Re-Commissioning the BattleBlog

Going to have to find somebody who knows how to re-start one of these things.

British Lord Benighted

Lord Andrew Phillip, a washed former member of the House of Lords who says he no longer wants to be called Lord, is Lording it over us Americans. Yes, using his intrinsic Limey superiority, he lays waste to our foreign policy, morals, and intellect. All without needing to rely upon a single fact. Good Lord!

This Lord said:

To quote from the UNHRC Report,
"Following Israel's withdrawal, Gaza has become a sealed-off, imprisoned, occupied territory."

Come again? Occupied by whom? Oddly enough, I agree that Gaza and the incredibly modestly named "West Bank" are occupied territories, but this is because they are parts of Israel which are infested with generations of violent hippie squatters. There isn't a single Israeli living, stationed, or patrolling in Gaza.
Occupied by whom, Lord Phillips?

He later smears America:

...To Hell with the Americans, frankly, because they seem to be locked in the sort of benighted view of Israel/Palestine as they have been over Iraq...

I'll be honest and admit that I had to look up "benighted".
be·night·ed adj.
1. Overtaken by night or darkness.
2. Being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness; unenlightened.

Let us assume that he is not merely using the word as a rhetorical flourish, and that he therefore intends the second meaning. This is the crux of his complaint. At least this is something we can have a real argument about.

I might even be tempted to agree with Lord Phillips again, but as above, not in a way he might have expected. America's policy toward Israel is unenlightened or in moral or intellectual darkness" only to the extent that we do not support Israel strongly enough. Speaker Pelosi's intellectually vacant, beheadscarved appearances with the chinless ophthalmologist come to mind. Secretary Rice's morally adrift pronouncements do as well.

The problem is that Lord Phillips overlooks the morally enlightened and intellectually illuminated argument that tiny Israel is the only Democracy in a sea of dictatorships, each one of which is bent upon Israel's destruction. Israel has honored every agreement it has made, and the Arab dictatorships have honored none. A moral person, an intellectual person, has no trouble discerning that the enlightened position is support for Israel. I have said many times that the Middle East is not hard to understand, unless you do not want to understand; unless you do not want others to understand. Leftist politicians and leftist journalists all insist that the Middle East operates by some unknowable calculus, that "...we westerners cannot possibly fathom the nuance of the intricately linked sets of motiva--Oh, fuck it! We give up! And so should you!"

And if you insist, as Lord Phillips does, that those Arabs occupying Israel and those surrounding it are working for peace and doing the best they can, but just can't get any traction without legitimacy and some sign that the west take them seriously, then indeed you cannot make sense of the Middle East. Because every time these selfsame Arabs are offered peace, which should benefit a bunch of squatters with no army, no navy, and no air force, but which does not include the peace of the Jewish dead, they reject it. To the Left, the mystery is: Why would these people keep provoking Israel to violence, in order to live in peace?

But it is laughably clear if you do not beg the question so. Repeat after me: The Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of the State of Israel. If, as an analytical method, you view the actions of Israel and the Arabs through the following lens--Israel is committed to living with Arabs, and Arabs are committed to living without Jews--you suddenly see the formerly incomprehensible actions of the Arabs as reprehensible instead. This is a key point--unlike support of the so-called Palestinians, support of Israel at no time requires you to say, "I don't know why the people I support would do such a monstrous thing."

That is morally and intellectually enlightened.

Two Billion Dollars to Imprison a Blogger

Meet Kareem. Full name Abdel Kareem Nabil, he was sentenced in February to four years confinement in an Egyptian prison. He was charged with and convicted of writing things critical of Islamist oppression and of the Egyptian Dictator, Hosni Mubarak. You cannot read his blog anymore, because he cannot write anymore.

Meet Sandmonkey. Not his real name. There's no picture, and now there's no blog. Recently, the Egyptian Security Service has been asking questions of his neighbors, and odd sounds on his phone lead him to suspect he is being monitored. He fears prison for being a "cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, [and] disgruntled" writer. His fears are well-founded. Just ask Kareem.

The Egyptian government has been jailing critics such as Kareem (already) and Sandmonkey (not yet), as well as terrorists such as members of the the Muslim Brotherhood. Under Islamist oppression, there is no difference between blogging your dissatisfaction and armed insurrection. And an Egyptian prison is not where you want to be. Ever.

We Americans have friends within the Muslim world, and guess what--Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak is not one of them. Yet we Americans give Mubarak's oppressive regime over two billion dollars every year.

So look again at that picture. That's a man who wrote blogs like this one. Do you like what you see? You are paying for it.

Sgt. Wilt is Wrong

United States Army Sergeant Jim Wilt is mistaken about lowering flags to half-mast in mourning.

In this AP article, he expresses frustration that the nation's flags are lowered to half-mast for those students killed in the VA Tech massacre, but not for American servicemen killed in Iraq. He proposes that at least the base he operates from should fly the American flag at half-mast when a serviceman from that base is killed.

I agree with the sentiment, but there is an important principle which has been overlooked: The national flag is flown at half-mast only on a day when the entire nation is officially in a State of Mourning. Countless Americans risk their lives in hazardous jobs every day. Every day, somebody is killed protecting America from terrorists, protecting citizens from criminals, protecting humans from fire, what-have-you. In no way does it detract from the honor rendered to those who give their lives to point out that if we fly the flag at half-mast every day, then there is no honor rendered at all. Just as a routine alert is no alert, if every day is special, then we could save money and simply buy flagstaffs half as tall.

Also, under no circumstances should a military base lower the flag of its nation due to one, three, or all of its assigned personnel being killed--without orders to do so from Washington. A national day of mourning is a Presidential Declaration, and no base commander, not even the Secretary of Defense, has the authority to go around lowering flags.

The third point is that the students who were murdered had accepted no particular risk, and in fact had assumed a complacent sense of security due to the declaration of the campus as a "gun-free zone". This was a promise made by the University which could never be kept, and as a result, after a certain point the students had no fighting chance. Please note that those quick-witted enough to act in time did not let the situation go beyond a certain point in their area. Those would be Zach Petkewicz and Prof, Liviu Librescu. But for the rest of the students, trusting and obedient, Death walked in and blew them away.

For this, a nation mourns in public.

Flashback! Posts from the Past...

I wasn't blogging here for about five months, but I was active online. I ripped a few good ones over at LGF while I was away, and I'm re-posting them here. I'll tweak and update them, add context where needed, but the gist is the same, and it'll be cut & paste for the most part. I'm having a great time reading my oldies (most of which, sadly have gone stale), and I will re-post the ones which have stood the test of at least a little time. I hope you enjoy reading these.
Thanks,
Haakon Dahl

Gonzocalypse Now

I have been over at the Free Republic, wading among the ruins after Hurricane Gonzales. This looks bad.

Name a single fight the President hasn't backed away from.
Situation A) An appointee of his is incompetent and he covers for them.
Situation B) An opponent of his is winning and he gives ground which will never be regained.
Situation C) He is unable to deliver on a promise, and avoids unscripted appearances for months, until the subject changes.

It feels dirty to say this, but the one fight he hasn't backed away from is -- the one he doesn't have to fight. I don't mean in the sense that somebody else has to march and shoot and perhaps die--that goes with the job. He is the Commander, not the Corporal.

I mean that the military provides him with the one thing that no other part of government does--a corps of unquestionedly knowledgeable experts, to whom he can always punt.

And so that one, he is winning. Won't walk away from.

This has been described as Battered President Syndrome. The result of years of a hostile and bitterly partisan media is that the White House no longer engages in public. Not for Scooter Libby, not for WMD, not for anything.

I saw a great post at FR, part of which I will reproduce here:

I'm afraid GWB has suffered a mental breakdown.
Oh, it's not outward. It's inward, in his soul, where all Presidents REALLY formulate their legacy.
I have been so loyal to this President and the GOP these past 15 years.
THAT's what really makes me ill in this whole matter.

I thought that was a good distinction. It's not as though he lost his marbles, or even his balls. He's just broken. This something I have suspected in G.W., and have outright said about Rice (she was the first to go, oddly enough, and will likely be the last one standing with the President).

Anyway, The Gonzocalypse is so bad because it not only brings out the most fevered of the left, but it also is EXACTLY the type of "flaming incompetence", to quote a Hugh Hewitt caller, that cost us the 2006 election through a disgusted and demoralized base. And still nothing changes.

But don't get me wrong--I'd still vote for Bush again over any Democrat.

In Which Arwa Damon Rocks!

Arwa Damon has impressed me greatly two times, both of which I mentioned here:

Just saw a "man on the street" bit on CNN, although with an Iraqi woman, and for once, I am impressed.

Arwa Damon (who is secretly on our side, I believe) turned in a great report with an Iraqi college student, one Miss Maha Nidal, saying that the turning point in killing a country is when the schools shut down. This is a profound point, and so simple (as profundity often appears) that I am just flabberghasted.

Arwa Damon, by the way, was the only CNN type to turn in a report after the Haditha extolling the unbelievable professionalism of the troops on previous patrols, and saying that in the end, she did not know if those same trooops would have done such a thing, and that until the "smoke clears", nobody will know what happened.

Well, it wasn't cheerleading, but it's as close as you'll get from CNN. For our side, anyway.

Gen. Pace Calls Homosexuality Immoral--No Apology Needed

Here's a clip from the AP, via MyWay News:

"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts," Pace said.

The newspaper said Pace did not address concerns raised by a 2005 government audit that showed some 10,000 troops, including more than 50 specialists in Arabic, have been discharged because of the policy.

Stand Fast General! A man willing to die for his country should be willing to retire for his principles.

Apology "neither required nor desired".

Incidentally, this policy was designed to keep the topic off of the table, not to keep gays out of the military. President Clinton wanted them in, the military wanted them out, and Congress hammered out this compromise with the White House. Gays in the military are expected to follow one simple rule, which is not to say or publicly demonstrate homosexuality, and the military is likewise to follow one simple rule, which is to not try to discover who is gay.

So the AP article is mistaken (or deceptive) in stating that 10,000 troops have been discharged "because of the policy". They were discharged for failing to follow one simple rule.

Finally, you won't see this mentioned in any press reports (I'll bet!), but the General was actually citing his own views on the morality of homosexuality as evidence that the policy allows gays to serve, despite his own beliefs on the matter.

In Which the Second-Ugliest Truth is Told

I really do feel for the poor Palestinian slob who thinks he is in a separate country and wants to raise his kids, work an honest day, etc... but those folks are a weapon wielded by the larger Arab world. It's a monstrous, evil, deadly, shitty game they force on us, and the only thing worse than winning a deadly shitty game is losing one.

In Which I Might Be Jewish

One day, we were having a discussion about religion, and the lack thereof on the part of, uh, some of us. Here's my take:

I call myself agnostic, as the whole point is that I admit I don't know the nature of the unknowable. You know, being mortal and all. I get a kick out of "Atheists" who want to prove that there is no Creator. Go ahead, I say, but be quick about it--Jesus is coming.

Heh.

I guess that if anything, I'm a Zionist. I feel politically very Jewish these days. I looked into the least religious variety of Judaism, but for crying out loud, it's a bunch of idiots dressed up as a church. With no God. How's that supposed to work? At that point, isn't it a club? Hell, I'm more Jewish than they are! At least I admit that there *might* be a God. It's not given to me to know these things.

So I feel Jewish and I don't know why. But I'm agnostic, and have been for better than twenty years. So I'm not really in the market, as it were. Joining a church would be intellectually dishonest.

Just the same, I hope that our friends without the ham don't mind if occasionally I say "WE". I feel it.

In Which I Get All Calvinist Wit' It

Little Green Footballs is a family place (er, depending on the time of day, and the temperature of the topic...), and we were discussing various traditions among the membership. Over there we have Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Ba'Hai, Mormons, Buddhists (I think), and so on. A sense of humor is a pre-requisite.

I may be agnostic (or I may not, heh), but I come from the Protestant tradition. These are my traditions:

• Don't laugh--that's not funny.
• Please be quiet, I'm thinking.
• What's that on your face? Ewww, it's food.
• Use your fork, not your fingers.
• Say "Hell" if you want, and "Damn" if you must, but "have got" will get your mouth washed out with soap.
• Don't scuff your heels on the ground--walk like a human.
• My religion actually does allow me to dance--but you won't catch me out there jerking like an electrician having a bad day at work.
• Tennis shoes are for tennis. Running shoes are for running. Athletic shoes are not to be worn except in the actual conduct of exercise.
• If you must suffer, do it quietly.

Your Mileage May Vary.

In Which I Blasted the President

This is from 04DEC2006, just after President Bush announced that our Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton had resigned, and that the President had accepted it. We knew what that meant--that the President had decided not to try to force the new Democrat-controlled Congress to confirm Bolton. I was unhappy because Bolton had impressed supporters and critics alike, and I thought that despite the unfair and childish objections from some of the loony left, his nomination had a chance of being confirmed after the fantastic performance he had turned in. Sadly, we never got to find out.

I don't get upset at very much.

Bush Accepts Bolton's Resignation

I am now upset.

After the Cheney years, the Powell years, and the Rice years, we finally come to the Bush years, and it looks like the Cavalry is not going to arrive after all.

They were supposed to charge the enemy, but the Cavalry instead is riding off into the sunset. At two o'clock in the afternoon. I have little faith that there is any fight this President will not walk away from.

After pledging his undying support for Rumsfeld--shitcanned. After declaring that he would go to the wall for Bolton--shitcanned. After saying that he would not withdraw from Iraq? One wonders. One really effing wonders.

President Bush has failed to learn the only real lesson to be drawn from this election--that appeasing the Democrats gains a Republican nothing, while it costs him the base, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. As the Republican party goes, so goes the stand against totalitarianism.

I am emphatically not of the "nuke 'em" crowd. But if we fail to act while the problem is conventional, what choice will there be later? We are squandering our opportunity to prevent a global bloodbath, because we cannot stomach a few well-placed and hard-fought battles.

When the mushroom cloud comes, we will have earned it.

Losing Bolton was a blunder, and the History books will reflect this. As a triumph. In Arabic.

Hoo! I was hot. I'm still not happy about it. But the nomination and confirmation of General Petraeus went a long way to restoring my faith. Before that faith was partially restored, I squeezed this off, amplifying and expanding some of my earlier comments.

Few people were cheerleading for the President and the Republicans in general as optimistically as I was. Don't get me wrong, I am crystal clear where my vote needs to stay in order to not be complicit in losing this war.

But after watching this administration, which started out so well, so clear, and with such purpose, degenerate into a paralyzed Washington jellyfish, I have lost faith in the people at the top.

I take orders and carry them out with gusto. But also with my fingers crossed, where I used to have certainty. I do not appreciate this feeling that the leadership of my team may no longer be very interested in winning. I do not know what to expect from this administration. And that is half of the problem right there. Years ago, I posted here about what a shame it was, the sad thing which had become of Dr. Rice. She was one of the first to fall to Washington disease. Remember when it was a refreshing breath of fresh air to hear her belt out the truth? That was then--this is now. When was the last time you heard her say something that didn't sound tired and safely devoid of any real point?

Alberto Gonzales makes me cringe every time I hear him. Likable guy, but he's just such a weasel. You never hear straight answers out of him. Boehner and Frist (not administration, I know) played nice for so long and with such timidity that we wound up getting nearly nothing done [in the 109th Congress].

Now that disease has the whole administration second-guessing itself. The President should have told the Democrats that if they want Rumsfeld, they can pry the SECDEF from Bush's cold, dead hands. That if they want Bolton, they can 'Bring it on!' We Republicans have managed to surrender on all of the important issues EXCEPT FOR ONE in the vain hopes of currying favor with Democrats. That if we just stop being such Republicans, they will like us more.

Of course, this does not work, and we are going to get tossed around the 110th Congress like a skinny prison snitch in a thong.

I appreciate the built-in gridlock for arresting dangerous movements in the Washington tar pits, but how on earth could we still be staring down the barrel of Amnesty [legislation for illegal border-jumpers]? Thanks to the House for holding off the onslaught, but with all three branches of the government more or less in our sphere, how could we have walked away with so little?

And get used to the past perfect tense--we will not see another bicameral majority for a long time. Certainly not in conjunction with the White House. We had the Hat Trick--but played the Shell Game.

Here's a question for you sharp knives out there: What issue do you predict that the President will not fold on? Hint: It's a trick question.

As I read somewhere online (NRO, Steyn? Not sure), the President needs to snap out of it. He is still the President, and needs to stand up to these Democrats now more than ever. We ALREADY LOST THE GODDAMNED ELECTIONS, so he can stop playing nice--because it won't work any better for 2008 than it did for 2006. But at least we could win a couple of important battles while we still have THE PRESIDENCY. I expect him to engage the damned Democrats, not fall in meekly behind them in their march to hand the country over to the the foreign and domestic communists and their Islamic wedge.

But what do we get?

"Hap-py Traa-aa-aails to youu-uu-uu..."

By the way...
I have always debated whether I should give the Republicans (and I am one) a blast when I am displeased. Before the elections, I stayed in cheerleader mode; argue for the cause, rally the base, shore up the wobbly, etc...
Since we lost the elections, I haven't said much.
Now I feel that the most productive thing I can do for the Republican Party is to fire broadsides where they need to go. We are about to make the same mistakes which cost us 2006. Well, not me. I'll be contrarian IN THE PRIMARIES, and vote solid Republican in the general elections. But while I do that, I'll be sure backhand whoever needs it. And right now, the virtual hand goes to 1600 Pennsylvania.

Doctors are required to "First, do no harm".

Presidents in wartime, on the other hand, ought to get in there and mix it up.

L3ft1st P0etry

I Ran across this at the Poetry Barn. Was wondering what would be a fair price.

L3ftist Poetry,
Sorry bout the caps,
Habits you know,
Grammarscian Diagram,
of Angry breasts,
and Ulululululating volvos,
off me pig,
grunting ziopecker
I AM NOT IMPRESS
sorry bout the commas
forgot where i was and who was grading this
neocryptozionisticexpialidocious
the thr33 was like an e
i cant believe i got a c
nary shall there be a pecker
within sight or half an acre
sorry bout the rhyme
it becomes truly vhallenging to vlout all the roles at wunst
shit i broke the flout flaunt float flight
three strikes im in rule
Jawj W. Boosh dont care bou bla peopl
i declear the crudase
in my reciprocating tunnel of love
JIHAD on your creamy twinkie stuffing

It wasn't framed or anything bourgeois like that. Is a buck-twenty-five a good deal?

Kareem Sentence Upheld

Here's the scoop, from UPI:

International Intelligence
Published: March 12, 2007 at 2:06 PM	Email Story | Print Preview | License

Egypt court endorses verdict on blogger

CAIRO, March 12 (UPI) -- An Egyptian appeals court endorsed a verdict sentencing a blogger to 4 years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and the president.

Judicial sources said Monday an appeals court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria approved the verdict issued last month against 22-year-old Abdul Karim Nabil Amer. He was convicted on charges of "ridiculing Islam and insulting" President Hosni Mubarak.

Arrested last November, Amer is the first blogger to be sentenced to prison in Egypt.

Here are the important facts:

1. This Egyptian blogger has been jailed for speaking against the abuses of the Mubarak dictatorship.
2. As the first case of its type, this is a matter of precedent. If pressure can be brought against Egypt to make them reverse the decision, it will free potentially thousands of patriots, not just a single blogger.
3. If nothing is done on behalf of Mr. Amer, moderates within Islam and patriots in oppressive regimes will decide that we are not serious about supporting them.

Abdul Kareem Nabil Amer has done nothing more than I have done in this blog, or you in your own blog. Or your e-mail. Or a conversation with friends. He rots in an Egyptian prison while you read this. Please sign the petition at www.freekareem.org.

UCLA Prof, Harbinger

The Things I Do Not Know

I do not know why this article by UCLA literature professor Saree Makdisi hits me so hard. It hits me harder than most others which are just like it, and that is a large number, to be sure. Hatred of Jews is not in short supply these days, and articles like this one come frequently, and more frequently as time goes by.

He is not saying anything which hasn't been said before, or even recently, and he contributes nothing original to the current wave of Jew-Hatred. He is only harping on the same Neo-Nazi talking points which have made the rounds from Gaza and Jeddah to Paris and D.C. and back. The media closes the loop for this self-reinforcing putrid system of fevered beliefs, but this has not always been the case.

I do not know why the current round of Jew-Hatred has sprung up so quickly, or why it has done so now as opposed to some other time. I suppose it has to do with other global tensions, but this disease seems not to require a predicate. We might just as well pin it on the fictitious Man-Made Global Warming as on any other world syndrome--this is a phenomenon which occurs in lean times as well as fat, in peacetime as well as war, and in dictatorships as well as democracies.

It has been around as long as Jewry and Judaism have. "Anti-Semitism" is hardly a modern problem, and it does not need the 24-hr news cycle in order to spread. But that is its vector in the Western world these days. And as Jew Hatred has been around for as long as Jews have, it seems that only sometimes does it flare up, become malignant, metastasize. In our time, the media serve as gatekeepers, like it or not, of ideas admitted to the public discussion. But in this, the media re only a reflection of ourselves, of course. We are uneducated and proud, lazy and defiant, ignorant and smug, uncritical and unapologetic. We as a global society can no longer tell good sense from horseshit without somebody telling us which is which. And because the media reflect us, and because we follow the media, we have become lost. Nobody is minding the store.

