There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max.

“Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.”

“What's that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”

It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity - which means of European civilization and culture - and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead - but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.

This past weekend, the Chinese Communist government organized a protest demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. Under the watchful eyes of Chinese security agents and police, the young protestors were encouraged to throw stones at the embassy in protest over the latest Japanese history textbook continuing to omit mention of Japanese atrocities in China during World War II.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on a charm offensive in India at the time of the protest, told reporters in New Delhi that “Only a country that respects and takes responsibility for history can win over peoples’ trust, in Asia and the world at large… (the protest in Beijing) should prompt deep and profound reflection in Japan.”

A Japanese response to the Chinese accusations will soon be forthcoming. There will be bland public statements, such as Prime Minister Koizumi’s to the Kyodo News Agency: “Any country can face criticism, but it is not good to let confrontation heighten because of that.” Then there will be the unofficial response, a private letter to Wen Jiabao on Koizumi’s official letterhead, which notes:

I, along with many of my fellow Japanese citizens, must admit to being astounded at your admonishing us to “take responsibility for history,” and to engage in “deep and profound reflection” on our history. Astounded because you pretend not to see how much this advice applies to you and the Communist Party of China.

There is an old English proverb of which I am sure you are aware: People who live in glass houses should never throw stones. The government of the People’s Republic of China is such a glass house.

We only recognize giants when they are gone, heroic ages when they are past. The day will come when America’s children will learn that the 1980s was such an age, bestrode by three giants who together rid the world of one of the great evils of history, the Soviet Union. They were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Now, only one is left.

We mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan last year, Pope John Paul’s this, so before we mourn Lady Thatcher’s, who turns 80 this October, let us acknowledge the incalculable debt those who live in freedom today owe to this triumvirate of truly extraordinary human beings.

It is easy to believe the hand of Providence set them on history’s stage one after the other in the short space of two years, exactly at the time America and the West was on the verge of surrender to the seeming inevitability of Soviet power.

Easy to believe with hindsight. But at the time,a Polish priest, an English woman commoner, and an American movie actor were about to confront the most evil power in the world. How off the wall do you want history to get? Truth is not simply stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic and awe-inspiring.

So now Alan Greenspan says the “lockbox” the Democrats pretend to advocate for Social Security must be “real.” Addressing the Senate Committee on Aging this Tuesday the 15th, he proclaimed:

In addressing Social Security's imbalances, we need to ensure that measures taken now to finance future benefit commitments represent real additions to national saving. We need, in effect, to make the phantom `lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.

The decision by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer this week that withholding marriage licenses from homosexuals is somehow unconstitutional is the latest example of America’s retreat from democracy. The type of government America is moving towards is a krytocracy.

Remember the word. American democracy has been superceded, replaced, by a krytocracy - a government of judges. Unelected judges.

America’s Constitution and the laws passed by Congress under its authority no longer have any meaning. The Constitution’s only - only - meaning is what judges say it has. We live in an era of krytocratic tyranny: rule by the arbitrary feelings and whims of judges.

But it’s worse than that. The Kramer decision is yet another example of the seizure, the wholesale theft, of American culture by a tiny fraction of Americans. Less than 2% of Americans are homosexual, engaging in practices the vast majority of Americans find abnormal and perverse if not morally repugnant - yet are willing to tolerate and ignore.

Yet being tolerated and left alone is not good enough. Despite the fact that no culture in human history has ever looked upon homosexuality as psychologically normal and made no legal, moral, or cultural distinction between its activities and those of normal folks, homosexuals are waging a war upon America to force her to do so. That’s why they have become Fruitcake Fascists.

Condoleezza Rice is not only not black, she is not a woman either. Not as far as the Left is concerned. For the Left, if you’re black or a woman, whatever your achievements are, they count only if you got them because you’re black or a woman - not because you deserved them on the basis of your ability.

If you got to where you are in life because of your ability and talents irregardless of your race or sex, then you are, for the Left, not “really,” “truly,” or “authentically” black or a woman - like, say, Al Sharpton or Barbara Boxer. Would anybody pay any attention to Al Sharpton if he wasn’t black? Would anybody pay attention to Barbara Boxer if she wasn’t a woman?

This is why, if he were alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a Republican.

