You've probably already seen this chart...

... of "Deficits with and without Iraq War." Either way it is damning for Dems, but especially it demolishes the Democrat claim that our fiscal problems can be blamed on the Iraq Campaign. Or on the the Bush tax cuts...

The chart is from a great piece in American Thinker by Randall Hoven, Iraq: The War That Broke Us -- Not. A quote:

...Just for grins, use the above chart to dissect Christopher Hayes' statement that our current and future deficits are caused by "three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession."

Two of those three things -- the wars and tax cuts -- were in effect from 2003 through 2007. Do you see alarming deficits or trends from 2003 through 2007 in the above chart? No. In fact, the trend through 2007 is shrinking deficits. What you see is a significant upward tick in 2008, and then an explosion in 2009. Now, what might have happened between 2007 and 2008, and then 2009?

Democrats taking over both houses of Congress, and then the presidency, was what happened. Republicans wrote the budgets for the fiscal years through 2007. Congressional Democrats wrote the budgets for FY 2008 and on. When the Democrats also took over the White House, they immediately passed an $814-billion "stimulus." (The $814 billion figure is from the same CBO report as the Iraq War costs. See sources at end of article.)...

Outrageous!

This is just a bit of ammo to keep in your locker, if you happen to be one of those who are accused of being bigots or denying constitutional rights by opposing the Ground Zero Mosque...

TThe ground zero mosque and the Restoring Honor rally:

...When news broke that Glenn Beck would be hosting a "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that Sarah Palin was slated to speak and that the rally would take place on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream" speech, the cry of outrage from the Left was immediate. Keith Olbermann was so distressed by the news that he invited uber-liberal talk radio personality Bill Press to weigh in on the matter:

"Unbelievable isn't it? [When] I first heard about this – from you, by the way – you know I was just outraged that the park service would even consider giving Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin a permit to hold a political rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that sacred shrine, on this historic date. . . . Clearly – I don't care what he says – he chose that site, on that day, to kind of supplant Dr. Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech with his message, whatever it is."

So, not only is Mr. Press outraged by Beck's presumption and insensitivity, he openly suggests that the government should prevent him from doing so! In one fell swoop Mr. Press commits a constitutional double-whammy, assaulting not only Beck's right to speech but his right to assemble. And how did Olbermann respond? Did he "speak out" against this diatribe with solemn recitations of Holocaust poetry and a condemnation of Press's "stoking of enmity" against Beck and Palin? Why, of course not. Instead of defending Beck's constitutional rights, Olbermann chooses instead to focus on rectitude, even going so far to suggest that Beck rally will be a "racist desecration" of Dr. King's memory....

In this case we have an American "sacred space" defined by both place and time. The equivalent to the mosque might be if Beck had reserved the time annually for the next 20 years!

Reprint of a personal favorite from 2005...

I was looking through old posts recently, and encountered this one. I'll just re-post it. Why? Because I want to--and it's my blog!     ;-)

Someone suggested I'm a "nationalist" recently. I don't think that really fits. My feelings are perhaps best expressed by what Lincoln said in his Eulogy on Henry Clay:

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that free men could be prosperous.

"The United States of America" is a set of ideas, not a territory or a race or a volk. There are lots of people living in foreign lands, who are Americans in good standing, because they "get it." It was Steven den Beste who wrote about this, and posted this great quote from an essay by Peter Schramm:

[My father] gathered my sister, me, and my mother up, and, in the middle of the night, we walked to Austria. I was not yet ten years old. When I asked him where we were going, he said: "We are going to America." I asked "why to America?" He said the following: "We were born Americans, but in the wrong place." It took me a while to understand what that meant. It took a lot of study of some great philosophers, of the American Founders, of Lincoln. I received four degrees for the effort and I slowly came to understand. My father always understood.

Perhaps someday America will change, and become just a nation. And perhaps a few people will resettle in Martian caves, with battered e-books in their hip-pockets containing the Federalist Papers, and The Constitution. And they will be the True Americans. (Myself, I would go a bit further, and say we Americans are the True Englishmen. Our revolution was fought for the "Rights of Englishmen," and our ideas haven't really diverged very far from what we thought then, while England has become a pale shadow of what it was.)

If you are a Leftist, you MUST be anti-American. You MUST oppose the idea that is America, because that idea is utterly opposed to collectivism and statism, and opposed to the belief that our rights are granted by government, or that the interests of "society" are worth the sacrifice of the individual. Many Leftists won't honestly acknowledge their enmity, but resort to sneaky formulas. and claiming to be "against nationalism" is one of them. It's a lie of course, none of them are bothered by French nationalism, or Swedish nationalism, or criticize when a Russian proclaims her love for her "Motherland."....

Actually one of the tricksy formulas for disguising leftish anti-Americanism is nationalism. You can say you love America, meaning things like Jazz, or "the simple workers" or Cajun cuisine, or kosher delis, or the beauty of the mountains and the prairies, etc. Sure, of course, we all do, but that's not America.

More by den Beste:

...You're French if you're born in France, of French parents. You're English if you're born to English parents (and Welsh if your parents were Welsh). But you're American if you think you're American, and are willing to give up what you used to be in order to be one of us. That's all it takes. But that's a lot, because "thinking you're American" requires you to comprehend that idea we all share. But even the French can do it, and a lot of them have.

That is a difference so profound as to render all similarities between Europe and the US unimportant by comparison. But it is a difference that most Europeans are blind to, and it is that difference which causes America's attitudes and actions to be mystifying to Europeans. It is not just that they don't understand that idea; most of them don't even realize it exists, because Europeans have no equivalent, and some who have an inkling of it dismiss it contemptuously...

The real pacifist... Harry S. Truman

Happy Peace Through Victory Day!:

Today marks the anniversary of the single greatest act in the cause of peace ever taken by the United States:

Dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That one decision, that one device, saved more lives, did more to end war, and created more justice in the world in a single stroke than any other. It was done by America, for Americans. It saved the lives of hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of American soldiers and sailors...


...Euroweenie peaceniks and an annoying number of American liberals see the bombing of Hiroshima as a shameful act. What is it America should be ashamed for—defeating an enemy that declared war on us? Bringing about the end of a fascist empire that killed millions of people, mostly Asians? Preventing the slaughter of the good guys—Americans—by killing the bad guys—the Japanese?

Here's everything you need to know about the Obama Left’s view of America: We’re supposed to be ashamed of winning WWII, and proud of a mosque at G'ound Zero.

The nuclear bombings almost certainly saved the lives of millions of Japanese. Even a brief look at the Battle of Okinawa shows what a bloodbath the "Battle of Japan" would have been. (People talk of our work in Afghanistan as a "war," but that's just stupid. It's not even a skirmish compared with Okinawa.) And it ended the conventional bombing of Japan, which killed many more people than the nuclear bombings did, and was turning scores of Japanese cities into charred wastelands.

And the prodigious economic growth of many liberated Asian nations under our influence after the war, and under the protection of our nuclear umbrella, has probably saved a hundred million or so lives just by increasing global wealth.

Hiroshima ended world wars, regional wars, and wars between developed nations. One can't even begin to guess how many lives have been saved by that.

Hiroshima was the single greatest humanitarian act in history. We should be proud of it.

And if the war had been ended by the Soviets bombing Hiroshima, all our fake liberals and fake pacifists and fake Quakers would be celebrating the event.

Charlene's calling the Gulf an impeachable offense...

I'd say probably yes. Won't happen, but it's nice to think about...

It’s Day 73 of the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster–
There is now clear evidence that the negligence by the Obama Administration caused the destruction of the Gulf coastline.

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries.
** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch and British.
** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.
** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
** The Obama Administration ignore oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.
** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.
** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.
** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.
** The massive A-Boat skimmer won't be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.
** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes up on shore.

Now there’s this… Obama Administration lied about cleanup efforts of Gulf oil spill.
CNS News reported:

Billy Nungesser, president of New Orleans' Plaquemines Parish, sensed that a chart showing 140 oil skimmers at work — a chart given to him by BP and the Coast Guard — was "somewhat inaccurate." So, Nungesser asked to fly over the spill to verify the number.

The flyover was cancelled three times before those officials admitted that just 31 of the 140 skimmers were actually deployed.

The incident is detailed in a report released Thursday by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans say the report provides evidence that the Obama administration misrepresented the assets devoted to the cleanup, misrepresented the timing of when government officials knew there was an oil spill and misrepresented the level of control the government had over the matter. It also claims the Obama administration seemed more interested in public relations than cleaning the mess and plugging the hole.

The report, which relies on interviews with several local officials in Louisiana, goes on to quote Nungesser, who had been on local and national television enough so that the White House became concerned. Two White House officials visited him on Father's Day and said, "What do we have to do to keep you off TV?" His answer was, "Give me what I need."

You could add lax supervision of BP, which just happened to give more donations to Obama that to any other politician. And the lies about the engineers report to justify shutting down drilling in the Gulf, which will kill about 120,000 jobs. And threatening criminal prosecutions to the very BP people who are tasked with fixing the problem. (sort of like threatening a surgeon during an operation.)

Any other suggestions?

Happy Flag Day!

Actually I love our flag but I'm philosophically not happy with having a "flag day." It came from a trend of the late 19th Century to turn Americans towards the false faith of nationalism. Back then men like Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were busily trying to make Americans more like Prussians. Our true spirit would be much better expressed with a "Constitution Day."

Or in this, the words of Lincoln in his Eulogy on Henry Clay:

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.

Last verse...

The Blue Beast...

(I wrote this a month or two ago, and got busy and never posted it. I actually start a lot more things than I post.)

Jim Geraghty, History Is Calling, but the Phone Keeps Ringing at 3 a.m.:

...It's not sustainable. Of course, as I said earlier this month, "unsustainable is the new normal." We're having a reckoning, but President Obama isn't all that interested in it; he wants to believe that a full, thriving economic recovery, along with rejuvenated tax revenues, is just around the corner.

I'm willing to bet that Walter Russell Mead's grocery list is full of fascinating historical allusions, but he's hit some similar notes in a few lengthy posts about what he calls "the blue beast" — a social model that defined our country for much of the last century, based upon large, stable entities — unionized oligarchies, big corporations, an ever-growing civil service, lifetime employment, etc. But that era has come to an end, and much of our political debate in the past decades is about trying to artificially extend the lifespan of the blue system by taking from the non-blue parts, or moving on to some other way of doing things:

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that's what it's all about...

(There's more. I recommend reading it.)

"Based upon large, stable entities." That was the model of the Industrial Age. The reason was to have an organization that could transmit information reliably. Industrial Age organizations all worked vertically. Information was gathered at the bottom, and passed to the next layer to be organized and consolidated into reports, which were then passed up to the next layer. The retail level reported to the district, which reported to the region, which reported to headquarters, which reported to the top brass. Then instructions went back in the other direction.

In the old days the people on the sales floor might discover something important. Perhaps "Housewives are bored with pastels this Spring; they are asking for bright solid colors." But it could take a month for the news to pass up the levels. And then months for instructions to be pondered and then passed down to buyers and designers and the advertising agency. And months more before that resulted in finished goods and ads.

Today the private sector is increasingly horizontal, and the decision makers are, or should be, scanning blogs and forums, and noticing new trends quickly. And being closely in touch with their own workers, who know a lot. Designers can now send CAD or graphics files to factories, which may be able to shift production immediately. And the elements can be anywhere. The designer might be in San Francisco, the ad agency in London, the factory in Indonesia. UPS might contract for warehousing and fulfillment. And if the company is a lively one, every part of it will be able to simply vibrate with the moods of the market, and change instantaneously if needed.

But that's only where competition forces people to move quickly. Few of us act that way naturally. In the public and quasi-public sectors the Industrial Age model still prevails. And as the pubic sector has become cut-off from the spirit of the age, it has become cancerous. [link]

If you are aware of these changes you start to see them everywhere. For instance in the way David Brooks or Peggy Noonan whine about the loss of respect for elites and grand old institutions. But the "blue-blood establishment" of old was just another of those "large, stable entities." It was like GM, but the product was not cars, it was elite members of the "top brass." And its product, in the form of Ivy League grads, might be slotted into leadership positions in government, or industry, or the academy, or the press, or the "mainline" churches. Even unions! Those were all among the "large, stable entities" of the Industrial Age.

One of the biggest challenges of our age is to somehow transform all the public and quasi-public institutions into Information Age organizations.

"As long as the light and warmth of life remain to us"

Deer in Arlington Cemetery, by Barry Scott Photography, November 2005

(The Grand Army of the Republic was the fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War. The GAR originated Memorial Day.)

HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868

I. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If our eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation's gratitude, the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.

II. It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.

III. Department commanders will use efforts to make this order effective.

By order of

JOHN A. LOGAN, Commander-in-Chief [Link]

"Overarching them will be the divide between patriots and post-Americans"

Mark Krikorian, at The Corner:

...Notwithstanding recent events, the main political divide in the coming years is not going to be between right and left, big vs. small government, pro-life vs. pro-choice, etc. These fights will continue, of course, but overarching them will be the divide between patriots and post-Americans. Andy writes "We don't aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine." Well, post-Americans already see themselves as citizens of the world, and so there's no problem in siding with "foreign" governments against your "countrymen," because these are primitive, archaic concepts.

And we shouldn't make the mistake of assuming this divide neatly overlaps with right and left; a significant portion of the elite right, especially the libertarians and corporate people, are post-American, while a large share of the Democratic electorate, probably a majority, is still patriotic, however misguided we think they are about cap-and-trade or card-check or whatever. However, at the elite level — elected officials, foundations, big media, major donors, writers and other opinion leaders — the Democrats are openly the party of post-Americanism. This doesn't necessarily mean they're all anti-Americans like Bill Ayers or the Reverend Wright; I'd wager that very few are. Rather, they're post-American, meaning they might still like our country well enough but have moved beyond a parochial concern with its interests and people to a broader, more "enlightened" view of the world.

Among the Republican elite, on the other hand, and even more among conservatives specifically, there remains a strong patriotic strain. And this is the key to political success — framing issues to the degree possible as a defense of America's sovereignty and promotion of solidarity among Americans of all walks of life. This can be done badly, of course; Aristotle tells us that each virtue has two related vices, and it would be unhelpful to counter the Left's insufficient love of country with an excess of that sentiment on our part. But a sober, manly patriotism, one that loves our own nation without hating anyone else's, will be key to separating the Left from its voters....

The trouble is that patriotism has lost force partly because America is just too strong. We have no credible enemies, and haven't had sine the fall of the Soviet Union. 9/11 seemed impressive, and stimulated a spurt of patriotism, but since then al-Qaeda has skulked in the shadows. That's just nothing compared with real wars. Most people think of patriotism in terms of uniting against enemies, in terms of wars and armies.

But there are no more wars on Planet Earth. What we call "wars" now are just struggles and slaughters within failed states. Nation states no longer attack each other. Partly because weaponry has just grown too powerful, and partly because america doesn't let them. (It is a true statement: "No two countries, both of which have a McDonalds, have gone to war with each other.")

Patriotism tends to seem meaningless once you've "won" to the point where there is no possibility of losing. So I don't see it as a big vote winner for the future. (A similar problem afflicted Christianity once there was "Christendom." Once nobody was being thrown to the lions, the point seemed to be lost on the average unimaginative person.)

Marriage not in such bad shape as you think...

...The 50 percent divorce rate is really a myth. The 20-year divorce rate for couples who got married in the 1980s is actually around 19 percent. Everyone thinks marriage is such a struggle and it’s shocking to hear that marriage is actually going strong today. It has to do with how you look at the statistic. If the variables were constant, then a simple equation might work to come up with the divorce rate. But a lot of things are changing. And it is true that there are groups of people who have a 50 percent divorce rate: college dropouts who marry under the age of 25, for example. Couples married in the 1970s have a 30-year divorce rate of about 47 percent. A person who got married in the 1970s had a completely different upbringing and experience in life from someone who got married in the 1990s. It's been very clear that divorce rates peaked in the 1970s and has been going down ever since.

I also think that there's a political agenda on either side of the spectrum. There's the built-in incentive to identify crises. If you're a researcher you can study them; if you're an advocacy group you can get funding and support. There's not a lot to be gained for your cause if you say, "Everything's pretty good right now." That doesn't generate a headline or supporters or grants. You see it in all areas of social sciences, but it’s part of the reason why this crisis of the American marriage has been overstated....

Well, I hope it's true. Of course one problem is that fewer people do get married. There a lot of couples just cohabiting, even having children without marriage. I'd guess that the real marriage statistic should include them—most such people would have gotten married in past times—and that the real statistics are therefore worse than they look...

"Till I fill their hearts with knowledge, While I fill their eyes with tears..."

Mark Steyn, Police State:

Well, what else would you call a country where the cops threaten a man with arrest for putting an election sign saying "GET THE LOT OUT" in his window, and charge a Christian with "hooliganism" after he was overheard saying that he believed homosexuality was a sin?

Why the British put up with their capriciously thuggish inept constabulary is a mystery. But certainly a land where displaying the colors of the Union Jack counts as "racist" and expressing what remains the Church of England's official position on homosexuality gets you fingerprinted and locked up is not one that has any meaningful commitment to freedom of expression. The current election feels like a theatrical pseudo-campaign played out in the ruins of a civilization.

Yep. Game's over. But WE are the English now. We fought our revolution for the "Rights of Englishmen," and we still retain... well, some of those rights. And we still retain at least some of the Christian faith that was the basis and wellspring of those rights. The torch has been passed to the Americans, and the Australians. And perhaps to the other lands of the Anglosphere, though the news from Canada is not encouraging...

    THE RECALL
I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.

Under their feet in the grasses
My clinging magic runs.
They shall return as strangers.
They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches
Of their new-bought, ancient trees,
I weave an incantation
And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,
Smell of rain in the night—
The hours, the days and the seasons,
Order their souls aright,

Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years—
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears.
    --Rudyard Kipling

What's really cool is that we Americans have taken this mysterious compelling something, expressed in the phrase The Rights of Englishmen, and we made it universal in its applicability...

Posted by John Weidner at 06:54 PM | Comments (1)

"The natural constituency for the culture of dependence"

Michael Barone, Tea parties fight Obama's culture of dependence:

...And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they [Tea Partiers] believe that this will destroy the culture of independence that has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous -- and the most charitably generous -- nation in the world. Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election.

Barack Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000 and lost those with incomes in between. He won large margins from those who never graduated from high school and from those with graduate school degrees and barely exceeded 50 percent among those in between. The top-and-bottom Obama coalition was in effect a coalition of those dependent on government transfers and benefits and those in what David Brooks calls "the educated class" who administer or believe that their kind of people administer those transactions. They are the natural constituency for the culture of dependence.

Interestingly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election the purported beneficiaries of the culture of dependence -- low-income and low-education voters -- did not turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the administrators of that culture -- affluent secular professionals, public employees, university personnel -- were the one group that turned out in force and voted for the hapless Democratic candidate. The in-between people on the income and education ladders, it turns out, are a constituency for the culture of independence. ...

This is a bit of a video I took when Charlene and I were at the recent SF Tea Party. Philosophically speaking I'm not precisely a Tea Partier myself, but close enough, and it's the sort of effort we like to lend support to (among other reasons, there will never be a rally of people like me, so I take what I can get)...

"The barbarians have breached the citadel..."

Spengler puts it in a nutshell,. Cultural Obamalypse: the Attack on the Pope:

The Obamalyptic mood in the White House seems to have infected the cultural left generally. Thirty-year-old news is dragged daily into the headlines to make it appear that some dreadful truth has been dragged out of the Vatican vaults, demonstrating Pope Benedict XVI's culpability in child abuse. It is hard to avoid the impression that the nihilists have a sense of empowerment as never before.

There's something ugly in the air. The two central institutions of the West are the Throne of St. Peter and the Oval Office. That is not an exaggeration, for the Catholic model in Europe and the American model are the two modes of life that the West has developed. When Catholic universal empire failed with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and was buried by Napoleon, the United States emerged as an alternative model; the non-ethnic nation founded on Christian principles albeit without an explicit tie to a particular Christian confession.

For the first time in history the barbarians have breached the citadel; to have Barack Obama in the White House is the cultural equivalent of electing Madonna to the papacy. America, the source of a civil religion that held together the world's only remaining superpower, is committed to its own self-demolition. Nihilists around the world are in a triumphant mood and believe that it is time to mop up the remnants of their enemies everywhere.

"The barbarians have breached the citadel." Well, yeah, but they had to do it by a trick. Obama was never elected; people voted for a phantom, and if they had known what he and the Dems were up to, John McCain would be President. The same thing is true about a lot of the Dems in Congress. They got in by deception. And I bet a lot of them are going to pay for it in November

My guess, my hope, maybe just a dream, is that the nihilists have over-reached on both fronts, and that Pope Benedict and President Palin will stand together against them just as JP-II and President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher stood against Soviet Communism, and won.

We are all Israel now...

William A. Jacobson, We Are All Bibi Netanyahu Now:

The reaction to Obama's treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu was as strong if not stronger than I have seen in the comments here and elsewhere in the blogosphere on any other issue. (I didn't let through a number of over-the-top comments.)

Why this reaction? I bet a lot of the people having this reaction only had heard of Bibi Netanyahu in passing on the news.

Who would care if our President left a foreign leader to wait in the White House while the President supposedly went to have dinner with his family? Who would care if our President broke protocol by refusing to be photographed and hold a press conference with a foreign leader? Who would care if that foreign leader left tail tucked between his legs, humiliated at home at the treatment by the leader of the free world?

Part of it certainly is that the foreign leader in question was the leader of Israel, which is tremendously popular with Americans. In Israel the clear majority of Americans see a democratic nation surrounded by implacable enemies who also are our enemies, doing what it takes to survive and thrive. In so many historical, religious and political ways Israel is our kindred spirit, more than just one among many nations....

It's more than just being a "kindred spirit." Israel is us. Israel and the United States are the only two countries that are ideas. Anyone who "gets" America's idea as expressed in the founding documents, is an American. As much so as someone whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. If I say someone is "un-American," you would not imagine that I'm criticizing their skin color, or accent, or lack of long residence in our country.

It's much the same with Israel. Jews from obscure corners of the world, with all sorts of languages and skin colors can make Aliyah and become Israelis.

Both countries have been refuges for the oppressed. And both have been founded by those who fled the control of their "betters" in the European elites. Fled and used only their own strength and courage to build a country from nothing. Both countries were toughened by fighting against savages, and by taming a harsh landscape.

Both countries are hated by Leftists, because Leftism is about taming people, and putting them under control of self-styled elites.

But there is a deeper similarity. It is my suspicion that much of what people believe and do is not because of rational thought, but is a reflection of spiritual struggles fought on a mostly unconscious level of symbols. We are all on a sort of path that can only be travelled in two directions: Towards God, or away from God and towards self-worship. And both America and Israel symbolically represent movement towards God. Not only in the religious elements of both country's formation, but symbolically in their demand that we consider an idea to be something bigger than ourselves; something for which we might even have to sacrifice our lives.

As I've bored you by mentioning before, I think that most "Leftism" today is not really Leftism at all, that the quasi-religious beliefs such as socialism or liberalism that were the old core of Leftist thinking have drained away, leaving nothing. Leftism today is mostly nihilism. The old-time Left didn't automatically hate America or Israel, because they considered it normal to believe in an idea—they just had a different idea. To the nihilist, belief is an affront!

And more than an affront. Almost an assault. They know somewhere deep in their hearts that they were made for something bigger, and the knowledge angers them.

"Governmentalized health care changes... the very character of the people"

This is the best summing-up of how I feel. Mark Steyn, Happy Dependence Day!:

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side...

"If you are pro-Israel, you are pro-American"

Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest: (Thanks to Jim Geraghty

...Many of the arguments and perceptions that have weakened support for Israel on the left cut no ice with the populist right. The argument that just war theory forbids the 'disproportionate' use of force has absolutely no weight in much of American opinion. When somebody attacks you, especially in an underhanded terrorist way, you have a natural right to defend yourself using every weapon and every tactic that comes to hand. This is the way most Americans think about war; American public opinion on the whole does not regret the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Two-thirds of American respondents tell Pew pollsters that they favor the use of "torture" under some circumstances. Such people are not necessarily indifferent to Palestinian rights, and they may not feel that every Israeli action is well judged, but they strongly believe that as long as Palestinians engage in terrorism, Israel has an unlimited and absolute right of self defense. It can and should do anything and everything it can to stop the attacks and many Americans consider international laws against such practices as pious hopes with no binding legal or even moral force. If the terrorists shield themselves behind civilians, that only shows how evil they are — and is an extra reason why you have both the right and the duty to eliminate them no matter what it takes.

This view may be right or it may be wrong, but its cultural hold on a substantial section of the American people is a fact. It is one of the strongest and most persistent elements in the national character.  It is unlikely to change anytime soon.

For many Jacksonians, Israel is a litmus test. If you are pro-Israel, you are pro-American exceptionalism, pro-western values and pro-defense. The more clearly you support Israel, the more you look like a reliable American patriot who will do what it takes to defend the country from religious violence and the more you seem to share the values of tens of millions of gentile Americans....

Using nuclear weapons against Japan saved millions of lives, and did more to bring peace on Earth than all the "pacifists" in history. it is only reasonable that we have no problem with them.

And of course, if you are anti-Israel, you are anti-American. They go hand-in-hand, and vice versa.. Read on to see what the student of Jeremiah Wright is up to...

Obama blocks delivery of bunker-busters to Israel:

The United States has diverted a shipment of bunker-busters designated for Israel.

Officials said the U.S. military was ordered to divert a shipment of smart bunker-buster bombs from Israel to a military base in Diego Garcia. They said the shipment of 387 smart munitions had been slated to join pre-positioned U.S. military equipment in Israel Air Force bases.

"This was a political decision," an official said

In 2008, the United States approved an Israeli request for bunker-busters capable of destroying underground facilities, including Iranian nuclear weapons sites. Officials said delivery of the weapons was held up by the administration of President Barack Obama.

Since taking office, Obama has refused to approve any major Israeli requests for U.S. weapons platforms or advanced systems. Officials said this included proposed Israeli procurement of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, refueling systems, advanced munitions and data on a stealth variant of the F-15E.

"All signs indicate that this will continue in 2010," a congressional source familiar with the Israeli military requests said. "This is really an embargo, but nobody talks about it publicly." ....

"The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate"

The "al-Qaeda seven" aren't like John Adams:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams' fellow countrymen -- not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Second, the British soldiers were accused of a crime. The constitution was not yet in place, but as I pointed out in my column this week, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy explains that the great American tradition later enshrined in the Sixth Amendment "guarantees the accused -- that means somebody who has been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime -- a right to counsel. But that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice system and lodged charges against." Unless they have been charged before military commissions or civilian courts, the al-Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo do not have a right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. They are not accused criminals. They are enemy combatants held in a war authorized by Congress....

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.
-- John Adams

"The needed wall of separation between race and state"

This census advice sounds sound to me...

Sending a Message with the Census - Mark Krikorian - The Corner on National Review Online:

...Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 — "Some other race" — "American". Pass it on.

The Blue Beast...

Jim Geraghty, History Is Calling, but the Phone Keeps Ringing at 3 a.m.:

...It's not sustainable. Of course, as I said earlier this month, "unsustainable is the new normal." We're having a reckoning, but President Obama isn't all that interested in it; he wants to believe that a full, thriving economic recovery, along with rejuvenated tax revenues, is just around the corner.

I'm willing to bet that Walter Russell Mead's grocery list is full of fascinating historical allusions, but he's hit some similar notes in a few lengthy posts about what he calls "the blue beast" — a social model that defined our country for much of the last century, based upon large, stable entities — unionized oligarchies, big corporations, an ever-growing civil service, lifetime employment, etc. But that era has come to an end, and much of our political debate in the past decades is about trying to artificially extend the lifespan of the blue system by taking from the non-blue parts, or moving on to some other way of doing things:

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that's what it's all about...

(There's more. I recommend reading it.)

"Based upon large, stable entities." That was the model of the Industrial Age. The reason was to have an organization that could transmit information reliably. Industrial Age organizations all worked vertically. Information was gathered at the bottom, and passed to the next layer to be organized and consolidated into reports, which were then passed up to the next layer. The retail level reported to the district, which reported to the region, which reported to headquarters, which reported to the top brass. Then instructions went back in the other direction.

In the old days the people on the sales floor might discover something important. Perhaps "Housewives are bored with pastels this Spring; they are asking for bright solid colors." But it could take a month for the news to pass up the levels. And then months for instructions to be pondered and then passed down to buyers and designers and the advertising agency. And months more before that resulted in finished goods and ads.

Today the top brass may be scanning blogs and forums, and noticing the new trends quickly. Designers can send CAD files to factories, which may be able to shift production immediately. And the factory can be anywhere. The designer might be in San Francisco, the ad agency in London, the factory in Indonesia. UPS might contract for warehousing and fulfillment. And if the company is a lively one, every part of it will be able to simply vibrate with the moods of the market, and change instantaneously if needed.

But that's only where competition forces people to move quickly. Few of us act that way naturally. In the public and quasi-public sectors of our world the Industrial Age model still prevails. And as the pubic sector has become cut-off from the spirit of the age, it has become cancerous. [link]

If you are aware of these changes you start to see them everywhere. For instance in the way David Brooks or Peggy Noonan whine about the loss of respect for elites and grand old institutions. But the "blue-blood establishment" of old was just another of those "large, stable entities." It was like GM, but the product was not cars, it was the "top brass." Its product, in the form of Ivy League grads, could be slotted into leadership positions in government, or industry, or the academy, or the press, or the "mainline" churches. Even unions! Those were all among the "large, stable entities" of the Industrial Age, and their leadership style was much the same.

One of the biggest problems of our age is to somehow transform all the public and quasi-public institutions into Information Age organizations.

Flying saucer churches....

Fr Dwight Longenecker, Beautiful Church Beautiful Bride:

A comment on the post on beauty makes a good point. Churches should be beautiful because the Church is the bride of Christ and should be 'without spot and wrinkle, as a bride adorned for her husband.' The liturgy refers to Psalm 45 where the splendor of the king and his queen are praised and refer this to the church which is the bride of Christ and therefore the Queen of the King in the Kingdom of heaven.

If a church building is a symbol and sacramental of the Body of Christ, then each element in the building points to the organic Body of Christ. The imagery of the people of God being a temple or a building built up and dwelt in by the Holy Spirit pervades the New Testament, and we can build up a complex analogy with each believer being a living stone, the Lord being the corner stone, the apostles and prophets being the pillars and foundations...

If this is so, then a beautiful and glorious church building not only points us to the glory of the celestial city, but also to the supernatural beauty of the church, which is the result of grace perfecting the nature of each of the redeemed. I am just dipping my toe into this rich theology of sacred architecture, and musing while I wait for my plane, but the question then arises, what were they thinking when they built Catholic Churches that are carpeted arenas, flat flying saucer churches with amplification systems rather than acoustics and a meeting hall rather than a temple?

I think I know what they were thinking and it doesn't smell Catholic to me.

Too right. On a symbolic or unconscious level I have little doubt it was anti-Catholic.

I would add that the same things happen analogously in the secular realm. For instance the founding fathers of our country had a deep affinity for Republican Rome. The fact that many of our public buildings and symbols are Roman in style, or use Latin, is no accident. The authority that our system and its founding documents have over us is bound up in this symbolism, along with a collage of our history and culture.

To build American government buildings like this....

...Is to symbolically destroy a country you hate.

Walk against death...

Here's a few short clips from the San Francisco Walk for Life today. I'm sure the "press" will pretty much ignore it, but it was even more impressive than last year. The last section of the video is above Fort Mason, heading towards the Marina Green. Charlene and I sat on a bench and ate our picnic for more than 45 minutes while those crowds passed non-stop. They were still going when we finally moved on. I'd say there were no less that 20,000 people in the march, and we had lots of rain....

