vs. evil.  From a moral sense, an enemy can be honorable and not the embodiment of evil.  Yet from that same moral sense, a criminal can be the embodiment of evil, yet you do not have to treat them as your enemy.

Defense is still required, but not necessarily of the same type.  Can your enemy be evil?  Absolutely.  I am convinced that those who rule Iran are evil men doing evil things.   I am convinced that Kim Jong Il is an evil man.  I am not convinced that Nroth Korea is, at this time, our enemy. 

An example of an enemy not being evil would be Vichy France.  Those pressed into the service of greater, and perhaps evil states, such as the Soviet Union, have been our enemies, but not necessarily evil. 

Al Qaeda is both evil and our enemy.  They are evil in that their goal is to enslave the world.  They condone evil acts.   They have religious approval before they slice tongues off.  They feel justified in suppressing freedom of thought and action.  The fundamentalist view of Islam is antithetical to Western thought and sensibilities and morals.

Does this mean that all muslims are our enemies?  No.  But it does mean that millions are. We need to understand that.  The only way to defuse our enemies is to show them strength.  As long as fundamentalist Islam continues to push people into aggressions against Western society, the threat continues.  Supression does work both ways.  In the past, we have been able to succesfully suppress the effects of fundamentalist Islam.  "Peaceful coexistence" with fundamentalist Islam requires us to be able to suppress.  Take away the suppression and the jihadist movement will again rise to become a threat.  It has happened that way through the centuries that Islam has been with us.

Iran is pushing all of the hot buttons.  The longer we take no actions to defuse Iran's intentions, the greater the threat to us and the more virulent their enemy status.  The moderate elements Islam are the ones being suppressed in Iran, today.  Without our supporting their cause in the most active fashion, we are capitulating.  We are acting weak.  We are the feminine side to their misogyny.  They will continue to abuse us until we push back in an active fashion and show them, again, our masculine side.  What keeps us from doing it now is that we are still wringing our hands over who is an enemy and what do we do with one. 

The Democrats are definitely acting in a feminine fashion.  Their inability to show the world the power of the U.S. and their continued support of our enemies through the continual insistence of engagement without action, are acts that will embolden Iran.  Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are useful idiots, as anti-suppresants in the halls of our government.  They do not recognize the enemy.  They do not understand the realities of action.  Iran does and will remain our enemy until we show them otherwise.

We see a brief headline where 100 something Iraqis were blown to bits by Al Qaeda.  Al Qaeda continues to win in Iraq according to the media.

There are some who are anxiously awaiting the next report of U.S. soldier fatalities in Iraq so we can notch another few deaths that are G.W. Bush's fault.  Harry Reid proclaims the surge a failure.

The sub prime lending market has taken a nosedive with some sub prime lenders going bankrupt.  So this means the economy is awful according to John Edwards.

CEO pay is going up.  Shareholders need to do something about it,according to various liberal watchdog groups and grandstanding members of Congress.

What is wrong with the above?

We are keeping score on the wrong things. 

I ask you, what games or competitions have you been to where the score is tracked into how poor an opponent is doing?  In chess, do we count how many men the loser has or the men and type of men the winner has taken?  In tennis, do we exclusively track our own score and neglect to keep track of our opponent's?  In golf, do we just count our putts, or do we count all of our strokes?

Yet we are in a deadly competition with Al Qaeda.  When was the last tally you heard on how many Shiite militia, Sunni insurgents or Al Qaeda we have killed?  I can't find the numbers.  We don't keep them.  Why not?  There are a number of reasons, none of them helping us win the war.  The answer is found in the political correctness that drives aspects of the Iraq war.  It isn't nice to publish the numbers we kill.  It may hurt the feelings of our Iraqi allies. 

How feckless.  In a culture that is testosterone-based, letting them know how many we have killed makes us look like a much more  valid ally.  As it is we appear to them as girlie-men.  In the feminine sphere, hurt feelings are as or more important as physical hurts.  We have let our culture become so effeminate that we are afraid to punch our own shadow, for fear of hurting its self esteem.

War is a nasty business.  We have to fight it with a certain nastiness, yet western culture has so delegitimized aggressive behavior that it is hard to find allies to participate with us in real fighting.  Look at how the British soldiers folded when captured.  Look at how the British were so passive in obtaining their soldiers back from the crazies in Tehran.  The west looked weak, the Iranians looked strong.  Ahmedinezad may be diminutive, but he knows how to keep score, and by his count, he is doing pretty well.

Al Qaeda looks at our media and sees the ingrained defeatism of the Democrat party and smile and know they are scoring points.  They also know that they can win with people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and all of the Democrat presidential nominees on their side keeping score for them.

Our Republican friends aren't immune from the PC disease that infects government at all levels.  Bush for all of his tough talk has let a defeatist State Department keep score in North Korea.  Guess what, we are keeping score on our defeats and Kim Il Sung's points.  He has scored lots of them with our help.

