House of Eratosthenes

Archive for the ‘Iraq and WoT Stuff’ Category

D’JEver Notice? IV

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

When we show signs of winning, that is when our fifth column types want us to talk to the enemy.

Not just with regard to things that actually have an enemy, either. Wherever there is a ray of hope, as that ray emerges, that is precisely when our “anti-ray” people want us to behave as if no such ray so emerged. Sen. Chuck Schumer offers a sermon of hopelessness about drilling in ANWR, for example. Now, the data say that the oil reserves there could bring down gas prices by 75 cents a gallon by 2025. They don’t know this for sure, and granted 2025 is a way off…seventeen years. But hey, seventeen years ago it was 1991, and we’d already been arguing about ANWR for a few years by then.

That brings me to Polar bears. They’re on the endangered species list now. It wasn’t so long ago that “endangered” meant what people thought it meant…that something was teetering on the brink of extinction…or headed there. This is not the case with polar bears, and cannot be the case with them, as population figures do not exist in adequate strength-of-estimate to conduct meaningful comparisons across time.

The best estimate we can make now, is that the population of polar bears is rising. So we need to take some special steps to keep them from going extinct. The best estimate we can make now, is that drilling in ANWR will have a long-term beneficial effect on gas prices. (Basic Economics 101 says this too). So we must move to act, and preserve the “pristine” environment — and stop any drilling up there.

Why do I have this irrational, sneaking suspicion…call it a “hunch”…that if, tomorrow night, we miraculously found five brand-new verifiable oil deposits stateside scattered throughout the lower 48 states…by next weekend we’d have five brand-new endangered species?

And how come nobody talks about what America is supposed to get out of it when we sit down and talk to the terrorists — whose asses we’re kicking? John Kerry talks of the “Wisdom of Talking” and his piece pretty much reads that way from top to bottom…oh, my way is so smart, and those other guys have “failed miserably” by trying that other way, and “we won’t know until we try.” Why no particulars?

As I pointed out earlier, the tea-drinkers feel SO strongly that they’re in the right. This is probably one of the few times when John Kerry isn’t acting as the vanguard of snottiness and condescension among those who sympathize with his point of view; everyone who thinks as he thinks, promotes what he promotes, seemingly without exception, applies the “John Kerry I’m So Good You’re So Stupid” mantra. The tea-drinkers behave, in every other way, as if they want more tea-drinkers. As if they’re arguing for the purpose of recruiting. Until they open their mouths and words come out…you don’t win too many converts to your side by beginning with “okay look here, you chucklehead, what you’re doing is really stupid.” Are they demonstrating exactly how they think this “negotiating” should be happening? Gosh — it seems to me just once, just once, some among them would throw out a piece of red meat or two about what would be negotiated. Don’t go wading shoulders-deep into the details. Just, y’know, tip a toe or two. Something more substantial than “we won’t know until we try”. Once you’re seated at the table and the tea is served, who says what?

But the timing is what really fascinates me. Our tea-drinkers, if they had America’s interests and well-being at heart — wouldn’t they wait until we got our asses kicked at something? Big, huge bombing that kills twenty guys, and a bigger and more fatal incident the next day. “Wow, we’re getting our butts handed to us over there we’d better start the negotiations.” Or, Abu Ghraib damaging our “reputation” — “We can’t take much more of this, we’d better start talking to the enemy and seeing what we can work out…won’t know until we try.”

My point is, I didn’t hear any of that stuff on those occasions.

It would still have been seditious. But at least it would have been logical. Time and again, what reality brings to me is a chain of events leading with victory — or substantial hope of it. Followed by a bunch of preachy, snotty, Kerry types with some argument they think is so much smarter than anything I or anyone else could say in response…without discussing any details at all. “Let’s begin the surrender talks before we actually win this thing” is what they seem to be saying.

Posted in Vision for Victory | 3 Comments »

John Wayne on Taps

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

H/T: Rick.

Posted in Fallen Heroes, Noble Warriors | No Comments »

Appeasing

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

It’s interesting how real life conjures up the same themes as the news, coincidentally, at any given time. I just got off the e-mail console, where I had to get a little bit philosophical with extended family over travel & trip plans. I saw us going into that thing…you know…with reliable people and unreliable people. I guess there are arrangements to be made insofar as kids from broken homes, stuff has to be coordinated and everybody has to be part of the coordination. Have you been noticing what I’ve been noticing about this? We dutifully take down what the unreliable people have in mind for things…as best we can, since they’re, y’know, unreliable…and then we refine it into instructions about what the reliable people should be doing. Usually, the reliable people do what they’re told, since they’re so reliable and all, and then they find out it all goes to hell because the unreliable people changed their minds, and so now it falls to the reliable people to revise things as expediently as can be managed, and keep watching for the next time the unreliable people change course.

The unreliable people don’t get bothered with any of this. Not a request for another visitation window, even several months down the road. What would be the point? And not a chastisement for changing plans at the last minute inconveniencing everybody else. What would be the point of that? And so all the burden, the inconvenience, falls to those who’ve earned the reputation of treating others with decent standards of respect and consideration.

The kids grow up to be buttholes. The grown-ups end up wondering why. They should be asking, why not? How could you expect the kids to grow up any other way? They see that when you live life for yourself, you get everything you want and nobody bugs you. When you do some planning and show considerations to others your life becomes one big headache; when you don’t, it becomes one big party. I’d have to worry about the kid who didn’t learn a lesson or two from that.

And now, fresh off my arguing about that…we see…via Sound Politics, via Little Green Footballs, via Ace of Spade HQ, via Cassy…some of these butthole kids have grown up and started writing editorials in the Seattle Times. Said editorials making about as much sense as you’d expect. Like fer example — how about the notion that Hitler’s demands weren’t entirely unreasonable? Bruce Ramsey is here to tell you exactly that.

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

The narrative we’re given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany’s claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland. [emphasis mine]

Editorialist Ramsey’s column here rises to the level of absurdity in which — if you launch into it determined to deal it some argumentative damage, you can do some, but if you take a friendly posture to it and take it seriously you can do even more damage to it.

I mean, let’s try to extrapolate his argument. It’s a response to President Bush’s point that, you know, our history books already tell us about a time when we tried to negotiate with scumbags. Ramsey tries to turn us the other way by walking through the factual background in a little bit greater detail…Hitler wanted them to do X…they went ahead and did it…the rest is history. Okay, so as far as the backdrop of fact, Ramsey agrees with President Bush. The effect the appeasement of Hitler had on ensuing events, it seems if he disagrees with President Bush there, he doesn’t come out and say it. One would think he would so comment. So we can presume that he further agrees about the cause and effect.

In the end, the Bush-Ramsey point of disagreement, is what we are all to think about this, and/or how we are to behave next time we are presented with an opportunity to appease a tyrant. Ramsey says we should boil up the tea, butter the crumpets, and let the talks begin. Well, why? He just admitted President Bush summarized the events of seventy years ago accurately — his only reservation is that such a summation bothers him.

He provides a defense of the appeasers of the 1930’s that, essentially, their actions were understandable in the wake of what came before. What he seems incapable of comprehending, is that future scholars would not be able to afford such a spirited defense of our generation, should we elect to take the Obama route. They would quite naturally ask “your folks knew all about Hitler, and if you forgot, your President reminded you — what in the hell were you thinking?”

There’s one other thing going on here, and it really has me curious. Ramsey, far from being alone in saying this, intones “In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other.” This is a hot, controversial issue, with each side intent on convincing the other how correct they are. Why, then, do these mint-tea-and-crumpet talkers never seem to furnish me with any details that would inspire me to see the correctness of their point of view? What’s going on in these “talks”? All I see is a bunch of compromises from the reasonable people, while the unreasonable people just do whatever they want. If the unreasonable people do make compromises, they just violate them later. Just like the extended-family visit-trip plans.

Another thing I see is that when these “talks” result in an agreement, somewhere down the road it turns into a big ol’ crap-fest. Yes, the mint-tea-and-crumpet talkers have their moment in the sun. They get to prance off planes with signed papers in hand that they can brandish before the cameras, and say like little kids, “Lookee What I Did!” just like Neville Chamberlin himself.

But without exception, it seems the longer a “talk” takes to turn into a crap-fest, the bigger the crap-fest it becomes. Ramsey’s point, the only one he’s managed to convincingly make, is a valid one: It’s an easy mistake to make, if it’s your first time making it. But that’s no justification for going back, Jack, and doin’ it again, decades later.

If I thought it was a good idea to make John McCain the next President, I’d say let’s go ahead and give the democrats that issue. Let’s make this election all about appeasement. Make it a mint tea and crumpets election year. You think we need to do more talking to the butt-wipes, vote for democrats, if you’ve learned your lesson then vote Republican. I’ll bet most voters have paid enough attention to agree with me. I’ll bet most of them have shared my experiences planning vacations & trips with extended family, to understand the principle that is at work here. McCain would bollux up the message, for sure, making it a “conservative” doctrine to go ahead and drink the tea — otherwise, though, we’d have a rout just like in 1994. I think most people are smart enough to get this. There’s people you do your negotiating and compromising with, and there’s other people who aren’t up to it. And people who aren’t up to it, always put up the appearance that they are. It’s what they figure they should do, in order to get what they want.

Posted in Fifth Column, TIK 52 | No Comments »

The Three Points

Monday, May 12th, 2008

From I Love Jet Noise…

During WWII, the Japanese were searching for a way to demoralize the American forces that they faced. The Japanese psychological warfare experts came up with a message that they thought would work well. They gave the script to their famous broadcaster “Tokyo Rose” and everyday she would broadcast this same message packaged in various ways hoping to have an impact on American GI morale. What was the message? It had three main points:

1. Your President is lying to you.

2. This war is wrong and illegal.

3. You cannot win the war.

Sound familiar? Maybe it’s because the U.S. mainstream media and the Democrat Party has picked up the same message and is broadcasting it to our troops. The only difference is that they claim to support our troops before they demoralize them.

Yes, it does sound familiar.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Deranged Leftists, Fifth Column, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Justification for Invasion, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

As Tortured As Logic Gets

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

But good enough to write up in a Sacramento Bee editorial…albeit, by custom, missing the signature of any human on top or below. See if you can spot the tortured logic. It is so in-your-face, it is impossible to state the position & summary without running into the unsolvable conundrum, each and every time.

I’ll give you a hint: The editorial pretends to make sense, by refusing to admit that some of these definitions might be open to interpretation. Simply follow their lead. Pretend there is no room for interpretation, no opportunity to interpret, no duty to do so. See where that gets you.

Editorial: End the tortured logic
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, May 4, 2008

When it comes to torturing detainees, the president can ignore or override any law or treaty. Or at least that’s what Bush administration lawyers believe, as outlined in the infamous 2002 torture memos and reiterated in a March 5 Justice Department letter.

That letter, released last week by Sen. Ron Wyden of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asserts that interrogation techniques banned under the Geneva Conventions are allowed – depending on circumstances. Gone is this country’s absolute ban on torture. In its place we have a Bush administration rule that if you have good intentions, torture is OK; if not, it’s bad.

Some standard. If the president’s intention is “to prevent a threatened terrorist attack,” torture is hunky-dory, regardless of laws and treaties.

The Justice Department letter reprises a 2006 exchange between John Yoo, who penned the torture memos when he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Douglas Cassel, a Notre Dame law professor.

Cassel: “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there’s no law that can stop him?”

Yoo: “No treaty.”

Cassel: “Also no law of Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.”

Yoo: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he can do that.”

That’s clearly stated, if not clearly thought out. Anything goes if the president approves it. There is no law beyond the whim of the president.

