Social Engineering Redux

I heard this on BBC World this morning and nearly shat myself: Put carbon tax on babies: academic says.

Does this smack of failed social engineering projects of the last century or what? It is very thinly veiled attempt to force human civilization into a box of robotic obedience to crackpot theories. It is a truly dystopian future that looms ahead if we are going to seriously put ecological well being ahead of human existence.

It is the latest in a string of theoretical nonsense that seeks to manage the relationaship between population and consumption of resources. It is also frequently the realm of science fiction.

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb — and with it the youth percentage.
In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 percent.
In the 1990s, 82.4 percent.
In the year 2000 — critical mass."

It is Last Day!

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German Insight

West Wing: The Comeback of a War President - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Never thought about things quite like it is spelled out in this article. I mean, nothing in it is a surprise. But the analysis is something I haven't seen before. I have some quibbles, but overall I think he's got it right. It sorta seems obvious if you stand back and look at it. A generational war. Not a season of 24.



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A Little Gem

I like this. Granted it sort of sounds like it was written by someone in high school, but hey. The sentiment is what I identified with:

Common Sense and Wonder: Bush Resignation Speech

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The End of the Mortgage Universe, According to the BBC

Not that I'm surprised, given their propensity to designate every other day as the end of American civilization, but it seems the British press has a case of Chicken Little hysteria:

The Independent: Markets fear banks have $1 trillion in toxic debt

BBC: Foreclosure wave sweeps America

The Telegraph: Arch critic calls for Citigroup to be broken up

Foreclosure wave? Yeah, I've notice that the rates have gone up (and down, and up, and down again), but I guess I'm living in my bubble again where this immense tidal wave has yet to penetrate. The BBC is actually using THIS photograph to illustrate how bad things are in America:

That's allegedly a picture of every house in America. The article later explains that it is probably a picture of some place in Cleveland. Well Cleveland is not America. In parts of Cleveland, subprime mortgages (i.e. mortgages given without a wisp of care for things like income, assets, debt, demonstrated responsibility or a JOB), represent a significant majority of mortgages given out in the past few years. That isn't the case in my town or, I imagine, your town. But if you live in a constant jealous snit of superficial arrogance in some formerly great country overseas, then this is surely the image you'd prefer to think of when faced with American supremacy.

I don't think I live in a bubble. I have gone through the mortgage application process several times. It is supposed to be rigorous. If a company chooses to award risky loans, and it goes tits up when people default or when the prime rates change, then I'm not sure I have a terrible amount of sympathy. Luckily father government is there to catch the people falling through the collapse of companies selling sub-prime mortgages. Lucky that Uncle Sam has such an enormous capacity to spend my tax money in such wealth redistribution schemes of cosmic proportions. Hey I have an idea. Instead of just bailing everyone out, why don't we negotiate a settlement whereby people (with the aforementioned thing called a job and some semblance of responsibility) can keep their houses at a reduced interest rate that is sufficient for subprime mortgage companies to either stay in business or sellout to some other, more solvent company (one with a better financial strategy, it is assumed).

And by the way, if your house happens to look like it is an abandoned and vandalized depression-era project, then my apologies. Aside from Cleveland and some places in New Jersey (Newark! I'm talking to you!), I think the magnitude of the 'disaster' is somewhat overstated. As are so many 'disasters' the press leads us to believe will end the universe as we know it.

I'm surprised I haven't seen an article blaming Dick Cheney and George Bush for this latest 'end of the universe' situation we are allegedly in.

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I Know John Kerry, John Kerry Is A Friend Of Mine...

So as most of you know I travel for work. Last week, Friday morning in fact, I was on a United flight from Pittsburgh to Washington Dulles. Sitting in 1A (first class of course) was John Kerry. I was in 2A (and Ruben Studdard was in 2F, but that's beside the point). This was a Canadair CRJ700 with a first class cabin consisting of 2 rows. Each row in first class had 1 seat, then the aisle, then two seats. The seats went 1A, then the aisle, then 1D and 1F. Don't ask me why. Anyway, Mr Kerry and I were on the 1 seat side, the 'A' side with no one sitting immediately next to us. I prefer that arrangement as I suspect he does as well. It was unclear to me whether the folks in 1D and 1F were with the Senator or not. Perhaps a campaign or Senate staffer or something?

I have seen and met politicians and celebrities on flights before. I'm always polite, a little star struck sometimes, and I always seek a handshake. That's all, a handshake. I don't ask for an autograph or whatever. Although I did offer Lindsey Graham a bit of unsolicited advice regarding immigration on a couple of occaisions. At any rate, no matter whether I agree or disagree with their politics, I'm always respectful of the offices to which these politicians have been elected. Normally I find myself impressed with the personal presence of politicians that I don't even like and am forced to reconsider their motivations based on a personal encounter. This was not one of those times. Allow me to paint a picture for you:

Senator Kerry was jabbering away on his Blackberry, asking whomever on the other end to 'Blackberry' him this and 'Blackberry' him that. As if it were a verb. That sort of irritated me. The flight attendent, as they are wont to do in the front of the plane, came round a few times for some pre-flight beverage orders. Senator Kerry simply ignored the poor stewardess who was just trying to do her job. She must have asked him 3 or 4 times, hovering near his shoulder and whispering so as not to disturb his call. He finally waved her away with a careless flap of his hand, an outright dismissal of the airline worker. That irritated me some more. But whatever, perhaps he was just in a bad mood. The Senator continued to talk on his Blackberry, long after the cabin door was closed and the plane was in motion, taxiing to the runway. This is in direct violation of Federal law as the flight attendants clearly pointed out in the pre-flight safety announcements. This law apparently doesn't apply to the Senator. Why would it? He's a billionaire, he's a prominent Senator and his initials are JFK. So why would petty things like 'rules' apply to him? That really put Mr. Kerry and me on bad footing. I was debating now whether I really wanted to shake his hand or not.

Once the plane took off and his call had ended, Mr. Kerry started to make himself comfortable in the seat. He took off his jacket and held it on his lap until the plane leveled and the flight attendent was up and about. He then discarded the jacket to her with one hand held out while his head was down rummaging in the bag he had at his feet. It looked like this poor girl was his personal assistant as she grabbed the jacket and hung it up. Not so much of a thank you or anything from the Senator. Also keep in mind that being in 1A, he was not supposed to have a bag at his feet. That is a bulkhead seat and there is no seat in front of him. It is one of those pesky Federal laws again. Anyway, from his bag he whipped out his New York Times (naturally) and began to read. He also started fussing with his hair. I mean, it wasn't just a 'oh let me make sure my hair isn't sticking up' tussle of the hair, this was a full-on, constant-motion, self-grooming that lasted the rest of the flight. As far as I could tell, it looked fine to begin with and none of his self-grooming had the least bit of effect. Perhaps it made him feel better though.

Mr. Kerry rolled up his sleeves as he read the Times. I thought this strange since it was bitter cold outside and the plane itself was quite chilly, the heat not yet on. Highly noticeable on his right wrist was the yellow Live Strong bracelet he is photographed with so often. I only thought about this later, and it is probably meaningless, but he almost always is shown in photos with the bracelet on his left wrist. Not his right wrist. Perhaps he wanted it on the aisle-side wrist so that when he rolled his sleeves up in the frigid aircraft, the common folk in the back would be able to see it. After all, if it was on the window-side wrist, nobody would be able to see his dedication to healthy living. As I've thought about this, the sheer vanity of the man convinces me that he must conciously do things like this just for show. But whatever, he's a politician.

