Tens of thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators marched to the Supreme Court yesterday , buoyed by hopes that their three-decades-long struggle to overturn the court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion will begin to bear fruit now that the Christian Right controls both the White House and Congress.

"I feel we're closer this year than ever before" to overturning the Supreme Court ruling, said John Stevens, 62, of Falls Church, who was among a group of about 50 parishioners from St. Philips Catholic Church in Falls Church.

Father Frank Nollen, 52, who was carrying an 18-inch statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said he too was "absolutely" more hopeful. "This has been a long time coming. Hopefully, we'll reverse Roe v. Wade." - as he flicked Holy Water on the marchers.

Police across the nation estimated the crowd that boycotted [Tuesday's] anti-abortion demonstrations at about 289 million.

No disturbances were reported. "It was a normal workday in America," one law-enforcement officer said.

The conservative media, however, chose to focus on the relative smidgen of folks actually carrying placards and marching in front of the Supreme Court. Led by cheerleader John Ashcroft, and greatly envigorated by a piped-in voiceover message from President Bush, who spoke to the crowd from a third-grade classroom in Wichita Kansas, the anti-abortion forces, all male, braved temperatures in the teens and a wind chill factor close to zero.

"We must protect the sanctity of life, and abide by the Constitution of this wonderful land," the president intoned."Right now, I am in sixth place in a spelling bee here in Wichita, Kansas, and I am fixing to do better. We all must repent our sins, and killing babies like these precious third graders I am with right now, just shouldn't be done in a civilized country. Leave it to Saddam to kill his own babies. May God bless you all back there in Washington DC."

According to the Washington Post, turnout at the Washington rally, sponsored by the Christian Right, was somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. Even if you accept the implausible estimate of one hundred thousand, that's still a mere 1/2860th of the turnout for the pro-choice faction who very effectively boycotted the demonstration--surely within the margin of error, meaning that it is statistically possible that anyone claiming to have attended the "antiabortion" rallies may have been nothing more than a religious mirage.

Even so, according to White House sources, the rally was a success, and with "Doc Frist now leading the Coalition of Christians and Senators, and several Supreme Court Justices coughing mighty mean during this cold spell, we may just be seeing the dawn of a whole new era where we help bring to life a precious, Christian newborn baby for every heathen life we extinguish in the Middle East."

"What a beautiful justification for the War on Iraq."

No disturbances were reported. "It was a normal Saturday in America," one law-enforcement officer tells ScrappleFace.

The liberal media, however, chose to cover the tiny pro-Saddam demonstrations instead. According to the Washington Post, turnout at the Washington rally, sponsored by the communist front group International Answer, was somewhere between 30,000 and 500,000. Even if you accept the implausible estimate of half a million, that's still a mere 1/578th of the turnout for the pro-war demonstrations--surely within the margin of error, meaning that it's statistically possible no one showed up to the "antiwar" rallies.

Even so, according to Reuters, "President Saddam Hussein hailed worldwide anti-war demonstrations on Saturday and said the protests showed that Iraq had international support for standing up to the United States."

Are Multiculturalists Legalizing Rape?
Back in July, we noted an article in which Bruce Bawer quoted a Norwegian professor, commenting on the statistic that 65% of rapes in Norway were committed by "non-Western" immigrants, mostly Muslims, as remarking that the victims had it coming. "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes," the professors said, because Muslims found their manner of dress provocative and "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape."

This is a new height in multicultural insanity, and now this type of thinking seems to be influencing Norwegian law. An appeals court "acquitted a man for sexually assaulting a mentally handicapped woman on the grounds that he had only lived 12 years in Norway and so had difficulty understanding the victim's condition," Aftenposten reports. The victim suffers from Williams syndrome, a Downs syndrome-like disorder, one symptom of which is "overly friendly and polite behavior and a desire to contact strangers." (PBS has more on the syndrome.)

