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Everything The American Voter Needs to Know About Foreign Policy in One Paragraph

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

First, the lead. George Will writing about Bill Richardson:

Clinging to the Obama campaign’s talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, [New Mexico Governor and former Ambassador and Presidential Candidate Bill] Richardson said this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama’s zest for diplomacy, and that America should get the U.N. Security Council “to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint.” Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the U.N. for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

Now, your paragraph. It is roughly paraphrasing the outburst I had yesterday when I heard on the radio about Sen. Obama calling for a cease fire. Which made the veins stand out in my neck and forehead. You might not understand that in the moment in which you read this sentence; but the paragraph below will make it all clear.

Begin paragraph.

Republicans talk to people as if they’re talking to teenagers; democrats talk to people as if they’re talking to little tiny kids. When you talk to a teenager, you essentially say “you do what you want, but if you do this then these are the likely results, and if you do that then those are the consequences.” You do not do this when you talk to little kids. When you talk to little kids you are responsible for weighing consequences yourself, and then you say “do this…don’t do that.” Normal kids eventually mature to the point where they can weigh cause-and-effect on their own — but democrats don’t seem to think that is the case. They talk down to people, cradle-to-grave, saying do this…don’t do that. You see it in Senator Obama. The man seems to have a medical condition. He can’t stop telling people what to do and what not to do. The folly of this communications tactic in foreign policy is evident when democrats achieve positions of power, and conceive new doctrines that consist of telling recalcitrant foreign powers “do this…don’t do that.” They do this even against history’s backdrop, in which it’s fair to assert that every foreign policy success has been a direct result of conducting diplomacy in the style one conducts diplomacy with a teenager. They do this in situations in which it has been proven that the teenage-diplomacy is the only viable option, short of military force. They don’t seem to be capable of rising to this challenge, intellectually. They dispense instructions…they form their foreign policy around the dispensation of instructions…like teaching a preschool class…and then the policy crumbles, inevitably, the day it comes up against a foreign head of state who defeats it handily with a single syllable, simply by saying: “No.” We’ve seen this happen, again and again and again.

End paragraph.

I would further add one more thing:

As ethereal and sloppy a definition the word “conservative” has managed to achieve in domestic issues, with foreign policy the definition has remained crisp, clear and distinctive. It means, quite plain and simply, to elevate the cost of being our country’s enemy by any means necessary, and to reduce the cost and enhance the benefits of being our friend. Liberalism is quite the opposite; liberalism, with regard to other countries, is very much like the slutty woman who spurns the likable nerd who brings her chocolates and flowers and carries her piano up the stairs on moving day, and then talks her mother into taking out a second mortgage on her house so she can buy truckloads of beer for her other boyfriend who bruises her face and dreams of one day getting the band back together.

When a liberal runs the United States, you know how to get the United States to do what you want. Just say you don’t like the United States. The liberal will come running to drink tea with you at Camp David, and find out what your “demands” are. If you go on record calling yourself an “ally” then the liberal won’t give a rat’s ass what you want. Liberalism means only bending over backwards for people who don’t like your country.

And so left-wing diplomacy is always doomed to fail. By saying “do this…don’t do that” what it is saying is “if you want to be our friend then do this and don’t do that.” But then, it says, you’re only going to be treated decently if you’re our enemy.

In a sane world, the “do this don’t do that” people would make it a worthwhile proposition to be on friendly terms with us — so that there would be some motivating agent to get foreign powers to do things. In reality, it is quite the reverse. Don’t ask me to explain it. Ask them.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Fifth Column, Poisoning Western Civilization | 3 Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XIX

Friday, July 25th, 2008

…but I hope I can send some attention to the Folds of Honor Foundation.

It began with the death of 28-year-old Brock Bucklin, an Army specialist from Caledonia. He was killed May 31, 2006 in Iraq when fellow soldiers were lifting heavy equipment and a hoist broke.

His sacrifice was etched on the hearts of the passengers on the flight that returned his body home.

When the plane landed, Bucklin’s 4-year-old son, Jacob, rushed to the casket carrying his hero’s body. That image stuck with Capt. Dan Rooney who was on that flight and has been on several tours in the Middle East.

“I was on a United Airlines flight, 664. You don’t remember the numbers of many flights in your life, but this was a night that my life changed,” Rooney told 24 Hour News 8. “For me, being an F-16 pilot, I’ve seen combat, I’ve seen death and destruction in Iraq. But I’d never seen that side of it. And having three daughters of my own, it was something that really struck me.”

Rooney decided to combine his two passions – patriotism and golf – and started the Folds of Honor Foundation, a scholarship to help pay for school for some of the 187,000 dependents left behind by war.

We were following a trackback and ended up at looking at a Linkfest Haven page at Elections Blog. We get lots of trackbacks that are just plain spam, and this one aroused our curiosity because it had some spamtastic attributes but was missing others. We picked up some unmistakably human-authored English and decided to investigate. From that, we found The Blog That Nobody Reads was already participating passively, and we decided to participate actively, and from that decision we wrote ‘er up.

Makes a lot more sense for that foundation to get attention from us, than the other way ’round.

Cassy with gunAlso, we’re going to be putting up some “guest blog” pages over at Cassy Fiano’s spot next week while she’s out of town, and she’s specifically asked us to toot our own horn while we’re over there…or strongly suggested we do so, repeatedly. Not so much that, but kind of left the door open — in a “nudge, nudge” sort of a way. We appreciate the offer and we’ll probably take her up on it…during which time, we expect the Writer’s Block to set in thicker than usual. “Horn-tooting” is a little out of character for us. Some of you nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, have been not stopping by and not reading it for awhile by now…and you know we’re a scrapbook, not a billboard. In other words, the central theme here is something like NOTE TO SELF: What is up with that chucklehead Barack Obama? You wouldn’t believe the wombat crazy bollywonkers crazy thing he did today…

…and whoever sees it, sees it, and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. WHATEVER. Yes, we’re pleased with the e-friends we’ve made since our go-live date following the 2004 elections. Yes, we’re as addicted to Sitemeter as the next guy. But “Hey Innernets! Guess what I think about THIS” is not our primary objective; and I doubt we’re alone here, I think this is a myth that has been started about the blogging community as a whole. We’re not attention whores. The driving force behind our having a blog in the first place is that some folks have thoughts that make a lot more sense in the written medium, than in the verbal one. Sometimes.

Anyway. We’ll be following a cross-posting format so in theory, you won’t see much over at Cassy’s place that you won’t see here. But that’s theory, there are bound to be exceptions. Besides, there are a lot more commenters over there than here, and some of ’em will be worth meeting, so do head on over. Not to say anything against the nobodies here…you’re worth meeting too.

But in the final analysis, Cassy has a much prettier face than I do, and a decent brain behind it. Stop on by and say a hello on her way out of town.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Glad I Learned About This, My Blogger Friends, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

City Councils Voting on Wars

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

BellinghamMy Dad tipped me off to the fact that the City Council in the fair city of Bellingham, where I spent my childhood, has unanimously approved a resolution in opposition to any proposed military intervention in Iran. The argument in favor is summarized here by a couple of peace activists up in the college hippy-town that is my old stomping ground:

On June 23, Bellingham City Councilperson Terry Bornemann introduced a resolution urging a diplomatic surge toward Iran and opposing military intervention in that country without Congressional approval. Why should the Bellingham City Council divert its attention away from important local matters to address yet another foreign policy issue? Didn’t it take enough flack for the Troops Home Now! Resolution in 2006?

Could it be the same reason that our National Guard is being diverted from its intended role in state emergency response? Perhaps it is the same reason that school administrators are diverting their time away from teacher development and curriculum improvement. Could it be the same reason governors are diverting their attention away from crumbling infrastructure to ward off financial ruin?

It doesn’t take a four star general to see the common denominator underlying these quandaries.

Our occupation of Iraq continues unabated, with a taxpayer price tag of $270 million a day. It has already cost the City of Bellingham $98 million. And the human costs to the United States are staggering with over 40,000 casualties, including 4,100 troops killed. Bellingham is home to some of these families.

So why, you ask, is the city council stepping in once again to consider another resolution, this time opposing U.S. military intervention in Iran?

Simple. If our local elected officials won’t, then who will?

What a fascinating rhetorical question!

But therein lies the problem. Rhetorical questions are not considered to be intended for, nor capable of inspiring, coherent answers. That is how they make the point, by arousing a stupefied failure to figure out how to answer them.

If only it applied here. This blogger was struck by a borderline jealousy toward his old man to realize the senior Freeberg’s letter aroused no less than 25 responses since midnight. That seems more impressive than it is — although it still is — because I noticed one commenter expertly named “headupyerass” commented three times and will no doubt return to comment some more. He has to. I know this type; his objective is to get the last word, and there are lots of other folks pointing out the error of his logic.

But which side prevails in this open-thread on the humble backwoods newspaper, is not the point I wish to inspect here. What I wish to inspect is this: This guy with his head up his ass, has an Internet connection, a keyboard, a screen, and all the other equipment that is required to make himself heard.

He has drive. He knows how to put a sentence together that describes his sentiments. He does so, repeatedly, which goes to show he can.

There are millions of others just like him. All of them with their heads up their asses…can’t avoid ’em…off they go, blah blah blah blah blah.

Does this not address the “if the officials won’t, who will?” question just about as satisfactorily as can possibly be imagined?

So with that in mind, the ball bounces back to the side of the court wherein we reconsider what the municipal-level authority’s dog-in-the-hunt is — exactly. Because I’m still unclear on it. Just a smidgen. If the citizens find nobody is speaking for them, they can write. It’s proven. So how ’bout the homeless people moving in, harassing downtown shoppers, and the threadbare parking facilities and the skateboarders and the traffic light switching patterns that encourage motorists to drive twenty miles over the speed limit? Every city can use a little bit more attention on issues like those, and many more.

But here’s another interesting question, one that is not asked. The Bellingham City Council vote was unanimous. It is being hailed as a “grassroots victory” of some kind, which implies that this is a way to manifest the thinking of the man-in-the-street. Remember what Ayn Rand said — the smallest minority is the individual; therefore, whoever oppresses or fails to support the individual cannot pretend to be advancing the rights of any minorities. Does Joe Six-Pack unanimously oppose military action against Iran, for any reason? Would a hundred-outta-a-hundred persons all across the fruited plane approve of the wording in the resolution?

Hell’s bells, you can just read the thread I linked above, to figure out that’s not the case.

But the resolution is unanimous. Something, therefore, is busted & gunnybags. It brings to mind something Bill (“wch”) said this morning about journalism…

A lot of journalists and politicians (metaphorically) stand in a room of people who are doing nothing but asking them for stuff. They believe it is their job to “answer” them, with news or legislation or favors.

They (for whatever reason) think that the people in the room represent the people NOT in the room. A wise person would ask where all of the other people (not in the room) are; and do they share the sentiments of the people in the room.

This is the conservatives’ largest problem: they’re not in the room, they’re too busy to stand in the room. They just know that if they were, they’d shout out “Hell no, we don’t want that!” That’s why they’re called the silent majority.