It was funny how he made little noises as he read the paper. I know this sounds weird, but for me it was a little moment of realization. I had never conciously thought of the fact that politicians, even at this level of prominence, actually read the same news stories that I myself read. That is, I may read an article and think things about it and here is this former Presidential candidate who may read the very same story and have his own opinion. It sounds obvious of course, I had just never thought about it before, much less seen it in person.

Anyway, the plane touched down on schedule at Dulles. The plane taxied to the gate. Mr. Kerry took his seat belt off and proceeded to get his things together even though the aircraft was still in motion. Again, another Federal law. Once the plane had actually stopped, but before the little 'ding' went off indicating that you may now stand up and get your bags, the Senator was up and moving for his jacket. Everyone else on the plane was still sitting, but not the Senator. He's above those little rules, you see. He bounded out the door as soon as it was open. We were not at a jetbridge, so down the stairs he went. I gathered my belongings snuck a peek at Ruben (he's lost some weight) and then followed the Senator. As we waited for our gate-checked bags to come forward from the rear compartment, I made my move. I turned to him and said:

"Senator? I just wanted to shake your hand. Don't agree with your politics, but it is always an honor to meet a Senator." And I extended my hand. He replied:

"Oh. That's nice. Good to meet you." And he extended his hand.

I shook his hand. It confirmed everything that I felt about him in my gut. It was akin to grabbing hold of a damp towel. Or more to the point, you know that memory foam at Brookstone that they make pillows and mattresses out of? You know, the stuff you put your hand in and the impression of your hand stays there for a few minutes? Yeah, that was what his hand shake was like. I nearly recoiled in horror. He felt...dead. I mean, it was cold out and his hand was cold and it was limp cause he's a puss and well I guess he just felt...dead.

And that was it. Well, almost.

After our brief encounter, he immediately turned away. I felt as if I had been formally dismissed. Ruben walked up to the Senator and began talking. It was windy and I had started to move away and didn't catch what they were discussing, but wouldn't THAT have been an interesting bit of convo to be party to?

As my bag came out and I prepared to move off into the terminal, a man walked up to the Senator and said:

"Senator Kerry? I was wondering sir if I could get a picture taken with you?"

To which the Senator replied:

"I'd love to, but I've got to get going." Yes. That's right.

He then turned back to Ruben and continued the conversation. The Senator's bags had not yet been brought out. He was in no rush to go anywhere and had just totally dissed a potential voter.

This was last Friday. This was only a few days before he supposedly attempted to call the President stupid but ended up describing American soldiers as uneducated. Either way he's wrong. Just like he was wrong to treat the regular people in my story as trash. He doesn't just need a lesson on the military, as some have suggested in recent days, he needs a lesson in how a politician is the servent of the people. He needs to be reminded that regular people are the people that vote for politicians. Treat them with disdain at your own peril.

I'm just hoping that none of the soldiers in Iraq ever have to shake Senator Kerry's hand. I suspect his salute is likewise limp-wristed.

If I try real hard, I may look masculine....oh damn, too late.

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My Own Disillusionment

So I'm drifting towards a viewpoint that I have opposed as long as I can remember caring about this topic. Interesting isn't it how one's opinions and convictions morph with time and events?

This article has prompted my lasted tirade.

I increasingly believe that since we are viewed as the source of the world's problems and seem to be on the defensive even on our own borders, the world doesn't deserve the continued involvement of Americans.

I'm becoming an isolationist. Yes, it is horrific. It is something I could never have imagined myself feeling. But since there are no advocates for our way of life outside our borders, and indeed there seem to be a decreasing number inside our borders, perhaps we should begin to look to our own internal needs and to hell with a world that despises us and everything we stand for. Bound and tied by supranational artifices such as the UN or World Court that seek to restrict America by claiming some sort of ultimate authority that supersedes our own laws, actively opposed at every turn by nations that only exist today because of the thousands of American graves that litter the world's soil, under attack for daring to believe in notion of God or outrageously claiming that not all views in this world have moral equivalency or foolishly arming ourselves because the mere concept of self defense, ignorantly opposing unlimited state socialism in the form of massive government programs designed for wealth redistribution and instead stupidly trusting the market and entrepreneurship to address social ills; these are views that while certainly not universally held in this nation, are ideas that define what American values are. And these ideas are held to be nonsense in most parts of this world.

My recent fall stay in Europe has totally convinced me that while we come from a common cultural, religious, legal, political and linguistic background, we think differently than Europeans. They think about things from a completely different viewpoint. I hold up as an example how I was ridiculed, by friends mind you, for suggesting that the State doesn't have the right or moral authority to require women to abort fetuses that may lead to children with developmental problems. Their belief (and this topic came up because of local polling on the subject that suggested a vast, vast majority felt this way in the low countries) is that such women have the social obligation not to burden the rest of society with handicapped children. Yes. Sixty years after the Nazi's and eugenics is alive and well in liberal (small 'L') Western Europe. The mere notion of State-mandated abortions horrifies me.

The world rejects our ideas, they reject our policies, they reject our lifestyle, they reject (and ridicule and minimize and trivialize) our culture, they dismiss our history as too short to count for much, they oppose us everywhere we try to act and they completely reject our leadership.

This isn't new. If you read historical documents and research this topic, you will find that dating back into the 19th Century the world has held these views. From the moment the Great White Fleet heralded our Great Power status, we have been the object of derision, the subject of onerous opposition and the target of insidious backstabbing. Only the emergence of the bipolar world and the threat of Soviet domination won us friends. Baby boomers who look to the fictional happy, unified West of the 60's and the illusion of utopia represented by the JFK generation delude themselves. Most of the world sided with us because we were the lesser of two evils, and only a little bit lesser. That and the fact that we had a nuclear umbrella.

So to the naysayers who claim that everything was happy until the 2000 elections are simply wrong. A system of smiles and yesses and nodding and cordial agreement existed that was a thin veneer over the vast reservoir of disdain, dislike and disapproval. A veneer held in place by the realpolitik of nuclear annhilation at the hands of the Soviets. The first signs that this veneer, this crust, was cracking came almost immediately after the Soviet Union fell. Clintonian international politics was not much different than George W Bush's. Despite what you may think. They both opposed the World Court, they both rejected the claimed supranational authority of the UN over the US Constitution, they both used covert practices (like those we call 'torture' since a Republican has been in the White House), they both supported Israel without reservation, they both sought to contain China, they both claimed and supported the concept of American exceptionalism. The difference is that Clinton did everything with a goofy smile, a pat on the back and was politically correct.

So given the threats we face to our very existence, given the bad faith of 'allies', given the active opposition of most of the world, I say to hell with them. They don't want us around? Fine. We have other things to do. I am an increasing believer in taking our proverbial ball home and letting the world burn itself to the ground. The Iranians want a nuke? Let them have it. North Korea wants a nuke? Fine. We don't really care what they do, provided they don't lob them our way. Naturally our enemies must be put on notice that we will simply obliterate them and erase their people from history in the event that a radiological device comes our way. I'm aware of the dangers involved in such a track. But we cannot take on every other nation and that nation's public opinion and expect that we will be successfull, or liked, or respected. Our military has been in South Korea and Germany for 50 and 60 years. We paid to rebuild both nations from scratch. We gave them their forms of government. We constructed their nation states out of our own pocket. And their feelings after all this? They still hate us.

They don't want us? They believe they're better off without us? No problem. We need them a lot less than they need us. So bring the boys home. Pull up the drawbridge. Post the guards on the watch tower.

Republican Treason?

Two articles in major publications on the same topic in two days. Is this evidence of a trend in conservative thinking? Do these positions represent a treason against the party or do they uphold the core values of fiscal conservatism that have been totally abandoned by the party in power? Is this the beginning of a return to roots effort and a revitalization of the core values of the GOP?

