In his comment on the little affair on Ware Street, before knowing (as he admitted at the time) any of the all-important details, Barack Obama proceeded to inject himself, and to declare with great self-assurance that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” – but if he knew so little about that matter, what business did he have commenting at all? Did he know that seven passersby and many policemen were witnesses to the hysterical and outrageous behavior of a man – his “friend” Henry Louis Gates?
Gates would not listen to Sergeant Crowley, who was repeatedly giving him his name, and continued in the “yo mama” vein and would not shut up. The professor finally was, quite properly – not “stupidly” at all – arrested. He was so quick to simultaneously invoke white racism and “racial profiling” and, at the very same time, to insist on quite another line – the “do you know who I am” approach -- to overawe someone he thought would be deeply impressed and not make him, Gates, subject to the same rules as others.
It was a telling moment, for it showed that Obama is willing to speak, with equal assurance and aplomb, about matters about which he knows something, and about matters about which he knows little or nothing. That will not soon be forgotten by a great many people, including many who were his formerly ardent supporters. And it is relevant to his disastrous – intellectually, morally, and geopolitically disastrous – speech on Islam that he delivered in Cairo.
For the Gates-comment fiasco, see the dignified and unanswerable message to be delivered by Crowley to Gates and Obama – the one that was composed by Crowley’s colleague, black sergeant Leon K. Lashley, who was present at Ware Street when Gates was shrieking hysterically and was handcuffed. The whole affair was merely an example of what Obama did in Cairo, again presuming to speak on a subject about which he knew almost nothing, and still does. I don't think Obama has felt the need to start studying the texts and tenets of islam. I don't think he has bothered to read Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ali Sina, or to watch the youtube appearances of Wafa Sultan. I think he thinks that having a vague view of Islam based on spending a few childhood years at a most unrepresentative school, in a most unrepresentative city, in the least representative Muslim-dominated country, at a time when secularism was at its height and Islam seemed to be on the wane and on the run, is sufficient. (In those pre-OPEC and pre-Muslims-in-Europe days, Islam at least seemed to be on the wane and on the run.) Obama thinks it is sufficient to be conscious of having a biological father who called himself a Muslim, whatever that may have meant to a black African Kenyan nearly a half-century ago, in the then-easygoing and syncretistic quasi-Islam of Kenya at that time.
For someone whose fame and fortune are owed, most critically, to his being elected President of the Harvard Law Review, where editors are supposed to burn the midnight oil in Gannett House seven nights a week, Obama appears to be singularly unbookish. He likes to write books about himself, but does he also like to read them? Doesn't he feel the need, don't others around him feel the need, to start reading, to find out what is in the texts, and not to listen solely to the apologists for Islam, of whom there are so very many, and so very many of whom are so well-versed in the arts of dissimulation and deception?
About the Ware Street matter he spoke without having found out very much. He did not realize that Sergeant Crowley was not some Rod-Steigerish fat southern sheriff from a 1960s film, but a sober, articulate, no-nonsense man who had been chosen to teach policemen about "racial profiling." Nor did Obama apparently know that the man he called a "friend" is not, as he appears to think, someone who is greatly respected either by Africanists (who found his PBS series appalling), nor by many in the field of Afro-American Studies, where Gates has a reputation as a prima donna and academic entrepreneur, not as a scholar as that word is normally understood. For he is above all, as the head of the Du Bois Center at Harvard, a powerful dispenser of favors and money that can help if offered, and harm if withheld. Apparently Obama is unaware of the reviews that raked Gates' "Africana" effort over the coals for what it included and what it left out, and the quality of its entries. Nor, one assumes, is Obama aware of the scholarly work (see Celeste Bernier and Judie Newman) calling into question, in ways that are unanswerable, the large claims and ballyhoo that Gates produced about that manuscript he bought at the Swann Auction galleries, and proceeded to then sell the publishing rights to Warner Books for an inflated sum. Is Obama unaware of the scholarship? See Celeste-Marie Bernier and Judie Newman, "The Bondwoman's Narrative: Text, Paratext, Intertext and Hypertext", 147-166; Tim Lustig, "Missing Intertexts: Hannah Crafts' The Bondswoman's Narrative and African American Literary History" 207-239; and Cynthia Hamilton's long review of H.L. Gates In Search of Hannah Crafts, 305-8.