Bingo. We are facing a recession or depletion of a certain human quality. I think the word that would most accurately describe this quality would be “maturity,” but I intend to use something far more descriptive than that. I’m talking about a specific aspect — the readiness, willingness and ability to defend one’s mindset against the fallacy of false consensus.

To say to oneself, when all assembled in immediate proximity are found to approve of something (or to not care), “I wonder if there is anyone who would dissent, and if so, what their reasoning might be?” Not so much to bring everything to a screeching halt and pugnaciously ask it; the far less intrusive variation — to merely be ready to entertain it.

We’re missing that. It seems to be a vanishing, and non-renewable, resource. I believe it starts early on, in about the second or third grade. Teacher says “How many of you…let’s see a show of hands…” and before the hands go shooting up, there’s two dozen little toe-heads swiveling around, first left, then right, to see what everybody else is doing. It starts out cute. But we tend to forget, too many among us never stop doing that, and years later when they serve on city councils or on editorial panels get this “gut feel” that because everyone in the room thinks something, everyone everyplace else must be on the same page.

It just ain’t so. Sorry.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Justification for Invasion | No Comments »

Best Sentence XXXIII

Monday, July 14th, 2008

The Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes out this morning to Stephen Browne, who is struggling to figure out why so many celebrities and academics seem to worship at the shrine of Che Guevara. He manages to come up with this beauty that I suspect is timeless, although I can’t prove it:

Though I am one myself, I know that intellectuals tend to be more than a bit on the wimpy side. They admire strength, they want to be strong, but they don’t know what strength is — and too damned often they think strength is brutality. [emphasis mine]

Of course this needs to be complexificated somewhat. I’m not a big fan of Che by any means. There are a lot of people who feel the same way about him that I do, and we have it in common that we’re big fans of “brutality” too — which, in turn, is bitterly opposed by the slobbering Che fans Mr. Browne is trying to inspect and critique.

Not so much brutality; but violence when & where it is justified:

vi·o·lence (n.)

1. swift and intense force: the violence of a storm.
2. rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment: to die by violence.
3. an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence.
4. a violent act or proceeding.
5. rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language: the violence of his hatred.

bru·tal·i·ty (n.)

1. the quality of being brutal; cruelty; savagery.
2. a brutal act or practice.

There is a difference; brutality is violent, but all violence is not necessarily brutal even though some may errantly call it that. I wonder if justified violence, that was not brutal, would slake the thirst of these wimpy intellectuals who crave some demonstration of strength.

I’m struck by how carefully both sides of this split, while adhering to their most base instincts, manage to keep track of the ultimate effects of this violence. Some consistently champion the violence against that which creates or preserves and abhor the violence against that which destroys; others condemn the violence against that which creates or preserves, and support the violence that destroys what destroys.

I’m also impressed that “brutality” is a good word to use in this situation. We saw in Abu Ghraib how the violence that destroys that which destroys, was mutated into brutality. Those of us who support violence to destroy that which destroys, for the most part, withheld our support from this. We recognized the political ramifications of these acts for what they were, and understood that these were people who had done something terribly stupid that would bring danger to their fellow service members who were already there, or headed there. This is not the kind of violence we want or need.

Those others who support violence to destroy that which preserves, support violence that is already brutal. Saddam Hussein was brutal. Che Guevara was brutal. Osama bin Laden and his “freedom fighters” are brutal. This kind of violence has no line to cross. And so to those who lend their support to it, or delay their condemnation of it, or use the word “minutemen” to refer to those who perpetrate it, this is a meaningless distinction. So they can’t have their Abu Ghraib moments, because it is logically not possible. Such a moment would mark the descent into a layer of savagery, in which this violence already mired.

I wonder what would happen if those “minutemen” who are doing violence against our own troops, and in so doing earn the adulation and apologia from some of the fifth-column types over here — what would happen if those minutemen found sophisticated new ways to disable our servicemen humanely? Or without killing them, or engaging any other lasting effects? Would any of the fifth-column types give a rip about that? It does not seem so.

And so this is why Mr. Browne has earned a BSIHORL award. He has chosen his wording very carefully. The intellectual cowards who crave strength, knowing not what it is, are not impressed with just any ol’ “violence.” They are, and always have been, in search of cold, cruel brutality. Nothing else will do.

Posted in Fifth Column, The Evil Men Do, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Looks Like I Got salvage To Shut Up

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

We’ve been having a back-and-forth over at Rick’s place Brutally Honest, in which our resident gadfly regularly chirps off (read that adverb as: often as he needs to, in order to always have the last word). His comments make no sense. He is not there to change any minds. He’s said so. He may speak for some Americans, in fact many Americans, but he isn’t even positioned properly to do that because he’s just another bossy finger-waggling Canadian.

His most egregious sin in the intellectual realm is to skip back and forth — almost athletically — between “I must be right because most people agree with me” and “it just goes to show how stupid people are because most people agree with you.” He possesses an enviable encyclopedic and fully up-to-date knowledge of what the polls say at any given instant, coupled with a self-stultifying vacillating weakness about what to do with this knowledge.

Serious doubts have been raised about whether he is real, and whether he is sane.

But whoever or whatever he is, he always has to have the last word.

Until yesterday morning, when I said…

You’re a cop, I’m on parole, I’m not allowed to carry a gun, you think I have a revolver in my pocket. So you say “I think Morgan has a revolver in his pocket and I want him frisked.”

Sig Sauer P220I get frisked, and you find I have a Sig Sauer P220. Which is not a revolver.

Morgan the parolee must have been a harmless teddy bear then, right? Just like Saddam Hussein?

I wish liberals like you had as much antipathy and acrimony for these deadly terrorists as you have for conservatives. I wish you questioned Saddam Hussein’s legitimate use of this deadly material, as passionately as you question the God-given right of law-abiding (non-parolee) private citizens to defend their families with Sig Sauer P220’s.

Perhaps this is the analogy that effectively conveys the truth, even to those who will put so much effort into staying ignorant with regard to it. The holy grail. When we confront danger, are we playing some sort of game like professional playing pool, in which you have to call the shot. One-ball in the corner pocket is all fine & good, but if what you called was six in the side you must lose your turn.

Would anyone use that protocol with everyday situations in their personal lives.

You find a nest of black widows under the see saw or swing set on which your kids play every day; fine and good, but what you said was “I think there might be a scorpion under there” — so you have to leave the black widows alone? What kind of sick asshole would think that’s the right way to go?

Sorry, that just cheeses me off. I know this was a cooperative agreement in which President Bush sought approval from Congress and the United Nations, and had to sell ’em on it. Whether that was a constitutional requirement (in the case of Congress) is a dubious proposition; the presidency, arguably, exists to sidestep bureaucratic committee-style inefficiency, especially with regard to military activities. And so in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in Spring of ’03, he became a war salesman, putting great effort into convincing mostly nameless & faceless authorities that Saddam was a dangerous dude.

Black WidowI’m from Planet Earth and have red blood in my veins. So where I come from, the real scandal — what was really “unjust and illegal” — was that this was put up for debate in the first place.

Now to be serious about it, I doubt the revolver/trenchcoat/P220 analogy is the “holy grail” that will shut these people up. I do think if anything would do that, this is a great candidate…but I labor under no delusions this has taken place. salvage‘s episodes of presence & absence occur in coarse, generously-sized chunks of time; as if his mommy decided he was spending too much time arguing on the innernets with those Damn Yankees down south, and laid down the law that he had to cut the grass in order to keep living in her basement.

Well, these people have a right to free speech. But down on this side of the border, I seriously, seriously do believe they shouldn’t be voting. If there is no legal way to deprive them of the vote, we need to create one and create one fast. I’m heart-attack serious. These are the people who say, if you find black widows under that play equipment, you gotta leave ’em where they are if you called “scorpion” or “snake.” They should not be choosing anything. Forget voting; they shouldn’t be allowed out of the house.

Posted in Justification for Invasion | 1 Comment »

George W. Bush, Great Leader

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Not my opinion, it’s the opinion of a Muslim guy over in the UK. Holy cow.

Take the Iraq war for example. OK, so he got us into Iraq in the first place. But for Pete’s sake, he’s the leader of the world’s only superpower. He needs to take decisions, even if sometimes they have nasty consequences – which is far better than we do in Europe, where we enjoy dithering not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Something had to be done about Iraq and our government was all for attacking it too. So let’s not blame G.W. for the war.

And when things did go wrong in Iraq, and there were calls to pull out, Mr Bush just followed his own counsel and doubled his bet with the Surge.

And he was right because Iraq is in a relatively better shape today than it ever was and Al Qa’eda is a shadow of its former self in that country.

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess.

That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

H/T: Ace, who apparently learned of it via Conservative Belle.

Thing I Know #31. He who does a noble, brave, heroic thing, tends to draw a seething hatred from he who could have done the noble, brave, heroic thing — but chose not to.

What I Know About People Minus What I Was Told When I Was A Child #27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Posted in Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Sacrifice!

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Carl at Simply Left Behind (which is a lefty blog) is opining on what’s wrong with us nowadays and sounding…very conservative…

You get hit by a car. You sue the other driver. He hires a lawyer and sues you back to try to prove that, indeed, it was your fault for stepping in front of his car.
:
You see a woman in an emergency room collapse. She lays there for 24 hours and dies. No one does a thing. Why? Because someone else should have handled it.

You walk down a street and a piece of newspaper blows across and wraps around your ankle. You stand next to a garbage can, yet rather than reach down, pluck the paper and toss it in the bin, you shake your foot and off it flies to litter again. Serial litter, I like to call this.

We fight a war in a far-off land, and the only sacrifice we’re asked to make is to load up on debt and shop some more. Arguably, given what has happened, this might turn into the ultimate sacrifice for many of us, but that’s a different story.

And I would add to that, the story of Sergio Casian Aguiar curb-stomping his own son to death for a full seven minutes. While bystanders watched.

A spectacle that shocked and horrified conservatives, while liberals made excuses:

“I would not condemn these people,” said John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has studied how bystanders react in emergency situations. “Ordinary people aren’t going to tackle a psychotic.

“What we have here,” Darley said, “is a group of family and friends who are not pre-organized to deal with this stuff. They don’t know who should do what. … If you had five volunteer firefighters pull up, you would expect them to have planned responses and a division of labor. But that’s not what we had here.”

Carl’s cognitive dissonance on the virtue of sacrifice is a source of endless fascination to me, in part because he represents so many millions besides himself. And while parts of his thesis make sense, together as a whole it is a baffling tangled mess of contradictions.

When the newspaper attaches itself to your ankle you’re supposed to bend down, pick it up, and throw it away!

Okay, with Saddam Hussein that is exactly what we did. Carl doesn’t like that…

But it makes sense! Because there was no sacrifice!

Yeah, well, we sacrificed plenty. That’s the point of all these war protests…supposedly we’re drafting our innocent doe-eyed children, boxing ’em up, hauling ’em to Iraq where they get blown up by the thousands. And that’s wrong! But that’s a sacrifice if ever there was one. So…your point?

It’s only the sacrifice of a few! It doesn’t affect everyone, so it doesn’t count!