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC fame is the latest to put these thoughts in print. The idea is basically that a defeat for the majority in November will shake them loose from their dream-like state of voracious spending. From the Washington Monthly:

And we thought Clinton had no self-control
Joe Scarborough

When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.

"Count me in!" was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America's checkbook for the next two years.

Maybe that's because right-wing, knuckle-dragging Republicans like myself took over Congress in 1994 promising to balance the budget and limit Washington's power. We were a nasty breed and had no problem blaming Bill and Hillary Clinton for everything from the exploding federal deficit to male pattern baldness. I suspected then, as I do now, that Hillary Clinton herself had something to do with "Love, American Style" and "Joanie Loves Chachi." And why not blame her? Back then, Newt Gingrich felt comfortable blaming the drowning of two little children on Democratic values. Hell. It was 1994. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The terminally rumpled Dick Armey (R-Whiskey Gulch) even went so far as to suggest that the Clintons might be Marxists, drawing an angry personal rebuke from Bubba himself. But 12 years later, it is Armey's fellow Republicans who should be sobered by the short and ugly history of Republican Supremacy.

Under Bill Clinton's presidency, discretionary spending grew at a modest rate of 3.4 percent. Not too bad for a Marxist, even considering that his worst instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress. (Well, his worst fiscal instincts.)

But compare Clinton's 3.4 percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP's reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81 percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress -- Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development -- have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.

It's enough to make economic conservatives long for the day when Marxists were running the White House.

This must all be shocking to my Republican friends who still believe our country would be a better place if our party controlled every branch of government as well as every news network, movie studio, and mid-American pulpit. But evidence suggests that divided government may be what Washington needs the most.

During the 1990s, conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to balance the budget while winning two wars, reforming welfare, and conducting an awesome impeachment trial focused on oral sex and a stained Gap dress.

The fact that both parties hated each another was healthy for our republic's bottom line. A Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival being held in the chairman's home district. Soon, budget negotiations become nasty, brutish, and short and devolve into the legislative equivalent of Detroit, where only the strong survive.

But in Bush's Washington, the capital is a much clubbier place where everyone in the White House knows someone on the Hill who worked with the Old Man, summered in Maine, or pledged DKE at Yale. The result? Chummy relationships, no vetoes, and record-breaking debts.

As a political junkie who wept bitter tears the night Jimmy Carter got elected and shouted with uncontrolled joy when Ronald Reagan whipped his sorry ass four years later, I find myself ambivalent for the first time over a national election. After six years of Republican recklessness at home and abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the aforementioned Bourbon Street hookers could spend this country any deeper into debt than my Republican Party. With any luck, Democrats will launch destructive investigations, a new era of bad feelings will break out, and George W. Bush will stop using his veto pen to fill in Rangers' box scores and instead start using it like a conservative president should.

Is spending really that out of control? I have felt and heard and casually known that it has been that bad, but I'm glad Joe put numbers to it. It is plenty enough to stir the soul of anyone who cares about small government and frugality.

Throw the bums out! Teach them a lesson! Just don't let them get control of anything that matters, like the Senate for example.

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What SHOULD Happen in November

Several months ago I wrote about my how my libertarian streak was breaking the surface and the resulting rage against the machine, the complete incompetence of the Republican controlled Congress, was infuriating me (read it here). It led me to conclude that the Republicans ought to lose the midterm elections. I have since backed off a tad and instead of the apocolypse of a directionless, idealess, rageful, vengeful, Bush hating, Democratic Congress, have decided that a Democratic House would be sufficient smack in the face to wake up the GOP from slothful idiocy and indolence.

I'm glad to see that the the New York Times is willing to publish an Op-Ed that agrees with my assessment.

How to Win by Losing
By RAMESH PONNURU
Published: September 13, 2006

CONSERVATIVES are dreading the November elections. The Republican capture of the House of Representatives in 1994 was one of modern conservatism's signal political accomplishments. Now the Democrats are poised to take back the House. If that happens, however, conservatives will find several silver linings in the outcome.

It would be worse for conservatives if Republicans actually gained seats. The Congressional wing of the party lost its reformist zeal years ago and has been trying to win elections based on pork and incumbency. An election victory would reward that strategy, leaving the congressmen even less interested in restraining spending, reforming government programs and revamping the tax code. Political incompetence and complacency, sporadic corruption and widespread cynicism: having paid a price for none of it, Republicans would indulge in more of the same.

Yes! Completely accurate critique I think. They have become so lazy and self-absorbed in the House and Senate that NOTHING is being accomplished even when the Republican party controls all three branches of government. Wither tax reform? Social Security reform? Immigration reform? I want my taxes lowered, simplified. I want my personal retirement account instead of the tottering 1960s era socialized blunderbuss. I want secure borders and rational immigration policies that make it easier and more attractive to follow the rules than the current incentive to break them. I want fiscal frugality, debt reduction, balanced budget economics. I want an energy policy that zealously reduces our dependence on foreign oil. Where is the majority? Why don't they act? They're clearly too busy accepting bribes from lobbyists, entertaining their mistrisses, smoking cigars, congratulating themselves on being masters of the universe. They need a defeat to restore themselves.

Of course, that's just a thought experiment. Almost nobody thinks that Republicans are going to pick up seats. The question is whether they will have a reduced majority or no majority. And outright loss might be preferable. A narrower House majority would most likely accomplish even less than the current one has. The party's small moderate caucus would gain in power and use it to frustrate conservatives. With no conservative reforms on the horizon, congressmen would revert to the pork strategy.

A straight loss, on the other hand, would make the Republicans hungrier and sharpen their wits. Freed from the obligation of cobbling together thin majorities for watered-down legislation, Republicans would be able to stand for something attractive. Some conservatives worry that Republican officialdom will see defeat as a reason to turn left. But that didn't happen after the last major Republican defeat in 1992. Then, conservatives were able to persuade the party that it had not lost power because it was too far right. They would make the same case this winter, but with more voices in the news media than they had back then.

The effects of victory on the Democrats may also be helpful to Republicans. Powerlessness has stoked Democrats' rage. If the party wins the House, its left-leaning "net-roots" may grow more enraged still, because the Democrats would then have the illusion of power without its reality. Even under their most optimistic calculations, they would have the smallest Democratic majority since 1957 -- and they will have to deal with a Republican president and (probably) Senate.

House Democrats could initiate countless investigations of the administration and schedule votes to make Republicans look bad. But they could not do much to affect either the conduct of foreign policy or the composition of the courts, which are the areas where their most fervent supporters most desperately want influence. If the Democrats try to appease their base by impeaching the president, they will probably increase President Bush's poll numbers, much as Republicans once improved President Bill Clinton's.

This is really the best part of the entire scenario. The leftists will insist on using their House majority to make a total ass of themselves. Pelosi and her ilk are truly bumbling idiots. Whenever they get up to speak they make the President's oratory look like Churchill's. It would be delightful to watch the radical hijackers of the donkey party, the netrooters and kos kids, self-destruct on a national stage. And you know, you KNOW they would. I almost salivate at the prospect. Given the megaphone, their own words will condemn them.

So the policy tradeoffs for Republicans are not especially troubling. They would still be able to set foreign policy and appoint judges. They would be blocked only from making domestic-policy reforms they show no sign of attempting anyway.

There is also the matter of the 2008 elections. Do Republicans really want to go into 2008 running a unified government? The last time an election maintained unified party control from one presidency to another was in 1928. And the 2008 elections matter more than the 2006 elections, because, again, the president has more say over foreign policy and the courts than the House does. If Democrats win the House now, the next Republican presidential candidate will be able to run against Nancy Pelosi and the liberal committee chairmen who would suddenly be in the headlines.