All that makes a mockery of Gates’ confident assertions. Obama is unaware of all this? Why not? Is Obama aware that Gates failed to recognize, in that work, the nearly word-for-word appropriation by its author – most likely not a black woman named Hannah Crafts -- of one of the most celebrated passages in all of Dickens, the first paragraph of "Bleak House"? In that passage dinosaurs are invoked to describe a London particular, the fog thus setting the stage for the ruinous pettifoggery of that case in Chancery, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. And elsewhere, I have recently learned, Gates has referred to "My luv is like a red, red rose" as a line by "Shakespeare." Such astonishing ignorance should raise eyebrows, not least because Gates majored in English as a Yale undergraduate and, unaccountably, received a summa. There is a Barzunian morale to be drawn here – I leave it to you to perform that grim task.
And Obama, for all of the hype about the enormous preparation that went into that Cairo speech, did the same thing when he spoke, with such little intellectual preparation, so self-assuredly (and absurdly) about Islam. The Cairo speech was composed by people who apparently are proud of all the effort they put in, and of how candid they were -- just as Obama wanted them to be. But of course he wasn't candid, for to be fully candid about Islam would have mortally wounded his hearers. But he could cleverly have smuggled in some home truths that would have required his Muslim audience to think, rather than to appeal to those among them who wanted their self-esteem increased, in a sign of tribute from the supposed leader of the Infidel West.
Obama and his speech-writers, so self-conscious of their mission, ought to have remembered that the audience did not consist only or even mainly of deep believers in Islam. He ought to have spoken truths, or at least not spoken so many egregious untruths, to those who, born into Islam, and now perhaps in a state of nascent questioning, would have preferred to have had him state things, obliquely if not directly, that might have raised uncomfortable questions, even while appearing to be simple remarks about, say, the American Bill of Rights, or about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the ways in which the "Islamic" version -- the so-called Cairo Declaration -- differ from it, and whether or not these two views of the individual can be reconciled.
None of this was done. And the apostates from Islam -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq -- have publicly or privately expressed their deep dismay, or in some cases their deep outrage and fury, at the damage that Cairo Speech did.
And if it is both the questioning Muslims, and those who have jettisoned Islam altogether, who should have been kept in mind as an important audience, there is yet another audience: all the world's non-Muslims, in Western Europe, in North America, in Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa, who in various ways are threatened by those who take their Islam seriously, and should not have had to endure a speech so palpably naive about Islam, even as its deliverer and his fellow speech-writers were congratulating themselves on their candor and their bravery.
What a pass we have come to. Held in thrall to an intelligent charmer, but one who on the most pressing matter of the day -- the meaning and the menace of Islam -- belongs firmly in the Camp of the Innocent, yet chooses to speak, as he did later on the little affair at Ware Street, with great self-assurance, when he had not, alas, earned the right.
Will he learn from this? Does he think the citizens of imperiled Western Europe are impressed with his Cairo Speech? Or the Israelis? Or the Indians? Or the Australians? And ask yourself exactly what gains were made by such a series of misstatements, about Islam as a "religion of tolerance" and so on, when the same hideous massacres of Christians are conducted in Pakistan, and the same violence -- prompted by the violence in the texts and teachings of Islam -- continues in Iraq, with this or that local enemy playing the role of "Infidel" faute de mieux, as well as in Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
So far, Obama has shown himself as willfully ignorant of Islam as was his predecessor. We will certainly "lose Iraq" in the Bush-Administration sense, and Obama appears not to understand that that "loss" -- as sectarian and ethnic conflicts reassert themselves, and if we are lucky, have repercussions elsewhere within the Camp of Islam -- will in fact be the only "victory" that should ever have been contemplated. Such a "victory" can have meaning, and credit taken for it, only by those who wish ardently to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam, and such people must first recognize the meaning and menace of Islam.
This Obama clearly has not done. He has not studied, he has not thought deeply and at length about Islam at all. In his pieties about it, he comes closest to being an echo of George Bush. His pieties, and his policies, with the squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, have now shifted from Iraq to a theatre in Central Asia. Yet if you live in Western Europe, the menace of Islamic unrest is soon coming to a theatre near you. For until now we in the advanced West, some still with heads in sands and feet in quicksand, have been privy merely to previews of coming attractions.