It is clear that Congress will have to act to restore some semblance of U.S. values. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has two amendments that would be a start. One requires all U.S. agencies, including the CIA, to follow rules of interrogation in the U.S. Army Field Manual. This forbids the use of waterboarding (controlled drowning), induced hypothermia and other techniques.

Gen. Jeff Kimmons, the senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has explained why: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Another Feinstein amendment bans outsourcing of interrogations to contractors. The Senate Intelligence Committee approved both amendments last Tuesday.

A bill by Sen. Christopher Dodd also is important. It makes clear that presidential authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions and other treaties is subject to congressional oversight and judicial review.

By passing these pieces of legislation, and overriding a sure Bush veto, Congress would be making what should not be a controversial statement: The President of the United States is subject to the law of the land.

Did you figure it out? It should have hit you like a ton of bricks by the last paragraph.

It’s exactly the same problem as the entirely unrelated issue of Net Neutrality.

The underlying premise is that there are things that are against the law, and so to make sure people follow the law, we need to pass a new law to force them to follow the laws that are already on the books outlawing things that are against the law.

If you respond to that with “well, okay then, we admit there are things left up to the interpretation of the President and that’s what we’re trying to change” — and that would at least be honest — it raises a whole new package of problems. How come the President doesn’t get to interpret laws as they apply to the Executive Branch? That’s supposed to be his job, isn’t it?

I’m pretty sure if you traveled back in time and quizzed the founding fathers about it, they’d be wondering why “congressional oversight and judicial review” are not only influential, but supremely so, upon these interpretations that take place with regard to “all U.S. agencies, including the CIA.” Those are part of the Executive Branch. In fact, I’ve got a feeling more than a few of the founders are going to wonder aloud just when Congress got in the business of interpreting anything.

People who write rules, shouldn’t be the first or the last to say what the rules are intended to mean. That’s why the United Nations flubbed things so thoroughly with Iraq; it’s why we stopped listening to them. That’s what Separation of Powers is all about.

General Kimmons’ comment is particularly disingenuous. Have you been noticing what I’ve been noticing about things that “history tells us” and that “science tells us”…things that are “settled”? They’re called that — because they are anything but. No, I don’t know that “no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices.” I don’t know that at all; in fact, that’s Thing I Doubt #15. It’s been on the Things I Doubt list for a long time now, and since then nobody’s put so much as an ounce of energy into delivering evidence to me to make me stop doubting it. All I’ve seen is a crapload of people who want me to stop doubting it. But there’s no reason to.

I do know Khalid Shaikh Mohammed lasted much longer under waterboarding than most — just two or three minutes. I know the information we got from him, then, was by all accounts, what one could reasonably call “good intelligence.”

If there’s a grain of truth to that, I could get bad intelligence from interrogation subjects for the next ninety-nine years, and I’d still say it’s worthwhile to keep on keepin’-on.

Who hates us because of our torture practices, anywhere on the face of the globe, who’s ready to like us again if we stop? Oh, scratch that — we did stop. Okee dokee: Who thinks we’re wonderful people now, who was not yet so convinced back when the CIA was still doing this? And who still thinks we suck green eggs now, who might just come around and admire us to pieces if we pass Feinstein’s legislation?

Name just one of each.

And what kind of unbridled hubris does it take to use a high-falutin’ but entirely empty phrase like “law of the land” to describe a bunch of politicians who happen to have opinions you like?

Posted in Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | No Comments »

Ah-Bump, Bump, Bump…Another One Bites the Dust

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

And Misha’s pretty pleased about it.

Aden Hashi Ayro was killed when the airstrike struck his house in the central Somali town of Dusamareeb, about 300 miles north of Mogadishu, said Sheik Muqtar Robow, a spokesman for the Islamic al-Shabab militia.
:
Another commander and seven others were also killed, Robow said. Six more people were wounded, two of whom later died, said resident Abdullahi Nor.

Say hello to your buddy Zarqawi, dickhead.

Posted in Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Barracks

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Duffy notices our anti-war leftists have adopted a habit of couching their war protest behind some supposed “concern for the safety and well being of our troops.” And so it is with some bemused and frustrated curiosity on his part, and mine as well, that he links to the following clip:

Reactions from the Olbycrowd? Time will tell. If it was a betting pool I’d be putting my money on the square that says “RIGHT, and this is just further evidence of the corruption of BushHalliCheneyBurtonBlackWater blah blah blah…”

Just because I’ve seen that pattern hold up so well. Nobody who has anything whatsoever to do with these operations can ever actually be helped as long as the current President has the eighteenth letter after his name. Nothing can be done…ever…about anything…except a lot of complaining, and that name “Bush” always has to be stuck in there somewhere. That’s all they’ve done. About anything.

But I have an open mind. Let’s see what they do.

I just find it really amazing. If you’re out here, by which I mean you’re a civilian…good heavens. Lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. Even if we dispense all the stuff for which people pay out of pocket and look only at the things to which they are “entitled.” Labels with big bold letters about MSG in their food, more labels about this-and-that may have been chopped up with machines that might’ve touched peanut products. Braille on the touch-keys of the drive-through ATM. Wheelchair ramps freakin’ everywhere. DO NOT USE THIS HAIRDRYER UNDER RUNNING WATER.

And then, on the other side of that green line, these guys are crapping on toilet seats that are half gone, and sharing their living quarters with big patches of mold. Hello?

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Big Mac Thesis

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Big Mac Heard it on the radio yesterday morning, I knew I’d heard it before, and used my Madd Googel Skilz to hunt it down.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has pointed out what he calls the Big Mac thesis: that no two nations with McDonald’s franchises have ever gone to war. A nation open enough and developed enough to be a profitable home for an established international franchise such as McDonald’s will generally find war an unattractive foreign policy option.

Of course, free trade does not guarantee peace, just as protectionism does not guarantee war. Enduring human vices such as greed, envy, racism and intellectual hubris, combined with the power of government, can overwhelm the beneficial influence of peaceful commerce. But free trade among nations does make war less likely, bringing us a step closer to the promise of peace on earth recorded 2,000 years ago. [emphasis mine]

I found a literal, quotable search string and was able to verify it’s accuracy word-for-word. It seems the original source doesn’t exist on the web; perhaps it was given verbally. I’ll keep looking.

Some of the “Roots Of Terrorism” folks point out problems with it, which exist only in their minds. They see America as an invading force and can’t differentiate between our invasion of Panama and the Iran/Iraq conflicts; and, they argue that Friedman is confusing cause and effect, since war-torn little hellholes aren’t attractive locations for McDonald’s franchisers. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the latter, McDonald’s (or to follow the spirit of the thesis more closely, capitalism) still deserves credit as a preservative agent for peace, if not an inspirational one.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

“The Left Wing…Kind of Admires American Terrorists”

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Fox News Friday night: “The left wing of the Democratic Party, frankly, kind of admires American terrorists.”

By sheer coincidence, I happened to trip across the video after skimming over an article on one of American history’s most important but forgotten icons: Emma Goldman, one of the principle founders of the American genocide movement in the early part of the 20th century, anarchist, terrorist, inspiration for “Emmanuel Goldstein” in George Orwell’s novel 1984. I just thought it was interesting that Emma Goldman sort of…talked…like…someone…any one of a number of people yammering away right about now.

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?

This gets a little bit off-topic, but awhile ago I had written about what an incredibly unloving act it is to tell a person — or a country — to straighten up and fly right, lest some third party be unhappy with them. I had characterized it as an unhusbandly thing to do, asking the reader to imagine a man married to a woman he loves…ostensibly…supposedly. And yet, offering all these verbal mid-course corrections to her for the satisfaction of some third party. If you react to that like I do, it’s a pretty curious thing to you. If the third party happened to be female, you would suspect, quite reasonably, that the fellow was having an affair with her until you saw some pretty solid evidence to the contrary. And even if he wasn’t, he’d be guilty of divided loyalties because a wife — like a country — is someone to whom your allegiance is supposed to be primary. To say “I would personally approve if you did Z instead of Y” is one thing. But to say “You’re losing credibility with X because you’re doing Y instead of Z and you’d better shape up so that X thinks better of you” is to subordinate that fidelity to something else. In my mind, there simply isn’t any getting around it.

I just think it’s interesting that for ninety years now at least, it’s been a favorite tactic of those who would fight the United States from within to say “look how these outside parties despise us!” Can anyone be surprised? Imagine yourself as the foreigner who so despises the United States. You see a country divided against itself; so any warm feelings you might otherwise have toward it, would have to be deeply conflicted. The fifth-column types therefore are afforded the luxury of criticizing from within, generating suspicion and bitterness across the shores, and then using that byproduct to foment more hate as if someone else caused it.

So there’s more of a close kinship between the far-left and American terrorists. The interests are the same, the tactics are the same. When the memberships overlap, as we learned with Obama and Wright, the far left is more than reluctant to disclaim the troubling friendships. They keep them. They use propaganda to distract and to make the issue go away. They’ll do it every time.

But the real damning evidence, in my mind, is in those eleven pages of comments underneath…on the Huffington Post. I scanned over the first page, reaching almost to the bottom, and then I gave up because I didn’t find what I was looking for. What I did find was lots of…

Don’t forget while Newt was was impeaching Bill Clinton, he was cheating on his wife, while she was suffering from cancer in the hospital, he told her he wanted a divorce.
Integrity is not his strong suite.

…and…

I love how these twisted fallacy-clowns are still able to get away with blaming “the leftists” for everything that went down the drain when the Republicans were in control off all 3 branches of gov. for 6 years.

…and it wouldn’t be complete without the ritual “free speech for me but not for thee”:

This pathetic loser should be muzzled and sent to jail for his idiotic comments! The saying “there’s no fool like an old fool “describes this old fool very nicely.He is as fat as a hog these days! What a loser.

Know what I was trying to find?

Someone who would contradict what Newt said. Address the issue directly, and tell us the former House Speaker was incorrect. Near as I can tell, not one left-winger did. I don’t think they will. The “accuse the accuser” methodology is woven into their fabric so tightly and so inseparably, that if anything ugly about The Left comes out they’re reduced to relying on a little bag of tricks to get us to forget about it, rather than confront the allegation directly. I think before they look into anything too deeply, they already know whatever the charge was, is likely to be proven correct. Why else would they become so dependent on this?

Oh, and the other observation I made was something I had been noticing for a few years by now. There is something leftward-tilting, nowadays, about the phrase “I love how.” I’m not entirely sure why this is. Usually when I observe that the left and the right think about things differently, I get shouted down…that must mean I’m wrong. But “I love how” is a very handy thing to say when you’re in a group setting, nobody in there is doing much thinking, and you’re just kind of trying to bully others around to your point of view. When you inspect things with cause-and-effect in mind, thinking with real independence, “I love how” isn’t going to be a useful thing to say at all, so in the last few years when anybody jots down those three words in sequence they almost always turn out to be a leftie.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Fifth Column | No Comments »

The Misadventures of President Talk-Over-Do

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Jimmy Carter did a lot of talking about unemployment, and did very little. He didn’t achieve much.

He did a lot of talking about inflation and did very little. He didn’t achieve much.

He did a lot of talking about Israel fighting with Palestine. The talking aside, he did very little. The problems that region had when he was in office, they still have today.

He did a lot of talking about the energy crisis. He put a solar panel on the White House, but apart from that did very little. He achieved probably less here than he did anyplace else, and it was particularly embarrassing for his defenders and apologists when Reagan got in and suddenly we didn’t have an energy crisis anymore.