Now all sorts of madness are discussed in reasonable terms, desperate battles of honorable men are debated and denigrated by cowards in places of respect, and piece by piece, each layer of our global civilization is eroded for want of maintenance, for want of defense, and exposes the layer beneath it.

The slippery slope does not lead away. It leads inward, and each time we fail to do the right thing, fail to take a risk for the sake of our way of life, fail to take a malcontent to task for disrupting the system which protects us all, we allow another of the million minor Satans to advance a step further down the slope, into our heart.

As a man goes, so goes his society. Seen individually, there are more pressing and more dire problems than "Anti-Semitism". Millions have died in North Korea, while a handful have died from Jew Hatred in the same period. Birthrates alone pose a far greater challenge to the longevity of Western Civilization than any particular ideology, no matter how malign. And in fact, the Earth may be getting hotter, say due to the Sun, and things may get quite unpleasant on this planet for every living thing.

But looking at problems individually is the recipe for failure. When humanity stops defending itself against suicidal ideas, Anti-Semitism is the vanguard. Whenever the Hatred of Jews becomes something otherwise rational people debate calmly, the entire world is in for a bad time.

I am not a Christian, or a Jew, or any other religion for that matter. I'm what you might call a "show-me" fundamentalist. But one thing my scientific outlook has shown me is that there is a Hell, it exists on Earth, it is created by man, and good people must fight evil or it will kill us all.

Using this article as a barometer, Hell is coming back.

And I don't know why.

Membership in Decline

Steve Stanton, the City Manager of Largo, Florida, wants to be a woman. Didn't tell his wife. Didn't tell his son. Didn't tell the city. Didn't tell the voters. But when a local newspaper, er, scooped him, he had to go public. Here's a quote from his hastily arranged television press conference: "I hope my son isn't watching."

Coward.

He has been a very good city manager for years and years. Recently he was publicly rewarded with a salary increase. This doesn't change the recently revealed basic fact, however, that he is insane. Stark, raving, screaming, cut-off-my-penis-and-call-me-Shirley insane.

Anyone can see that this is a mental illness. If you wanted a doctor to cut off your hand because you have always felt that you had one hand too many, the doctor would decline, and recommend a psychiatrist. Your only option might be to travel to Saudi Arabia and steal a bagel some bread for some of that non-anesthetized Koranic justice.

But that's the closest place you'll find somebody willing to lop off a perfectly good body part. Unless it's your penis, in which case otherwise rational, civilized, western liberals feel that the problem is not all in your head--it's the head and the shaft which offend.

What is this liberal fascination with destroying men? In school, boys are medicated or disciplined out of boyish behavior. In public, men are shamed out of gentlemanly behavior. Opening a door for a woman supposedly makes her less a woman? I disagree, but even if it were true, failing to do it makes a man much less a man.

Nationally, we are socialized to believe that the use of force is always wrong, and that we must always resort to the government as a mommy figure, but nobody should be the Daddy. Television programs routinely feature fathers committing all sort of malfeasance. Whenever a family breaks up, it is either because a man is being selfish and evil, or because a woman who has been victimized by a man is being selfish and evil. The root cause of all family problems in American entertainment is the presence of a man in the family, or the absence of a man who was no good for the family when he was there anyway.


The destruction of the American Man proceeds apace, in whole and in part. Through the media, education, and mental health institutions, we learn that men are bad, maleness is bad, penises are bad, and we would all be better off with as little of any of these as possible. Boys are pressured to be like girls, men are trained to act like women, and penises are lopped off to be replaced with fake vaginas.

This is no simple personal elective surgery that Steve Stanton has chosen. It is not like removing an appendix before journeying to Antarctica, or having those tonsils out after a series of non-specific illnesses. Those are procedures which rational arguments can be mustered both for and against. The procedure Stanton wants, on the other hand, requires acceptance of a whole raft of radical liberal ideology in order to view the surgery as anything other than insanity. We can all tell who is a man and who is a woman when the pants are off. Only a crazy person sees one and assumes the other. No amount of liberal brainwashing from the University will convince me otherwise. In the Bizarro World of academics and journalists, the only good man is one who has no use for women.

I do not know what happened to Mr. Stanton that he should think he is a woman. Perhaps it was something in his childhood, or perhaps he was born with a brain defect. Either way, nothing requires me, or the City Council of Largo, Florida, for that matter, to play nice with this madness. When a crazy person insists that he is Henry VIII, you are free to denounce his madness. Extend sympathy if you wish, but you will not be accused of "discriminatory" behavior for calling this lunatic a lunatic. Same for Napoleon, next time you see him staggering on a street-corner. And the same goes for the alleged "Susan" Stanton, the next time you see "her", with or without her penis, in the Largo City Hall.

The City of Largo is well within its rights to terminate, fire, round-file, shit-can this pathetic side-effect of a widespread public dementia. The taxpayers are under no obligation to enable this sort of mental deficiency. Certainly those who are raising children have no desire to bless this type of miserable example.

Good Job, Largo!

Death for 1LT Ehren Watada under Aticle 90, UCMJ

This is an article from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ):

894. ART. 94. MUTINY OR SEDITION

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who--

(1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny;

(2) with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition;

(3) fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition which he knows or has reason to believe is taking place, is guilty of a failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition.

(b) A person who is found guilty of attempted mutiny, mutiny, sedition, or failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.

1LT Ehren Watada is skating on thin ice. He is engaged in a deadly serious game, as indicated by the words "shall be punished by death" above. The only thing that keeps this article from applying to him is the solitary nature of his action, the fact that it is not "in concert with any other person", as in the first paragraph. Notice that this paragraph does not require "in time of war". That's right--mutiny and sedition are so serious that even in peacetime, the penalty could be death.

Still, the case for death for Ehren Watada is not hopeless. He has violated an entire section of the UCMJ:

886. ART. 86. ABSENCE WITHOUT LEAVE

Any member of the armed forces who, without authority--

(1) fails to go to his appointed place of duty at the time prescribed;

(2) goes from that place; or

(3) absents himself or remains absent from his unit, organization, or place of duty at which he is required to be at the time prescribed; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

He is clearly in jeopardy of a conviction for Article 86.

887. ART. 87. MISSING MOVEMENT

Any person subject to this chapter who through neglect or design misses the movement of a ship, aircraft, or unit with which he is required in the course of duty to move shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

He is clearly in jeopardy of a conviction for Article 87.

888. ART. 88. CONTEMPT TOWARD OFFICIALS

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

He is clearly in jeopardy of a conviction for Article 88.

...

890. ART. 90. ASSAULTING OR WILLFULLY DISOBEYING SUPERIOR COMMISSIONED OFFICER.

Any person subject to this chapter who--

(1) strikes his superior commissioned officer or draws or lifts up any weapon or offers any violence against him while he is in the execution of his officer; or

(2) willfully disobeys a lawful command of his superior commissioned officer; shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct, and if the offense is committed at any other time, by such punishment, other than death, as a court-martial may direct.

He is clearly in jeopardy of a conviction for Article 90.

And this is just what the defense is hoping for. This is an attempt by the left to bring President Bush to trial. The prosectution is staying away from Article 90 in order to (presumably) secure a conviction on violation of the lesser article 87. In order to convict 1LT Ehren Watada under article 90, the prosecution would need to establish the lawful nature of the order to deploy to Iraq. This opens the door to a finding by a Court-Martial that the war is illegal. Nightmare scenario, right?

BRING. IT. ON.

If we let these turds scare us out of our own courtrooms, then more will follow. Perhaps 1LT Ehren Watada missed the class in ROTC where they explained that he is in the military, and does not have the same liberties as most citizens. In case anybody wondered why he has the right to speak out like this, he does NOT have the right to say these things, and will likely go to jail for his words, even if not his deeds. That's how serious it is.

Perhaps if 1LT Ehren Watada had actually been acting on principle, he could have kept this matter between himself and his Chain of Command. Instead, he went screaming to the press is what can only be called a PR campaign.

The fact is that 1LT Ehren Watada accepted his appointment as a Commissioned Officer in the United States Army after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I have my hunch that this has been a calculated political maneuver at the behest of his dingbat moonbeam father:

I am a RPCV [returned Peace Corps volunteer] 1964 Peru. Last year I visited Peru twice and wherever I went, friends, relatives, and people of all walks of life expressed disgust with "Bushy" and it was impossible to disagree. Their perception of the USA is like a "Rambo". "Have gun, am right." Whatever good the Peace Corps did forty years ago in developing good will has now been destroyed. We eliminated the myth that we were CIA henchmen out to get the communistas.
We are now obsessed with a "terrorist" behind every tree, as we were obsessed with a "communist" around every corner forty-five years ago. We need to start somewhere to make a change. Bob Watada

The communists were real, and still are, for that matter. No need for scare quotes. Ditto for terrorists. The house in which 1LT Ehren Watada grew up was clear about who the good guys and the bad guys were. Marxists and Jihadis good, Americans bad. Loud and clear.


There can be no more shameful or disastrous an event in war than that one's own Commissioned Officers refuse orders to deploy, encourage their own soldiers to refuse to deploy, and backtalk the entire Chain of Command from Major to Commander-in-Chief--and that he is not forced to confront the fact that he would do a far greater good for this country dead as an example than he has ever done alive as a Soldier.

So let's go ahead and have a trial on an article which matters. Put him up on Article 90, WILLFULLY DISOBEYING SUPERIOR COMMISSIONED OFFICER. Punishable by death.

Palestinians: "We don't deserve a State!"

I agree.

The Middle East is impossible to understand if you assume that Israel will not accept Palestine. But the Middle East is easily understood if you assume that the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

Arafat was offered Palestine, and nothing changed.
Israel has accepted Palestine (a la Caroline Glick), and nothing has changed.

Gaza has its own port cities, its own border with Egypt, and not a single Israeli on the territory. They have a "government" funded by massive cash inflows from around the world, and they have complete control over their social, economic, and military institutions. Nowhere in the history of mankind has a state existed with more freedom and less responsibility than the current Gaza Strip. It should be succeeding like Singapore, like Hong Kong, like--well--like Israel.

But it isn't. And it won't. Because it can't.

Palestine the idea does not support Palestine the "country". Palestine the idea is only a weapon to be used against Israel. So Palestinians are victims, yes, but of the massive Arab war against Israel. As surely as if the people were flung from catapults, you need only trace back the trajectory to find out who to blame. And it doesn't start in Gaza, or in the "West Bank".

The young men who explode in cafes and on buses in Israel were sent by the Imams in Egypt, at Al-Azhar University, and by the Mullahs in Iran, in Qom and Tehran, and by the mutant dictators like Bashar Assad in Syria and the horrifically inbred dominant tribe of Bedouin despots in the Arabian Peninsula.

It doesn't start in those parts of Israel currently occupied by Jordyptian refugees, but that is thin cover indeed for any who now cry for mercy from that area. If they really wanted to exist in a free and representative government, they would have moved to Israel. Or America. Or one of the comfy socialist nanny states of the European Peninsula. Many of them do. So many, in fact, that what is left in "Palestine" are the hard core, the bitter and fanatic "dead-enders" who have nothing to gain, for in a lawful society, they would be thrown in jail, and nothing to lose, for they have destroyed everything the Israelis left behind. And they have built nothing. The problem now facing the "Palestinians" is that for so many years, it may not have started in Palestine, but but also never stopped.

If the Palestinians wanted a State, they should have fought for it in Palestine. Instead they fought in Israel, against the only people in the region who had an interest in stability. Now that Israel has sealed itself off from them, they are fighting in Palestine, and have discovered that there is nothing left.

Fuck 'em.

Senate Republicans, Stand and Fight!

Stand and fight! You should not even offer amendments. Just block this infernal treachery! These NON-BINDING resolutions have no effect in law, and the symbolic damage is already done. Therefore, it cheapens us to engage in negotiations, and gains us nothing. It will not even profit the Democrats, but they are too stupid to see this. The only winners will be our enemies, and it would be nice to have at least one party which can see that. It would be more than nice, in fact--it is a matter of survival to our very Republic.

You would not entertain haggling over the price of your wife. You would reject the offer on principle, and probably counter-offer a punch in the face. Your country deserves no less.

Stand and Fight!

How to pay for the Global War On Terror

Some people think that the way to do it is to raise taxes. This is madness.

We pay for the war by maintaining an economy strong enough to kick ass on seven continents and the moon. You do that by keeping taxes low, which actually increases total revenue. If instead you raise taxes, you slow the economy, and you wind up with a larger slice of a smaller pie.

Back by Popular Demand!

I have been away. Not in any physical sense (and no, I was not deployed anywhere), but I have been posting over at Little Green Footballs, a.k.a LGF, which I felt provided me with a far wider audience. Which is true. And the companionship of my fellow Lizards (check LGF to figure that one out). Which is valuable. But I have been solicited by people who want me to update my blog with increasing regularity. I can't link to it, as these have been actual walking, speaking human beings. People I gave the link to a long time ago, and who tell me months later, "Please post something! I check your blog once a week, and still all I see is the weird Kofi post, or whatever that was. And a bunch of comment spam."

SO I have cleaned up the comment spam, and we'll start this round of posts with a media issue--the New York Times is Lying. See the next post.

Thank you all who have convinced me to move back into my old house, as it were, to start posting here at my own site. I will regale you all some time with a post describing my computer nightmares which began in July, and are only now approaching a fantastic and triumphant conclusion. Here's a hint--I have no more Microsoft Code in my home office. No Windows, No Office(tm), No Nothing.

Ubuntu

New York Times Lying, says New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame

Time running out for Byron Calame?
Or for the New York Times?

I'll make an accusation here: In the end, the New York Times does not much care for honesty.

Please see Michelle Malkin's column at the Jewish World Review. There are two angles to this story as it relates to the media, which I will relate through some quotes. The first angle is that the NYT has been caught in a lie and is stonewalling, as reported in Malkin's article:

On Sunday, Calame wrote a stunning column debunking an April 9 New York Times Magazine cover story on abortion in El Salvador. The sensational piece by freelance writer Jack Hitt alleged that women there had been thrown in prison for 30-year terms for having had abortions. Hitt described his visit to one of them, inmate Carmen Climaco. "She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence" for aborting an 18-week-old fetus, Hitt reported.
...
Climaco had actually been convicted of murder for strangling her newborn baby.
...
There is "no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported," the editors imperiously told Calame. They refuse to issue a correction, publish an Editors' Note or inform their readers of the ready availability of the court decision that exposes Jack Hitt's deception about the Climaco case.

The second angle is that the NYT "Ombudsman" Byron Calame has a two-year term, which may not be renewed, partly due to NYT Editor Bill Keller's aggravation at the prospect of being questioned from within his own organization. The following quote is pulled from a post at Malkin's site, which in turn she attributes to Michael Calderone at the New York Observer:

“I have been critical of the newsroom,” Mr. Calame said. “I’ve also praised the newsroom, and I think that Bill Keller has been—quite obviously—unhappy with some of the things I’ve written.”

“It seems to me that the high degree of independence that has been given to the public editor at The New York Times makes it a situation that inevitably causes criticism,” Mr. Calame said.

He added: “So it is not a surprise to me that The New York Times—that Bill Keller, the executive editor, and Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher—would want to sit down and think about whether they want to have a public editor.”

I have two observations: First, A newspaper shouldn't need a Public Editor or "Ombudsman"; newspapers should be public editors. If Americans need special representation within a newpaper organization to take their views into account, then what is the newspaper itself doing?
Second, the difference between strangling a newborn and aborting an 18-week-old fetus may not be as great as it seems. Eighteen weeks is half of a full-term pregnancy. It is certainly murder in both cases, to a certain point of view. Monstrously, they may both be viewed as acceptable solutions to an "unwanted pregnancy" by another point of view. Certainly to Ms. Carmen Climaco, now in prison for one of these actions, and the New York Times refuses to draw a distinction. What is point of view that says that the two actions are fundamentally different?

With the spectre of the AP's Jamil Hussein comeuppance looming large, the NYT would be well-advised to admit their mistake and back down. Cut and Run. Not because they cannot win, but because they are fundamentally wrong to pursue this. This was an interesting story, deceitfully misreported by a freelancer for the NYT. The New York Times' dreadful misjudgement
in backing a demonstratedly false interpretation of the facts (see the Malkin article at the Jewish World Review, linked above, to see how easily the falseness was proven) is impossible to reconcile with the mission of an American newspaper. That the New York Times has an honesty problem is not disputed--after all, they appointed Mr. Calame to address the problem. The accusation that, in the end they do not care much for honesty, is rapidly losing its accusatory tone--soon, that statement may simply be honest reporting.

For Ms. Climaco's dead child, the clock has stopped. For the New York Times, the clock is ticking.

What's the Frequency, Kofi?

Rarely do we see a paragraph so mistaken as this gem from Mark Malloch Brown, the #2 man at the United Nations. And by gem, I mean piece of poo.

Mark Malloch Brown, currently Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, started his career, or at least the high-profile segment, as a journalist. He wrote for The Economist from 1977-1979, and so his investigative skill should be particularly sharp, as The Economist is often liberal but rarely shoddy. So we expect Mr. Brown to tell us something substantial. Something helpful. At least something true.

Let's listen.

It’s not helpful to couch this war [between Israel and international terrorist organization Hez'b'Allah] in the language of international terrorism. Hizbollah employs terrorist tactics, it is an organisation however whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda.

This Orwellian inversion of "helpful" to "not helpful", and of "identical to" to "separate and different from", can only hold true within a tightly-defined context.

First off, it's certainly not helpful from the point of view of international terrorists, that's for sure. International terrorists probably don't like many things about the Global War Against Terror, such as the American PATRIOT Act endorsed, strengthened and supported by all three branches of the U.S. government, the International Terrorist Telecommunications Surveillance Program run by the NSA, or the International Terrorist Finance Monitoring Program with access to the SWIFT database of worldwide monetary transfers. And so far, we haven't even mentioned bombs or bullets--all things which the international terrorists do not find helpful, but which those countries fighting against international terrorism do find immensely helpful. So I guess we can see where the UN feels its interests lie, and that provides us with the necessary context for Mr. Brown's remarks.

Moving on to the second sentence, Mr. Brown courageously knocks out his own shadow while the international terrorists of the U.N. march down the hall, unimpeded, past the office of Mark Malloch Brown. Nobody said that Hez'b'Allah was al-Qaeda, except perhaps Mr. Brown. But it takes a big man to reverse himself when spouting silliness and immediately begin spouting the opposite silliness. You see, he has traded up from Dan Rather's "fake but true" to "real but false". So with his journalistic integrity intact, he bravely and accurately destroys the truly unspoken argument that Hez'b'Allah is al-Qaeda by citing facts which are not true--that the Hezbos' and the Alkies' "roots historically are completely separate and different".

This might hold water if one organization were derived from a radical arm of bloodthirsty sect of a dark ages religion bent on world domination, and the other were, say, Shinto. It might make sense, if the goals of the two organizations were, on the one hand, genocide against the surviving members of the world's oldest mainstream religion, huddled on a tiny strip of land where they watch the graves of their ancestors pillaged to make urinals under the watchful eyes of the United Nations, and on the other hand, a goal of freeing the oppressed peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, Southern Asia--and everywhere else the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live--from the hateful and repressive regimes they currently suffer under.

Of course, if you limit the context of Mr. Brown's comments to matters of nationality, and a certain time-frame, and if you quibble over differences caused largely by geography (and certainly not ideology), you could indeed say that these two organizations are separate and different.

But no, the origins of Hez'b'Allah and al-Qaeda are the exact same; hatred and repression under Islamic dictatorships which manufacture handy bogeymen to blame for all of the privations caused by first, Islam, and second, dictatorship. So America and Israel are the Emmanuel Goldstein of Islam's permanent 1984, a society Hell-bent on sending us all back to the year Nine-Eighty-Four.

Not only their origins then, but their goals too, are identical, and at any rate not hard to discover. It doesn't take an investigative reporter of any particularly great skill to ferret out the true goals of both al-Qaeda and Hez'b'Allah--Death to America, Death to Israel. You may even have heard these phrases yourself.

And so I am reminded of Winston Smith in the Orwell novel 1984, and I will remember the last four words of that book until my dying day, so complete was my horror at the masterful conclusion of the novel. Unfortunately, only the bad parts are familiar in reference to Mr. Brown, and the good parts are not present. There is no conclusion, and if Deputy Secretary-General of the international terrorist organizations the United Nations Mark Malloch Brown has his way, there also will never be a conclusion. Not one that you can read in a language other than Arabic, anyway. Also, the lack of conclusion is not masterful, it is pathetic, or it would be, if that didn't also require pathos. Only the horror remains, but it is ours, not Mr. Brown's, as we realize the bone-chilling truth behind this journalist-cum-diplomat and his views on truth, proof, context, and goals:

He loved Dan Rather.