The first clip is along the Embarcadero, and the second is going up the hill into Fort Mason. In the last bit you can see some red-roofed buildings in the background. Those are the buildings and piers of Ft. Mason from which 1.36 million Americans embarked for the Pacific campaigns of WWII.

Instauration...

Alan Sullivan, Dead Souls, Arise!:

Peggy Noonan misses the point again. Our problem isn't failure of institutions. It is excess of institutions, and an excessive disposition to rely on them. How does it avail anyone that "journalism" has come to regard itself as an "institution?" This is the same nonsense as "consensus science." A stale collectivism has pervaded almost every aspect of American life. And not just American. We are the trailing indicator of what Europe has already achieved — a continent of dead souls. Why? Because the entire culture has turned away from the faith that defined it and gave it meaning. That faith came to seem untenable in the face of a new one whose miracles were physical rather than metaphysical. Too few were the thinkers who recognized that the two realms were a continuum, not a dichotomy.

It may seem a long leap from this deep thought to a secret Catholic boy-cult among Boston clergy, but it is just a little sideslip, a dance of ennui. Poor Ms. Noonan, still trembling in dismay. She wants to salvage institutions. Let them fail! Let the grace of individual redemption explode through them. It is not a question of taking responsibility; it is a challenge to walk away with Christ, for those of us who seek him. Or simply to heed God, immanent and unrecognized.

Addendum: And yet I love the Church — its antiquity, its dignity, its vast storehouse of wisdom and art. Let it fail, but let it also be reborn.

"Let it fail, but let it also be reborn." Amen, brother. Truth to tell the Church has failed and been reborn a hundred times, or ten thousand times if you look at local instances. There is no point in her history where you cannot find holy men and women deploring her fallen state, and setting to work reforming and renewing. But what other institution can you name that can renew itself repeatedly for 2,000 years!

...Shall the past be rolled back? Shall the grave open? Shall the Saxons live again to God? Shall the shepherds, watching their poor flocks by night, be visited by a multitude of the heavenly army, and hear how their Lord has been new-born in their own city? Yes; for grace can, where nature cannot. The world grows old, but the Church is ever young. She can, in any time, at her Lord's will, "inherit the Gentiles, and inhabit the desolate cities."...
      -- John Henry Newman, The Second Spring

As an example of renovatio, it's very interesting to consider the Holy Father's new Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, [Link] which allows groups of Anglicans to join the Church by forming personal prelatures, which are something like bishoprics, but not attached to any territory such as a diocese. And to join while keeping much of Anglican liturgical and spiritual tradition.

You could call this an institution-busting innovation. For one thing, the prelatures do not have to obey any bishops within whose diocese they happen to be operating! Wow. They are supposed to consult, but no more is required; they can consult, and then (with utmost respect of course) thumb their noses at bishops. This is surely no accident—Benedict is a deep old file, and has been dealing with entrenched Catholic bureaucracies since I was a little boy.

Also, this is a model that could easily be extended to all sorts of other Christian groups. And if so, if they start to become successful and attractive, the result would be competition within the Church! Prelatures are not supposed to be open to other Catholics, but if they are flourishing it will be hard to keep the others down on the farm. Benedict is a Tocquevillian, and can't be unaware of the greater vigor of Christianity in places where Christian groups compete for souls, compared with the state-church model of most European countries. We could live to see the day when Catholic Bishops have to hustle, and run lean 'n mean sees to keep Lutheran or Syriac prelatures from grabbing market-share!

And this is a possible step towards an Information Age structure for the church. The Anglican Prelatures do not have to have any "locality," except that they are to be formed within a particular conference of bishops, ie: The United States, or Australia. Presumably there will be headquarters, parishes, church buildings, etc. But none of these is required. The whole Chancellery could reside on a laptop.

Of course the whole thing may flop, and the assorted Anglicans may chicken-out and decide to do nothing. But that obvious worry is itself a blow against entrenched institutions, which are always averse to risk. Not B-16; he's just pushed a pile of chips to the center of the table with a smile. Be not afraid!

Thought for the day...

Hugh Hewitt:

...We are 45 weeks from the chance to begin to repair the damage that has flowed from marrying high school rhetoric and plans with power. We had another close call yesterday. Pray we keep being lucky for a while longer until we can start to be smart again.

Poor Hitchins.... Straining so hard to be an atheist...

I started out to mock and fisk this piece by Ebenezer Scrooge Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens: Merry Christmas. Now, about that public display...

But I gave it up. It's a parody in itself. Poor Hitch, a fine fellow, I like him, but working so hard at the atheist schtick, and looking like something else altogether. You can run, daddy-o, but hide? And his fantasizing about America being a "secular republic." Ha ha. You'll be long in your grave before that happens, Mr H.

David Furst / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather together to pray moments before setting off on a patrol of western Baghdad on Thursday. Army Times 11/8/05

"Exchanging real for fake emotion"

I highly recommend a new piece by Roger Scruton in The American Spectator, Totalitarian Sentimentality:

...As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality "totalitarian" since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to "solve" our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the "victims," who have a "right" to state support.

The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state: for example, mass illegitimacy, the decline of the indigenous birthrate, and the emergence of the gang culture among the fatherless youth. We have seen this everywhere in Europe, whose situation is made worse by the pressure of mass immigration, subsidized by the state. The citizens whose taxes pay for the flood of incoming "victims" cannot protest, since the sentimentalists have succeeded in passing "hate speech" laws and in inventing crimes like "Islamophobia" which place their actions beyond discussion. This is just one example of a legislative tendency that can be observed in every area of social life: family, school, sexual relations, social initiatives, even the military -- all are being deprived of their authority and brought under the control of the "soft power" that rules from above.

This is how we should understand the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. To his credit he has made clear that he does not deserve it -- though I assume he deserves it every bit as much as Al Gore. The prize is an endorsement from the European elite, a sigh of collective relief that America has at last taken the decisive step toward the modern consensus, by exchanging real for fake emotion, hard power for soft power, and truth for lies. What matters in Europe is the great fiction that things will stay in place forever, that peace will be permanent and society stable, just so long as everybody is "nice." Under President Bush (who was, of course, no exemplary president, and certainly not nice) America maintained its old image, of national self-confidence and belligerent assertion of the right to be successful. Bush was the voice of a property-owning democracy, in which hard work and family values still achieved a public endorsement. As a result he was hated by the European elites, and hated all the more because Europe needs America and knows that, without America, it will die. Obama is welcomed as a savior: the American president for whom the Europeans have been hoping -- the one who will rescue them from the truth.

How America itself will respond to this, however, remains doubtful. I suspect, from my neighbors in rural Virginia, that totalitarian sentimentality has no great appeal to them, and that they will be prepared to resist a government that seeks to destroy their savings and their social capital, for the sake of a compassion that it does not really feel.

It's because of what America IS...

You've probably already seen this piece by Byron York, Obama keeps his Afghan promise, but Dems crumble. It's worth a read.

The dilemma the Democrats are in is exquisite. Not just because they are now stuck with campaign promises that were in fact lies. On a deeper level, America simply does not abandon allies. We believe we should be trustworthy. The one occasion when we did abandon an ally, South Vietnam, is still a point of extreme sensitivity. And that wasn't "America's" action, it was the Democrat Party which had suddenly been handed power ofter a Republican scandal. And which immediately used that power for evil, handing an ally who had trusted us over to communist tyranny and mass-murder.

Now the electoral fluke of 2008 has again handed them great power, and the chance to express the nothingness in their hearts. But they gained that power by promising to do what America has always believed in, keeping faith with our friends! (Although the promise was packaged as an excuse to betray another ally, the democratically elected government of Iraq—ironies within ironies!.)

...And yet, in the 2008 presidential season, from the Democratic primaries to the general election, Democrats felt required to promise to step up the war in Afghanistan. Was it because the Democratic base that now opposes escalation supported it back then? No. A Gallup poll in August 2007 — in the midst of the Democratic primary race — found that just 41 percent of Democrats supported sending more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan.

If the base didn't support it, then why did candidates promise it? Because Democratic voters and candidates were playing a complex game. Nearly all of them hated the war in Iraq and wanted to pull Americans out of that country. But they were afraid to appear soft on national security, so they pronounced the smaller conflict in Afghanistan one they could support. Many of them didn't, really, but for political expediency they supported candidates who said they did. Thus the party base signed on to a good war-bad war strategy.

"One of the things that I think is critical, as the next president, is to make absolutely certain that we not only phase out the Iraq war but we also focus on the critical battle that we have in Afghanistan and root out al Qaeda," Obama said at a Democratic candidates' debate in New Hampshire in June 2007. The war in Iraq, Obama continued, "is an enormous distraction from the battle that does have to be waged in Afghanistan."

"There isn't any doubt that Afghanistan has been neglected," said chief Obama rival — and now Secretary of State — Hillary Clinton at a debate in April 2008. "It has not gotten the resources that it needs."

. Other top Democrats adopted the get-tough approach, at least when it came time to campaign.  In September 2006, as she was leading the effort that would result in Democrats taking over the House and her becoming speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi said George W. Bush "took his eye off the ball" in Afghanistan. "We had a presence over there the past few years, but not to the extent that we needed to get the job done," Pelosi said. The phrase "took his eye off the ball" became a Democratic mantra about the supposed neglect of Afghanistan — a situation that would be remedied by electing ready-to-fight Democrats.

But now, with Democrats in charge of the entire U.S. government and George Bush nowhere to be found, Pelosi and others in her party are suddenly very, very worried about U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.  "There is serious unrest in our caucus," the speaker said recently.  There is so much unrest that Democrats who show little concern about the tripling of already-large budget deficits say they're worried about the rising cost of the war.

It is in that atmosphere that Obama makes his West Point speech.  He had to make certain promises to get elected.  Unlike some of his supporters, he has to remember those promises now that he is in office.  So he is sending more troops.  But he still can't tell the truth about so many Democratic pledges to support the war in Afghanistan: They didn't mean it....

"...and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another"

      PRAYER FOR HOME AND FAMILY - Robert Louis Stevenson

Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth.

Let peace abound in our small company. Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Offenders, give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of others.

Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

As the clay to the potter, as the windmill to the wind, as children of their sire, we beseech of Thee this help and mercy for Christ's sake.

Note: To most of the country colorful autumn leaves are fairly unmemorable. But in San Francisco they are quite rare, so we take note of them. I snapped this this morning...

They did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened
(Rom. 1:21).

I wish I'd been so clueful when I was 17!

The young gal in this video is 17 year-old Jackie Seal. [Starts about 1:15] She was ambushed quite unfairly by Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC, but held her ground most admirably. I'm so impressed. If I'd been in that kind of spot at that age I doubt if I could have gotten a word out.

This isn't the first time we've seen a reporter argue with a Palin supporter, rather than, like, report the news! What a meltdown! Astonishin' what Sarah does to these people. I mean, how hugely insecure O'Donnell must be to feel the need to defeat a teenager!

This is from Jackie's blog....

...I then see Norah O'Donnell approach a man all decked out in Palin garb. She asked him a few questions (camera not rolling) then said she'd like to have a woman in the shot. She asked a woman who refused then pointed at me and said "Hey talk to her" So I walked over. I knew I was walking into hot water with MSNBC— thought I was prepared.... Seconds later I met her... One of the many faces of liberal media bias. She asked me my name and then before going on air asked me why I liked Sarah Palin, I repeated what I told the NYT reporter. Norah didn't seem to like that much.

So what did she do? I mean she couldn't ask me that question on television, heaven forbid her not have a biting response.. I noticed her look down at my shirt then, she turned around blackberry in hand spoke to a man, thumbs tapping the blackberry (I don't remember if she called or not, she may have. But she was on her blackberry), then jotted down a quick note. Little did I know that note would be used against me. She told us she'd be walking up to us. You know like she just stumbled upon us. The shot began... I kept telling myself answer her question well, don't freak out. Well, I thought she'd ask me the same question. She asked the man beside me (who by the way is NOT my dad) the same question she had before we went on air. Myself on the other hand, not the same story. She had me read my shirt and then proceeded to ask me "Did you know Sarah Palin supported the bailout" to be 100% honest I was like, are you kidding me? She is trying to use my shirt against me. I was so shocked by the craftiness she had that I was truly stumped. I asked her where she got her fact and she read her little note. Then she asked me what I liked about Sarah, and I talked about the Constitution...

(Here's the link to her blog-post)

In a small, dimly-lit airport...

Something for Veteran's day. A re-post of an old post from August 05, 2004...

This is a splendid story. I've been in dingy airports at 3AM, and the thought of one of those spooky dumps becoming a place of Grace is weird and beautiful...

3 A.M. With the VFW
By Sgt. Michael Thomas

...Thirty-six hours after our scheduled arrival, we landed in Bangor, Maine. It was 3 a.m. We were tired, hungry, and as desperate as we were to get to Colorado, our excitement was tainted with bitterness. While we were originally told our National Guard deployment would be mere months, here we were – 369 days later – frustrated and angry.

As I walked off the plane, I was taken aback: in the small, dimly-lit airport, a group of elderly veterans lined up to shake our hands. Some were standing, some confined to wheelchairs, all wore their uniform hats. Their now-feeble right hands arms stiffened in salutes, their left hands holding coffee, snacks and cell phones for us.

As I made my way through the line, each man thanking me for my service, I choked back tears. Here we were, returning from one year in Iraq where we had portable DVD players, three square meals and phones, being honored by men who had crawled through mud for years with little more than the occasional letter from home.

These soldiers – many of whom who had lost limbs and comrades – shook our hands proudly, as if our service could somehow rival their own....

Doughboys of the 77th divsion wait on the edge of the Argonne Forest, before the attack on September 26, 1918.

No additional comment necessary...

Urban Desertification:

The Kelo case was a dreadful constitutional error by a Supreme Court that had somehow been seduced into reckoning local government's pursuit of "economic development" was more important than individual property rights. So the bulldozers rolled — and then, even before the recession — the developers disappeared. Now, another blow to the foolish municipality of New London, CT. Pfizer drug company, whose adjacent facility was the excuse for the whole Kelo exercise, has announced it will close the R&D headquarters. (Is this in anticipation of US policy?) So New London will have an abandoned business to keep the razed neighborhood company. Welcome to the wonderful world of "city planning."

Sixties rubbish crashing and burning...

Andy McCarthy on the accusations of racism against Rush Limbaugh:

...In the 1970s, I went to a highly integrated, all-boys high school (Cardinal Hayes) in the Bronx. It was one of the best experiences in my life, and I had great friendships with all manner of guys, because from the first day they treated us like we were all "Hayesmen" — not white guys, black guys, Spanish guys, Chinese guys, etc. We were encouraged to see each other as peers, not tribesmen. Of course there was intra-group affinity along ethnic and racial lines — there always is. But there wasn't a lot of tension. There was some — again, there always is — but there was no special treatment and no pressure for enforced separateness. We laughed at each other's expense (ethnic and racial jokes were not cause for banishment from society back then) and competed on a level playing field of merit. Everyone was treated like he belonged, if you did something good it was yours, and if you screwed up it was on you, not your heritage.

That's how Rush treats people — in the Martin Luther King aspiration that the content of one's character is what matters, not the color of one's skin. Yet, in the media narrative, he's somehow the one who's got a race issue — and the guys who trade on race, live and breathe it 24/7, are held up as our public conscience. The Left calls this "progress." I call it perversion.

There's only one way this nonsense ever goes away: When we say "enough!" and tell the race-baiters their time is up. It's too much of an industry, so it probably won't happen tomorrow. But the Sixties ideal is crashing and burning before our very eyes, and I think it'll take a lot of its warped obsessions down with it.

I keep hoping that Lefty race-baiting will reach some sort of tipping point, and people will wise up.

I often feel like pointing out to some of the African-Americans I encounter in our parish (don't worry, I never say nuthin') that if liberal Democrats really cared about black Americans, they would have made sure the first black presidential candidate was rock-solid. Experienced, competent, wise.

Of course if that were the criterion, the first black president would almost certainly be a Republican...

"the conflict had to be fought in grime and terror"

From Ralph de Toledano's A Friend Remembers Whittaker Chambers:

...Few understood the Old Testament evocations of what he wrote in Witness. "Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible." But the word when uttered takes flight and lodges in hearts that are otherwise occupied. He looked to a God of Mercy, but when the sword was brandished, it was to a God of Justice that he bent...

...I had known several men who had come out of the dark world of the Communist underground, but what I learned from them was little more than names, dates, and places. What Whittaker Chambers imparted was a sense of meaning and dimension — a sense not of Good-and-Evil, but of Good-in-Evil. He gave the names, dates, and places, but he invested his account with their tragic reality. I understood, as he talked, what was at stake in the Hiss case — not only for him but for me as well. It is impossible to express why I was so moved and so involved. I was hearing of conspiracies and activities about which I knew, but they were set in the context of history and personal travail.

For Whittaker Chambers, history was a living tapestry in which past and present were interwoven with a lurking future. He would speak of the French Revolution, of the marching Kronstadt sailors, of Lenin and Stalin and the cellars of the Lubyanka, of the Cromwellian mobs and the shattering blow to Western civilization in the First World War, of Soviet spymasters and the Nazi-Soviet pact all in one voice — as if it were all happening now, an unwinding newsreel. He measured the conflict as one between men like himself and like the Communist who declared with equal determination, "Embrace the Butcher but change the world" — Bertolt Brecht's searing line. And he separated both from those who dawdled with reason and escaped from commitment. He also accepted the terrible and humbling fact that the conflict had to be fought in grime and terror, leaving their taint on those who fought it.

"Is dirt nice? Is death nice? Above all is dying nice?" he wrote me much later. "And, in the end, we must ask, is God nice? I doubt it." And again, "A man's special truth is in the end all there is in him. And with that he must be content though life give him no more, though man give him nothing." For he was convinced in his last years that his witness was "all for nothing, that nothing has been gained except the misery of others, that it was the tale of the end and not of the beginning. . . . You cannot save what cannot save itself." He stood, in those days, like Jeremiah in the solitary city, his feet treading the scrolls. And yet to the very end, when he wrote and burned and burned and wrote again the pages of a book that was not to be finished, he never dismissed the imperatives of history that demanded the defeat of the pundits and the paleographers. It is an imperative of the heart, and his great heart knew it....

Never again.

Charlene recommends this piece by Robin of Berkeley in American Thinker, Sympathy for the Devil. It's very much a "read the whole thing" thing. But I will quote a line that struck me...

...We have a man who has been privileged with the greatest honor, the Presidency, and what does he do? Does he demonstrate an ounce of gratitude or humility?

No, he betrays us in the most profound way possible: by not protecting and defending us....

And defending us means defending Israel. Israel is part of us. Part of our DNA, as Spengler put it. A sibling, in a way no other country is. An almost invariable marker of the sickness of Leftism is ice-heartedness towards both America and Israel.

Thanks to Roger Simon for these...

And this...

AFP: Israel gets two more German submarines:

...JERUSALEM — Israel has taken delivery of two German submarines ordered four years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.

"We have received two Dolphin-class submarines built in Germany," he said, on condition of anonymity. The submarines, called U212s, can launch cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads, although when it confirmed the sale in 2006 the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The subs were ordered in 2005 and delivery was initially expected in 2010.

Including the two new ones, Israel has five German submarines -- the most expensive weapon platforms in Israel's arsenal.

Germany, which believes it has a historic responsibility to help Israel because of the mass murder of Jews in World War II, donated the first two submarines after the 1991 Gulf War....

"Inextricably intertwined"

Why Should America Support Israel? -- Spengler:

...But there is a far more fundamental reason for America to support Israel. Israel is part of America's DNA. As Michael Novak showed so effectively in his book On Two Wings, America's founding drew on the uniquely Hebrew concept of holiness of the individual and divine love for the weak and powerless, as much as it did on the natural law tradition of Grotius and Locke. The destiny of the United States of America and the people of Israel are inextricably intertwined for that reason, and America's affinity for Israel and deep interest in the welfare of the Jewish people are bred in American marrow.

From this point of view, what is sacred about America is a reflection of the holiness of Israel. If America succeeds in banishing the sacred from public life — and that is the broader agenda of the liberal Democrats [precisely so.] — there will be little reason for America to have a special relationship with Israel except for military convenience. And if this banishment of the sacred from public life were to coincide with a demoralized retreat from the exercise of power in Western and Central Asia, there would be little reason at all for a special relationship.

America's Jewish leadership has failed on all counts.

The liberal left with its smarmy universalism has demanded that Israel make any concession required to appease the paranoia of the Arab world. But this is a paranoia that cannot be appeased, for the patient really is dying. [See Spengler here.]

The secular right argued that because Israel is the region's only democracy, it deserves a special relationship, and argued further that imposing democratic governments on other countries would lead to cheer and goodwill everywhere. But Americans never cared enough about whether other countries were democratic to make it the criteria for a special relationship (how about Iceland?), and project of imposing democracy on the Arab world came to a horrible end. [I disagree on both points. And if Iceland were beleaguered we would discover that the Icelanders are our cousins, and their democracy emerged from the same Dark Ages germanic WALD as did the "Rights of Englishmen," for which we fought our revolution.]

The religious leadership should have had the most to say about Israel's holiness and the American character. Not only did it fail to make this argument, but it stuck its fingers in its ears and turned its back when Christians made this argument—Michael Novak, for example. Rather than make common cause with the Christians who sought Jews out in friendship in the clear belief that the welfare of the Jewish people was of existential importance for the United States, the religious community for the most part dwelt on past injuries. That, perhaps, is the most disappointing of all.

Obama's betrayal of Israel forces a reconsideration of Jewish policy in general. It exposes the left the rage of the majority of the Jewish organizations (weighted by donors), although younger secular Jews will continue to pursue their pipe-dreams....

Israel is us. America and Israel are the only countries that are, in their essence, ideas. Not "nations," not a volk, not a language, not a history...but an idea. Therefore they are the only two countries one can easily join, just by accepting the idea. (Technically an Israeli Jew needs to be born Jewish, but in practice one can convert. But even without that, Jews from long-isolated regions, who have almost entirely forgotten Jewishness, can still be Israelis.)

And Israel and the US were both founded by escapees from domination by European elites. (That's one of the reasons Leftists are so anti-) They are countries of the self-made, of pioneers who started with nothing, fought savages and reclaimed the land. The first Israelis had much more in common with Sarah Palin than Barack Obama.

And both are The Chosen People. The Jews of course. And Americans symbolically, in virtue of America being a Christian refuge and project, for Christians are God's New Israel. And because we see ourselves as a"City on a Hill." A light unto the nations. That's the biggest reason why our Leftists and fake-pacifists hate both America and Jews, and cling lovingly to any supposed sin by either, and repeat them gloatingly for generations. They hate God.

Or rather, they hate the demand to serve God. Not themselves. (It's not really a demand demand....it's just the obvious thing one should do given the situation. If the guy who created a universe of at least 100 billion galaxies cares about—loves—little me....there is no other reasonable response.) The self-worshipper feels imposed-upon by Jews and Christians and American and Israeli patriots, even if he or she doesn't have any contact with them at all. It's really their conscience speaking, through Jews and Americans as symbols.

Bingo...

Context

I recently got into an online argument with a leftisty over a particularly slimy item which equated the 9/11 attack with the takeover of Chile by Gen. Pinochet. A twofer of anti-Americanism! Arguing was a waste of electrons on my part, but I'll reprise some thoughts here, just for personal satisfaction.

I pointed out that the end result is that Chile is now a strong democracy, with the highest GDP per capita in the region, low unemployment, etc. In fact, probably the best place for people in Latin America. And the possible alternative that was avoided in overthrowing Allende is the hell-hole that is Cuba, where cell phones are status-symbols of the rich, and writers are thrown into labor camps. Where prostitution and sex-tourism are the only growth industries

Of course Mr D (I'll call him D for Denigrator) doesn't care a whit for brown-skinned people in far parts of the globe. They aren't real. (Unless they are harmed by the US or Israel. Then suddenly human suffering matters.) And of course the torture and suffering inflicted by the Castro regime is especially invisible.

Mr D accused me of worshipping force and empire, etc. And violating Catholic moral law, which does not permit doing evil so good will come. Which is true, and that is something I care about. But moral reasoning always exists in a context. It's not a simple set of norms that can be applied automatically.

So for my own satisfaction I'll place the situation in what I think is its real context, and any experts out there may feel free to correct me.

Imagine that I have a friend whose life is falling apart. Joe has lost his job, and is sliding into indigence, or crime, or addiction—something ghastly. So I steal some money and use it to help Joe pull himself together and get a job. And the end result is that his children are fed, and he becomes a solid citizen.

And then suppose that Mr D spends the next forty years, with smug self-satisfaction, accusing me of being a thief. And preening himself on his moral superiority. And never once expressing the slightest pleasure that Joe has escaped poverty. Suppose he is obviously ice-heartedly indifferent to the actual suffering human beings in the case.

AND, imagine that I continue on helping many other people escape the traps of poverty. AND, I find a better way [LINK!] to do so without needing to steal anything. And yet Mr D shows not the slightest interest in this, even when It's been pointed it out to him in the past.

Who's the Christian here? And who's the whited sepulcher?

Jesus told a story about a guy who helped a man who had been beaten and robbed. And the sharp point of the story of that good Samaritan was that Samaritans were despised heretics to the Jews! They were hated sinners, loathed worse than pagans. And, for the Jewish priest to pass by the injured man was probably a moral thing to do by Jewish standards. Pious Jews, especially priests, had to avoid all kinds of contaminations, like touching corpses, or touching non-Jews. But Jesus cuts through the crap with a brutal logic that it is hard for us to even appreciate now, and sides with the mucky yucky guy who jumps in to help those in need. If Jesus came back now he might tell the story of the Good Atheist, or the Good Mormon, who helps someone when supposed Christians pass on the other side of the road.

And think a moment about a person who spends decades repeatedly pointing out a particular sin someone committed. As if that ere the only thing that happened. Cherishing his moment of moral superiority. What does it tell you about the state of his soul? What does it mean? I think it was Augustine who defined the root of sin as being incurvatus est. That is, curved in on yourself. I think of that phrase when I see Leftizoids cherishing and caressing their little moral-superiority gotchas that in fact occurred when I was a boy! They keep them like oysters making a pearl. And their little ice-chip hearts curve in and in and inwards.

Life isn't like a series of neat binary moral choices. It's a struggle on a darkling plain. You can either jump into the maelstrom, and make mistakes, and try to do better. Or you can sit on the sidelines and sneer.

I think a lot of Lefties are like updated versions of the Cheshire Cat. They seem to be slowly fading into nothingness, until all that's left is the sneer.

Virtue is not, like riches, power or glory, a privileged or exceptional thing; it is the reign of order in every soul that wills it, the spontaneous fruit of love, which is the common fund of our nature, and the most lowly hut is an asylum as open to it as the palace of kings. A thought followed by a resolve, a resolve followed by an act: such is virtue. It is produced when we desire it, it increases as quickly as our desires, and if it costs much to him who has lost it, he has always in himself the ransom which will bring it back again...
-- Lacordaire

"It will send us back to the Middle Ages"

Good stuff on health care, from Clark Judge:

...In recent weeks I have talked with people on the cutting edge of health delivery. There is a tremendous amount of experiment going in health care delivery. At least some of these experiments will transform health delivery and, if public policy allows it, solve the problem that is driving health overhaul: inflation of costs.

One such experiment is with what is called direct primary care. Think of Minute Clinics, only bigger and broader. For a modest and fixed monthly fee ($40 to $80/month), these facilities assume responsibility for all of a patient's routine care. Appointments can be same day. Time allotted per patient is extensive.

How? By taking fees directly from the patent not the insurance company or the government. These firms estimate that 40 percent of the costs of health providers (not insurers, providers) are incurred in the processing the paperwork that government and private payers demand. Much of the productivity boost allows higher care for a lower price is derived from cutting out these costs.

Another set of experiments is with a new approach to pharmaceuticals. I asked a former senior official at the Food and Drug Administration what he thought of Obamacare. It will send us back to the Middle Ages, he replied. His reason? The administration's embrace of comparative effectiveness standards would cut off the most promising experiments in medical science.

Comparative effectiveness standards are, he explained, based on population averages — greatest good for the greatest number. But born of the mapping of the genome and other biochemical advances, the changes he saw coming would lead to medicine that is specifically tailored to each patient's unique makeup. Comparative effectiveness panels, he said, would effectively end the ongoing research and development in patient specific care.

The widely understood alternative to the president's government-centered reforms is patient centered reform — including giving the consumer the same tax preferences when buying insurance for themselves as companies now receive and expanding Health Savings Accounts.

HSAs put those receiving care in charge of all normal health choices, cutting out both government and insurance companies. With HSAs, the usual questions consumers ask — in particular how much value am I receiving for the money — consumers are now asking for the first time in decades in the American health world. ......

I second this: Afghanistan Is Not "Obama's War"

I have utter contempt and hatred for the scoundrel dogs who claimed that the Iraq Campaign was "Bush's War." The Iraq Campaign was voted for by Congress. That makes it America's war! No American citizen has the right to stand aside and sneer. All Americans owe a solemn duty to give warm-hearted, generous-hearted support for our troops and our country's objectives. (NO, I'm not saying that one can't make constructive criticisms.)

Likewise with Afghanistan. It is America's fight. No Republican has the right to oppose it just to hurt Obama or the Democrats. That would be despicable.

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not 'Obama's War' - WSJ.com:

...We also believe supporting the president's Afghanistan policy is politically smart for Republicans. For one thing, isolationist tendencies don't do well in American politics. Even in a war as unpopular as Vietnam, George McGovern's "Come Home, America" cry backfired badly. So has every attempt since then. There is no compelling evidence that the congressional GOP was politically well served in the 1990s by opposing intervention in the Balkans.

In addition, indifference or outright opposition to the war would smack of hypocrisy, given the Republican Party's strong (and we believe admirable) support for President Bush's post-9/11 policies, its robust support for America's democratic allies, and its opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests. Republicans should stand for engagement with, rather than isolation from, the world. Strongly supporting the president on Afghanistan would also be a sign of grace on the part of Republicans. We know all too well how damaging it was to American foreign policy to face an opposition that was driven by partisan fury against our commander in chief. Republicans should never do to President Obama what many Democrats did to President Bush.

Mr. Obama's policies shouldn't be immune from criticism; far from it. Responsible criticism is a necessary part of self-government. And we are particularly concerned about reports that retired Marine Gen. James Jones, Mr. Obama's national security adviser, told Gen. McChrystal earlier this summer not to ask for more troops and that the Obama White House is wary to offer what Gen. McChrystal says he will need to succeed.

We do believe, however, that Republicans should resist the reflex that all opposition parties have, which is to oppose the stands of a president of the other party because he is a member of the other party. In this instance, President Obama has acted in a way that advances America's national security interests and its deepest values. Republicans should say so. As things become even more difficult in Central Asia, it's important to keep bad political patterns we have seen before from re-emerging.

"The essential incoherence of modern liberalism"

Orrin Judd on Ted Kennedy...

...but his own legislative legacy means that to some considerable extent we live in Ted Kennedy's America. Of course, his isolationism meant that the South Vietnamese live in Ted Kennedy's Vietnam and, had he had his way, Eastern Europe would still be to some extent Ted Kennedy's Iron Curtain and Iraq would be Ted Kennedy's Ba'athist regime, etc. Among the tragedies of his life is that where the older brothers became heroes fighting the Axis powers, he was only too willing to countenance equally vile evils. And even setting aside the personal damage he did to people, he can never be forgiven his betrayal of his own religion to embrace abortion. For all the talk of how much he cared for the weakest members of society, the fact is he helped kill tens of millions of the most vulnerable.