When do we keep score and act like we want to win.  When are we gong to recognize that we need to win... not just co-exist.  Our enemies are keeping score.  They know who is ahead and who isn't.  They know that we always can come back and snatch victory from defeat... although our current way of keeping score is a strategy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

On the home front, we are confronted by John Edward's two Americas,  those who are doing well and those who are doing really well.  Yet the way he keeps score, there is no way those who are employed and making as much money as they ever have can feel good about it.  The way he wants them to keep score is to look at people like himself and tell themselves to feel bad about it, then vote for him.

The Dems keep calling the economy bad.  They were recently decrying the state of the sub prime mortgage lenders as the housing inflation that allowed folks to make money on 100% loans ended.  There are those who couldn't make the payments and loans defaulted.  Housing starts fell.  The sky is falling.

Yet this week the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 12,900 for the first time.  The performance of stocks is not an outlying factor.  Unemployment remains low.  The economy has shrugged off a number of horrific events and continues to move along.  The recession Bush inherited, 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq War, the end of the housing bubble, $70+ a barrel oil prices have all been taken in stride by the economy. 

Why are those points not tallied up and disseminated by the media?  Well, we can't have Republican success.  We can't point to an incredibly strong economy when it was sustained in part via tax cuts.  We can only publicize negative points.   CEO salaries?  How horrible are they?  Someone is making a ton of money from the economy.  Yet why don't we hear about the correspondent rise in shareholder values with those rising salaries.  Those CEOs are making a lot of money because they are hired to increase shareholder value.   Perhaps a CEO with a high salary might actually be a good thing for a company?  Are we likely to think more of a professional baseball player making 500,000 per year or one who is making 5,000,000 per year?  No, we will think the lower paid baseball player is of lower relative worth.  Then why are we hung up because one CEO is making more than another?

It's all in the scorekeeping.  Many of our institutions revel in failure and abhor victory.  The media, the leftists, the Democrats, those wimps on the right (with apologies to Bernard Goldberg's new book), want to promote the things that will keep us needing government and institutions (them) to solve our problems.  They don't want us winning and feeling good about our accomplishments.   Only through failure can we win the respect of our allies and our enemies.  Can you believe that?  Yet it is how they view life...  the only way they can justify that viewpoint is keeping score on the wrong things.

What happens when the media grabs hold of a subject they are interested in?  They pound it to death.  The great example of this is the brouhaha over Don Imus' ridiculous quote. 

What if the media reported the statement, the apology and then let it drop?  Imus would have taken a bit of a ratings hit.  There wouldn't be the great hand-wringing on the part of white-guilt-driven whites and there wouldn't be the demogogic reaction by Sharpton and Jackson.  People like this do not deserve a "Reverend" appelation.  Imus deserves some public excoriation, but then everybody can move on.

It has been pointed out in many places that Imus is merely emulating the hip-hop/rap terminology present in white culture and embedded in black culture.  It has been pointed out by many, that the issue should be expanded to decry the common terminology degrading the American culture.  I can't remember where I heard it, but this segment of black culture is actually "prison" culture.  Violent.  Anti-intellectual.  Mysogynist.  Anti-authority.  Profane.  Amoral. 

Our media has glorified single parenthood.  It has glorified, or at least made respectful, immoral/amoral behavior.  It walks away from value judgements of morality.  However, it does not walk away from political correctness, which is not morality. 

The media gives Sharpton and Jackson massive amounts of attention to be the spokesman of what is acceptable from a racial standpoint.  This is not a moral stand, but a politcal one.  White-guilt.

Then you have the Duke Lacrosse players.  The media was all for supporting the black accuser.  However, the media gave lots of people a platform for their condemnation of white America, lacrosse players, northeast elitists, white athletes, etc., etc.  Yet now that they have been declared INNOCENT, where are the media apologies?  Is the media going to solicit apologies from the Duke University president firing the coach and cancelling the season?  Where is the condemnation by the media of Duke not presuming innocence, but presuming guilt.  Was it because the athletes were white and not black?  Would black athletes have gotten the national press, the public hand-wringing?  No. 

The media acts without morality.  It operates because it can.  Just like the fuedal lord in medieval times, who could do whatever he wanted, without regard to morals or rule of law, the media acts in the same manner.  Just as the fuedal lord had no conscience, no guilt when doing wrong, no sense of the rights of others, the media can do whatever they want. 

The media acts as arbiter of life... without a moral connection.  They exacerbate to get ratings/exposure/money.  They distort to get ratings/exposure/money.  If they are wrong?  It gets swept under the carpet.  Will the Duke lacrosse players get much press as they will probably pursue legal recompense?  Look for dwindling coverage while the Don Imus comments go on and on and on and on.