We-ell, as I pointed out in my comment, in a lot of other areas a financial sacrifice is supposed to count, and supposedly, the Iraq war is responsible for crude oil that costs $149 a barrel. When we pull in to a gas station and have to part with $50 to fill a twelve-gallon tank, that seems to me to be a sacrifice, especially when by Tuesday of next week we’ll have to do it again.

Unless financial sacrifices don’t count, in which case Carl just nullified every speech made by every tax-and-spend liberal who ever wanted to “roll back the Bush tax cuts” for the virtue of sacrifice.

I think liberals like Carl are confused on the concept of sacrifice. There are two definitions to it: There is the outcome-based sacrifice, in which the “sacrifice” itself is just a negligible and unpleasant side effect in the process of upholding what truly matters. The narrower definition, in which the pain is the point, is what John Galt was talking about in that monstrously long speech of his:

Sacrifice is the surrender of value — of a higher value to a lower one, or of the good to the evil.

The code is impossible to practice because it would lead to death, and thus moral perfection is impossible to man.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice cannot provide man with an interest in being good.

Since man is in fact an indivisible unity of matter and consciousness, the sacrifice of “merely” material values necessarily means the sacrifice of spiritual ones.

The self is the mind, and the most selfish act is the exercise of one’s independent judgment. In attacking selfishness, the Doctrine of Sacrifice seeks to make you surrender your mind.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice commands that you act for the good of others but provides no standard of the good. And it requires only that you intend to benefit others, not that you succeed.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice makes you the servant and others your masters –and adds insult to injury by saying you should find happiness through sacrifice.

Somewhere in there Galt made a mention of the mother who went without eating so that her infant could eat; that would not be a sacrifice, according to Galt who was using the pain-based definition of “sacrifice.” That mother would be upholding an ideal important to her system of values, simply paying a price necessary to acquire it. Sacrifice, Galt said, would have been giving up her child for the sake of something not important to her. (Update: It actually had to do with sacrificing the child for a nice hat. See below. My memory managed to “sacrifice” the finer details to retain the overall picture; cut me some slack, it’s a freakin’ thirty-five thousand word speech.) That is what is meant by surrender “of a higher value to a lower one.” It entails a net loss, because the pain is the point of the exercise.

My thinking is, the people who agree with Carl, also agree with John Galt. Sacrifice is not about principles. Sacrifice is identifying what is important to you, and then getting rid of it.

Our liberals do not feel the conflict of this dissonance when they talk about raising taxes on rich people. Money is supposed to be important to rich people, right? And so we force them to get rid of it through higher taxes. When we talk about meeting the objectives, we already begin the process of losing the interest of our liberals; their eyes glaze over, and they yearn to spend their precious moments on a rerun of The Daily Show or watching another one of Keith Olbermann’s recycled rants. But we complete that process of alienating them when we talk about meeting the objectives through private charities.

This is because in the more specific, liberal-and-Galt definition of “sacrifice,” private charities don’t meet the criteria. They are voluntary. The donors are exchanging an inferior value, which is the cash that is donated, for a greater one which is the beneficial effect of the charity. They choose this. In so doing, they are upholding their own systems of belief and therefore are not “sacrificing.”

I suspect that is the real reason why so many of our liberals can hold their protests about the latest handy round body-count in our “illegal and unjust war,” on the one hand — and on the other, decry the lack of “sacrifice” that has been made in the war. Real people like you and me who have red blood in our veins and are from Planet Earth, look at that and say “how can you protest both?” The answer to that is easy.

Liberals are like the girlfriend who is unhappy with her engagement ring if the prospective groom still has money left after he bought it — the size of the ring isn’t the point, how good it looks isn’t the point, how much did it cost isn’t really the point; the point is, did it cost enough that it hurt him.

This is why their ideas are unfit for implementation in the real world. Out here, if you have a job to do, and you get it done but it didn’t cause you pain, that’s a success. If it was such a painful experience that it injured you, it’s still a failure if you didn’t meet the stated objectives. Reality says it’s all about getting the job done, not what you give up to do it. Our liberals don’t agree. They think, if you’re suitably diminished that you can’t do anything else, and your intentions were noble, then that’s all that matters. Whether the job got done, is just a side bunny-trail to them.

This is provable. Saddam Hussein is that newspaper flying about the ankles if ever there was one. One President kicked him aside to be blown further down the sidewalk, and another President picked him up and stuck him in the trash bin. Our liberals are furious at the President who chucked him in the trash bin. They won’t say why.

Update: John Galt’s comments on sacrifice, whittled down to the bare bone, heavily edited from the state in which they exist starting on p. 940:

The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
:
If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself – that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
:
A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted…
:
If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty.
:
Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice – no values, no standards, no judgment – those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral – a morality that declares its won bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment. [emphasis mine]

Now, I have not heard a single lefty-leaning Bush-bashing blue-blooder — not once! — seek to assert that the war in Iraq, oh dear if only it entailed “sacrifice” from us all the way that noble effort by FDR that was World War II demanded rationing of rubber, steel, wood, et al…why, then the War On Terror would be an equally heroic deed and then they’d be able to get behind it. I have not heard ’em say that one single time.

But I’ve heard ’em, many-a-time, throw out some platitudes designed to bully the casual thinker into believing that’s where they were coming from. That glittery, glistening heroic sheen of “sacrifice,” yesiree! That’s what Bush’s unjust and immoral war is missing. We aren’t sacrificing enough!

But John Galt’s words put that into a whole different light, don’t they. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t. It is therefore morality for the immoral; it is a moral code for those who cannot appreciate having one.

Not that asphalt rationing would bring any of these nattering nabobs on board. It wouldn’t. If you parse Carl’s words very carefully, and listen to the other nattering nabobs very carefully, you’ll see they are promising no such thing. The universality of our sacrifices has nothing to do with it — the country is engaged in an intensive effort, there’s still a Republican in the White House, and that is all it takes to inspire their impassioned opposition to what we’re doing.

All the bitching about “sacrifice” is just a red herring — and that’s the best part about it.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Justification for Invasion, Mediocrity/Excellence Confusion, My Blogger Friends, The Split, Vision for Victory | 3 Comments »

What Does a “Che” Tee Shirt Mean?

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

We got one possible answer to this when fifteen hostages were freed from the terrorist organization FARC, by the Colombian Army. The Colombians infiltrated the terrorist group by wearing…

One of the most positive side effects of Colombia’s rescue of 15 hostages from FARC communist terrorists was in dispelling the myth of revolutionary Che Guevara as a romantic hero.

Che, after all, was with the bad guys last week. The Colombian soldiers who freed the hostages wore Che T-shirts to convince the FARC they were fellow terrorists, and it actually worked. Within minutes, the hostages were handed over.

“They were wearing Che Guevara shirts, and I thought: It’s the FARC!” said former hostage Ingrid Betancourt. Her disappointment turned to joy when the disguised men announced, “We are the Colombian army. You are free!”

Colombia’s flawless rescue was one of the most awe-inspiring victories over terror in history, one that will be studied, celebrated and immortalized in books and films. All that will be forthcoming.

What’s important now is that Betancourt may have taken down all the haloed glory of Che by telling the world about the T-shirts, making Che a detail too important to leave out of any Hollywood reenactment.

H/T: Roland, the Gunslinger, at The Saloon.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Fifth Column | No Comments »

Five Hundred Fifty Metric Tons

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Via Rick, we learn about Don Surber’s handy summary of exactly what’s been happening the last five years. It’ll be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but let’s just see any from the other side take it on directly:

From Brian Murphy of the AP:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” – the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment – was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

Joe Wilson is a liar who should be investigated for contempt of Congress charges regarding knowingly giving false testimony. This yellowcake, though, predates that.

There is a happy ending. This stuff is not in the hands of terrorists, thanks to President Bush’s actions for which he has been hammered by the left for 5+ years.

When I was a young man just coming of age, I was told Ronald Reagan was a senile old warmonger because he was irresponsibly ratcheting-up an arms race with the Soviet Union; a little while later, as the Soviet Union came apart I was told it might be time to pay the piper on this as the munitions of the former republic came to a high potential for falling into the hands of terrorists.

So in just a few short years, the American Left has gone from arguing against the Reagan Doctrine, because of all the havoc it might cause through terrorists getting ahold of weapons and raw materials that would otherwise be unavailable to them…to an impassioned reprimand of anyone who might try to stop that from happening.

In November, they’re running for control of our military and our intelligence agencies. Their sales pitch? That they would bring about “change.” Huh. Yeah, looks like it.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | No Comments »

So Let’s Talk About What’s Good

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Via Obi’s Sister…

What’s right about the US of A. You get to both read and write.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Imagine This…

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Thomas Jefferson once said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” On this Fourth, I’m thinking about something a little bit different. Suppose somewhere there is a nation in which each citizen has the precious and inalienable right to be smart, but is wholly deprived of the right to be stupid.

Where I’m going with this, is that I strongly suspect such a nation is something that never was and never will be. For a number of reasons. Starting with, someone would have to sit in judgment of what’s smart and what’s dumb. The truth of the matter is, “smart” people haven’t done a great deal for us because what’s usually thought of as something smart, is thought of that way because it’s orthodox. It’s same-ol’ same-ol’. The car you drive, the light bulb you turn on, the cell phone into which you do your chattering, they were all invented by someone whom someone else thought was doing something abysmally stupid.

And then we have those things that really are stupid, like the mutterings of Matthew Rothschild and Chris Satullo, along with the usual gang of nitwits…M. Moore, K. Olbermann, N. Chomsky…along with the ones who just tone down the anti-USA rhetoric a little bit, because after all they’re competing for a position in which they would run it. Clinton, Kerry, Obama, Dean.

What I think is really great about this country, is that these chuckleheads are running around, advertising by their blatherings what is wonderful about it without even knowing they’re doing it.

Abu Ghraib, you say? Abu Ghraib was a bunch of rotten stuff done to rotten people by ignorant stupid Americans…who were then caught by other Americans, and tried by other Americans and sentenced by other Americans while yet other Americans observed the whole process and reported to the whole world what was going on. Moral of Abu Ghraib: Americans do stupid things just like people all the world over. And then Americans tattle on other Americans. We are not perfect, nor have we ever claimed to be. But where we can be transparent and still defend ourselves, we make ourselves visible to general audiences. Our government is split — the executive, the legislative, the judicial, none of the three beholden to any of the others.

We fall for a lot of bullshit, like that the planet is in danger and if we all just unplug our waffle irons when they’re not in use, maybe we can save it. That’s the price of free speech.

Like I said, if you want to recognize the right people have to come up with smart things, you have to recognize the companion right people to fall for stupid nonsense.

We have a lot of weapons, but it isn’t the stockpile of weapons that makes us great. It is the difference between what we have, and what we use.

When we were attacked, we flew over Afghanistan, the country from which the attack came, and out of the bellies of our airplanes dropped — food and money.

Our worst critics prefer to stay.

Our poor people are fat.

Happy Independence Day.

Update: I see Gerard is also pointing to the “worst critics prefer to stay” slogan that is mutually enjoyed by us both, along with others.