Isn't that prospect just delicious? The notion that the House Democratic leaders would have to actually espouse a philosophy, describe an agenda, have a plan, something other than 'hate Bush', to me seems very exciting. Given the division in their party, they will be completely unable to have a coherent message. The plethora of investigations and hearings they will launch will make it totally impossible to have a consistent message or theme. The internal squabbling, bickering and outright civil war coupled with the external projection of confusion mingled with anger will render the House completely ineffectual. They will emerge as the symbol of everything that is wrong with American politics. And I can't wait for THAT.

Winning in 2006 will make it harder for Democrats to address their long-term structural problems. It has happened before. They confused the Watergate landslide of 1974 for a mandate to embrace McGovernism for 20 years. If they win because of high gas prices, bad war news and conservative discontent now, they will be less likely to adopt new approaches to national security and social issues. That, too, will help Republicans in 2008.

Who knows? If Republicans play their cards right, and the Democrats prove unequal to the task of running the House, the voters could put the Republicans back in power on Capitol Hill in 2008. After a few years in the wilderness, maybe they will be disposed to using that power for conservative ends.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, is the author of "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts and the Disregard for Human Life."

The GOP has grown too drunk with power and take their opponent's incompetence for granted. I think a GOP oss in the House in November 2006 is the best thing that could happen for their prospects in 2008. I also happen to think that the self-destruction of the leftist MoveOn/Kos/netroots wing of the Democratic party is the best thing that could happen for Democrats. The restoration of that party, the reestablishment of an ideological alternative in American politics (something we haven't seen for quite some time), is the best thing that could happen to politics within the Republic. Our nation is strongest when we have honest debate and alternatives. The complete lack of any other ideas, the ideological bankruptcy of the left, have hurt us, and the restoration of a true Opposition will utlimately be best for the country.

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Inside The Intellectual Bubble

The misleading character of the media angers me continually. Their ignorance of their own bias is frustratingly inbred. But there is still one group of fools that generates in me even more disgust. Need I describe them? They are the intellectual elite of this nation. Perpetually enraptured by their own brilliance, gleefully cheering any difficulty America or Americans may face in the world. Somehow they seem to think that only they have the intellectual capacity to truly understand the nature of things. It is lucky for the Republic that intellectuals stay inside their ivory towers and glass bubbles and don't attempt to enter politics. History is full of examples of intellectuals attempting to run a state. Lenin, for instance.

So it was no surprise to me to read this article from the Boston Globe this morning. It WAS a surprise, however, to see that a Harvard professor wrote the column. I have heard this man speak before, but never with this degree of disgust for his peers. It is a troubling look inside the intellectual bubble.

At universities, little learned from 9/11
By Harvey Mansfield | September 13, 2006

FIVE YEARS have now passed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and what have our universities been doing? I can tell you about Harvard, and the answer is not reassuring.

Harvard has just welcomed the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to give a little talk. Harvard thinks this is free speech, but in fact the university has allowed itself to be used as a platform for sweet-talk in the service of a regime that hates, and wants to bamboozle, America. Note, too, that Harvard professor Stephen Walt and a Chicago professor have just written an expose of the Israeli lobby's influence on American politics. They encourage the belief that Israel is the main problem we face .

Nor has Harvard relaxed its hostility to ROTC on the campus. The pretext is the military's policy discriminating against gays by requiring them to keep silent about being gay. Never mind what would happen to gays or defenders of gays if the Islamic fascists took over.

These are not isolated incidents but signs of the prevailing attitude at Harvard and other elite universities. There is lots of griping against the Bush administration but little activist dissent of the kind seen in protest against the Vietnam War. Cindy Sheehan's movement has not caught on.

All to the good, one might say. A university is not a political actor and should not be drawn away from its own business by too much concern for current events.

Yes, agreed. A university is an institution of learning, and as such takes a broad view of things. But this means it should learn from events if not try to control them. What has Harvard learned from Sept. 11? Very little.

Sept. 11 was a stunning blow to multiculturalism. The attacks showed that we have enemies who hate us because they hate both our principles and our practices. They despise the way we live not because we do not live up to our principles of freedom, democracy, and toleration, but because we do. They do not think we are multicultural; they believe we have one culture, and they mean to do away with it.

The feminists at Harvard seek to remove every vestige of patriarchy in America, but they have said almost nothing about the complete dismissal of women's rights by radical Islam. To do so would be to attack Islamic culture, and according to multiculturalism, every culture is equal and none is evil. They forsake women in societies that repudiate women's rights and direct their complaints to societies that believe in women's rights. Of course it's easier to complain to someone who listens to you and doesn't immediately proceed to slit your throat. No sign of any rethinking of feminism has appeared in the universities where it flourishes.

Civil liberties should be another topic of reconsideration. Civil libertarians on the left and the right assume that government is the object of their vigilance and minorities need special care. In time of peace that may be true, but in a war the government is your main friend, and the majority must be protected. The preaching of radical Islam is in fact "a clear and present danger," and we need to suppress it. This sort of speech is not just blowing off steam or keeping us honest or puncturing our complacency. Here is a new task to occupy the anxious minds of civil libertarians in universities: how to distinguish truly dangerous speech and how to defeat it?

The jihadists say they will triumph because they believe in death while we believe in life. That is not quite so. We do believe in life -- but not at any cost. We too value sacrifice and honor for a decent cause. But we let our soldiers speak for us. The professors, who should be our spokesmen, have learned nothing from our soldiers and have nothing to say on why they volunteer to risk their lives.

The difference between our country and the terrorists dwarfs that between liberals and conservatives within our country. But conservatives are more aware of this fact than are liberals, and our universities are dominated by befuddled liberals. Better that they be befuddled than determined to rebel, as during the late 1960s. Better still that they heed the requirements of their own doctrines in the new circumstances of terrorist war.

Harvey Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University and author of the book "Manliness."

I don't know that I would agree with Mansfield when he says that the professors should be our spokesmen. I think professors, and other intellectuals, should be our educators and keepers of knowledge, our human Great Library of collective intellect. Be that as it may, his point is a powerful one and something I think it would be hard for an intellectually honest professor or writer or student wrapped up in this bubble to argue against. Why don't our intellectuals support the elimination of religious extremism? Why don't they rail against Islamofascism they way they do against evengelical Christian groups? Where is the outrage against the beheadings and religous killings? It just makes me shake my head in absolute disgust and disbelief. I'm glad that there is, at least, a counter intellectual position such as what Mansfield has espoused. Hopefully there are others keeping their silence inside the bubble for fear of being cast out by their peers for holding a discordant opinion. Hopefully these thinkers too can summon the courage to take up the pen for their country, to take to the podium for their people, to lend their voice in support of civilization.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Politics, Intellectuals, Harvard, GWOT, Islamofascism

Clear Canadian Correctness

I was so pleased to read the following article. It appears that there are in fact clear thinking Canadian media types. And they actually are writing articles. And those articles are actually being printed. It often gives me pain to read what my former countrymen write, often naively I believe, about world affairs. But I am optimistic that several recent articles I've read (like the one below) might augur more articles of this nature. From the Ottawa Citizen:

August 29, 2006
The West Invites Attack
By David Warren

Contrary to generally received opinion, the West is not today under siege from Muslim fanatics because of a resurgence of Islam, but because of the West's own moral and intellectual decline. Even Osama bin Laden knows this. The West invites attack, and the enemy's strategy in attacking is paradoxically to hide his own weakness.

If you look at the enemy, even where he has concentrated his best forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon, you see something unimpressive. Everything that enemy has to fight with, is a by-product of Western industry and invention. The adaptations are sometimes clever, in a psychopathic way, but they are more psychopathic than clever.