Kim Jong-Il goes to Washington

Kim Jong Il goes to Washington
  Okay, it's a scenario, and one which I do not relish. That little turd is about thirty years overdue to be strung up by his ankles from a lamp-post. He is certainly not overdue for some Presidential treatment.

But the opportunity presents itself for the President to use the awesome power of his office to make a real change in an otherwise stagnant situation. Kim Jong-Il wants bilateral talks? He wants to sit at the big table? Fine. Bring his ass to Washington.

Put him in a room with W, and let the good times roll. President Bush could tell that dime-store dictator that if he doesn't mend his ways today, there will be Hell to pay tomorrow.

There is an increasing rumble in Congress for the president to tell Kim Jong-Il to calm down or be "calmed". Senator Joe Biden (D) thinks that we should tell him directly, "If you do anything too stupid, we will AN-NI-HIL-ATE you." It is a joy to hear the Senator speak those words--listen on the 16 July 2006 edition of Meet The Press.

Senator Biden and (of all people) Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are in very close agreement as to what to do with (or to) Kim Jong-Il. Newt: "If you put a missile on the launch pad, we'll take it down, and if you fire ONE ROUND into South Korea, your regime is OVER."

They agree that these are the things which President Bush should be saying to Kim Jong-Il. For added effect, Bush could slap the little bastard on his fat cheek to punctuate each point. What's Kim going to do--call Jan Egeland?

That petty tyrant should depart U.S. soil afraid, angry, ashamed, astonished, and absolutely convinced that every morning he should mumble a bitter "thank you" to President Bush for not having him killed the night before.

The six-party talks have been a kid-gloves evolution designed more to force our slow-footed nominal allies into actually helping than to coerce Kim to do anything. If those talks have been a failure, the answer is not to be even more kid-gloved with the unspeakable horror from beyond the 38th parallel. It is well past time to show this human plague how lucky he was to have been at six-party talks. I now support bilateral talks between America and North Korea, but only with that demonic piece of shit placed firmly into Receive Mode.

Israel isn't taking any crap from the Islamic Party of God; why is America being pushed around by a small man with bad hair? The problem is not that Kim has too little hope--the problem is that he has far too much hope, and the United States is derelict in our duty to remove that hope from him.

Israel Justified, Force Appropriate Says Everybody

Here are the results of my informal and non-scientific poll:

Respondants who support Israel and think current level of force is appropriate:
Arch-Conservative English teacher, Proprietor of this blog.
Conservative Canadian English teacher, eh.
Liberal Democrat English teacher with tattoos, greatly admires Bill Clinton.
Aging Liberal English Teacher, balding with ponytail, greatly admires Jimmy Carter.

Respondants who do not support Israel, think current level of force is too much:
[crickets]

Respondants who will not commit to a position:
Fellow who said "the last I heard, the Ginza strip was given to the... Palestinians?"
Fellow who said "kill them all, let God sort them out."

So across the political spectrum, it's 4-0 in favor of Israel, with two abstentions.

Bob Schieffer, the Middle East, and the Second-Ugliest Truth

Bob Schieffer has mis-appropriated the fable of the Frog and the Scorpion, and rolled it into the media campaign against Israel. If you start with the world-view that the Middle East is impossible to understand, you wind up condemning Israel. The converse is true as well; If you start by condemning Israel, then the Middle East is impossible to understand. On the other hand, if you start with the idea that the wars in the Middle East can be understood, and have largely rational causes, you wind up with this: the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

The story below, as the closing comments of the July 15 2006 broadcast of Face The Nation is how Bob Schieffer views the Middle East: Unfathomable.

When the war broke out in the Middle East, I thought about the old story of the frog and the scorpion who were trying to cross a river there.

The scorpion couldn't swim and the frog was lost, so the scorpion proposed a deal: Give me a ride on your back and I'll show you the way.

The frog agreed and the trip went fine until they got to the middle of the river and the scorpion stung the frog. As they were sinking, the frog asked in his dying breath, "why would you do that?"

To which the scorpion replied, "because it is the Middle East."

It is worth noting that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip did not kidnap that Israeli soldier and provoke all this because the Israelis were invading Gaza. No, all this happened in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, which was what the Palestinians wanted, but this is the Middle East. Why fundamentalists in Gaza and Lebanon chose to provoke this war makes no sense.

Israel had every right to respond and did. But this is the Middle East. So, the response may have made it worse by giving moderate Arabs in the region an excuse to distance themselves from Israel.

There was a time when America spent a lot of its diplomatic effort on the Middle East and sometimes, it had real impact. Jimmy Carter's Camp David accords, after all, removed Egypt as the main threat to Israel.

But in recent years, we have stepped back. Why? Hard to say. Except this is the Middle East.

That sounds cute, and I am sure that Bob Schieffer actually heard it that way at some point, and so in a sense he is faithfully reproducing a story he has heard. But I find it impossible to believe that a man as presumably well-read as Bob Schieffer has never heard the fable in its original form. Note that Bob Schieffer has assigned the role of Frog to Israel, and the role of Scorpion to the Arabs--or else the paragraph which ends with the words "...makes no sense." makes no sense itself. I agree with the assignment of characters, but want to point out that it is Bob Schieffer himself who has cast the roles. Seeing the fable the way it was written will shed a lot more light on the situation today--which is what Aesop wrote his fables for in the first place.

The Scorpion and the Frog

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the
scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The
frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion
says, "Because if I do, I will die too."

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream,
the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of
paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown,
but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"

Replies the scorpion: "It's my nature..."

Now that is a very true observation about Scorpions, and about the Middle East as well. Let us re-visit Bob Schieffer's version with Aesop's original intent restored. And remember--I didn't draw this analogy--Bob Schieffer is the one who said that the Frog is Israel while the Arabs are the Scorpion.

We could simply replace every occurrence of "...because this is the Middle East" with "...because that is the nature of the Arabs", which would be closer to the truth, and would represent a concrete statement of cause rather than Bob Schieffer's abdication of the whole thought process. But we can actually use this as an tool for analysis of the situation by making explicit a proposed nature of the Arabs, which is this: "...because the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel". If that conjecture fits into the story, then it is a good bet that it is true; at least as true as the timeless nature of the fable itself, which in this analysis we regard as a valid argument. At any rate, this is far better than Bob Schieffer simply throwing his hands up and declaring the problem incomprehensible. Let's try:

When the war broke out in the Middle East, I thought about the old story of the Israeli frog and the Arab scorpion who were trying to cross a river there.

The scorpion couldn't swim and the frog was lost, so the scorpion proposed a deal: Give me a ride on your back and I'll show you the way.

The frog agreed and the trip went fine until they got to the middle of the river and the scorpion stung the frog. As they were sinking, the frog asked in his dying breath, "why would you do that?"

To which the scorpion replied, "Because the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel."

It is worth noting that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip did not kidnap that Israeli soldier and provoke all this because the Israelis were invading Gaza. No, all this happened in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, which was what the Palestinians wanted, but the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel. Why fundamentalists in Gaza and Lebanon chose to provoke this war makes no sense.

Israel had every right to respond and did. But the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel. So, the response may have made it worse by giving moderate Arabs in the region an excuse to distance themselves from Israel.

There was a time when America spent a lot of its diplomatic effort on the Middle East and sometimes, it had real impact. Jimmy Carter's Camp David accords, after all, removed Egypt as the main threat to Israel.

But in recent years, we have stepped back. Why? Hard to say. Except that we know this: the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

------------------------

This new version actually holds together pretty well, with the glaring exception of this sentence; "Why fundamentalists in Gaza and Lebanon chose to provoke this war makes no sense." Wrong, Bob, it makes all kinds of sense, and where this sentence, the heart of your analysis, used to fit into the larger story, it now sticks out irreconcilable with the obvious truth, which is this: The Middle East is simple to understand if you are willing to admit that the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

An analysis of Aesop's fable of The Scorpion in the September 1995 edition of The Ethical Spectacle concludes this:

In any event, the scorpion's unexpected and self-destructive defection [betrayal--HBD] raises the issue of how to counter a player who defects first, and defects in a way that prevents you from retaliating on the next move (your life has ended in the meantime.) All assassins and terrorists play the game this way. Because they are willing to die--it is their nature--the future has no shadow [deterrent effect--HBD] for them. This madness is not unique to humans--the bee that stings to defend the hive, then dies, is a suicidal defector in nature.

"A-ha!", you say, "I have you now! The suicide bombers of HAMAS and the IPG (Islamic Party of God, or "Hez'b'allah" in Arabic) are like bees, dying if necessary to defend their, uh, hive from the marauding Jews!"

Not so fast, Ahmed. Nobody is marauding the hive, not even Jews. Even Bob Schieffer, who does not think this thing can be understood, can see that the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon years ago, and from Gaza a year ago, and that both of the attacks upon Israel in the recent war were unprovoked. He uses that word, unprovoked, in his own editorial voice. But "provokedness" requires a context, and the fact is that Israel may indeed have provoked the Arabs by unilaterally withdrawing from occupied territory. The only way this begins to make sense is if you accept this fact: the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

For in withdrawing, the Israelis give the Arabs what they have asked for, and gain the internationally agreed-upon moral high ground. This is an unacceptable state of affairs for the Arabs, because if the United Nations is no longer able to publish an un-ending stream of condemnations of Israel, then it becomes very difficult to explain the ceaseless terror attacks as "defense". The Arabs' worst nightmare is that Israel gives them everything they want except the destruction of Israel. That would take away their opportunity to destroy Israel with the full cooperation of most of the world, and the second-ugliest truth is that everything else they could possibly gain from Israel is secondary to that quest for the Muslim Holy Grail, which is succinctly and plainly expressed every single day by hundreds of thousands of Arabs and other Muslims in mosques and on streetcorners, in public and in private: Death To Israel.

How can we not believe that this is their true goal? How can we even assert that they would accept anything less? How can we then make our Foreign Policy one of "Honest Brokerage" between bloodthirsty genocidal savages in the thrall of the bloodiest organization the world has ever known on the one hand, and a tiny Democracy founded by war-weary survivors of a previous genocide on the other?

How can we? Like this:
First, fail to admit the obvious truth that the Arabs will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.
Second, anytime that obvious truth is plainly shown by well-reported events, watched and discussed by billions of people, repeat the mantra of nonsense:

"The Middle East is incomprehensible. Those people have been killing each other for thousands of years. You can't make any sense of it. There is no meaning. Nobody there thinks, they just do things to each other for no reason, and if perchance, one of them were to ask another why he acted that way, they would simply throw their hands in the air and say--because this is the Middle East."

Third, fill the media with people who will refuse to admit the obvious truth, and get the media talking heads to repeat the nonsense mantra from step two. People will have such a hard time trying to understand what the media is saying, that they will believe the Middle East is impossible to understand.

And that is actually the Ugliest Truth. The Media is the Second Holocaust

No Twisters in Tornado Alley--Gore Blames Bush

"No Tornadoes Confirmed In Nebraska-Kansas Area This Year
First Time Since 1950 There's Been No Tornadoes In Region"

Failed Presidential Candidate and former Senator and Vice-President Albert V. Gore Junior (D-OZ) issued a statement condemning the Bush administration for the lack of tornadoes this year in Kansas and Nebraska. "You can't have KANzuzz... without tornadoes... [sigh]... and you can't have NuhBRASkuhh... without any twisters... and... [sigh]... if *I* were president, we would have had a bumper crop of tornadoes. Believe me, a Gore Presidency would have seen F5 tornadoes ripping the roofs off of churches and guillotining whole herds of schoolchildren with flying... duhbreee."



local6.com - Weather - No Tornadoes Confirmed In Nebraska-Kansas Area This Year

http://www.local6.com/weather/9468760/detail.html

[Flashback--NK Missile Launches] Ted Turner: Good Riddance to Bad Money

Ted Turner, departing stage far left a broken and meek man, had this to say:

"I just wish the last five years I could have made a bigger contribution," Turner said. "I hung in there as long as I could. I've done my best."

Failure. Like a mobster who has been shot in the face to prevent an open-casket service, Turner slinks quietly away, his money having far outlasted his sanity.

Here is Ted Turner's astounding appearance on CNN, interviewed by a gob-smacked Wolf Blitzer.

Ted Turner: "...I talked with quite a few of the North Korean leaders and South Korean leaders, too, and spent really the most time with the head negotiator for North Korea. And I was really over there to try and persuade North and South Korea to make the DMZ into an international peace park when, when they sign a peace treaty, which I anticipate will be fairly soon, now that we have the six-party talks, we have agreement there. But I had a great time. I am absolutely convinced that the North Koreans are absolutely sincere. There's really no reason -- no reason for them to cheat or do anything to violate this very forward agreement. I mean, I think we can put the North Korea and East Asia problems behind us and concentrate on Iran and Iraq, where, where we still have some ongoing difficulties."
Blitzer countered: "I've got to tell you, Ted, given the record of North Korea, especially the fact that, in the Clinton administration in '93-'94, they made a similar pledge, which they violated and they backed out of, I'm not exactly sure that I accept all your optimism."
Turner: "Well, you know, I was optimistic about the Cold War when I got to Russia, too. But I looked them right in the eyes. And they looked like they meant the truth. I mean, you know, just because somebody's done something wrong in the past doesn't mean they can't do right in the future or in the present. That happens all the, all the time."
Blitzer: "But this is one of the most despotic regimes and Kim Jong Il is one of the worst men on Earth. Isn't that a fair assessment?"
Turner: "Well, I didn't get, I didn't get to meet him, but he didn't look, in the pictures that I've seen of him on CNN, he didn't look too much different than most other people."
Blitzer: "But look at the way, look at the way he's, look at the way he's treating his own people."
Turner asserted: "Well, hey, listen. I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars, but ah-"
Blitzer: "Lot of those people are starving."
Turner: "I didn't see, I didn't see any, I didn't see any brutality in the capital or out in the, on the DMZ. We went, we visit, drove through the countryside quite a bit to get down to Panmunjom and Kaesong. We traveled around. I'm sure we were on a special route, but I don't see, there's really no reason, North Korea's got enough problems with their, with their economy and their agriculture. I think they want to join the western world and improve the quality of life for their people just like everybody else. And I think that we should give them another chance. It doesn't cost us anything. We already have agreements. And North Korea never posed any significant threat to the United States. I mean, the whole economy of North Korea's only $30 billion a year. It's less than the city of Detroit. It's a small place, and we do not have to worry about them attacking us."
Blitzer: "You know, they have a million troops within literally a few miles"
Turner: "A half million."
Blitzer: "Well, best estimates are a million. A million troops along the DMZ."
Turner: "We have a half a million troops, of which 28,000 are Americans and they've been there for 50 years. One of the things I said in both North and South Korea is it's time to end the Korean War officially and move on. And get those hundreds of thousands of young men that are sitting there back building hospitals and roads and schools in North and South Korea and improving the gross national product. It's just a waste of time and energy for them to sit there."
Blitzer: "I think the bottom line, though, Ted, and I think you'd agree, they had this opportunity in the '90s, when they signed this first agreement and they cheated. They didn't live up to it. Now they have a second chance. I hope you're right. I certainly do."
Turner: "Well I hope I'm right, too. But you know it's, in the Bible says you're supposed to forgive seven times seventy, or something like that, but just because, just because, you know, I mean, in 1940, the Germans were our enemies. For the last 50 years, they've been our allies. Same with the Russians were our enemies before '91 when the Cold War ended. Let's give 'em a break. Give 'em a break And besides, even if they do -- even if they do threaten us again, the threat is non-existent to the United States. They can't threaten us. I mean, it's like a fleet attacking an elephant."
Blitzer: "What about those ground to ground missiles that they have, and the CIA-"
Turner: "They can't reach us."
Blitzer: "Well, they can reach Japan. They can reach South Korea. They can reach a lot of our allies-"
Turner: "They can't reach the USA, and we can pound them into, into oblivion in 24 hours."
Blitzer: "But, you don't want to get, you don't want to get to that. There are some estimates, by the way, that could reach Alaska."
Turner: "Well, what, the Aleutian Islands? There's nothing up there but a few sea lions."
Blitzer: "Well, you know, this is a serious issue. I hope you're right, as I said-"
Turner: "I know it's a serious issue. I mean, I didn't go over there to waste my time."
Blitzer: "No, no, no. I'm just, I'm just saying the point you said-"
Turner: "Have you ever been there?"
Blitzer: "I've been to South Korea. I've been to the DMZ."
Turner: "Have you ever been to North Korea?"
Blitzer: "No, I've never been to North Korea."
Turner: "Well, you know, I mean, at least go up there and look in their eyes and have a chat with them before you -- before you accuse them of-"
Blitzer: "By the way, I've made several requests, but they haven't let me into North Korea. But maybe if I go with you the next time they'll let me in."
Turner: "Alright, I'll take you. I took Christiane Amanpour with me this time."

When Wolf Blitzer is the guy bring you back from the fringe left, you have truly gone where no man has gone before.


Here's a statement from the aftermath of one of Turner's many comparisons between Rupert Murdoch and Adolf Hitler--Fox takes the relatively high road:

In response to Turner's statements, Fox News issued a statement in New York saying: "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind — we wish him well.”

I am not so charitable. I hope Ted Turner goes to Hell, which is still better than the unspeakably gruesome regime in North Korea.
Don't come back, Ted.

Star Jones Reynolds is a Class Act

WTF? Is this the wrong blog?

Conservative. Republican. Rationalist. Military.

These are not words commonly associated with the (ABC?) television show "The View". I believe that I have seen the show exactly once, and was astounded at the stupidity, the willful ignorance, the liberalism, the militant idiocy on display. All of that and an around-the-world-and-back snap. Even so, I'm going to wade in on what I guess is some kind of big controversy. It all began innocently enough...

I watch a lot of CNN, I'm afraid, and I was ambushed by a re-run of Larry King on which Star Jones Reynolds was interviewed. She done good. She and I might wind up fistfighting in the aisles of a town hall meeting, but in her current dispute with BabaWawa and the rest of those harpies at ABC, she has proven to be an adversary worthy of far better opposition.

They fired her and told her that she could make up any story she wanted when she left, and they would back her up. Well, what her exit story wound up being was this: they fired me. This sort of honesty didn't seem welcome at ABC. Amazingly, she was quite even-handed in her firing announcement, saying simply that the show was going in a new direction, and that she would not return in the coming season. Anybody who can speak English can hear her saying, quite graciously, that she had been fired. She then offered plenty of positive comments for her co-hosts, and seemed to go out on a high note.

No fool, she prepared for Armageddon and still offered olive branches. When her peace gestures were rebuffed by the greedy corporate shills at ABC, and especially the liar Barbara Walters, she unleashed a fistful of the other hand. Oh, it gets a bit thick at times, "I will not denigrate Berbara Walters at any time--that's not part of who I am," she says, by way of denigrating Barbara Walters. But BabaWawa and the rest of the ABC gaggle made it easy for Star. Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie behaved deplorably, and they are now eating poop for it.

Spoon it down, chumps. DO NOT DIS THE STAR!

Truth be told, I couldn't care less about any of this. But I was surprised to see the way in which she conducted herself, and was so impressed I felt compelled to give credit.

Of course, I could be wrong. But if I am, don't tell Star Jones Reynolds. The last thing I want is her on my case. She's also a lawyer.

Guardian v. Israel (again...)

Here's a stupid article, or opinion piece, or for all I know news story from the guardian. This is a British newspaper, which is also called al-Guardian for its strident anti-Israel tone; like al-Jazeera for al-Bion.

If you scroll through the comments at al-Guardian, you will see that this is the same letter I posted in the online comments section of that paper, with a few minor tweaks (omitted words, misspellings) but nothing substantial has been changed. Note that the response only quotes a single sentence from the article, then proceeds from there. You can read the rest of the article, but it doesn't get any better. Here is my response:

---

This is a remarkably densely-written article. And by dense, I mean thick, stupid, obtuse.

Take this sentence from the [first] paragraph--"Israel's most recent effort to end the territorial stalemate by pulling out of Gaza and dismantling some of the West Bank settlements has drawn criticism for being too little, too late."

Never mind the fact that it was a completely unilateral withdrawal, a physical, tangible thing freely given in exchange for absolutely nothing. With no quid pro quo, this constituted an awesome good-faith gesture, and should have been recognized as Israel's genuine hope for peace and co-existence. Instead, it has indeed been criticized as "too little too late". Of course, this is said by those for whom nothing less than the death of all Jews is sufficient, and no time later than 1945 is acceptable.

How appropriate then, that Mathias Mossberg posits a solution which has been tried before, and under names such as Segregation, Apartheid and the Final Solution. What he suggests is the doctrine of separate-but-equal, wherein a somewhat intermingled but definitely separate society exists within a larger dominant culture. And with over one Billion Muslims clustered about that land, who does Mr. Mossberg think will be the dominant culture? Shall the Jews wear little yellow badges, stars perhaps, to indicate which set of laws applies to them?