The accused, a 22-year-old cab driver "originally from the Middle East," testified "that he found nothing odd about the woman's appearance or behavior" and "cab drivers often talked about easy sex offers from female passengers." The appeals court overturned his prison term of 60 days (!), but it did order him "to pay the woman NOK 25,000 [$3,600] in damages and to replace her ruined coat."

Mideast Monkeyfishing
Charles Johnson's excellent Little Green Footballs blog published a parody last week, a story from "Al-Jee'ef" that "reported" on an Arab League statement denouncing the " 'illegal Zionist occupation' of Earth orbit." (The joke referred to a real news story, on Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, now aboard the space shuttle Columbia.) There was no such Arab League statement, but Ha'aretz, the newspaper sometimes called the New York Times of Israel, published a headline on its Web site: "Arab League condemns NASA inclusion of Israeli astronaut as 'first step in illegal Zionist occupation of space.' (News Agencies)"

Today LGF notes that an article by Israel's ambassador to France, which appears in the French-language Guysen Israel News, also cites the parody as if it were on the level.

We almost can't blame the Israelis for falling for this; after all, such a statement by the Arab League would be no more insane than typical Arab politics. The Jerusalem Post reports that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority has named a soccer tournament after Abdel Baset Odeh, the Hamas terrorist who murdered 30 Jews in last year's Passover massacre.

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

It's a good thing the Arabs don't play real football, or this Sunday we might be watching the Raiders-Martyrs Super Bowl.

Born to Be Mild
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has a hilarious interview with former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who now writes a column for a New York daily newspaper:

Whatever happened to the liberal media?

Paul Krugman thinks it's a myth. Doesn't exist. A figment of the conservative imagination.

"Probably a majority of reporters are registered Democrats or vote Democratic," he says. "But a heavy majority of editors are Republican. The corporations that control most media are Republican. There are operations like Fox News which are unabashedly part of the Republican enterprise and operations like CNN which are carefully evenhanded. The Times is actually--it's clear the editorial page is mildly liberal and most of the staff must be mildly liberal. But in reporting on issues, most of the time it bends over backwards to find two sides to every story.

"There's an organized machine on the right. There really is a lot of money and professional right-wingers out there to influence the media. There's nothing comparable on the left."

That "mildly liberal" is a hoot. As columnist Michael Kelly points out elsewhere in today's Post, the Times editorial page only tries to appear "mild":

Last weekend, the left held large antiwar marches in Washington, San Francisco and elsewhere. Major media coverage of these marches was highly respectful. This was "A Stirring in the Nation," in the words of an approving New York Times editorial, "impressive for the obvious mainstream roots of the marchers."

There is, increasingly, much that happens in the world that the Times feels its readers should be sheltered from knowing. The marches in Washington and San Francisco were chiefly sponsored, as was last October's antiwar march in Washington, by a group the Times chose to call in its only passing reference "the activist group International Answer."

International Answer, of course, is a front for the Workers World Party, which, as Kelly notes, split from the Socialist Workers Party over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary--which the WWP supported. "The left," Kelly notes, "has hardened itself around the core value of a furious, permanent, reactionary opposition to the devil-state America, which stands as the paramount evil of the world and the paramount threat to the world, and whose aims must be thwarted even at the cost of supporting fascists and tyrants." The New York Times is "mild" only in that it insists on calling this "mainstream."

France on Iraqis: Let Them Eat Cake
A group of Iraqi women whose families have been victimized by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship gathered in Paris yesterday, where they "called for the Iraqi leader to be indicted for war crimes and said regime change is the only way to save their desperate nation," the Associated Press reports. "The women also denounced the systematic beheading of innocent women who belong to families suspected of opposing Saddam's regime," the AP notes. One of them "said 16 innocent women were decapitated in front of their own children three months ago."

What's the big deal? ask the leaders of France and Germany. "Don't expect Germany to approve a resolution legitimizing war, don't expect it," CNN quotes Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as saying. Adds President Jacques Chirac: "Germany and France have the same judgment on this crisis."