Mr Fitzgerald's essay, when first put up, attracted a good few comments.
Here are the ones I (dumbledoresarmy) copied and kept.
I will re-post that record, divided into parts.
Part the first.
MUHAMMEDBEAR said - A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In Obama's case knowing so little has made him the most dangerous person ever to occupy the Oval Office.
CORNELIUS said - PS - Will post some thoughts later today about the linkage between "squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale" on the Muslim world...and deciding Western Europe's fate.
Europe...
Among France's 5 million Muslims are close to 3 million Algerians.
Algeria is a secular Muslim country that has been fighting a life-and-death battle with an Islamist insurgency since 1992. It cooperates closely with France and the West on anti-terrorist efforts.
Imagine if we adopt the policy of leaving the Islamic world to its own devices and revoke all our assistance...and in the process, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (the latest incarnation of the AIG, the original Algerian rebel group) toppled the Algerian government. Suddenly, instead of helping the French identify and monitor the radical elements among France's Algerian emigre population as the current government in Algiers is now doing, the new government would actively support those same radical emigres, logistically and financially, to foster jihad and chaos across the Mediterranean. If you think riots and car-burnings are bad enough, then use your imagination on what might come to pass.
In short, the fall of the Algerian government to radical Islam would be catastrophic for the French...who comprehend this clearly and are doing all they can to prevent such an outcome. There is a similar dynamic among Moroccans in Spain and Pakistanis in Britain. If Pakistan goes Taliban, imagine a flood of 7-7s in London. Europe's fragile will would be broken, and if you think they're accommodating to Islam now, imagine abject surrender.
It is the height of irresponsibility to suggest that the West has no stake in - and no ability to influence - what occurs in the Muslim world.
GMCCAL said - It is not just Presidents who are willfully ignorant of Islam. It is also all those Presidential advisors and underlings who formulate policy. That may be even more dangerous.
GRAVENIMAGE told Hugh Fitzgerald - Hugh, excellent piece.
We know much of what Obama has said--with little thought as to the facts or the repercussions. What has he refrained from saying?
Well, he [Obama] was so cautious in addressing the fraudulent Iranian election and its violent aftermath that he said nothing at all days on end, before offering a weak statement asking for restraint.
So far as I know, he has not mentioned the Iranian kidnapping of peaceful American hikers, either--little surprise, since he had so little to say about the arrest and sentencing on trumped-up espionage charges of Iranian-American student journalist Roxanne Soberi.
As you noted above, he has said nothing about the massacres of Christians in Pakistan, all the while we have increased our aid package to our "good ally".
Neither has he said anything about the similar--if marginally less gaudy--killings, kidnappings, forced conversions and oppression of Christians in Egypt--another "ally".
The only mention he has made lately about the Middle East has nothing to do with ongoing rocket attacks on Israel, but only on the building of Israeli "settlements"--since everyone knows that the "Palestinian territories" are to remain Juderein.
It seems that there is a great deal that President Obama will say in haste--much of it foolish. Of as great a concern are the many things, it seems, that he will never speak of at all.
DGENE said - Foolish comparison and equivalence between Bush and the Obamanation.
Bush gave us victory.
Barrie brings us misery and defeat.
Confusion of the two does a disservice to the truth.
HUGH (Hugh Fitzgerald) replied to DGENE - Bush did not give "us victory."
Even if one were to grant legitimacy to the original invasion of Iraq (and that, it turns out, requires a willing suspension of what at this point is widely-shared disbelief) he was incapable of figuring out anything more significant about Islam other than it was, as he put it, a "religion" and therefore presumably entitled, in the mind of Bush, to all sorts of respect. He did not go beyond that, ever.
Neither he nor any of the others who counted in his Administration, civilian or military, appear to have begun to learn about Islam as they ought to have, and could have, and had a responsibility to do so, and consequently, instead of leaving Iraq promptly, once Saddam Hussein had been seized, his sons killed, the game of Fifty-Two Pick-Up successfully completed (or nearly so), and power inexorably transferred from Sunni to Shi'a Arabs, he continued to pursue some kind of messianic sentimentalism that was based on the idea that People Are The Same Everywhere and that "freedom" could be brought -- transplanted and grown with American Miracle-Gro, the magic ingredient of which was billions and tens of billions of dollars -- to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq.