From arguing with lib-ruhls on the innernets, which is my own way of talking-over-doing, I’ve found Jimmy Carter has a lot of fans out there. They’re very energetic and enthusiastic; really have their minds made up about him. Near as I can figure, they were all born after he was out of office. I haven’t found any exceptions to this pattern at all. I don’t know if that rule applies to people who write slobbering editorials like this one (H/T: Rick), but Former President Talk-Over-Do is really popular in something called the “international community,” which I’m gathering means “people you find if you grab your passport, fly around the world, and talk ONLY to people who agree…with certain other people.” Dignitaries. Ambassadors. Upper-crusters. People who are safely insulated from doing actual work, or having any of their family get hit with actual shrapnel.

The real issue here seems to me to be a fairly sharply defined, cut-and-dry distinction between talking about a problem and actually solving it. Carter seems inconsistent in this area. I know what he does when he’s the President of the United States…God help me, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. What an incredible education that was. And the nonsense he’s doing now is quite consistent with what he did back then. Lots of talking. No doing. It’s like a rule.

Jimmah But when he poses for these Habitat-For-Humanity photo-ops, over half the time he’s holding a hammer in his hand, pounding a nail. Pound, pound, pound, pound. To which I have to say, waitaminnit. How come he isn’t talking to the nails?

Read some of these slobbery editorials sometime. Just look at the ones that purport to measure “results,” just going through the motions of so measuring. Just look at it.

Carter’s method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him.

Er, yeah…Hussein in Iraq…is that a result? Khadafi in Libya…is that a result? Apparently not. So I guess what the author meant to say was “Carter’s method…beats out any of those who ostracize him…provided you consistently ignore the results of those who ostracize him, and we certainly intend to do that here.”

You know, if this is the kind of comparison being made by the Talk-Over-Do camp then I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that President Carter achieved as little as he did. In fact, if their paradigm made any sense, then none of the nations around the world would have had any military resources at all…and never would’ve in all of human history.

And Carter himself never would have swung a hammer. He’d just be sitting at a conference table with a glass of water for himself, and another one for the nails.

But “at the end of the day” the house would remain a dusty dirty pile of lumber, and that would look very silly. And so I find it interesting. When Jimmy Carter actually wants to get some results, he goes all Ronald-Reagan all over those poor little nails.

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

Tolerance and Intolerance II

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

Once again it is shown: Tolerance and intolerance are mutually-exclusive things. It is an act of intolerance, to tolerate intolerance.

Let all who doubt that, feast their eyes:

This morning, my son asked to go swimming at 10 am. As he was going to play with a friend at 11.30, I agreed to take him early. I checked the pool programme online… and the opening times. Apparently, the pool was open, and no special programmes were being run. So, off we trundled. When I arrived at the pool, I was told that we could not swim in it until 10.45. The reason is that it was being used for ‘Muslim Male Swimming’. This is apparently so every Sunday morning. I couldn’t quite believe that a swimming pool was really institutionalising both gender and religious segregation… Apparently, this is a policy insisted on by Hackney Council, which sets the policy for all Hackney pools.

Or, as I said at the early part of last year:

Whenever someone in a position of authority uses those four words in sequence, “aimed at promoting tolerance,” something that had previously been tolerated, no longer will be, and it is soon to be subjected to intolerance.

Posted in Europeans, Poisoning Western Civilization, The Muslim Question | 1 Comment »

Hundredth Birthday at Hooter’s

Friday, March 14th, 2008

What did I say last weekend?

I started noticing this a few years ago. The oldest living guy, lady, person in the world at any given time…said something about a daily ritual involving exactly one glass of red wine. And it made a deep impression on me that the news stories weren’t trying to play it up, they just saw it as a cute little tidbit of human interest to toss into the story.

The occasion was a clipboard white-coat pocket-protector propeller-beanie egghead story about how alcohol might very well be good for you especially if you want to live longer.

And what do they have to say about Pearl Harbor veteran John Persinger?

“I don’t know how I did it,” he says. “Good living, I guess. A lot of good food. Steaks, fried potatoes. I sip a little Royal Crown now and then.” Don’t get the wrong idea. He means Crown Royal.

Alcohol may be good for you after all. A little here, a little there…maybe you get to live to be a hundred. That’s what the “it” is. He’s in triple-digits now.

And if you’re lucky, you get to celebrate it. At Hooter’s, of course.

At the beginning of the story, it says that although John’s wife, Vi, has predeceased him, if she were around today she wouldn’t have a problem with celebrating at this fine eating establishment. And you know my theory? That’s got as much to do with his longevity as anything — including the whiskey. Marry a woman who “takes care” of you, stopping you from doing anything she doesn’t think should be respectable, even though you damn well know you’d rather be doing it…you can feel the years slipping off your life. Anyway. Maybe that’s part of it and maybe it isn’t, but I’m glad John Persinger’s around. It gives you cause for hope when you see men doing things they enjoy — takin’ a break from the rules-rules-rules, finger-waggling no-guns-allowed save-the-spotted-owls politically-correct nanny-state.

Yay Hooters!

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

Bush to Veto Waterboarding Bill

Monday, March 10th, 2008

So you see, he’s still good for something.

Senator Kennedy manages to get things 180 degrees bass-ackward with surgical-precision accuracy once again. Had his talent been appreciated earlier, Mary Jo might still be alive today.

“President Bush’s veto will be one of the most shameful acts of his presidency,” Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said in a statement Friday. “Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world.”

Yes by all means Ted, let’s just feed the terrorists three hot meals a day and let ’em have their naps like little kids in Kindergarten. Let’s just wait for them to tell us something out of the goodness of their hearts.

Most shameful act of his presidency…what a laugh. From what I can remember, President Bush’s approval ratings dropped like a rock after he started making nice-nice with you, you pompous blowhard.

The pattern remains unbroken: Whenever a hardcore leftist talks about the “rule of law” they’re always talking about something that hurts the country. “Rule of law” is never used to describe something that really is a rule of law…like, say, building a fence to force people to go through proper channels when they want to come here. That would have something to do with a “rule of law.”

Oh, and uh…what’s up with this “eyes of the world” stuff, huh? What’s a United States senator care about that? Does he represent the people of Massachusetts in our federal government, or does he represent a bunch of foreigners? Because, you know, if I’m not mistaken I think he took an oath that addresses that question directly.

Posted in Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 6 Comments »

Will Win This Yet

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

An optimistic tone over at the Rottie’s place thanks to Crunchie.

As well as a crystal-clear distillation of what exactly we’re supposed to be doing over in Mesopotamia…and which, it seems, we are indeed doing. So no, we’re not there to steal oil and kill brown people. In fact, if those are indeed the stated purposes then we need some hearings pronto, because we’re doing a pretty lousy job of it.

If you’re a screeching Lunar Chiroptera the only reason we went to war in Iraq was for the oil, or to kill brown people, or yada yada. But anyone who paid attention and had an IQ above explosive diarrhea, knew that Iraq was the first step in the long marathon of actually winning the strategic war against Islamofascism. You see, we had two choices. We could play whack a mole from now until doomsday, killing terrorists wherever we could find them, taking out one cell at a time, at a huge long term cost in lives, or we could go after their “hearts and minds” and eventually kill the ideology that spawns them.

The occasion for this commentary is, of all things, the Gray Lady, linked by Blackfive.

After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

Abe Greenwald has a prize-winning commentary about this…

It is impossible not to infer that the Bush Doctrine and the commitment of the men and women in uniform has facilitated this shift. Far from “creating more terrorists” as the failed cliché goes, the war has helped to nurture an appreciation for liberty among Iraqi youth. A 24-year-old Iraqi college student is quoted as saying she loved Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11. Now, after seeing the efforts of religious leaders to curtail her daily freedoms, she rejects extremism entirely. While George Bush’s critics can make no useful connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, this young woman has no problem doing so.

People who oppose the Iraq war, by & large, also oppose conservatism. When they are left to describe in detail the conservatism they want to resist, invariably they give a perfectly functional line-by-line description of the Islamofascism we would go back to tolerating endlessly were these anti-conservatives calling the shots. Something out of the seventh century…bad for freedom…oppressive to women…steamrolling over the will of the people…a theocracy…a moldering patriarchal layer of insulated & isolated martinets imposing draconian punishments, out of touch with the common people.

It’s like something in one half of the world is perfectly alright and ought not be messed with — when you have the same thing, as they see it, closer to home, suddenly it’s time to bear any burden, pay any price, fling any rabid spittle, to overthrow it and bury it. But if something that really does fulfill all their nasty nouns and adjectives, flourishes east of Greenwich…well, that’s all good. Let it be.

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

Cheap Talk

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Neo-neocon is inspired by He Who Walks On Water and wants to dialog with our enemies, to quote herself on the subject of useless and potentially dangerous talk:

…even therapists must acknowledge that there are times when talking does no good, when therapy is inappropriate, and when the tools of the trade (”the talking cure”) not only don’t work but can be harmful. But Pelosi and Lantos and so many others seem to think of dialogue as something magical and universally appropriate:

…however objectionable, unfair, and inaccurate many of [Ahmadinejad’s] statements are, it is important that we have a dialogue with him.

Why? Why is it important? In order to feel that we are peaceful and good people? In order to empower him to think that we are fools? In order to allow him to buy time while he develops his nuclear weaponry? In order to give him greater prestige in the eyes of the world? In order to afford him propaganda opportunities and photo ops?

You know, the subject of talking actually being dangerous makes me think about the whole WMD argument with Iraq. There are so many people in my face, now that our incumbent President has an approval rating down in the teens somewhere, sneering at me that “IRAQ HAD NO WMD!!!!111!!!!ELEVENTY!!!”

And time after time, all I have to do is calmly ask them just how much time Iraq had to get rid of any WMD they might’ve had lying around, and I get back this deer in the headlights stare. Every time.

It’s like asking someone with a “family history” of supposedly unavoidable obesity, what her grocery shopping list looks like. Or what she had for dinner last night. OOPS. One question. Changes everything.

In Iraq’s case, the answer — presuming Saddam Hussein was a chronic procrastinator, and even that does not seem to be the case — is one hundred eighty-six days. That’s the length of time between President Bush’s “You Guys Are Teetering On The Brink Of Absolute Uselessness” speech to the United Nations, and the actual invasion.

In the space of time between those two events, you know what we did?

We talked.

It ended with France imposing a hard-line veto on the Security Council. America got a bum rap for not “listening” to “allies,” but Saddam got plenty enough time to flush his weed when the cops came a-knockin’ because we made the mistake of doing exactly that. We participated in a dialog. France refused to participate, and for that, I don’t recall France getting a bum rap at all.

That’s the thing about useless talk. It tends to be more than useless; it tends to be dangerous.

And that’s the thing about dialog, compromise, negotiation. The people who insist everyone else is supposed to do it, tend to be the ones who bring it to a screeching halt. And nobody notices.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

Memo For File LVI

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

This week President Bush said something interesting about the democrats who are resisting an extension to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

“I suspect they see a financial gravy train,” Bush said, referring to lawyers pursuing class-action lawsuits against telephone companies who have turned over information to the government.

One indicator that he might be right about that, is that this isn’t the first time we’ve been arguing about this electronic surveillance. The most recent big ol’ melee occurred in early 2006 when former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez went up to the hill to testify about it, at which time the Old Gray Lady summarized things in that cool, clear-headed, balanced way she has…

Spying on Ordinary Americans
Published: January 18, 2006

In times of extreme fear, American leaders have sometimes scrapped civil liberties in the name of civil protection. It’s only later that the country can see that the choice was a false one and that citizens’ rights were sacrificed to carry out extreme measures that were at best useless and at worst counterproductive. There are enough examples of this in American history – the Alien and Sedition Acts and the World War II internment camps both come to mind – that the lesson should be woven into the nation’s fabric. But it’s hard to think of a more graphic example than President Bush’s secret program of spying on Americans.