The great irony of his career was that he was at his very best when he helped to prevent government from limiting people--immigration reform, civil rights, deregulation—largely mistaken when he either helped or turned a blind eye to government interference in people's lives—all of the various mandates and regulations he helped pass—and a fellow traveler with evil when he collaborated with regimes that oppressed and killed people, from the legal regime of Roe to the foreign regimes of North Vietnam, Iraq, etc. His inconsistency on these questions made him a lesser man than a Ronald Reagan or a George W. Bush who applied their humanitarianism universally and illustrates the essential incoherence of modern liberalism, of which he was the last icon.

Made me proud...

I recommend this piece by Michael Yon, Do Americans Care about British Soldiers?

It's about an amazing effort to save a severely wounded British soldier in Afghanistan. It involved multiple airlifts, coordinated by the The Combined Air and Space Operations Center, which is an amazing place in itself.

...Officials at the Combined Air and Space Operations Center and Joint Patient Movement Requirements Center at an air base in Southwest Asia, and the Global Patient Movements Requirement Center and 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., immediately started working to find the aircraft, aircrews and medical crews to airlift the soldier to further care.

"We received the call on our operations floor to airlift the British soldier from Afghanistan to Germany and immediately did what we could to make it happen," said Col. John Martins, the 618th TACC director of operations who led coordination efforts for the mission. "It was a complex move. Not only did we have to find a plane and crew to fly the patient out of theater, but also we had to find another plane and aircrew to get the right medical personnel and equipment into Afghanistan because we needed specialized medical teams to care for the patient in-flight."

In less than six hours, a C-17 Globemaster III previously scheduled to fly a cargo mission was airborne with the required medical personnel and equipment from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Afghanistan...

And, sorry to interject politics here, but the Brits themselves were capable of neither the medical nor the logistical miracles needed to save their own soldier. Why? Because that once-great nation has been destroyed by the very socialist policies that Obama and "Progressives" want to use to destroy the United States of America.

Why "bi-partisan" doesn't work any more...

Post-Partisan Promise Fizzles - WSJ.com:

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama campaigned last year on a pledge to end the angry partisanship in Washington. He wasn't the first to promise a post-partisan presidency: Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton offered a similar change, only to see the mutual hostility between Republicans and Democrats increase while they were in the White House.

Now, just as his predecessors did, Mr. Obama is seeing that promise turn to ashes. Angry town-hall meetings, slumping presidential approval poll numbers and rising opposition to his signature health-care proposals suggest an early resumption of politics as usual....

But why? Only Random Jottings can explain!

Mr Random Jottings knows, because his mind was formed first by reading Peter Drucker. And Drucker pointed out something that was true, back then, but which I don't think is true any longer.

He often told truths in the form of stories, and one of them—I don't remember where I read it—was about his receiving a European visitor, who complained about the numbing sameness of America. Of a lack of variety. Drucker pointed out, as a counter-example, the astonishing variety of institutions of higher learning within a twenty mile radius of where they sat. Public, private, religious, ethnic, technical, tiny, huge...scores of them, all wildly different.

But the visitor was not in the least impressed. And Drucker finally winkled out of him that what he called "sameness" was the lack of ideological variety. The visitor came from a world of intense and clear-cut political world-views ranging from fascists to Christian Democrats to Social Democrats to socialists to communists.

The thing was, we Americans (back then) shared a common ideology. 90% at least of Americans shared a belief in "the American Dream," American exceptionalism, limited government, free-market economics, and in a sort of generic Christianity as the "public religion." It was only a small fringe who disagreed with this. (Commies, basically. And most Americans saw nothing wrong with purging them from public life. Well, they deserved it, since they were either secret agents of a totalitarian enemy, or aiders and abetters.)

Drucker wryly pointed out that most Americans would deny they had any kind of ideology whatsoever!

And in that situation bi-partisanship was fairly common. Why? Because both parties were variations on the same themes. When I was growing up there were lots of conservative Dems and lots of liberal Republicans! And the very-Catholic Dems were the party of traditional morality!

And people like me refer to this ideaology as "anti-American," which is not quite accurate. It is really "anti" that traditional American ideology, and the institutions that embody it. The "Progressive" loves American in those aspects that fit his ideology.... He or she loves Berkeley or Ann Arbor or Boston or Manhattan. And loves to see victms standing in line to be processed by government bureaucrats.

And while "Progressive" by no means describes all Democrats, it does describe the people who hold the levers of power in the party.

It is a very interesting thing that both George W Bush and Sarah Palin were very successfully bi-partisan in their roles as state governors. Both worked with Dems in their state legislatures in just getting practical things done. And in both cases their bi-partisanship became impossible the instant they stepped on to the national stage.

This should deflate some Baby-Boomer egos...

You're Bob Dylan? NJ police want to see some ID:

...The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.

The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name. According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.

"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.

"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.

"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said. The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind" said that he didn't have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night's show. The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

"He couldn't have been any nicer to them," Woolley added...

Classy guy. Unlike a certain other person who was questioned by the police recently. But I just have to laugh at the way the young cops had never heard of him. There's an opinion floating around my generation that our youthful musical efforts had some sort of significance, or importance in history. Ha ha.

I thumb my nose at lefty Jew-haters...

Poll: 70% of Americans see Israel as U.S. friend - Haaretz:

...More than two-third of Americans regard Israel as an ally despite recent diplomatic tensions, a nationwide survey conducted by the U.S. polling firm Rasmussen Reports has revealed.

The 70 percent who view Israel as America's friend marks twice the number of respondents who view Egypt as an ally, though that Middle Eastern country has been polled as the most highly regarded Islamic country among Americans.

According to the poll, 81 percent of U.S. voters agree that Palestinian Authority leaders must recognize Israel's right to exist as part of any future Middle Eastern peace agreement...

Bad investment: Poor Obam, he spent twenty years listening to Jeremiah Wright spout anti-Semitic venom, and the result is that he's totally out of touch with actual Americans...

Cuff the blowhards and take 'em in to cool off...

My one thought on l'affaire Gates...

The job of the police is to preserve law and order. Not just law.

I don't feel much sympathy for the bloggers who have been saying, "I have a constitutional right to mouth off at a cop." Well, maybe so, but if you do, he has—or should have—a common sense right and duty to toss you in the black-and-white and take you to jail for a few hours. And I hope he does.

Why? Because if wise-guys can get away with giving the cops a lot of crap, then the "order" part of law n' order will be severely harmed. Bad actors will be encouraged in their evils. The authority cops have to preserve order will be eroded.

It's just like the "Broken Windows Theory" of crime prevention. It has become clear that allowing a neighborhood to be vandalized or trashed encourages crime. And that keeping on top of small offenses and misdemeanors discourages crime. People just don't do crimes as much when they get the subliminal message that it's not tolerated thing.

Well, having loudmouths wandering around bragging about how they insult cops, and that the cops just have to take it without responding... That will have the very same crime-encouraging effect.

Food groups of the Blue Man...

The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model:

On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.

Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area.

This administration shares all the basic prejudices of the Blue Man including his instinctive distaste for "sprawl," cars, and factories. In contrast, policy is tilting to favor all the basic blue-state economic food groups—public employees, university researchers, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the major urban land interests.

Yet despite all this, the blue states appear to be continuing their decades-long meltdown. "Hope" may still sell among media pundits and café society, but the bad economy, increasingly now Obama's, is causing serious pain to millions of ordinary people who happen to live in the left-leaning part of America.

For example, while state and local budget crises have extended to some red states, the most severe fiscal and economic basket cases largely are concentrated in places such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and, perhaps most vividly of all, California. The last three have among the highest unemployment rates in the country; all the aforementioned are deeply in debt and have been forced to impose employee cutbacks and higher taxes almost certain to blunt a strong recovery....

Blue States = Europe. Unfriendly to America, morality, Israel, Life, liberty, and, especially, God. So they are dying. Well, duh.

And I can report, embedded as I am in the Heart of Darkness, that the Blue Man ain't as happy as one would expect him to be right now...

Even if you are a same-sex marriage supporter...

...You should be embarrassed by the bogosity of the arguments in this piece...

Davis Boies, Gay Marriage and the Constitution - WSJ.com:

...The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it. In 1978 the Court (8 to 1, Zablocki v. Redhail) overturned as unconstitutional a Wisconsin law preventing child-support scofflaws from getting married. The Court emphasized, "decisions of this Court confirm that the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals." In 1987 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a Missouri law preventing imprisoned felons from marrying....

This is as if I wanted to change the definition of "US citizen" to anyone with a Green Card — and I then quoted various voting-rights cases in support of this. And then went all sob-sister about how the Supreme Court holds that the right to vote is fundamental, and how can bigots deny our resident alien-citizens their inalienable rights?

That would be a dishonest argument, because the cases assume that citizenship is a certain thing. Similarly, cases like those mentioned in the quote are not applicable because they all assume that marriage IS a certain thing. Gay-marriage advocates want to change the definition of marriage.

The article is intellectually fraudulent because it assumes a priori that same-sex couples already have the right to marry, a right that has been denied to them out of policy. Just like that law "preventing imprisoned felons from marrying." It assumes that the new definition already exists; is already accepted.

No issue can be discussed without assuming that words mean what we commonly think they mean. If you want to give a word a different meaning in an argfument, then the rules of discourse require that you say so up front. The author is pulling a fast one by slipping in a new definition as if it is something we've already accepted.

Or consider this:

...Gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters, our teachers and doctors, our friends and neighbors, our parents and children. It is time, indeed past time, that we accord them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It is time, indeed past time, that our Constitution fulfill its promise of equal protection and due process for all citizens by now eliminating the last remnant of centuries of misguided state discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The argument in favor of Proposition 8 ultimately comes down to no more than the tautological assertion that a marriage is between a man and a woman. But a slogan is not a substitute for constitutional analysis. Law is about justice, not bumper stickers...

But the authors here make the equally "tautological" assertion that marriage is with ONE other person. How can you justify that, Mr Boies? What if I love two people? Do I not have the "basic human right" to marry the persons I love? Do I not deserve equal protection? Should we not end centuries of discrimination against "triads?"

Putting things in perspective...

Charlene recommends this, by the Steady Conservative:

...They immediately began to say that this is one of those 'do you remember where you were when Elvis died' kinda moments. Which sadly it probably is. Our society seems to adore these celebrities more than the true heroes of our nation. Michael Jackson was a great singer and performer. But that is all he was. And one who was accused numerous times of child molestation in addition to his drug problems.

So I ask. Do you remember where you were or what you were doing when Ed Freeman died? It was covered in the media, but not like Michael Jackson. He did get a post office named after him, but there were not millions of mourners world wide. The day was August 20, 2008. Ed Freeman was a Vietnam War era Medal of Honor recipient, although due to a technicality, he did not receive the award until 2001. His wing man MAJ Bruce Crandall received his in 2007. Here is his citation....

I can proudly say that I wasn't even aware that Elvis died, whenever it was he died. If he died...

"God Save our American States"

I've posted these before, but not for a few years...

From a letter by Abigail Adams to John Adams (who was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress), July 21, 1776:

...Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the multitude into King's Street to hear the proclamation for independence read and proclaimed. Some Field pieces with the Train were brought there, the troops appeared under Arms and all the inhabitants assembled there (the small pox prevented many thousands from the country). When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona [balcony] of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was paid to every word.

As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyful. Mr Bowdoin then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independence. After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen...

And also from a letter, by John to Abigail...

I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means...
--John Adams

For the Fourth...

Of course it would be best to have an equivalent song from the Revolutionary war. But if there's any American who doesn't get a lump in the throat listening to this one, well, he's not an American at all. Just a worm...

This approach actually works... So of course Dems are not interested...

Greg Scandlen, More choice for consumers is always healthy - BostonHerald.com:

...Meanwhile there is an approach that has proven to work after six years of testing by millions of people nationwide. Consumer-driven health (CDH) plans empower individuals by taking money away from third-party payers and putting it in the hands of consumers to spend as they wish.

Now that one out of five Americans under age 65 is paying some of his or her own bills through health savings accounts (HSA), high deductible plans and similar consumer-driven plans, policymakers are beginning to see a profound effect on the service side of the ledger. Consumer-driven health (CDH) plans cost 25 percent to 40 percent less than preferred provider organizations (PPO) and health maintenance organizations (HMO), and their rate of annual cost increases is one-third of that of the two other plans.

It isn't just vendors with a vested interest that are capturing these results. Last fall the Kaiser Family Foundation found the average family premium for an HMO totaled $13,100 while an HSA cost only $9,100. The premiums for CDHs at WellPoint and Cigna actually fell over a two-year period, while premiums for their HMOs and PPOs rose about 10 percent.

Costs for CDH plans are falling because people are becoming more invested in their own health - something policymakers have long been trying to achieve without success. Consumers with a CDH participate in wellness/prevention programs at a higher rate than others, and they choose generic drugs over name brands, avoid using emergency rooms in favor of retail clinics or their own doctor, and comply better with recommended treatment programs.

By any measure, CDH is a success, confirmed last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It found 20 percent of the under-65 population is now in some version of a CDH.

So, why isn't Orszag jumping for joy? His hope for a more efficient, better quality health care system that actually lowers costs is being realized right before his eyes. He either is not paying attention or he prefers to hope for complicated, government remedies that may never work....

Of course he does. Dems want to run the circus, and are only interested in "solutions" that involve bigger government.

Well, thank you Republicans, for getting HSA's passed after decades of Democrat obstruction. And thank you George W. Bush!

"Obama's identification with the Muslim predicament runs deep"

David P. Goldman (Spengler) is very good in First Things: Obama and Cairo:

...Americans shield themselves from the horror of national death. In the eyes of the third world, the Holocaust is of no special consequence. Every tribe and nation will face its own Holocaust, that is, its own extinction. The world is in the midst of a Great Extinction of peoples, in which between half and nine-tenths of the world's 6,000 languages will be silent forever during the next century. Americans shield their eyes from the horror that pervades life in the Muslim world, the sense of looming extinction that lies upon ordinary life like an unending plague of darkness. As Franz Rosenzweig wrote, "Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power."

At one level, the Palestinian belief that the cozy settlements of their exile are the equivalent of the Nazi death camps is delusional. At a deeper level, it is true, for the Palestinians Arabs are dying of shame and humiliation, that is, of their incapacity to adapt to the modern world. They are not dying quite so fast as their Persian coreligionists, but they are dying nonetheless. They know they are dying. They make a virtue of it in the slogan, "You love life: we love death." They fight like men with nothing to lose, because they have nothing to lose in fact.

It used to be the conservatives who stood athwart history, shouting "Stop!" Now it is the president of the United States. As the son, stepson, and half-sibling of Muslims, Obama's identification with the Muslim predicament runs deep. Contrary to some benign interpretations, I do not believe that Obama has made a well-meaning or naive gesture towards the so-called Muslim world. On the contrary, his opinions were long in formation, and his actions precisely calculated. But he is cleverer by far than his American critics. He understands the various tribes of American politics as cultures to be profiled and manipulated....

"Every tribe and nation will face its own Holocaust..." Very true. And I've advocated measures which will advance this, by spreading democracy and capitalism into parts of the world that are now ignorant of them. You could easily say I'm a monster, a destroyer of cultures, were it not for the fact that it's going to happen no matter what we do. It's just happening. Globalization is dissolving local things all around us. Democracy is advancing at a rate of 1.5 countries per year. Despite horrible exceptions, the world is growing richer, and fewer people are poor. (The economic liberalization in India starting in the 90's is estimated to have lifted 300 million people out of poverty, and into the Indian middle-class. Think about that number: 300 million. Almost the population of the whole US. Stupefying, a prodigy, though people seem to just take it for granted.)

But America is a dying culture as much as any. Our very success is now replacing our traditional culture with another one that looks similar on the outside, but is nowhere near the same inside. I'm old enough to know. I grew up with some old-timers, worked with them, and absorbed America through my pores. And I was also part, though I didn't realize it at the time, of the first great discontinuity in American culture, in the 1960's, when vast numbers of young people simply dropped much of what it was to be American and invented new and bizarre alternatives.

I've been concerned in a diffuse way about such things since the 1970's, but the big eye-opener for me was 9/11. Because I had just assumed that Americans would rally to their country's defense in the same way they did after Pearl Harbor. What a shock it was to me when a large portion of Americans didn't! It was, and still is, like being in one of those science-fiction stories where the alien shape-shifters are replacing ordinary people, and the hero tries to warn the others, and they think he's crazy.

Which leads inevitably—if one is not afraid to follow the inferences—to the question, "What, if anything, does NOT change?" And If you ponder that, you quickly realize that simple conservative rigidity doesn't work. For any organization to stay the same, it is necessary to adapt to a changing world while keeping the essentials un-changed. A very tall order! Impossible!

There is one group on earth that seems to be able to do exactly this. And I joined that very group without even being aware of it. It was only after I decided to join the Church Catholic that I grasped that she really was this flexible but unchanging organism. (I don't have time to go into this fascinating topic right now, but I assure you I can back my assertion up with facts if needed.)

"Just a regular old guy"

"We Didn't Know He Was Clarence Thomas":

High school seniors Terrence Stephens and Jason Ankrah, star football players at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Md., were sitting on a plane returning from a recruitment session at the University of Nebraska when they struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to them.

Their seat-mate just happened to be a major Cornhuskers fan.

When they started chatting, Stephens and Ankrah didn't have a clue they were holding court with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

"I was amazed this guy knew so much about us as football players and as people," said Stephens. "That was shocking. I felt honored to be known by someone of his caliber. He was just a regular old guy, sitting in coach, which really shocked me."...

...By the time the plane landed, the students had figured out who Thomas was, and they promptly told their principal they wanted to invite Thomas to give the keynote speech at their high school graduation. Of course, Principal Carole Working didn't exactly think Thomas would take them up on it. But he showed up at the high school on Monday...

U kan take it from de Tocqueville...

Charlene recommends this video by Andrew Klavan, aimed at kids graduating from college: Why Are Conservatives So Mean?

I can't embed it like a YouTube, but it's really good, and fun. Please take a look...

Memorial Day...

We in this country, in this generation, are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of 'peace on earth, goodwill toward men.' That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago, 'except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.'

John F. Kennedy
Undelivered luncheon speech
Dallas, Texas
Nov. 22, 1963

Government health care. Disaster. So, why do it?

Mark Steyn, on the Hugh Hewitt show... (emphasis added)

...HH: Everywhere you try it, you just mentioned Bulgaria, Great Britain and Canada, it is a disaster. Why do they want to do it?

MS: Well, what is does is, if you're a Democrat, what it does is it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. It alters the equation. If you provide government health care, then suddenly all the elections, they're not thought about war and foreign policy, or even big economic questions. They're suddenly fought about government services, and the level of government services, and that's all they're about, because once you get government health care, the citizens' dependency on government as provider is so fundamentally changed that in effect, every election is fought on left wing terms. And for the Democratic Party, that is a huge, transformative advantage.

HH: Oh, that's very interesting. Now in Canada, though, don't people get mad at their quality of health care? Don't they throw the bums out and perhaps urge a return to American style medicine?

MS: No, because the strange thing is that when people, even when people have really bad experiences, you see this in the British press all the time whenever they have one of these horror stories about someone who goes in because they've got a bad case of, they've got a case of pneumonia, and they wake up and find their left leg's been amputated because the wrong memo went around. All those horror stories are always followed two days later by someone writing a fawningly, groveling letter about having received mediocre, third world care, but being eternally grateful for it. It really does, government health care is really the ditch you want to fight in, because once you surrender that, I think it's very difficult to have genuine self-reliant citizenry every again. It really fundamentally changes the equation.

HH: Then where's the AMA?  Where is business? Why hasn't this battle been joined even as the ink is getting very dry on the big Obama rewrite of American medicine?

MS: Well, because I think most of the spokesmen for the conservative argument in Washington do not make the case. And they don't understand that once you've got a government system, it becomes like any other government program. On Friday, you have to pay the doctor, you have to pay the nurse, you have to pay the janitor. So your only way of controlling the cost is to restrict access to the patient, to the customer. And that's why once you've got a government health care system, everything is about waiting lists and waiting time. It's about waiting two years for a hip operation. It's about waiting 9 months for an MRI. It's about waiting, waiting, waiting....

Some other thoughts by Alan Sullivan here.

East Side, West Side...

This is just too cool...

The book to read is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

No reason to be ashamed...

Also part of that TigerHawk quote from the previous post:

...Hiroshima-Nagasaki

The US had already firebombed Tokyo with a higher loss of life than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The US had also firebombed about 70 other Japanese cities. Without the A-bomb drops, Curtis LeMay would have lit up all of Japan -- conventionally -- by the time of an invasion, and had already made a good start. The B-29 was a remarkable plane for its time -- it ... not the A-bomb ... would have become known as the greatest single killing machine in world history.

The horror of WWII was that civilians became military targets, all over the world. In terms of "people killed" -- a gross measure, but still relevant -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't rank that high. You want "millions" and "horrific", you can't beat the Nazis. The Japanese military killed 200,000 to 300,000 civilians at Nanking alone -- and did it "retail" and often sadistically.

I'm not proud that the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- but it was justified and the right decision in the context of WWII.

Jon Stewart -- who I like -- is just wrong on this. Exploding an A-bomb at sea as a demonstration wouldn't have been effective. I'd even go so far as to say that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have helped the US and Soviets steer away from actual using the damned things...

Well, I AM proud that we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the correct moral choice, so there is no reason to be ashamed of. (And if it had been Russians who ended the war by using nukes, our lefty-frauds would have no problem with it.)

If you know the history of how difficult it was for those in the Japanese government who wanted to surrender to pull it off (the book to read is: Japan's Longest Day) you see that it is 99% likely that the nuclear bombing was one of the great acts of mercy in history, one that saved millions of lives. (If you think I'm being foolish, just read up on the battle for Okinawa, and multiply that by the much greater size and population of the main Islands!) The discussion thread I took these quotes from has comments from the descendents of Americans who were poised to invade Japan, and were saved from a bloodbath by the Atom Bomb.

But even that is in a way too America-centered; the number of Asians (including Japanese) we saved by using our nukes was far greater. Remember, Japan had more than a million men under arms in Manchuria at the end of the war. Imagine all of them fighting to the death, as was normal. Or running amok in defeat, as in the sack of Manila. (You might read this, on Japanese war crimes. Crimes which the A-Bomb put a stop to.)

"Is it ever just for us NOT to war against such regimes?"

Orrin Judd:

...So where Mr. Douzinas's intended audience, Europeans, have to answer his ridiculously easy question in the negative--wars can never be just, by definition, because their atheism excludes justice--we face a quite different question here in America. Particularly given the ease with which we can effect change once we turn our attention to states where unjust regimes prevail--Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Libya, Southern Sudan, etc.--the genuinely difficult moral question becomes: is it ever just for us not to war against such regimes? Do we implicate ourselves in the injustice when we fail to remove the dictatorships in Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Burma, the PRC, etc? Does the universal applicability of our Founding impose some moral obligation upon us to advance the march of Liberty wherever and whenever we can?

That's a pretty awesome burden and it's easy to see why the massively self-absorbed seculars want no part of it. But it isn't one that the residents of the City on the Hill can ever dodge more than briefly...

I sometimes wonder what might happen if St Thomas Aquinas (noted for explaining Just War Theory, along with almost everything else) came back, and was asked about the "War on Terror." My guess is that he would say that it is not a war at all. No armies are arrayed against us; we fight against no prince.

Rather, our situation is like dealing with infestations of quasi-revolutionary robber-bands. Lestai. Brigands! And he would say that we don't need to indulge in a lot of head-scratching about what is the moral course of action. It is obvious we should quickly go smoke them out and string them up before they loot and pillage nearby towns.

What us schlubs need is "inspired tutelage..."

Fred Siegel, in FrontPage Magazine, has a very worth-reading history of the origins of American liberalism...

...The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. "Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class," Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, "and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected." Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of both organic pre-modern folkways and the harmony to come when it would re-establish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world....

....Croly, said literary critic Edmund Wilson memorializing him, "was a kind of saint." In another age he might have become the "founder of a religious order." Instead he founded The New Republic, which became the primary political organ of the new liberalism. Croly, whose sanctimony was sometimes mocked as "Crolier than thou," told Edmund Wilson that "he saw his culture as mainly French." He was the first child in the United States whose parents christened him, so to speak, into the mid-nineteenth-century French intellectual August Comte's "Religion of Humanity." Comte's concoction was designed to create a scientific, progressive, and comparably hierarchical alternative to Catholicism.

To attain that "religion of humanity," Croly called for a Rousseau-like "reconstruction" of American ideals "on a platform of possible human perfectibility." "What a democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to move it in the direction of improvement." The people in this picture "are not sovereign . . . even when united in a majority." His hope, however was that under inspired tutelage they can "become sovereign . . . in so far as they succeed on reaching and expressing a collective purpose," and that purpose was a strong unified nation in which religion and politics were melded into "the religion of humanity," which would be "a religion based not on conjecture but fact." The famous closing lines of The Promise read: "The common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero" if "his exceptional fellow-countrymen" are able to "offer acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness."....

Do read it. And when I write, as I often do, that "liberals" aren't liberals any more, this is the kind of thing I'm referring to. (And I'm sure you can already guess that I think that every morsel of the above quoted ideas are profoundly evil and dangerous. I don't need to spell it all out, right?)

Traditions exist for reasons. Often good reasons.

From an e-mail from one of my sons....

...But now on to the heart of this email: I read that Mrs. Obama touched the Queen while visiting her. Apparently it is Etiquette to not touch the Queen. Unless the Queen extends her hand to you, you are supposed to just touch it, not firmly shake it. Why is that? When did this tradition start? Do you know if there is there something similar with other monarchs around the globe? Or with His Holiness Pope in Rome?...

In the past, before this new-fangled democracy business muddled things up, one would always treat anyone of higher rank with respect. Which included avoiding anything that smacked of "familiarity." Touching someone says, in body language, "I'm your equal."

There was a whole language of gesture, ceremony, pomp, and display, most of which we've forgotten. And the messages conveyed by this language had big political implications. One could "read" a political situation by observing subtleties of posture. Allowing familiarity by an inferior could be dangerous—a signal that one was uncertain, insecure, hesitant. A political enemy might decide this was the time to strike.

Nowadays in political conflicts one can just take a poll! Or ask focus groups. Or make a speech in Iowa and see how the world reacts.

But this only applies to domestic politics. You can't do that kind of thing in international relations. On the international stage gestures of strength and confidence—or weakness and uncertainty—are still critically important. Because they are "read," by friends and enemies alike.

Traditions usually embody wisdom learned in the past. It is not a minor thing that traditionally in America we have believed that "partisanship should end at the water's edge." It's extremely important. If we look divided, or weak, or confused, we invite attack by enemies. And we are telling friends we can't be trusted. That's why Obama's bumbling diplomacy is a deadly serious matter.

I'm sure all my readers have seen the film Russian Ark, since I recommended it. Think back to the scene of the reception of the Persian delegation. Ponder that elaborately staged performance, its beauty, splendor, grace and power. That was not just done for swank, it was a political message. It said Russia is strong and young and confident. Like an athlete whose strength and gracefulness intimidates the competition.

(The exact same thing is seen in bad neighborhoods, where the rule of law and electoral politics have broken down. The gangster projects power and confidence with his flashy cars and babes, his attentive entourage, his bold gestures in defying the law. If he stumbles or looks confused in any way, watchful eyes will note, and his position my be challenged. And if you touch him with familiarity in public you might end up sleeping with the fishes! The same applies to the forces of law and order. Imagine a dramatic raid by the police, and the gangster led off in cuffs looking helpless! That might be a game-changing display. Earth is a kind of bad neighborhood, and we are the cops.)

That's why it was wicked folly for Democrats to attack and weaken President Bush in his works of diplomacy and warfare in the War on Terror, and the Iraq Campaign particularly. That was warmongering. It heartened our enemies, and made the Iraq Campaign longer and more bloody. It made future conflicts more likely. It invited future 9/11's.

And that's why Obama's disgraceful performances with the PM, and now the Queen, make our situation in the world more dangerous. Britain usually stands with us in world crisis, but now it is certain that our relationship is being re-calculated in Whitehall and London. You don't to stand shoulder to shoulder with a nation led by erratic goofballs...

Update: To me an even more interesting question is WHY are so many Democrats making elementary mistakes in this field. Stupid obvious mistakes. My theory is—sorry to repeat myself—that the morphing of liberals into nihilists is to blame. The nihilist hates those things which have a claim on us. Which are bigger than the individual. Things that make claims of duty and respect, to which we should put our selves second. They trash the great traditions and customs of our civilization in the same way they vandalize our traditions of art and architecture, the same way they malign America and Israel, the same way they crucify God as a daily routine.

And now poor Obama is like a dirty child who has always scorned manners and courtesy, and finds himself visiting a polite household. He's spitting on the floor not because he's trying to express insult, but because the habits of trashiness are all he, and his group, ever let themselves learn. It's the same with Clinton. How could anyone make an official visit to the Western Hemisphere's most important religious shrine, and not bother to learn the story of it? She's learned a few things, but deep down she's a child of dirt. She showed precisely the same inner squalor, and hatred of the good and beautiful, when her husband was getting started in Arkansas politics and she offended people by still wearing hippie sandals.

Why there aren't any barbers anymore...

Riehl World View: Of Plumbers And Barbers:

...In the 70's and 80's many states merged their Barber and Cosmetology Boards into one. Suddenly a young man who could make a decent living as a Barber couldn't do a partly paid apprenticeship, taking just months to learn a career that could serve him for life. He had to pay to attend a Community College or private tech education program that could last two years, while making him learn a variety of skills he'd never employ. And he, or she was also taught to charge much more for the service.

And that doesn't include the regulation side, which went on to require every Barbershop to meet the standards of the largest women's Salon in terms of specialized sinks and facilities a traditional Barber would never need.

In states where this took place a career once dominated by men became a women's forte - which is fine, though many never have learned how to give a good Men's haircut. Costs of a haircut more than doubled, you could forget getting a nice shave if you wanted it. And businesses saw their overhead costs rise dramatically. And all because the government was just looking out for you....

I'd guess this is just another example of people being destroyed to advance leftist theory. It's a humble example, to be sure, but no different in kind from the many examples of whole countries destroyed, and millions slain. (Like this recent example.)

I don't know any details of how these decisions were made, but one would have to be blind not to realize that the barbershop would be an irritant to "feminists" and the general run of girly-men bureaucrats and academics. Think of it--a bunch of guys sitting around a totally male place, laughing and joking, talking about the game, or listening to Rush..... How the vegetarian-pacifist types must have hated it.

And it was so American...the striped pole, the big chairs, the piles of Sports Illustrated and Playboy. To relaxed shabbiness, and total disinterest in trendy decor and style. I'm sure the faculty lounge crowd recoiled in disgust. You know that.

So they destroyed it. In the same way, though on a miniature scale, that Stalin sent annoying tribes to Siberia, or Castro sends writers to labor camps.

They destroyed it, and we never got a vote. The last thing "Democrats" want is democracy. The nihilists will win in the end, because they are tireless ant-workers, always chewing away at all things tough and meaningful. The decisions are made in obscure bureaucratic corridors, and the battle is lost before the public even realizes there was a battle. And every augmentation of government power and size--you know, the ones done to "help people"--is really about moving more decisions out of private hands, and out of any possibility of people voting on the issues.

My sons will never know that old American institution, the barber shop. And so they will be a little less masculine, a little less confident in this brave new world where real existence is found in cubicles staring at computer monitors. They will have a little less fun--masculine fun. A sick irony; my son the singer knows barbershop quartets... but has probably never been in a barbershop! The barber shop will just be something old guys talk about, before time's river carries them away. Something grandpa bores you by going on about, like patriotism or the Federalist Papers, or the Bataan Death March.

And women will wonder, in the vague ineffectual way proper to their sex, why men are becoming somehow less satisfying, less interesting. Of course they won't wonder enough to actually DO anything, or re-think the crap they have been indoctrinated with--that sort of thinking is upsetting and can make one feel uncomfortable on Facebook!