When Arafat walked away from peace after Oslo, the Palestinians had their best chance to repudiate him as self-serving. They did not, and perhaps could not, due to pressure from the larger Arab and Muslim world. Why are Palestinians no longer welcome in Jordan? Why did the so-called refugees leave in the first place? The Palestinians are pawns in a cruel Arab game, but this does not make it incumbent upon Israel to lie down and die, which is the inevitable outcome of Mr. Mossberg's insipid suggestion.

Since all other solutions proposed or tried have not worked, I have my own--we should all go party at Mr. Mossberg's house. He'll pay for everything. Well, my idea may not be realistic, but nothing else has worked... and that's justification enough for Mossberg.

The American Party Party

America is one big party and we're all invited. Please kick in for beer and munchies--there is no free ride. Please sign in. Everybody will get a goofy little nametag which may seem a little troublesome, but it is also proof that you are a party-goer in good standing, with full rights to the keg, the buffet, and the selection of music.
Which brings us to The Music! There will be a band, which takes requests, and when they're not playing, there's also a thumpin' stereo system. Bring music! If you don't like somebody else's music, just simmer down and they'll do the same when your music is playing. You can set up other stereos in other rooms, but please, remain part of the party--we're all in this together.
Please speak up if we seem to be running low on anything--some folks have thrown extra money into a pot for just this type of emergency. Bring guests too, as many you like, but guests must also be paid for and must sign in. It's just common sense, right?
See you there!

---

Okay, I'm sorry to do this, I need to make an announcement. It has come to my attention that some people, actually quite a few, have come in through the screen door on the side of the house. They have been drinking your beer, eating your sandwiches, programming your music and just throwing trash all over the floor. I would like to ask for everybody's co-operation in spotting people without nametags. Ask them to leave. For Heaven's sake, it's easy enough to walk in the front door and sign in, pay a little money. Even if they don't have enough money, well, we're all still neighbors--we do have a little surplus, and I don't think anybody would mind if a few people were allowed to sign in without paying the full amount. Right? So if you need a nametag, just go on out and come in through the front door. They'll take care of you there. Ed, what was the music? Yeah, please start the music up again. Thanks everybody--sorry to interrupt, but I'm sure you can see why I had to. Party On!

---

Okay, Okay, Okay! Yes, sorry to interrupt again, but the--yes, exactly, the people at the front door are having a hell of a time. Do you know that there's a line stretching around the block? Yeah well apparently some of our party-goers have been telling people in line that they don't need to pay anything, and word is racing through the neighborhood. Say that again? Right, I don't know who it is, but I would REALLY like to find out. Now the people at the door are in the uncomfortable position of having to explain the same old rules as if things had changed suddenly, and it sucks. Everybody is disappointed now--the people waiting in line, the people at the door, and us in here, too.
Well, no, obviously the problem is not that people need to sign in and pay. That has always been the case, although it wasn't always enforced so strongly. If anything, that was our mistake--allowing some people to "get away" with having snuck into the party. But even worse is the wrong information being spread by some people inside the party.
Let's get one thing straight--this party can take people in as fast as they come--but only if the sign-in and payment systems are working properly, and more importantly, only if everybody knows these systems are working properly.
I want to bring up something Ted over here said. He said we ought to allow the gate-crashers to stay here no problem if they got here before six o'clock, just give them a nametag, that they ought to work in the yard for a while then then be given a nametag if they if they got here between six and seven, and that those who got here after seven should go out, work in the yard, bring some extra money and come through the front door.
Yeah, I don't think so either.

---

Bad News, I'm afraid. Listen, everybody needs to walk slowly toward a door, or even a window. I hate to say it, and please stay calm, but it seems that Ted's friends have been holed up in the basement, listening to largely unpopular music, and plotting to take the house over. The worst part is that they have been burning the support timbers to keep warm down there. Yes, you're exactly right--if they had just stayed within reasonable bounds, then they could have enjoyed the warmth we all paid for, and which we all share up here in the house. No, I don't know why he did this. Yes, they could have simply joined the party across the street where that kind of music is popular. Well, for the better food, and colder beer, I guess. I don't know. Sorry, The party's over, and you can thank Ted and his gate-crashers for making it unaffordable to continue, and for undermining the very infrastructure needed to support a house in the first place.

---

THIS IS TED SPEAKING. I am in charge now, and I would like to say a few things.
First, that the condition of this house is deplorable. The previous administration has left us with a tottering shambles and it will take hard work to set things right. Crews are already hard at work de-constructing the bourgeois furniture in order to fashion added supports for the basement--I have seen it, and it's in terrible shape. Do not interfere with the de-constructionists--they know what they are doing.
Second, from now on, and for the foreseeable future, there will be no more free beer. Food rations will be limited to one plate per day. If you want to know who to blame, just remember who ran this place into the ground over the last four years.
Third, we saw the damage caused by having two different kinds of music available. Henceforth, I as your leader will select the music. When dancing is allowed, you will dance to my tune. There will be no complaints allowed.
Fourth, I am ordering the doors and windows bolted shut. There can be no question but that the open window-and-door policy of the previous administration cost us dearly. Their inept bumbling and incompetence has led directly to the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves.
Fifth, the multiple-tiered approach to party-going was a failure, and therefore, from now on there will be only one kind of party membership. We will all be the same in work and in play, in thought and in deed. Only this way can we truly be a fair-minded house. You can see how things such as complaining about the music, or asking for more food, are exactly the wrong-headed thinking we must leave in the past.
FINALLY, VIOLATORS WILL BE DEALT WITH SEVERELY.
PARTY ON!

Russ Feingold, Part II

What Is Russ Feingold On?

Part II
Russ Feingold (D-Atlantis) is full of something, and it isn't patriotic fervor.
All quotes in this post are taken from his 25 June 2006 appearance on Meet The Press with Tim Russert, whose quotes are indicated by RF and TR, respectively.

---

Russ Feingold on the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program:

RF: ...President Karzai said that he’s very concerned. He said it just yesterday, apparently. He’s very concerned that our strategy in the fight against terrorism isn’t working. He’s concerned that we’re not dealing with the financing of terrorists.

Senator Feingold appears to be criticizing the Bush administration by agreeing with remarks from President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai. Therefore, Feingold seems to think that we are not doing enough to deal with terrorist finances. So we may safely consider Feingold an ardent supporter of TFTP, aka SWIFT. We thank you for your support, Senator, and will count on you when the time comes.

Russ Feingold on Offense:

RF: We’re on the defensive in many of the places in the world. We’re on the defensive in Afghanistan right now in some ways. [...] So even in Afghanistan, which was, of course, an intervention that I supported, we don’t have our eye on the ball, and we need to win that battle. You notice I’ve never called for leaving Afghanistan. I’ve never called for a timetable to leave Afghanistan. That is a situation that we have got to prevail in, and we have lost ground in Afghanistan because our resources have been diverted to Iraq. That is well known, that our ability to succeed in Afghanistan has been hampered by the bad decision to go into Iraq.

U.S. Troops in Tora Bora, in Baghdad, and other such far-flung places are not on the defensive. Accountants and Travel Agents in the World Trade Towers were on the defensive. Note to Russ: when you're playing on your own turf, it's defense. We are on the offense in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. What Feingold wants to do is drop the ball at the ten-yard line ("cut") and stroll calmly for the benches ("run"). And if the enemy should, say, pick that ball up and run it into our territory (again), then it would be okay with Senator Feingold to go back and start all over again (see Russ Feingold on Quagmires).

Russ Feingold on Motivation:

TR: You said some Democratic senators told you privately they felt intimidated to vote for the war. Why?
RF: They may not have used that exact word, but they certainly indicated that they felt that there was enormous political pressure. Because the White House has done a terrible job of running the fight against terrorism. A terrible job in Iraq, but they’ve done a brilliant job of intimidating Democrats.

First, this makes no real sense. Feingold says "The administration is terrible at war planning and execution, and THEREFORE Democrats are intimidating into voting for the war? Huh? If it were true that the administration were so bad at all of this, it would be a simple thing to say, "Your war is a disaster and we're not following you there--bring the troops home NOW." SO this argument makes no sense--he is arguing against his own cause. I'll assume that the question caught him off-guard, and he simply retreated incoherently into talking points e.g., war bad, Rumsfeld incompetent, Bush lied, etc. So we'll give him a pass of sorts on this. The next example, however, is pretty clear-cut. The very next thing he said was this:

Somehow Democrats are afraid to say, “Look, not only was this a mistake, but it continues to be a mistake and it’s being run in a mistaken way.” And I cannot understand why the structure of the Democratic Party, the consultants that are here in Washington, constantly advise Democrats not to take a strong stand. This election could turn on this Iraq issue, in fact, the 2006 election, and maybe even 2008. The party that says we have a reasonable plan to bring the troops home by, by this date and to refocus on the anti-terrorism issue is the party that will win.

Russ Feingold says that it is consultants setting the Democrats' agenda. Fair enough, there's a lot of that going around. Let's admit that all politicians are motivated by a mixture of causes, noble and well, ignoble. Ignoble causes will include petty political calculations, but there's a harsh consideration here; if you lose your office, it won't matter what any other motivations of yours had been. So we'll admit that this mixture of motivations is a healthy part of any government.
This means also that anybody who tells you that his motivations are completely noble is completely suspect.

RF: The president—see, he has to give up the—his goal here, which is, which is not consistent with the interests of the American people. His goal is to broaden the power of the executive beyond all reason, it’s an abuse of power. His goal should be to go after the terrorists, not to try to broaden the power of the president beyond all reason.

But:

TR: The Washington Post [says that] 56 percent of Americans feel that you are using [your motion to censure President Bush] for political advantage. Do you agree with that analysis?
RF: Well, of course I don’t agree that I’m doing it for political purposes. That same poll, Tim, showed that a very substantial number of Americans supported the censure resolution, regardless of what they thought my motives are.
As to my motives, Tim, I came here to Washington to stand up for the Constitution and for the Bill of Rights. I believe this is an historical affront to the Constitution. I guarantee you, that is the reason I proposed it; that is what I believe. ...our children and grandchildren... where were the representatives...? Where were the congressmen, where were the senators...?
That’s my motive, believe it or not.

I don't believe it. Chalk one up in the Tis-So-Tain't-So column, I guess.


More to come in Part III, where we analyze the man's amazing PSYCHIC POWERS!
LEADER:

XX: QUOTE FROM SOURCE XX.

MY OWN RESPONSE TO XX's QUOTE.

Geneva Conventions and Guantanamo

YOU KNOW....
I have been studying the Geneva conventions (four treaties and three subsequent "protocols"), and have come to several conclusions:
1. No group of people has ever behaved so exactly antithetical to the aims of the Geneva Conventions as the Islamists. It seems that for each prohibited action, they do that thing, and for every required action, they refuse.
2. The Islamists are unquestionably NOT covered under the Geneva Conventions. Many of the SHALLs and SHALL NOTs alluded to above are what actually determine whether or not a force is entitled to protection under the accords.
3. The Islamists, far from being mistreated, are only the most recent in a long line of foes to have the INCREDIBLE GOOD FORTUNE of fighting against the United States. The Geneva Conventions (GC) clearly do not apply to the Islamists, because tha Islamists clearly do not apply the GC to any of their own actions. Nonetheless, they are housed, fed, cared for, and even litigated for by Americans. The only thing keeping these people alive is an astouding preference for mercy on the part of America and Americans.
4. There is no legal obstacle to simply executing the lot of the Guantanamo "detainees" and dumping their bodies over the fence--kill them all, and let Castro sort them out--other than America's own laws as expressed by or passed through the Uniform Code of Military Justice which governs the actions of our servicemen. The captured Islamists have no rights, however, under the U.S. Constitution. They are not U.S. Citizens. They are not in America. Perhaps Cuba has an anti-littering provision which is germane.
5. The left is not so upset about Camp XRAY as they are that we still have not given Guantanamo back to the benevolent Agrarian Reformer and Friend of Che.
6. SCOTUS better come back with nothing other than "They have no rights, and the proper thing is for the U.S. Military to keep them right where they are until they no longer pose a threat".

The point is that criminal law has no bearing on the detainees, captured on the battlefield.
Also, US Civil law has no bearing on the detainees, captured on the battlefield.
Also, the provisions of the Geneva Conventions have no bearing on the detainees, captured on the battlefield.

The whole purpose of the Geneva Conventions is to reduce (or perhaps, even to eliminate) wartime atrocities by setting down both protections and requirements for combatants. It is expressly a "Golden-Rule" type of accord, in which those who will not abide by will also not be protected by it.

That is not a side effect--that is the central mechanism for reducing wartime atrocities.

The detainees are indeed in a legal black hole--they have worked very hard to slip past the event horizon of human behavior, and now they cannot return to the universe where normal rules apply.

So eat shit-covered koran pages and die slow horrible deaths, al-Qaeda. Serve as an example, and help us all strengthen the Geneva Conventions. Peace Be Unto You Sooner Rather Than Later.

Polarization is good. Bipartisanship is bad. -or- THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

The Roman Republic had a Triumvirate-a three-way split in power. This collapsed to a two-way sahre, which of course soon led to a single man in charge of the whole shebang. At that point it was no longer the Roman Republic-it was the Roman Empire, which devoured itself.

I read a wonderful book entitled The Armchair Economist, (which citation I will expand in place without comment) that had a passage concerning bipartisanship. The author said that it amounted to collusion, like price-fixing. If all of the gas stations on your street are working together, then they can only be working against you, and prices stay too high--they trust each other not to start a price war, also known as fair competition.

If you believe in market forces as fervently as that author does, and I confess that I can follow closely where he goes, then it is no far stretch to feel that a Congress eternally at odds with itself, consantly mired in bickering and petty, mean, nasty partisan attacks is the perfect system of American government. The worst form of American government is one in which the members of Congress feel more in common with each other than with their respective constituents.

This leads me as an aside, to a comment made by a very different sort of fellow--a History Professor who feels that the ability of Representatives and Senators to raise funds within Washington, D.C. places them at odds with the people who sent them there in the first place. If they were allowed to raise funds only within their own constituencies, they would pay much more attention to their rightful masters, pajama-people like you and me, and the power of large lobbying groups would be greatly diminished. This should have the knock-on effect of breaking the death-grip of some useless geezers on their own seats. All of which would be good for Joe six-vote, uh, I mean, Joe six-pack one-vote. Sounds like a great way to return power to the people, huh? I'd like to hear what my economist has to say about it. The History Professor is Newt Gingrich.

Politics and Economics are naturally tied to each other, and it has nothing (well little) to do with money. Economic theories are just as valid when discussing dollars as they are when discussing seashells, kisses from pretty girls, or Global ecopolotics, because economic theories do not directly address money. Economics is the science of practical human decision-making.

We have heard a great deal recently about the evils of our partisan bickering, and the road to Hell along which we thunder in Hot Rods of Hatred.

Hogwash.

We are awakening from History, as we blink ourselves upright in the Post-Cold-War dawn. The sun rises, thawing the world, and some early morning predators have shown themselves. We remind ourselves that this is how the world has always been, that before the long Soviet Night there was not peace but war, more war, and still more war. The responsible among us take up defensive positions, and in some cases scoot out to punish the predators which get too cavalier near our camp. Offense is better--it always has been.
Long before mid-day, we will organize a regular hunting party, the same as we did yesterday. The sunken-eyed guardians who watched our camp all night will sleep in the heat of the coming day. Life in our camp will go on as it always has, provided that we do what we always have.
We forget our violent nature only at our peril.

We are awakening from history, and the relative calm imposed by the Cold War is evaporating. Think radical Islamism is bad? Wait five years and it will be worse. Do nothing for five years and it will be MUCH worse. There is a reason that people call this the "Long War", and it is honesty. The fact that Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on much, and bitterly disagree on most, is not alarming under these trying and dimly remembered circumstances. Politics is a messy business, and if the views of the people are to be honestly and forthrightly represented in Washington D.C., it must be an odious, unpleasant business as well. The truth is that in the last sixty-odd years, we haven't needed much from Washington, and it has seemed relatively pleasant. Now we need it to function as a cutting room, and it is getting ugly.

I for one do not mind the current partisanship and "poisonous" atmosphere in Washington, and the political sphere at large. Poisons such as this are small fry, and serve to weed out the weak. In an American Democracy which is supposed to function as a "Marketplace of Ideas", only the strong should survive. I expect the caustic atmosphere to eliminate any Representative who cannot cut the mustard. I expect the partisan attacks to topple any Senator who does not meet the standard--efficacy.

Therefore, the last thing I want to hear is that a Democrat has a proposal and a Republican has co-sponsored it. Or vice-versa.

I predict that what is now called the American Century (1900-1999) will actually be called the Totalitarian Century, after the sponsors of the great wars of the period. 2000-2099 will be the American Century. The political rumblings you hear now are just the beginning.

Welcome to the American Renaissance.

Russ Feingold, Part I [updated]

What Is Russ Feingold On?

Russ Feingold (D-Atlantis) is full of something, and it isn't patriotic fervor.
All quotes in this post are taken from his 25 June 2006 appearance on Meet The Press with Tim Russert, whose quotes are indicated by RF and TR, respectively.

Russ Feingold On Amnesty:

RF: I don't think there should be amnesty for people who have killed or are trying to kill American troops...we, as Americans, cannot tolerate the idea that people who have murdered American soldiers should get off scot-free.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, is actively destroying our ability to prevent terrorist attacks not only on our soldiers, but on Americans here at home. Note that even Bill Keller does not dispute that he destroyed a valuable program which has successfully stopped terrorist attacks, and caught terrorists from earlier successful attacks. What does Russ Feingold think of Bill Keller's attempts to murder accountants and travel agents in America? My guess is that amnesty for Bill Keller is what Russ Feingold has in mind. Congress seems to be getting up in its hind legs about this--perhaps we will get to hear what Russ Feingold has to say.

Russ Feingold On Timetables:

TR: Army General George Casey presented his plan to Pentagon leaders and President Bush in confidential briefings... the number of combat brigades could shrink to seven or eight by the middle of next year, and to five or six by the end of 2007. Make sense?
RF: ...it shows that all this talk about a timetable being unreasonable or ridiculous is just wrong. ...our [Kerry-Feingold] timetable that we proposed last week had to do with bringing the troops home within one year. I mean, how is this different? ... The fact is it is a public timetable...

The fact is that Casey's plan is only public because it was leaked to the New York Times! Notice where it said "confidential briefings"? So one difference is that the now-public nature of this plan is the result of a crime. By the way, the late late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's timetable also "had to do with" bringing American troops home within one year. Another difference, under-reported by our feckless media, is that General Casey's "Win" plan is based entirely on conditions in Iraq, while Kerry and Feingold's "Cut and Run" plan is based entirely on arbitrary calendar dates. One of these is a sound basis for planning, and the other is a recipe for defeat. There's the difference, Russ Feingold.

Russ Feingold On Somalia:

RF: You know, Tim, today it was announced that [a known Al-Qaeda operative, on the State Department's Terrorist List] has taken over in Mogadishu, in Somalia.

Russ Feingold goes on to say that this is because we are stuck in the Iraq Quagmire, and that it is preventing us from addressing real problems such as Somalia.
I am astounded at the sheer nerve, the chutzpah, of this Cut and Run Democrat to take the Bush Administration to task for Somalia. Of course, the right time to deal with Somalia was when we were there a decade ago. Now there was an opportunity. Of course, we cut and run from Somalia under a Democrat President, an act which was cited by no less a terrorism expert than Osama bin Laden as a major reason for attacking the United States on 11 September, 2001.
I find it revealing that Tim Russert, who is no dummy, did not see fit to point this out to Russ Feingold.

Russ Feingold On Quagmires:

TR: [If we were to cut and run] If things did get worse, would you consider going back in?
RF: Sure. Look. You don't just lock this down permanently. I'm trying to propose what makes sense at this point. My guess is that things would not get worse.

Russ Feingold is on the record saying that if we cut and run from Iraq, he does not think that things will get worse. How then, does he explain what happened to Somalia? As far as "not locking this thing down permanently", nobody is saying that when we meet our objectives in Iraq, the rest of its peaceful future is guaranteed. I haven't heard anybody in the Bush administration say that we can "lock this thing down permanently". This is Russ Feingold's misunderstanding or worse, misrepresentation of our own reasonable, obtainable, and measurable goals in Iraq. But why is he so cavalier about putting troops back in if it gets worse after we cut and run? If Russ Feingold were truly interested in winning in Iraq, wouldn't he want to do that now, rather than giving the enemy a respite, a la Vietnam, before committing more troops to die? Shouldn't we press the advantages we now have in position and momentum?


Russ Feingold is advocating the same strategy that failed in Vietnam--a little bit here, a little bit there, don't ever truly accomplish an objective, but be willing to come back and pound the same worthless targets at great risk to American lives. He is also advocating the same strategy that failed in Somalia and bought us 9/11--show the terrorists that we will leave when they tell us to.

The Democrats at large are advocating a strategy which won in Vietnam--it won for the other side. Defeat the will of the American people. Their cynical ploy amounts to cowardice at best, and treason at worst. More on this in Part II.

A Prairie Home Com-SHUT THE HELL UP!