Happy Fourth!Speaking of Gerard, he’s taking apart another America-hating halfwit and his performance in this regard exceeds all expectations, even if you’re accustomed to his wonderful work. He’s pretending it’s some kind of dreary chore but I’m not buying it for a second, as the old boy seems to be enjoying himself immensely…

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter — in the commenter’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad — a mindset in which “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange, almost masochistic, pleasure.

Faced with such a deeply-rooted but deeply wrong mindset, we find ourselves eavesdropping on Macbeth as he discusses his wife’s madness with a doctor:

Macbeth
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

That is a random sample, not creme de la creme. It’s all that good. Head on over.

Also, Locomotive Breath has graciously pointed to our home page as a place you should go if it’s taking awhile for the sun to set and you’re sittin’ there in your lawn chair all bored, wireless laptop in one hand, sparklers in the other, beer in the other. He also has others. I stole his pinup because he probably stole it from somewhere else (most likely here), and there’s many others along with lots of good stuff. So hit both places if you have the time.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

True Greatness Inspires Lots of Bitching

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

So let’s not question whether this is a great country ever again, for it certainly has drawn more than its share of bitching.

Rick found something to pair up with our own tongue-in-cheek bitching we were doing yesterday…it’s an aging sourpuss Philadelphia Inquirer baby-boomer who wants us to “put the fireworks in storage” — because he says so.

Same ol’ nonsense. Terrorists cut off the heads of our journalists in front of a camcorder…we drip some water down someone’s nose and we’re supposed to wring our hands in paralyzing guilt for becoming “like them.” Oh, I think if becoming like them is the class assignment, a grade of C-minus would be exceedingly generous.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

Blah blah blah. You know the drill.

Blackfive found another internationalist pompous jackass sycophant, this one a Gen-X-er. Actually, I don’t know that. Matthew Rothschild could be ninety, for all I know. But these people are always sycophants. Ever notice that? You can’t just sit quietly and cluck your tongue about how ashamed “America” should be of herself, and keep it to yourself. This stuff always has to be advertised.

They know not what they say about themselves. What kind of person sits and stews about Abu Ghraib while we liberate Iraq? It’s impossible to reasonably conclude that this resentment against the USA is the product of any kind of thinking; it was the point going in. These are people filled with hate because they want to be — and they want the whole world to know.

So it’s rich material. Every time.

It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don’t play that martial music, white boy.

And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

Er…an old-fashioned concept called gratitude?

Like this —

I am so thankful to have been born into a country given to such extreme heights of productivity, capable of providing so much opportunity and comfort for those living within it, that people utterly devoid of talent can afford what surely must be the ultimate luxury: Pretending it’s cool to be an ingrate.

And…I don’t give a good God-damn who knows I’m thankful for that, and who doesn’t. It’s something that simply is. This country is truly great. It cannot be denied. We get more than our share of bitching, way more, and like the winner of that six-word slogan contest said: Our worst critics prefer to stay.

Happy birthday, and many more.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Western Civilization, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Hitchens is Waterboarded

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Via Rottweiler, we find out Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding. Hitchens then decided waterboarding must be torture, because he doesn’t like it. He then seizes on an interesting argument against it:

It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

That’s a great point, Hitch. Let’s turn it around. You aren’t willing to use thumbscrews and pincers and electrodes and rack because you don’t want to “open doors,” so you don’t waterboard either.

How bad does a looming disaster have to be, then, before you consider doing something?

Your rhetorical was good; mine was better. In fact, I have an even better one — your concern is opening the doors, who opened this one? Them, or us?

I notice something about these two words: “Torture,” and “Constitution.” These words do not seem to mean what people want me to think they mean, when they use them in my presence. By paying close attention to what’s going on as these words have popped up — and I’m not that bright about this stuff, so they’ve had to pop up a whole lot during that time, but don’t worry because they certainly have — I’ve finally figured out what’s happening here.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me and me.

I, me, we, I, me.

“Torture” is torture when it’s something I don’t want to have done to me.

You have broken the “Constitution” when you do something I don’t think you should be doing.

Most of the people throwing around the T-word have no meaning in mind beyond the one above; most of the people throwing around the C-word have no meaning in mind beyond the one above. What is above, most of the time, is all there is. And that’s a fact.

These are children who grew up into adulthood, having never done anything they didn’t want to do. And now they’re re-defining our words for us, words that already have meaning…or are supposed to. But not to worry too much about Hitchens and the T-word; he ultimately redeemed himself by inspiring Stoaty to give it a new definition that was more to the Rottweiler’s liking, as well as my own. Torture is…

…any experience so horrible that no-one would consider trying it out simply for the purpose of writing a Vanity Fair article about what it’s like.

Posted in Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 1 Comment »

Plagiarizing Goebbels

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler thinks George Lakoff, author of “The Political Mind” (Viking, $25.95) is stealing material from Joseph Goebbels. Lakoff’s point is that we’re voting “the wrong way” because our synapses are being unfairly exploited by conservatives, and if “progressives” simply retool their messages to manipulate our frames of references rather than give us these pesky “fact” things, we’ll start voting the right way again. Which is a chuckle and a snort to anyone who’s been paying attention to what kind of material the “progressives” have been selling up ’til now…sure they’ve got problems, but dishing out facts doesn’t seem to be one of ’em, at least to me.

They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.

This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters. [emphasis mine]

As Rottie has pointed out — the idea that liberals offer “programs that serve voters’ interests” is something of a hoot as well. That is, unless you consider the possibility that liberals have now successfully recruited so many illegal aliens and dead people into the voting process that the term “voter” has substantially changed.

And I’m wondering how neuroscience goes about showing that self-interest is a conservative idea. What’re they doing, strapping a guy in a chair, having him make self-interested choices in some creative experiment and then peeking at his “conservative” lobe to see if it lights up? Hmmm, I wonder what the conservative lobe would be. I would guess when you know a stove is hot, the liberal lobe is the one that lights up when you think “I think I’ll put my hand on that” and the conservative one would be the one that lights up next time ’round, when you think “that didn’t turn out so good, I believe this time I will not be doing that.”

From this, Lakoff’s agenda follows. In place of neoliberalism, he offers neuroliberalism. Since voters’ opinions are neither logical nor self-made, they should be altered, not obeyed. Politicians should “not follow polls but use them to see how they can change public opinion to their moral worldview.”

Yeah, I’m reading through all this stuff and you know what I’m seeing?

“I want liberal ideas to prevail and they damn sure aren’t going to prevail if those promoting them continue to muddle around with ‘facts’ and ‘logic,’ so I want them to start selling snake oil instead.”

And I don’t think Goebbels is the only one plagiarized here. I remember seeing it just a short time ago. Ah…here it is — here and here and here.

This column from Robyn Blumner about a psychology professor named Drew Westen telling Democrats to abandon fact-based campaigning and employ emotional tactics instead would be knee-slappingly hilarious, something fit for the pages of The Onion, were she not so gosh-darn serious about it all.

In one exceptionally clear 400-page volume, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, lays out everything that Democrats have been doing wrong. He explains it all in neuroscientific terms according to what regions of the brain control political decisionmaking, but it comes down to this. In election after election, Democrats have been appealing to the dispassionate, rational, fact-sensitive voter. A being, apparently, who doesn’t exist.

According to The Political Brain: The Role of Emotions in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, winning elections is all about influencing feelings and emotions. Westen says bringing more passion into politics requires the use of storytelling narratives and other emotional cues that powerfully engage those circuits of the brain that recruit and reinforce beliefs.

Democrats keep losing presidential campaigns, not because the issues they stand for are unappealing, but because they tend to structure their campaigns to engage the brain’s reasoning centers. And that just doesn’t cut the synaptic mustard.

I actually heard about this guy on Rush Limbaugh the other day. Basically, his strategy for winning elections for Democrats is to have them appeal to the emotions of voters rather than their reason. Which, to me, sounds a bit like “just tell ‘em what they want to hear.” Not to mention more than a little insulting for American voters. Apparently we’re all a bunch of morons who aren’t smart enough to wrap our minds around the brilliance and nuance of liberal policies.

Though I’m curious as to how Professor Westen thinks won Democrats the last election. Did they win because they just told Americans what they wanted to hear? Did the Democrats abandon reason and play on our emotions?

Exactly the question I had with this Lackoff guy. We’re still in the first term of the Marc Foley Congress, in which democrats took charge of everything because we “all” figured out they’re so great and Republicans suck so much. That’s what I keep getting told, anyway…doesn’t that mean our “progressives” are happy with the way things turned out? Westen’s masterpiece popped up during this first term, in fact when the victory was supposedly still fresh. Lackoff’s book, also, is published during this first term.

I’m already familiar with the fact — oops! Sorry guys! — that liberals have a distinct tendency to engage schemes that have failed repeatedly…like universal healthcare, minimum wage, price caps, gun control, the list goes on and on. So it took me by surprise, although I suppose maybe it should have been a foregone conclusion, that they want to change things that have worked well.

Is that what’s going on here? Or should I stick to my original theory, that the way they run their political campaigns is in a manner completely opposite to the way they want to run things once they accumulate more power across the national landscape? I’d like to know which it is, because I like that original theory better and it seems to hold true. You little people should be ashamed of being able to hold on to your money…we can have tax loopholes…you should ride razor scooters to work…we get to ride in limousines…you have to call 911…our bodyguards can carry Smith & Wessons…the world is mad at you for recognizing enemies…we shall prevail over our Republican opponents no matter what it takes…

Either way, I pity the poor democrat strategist who’s been tasked to read Lackoff’s book and look for ways to implement it. How do you shun facts, and embrace phony propaganda, more than the democrats have already been doing it? How do you repeat empty, vapid messages more often than they already have? In 2008 they’re down to just repeating the monosyllabic “hope…change” over and over again.

And, finally, I have to revert back to one of my favorite questions about liberals. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could rustle up just half the acrimony, half the anger, half the resolve and half the determination to prevail against an enemy at any cost — against the terrorists, as they do against Republicans?

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Targeted Wimp-Out

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Daisy Duke Golf
I really don’t know what this picture has to do
with the subject under discussion
but it looks pretty good to me

Becky, the Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, is ticked. She’s ticked at the democrats because the democrats wimped out to President Bush. Like millions of anti-war bloggers and activists, she wanted them to hold firm, not wimp out; she wanted them to hang on to the bitter end. About — wimping out to the terrorists. She wanted those limp flaccid democrats to carry the fight to President Bush, so that they could be victorious and prevail, in the battle to get him to stop carrying the fight to the terrorists, and stop trying to be victorious and stop trying to prevail. She’s upset at them for caving in to him, as he continues to not cave in to the terrorists.

She’s upset about the “wimp out” that took place in the battle to wimp out.

She wants to see more determination and resolve…in the battle to not show any determination or resolve.

She wants more spine shown in the battle to show spinelessness.

Targeted wimping-out.

This is, as I’ve commented a few times over at her blog, what is wrong with libertarianism in 2008. You use that word (capital-L) “Libertarian!” and I think — more freedom. People can do what they choose to do as long as it does not harm others. More authority at the local level and less at the federal level.