If this was an influential blog, I might have to keep a civil tone, so as not to alienate readers and make dialog impossible. Since I'm just a very minor blogger, I can say what I like. Say what's true. Liberalism is evil. Leftism is evil. If you are a "Democrat," you are, at the very least, up to your waist in foul evil and nihilism and the destruction of all things good and true. I look on you worms with the utmost contempt!

Update: Charlene adds that black hair braiding salons are now under pressure to adopt the same (utterly un-needed) "cosmetology" standards . But somehow this is an "institution" that liberals have some sympathy for preserving! I wonda why?

The biggest "youth protests" of our time...

...but it's a funny thing. The people who usually want "youts" to march and protest and shake-up the stodgy sclerotic establishment seem oddly unamused. I can't imagine why.

Well, Charlene and I and our daughter Betsy had a great hike on the Walk for Life. I'd guess there were 20k of us. (another estimate says 30k) Lots of families and kids. And I kept thinking of Mark Steyn's phrase, "The future belongs to those who show up for it."

Photo by Elizabeth Weidner

So, If high gas prices meant that were being ripped off by Big Oil...

...do low gas prices mean the oil companies are doing something good? Just kidding; of course all oil companies are always horrid. Just ask a Democrat.

We're Spending $1 Billion Less a Day on Gas!:

...CNBC's Mary Thompson broke down the numbers she received from Kloza Friday: when gasoline peeked on July 11, we were spending $1.613 billion a day to fill our tanks. The combination of lower prices and lower consumption brings that down to $611.5 million today.

And, the news might get better because wholesale gasoline is currently trading around $0.80/gallon, which means that some parts of the country could see prices at the pump approaching $1 in the next few weeks.

Of course, we shouldn't ignore huge declines in what we'll all pay to heat our homes this winter. Heating oil a year ago was $2.64/gallon. Now it's $1.25, or down over 50 percent.

Maybe more important, this is down from a July peak of $4.15. And, natural gas has plummeted from $13.60 in July to $5.80 today, which means we're all getting a HUGE cut in heating costs not only from last year, but also based on what was being forecast just five months ago.

This seems worthy of some holiday cheer, although it's likely most media outlets won't care until after Inauguration Day when they'll be able to give the new president all the credit....

Actually, what's really silly about the lefty evil-oil-companies paranoia is the WE own them. Ordinary people. As Peter Drucker pointed out long ago, the majority of shares of publicly traded American companies are held by pension funds and mutual funds, which are middle class investment vehicles. (The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America)

Most of the "progressives" who were bellyaching about Dick Cheney and oil companies are really capitalists whose 401-k's and pension funds depend on companies like Haliburton making profits. And you can bet they wouldn't like it one little bit if their slice of capitalism were socialized.

Puzzling things...

Madoff the Jew: The Media's Hypocritical Obsession With the Fraudster's Faith, by Phyllis Chesler:

...Most Jews do not recognize themselves in what Madoff did; they still expect to be judged on their own merits. I doubt this will happen. I think  Jews will be judged as if we are all guilty, whether or not we are innocent or poor, and whether or not we fight for justice for Palestinians or for justice for murdered Chabadniks in Mumbai. Here's one reason why.

For days now,  I have been following the media coverage of the Madoff scandal. I could not help but note that the New York Times kept emphasizing that he is Jewish and moved in monied, Jewish circles; not once, but time and again, in the same article, and in article after article. 'Tis true,  alas, 'tis true, the rogue is a Jew: But how exactly is Madoff's religion more relevant than Rod Blagojevich's religion?  The Times has not described Blagojevich  (or Kenneth Lay of Enron) as "Christians," nor do they describe the Arab or south Asian Muslim terrorists as "Muslims."....[Thanks to Bookworm]

That last sentence is misleading. If there was some way to link Ken Lay with real Christianity, they would have leaped at it. Imagine if he had been a pro-life activist!

Still, the kind of Jew-hatred the Times is showing is strange. It is exceedingly likely that most of the Jews touched by the Madoff mess are not very Jewish, except as a cultural holdover. For most American Jews, their real "religion" is liberalism, and the percentage of them who read the NYT is probably far higher than the general population. Yet we se leftist anti-Semitism all the time, especially in the truly insane hatred of the state of Israel. Think how crazy it is--Israel is a tolerant democratic society where Muslim MP's can heckle the Prime Minister, who might well be a woman. Israel is a place that has "gay pride" parades--and yet the Left invariably prefers Muslims who oppress women and gays.

Equally puzzling is why American Jews continue to put up with this. Perhaps they have just transferred their stubborn religious faithfulness to the new faith of liberalism, and are refusing to be detered by persecution!

Also puzzling is the philo-Semitism of so many of us on the Right. We sure don't gain any tangible benefits! One of the oddest things I read this year was this piece about President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. The Israelis were quite embarrassed to be lauded as Zionists and the Chosen People. Not to mention those references to that quaint old thing, the Bible!

It's almost like nobody believes the current "non-Jewishness" of so many Jews is real. Like any day now they will pull off the mask and be the People of the Book again...

An excerpt from the article:

....nd most embarrassingly of all, what President Bush believes about the Jews is something that nearly all Jews once believed about themselves. It's aggravating to be reminded of the you you once were and would like to forget. Remember the time back in high school when you had great ambitions and thought you had a God-given talent that the world would hear about some day? Not really, because now, decades later, you've done everything you can to banish it from your mind -- which is why you cringe when you run into an old classmate who recognizes you and exclaims with a slap on the back, "Hey, it's you! I'll never forget the impression you made on me."

For many Jews, President Bush is like that classmate. They wish he hadn't recognized them.

The president, it was observed rather ruefully in Israel, gave a Zionist speech such as hasn't been heard from mainstream Israeli politicians for many years. If by that is meant that he invoked the Bible, rather than the Oslo "peace process" or his own "road map," this is certainly true. The Bible has long ceased to be bon ton in Israeli intellectual life. It has become politically incorrect for Israelis to think that just because some possibly imaginary progenitors of theirs had religious fantasies about God's pledging them a country, their contemporary thinking needs to take this into account. If an American president feels comfortable with such fairy tales, that's no reason why they should.

President Bush clearly believes the Jews are central to history in a way most Jews themselves no longer do. They find such thinking primitive. The only problem is that history itself shows signs of agreeing with the president.

This, really, is the astonishing thing about the country Mr. Bush addressed last week when he said, "Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again and America will be at your side": How central to everything it is. A tiny place with a population that wouldn't fill any of the world's ten largest cities, it finds itself in the middle of all the great conflicts of our times: The battle for democracy, the war against terror, the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, the campaign against nuclear proliferation. Practically every scenario for a nuclear Armageddon, ranging from that of the most wild-eyed preacher of the Gospel to that of the most cool-headed political scientist, revolves around Israel.

Perhaps it really is primitive to believe, as President Bush does, that this has something to do with the Jews being the people of the Bible. Certainly, most Jews themselves would like to think that it has to do with other things. They would rather not be at the center of anything. It makes them nervous when someone reminds them that, despite their best efforts, that's where they still are. The role of being a chosen people is big on them.

The president of the United States disagrees. That's part of the reason why many Jews will be relieved to see him leave office next January. It's not just stem-cell research, or even the war in Iraq. The man thinks too much of us. That's something we're not prepared to put up with...

We brought peace to the planet, and nobody noticed...

Our friend in India, Bisaal, put a comment at this post. I'm taking the great liberty of expanding my answer into a post, since I don't have any other inspiration this morning.

Bisasl wrote:

The Vietnam intervention didnt work out very well.
USA still has a lot of Army stationed in North Korea.
And now you have Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
The question is what does US wants to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am yet to see an "Exit strategy".
Perhaps Afghanistan is a ruse for Pakistan in some way and Iraq WAS a danger (still it was a great pity that US had to undertake such trouble to get rid of an unpopular tyrant).

Bisaal, take a look at this photo.

See North Korea shrouded in inspissated gloom? And South Korea and Japan blazing with light? We (and the Brits) made that possible. Peace, prosperity and democracy. We still have a couple of brigades stationed in SK, but so what? They ensure that neither NK nor China is going to even think of military aggression on the Korean Peninsula, which is the natural path towards Japan. (And our air elements there help ensure that China will never invade Taiwan, another place that shines at night thanks to us.) We are the pacifists, 'cause we keep the peace.

Vietnam was badly bungled, but we ended up with a South Vietnam that was defending itself successfully against North Vietnamese attacks---until the vile traitor Democrats who controlled Congress after the Watergate scandal suddenly killed our military aid to them, and condemned them to Communist tyranny. If that hadn't happened satellite photos of the region would probably show contrasts similar to Korea's.

What do we want to achieve in Iraq? Much the same. (And we are already a long way towards that goal--we are no longer doing much real fighting there.)

Afghanistan may be hopeless as a possible democratic state, but that's the region where global jihad is centered, and I suspect we are just whacking at the hornet's nest, in hopes of stirring up open trouble we can solve. (Reminds me of a joke I found hilarious when I was six years old: "How do you cure a cold? You stand in the rain until you get pneumonia, because we have a cure for that."

The most important part of what we and our allies have achieved is that the places we have conquered aren't dangers to the world anymore. But the crazy thing is, we did it so well that nobody can even see it! You don't see it! Possible aggression by Germany or Japan or Italy used to be a HUGE worry, not to mention a huge reality. That's GONE! So far gone you don't even notice it.

We brought peace to most of the planet, and now everyone just takes it for granted, and thinks peace is the normal state of mankind! We talk about wars now, but there aren't any wars--not real ones. In September 1918 America committed 1,300,000 troops to the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. We suffered about 117,000 casualties, including 48,909 dead. Wars like that are extinct; the last one was the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980's. That was the last time nation fought nation in any serious way. (This is reason #67 why "liberals" discourage the study of history.)

What we call "wars" now are always internal slaughters and genocides within failed states. (This includes our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; in both cases the governments in power melted away like mist, and we were almost immediately faced with the job of creating democratic states.)

Of course our fake-pacifists hate America! Our "exit strategy" is victory--followed by peace.

Update: Oh, and Bisaal.... what we do is an Anglosphere thing. Britain did lots of peace-keeping in the 19th Century. Our main allies in all the fights of the 20th Century have been Britain, Canada, and Australia. So guess who that progression is pointing to! Who's next?

Our Secretary of State is cooler than your Secretary of State...

I haven't been wildly enthusiastic about Condi's diplomatic doings lately, but boy is that Lefty/Hollywood crapola about Democrats being artsy and cool and hip, and Republicans being dull and stodgy a bunch of silly BS! Especially when you hear it from ghastly woman-hating old harridans of "feminism" bashing Sarah, or wrinkled "stars" sucking up to the trashy Clintons...

Thank you!

We are thankful for the men and women who stand on Freedom's Wall!

The crew of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine Jacksonville tends the mooring lines Nov. 24 upon returning to Norfolk, Va., after a six-month deployment. The deployment was Jacksonville's first in five years after the recent refueling and modernization of the ship. MASS COMMUNICATION SPC. 2ND CLASS XANDER GAMBLE / NAVY [link]

"Opposed to Western/Judeo-Christian civilization"

From Orrin, in a post with the splendid title (I envy him this sort of cleverness) Inherit the Windbags, about "conservatives" who support Obama...

....In fact, the only real difference [in Obama's policies compared to McCain] is precisely that he's the most extreme supporter of aggressive social experimentation to be nominated for president during this era. On matters of abortion, infanticide, gay "rights," infant stem cells, euthanasia, etc. he is consistently and radically Pro-Death and opposed to Western/Judeo-Christian civilization. Edmund Burke would have no trouble recognizing the Jacobin in at least this aspect of Mr. Obama's politics

When we consider then what sorts of Republicans are supporting Mr. Obama we would, as Mr. Powers says, expect to find the old Eastern Establishment, secular Darwinist Right. Contrary to Mr. Powers, these issues are pretty much the same and Rockefeller money funded the more openly eugenic experimentation of the early/mid 20th Century. That's not, of course, to say that every "conservative" backing Mr. Obama is doing so because he'd increase abortion and fund it for "the poor," but it is fair to say that they are at least unbothered by the prospect. In fact, even the ostensibly pro-life Doug Kmiec was willing to forgo Communion in order to back Barack Obama.

This is why so many of the converts cite the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. The choice drove home the reality that the GOP is and is going to stay the party of the religious. They were hoping for a Joe Lieberman, Colin Powell, Mitt Romney, or Tom Ridge who are indifferent to or supportive of abortion.

Over time this is likely to be a more permanent divide and is certain to impact the Democratic Party more heavily than the Republican. After all, Darwinism is a marginal belief in America while Christianity is central. Eventually one would expect to see the parties divide along more clearly secular vs religious lines and the Democratic hold on entire tribes loosen, a process that will be accelerated by the recognition that intellectual elites support the Democrats in no small part because of "population control."...

It just fascinates me the people who hate Sarah. It's so revealing. The "feminists" who fantasize about seeing her raped or murdered, for example. (Ladies, your guilt is showing.) Or the Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley types on the right.

And this is all extra interesting because traditionally the V-P is someone who can give red meat to the base, allowing the presidential candidate to act "presidential," and move to the center. This is normal in our politics. So why should Republican "centrists" and libertarians hate Sarah? Why?

The real battle is increasingly about who we are. What is America and who are Americans. This is because old habits have worn off. Habits of religion, yes, but also patriotic faith, and faith in those things, including morality, that ancestors and founders have handed down to us---faith that those traditions should be revered. And just---faith in America. When I was growing up, everybody was patriotic.

I'd say that when Orrin writes: "...the GOP is and is going to stay the party of the religious," we should think of "the religious" in a broad-brush sort of way. It could include those who cherish the Great Books of Western Civ., and those who get a lump in their throats when they hear the Star Spangled Banner at the ball game. That is, those who think there are things bigger than the almighty self, things which demand an attitude of humility and willingness to sacrifice.

And the irreligious should include many people who still go to church, but recite their creed in the spirit of participating in a charming old folk-ritual. Or who call themselves people of the Right, but recoil from moral responsibility and personal humility.

The battle-lines are shifting, and as they do various people are going to find themselves suddenly stranded in no-man's-land, wondering which way to scurry. A few decades ago we had the neo-cons; Democrats who noticed that the Democrat Party had drawn away from them like the tide going out...and awkwardly found a new home on the right. Perhaps now we will have a bunch of neo-libs!

I'm thinking of Sager especially. The libertarian creep of the world. I should fisk this piece, The Rove Realignment, Have libertarians been driven out of the GOP? But what's the use? He'll never get it. Better he should just head over to the Party of Death where he belongs...

"Defending the culture IS a governing philosophy.."

...Not that the GOP doesn't need some re-focusing, but what the Beltway types can never seem to grasp is that defending the culture is a governing philosophy, indeed the philosophy of the majority. And what the Left wants to do is destroy the culture in order to make people dependent on the State...

Exactly. And Sarah embodies this philosophy. That is, she doesn't expound it, she's just the thing itself. And "Palinmania" is a very rational response to her. A matter of having something just on the tip of the tongue for years, and seeing Sarah, and saying: "That's IT! That's what I've been trying to say, and never could quite find the words!" Of course you want to jump up and down and cheer.

It's frustrating, because the attacks on America's traditional culture are mostly in the form of millions of tiny cuts by millions of tiny shit-stupid ant workers. Few of which are big enough to make a fuss about. And if you were to do so, you would at most push them back a few feet, but then see them ooze around you once again.

I was just thinking about the way, when you or someone you know is in the hospital, you get a visit from a "social worker" whether you want it or not. On one hand is a trivial thing, and lots of people may benefit from it. On the other hand, it's a clear message that you are expected to rely on the bureaucracy, not on the support of family or church or such old-fashioned things. It's something that to me has a nasty smell, but if you complained you would just be thought to be a crank.

I don't know if anything can really be done. My guess is we are doomed. But I do know that the National Review types don't quite get it, and Sarah does quite get it. So she's my gal, and I'm sure a lot of other grass-roots Republicans feel the same...

And even if the struggle is hopeless, one should keep fighting anyway. One is either a man, or a horrid vile cowardly collectivist flubber-worm! I've added a quote to the top of the sidebar, to express my deep and bitter feeling on this. (Explanation here.)

Well, it's plenty late. I should be in bed. But I'll post this, pour another glass of Scotch, think of Scotland and Western Civilization on the skids... And I'll say yet another prayer to Our Lady to give Sarah strength and protect her from the hosts of Mordor. And resolve to go down fighting!

Be thoughtful--listen to Oprah...

Bookworm writes:

...I was sitting near two women and overheard part of their conversation. After a lengthy back and forth praising Oprah, this gem came out: "Sarah Palin is stupid but she communicates really well to Americans because most Americans are stupid."

I live among this sort of people; that's exactly how they think. In fact a lot of them (including I'm sure these two---this is Marin County) are Democrats because the Dem Party is somehow, in the popular mind, "associated" with intelligence. They would never dream of showing intelligence by actually thinking. Instead they will buy some books Oprah recommends, and put them on the coffee table, to show that they are thoughtful

My experience in seven years of blogging is that Democrats are in fact really stupid. Not one of them has been able to make a case for their vague slippery ideas.

Darn good question...

Question for Obama [Jonah Goldberg]

"You speak constantly about helping the middle class, why did you belong to a church for so long that considered 'Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness' to be a religious obligation?"

Actually, the sick-making insanity is that there are 50 million or so middle class Americans who REALLY want to be seen as hip, cool, bohemian....and NOT middle class!!!

And 97% of them are buying the same trendy cool hip mass-produced consumer goods as all the others buy, to show that they are "special" and "different."

And they give their children this year's trendy names, to show that they are not anonymous and insipid. I had to laugh today, thinking of a certain pretentious family in one of our kid's schools (maybe 1995) who named their children "Paris" and "Somerset." Because I was in Kragen Autoparts, and the nice but not classy young black woman at the counter had a name tag that read...... "Paris."

And all those 50 million brain-dead middle-classians are now going to prove that they are hip and with-it and not middle-cass by voting for an amiable con-artist... Funny.

As Andy Warhol put it, "There is nothing so middle class as the "Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness."

The opiate of the trendy liberal...

Peter Guttman has written a piece which argues that no one should be President who hasn't traveled. (He's a travel writer!) I think he's got it exactly backwards...

...Although historians will long debate how this country arrived at the global mess it's now in, it seems clear that much of it could have been prevented. In fact, I believe that a relatively simple amendment to the Constitution could prevent it from happening again. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, drafted in 1787, says that only natural-born Americans, at least 35 years of age, who have lived in the country for 14 years can serve as president or vice president. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has proposed (apparently with his friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger, firmly in mind) that this antiquated provision could best be corrected by opening the presidency to foreign-born U.S. citizens.

[It's hard to debate this guy, since the "global mess" is not defined--sloppy writing. War on Terror? Financial crisis? We're not popular in Belgium? Maybe it's the old "Europeans are so much more sophisticated and nuanced than us crude cowboy Americans" line. I'm guessing he is NOT thinking of Schwarzenegger as a solution to anything. For the record I don't think we are in a "global mess."]

But this adjustment misses the real point. Although a revision to this section is much needed, I believe that qualifications should not be loosened but rather tightened. I suggest the Constitution be amended to require that candidates for the presidency (and vice presidential selections as well) have visited a minimum of 20 countries. The amendment would require that each visit would have been made more than four years before the candidate's possible inauguration and that it would have lasted at least 48 hours. This serves as proof that a candidate is genuinely interested in, and possibly even knowledgeable about, the world around him or her.

[I would argue the opposite. The person who has travelled that much has likely lost the clarity of vision of what America is all about, and in fact probably never had it in the first place. I propose that to be eligible for the Presidency, a person should have lived at least twelve years in rural or heartland America, doing some real job. (Not government or foundation or academic or journalist).]

In the 21st century (unlike the period during which the Constitution was written), travel no longer means days of arduous journey by stagecoach or months aboard a steamship to reach an overseas destination. In a country that hopes to lead the world toward a more enlightened future, it is no longer acceptable to allow the reins of American leadership to reside in the hands of anyone lacking what is perhaps the most valuable credential of all -- the experience of foreign travel.

Sadly, we ignored a red flag during our previous two presidential campaigns. Quite simply, a middle-aged man of considerable means and privilege who has freely chosen in his first fortysomething years on this planet to visit fewer than four countries (of the almost 200 United Nations' members) should not be permitted to captain our nation. It is plainly irresponsible to allow a blindfolded driver to navigate through the increasingly chaotic rush-hour traffic of global development, aided only by an off-key chorus of back-seat drivers...

[He misunderstands the Presidency. If the President is steering the car he is failing his duty. (Think Carter.) What the President is supposed to do is to SEE WHEREwe want to get to, and continually nudge the thousands of drivers of our government to move that way.]

...Our recent myopic, good-versus-evil attitude toward foreign policy has been one of the obvious results. Our current cartoon perspective on the world could have been sensibly altered with the experience-tempered subtlety and sophistication of leaders who have spent time outside the country.

[It's the "good-versus-evil attitude" that is reasonable. We face opponents who are evil. And we ARE the good guys. "experience-tempered subtlety and sophistication" are just code-words for moral relativism. and a decadence that will never fight against evil, even if it's throat is about to be sawed through by terrorists.]

I believe that President Bush has been gravely HARMED by the traveling he has done in office. He started out like the child who sees that the Emperor has no clothes, and isn't afraid to point it out. He broke silly taboos, for instance by saying openly that we would defend Taiwan. And demanding that the Palestinians abandon terrorism before getting any more concessions. But we haven't seen much of that refreshing candor lately---too much traveling, I'd guess.

"The ensuing 218 years have gone pretty well..."

Ron Paul says that the Paulson plan is unconstitutional. So does Michele Malkin...

....I think they're wrong. Don't believe me? Then ask Alexander Hamilton.

You see, we've been here before. As George Washington was taking the oath of office, U.S. credit markets were in full meltdown. America faced a credit crisis in which debt obligations were being purchased by banking houses at 25 cents on the dollar. Paulson's predecessor was a guy named Hamilton, and Bush's predecessor was a guy named Washington. Hamilton wrote up a plan (called "Report on the Public Credit") in which he proposed that the Treasury department buy the troubled securities from the private sector, thus restoring the collapsing credit market.

Jefferson was opposed. He hated financial markets and manufacturing, which he thought were the industries of the past, associating them with Europe from which America had just broken away. He believed the future lay in small farming. Jefferson also believed that the Hamilton bailout plan was unconstitutional, and he talked Madison into fighting the plan in the House. Populists in the House said that since the debt was not created by the federal government, the federal government ought not to put itself on the hook.

Hamilton's case was simple. When any part of a nation participates in a massive repudiation of debt, the creditworthiness of the whole nation is damaged. Hamilton saw this as a national problem in need of a national solution. He argued that the whole nation would benefit from a return to a well-functioning credit market, with low interest rates fueling growth.

Hamilton believed that if the Constitution gave executive power to the president, then that included the authority to create specific institutions and programs necessary to exercise that power.

Jefferson's brand of suspicious populism held sway in the lower House and the bill was defeated. Credit markets reacted with panic.

Finally Hamilton and Jefferson sat down together and hashed out a compromise. Jefferson traded his support for the ultimate piece of political pork--the District of Columbia. The nation's capital was to be moved south, from New York to northern Virginia. The Washington administration agreed; Jefferson told Madison to support it. It passed; the Treasury bought up the paper, America's credit markets were restored quickly, and although we've had a few rough patches, the ensuing 218 years have gone pretty well so far....

Some economic thoughts...

Mike Plaiss e-mails:

Thought you might like to see this in response to your fisking of the Spiegel article. What you are looking at is the US Dollar Index. It is an average of the exchange rate of the dollar and six major world currencies. The dollar is surging. The US economy is struggling but everything is relative. Europe is in just as big of a mess as we are, and investors worldwide are voting with their pocketbooks.

Capital is flowing into the United States, not out. And to buy US assets one needs US dollars. The Dow is down about 20% year to date, and the S&P a bit more (about 22%). Below is a list of major stock indexes from around the world over the same time period:

Dow Jones European Index -30.63%
United Kingdom -23.70%
France -28.34%
Germany -28.98%
Spain -26.13%
Italy - 33.90%
Holland -25.24%
Sweden -28.91%
Japan -27.13%
Hong Kong -34.52%
Australia -24.90%

Yes, a lot of this capital has flowed into US Treasuries as a safe haven, and that has something to do with the surge in the dollar, but a comparison of these stock indicies tells you there is a little more to the story.

And Richard Fernandez (Belmont Club) posts this, by a reader:

...In engineering there is a concept called "design margin" in which extra strength, power, capacity, capability is built into things to account for wear and tear as well as unknowns about the environment.

I think that the reason so many things seem to be "breaking" today is that over the last 20 years we have used up our "margin." Not pumping oil from our own known reserves ate into that margin. Cutting the military back by almost 50% - and then deploying it more than before - cut into that margin. Insisting on environmental, legal, racial, considerations in everything ate into that margin. Political correctness ate into that margin.

No one thought that a number of bad loans made to people who could not repay them would sink the economy - indeed it is not clear that it will even now - but eventually that “margin� in the financial system got eaten away. A single massive award in a lawsuit by a woman who spilled coffee in her lap ate into that margin in its own way, as did innumerable other lawsuits, silly or not.

Silly stuff, but I can't resist fisking...

America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role, By SPIEGEL Staff (Thanks to Bookworm)

The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. [No, our military is growing in cunning and power. Because we fight. It's YOUR might that is ebbing rapidly.] Still, this is no time to gloat. [You are not just gloating, you are drooling with pleasure.]

There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. [I'm old enough to have heard this before. And maybe we're gonna get a new black-face Jimmy Carter. But do you remember who followed him?] A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker's tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience's reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president.

Or what is left of him. [Enjoy it now, suckas. Wait'll you get a dose of President Palin...]

George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly. [He's grown old honorably, fighting the world's battles, while you've grown old in nihilism, attempting nothing.]

He talked about terrorism and terrorist regimes, and about governments that allegedly support terror. He failed to notice that the delegates sitting in front of and below him were shaking their heads, smiling and whispering, or if he did notice, he was no longer capable of reacting. The US president gave a speech similar to the ones he gave in 2004 and 2007, mentioning the word "terror" 32 times in 22 minutes. At the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations, George W. Bush was the only one still talking about terror and not about the topic that currently has the rest of the world's attention. [Until something goes Ka-Boom! THEN you will remember terrorism.]

"Absurd, absurd, absurd," said one German diplomat. A French woman called him "yesterday's man" over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN. [It doesn't matter what the UN thinks. The UN is old, erratic, utterly corrupt, and totally irrelevant.]

The American president has always had enemies in these hallways and offices at the UN building on First Avenue in Manhattan. The Iranians and Syrians despise the eternal American-Israeli coalition, [We should f---ng CARE about the enmity of Iran and Syria? I'm proud of it.] while many others are tired of Bush's Americans telling the world about the blessings of deregulated markets [So, how's that EU economic dynamo workin' out?] and establishing rules "that only apply to others," says the diplomat from Berlin. [And your alternative plan, Herr Berlin? Your counter-offer? I'm waiting with abated breath to hear how you are going to step on stage and make the trains run on time.]

But the ridicule was a new thing. It marked the end of respect. [Oh yeah, all that euro respect we've been used to. You've been hating Americans since at least 1830. Big deal. Ho hum. Dirty little hooligan children always hate the grownups.]

....Is it only President George W. Bush, the lame duck president, whom the rest of the world is no longer taking seriously, or are the remaining 191 UN member states already setting their sights on the United States, the giant brought to its knees? UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon referred to a "new reality" and "new centers of power and leadership in Asia, Latin America and across the newly developed world." [So step up to the plate, wise-guys. Show us yer leadership.] Are they surprised, in these new centers, at the fall of America, of the system of the Western-style market economy?... [Well, we'll see how that goes. But here's the brute fact, Huns. If we go down, you go down too---that's what globalization is about. And when we come back up, you will come back up too. Eventually. Which means our relative positions won't change! You will still be behind, and your stagnant economies will continue to slip farther behind...]

Starting Wars for Dummies, 1st ed.

A lot of people have mentioned this article because of the possibility that the Iranian ship has radioactive materials aboard that are killing the pirates. To me the much much more interesting issue is that we see revealed a miniature, a little "Cliff Notes" version of the path that led to the Global War on Terror we are now in. Maybe I should write a book, "War Promotion for Dummies!"

A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates.

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill "within days" of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died....

...About 22000 ships a year pass through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden, where regional instability and "no-questions-asked" ransom payments have led to a dramatic rise in attacks on vessels by heavily armed Somali raiders in speedboats.

The Iran Deyanat was sailing in those waters on August 21, past the Horn of Africa and about 80 nautical miles southeast of Yemen, when it was boarded by about 40 pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. They were alleged members of a crime syndicate said to be based at Eyl, a small fishing village in northern Somalia...

• Is there any question that piracy is totally wrong according to the generally accepted values of the civilized world?
• Is there any question that the powers have both a right and duty to suppress it?
• Is there any question that we have fought piracy in the past, to the great good of the planet. (And especially to the poor of the world, who would be hurt most by contractions in trade?)
• Is there any question that the problem will get worse if not stopped now? That the profits of piracy will be invested in more powerful weapons and the recruitment of more pirates?
• Is there any question that we have ample power to fight the problem? (Think satellite surveillance, Predator drones, Hellfire missiles into any speedboats approaching ships.)

The answer is that we are paralyzed because we have lost the core values of Western Civilization. America partly, Europe almost totally. The real problem is inside the souls of the people of the West. The problem is nihilism.

And that is precisely the case with the War on Terror. We had the right and duty to squelch terrorism when it first became a problem, many decades ago. And we didn't. And because we failed to slaughter hundreds of people back in, say, the 1960's, hundreds of thousands have to die now. Maybe millions. The short answer is that pacifism is murder, and those who call themselves pacifists or anti-war activists these days have blood of innocents dripping from their hands.

But the bigger problem is that there is almost no real pacifism today--it's just a smokescreen to hide empty souls who don't dare to take any decisive action, because that requires acknowledging higher duties.

Western civilization is, to its very core, a Christian civilization. Once the habits of Christian virtues (which can also be held by unbelievers) are lost, there is really nothing left.

...The moral approach to war in Aquinas and Calvin is refreshing for those familiar with modern Christian approaches to warfare--approaches which, more often than not, do little to help Christians understand why they should be prepared to participate in or support war of any kind. Aquinas and Calvin, in contrast, teach Christian soldiers why they need to participate in and support just wars. From the divine point of view, God desires to restrain evil among His creatures. And in using human beings to do so, God actually elevates the restrainers...

...The most noteworthy aspect of the moral approach to warfare in Aquinas and Calvin is that it teaches--contrary to today's prevailing views--that a failure to engage in a just war is a failure of virtue, a failure to act well. An odd corollary of this conclusion is that it is a greater evil for Christians to fail to wage a just war than it is for unbelievers. When an unbeliever fails to go to war, the cause may be a lack of courage, prudence, or justice. He may be a coward or simply indifferent to evil. These are failures of natural moral virtue. When Christians (at least in the tradition of Aquinas and Calvin) fail to engage in just war, it may involve all of these natural failures as well, but it will also, and more significantly, involve a failure of charity. The Christian who fails to use force to aid his neighbor when prudence dictates that force is the best way to render that aid is an uncharitable Christian. Hence, Christians who willingly and knowingly refuse to engage in a just war do a vicious thing: they fail to show love toward their neighbor as well as toward God.
    -- Darrell Cole

The story or myth that expresses this is the story of the knight who protects the innocent. I don't think the like occurs in non-Christian cultures. There are no folk-tales or ballads of the Centurion or the Samurai who has a duty or calling to protect the little people. If you follow the stories of our troops (and sometimes the Brits) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you will see the old story told anew. (You won't get it from the foul devils of our "news-media," but us bloggers pass the tales on like Samizdat.)

