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Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden is still at large — but that’s not a failure of White House policy, says Frances Fragos Townsend. As she explained to CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry last night:

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we’re going to get him. Still don’t have him. I know you are saying there’s successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That’s a failure.

TOWNSEND: Well, I’m not sure — it’s a success that hasn’t occurred yet. I don’t know that I view that as a failure.

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At holiday dinner my inlaw’s inlaw in law, a New Jersey state prosecutor, told us that prosecutors now ask all potential jurors if we ever read “progressive blogs,” and reject us from juries if the answer is “Yes.” Meanwhile, if a perp has been, say, involved in an assault which nearly removed the nose from the victim’s face, prosecutors are working closely with armed services recruiters to offer him the chance to avoid trial and punishment by accepting recruitment.

So here’s where we are as a society: If you hold solid, progressive, core American values – the kind our nation was founded on and for – and you use the blogs to inform and refine those values, you are no longer a “peer” fit to judge others before the law. And if you are dragged before the courts, rightly or wrongly, you can count on your progressive peers having no representation on your jury.

But if you are a violent thug, our prosecutorial system will bend over backwards to see to it that you have a premier opportunity to represent America to the inhabitants of other lands. Apparently there’s been a long history of “rehabilitating” criminals by steering them into the forces rather than into trial and incarceration. But recruiters are especially anxious to exploit this resource today to fill the ranks. So you take kids from the street, who have most likely already been traumatized before their own expression of violent psychosis brought them before criminal justice, and send them to a war zone so that they can experience even more trauma, commit more mayhem, and contaminate their fellow troops with their attitude.

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Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,�? stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’�?

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Take a look at this article which I pulled from the New York Times archive. It appeared on page one on April 25, 1975. It’s about a famous speech Gerald Ford gave in which he declared the Vietnam War over:

Ford Says Indochina War Is Finished for America

By RICHARD L. MADDEN

NEW ORLEANS, April 25 — President Ford, calling on the nation to develop an agenda for the future, declared today that the war in Indochina was finished “as far as America is concerned.”

Mr. Ford urged the beginning of what he called “a great national reconciliation” and added:

“We are saddened, indeed, by events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world. Some seem to feel that if we do not suceed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded in nothing nowhere.”…

The President made his remarks in a speech to more than 4,500 members of the student body of Tulane University, who greeted his appearance and speech in the campus field house with prolonged and enthusiastic applause, particularly his comment that the war was finished as far as this nation was concerned….

“Today, American can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam,” Mr. Ford said.

“But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished — as far as America is concerned,” he said.

This well-known speech highlights a key aspect of Gerald Ford’s legacy: His performance at the end of the Vietnam War. Yet if you read all the pieces lauding Ford, you’ll find that this aspect of his Presidency — his handling of the war’s aftermath — is not very high at all on the list of things that are praised by Washington’s wisest commentators.

This speech, for instance, was not mentioned in David Broder’s column deifying Ford today. There was no mention of it in George Will’s column on Ford, no mention in Robert Novak’s column on him, and no mention in the Washington Post‘s grand and sweeping farewell editorial. In fact, neither Broder’s nor Will’s column even contained the words “Vietnam” or “Indochina.” Nor did Novak or the Post editorial make any mention of Ford’s declaration that the Vietnam war was over.

Instead, those worthies spent most of their ink praising Ford for his “civility” or “decency” — that is, mostly towards themselves and others in Washington, D.C.

This strikes me as exceedingly strange — and very revealing. Whatever the verdict on Ford’s performance in the aftermath of Vietnam, Ford’s handling of the end of the war would seem to be one of the aspects of his Presidency that has direct relevance to our current situation. It clearly bears most directly on the thing that matters to the American people more than any other issue right now — that is, the Iraq war. After all, at this moment we’re all awaiting a speech from another President about another seemingly hopeless quagmire that continues to claim the lives of Americans with no end in sight. While the historical parallels are far from perfect, many of Ford’s phrases then have profound resonance in the current debate.

So why do we hear so little praise or discussion of this aspect of Ford’s legacy? None of these commentators could spare a single word on it. None of these commentators thought to ask whether that speech on Vietnam, or his handling of the end of the war in general — rather than his “civility” — might contain guidelines or lessons that D.C.’s current leadership might learn something from, or even might usefully contemplate in the context of the current quagmire. Instead, they were mainly preoccupied with drawing lessons for the present from how nicely behaved Ford was to them and their class of D.C. insiders.

Healthy priorities, huh?

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The state of Florida tortured 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson to death for trespassing. The teen had been sentenced to probation in 2005 for taking a joy ride in a Jeep Cherokee that his cousins stole from his grandmother. Later that year, he crossed the grounds of a school on his way to visit a friend, a violation of his probation. His parents were given a choice between sending him to boot camp and sending him to juvenile detention. They chose boot camp, believing, as many Americans do, that “tough love�? was more likely to rehabilitate him than prison.

Less than three hours after his admission to Florida’s Bay County Sheriff’s Boot Camp on January 5, 2006, Anderson was no longer breathing. He was taken to a hospital, where he was declared dead early the next morning.

A video recorded by the camp shows up to 10 of the sheriff’s “drill instructors�? punching, kicking, slamming to the ground, and dragging the limp body of the unresisting adolescent. Anderson had reported difficulty breathing while running the last of 16 required laps on a track, a complaint that was interpreted as defiance. When he stopped breathing entirely, this too was seen as a ruse.

Ammonia was shoved in the boy’s face; this tactic apparently had been used previously to shock other boys perceived as resistant into returning to exercises. The guards also applied what they called “pressure points�? to Anderson’s head with their hands, one of many “pain compliance�? methods they had been instructed to impose on children who didn’t immediately do as they were told.

All the while, a nurse in a white uniform stood by, looking bored. At one point she examined the boy with a stethoscope, then allowed the beating to continue until he was unconscious. An autopsy report issued in May—after an initial, disputed report erroneously attributed Anderson’s death to a blood disorder—concluded that he had died of suffocation, due to the combined effects of ammonia and the guards’ covering his mouth and nose.

Every time a child dies in a tough love program, politicians say—as Florida Gov. Jeb Bush initially did on hearing of Anderson’s death—that it is “one tragic incident�? that should not be used to justify shutting such programs down. But there have now been nearly three dozen such deaths and thousands of reports of severe abuse in programs that use corporal punishment, brutal emotional attacks, isolation, and physical restraint in an attempt to reform troubled teenagers.

Tough love has become a billion-dollar industry. Several hundred programs, both public and private, use the approach. Somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 teenagers are currently held in treatment programs based on the belief that adolescents must be broken (mentally, and often physically as well) before they can be fixed. Exact numbers are impossible to determine, because no one keeps track of the kids in these programs, most of which are privately run. The typical way to end up in a government-run program, such as the camp where Martin Lee Anderson was killed, is for a court to give you the option of going there instead of prison. The typical way to end up in a private program is to be sent there by your parents, though judges and public schools have been known to send kids to private boot camps as well. Since they offer “treatment,�? some of the private centers are covered by health insurance.