The war has badly damaged the Libertarian party. Badly. Too many loud, angry small-l libertarians are insistent on a falsehood — that capital-L Libertarianism is inherently anti-war. Well, it isn’t. Capital-L Libertarianism is about the right to defend yourself; individuals have the right to defend their homes, states have the right to defend themselves from invasion by illegal aliens if the feds aren’t up to the job, and the federal government has the authority and the responsibility to defend the nation. The small-l libertarians insist that “Libertarians” see the Libertarian movement their way, not my way; that there are no Libertarians who recognize true Libertarianism as Libertarianism.

Well, they’re wrong. This is a red-hot issue in the Libertarian movement: When we use that word on ourselves, are we calling ourselves a bunch of deranged Jimmy-Carter peaceniks? Some, like Becky, say yes; some say no.

Becky Does Not Make Sense TodayWhat is really destructive about this, is the method by which these pronouncements are made. Former President Carter’s comments and bullying implications notwithstanding, there is no verbiage in the Constitution or in any treaty, not on any legally binding hunk of paper floating around anywhere, that outlaws preemptive war. When our small-l libertarians call that “illegal,” they mean someone said “That’s just wrong! Can I get an amen here?” and a bunch of other small-l libertarians said “Hell yeah!”

Populism, in other words. The Libertarian movement has been subject to an incursion by anti-war peacenik populists. That is why they are small-l libertarians. Unlike Becky, most of these folks couldn’t give two hoots about the ideals that are really part of capital-L Libertarianism. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about states’ rights, or the right to home-school, or ratcheting down on federal spending for social programs, or any of the other stuff; they just want to be a bunch of anti-war halfwits.

The foundation of anti-war halfwitism, however, is that if one side is engaged in a war, and it calls a halt to the war, the other side will automatically stop fighting too. That’s why we don’t want these people making important decisions about anything — they don’t understand human nature and they don’t care to understand it. They’re delusional Utopian thinkers who do all their reckoning with reality while high on airplane model glue fumes.

The foundation of this small-l libertarianism that results when classic capital-L Libertarianism mates with populism, is — words like “constitution” and “illegal” are defined by that “Can I Get An Amen Here?” process. Which, in my book, is the direct opposite of capital-L Libertarianism. This is the difference, when you get down to it, between what Ron Paul was pretending to be and what Ron Paul really is.

Their ultimate goal, of course, is to make sure our country wimps out, on everything, and everyone living within it wimps out too. All the time — except when people oppose the small-l libertarianism. Essentially, it is a political movement that insists that nobody, anywhere, at any time, is worth fighting or resisting…except the enemies of that particular political movement.

Targeted wimping-out; targeted standing-up. No real principles involved in any of this. Just a half-assed effort to put forth the appearance.

Sorry, small-l libertarians. If we have a need for a political movement like that, that’s exactly what democrats are for. One of those is enough of a headache, we don’t need two.

Update: Link submitted by Becky’s commenter Mark Wadsworth: Democrats Vow Not To Give Up Hopelessness. Good ol’ Onion.

That’s satire news, for those of you who may not be in the know.

In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

“We can lose this,” Reid added. “All it takes is a little lack of backbone.”

Posted in Fifth Column, Libertarian Split, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Women in Skimpy Clothes | 4 Comments »

George Carlin R.I.P.

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

As a South Park Republican I’m divided about the departure of Mr. Carlin. I kind of see it Sister Toldjah‘s way, and I kind of see it Locomotive Breath‘s way.

I lean a little bit in the direction of LB, because in the end, ingratitude makes me sick. Carlin did very well in his country, and it wouldn’t have killed him to save a few kind words about it.

He was pretty sure Obama would get assassinated. He made the mistake of saying so out loud, but being a lefty, he got away with it. Of course. Like most atheists who brag about being atheists, the man had a lot of faith about things he never would’ve been able to prove if he tried to.

On the plus side, this routine stands out in my head as one of the funniest things I saw in my childhood. Mister Carlin, if I were Our Father Who Art In Heaven, I’d say this is just enough to topple you into the pearly gates. But, of course, I’m not Him and that’s not up to me. Hope you’re doing alright.

Posted in Celebrity Halfwits, Eulogies, Fifth Column, Poisoning Christianity, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Signs

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Big Peace SignThe kollege kids in Ithaca, NY want a Guiness representative to validate their claim to the largest human peace sign.

The previous largest human peace sign was made by 2,500 people at the University of Michigan. Ithaca is now waiting for Guinness to sanction its new record of 5,814 people.

Organizer Trevor Dougherty, a high school sophomore, says the effort was a show of support for world peace, not just an attempt at a record.

Yay. Yes, the world could use some more peace. We could start with our left-wingers pledging to work more closely with our right-wingers. Compromise a bit more often. Heh…funny how that one item seems to be left out.

You know, it occurs to me that “peace” stands alone as having it’s own simplistic, easily-reproduced sign. It is the one intangible noun that defies a solid definition. Next to “greed” and “hate crime.” “Racism” seems to have slipped a few teeth in the cogs as well; it used to mean a personal belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another, and lately I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t incorporate that being called “racist.”

But I digress.

You show people a peace sign…everyone understands it refers to the word “peace” but we have so little collaboration about what that really means. Stop fighting? Ban guns? Sign a non-proliferation treaty, and just hope the other guys are demolishing their munitions when they say they are? Does it mean start inspections, or call a halt to them? Does it have something to do with Marxism? Why or why not?

I can think of a few other things that could use a simple, internationally-recognized pictogram, to make it easier to promote them. These are things much more worthy of such promotion than the same-ol’, tired old war protest.

Graphics artists, your submissions are solicited. Make ’em simple as possible, and preferably fitting in a circular border. Who knows, maybe one or two of ’em will have ten thousand able-bodied supporters, and before the summer is out we can break the record.

1. Skepticism about global warming. I doubt you can save the planet by unplugging your toaster.
2. Critical thinking, in general. We used to have some. Let’s bring it back.
3. The Wolfowitz Doctrine.
4. The willingness to provide others who are weaker with a terrible, deadly defense. (The U.S. Marines have a nice logo that says exactly this, to some.)
5. The idea that maybe we should keep putting violent criminals in jail until there’s nobody around to commit violent crime anymore. That’s what the “peace symbol” means to me, but that’s open to individual interpretation.
6. Hooray for capitalism.
7. You can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
8. Say no to crack: Pull up those pants!
9. Hooters girls, on the other hand, are awesome.
10. So is cold beer.
11. So are buffalo wings.
12. I wish cars were still built so we could tear ’em apart and put them back together again.
13. Commies leave. This country isn’t for you.
14. Nerds are cool.
15. Any country that is our ally only until we take steps to defend ourselves, is an ally we don’t want or need.
16. Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.
17. Drill here now. Sign Newt’s petition.
18. Peer pressure sucks.
19. Canada, shame on you for your Human Rights Commission!
20. Keith Olbermann, go away.
21. Guilt is a useless and nonsensical human emotion.
22. It’s a futile endeavor to try to be better than everyone else when you’re also trying to be exactly like everyone else.
23. Let’s make it easy for young people to find work. There’s nothing wrong with a seventh-grader mowing lawns for money.
24. Rule For Living With Me #2. Show how mature you are. All things do not necessarily have to be said.
25. Go away, Oprah.
26. Thing I Don’t Get #24. Men shouldn’t get piercings in their junk and I don’t know why they’d want to.
27. Teach your child how to drive a stick-shift!
28. Same-sex marriage: It isn’t a human rights story, it’s a human-interest story.
29. Getting your news out of The Daily Show is a bad, bad idea.
30. Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

Stan Fields: What is the one most important thing our society needs?
Gracie Hart: That would be… harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan.
[crowd is silent]
Gracie Hart: And world peace!
[crowd cheers ecstatically]

Update 6/24/08: Phil submits the following for #17. One down, twenty-nine to go.

Posted in Fifth Column, Is It Really a Man's World?, ManBearPig, Oil & Gas, Pinheads, TIK 52, TIK 70, Vision for Victory | 4 Comments »

Helping to Highlight JohnJ’s Point

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

…JohnJ being one of my blogger friends trying to persuade me to go toward the light, Carol Anne, and support McCain this fall.

It’s a good thing I never said this point was entirely lacking in merit, for it certainly is not so lacking. Searching around for an editorial I saw last week in Sacramento Bee, I found it under Paul Greenberg’s name and Mr. Greenberg states a powerful case.

Nothing so well illustrates the essential asymmetry of this country’s worldwide struggle against terrorism than last week’s 5-to-4 opinion out of the U.S. Supreme Court. The enemy is fighting a war; we are litigating a plea.

Throughout the sleepy Nineties, we dealt with two – two! – earlier and incomplete attacks on the World Trade Center not as the barbaric acts of war they were, but as isolated matters for the criminal justice system to deal with when and if it could. While we slept, the enemy plotted. We paid the bloody price for our obtuseness – in thousands of innocent lives – on September 11, 2001.

Now we’re proceeding with great deliberation down the same blind alley.

How to describe this latest opinion from the high court? It’s not easy to get a handle on this decision for, against or maybe just vaguely about the exercise (or paralysis) of the president’s wartime powers. Here is how His Honor Anthony M. Kennedy – heir to the equally vacuous Sandra Day O’Connor’s swing vote on the high court – “explained” what his majority opinion means, or rather doesn’t mean: “Our opinion does not undermine the executive’s powers as commander in chief. On the contrary, the exercise of those powers is vindicated, not eroded, when confirmed by the judicial branch.”

This whole issue shouldn’t be an issue, of course. Supreme Court Justices are sworn in with an oath to defend the Constitution. Not to twist it around to make people happy, who in turn don’t even live in this country. They’re supposed to read the Constitution, look at some lesser law, and say “I don’t see any conflict here” or “yeah, that’s messed up, you’re not supposed to do that and it says so right here.”

What Kennedy is doing is ratcheting up the standard of constitutionality in such a way that it has little to nothing to do with the actual Constitution. He’s an authority doing exactly what authorities aren’t supposed to do when they wield authority: Try to use it to make himself popular.

…this is the third time in four years that the high court has left the question of how or if to try enemy combatants up in the cloudy air. What are the other branches of government, or even the lower courts, let alone our troops in the field, now to do with these detainees and future ones? The weightless burden of the court’s confused and confusing guidance on this subject might be summed up as: To be determined.

Each time the Supreme Court has ruled against this system of trying enemy combatants, lawful or unlawful, Congress and the executive – at the court’s explicit behest – have moved to meet its objections, only to be told once again that the tribunals still don’t pass constitutional muster.

In matters of civil and criminal law, you don’t want anything to happen unless all the tumblers are lined up. Outside of the military, government has a way of doing things like that naturally: Everyone has to agree something’s a go, but the lowliest mail clerk has the authority to stop it. Great way to prosecute a case. Lousy way to fight a war.

Greenberg closes by echoing John’s point, almost word-for-word:

The one thing that this latest example of law at its least vigilant does make clear is the importance of this year’s presidential election. Sen. John McCain, who knows something about war and being a prisoner thereof, says he would appoint judges who are committed to judicial restraint; he’s criticized this decision. Sen. Barack Obama has praised it. However confused and confusing this latest decision, it does clarify the decision facing the American voter this November.