"The long-winded version"

Here's Mike Plaiss's follow-up....

Since you invited me, you've opened yourself up to the long-winded version. First, I'm afraid, it is important to understand the role of capital in a bank. Here's the short version. A bank must maintain a certain percentage of their assets in capital. So if a bank has $1 billion of assets (loans, investments, etc.) then they have to have, say, $50 million in capital -- their own money, not borrowed funds. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea. So a shareholder group could raise $50 million in capital (real money), borrow $950 million, and they'd be fine running a $1 billion bank. Understand that a lot of that $950 million would be in the form of good old fashioned savings accounts, CD's, etc.

You may be surprised at the amount of leverage (borrowing) that banks are allowed to employ and this is the first of two problems that the financial sector is facing right now. Banks have never been more leveraged, especially investment banks. They can leverage even more, and it is no accident that they were the first to die.

The second problem is that banks have suffered a very real decline in asset quality. Nearly every bank is struggling with an increasing number of bad loans. Imagine a developer who borrowed money to build a new subdivision in 2006 with plans on having the first phase complete in 2008-09. He is likely bankrupt-- and the value of that land, the collateral, to the bank now? Not good.

Asset quality issues inevitably impact capital. Bad loans have to be written off, investments that have depreciated significantly in value have to be written down, etc. All of this decreases capital. Let's use the numbers in the example above and assume that the bank is looking at loan losses (or investment write-downs) of just 1.5% of those $1 billion in assets. Well, that's $15 million in capital that's gone, but remember they are required (by some quite determined regulators) to have $50 million in capital.

The bank now has two choices. Raise $15 million in capital (In this environment!? Good luck), or shrink the balance sheet. If they shrank their assets from $1 billion to $700 million, they'd be OK with only $35 million of capital.) So the bank in this example is looking to sell $300 million worth of loans or securities -- preferably by the end of the quarter.

If it were only a few banks in this predicament, it would be no big deal, but the reality is that many if not most banks are in this same boat, and that is the crux of the problem. Everybody is looking to de-leverage, to shrink their balance sheet by selling assets, at the same time. It only takes a moment of thought to realize where that gets you.

And if it were just the banking world it might not be such a big problem. But nearly everybody is looking to de-lever (sell assets) right now. Hedge funds? They borrow money to buy their assets too. Who's going to lend it to them now? They are under even more pressure than the banks to sell. Private equity? Yes, that's coming on line (and what a great time to have access to private equity) but frankly it's a drop in the bucket. Thus, we have maybe 5 sellers (of all assets) for every one buyer and therein lies the "opportunity" as Kessler sees it.

None of this is really a defense of the plan, only its cost. If the government buys these assets they aren't "out" $700 billion. The treasury can borrow at, say 4%, buy assets that are going to return north of 8% (even with the losses factored in) and make a killing. It is certainly reasonable to argue that this is simply not something that the government should be in the business of doing. I have thoughts on that, but again I'll save them for later.

A safe haven for capital...

...Firms will haggle, but eventually cave -- they need the cash. I am figuring Mr. Paulson could wind up buying more than $2 trillion in notional value loans and home equity and CDOs for his $700 billion.

So the U.S. will be stuck with a portfolio in the trillions of dollars in bad loans and last-to-be-paid derivatives. Where is the trade in that?

Well, unlike Mr. Buffett or any hedge fund, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve get to cheat. It's not without risk, but the Feds, with lots of levers, can and will pump capital into the U.S. economy to get it moving again. Future heads of Treasury and the Federal Reserve will be growth advocates -- in effect, "talking their book." While normally this creates a threat of inflation and a run on the dollar, and we may see dollar exchange rates turn south near term, don't expect it to last.

First, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley now operating as low-leverage bank holding companies, a dollar injected into the economy will most likely turn into $10 in capital (instead of $30 when they were investment banks). This is a huge change. Plus, a stronger U.S. economy, with its financial players having clean balance sheets, will become a safe haven for capital.

Europe is threatened by an angry Russian bear. The Far East, especially China, has its own post-Olympic banking house of cards of non-performing loans to deal with. Interest rates will tick up as the economy expands -- a plus for the dollar. Finally, a stronger economy driven by industry instead of financials means more jobs, less foreclosures and higher held-to-maturity payouts on this Fed loan portfolio.

You can slice the numbers a lot of different ways. My calculations, which assume 50% impairment on subprime loans, suggest it is possible, all in, for this portfolio to generate between $1 trillion and $2.2 trillion -- the greatest trade ever. Every hedge-fund manager will be jealous. Mr. Buffett is buying a small piece of the trade via his Goldman Sachs investment.

Over 10 years this could change the budget scenario in D.C., which can also strengthen the dollar. The next president gets a heck of a windfall. In the spirit of Secretary of State William Seward's purchase of Alaska for $7 million in 1867, this week may be remembered as Paulson's Folly.

Mr McCain was laughed at by lefty retards for suggesting that our economy is fundamentally sound. But it IS fundamentally sound. In fact, it's the wonder of the world, and has been since the Reagan tax cuts (With an assist from the Bush tax cuts.) Last quarter it grew at a 3.2% annual rate, even as the press was begging people to believe we are in a recession. Most European countries would kill to get their economies growing at 1%.

The financial sector has tied itself up in knots with derivatives, but the underlying asset is the USA. And to give you an example of how strong we are, our current military budget is about half the planet's total military military expenditure, and yet, as a % of GDP our defense budget is about half what it was in the Reagan years...

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story

....Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even "on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a "world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe...

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie "continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

"A quest for the inchoate self."

From a post I liked by Alan Sullivan with thoughts inspired by Governor Palin...

...But I had odd affinities for a city kid. I was fascinated by the natural world: water, fire, earth, and air. I read about mountaineers and polar explorers; I soared into space with science fiction. So I fit poorly in both of America's cultures, which were already fully apparent then: urban America that respected and envied Europe; rural America that had evolved its own culture and needed no other.

Affinity and chance took me to the Red River Valley of the North. I spent a quarter century in a cultural setting not unlike Alaska, and I travelled in the biggest state too. I understand and admire Sarah Palin. Northern climes do not allow for real dissolution of community. People must cooperate to survive.

In 1992 I bolted from traditional politics and supported the Perot campaign. In the space of a few weeks I met a lot of people I would never have encountered: military folks and hard-core social conservatives — people like the Palins. Tim and I were completely open about who we were [gay partners]. I was astonished at the lack of prejudice. There was ignorance, and even some curiosity, but no hostility.

If we had frightened them with effeminacy, or told them America was despicable, we would not have been well received. Instead we shared their pride in country, hope for its future, and determination to keep America free. And for the most part we meant the same thing when we said "free" — though we had some tough debates about the drug war.

The 1992 campaign finalized a lesson I had been slowly learning for the previous decade. I had brought a lot of mistaken assumptions from the city. The people of Red America were wrongly stereotyped, while the people of Blue America were understood and sometimes pitied by their country brethren. This is why Sarah Palin could be partisan with a smile. She doesn't hate her foes; she is a Christian.

What is the significance of her nomination? Incalculable. Obama poses as "an agent of change,"� but the most telling line of last night, for me, was Palin's observation that the Presidency should not be a journey of self-discovery. Palin knows who she is; Obama's whole life has been a quest for the inchoate self. He will never be satisfied; he will always want more, and never be sure what he wants more of....

I was reading somewhere that after Palin's speech the RNC received a million dollars in donations.......and the Obama campaign received 8 million. So, does that worry me? Not very much. It doesn't do you much good to have the money to get your message out, if you don't have a message. Obama is like a person with great writing talent---who doesn't have anything to say.

Actually, it's worse than that. He's a hider. He has to hide what he really is. We got one tiny glimpse of the real Obama, when somebody blogged what he said in San Francisco about bitter people in small towns clinging to guns and religion. That alone may well cost him the Presidency. And I feel confident that that's what he's really like among his pals. There are lots of people like him around here. Bitter. Clinging to shreds of Leftism they don't really believe in, because they have nothing else... Suits of clothes with no emperor inside.

Sums up Sarah...

I have all sorts of Palin items I've thought of blogging, but this really sums up her appeal. Especially for me, acting as a sort of embedded journalist here in the post-moral left...

Beldar writes:

...The opening splash of the Palin announcement has been all I'd hoped it might be, and I thought she was terrific at the rally. And something that just thrilled me, that hit me at a very emotional level, was at the very end of her prepared remarks, when she turned to face McCain again and shake his hand. You couldn't hear her over the music and the roar of the crowd. But you could very distinctly see her lips say to John McCain the words, "Thank you, sir!"

Oh, my! A national candidate who doesn't just profess humility, but actually still possesses it, and who displays unselfconscious respect for the older generation of which McCain is a part! What a fine, fine thing, that "sir" — as she thanked McCain for giving her this chance, for taking a risk on her. And you could see in her face the determination to do her very best not to let him down...

Sacrifices...

David Harsanyi writes:

Biden on Haditha
In June 2006, straight-talking Joe Biden went on Meet the Press and demanded accountability from the administration for the so-called Haditha massacre. Biden spoke about the incident as if the accused marines were guilty (before a trial) and called on the administration to proceed — and to be treated — as if there were a cover-up at the highest levels of government.

Well, it turned out Biden was wrong about Haditha. Eight of the Marines charged for the “massacre” and “coverup” have already been exonerated. (One case is still pending.)...

[Thanks to Glenn R]

He writes that Biden ought to admit he was wrong and apologize, especially since Biden demanded apologies and admissions of mistakes from the administration. In fact demanded that the Secretary of Defense should be fired immediately!

I completely agree with Harsanyi, but I don't think that's what's most important here.

There are claims made on us by things that are higher and more important than our selves. Of course the highest is our duty to God. But there are also claims on a lower level that work in an analogous way, and are mysteriously tied to each other. One of these is the duty we owe to our country. Especially in a case where ones country is not just a nation or a volk or race, but is based, like the United States, on ideas handed down from our forefathers.

And the claims of our country are strongest in time of war. We have then, all of us, an especial duty to put our selfish interests second to the needs of our land. This will involve for some people putting their lives at risk. Others owe different sacrifices. Politicians have a duty to put their political advantage second to the needs of war. (No, I'm not saying they can't criticize, but any criticism must be constructive, and done with the utmost care.)

This is a duty. There is no evading it.

An example of this is our four great wars of the Twentieth Century. All of these were Democrat wars. Democrat presidents led us into WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. And in each of these wars the Republican Party was a loyal opposition, and gave up many opportunities to criticize. No Republican stood up in the Senate and pointed out that Belleau Wood or Iwo Jima or Slapton Sands or LZ Bitch were blunders that threw away lives needlessly. No Republican demanded that Stimson be fired for the Battle of the Bulge. Why not? Because it would have undermined the war effort and the confidence of our troops.

When Joe Biden condemned the Haditha marines, declared them guilty before the incident had even been investigated, he violated this solemn rule. In fact what he did was to commit treason, just as much as if he had given secrets to the enemy. He voted to send those men into battle in the Iraq Campaign, and then he betrayed them. He sent American men and women to risk death in war, and then he turned around and spit on them.

This is close-to-certain evidence that he is a nihilist. That he puts nothing higher than himself. Why do I say that? Because the claims of higher things are tied to each other. Each one teaches us about the others. I put my children's welfare higher than my own, and this is a very easy thing for a parent to do. But that duty teaches me a lot about how to undertake other solemn duties. (As a Catholic I would say that these things are somehow linked sacramentally. The small things touch on the greater things, and vice versa, in ways that are supernatural and mysterious.)

Mr Biden's casual flouting of a solemn duty is strong evidence that he acknowledges no higher duties of any sort. Of course I could be wrong about this, but I would be surprised to learn that he has some philosophy or cause or set of deep principles that he holds sacred, that he would sacrifice his own interests for. And I think that what he is says a lot about the party and the type of people who have put him forth as a possible Vice-President.

A different and overlooked tradition...

I was quite fascinated by this essay, Conservative Internationalism, By Henry R. Nau (Thanks to Orrin Judd).

Since World War II international relations specialists have debated two main traditions or schools of American foreign policy, realism and liberal internationalism. Realism identifies with Richard Nixon and looks to the balance of power to defend stability among ideologically diverse nations. Liberal internationalism identifies with Franklin Roosevelt and looks to international institutions to reduce the role of the balance of power and gradually spread democracy by talk and tolerance. Generally speaking, conservatives or Republicans were considered realists — Eisenhower and Ford — while liberals or Democrats were seen as liberal internationalists — Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.

This debate broke down with Ronald Reagan. He opposed both the realist containment strategy of Richard Nixon and the liberal internationalist human rights campaign of Jimmy Carter. He adopted a strategy that used force or the threat of force assertively, as realists recommended, but aimed at the demise of communism and the spread of democracy, as liberal internationalists advocated. Reagan improvised and succeeded brilliantly. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union disappeared, and the United States emerged as the first preeminent “global” power in the history of the world. Even former critics now concede that Reagan was on to something.

But what tradition did Reagan represent? The debate between realists and liberal internationalists leaves no explanation for Ronald Reagan ’s eclectic foreign policy choices and the extraordinary outcomes he achieved. The conventional foreign policy traditions don’t fit. Realists and liberal internationalists try to claim Reagan but they distort and miss the novelty of his contributions. Others conclude he is unique and “has become a transcendent historical figure,” not terribly relevant to contemporary debates. Still others argue Reagan’s foreign policy had nothing to do with ending the Cold War and subsequently wound up in the hands of Reagan impostors, the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration, who ran it into the ground in Iraq.

This essay rejects all of these conclusions. It argues instead that Ronald Reagan tapped into a new and different American foreign policy tradition that has been overlooked by scholars and pundits. That tradition is “conservative internationalism.” Like realism and liberal internationalism, it has deep historical roots. Just as realism takes inspiration from Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt and liberal internationalism identifies with Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, conservative internationalism draws historical validation from Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. These four American presidents did more to expand freedom abroad through the assertive use of military force than any others (Lincoln doing as much or more to expand freedom domestically by force). But they expanded freedom on behalf of self-government, local or national, not on behalf of central or international government, as liberal internationalists advocate, and they used force to seize related opportunities to spread freedom, not to maintain the status quo, as realists recommend. All of these presidents remain enigmas for the standard traditions. The reason? They represent the different and overlooked tradition of conservative internationalism....

Fascinatin' stuff. On Jefferson especially. I will look at him with much more favor henceforth. And Polk too. He spread freedom to a vast part of the globe, which has flourished ever since, even as the adjacent lands he did not annex have languished in poverty, injustice and cruelty...

And as regular readers will guess, I think George W Bush is acting in the same tradition, and deserves the same respect and gratitude we give to Ronald Reagan.

Questions for Samantha...

I was thinking of fisking this piece, The Democrats & National Security, by Samantha Power, in New York Review of Books. There's lots to correct, but really, the piece is self-contradictory; there's no point in attacking it. In fact it's kind of comical, in the way it misses the essence of the subject.

It's about the possibility of Democrats reversing the traditional Republican advantage among voters on national security issues and military matters. But all the arguments and assumptions of the article are leftist arguments and assumptions. It amounts to saying that ordinary Americans will trust Dems with national security any minute now---as soon as we start thinking like the people who subscribe to the NY Review of Books.

To be trusted on defense, it's not enough to have a clever policy. There's a certain other quality one must possess...

Samantha, dear, let me ask you a few questions. When was the last time you got a lump in your throat when you heard The Star Spangled Banner? Hmmm? Or when thinking of Pearl Harbor, or the Bataan Death March? When was the last time you were outraged because a hero who was given the Medal of Honor was ignored by the press? Eh? When was the last time you said that the President should be given honor and respect as Commander in Chief, even if one disagrees with his politics?

And your friends. When accusations are made, how often do they give American troops the benefit of the doubt? How often do they suspect that the grunts probably acted correctly, and are being smeared by the press? And is their first instinct to support our leaders in time of war? And what do you kids do on Memorial Day to honor those who have fallen in service of our country? On what days do you fly our flag?

When you hear, Samantha, of someone taking a job in Iraq, or joining the reserves, do you feel envious? Hmmm? Like us ordinary Americans do? And maybe a little bit guilty that you are not also standing on Freedom's Wall?

Is "Freedom's Wall" a phrase you would feel comfortable using? Comfortable among your friends? And your readers at the NY Review of Books? Hmmm? You know, the sort of Democrats who are going to, as you say: "advance a distinct twenty-first-century foreign policy that voters will prefer and trust them to execute?" That doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? Wouldn't it be more poetic to say that you are going to "Stand on Freedom's Wall and defend America?"

Try saying that. Say it out loud. Among your pals. Try it on for size, since you are "auditioning," shall we say, for the part of "trusted with national security."

Or say this:

“We in this country, in this generation, are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward men.’ That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago, ‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’”

It was a Democrat who said that. Can you say it?

Happy Fourth of July!

I came upon this old photo and scanned it. It's hard to imagine these three are now driving cars and going to college! The picture is taken on the balcony of our house. We are very lucky to live on our quiet circle, with grass and shaggy trees in the middle...

Keep THIS to throw in their faces...

There's a common line of sly leftist insinuation, that paints our troops as "victims." You know, rubes, under-educated dupes "sent off to die for oil," and similar dirty lies. (If only we were stealing oil; It's a killer to fill up my truck these days!)

The next time you hear that stuff from America-hating Obama-loving types, you might fling this story from Bob Krumm back at them....

BAGHDAD – How are you spending your 4th of July holiday? While most Americans probably slept, 1,215 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines raised their right hands and committed to a combined 5,500 years of additional service during the largest reenlistment ceremony in the history of the American military. Beneath a large American flag which dwarfed even the enormous chandelier that Saddam Hussein had built for the Al Faw Palace, members of all services, representing all 50 states took the oath administered by Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of Multi-National Forces Iraq.

Petraeus, reiterating earlier remarks made by Command Sergeant Major Hill, said that the unprecedented ceremony sends a “message to friend and foe alike.” He told those assembled that it is “impossible to calculate the value of what you are giving to our country . . . For no bonus, no matter the size, can adequately compensate you for the contribution each of you makes as a custodian of our nation’s defenses.”

Last year Gen. Petraeus, along with Senator John McCain, presided over a similar Independence Day ceremony. Then only 588 servicemen reenlisted. This year’s event, more than twice as large, saw the equivalent of two battalions extend their service in America’s military....

Also, remember, to the "liberal," the "soldiers as victims" meme is just a proxy for the bigger story--that we are all victims! No one should stand tall. Except for government bureaucracies, of course.

Update: Ethan Hahn sends a link to a picture of the event, from this article, on the official MNF-Iraq web site.

1,215 Servicemembers from all over Iraq gather in the Al Faw Palace rotunda on Camp Victory, to re-enlist and celebrate America’s Independence Day, July 4, 2008. Photo by MNF-I Public Affairs.

Day of Deliverance...

John Adams, with the Continental Congress, in a letter to Abigail, his wife, on the occasion of our declaration of independence:

..."But on the other Hand, the Delay of this Declaration to this Time, has many great Advantages attending it.—The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished.—Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their Judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in Town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act.—This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.

But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, [the actual date of the resolution in Congress] will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. -- I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not.—I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.—Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not."

You can see a scan of the letter here.

I want you to look at this picture and DESPAIR!...

This AP article, Everything Seemingly is Spinning Out of Control, is really too stupid to waste time on, but it's a sleepy afternoon. What really bugs me is what whores journalists are. If the editor asked this person he would write a similar piece on how hopeful and improving things are, and how confidence is strong. (And he will, once a Dem gets in the White House.)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. [Happened before, will happen again. Each time with more problems because more people build in flood-plains.] Polar bears are adrift. [And Antarctic ice is at a record maximum] Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. [Actually they are still high compared with just a few years ago] Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. [Yet we seem to afford them] Wars without end rage in Iraq, [What a moron. We are clearly winning in Iraq] and Afghanistan and against terrorism. [All wars are "without end"...until they end.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. [Stupid remark. Alger's stories were about triumphing over adversity, not enjoying lotus-land. So how is alleged adversity going to make him spin?]

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance. [If this is the "thesis" of this essay, where's the evidence? The fact that we have problems is NOT evidence that we feel "powerlessness."]

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order -- and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, ''Yes, we can.'' [This is completely illogical. A message of change and "Yes we can" is the opposite of a sense of hopelessness.]

Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003... [Actually I believe current polls show a majority of Americans happy about their own personal prospects.]

An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on the national mood.

..."It is pretty scary,'' said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.'' [This is evidence of.....of....what? Midwest Derangement Syndrome? Is "things are going to get better" supposed to mean no more tornados?]

Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone. [So? What's the point? You think earthquakes in China are a new thing?]

Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire. [A "world gone haywire" measured from what baseline? What is the normal non-haywire steady-state? When did it happen?]

Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet's weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge? [It's something that happens every few decades, clot-brain. You can look it up.]

This is too silly to keep on with. Let me just provide some actual evidence against the idea that floods in the Midwest are shocking novelties, and mean that our world is coming apart at the seams. This picture was taken May 11, when we were visiting our son Rob in Grand Forks, ND, for his graduation. He and I are standing level with the town around us, and least 20 feet above the level of the Red River, which you can see behind us. (For that 1997 flood I blame Clinton!)

Flood monument in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

New terrain...

Good post by Victor Davis Hanson: Any more Grants and Shermans?...

Who becomes a general — and why — tells us a lot about whether our military is on the right or wrong track.

The annual spring list of Army colonels promoted to brigadier generals will be shortly released. Already, rumors suggest this year, unlike in the recent past, a number of maverick officers who have distinguished themselves fighting — and usually defeating — insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq will be chosen...

Let's hope so! All of America's significant wars have been new terrain for those who fought them—each a new type of war. All of them started with costly mistakes until the new way of warfare was learned. [The leftist claim that the Iraq Campaign is somehow illegitimate because mistakes have been made is stupid and dishonest.] And always many officers, steeped in the thinking of the last war, had to be removed or sidelined to make room for those who could adapt.

Hanson writes about the Civil War, and the many generals Lincoln went through before getting Grant and Sherman. And also how WWII was won by generals that George Marshall promoted from relative obscurity.

WWI was a similar case.

I wrote a small piece here about General Pershing's immense task in finding officers for our huge "instant army," when so many colonels and generals were sunk in mental lethargy from decades of garrison duty broken only by occasional indian wars. (Hunter Liggett, who was mentally ready, was given a Division in January, 1918, and by October was commanding an Army!)

And Pershing himself had been bumped in rank over many senior officers. Teddy Roosevelt thought highly of him, and wanted to make him a colonel. But the Army would not agree. There was, however, another possibility... From Wikipedia:

...In June 1903, Pershing was ordered to return to the United States. He was forty-three years old and still a captain in the U.S. Army. President Theodore Roosevelt petitioned the Army General Staff to promote Pershing to colonel. At the time, Army officer promotions were based primarily on seniority, rather than merit, and although there was widespread acknowledgment that Pershing should serve as a colonel, the Army General Staff declined to change their seniority based promotion tradition just to accommodate Pershing. They would not consider a promotion to lieutenant colonel or even major. This angered Roosevelt, but since the President could only promote army officers in the General ranks, his hands were tied...

...After serving as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, Pershing returned to the United States in the fall of 1905. In a move that shocked the army establishment, President Roosevelt convinced Congress to authorize the appointment of Pershing as a brigadier general, skipping three ranks and more than 835 officers senior to him....

General Pershing and colonel Marshall, during WWI

Fisk du Joor...

There's a certain sort of article where every sentence brings a sarcastic reply to the tip of my tongue. And now, thanks to the magic of the Interweb, I can share my snark with all of you! [Heads nod towards sleep, eyes glaze over, the crowd shuffles away. That's OK, I do this mostly for my own fun. You've read it before, so feel free to skip.]

Harold Meyerson | May 15, 2008 | The American Prospect

If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there's one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words "an Englishman" to "American" to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year. That is why McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president -- because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing. [Uh, right now, Obama fans are howling because he's being tarred as an appeaser, and pounded for associations with Wright, Rezko, Hamas, etc. If these attacks have no "chance of prevailing," why the fuss?]

Now, I mean to take nothing away from McCain's Americanness by noting that it's Obama's story that represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama's white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants and has moved beyond a racial caste system that Obama exists, has thrived and stands a good chance of being our next president. [But, curious thing, Barry achieved the "American dream" (Harvard Law, Wall Street, big $, etc.) and then proceeded to SHED that American identity, becoming a "community organizer," joining an "Afro-centric" church, and reinventing himself as a black person. In fact, re-inventing the racial caste system! So why, exactly, should pointing this out be a bad thing?

In fact you are only bothered by this issue because you know that the charge is TRUE. I live among people like you and the Obama's. I know you. I know perfectly well your utter alienation from ordinary Americans who enjoy Christian faith, bowling, Nascar, deer-hunting, suburban life, and the Superbowl. Why, exactly, should they not reject a candidate who rejects THEM, who rejects the very things the ARE? Why should McCain not point these things out?]

That's not the America, though, that the Republicans refer to in proclaiming their own Americanness. For them, "American" is a term to be used as a wedge issue, a way to distinguish their more racially and religiously homogeneous party from the historically more polyglot Democrats. Such separation has a long pedigree: Campaigning for GOP presidential nominee Alf Landon in 1936, Republican leader Frank Knox said that the Democratic Party under President Franklin Roosevelt "has been seized by alien and un-American elements. Next November, you will choose the American way."

Knox meant two things: that the New Deal represented an ideology outside the pale of American thinking and that the New Deal coalition, which represented record numbers of foreign-born, non-Protestant Americans, was therefore un-American.[Well, it was true. Socialism IS outside the "pale of American thinking," and we now know that some of the New-Dealers were secret agents for Stalin.] In more recent elections, Republicans have depicted Democratic presidential candidates as un-American cultural elitists heading up a dangerously diverse party. [Diverse is an interesting word to pick, since it has become a code-word for racial quotas, which are very un-American. So much so that a code-word is necessary. And, come to think, Obama probably favors racial quotas, but will lie like Ananias about the subject, and many other similar subjects. So really, calling him "un-American" is a proxy for real and substantive ISSUES that he would prefer to duck.]

This year, we can expect to see almost nothing but these kinds of assaults as the campaign progresses. The Republican attack against Obama all but ignores the issue differences [Obama is currently under attack on the issues of foreign policy and Federal judicial nominations, to name just a few.] between the candidates to go after what is presumably his inadequately American identity. He is, writes one leading conservative columnist, "out of touch with everyday America." [Obviously.] His reluctance to wear a flag pin, writes another, shows that he "has declared himself superior to an almost universal form of popular patriotism." [It's the simple truth. I live in SF, I know.]

There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there's not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. [Surrre. Americans are SO ready for higher taxes, abortion, gay marriage, nationalized health care, appeasement, speech-codes and multiculturalism.] Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of "What are you going to do for America?" rather than "Are you a real American?" Republicans are doomed. They offer no solutions for the stagnation (or decline) of American living standards, [So why is building extra storage space for people's stuff a booming business?] or for the weakening of America's economic power. [The EU, China--they're gonna steam-roller us any day 'cause they're so superior!] They offer no resolution to America's war of choice in Iraq. [Except winning--we are providing that one. I know it disgusts you lefties, but Americans go for winning our wars.] Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown. [Oh right, he had a little button he could push that would re-build the failed levees, and cause the Democratic leadership of Louisiana to be honest and effective. But he just sat there and didn't push it.] They are the American party, and McCain the American nominee, that hasn't a clue about how to help America in its (prolonged, I fear) moment of need. [We're sinking, we're sinking! We need Big Government and Barack to save us. Glub, glub.......]

What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which "American" is synonymous with "white" and "Christian," than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write "American" when answering the census question on ethnic origin. [That is so disgusting, "American." Ugh! Horrid rednecks. And they've only been here since the 18th Century! They should think of themselves as an ethnic group oppressed by white Christians, and needing Affirmative Action.] For some, "American" is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend. [We get the picture. In fact,the real point of this piece is preparing for defeat. if Obama loses, it means we are RACISTS, not that we are rejecting Obama's leftism. I spit, with the utmost contempt, upon that formula. In fact, we Republicans would be delighted to consider voting for a black person. IF they were also, like Colin Powell or Condi Rice, or Bobby Jindal, or Janet Brown, AMERICANS. Not anti-American leftists.

Which is why Gilbert and Sullivan penned what could be the perfect McCain marching song:

But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains American!
He remains American! [Which in itself is good reason to vote for him, rather then Mr Fraudulent.]

PS: I hate to break it to you, Mr Meyerson, but the knuckle-draggers in Appalachia are perfectly aware that "American" is not usually considered an "ethnic origin." They do that because they loath your identity-politics, which are un-American.

Smart is not the same as wise...

Orrin Judd:

It would be easier to feel sorry for the Democrats if they ever learned anything from their mistake--singular, because it's the same one almost every time. While the Republicans nominate the guy whose turn it is next, a well-known and battle-tested veteran, the Democrats repeatedly serve up a neophyte Northern liberal and then act stunned when he's not ready for primetime and voters dislike him once they get to know his political views.

There's lots one could say to amplify this. One is that being smart is not the same thing as being wise. And since a large part of being wise is having the humility to realize you don't know it all, and the humility to see things as they are, rather then what your theory says they should be, you can almost bet that anyone who people look at and say "he's so smart" is not wise.

"Wise" can't really be defined. It's just one of those things you know when you see it, if you are looking. When it comes to politicians, it's even harder to be sure. But a good bet is that a "well-known and battle-tested veteran" has probably had a chance to reveal any un-wisdom he may have.

Is McCain wise? I have various doubts about him, but I feel confident that he is far wiser than Barry or Hillary. For one thing, there's no doubt that he is a patriotic American, and that in itself is deeply wise. Because this great nation is herself "a well-known and battle-tested veteran," and the results have shown this a thousand times. Betting on America is the smart bet. Betting on Europe is the sucker's bet.

And if you are a liberal reading that previous paragraph, you probably instantly thought of all the reasons you despise this country (without having the guts or conscience to move elsewhere). You thought of all her supposed hideous faults, things that are taken for granted over the Brie and Chardonnay at San Francisco soirées, where guys like Obama go to raise big bucks. If you did, you are not wise. You are a fool.

Extraordinary delegation of authority....

Here's a cool piece on how WalMart (and other big-box retailers) performed prodigies of disaster-relief during Katrina...while Federal (and in Democrat areas, local) government did poorly. The secret was pushing authority into the hands of those on the scene.

President Bush missed a big fat opportunity, when things were being changed after 9/11, to strengthen local emergency-response agencies, instead of adding more federal bureaucracy.( I think he was rendered short-sighted from spending too much time in government, despite his successes in the private sector.)

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer -- and remembered as American business's answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

"A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level," was Scott's message to his people. "Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing."

This extraordinary delegation of authority -- essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year -- saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. ...

[....]

...This benevolent improvisation contradicts everything we have been taught about Wal-Mart by labour unions and the "small-is-beautiful" left. We are told that the company thinks of its store management as a collection of cheap, brainwash-able replacement parts; that its homogenizing culture makes it incapable of serving local communities; that a sparrow cannot fall in Wal-Mart parking lot without orders from Arkansas; that the chain puts profits over people. The actual view of the company, verifiable from its disaster-response procedures, is that you can't make profits without people living in healthy communities. And it's not alone: As Horwitz points out, other big-box companies such as Home Depot and Lowe's set aside the short-term balance sheet when Katrina hit and acted to save homes and lives, handing out millions of dollars' worth of inventory for free.

No one who is familiar with economic thought since the Second World War will be surprised at this. Scholars such as F. A. von Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have taught us that it is really nothing more than a terminological error to label governments "public" and corporations "private" when it is the latter that often have the strongest incentives to respond to social needs. A company that alienates a community will soon be forced to retreat from it, but the government is always there. Companies must, to survive, create economic value one way or another; government employees can increase their budgets and their personal power by destroying or wasting wealth, and most may do little else. Companies have price signals to guide their productive efforts; governments obfuscate those signals.