Here's a comment I left at Slate's site about a column of theirs, written by Sam Anderson, trying to figure out why suddenly some people might not actually love listening to Garrison Keillor. I said:

You folks on the left just don't know how truly tone-deaf you can be, because you are not, in fact, dosed with unceasing rightist sentiment sanctified as "the center". You live in a bubble of uninterrupted leftist thought, assumptions unchallenged and therefore never noticed. The leftist assumptions made along the way to your opinions about Garrison Keillor are striking.
Some of your quotes:

"He began his career in the early '70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine's Golden Age aesthetic..."

The New Yorker is about as leftist-elite as you can get, and he was too leftist-elite for that magazine.

"How has someone so relentlessly inoffensive managed to become so divisive?"

He's only inoffensive if you snuggle comfortably in the bosom of the leftist elite.

"Keillor delivers the news in a kind of whispery trance. When he speaks, blood pressures drop across the country, wild horses accept the saddle, family dogs that have been hanging on at the end of chronic illnesses close their eyes and drift away."

Your mistake is in never having noticed that the blood pressure of many people actually rises when his dripping-water monotone delivery of leftist humor begins, and this has always been so. The problem is that you seem never to have met any of these people. His cloying adagio may appeal to people who already agree with him, but to those who find his unavoidable politics suspect, the extra time between drawn-out syllables is precious life itself down the tube, wasted, never to be regained. The fact that he takes an hour to deliver twenty minutes of bilgewater does not increase the value of the bilgewater.
There is nothing new in popular irritation with Garrison Keillor. His movie has not uncovered a new phenomenon, and has certainly not caused any American to change opinion of him. I have always loathed exposure to his leaking-faucet radio program. As with any annoying, repetitive, purposeless noise, I move quickly to stem it at the source. I hasten to add that if I were unable to, I might also wish to "close my eyes and drift away", much like a dog with a terminal illness.
I am reminded of an often-repeated story about a newspaper employee, snuggled comfortably in the bosom of the New York Times, who burst into tears upon the election of Richard M. Nixon to the office of President. She could not believe that he had been elected, and refused to accept it at any rate. "It simply can't be true," she wailed, "I don't know ANYBODY who voted for him!" How far is it from the New York Times to The New Yorker?
I am fairly sure, Sam Anderson of New York, that you don't know ANYBODY who doesn't like Garrison Keillor. Pity that. Such a friend could have saved you from writing this article, better entitled "In Which I Demonstrate My Utter Ignorance that Half of the Country Exists."
Garrison Keillor is relentlessly many things, but inoffensive is not one of them. Boring. Pompous. Tedious. Sanctimonious.
He's Michael Moore without the flying spittle.

Execute 1LT Ehren Watada

Here's one for the lawyers: please find the justification to execute commissioned wartime traitor Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada. Surely this cannot be difficult.

If a Commissioned Officer is refusing orders to go to war, is he still accepting paychecks? He has accepted a promotion from Second Lt. to First Lt. since the invasion in March 2003.

Patriots are not the only ones whose blood refreshes the tree of Liberty--this coward is now worth more dead than alive.

DISCLAIMER: Obviously, this is predicated upon the accuracy of his reported and planned actions. An execution will only be appropriate after a Court Martial, and the attendant fact-finding. I am not in favor of lawlessness--hence the plea to the LAWYERS.

Bang Bang Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iran had our hostages, Ayatollah proteges
noone seemed to mind
Four-hundred and forty-four days, a
Pre-sidency
Mahmoud Ahma'nejad said he did it for his God
Carter walked behind
Democrats in Washington have this
Te-henden-cy
But when they want to threaten the world,
They do it from Tehran
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
We were not misled
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Did just what he said!

A. Q. Khan again, working out of Pakistan,
Has something to share
Knowing all too well that where there's a will, there's a way
Baradei sounded pissed--Kofi said comply with this
Strongly-worded note
Or he'll have no choice but to send ano-other one
And while the Jews are saying their prayers
We'll stuff it down their throats!
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
We were not misled
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Did just what he said!

Hillary Clinton won, Worser than the other one,
Israel stands alone
Never been more certain of being ki-hi-hi-illed
Kofi Annan and Mohammed el-Baradei
High-five in the hall(BACKGROUND SPOKEN CHEERS)
Saying after all, it was Allah's wi-hi-hi-ill
But the plot's been foiled for on their own soil
Americans lance the boil!
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
We were not misled
Bang, bang, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Did just what he said!

Why Smart People Become Liberal Idiots -- Second Draft

Let's face it--there's a lot of brainpower going to waste behind the Neuron Curtain of accepted Liberal discourse in this country. Not all of those University professors are idiots--neither are all of their students. The starlets and leading men of Hollywood had to work hard to get where they are, and more to the point, they had to navigate levels and mazes of treacherous studio politics. I can't make any sense of Hollywood--can you? They did.

So while Heaven knows there is no shortage of stunningly stupid people on the left, mental retardation is not actually synonymous with liberalism in American politics (and for those of you from or in someplace not America, we use the terms liberal and conservative somewhat differently here--beware). What is synonymous with liberalism is condescension--that smug superiority which oozes from the very pores of liberals. They manage somehow to ignore you and lecture to you at the same time*, which is an amazing feat. They manage to focus their attention on a spot about three feet behind you, as if you are an ignorant bystander in a conversation between two People Who Matter.

American liberals are people who think that we should be forced to do as our betters in Washington D.C. command, for they are wise and just, and would not have risen to that position without being so. Unless they are Republicans, the nasty cockroaches. You may say that this liberal willingness to accept the dictates of authority ("We're going to take money away from you for your own good"--Hillary Clinton) is a result of liberal thinking, but I say that it is the source. Liberalism is not based upon stupidity--that is the result of liberal thinking. Liberalism is, however, based on feelings of superiority.

If you start with the assumption that you are a superior being, everything in Liberalism starts to make sense. You are a Person Who Matters, and that brings many privileges. You get to tell people what to do. You get to keep talking long after your turn has ended. You don't have to make sense when you argue--your word is sufficient that a thing is true. If anybody tries to dispute your facts, simply repeat what you said a moment ago--your opponent clearly did not hear you, or worse, does not realize who you are--mention your credentials again.
Here's one of the neatest tricks of all--Liberalism lets you feel superior to the the rest of the world, while denying that you would possibly harbor any feelings of superiority, as that is an inferior mode of thought.

You get to reject common sense and the hard-won wisdom of bitter experience not in spite of its eminent sensibility, but precisely because of it. You can hardly feel superior to the masses if you agree with them--therefore perversity and cynicism must necessarily dominate your decision-making, your bullshit-filtering process. If you are forced to agree with the masses, at least argue a minor point: the sky isn't actually blue, it just looks that way. No doubt because your puny conservative eyes see it that way.

I recall my recurring unease at the venom directed toward anything resembling "Social Darwinism" in my University work. Social Darwinism is the point of view that some cultures are superior to others and either will or should displace, assimilate, or eliminate the lesser cultures. This is a discredited way of thinking, because in the Liberal Cosmogeny, all cultures are created equal, with the exception of Protestantism, which is clearly a holdover from Neanderthal times. It is therefore not just wrong, but Wrong to say that there are features of culture and society which make a given one more or less suited to long-term survival, or that some cultures and societies have features which confer benefits upon a people, and others which confer burdens. We shall not say that Western Civilization displaces everything else because of a unique combination of work ethic, individualism, and scientific inquisitiveness. No, we must admit, screeching, that our corrupt Coca-Cola culture is spread at bayonet point, and (rend garment now) with financing by a global Zionist Conspiracy. Never mind the implications of alternating-current infrastructure.

It is simply not Correct to say that America is strong because Americans made it strong, and that Americans had that oportunity because of many identifiable factors. No, only negative things can be identified in America, so while the good, honest, hard-working people of Sweatshopistan (who remain that way because of their strong family values, their religious predilection to work hard, and the righteous fear of neighbors and God avenging wrongdoing) are clamoring to come to sinful America, the fat, lazy Americans (who got that way through the concerted efforts of Madison Street, Wall Street, Pensylvania Avenue and the overlords in Tel Aviv) should simply accept death with a smile and make room for the Sweatshopistanis.

*I have peeled this description from Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. It is a wonderful book, and contains a line something like "Arkady felt as though he was being simultaneously lectured to and ignored." No doubt, I am butchering the quote, but the sense has remained with me for over twenty years--truly a fantastic book.

Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) lays down the LAW!

This is how a Leader handles business. A short statement fromm Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) Chairman, Senate Intelligence Committee:

"This is Senator Pat Roberts. In all of the furor in Washington, and the criticism about the intelligence community's capability of detecting and stopping terrorist attacks--I have a warning. This business of continued leaks, making it possible for terrorists to understand classified information about how we are preventing their attacks on America is endangering our country, and it is endangering intelligence sources, methods, and lives.

Now I think the great majority of American people get it. Al-Qaeda is at war with the United States. Terrorists are planning attacks even as I speak. But, through a very effective and highly classified program, we have stopped these attacks. The fact that we have had another tragedy like 9/11 is no accident. But today in the Congress and throughout Washington, leaks and misinformation, and quite frankly just plain politics are endangering this program. Bin Laden, and Zarqawi, and the terrorists must be rejoicing. We are going to get to a point where we are unilaterally disarming ourselves of the technology advantage that we have in the war against terrorism. Game, set, match: Al-Qaeda.

And mark my words: the same people who are attacking the Commander-in-Chief for legal efforts to track terrorism here will be the first people to attack the government for not doing enough if there is another attack. Now I am a strong supporter of the Fourth Amendment, and protecting our civil liberties. But you don't have any civil liberties if you are dead. Remember Khobar Towers, and Beirut, and USS COLE, and the Embassy attacks, and the two attacks on the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, and more to come if this surveillance program is compromised.

Now about these phone records. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that phone records are useful in law enforcement and intelligence investigations. Now I'm not talking about the contents of a telephone call--what you say to someone over the telephone. I am talking about a businees record that contins the number dialed, the time of the call, and the length of the call. Not any conversations. Law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts have been using phone records to track the criminals and the threats to national security for years.

And Congress is doing its oversight! On the Senate Intelligence Committe, we have a Terrorist Surveillance Program Sub-Committee: seven Senators. We have had three hearings, more to come, numerous briefings, I have been to the NSA, I have seen how the program works; I have never seen a program more tightly run or closely scrutinized.

When people asked on September 12th whether we were doing everything in power power to prevent another attack, the answer, unfortunately, was no. Well now we are. And we need to keep doing it. And if there is another attack, as promised by Al-Qaeda, the leakers, and the uninformed, and the mis-informed critics will bear part of that responsibility."

Any Questions?

President Bush's 'Fourth Way'

As President, Bill Clinton popularized the 'Third Way', which was one of the incarnations of triangulating against one's own base and the opposition. The Third Way, when successfully executed, yields a healthy percentage of the moderate middle, while alienating only a small percentage of the hard-core base, which will still likely vote along party lines.
Long story short; in failing to deal effectively with the Mexico problem, President Bush is pioneering the Fourth Way, in which an attempted appeasement of the middle will fail to yield any of the moderate vote, while radicalizing the base to the extent that they do not vote, or even protest in disgust by voting for another candidate.
Even President Reagan could not leap this chasm in two short hops--the 1986 amnesty was one of his few unmitigated failures. Bush is a fool to try.
This Fourth Way is the mirror reflection of the Third Way; halfway between the two ends of the political spectrum, but rather than elevated in success, sunken in failure.

The Proper Response from Bush to Ahmadinejad

Look at this:
My Way News - Officials: Iran's President Writes to Bush

"In the letter, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world," spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham told a news conference."

---

This took me about fifteen seconds, but I'm a little slow tonight. Here is what President Bush should tell his polar opposite:

"The next time I speak to an Iranian dictator it will be over your dead body. Trust is important and I will never trust you. If you think that you'll get a different answer when I am no longer President, you go ahead and wait. You and the horse you rode in on. Meanwhile, your nucular [sic] program needs to stop. NOW."

The beauty of this is that it not only shows Iran that we will not be bought off with vaguely intimated hopes, and that we know without a doubt that there is no hope behind the slippery dictator's words, just more delays for the West to accept while the "Iranhattan Project" continues; it also shows the rest of the world, bad guys and good, that the United States will not be shoved around just because elections loom in 2006 and 2008.

Beyond Beauty, however, lies virtue, and the virtue of this is that even if the Republicans lost the White House, House, Senate, Five justices and all of the State Governorships to the Democrats; the Democrats would still be forced to take a tough line with Iran. Nothing is guaranteed, but this is as close as it gets, and there is truly nothing to lose but time and freedom to act.

For those who are inclined to argue that my plan prejudices any productive outcome of working with rather than against Iran, please see the previous post, entitled "Pony".

Southern California Name Contest

Please submit your witty name conflating the current mess in California with Middle-Eastern themes. I am disgusted every time I see millions of people marching in America. Next thing you know, we'll be rending our garments and ululating over spilt milk, but only when the cameras are on.

Kick-off:

The Calistinian Authority.
Cordobistan.
Hassan Diego.
Iranaheim.
Iraquez.

And so on.

A winner will be selected by my subjective standards, unless I am shouted down by a massive reader outcry. Who says that Snivelry is dead?

AND if anybody think this is racist, ethnist, or any of the rest of that, consider who claims Everything For The Race. Hint: Race is pronounced "Raza" in that motto.

I see very real parallels between on the one hand, the Arab states which prolong the suffering of "Palestinians" and on the other hand, the Mexican Government and its race-baiting American enablers who quite profitably prolong the misery of "Aztlanos", Mexican workers in America.

[UPDATE] 11MAY2006 Massive Reader Outcry narrowly averted.

A Day Without Illegal Immigrants--GREAT!

Today was a great day! My hourly wage TRIPLED, my Federal Taxes were SLASHED, I didn't have to wait at the health clinic today, and when I got out of there, the bill was a LOT less than what I'm used to paying! To top it all off, my daughter's reading level went up by a WHOLE GRADE overnight, because her class had not been held back for years by children in families who refuse to assimilate but stumble along with Spanglish instead. Can I please have EVERYDAY without illegal immigrants?

Sincerely,

The American Worker

Communist May Day Celebrated by Millions in American Cities

Never mind the actual issue most Americans are considering; illegal immigration. Put that aside for a moment and look instead at something in the background of Today's events. Real Power.

The demonstrations, scheduled for the first day of May, are a show of force by the still very healthy international Communists. Through groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R., the global Communist movement captures the energy of any center-to-left political faction and perverts it for the purposes of the Communists.

Why on earth would a protest about illegal immigration from Mexico be held on May first, when the fifth of May is so close? May fifth in Spanish is Cinco de Mayo, which is Mexican Independence Day. It would make much more sense for millions of people from Mexico to take the fifth as a holiday. Why would they march on the first instead?

May first is the biggest holiday of the Communist faith. It is Christmas and Hanukkah combined, and in Communist countries, there is a month-long Ramadan of feverish factory activity which consumes most of April, in preparation for "May Day", the holiday dedicated to Workers of the World. April is marked by much exhortation of the proletariat to ever-greater production, in order to have something to celebrate on May Day. Hallelujah, Comrade.

This scheduling detail regarding the first vice the fifth of May is a show of force by the Communists who run the "incubators" of supposedly grassroots movements. The very name "Common Cause" admits the co-optive nature of that organization. The "answer" in "International A.N.S.W.E.R" stands for "Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. This is a clear example of casting a wide net in order to claim a common cause.

In what I could call Phase I of the (New, Post-Soviet) COMINTERN American Operation, these incubators contact other movements and provide training and financial support. Somebody dispute me on this. The smaller movements are invited to join massive marches to show Solidarity, demonstrate Common Cause, and enjoy the publicity benefits which smaller events will not bring.

But notice that whenever a massive protest is held in America, there always seems to be an uninvited guest: Communism. Of course, the Commies are welcome at any table set by the American Left, but when was the last time you saw Communism or its financial underpinning Socialism mentioned in the publicity for any of these events? Gold Star Mothers for Peace and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat--and the Destruction of Israel. A Day Without Immigrants, or Jews for that matter, you Zio-Capitalist Pigs.

A year ago, I would have confidently surmised that we would never see Communist or Socialist sentiment expressed openly in the publicity surrounding a demonstration or other sort of mass event. Rally, even. Now however, I am grateful I said no such thing, for I feel quite certain that we will see the International Communist movement switch smoothly into Phase II of the American Operation--manifestly Communist demonstrations, and I give it one year from the date of this blog post.

We are winning the battle in Iraq, and we are losing the war at home.

Today's marches in various cities are a show of force. This is a demonstration that leadership of these organizations large and small are either populated or controlled by Communists to such a degree that they can move millions of Mexicans to stay away from work on May Day, but work straight through Cinco de Mayo.

That is real power.

Remember Rolling Blackouts? Iran Does.

Here's a letter I wrote to the stalwart stock at POWERLINEBLOG:

Sir,

I have not seen mentioned *anywhere* the logical connection between California's electricity woes of a few years ago, and our current oil price misery.

The problem in California was that after the *insufficient* deregulation of the power industry, power providers wound up with a cap on prices, while consumers had (therefore) no cap on consumption. The supply side, which can do basic math, stopped investing and reduced operations to perfunctory, mandated, caretaker tasks, while the demand side chugged an ever-larger draught until the taps were dry, barback unseen and not coming soon.

If this Republican administration and Republican Congress deal with oil in the same pandering, bite-the-hand-which-feeds way that California "dealt with" electricity years ago, the results will be much the same, with the added specter of Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's replacement all rubbing their hands with glee as they carve up the remnants of our crippled economy.

This treatment is precisely what I see coming when I hear opportunistic House Reps and Bush Admin. types begin to take up the cudgel of wanking against an American industry whose profits, as a percentage, are lower than the average for all American industries. Some facts would help.

Thank you,

Haakon B. Dahl
LT USNR

Yokohama, Japan

President Bush and You-Know-Hu

Howard Dean tips the Liberal Hand--First Amendment be Damned

In a surprise move, the DNC has begun its attack on the First Amendment before it has finished destroying the Second. This is, of course a grave strategic mistake. Adherents of the "anti-tyranny" reading of the Second Amendment could hardly have been given a greater gift than Howard Dean's attack on the First Amendment. Read on to gain the full "chilling effect"!

On April 20th, 2006, at the Christian Science Monitor's Monitor Breakfast, Howard Dean said "The religious community has to decide whether they want to be tax exempt or involved in politics." Here is part of the description of that Breakfast, from the Christian Science Monitor's website: "The Monitor Breakfast is a simple concept: bring journalists and public officials together over bacon and eggs for an in-depth, spirited discussion of the latest issues."

Howard Dean is wrong about the religious community and its rights and obligations under our Constitution, and he is more wrong about this than he usually is about most things, which is noteworthy. Is there any way to interpret his statement other than as a threat? "If you are involved in politics, we are going to pull your tax-exempt status; your choice." Briefly, he could properly have said: "The religious community has to decide whether they want to be tax exempt or involved in earning a profit," or he could have said "The religious community has to decide whether they want to be involved in politics or in earning a profit."

This is a shamelessly transparent threat to the religious side of the right, from the irreligious side of the left. Obviously, it is in the Democrat Party's interest if church-going, God-fearing people stay home on election day, and keep quiet until then. The problem is that he is trying to use a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists to trump the United States Constitution. What's more, he doesn't understand the letter in the first place.

Here is the relevant passage from Jefferson's famed 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State"

Notice that this recitation of the two church/state clauses refers only to State actions impact upon churches. Would not a threat to revoke tax-exempt status in retaliation for political activity directly conflict with the second of the church/state clauses? Does it not prohibit the free exercise thereof?

Here is the "wall" phrase used by Jefferson once more, in a similar letter, to "the Virginia Baptists". This 1808 example is less well-known:

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
"We have solved ... the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries."

No wonder this example is less well-known. It develops in greater depth the anti-government-meddling thrust of the separation, and since it is Democrats who triumphantly wave the Danbury letter around as if it were tickets to a Whoopi Goldberg filth concert, we can fairly expect them to leave this clearer version by the wayside. It clarifies that the threat is of government preventing the free exercise of speech and especially, religion or the lack thereof, through the establisment of a church/State entity. Again, the threat latent in church/state entanglement is that the government establishes, "supports", or "forces [the] views [of]" a church on persons of other faiths, or on persons of no faith.

At no time is the Constitution or Thomas Jefferson fearful that the political actions of church-going people will cause the destruction of the Union. The converse is the threat; that religious actions of the State will cause the destruction of the people.

As the Chairman of the Democrat Party, Howard Dean could be expected, between jam and biscuits, to attempt to discourage the religious right from going to the polls or from speaking up about right and wrong in politics. Yet even if his quite anti-Constitutional threat had been veiled, would it not constitute a "chilling effect" against the exercise of free speech, which is quite clearly protected, and especially against free religious speech, which is specifically and explicitly protected not once but twice? He is actually threatening to use the power of government to curtail the political activity of conservatives. This not only clarifies the preference of the Democrat Party for cherry-picking laws, judges, and amendments, as well as sources to govern all of the above, it also demonstrates a breath-taking advance of their anti-Constitutional agenda. Truly, I seek a better term to describe it, but there it is. And yet the threat is not veiled! "You shut those churches up or we'll hit you in the pocketbook!"