Chirac also said: "As far as we're concerned, war always means failure." CNN doesn't say what language he was speaking when he said this, but if it was French and not German, the statement refutes itself.

Reuters notes that the French and Germans "declined to reveal how they would vote if the United Nations Security Council debates a war resolution." If it comes to a new resolution, we wouldn't be surprised if France ends up voting yes anyway, since the alternative is to render the U.N. irrelevant, and its permanent seat on the Security Council is Paris's sole remaining claim to major-power status.

Blogger Steven Den Beste has some interesting speculation about the motives behind the Franco-German defense of Saddam:

Suppose we (the UK and US) do ignore all the pressure and last-minute finagling and do actually attack Iraq, which I think now is virtually certain.

Suppose we win, which is absolutely certain.

And suppose, once we've done so, and have occupied Iraq and have full (really full, not UN full) access to Iraq's records and can truly find what they have, that we find that everything we've been saying about their WMDs is really true; that they have chem and bio weapons and banned delivery systems, and are near to developing nukes, which I also think is extremely likely.

One more and the most important: suppose that the records also show that during the 1990's companies in France or Germany (or both) actively and deliberately broke the sanctions and sold equipment and supplies to Iraq which helped it to create these things, and that the governments of Germany and France knew and approved of this and actively helped.

Den Beste acknowledges he has no way of knowing how likely this is, but his suspicions are at least plausible. "I will become extraordinarily suspicious if there's a notable change in tone and behavior from either or both nations about two months after the war ends."

Saddam's Shields
Reuters has another piece on the various idiots who are heading to Iraq to act as "human shields." Clueless as ever, "reporter" Andrew Cawthorne claims: "The new human shield plans revive memories of the 1991 Gulf War when President Saddam Hussein forcibly held thousands of Western hostages after his invasion of Kuwait." How does pro-Saddam extremists deliberately putting themselves in harm's way "revive memories" of the taking of hostages?

The pro-Saddam brigades include everyone from "more than 100 Romanian diehard communists" to Ken Nichols, "a former U.S. marine in the 1991 Gulf War," who remarks: "The potential for white Western body parts flying around with the Iraqi ones should make them think again about this imperialist oil war." But that's silly. It'll be tragic if Iraqi civilians and even soldiers die in the war; they don't have any choice about living under Saddam's brutal dictatorship. But if Ken Nichols dies, it'll be hard to shed any tears for him, since he's volunteering to defend that dictatorship.

Reuters fails to do justice to how much of a wacko Nichols is. Check out this rant in which Nichols denounces the U.S. government for refusing to recognize his renunciation of his U.S. citizenship. Nichols claimed he was no longer an American because he'd moved to Hawaii, which in his alternate universe is an independent nation.

You Don't Say--I
"Bush Says Iraqis Are Still Resisting Demand to Disarm"--headline, New York Times, Jan. 22

You Don't Say--II
"Rumsfeld Says Iraq Diplomacy Is Nearing the End of Its Road"--headline, New York Times, Jan. 21

Nicks and Cuts
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is smarter than he looks, claims New York Times columnist Nick Kristof: "It turns out that the Great Leader is actually a smart and self-confident sophisticate who surfs the Internet and watches CNN; any day now we may find that he's a fan of Wall Street Journal editorials."

Kristof is also a fan of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, though he's afraid to admit it. Later in the same column, he writes: "One ray of hope is a very sensible letter released a few days ago by leading American conservative thinkers, urging the White House to negotiate with the Great Leader about nukes but also to put human rights on the agenda." But he doesn't acknowledge that the letter appeared on the Journal's editorial page.