Aside from the public vs. private issue, Horwitz suggests, decentralized disaster relief is likely to be more timely and appropriate than the centralized kind, which explains why the U.S. Coast Guard performed so much better during the disaster than FEMA. The Coast Guard, like all marine forces, necessarily leaves a great deal of authority in the hands of individual commanders, and like Wal-Mart, it benefited during and after the hurricane from having plenty of personnel who were familiar with the Gulf Coast geography and economy.

There is no substitute for local knowledge -- an ancient lesson of which Katrina merely provided the latest reminder....

Young girl traveling...

Tom Maguire:

By way of Ace I am watching this video in which Obama calls for the day that a young girl traveling abroad can say with pride that she is an American - that, we are informed, is the change he is working for.

I know that message lights Democratic fires, but my goodness - is that what he wants to present to the general public?...

It's the usual—casual—anti-Americanism of lefty elitists. How I hate it. I live in the middle of it, and I DESPISE it. "Lights Democratic fires." Oh yeah.

As far as I'm concerned, that one clip should disqualify Mr Obama from being President. If Obama's the nominee, I hope John McCain takes that clip and rubs his face in it!

Elite snivelers from Harvard hate America because she is bigger and greater than we. Because she makes demands on us--demands for loyalty and duty and service. They are nihilists, and want to worship only themselves.

For the American citizen, to love and serve our nation is a requirement. (This is an analog, on a much lower sphere, of the requirement that we love and serve God.) It is not optional. And it has nothing to do with nationalism. America is not a nation, in that sense.

She is an idea, and an authoritative tradition. There are few other nations that can claim this. Maybe none. Actually, you can see which. Just chart which countries leftists really really hate. Ummm....Oh yeah, Israel. And they hate and fear what England used to be, though they've mostly killed her by now. America and the Anglosphere are now England.

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.
      -- Abraham Lincoln, Eulogy on Henry Clay , July 6, 1852

Standing up to the hoodlums...

Heartening news in the WSJ about the biggest scam in the world, the asbestos litigation quagmire. A judge and a defendant are actually standing up to those vile thieves! Charlene was involved in the litigation when I first met her, so I've learned a lot about that criminal enterprise.

....A building materials company, W.R. Grace was among the firms swept up in a second round of asbestos litigation in the late 1990s. Having chewed their way through asbestos manufacturers, trial lawyers went after companies that had only a marginal asbestos link. By blanketing these firms with an avalanche of claims they recruited, the tort bar pushed at least 30 of these second-tier players into bankruptcy.

Most companies then followed the usual asbestos bankruptcy script. They cut a deal with the plaintiffs attorneys, handing over a big sum to pay current and future claims. Federal bankruptcy judges happily went along, because most view their jobs as getting companies out of bankruptcy quickly and few want the hassle of investigating tens of thousands of individual asbestos claims.

Enter W.R. Grace, and its lead attorney, David Bernick, a veteran of the tobacco and breast-implant wars. Mr. Bernick has taken the unheard-of position that federal rules of evidence apply even in bankruptcy court. He has argued that the only way Judge Judith Fitzgerald can make a legitimate ruling on Grace's liability is for her to decide first how many claims have scientific merit. This is revolutionary stuff.

To her credit, Judge Fitzgerald has allowed Grace to investigate those claims, and present her with its results. The stakes are enormous. At the end of this process, Judge Fitzgerald will make a finding on W.R. Grace's ultimate liability. The plaintiffs claim it is as much as $6 billion, a figure that would make Grace insolvent. The company claims the money necessary to cover legitimate claims is closer to $500 million, a number that would allow it to rejoin the land of the living...

Tax the rich!

Kruse Kronicle has a nice piece, based on Congressional Budget Office data, graphing how the Bush tax cuts resulted in the rich paying more taxes. And the poor paying less.

You probably already knew that, but he's got nice charts, and it is worth saving the link to use in arguments against Bolshies who claim that Bush "cut taxes on the rich."

....The 2005 total effective federal tax rate as a percentage of the 1979 rate:

• Top Quintile = 101.2%
• Fourth Quintile = 85.0%
• Middle Quintile = 76.8%
• Second Quintile = 60.1%
• Bottom Quintile = 14.3%

As I showed in a post last month, the top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of federal income taxes. The top 25% of taxpayers pay 86% of income taxes.

Finally, keep in mind the New York Times article two weeks a ago that pointed out that while the bottom quintile has $9,974 in income per household a year it spends $18,153. That means non-cash assistance (as well draws on savings in the case of retired or unemployed payers) nearly doubles the actual income of the bottom quintile.

Rather than populist outcry over "tax cuts for the wealthy," maybe we need to look at the whole package of consequences that come from tax policy. Is the final objective really to have all taxes paid by the top 1% of society?

Recommended destination....

I'm tagging along with Charlene to a Federalist Society conference at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

Awesome! I had no idea. I had vaguely imagined a library, with various historical documents and mementos in some glass cases. But it's a knock-out museum, located on a hilltop with sweeping views. (I guess there is library-like stuff somewhere, with scholars toiling over documents, but that's not evident to the visitor.) We had a great time. I recommend it highly, should you ever happen to be in the LA area.

Ker-bam!

By Thom Shanker. WASHINGTON: Videotape of the U.S. Navy mission to shoot down a dying spy satellite made available shows an interceptor missile ascending atop a bright trail of burning fuel, and then a flash, a fireball and a plume of vapor. A cloud of debris left little doubt that the missile had squarely hit its mark as it spent its final days orbiting high above the Pacific Ocean.

A different kind of doubt still lingers, though, expressed by policy analysts, some politicians and scientists, and not a few foreign powers, especially China and Russia: Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk has passed of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where? Or should they be worried about the latest display of U.S. technical prowess and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?....

"Should the people of the world be worried...." The way the question is put reminds me once again of the contempt I feel for the sort of people who make up the New York Times. (Shanker is their Pentagon reporter.) His loyalty and sympathy, as a member of the "coastal elites," is centered somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and a lot closer to Paris than to the nasty old USA. His heart is in Belgium.

When he writes "the people of the world," he doesn't mean, like, you know, the actual grubby little people. No. He means their owners, the ruling elites. They are the ones who might not want us to be able to shoot down incoming missiles.

So let me rephrase the question. Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the cops are on the beat, and carrying bigger guns than the hoodlums who think they own the neighborhood? Yeah, baby.

Should the people of China be breathing a sigh of relief that their brutal masters are feeling less pushy today? You betcha.

Should the little people of the world feel glad that the liberating spirit of Ronald Reagan has been vindicated today, at the expense of the "realists" who think that we have no "strategic interest" in their freedom and prosperity? And at the expense of the vile leftists who are in favor of tyranny and oppression?

It's no accident that Democrats and Euro-socialists and all the world's tyrants hated Reagan's vision of missile defense, and have fought it tenaciously from that day to now. They hate it because they hate the United States of America, at least when she is strong and proud and free. We are supposed to be humble and conciliatory and meek.

To which I say, Ha ha ha. You lose, sniveling worms. We shot a rocket—not from a stable platform—from a cruiser moving on the waves, and we not only whacked a satellite out of orbit, we hit one particular spot on the thing! To all the fake scientists and fake experts who have declared that this sort of thing is impossible, I spit upon your nihilism. It is ALL possible. Because we are Americans. We can do this stuff.

And thank you, President George W Bush, who made missile-defense and anti-satellite defense a priority.

The guided missile cruiser USS Shiloh launches an SM-3 during a ballistic missile defense exercise. (Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Navy)

Effete idiocy...

As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world. -- John McCain [link]

Well yes, Alaska National Wildlife Refuge IS pristine and beautiful. What rarely gets mentioned is that the lofty snow-clad peaks and Grizzly Bears are not in the area where the oil is. The area proposed for drilling is a coastal mud-flat. A mosquito refuge. A place nobody visits.

And the drilling proposal would only occupy a tiny portion of it, with no likelihood of harm to wildlife—we've already built an oil pipeline all the way across the state without any reported harm to wildlife.

"Pristine and beautiful" are only human values. Nature cares nothing for them. If we used Yosemite Valley as a dumping place for old cars, the birds and raccoons would not mind at all.

But people don't think logically about this stuff. Because "Green" is a religion. The perfect faith for the nihilist, since the Goddess cares nothing about us, "created" us with no conscious intent to do so, may wipe us (and our whole planet) out in the blink of an eye, without remorse, and is "worshipped" by leaving things "pristine and beautiful," which is defined as having no humans touching them.

I'm still liking Mitt the most...

We just sent a little donation to the Romney campaign. Now's the time our morsel will have an effect, if ever.

I still think Mitt's the best of the lot. (Here's a good case made.) And I still find him as a person somewhat hard to warm to. That doesn't matter to me personally; I don't make these decisions based on emotions. But, rationally, it's a problem in a candidate or president, both of which jobs depend on persuasion more than on correct decision-making.

My impression is, that if George W. Bush and Mitt Romney were my next-door neighbors, (and not in politics) George would seem like a regular guy who I could chat with as an equal, but Mitt would, while being unfailingly courteous, leave an feeling that he normally dwells on a higher level of existence, one you reach by the special executive elevator that goes only to the top floor. (NOTE: These are just impressions from a distance. No one who actually knows Romney seems to find him like this!)

It is interesting the number of people who just hate him on sight. I would be very curious to know how much that group overlaps with the group that instinctively hated Bush. (There is of course a considerable contingent of Leftists for whom American-successful-white-male-business-executive is the culmination of evil. I spit upon their nihilism. I'd ship them all to Cuba if I could.)

I looked back at this post, from last April, and noticed a good comment by Lyle:

Maybe he'll grow on us.

If choosing a president were the same as choosing a CEO, Romney might be the choice. He's smart, level-headed, and competent. He has presidential temperment and demeanor. He looks the part.

Maybe voice has something to do with it. I've heard Romney several times but his voice didn't leave an impression. In the sense that we're casting a leader as well as choosing a CEO, a commanding voice matters.

Imagine hearing President Hillary! alternately screech and drone for four long years. Or John Goober Edwards. But we've heard Giuliani's pragmatic briskness and Thompson's folksy growl for more than a decade, and both wear well.

"I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this"

Charlene saw this YouTube clip, posted by Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard's blog. It's an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's famous speech, A Time for Choosing.

Dean writes:

.. What I find most remarkable about the speech beyond its extraordinary content is the simple, straight forward language and the appropriately spare delivery. There were no clumsy applause lines, no laundry lists of silly promises meant to purchase the votes of certain citizens. Instead, it was just one man talking sense, honestly and from the heart, clearly without the guidance of either pollsters or focus groups.

Current candidates, please take note - the audience loved it. And 43 years later, it's part of history. Even the most moving paen to ethanol won't be so recognized.

To me what is especially noteworthy is how similar the fake-pacifism Reagan was fighting against is to what we deal with now, or what Winston Churchill battled against in the 1930's. The same speeches could be given any time over almost a century.

The same stupid idea, that by being "pacifistic," by not resisting the thugs and tyrants of the world, we will obtain peace, is as alive now as it was in 1938. Pacifism kills.

We "considered ourselves a vanquished people"

From A Revolutionary Christmas Story, By Lynne Cheney, NYT, December 21, 2004

AS 1776 was drawing to a close, Elkanah Watson, a young man in Massachusetts, expressed what many Americans feared about their war for independence. "We looked upon the contest as near its close," he wrote, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people."

There was good reason for pessimism. The British had driven Gen. George Washington and his men out of New York and across New Jersey. In early December, with the British on their heels, the Americans had commandeered every boat they could find to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. They were starving, sick and cold. The artist Charles Willson Peale, watching the landing from the Pennsylvania shore, described a soldier dressed "in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So disfigured was the man, Peale wrote, that at first he did not recognize him as his brother James.

In these desperate circumstances, George Washington made a stunning decision: to go back across the Delaware and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton. On Christmas night, he led 2,400 men, many of them with their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes, to a crossing point nine miles upstream from Trenton. As freezing temperatures turned rain to sleet and snow, they began to cross the river.

The task was harder than any of them had imagined. Men had to break through ice to get into the boats and then fend off chunks of floating ice once they were in the river. Getting cannons across - each weighed nearly a ton - was especially difficult. Downstream, two other groups that Washington had ordered to cross the Delaware failed in their mission. But Washington and his men persevered, until finally, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they were across and ready to march to Trenton.

They had planned to approach Trenton before dawn, but the difficulty of the crossing had delayed them, and it was daylight when they encountered the first Hessians. Still, the surprise worked, and in two hours, with few losses of their own, they captured nearly 900 of the enemy. "This is a glorious day for our country," Washington declared... [There's more.]

Thank you Lynne Cheney for this one! And we should be very grateful that, even in these last decadent days of America, we have public servants like the Cheney family...

Will anyone say, "Thank you?"

AP: President Bush has approved "a significant reduction" in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, cutting it to less than one-quarter its size at the end of the Cold War, the White House said Tuesday.

At the same time, the Energy Department announced plans to consolidate the nuclear weapons complex that maintains warheads and dismantle those no longer needed, saying the current facilities need to be made more efficient and more easily secured and that the larger complex is no longer needed.

"We are reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest level consistent with America's national security and our commitments to friends and allies," White House press secretary Dana Perino said...(Thanks to Orrin)

ZO, my question is, will any of those people who think America's development and one-time use of nuclear weapons was a bad thing now express gratitude for this reduction in our stockpiles? Hmmm?

I myself would say that it was one of the best things that ever happened. It immediately put an end to world wars, regional wars, and wars between developed nations. And also to some rather less-developed ones, such as India and Pakistan. They used to fight wars with each other, remember? And Israel no longer fights with Egypt or Syria, either. Remember those wars? They stopped once Israel had the Bomb. (Of course the Arab animals started proxy wars using terrorist scum to blow up pizza parlors full of women and children....but the total bloodshed was still far less than would have happened in wars.)

Two positive stories...

(Thanks to Orrin)

Triumphs for Democracy, By MICHAEL BARONE

The world looks safer, friendlier, more hopeful than it did as we approached Christmastime last year.

Then, we were on the defensive, perhaps on the verge of defeat, in Iraq. The Europeans' attempts to persuade Iran to renounce nuclear weapons seemed to have failed. Hugo Chavez was using his near-dictatorial powers and the oil wealth of Venezuela to secure the election of opponents of the American "empire" in Latin America.

Today, things look different. And they suggest, to me at least, that the policies of the Bush administration, pilloried as bankrupt by the Democrats after their victory in congressional elections in November, have served American interests better than most Americans then thought....

It will probably come as a shock to most people, even to those who follow the economy, that mortgage applications rose last month as a result of declining interest rates.

In the midst of the hysterical media-fed notion that a tidal wave of subprime-loan foreclosures was going to plunge the country into a recession, the fact is that the economy is still growing and Americans are still buying homes.

The torrid pace of recent years has slackened, but homes are being sold, banks are lending money and most Americans — even those saddled with subprime mortgages — are paying their mortgages on time.

Not everybody realizes this, however. The Washington Post, in a story about the administration's mortgage-relief plan, reported last week that, "Lending, which had boomed for years, ground to a halt." That has been the myth reported ad nauseam on the nightly network news shows, and apparently it has been accepted as a God-given fact....

I kind of imagine the people at the Washington Times just relishing any chance to poke a pin in the fraudulent pomposity of the Washington Post. Thank you!

Guided by the Spirit...

These mass shootings are a recurrent bitter frustration to me, because I know (I'm not the only one of course) what to do. I know how people should respond, to save lives. If everyone at that church had instantly started throwing things--chairs, shoes, keys, potted plants, books, pictures off the wall--the gunman would almost certainly have been quickly overwhelmed.

And I post this idea every time, confident that no one will take notice. Just call me Cassandra.

Here's a fascinating story about the security guard who brought down the killer...

...At about that moment, [Jeanne] Assam, 42, turned a corner with a drawn handgun, walked toward the gunman and yelled "Surrender!"

Bourbonnais said.The gunman pointed a handgun at Assam and fired three shots, Bourbonnais said. She returned fire and just kept walking toward the gunman pressing off round after round.

After the gunman went down, Bourbonnais asked the Assam, a volunteer security guard with the church, how she remained so calm and focused.

Bourbonnais said she replied:

"I was asking the Holy Spirit to guide me the entire time."

Update: There's more on Jeanne Assam here. she's not a hired security guard, but a member of the church and former police officer volunteering to provide security.

Interesting stuff...

UK Telegraph: Republicans winning new citizens for 2008 vote By Toby Harnden in San Diego, California:

Minutes after taking the Pledge of Allegiance, new American citizens are urged to register as voters by Democratic activists who see them as natural party supporters who could hold the key to the 2008 election.

But with increasing illegal immigration threatening the economy and security of the United States, many legal immigrants anxious to uphold the laws of their adopted country are moving towards the more hard-line immigration stance of Republicans.

Even in California’s Democratic-controlled San Diego, sizeable numbers of America’s newly-minted potential voters said that illegal immigrants should be penalised rather than given an easy route to citizenship as most Democrats advocate.

“For a long time, immigration was OK,” said Sara Wright, 49, a seamstress from Mexico who arrived in the US legally in 1986.

“But now, no more. A lot of really bad people come from Mexico and commit crimes....

I'm not sure how much this means. But the simple fact is that all the good things that immigrants come here for only happened because we have the rule of law. That's the real problem with illegal immigration. That's the first question to ask about any proposed solutions... does it uphold the rule of law?

And it is NOT being compassionate in the long run to undermine the laws that all our freedoms depend on. (A concept, alas, beyond most Catholic leaders.)

things to be thankful for...

We can all be thankful for our peerless military, and for the sight of happy schoolchildren in the Dora neighborhood. Thankful that Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces are even now delivering a crushing defeat to the murderous animals of al Qaeda. These children can smile because good and brave men took on the forces of evil.

A schoolboy waves at a U.S. soldier on foot patrol in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood on Wednesday.

HADI MIZBAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS Army Times Frontline Photos 11-21-07

— — — — — — — — — — —

Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division celebrate Thanksgiving in their tent at Firebase Wilderness in the Afghanistan Paktia Province. The soldiers had saved up cheeses, sausages, pretzels and other treats from home, which were sent out in care packages.

John D. McHugh / AFP /Getty Images. Army Times Frontline Photos 11-24-06

In reality, a mighty host...

Measured by the standards of men of their time, ... [the Pilgrims] were the humble of the earth. Measured by later accomplishments, they were the mighty. In appearance weak and persecuted they came -- rejected, despised -- an insignificant band; in reality strong and independent, a mighty host of whom the world was not worthy, destined to free mankind.
      -- Calvin Coolidge

"I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps"

You might want to take a look at a fudgy little video that John Hinderaker of PowerLine has posted...

...In the school district where I live, a concert is put on annually by the four high school choirs, plus a little kids' choir of elementary school children, of which my youngest daughter is a member. Participation in the high school choirs is competitive and their quality is high. A director for the concert is brought in from the outside, generally from a college. The concert begins with a couple of numbers by the kids' choir; this year, they started with a medley of The Pledge of Allegiance and America the Beautiful. The crowd--I live in a middle-of-the-road, non-elite area--loved it. The four high school choirs perform separately, and then at the end, they combine in a single large choir for a couple of songs. Most of the music sung is classical; lots of it is religious, often in Latin. As I said, the quality is high.

For the finale, they bring out the kids' choir to sing with all four high schools. This year, the finale was Battle Hymn of the Republic....

That's what's on the video. Gave me a lump in the throat. Maybe it's just because I live in this sinkhole of Lefty nihilism and anti-Americanism, and have put three kids through school without EVER hearing a concert of patriotic songs..... especially THAT patriotic song.

11th hour, of the 11th day of the 11th month

(This is partly a re-post of a Veteran's Day piece I did in 2005)

It's good to stop on Veteran's Day and remember that everything we have, we have because of war, because brave men fought in savage conflicts to protect and enlarge our patrimony. Often, when I'm feeling that my life is just too too difficult, I think about an Iraqi man I read about, who spent 17 years in a little crawl-space between two walls in his family's home, to avoid arrest by Saddam's secret police. War freed him, and war keeps us from suffering a similar fate, or far worse...

Remember, as you enjoy your holiday (or, like Charlene and I, you enjoy the huge privilege of being self-employed, and working hard today because the work is there) that you are not worrying about visits by secret police because a lot of good guys killed a lot of bad guys over the course of many centuries...

David Furst / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images

Soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather together to pray moments before setting off on a patrol of western Baghdad on Thursday. Army Times 11/8/05

American soldiers at a funeral near Saint-Mihiel, 1917




[link]

You all know how it's often a problem, when children are raised in prosperity, that they sometimes have no appreciation of how hard their parents worked, and how hard and dangerous life can be.

And our nation has a similar problem. Our ancestors performed miracles of endurance and suffering and courage, so we could enjoy wealth and comfort such as the world has never seen. But this very success has created a sub-culture of Eloi, weak and foolish creatures who burble, "War never solved anything," when it has in fact solved a host of their problems. They are sitting in unthinking comfort and security on the heaped bones of America's enemies. And they sneer and carp at our military, while—of course—not moving to anywhere where they are not protected by strong men with guns.

To anyone such as myself, who has read a lot of history, the military we have now is an astonishment. Never on this planet has there been such a combination of soldierly proficiency, of devastating weapons used with extreme restraint, and such care to protect civilians and to nurture chaotic lands towards democracy and progress. I recently mentioned a splendid book, House to House, by David Bellavia, about deadly struggle in the second battle of Falluja. But in most of our wars, we would not have done that house-to-house stuff. We would have just flattened a Falluja, like we did to Aachen. We could easily have destroyed that horrid place, along with many civilians and many terrorist murderers, and not lost a single American life. Instead, American and Iraqi soldiers groped through a nightmare of booby-trapped buildings and carefully-prepared kill-zones. And many brave men died.

They gave their lives to save the innocent. History will record that they are the true Christians of our time, the real "good Samaritans." While our fake-pacifists are just ice-hearted free-loaders, living in safety because blood is shed by real men and women whose boots they are not worthy to lick.

'Strider' am I to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly...

Good sense...

A friend sent the link to this NYT article by N. Gregory Mankiw , and remarked: "You might want to blog this if it doesn't pick up more circulation. I haven't seen anything yet. He refutes at least 50 Krugman columns on health care in about 5 or 6 hundred words."

STATEMENT 2 Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.

This number from the Census Bureau is often cited as evidence that the health system is failing for many American families. Yet by masking tremendous heterogeneity in personal circumstances, the figure exaggerates the magnitude of the problem.

To start with, the 47 million includes about 10 million residents who are not American citizens. Many are illegal immigrants. Even if we had national health insurance, they would probably not be covered.

The number also fails to take full account of Medicaid, the government's health program for the poor. For instance, it counts millions of the poor who are eligible for Medicaid but have not yet applied. These individuals, who are healthier, on average, than those who are enrolled, could always apply if they ever needed significant medical care. They are uninsured in name only.

The 47 million also includes many who could buy insurance but haven't. The Census Bureau reports that 18 million of the uninsured have annual household income of more than $50,000, which puts them in the top half of the income distribution. About a quarter of the uninsured have been offered employer-provided insurance but declined coverage.

Of course, millions of Americans have trouble getting health insurance. But they number far less than 47 million, and they make up only a few percent of the population of 300 million....

Mr Mankiw, I note, is a Romney advisor. I'd call that a good sign....

See the world...

From Victor Davis Hansen's blog...

....I spent some time in Iraq accompanying Col. HR McMaster who was on an inspection tour of the forward operating bases. He is a UNC PhD, former Hoover Security fellow, and author of an acclaimed book, Dereliction of Duty, on (the lack of) military leadership during Vietnam, as well as one of Gen. Petraeus’s top counter-insurgency thinkers.

I could not imagine a tour (some 30-40 days I think he is on) that would pose more risks—humveeing and coptering into all sorts of places, regardless of the recent 24-hour conditions. Over the years, in Gulf War I, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, he has seen a number of close calls, and walks with a limp from an injured hip (probably will have to be replaced). Full body armor, pistol, and M-16 to lug around can’t help the pain.

I would watch him negotiate with Sunni governors, police chiefs, and generals, then be debriefed by Marine and Army officers, then go on tour in Humvees or foot patrols. This would start at 7 am and end at 8pm. Then after the long helicopter trip back to Camp Victory, HR would eat and join discussion with fellow Colonels until after 11 PM.

We often talk loosely of the idea of a renaissance man, but colonels like McMaster come closest—I would add another Colonel Chris Gibson—to the idea that I have ever come across.

Something is going on in Iraq entirely missed by media. It’s not just that things are turning around, but rather Gen. Petraeus has assembled perhaps the most gifted group of Army officers seen in a generation—who feel they are going to snatch victory from the jaws of political defeat. I think they will pull it off and the entire political landscape here at home will have to readjust to it by early next year. The smarter Democrats will take credit by claiming their anti-Bush efforts forced needed change, the denser ones will just continue to deny, like Sens. Reid and Schumer, that any good is occurring at all.....

Life has many frustrations, but there are also some sweet moments. The thought of what a bitter pill victory in Iraq is going to be to fraudulent liberals gives me a warm feeling in my tummy like a shot of whiskey!

Another charming thing is that there are so many things that are not what the received liberal wisdom says they are. I suspect that guys like Col. McMaster are not just gifted in relation to army officers of the past, but also in relation to certain people who imagine themselves as the highly-gifted elite....academics especially. The academic world is not looking very impressive these days, and I don't expect history to be kind to it. Same with the realms of journalism, the arts, and the whole bi-coastal arts-and-croissants crowd.

Related to this, one of the oddities of contemporary American life is that liberals preen themselves on being well-travelled because they've been trekking in Nepal or have gone on a photo-safari in Tanzania. But people who are really well-travelled, who know intimately some place you've never even heard of, are much more likely to be found in rural or small-town America! Those people join the military, or thye oil companies, or do missionary work, and they really "see the world."

"No one will ever believe you..."

I liked very much this comment that Mike Plaiss made to this post about our having, from time to time, an idealistic foreign policy...

For anyone interested in a long-winded anecdote that is relevant to this discussion, here it is:

I used to teach English as a Second Language (ESL), and had the very good fortune to have many smart and intellectually minded students. We had countless conversations about world events, the countries they came from, etc. I did most of the learning in that class. I would even go as far as to say that most of what I think I know about the world outside the US came from those conversations. (I have dozens of stories a lot like this one.)

This was all right in the middle of the war in Bosnia (but before we got involved). In fact, I had several students from there, several from Eastern Europe, and a few from the Middle East. Debate had already begun in the US as whether we should get involved. All of my students, including the ones from Bosnia, were sure that the US would NOT get involved. One student from Syria, one of the teacher’s assistants, was pretty adamant about it – “Why would you? You have nothing to gain.”

I had developed a lot of credibility with this group because I actually knew where their countries were, and even a little bit about their histories. (Yes, it is sad to say that they were truly shocked that an American knew where Odessa was, as an example.) So it got their attention when I told them to not be so sure – the US may well get involved.

“Why?”, they asked. “To stop the killing”, I answered. The Syrian scoffed (loudly), and everyone was shaking their heads in disbelief, and a few were laughing. But, like I said, I had developed a lot of credibility with them by this point and they were all fascinated and wanted to know more about my thoughts. Keep in mind that all of these people had only been in the US for a few weeks or months, and I had language barriers to deal with, but I did my best to explain to them that this is the way Americans are. If we believed that genocide was, in fact, occurring in Europe (did my best to explain why that mattered), and that there was something we could do about, that we may well go to war to stop it.

Apparently I did a pretty good job because even the Syrian seemed convinced that this may be so. I could see the wheels turning in their heads as they re-evaluated their thoughts. Then the Syrian, who by the way was an extremely smart young man (he was in college and intended to go to med school), said something that I will never forget.

He said, “Well, then you have a bigger problem on your hands.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked, “What do you mean?” “No one will ever believe it. No one will ever believe you would go to war for such a reason. So if you do it (go to war), they’re going to come up with their own reasons as to why you really did it. This would be terrible for the United States.”

So yes, going to war, even for truly altruistic reasons, can do great damage to the reputation of the US.

Ah well. As Mencken, or maybe not him, said, War is God's way of teaching Americans geography...

It fits...

Powerline has this quote, from a new book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.

Some have called it the CIA's greatest covert operation of all time.
It involved deep penetration of a hostile regime by planting a network of agents at key crossroads of power, where they could steal secrets and steer policy by planting disinformation, cooking intelligence, provocation, and outright lies.

It involved sophisticated political sabotage operations, aimed at making regime leaders doubt their own judgment and question the support of their subordinates.

It involved the financing, training, and equipping of effective opposition forces, who could challenge the regime openly and through covert operations.

The scope was breathtaking, say insiders who had personal knowledge of the CIA effort. All the skills learned by the U.S. intelligence community during the fifty years of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union were in play, from active measures aimed at planting disinformation through cutouts and an eager media, to maskirovka--strategic deception.

It was war--but an intelligence war, played behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. Its goal was nothing less than to topple the regime in power, by discrediting its rulers.

Many Americans believe this was the CIA's goal during the 1990s, when the Agency had "boots on the ground" in northern Iraq, working with Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein. Most patriotic Americans probably hope that the CIA today has such an operation to overthrow the mullahs in Tehran, or North Korean dictator Kim John Il.

But the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation was none of them.

It was America's 43rd President, George W. Bush....

I'd say it seems to fit the facts we've observed over the last 6 years. Remember this quote, by Michael Ledeen?

...ML: Before we get into the details, I've got a quickie for you. I was reading a recent interview with Charles McCarry, the ex-spook who writes terrific books, and he said something quite extraordinary.

JJA: To wit?

ML: He said: "I never met a stupid person in the agency. Or an assassin. Or a Republican... They were, at least in the operations side where I was...wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat. Because they were the absolute opposite, in their own politics."...

Fascinatin', that befuddlement! The left hates the CIA for the same reason that it hates the US military. Because their very existence presumes that we have a country worth fighting for. They do not hate the State Department, because it is presumed to share the view of nihilists that there is nothing worth fighting for, that there is no "good vs evil."

Sweet Week

I love it every year. Fleet Week! At any odd moment you might hear a growl that slowly builds to a roar, and then an F/A 18 or two goes ker-WHAMM over your head. Awesome. The Blue Angels.

Cinnamon Stillwell has a blogpost that expresses just what the Weidners feel...

San Francisco Peaceniks in a Panic Over Fleet Week

It's that time of year again and Fleet Week has descended upon the city of San Francisco. For those who, like myself, appreciate the unabashed demonstration of military prowess, not to mention the spectacular air shows of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, it is a time to relish. And, of course, an occasion for gloating about the matter at one's blog.

It helps that self-proclaimed socialist supervisor Chris Daly's third attempt to ban the Blue Angels, due, he claims, to safety concerns (never mind that there's a higher chance of being hit by a car in San Francisco than an Angels pilot crashing), was soundly defeated by his more commerce-minded colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. Ah, the smell of victory in the morning.

Getting to watch the Blue Angels practice throughout the week is another perk for patriots living in the vicinity. There's nothing quite like the beauty of jets flying silently in formation, that sonic boom as they pass overhead, or the thrill of a jet zooming past one's very window.

But for local liberals unaccustomed to such icky displays of militarism and residents annoyed that their daily lives of leisure are interrupted by those who, in reality, make those daily lives of leisure possible, Fleet Week is a time of terror.

I know of one such fellow who was in a virtual panic last weekend to, as he put it, "get out of town before the Blue Angels arrived!"....

"Fleet Week is a time of terror." Ha ha ha. All our fake-pacists can just crunch on it with their Granola. Every one of those frauds knows perfectly well that they are protected by the world's strongest military, and by cops with pistols on their belts. And they want it just that way, so they can play their infantile games in perfect safety, and rely on the grown-ups to gun down the criminals, while they pretend to be "non-violent.". Parasites and freeloaders. Liars.