It certainly does. What it actually means, I’ll leave to each reader to decide for him- or herself.

I know McCain isn’t speaking from the heart, though; I know this beyond the shadow of any doubt. His schtick is that he understands Guantanamo has to be closed down, that we need to recapture some of our global popularity by gelding ourselves in our treatment of these terrorists. He also clings to the tired old song that if we continue with our harsh interrogation techniques, it just puts the men and women serving on our behalf in danger, in case they are captured by the enemy.

The facts don’t square with this sales pitch. When John McCain was captured by the North Koreans Vietnamese, the United States was a signing party to the Geneva Conventions. That’s just a fact. The VC brutalized him at the Hanoi Hilton, and that, too, is an inconvenient fact. No getting around it.

So if anything, McCain is in a great position to know — beyond any doubt whatsoever — that a nation’s determination to behave in a “civilized” manner either by treaty or by deed, does nothing, zilch, zip, zero, nada, bubkes, as far as ensuring that nation’s troops will be subjected to kinder treatment by an enemy once they are captured.

He knows this. He knows it personally. And he’s playing up propaganda that is meaningful only to those who are too ignorant of the facts to understand what’s really going on here.

So do I think McCain’s rhetoric is right on the money about these nominees to the Supreme Court? Yeah, pretty much. Do I think a President McCain is likely to nominate better judges to the Supreme Court than a President Obama? Mmmm…maybe. There’s the slimmest of chances. Would I put a lot of money on it? No. I’d put very, very little. McCain is the very picture of a Republican nominee for President who’ll screw the conservatives over that way once he gets in.

Do I admire him for his service? Hell yes. Do I admire him for his character? Not one bit. I think he has serious issues in that department. Do I think he’s better than a democrat? Uh…maybe I would, if it weren’t for the history of Bush Pere. Or Nixon. I have my reasons to be jaded.

Am I optimistic about how things are going to turn out this year, if only the Republicans unite on this candidate, and thus reassure the candidate that we’re all with him, and consider the job of team-building to be behind him?

Hell no.

He’s the presumptive nominee. He doesn’t have the track record of sticking with principled positions on things…which means both sides will get a benefit out of him if they lean on him.

And those “moderates” are going to lean on him 24×7 all the way to election day.

Those who understand the wisdom of what Greenberg has had to say, should lean on him too. Which means, necessarily, that he can’t count on us. Not until he’s made some commitments that he hasn’t even bothered to make just yet.

Update: As Buck points out, I got my countries mixed up. It’s tough to keep straight in one’s mind all those wars the democrats started.

Posted in Elections, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Justice, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | 5 Comments »

George W.’s War

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

No way to tease it without spoiling it. Just read it.

Posted in History, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Know The Devil You Know

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

I suppose this weekend we should eventually get around to discussing that subject I try so hard to avoid, which is this decision we all need to make in November.

I have a lot of close friends who beat me up quite regularly over my failure to declare allegiance to Mister Straight Talk. They say our national security is in peril if Obama gets into the White House. And they’re right. They say if I engage in my silliness, e.g., writing in my own name, writing in Fred Thompson’s name, staying home, etc., I will help to make this happen. They are right about that too.

Where they’re wrong, is in offering up Sen. McCain as any sort of remedy to the situation. Not that this is news to them. You can tell they already know this would be a false argument to make, by their careful reluctance to actually make it. They don’t say this word-for-word. It sounds, to the lazy intellect, when you say “we’re up to our shoulders in crap if Obama gets in and McCain’s the only guy who can stop that from happening,” like you’re saying “if McCain gets in maybe we won’t be up to our shoulders in crap.” But those are two different things, they know those are two different things, and that’s why they put so much energy into repeating one of those two things while remaining silent on the other.

The balance of my thoughts has to do with McCain’s penchant for backstabbing, both politically and personally. It is captured well by LindaSOG:

I was somewhat struck by this:

Last January McCain said that the president was “ very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of defense.”

“John said some nasty things about me the other day, and then next time he saw me, ran over to me and apologized,” Cheney said in an ABC News interview in February. “Maybe he’ll apologize to Rumsfeld.”

Aw. Ran over and apologized, did he? Nothing says hypocrite and panderer quite like an apology made in private for an attack made in public. Maybe McCain will apologize to Rumsfield, or… maybe he already has. In private.

Some of McCain’s colleagues in the Senate said they believe Rumsfeld will eventually support the GOP candidate. “He will be for him in due time,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said. … Rumsfeld’s vote will be for McCain, Thune surmised, because “he cares about the country’s national security.”

Close GitmoYeah sure, McCain really really cares about the country’s national security, you can tell by his plan to close GITMO because after all, closing GITMO and bringing terrorists here into the United States prison system will do so much for the country’s national security. Sure, why not give these hardened and experienced terrorists a captive audience made up of angry, violent, hate-filled American citizens and the opportunity to recruit and train and initiate them into Jihad. It will only make us safer, right?

McCain has been remarkably consistent on the closing of Guantanamo, and other issues dealing with the upcoming gelding and defanging of the United States; embracing our new paradigm of advertised harmlessness.

Let’s just call this what it is: A religion. It’s based on mountains of faith, and on not so much as a molehill of anything else. There is no evidence — anywhere in human history! — that this will have a beneficial effect on anything. What happens to the guy who goes trolling for dates, showing off how harmless he is and how he totally respects the object(s) of his affection? He sleeps alone, of course. What happens to the father who shows his children how harmless he is? They disrespect him, disobey him, and grow up to be hoodlums. What happens when he showcases his harmlessness to his wife? He gets divorced and loses everything he owns. What happens when the justice system shows how harmless it is? Crime goes up. What happens to countries with harmless systems of national defense? They get invaded and conquered. And on the list goes…

I’ll simplify Goldwater’s wisdom for today: Harmlessness is not a virtue. Period.

What’s really flawed about this “harmlessness is virtuous if it’s advertised” religion, is that it is lacking a deity. That’s a terminal defect, you know. There needs to be an authority sitting in judgment of us in order to determine what incredibly good people we are, for having closed down Guantanamo. Step One, we close it down…Step Two, ???????? says “look what they did, they’re wonderful people”…Step Three, we get more popular, and in this way our interests are served. Good karma — but — for that to work, you need to fill in the “????????”. There’s no way around it. Now, who’s performing that adjudication? Osama bin Laden? Earth-Mother Gaea? “Most” people around the world? This is where it breaks down…none of those wash.

So over the next four and a half months, I’ll be instructed to believe, many more times, that McCain deserves my vote because it’s better to ally with The Devil You Know than with The Devil You Don’t. And that is my retort: All these people who say so, smart as they may be in other matters, simply don’t know this Devil You Know. As LindaSOG points out with amusing verbal irony, to place a premium value on our national defense is inconsistent and irreconcilable with wanting to close down Guantanamo to score some prop points with some unnamed deity.

Gee, now that I think on it some more, Obama might be the Devil I Know. McCain’s appeal to conservatism, where he has some, is that he’s a crap shoot as opposed to a sure thing. A crappy crap-shoot.

Posted in Elections, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | 3 Comments »

Can’t Have Baby Alex

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Via Don Surber, via Rick, the latest MoveOn has everything. Weird grin, exploitation of children, promulgation of the strange surreal left-wing myth that parents sign their kids up for service, single Mom, no Dad, quote out of context with a desperate hope that none among the recruited take the time or energy to go research it. And, of course, the fallacious Jean-Luc Picard premise that we can banish war (and crime) forever simply by deciding to. Yay!

How do they make sure all these boxes get checked when they make these? Is it carrots, or sticks. Here’s a bonus for you, your new video whacked all the moles — or — you’re the one who gets whacked, because you missed one.

Here’s McCain’s side of the story vis a vis the hundred-years remark. It includes his complete quote, reproduced here:

…a crowd member asked McCain about a Bush statement that troops could stay in Iraq for 50 years.

“Maybe 100,” McCain replied. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

It’s about the United States, and those other countries who have the balls to back us up on this, being a monkey on the back of Al Qaeda. Like salt on a slug. And I find it interesting that MoveOnDotOrg is so resolutely against that idea…more than interesting.

We need to dissect some left-wingers for study sometime. This seems to be such a constant with them — things that they are responsible for deciding, they act like they’re not; and things that they are not responsible for deciding, they act like they are. We can’t have Alex? And that’ll stop all the fighting? Really? Wow.

She’s probably not “Alex’s” real mother, but better than even odds she’s as free to vote as you and me, along with all the dimwits who can’t see anything wrong with what she’s saying.

Posted in Elections, Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

Fred Thompson Rocks — Some More

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Via MyPetJawa. The old guy still has some life left in him.

I hope someone in South Carolina is regretting their boneheaded mistake, and if they can’t recognize they made one, I don’t very much care. This is what we need:

In reading the majority opinion I am struck by the utter waste that is involved here. No, not the waste of military resources and human life, although such a result is tragically obvious. I refer to the waste of all those years these justices spent in law school studying how adherence to legal precedent is the bedrock of the rule of law, when it turns out, all they really needed was a Pew poll, a subscription to the New York Times, and the latest edition of “How to Make War for Dummies.”

God bless you, Fred. If you’re done with that stupid race for good, maybe someone else woven from your fabric will pick the banner next time around.

Posted in Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 1 Comment »

72 Virgins Dating Service

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

H/T: The Sudden Curve.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Noble Warriors, The Muslim Question, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

The Phony “Bush Lied” Line

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Anchoress…

What a long, strange trip it’s been, and here, some years later, we finally get someone in the press to tell it straight: Bush did not lie.

That someone is Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who writes…

Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” he said.

But dive into Rockefeller’s report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements “were substantiated by intelligence information.”

On chemical weapons, then? “Substantiated by intelligence information.”
:
In the report’s final section, the committee takes issue with Bush’s statements about Saddam Hussein’s intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

I’ll get to that in a second. But first let’s zoom in on what inspired Anchoress to say “Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Say it with me.”

But the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

Yes, how far we’ve come. If you could go back to 1991, nobody there would believe you when you told them we had a new President, who took down Saddam Hussein and got a litany of crap for doing it, weapons-o-mass-destruction or no. And, if you could go back to 2004 and tell ’em our mainstream press used the phrase “phony ‘Bush lied’ story line,” that wouldn’t be believed either.

Hell. That much wouldn’t have been believed last year. It’s kind of a bombshell now.

Fred Hiatt continues:

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

See, this is what I think people are missing. We haven’t put too much thought into why, really, it comes so easily to people to accept that “Bush lied.” There are the defects in integrity and character that wedge them into absurd anti-war dogma, in extreme situations wherein perhaps, as Phil says, “sometimes war IS the answer.” People can go through things, and some of these things make it look like a good idea to oppose war, unconditionally, all the time, and forever. One of those things is — war. Veterans can go through combat, and come away thinking war is so awful, that there must be a better way — always. Understandable, I suppose. But that’s feeling, not thinking. Engaging in it at such a critical decision-juncture is, simply, a mistake. Other people want to look good…and have secrets and other inner demons that persuade them toward the idea that they won’t look that way, until they do something grandiose, costless and perpetual. Like engage in silly war protests. Maybe it’s to convince those around them that they’re good people when they themselves know otherwise…form your own opinion about that.