You Don't Say--III
"Tension Along Koreas' DMZ Remains High"--headline, National Public Radio Web site, Jan. 16

Stupidity Watch
If you have children enrolled at Michigan State University, you might want to consider pulling them out. If Anthony Vigil is typical, MSU produces students who are not only ignorant but aggressively so. Here's an excerpt from a Vigil commentary in the MSU State News:

With regard to the United States, the so-called "founding fathers" discursively, ideologically and juridically constitute the political sovereignty of their "whiteness" in stark contrast to those, whom by virtue of naturalized difference, are incapable of full citizenship: "Injuns, Mexkins, Afrkins or Ohrentals." In fact, one could equally argue that the ideological "war on terrorism" begins precisely at the moment in which the imperialism of the nation-state approaches a state of emergency, namely when its innumerable acts of genocide, removal, termination or incarceration of the "nonpeople" are met with armed resistance.

He's got enough 50-cent words in there to buy a nice dinner, but intellectually he's flat broke.

You Don't Say--IV
"Kennedy Criticizes Bush Policies and Says Democrats Should Stand Up to the President"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 21

A Real Man Knows Who's Boss
You may remember him from such films as "Junket Whore " and "The Aliens Are Coming," but now actor Ed Harris is diversifying into politics. Harris "has questioned President's Bush's manhood because of the president's support for restrictions on abortion," CNSNews.com reports:

"Being a man, I have got to say that we got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity. He's a good old boy, he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck. That is not the definition of a man, God dammit!" Harris said to wild applause.

Harris was speaking at a party held by Naral Pro Choice America to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. And how did Ed Harris come to be such a fervent advocate of abortion rights? "I am here because my wife Amy's been a fighter for woman's rights. She has educated me over the 20 years we have been together to the point where she's got me in her hip pocket." What a man.

CNSNews also quotes actress Kathleen Turner as saying "the GOP's increased strength in Washington 'scares the hell out of me' ":

"I don't feel that the country is really being consulted. I don't feel we are really being informed. I think that is a high-handed kind of government that frightens me," Turner told CNSNews.com.

Um, Kathy, didn't we just have an election?

You Don't Say--V
"Partying Young Could Lead to Drugs"--headline, the Age (Melbourne, Australia), Jan. 22

You Don't Say--VI
"Early Marijuana Use 'Leads to Problems' "--headline, BBC.co.uk, Jan. 22

The Scales of Justice
"A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit against McDonald's Corp. that alleged the fast food chain was responsible for children's obesity," Reuters reports. The delightfully named Judge Robert Sweet threw out the whole case, saying that the porcine plaintiffs--one is a 14-year-old girl who is 4-foot-10 and weighs in at 170 pounds--could not have been "unaware of the dangers of eating such food."

Meanwhile the Associated Press reports a new study finds people are eating bigger portions--even at home. This troubles Margo Wootan of the self-styled Center for Science in the Public Interest: "We're getting so used to these big portion sizes when we eat out that when we go home we forget what a normal portion is." Maybe fat folks should start suing themselves.

'The Egghead Crowd'
In a National Review Online review of City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald's new book, "Are Cops Racist," pseudonymous policeman Jack Dunphy opines that "Mac Donald's voice deserves to be heard by a far wider audience than the egghead crowd that no doubt comprises City Journal's subscriber base."

You mean like all the waitresses and truck drivers who read National Review?

This Just In
"The Bee Gees are over," the Australian Associated Press reports from London.

In other news, Jimmy Carter has left the White House, America has concluded its Bicentennial celebrations, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

You Don't Say--VII
"The slaves most directly impacted by slavery have all died."--Houston Chronicle, Jan. 21

We Get Results
Yesterday we noted that the New Jersey Education Association, the Garden State's teachers union, had on its Web site a brochure encouraging parents to volunteer in schools, which came in three flavors--one of which was a dumbed-down "African American version." We heard this morning from a couple of readers who said it had been renamed "ethnically diverse version," but by the time we checked the link to this version had disappeared from the page altogether. As we write, the brochure itself is still available here (in PDF form), but the way these things work, it'll probably be gone soon. Google has a cached version of the page with the original "African American version" link.