I like that headline the best.

Point is, I find it strange that the civil-protection battleground has been left untrampled in this issue until the second month of 2008. That just reeks of quid pro quo, doesn’t it? Okay Mister President, we’ll help you gut the “civil liberties” of “ordinary Americans” like a big bloated fish, just pay us back by opening a hunting season for our friends the trial lawyers.

Because you know what world we democrats live in, Mister President. You know litigation is the one industry we adore. You know these are the “corporations” that, in our world, aren’t “greedy.”

But maybe I’m reading something into it. Maybe there’s a good reason why, in 2006, spying on a cell phone conversation was just-plain-wrong, don’t-do-it, If We Let This Happen The Terrorists Have Already Won — and in 2008 it has nothing to do with principle, instead it’s all about tral lawyers collecting pelts. Maybe there’s a perfectly legitimate explanation.

Or maybe not —

As Congress debates giving immunity to phone companies that assisted the government in tracking terrorist communications, trial lawyers prosecuting those phone companies have poured money into the coffers of Democratic senators, representatives and causes.

Court records and campaign contribution data reveal that 66 trial lawyers representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against these phone companies donated at least $1.5 million to Democrats, including 44 current Democratic senators.

All of the trial lawyers combined only contributed $4,250 to Republicans in comparison. Those contributions were made to: Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), Rep. Tom Davis (Va.), Sen. Lindsay Graham (S.C.), Sen. Mel Martinez, and Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.).

One maxed-out lawyer donor, Matthew Bergman of Vashon, Washington, has given more than $400,000 in his name to Democrats. In the 2008 cycle alone he donated $78,300 to various campaigns.

Bergman’s law firm’s website says he also specializes in “identifying viable asbestos defendants, locating evidence and developing legal theories to hold offending companies accountable.” In 2004, his firm split a $4.3 billion payout from Halliburton with seven other law firms. $30 million of that was delivered to their firm’s asbestos victim clients.

I think it’s high time we had a serious debating or reckoning about what exactly an “Ordinary American” is. If I’m born in Pakistan to a Jordanian father and a Palestinian mother, grow up in Saudi Arabia, get recruited by Al Qaeda, work my way up in the structure to the point where Osama bin Laden trusts me to do some plotting with other terrorist officers over a cell phone which, while I’m using it in Syria, sends some signals over a network where American telecommunications interests could reveal a record of my calls to the CIA — maybe not getting sued for it — um…does that make me an “Ordinary American” even though I’ve never personally been to America?

It sounds like that should be off-topic from what the squabbling is about. But I don’t see anyone stepping up and saying that.

It seems what they want me to think, is that my civil liberties are in peril. Because Sprint (my carrier) might clue someone in on my text messages and my phone calls. If this is done, I’m told, life will become dreary and gray just like in that 1984 commercial before the girl throws the hammer into the movie screen.

That argument has one glaring problem that is terminal to it. Like all other non-stupid people, I don’t see the cell phone that way. I see it as a public venue. When I send a text message, I see it as a wad of bytes meandering toward someone who is familiar by way of a gazillion and one complete strangers who are not.

Nobody with a reputation worth defending has told me a cell phone call or a text message is equivalent to a face-to-face sitdown in a soundproof, empty room. Not one single time. And so when my sweetie and I are both working our asses off and I need to schedule a “date” by a text message, I get coy. I hint at things. I imply. I wink. And if it’s the day after and the date went extremely well, I save it until I get home. I don’t do pillow talk by way of text message.

For these reasons, I’m resistant to the people who are legitimately concerned about Verizon or Cingular releasing their records to the CIA. Yes, I do think they have something to hide. And as far as the people who are just worked up into a lather about the Government spying on their “private” conversations, I don’t think they’re “ordinary” either.

I think they lack common sense.

Because a genuinely “private” conversation doesn’t belong there.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Incumbent Scandals, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 4 Comments »

This Is Good XLVIII

Friday, February 29th, 2008

This is better than good. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve read all week, as well as successfully making the most salient and understated point…

My Solution to Iraq Is to Never Have Gone There
An Editorial by Senator Barack Obama

Iraq continues to be a serious problem, and the Bush administration has done nothing but increase the problem and cause unnecessary deaths. It is a mess, but I have a solution: I would never have gone there.

The Iraq War will be a big problem to inherit, but it would not be if we hadn’t have gone there. That’s why that is my solution.
:
As for Al Qaeda in Iraq, I don’t think they would be a problem if we hadn’t had gone. Maybe they already were there and working with some support from Saddam, but I still think not having gone there is a risk worth taking. You may worry about all the terrorists there and whether they have intentions for attacking America, but you wouldn’t if we hadn’t had gone.
:
The future. And not just any future; a future where we look forward and say, “We shouldn’t have gone to Iraq.”

Posted in Challenger Scandals, Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Obamamania | 1 Comment »

On the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Statement from President Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998 on signing the Iraq Liberation Act.

Today I am signing into law H.R. 4655, the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.” This Act makes clear that it is the sense of the Congress that the United States should support those elements of the Iraqi opposition that advocate a very different future for Iraq than the bitter reality of internal repression and external aggression that the current regime in Baghdad now offers.

Let me be clear on what the U.S. objectives are:

The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region.

The United States favors an Iraq that offers its people freedom at home. I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq’s history or its ethnic or sectarian make-up. Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else.

The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.

My Administration has pursued, and will continue to pursue, these objectives through active application of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions. The evidence is overwhelming that such changes will not happen under the current Iraq leadership.

In the meantime, while the United States continues to look to the Security Council’s efforts to keep the current regime’s behavior in check, we look forward to new leadership in Iraq that has the support of the Iraqi people. The United States is providing support to opposition groups from all sectors of the Iraqi community that could lead to a popularly supported government.

Clinton talked. Bush did.

Posted in History, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Justification for Invasion | 3 Comments »

CAIR Loses Tax-Exempt Status

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Via Always On Watch, via The Amboy Times.

Somewhere in the dead of night, without any known announcement from the organization, the highly controversial Washington DC based group CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations has apparently lost the tax status which enabled it to conduct lobbying activities. The organization was registered for many years under the IRS tax code 501c(4) which allowed the organization to conduct lobbying activities, campaign funding, legislation and candidate backing, and many other government and litigation related activities. A 501c(4) tax status is very difficult to maintain, requiring quarterly public filings, and is very regulated under strict lobbying laws, yet is the most powerful tax status for organizations wishing to influence government. CAIR, who was under this status, had numerous members of their leadership indicted on terrorism related charges in the past, and had received large amounts of funding from questionable foreign sources. Many critics of the group often wondered how CAIR was able to hold on to such a highly critiqued tax status such as 501c(4).

Hope on the mend…?

Posted in Fifth Column | No Comments »

On Liberal Morality

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

I had cited in the seven lies I was told, as a boy in public school, presumably being told the same things that many other kids were told, the canard that “Republicans and Democrats want to get the same things done but have different ideas of how to go about doing it.” Post-high-school-graduation, I have seen very little evidence of this. Higher standard of living, maybe? Republicans and democrats both want that? I dunno about even that one. There are a lot of Republicans, it seems to me, who take the “money is the root of all evil” thing a little too seriously (chopping off the “love of” at the beginning of that cliche). And the democrats who want to raise standards of living, I’ve notice, always seem to want to target certain favored classes of people. With other classes not quite so smiled-upon, an increased standard of living is, in their minds, an evil thing.

One of the wonderful things about America, in my mind, is that our ideological split is rather singular in nature — us on the one side, them on the other. This gives rise to some unhealthy things, such as people in both camps who are tempted to cross the fourth milestone to insanity, essentially insisting “nobody from my tribe can have a bad idea, and nobody from the other tribe can ever have a good one.” That isn’t good at all. But consider the alternative to a single ideological split: Many of the same. Ugh. You think it’s hard, now, for an election campaign to be run on issues rather than personalities. I’ll take one single big fat chalk line down the middle of the house, thank you very much.

But here’s another wonderful thing about America’s split between conservatives and liberals: It goes right down to the definition of morality. This means you can find decent people on both side of the line — we aren’t quibbling about whether to be moral, we’re disagreeing about how to test it. In that sense, the old falsehood has a kernel of truth to it (as do all potent and convincing falsehoods). We all — or most, anyway — want to be good people. How do we define it?

I’m amused that this piece that leans right contains essentially the same phraseology as this other piece that leans left…”Liberal morality is a very alien thing…” versus “…social conservatives frequently take stances that liberals find baffling, if not downright evil.”

Now here is a differential across the divide: Once we do have morality defined in a way that makes us comfortable, what do we think of people who fail to adhere to our standards?

I think Larry Elder summed it up very capably when he said,

Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

The column in question concerns Elders’ encounter in a barbershop with a fellow patron who was shocked to learn Elder had voted to re-elect George W. Bush. It is titled “Open-Minded Liberals”…with a question mark at the end.

The older I get, the more befuddled I am that this “open-minded” nonsense ever got started. It is one of the few mysteries in life that my unhealthy childhood television diet back in the seventies, might provide some assistance in unlocking. I recall it was very fashionable for television networks to release pastiches of “All in the Family” in one boring episode or another, setting up a central character to be good-hearted “meathead” and another marginal character, often a one-time-only character, to be “Archie” except not so lovable. It became ritualistic for the central character to deliver some caustic, dismissive line in one of the last scenes while the canned studio audience sound effects would cheer wildly, condemning the marginal character’s racism or, occasionally, sexism. The marginal character would give this look downward at his toes like “aw gee, I suck so much” and he’d never be seen again.

It was boring and unimaginative immediately. It didn’t get to be tragically funny until years later. Half-hour sitcoms telling us what values to have? Nowadays we have cable television shows like “Desperate Housewives” or “Six Feet Under” or “Dead Like Me” telling us how to look at life…which is another problem…but overall, a vast improvement.

I digress. The point, here, is that stale comedy shows from the era of double-digit inflation and gas rationing, represent the last time I have ever seen liberal ideas given even the semblance of “open-mindedness.” How our left-wing friends got all twisted around from tolerance, to anything-but, is a delicious chronicling of irony. It’s as if they set themselves up for it from Day One. Like their bumper sticker slogan might as well have been…”we all need to be respectful of people who aren’t like us…and we have no room anywhere for anybody who disagrees.” Or how did Austin Powers’ father put it? Something like “There’s two things I can’t stand, people who are intolerant of other cultures…and the Dutch.”

Discarding all the occasions where intolerance would necessitate some form of action, I haven’t seen the people we call “liberals” tolerate anything outside their perimeter of favored cultural sexual-preference and skin-color baubles since…well…ever. Their morality seems to have something to do with intolerance, if anything. And the intolerance is a complicated thing. It has at least two tiers. They’re intolerant of terrorists…they’re intolerant of conservatives…you don’t exactly have to be a seasoned scholar of modern popular culture to realize these are two entirely different things. There is a commitment to making sure the conservatives don’t get their way. To make sure of it. And if the conservatives do indeed get away with some shenanigans, why, vengeance will surely belong to the liberals someday.

Myself and others have thought, very often, how things would look now if liberals were as committed to thwarting terrorism as they were to thwarting conservatism.