Here are some pix I took from Fleet Week 2005.

Special morning...

Photograph ©2001 The Record (Bergen County, N.J.). Photo Credit: Thomas E. Franklin, Staff Photographer .

Charlene and I went to the 6:30 Mass this morning. We've been trying to do so once a week. Afterward she jumps on a bus for downtown, and I drive home. As I was driving back I passed a fire station, and saw the firefighters lined up, raising our nation's flag. I felt rather awed. I wish I'd had a camera. I hurried home and put out our flag. One of the many thoughts in my head is that America is not just a country, like other countries. It is an authoritative tradition, handed down to us from our forefathers and from God. America is an idea. (I wrote about that here.) "The rights of Englishmen are derived from God, not from king or Parliament, and would be secured by the study of history, law, and tradition." The rights of Englishmen are what we fought the Revolution for, and their origin is exceedingly ancient, and mysterious, and not something created merely by men. And I think America makes demands on us, analogous (not the same, but analogous) to the claim made on us by God. And, analogously, we resist that claim in a thousand squirrely ways. We invent heresies, to put it bluntly. Certain people suddenly discover they are pacifists or internationalists. Someone this morning mentioned a prayer-intention for the victims of the disaster on 9/11. Nuh uh. It was not a disaster, it was a murderous terror attack on our nation and on innocent fellow-citizens. And an attack on our land makes claims on us. It requires that we put our own concerns second and rally to the defense of our country, even at the risk of our lives, or the loss of elections. And, analogous to the other, greater sphere, many people answer non servum.

decline and undecline...

I liked this piece, The Decline and Fall of Declinism... I've been hearing all my adult life about how America is soon to be outstripped by this or that more organized and efficient (ie: more socialist) alternative. Remember MITI? Remember—this will date me—"We will bury you"? Ha ha.

..Under the heading “The end of a U.S.-centric world?” the PostGlobal section of The Washington Post website recently declared that “U.S. influence is in steep decline.” It was just the latest verse in a growing chorus of declinist doom-saying at home and abroad.

In 2004, Pat Buchanan lamented “the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.” In 2005, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee concluded that Hurricane Katrina exposed “a hollow superpower.” In 2007, Pierre Hassner of the Paris-based National Foundation for Political Science declared, “It will not be the New American Century.”

And the dirge goes on....

...But the declinists were wrong yesterday. And if their record—and America’s—are any indication, they are just as wrong today.

Any discussion of U.S. power has to begin with its enormous economy. At $13.13 trillion, the U.S. economy represents 20 percent of global output. It’s growing faster than Britain’s, Australia’s, Germany’s, Japan’s, Canada’s, even faster than the vaunted European Union.

In fact, even when Europe cobbles together its 25 economies under the EU banner, it still falls short of U.S. GDP—and will fall further behind as the century wears on. Gerard Baker of the Times of London notes that the U.S. economy will be twice the size of Europe’s by 2021.

On the other side of the world, some see China’s booming economy as a threat to U.S. economic primacy. However, as Baker observes, the U.S. is adding “twice as much in absolute terms to global output” as China. The immense gap in per capita income—$44,244 in the U.S. versus $2,069 in China—adds further perspective to the picture....

All you have to realize about those China-is-the-next-superpower screeds is that these things are not linear. The techniques that will get you from per capita $500 to $2,000 are not the same as those needed to get from $10,000 to $20,000, etc. To keep growing a country must learn a new game at every stage, and each one is harder....and....less amenable to centralized control or stimulation.

There's another thing that we all should be aware of, and that leftists don't want to know about...

...While the declinists routinely remind us that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 15 countries combined, they seldom note that the current defense budget accounts for barely four percent of GDP—a smaller percentage than the U.S. spent on defense at any time during the Cold War. In fact, defense outlays consumed as much as 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s, and 6 percent in the 1980s.

The diplomats who roam the corridors of the UN and the corporate chiefs who run the EU’s sprawling public-private conglomerates dare not say it aloud, but the American military does the dirty work to keep the global economy going—and growing. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” as Thomas Friedman observed in 1999...

Despite the crap you hear to the contrary, America provides by far the biggest and most important slice of the world's "foreign aid." Our 12 Carrier Strike Groups, and all the rest of our peerless military, are what make growth and prosperity possible for China and everybody else.

The world's economy runs on trade, to an extent far beyond that of any other time in history. In the past, foreign trade was, for most countries, just frosting on the cake. 5% or 10%. Not any more. If someone mined China's ports now, their whole economy would go "poof!" and vanish.

We donate the cost of world peace. And world peace is exactly what we have, by the standards of those past time when nations went to war with each other. That doesn't happen any more; the "wars" we have now are internal conflicts and genocides within failed states. And the involvement of the US and her Anglosphere allies is in the nature of cops breaking up gang wars. The "War on Terror" has claimed less than 4,000 American lives. [Insert boiler-plate statement yes-every-death-is-a-tragedy blah blah blah.] In a REAL WAR you can lose that many in a single DAY.

And when (rarely now) nations actually do threaten war, as India and Pakistan were doing a few years ago, we lean on them. In fact, we don't allow them to go to war. We are the grown-ups, they are the teen-agers, and we are teaching them how we expect them to behave.

It's just the way America is...

Some interesting poll results...

Altruism, the Global Interest, and the National Interest...

....A large majority of Americans feel that US foreign policy should at times serve altruistic purposes independent of US national interests. Americans also feel that US foreign policy should be oriented to the global interest not just the national interest and are highly responsive to arguments that serving the global interest ultimately serves the national interest. Americans show substantial concern for global conditions in a wide range of areas.

It is often assumed that most Americans feel US foreign policy should be tied closely to the national interest, narrowly defined, and are opposed to the idea of making sacrifices based on altruistic purposes. Polling data reveal quite a different picture. In numerous cases Americans show support for altruism in US foreign policy independent of any impact it might have on US interests.

In January 2000 Beldon and Russonello asked respondents to rate a list of reasons "for the US to be active in world affairs" on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning "it is not at all an important reason" and 10 meaning "it is an extremely important reason to you personally." Altruistic reasons scored quite well.[1]....(Thanks to Orrin).

This is pleasant to me, because I despise utterly the "realist" school. I am, in Walter Russell Mead's indispensable classification, partly a Wilsonian. However, the trouble with an idealistic approach to foreign policy is that it tends towards soft-mindedness. Towards the sort of thinking that assumes that "soft power" and negotiations will solve all problems. (Which makes the name very appropriate, since few human beings have exemplified the debacles that result from mushy idealism like Woodrow Wilson.)

Unmodified Wilsonianism is catastrophic folly, and the sort of thing that got us into the present war. What's required, for the good of the world, is a combination of Wilsonian and Jacksonian foreign policy. What's needed, if we want peace, is to be willing to BOTH crush the forces of evil with stunning force, AND reach out to the needy (including the defeated enemy) with idealism and generosity.

Seismic shift?

Dean Barnett has a great article in Weekly Standard, The 9/11 Generation...

....Regardless of their backgrounds, the soldiers I spoke with had a similar matter-of-fact style. Not only did all of them bristle at the notion of being labeled victims, they bristled at the idea of being labeled heroes. To a man, they were doing what they saw as their duty. Their self-assessments lacked the sense of superiority that politicians of a certain age who once served in the military often display. The soldiers I spoke with also refused to make disparaging comparisons between themselves and their generational cohorts who have taken a different path.

But that doesn't mean the soldiers were unaware of the importance of their undertaking. About a month ago, I attended the commissioning of a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The day before his commissioning, he had graduated from Harvard. He didn't come from a military family, and it wasn't financial hardship that drove him into the Armed Forces. Don't tell John Kerry, but he studied hard in college. After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

A few weeks after his commissioning, the lieutenant sent me an email that read in part:

I remember when I was down at Quantico two summers ago for the first half of Officer Candidates School. The second to last day I was down there--"Family Day," incidentally--was the 7/7 bombings. The staff pulled us over and told us the news and then said that's basically why they're so hard on us down there: We're at war and will be for a long time, and the mothers of recruits at MCRD and at Parris Island right now are going to be depending on us one day to get their sons and daughters home alive.

When I was in England last week, I talked to an officer in the Royal Navy who had just received his Ph.D. He was saying he thought the larger war would last 20-30 years; I've always thought a generation--mine in particular. Our highest calling: To defend our way of life and Western Civilization; fight for the freedom of others; protect our friends, family, and country; and give hope to a people long without it.

It is surely a measure of how far we've come as a society from the dark days of the 1960s that things like military service and duty and sacrifice are now celebrated. Just because Washington and Hollywood haven't noticed this generational shift doesn't mean it hasn't occurred. It has, and it's seismic....

Oh, let it be so, let it be so. Sometimes things like this make me feel hopeful, and then other times I think we are trapped in a sort of ratchet, and that even though there may be upswings, each one is lower than the one before. And to make things more confusing, the upswings are often reactions to the bad things that happen, and so the bad things are in some way good things! I probably won't know what's going on until the Judgement Day.

Dean's article is sub-titled: "Better than the Boomers." Let it be so, let it be so...

I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days... [link]

"God Save our American States"

I've posted these before, but not for a few years...

From a letter by Abigail Adams to John Adams (who was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress), July 21, 1776:

...Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the multitude into King's Street to hear the proclamation for independence read and proclaimed. Some Field pieces with the Train were brought there, the troops appeared under Arms and all the inhabitants assembled there (the small pox prevented many thousands from the country). When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona [balcony] of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was paid to every word.

As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyful. Mr Bowdoin then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independence. After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen...

And also from a letter, by John...

I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means....--John Adams

Long arm of the law...

It's not a war we're in, just cops 'n robbers. And Unca Sam's the cop on this world's beat. So sleep safe, enjoy your Fourth of July, support our troops and our allies, and thank God for America...

Update: A reader e-mails that the photographer’s name was almost certainly U.S. Army Sgt. Greg Heath / 4th Public Affairs Detachment. He sent another photo of the same scene, which I may post soon...

Demographics is destiny, as Mark Steyn put it...

Fascinatin' stuff, by Robert M. Dunn in TCS...

....There has been a stunning decline in the fertility rate in Mexico, which means that, in a few years there will not be many teenagers in Mexico looking for work in the United States or anywhere else. If this trend in the fertility rate continues, Mexico will resemble Japan and Italy - rapidly aging populations with too few young workers to support the economy.

According to the World Bank's 2007 Annual Development Indicators, in 1990 Mexico had a fertility rate of 3.3 children per female, but by 2005, that number had fallen by 36 percent to 2.1, which is the Zero Population Growth rate. That is an enormous decline in the number of Mexican infants per female. The large number of women currently in their reproductive years means that there are still quite a few babies, but as this group ages, the number of infants will decline sharply. If this trend toward fewer children per female continues, there being no apparent reason for it to cease, the number of young people in the Mexican population will decline significantly just when the number of elderly is rising. As labor markets in Mexico tighten and wage rates rise, far fewer Mexican youngsters will be interested in coming to the United States. Since our baby boomers will be retiring at the same time, we could face a severe labor shortage.

There have been significant declines in fertility rates across Latin America, but Mexico's has been unusually sharp. In El Salvador, another country from which immigrants come, a 3.7 rate in 1990 became 2.5 by 2005. Guatemala is now at 4.3, but that is far lower than it was in 1990. Jamaica, another source of illegal U. S. immigrants, has fallen from 2.9 to 2.4 over the same period. Chile and Costa Rica, at 2.0, are actually slightly below a replacement rate. Trinidad and Tobago, at 1.6, is well below ZPG. For all of Latin American and the Caribbean, a rate of 3.2 in 1990 fell to 2.4 in 2005, a decline of 25 percent. This means less pressure on the United States from illegal immigrants from the entire area, not just from Mexico. A powerful demographic transition is well underway, and soon many of these countries may be worried about there being too few babies rather than too many. We may miss this labor, and wonder how we will replace it....

So who's going to pick the strawberries? Robotics might be a good long-term investment. It's a funny future we may be facing, with perhaps a "guest worker" program that pays people to come here, with competition for scarce resources from Mexico!

And if you wonder why "liberals" are so angry and defensive and brittle these days, you should realize that their world-view is still based ideas that no longer reflect reality. Including the idea that exploding populations are "destroying the earth," and that we should be having fewer children, and a smaller "ecological footprint," and similar anti-human rubbish....

Liberals (in the contemporary sense, not the classical) today are like people with a terminal illness who are in deep denial. But they feel these odd twinges and pains, which are getting harder and harder to ignore...

Flag Day

Jannette Elms holds a U.S. flag to show support for local service members during a Veterans Day parade in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sunday.
From Army Times Frontline Photos, about 10-15-05
Dave Scherbenco / The Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) / AP Photo

Clear thought...

Mike Plaiss e-mailed to tell me of a WSJ article, but only available to subscribers: "There is one today (not on-line) called My Only Son by Leon de Winter that could have simply been lifted off your blog. If you don't regularly get the WSJ make sure to pick one up today. You'll want to read this."

Well, as they say, "Information wants to be free." Several bloggers have reprinted the piece. You can find it here. I'll quote part of it...

Leon de Winter: My Only Son

During the past four years, 170,000 Americans have died in traffic accidents. For young people, traveling in a car is the leading cause of death. Over the same period, 3,500 Americans were killed in Iraq in a war against radical Islam. These statistics haven’t been properly contrasted.

Mobility is a must in Western society. It’s a prerequisite for affluence and it fosters a sense of freedom. No politician could ban cars or severely limit their use. Transportation is the nation’s lifeblood. Its inherent risks are inescapable for an open society.

So Americans manage to deal with the fact that tens of thousands of people will be killed each year on the roadways. But when it comes to the war against Islamic fascism, the nation may soon decide that 3,500 deaths over four years is too much. This for a great nation of 300 million inhabitants.

If that is the case, then the United States will have begun to undermine the moral foundations spelled out in its own Declaration of Independence. If America is unable to carry out a war of its own choosing in defense of liberty because the cost of 3,500 lives is unacceptable, then it will soon be unable to maintain its position and power in the world...

...How did we get to this point?

Western civilization’s pursuit of affluence, secularization and sexual revolution have all sapped its willingness to make sacrifices. Today’s parents often have no more than two children, some may have only one son. His life is so precious that it has come to seem unbearable for him to be killed in battle. In his study “Sons and World Power,” German genocide expert Gunnar Heinsohn investigates family size in various societies in relation to the frequency of violent conflict since 1500 A.D. His conclusion is disturbingly simple: The presence of large numbers of young men in nations that have experienced population explosions—all searching for respect, work, sex and meaning—tend to turn into violent countries and become involved in wars. He cites, as an example, the Palestinian territories, where many families have as many as four sons.

Most countries in which Islamofascism has taken root have experienced population explosions. Huge numbers of young men are searching in vain for a respectable future. They legitimize their frustration with a radical ideology that channels their dissatisfaction and finds roots in the ancient religious traditions of Islam.

Mr. Heinsohn’s explanation shows the extreme pacifism of today’s Europe to be more than a response to the horrific experiences of World War II. He sees Europe’s low birthrate as the basis for the remarkable period of peace Europe has nurtured since 1945. Europe’s sons have become too precious for war.

This same phenomenon is also happening in America. Large families are becoming scarce. As a result, the sacrifice of a second or third son to a violent death, a possibility since the dawn of civilization, is not possible because those sons simply aren’t there....

I'm not sure if de Winter is correct in his reason why we may be unwilling to endure the casualties of the War on Terror. But he's thinking clearly, which sure can't be said for most Americans. One of the ways people are muddled is that they don't even realize that, while we have averaged 620 combat deaths a year since 9/11, the normal number of non-combat deaths in our military is about 700 or 800 per year! (Accidents, disease, suicide, homicide, etc.) That's the price we pay just to have a peace-time military.

Almost everything our nation does costs lives in some way or another. something I've never seen mentioned by the people who shed fake-tears and claim that 3,500 deaths is "unendurable."

"As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts."

A D-Day Prayer, broadcast by President Franklin D Roosevelt...

My Fellow Americans:

Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

"For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home..."

So it was then, so it is now. Our soldiers are today's "Samaritans," who succor those in need, while elitists pass on the other side of the road. The difference is that then all Americans recognized the basic Christian goodness of our troops and the rightness of their mission. Now our country is divided, divided into Americans and poisonous nihilistic reptiles who miss no opportunity to slander our brave soldiers, and to suggest that their deeds are meaningless, or even evil.

A bit more on Memorial Day...

Penraker, good as always...

The media is trying to turn Memorial Day into Grieving Day.

It much more suits their downward look on life.

Last night I watched part of the National Memorial Day Concert from Washington, D.C. There was a long speech by two actors, reading excerpts from letters from soldiers. It ended with the woman crying.

Today the Post has an article about grieving parents.

Memorial day is not Grieving Day. It is a thankful remembrance of how great these guys were, not how pathetic their deaths were, and how bad we feel now that they are gone. It is not about us, it is about them, and the magnificence of their sacrifice.

Pathos is the highest form of human existence in the media's eyes. If it cries, it flies. If it bleeds it leads. If it inspires, it is forgotten.

The day should be inspirational, not a downer. There has been a subtle shift in the society. We love grieving. This is not healthy. Not healthy at all.

I don't watch TV, but I bet I can guess what "Grieving Day" lacks, that Memorial Day has. MEANING. We honor our dead heroes on Memorial Day, and solemnly affirm that their deaths had meaning, that they served a high and worthy purpose, that they helped to preserve our nation and constitution, a noble experiment that has transformed the earth for the better.

But the Leftizoids who are the press, and who infect all our public institutions, do not believe any of those things. They wish to portray our wars as pointless tragedies.

They did the same thing with 9/11, morphing it into a "tragedy," requiring grieving and "closure." (I think anyone who henceforth uses the word "closure" should be flogged.) Something like an earthquake or tsunami. Why? Because those things have no meaning. Whereas a brutal unprovoked attack on a great and good and peaceful nation does have meaning. Tons of it. And it demands a response. It demands we take its meaning seriously. And if you are a nihilist, like our fake-"Democrats" and fake Quakers and fake anti-war activists, that's existential trouble that must be avoided at all costs.

Memorial Day is NOT a time to grieve. It is a time for hearts to swell with pride and wonder at how lucky we are that heroes would give their all to preserve our way of life for future generations...

Because of their sacrifice...

From the President's Radio Address:

...On Memorial Day, our Nation honors Sergeant Christoff's final request. We pray for our men and women serving in harm's way. We pray for their safe return. And we pray for their families and loved ones, who also serve our country with their support and sacrifice.

On Memorial Day, we rededicate ourselves to freedom's cause. In Iraq and Afghanistan, millions have shown their desire to be free. We are determined to help them secure their liberty. Our troops are helping them build democracies that respect the rights of their people, uphold the rule of law, and fight extremists alongside America in the war on terror. With the valor and determination of our men and women in uniform, I am confident that we will succeed and leave a world that is safer and more peaceful for our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day, we also pay tribute to Americans from every generation who have given their lives for our freedom. From Valley Forge to Vietnam, from Kuwait to Kandahar, from Berlin to Baghdad, brave men and women have given up their own futures so that others might have a future of freedom. Because of their sacrifice, millions here and around the world enjoy the blessings of liberty. And wherever these patriots rest, we offer them the respect and gratitude of our Nation.

Memorial Day, 2007. "And the dead must be forgot"

From a Memorial Day address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (who was himself thrice wounded in the Civil War) The Soldier's Faith, May 30th, 1895

...As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

Three years ago died the old colonel of my regiment, the Twentieth Massachusetts. He gave the regiment its soul. No man could falter who heard his "Forward, Twentieth!" I went to his funeral. From a side door of the church a body of little choir-boys came in like a flight of careless doves. At the same time the doors opened at the front, and up the main aisle advanced his coffin, followed by the few grey heads who stood for the men of the Twentieth, the rank and file whom he had loved, and whom he led for the last time. The church was empty. No one remembered the old man whom we were burying, no one save those next to him, and us. And I said to myself, The Twentieth has shrunk to a skeleton, a ghost, a memory, a forgotten name which we other old men alone keep in our hearts. And then I thought: It is right. It is as the colonel would have it. This also is part of the soldier's faith: Having known great things, to be content with silence. Just then there fell into my hands a little song sung by a warlike people on the Danube, which seemed to me fit for a soldier's last word, another song of the sword, but a song of the sword in its scabbard, a song of oblivion and peace.

A soldier has been buried on the battlefield.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep dark grave:
"Did the banner flutter then?"
"Not so, my hero," the wind replied.
"The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
and the soldier asks once more:
"Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love--and remember me?"
"Not so, my hero," the lovers say,
"We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Tattoo removal, a growth industry...

Andrea linked to a thoughtful blogger, Maclin Horton. A couple of small things I liked...

I Enjoy Being Right
I've been predicting for a while now that the tattoo fashion would lead to a profitable trade in tattoo removal.

My parents had a collection of cartoons from Punch that gave me many hours of pleasure in my youth. I think it was there that I saw one which has come to mind often since the fad began: a tattoo artist drawing something huge on a man's back and remarking "Of course it's the fellows who can take them off who make the real money." [Link]

And this is a thought I have often had myself...

One of my perpetual complaints is the treatment of the 1950s in popular lore, in journalism and entertainment. The way some of these people talk, you’d think they really do not understand that Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver were sitcoms, not documentaries, the silly pap of their time just as Desperate Housewives is of ours. Or even that physical reality was very much the same then as now: that colors, for instance, existed, and that human beings were physically the same creatures we are now, although they dressed differently. The usual view is that life was gray, repressed and miserable from roughly 1945 until 1964, when, as Philip Larkin tells us, sex was invented....

In "popular history," as in so much else, everything is adjusted to fit the perspective of us Baby Boomers. It's really stupid. All the "60's" fads were invented in the 50's or earlier, and just taken up into mass conformity in the sixties. And passed along into mass culture in the 70's, with hideous destructive effects...

Speaking of tattoo removal, there's a great SF book on fads, Bellwether, by Connie Willis. Very funny.

"You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you..."

To me, one of the chief evils of our time is that most people have come to expect a world of comfort and entertainment. A world where there's no need to make difficult choices, and above all, no need to seek Truth, and fight for it. This editorial from the NY Sun is a useful corrective. It tells of an incident in our Civil War, when the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, went to Washington to plead for Illinois to be spared its draft contingent...(Thanks to PowerLine)

...."The War Department's blue-uniformed sentries came rigidly to attention as the president appeared," Mr. Wendt writes. Lincoln, he says, gave them a friendly "at ease" and led his visitors through the "chattering telegraph operations room," where he knew everyone by name, to Stanton's "vast cave of maps and charts," where Stanton glowered beneath dark oil paintings of Generals Knox and Dearborn. Stanton was none too pleased to see the same Chicagoans whom he'd shooed out of his office earlier in the day return with his boss. Medill made a game effort, reading from his own newspaper about how no other congressional district had put so many men into the war.

For months, Mr. Wendt explains, the Tribune had "acknowledged to its readers that after four years of the most brutal fighting known to man, even greater sacrifices would be required. The armies were devouring men on a scale not known before in military history, as new weapons outmarched generals' old tactics." Draft riots ensued, particularly in New York. The Tribune required an entire supplemental page, Mr. Wendt notes, just to list Illinois casualties among the more than 13,000 suffered by the Union at Shiloh.

When Medill finished his plea, Stanton nodded to his provost marshal, General Fry, who "read the sanguinary statistics of four years of fighting in a loud, sonorous voice," while Lincoln listened with his head bowed. Stanton then rejected the plea, saying, as Mr. Wendt paraphrases it, that there could be no city nor section nor state asking for special favor, not even Illinois. Medill left the meeting pledging to remain silent about it until the war ended. It would be 30 years before he could bring himself to write the account that Mr. Wendt quotes at some length.

"I shall never forget," Medill said of Lincoln, "how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face. ‘Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. … Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. … Go home, and raise your 6,000 extra men."

Then, in Medill's own account, Lincoln turned on the great editor. "‘And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any [other] paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.'" Wrote Medill: "I couldn't say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn't have an answer. …"

Boom, and it's all gone...

Tim Blair links to blogger Joni, in the town of Greensburg, Kansas, destroyed by a tornado...

This is what my hometown of Greensburg, Kansas, used to look like. It's a small, rural town in Southwest Kansas. Last night, a tornado swept through the town, killing at least 7 people, and destroying most of the town. (News reports are saying 90% of the town was destroyed or damaged.) Every church in town, including the one my parents and my sisters' family attend, was either severely damaged or destroyed. The roof of the small hospital collapsed. My family lives a few miles north of town, and none of them were injured. Three family members worked in Greensburg, and will be dealing with the devastation left behind. Thankfully, several relatives and friends are known to be safe. I'm sure more details will come out as time passes. Right now, they are evacuating the entire town (what's left of it), for people's safety, and to enable safety and rescue efforts to go forward.

Please pray for Greensburg, Kansas, my family, and the surrounding community. How do you rebuild an entire town?

The picture of the town as it was before was very affecting to me. I've been in that sort of country town many times. I've never lived in one; it's hard for me to imagine what growing up in a small town would be like.

But still, I can picture it. I said to myself, there will be a train line, with grain elevators beside it. The streets will be a grid, and there will be one called "Main Street." And in one direction all the streets will be named after trees. Well, you can look on Google Maps, and there they are! And there are streets named after presidents, and after states. I guessed there might be a "Euclid Avenue," but I don't see one...

The fast-growing Southern California suburb I grew up in had a small agricultural town at it's center, like something preserved from an earlier age. It was in the process, in one sense,of being destroyed as thoroughly as if a tornado had hit, though many of the buildings were still there. There were housing tracts with one corner "notched," where an old farmhouse still stood, weathered, overgrown, with decorative trimwork that contrasted oddly with the 50's architecture all around it. And there were still many groves in my youth, citrus and avocado. And there were still old-timers around, and some barns, and funny little Caterpillar tractors that could disc an orange grove. The ground under the avocados was always covered in big crackly dry leaves, that would make a racket as you walked over them.

More pix here. Flabbergasting.

Not exactly heroic...

John at PowerLine has a good point about the Fred Thompson phenomenon...

...Second, the last five years have been a critical time in our nation's history. From 2002 to the present, men like George Bush, John McCain, and many others have been fighting a very difficult battle on behalf of our country. Not Fred Thompson: he preferred to leave the Senate to live the very sweet life of a minor television celebrity. There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it's not exactly heroic, either...

I really don't know anything about Mr Thompson, and since I don't watch TV I really don't even know what he looks like! But I do know that virtue isn't a matter of what you feel, or think, or believe. It only exists in what you DO. What you do with whatever resources you possess, whatever challenges you happen to be presented with. Most of us can't be among the heroes who hunt down terrorists. that's a job for the few. But the main front of the War on Terror is right here at home, where nihilists and appeasers wage ceaseless propaganda war against America, and against the whole idea that there's anything worth fighting for. And it would seem like Mr Thompson, as a respected celebrity, has been in a position to render important service to his country over the last five years... Your country, the best and greatest nation that has ever existed on earth, is under attack, and you fail to rush to her aid. What does that mean? What does that say about a person? .

Something for me to think about today...

From an essay by Daniel Larison, in New Pantagruel...

It has been one of the great, failed projects of conventional American conservatism to encourage the fiction that the Christian civilisation conservatives admire and the Enlightenment civilisation that destroyed it are part of a real continuity. For the purposes of this essay, I take it as a given that conservatism is, or at least ought to be, the persuasion and mentality that seeks good order and that in a Western society a conservative’s understanding of good order is unavoidably defined significantly and primarily by the Christian intellectual tradition in general and by the received teachings of the early Fathers of the Church in particular....

[....]

...However, this American conservatism was never entirely committed to rejecting the French Revolutionary model of society and its conception of humanity, at least not when similar ideas had already established themselves in Anglo-American culture by means that were really no less excessive and revolutionary in the seventeenth century. American conservatism could readily abjure an offensive Continental radicalism to which it was not really connected while embracing the fruits of an equally philosophically offensive, but more politically moderate English radicalism drawn from the English Puritan Revolution that had created the Anglo-American political consensus of almost three centuries.

For an American, even one inclined to recognise the deep roots of American order in Israel and antiquity, these three centuries must seem nearly an eternity—indeed, they are virtually the whole of our historical experience on this continent. From an American perspective, circa 1775, the legacy of Whig usurpation, violence and abstraction was already in some sense "traditional" and relatively well-established in precedent—the rights of Englishmen our ancestors claimed were, in the sweep of history, fairly new and based on contractarian and rights theories just as speculative and ahistorical in their own way as any imagined in France, but they had acquired a certain respectability and stability through their institutionalisation and their ready application in colonial life. The accidental seventeenth-century alliance between Dissenting and Reformed Christianity, the parliamentary cause and a philosophy of natural rights grew steadily stronger in the course of the Stuart dynasty, which in turn lent an unusual plausibility to the accommodation of Enlightenment claims and Christianity in English and American societies.

The results were the virtually universal Anglo-American embrace of political liberalism of one stripe or another and the tendency towards the unhealthy and rather odd identification of the "causes" of liberalism and Christianity, which profited from and deepened the secularisation of Anglo-American cultures here and in Britain. It is not surprising, then, that it was not until American Catholics, for whom the mythical alliance of Protestantism and political progress was always as nonsensical as it was often offensive (for what it implied about the Catholic church and Catholic nations), began fully to come into their own culturally, politically and intellectually that this largely unexamined accommodation continued unabated. It is perhaps also not surprising that American conservatism found its early champions in intellectuals (e.g., Weaver, Kirk, Burnham) whose journeys typically began on the left or far left, as these men had already taken the assumptions of the liberal age to their logical and unavoidably absurd conclusions and then recoiled in contempt at what they had found waiting for them...(Thanks to Orrin)

"...recoiled in contempt." Precisely the right attitude.

Long processes...

From City Journal, a good piece on the Broken Windows theory in action..

...In the early nineties, the chief of New York City’s transit police, William Bratton, put the Broken Windows theory into practice. With Kelling as consultant, Bratton began to go after the fare evaders, aggressive panhandlers, pickpockets, and other petty (and not so petty) criminals who had turned the subway system into what he called “the transit equivalent of Dante’s Inferno.” Bratton also had cops enforce anti-loitering laws to steer the homeless away from the subways and toward social services. Homeless advocates and civil libertarians fought him every step of the way, but Bratton prevailed, bringing order to the chaotic system. Sure enough, not only did minor crime plummet; serious crime did, too, and ridership soared. In nabbing low-level offenders, Bratton also discovered that many of them were wanted for much more serious crimes.

A few years later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani chose Bratton as his top cop and charged him with leading a similar revolution above ground. The rest, as they say, is history...

...Bratton is now the chief of police in Los Angeles, where he has successfully employed many of the tactics that worked in New York....(Thanks to Orrin)

My off-the-top-of-the-head guess is that LA will be a much harder nut to crack than NY. But I sure wish them well. Notice how, as with every important reform, the opposition comes from the Left. The reactionaries of our time.

Also, cases like this can only be understood as things working over a long period of time. The "homeless advocate" may focus on one moment, and see cops rousting poor bums from the tiny comfort they can find in the subway. Looks bad. But in fact this is one instant in a process that extends backwards in time through decades of neglect, and also forward in time towards improvements that may take decades to become apparent. To focus on one moment is to tell a lie.

WE see the exact same thing in debates about the War on Terror.

Reluctance to engage with reality...

Mark Steyn, on you know what...

...The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual self-defense," and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and "safe spaces" that's the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we "fear guns," and "verbal violence," and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ''The Three Musketeers.'' What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

The day after the Virginia Tech killings, I posted this, (about my earlier suggestions of "throwing things" as a response to killers) and in the comments Andrew chided me for my insensitivity, for saying "I told ya so" so soon. And I felt a bit abashed.