Gen. Goldilocks
A few weeks back Rep. Charles Rangel called for the reinstitution of conscription on the grounds that the all-volunteer military is racist. Because blacks are more likely to join the military and thus more likely to die in combat than whites, Rangel suggested, waging a war with a volunteer military is racist. But it turns out Rangel was wrong: While it's true that the overall ranks of the military are disproportionately black, blacks are actually underrepresented in combat units, as USA Today is the latest to report.

But you can't please everyone. It turns out that if whites are more likely to die in combat, that's a sign of antiblack racism too, at least according to USA Today:

The reasons for the racial divide are unclear, but several theories have emerged, including lingering racism in some quarters of the military.

Put Rangel and USA Today together and you have the Goldilocks approach to military recruitment: This army is too white. This army is too black. But this army is just right.

Hispanics Hit the Big Time
Guinness, call your office. There's a new record for biggest minority in America, and it's held by Hispanics, CNN reports:

The Latino population grew to 37 million in July 2001, up 4.7 percent from April 2000. The black population increased 2 percent during the same period, to 36.1 million. . .

Hispanics now comprise nearly 13 percent of the U.S. population, which grew to 284.8 million in July 2001. That's up from 12.5 percent, or 35.3 million of the country's 281.4 million residents in April 2000.

Blacks make up 12.7 percent of the nation's population, up from 12.6 percent in April 2000. The black population grew by 700,000 in the 15 months after the census was released.

Hispanics aren't evenly distributed throughout the country, however; the census reports that in California they actually they make up a whopping 32.4% of the population, almost 2 1/2 times their nationwide proportion. So they must really be the biggest minority in California, right?

Well, no, as it turns out. "White persons, not of Hispanic/Latino origin" are 46.7% of Californians, making them a bigger minority than Hispanics. And "female persons" are 50.2%, which means male persons must be 49.8%.

So in California, despite all the progress minorities have made, the two biggest minorities are men and whites. It's just another example of how in racist America, the white man always comes out on top.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Moynihan, Jose Fernandez, David Elbaum, Hershel Ginsburg, Carl Sherer, Michael Segal, Sharon Langworthy, Mary O'Boyle, Don Mishell, Gad Meir, Anna Sechuga, Stanley Schaffer, Todd Warnick, Daniel Schwartz, Yishai Ben Mordechai, Hampton Stevens, Moshe Bell, Miriam Himmelfarb, Chana Lajcher, William Katz, Yisrael Saperstein, Monty Krieger, Neal Sanders, Edward Tannen, Yehuda Hilewitz, Josh May, Gershon Dubin, Pat Rowe, Jenifer Sawicki, Michael Skov, S.E. Brenner, John Hartness, Mark Merkley, C.E. Dobkin, Brian McCarthy, Steven Shores, A. Gill, Robert LeChevalier, John Archer, Barak Moore, John Parker, Joel Goldberg, Raghu Desikan, Arnold Nelson, Natalie Cohen, Michael Siegel, Don Rorabaugh, Jason Gottlieb, Steve Ginnings, John Gaylord, Bob Grinsell, David Schlosser, Jim Orheim, Dave Johns, Aviva Ross, Tammy Mosley, Chris Fountain, Marie Bourgeois, Russell DePalma, Eric Friedmann, Glenn Ackerman, Richard Miniter, Michael Bumgardner, Tim Burke, Jon Sanders, George Mitchell, Carla Austin, Nicole Peck, Bruce Jacobson, Randy Heath, Bill Chesky, William Schultz, Edward Himmelfarb, Daniel Goldstein and Jose Guardia. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Why won't Colin Powell support Iraq's democrats?
• Claudia Rosett: The U.N. Human Rights Commission is worse than a joke.
• Jesse Walker: Commercials are the one brand of big-budget filmmaking that takes artistic risks.