And how long do you have to wait for a liberal to, even in the midst of denying what’s above, justify it nevertheless? Something about your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack being thirty gazillion to one? When we waterboard we’re worse than they are? Aren’t those favored liberal talking points now?

Anyway, all that is just a prelude to what follows below. I was having a discussion over at Phil’s place which led to an interesting off-line. The subject isn’t quite so much liberalism, it’s more like very mild forms of egalitarianism…the minimalist sort that formed, among other things, the American experiment itself. Phil was referring to the last 200 years or so in terms of how tyrants come to power, and I’ve always been rather interested with what came before the 200-year period. What started all this, I wonder? The storming of the Bastille? The subject immediately under discussion is what Rush Limbaugh sometimes calls “Gettin Even Withem Ism” (it’s a phonetic expression and I have no idea how one correctly spells it), which by itself is a curiosity. Listen to liberals for awhile, especially Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see it’s almost compulsory to call out some bad guy who’s due to be taken down a peg or two. One gets the impression that their brand of liberalism cannot survive long without this essential element, not even for a breath or two.

That has always struck me as odd and strange. If we’re trying to achieve an open, tolerant, transparent and diverse society, why we could just babble away about that noble vision for months at a time without calling out any villains, right?

Today’s liberals can connect bad guys to anything you want to discuss. Health crises, like AIDS. Weather phenomena like Hurricane Katrina. I mean…you just name it. Maybe this is why Barack Obama is kicking Hillary’s ass lately; maybe the liberals themselves are just sick of it. That’d be a good thing. It would imply that like the rest of us, they have a hunger for solutions and are ready to subordinate the distribution of blame to a decidedly inferior priority. That they’re finally starting to grow up a little bit. To think about becoming what, in my lifetime, they have always bragged about being: “progressive.”

But on the subject of morality, I thought this DailyKOS writer did a pretty good job of drawing up the difference:

Liberal Christian morality differs from conservative Christian morality in that liberal Christians don’t look at the Bible and see rules but instead see guidance for how to think about morality and justice. Right and wrong is not determined by God, but God’s morality is based on fundamental truths of right and wrong. Conservative Christians criticize this thinking as non-Biblical, because it excludes sections of the Bible that are clearly rules-based. Liberal Christians have a number of responses, including the idea that God is constantly trying to get us to change and move beyond what we once were.

If I understand this right, the liberal view of morality is not superior or inferior, but rather dynamic instead of static. It defines continual self-improvement as one of the most important pillars, perhaps the all-important pillar. We are a continuously self-improving thing, designed to discern for ourselves what is right and what is wrong.

Maybe that’s why liberals don’t like us to talk about terrorism. It highlights self-contradictory things about this that would normally be kept in the dark, and it lights up those contradictions rather brilliantly. If we are in a process of evolution, becoming a progressively more moral species, relegating to the realm of wrongness things that were previously thought right, we can cheerfully avoid ethical conundrums right up until the point where we encounter some “missing links” such as the terrorists who murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001. If we’re being socially tolerant, then we need to respect other cultures, and that includes the decision to live in the seventh century. If some other culture wants to live as million-year-old chimpanzees on the spectrum of moral evolution, and the rest of us our in a process of relegating previously-right things to the realm of wrongness, that would mean these primitives are living in a time when the acts we consider wrong, are in fact right. And if that includes murdering thousands of office workers and bystanders to make a point about our foreign policies, then the potential exists that the September 11 attacks fall into the zone of “aw, that’s quite alright” — at least in the perspective of those who committed them. And we are honor-bound to respect that.

If you want to avoid that conclusion, then you have to at least allow for the idea that some issues of right and wrong are absolute. And if you want to allow for that, then you have to embrace at least some of…oh, dear…that awful, dreaded conservatism.

Well, it’s widely accepted that moderation is a good thing. So maybe that’s how the liberals justify it. But when you listen to liberals and their opinions of conservatives for very long, it doesn’t seem like this can be the case. They seem to think of conservatism the way Yoda spoke of the Dark Side of the Force…you know…once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

They are the doctor’s hands, scrubbed and ready for surgery. We’re the filth, slime and muck. They are not to come into contact with us. It’s exactly what Larry Elder saw in that barbershop.

I was looking around for something that would more reasonably explain all this, and I stumbled across this piece that invoked images of the Bastille all over again, and made a brilliant point besides.

The Nature of Liberal Morality
By John “Birdman” Bryant

In contrast to conservative morality, liberalism is based on the premise that Reason, rather than Tradition, should be the criterion of good. Ironically, however, the first historical instance in which Reason was made the basis of morality — the French Revolution — not only witnessed some of the most immoral acts ever performed by man, but saw Reason literally transformed into the god of a religion thru the efforts of Hebert and others, so that Reason simply became a different form of Tradition.

I know if I tried to be a liberal, I’d make a very bad one. This notion of moral definition that is dynamic across time, has always troubled me greatly, and I suspect it troubles everybody else too — even liberals.

I do something marginally terrible, such as jaywalking or littering, and fifty years later my grandson is busted for exactly the same crime. We both go through the judicial process and receive, half a century apart, radically different judgments. Both those episodes are alright? How can that be? If that is the case, what is to be said if the crime for which we are each respectfully busted, me now, him five decades from now, is far more serious? What if we each kill someone under identical situations? I serve 25-to-life and my grandson gets out after two and a half years? Or vice-versa? Neither scenario carries some kind of miscarriage of justice? How can that possibly be?

If that is indeed the case, what are we to think about slavery — back when it was actually practiced here? We’d have to grant some kind of approving nod to it, wouldn’t we? Or at least, fail to condemn it. And if we fail to condemn that, what else would we have to say is alright…so long as it comes from a respectfully primitive time.

The author goes on to quote himself, and finds an exception to a rule that previously left such exception unmentioned:

“The principal axiom — and fallacy — of the philosophy which in the present day goes by the name of “liberalism” is that any given human life possesses infinite value. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ eagerness to feed the starving third-world masses, in spite of the fact that such feeding will not stop starvation, but will make it all the worse once an infusion of food has made it possible for those who are starving to add to their numbers. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ abhorrence of the death penalty, even for those persons who have committed the most heinous and despicable crimes. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ opposition to war, even when the enemy is clearly opposed to the democratic principles which make the liberals’ self-righteously resounding protests possible. And it is this axiom which so arouses the liberals’ anger when scientists, in the study of their carefully-gathered statistics, conclude that some racial, ethnic or other groups may be inferior to others, thereby implying that — since the value of some people is less than that of others — that therefore not all those values are indeed infinite. “There is, however, a notable exception to the above axiom, which is that liberals, in favoring a woman’s right to abortion, do not seem particularly concerned with the lives of the unborn. I am not sure why this exception has arisen — or indeed that it is an exception, as liberals may well be split on the issue — but my suspicion is that it has much to do with liberal opposition to religion, and particularly the liberal distaste for the views of religious fundamentalists on abortion, who maintain that every fetus possesses that apparently-imaginary entity known as a ‘soul’.

Personally, I think that might explain part of it, but there’s got to be a whole lot more to it than that. Some liberals are religious, after all.

The relationship between liberals, and oppression of humans by other humans, is a curious one. They outwardly deplore it, but as we saw with the Iraq war, they also condemn bitterly those who interfere with it. It’s kind of like the big brother who pronounces nobody can ever touch a hair on his little brother’s head — except him.

Except the big-brother-bully occasionally has to translate his words into action, while our liberals seem opposed to doing that or allowing anybody else to do it either. Whaddya get when you cross bullying with laziness…liberalism.

Cause of Global Warming The abortion issue has always seemed, to me, to have something to do with a minimalist definition of what people are. I reach this conclusion by observing it from a high level, from which I can simultaneously observe the euthanasia issue, the death penalty issue, the evolution-versus-intelligent-design flap, and the “don’t emit carbon ManBearPig” thing. Across all five of these issues, it seems the one axiom that earns opposition and condemnation from our liberals, is the one that says we matter. That we are here to accomplish something wonderful and great. Five times out of five, this dictum wanders into arguments that our liberals cannot allow to stand.

And you could power large cities off the energy they arouse in opposing them.

One can’t help but wonder if “global warming” isn’t caused, over the last ten years, primarily by liberal outrage. I guess when you work really hard over a lifetime at being ordinary, you get extra-extra-ticked-off if you see someone else trying to be extraordinary. Maybe that’s what liberalism is.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, ManBearPig, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, The Evil Men Do, The Muslim Question | 3 Comments »

Salvage’s Frosting Diet

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Salvage is Canadian, but I’d like to make it clear at this time that there are other Canadians who are not like him. He’s been hanging around Rick’s blog ever since Zossima dropped out of it…which is interesting…giving us an almost-daily education about sarcasm. How it is open to abuse. How pure sarcasm, can be used to prop up just about any silly statement. Convincingly. Somewhat convincingly when coming from salvage…perhaps more convincingly when manipulated by someone more capable.

It’s worth keeping in mind, I think. Some folks are known to use sarcasm to decide anything and everything. They are strangers to genuine exchanges of ideas. They are the “Daily Show” generation — those who were brought up under the belief that when they were watching certain entertainment programs, they were watching “news.” Who is to blame them for thinking any idea worth pondering, should fit onto a bumper sticker or within a single lungful of air?

Sarcasm has its place. But in my view, that place is as a garnish. Or cake frosting. We got a lot of young people walking around, I see, who substitute that frosting in place of the cake, the sherbet, the Hors D’Oeuvres, the vegetables, and the entree.

Their “diet” is as far away from healthy as you can get. And at Brutally Honest, we get a reminder of this every time we watch salvage do his “dining.”

Well, yesterday salvage took a break from the bucket o’ frosting and compromised with his mommy to chow down on a hunk of muffin…or sugar cookie…or something…with lots of sarcastic frosting spread all over it, of course. Can’t take a break from it, you know — in no other context, can his absurd ideas enjoy even the appearance of legitimacy. At issue was the case of Ezra Levant’s case before the Human Rights Commission.

A complaint has been filed with Canada’s HRC, which has lately become notorious. The point of the complaint is a selection of those horribly offensive cartoons about the prophet Muhammed, of which Levant is the publisher.

Van der Leun put up the YouTube clips from Levant, and then Rick linked to Van der Leun. Rick wondered aloud how it could be justified that this story is ignored, by the very same folks who “want to trumpet the loss of civil rights at the hands of Bushitler and his co-chimp Cheney and other ‘neocons’.”

…and salvage jumped in to provide an answer to that.

Yes, the elimination of habeas corpus and the indefinite detention certainly compares to the undemocratic hell that is a Human Rights Commission hearing and there is no doubt that Ezra Levant will be sentenced to life in the Maple Syrup mines.

Actually the Human Rights Commission is just following their mandate, someone made a complaint and now they’re investigating it. Sometimes people make stupid complaints but they still have to be followed up.

And yes, this is a stupid one you can tell because it’s gotten you wingnuts all worked up which is always fun to watch.

So keep it up, and when the Commission finds there isn’t any grounds and it ends? I’m sure you and your wingnut buddies will talk about that with equal enthusiasm.

Nah, just kidding, you’ll just find another molehill to shriek your fear and loathing at.

It’s clear to me that salvage didn’t watch the clips — that, or if he did, the point went whistling at Mach 1 right over what passes for his noggin.

See, when the argument is made about President Bush’s “elimination of habeas corpus and the indefinite detention,” this actually resonates with fair-minded moderate folks such as myself, even if it doesn’t completely convince us, because that says what we have is a decision we are accustomed to having made in the public spotlight, with transparency, publicity, and oversight, suddenly made in what might be thought of as a “black box.” We find the argument compelling, even if we don’t find it altogether convincing for a number of reasons. Some of the problems have to do with the nature of military operations. We have “detainees” captured on the field of battle…should the detainees be released to our court system? Can it not be said that the rights of the detainees have been violated, if this does not come to pass?