How much simpler is it to understand that the framers of the Constitution believed that individual rights were sovereign in Man, and that the greatest threat to that self-determination was government tyranny, than to accept the penumbrae, the aurae, the emanations of legal decisions designed to protect the "rights" of groups at the expense of individuals? There are no groups mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Every enumerated or implied right resides in an individual. The liberal left has never "understood" this when that misunderstanding afforded them an opportunity to chip away at rights they do not like, such as that guaranteed by the Second Amendment. And in issuing threats which restrict the Free Exercise of religion, they have come now for the First Amendment. Welcome to the foreshadow of Government Tyranny.

Perhaps Mister Dean could be persuaded to put down his croissant long enough to step to the window. He would see the real face of America, armed by the Second Amendment to preserve the First. That's why we have a Second Amendment.

Bedrock Principles

No philosophy makes any sense without reference to basic principles. Here are mine:

Individual Rights are the only rights which exist.
The very idea of collective or group rights is in conflict with the idea of individual rights. The U.S. Constitution guarantees certain enumerated rights to Americans without prejudicing unmentioned rights.

The Constitution is the source document for all law in America.
No law contrary to the Constitution is a law. No other document (or worse, undocumented idea) is equal in stature to the Constitution. Rights do not flow from the Constitution, but pass through it to us from a higher source. The higher source is unassailable by any law.

Islam is manifestly incompatible with democracy and is therefore hostile to the United States. This does not make individual Muslims guilty of supporting terrorism.

Personal responsibility is the preferred means to address societal ills.
Market principles should govern wherever possible. Free-Market operations should be regulated by government only to prevent long-lasting and otherwise unstoppable abuses. Other lesser abuses will be taken care of by market forces.
The Death penalty increases the value of life through market principles. It sets a high price on murder, which addresses the problem from a standpoint of personal responsibility.

Other points...

Military Officers, Government Officials, and corporate "whistle-blowers" should be willing to resign or face termination for speaking up. Otherwise, one can hardly be said to have taken a stand. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have no credibility because they assume no personal risk--Martin Luther King jr garnered enormous credibility by accepting jail time and putting himself at great personal risk.

Iraq was a threat of many types, and more valid reasons existed to invade than could possbily be listed on an evening news show. The invasion was right.

The war on terrorism will last a long time.


People like Donna Brazile and NM Gov Bill Richardson are saying that the US can no longer "outsource the negotiations" with Iran to the UN and the IAEA, and that we need to "engage" the Iranians directly. This is madness. First, I'll explain what they are talking about. They are talking about allowing Iran to win by bringing the US into fruitless talks which make the problem appear as a tiff between a hegemonist US and the poor, oppressed Iranians.
No, the US is doing exactly the right thing. Let the hot-air flow freely from its masters at the UN and the frankly complicit IAEA. This talk of sanctions and other ineffective measures is the good cop, while the US plays bad cop. Deal with the UN, or get slapped down by the US.

building a wall on the southern border is not "sealing the border" or any of the rest of that. It just requires people to come through our welcoming doors and sign the guest book, not crash through the damned walls and pour in the windows.

Global Warming is Hot Air

This is the lead paragraph of a calmly-written, scientific-toned opinion piece by Bob Carter of the Daily Telegraph:

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

This is a great read, and the sort of cautious but backed-up-by-facts discourse I expect in scientific reading. Contrast this with the death shrieks which usually accompany public statements on the fiction of Global Warming.

The article is long on facts and short on the eyes, so it won't take you too long to come away with a consistent set of arguments for or against your own position. Of course, the whole popint of a scientific point of view is to change your mind when confronted with overwhelming evidence. Let's see what the so-called scientists in the Global Warming industry do with this information.

Here are two more paragraphs from close to the end of the article which touch on something I said about a year ago. The paragraphs:

The British Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from science reality. Intern-ationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses have been backed.

As mooted recently by Tony Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose six member countries are committed to the development of new technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and reducing pollution.

Er, I'm still looking through my e-mail for a dimly remembered post about Kyoto and CO₂ vs the AP6 and the real contributions made by mankind to any heating of the climate. Meanwhile, here's what I said in a comment at the no oil for pacifists blog:

I agree with you that most of the global warming bunk we hear is the product of an almost religious belief system. The only scientific cycle proven so far is the positive feedback loop between global warming research funds and results which call for funding further global warming research.

If you check the link to my article there, you will see that I tried to convince the "natural cycles" author of the original post that he had misinterpreted data to support the "our" side of the argument. Even when forced to argue against my own point, I will stand up to say that one has misinterpreted (or worse, cherry-picked) data to make a point with which I agree.

My exasperated sister once took me to task for something I said by telling me, "Next thing we know, you'll be talking about the "so-called global warming!" Well, at the time, I let it go, because she is after all, my sister. But she was right about my point of view. Global Warming should always be underlined and capitalized, for it is the title of a work of fiction.

Death, Part II--a rough draft

VERY ROUGH DRAFT:
Comments welcome.


In my Defense of the Death Penalty, one of the key points is that the value of life is set in a market, not as an absloute. It may be an absolute to you that every life is precious, and frankly, I appreciate your upward contribution to the aggregate value, but there are people who do not hold so refreshing a view as yours. To some, the value of your life is to be measured against, say, the value of that wristwatch of yours, as modified by your ability to deny its possession. In this way, perhaps the Buddhists are correct, in that the value of your worldly wealth is subtracted from the value of your life (this is a gross simplification, and I hope any Buddhist reader would offer a beter phrasing).

This marketplace for the value of life has many implications, and we turn now from the microeconomics of mugging and self-defense to the macroeconomics of war and collective defense. Of course there is a middle ground which is approached from the micro- side through the effecvt of laws such as capital punishment and its upward contribution to the value of each individual life through by modifying downward the potential value of any goods gained through taking that life--the threat of payment in kind. This sort of middle ground, the interplay between large and small scale effects in questions of life and death of individuals and groups, can also be approached from the macroeconomic side by looking at war, rules of war, and conduct of individuals in wartime. An esential feture of markets is that they offer differing products, so we will let the valuse of lives adjust to local market conditions and prevailing sector values--think of a black man's life in Mississippi in 1820, a Baptist minister's in Saudi Arabia today, or an outspoken student journalist in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989. Some factors are global, some are local, some are categorical, and some are due to individual action. It is not racist, classist, or anything-else-ist for us to point out thse functions of a market.

Suicide atacks are generally frowned upon, and typically seen to be less effective than conventional attacks, except in rare circumstances. This is the key to understanding how war has changed, and why the Long War will be, well, long, and why it won't look liie any progress is being made, when in fact your continued existence should be taken as proof positive that we are winning--that is what it means to be playing defense--get used to it.

What has changed is that the sxtenuatuing circumstances whoch would justify suicie attacks were hostorically lilmited to short-term situations. Japan near the end of World War II was hopelessly overmatched, yet for complex reasons would not syurrender. Part of it was simple stubborn/honor-based notions of the meaning of surrender, some of it was realist fear of retribtib not rom the victor, bt from the victor's associstes (China, Korea, the rest of Aisa--one could argue the America's presence in Japan over the last 60 years jas been as much to protectr japan from asian retributuon as much as to support operations against COmmunism. I just may argue that later), and some of it was due to the agonizing sloth of bureaucrqatic politics the likes of which are rarely seen in the West.

This put Japan in the position of fighting a conventional war that they could not win, and they could not stop fighting. This desperation led to eserate tactics, the real result of which was to increase the cost of each attack the Japanese attempted. There were successful aspects of the widespread adoption of the tactic, functioning as a portable minefield--it won't wipe out the American attacker (since Japan was by this time now on the defense), but it would make the advance so painful and dangerous that the Americans were foced to slow down and consolidate before each step forward, and hunker down while consolidating.

But the increased cost of each suicide attack, whereby it used to take a bomb for each attack and the risk of a pilot and plane, but now it takes a pilot and plane, and don't even count the cost of the bomb, meant that the suicide attack, as a tactic employed by a state fighting a conventioal war was limited in time--it was only an end-game tactic, to somehow have an upward influence on the potential outcome--perhaps the Americans can be persuaded not to invade--perhaps they can be sued for peace (incongruous with the refusal to surrender, but not unthinkable given rapidly changing circumstances)--perhaps we can hurt them eough that they back off and we ratake the offensive. Whatever the hoped-for effect, it was a temporary tactic. As a nation, japan expected Victory or Death, and was guaranteed one or the other if they refused to surrender.

There as been much talk recently about the effectiveness of suicide tactics, and te motivation of people at an individual level. I will be quick to point tout that any fghting man, or any threatened mother, for that matter, can be persuaded to engage in a suicide attack. In the market of human lives, sometime's even one's own highest price is met by the bidder--be it an enemy soldier with a grenade in your tent, or a bear menacing wither you or your children. So for the rest of this discussion, I will not address suicide attacks as a pathology of the individual, but as a rational choice made by individuals. The pathology comes in when suicide attacks are embraced as a society, or a force.

In April 2006, three bombs went off at a crowded Mosque in Najaf. Two, and perhaps all three were attached to suicide atackers. The tactics were impressive. This particular mosque was heavily guarded, so the first bomb was blown close to but well outside of the compound. In the ensuing panic, the protion of the corwd closest to the mosque ran into the compund and into the mosque, and thw more suicide bombers infiltrated by simply mixing with that crowd.

The bombers did not need to overwhelm mosque security--they let the panicked crowd do that for them. Cost, one suicide bomber, and don't worry about the cost of the bomb. It would likely have cost more attacking lives to overwhelm the security forces in a conventional fight, say a gun battle, than the suicide attack did. The difference is that the single suicide attacker was guaranteed to die, whereas each individual in a squad has only a risk of dying. No matter how hopeless the attack, each given attacker could potentially survive a conventional attack. This is of course not the case when you blow your own vest.

The rest is fairly straightforward; the remaining attackers rushed in and blew their vests at different locations. The attackers took down an entire mosque, killed 79 innocents and wounded presumably twice that number, and all on the third aniversary of the fall of the famous statue of Saddam. You know, that one.

In cost/benefit terms, this operation was a success. For that matter, so have most of these suicide attacks. One reason is that they are targeting soft targets. Another is that their opponent has not yet begin fighting as if this were a war of survival. America is still fighting this war as a side job.

If suicide attacks are so sucessful, why are they not used more often? The attacks are successful on the microeconomic scale, ut on the macro- scale, something else happens. The average value of all lives on the suicide bomber's side goes down. If Americans manning checkpoints feel ever more threatened by jihadi bombers, then the Americans have ever less resistance to shooting suspect pedestrians and speeding cars when too close to the checkpoint. Again, in this arena with a lowered value on the life of people behaving oddly near checkpoints, an individual lowers the value of his wn life considr=erably by speeding toward a checkpoint, or by walking across the road several times on the approach.

There is a restoring function, however. When the value of lives is lowered, people are by definition exposed to more risk. On a macro-scale, people will tend to resist this, but only if the market is allowed to functiuon. If oqdinary Iraqi begin to fear the Americans in their neighborhoods because thy know the jihadis, who are indistinguishable from ordinary Iraqis unitl it is potentially too late, are making the AMericns nervous, then the ordinary Iraqis do not want the jihadis around. The actual mechanism here is arguable however--perhaps the ordinary Iraqis can more easily persuade the Americans to leave than persuade the jihadis to stop. Tye key to this one, then, is community syupport. If the jihadis have no community suport, then they will be easier to convice to stop or leave, but uif they are supported, it is easier to get the Americans to leave. Likewise American support. This is what is meant by "hearts and minds". Americans distributing chocolate is not short-sighted appeasement any more than restoring the power grid, or on that metter overthrowing Saddam was. Everything is designed to show the raqi people that tey are better off with American influence and friendship than without it--that we, and the welcoming community of nations have more to offer than the dead hand of jihad.

One reason the market has functioned less well thatn we would like is that we have hobnbled the restoring function, and for two reasons--one good and one bad. The good reason for hobbling the restoring function is that it depends upon ordinary Iraqis being afrad iof the consequences of AMericans feeling threatened in the neighborhoods of Iraq. This means allowing American forces' own fear to dictate that they shoot first and ask questions later, wiping out Iraqis as they see fit. Clearly, this is wrong, and we're not going to do it. It is therefore a good reason not to allow the market to run free.

On the other hand, if Americans were more serious about this war, we would be standing up in other arenas where we are currently, well, lying down. Abdul Rahman. Danish Cartoons. CAIR. Border security. These are all literlally life-and-0death issues where the official, and popular American position has been a big shrug. If we fought in these areas as if our lives depended upon it, we would see fewer suicide bombings, including those like the 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 attacks, in the long run. Unfortunately, in the Long War, the long run is a hard sell in the short term, and it is the here and now where the jihdis are winning the battles for the long term.

America does not yet feel threatened enough to behave in a market-dictated fashion. It is as if the cost of raw materials started to soar, but one manufacturer stubbornly refused to adjust prices or output. It won't matter how much market share he captures if all he can do with it is sell at a loss--it looks like a short term winner, but it is death in the long term.

There is an argument that America is responsible for creating the suicide bombers. Technicallym this is correct, but not in the way "people" like disgraced former professor Ward Churchill think.

The Japanese kamikaze atacks were our creation as well. We were winning that war so undeniably, so completely, that they gave up on the conventional war--that is, after all, the only way to get people to kill themselves for a goal--leave them no other hope. As several observers on both sides of the war said before it even began, American production, as brought to the Pacific by the heroism of the American military, overwhelmed Japan so staggeringly that for the first time in two thousand years, they wondered in a very real and short-term sense if their nation would survive. That does things to people. The individual perception of self-worth in the long term goes to zero if the short-term is a disaster, and this person is now willing to die for an ideal. Note that this statement also applies to the grenade in the tent scenario, the bear between you and your children scenarion, and it also applies to people living in a society which offers as little to its own as political Islam does.

The world of Islam is a billion people who during the twentieth century slid into eligibility for "martyrdom operations". The West went from horses to Segways, and from kites to Lunar landings in the same period of time that political Islam went from camels to camels, except where oil and the money of the West was involved. That billion people have accomplished absolutely nothing in the last hundred years, except in their sole area of success, where they have been sucessfully prostituted by their own ruling class to people who don't even pray five times a day, and this is *still* not how America has created the suicide bombers--this is just the precondition.

Duruing the same hundred years, America and the West have developd more and more sophisticated methods of warfare, enabling on the micro- scale, one person to kill many more than before. When stated this way, it sounds like insanity. But on a macroeconomic scale, this causes fewer casualties total, because killing people was never the point; control is the point, and if a small force can sucessfully threaten a larger one, then they need not be killed if they can be controlled. Tis is crucial--the increase in the lethality of modern weapons in the twentieht century has resulted in fewer and fewer deathcs and cansualties.

The problem is that the West and the Communist bloc and all of their client states were playing the same game--conventioanl war, sometimes with the strategic deterrents to conventional war thrown in. The big problme now is that the forces of jihad are not state-based, cannot fight a conventioal war, and cannot even move from their hut to a car outside without being seen by airborn thermal imaging. Tey can only aproack by blending into crowds, and they can only attack by suicide. If America were fighting this war with the weapons of World War II, the jihadis would be figthing in armies, because it would pffer some hope of at least affecting our position. Perhpas they would never win a war by squads, but they could accomplsh their goals of influencing our policy. Against the awesome technology we now employ, there is no hope of even getting our attention without blowing themselves up to do it, and there are a limited number of ways that this will change.

One is the Iranian bomb. [discuss]

One is America fighting this as if it mattered. [discuss]

My conversation with Tom Head, Civil Liberties Guide at ABOUT.COM

[See UPDATES below]

This is a conversation I had with one of the "Guides" at about.com. I don't use about very often; I used to and then they seemed to get taken over by sponsored posts; perhaps I just noticed it as I became more discerning or less patient with interfudge. So now when I want to know how stuff works, well, I got to howstuffworks.com. But I came across this article doing research for a LGF post.
I took exception to the race-baiting American-Communistic-Liberals-Union Kumbayah-singing tone of his article, and he countered my jackbooted oppressive baby-killing arguments. It was great!
In the first numbered comment, I complain soundly about inaccuracies in the article:
1. Your article is a BREATHTAKING snow job, from the headline to the last line. Don’t you owe people who even bother to look at your site the honesty of telling the truth? How can you begin to claim that you care about Civil Liberties when what you post in place of factual explanations is fatuous puff-pieces, heavy with the burden of egregious exaggerations and outright falsehoods?
She was not accosted for a hairstyle, except in National-Enquirer-Headline-Writer-land. Refusal to identify herself to the very people whose sole employment is to protect her does not constitute “civil disobedience”. The one constant thread connecting every definition of Civil Disobedience which I have ever read or heard of is that the practitioner intend to get caught and accepts whatever punishment may result. She obviously fails this test, and in the very first sentence your article fails an honesty check.
Moving on to the second sentence, you conflate the lapel pin with a nametag. Most members of Congress don’t wear their nametags but they do wear their lapel pins. You finally let the other shoe drop on this halfway through the second paragraph; far enough that the connection is hard to see, and the truth effectively obscured. To say that you are lying requires only a trivial amount of interpretation, whereas to say that you are telling the truth requires a fantastic suspension of critical faculty.
You continue on this manner throughout the article, even finishing on an apallingly dishonest note: Rep. Cynthia McKinney was never “vindicated” of accusing President Bush of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, and she only “reclaimed her seat” when it was vacated by the incumbent for a failed candidacy elsewhere.
I challenge you to respond to even the first of my arguments; I challenge you to back up your claim that her nametag and lapel pin lawlessness constitutes Civil Disobedience. And I expect you to do so fully versed in the finer points of Civil Liberties, rather than DNC talking points.

Haakon Dahl
revwatch.blogspot.com

Comment by Haakon Dahl — April 4, 2006 @ 4:21 am
2. Nice try. You wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped up and bit you on the ass
Comment by Chip D. — April 4, 2006 @ 10:00 am
3. Haakon Dahl writes:

Your article is a BREATHTAKING snow job, from the headline to the last line. Don’t you owe people who even bother to look at your site the honesty of telling the truth? How can you begin to claim that you care about Civil Liberties when what you post in place of factual explanations is fatuous puff-pieces, heavy with the burden of egregious exaggerations and outright falsehoods?

Good morning to you, too!

The one constant thread connecting every definition of Civil Disobedience which I have ever read or heard of is that the practitioner intend to get caught and accepts whatever punishment may result.

If they’re forced to, yes. If they’re not forced to, no.
McKinney has been detained on five different occasions for refusing to wear a lapel pin. That indicates to me that this is a case of civil disobedience, not forgetfulness.

Moving on to the second sentence, you conflate the lapel pin with a nametag.

You know, you’re right about this part; my wording is unclear. I’ll correct the article to reflect this.

To say that you are lying requires only a trivial amount of interpretation, whereas to say that you are telling the truth requires a fantastic suspension of critical faculty.

I’ve read that sentence twice, and I still can’t tell whether it’s a criticism or a compliment.

You continue on this manner throughout the article, even finishing on an apallingly dishonest note: Rep. Cynthia McKinney was never “vindicated” of accusing President Bush of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, and she only “reclaimed her seat” when it was vacated by the incumbent for a failed candidacy elsewhere.

So let me get this straight: You think she won her seat back in a majority-white Georgia district without being vindicated? Come on, chief, we both know that’s not how it works. If she said what she had been accused of saying, her political career would have been over in Georgia. Finished. Done.

I challenge you to respond to even the first of my arguments; I challenge you to back up your claim that her nametag and lapel pin lawlessness constitutes Civil Disobedience. And I expect you to do so fully versed in the finer points of Civil Liberties, rather than DNC talking points.

I’m not very well versed in DNC talking points, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to rely on you to tell me how much I do or don’t conform to them. But I make no apologies for being serious about the very real problem of racial profiling in this country.

Cheers,

TH

Comment by civilliberty — April 4, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
4. Good Morning to you as well! Let’s get right to it:

If they’re forced to, yes. If they’re not forced to, no.

This makes no sense. You cannot claim any willingness when you are forced to do something. Willingniess to get caught and accept consequences is a hallmark of Civil Disobedience. If you disagree with this, then you are talking about something else and calling it Civil Disobedience. If you must be forced to do something, then you cannot say that you had any willingness. What you are talking about does not therefore meet the test for Civil Disobedience. It is merely a lawlessness of convenience, with a flimsy excuse tacked on after the fact.

McKinney has been detained on five different occasions for refusing to wear a lapel pin. That indicates to me that this is a case of civil disobedience, not forgetfulness.

So what? Many people have been arrested multiple times for repeat crimes. They are in JAIL. They are called repeat offenders. I never said she was forgetful. I said she was breaking the law.

I’ll correct the article to reflect this.

Fair enough!