Other folks engage in the twenty-seventh item among the things I know about people, minus what I was told when a child:

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Apart from all that, of course, the timeless cliche is still true: War protests are great places to meet chicks.

These are all reasons why people become stridently anti-war; it isn’t all about being pacifist and cuddly and sweet. But there are less personal reasons. Reasons that have to do with money and not character defects.

The United States is a superpower. Those other countries out there, be they belligerent or no, have their own economies; and all economies thrive in certainty and wither in uncertainty. Our weapons are under lock and key, but our political resolve to use them is not. We can be de-fanged, easily, with our arsenal remaining completely intact.

So Hiatt has hit on the agenda behind the “Phony ‘Bush lied’ line” in which we’ve been buried for these last five or six years, without trying to, perhaps without realizing it. What is a sign-off item of concern to him, has been the primary sense of purpose to others from the very beginning. It is to escalate the political cost paid by future Presidents, now and forevermore, for even thinking about engaging in military aggression. Even for the most entirely valid, sustainable, defensive and non-preemptive reasons.

Being the “big guys,” we are not to do it. We are not to even think about it.

Is the artificial aggravation of such political exigencies…treason? Well, I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have to say about it. Reading over the founding documents, including the Federalist papers (starting with 2 through 5, but there are others), Washington’s Farewell Address, and the Constitution itself, you can’t help but pick up on the concerns they had about anything — anything — discouraging the executive from showing well-placed hostility at the right time and place, so long as it served the national defense. Apparently, they were big fans of Phil.

Those who mold, shape, and direct the anti-war movement draw on anti-war passions; that does not mean they are guided by those passions. They are guided by strategy. They have reasons for gelding America into such a grotesque national and international political status that she never fights, no matter what.

Until all contemplations of war by our legislature, and our executive, look like this…

In this chapter with Iraq, the objective has been to scandalize the preemptive strike.

If that’s been successful, the new doctrine in place is that we can’t raise a hand against the other guy, until we’ve courteously allowed him to get his licks in. I’m sure that looks noble to some, but that doesn’t mean that it is. And it certainly doesn’t serve our nation’s interests.

In fact, it gets us most of the way there, to the “don’t fight ever, no matter what” doctrine. About eighty or ninety percent, give-or-take.

Well, we know now, it wasn’t based on truth, and for the most part wasn’t even based on an attempt to be honest. I wonder if it’s succeeded. Time will tell.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Justification for Invasion | 2 Comments »

Memo For File LX

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

I was reminded of something Ann Coulter said…

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position…Liberals mock Americans who love their country, calling them cowboys, warmongers, religious zealots, and jingoists. By contrast, America’s enemies are called “Uncle Joe,” “Fidel,” “agrarian reformers,” and practitioners of a “religion of peace.” Indeed, Communists and terrorists alike are said to be advocates of “peace.”

Liberals demand that the nation treat enemies like friends and friends like enemies. We must lift sanctions, cancel embargoes, pull out our troops, reason with our adversaries, and absolutely never wage war — unless the French say it’s okay. Any evidence that anyone seeks to harm America is stridently rejected as “no evidence.” Democratic senators, congressmen, and ex-presidents are always popping up in countries hostile to the United States — Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Iraq — hobnobbing with foreign despots who hate America. One year after Osama bin Laden staged a massive assault on America, a Democratic senator was praising bin Laden for his good work in building “day care centers.”
:
Liberals want to be able to attack America without anyone making an issue of it. Patriotism is vitally important — but somehow impossible to measure. Liberals relentlessly oppose the military, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, and national defense. But if anyone calls them on it, they say he’s a kook and a nut. Citing the unpatriotic positions of liberals constitutes “McCarthyism.”
:
Only questions about patriotism are disallowed — unless it is to say that liberals are the “real patriots.” Phil Donahue said the “real patriots” were people who aggressively opposed their own country’s war plans: “Are the protesters the real patriots?” It is at least counterintuitive to say that it is more patriotic to attack America than to defend it. Even Donahue couldn’t continue with such absurd logic, and quickly condemned patriotism as “the last refuge of scoundrels,” and warned: “Beware of patriotism.”

This is all much bigger than patriotism, or liberalism. In my time, I’ve learned to be wary of people who take pains to showcase their whatever-it-is-ness. This is really no different than what all those ladies out there say about big penises, and whatever icon manifests them. You know the refrain, I’m sure. The savvy damsel quickly infers that the expensive red car is symbolic not quite so much of a daunting phallic presence, but rather of a need to suggest the existence of one; it is “compensating for something.”

But the job of a lady on the prowl looking for a large serving of trouser meat, is a little more challenging than mine as I seek to avoid liberals who are “real patriots.” The guy with the oversize sneakers, or the expensive watch, or the big fancy car — will blend in somewhat with his competition, by allowing the lady to draw her own inferences about his giftedness. When it comes to the liberals treating their “patriotism” as Freudian projections, they are much more easily contrasted against others because they won’t allow anyone else to come to their own conclusions. The liberal simply is patriotic. As Ann points out, if you even so much as suggest otherwise you are Joe McCarthy.

Funny, isn’t it, how liberals accuse others of being “cowboys.” What does a cowboy do? He drives cattle toward a specific destination, by watching for any critters wandering anywhere else, and then creating a controlled commotion to bully the poor thing back in line. In politics, this is exactly what liberals do….the temptation arises to suggest this is all they do, and that wouldn’t be far from the truth. They allow the rest of us draw whatever conclusions we may, until it’s something contrary to the liberal’s liking — and then they bullcuse us of being…something.

Watch ’em awhile, and it isn’t hard to figure out: What they accuse people of being, really isn’t the point of the exercise, nor is who they’re accusing. The point is to cudgel us into wandering back in line.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a digression. The point here is what inspired me to dredge up that excerpt from Ann’s book. It was not, as you could be forgiven for imagining, the post previous.

I hope Gerard does not take exception to this. He, unlike me, is above throwing around the l-word helter-skelter in Ann Coulter’s well-known style…and he is certainly correct for being above that. There are people who do liberal things who aren’t really liberals. Yes, there are. Call ’em what you will. I call them “future liberals.” But I’m inclined to believe Gerard isn’t going to be nearly as receptive to being associated with Ms. Coulter as, let’s say, I would be.

Be that as it may, I was given cause to think about the book — specifically, this bit about Phil Donahue — late last night as I worked my way through his (reprinted) essay about Judas Iscariot.

We’ve long permitted greater and greater levels of betrayal in our society. We’ve codified them as law, policy and custom as far as the wishes of the individual are concerned. It is no longer sophisticated or fashionable to speak of selfishness as betrayal. That word is so harsh when, after all, we are only speaking of “differing needs,” aren’t we. When the betrayal of others is glossed over with phrases such as “I needed to be me,” or “I needed my space,” or “I needed more money,”or “We were just on different paths,” then the elevation of this disease of the soul from the betrayal of another into the larger realm of treason against all is only a question of degree.

The problem is that shame, a vestigial thing in many shrunken souls, persists, and shame must be driven out of the soul if the secular is to thrive. Both betrayal and treason are still weighted down by a lingering sense of shame within at the same time they are made safe from the onus of blame without. Both are permitted by our cults of personal freedom and “sensible” selfishness, but both are formed of dark matter and not easily expunged from one’s soul no matter how reduced it may have become.
:
Now our traitors to God and Country have found a sheaf of rags that “prove” that the greatest treason was really “all good;” that Judas was really the greatest friend Jesus ever had and was, with a kiss, doing him the greatest favor ever done.

Treason, done with the kiss of “my personal freedom,” proves that you do not really hate your country, you love it. You are, in the final analysis, your country’s best friend. In these “new” old tales about Jesus we read that Judas betrayed the Son of God because Jesus told him to do it. Really? Or did his betrayal come, not from any request that may or may not have been made, but from humanity’s persistant lust to sin freely and without even the thin penalty of remorse? Was this final treason done because this sin had been secretly blessed by God, or for the sheer dark thrill of asserting the self at the expense of life in the light?

“I betrayed my friend, because he gave me the freedom to do so. Feel my love for him.”

“I betrayed my country because it gave me the freedom to do so. Feel my love for it.”

That’s as much teasing as I care to do. You really need to go read it from top to bottom.

I close with a note of irony; I can’t possibly be the only person who has noticed what follows. I remember six and a half years ago, as America’s “goodwill” was being sopped up like an odious discharge of something vile all over a nice clean linoleum floor — when the flag pins began to inspire partisan rancor. Remember that? That’s when the talking points came out. That’s when we started to hear bits and pieces like Mr. Donahue’s, about “real patriots”…always doing non-patriotic things.

Every little thing that would help America, even in tiny, almost insignificant ways, would inspire a debate. And the debate always closed with — you shouldn’t be doing that. It started with wearing a lapel pin to show your pride, and your resolve that we’d get through this. When the attacks were fresh, and through the Anthrax scare, ongoing.

Our liberals said the flag pins were empty symbols. To attach it to my analogy about the guy with the little penis driving an enormous car to suggest the opposite — they bullcused that the flag pins were exactly that, to bully us into taking them off.

It worked.

The irony is, that because it worked…flag pins, today, have meaning that they did not have six and a half years ago. Back then the adornment had an attribute of costlessness; if you wore one, the argument that it meant next-to-nothing had some weight, because you weren’t deprived of any opportunity that would be open to you if you left the pin at home.

Now, that’s different. There’s a handy social club of “No Star Belly Sneeches” who can’t ever be seen with a flag pin. Draw your own conclusions as to why — except they won’t allow you to, of course. You are to regard them as “the real patriots” or else you are a “McCarthyist.” As Gerard points out, they want props for being the greatest friends this country has ever known…while not really doing too much that substantially benefits the country, and indeed, shouting-down and bullying-around anybody they catch doing things that significantly benefit the country.

Poor Obama doesn’t know what to do about it.

I find this reassuring, in it’s own way. With the Republican party’s nomination of a virtual-democrat, and with the democrats’ nomination of the one who arguably is one of the most hardcore-liberal among them if not the most hardcore-liberal…I have found it unavoidable to wonder if perhaps Gerard’s modern-day Judases have achieved majority representation in our electorate.

But if Obama sought to win election based on their votes and their votes alone, there’d be no confusion about what to do, now would there? The man seeks to confuse. This much is undeniable. And not so much of an indictment, really; he is a politician. But politicians obfuscate when they must. It bears a cost for them. And I don’t think Obama has become quite so much like Bill Clinton that he does it for sport…not yet anyway…

Obama knows things I don’t about who’s doing the voting. He should. He pays enough for this kind of knowledge. And he must have some facts that tell him that while Gerard’s Judases are firmly in his camp, their numbers are not quite so high that they’ll put him over the top. They must fall far short of this. There must be data that say the Judases, loud as they may be, number weakly.

America has an enemy. His name is Barack Obama. He seeks to prevail through confusion; confusion that costs him a-plenty.

What do you do when your enemy is forced to do something that costs him a lot? You do what you can to make it even more expensive. Exorbitant. Blisteringly so.