The argument isn’t dismissed lightly. Folks like salvage, gorging themselves on the frosting of sarcasm, think it is — because it does not triumph. The grownups, who understand things like roughage and protein and vitamins, and therefore do not dine on frosting alone, have other things to consider…

…like, for example, what laws have these “detainees” broken? The most-liberal guy where I work came up with an interesting point: He’s opposed to releasing detainees into the legal system, because regardless of his feelings about pre-emptive military strikes, he certainly doesn’t want America to be empowered to go around the world arresting people. On that, he and I agree. And then there’s the matter of what a legal system does with prisoners, who are found to have not violated any laws (or, more to the point, cannot be proven to have violated any laws).

Those prisoners have to be released, right?

It just doesn’t seem to fit the situation. It would appear we have found the reason why some things are treated as legal issues, and other things aren’t. The legal process is all about “rights,” whereas in thousands of years of war, nobody with a respected viewpoint on the matter ever declared the day-to-day business of war to have much to do with rights.

Saying so, doesn’t make you a right-winger or a Bush-bot. It makes you a grownup. But as salvage helps to remind us, lot of the folks talking about this stuff now aren’t really grownups.

But getting back to the back-room nature of how the Bush administration has been dealing with the detainees. I think we can all agree, at the grownup dining table at least, that the detainees do have some rights — and that whatever these rights are, they ought to fall short of the rights needed to run wild & free and make trouble. And so even though we don’t bow to the wisdom of the frosting-kids, as reasonable adults we are bothered by the idea that people in authority are deciding things and their decisions are not open ones.

Salvage and the rest of the frosting-kids, fresh off of making that argument, and festering in their disappointment that this one argument didn’t determine the outcome…then indulge in the unbelievable, which I’m pretty sure is the point Rick was making. They look upon the closed-door proceedings of the HRC — not the hearings we are able to browse on YouTube, thanks to the uploading by the defendant himself, but the process by which these decisions are handed down — they understand the rubber is going to meet the road in whatever way it’s gonna. And this raises no red flags with them.

To state it a little more succinctly. It is in the nature of a military tribunal that oversight is limited — that’s supposed to be an awful thing. Oversight seems to be missing altogether from what the HRC does…it’s not immediately obvious how the HRC finds it necessary to function without it, but it’s missing anyway…and that’s perfectly alright?

It should be noted the care involved in choosing the word “limited.” It does not mean “non-existent.” Far from it. At least, that is the case where the military tribunals are concerned.

President George W. Bush has ordered that certain detainees imprisoned at the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay were to be tried by military commissions. This decision sparked controversy and litigation. On June 29, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the power of the Bush administration to conduct military tribunals to suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay.

In December of 2006, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was passed and authorized the establishment of military commissions subject to certain requirements and with a designated system of appealing those decisions. A military commission system addressing objections identified by the U.S. Supreme Court was then established by the Department of Defense. Litigation concerning the establishment of this system is ongoing. As of June 13, 2007, the appellate body in this military commission system had not yet been constituted.

Three cases had been commenced in the new system, as of June 13, 2007. One detainee, David Matthew Hicks plea bargained and was sent to Australia to serve a nine month sentence. Two case were dismissed without prejudice because the tribunal believed that the men charged had not been properly determined to be persons within the commission’s jurisdiction on June 4, 2007, and the military prosecutors asked the commission to reconsider that decision on June 8, 2007. One of the dismissed cases involved Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was captured at age 15 in Afghanistan after having killed a U.S. soldier with a grenade. The other dismissed case involved Salim Ahmed Hamdan who is alleged to have been Osama bin Laden’s driver and is the lead plaintiff in a key series of cases challenging the military commission system. The system is in limbo until the jurisdictional issues addressed in the early cases are resolved.

This has always bothered me about the “eliminating habeas corpus” argument. I remember all the crowing and champagne-glass-clinking when the Supreme Court decision was handed down. Oooh, we’re so wonderful and Bush sucks so much, because the Supreme Court showed him what-for. And then the process is reformed to accommodate the decision…and then is challenged anew…and heard in court some more.

That’s oversight. It’s there, or it isn’t. If you’re victorious in getting it installed, or using it, or exploiting it, and you want to shout from the highest hilltops that you had your victory against the Imperial Galactic Bush Administration and bask in your wonderful-ness — seems to me, the option to grumble about lack of that openness and oversight at some later time, has been jettisoned. You can’t have it both ways.

Okay now if the issue is comparing the military tribunal situation to the Human Rights Commission hearings…and it seems to be, because if I’m reading it right, Rick laid down a challenge and then cupcake-frosting-boy went and picked it up…it’s fair to ask: Does the HRC have as much transparency and oversight as this military tribunal process — which I’m told has none, but clearly does have plenty?

We’re not off to a good start here. I would cite as Exhibit A, Levant’s seventh clip, “What Was Your Intent?”

LEVANT: Why is that a relevant question?

MCGOVERN: Under section 31a, it talks about the intention…purpose…we like to get some background, as well.

LEVANT: Is it, you’d like to get some background? Or does this determine anything? We publish what we publish. The words speak for themselves. Are you saying that one answer is wrong and one answer is right? Is a certain answer contrary to law?

MCGOVERN: No.

LEVANT: So if I were to say — hypothetically — that the purpose was to instill hatred, incite hatred, and to cause offense, are you saying that’s an acceptable answer?

MCGOVERN: I have to look at it in the context of all the information, and determine if it was indeed.

You have to admire the way Levant is handling this. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say he is Henry Rearden sprung to life, leaping straight out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged:

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“What?”

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, this is the legally appointed court to try this particular category of crime.”

“I do not recognise my action as a crime.”

“But you have admitted that you have broken our regulations controlling the sale of your Metal.”

“I do not recognise your right to control the sale of my Metal.”

“Is it necessary for me to point out that your recognition was not required?”

“No. I am fully aware of it and I am acting accordingly.”

He noted the stillness of the room. By the rules of the complicated pretence which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.

“Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?” asked the judge.

“No. I am complying with the law – to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defence is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself.”

“A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognised by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it.”

“Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle – the principle of the public good.”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to e their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

A group of seats at the side of the courtroom was reserved for the prominent visitors who had come from New York to witness the trial. Dagny sat motionless and her face showed nothing but a solemn attention, the attention of listening with the knowledge that the flow of his words would determine the course of her life. Eddie Willers sat beside her. James Taggart had not come. Paul Larkin sat hunched forward, his face thrust out, pointed like an animal’s muzzle, sharpened by a look of fear now turning into malicious hatred. Mr. Mowen, who sat beside him, was a man of greater innocence and smaller understanding; his fear was of a simpler nature; he listened in bewildered indignation and he whispered to Larkin, “Good God, now he’s done it! Now he’ll convince the whole country that all businessmen are enemies of the public good!”

“Are we to understand,” asked the judge, “that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?”

“I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

“What … do you mean?”

“I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.”

“Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognise its right to do so?”

“Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes – by refusing to buy my product.”

“We are speaking of … other methods.”

“Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters – and I recognise it as such.”

“Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself.”

“I said that I would not defend myself.”

“But this is unheard of! Do you realise the gravity of the charge against you?”

“I do not care to consider it.”

“Do you realise the possible consequences of your stand?”

“Fully.”

“It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Impose it.”

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. “This is unprecedented,” he said.

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no … yes … that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a –” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defence!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen,” said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

I did a quick check at the Fallaci award nominee page to see if Levine was nominated, as I was. Negatori. He should’ve been, at least next year if not this one. I’ll make a point to see what I can do about that next cycle.

It seems to me, at the very least, what we have here is a “black box” process for producing an outcome. I think even McGovern would agree with that — and with that, what we have is a breakdown in the ability to ensure consistency across the cases that come up before the Human Rights Commission.

McGovern is being deliberately evasive on the matter of how intent factors into the decision. She’s being asked about this directly. She has no answer. This is as valid a delineation as any other, in my mind at least, between free and un-free societies. The authorities are going to meet in a back room someplace and decide what’s what. Will they do that with any kind of consistency? With “equal protection,” as we call it down here?

Who knows? Who cares?

With nothing to hold the authorities to consistency and the provision of equal protection, they can show whatever favoritism they want to. What is to stop them? What oversight? Nevermind oversight…what opportunity to inspect, to criticize?

But of course this is not Guantanamo. These are full-fledged citizens of the country within whose government the HRC functions — not unlawful combatants.

Rick has issued the challenge, and frosting-boy salvage has failed in trying to accept it. He has no answer. His competence in following the facts and forming reasoned opinions about them, has been called into question. That has failed, or else his impartiality has failed. Maybe both.

Let’s pause for a minute or two to ponder how many people just like this are walking around — as free as you & me — spouting their nonsense, with “undecideds” listening to them, taking them seriously. It’s not a pretty picture. We have a multi-national conglomerate of folks who worry, ostentatiously, about things that are supposed to be described by words like “liberty” and “freedom.” But they have no understanding, or very little, about what those words really mean. And so when freedom is subject to genuine abuse, it can take place right in front of their eyes. And they can’t see it.

The frosting that is sarcasm is simply a poor diet. It makes for an imbalanced diet. To consume it, and nothing else, remains a bad idea, even if a lot of other folks are doing it. And if your diet of thinking is imbalanced, you can’t think straight…which is a problem for real lovers of freedom, because freedom is maintained only by means of rigorous, healthy, balanced, critical thinking. Here endeth the lesson.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Overlawyered, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, The Muslim Question | 1 Comment »

Selfless Sacrifice

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Two Iraqi soldiers took down a suicide bomber at the cost of their own lives.

A spate of bombings, including a suicide attack on Iraqi soldiers attending an Army Day ceremony, rocked Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 14 people and wounding 32, Iraqi officials said.

The suicide attack on the soldiers took place in Karrada neighbourhood as gifts were being handed out to troops by a civilian organisation on Army Day, an official holiday marking the 87th anniversary of the founding of the army.
:
US military spokesman Lieutenant Steven Stover said that according to eyewitnesses two Iraqi soldiers were killed when they flung themselves onto the attacker as he detonated his explosives.

“They absorbed some of the blast. They saved a lot of lives,” Stover told AFP.

“The selfless sacrifice of the two Iraqi (soldiers) should not be forgotten,” he said in a later statement. “These two Iraqi martyrs gave their lives so that others might live.”

I hope their sacrifice is remembered appropriately and with high honors. Not sure how…I just wouldn’t want it to be ignored altogether. That would send a pretty crappy message.

This entire situation occasionally privileges us to see the very worst humanity has to offer — at which time, I note, there is no shortage of politically agitated factions, here stateside, invested in making sure everyone knows about it. Well, equally often if not moreso, it also shows us the very best of human behavior as well. So guess what?

What say you New York Times. How about run this on the front page for an entire month in a row.

Posted in Fallen Heroes | 2 Comments »

Memo For File L

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Cinnamon Stillwell has some criticism for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Specifically, on CAIR’s latest effort to muzzle talk show host Michael Savage.

CAIR has a rebuttal for Ms. Stillwell. It is rather thin on fact and rather thick on instructions to readers about what-to-think. It accuses her of “cherry-picking,” and then, I notice, proceeds to show us how it is done.

It seems the folks who read CAIR’s rebuttal, at least the ones who were motivated to comment on it, are not entirely convinced.