…criticism or a compliment…

Most people consider lying less-than-praiseworthy.

If she said what she had been accused of saying…

Here is a selection from Rep. McKinney’s remarks on September 14, 2002, at the reception for the Congressional Black Caucus. If you can see the difference between Martin Luther King’s Civil Disobedience and the actions of, say, a guy who speeds through “opressive” red lights, then I submit that you can see the difference between actual questions and accusations couched as questions:

Cynthia McKinney: Goodbye to All That
“And after I’ve asked the tough questions, here’s what we now know:
* That President Bush was warned ... [moonbat quote snipped; includes stock market, crawford, Ashcroft conspiracies] ...the attacks."

So on at least one instance, she really did “say what she had been accused of saying.”
I thank you for your response, and look forward to continuing this conversation. I’ll post it at my blog as well, but when I have more time. I would like you to consider this, however: If you are truly serious about the problem of racal profiling in ths country, you will not allow the issue to be kidnapped by the likes of Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to function as a weak sister for responsibility. She was wrong not to show ID, she was wrong to slug the cop, and she was wrong to desecrate the memories of those who have suffered and even died for non-violent resistance in order to, essentially, try to beat a ticket.
You Civil Liberties types should be throwing your shoes at the TV in disgust for what this miserable hate-monger is doing to you.
Comment by Haakon Dahl — April 4, 2006 @ 8:14 pm
5. Haakon Dahl writes:

This makes no sense. You cannot claim any willingness when you are forced to do something. Willingness to get caught and accept consequences is a hallmark of Civil Disobedience.

Willingness to get caught is part of it, but fighting the laws after you’re caught, petitioning for jury nullification, and so forth doesn’t alter the original act of civil disobedience. If it did, the history of the civil rights movement would look a lot different.
Civil disobedience is at its core a challenge: “Are you really going to do this?” If the answer is “no,” then the establishment blinked and the strategy worked.

So on at least one instance, she really did “say what she had been accused of saying.”

At no point did she say that the Bush administration ordered, or was complicit in, the 9/11 attacks. She was making a forceful case for further investigation, which did in fact eventually happen.

She was wrong not to show ID, she was wrong to slug the cop,

Actually, my understanding is that she swatted his most likely kevlar-protected chest with the back of the same hand she was carrying her cell phone in. Unless she’s a third-degree black belt, that really comes across as more of a reflexive act than a violent one.

and she was wrong to desecrate the memories of those who have suffered and even died for non-violent resistance in order to, essentially, try to beat a ticket.

The same could be said, and frequently is said, of virtually anyone who stands up to the police in similar cases. I can only admire the courage of people who are willing to face criminal charges to prove a point.
McKinney isn’t an idiot. She could have worn her lapel pin at any time if she wanted to. This was a calculated expose of racial profiling by the Capitol Police, and it did the job beautifully.

Cheers,

TH

Comment by civilliberty — April 5, 2006 @ 12:28 am
6. Well, MR. H., we probably won’t see eye to eye, but thank you for responding; I appreciate you taking the time to argue with the rabble. Of course, you can’t argue the same post forever, so I will close with just one point:
If it is true that as you say, “This was a calculated expose of racial profiling…”, then why was the following quote her first statement, posted on her own website?

“I know that Capitol Hill Police are securing our safety, and I appreciate the work that they do. I have demonstrated my support for them in the past and I continue to support them now…”

These are not the words of a champion of civil liberties embarking upon the next phase of a campaign of Civil Disobedience. She was not challenging anything–she was trying to wriggle off the hook until smarter people suggested offense as the best defense.

Take Care,

Haakon B. Dahl


The Civil Disobedience angle is an ex post facto rationalization of lawlessness.*

Comment by Haakon Dahl — April 5, 2006 @ 8:40 am
7. Was that a terrorist suicide vest the officer thought she was wearing, or is she gaining weight from christian leader donations?
Another mislead spoiled child taught that it is okay to misbehave because you are black.
Thank you rainbow coalition for the advertising that you so kindly twisted the arm of corporate America to support a minority group of black “religious” leaders that purport to represent a vast majority of well educated, well behaved black people who have willingly, lovingly, patriotically, spiritually, immersed themselves into the american society that cares not what their color is. I can only dislike the racist individuals of all colors that whine, whine, whine, they are uneducated, ineffectual intellectual wanabees.

Comment by dpete — April 5, 2006 @ 9:34 am
8.Haakon,
Thanks for challenging me on this. I think you’ve just demonstrated a significant benefit of the Comments feature: It holds Guides accountable for their writing. In this case, I believe I’m right–but it’s nice to know I’ll need to be ready to make my case.
I suspect McKinney’s quote was her way of skirting the problem of attacking the Capitol Police as a whole, who for the most part do an amazing and largely thankless job. To highlight racial profiling is not to say that police officers, even the specific police officers who are guilty of the practice, are monsters. Racial profiling is easy to do. I’d go so far as to say that everyone, inevitably, ends up doing it in some way, at some time. But it still needs to be highlighted, and the only real way it can be is for well-known black folks to specifically make themselves vulnerable to it. That shocks the system. I’m not sure that many people realy care about racial profiling in the abstract, but when it affects the life of a known person, it opens a lot of eyes.

Cheers,

TH

Comment by civilliberty — April 5, 2006 @ 12:58 pm

---

And that was the conversation.

I can't describe how pleasant it is to have a civil conversation with somebody online who is from the other side. I left in the comments from other folks att #2 and #7, which were in a way aligned for and against as well.
Anyway, as Mr. Head himself says, it is good for all concerned if readers write in to the online authors who post something disagreeable to those readers. It helps keep the authors honest, and it refines the opinions of both persons in the argument.
Your mind is the only tool which becomes sharper with heavy use.

[UPDATE] 07APR2006: Now that Rep. Cynthia McKinney has pretended to apologize, I really want to go follow up on this conversation. Can't find the article anymore! Ugh.

E2A: The Electronic Second Amendment

EARLY DRAFT: Obviously unfinished. Feedback welcome...

EFF, E2A, and You: The Electronic Second Amendment.

What guarantees your access to the world beyond your browser?

In world of physical media and flesh-and-blood people, the second amendment protects the first, protects itself, and protects most of the rest of the bill of rights, as well as the constitution itself.

Conservatives are typically supporters of a freedom-based interpretation of the second amendment, and enjoy pointing out that if armament goes, speech will soon follow.

How unseemly then, that the online equivalent of the second amendment has become the preserve of scruffy hippies, while conservatives, almost by default, hold ground bounded on the high side by the impassable mountains of censorship, while the low side ends in the high grass of tumultuous discourse, somewhere short of the wild, impenetrable jungles of lawlessness and anarchy.

(awfully purple...)

So if we look at the necessary interpretations to bring the first two amendments online, so to speak, the First amendment is easy:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of publishing; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

A distinction I make here is in initially interpreting "the press" in the same manner as "speech"; that is as a faculty for communication wich is possessed by people. This shifts the emphasis of the original phrase from "freedom of the people to speak, and of media entities to publish" into the more rights-based "freedom of the people to speak and to publish", which may not be the dominant interpretation, but one which it must be hard to argue with. Certainly the founding fathers did not mean to allow only media entities the freedom to publish when many of those men were themselves publishing tracts to influence the nature of society. It is therefore no stretch to render "the press" as "publishing", meaning that it is both a right and an ability equal with speech, possessed by all.
This also goes some of the distance toward resolving arguments about whether any such things as "group rights" exist, or if the Bill of Rights applies (as I say) fundamentally only to individuals, whereas group rights may fairly be extended only from those individual rights.
With that in mind, let us look earlier in the First Amendment, to the famed Establishment Clause.
At issue is whether the word "establishment" is construed either as its n1 meaning (the first listed definition as a noun) which refers to the act of creating or sanctioning a thing, and is based upon the verb; or as its n2 meaning which is a thing that has been created, and is through and through a noun. A lesser issue is the meaning of "respecting", which we will take to mean regarding, rather than paying admiration to, a given thing.
n1: ...make no law creating or sanctioning a religion...
n2: ...make no law regarding an existing body of religion...
I say that the Amendment intends the first of these. Obviously, I must be in the majority, or else tax breaks for establishments of religion would be unconstitutional on their face.
It is therefore not true that the government can make no law with respect to religion. It is true that the government can neither promote nor restrict a particular religion. NOR, I say, may it promote or restrict religion as a whole.
Note that the Amendment does not protect merely the exercise of religion; it protects the free exercise of religion. That means one-hundred percent, and any law which would restrict the practitioners of a particular religion to only ninety-nine percent of that freedom is on its face unconstitutional. This is quite clear, and it is the law of the land. Note also that the right not to be offended by the freedoms of others does not exist.
It sould therefore be a simple matter to reverse the depredations of the ACLU upon the freedoms of Americans, yet instead conservatives are getting mugged again and again. Why?
Let us look at the Second Amendment for a case study in turning freedoms into tyranny.



(individual rights, militias... the big three often mis-interpreted, mis-quited, and mal-cited decisions...)

FULL CIRCLE: The first amendment concerns information. THe second concerns power, in particular, power over information. Crypto technology is the online equivalent of bearing arms. coding and codebreaking, encryption and decryption--these are the handguns and long arms of the internet, and they are as much your birthright as the Bill of Rights.

OTHER NOTES to GORE? Gatekeepers--There are no gatekeepers, because there are no gates. There are no gates because there is no fence. There is no fence because there is a First Amendment. There is still a First Amendment because there is a Second Amendment.

EOF

A Moderate Muslim Speaks Up

This is great. I heartily recommend reading the whole thing. Here is a money quote, the penultimate paragraph:

Muslims who are never tired of blaming non-Muslims for giving a bad name to their faith should, for their own sake, look at the images of their coreligionists holding swords over the heads of innocent foreigners in Iraq. Do they not look evil? I have always wondered if the Muslims realize the impact of statements written on banners behind Islamist head choppers. What kind of Allah and the prophet would bless the acts of barbarism? Those banners proclaim that the worst kind of barbarism is being carried out in line with Islamic teachings. Why shouldn't a non Muslim think that Islam is an evil faith when all of the fatawas (religious rulings) issued in Saudi Arabia and Egypt justify these killers and homicide bombers? Why has there been not a single fatwa that declares these barbarians infidel?

You will want to read the facts and examples he lays out in building up to this concluding challenge to the Ummah, and especially, the paragraph which follows. For those, like me, who have been carping high and low about the lack of outrage from the rumored but seldom seen "moderate" Muslim, this is a blast of fresh air from a man whose moderation needs no special punctuation.

Jill Carroll COMPLICIT in her own kidnapping--APOLOGY

I Was Wrong, I Am Sorry

I have been banging the drum with a theory about Jill Carroll's complicity. I am relieved that she is safe, heartened that she is not the type of person I thought, and quite happy to be wrong. To have been wrong, that is.

I should have given more leeway, more caution to the side of grace than I did in interpreting inconsistencies in her statements. Instead, I rushed to condemn a woman who had done nothing wrong, and to criticize an American caught in a hazardous position overseas rather than offer support.

Common sense dictates that the willingness to admit and repudiate mistakes is the "price of admission" for speaking of others in public. Apologies motivated by mechanical or procedural concerns, however, are worthless. Common decency requires that an apology be heartfelt, detailed, and conveyed as publicly, or more so, as the the offending incident.

I frankly hope that Jill Carroll and her family never see, or saw respectively, my remarks regarding Ms. Carroll. I am ashamed to have impugned the integrity of a woman in peril, far from her home, who had done me no wrong, from the comfort of my living room.

I apologize to Jill Carroll and her family.

Sincerely,

Haakon Bjoern Dahl

NOTE: Here is a link to my posted apology on LGF, where you will see that I post under my real name, and frequently mention this blog. LGF gets a lot more traffic than this blog, so I posted there first. The original post from this location has been moved down into the comments as a matter of record.

Shame, you cowards! AN OPEN LETTER

This letter was mailed to am@cnn.com, the mail address for feedback to the American Morning show, after one of the co-hosts, Miles O'Brien, asked a seemingly innocuous question about the "possibility of redress" to Muslims somehow offended by "the cartoons".

At least admit that it is FEAR which prevents you from showing the Mohammed cartoons. You have shied away from showing NOTHING else. You do not have a habit of restraint in the name of respect for potential offense. Christ in urine, check. Mary in poop, check. Burned bodies of American contractors being dragged through the streets, check!

And how can you ask about the possibility of redress?! MILES O'BRIEN, how can you read that prompter without pooping in your chair?! Won't anybody up there on the set break the wall of fear?

Earn your pay, you "journalists"! Learn why the cartoons were penned in the first place--the Newspaper editor was ashamed that nobody in Denmark would illustrate [a children's book about Islam] due to FEAR. So he challenged editorial cartoonists to write, well, editorial cartoons featuring Mohammed. The cartoons were a "Freedom of Navigation Exercise" (look up LIBYA, 1986, and US NAVY to find out what that means) for Free Speech.

Here's an analogy--you wake up in the middle of the night with the sudden sensation that you are not alone in your house. You turn on a light, which enrages a big man with a honking big knife! As the knife flashes at you and you duck and dodge, do you struggle against the man, or do you ASK ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF REDRESS for turning on the light, MILES? At some point, you have to wonder why the man was in your house (which is not about immigration in this [analogy], but about the infringement upon your right to Speak Freely).

Sorry to pick on you Miles, but you happened to be the guy reading the prompter. Of course, any response from anybody at CNN who is not a PR droid would be welcome.

I live in Japan, and I would appreciate a public or private response. If you desire your response to be held confidential, just tell me--I will honor that.

Haakon B. Dahl

A Letter from a Terrorist--"Why I will not release your infidel daughter"

The RevWatch has obtained the following letter from the unknown parties holding Jill Carroll:

Mrs. Carroll,
Thank you for your letter of Thursday, January 16th (by your calendar). I will respond point-by-point to your misguided notions about Islam, my organization and our goals, and the eventual fate of your daughter. From your letter, I quote:

My daughter Jill Carroll was taken hostage on Saturday, January 7th, in Baghdad, where she works as a reporter. Jill's fairness in reporting and her genuine concern for the Iraqi people made her the invited and welcome guest of her many Iraqi friends. A video just released gives us hope that she's still alive but has also shaken us about her fate. So I, her father and her sister, are appealing directly to her captors to release this young woman who has worked so hard to show the sufferings of Iraqis to the world.

Already you have shown a complete disregard for, and an offensive ignorance of, my organization's goals. The name of my organization is of no consequence to you--we will never meet or negotiate for anything you want. Let me explain first about my own motives, and how you have already set yourself up for failure with this letter of yours.

I do not give a camel's tick for the alleged reporting done for or against Iraqis. I am not an Iraqi, I do not have much in common with them, and frankly I find them to be contemptible. I feel no compunctions about blowing up a school bus full of Iraqi children if it will further my goals, so do not bother me with your concerns for your child! The will of Allah will always be done, and no Iraqi or American will change that fact.

Furthermore, the suffering of Iraqis is actually a boon to my organization. Iraqi people who vote in peace, who shop in safety, and who sleep without nightmares of violence are no help to me. Those are the ones who have sold themselves into slavery, and turned away from the Path of Allah. No, it is the terrified, the insecure, the angry and indignant who are the true believers, either as cause or effect. Just as you cannot squeeze blood from a stone, I cannot motivate people who are happy. But I can squeeze blood from people, and I assure you, I could motivate even a stone, such is the degree of unhappiness I can cause.

Jill has always shown the highest respect for the Iraqi people and their customs. We hope that her captors will show Jill the same respect in return. Taking vengeance on my innocent daughter, who loves Iraq and its people, will not create justice.

Still, you harp on this theme of respect and love for Iraq and its hapless, overly passive citizenry. Let us be direct here: I can tell that you do not like your President, and feel that he is a devil. This is a point of view you and I probably share, but, and this is the critical point, for completely different reasons. I hate your president (may he die), I hate you, and I hate your daughter too. I hate all you Americans and I do not care for whom you vote. VOTING IS HARAAM! It is a violation, indeed, it is the absolute cancellation of the law of Allah for you to vote. Voting is the creation of earthly laws, and the Holy Koran is quite clear about this: There Is Only God's Law.

It is not in my power to take vengeance, and neither is it in me to create justice. If you had a moral aspect to your depraved being, you would know that these powers are reserved exclusively to Allah, and certainly are not delegated down to such an unworthy servant as myself. I try to forgive you for your failing, to the extent that I can, because you are ignorant and evil, but it only winds up changing the emotion I might feel as I behead you. I would still remove your head from your body for the Glory of God.

So your celebrations of voting Iraqis and your own elections are of no concern to me or my organization, except to cause us an unbending resolve to destroy your sinful system, and to abolish your democracy (Haraam), your culture of entertainment (Haraam), your filthy and unavoidable empire of free sex (Haraam), consequence-free living, cohabitation, consortment of the sexes, public indecency--ALL HARAAM!

Your letter continues:

To her captors, I say that Jill's welfare depends upon you, and so we call upon you to ensure that Jill is returned safely to her family, who needs her and loves her. Jill's father, sister and I ask and encourage the persons holding our daughter to work with Jill to find a way to contact us with the honorable intent of discussing her release.

Well. Nice try. Perhaps you think you are dealing with an idiot who has never read a book or learned a tactic. Your obvious attempts to make me "identify with" you and your daughter, to "personify" her to me, and to perhaps cause the strings of my heart to change my actions are worse than useless. Do not presume to tell me the power I have.

Your daughter will be released when the exact conditions I have laid out are met, and even then it is only a possibility. If my conditions are not met, it is an impossibility. Do not attempt to placate me by calling the cowardly action of negotiation "honorable". It would not be honorable for me. It would not be honorable for you.

We are enemies, you and I, and I have power, and you do not. Shut up. In the name of the ALmighty Allah, shut your mouth.

---

NOTICE from Haakon B. Dahl, RevWatch--This "letter" is an attempt to illustrate the difference between us and the terrorists we are fighting in Iraq. If you are not sure who I mean by "us", perhaps you would be more comfortable reading something else--you will not like much of what I have to say here. Although I have written this in the voice of a fictional terrorist, I do not believe that I have written fiction. I believe that this is the point of view held by the evil men who are holding Jill Carroll, and that all the entreaties in the world from her parents and other westerners will do nothing to aid her release.
I typically eschew disclaimers, but if this post becomes popular, I want it known from the beginning exactly what I am saying. Some people do need explanations.

A Letter to the Editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader

Here's a nasty little cartoon:




I didn't like it. In fact, I didn't like it a lot, so I wrote the Editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader a letter.

Sir,
The cartoon you printed on 17NOV was not a political commentary; it was vandalism, appreciated only by the same crowd who think that religious symbols covered in urine and dung somehow constitute art.
You should be ashamed for having printed such puerile filth, and poorly drawn filth at that. If you insist on sinking to this level, it could at least have some talent behind it.
Yes, I am a Republican. No, I would not find value in sick jokes which tear and strain to link Democrat policies with cannibalism and the grisly practices (live beheading) of our enemy. If you doubt that al-Zarqawi and his minions are your personal enemy, I suggest you travel there and ask him yourself. And if you go, please take that disgusting cartoonist with you. He can interpret for you. He speaks their language.
Sincerely,
Haakon B. Dahl, LT USNR
Yokosuka, Japan

Note that I wrote that letter to the EDITOR of the paper, not to the cartoonist. What happened then? I received an answer from the cartoonist himself, who is presumably not also the Editor in such an auspicious paper as the Lexington Herald-Leader.[SEE UPDATE BELOW] I therefore consider this correspondance to have been made public. Accordingly, this is the "letter" I received from the cartoonist via e-mail:

sorry you didn't like the cartoon....i don't really understand your angry response...it seemed like a run-of-the-mill anti-cheney toon to me....everyone has their opinion.....thnx for your service and happy holidays!
joel pett

I didn't write to the cartoonist, I wrote to the Editor. I expected that my letter would be printed, responded to, or summarily ignored, and I confess that the last option is the one I most expected. I did not expect my criticism of (an employee? a contractor?) to simply be forwarded to that person for disposition. I ask the reader, Does your business work like that? Why not?
I did not expect the cartoonist to be able to "really understand" my "angry response". That's why I didn't write to the cartoonist. I can tell by the quality and content of the cartoon itself that the cartoonist will not understand the point I am making, or he would never have penned that foul little cartoon!
No, I wrote to the Editor of the paper in the same fashion in which one may complain to the manager of restaurant where one has been insulted by a wayward employee. Because the "author" did not attempt to write in English, I will not criticize his grammar, and while I may or may not appreciate the sentiment he attempts to express in his last "sentence", depending on just what the sentiment is, I find it hard to accept his thnx for my service. Really, I don't wish to seem ingracious in accepting thnx, but what is the correct response? ur wlkm? I just can't do it.
So assuming that "thnx" means "thank you" in this case, as opposed to the sound one might make when afflicted with congestion, I find that to be the one "sentence" with which I do not take issue. Would you say that the first sounds less than true? That the second is manifestly obvious? That the third is disingenuous? That is, if the cartoon is "run-of-the-mill", does the cartoonist expect to get paid for it? In the fourth sentence, he tries to be mealy-mouthed, but fails even in this as his grammar is not up to the task.
And that's it. I have not re-addressed my initial complaint; that has gone ignored in the original letter. And I have posted the cartoon here without permission; I do not fear a letter from their lawyers, but rather would welcome such a thing--any response not written with a crayon would be better than what I have gotten to date. Besides, I assert that this is Fair Use.
If I had wanted to engage in this sort of note-passing, I would have written to the cartoonist. Furthermore, I would have sent him a crudely drawn picture rather than go to all the trouble of writing an actual letter. I cannot bring myself to communicate in little ellipsis-separated snippets, completely devoid of any capitalization. Perhaps we all speak like this from time to time, and it is certainly not a matter of life and death whether or not some prescriptive grammar is followed. What has me so exercised is the utter and surpassing laziness, not even thinly veiled behind a form letter. This is laziness on parade, a militant apathy. And do not forget, this is the response garnered by a letter to the Editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

thnx 4 nthng.