I think I've been feeling this way for a while. But I still find it emtionally and intellectually captivating to hear it, or rather see it, in print. We are under attack not because of the strengths of our adversaries, but because of our own weakness! In fact, our enemies have no actual strengths. What appears to be their strength is in fact our own inability to articulate, much less implement, a defense. Makes those 1930s-era analogies ever more clear to my mind.

As one very unofficial Persian commentator put it recently, it is amazing to see a country that cannot even manufacture good safety matches, going about constructing an atomic bomb. The thousands of Katyusha rockets that the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, pumped into northern Israel, are worth examining. They are laughably inefficient in range and aim, and cannot carry much weight in explosive. They can kill only randomly, and then mostly because they are packed with crude shrapnel. Once in shelters, Israeli civilians were at no risk from them. Once emerged, they find their buildings pocked by all this flying gravel, but structural damage only where the rockets directly hit. What contemptible missiles these are!

Indeed. And yet with all of our technology and all the expense and faith we have put into our military super-capability, we are unable to achieve anything like what the enemy achieved in the PR battle during the recent Lebanon conflict. If you can't decide or agree why you are fighting, how can you successfully wage a conflict, even if the enemy is wielding stone age weapons?

But the ideology behind the terrorist weaponry is equally contemptible. If I were a Muslim, with the inheritance of Islamic tradition behind me, I'd be deeply ashamed of the babbling idiots who claimed to speak for me. I would be very loud in contradicting them. Their ideology is tied to Islam, and constructed largely with an Islamic vocabulary and rough grammar, but hardly with an Islamic syntax. By this I mean, that it is inconceivable that anything resembling the "blovulations" of the Salafists, and Shia revolutionists of Iran, could emerge from a purely Islamic course of reasoning. There are too many extraneous elements. In the use of Islamic terms, there is too much slapstick and self-parody.

As many have now observed, the "Islamists" have semi-consciously spun together diverse ideological materials. They have borrowed uncritically from such 20th century totalitarian ideologies as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Each of these European ideologies, itself simplistic, had previously played a part in Arab nationalism. The Hitler strain came right off a flight from Berlin, in the person of the satanic old Mufti of Jerusalem. You look at the fascist salutes in the Hezbollah warrior parades, and see that almost everything about these soi-disant "soldiers" is pathetically imitated from a melodrama on some other history channel.

The very obsession with Israel and the Jews -- exhibited in obscene repetitions of blood libels -- is instructive. While there is some choice indigenous anti-Jewish material to be found within the Islamic tradition, starting in the Koran, the flavour and pitch of contemporary Muslim "anti-Semitism" owes little to it. One must ask such questions as, why do the current rulers of Iran spend so much time denying the Holocaust? It had nothing to do with Islam.

Indeed, the term "Islamo-fascists", that President Bush was recently criticized for using, is a more accurate short description, than the default term "Islamism" we have been using, to describe this crassly politicized caricature of Islam.

So why, if the enemy's ideology is morally and theologically bankrupt and completely bereft of optimism, why are we seemingly unable to combat it? Liberalism, in the classical sense, has historically proven itself the winner of men's souls. Human beings wish to live in open, free, tolerant societies that guarantee some degree of economic advancement and benefit. This is not simply my opinion asserted so as to appear as self-evident fact. It has been demonstrated repeatedly for thousands of years. Why does it constantly come under successful, if temporarily so, assault from those ideologies that preach hatred, destruction, closed societies and economic depression? Why must we fight this battle every generation?

I do not want to insert the standard refrain about the glories of past Islamic civilizations, that political correctness demands. For "PC" is a good enough label for our real mortal enemy. But it is certainly true that Muslim authorities, in most preceding centuries, offered a view of God and man's duties and destiny, that was a whole lot more impressive than the current lot offers. Islam has long been the West's rival. But we could never have wished our rival to be idiotized to such a degree.

Again, our enemy's central weakness is ideological bankruptcy. As the author points out, they have simply borrowed and combined tired and defeated ideologies from past times. Yet this very thing is what we are fighting. How can it be that Islamic Nazism is being accepted by masses in the Muslim world as a legitimate form of expression? I find this argument so compelling. It is, I think, the first time the issue has been framed in this way. We lack the will or ability to combat the very things we have spent so much time, effort, money and blood combatting since the dawn of Western Civilization.

We have a problem in us, not in them. It is the recovery of our own sense of what we are, what we believe, and what we are about, that would defeat Afghan cave-dwellers and shrieking ayatollahs fairly quickly.

In a column this last week, on the current threat from Iran and its proxies, I asked a naïve, simple question that I will repeat. I observed that no counter-threats have been tabled, nor lines drawn in the diplomatic sandboxes of the West. I asked, why not? Why not say plainly, "If you do this, we will do that."

It is this inability to deal forthrightly with madmen, that suggests we have lost too many of our own marbles. For why should a man with a gun fear a man with a stick?

Of course! What a brilliant point and yet so simple: What is our policy regarding a Nuclear Iran? What is our policy regarding attacks upon our civilization? I have been thinking for time that a Kennedy-esque statement should be made to the effect: "It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Iran against any nation in the Middle East as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."

I suspect with such a statement, presented on every television network by a stern-faced President George W. Bush, that the fanatic in Teheran would be restrained by the self-preservation interests of the Mullahs. No one can doubt that W means what he says and will follow through to the utmost to achieve what he believes, sometimes to his political detriment.

Imagine if he were to give Kennedy's speech in today's climate. He could, for example, apply many of the exact phrases JFK used:

"Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace."

"The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere."

"Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation, which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required--and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth--but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced."

"My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead--months in which our patience and our will will be tested--months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing."

"The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are--but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high--and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission."

"Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right- -not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved."

We have fought these ideological battles many times in the past. We must learn from our own history. We must utilize the rhetoric at our disposal, the information tools of the mass media, the ability of liberal democratic ideals to win the hearts and minds of humans everywhere. And, if needs be, we must be ready with backbone to resist the drift toward and allure of appeasement.

The full text of Kennedy's speech to the American people regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis can be viewed here.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Iran, Nuclear, George Bush, Ahmadinejad, Kennedy, Politics, GWOT

Genesis: August 2, 1990

Sixteen years ago today, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and brutally occupied the tiny nation state. The deployment of American forces to Saudi Arabia in order to counter this aggression was viewed by Islamic fundamentalists as soiling their holy land. Even though western troops were there at the invitation of the Saudis, for the protection of that Muslim kingdom and only in response to Hussein's aggression, the mere notion that infidel troops were trodding upon holy land led directly to the creation of Al Qaeda by Osama Bin Laden.

America, acting in order to protect Muslims in Saudi Arabia from the Iraqi dictator and to ensure the free flow of oil to the wider world, somehow takes the blame for being imperialistic. If America had done nothing to ensure the security of the Muslim Holy Land, if Saddam had marched to Riyadh and then to Mecca, I wonder where Bin Laden's anger would have been directed.

It can be argued that the event 16 years ago today marked the beginning of the war on terror. Although we did not acknowledge that there was such a war until September 11, 2001, we were nonetheless being targeted from August 2nd 1990 onward. Even though we have repeatedly acted in defense of Muslims worldwide, often with military force, the only excuse ever given by militant Islam for their hatred of us is that we blasphemed their religion with Operation Desert Shield by placing our troops on their sacred land.

