I could be wrong

Things Change

2008-12-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

That was the title of a Mamet play (I think) and movie, and it's becoming my mantra as well.

I've concluded that when I pay attention to the multiple idiocies of US foreign and domestic policy, the only result is that my hair turns whiter, my stress levels rise, and I get a certain amount of cardiovascular exercise through rapid spikes in my blood pressure. (No, Ma, really, it's good for you!)

The hell with that.

I'm reorienting my life, getting ready to ditch this gig for a new and hopefully better one.

I'm blissing out on nature, I'm thinking about reconnecting with "real life" and not worrying so much about the multiple idiocies of US foreign and domestic policy. I'm cooking more, and taking more time doing it. I'm listening to podcasts, and reading blogs, from the paleolithic/evolutionary fitness/caveman diet folks.

I know that there are many, many ways in which we, we Americans, are alienated from the real world, and I'm trying to figure out how to get back to that real world.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going, but I've got a few ideas, and hopefully they're better ideas at that.

Peace for now, yo.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Justin Raimondo

2008-12-11T22:01:00.001-08:00

We would take half the defense budget, pile it in heaps, set it in fire and roast marshmallows over it and gain no less from it than we do now.

Everything I need to know, I learned from the Kinks

2008-12-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

We are the village green preservation society
God save donald duck, vaudeville and variety
We are the desperate dan appreciation society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
We are the draught beer preservation society
God save mrs. mopp and good old mother riley
We are the custard pie appreciation consortium
God save the george cross and all those who were awarded them
We are the sherlock holmes english speaking vernacular
Help save fu manchu, moriarty and dracula
We are the office block persecution affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliate
God save tudor houses, antique tables and billiards
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
God save the village green.

Everything I need to know, I learned from John Prine

2008-12-04T16:47:00.001-08:00

I ain't a-hurting nobody
I ain't a-hurting no one.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Peachy Carnahan

2008-11-23T03:24:00.001-08:00

We've got to brass it out, Danny, brass it out!

So THAT'S how it happens

2008-11-23T03:18:00.001-08:00

So the baby starts crying at 0-dark-thirty, and you wake up and get her a bottle, and can't go back to sleep. And then you find yourself drinking Jim Beam (at 0-dark-thirty!) and reading Girls With Slingshots.

This is NOT how my life usually goes.

My my, where DID the time go?

Everything I need to know, I learned from Basil Plumley

2008-11-22T18:18:00.000-08:00

Lt. Colonel Hal Moore: I think you oughta get yourself an M-16.
Sergeant Major Basil Plumley: Sir, if the time comes I need one, there'll be plenty lying on the ground.

The Leonard Cohen of the spy genre

2008-11-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

There is not much at which I trust the New York Times. I find their---using the editorial they---politics to be not much to my liking, far too redolent of trust in government, of the big idea, of the technocrat, far too dismissive of the little platoons of society in which, to various degrees, I place my trust. And yet, and yet . . .

There are things at which the Times does excel.

One of these things is the review of the novels of Alan Furst.

I began reading Furst's novels while I was still in the Suck, still wearing the pickle suit, when the Soviet Union was still, to some degree, The Menace To Be Feared. (The fears of childhood frequently linger into adulthood, and I was, and remain, an American child of the Cold War.) I believe that the first of his novels that I read was Dark Star, although quite possibly it was Night Soldiers. Whichever of the two it was, it---or they?---was/were a grand read, and I have continued to return to them over the years, for repeated readings and great enjoyment.

I am not quite sure by what accident of fate or chance I came upon Mr. Furst's books, umm, "first." I tend to haunt used book shops more than the NYT's book review pages, and yet, somehow, I came across them.

From the first read, I knew I was sunk. I have, since that time, consumed each new Furst novel as I came across it. No artist is entirely consistent, and this is true, of course, of Mr. Furst. His novels have included high and . . . not so high . . . points, although each of them has been a pleasure, and an intrigue.

The title for this post, and the New York Times reference, comes in a review of Mr. Furst's Blood of Victory by Janet Maslin, from this paragaraph in her review:

Mr. Furst, the author of last year's "Kingdom of Shadows" and a string of alluring earlier espionage novels in a similar vein, seems to arrive effortlessly at such assurance. He glides gracefully into an urbane pre-World War II Europe and describes that milieu with superb precision. The wry, sexy melancholy of his observations would be seductive enough in its own right — he is the Leonard Cohen of the spy genre — even without the sharp political acuity that accompanies it. Of tensions between Stalin and Hitler, Mr. Furst's latest protagonist resignedly observes, "Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight."

Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight.

A frequently quoted observation is that reading Furst's Night Soldiers series is like watching Casablanca for the first time. I quite like Casablanca, for all its flaws. I cannot argue with the frequently quoted observation.

I don't know what Mr. Furst would make of me. Perhaps an elegantly drawn, throwaway minor character? At best.

But you will not go far wrong, if you venture into Mr. Furst's novels. On this, I trust the New York Times, and that's saying something.

75 years ago on this date, the Century of Progress

2008-11-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

75 years ago, on 20 November 1933, the Century of Progress balloon ascended to a height of 61,000 feet.

Clank.

Clank.

Returned safely to earth, too!

That "clank clank" sound could have been made by two big brass balls clank-clanking against each other.

61,000 feet!

At the helm? Jean Piccard. Not Jean-Luc Picard, mind you, but Jean Piccard, a Swiss-born American. Later, he ascended to a similarly impressive height with his wife and c0-researcher, Jeannette.

I cannot in good conscience call this achievement stellar, but I can call it stratospheric.

It Couldn't Happen Here? It DID Happen Here

2008-11-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

Justin Raimondo on the strange return of socialism.

After 9/11, LeMonde (I think) had a headline saying "We are all Americans now."