But thinking about it again, NO. The hell with being "sensitive." Andrew, that's the attitude that killed those people, and you are a part of it. "We must all be sensitive and caring and grieve together blah blah blah." The glorification of weakness and weepy-drippy sensitivity is exactly what led to the students of Virginia Tech being helpless sheep, instead of knowing how to defend themselves. They died because their teachers and parents and churches didn't prepare them for life's dangers, and didn't prepare them, psychologically and spiritually, for the way life can present you with life-or-death choices at any instant.

And some other people who are real experts have exactly the same advice as I gave. (I said it way back in two-thousand and blankety-blank ONE!It was even picked up by Glenn Reynolds. Nobody listened, of course.) AND, if you read the following, those guys are being intentionally ignored too. And so more students will die the next time, killed by "educators" and "Democrats" and hippie pacifists and all the drooling idiots who think bad things will go away if we think nice thoughts...

...But merely putting forth the notion of resistance to killers is now politically incorrect. A Fort Worth school district recently hired a security outfit called Response Options.

It was founded by retired SWAT cops appalled by the Columbine massacre. They decided to do something about it and came up with a program that taught teachers and children, if someone with a gun came into their classroom, to throw everything at him that came to hand, and swarm him to bring him down.

The rationale is the school shooter is beyond reason. He is there simply to kill. There is no reasoning with such animals. And by attacking, there is a better chance of survival for the largest number of potential victims.

As trainer Robert Browne of Response Options told the press at the time: "Getting under the desk and doing what the gunman tells you ... that's not a recipe for success."

But when news got out, the school district backed off from the program.

One wonders what might have been for the victims at Virginia Tech had anyone in the building been armed or if, at least been trained in defence against such monsters the way they were trained in fire drills as children.

Universities are for teaching. But for teaching what?

Dafydd has a great post you should read about Virginia Tech that covers things I was groping towards yesterday...

....But what about the other presumably adult men and women at that campus? Most were nowhere near the scene and therefore never had the opportunity to test their courage, their honor, and their worth. This is a minor tragedy in itself; it's the subject of one of the greatest poems ever written in English: "Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray.

But there are others; there are also those who were there, who were close by. What did they do? How did they acquit themselves?

Did they gather those around them and hurry with them to safety? Did they save themselves? Each of these is a minor virtue, and I don't want to knock it. Sometimes, such minor virtues are all that a person can achieve, given the time, place, and opportunity.

But surely there must have come a time when a man or woman, hiding not far away, saw that the gunman had turned his back. What that person did in that moment is the true assay of character.

Maybe someone charged at the gunman -- but foul fate intervened, and the butcher heard, turned, and added another victim to his hellish toll. Anyone so killed is as heroic as Professor Librescu.

But -- and I hate the thought, even as it screams insistently -- it is virtually inevitable that there were others who were there, who saw an opportunity, but who were frozen to the spot with dread. Or else they talked themselves into believing that there was nothing they could do. Or worst of all... some must have done nothing because they had been carefully taught that "nothing" was what they were supposed to do. I cannot help thinking that for many students at Virginia Tech yesterday, just as for the fifteen British sailors and marines, "fighting back was not an option," because to them, it is never an option....

The world we live in teaches us, constantly, in a thousand different ways, that the only important thing is ME. And the most important thing is to keep ME safe and comfortable and alive. It didn't use to be this way, past societies always honored heroes,and those who made honorable choices at the risk of their lives.

The lesson the world teaches is nihilism. That nothing really matters, except keeping ME alive and happy. (And even the "alive" part is conditional, if I get old and suffer I should chose euthanasia!) The lesson is always disguised, because few people will admit to being nihilists. It's often disguised as Leftism: All that's important is rights, not responsibilities. Or pacifism and Quakerism: Gandhi and Jesus want us to be sheep. Or hippie-dippy spiritualism: I'm not interested, I've found peace.

What our teachers and leaders should be teaching us is that any moment we may have to make a life-or-death decision. And that there are worse things than dying. And that death may be preferable to dishonor. But very little in our culture teaches those things. It's not just because of hatred of Bush and hatred of America that there are no headlines when one of our troops is awarded a medal!

It's painful to think about how the concept of "honor" has almost disappeared. Though it was often a bit ridiculous, with swaggering D'Artagnan's fighting over trifles, it was also the secular equivalent of Christian self-sacrifice, and the valuing of things of the spirit above mere selfishness and survival. You can be sure the professors and administrators of Virginia Tech would reject honor with a sneer...

It's no accident that the same people hate The Church and hate honor. They are intimately connected. Honor is dependent on people believing—somehow, deep down—that there is more to life than just "me." It is a religious idea. Where faith dies honor will die too, by and by. That's what I'm suspecting, anyway. Recent example: the Royal Navy.

Just keeping it for when I need it...

PowerLine had this post on how the "Bush Economy" is doing, and I'm quoting it here partly so I'll have the figures at hand when needed. To use in combat, in the un-ending and almost-hopeless fight against LIES.

The Department of Labor has just announced this month's job figures, and it's more good news. March saw the creation of 180,000 new jobs. This means that since August 2003, more than 7.8 million jobs have been created, with nearly 2 million jobs created over the last 12 months. The economy has now added jobs for 43 straight months, and the unemployment rate remains at 4.4 percent, which is low by historical standards.

The news is also good on the pay and productivity fronts. Specifically:

Real after-tax income per person has risen by 10 percent since President Bush took office.

Real wages rose 1.8 percent over the past 12 months through February, which is substantially faster than the average rate of the late 1990s economy.

The economy has now experienced more than five years of uninterrupted growth, averaging 3.0 Percent a year since 2001.

Since the first quarter of 2001, productivity growth has averaged 2.8 percent, which is well above average productivity growth in the 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s.

What seems to me important here is that this is not just about material prosperity, but about things of the spirit. For instance, Welfare Reform has resulted in millions of people escaping welfare-dependency, and becoming able to hold jobs and provide for themselves. Quite possibly many of them have not actually improved their material condition much, but their psychological situation is vastly different. And this will tend to help their children and grandchildren as well. I could not happen in France.

BUT, it wouldn't work if America didn't have a strong economy that can provide lots of jobs. Basically we have enjoyed strong growth since the Reagan tax cuts. With what seems like a much-needed booster shot from the Bush tax cuts.

Lead and Gold

Scott Chaffin links to this quote, posted in the blog Lead and Gold:

From Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory

After lunch a bright red Lincoln Navigator pulled up to Crockett Street and out jumped a Hispanic mother with three girls, ranging in age from eight to twelve. Her husband parked the car in a nearby lot and returned bearing a video camera. The three daughters, dressed in matching white pullovers and Gap skirts, were striking. Their father, a CPA with a Wharton degree, posed his family in front of the limestone walls of the chapel and triggered the camera. They waved on cue but smiled spontaneously, obviously delighted to be where they were. He then told them briefly about the Alamo, delivering the Daughters' version of the battle, and he let his girls know that it stood for courage and integrity, virtues they needed to cultivate in their own lives.

At that point, the Anglo graduate student arrived at the chapel door. He asked, "Why are you even here today? Don't you know what this place stands for? It represents the rape and destruction of your people." Looking just the least bit annoyed, the Hispanic man politely replied, "We're not so bad off, you know." The Anglo student was persistent. "You don't understand, you just don't understand," he continued. "You shouldn't be teaching your kids this stuff." The CPA stopped short. "Escucheme, bolillo [Listen to me, white bread]," he said sharply. "If Santa Anna would have won the war, this whole city would be a shithole just like Reynosa. Soy tejano [I'm a Texan]. Mind your own goddamned business. It's my Alamo too."

There are some things that are just so insane that it's useless to even argue with them. Better to spend your time on something constructive, like counting snowflakes. One of them is the spectacle of leftydweebs observing the phenomenon of millions of people crawling over broken glass to get INTO this country (or OUT of whatever "workers paradise" is in fashion this year) and saying, "Look how rotten America is."

Orcish...

Charlene noticed the Dover Beachcomber quoting from the Lord of the Rings (appendix) and relating it oh-too-well to modern life..

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering. Much of the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigor, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.

I thought of this one because, as my wife and I were stopped in traffic in Santa Rosa yesterday while driving home from a great couple of days on the Mendocino coast, I suddenly became aware of the driver in the PG&E truck next to me talking plenty loud enough to hear across the space between our vehicles. She was a perfectly normal looking young woman, having a friendly gab with her co-worker. All I caught was: "F***, really? Nah, you're s***in' me! If that mother-f***er thinks I'm gonna put with that s***... ". Then traffic started moving again.

Here I should join in heaping deserved moral censure on the decadence of our wretched era...but actually it reminds me of one the funniest things I ever heard. It was way back when I owned my bookstore. One day, ker-bang, there was a fender-bender right outside. These two black guys jump out of their cars and start yelling at each other:

Now up to this point it was just squalid. BUT, it went on...

and on....

and on...

With no more variation in vocabulary or matter than what I've written! After ten or fifteen iterations we were all ready to roll on the floor laughing.

SF trivia...

When I put up the new banner picture, Charlene and I realized we had no idea what the large building is you see below the bridge.

We drove over to the Presidio on Sunday. We discovered from a friendly security guard that it was originally the SF Marine Hospital, built in 1875, which served merchant seaman. The Marine Hospital Service which built it is actually the forerunner of the Public Health Service.

The building is now being restored as housing. The two ugly modern wings (you see one of them on the right) are going to be torn down, as they deserve.

Changes and reforms, hardly noticed...

A Health-Care Bargain - WSJ.com, By DAVID GRATZER
January 31, 2007; Page A12
Three years ago this month, insurance companies began offering Americans a new type of medical coverage: health savings accounts, which marry low-cost, high-deductible health insurance policies with pre-tax accounts to pay for day-to-day health care. But the anniversary is muted. A slew of reports have been critical, dismissing consumer-driven health care as unpopular and harmful; and with the Democrats in control of Congress, Washington's enthusiasm for the concept has cooled. Nevertheless, the Republicans should take credit where due. The White House ought to build on the growing success of HSAs, which are integral to the president's vision of "affordable and available" health care.

An executive of an upstart airline recently described her company as having three 757s, more than 200 employees, and one big headache: rising health-care costs. Thus, they made the switch to HSAs in 2006, and premiums rose just 5%, compared with a national average of over 8%. Such successes aren't making the news, but overwhelmingly negative stories are. A much reported Commonwealth Fund survey, for example, concluded that enrollment in consumer-driven plans is stagnant, people are grossly dissatisfied, and care is delayed. But the report was flawed on its face: For one, it was unrepresentative, drawn from a pool of "Internet users who have agreed to participate in research surveys."

Here's the untold story: Despite recent entry into the market, these plans are gaining popularity. Drawing on information from major insurance carriers, William Boyles, publisher of the Consumer Driven Market Report, estimates that enrollment in HSA-type plans or HRAs (a forerunner to health savings accounts) more than doubled since January 2006, to 13.4 million Americans. The estimate is plausible, as last year twice as many employers offered this coverage than in 2005, and the number of financial institutions supporting HSAs tripled.

Early data suggest good results...

It's maddening both that the Republican congress does not deserve its do-nothing reputation, since a LOT of good things have happened under Republican leadership, and also maddening that it DOES deserve it, since it should have done a lot MORE. Including expanding and improving the HSA program while it had the chance.

It's similarly maddening (since I'm a mood to feel aggrieved) that the President's attempts to create private Social Security accounts were denounced by middle-class lefties who themselves almost certainly have 401-k's and IRA's---which are government-sponsored private retirement accounts.

And I remember trying to present some good points about Bush to a would-rather-die-than-think leftish person of my generation, and I mentioned that we had finally passed HSA's (After they were blocked for decades by Dems). And he immediately said "Oh yes, we got our HSA right away!" But, Bush was still bringing the dark night of fascism down upon us...

The word I need is an antonym for "nihilist"

Charlene went on the annual west coast Walk for Life today. As usual my thoughts were less on the issues of the moment than on the clash of underlying ideas. And so I was very taken by the contrast seen here between two pieces of architecture. The Vaillancourt Fountain is the perfect expression of the view that there is no meaning to life, no certainty, no hope, and that only a fool would have noble aspirations or dream of finding truth. (Or beauty! Blehhh.) It's nihilism embodied. And there behind it you see the tower of the Ferry Building, which has a very different story to tell.

The walk was a big success, as far as we could see. We hiked for many miles in the middle of the crowd, and never once were we able to see the beginning or the end of the procession. There had to be way over 10,000 people out on a beautiful day. And the counter-protesters we saw were just a hundred at most, maybe two, and none of them looked like anyone you would want to know. Trashy chomskys. It was a pathetic showing for the Culture of Death.

If any of our St Dominic's friends are reading this, that's Anne Whitaker in front of me, in pink...Charlene was on the walk last year, and says the protesters were much less obnoxious this year, probably because there were fewer of them...

We act like turtles...

Charlene's recommendation this morning is this article by Steve Sailer, Fragmented Future, Multiculturalism Doesn’t Make Vibrant Communities but Defensive Ones. (Thanks to ChicagoBoyz)

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.
—Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam

It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery—that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities—was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn’t dared announce it “until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish without that.’”...

"Irony laden," yeah. I wonder what those proposals were? And "irresponsible" presumably means "letting yahoos (you and me) have information that might undermine politically-correct thinking."

And I can vouch for this line by Sailor being true: "Putnam’s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood..." Another thought that us urbanites can appreciate:

...As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom....

Read the whole thing, as the cliche goes. [BTW, I hate those little Internet acronyms, like RTWT. IMHO. I used to frequent a woodworking forum, where the little wife was always SWMBO. Plehhh.] But here's another morsel...

...Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, “The rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.” And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, “Perhaps the most vivid example of the ‘blackening’ of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated.”...

Merry Christmas to all who serve on Freedom's Wall...

Thank you, from the Weidners...

(These pictures are from Army Times Frontline Photos, Christmas 2004)

Capt. Clace Perzel, left, rides a military motorcycle side-car dressed as Santa Claus after distributing Christmas gifts at his base in Ghazni province, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday. Christmas 2004. Musadeq Sadeq / AP Photo

Chief Warrant Officer Mike Marcotte, of South Kingstown, R.I., greets his daughter Abigale, 3, and his wife Marybeth, in North Kingstown, R.I., as he returns from Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 126th Aviation Regiment, on Saturday. Christmas 2004. Joe Giblin / AP Photo

Army Sgt. 1st Class Clifford Gailliard, left, of Charlestown, S.C., leans over Staff Sgt. Donnie James, of Fayetteville, N.C., during a game of dominoes with Pfc. Vorasane Phothisane, of New Iberia, La., in Baghdad, on Sunday. Christmas 2004. Jacob Silberberg / AP Photo

The most significant Christmas Eve in American history...

This is a piece by Stanley Weintraub, from the December 23, 2004 LA Times. He is the author of General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (Thanks, as so often, to Orrin Judd.)

We don't associate George Washington with Christmas Eve, or Christmas itself, yet the most significant Christmas Eve in American history occurred in 1783, when Gen. Washington, then 52, headed home to Mount Vernon after nine years at war — and turned his back on ruling the states like a king.

The American Revolution effectively ended at Yorktown in October 1781, but in the fall of 1783 the defeated British still held a few positions as bargaining chips for negotiating the peace. Although a treaty acknowledging American independence had been signed, ships carrying the documents were still at sea when Washington gathered up his remaining troops in November at West Point and headed for New York City, to take over as the last Redcoats embarked for Britain.

Equally important to Washington was his desire to have Christmas dinner with Martha, to bring yuletide gifts to his wife and his step-grandchildren (he had no children of his own) and to return to being "a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac … under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life."

That his imagery recalled the biblical book of 1 Kings is an irony he may not have recognized. He was renouncing the idea raised by his admiring countrymen — who had long lived under monarchs, the common form of rule everywhere — that George III be replaced by their own George I.

"Had he lived in days of idolatry," a colonist had written in 1777, "he would have been worshiped like a god." Abigail Adams wrote of Washington's "Majestik fabrick." To one poet he was "Our Hero, Guardian, Father, Friend!" To another he was "First of Men." And, by 1778, a Pennsylvania German almanac had referred to him as "Father of his Country."...

A brigadier general wrote to Washington, echoing sentiments in the press, that the colonies should merge as a monarchy, with him as king. Washington responded: "I must view this with abhorrence and reprehend [it] with severity."

Philadelphia artist Benjamin West, painting in London on the commission of the king, told George III that despite Washington's popularity, the general chose to return to his farm in Virginia. The king was astonished. If Washington does that, said His Majesty, he will be the greatest man in the world.

In December 1783, the general made good his word.

Crossing the Hudson from New York on Dec. 4, Washington began his journey home and away from public life. He rode through villages and towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Americans watched expectantly for his arrival, banquets and balls were planned in his honor along the way. When less formal crowds gathered, he stood atop the wagon carrying his belongings and thanked his countrymen, even those he knew had been less than loyal to the American cause, for supporting the new nation.

At Annapolis, Md., where the weak and disunited Confederation Congress was meeting, Washington planned to showcase his retreat from public duty and public life. He would return the official 1775 parchment appointing him commanding general. The occasion was to be a piece of theater to emphasize the nation's civil foundations.

The adulation along the way delayed his arrival in Annapolis to Dec. 22. There he penned his parting address for delivery the next afternoon — the only valedictory he would ever give in person. (The "Farewell Address" of 1796, written largely by Alexander Hamilton to mark the end of his second term as president, was never spoken. It was published in a newspaper.)

On the evening of the 22nd, Washington was honored once more at a banquet and ball, this one punctuated by 13 patriotic toasts and ceremonial salutes by cannon. Late that night, he returned to his lodgings and reviewed his speech. Apparently no longer sure that he would or could bar the door to further public service, he deleted two phrases suggesting finality: "an affectionate and final farewell" and "ultimate leave."

The address the next day at the Maryland State House was a solemn occassion. "The glory of your virtues will not terminate with your military command," Thomas Mifflin, president of the Confederation Congress, told Washington, "it will continue to animate [the] remotest ages. You have defended the standard of liberty in this new world."

Up and down the former colonies, newspapers would report the remarkable events. "Here we must let fall the scene," the New Hampshire Gazette closed its report. "Few tragidies ever drew more tears."

It would not be Washington's final act, as he had hoped — although with less and less assurance as he neared home. From retirement, he watched the nation drift toward disunity, and then answered the call to lead first the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and then, by unanimous vote of the first electoral college, the republic.

After serving two terms and with the nation now set on course, he would retire, this time for good, from the public stage.

But none of that was known on Dec. 24, 1783, when Washington's party crossed the Potomac to Virginia. Winter twilight came early. Up the slope from the river, Mount Vernon, with its three shuttered doors in the white west front and its many green-shuttered windows, now candlelit, beckoned.

The next day, as a heavy snowfall locked the plantation in snow and ice, Washington at long last celebrated a festive and unmilitary holiday. There he confronted, he later wrote, just one challenge: an "Attack of Christmas Pyes."

A "strong woman" who really was strong...

Jeane Kirkpatrick has died. When you hear the silly line about Hillary Clinton is a "strong woman," (quick, list her bedrock beliefs!) compare her to Kirkpatrick. I don't have time to write, but this is from the AEI's web page:

AEI senior fellow Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who joined the Institute in 1978, died yesterday. As a young political scientist at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick wrote the first major study of the role of women in modern politics, Political Woman, which was published in 1974. Her work on the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which was formed in the aftermath of the Democratic Party's tumultuous 1968 convention and changed the way party delegates were chosen, led to Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition, which AEI published in 1978.

Yet it was an essay written for Commentary magazine in 1979, "Dictatorships and Double Standards" (later expanded into a full-length book), that launched her into the political limelight. In the article, Kirkpatrick chronicled the failures of the Carter administration's foreign policy and argued for a clearer understanding of the American national interest. Her essay matched Ronald Reagan's instincts and convictions, and when he became president, he appointed her to represent the United States at the United Nations. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was a member of the president's cabinet and the National Security Council. The United States has lost a great patriot and champion of freedom, and AEI mourns our beloved colleague...

Suck-up to dictators, throw trouble-making Jews under the bus...

That's what the Iraq Surrender Group is all about. I'm too busy tired and pissed to write about it--Hugh Hewitt is worth reading.

The far right and the left both like this thing, so I spit upon it. And I think I hate "Blue-blazer Republicans" more than I hate the chomskies.

UPDATE: Dafydd has a lot of good thoughts. [Part one. Part two.] Worth reading. Short version: The dicta were written by the Democrats, but the holdings (ie: the actual recommendations) were written by the Republicans of the group...

Thinking about Mike's comment, I suspect that the Dems needed a paper defeat. Remember the old Vietnam line, "Let's declare victory and leave?" The Dems want to declare defeat and stay! They don't want the political hot-potato of cut-and-run, they just need something to give to their drooling fake-pacifist supporters. Hopefully this will satisfy the peaceniks, and they'll now let the grown-ups get on with the War on Terror.

" and the U.S. government was on 'autopilot'..."

Those who think the appointment of Robert Gates as SecDef means a sellout to the "realists," might want to read this column by Michael Barone. (Thanks to Dafydd.) He took the trouble to actually read Gates' book, and found a lot to think about, and a lot that doesn't jibe with all the speculation..

...Yet Gates also discusses times in which policy had to change course sharply in response to rapid changes in the world, notably during the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. Interestingly, this career government bureaucrat did not find the government bureaucracies of much use in coming up with new ideas. Instead, his impulse was to create small committees of political appointees. In July 1989, he sent Bush a memo citing developments in the Soviet Union and concluding that "we should not be confident of Gorbachev remaining in power."

As Gates recounts in his book: "Bush agreed to the contingency planning I had first considered in the spring, and in September 1989, I asked Condi Rice to gather a group of people and in very great secrecy begin this work. When I met with her to explain the task, I told her that I thought the planning was very important because the situation in the Soviet Union could go bad in a hurry, and the U.S. government was on 'autopilot' when it came to thinking about such dramatic developments. Her group included Dennis Ross at State; Fritz Ermarth and Bob Blackwell from CIA; and Paul Wolfowitz and Eric Edelman from Defense. This group commissioned a number of studies by CIA and used them in reviewing and planning U.S. options. While no such effort can prescribe in detail policies based on specific future events, this work served us to great advantage in dealing with events over the next two years, and especially as the Soviet Union imploded in 1991."...

There's a lot more in the column. It makes me want to read the book, though I kind of doubt I will find the time. Too many books, too few years...

Be thankful for America, and believe in her!

My country, you are best hope of freedom for our world. Many hate you and revile you and hope that you will fail.

But even here in the nihilist darkness of Pelosiville, we give thanks for this great land.

And especially for the men and women of our armed forces. Billions of ingrates sleep safely because you police the sea-lanes and fight terrorist bandits in distant swamps and deserts. Thank you!

From President Bush's address, during his surprise Thanksgiving trip to Iraq in 2003:

....I'm particularly proud to be with the 1st Armored Division, the 2nd ACR, the 82nd Airborne. I can't think of a finer group of folks to have Thanksgiving dinner with than you all. We're proud of you. Today, Americans are gathering with their loved ones to give thanks for the many blessings in our lives. And this year we are especially thankful for the courage and the sacrifice of those who defend us, the men and women of the United States military.

I bring a message on behalf of America: We thank you for your service, we're proud of you, and America stands solidly behind you. Together, you and I have taken an oath to defend our country. You're honoring that oath. The United States military is doing a fantastic job. You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country. You're defeating Saddam's henchmen, so that the people of Iraq can live in peace and freedom.

By helping the Iraqi people become free, you're helping change a troubled and violent part of the world. By helping to build a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East, you are defending the American people from danger and we are grateful.

You're engaged in a difficult mission. Those who attack our coalition forces and kill innocent Iraqis are testing our will. They hope we will run. We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost in casualties, defeat a brutal dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins.

We will prevail. We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive. And we will win because you're part of the finest military ever assembled. And we will prevail because the Iraqis want their freedom...

Feeling better about the election...

I'm feeling better about the election. I wrote a long unpublished post of the going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket type, but, well, maybe that's not how I'm thinking.

Michael Barone wrote somewhere that both parties have moved to the right. Dems by adding moderates, and Republicans by shedding them. I don't expect those new Dems to have much influence on their party now. The Democrats are still controlled by the monsters who gladly helped shovel millions of South Vietnamese and Cambodians into Communist concentration camps, and condemned millions more to death or desperate flight. And who would do it again, without remorse. They will be setting the agenda. Which will fail, yet again, and thus clear the way for other ideas.

But those new people may well be the future of their party, their future Goldwaters and Reagans. If our country has a future (as seems likely to me on this lovely morning) then the Democrat Party has a future, and it will be groping towards better, more American ideas over the next generation or two.

I expect that we will pay a bloody price for the message we have now sent to the terrorists, the message that we will retreat when casualties rise. We are teaching them to kill people. (And when the bill comes due I will not forebear to point out that Pelosi and her gang are murderers and warmongers, and that their "pacifism" means getting Americans and innocent bystanders killed, while letting killers frolic.)

BUT, wars are about fighting. Sorry chomskys, but that's the way it is, and you won't be able to wriggle away from that reality. I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone of Trotsky's famous remark. When it happens, when things get ten times as ugly as they are now, we will have leaned a lesson. (Or if not, than I guess some future Osama will arrange for them to get a hundred times as bad.)

This is going to be a lonnng war, and sometimes losing a battle can be a blessing. The winner thinks he has the world figured out, and the loser is prodded to the hardest part of any activity, which is re-thinking his assumptions. Most people would rather die than question their underlying beliefs, but there are always a few who, confronted with the blood-splattered rubble, will go back to the philosophical drawing-board.

I just hope it's not San Francisco that that's the target. My guess it that softer (philosophically softer I mean--think European) targets will get hit. We have taught the terrorists one lesson that their Democrat allies will have a hard time erasing. That is that America can still be a very dangerous lion to prod. I firmly believe that 9/11 happened with the expectation that America would either lash out in instant fury, or cringe away towards appeasement. I don't think al Qaeda would ever have attacked us if they thought that our response would be to patiently and cold-bloodedly dismantle two Islamic countries, and rebuild them with democratic institutions.

That had to be a nasty surprise, and don't imagine they will risk it again soon....

Thank you...

...to all who have served on Freedom's Wall!

I saved this picture from a few years ago...I hope this guy came home OK....

Eagle-Gazette / AP photo
David Castro holds his youngest daughter, Electra, 1, before leaving for Iraq with the 216th Engineer Battalion on Sunday. Castro has five children.

Alternate history--The Burgundiosphere...

Via Tim Blair, a fine letter to Mark Steyn...

I am a Brit nearing 60 living happily in the U.S.A. these past few years. I have just read America Alone. The World as I knew it has already ended....

....I live in the South in modest circumstances. Each day God sends is a joy – I catch my breath at the politeness and gentility of everyday life, and the innate goodness of the people I have the good fortune to meet every time I go to the store or fill up with gas.

It’s the same thing in Australia – whenever I have had the privilege of visiting I have been struck by how much Australia has stuck to its values and continues to do so. The complete and utter absence of bullshit is exhilarating.

And as each day passes I realize with deep sorrow how much multiculturalism has damaged, and is close to destroying, my beloved old England. As you have mentioned before, "Fings ain’t wot they used ter be".

National pride hides in the closet in England. It is the love that dare not speak its name....

I've long suspected that the Anglosphere is the new "England." And that poor England itself is too far over the edge to pull back. (I would LOVE to be proved wrong on that!) A certain mysterious and palmary quality of Englishness has been passed on to many lands, with Australia and the USA currently showing the most of it. And India being a question mark of the most fascinating sort...

An interesting thing to ponder is, how much of this "Englishness" is racial/tribal/deep-cultural—I don't quite know what term I need. And how much was contingent on history. Especially on how Britain's being an island prevented the need to create an absolutist monarchy with a large standing army ready to fight the forces of Philip II or Louis XIV. One wonders if, had Burgundy or Bavaria been islands, they might have preserved more of the pluralism of the Middle Ages. Things like parliaments, boroughs, declarations of rights, perhaps a system of slowly-evolving law with a fairly independent judiciary...Might we now be saying that those places settled by Burgundians have a special flavor of freedom, moderation and free enterprise?

One interesting oddity to me is that when I wander Catholic blogs, it is often impossible to know if I am "in" the US or Australia. [link, link] At least until somebody mentions the Archdiocese of Mudamuckla, or the scandals at Yankalilla. Then I know I'm far from Kansas...(Just kidding with the Aussie place-names. I love them. Here's a good quote.) I've never had that experience with an English Catholic blog. And recently Englishwoman Natalie Solent, who is Catholic, mentioned in an interesting post that Catholics are "frightfully dull nowadays." Wow. I can't imagine anybody in America or Australia saying that, grave though our many Catholic problems and shortcomings are....

THE RECALL
I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.

Under their feet in the grasses
My clinging magic runs.
They shall return as strangers.
They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches
Of their new-bought, ancient trees,
I weave an incantation
And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,
Smell of rain in the night—
The hours, the days and the seasons,
Order their souls aright,

Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years—
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears.
    --Rudyard Kipling

It's what we have Republican Presidents for...

From a review, by James Nuechterlein, of several books on Abraham Lincoln, in the August issue of First Things...

...At other times he showed flashes of imperial insistence. In January 1865 he was two votes short of getting the necessary two-thirds margin in the House of Representatives for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. His instructions to his vote managers were blunt: "I am president of the United States, clothed with great power. The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come—a measure of such importance that those two votes must he procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am president of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes." The votes were procured...

Left by the side of the road...

Orrin Judd, on this piece by Jonah Goldberg, and on other writings of the NRO gang:

...The neocons and libertarians have never quite gotten a grasp on how little their concerns matter to the conservative party, which nominated and elected George W. Bush, largely over their objections, to cut taxes, move the country to the Right on moral/social issues, and implement Third Way entitlement reforms that would maintain (indeed increase) the size of government but transfer responsibility for the money government collects from bureaucrats to citizens.

They're so bent on pie in the sky that they're unaware of the tectonic shifts beneath their feet, from public school vouchers to free trade to HSAs to civil service reform to the special relationship with India to retirement reform to the Faith-Based Initiative to stem cell research limits to the sunset commission to federal income tax revenues hitting their lowest level since 1950 and so on. Not all have required major congressional action and the entire agenda hasn't been enacted--SS privatization, for instance, requires more GOP senators, not fewer--but the revolution is much further along than anyone would have dreamt possible in January 2001....

I'd say that's about right. I am, in my sympathies, a small-government conservative myself, but it's folly to imagine that that idea is ever going anywhere. It never happens. Whereas there are Bush clones winning elections all over the globe. There's even one running neck-and-neck for Prime Minister of Sweden, for pity's sake!

We subscribe to National Review, but I hardly read it or NRO anymore. It's boring. Jonah and Co. are almost as much in the bypassed-by-history class as leftists are.

Morons...

Dafydd quoted this bit...

...Mr. Powell, a former four-star Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had a leadership role in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, said in his letter to Mr. McCain that redefining Common Article 3 would only deepen worldwide doubts about America’s moral stature.

“Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk,” Mr. Powell said in his letter to Mr. McCain. Critics of the Bush administration approach have argued that, if the United States is seen to be mistreating captives, Americans who are taken prisoner could be subjected to cruelty...

"Subject to cruelty?" What could he mean? Quelle horreur, perhaps they may not be given Novacaine when their heads are sawed off. Sorry to break this to you, softhead, but when Americans are captured by the kind of enemies we have now, they are tortured and killed forthwith.

And how do you appeasers and pompous blowhards react to that? By attacking America for not being nice enough! For not having sufficient "moral stature."

Screw you, Colin Powell and John McCain. America and the Bush administration have the real moral stature, by virtue of being willing to roll up their sleeves and tackle some of the most bloody and difficult problems that bedevil our world. While you midget ankle-biters stand on the sidelines and sneer and carp, and demand that America be