The Iranian president's welcome to Columbia - following a self-serving whine by the university's president - reflected brainless activism, not academic freedom.  It was the professoriate imitating Hollywood's embrace of terrorists.

We hear a great deal about the dumbing down of students, but the real problem has been the dumbing down of their professors.

Yes, there's been a media fuss over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's propaganda opportunity. But that just makes the faculty-lounge "heroes" feel even more self-righteous. Anyway, post-modern professors seek publicity, not knowledge.

And we give it to the weasels.

Meanwhile, Columbia denies our military's ROTC programs the chance to recruit and teach on campus - ostensibly because of the Congress-approved "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Of course, it's just a cultural issue when Ahmadinejad executes homosexuals (although, according to him, there aren't any in Iran).

The ban on ROTC isn't really about gay rights, though. The professors and student-activists behind it believe they're punishing the wicked, wicked Pentagon. Well, let me break the truth to Professor Bunkum: The military doesn't need Ivy League recruits.

We're doing just fine without them, thanks.

CO₂ is not the most important greenhouse gas.  Water has somewhere between five and seven times as much heating effect as CO_2.  

In fact, if the Kyoto Treaty were to be adhered to, by the year 2050, according to the alarmists' own models, the net effect would be to slow the increase in average temperature by less than seven one hundredths of a degree Celsius, a number too small to measure. 

So, if water is five times more important than CO₂  in warming, why has there not been a Kyoto-type conference to convince nations to reduce their water footprint?  Shouldn't liberals pay five times as much for water credits as they do for carbon credits?  

In the Moslem fifth of the world, probably about a quarter of the population wishes to be in conflict with America and the West. Probably more than half do not wish such conflict but wrongly suspect that America is out to divide and suppress Islam.

Meanwhile, much of the Moslem Westernized elite (no more than 5 percent of the total Islamic population) both in Moslem countries and in America and the West rather desperately hope radical Islam and the Western response it has induced would just go away. They would prefer to live and prosper peacefully in the globalized Western political world.

Moslem governments in the Middle East and elsewhere are playing a dangerous double game - cooperating with Western intelligence and covert military efforts and jailing some of the terrorists, while at the same time giving rhetorical and sometime financial support to much of the deranged paranoia about Americans and the Jews that further inflames the radical instincts of the Moslem masses.

In fairness to those governments, most governments - West or East - live in the short term. In the long term, the Moslem regimes would be overthrown if the radicals gain power, but in the short term they would risk further inflaming the radicals if they didn't rhetorically support their madness. So the Moslem governments increasingly risk losing tomorrow for the sake of staying alive today.

Fallujah, Iraq.  The Marines of 1st Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines - many from New Jersey - aren't living large, but they're making a huge difference. Bunking in a police precinct headquarters in Fallujah, they're at the forward edge of our current successes in Iraq.

It's summertime, but the living ain't easy. The work's tough, the heat's wicked, the "facilities" conjure the old line about what bears do in the woods, and only goodie boxes from home liven up a diet of field rations (great for two or three days, nasty after two or three months).

You'd expect complaints. I didn't hear one. And talking to three Jersey boys, I was surprised to hear just how positive they felt about the mission.

"I'd do it again in a heartbeat," Lance Cpl. Justin Blitzstein of West Milford told me. Self-assured and ready for anything, he added, "Anybody who doesn't think we should be here should see the difference we've made in the way these people live. And everybody here's a volunteer. We want to be here."

Baghdad. "Al Qaeda's worn out their welcome," Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno told me.

Probably the tallest, and just maybe the toughest, man in Iraq, the Rockaway, New York native also has a vigorous intellect at odds with the stereotype of generals.  Even though he looks like he could've had a parallel career in the World Wrestling Federation.

In a forthright interview, the commanding general of the Multinational Corps-Iraq - the man who leads the day-to-day fight in support of Gen. David Petraeus - noted that, while foreign terrorists remain a threat, al Qaeda's been wounded so deeply by the Sunni Arab shift against them that he now feels other issues take priority.

He outlined them for me.

Every political season gives birth to one or two instant clichés. Outside of politics, a phrase often takes generations to be spoiled as an effective term by long familiarity, or to become dull and meaningless by overuse. In today's politics, a genuine cliché can be created in a month due to its intense repetition by TV and print pundits as well as by a myriad of bloggers.

But at least non-political clichés have the advantage of pointing out something usually true. Go outside at 4 a.m. and you will note the truth of the cliché that it is always darkest before the dawn. Have a small tear in a piece of clothing promptly sewed up and you learn that a stitch in time does save nine (stitches). Or perhaps, more accurately, don't have it promptly repaired and have to pay for extensive stitching.

But this season's premier political clichés are already both hackneyed and trite, while having no obvious truth to them. I am referring to the claims that Sen. Barack Obama would bring "real change to America," while Sen. Hillary Clinton would bring "extensive experience to the office."