A central piece of evidence to CAIR’s “you should think the way we think you should think” argument is Hate Hurts America and their web site…that web site’s front page…the articles appearing in that front page.

Conservatarian.net systematically dismantles CAIR’s argument.

Northeast Intelligence Network does more of the same.

The funny thing about our right to supposed “freedom of speech”? That right’s most dangerous enemies, are not the ones who declare an all-and-out frontal assault on it…it’s the ones who want to tailor it to their own private agendas. The ones who say, oh sure, you have a right to speech here…but not there.

CAIR seeks to redefine what America, and its freedom-of-speech, are all about. If they can just do that, they’ll succeed at dismantling this great nation brick-by-brick. If they cannot, they will not.

Posted in The Muslim Question | 3 Comments »

Olmstead RIP

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

His final post, written for the purpose of being released in the event of his demise. Respected milblogger, he is now the first Iraq casualty of 2008.

I do ask (not that I’m in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don’t drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don’t cite my name as an example of someone’s life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I’d prefer that you did so.

On a similar note, while you’re free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I’ll tell you you’re wrong. We’re all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.

Obsidian Wings, where you can view the entire thing, and express condolences. But it bears repeating the departed’s final wishes about political commentary, on either side.

Those who wish to view what comments have been made, could peruse the list below. It’s just Googling with filtering, supplemented by some other links the search engine didn’t catch on the first go ’round.

Major, obviously you’ve left a large hole. Godspeed noble warrior.

Olmstead The green-lit FARK thread

Kate at Small Dead Animals

Neo-Neocon

Gerard at American Digest

The Daily Brief

Michael Totten’s Middle East Journal

Mahalo

Rocky Mountain News

…and their article published on Maj. Olmstead’s deployment last summer.

Riehl World View

Matthew Yglesias

Sigmund, Carl & Alfred

NRO: The Tank

God, Politics, and Rock ‘n Roll

BlogoWogo: Tears fall. Words fail.

FORVM

Enrevanche

Bitch, Ph.D.

Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Simple Justice

Black Five

Fred Schoeneman

World and Global Politics Blog

Weekly Standard

Badgers Forward

The Opinionator

America’s North Shore Journal

Posted in Noble Warriors | No Comments »

Benazir Bhutto Killed In Attack

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Uh oh. This is going to lead to some bad things, I think.

Benazir Bhutto Killed In Attack

Pakistan Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has died after a suicide attack at a political rally. “At 6.16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

“She has been martyred,” said party offical Rehman Malik.

The explosion went off just after Ms Bhutto left the rally in Rawalpindi, minutes after her speech to thousands of people. Her support[er]s have smashed windows at the entrance to the hospital where she was being treated, some calling “Dog, Musharraf, dog,”.

It is the first major attack since President General Pervez Musharraf lifted emergency rule two weeks ago. At least 15 people died in the attack in the heart of Pakistan’s military and parliamentary district.

Other headlines say different things, though.

Benazir Bhutto ‘badly injured’ in bomb attack

Another headline says she was unhurt

Another headline says no, she was killed

And another

Malkin says Bhutto was Assassinated

Update: Do not miss the FARK thread on this. Do NOT miss it…even if you haven’t bothered to start a “Rogue’s Gallery of Inane Stupid Leftwing Moonbat Bullshit Conspiracy Theories”…but most especially if you are among the ones who have. I’m tellin’ ya, it’s got everything — some of which will make you laugh, some of which will be sure to make you cry. And best of all, a whole googleplex of facepalms.

And, as you might guess, the stupid deranged crap that inspires facepalms to be put on display.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, The Muslim Question | 4 Comments »

Iraq: Best Story of the Year

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Some mad McCainiac is going through the triumphs of the United States forces in Iraq. It is truly a “High Noon” moment right now, and I hope the Hadleyville citizens who kept the shutters closed — read that as, snarked away about who a fustercluck Iraq was becoming for these past four years or so — feel rightfully ashamed, although I have my doubts.

But whatever. Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper are climbing in the stagecoach, and Frank Miller is deader than Marie Antoinette.

First, the country will now have the time to establish itself. A year ago it seemed as if American forces would have been withdrawn in ignominious fashion either well before the end of the Bush Administration or, at best, days after the next president came to office. This will not now happen. The self-evident success of the surge has obliged the Democrats to start talking about almost anything else and the calls to cut and run have abated. If the US Army remains in Iraq in strength, continuing on its present path, then deals on a constitution and the division of oil revenues between provinces will be realised.

Secondly, the aspiration that Iraq could be some sort of “beacon” in the region is no longer ridiculous. It will never be Sweden with beards, but there has been the development of a vibrant capitalist class and a media of a diversity that is unique in the region. Were Iraq to emerge with a federal political structure, regular local and national elections and an economic dynamism in which the many, not the few, could share, then it would be a model.

Finally, Iraq in 2007 has illustrated that the words “intelligent American policy” are not an oxymoron. The tragedy is that the approach of General David Petraeus could and should have been adopted four years ago in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s enforced departure. One prominent American politician alone has spent that time publicly demanding the extra soldiers which, in 2007, have been Iraq’s salvation. That statesman is John McCain. Is it too much to hope (let alone predict) that he will reap his reward at the polls in 2008?

Yeah, I think it is. McCain, for all the respect that is ritually flung his way, with no small amount of justification for his ordeal nearly four decades ago, has acted more like a double-talking politician on a whole mess o’ campaign issues than most of the other candidates.

But the point is well-taken. Jobs, in general, don’t get done by means of a whole lot of creative rationalizing for staying away from them and not doing them. Carrying out the trash involves filling some sacks, making omelettes involves breaking eggs…and all that.

(H/T: Kate, who’s on fire lately.)

You want more? Fellow Webloggin contributer Bookworm reports that Iraq is producing a lot of oil…

This is good news:

Iraqi oil production is above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at 2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the start of this year.

It puts the rise down to the improving security situation in Iraq, especially in the north of the country.

Typically, the IEA goes on to put a lot of negative spin on things, but the core news is good. Even better is that revenue from this oil, rather than going into the pockets of Hussein and his minions, or into the pockets of corrupt UN officials, will, at least in theory, benefit the Iraqi people.

Ideologically-motivated Iraq critics have an uneasy coupling with history right now. History will have to look at Iraq as it exists now, and then at the end of 2002. You can make up stories Micheal Moore style about flying kites and catching butterflies and drinking from sweet milk chocolate fountains in downtown Baghdad under Hussein’s old regime until you’re blue in your fat disheveled mustard-stained Michael Moore face…but the world community desperately needed this thing to happen, and now that it’s happened it is the very picture of success. All those explosions and stories of sectarian violence between the bookends, tragic as they may be, in the final analysis end up looking like what they are: Partisan propaganda.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

Fire Ants Versus Iraqi Spider

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

One week to Christmas, we’re just about to hit the home stretch…

…so here is your final brief respite from Christmas-related stuff. One last gulp of air. Oh, and you’ll never guess who wins.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 3 Comments »

An Ad I’d Like To See

Friday, December 14th, 2007

File this one under “Priceless Advice Republicans Can Have For Free.” Are they listening? I hope they’re listening. You lose the election next year, Republicans, and you haven’t used what appears below…I hope whoever’s running the show stays unemployed for a good long time.

Don’t come cryin’ to me.

Here’s the television commercial I’d like to see.

There’s this line of people that stretches off into the distance, in both directions, as far as the eye can see. Everybody is patiently waiting for something, for what purpose it’s not clear. John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are working the crowd. They’re talking to people who are waiting in the line.

Barack Obama is telling everybody to think happy thoughts. Every once in awhile he chrips out, “Aren’t I just awesome and wonderful?”

John Edwards is asking people “Have you been to the doctor today? You’re supposed to go, you know. If you haven’t gone to the doctor today, you’re in the wrong line.”

Hillary Clinton is asking them how long they’ve been waiting in line, making sure they’re suffering adequately. “You’re not cutting in front of anyone, are you? Good, good…it’s important that everybody wait until their legs are good and tired. Good and tired. How much money do you have? If you have too much, I’ll be taking some away for the common good.”

Looney Left Obama is telling them “Sameness, yes, that is what is important. We have to make sure each of you is equally well off, and endures an equal amount of pain.”

Edwards is making people feel guilty about carbon emissions, asking them if they’ve changed the light bulbs in their homes. “You can pick up new light bulbs on the way back from the doctor.”

Clinton is reminding them to think about retirement, healthcare and their grandmas having to choose between medicine and dog food.

Obama is asking someone what kind of laptop she has. It isn’t faster than anybody else’s, is it?

Edwards is reminding everyone listening that all the speed limits have to be exactly the same. “Ball bearings, that’s what we all are. Identical in every way. Except I’m a really rich ball bearing, of course. I’ll make everything the same.”

Clinton is droning on about new labels to be put on food packages.

All three candidates start talking over each other, reaching a euphoric crescendo, babbling on about their personal tastes. Hillary just loves her hybrid automobile, which American-made, of course. “And I’ve ALWAYS been a New York Dolphins fan!” Edwards yells, “Sameness! Sameness! You’re all the same! I’m SO much better than you!”. Obama smiles, giggles, and holds up some weird-looking toy animals — “Ya gotta catch ’em all!” Hillary starts giggling maniacally.

It all goes silent the instant a gunshot rings out. A man from the line falls flat on his back, blood pouring out from between his eyes which are frozen open.

The only sound anybody can hear is an empty cartridge bouncing on the floor, and then rolling around.

The dead man’s unseasonably warm trench coat falls open, revealing an enormous belt of dynamite sticks. A push button detonating device falls out of his hand.

The man who had been standing next to him holsters a 9mm sidearm that is still smoking. He looks back up at Hillary, whose jaw is now hanging open, her eyes frozen in horror. He looks at her expectantly with a look that might say, “sorry to interrupt — you were saying?”

The candidates exchange glances. Nobody seems to know what to say. The man continues to wait for Hillary to finish her thought. He shrugs his shoulders.

FADE OUT. The sound of a heartbeat starts repeating…

Narrator: “This November, the Republican party encourages you to vote according to what is really important to you. Not what someone else says is important to you.”

The heartbeat sound quickens slightly. FADE IN on another shot of the push button detonating device. End of commercial.

Posted in Elections, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 5 Comments »

Pre-Emptive Strikes

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

I hope the words of Neo-Neocon are considered, with great weight, by those with the authority to do something. Right now the best case scenario is that peace will somehow prevail, owing to factors that now & later defy explanation.

And I’ll have to explain to my grandkids why, in the years after the September 11 attacks, we got this misguided prevailing sentiment going that we can wish evil away by simply wishing it away. It’s going to strike them as mighty peculiar we fell for this old hippy-chestnut right after the worst attack ever carried out on American soil, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain that. The baby boom, I guess. The hippies grew up, and old, into elder-middle-age, that part of life where we think authority should be entrusted to people.

I can only hope there won’t be any grave consequences to this “non-pre-emption” policy in our history books by then.

Why is preserving the right to strike preemptively so important? Unfortunately, the invention of nuclear weapons has changed the nature of war by making a single nuclear strike potentially catastrophic. Atomic bombs have only been used once—technically, twice, but within a few days of each other and as part of the same strategic plan—and although they had the effect of ending World War II and probably preventing the far greater loss of life that would have ensued with an invasion of Japan, their use was certainly not preemptive. They came at the close of a war in which Japan had originally attacked us.