That’s what we need to do now.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff, My Blogger Friends, Obamamania, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Open Letter From Obama Supporters to Islamist Whack-Jobs

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

As written by Gerard:

9/11 JumpersTO: ISLAM
FROM: AMERICANS UNITED FOR OBAMA
RE: KILLING US SOME MORE

DEAR ISLAM,

You may have asked yourselves if, with the rise of Barack Hussein Obama, we American supporters of the candidate of the millennium are impatient with you. Yes, it’s true. You are not fulfilling our desires which we believe we have made clear with our worship of Obama. Let’s be clear about one thing, as supporters of Obama we thirst for death.

We would like you, at your earliest opportunity, to expunge our guilt – especially that of the whitest and therefore most guilty among us – by slaughtering us wholesale.

Just as you hate us for what we are so we hate ourselves for who we are. We have so much while you, the petulant children of a whacked-out god, oppressed by your own ratty cultures and fascist governments and unable to contribute anything to civilization for over 500 years, have so little except your “trauma.” Because of this we feel it is only fair that you get to kill more of us at will.

As Obama-Americans we have a problem with our self-esteem in this country, and that problem is that you are not killing enough of us quickly enough. Especially if we support Obama. You don’t think we’re working for him for our health, or even our health-plan, do you?

Pretty much. There’s much more. Go read the whole thing.

Twenty-first century American liberalism in a nutshell: That which builds or preserves must, at all costs, be destroyed; that which destroys must, at all costs, be preserved.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, The Muslim Question | 1 Comment »

Washington After a Nuclear Attack

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

…as envisioned by, apparently, our old friends Al Qaeda. From ThisIsLondon.co.uk from the Evening Standard:

boom[The image] appeared as rumours swept the Internet that the FBI was warning that an Al Qaeda video was about to be released urging militants to use weapons of mass destruction to attack the West.

The information was said to be coming from ‘groups that monitor Islamic militant websites’.

The FBI was quick to point out that it had not issued any warning and that the video was not an official Al Qaeda release through its media arm, Al Sahab, but simply an ‘ amateur’ collection of old footage spliced together and posted on the Internet.

U.S. analysts said a lot of effort had been put into the video – entitled Nuclear Jihad, The Ultimate Terror – with graphics, music, and clips of different leaders and groups.

The same expertise seems to have gone into creating this image of a devastated Washington.

Update 6/2/08: Oops, we been had on this one:

On May 30, 2008, the Telegraph newspaper ran a misleading story, “SITE red-faced as Islamist ‘Washington ruin’ image turns out to be from Fallout 3 game,” which incorrectly and falsely described analysis provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Discussing a computer-generated image of a destroyed Capitol Building in Washington that was posted to a jihadist forum, the Telegraph claimed, without any basis, “The SITE Intelligence Group said that the image, showing a ruined Capitol Building in Washington, was created by extremists as part of discussions about the feasibility of nuclear strikes against the US and Britain.”

This claim is entirely false, as is the characterization that SITE is “embarrassed” or “red-faced.”

SITE rejects the claims by the Telegraph and stands fully behind the accuracy of its information and analysis. SITE at no time maintained that the image “was created by extremists.”

SITE reported to its subscribers that extremists posted the image to a password-protected forum affiliated with al-Qaeda. This is entirely accurate. Moreover, this information was part of a report describing the general atmosphere in this forum with regard to extremists’ discussions on weapons of mass destruction, making its context all the more important. This report in its entirety is also completely accurate.

The Telegraph is not a subscriber to SITE’s services. Apparently, the newspaper made these erroneous claims without actually reading SITE’s original report, and the basis of their information for their incorrect article is unknown to us.

The SITE Intelligence Group, a leading provider of intelligence and analysis to governments, organizations, and institutions across the world, has contacted the Telegraph to correct their factually inaccurate and misleading article.

H/T on that to Reverse Vampyr, who like many is pointing to Telegraph with a link that seems to have once worked. Now it’s giving a 404. A search from the main page on the word “nuclear” returns no results relevant to this. (The ThisIsLondon link, top of the post, still works fine.)

There is scrubbin’ goin’ on. Telegraph seems to be engaged in a process of backtracking from it’s backtracking. They can do that without our help…

Gah. We been taken. We knew it would happen one day, and now that it has, we got the balls to admit it.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | No Comments »

Ostrich Doctrine

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

salvage‘s ignorance is luminescent. If naivete is a candle, this dude is a flare. He could light up your campsite for your 2 a.m. potty trip during a new moon, like it’s lunchtime.

How? What exactly is Iran going to do? Having a reactor doesn’t = bomb, having a bomb doesn’t = delivery system having a delivery system doesn’t = first strike capability. Considering Israel has a nuclear arsenal that could kill everyone in the ME I don’t think Iran is much of a threat. Even if they could launch their one or two nukes they’d be brought down before they came near Tel Aviv and Iran would be a smooth glass bowl.

Iran is as much a threat as Iraq was, that is not at all.

I love this mix of hubris and cowardliness that is the American wingnut; USA is the most powerful nation in the world BUH! BUH! THAT THIRD WORLD NATION WITH A FRACTION OF OUR MILITARY IS SSSAAACCRRRYY!!

Fear and hate, you just wallow in that crap endlessly.

There ya have it. Recognition of a possible threat == fear and hate.

And bad guys, there’s millions of people crawling all over our continent just like this guy. Say out loud “it’s a for a reactor not a bomb” and they believe it. They are the proponents of the Ostrich Doctrine. The Hakuna Matata foreign policy that has preceded our greatest successes in international relations. Yes…I remember reading that in history. Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time,” and within six years we had it. Yeah. Right.

If he was a democrat, I’d say he has this attitude for the reason our democrats have this attitude. Which is, when you recognize a threat, you have to act on it, and when you act on it everyone who votes here is reminded that there are people in the world who want to do us harm…which there are…and when people think of that, they tend to vote for defense. democrats are opposed to defense — you look at their policies on all the issues, across the board, and the one consistency is that the only things worth defending from anything anywhere are things that have to do with democrat foreign and domestic policies. Things like abortion clinics. “Detainees” at Guantanamo. Things that attack other things.

That’s how I’d explain his ignorance if he was a democrat.

But salvage lives in another country, one that is dependent on the United States’ readiness, willingness and ability to defend things — to occasionally ignore what the democrats want us to do — for the defense of salvage‘s own country.

So I would have to chalk this up to plain old self-centeredness. When you say something is, or is not, a threat — you have to have a target in mind. Yeah, well, I think insofar as what salvage has in mind I’m going to have to agree with him a thousand percent. salvage is thinking about salvage. Not a threat? Yeah, if I’m a Mad Mullah and I’m in charge of governing Iran and I’ve got my thumb on a nuclear button that those stupid Yankees in the Evil West know nothing about…and I’m looking for a target…Canada’s going to be pretty far down on my list.

Whatever. Does he really expect people to think “Aw…I’m so glad salvage pointed this out — they may get a nuke, but they don’t have the delivery system! So we have nothing to worry about!” Well, I think he does. That’s the way he thinks. Nothing goes kaboom unless it’s spent the previous few minutes whistling through the air, like Luthor’s rockets in that first Superman movie. Ever.

Remember. This is not a lone wolf. He’s in lots of good company.

Lots.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

Changing of the Guard

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Thank you.

And to the rest of us, if & when you see the vet out there, in front of the store with his donation can — do make a point to drop something in. It’s the very least you can do.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Eleven Percent

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

I was just listening to Meet The Press with half-an-ear, and someone had commented on a poll that says a large majority of voters understand Barack Obama is a Christian, twenty-something percent don’t know what he is and eleven percent still say he’s a Muslim. Time for Tivo. I was disappointed in my ability to receive the television medium because I was specifically looking for some foundation to this argument they were having — Tim Russert was going into borderline hysterics about what a good Christian Barack Obama is. “Borderline hysterics” meaning…throwing out factoids that would be meaningful only to people who are trying to figure out what Obama’s religion is. A long string of ’em. Which is a little weird, because if he was trying to prove something, one or two would have sufficed.

My impression was that since the media is in the tank for Obama, they were trying to conjure up a boogeyman that doesn’t actually exist: The millions-strong mob of likely voters who have eliminated Obama on the unfair and false accusation that he’s a Muslim. I was skeptical that this mob exists. Having heard this eleven percent thing, I remain just as skeptical.

It isn’t that my Madd Googl Skilz have failed to wrap their virtual tendrils around this poll. I’m sure I’ll come across it later. I think eleven percent sounds about right.

And yeah, I believe every single anecdote about encounters with these people. I think they’re out there.

It’s just that I doubt they’re worth discussing. At all. I don’t think they matter, I don’t think they’re significant, and I certainly don’t think they’re going to affect the outcome of anything. Naturally, if I’m wrong, that would be a good thing because this is an exceptionally just-plain-bad presidential candidate.

But back to these eleven percenters who “still think he’s a Muslim.”

I think they’re worth talking about, only because when people talk about them, all present feel a strengthening of their loyalties to the Obamessiah…and they like this. Obama appeals to the “feelings” voter. And I can’t help noticing that “feelings” voters use their feelings as sort of a security blanket — they can’t drop ’em for too long or they get all antsy.

That, and of course, they don’t think. One of the persistent myths of our time, one accepted by far more than eleven percent, is that a single person can throw both his feelings and thoughts into a single decision. Not so. You have to choose which master you serve. To a thinking voter, “He Isn’t A Muslim After All!” is a pretty poor qualification for President. I’m not a Muslim, and I don’t know if I’m up to the job…although I’d be better than him, because I have the capacity to mix in an occasional wise decision in with my long train of stupid ones. That, and when I don’t know something, I think I’m pretty good at figuring out what it is I don’t know. Besides, isn’t being a Muslim supposed to be more-or-less okay?

I challenge the idea that eleven percent of anything means very much. Good heavens, what would happen if George Bush’s approval rating was suddenly eleven percent? World War Three could break out that very same morning and you’d probably hear nothing of it. The networks would rush to give us instructions to believe that eleven percent is statistically the same as zero…and they’d be right about that.

Because the elephant in the room that they’re trying to ignore, is that eleven percent, which is one out of nine, is a fraction descending far into the heavy fog of “statistical nobody.” You can come up with any cockeyed idea you want to — and it will find acceptance in one out of nine people, and probably more, with no trouble at all. One out of nine…you’ll probably find exuberant, enthusiastic acceptance of whatever-it-is among that many.

Obama should be pleased as punch. One out of nine means this canard is effectively dead.

Now, the real question, as far as I’m concerned, is how many likely voters think Obama wants the radical Muslim whack-jobs we’re fighting to come out of this thing whole, so they can stir up some more trouble later on. Seems to me this is far more pertinent to our decision than Obama’s personal faith, which is constitutionally barred as a litmus test for his candidacy anyway. The only thing I took away from all that stuff about his church is that he has a history of making friends with America-hating dickheads, and I already knew that. I’m concerned not with his personal creed, but with his sympathies.

And you know what? I’ll bet that’s true of the people who were questioned in whatever that poll was. In fact, I’ll bet it’s true of the eleven-percenters.

Posted in Obamamania, The Muslim Question | No Comments »

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