Well our troops aren't there anymore. What is the excuse now? That Jews exist? That Israel is our friend? That we don't immediately renounce Christianity and all become Muslim? At some point the hollow excuses, the convenient lies repeated so often that the purveyors are self-deluded by them, become so obvious and transparent that the underlying truths cannot be blamed on troops in Saudi Arabia or American imperialist aggresion or some other equally fabricated straw man.

The Arab street hates us because we are not like them. They hate us because they are envious of our freedoms, wealth and power. They routinely feel humiliated and downtrodden by western powers. They are oppressed, terrorized and impoverished by their own rulers. They respond by blaming the richest, most free, most powerful nation in history for their situation. And they are led, their hate inflamed, by the few who hate for no other reason then because they are twisted and evil.

It is a generational conflict that will outlive my time on earth and yours as well. And one could argue that some of the first shots were fired on August 2, 1990.

Is it prophetic that a number of other historic events occurred on this date? Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae in 216BC. The Declaration of Independence was signed by the delegates in 1776. The British defeated the French navy at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. The Ottoman Empire fell in 1903. Hitler became Fuhrer in 1934.

Will Saddam's invasion of Kuwait someday rank on this list?

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, AL Qaeda, GWOT, Osama Bin Laden, Desert Shield, Desert Storm

Coherency through Conflict, Clarity from War

There is a cacaphony of nonsense flying around the airwaves and web about the Middle East situation. You have the usual low-brow simplistic crap coming from the main stream media, but you also have basically anyone with a computer becoming a pundit with oodles of self-generated 'credibility'.

I've been casting about for some sort of opinion or position that gelled the situation for me, something that lifted the shroud of relative subjectivity and revealed a clarity, a truth that in my mind exists at the heart of most human conflict. I suppose you could accuse me of trying to boil a tremendously complicated issue into overly-simplistic components. But I honestly believe in good and evil. Not that there aren't shades in between, but there are topics which do fall into one of the two extremes. From the perspective of a modern, progressive, liberal society, I view violent religious extremism and militant theocracy as falling on the 'evil' end of the spectrum.

But how to portray the current conflict? There appears to be a different view for every blog on the web. I have until today been dissatisfied with nearly every portrayal I've come upon. That's why I'm pretty pleased to have read The Times today (London, not New York). To me, the column is smack on. I haven't heard anyone reveal the nugget of truth I've sought in such a succinct manner. This is exactly what I would have written had I been able to gain this sort of clarity.

This is just the start of a showdown between the West and The Rest
Amir Taheri

MANY IN THE WEST see the mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah, now in its fourth week, as another episode in a tedious saga of an Arab-Jewish conflict that began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a political version of the "original sin". The conventional wisdom in the West is that the whole tale would end if Israel were to return the occupied territories to the Palestinians, allowing them to create a state of their own.

But that analysis does not reflect the Middle East's new realities. All the wars in that region of the past century, including the one between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, revolved around secular issues: border disputes, the control of territory and water resources, security and diplomatic relations. Although fought in the name of nationalism or pan-Arab aspirations, none had a messianic dimension.

The first two wars of the new century in the Middle East, however, were ideological ones. The United States toppled the Taleban in Afghanistan and the Saddamites in Iraq not in pursuit of territory but in the name of an idea: democracy.

Since 2001 the region has been turned into an ideological battleground between two rival camps with global ambitions. One camp, led by the United States, claims to represent the modern global system of open markets, free elections, religious freedoms and sexual equality. The other camp is represented by radical Islam, which regards the Western model as not only decadent but dangerous for the future of mankind. It hopes to unite the world under the banner of Islam, which it holds to be " The Only True Faith".

In the Lebanese conflict, Israel and Hezbollah are the junior proxies for the rival camps. Israel is not fighting to hold or win more land; nor is Hezbollah. But both realise that they cannot live in security and prosper as long as the other is in a position to threaten their existence. A Middle East dominated by Islamism could, in time, spell the death of Israel as a nation-state. A westernised, democratic Lebanon, on the other hand, could become the graveyard of Hezbollah and its messianic ideology. And if the US succeeds in fulfilling George W. Bush's promise of a "new Middle East" there will be no place for regimes such as the Islamic Republic in Iran and Syria's Baathist dictatorship.

The present rupture in Lebanon has much to do with who will lead the fightback against the West. For almost a quarter of a century there has been intense competition within the Islamist camp over who could claim leadership. For much of that period Sunni Salafist movements, backed by oil money, were in the ascendancy. They began to decline after the 9/11 attacks that deprived them of much of the support they received from Arab governments and charities. In the past five years Tehran has tried to seize the opportunity to advance its own leadership claims. The problem, however, is that Iran is a Shia power and thus regarded by Sunni Salafists as "heretical". To compensate for that weakness, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made the destruction of Israel a priority for his regime. The war triggered by Hezbollah is in part designed to show that President Ahmadinejad is not bluffing when he promises to wipe Israel off the map as the first step towards defeating the "infidel" West.

The broader aspects of the Lebanon crisis are better understood in the Middle East than in the West. For the first time, Israel is under attack from Islamist and Arab secular radicals as "an American proxy". Writing in Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab daily, a Syrian Cabinet minister, makes it clear that the war in Lebanon today is between "the forces of Islam and America, with Israel acting as an American proxy".

Iran's "supreme guide", Ali Khamenei, expressed a similar view this week during an audience he granted in Tehran to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President. "What we see in Lebanon today represents the revolt of Muslim nations against America," he said. "Hezbollah is backed (by Iran and others) because it is fighting America." President Chávez endorsed that analysis by calling on Muslims and non-Muslim revolutionaries to unite to "save the human race by finishing the US Empire". Iran's state-controlled media has said that Lebanon would become "the graveyard of the Bush plan for a new Middle East".

Tehran believes that a victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon will strengthen President Ahmadinejad's bid for the leadership of radical Islam. A number of recent events have made his attempt to wrest control more likely. This week several leading Sunni theologians at the Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo issued fatwas that allow Sunnis to fight alongside and under the command of Shia Muslims. The fatwas came in response to a Saudi fatwa that had declared any association with and support for Hezbollah to be haram (forbidden).

More significant was a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two. The Salafist radical tried to get hold of Hezbollah's tailcoats in the hope of winning a share of the expected spoils of victory. He endorsed the idea of a global campaign against the "infidel", thus abandoning his previous strategy of focusing the jihad on countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. More significantly, he dropped the al-Qaeda claim of fighting a defensive war against the infidel by designating a vast area of jihad from Spain to India.

All that is good news for President Ahmadinejad, who claims that Sunni radicalism has reached the limits of its capabilities in the fight against the global system led by the US and that it is now the turn of the Shia, led by Iran, to be in the driving seat.

"Hezbollah has fought Israel longer than all the major Arab armies combined ever did," President Ahmadinejad told a crowd in Tehran this week. He also promised that Muslims would soon hear "very good news" about the jihad against the United States.

The idea of Shia leadership for the jihad was further boosted this year when Iran took Hamas under its wings. As a branch of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement, a Sunni outfit, Hamas has exerted its influence to win wider support for Iranian leadership at least as a tactical choice.

Many in the Middle East are alarmed by these shifts of power and dread the prospect of the region entering a new dark age under radical Islamist regimes. For this reason, there seems to be much less hostility towards Israel in the wider Arab world than we might expect in the West. There may be no sympathy for Israel as such but many Arabs realise that the current war is over something bigger than a Jewish state with a tiny territory of 10,000 square miles, less than 1 per cent of Saudi Arabia's land mass.

This war is one of many battles to be fought between those who wish to join the modern world, warts and all, and those who think they have an alternative. This is a war between the West and what one might describe as "The Rest", this time represented by radical Islamism. All the talk of a ceasefire, all the diplomatic gesticulations may ultimately mean little in what is an existential conflict.