No grasp of Islam, hence no grasp of the nature of Jihad, nor of its varied instruments, nor of its deeply menacing nature to all Infidels, their institutions, their well-being, their civilizational and physical security. No grand strategy for using the pre-existing fissures, ethnic and sectarian, that presented themselves on a platter in Iraq. No notion of weakening, by dividing and demoralizing, the Camp of Islam.
Those people who continue out of some kind of crazed loyalty to keep defending the indefensible and wasteful Bush policy are far less able to criticize, convincingly, the extension of that policy -- to a different theatre -- by Barack Obama.
Those who, on the other hand, never endorsed that Bush plan, opposed it just as soon as those criteria (seizure of Saddam Hussein, destruction of his heirs and potential assigns), have nothing to be embarrassed out or to apologize for, and are, at the very least, entitled to be listened to, and possibly much more."
END OF FIRST PART OF ORIGINAL THREAD.
Second section of original comments thread.
DADCITO said -Hugh appears to be considering the idea that there was a good reason for invading but that we stayed too long at the fair.
My perspective differs. The only justification for an invasion of Iraq would have been concrete evidence of the presence of WMD. Since Colin Powell was played the fool at the UN based on "intel" provided by a scam artist and Rumsfeld's reported insistence that we needed to invade "because there are not enough targets in Afghanistan", the idea that there was any rational justification for the invasion in the first place vaporizes.
What has occurred places no blame, rather only honor on our Armed Forces. We military men take orders from our commanders and always will. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our military has done great things while operating under absurd constraints (ask any recently returned service member about the current "rules of engagement").
-KAFFIRKANUCK said - ROEs: I'd rather have tried to protect myself than worry about being tried by a Jury of my peers. That is the ROE we all really believe in after any JAG brief.
DADCITO said - That said, let’s remember that Bush was no paragon of virtue; he and his coterie of wily operators led us into an unnecessary invasion of a state in which the majority beliefs of the population (Islam) are antithetical to democracy. When a state is Qur’an-based, “Iraqi Freedom” is an oxymoron and as President he should have known better.
Obama, however, is a true believer (and I am very worried about what those core beliefs may be). He wrote his autobiography after having accomplished nothing (shades of a certain 20th century German corporal); and thus far has pandered to some of the most ardent foes of democracy (Cairo and elsewhere); has told every person of color in the US that police are racist and stupid; and, has steadfastly refused to come clean about his academic and birth records.
PMK said - My guess is Obama knows all he needs to know about Islam. He isn't ignorant about the religion at all. He is in sympathy with it. Remember the genuflection before the Saudi king? That wasn't the act of a practicing Christian. Bush may have held the king's hand but never did we see a picture of him genuflecting and kissing the man's ring.
As for Western Europeans, they are going to have to save themselves. It's a job no one else can do for them, certainly not "cowboy" Americans. Not even the American military can save societies that are bent on self-destruction. People have to want to be saved.
-BASEBALLMAVEN said - Exactly...if we're comparing Bush and Obama, Bush wins in my book--at least his is a good American who loves America and what she stands for--freedom.
I disagreed with Bush when he took us in a spendthrift direction. I was in agreement with the Iraq invasion, not only because of the belief in WMD being there, but because I naively thought (I wasn't reading JW at the time), that we could win the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqis by ridding them of the evil dictator, and that we could thereby have a friendly nation in the scary Arab world from which to fight the jihad...
I was so naive at the time to believe that there was such a thing as moderate islam that were also 'people of the book' who didn't, en masse, hate non-muslims....
Having had my eyes opened to the real goals of islam, I now believe we should have stayed out and that we should get out--of Iraq AND Afghanistan.
-PMK said - I agree. For all his faults, Bush has it all over Obama. I was a reluctant supporter of the war in Iraq - WMD would remain a threat forever under Saddam and the Baathists. The sanctions were breaking down and a huge benefit was the revelation of Oil-For-Food payoffs. Bush's steadfastness in Iraq almost cost him reelection.