Doomsday scenarios were ever-popular during the Cold War. But the reality was that if a nuclear missile hit a U.S. city, we would know for sure who launched it: the Soviets. Thus we knew against whom to retaliate. And thus the Cold War was conducted without a single nuclear shot fired.

We are now facing a threat an order of magnitude or greater than that of the Cold War. What if a nuclear bomb goes off in a U.S. city and we're not sure who did it, so we don't know against whom to retaliate?

Notice how quick President Bush’s father was to explain to the press that we don’t have to take seriously what his son said at his second inaugural about “ending tyranny in our world”? Thanks for sharing, Dad. What you really made clear is why you never had a second inaugural yourself.

The speechwriter who wrote Bush the Elder’s first and only inaugural address (where he pledged to achieve a “kinder and gentler nation,” and Nancy Reagan exploded in anger, whispering to her husband, “Kinder and gentler than what?”), Peggy Noonan whined once again in the Wall Street Journal today about GW’s “overweening” idealism, and that his speech had no “historical context.” I guess Peggy, like her former boss, didn’t pay much attention to the news last year.

Perhaps the most important story of 2004 was the achievement of democracy in so many countries. Every “realist” squish in Washington has the vapors over GW’s suddenly becoming a radically dangerous Lone Ranger cowboy - when what’s really happened is he’s acting on the old political adage that if you discover a parade that’s going where you want, get out in front and lead it.

GW’s second inaugural address was the Vision Statement. What is needed now is the Business Plan, how the vision is to be actually implemented. For an insight into Bush’s Business Plan for Ending Tyranny, we can look at the drunk coal miners of Donetsk.

Dr. Wheeler's Final Behind The Lines Column from Strategic Investment

It is a humbling experience to have a deep conversation with a truly great man. Harry Wu has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is in the same league with Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is Harry Wu who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year, not a racist kook, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who believes AIDS was invented by white scientists to exterminate black Africans.

When I had lunch with Harry this week, we agreed that China faces chaos - and that the Chicoms will most likely try to cure the chaos with war.

The New York Times reports (12/31/04) that there were over 60,000 - sixty thousand - riots, disturbances, and public protests throughout China in 2004. "People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," a demonstration leader was quoted. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

Chinese, written and spoken, is my candidate for the weirdest major language on earth. At the Monterey Institute, where US diplomats are taught foreign languages, it takes on average 600 hours of instruction to be fluent in a European language such as French or German, 1200 for Arabic - and 2400 in Chinese. (This means, of course, that for China and the world to communicate, Chinese must speak English, as the world will never speak Chinese).

Beyond the technical difficulties lie far deeper problems, resulting in a grossly myopic view of China’s history and future. The one buried most deeply is the way Chinese grammar reverses time: the past, in Chinese, is in front of or before you, while the future is behind you. Chinese culture is oriented towards the past, reading Chinese history through a distorted lens, and stubbornly attempting to apply illusory lessons to the present.

This is precisely what China’s military and government leaders are doing with their strategy towards America.

The deepest and darkest joke I’ve heard in a long time goes like this. Osama bin Laden prays to the spirit of Yasser Arafat who then appears before him. “Yasser, please help me understand something,” requests Osama. “We’re both fellow terrorists. You’ve even killed more infidels than I have. Yet you get the Nobel Peace Prize, your funeral is attended by heads of state from around the world, and European newspapers compare you to Moses - while I am the world’s most hunted and hated man, reduced to hiding in inaccessible mountain caves. How did you do it? What is your secret?”

Yasser breaks into a ghostly smile. “That’s easy,” he explains. “I only killed Jews.”

A deep joke always reveals a black truth. European hatred of Jews is an ancient hate, and periodically erupts from the darkness of men’s souls into the light of history. Today in Europe -- particularly France -- another eruption has begun. It will get worse unless it is fought and opposed.

It is getting worse because Jews are the Europeans’ perennial scapegoat for cultural failure. Old Europe now faces demographic doom because its native inhabitants refuse to have children, and economic doom because they would rather go on vacation than work. You know how bad it is when Consumer Reports currently ranks Mercedes and BMW as the most poorly made of the world’s luxury cars.

To rescue Old Europe economically and demographically, to exorcize its Jew-hatred, it needs to be rescued culturally. There is only one way to do that, and only one group of folks to do it: American Christians.