And so the follow-on piece must be 'what are we to do?' Extermination of militant Islam is a generational effort involving military action and a huge ramp up in the application of soft power. You don't have to win hearts and minds in the same way that we did versus Communism. But there has to be a sustained, broad, deep and massive effort over decades to convince people with hate in their hearts that life, peace and liberty are preferable to death, destruction and tyranny. Because in the end we will not be conquered or cowed. Western Civilizations will never submit to rule by Islamic Theocracy based in a Mesopotamian caliphate. So that clearly cannot be the end result. Likewise it seems unlikely that an extermination of a billion Muslims by the US Army is on the agenda. So that clearly can't serve as the end result. What is the middle ground?

Any branch of a religion that instructs its adherents to murder all non-believers is not a religion at all. It is intolerable and should be extinguished. Discovering the roots of such a seemingly widespread belief system is key to its destruction. What are the underlying roots of militant Islam? Do we know? We think we do, but do we really? Israel's effort to punish militant Islam seems to be serving only to generate more of it. Is the solution simply to retreat then? That hardly seems productive. Whatever the cause, whatever the drive to murder people for holding a different belief, to cause chaos and destruction and anarchy, these roots must be found and disolved.

I have always believed that at some level economic conditions are responsible for discontent on this level. In wealthy nations where property and money are at stake, conflicts are resolved in courts so as not to jeopardize one's possessions. Naturally if one has no possessions at all, nothing to risk and nothing to lose, then violence is also an acceptable method of conflict resolution. Look at the myriad of beliefs in this nation alone. We hold our beliefs no less strongly than a Sunni Arab holds his beliefs. Why then do we seem to resolve conflicts differently? Why do we approach a conflict with an eye on preserving our wealth, property, family, etc. while the militant Islamist seeks to resolve conflict through killing his opponent and taking his land, his wealth? Economic interest is a necessary precursor to stability and peace. Without it, those have nothing will always seek to overturn the status quo.

And what of simple religious intolerance? Is that not also a driver for the militant Islamist, the extremist Jew or the fundamentalist Christian? It would seem to be an inherent part of human nature dating back to prehistory that we prefer our own kind. But if all our basic needs are met, if our dreams and desires for our lives and those of our children are accessible to us, we can go on hating The Other without feeling the need to kill him outright. For if we do, we invite reprisal that jeopardizes our property, our families, our futures.

These are my thoughts. This has always been my philosophy toward revisionist people, revisionist politicians and revisionist powers. Those who seek to overturn the existing order do so only because they are not part of it. Those already in the establishment seek to preserve it. Simple isn't it? How do we make it into a policy that helps undermine Islamic extremism? How do we translate it and modify it and morph it into an instrument to be wielded by a state, into an effort that can be made in the troubled parts of the world? Is it even possible to generate a scenario where militant Muslims feel part of the system and therefore less likely to try to destroy it?

I'd like to see a Times column on THAT subject. The article above summarizes the problem as I see it. Now all we need is the solution.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, Bush, War, Middle East

The American Opportunity in Lebanon

Not to sound callous, but I don't much care whether Israel is being disproportionately brutal in its response to the kidnapping of its soldiers. To be perfectly honest, I also don't much care what happens to the Lebanese. Take that.

But what I am very concerned about is American interests. And I don't see American interests served by allowing Iran and Syria to create a terrorist state run by Hezbollah on Israel's northern border. Likewise, I don't see American interests served by allowing a newly free Lebanon to fail utterly and further discredit democracy in the eyes of the Arab street.

So where others are wringing their hands over the propiety of pounding Lebanon to dust versus the legitimate need for Israel to defend itself, I don't seem to be able to form much of an opinion. I don't really call this a crisis like some do and I'm not sure it is the flashpoint for a World War III. Probably because I don't necessarily care about the conflict itself. I care about the opportunity it affords the United States to further the creation of moderate Arab democracies in the Middle East. Because I strongly believe that doing so is vitally in our national interest.

So here are some good things I see.

First of all, other Arab states are not keen to support Hezbollah in this fight. They're terrified of Iran and their own internal militant Islamists and that gives us the advantage. Furthermore, the fact that Arab public opinion is divided on who's to blame here reinforces the notion that Hamas, Hezbollah (and non-state actors in general) are bad for the region.

Second, the spotlight being focused on Iranian involvement clearly reveals to the world the nature of the regime in Teheran. It will make dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue easier for us diplomatically. The regional actors clearly see the ambitions of Iran to destabilize the entire region and hold everyone hostage to Islamic militias. They are now less likely then ever to support an Iran with long range missiles and nuclear warheads.

Shrewd diplomacy by the Administration has allowed the United States to largely (I stress largely, not totally), escape the traditional accusation of one-sided unilateral support for Israel. We appear to be much more aloof and yet deeply engaged in the diplomatic processes underway. I think this is good for us. Clearly we support Israel, but that does not preclude us from putting Condi in Beirut with Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and expressing sorrow over the deaths of the innocent, dispensing American aid and demonstrating American support for Lebanese democracy. It doesn't stop us from sending her to talks with the beleaguered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and propping up his prestige. Image and status is terribly important in the Arab world. Treating these leaders with respect and pledging to help them rebuild their tattered democracies goes a long way to shaping the American role in the region as the champion of liberty.

Of course we want peace. Interminable war simply delivers desperation, poverty and extremism. But democratic states cannot discuss peace with gangs and militias. These latter groups must be destroyed either through military force, diplomatic pressure, co-option or by drying up the reason for their existence.

We can achieve a breakthrough here. By demoting the Israel vs Hezbollah issue as a symptom of the real problem, we can finally bring Europe, the UN and other Arab nations to the table to deal with the twin problems of terrorist militias and the two rogue nations remaining in the Middle East who support them.

Unbeknownst to Hezbollah and Hamas, by instigating this current incident, they have furthered the Bush Administration's aim of spreading democracy in the Middle East. We can regain some credibility with the Arab street by favoring democracy in Lebanon and Palestine (i.e. appearing to favor Lebanon and Palestine by speaking the language of support for their suffering AND THEIR DEMOCRACY). We can regain some credibility in Europe and at the UN by playing the intense diplomacy shuffle and making clear that our first option is never to simply pull a trigger and bomb the shit out of everyone. We gain international support for and committment to the legitimate democracy of Lebanon. Funds will pour in, stabilization forces will secure the region, the place will be rebuilt and the need for radical Islamist militias will disappear. In short, the country's success at democracy is given a huge boost and we gain a friendly ally next door to Syria. In other words, we achieve in Lebanon what we are still striving to achieve in Iraq. And this time the world is on our side.

So let's keep our fingers crossed that calm, rational thinking prevails in Washington and that we are able to exploit this potential windfall for the multi-generational war on terror. The only thing I can think of that would torpedo this effort is a shift of power in Congress this fall.