At this point, we have done our duty in Afghanistan and Iraq and we should leave the Middle East (I don't know if we should even stay in Qatar) and, if I had my druthers, US policy would be that the next 9/11 attack in the US will result in the leveling of the Grand Mosque. Call it MAD - Mecca's Assured Destruction.
If the Muslim world knows upfront what terrorism will lead to, they'll have no excuses when it does happen. The choice will be theirs.
KAFFIRKANUCK said - Jesus Christ Fitz, now I know how my co-workers feel every time I use uncommon English.
Did you mean Bezonian morale, or that alluding to Barzun?
Because, you may have hit upon a marriage of both, but it would still need to be Barzun-Bezonian if in a disciplined indigent scoundrel-student of history, or if accepted, what you created in “Barzunian.”
Now, the homeless aspect of the scoundrel, be it Professor Gate’s self egotistical initiated alienation, or that ‘socialism’ is doomed to fail in the US, as taken in Barzun’s best selling works, therefore an indigent idea; and the very taunting nature of Gate’s behaviour with Crawley and Obama’s attempt to reshape the misspoken event to create his own PC story of profit, for future use ergo western history a la Bezonian.
And by grim, are you saying Barzun’s critically acclaimed historical survey, 'From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000)' is a hard sell for those who hope to be entertained by its’ contents?
Would be nice to know whether it’d be a worthwhile read.
And as I, through a choice of my own, send myself to the very squanderous central Asian theatre, I understand why you would compare Bush as wilfully ignorant of Islam as Obama, but as I am always fond of saying, actions speak louder than words.
And where Bush’s big errors overshadow, like invading Iraq, his other good policies are being quietly and systematically cancelled, changed or destroyed; Bush’s actions regardless of his ignorance of islam doesn’t compare to Obama’s complicit inaction due to the possible, if not in perfidy, ignorance of islam.
HUGH (Hugh Fitzgerald) replied - To the Unbeliever in the Colossus Of The North:
1. The police sergeant who behaved correctly was Crowley not Crawley, though I admit there is a vanity-fair aspect to the Ware Street brouhaha and its, from one of the sides, headless aftermath.
2. The word "Barzunian" contains no indtended allusion to another favored word -- Shakespeare's "Bezonian." ("Under which king, Bezonian? Speak, or die!"). Adjectival form, from proper noun “Barzun.”
3. If you have to ask if "From Dawn To Decadence" is worth reading, you can't afford to read it. And at the very same time, you can't afford not to read it. This is not quite the All-Cretans-Are-Liars of Russell's Paradox, but two statements that are simultaneously both true and false.
4. I think every word Jacques Barzun ever published is worth reading. Some favorites: "Teacher in America," "The House of Intellect," the handbook on French prosody, and two short books of mini-essays mainly about word usage: The Culture We Deserve" and "A Word Or Two Before You Go."
The last two could easily be slipped into a knapsack heading for Kabul, and read when fellow soldiers are, during down-time, watching on their computers the Playboy Channel or worse.
I heard of one Reservist who brought two dozen scholarly works with him to Iraq. He apparently "had to finish a paper." I presume he did.
-DUMBLEDORESARMY said to KAFFIRKANUCK - Speaking of books in soldiers' knapsacks...you will have noticed me referring, time and again, to one of my favourite Aussie books, Ion L Idriess' "The Desert Column" which is based on the daily diary Idriess kept of his war service, first in Gallipoli, then as Trooper No 135 of the Australian Light Horse, riding - and fighting - his way with Chauvel's Forty Thousand Horsemen, from Egypt to Jaffa (which is where he got the wound that ended his military service).
What is striking about this is how many of these ordinary soldiers - the rank and file - were, because of Sunday School, and their history lessons in primary school, quite well informed about, and interested in, the history-haunted country that they were traversing. Their chaplains frequently delivered little history-and-archaeology lectures for any of the men who wanted to listen - and many did.
The Australian military padre who accompanied the Light Horse into what was then called 'Palestine' by the West, happened to be a fully-trained and educated archaeologist.