UPDATE: Thanks to LGF reader and blogger J.D. , I learned that Mr. Joel Pett is indeed "on the editorial board" of this paper. My earlier qualms about private correspondance, however, are gone. This was a letter to the Editor, obviously for publication. I intended that my letter be published; I intended any response to be published. This is the way of letters to the Editor--nothing has changed. A paper's refusal to print criticism or its own weak-kneed response does not make the criticism or response private correspondance.

But what of Mr. Pett and the paper? Is this the best cartoon the paper could come up with? Is the Lexington Herald-Leader a little tight for cash, and has it asked an editor to fill in as a cartoonist? Editorial cartoons are the sort of thing many people would like to do, even for free. One need not suddenly add it to the job description of an obviously overworked and hurried Editor--look what happens to the quality!

So Mr. Joel Pett writes the editorials (?), prioritizes the news to be printed (?) and also pens the cartoons? Is he a man of such talent that more than three hundred people pay to read his writing, share his priorities, and chuckle at his vandalism? He must be an imposing figure. We shall try to find pictures of this man. Stay tuned.

Michelle Malkin has posteda Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post from no less than the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are not happy with a different cartoon. I will run a side-by-side of the responses when the WaPo responds.

Commitments vs. Commitment

Walter Cronkite says we should have abandoned Iraq when a hurricane knocked out NOLA... He says it would have provided a perfect excuse. I beg to differ. He advocates running away from a commitment.

This would change the nature of all of our international commitments: "The United States hereby commits to come to the aid of any country signatory to this pact against aggression and other forms of tyranny--unless in case of rain, in which case we will only play home games."

A commitment is something you must do. Capital letter-C "Commitment" is what guarantees you will do it. A commitment is something you can point to on paper, and is something which can be counted, whereas Commitment is found within the hearts of trustworthy people, and cannot be measured by number or degree. Commitment is either present or absent, true or false. Commitments can be altered, but Commitment cannot.

Thanks to our Unlce Walter, I have learned that I can sum up the difference between the American Right and the American Left in one word, indeed, one letter:

Liberals have commitments.
Conservatives have Commitment.

"No Regrets" Cronkite says Abandon Iraq

Here is a snippet I have edited [see brackets below] from Breitbart.com:

Former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, whose 1968 conclusion that the Vietnam War was unwinnable keenly influenced public opinion then, said Sunday he'd say the same thing today about Iraq. "It's my belief that we should get out now," Cronkite said in a meeting with reporters.
"We had an opportunity to say to the world and Iraqis..." [that America was broke after Hurricane Katrina,] "...that "our hearts are with you" and that the United States would do all it could to rebuild their country, he said.

Note that what he calls an "opportunity" is actually an excuse. Things which make yur life harder do not provide opportunities, they remove opportunities. They may, however, provide you with an excuse. The only difference between taking an opportunity with or without an excuse is your own fortitude. So Mr. Cronkite is a Socialist of the cut-and-run variety, but without the cojones to say so.
This sort of decision-making may be popular in France, but it never pans out for the states. For an example, think of our crushing defeat in the 1968 Tet offensive. That was a handy excuse to leave Viet--hey, wait a minute--Tet was a defeat for the other side!
In fact, the only thing more galling than Uncle Walter's surrender without the balls to say "surrender" is the fact that he always seems to think that the right time to surrender is when we really start kicking ass. After the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese were doomed unless for some reason the U.S. were to simply leave the battlefield. Similarly, now that Iraq has had three elections, we are scheduled to start reducing our presence this year and the country grows more stable everyday, Syria stands busted, Libya has seen the light, and Afghanistan has high-ranking women in government--Yup, it's time to quit. To a man such as Walter Cronkite, this war is now unwinnable. That is because a man such as Walter Cronkite is actually on the other side. Feel free to check my math here, but it's only arithmetic: if America is winning (and we are) but he says "we" are losing (and he does), then it is clear who he means by "we".

"I think we could have been able to retire with honor," he said. "In fact, I think we can retire with honor anyway."

Speaking as if he were one of us, he whispers poisonous advice. So which is the deeper flaw? Is it the Bush Administration's failure to cut and run when we had a handy excuse, or the failure to cut and run (er, "retire") now without an excuse? Speaking of retirement, in other news, Cronkite assessed his own powers of decision making as deeply flawed:

"Twenty-four hours after I told CBS News that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday I was already regretting it and I've regretted it every day since," he said. "It's too good a job for me to have given it up the way that I did."

This is the melancholy sound of regret. Walter Cronkite doesn't even know how to retire from CBS with honor (hint: shut up), but somehow he knows how to run the world? This from the same man who says that we should cut and run from this war (like the last) whenever an excuse provides political cover. If (for some reason) the Bush administration were to take Cronkite's advice and later have regrets, what would those regrets be? Would they be the regrets of a Clinton or an Annan for action not taken?

CNN.com - Clinton expresses regret in Rwanda - Jul 23, 2005
KIGALI, Rwanda (Reuters) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, visiting a Rwandan genocide memorial on Saturday, expressed regret for his "personal failure" to prevent the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 people. Clinton apologised on a previous visit to Rwanda in 1998 for not recognising the crime of genocide. Clinton administration officials avoided the word in public for fear it would spark an outcry for action they were loathe to take, six months after U.S. troops were killed by Somali warlords in Mogadishu.

BBC NEWS | Africa | UN chief's Rwanda genocide regret

"The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he could and should have done more to stop the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago.

At a memorial conference at the UN, Mr Annan said he realised he personally could have done more to rally support for international efforts to stop it.
"The international community is guilty of sins of omission," Mr Annan said.
The genocide - in which some 800,000 people died - occurred when Mr Annan was head of UN peacekeeping forces.
The UN Security Council failed to reinforce the small UN peacekeeping force in the country.
"The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret," Mr Annan said.
He said the painful memory had influenced many of his later decisions as secretary general.
"I believed at that time that I was doing my best," he said.
"But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support.""

In Defense of the Death Penalty

Diamondback Online - A cry for mercy

Mario Khurram, a Senior at the University of Maryland, proposes, in the article linked above, not using the death penalty for convicted terrorists, or any other murderer for that matter. His post, while poorly reasoned toward an unsupported conclusion, is offered in a level tone, so I will respond in kind. I hope he appreciates my refutation offered in the spirit his article seems to be--that of intelligent debate--and I welcome comments.

He starts by positing that the death penalty may be invoked for convicted "murderers, terrorists and/or enemies of the state," and calls that "disastrous." He then ascribes the death penalty primarily to an eye-for-an-eye mentality, an attempt to "balance out" the scales of justice, and reminds us that criminals have families, too.

He has already misplaced the responsibility for the deed and the motivation for execution. Every person has, or at least had, a family. If we truly believe that every family has the same rights, then every family must have the same responsibilities. We do not assign responsibility for murder to the family of the murderer, but they certainly have no claim upon the family of the victim, nor upon society in general, for consideration of their fate should they be deprived of the company of their murderous offspring.

No, the murderer alone is responsible for his actions, and when the time comes for him to face the consequences of his actions, those consequences should not be mitigated by a concern for those close to the killer. The time for consideration of this type was when the killer weighed, or failed to weigh, the consequences of his actions as they affect not only him, but his victim, his victim's family, the society in which he runs amok, and yes, his own family. So the decision to spare his family a harsh ordeal, to have mercy on their own sensibilities, and to shield them from the loss of their murderous loved one was made by the killer at the time of the deed. Neither society nor the state itself owe an appeal of this decision to the killer's family, as the victim's family has no appeal, and the rights and responsibilities of both families are held to be equal.

He goes on to question the authority of the state, vis the law and its moral underpinnings, to deprive any person of his life. He says it is "very paradoxical". I say it is simple. From Mr. Khurram's post:

It is plausible and reasonable that the state may revoke numerous individual liberties via imprisonment, but revoking the most critical personal right to life demands serious deliberation. Without life, no other rights can exist or have any meaning in any government.

In this, I agree completely. We institute governments to protect our own rights. My right to life is protected in part by the knowledge that if I am deprived of my life through the wanton act of another, every effort will be made to apprehend that person and exact a severe penalty. Serious deliberation has already been undertaken in the course of legislating the sentence of execution for the most heinous crimes. Serious deliberation will be also undertaken by a jury of the killer's peers. Their decision is binding. This is all done to preserve the value of life, not to cheapen it.

He then delves deeper into philosophy, raising questions about the value of a life.

Is a guilty person’s life of less value than an innocent person’s life? By what process does a person’s life lose value or become unworthy and subhuman?

We could simply dispense with this argument by stating the obvious--that life is of the utmost value. Yet the question as he has phrased it is concerned with relative value, and for that we may not rely solely on our deeply held beliefs, or cherished notions. For any discussion of a shifting value, there must be a market, so let us play at philosophical economics for a moment.

Nothing has an objective value. That is more properly referred to as a price, and is completely arbitrary, but in a fair market, the price is typically set close to the value, as determined by the market. Value exists only to a decision maker, either a producer or a consumer, that is, a giver or a taker. In this exchange of metaphysical goods, the value is set by the willingness of one person to give a life, and the willingness of another to take it. Let us assume that all persons are extremely reluctant to give a life, although some will for a sufficiently lofty ideal, but none can be convinced to do so without a very good reason. In the case of simple murder, the selling point of the victim has not been determined, but presumably it is set quite high, so the only variable remaining is the willingness of the killer.

Again, in order to preserve the value of life, through our government we enact laws which tend to damp that willingness to take a life. The most effective of these methods would be to attach that which is most dear, one's own life, to the life of a prospective victim. The killer is presumably not willing to die without a very good reason. If the family and society from which a person comes have somehow failed to instill in that person a basic respect for the sanctity of life, let the law act as a final attempt to stay his hand.

So once again, the value of a life has been set by the killer. Through the deterrent mechanism of a possible death penalty, the upper limit on the value of a killer's life to society is determined to be the value of the victim's life to the killer.

---

Mr. Khurram points out the futility of attempting to "fill a void" created in our society by a murder, through the remedy of capital punishment. In this his answer correct, but that is not the question. The void cannot be filled. That is why the greatest effort must be made to prevent the act. There can be no atonement for murder.

He also bats down the notion that execution is the harshest consequence offered. I agree. It is hardly the harshest punishment possible. But he offers this canard:

Proper and strict life imprisonment (without parole), where the criminal is stripped of everything but the bare necessities, satisfies the criteria as the harshest consequence.

Not at all. The harshest consequences are routinely meted out to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, year in and year out, for actions not even criminal in this or any other civilized society. The harshest consequences are also a simple, brutal fact of a short, hard life for millions of human beings who have done nothing wrong, offended no person or society, and who perhaps have never had so much as an impure thought, simply because they live in Hellish parts of the Earth, or have fallen to natural disasters. Starving children, drowned cities, slave labor--all "satisfy the criteria" of a consequence far more harsh than those offered by the American system of justice.

Mr. Khurram has the good fortune to live in a society which abhors violence and cruelty. This has conditioned him to think that our civilized system of making unpleasant decisions, in the wake of unconscionable acts, equates the worst which the world has to offer. In this he is mistaken.

He then engages in some rhetorical baiting of the religious through the appeal to an example set by the almighty, and further through a brief dunk in the abortion debate. I am inclined to agree with part of his argument--let us all follow the example of the almighty (as you perceive that power) and be done with this talk of murder. But in his appeal, he seems less than genuine, and it sounds more like a device than a conviction. He is casting about for support, trying to shame the anti-abortion and pro-death-penalty crowd into seeing murderers and hapless innocents as equal. Remember, however, that the murderer has already determined the value of his own life to society, whereas an unborn child has done no such thing. I reproduce his closing paragraph in full, without interrupting to point out the three grammatical errors:

I would like to encourage all those who fight abortion in the pro-life movement to consider that being pro-life also means fighting capital punishment. If we were to spend even half the energy to combat the death penalty as we do abortion, it could be permanently abolished, at least in the United States. We as individuals should learn to embrace mercy as a tremendous and liberating virtue. Of course, the government as an institution has the authority to punish crimes. But let us as individuals learn to forgive, especially when it is hardest. Why is it that God doesn’t strike the criminal dead, immediately after his heinous act? Despite our faults and shortcomings, why does he allow us to maintain the most precious gift of life that he has given to us? The answer is mercy.

Here, Mr. Khurram has mixed some gentle advice with a few non sequiturs. Embrace mercy, indeed, and do it when contemplating murder. Learn to forgive, and definitely forgive before taking the life of one who has done you, your family, and your society no such injury. Well said.

And if he wishes to question the actions of the almighty, he might wish to ask why He does not strike the criminal dead, immediately before his heinous act. I, however, would not presume to ask such a question.

Mr. Khurram demonstrates his misunderstanding of the problem by shading the death penalty as punishment, which has at its core the goal of behavior modification, as if it were something from which we expect the murderer to learn. We do not expect him to learn--we expect him to die, and his sole remaining earthly redemption, the last he may offer society, is if he may serve posthumously as a warning to others not to repeat his crime.

And his statement that "being pro-life also means fighting capital punishment" is patently mistaken. Being pro-life means assigning the highest value possible on life, and part of that is deterring, with every instrument at our disposal, the taking of life.

---

A man's family, culture, and society attempt (or should attempt) to instill in him the utmost regard for the awesome gift of life. Imperfect creatures that we are, however, we institute governments and imbue them with tremendous powers to stand against the vicious impulses of some in our midst. That power must be credible to be effective. The death penalty is society's last-ditch effort, when all else fails, to preserve the value of life.

---

Haakon B. Dahl (your humble correspondent) is a former Naval Officer who lives in Japan, and may be reached through comments at The RevWatch blog. I welcome all comments, but particularly comments from those in economics who may wish to poke holes in my analogy. I reserve the right to delete comments as I see fit.

NOTES FOR UPDATE: DNA technology is ostensibly good enough to prove innocence. But not really, as absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. SO you can say that the prosecutor has not proven the case, but DNA is much better at nailing criminals than freeing the innocent. So if the "wrong man" argument dominates the anti-death-penalty crowd, this is fairly easy to counter--if DNA puts the man at the scene at the time, fry him. DEVELOP this argument and work it in.. And get Khurram out of this, to make it a regular essay, rather than a response piece--too long anyway.

Blogs vs. Media Giants?

Boy, am I hungry. I could eat a cow. Good thing, too, as I don't know any butchers in the area. Lots of ranchers, no butchers. No choice but to go hit up one of my rancher friends, walk a cow home, and eat the whole thing. But before I do, let me tell you about something I saw.

I saw an article at NewsBusters in which New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said, "Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media. Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."

Well, of course his comments did not please me, but the fact is that he is right. I can count actual reporting bloggers I am even familiar with on one hand, and the only one I can name is Michael Yon.

So what is this blog nonsense, anyway? Just today, I found myself explaining to yet another co-worker that he probably already reads blogs, he just doesn't know it. He thinks they're just web pages, and to him, that is all they are. I tried to describe the filtering hierarchy which the blogosphere evolves as its chosen architecture. I failed. Again. But in reading Mr. Keller's comments, I realized where blogs fit in--as a "front-end".

Let's slide on into software terms here, but gently. This description may not be anatomically correct, but it puts most of the parts in the right places. A program you run can be considered to have many parts. The part you see is the user interface (UI). Behind that is the guts, and behind that is the back-end, which deals with program-to-machine issues, and communications with other computers. The guts section contains the actual "I'm-doing-what-you-want-me-to-do" program, such as a database which stores (and more importantly, retrieves) phone numbers and addresses. And trapped between the guts and the UI may be a front-end. The UI may in fact be a part of the front-end, but not necessarily.

If you have used Microsoft's Access for your database needs, you have actually used an optional front-end. Access is NOT a database program--it is a front-end to the Microsoft JET database engine. If you had to deal with JET, you would swear you were using DOS. In fact, it would be SQL or something similiar (suspiciously similar...). So Microsoft came up with Access to keep those hands of yours and mine free of the dirty litle details of databases. Instead, we point and click and still wind up typing a lot. The front-end "fits onto the front" of the database engine so we only have to deal with shiny mousables and gridded tables. Of course, there are other front-ends, and this is where we come back to blogs.

The mainstream media is the News Engine. They make lots of money and have lots of people and equipment stationed across the globe and they go out and get lots of news. Then they put it on their own private networks and charge advertisers a fortune to be squeezed in between bits of this hard-won news. The network news programs have their own profit and loss responsibilities, and they try to attract more viewers, so they can charge the advertisers more, and they do this by taking all that valuable information and reducing it to something easy to feed to we invalids.

What blogs have changed is the front-end of the news. We are no longer forced to deal directly with CBS or CNN and their patronizing gruel-casts any more than we still have to deal with MS-DOS. The Internet has evolved an open source front-end for the MSM's News Engine.

Keller is right. We need the legacy media and their awesome resources to provide the raw material of news to the blogosphere. But you don't ask ranchers for beef; you ask butchers for beef, and if your butcher keeps trimming it his way instead of your way, you go find a different butcher.

We no longer need the MSM to study, analyse, antagonize over everything and then tell us what to think--we have developed our own front-end; it is customizable and verifiable, we fact-check it and each other, and it's here to stay.

FoxNews Poll

This FoxNews Poll shows the results for several political figures, when respondents were asked whether the subject was a "Strong and Decisive Leader", and "Understands the Needs of Average Americans".

I found it interesting that the subjects are ranked in descending "Decisive Leader" order, and that that closely matches the numbers for "Understands Needs" order. They descend roughly together, until "Understand" takes a jump back up with Clinton, and stays high for Kerry and the Algore.

So I did a little math. I wanted a single composite of both "scores", so I plotted the results by hand, X=Understanding, Y=Leadership. If you look at the resulting graph, you see the subjects range from unpopular in the lower left (Gore Country) to Popular in the upper right(Giuliani Country). Also, they fall either above or below a diagonal line which indicates whether they lean more toward Leadership or more toward Understanding.

I also wanted more interpretation of the scant data, so I wrote a small python function lead(a,b) which takes a=leadership and b=understanding scores straight from the poll, and gives you back two numbers. The first number is sqrt(a^2+b^2), which on the graph is just the distance from zero that the subject earned. This is a numerical score for Popularity, and in the list below, it is the first number under a subject's name. The function lead(a,b) also divides a/b (leadership/understanding) to give a quotient of leadership vs. understanding, and this is the second number under the subject's name.

Using Rudy as our example, we would say that his popularity is 90.52 (minimum possible 0, maximum possible ~=~ 140), and a Leadership vs. Understanding quotient of 1.03 (over 1 = more leadership, under 1 = more understanding). The exact scores are reproduced at the bottom of this post.

If you now plot THESE scores you get some real information! Plot popularity from 60-100 going up the page. Plot Lead/Understand from 0.5 to 1.5 going left to right across the page.

Obviously, President Bush is not a candidate, but was included in the poll.

Assuming that these numbers mean anything at all, Condoleezza Rice is a more popular version of GW Bush. John Mccain is a more popular version of Hillary. Rudy Giuliani is the most popular, and centered between the four previously mentioned subjects as far as Lead/Understand. Lying at the fringe of the main group is John Kerry, more popular only than Gore. And the Algore itself lies an amazing distance to the left (very low lead/understand score), far from the group, and less popular than any other as well.

Some people call Giuliani "un-electable". This poll seems to suggest otherwise.

Listed below are the results of my number-crunching, as copied and pasted directly from the program I used. They are listed in the same order as in the FoxNews poll; descending by "Decisive Leadership" percent answering "yes".

Rudy Giuliani
>>> lead(65,63)
90.5207158611
1.03174603175

John Mccain
>>> lead(56,57)
79.9061950039
0.982456140351

Condoleezza Rice
>>> lead(55,49)
73.6613874428
1.12244897959

George W. Bush
>>> lead(51,45)
68.0147042925
1.13333333333

Hillary Rodman Clinton
>>> lead(51,53)
73.5527021937
0.962264150943

John Query
>>> lead(35,40)
53.1507290637
0.875

The Algore
>>> lead(27,41)
49.0917508345
0.658536585366