Thoughts? And by the way, in order to comment you need to register. It helps me keep spam out.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, Bush, War, Middle East

230 Years and Counting...

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - hat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Chair Dickhead of Thursday

Codernaut says: i hate people
jendean2003 says: what happened
Codernaut says: nothing
jendean2003 says: well something must have happened
Codernaut says: i just hate people
Codernaut says: they think they're funny
Codernaut says: but they're not
Codernaut says: they think they're being polite
Codernaut says: but they're not
Codernaut says: most people are ignorant, rude and stupid
jendean2003 says: are you sure nothing happened
Codernaut says: the cube i'm in at this client is one of like 4 in a square
Codernaut says: that all face each other, kind of thing
Codernaut says: so in the middle there is an open space with some chairs
Codernaut says: and there are 3 other people in this cube area
Codernaut says: and they're all moving out to make room for more ibm portal people
Codernaut says: on this project
Codernaut says: so the guys who are moving are all ibmers too
Codernaut says: and they've been here for like 5 years
Codernaut says: one guy for 11 years
Codernaut says: and so they know everyone at --client redacted-- and what not
Codernaut says: and other people who are on their project are always hanging out here
Codernaut says: shooting the shit
Codernaut says: and it is annoying
Codernaut says: and there is a tragic lack of chairs
Codernaut says: so frequently someone is using my chair when i come back from someplace
Codernaut says: so i go get coffee about 20 min ago
Codernaut says: and i come back with a coffee, fruit cup and bottle of water - hands full
Codernaut says: and they're all hanging out and laughing and making stupid comments about golf and the one guy's putter being bent or something
Codernaut says: and this one guy is in my chair
Codernaut says: and he's laughing and cackling and hacking.
Codernaut says: like he was drunk
Codernaut says: older smoking type
Codernaut says: ha ha ha ha, his putter was crooked, ha ha ha!
Codernaut says: and he's in my chair
Codernaut says: and so i maneuver around all the people who can't be bothered to get out of my way
Codernaut says: which is fine. they're mostly proto-human anyway and don't know any better
Codernaut says: and the guy knows he's in my chair, cause he's in my cube
Codernaut says: and he doesn't get up
Codernaut says: he's just looking at me with this stupid look on his face. again, like he was drunk
Codernaut says: so i say, could I have my chair please?
Codernaut says: and he says 'no!'
Codernaut says: and then he laughs and laughs and cackles and everyone thinks that is the funniest thing they've heard all day
Codernaut says: fucking idiots
jendean2003 says: i hope you told him to fuck off
Codernaut says: i mean, it wasn't even funny. if he had said something funny, i would have laughed
Codernaut says: i went into 'disapproving dismissal' mode
Codernaut says: said nothing. didn't even ackowledge that he said anything
Codernaut says: no smile, no eye contact, nothing
Codernaut says: like he didn't exist
Codernaut says: total dismissal of him as a human being
Codernaut says: and i put my stuff in my cube
Codernaut says: on the desk
Codernaut says: now, everyone else got the message.
Codernaut says: the talking stopped and they began shifting around in obvious embarrassed discomfort
Codernaut says: and then i paused to allow the full freeze to descend on the chair dickhead
Codernaut says: and he got up and left
Codernaut says: and as he was leaving he said 'jeez'
Codernaut says: like he was upset that i didn't think he was funny
Codernaut says: so i'm satisfied a little bit that the chris 'cold brush-off of death' got to him
Codernaut says: i love having the ability of making everyone suddenly uncomfortable
jendean2003 says: you do have that amazing ability
Codernaut says: i mean, it was a mood killing chill that i brought on
Codernaut says: and everyone left
jendean2003 says: that's my man
Codernaut says: god, just reliving it makes me feel better

That Crazy Hawking...

So rock star Stephen Hawing is in China for a conference on string theory. He also had time to discuss the future doom planet Earth will experience. He knows this, of course, because he is an android from the future.

Stephen Hawking charmed a group of Chinese students on Wednesday, telling them he liked Chinese culture and women while warning that global warming might turn the Earth into a fiery planet.

He's a charmer all right. 'I love your women, and oh by the way you will all die in a fiery storm of sulfuric acid. Pass the eggrolls.'

Story here.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Stephen Hawking, China, Global Warming, Chinese Food

Distracting Thought of the Day

I'm mentally exhausted from thinking about the big issues of the day. I'm just so over it all. For the moment.

Anyway, here's a thought. Barry Bonds is a cheat. His entire baseball record should be thrown out as unreliable and he should be as tainted as Pete Rose.

Random and mandatory drug testing for all MLB players should begin immediately. Anyone caught doping should be thrown out for good. Baseball is too noble to be played by cheats and liars.

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Barry Bonds, MLB

May Day 2006

So it's May Day again, or as I like to call it, the Global Day of Demonstrated Ignorance. The focus this year is not on labor unions or the proletariat, but instead on a straw man argument used as a convenient excuse for not attending school or work. The ignorant have taken to the streets demanding that Republicans in Congress not send their immigrant parents, friends, neighbors back to the lands they came from.

If Congress were really proposing such action, as an immigrant I would certainly protest along with everyone else. But of course no one anywhere in government is suggesting uprooting legal immigrants and throwing them out.  I'm pro-immigrant, pro-immigration. However, that presupposes that the immigrants follow the laws in order to get here. If they don't follow the laws, that makes them law-breakers. And the number one synonym for lawbreaker is criminal. So yes, an illegal immigrant is by definition a criminal and should be treated the same way as any other criminal.

That being said, protest all you want. I don't really care. It impacts me not at all.

But why in the hell are the protesters carrying Mexican flags? That is one of the most racist things I think I've seen in recent memory. Who are they to suppose that Latinos (and specifically MEXICANS) are the only immigrants in this nation? While the nation has always been dependent on immigrants, they seem to think that the United States would stop without MEXICAN immigrants.

I think the Irish, Italians, Scots, Welsh, English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Scandanavian, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, West African, Arabic, (etc etc etc) immigrants that have come here before them might object to that notion. And yes, Canadian immigrants should also be similarly indignant at such a prospect. And yes, I am.

The Jill Carroll Experience, part Deux

So I mentioned yesterday that I thought something was fishy about Jill Carroll's miraculous release from captivity without a scratch and full of praise for her captors.

Well, go read this over here. Seems she likes denouncing George Bush and the effort to liberate Iraq.

Is it possible, then, that this was a publicity stunt?

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Jill Carroll, Media, Iraq, Kidnapping, George Bush

More Immigrant Anger

I'm an immigrant. Sure my skin isn't brown, but that is hardly relevant. My family waited in line, paid a hefty sum of cash, took the medical tests and worked hard to gain the priviledge of living in this nation.

I volunteered to serve in the US Army. I enlisted while my friends went off to West Point and Cornell and Harvard and Yale and Brown.

I studied American history and Constitutional Law in College. Frankly, I know more about this nation than you do.

I am more American than most Americans and I am ENRAGED.

Who do these people think they are and WHY do they think that breaking our laws entitles them to rights under our system?

They are not immigrants. Immigrants come here because they love this country.

They break our laws.

They are criminals.

Technorati: Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Immigration,

The Jill Carroll Experience

Hm. Is it just me or does her story not entirely make sense? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something is not fully right about this...

Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Media, Iraq, Kidnapping,

Goodbye Caspar, Thanks for All the Fish

Caspar Weinburger is dead at 88. BBC is covering it here in a remarkably balanced piece. Read about his extrodinary career in a less balanced piece at Wikipedia.

Call me biased, but I think he was the greatest Defense Secretary since the Department of Defense was formed. Partially because he served under the greatest President since the Department of Defense was formed.

Curious about his guidelines for using US military power? In a notable speech in November 1984, entitled "The Uses of Military Power," he listed six major tests that ought to be applied when the United States considered the use of combat forces abroad:
(1) . . . The United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies. . . .
(2) . . . If we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all. . . .
(3) . . . If we do decide to com-mit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. . . .
(4) . . . The relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed-their size, composition and disposition-must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. . . .
(5) . . . Before the U.S. commits forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. . . .
(6) . . . The commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort.

Should be considered Gospel as far as I'm concerned. You may also wish to read the biography at DefenseLink. It contains fascinating insight on Weinberger's relationship with Thatcher, among other equally fascinating insight on other topics.


Technorati: ChrisCam, webcam, Weblog, Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan, Cold War, Soviet Union, Politics, 1980s