"Chaplain Maitland-Woods is a decent old sort. He is quite mad, though, mad on old buried cities and ancient peoples. Whenever the padre gets a chance he climbs one of these big old mounds and a crowd congregates, Aussies and En Zeds, Tommies and Cameleers and Artillerists and heaven knows what not, while he holds forth and tells us that the Bedouins were the cut-throat Amalekites who harried David and were just as dirty a crowd thousands of years ago as they are today.
"Then the padre points up this very wadi and tells us of the queer old armies that struggled along it, tough old chaps who tended their flocks and annexed those of their neighbours; who skinned one another alive at times, who built cities that other people razed to the ground...
"The padre has got numbers of the boys archaeology mad. In their precious spare time they are digging all along the wadi and finding queer old stone houses, and buried tombs, and things so musty with centuries that even the padre does not know what they are. The boys disdain anything Roman, for that is too modern."
Thanks to Chaplain Maitland-Woods and his amateur archaeologists, one piece of war booty that went home with the Aussies was a gorgeous mosaic Byzantine church floor, circa 5th century, which they chanced upon whilst digging fortifications on a hill near...Gaza. You can see it now in the War Memorial in Canberra where, as a Christian relic, it is probably for the time being a whole lot safer than it would have been under the Hamas barbarians currently inhabiting Gaza.
-DAVEGREYBEARD said - Hey dumbledore, some emails should be saved! Just got back from a short trip in our motor home to San Diego. We went to attend the wedding of my niece – quite a fun party. We left right after our last conversation on JW so I did not have a chance to reply. Regarding the present thread, it is always a pleasure to read your posts, as they are invariably entertaining and informative. I would very much enjoy corresponding with you debbdave@sbcglobal.net if you are so inclined. The book you mentioned sounds fascinating and I shall try to get a copy – my experiences as an Infantry Lieutenant in Viet Nam sometimes allow me to relate to such stories in a special way. Hope all is going well down-under. Dave
HUGH / Hugh Fitzgerald said - Dadcito" above writes tha "Hugh appears to be considering the idea that there was a good reason for invading but that we stayed too long at the fair."
That does not accurately convey what I wrote in the posting to which "dadcito" refers:
"Even if one were to grant legitimacy to the original invasion of Iraq (and that, it turns out, requires a willing suspension of what at this point is widely-shared disbelief) he [Bush] was incapable of figuring out anything more significant about Islam other than it was, as he put it, a "religion" and therefore presumably entitled, in the mind of Bush, to all sorts of respect."
Does that sentence strike you as showing that I believed there was "good reason" for the initial invasion? I was merely offering a rhetorical concession: IF one were to "grant legitimacy" etc. THEN etc.
A different thing.
PIMP said - Hugh is a true independent.
You can classify people by their political outlooks. there are the PARTY LOYALISTS. These people are the lazy thinkers, they let their party and leaders decide whats right for them. These people say " Oh yea i voted for obama and whatever he says and does is perfectly allright. same with the bush supporters.
Then their are the MODERATES. these people love Mcain and their outlook is to find the middle way between the two parties. Some of these people even call themselves "independents".
then their are the real INDEPENDENTS. These people see issues and formulate what the best way to deal with them. Their solutions might support the views of the left or the right. but they are independent of the two parties.
I think people like Hugh and Spencer as well as Geert and others are like that.
Some party loyalists and moderates get confused by the independents, they think that somehow they are really leftists or rightests in disguise.
ICESTAR said - "Before 9-11-2001 Islam and Muslims were marginal and I knew little of Islam. I was more angry at BC for his response to the attacks on the USA and our interests.
I figured Muslims should just get with the program and join the 21'st century. I really couldn't figure out what the problem was with Muslims.
I did know some things about Islam, but basically ignored it as a backward fringe ideology that would die a natural death.
I was very wrong.
Like the rest of the American public I think GWB and his administration was equally ignorant of Islam.
After nearly 9 years, there is no excuse.
BO is a racist as is his wife. He is also a narcissistic fascist who is willfully ignorant about Islam and hates white America and all its accomplishments. I would like to see BO declare January "White History Month".
BO presented himself as a centrist and moderate, he has repeatedly proven that to be false. Even the MSM cannot save BO from himself."
END OF DUMBLEDORESARMY'S RECORD OF ORIGINAL COMMENTS THREAD.