For a long time it was only the USSR and the US who were in the nuclear game. But now we are in a different era, one in which smaller nations—with an eschatological and ideological agenda that is less likely to be deterred by doctrines such as Mutually Assured Destruction—are going nuclear. This is where preemptive strikes can become a useful and perhaps necessary tool to have in the arsenal in order to prevent a possibly huge loss of innocent life from a single and unprovoked attack by such a nation. But because this situation is such a new one, we have not yet developed sensible standards by which to judge when it is not only permissible to act preemptively, but when it might be necessary to do so.

Non-pre-emption means the bad guy has to strike first. It means you wait for the next Pearl Harbor to happen. This is simple, solid logic. All you have to do is think on it awhile, and leave the marijuana alone while you’re doing your thinking. It’s pre-emptive strikes, or else…the first few battles, and probably the entire war, you just let your ass get kicked.

This is not a false-dilemma. There is no in-between.

Some days, I’d be fine with giving up the right to vote if I could just take all the hippies down with me.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | 5 Comments »

On the “I Can Believe It” Argument

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Two years ago, Doug Thompson fooled a bunch of fire-breathing lefties into thinking our next big national debate was going to be about whether the Constitution means anything. At all. He did this by peddling a charming chestnut about an outburst supposedly spewed by President Bush in a meeting.

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

Those three people are supposedly public servants, but of course Doug Thompson could never ever reveal his sources. All right, fair enough — I can buy that officials will tell a reporter something “off the record.”

What I can’t buy, is a high ranking official of the executive branch closing his office door, whipping out his palm pilot or his Outlook contact list or his plain ol’ Rolodex or Yellow Pages, skimming past the Washington Post, and dialing up “Capitol Hill Blue” to spill the beans on what the boss just said. Because in the last month of ’05, there was substantial blog-buzz about “did he really say that?” Amid the dizzying hubbub of “well, I don’t need too much proof because that’s just part & parcel of how this administration works” (in which case…wherein lies the necessity of you saying that?), occasionally someone would show a little restraint and point out — hey, we’ve only heard this from one place, and that one place is Doug Thompson.

Sadly, that includes the first handful of commenters over at — of all places — DailyKOS.

Thompson wrote a follow-up piece called “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Ire.” It’s no longer there. But I found a copy of the first paragraph here.

The firestorm over Friday’s column quoting President George W. Bush’s obscene outburst over the Constitution continues to grow with our email box overflowing from outraged readers who think the President should be impeached along with pro-Bushites who want my head on a platter.

Let me see if I can construct the rest of it from memory. Thompson had a story about trying to follow up with his “three people present for the meeting that day.” For some reason, his leads had grown soft. And so he did the only sensible thing — he removed this follow-up piece after posting it, and left the original chestnut where you can find it today.

Are you following what I just described? He got hold of something second hand. He published it and became a legend on the innernets. A bazillion and one people knew the name “Capitol Hill Blue,” who had not heard it before. (If I remember right, I was one of those.) He said, hey, this actually has some legs — if I’ve been snookered on this thing, I’m really going to look like an ass. Better check it out. He documented his attempts to check it out. But he found nothing, or next to nothing. So he took down the chronicling of his attempt to check out the story…in it’s place is the message: This article has been removed from our database because the source could not be verified.

But the original story he could not check out is exactly where it’s always been. From the day it went up, all the way through to the very moment in which I type the sentence you’re reading now. The story that made Capitol Hill Blue famous…which nobody thinks really happened, once it comes time to bet some reputations on it. It is left whole, at it’s original address, undented and unscratched. Hey, no such thing as bad publicity, right?

I explore this story in order to point out something about human nature, and how we handle truth. This is a great example of circular reasoning. The leftist argument about why this story matters is, if I were to make up something about you calling the Constitution nuthin-but-a-g.d.-piece-o-paper, the sole source argument would do some damage because you probably don’t have a track record of disrespecting the Constitution. But when Doug Thompson did that with President Bush, we should all believe it, because that’s “how this administration operates” and “I don’t need much to convince me he said that.”

And President Bush’s disrespect of the Constitution needs no substantiation, of course. It is the stuff of legend. Just do a Google sometime and you’ll see how well-documented this disrespect is. Documented…with little tidbits…just like this one. Which, in turn, rest on Bush’s well-established disrespect of the Constitution.

See, the anecdote relies on the trend for what little credibility it has, and the trend relies on more anecdotes just like this one. A proves B and B proves A. In a universe in which this does anything to elucidate at all, you could sit in a big bucket and lift yourself by the handle.

Now if one is dissatisfied with simply exposing the threadbare composition of this assertion, and really wants to deal it a wallop, it turns out that is pretty easy too. President Bush’s disrespect of the Constitution is supposedly so thoroughly demonstrated, that a careless piece of gossip that would be that and nothing more if it were about anybody else, suddenly becomes believable, and even a piece of what might be called “news”, when it is about him. Alright. If that is the situation as it now exists, then, from where arises the necessity to discuss it at all? There’s really nothing to argue about then, is there? We all just “know” this thing about President Bush. Maybe he said it and maybe he didn’t — the fable that he said it, then, ends up being just butter masquerading as the toast.

Jones And therein lies my tie-in to the whole thing about Ms. Jones, former employee of Kellogg Brown Root.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

“It felt like prison,” says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming “20/20” investigation. “I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened.”

Is she telling the truth? Maybe; maybe not. But it’s the same situation as President Bush calling the Constitution a goddamn piece of paper: There is no reason to show any skepticism toward it, until I start to take it seriously — at that point, there is an abundance of reasons. Let’s continue with the article first…

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

“I said, ‘Dad, I’ve been raped. I don’t know what to do. I’m in this container, and I’m not able to leave,'” she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

“We contacted the State Department first,” Poe told ABCNews.com, “and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen” — from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by “several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally.”

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

A spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones’ alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

“It’s very troubling,” said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. “The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don’t have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice.”

Congressman Poe says neither the departments of State nor Justice will give him answers on the status of the Jones investigation.

Asked what reasons the departments gave for the apparent slowness of the probes, Poe sounded frustrated.

“There are several, I think, their excuses, why the perpetrators haven’t been prosecuted,” Poe told ABC News. “But I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department, when crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted.”

Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones’ former employer doesn’t want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones’ claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones’ claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones’ case. In recent testimony before Congress, employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees said that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.

In his interview with ABC News, Rep. Poe said he sided with Jones.

“Air things out in a public forum of a courtroom,” said Rep. Poe. “That’s why we have courts in the United States.”

In her lawsuit, Jones’ lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a “boys will be boys” atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.

“I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws,” said Kelly. “The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her.”

Halliburton, which has since divested itself of KBR, says it “is improperly named” in the suit.

In a statement, KBR said it was “instructed to cease” its own investigation by U.S. government authorities “because they were assuming sole responsibility for the criminal investigations.”

“The safety and security of all employees remains KBR’s top priority,” it said in a statement. “Our commitment in this regard is unwavering.”

Since the attacks, Jones has started a nonprofit foundation called the Jamie Leigh Foundation, which is dedicated to helping victims who were raped or sexually assaulted overseas while working for government contractors or other corporations.

“I want other women to know that it’s not their fault,” said Jones. “They can go against corporations that have treated them this way.” Jones said that any proceeds from the civil suit will go to her foundation.

“There needs to be a voice out there that really pushed for change,” she said. “I’d like to be that voice.”

If I were inclined to believe this story, and not only that but to persuade others to believe it, as many people as I could possibly contact — and believe me, there are people who look at this story exactly that way — I would be very troubled by the contents. They seem almost carefully designed to back the listener into a corner, in which the only option available is to believe the alleged victim and Congressman Poe. KBR has nothing, because the Government is assuming sole responsibility for criminal investigations. Alrighty, then isn’t someone just getting into a whole bushel of trouble for allowing the sexual assault kit to be handed over to KBR security personnel, who then “lost” it?

That a KBR spokesman is commenting at all, is an indication to me that something took place. But the rest of the story gives indications that bread crumbs should have been dropped here & there. The State Department, in effect, “raided” contractor facilities. Two years later, all we have is the word of the victim, along with the Congressman who got things rolling. Here’s what we get about that: “A spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.” Can’t we have some more? Is that just him, or the actual Department? If it is the actual Department, what is the stated reason? National security? A phone was used to call family and let ’em know something was going on. There should be a record of that. It’s been two years.

What does “I want other women to know that it’s not their fault” mean? The situation of an epidemic, in which something between a bare plurality and an overwhelming glut of female contractors are being vaginally and anally raped and then locked up in trailers, is not raised anywhere else in the article — stem to stern, it is treated as an isolated case involving Ms. Jones alone.

But probably the most damning thing of all against the story is that there are NO names. None at all. Even where there clearly should be some. Who’s running that outfit, with the big portable trailer outside the offices with the rape victim locked up in it? Gosh, he should be in a lot of trouble, huh. What, is his name classified? What about the person who threatened her job? Is his name classified too?

Is this the way whistle-blowing works? You bravely step forward against these cowardly, corrupt white males who engineered and covered-up your sexual assault…but, in the name of national security, make sure their names are kept out of the limelight? Well, maybe so. That is not how it worked with Abu Ghraib, in which case, by the time I heard about it the DoD was already conducting it’s own investigation. That didn’t matter. Once the story broke I knew names, dates, who was responsible for what. The public had a right to know, and all that.

In this case, only half the cat seems to have been let out of the bag. A strategically-selected portion of the cat. Just enough to convince me one person said something was a certain way, and I should just…believe it. One person. Not just any person, but the person who was drugged-up on God-knows-what when all the excitement was taking place.

But here’s what I find really unsettling about this — the circular reasoning part of it. The linkage of that name “Halliburton” may be improper; they divested themselves of the KBR subsidiary this last spring. And while at the moment Ms. Jones was supposedly still locked in a trailer, they were still the parent company, nevertheless any four-year-old should be able to see why the H-word is really being tossed around. This has nothing to do with re-encapsulation of facts as they occurred. It has to do with visibility. “Halliburton” is virtually a household name, “KBR” is not. This is a Kellogg Brown Root matter involving KBR personnel and officials, assuming it happened as stated at all.

The anecdote is proven by the trend — the Halliburton trend, not the KBR trend, which would be more relevant but possesses far less name-recognition — and the trend is proven by anecdotes like this one. On whether there is a vast litany of chronicles about sexual assaults and other shenanigans being conducted within the KBR sphere, I’m not in a position to say one way or the other. But if there is such a thing, and this story is to ultimately rely on the circular-reasoning “nature of the beast” argument, then at the very least I would say that is what should be under discussion, not the notoriety achieved by former parent company Halliburton. If KBR does have such a track record, and it’s opened to inspection and provides all the substance I demand here — then, rightfully, there ought not be much urgency in discussing Ms. Jones’ case, ought there? It either sets a new low for KBR or it doesn’t. Can’t have it both ways.

I’m left with something pretty disturbing. Something almost certainly happened, probably to Ms. Jones. It seems that she, Congressman Poe, and the reporters contacted have been frustrated trying to figure out where this government investigation is going, and decided to appeal to Vox Populi. Rabble-rousing was the only way to get some satisfaction here. I say, if that is the case then let’s give them what they want. We should, at the very least, have an understanding of who is in charge of such an investigation.

It’s mighty suspicious, in my eyes, that we don’t at least have that. Our government isn’t supposed to be that opaque. But if we’re going to storm the capitol with pitchforks and torches, I think we should keep in mind what it is we don’t know. This is a situation in which an investigation is not simply a formality — we really don’t know what happened, or for that matter if anything did.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Incumbent Scandals, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Moonbat Conspiracies, Private Sector Scandals | 5 Comments »

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