After the South Ossetian War of 2008, John McCain said "We are all Georgians now."

Today?

Well . . .

WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW.

I'd make a joke about drinking the Kool-Aid, but that, too, seems somehow inapropos.

Didja hear about Obama's Polish connection?

2008-11-18T06:37:00.001-08:00

Didja hear that Barack Obama might have a Polish connection?

Rumor has it that his grandfather ate a Polish missionary.

Hey, ordinarily I wouldn't go there, that's not the kind of joke I find funny. The Polish Foreign Minister, however, apparently has differing tastes in humor. (That's cool, I mean, humor is a very individual thing.) And besides, he wasn't telling a racist joke, he was just retelling a racist joke, as an example of the racist jokes that some racist jokers tell.

I wonder if his wife will discuss it in the Washington Post?

Yes, but do you want to end up like George W. Bush?

2008-11-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

With Russian tanks only 50km from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia's Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned. "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. "Hang him?" he asked.

Mr Putin replied: "Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein."

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: "Yes, but do you want to end up like (US President George W.) Bush?"

Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: "Ah - you have scored a point there."

Because NO ONE wants to end up like Bush!

Elton John talks sense-smack on gay marriage

2008-11-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

I've always had a weakness for some of Elton John's songs. "Sad Songs (They Say So Much)" and "Rocket Man," for instance. I never really cared for "Candle in the Wind," since I've been a Christopher Hitchens-level atheist in the Cult of Diana, but there you go.

And it's never been a really big secret that Elton John is gay.

I try and search my heart for hatred or bigotry, and (unsurprisingly, perhaps) seldom do I find it. I'm opposed to gay marriage, but am a wishy-washy supporter of civil unions, or civil partnerships. Mostly, this comes down to a mixture of the sacred and the profane, for me. The sacred is the church, and the profane is the state.

I like to use that phrase, "mixture of the sacred and the profane," about a LOT of things, from blues music to sex, but that's really a sidebar, and only tangentially relevant to Elton John and gay marriage.

I don't mind if gay people enter into committed relationships with each other; rather, I think that's a good thing. Caring and loving? Stable relationships? In my mind, that gets chalked up in the "win" column.

But it doesn't quite seem like marriage to me. Maybe that's my heart's inner hatred and bigotry, although I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

Amid all the hubbub about gay marriage, especially in light of California's Proposition 8, along comes Elton John and talks some sense-smack about "gay marriage." In, of all places, USA Today!

The article, by Donna Freydkin, quotes Sir John:

In December 2005, John and Furnish tied the knot in a civil partnership ceremony in Windsor, England. But, clarified the singer, "We're not married. Let's get that right. We have a civil partnership. What is wrong with Proposition 8 is that they went for marriage. Marriage is going to put a lot of people off, the word marriage."

Further:

"I don't want to be married. I'm very happy with a civil partnership. If gay people want to get married, or get together, they should have a civil partnership," John says. "The word 'marriage,' I think, puts a lot of people off.

"You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships."

As I have said before, I am a cautious progressive. I am reluctant to throw over several thousand years of history and tradition based on popular fads. Once overthrown, I find that history and tradition have a hard time coming back, if we turn out to have made an error in judgment.

Maybe I am a bigot and a hater---I don't think so.

And I have never held more respect for Elton John than I do right now.

Note: Edited on 22 November 2008 to add a "close parens" after "sad songs (they say so much". My bust, my bad, my edit. Hey, I'm not going to redact this to cover up embarrassing boo-boos!

233

2008-11-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday, Devils.

"We're surrounded. That simplifies the problem." Chesty Puller

"Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?" Dan Daly

"War is a racket." Smedley Butler

"I have only two men out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." Clifton Cates

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet." James Mattis

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." William Shakespeare

No better friend, no worse enemy. Teufulhunden, the hounds of hell. Devil dogs. Woof woof.

Happy birthday, Devils.

The man in the mirror

2008-11-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

So, word on the street is, even IF Georgia started the whole dustup that became the South Ossetian War of 2008, Russia is to blame for massively overreacting. (And lots of street people seem to think that the "IF" is a mighty big one.)

Hmm.

Man in the mirror time?

There's no real, tangible correlation between Iraq and 9/11, although there was a time when word on the street had it so. (C'mon, you know it's true, you lived through it just like I did. Atta, Prague? C'mon. Short term memory loss isn't that bad.) If we pretend there is, there's still the question of just how many Iraqis we've killed (liberated from life) since Operation Iraqi Liberation . . . oh wait, the acronym for that one didn't work out, whatever, started.

And Afghanistan? (More on point.) How many Afghans have we lit up? How long have we been there? How long do we plan on being there?

Contra SOW-2008! The Georgians went into the autonomos zone, killed Russian peacekeepers, and played games with artillery and Grad rockets. (Grad, or Град, is Russian for "hail." Not as in hail and well met, but as in small hard things falling from the sky.) What did the Russians do?

Only my take, of course, but it's mine.

The Russians responded with a short, sharp, shock of overwhelming force. They tore up the Georgians a hella lot worse than Obama tore up McCain (don't look at electoral votes, don't look at states, look at popular vote totals). The Russians rolled in like it was cool, killed any elements of the Georgian military that didn't run away tuit de suite, then rubbed the Georgians' noses in the mess they made by sinking chunks of their fleet.

AND.

THEN.

THEY.

STOPPED.

Sorry, folks, that's what they did. While Saakashvili was blubbering on tv about the destruction of Georgia, the Russians pushed past their defensive zones into Georgian territory, laagered up their tanks, BMPs (Боевая машина пехоти, or infantry combat cars, or as we call 'em APCs), and sometimes revved the engines, like kids at a stop light looking for a drag race.

There was a lesson, there, and it wasn't just for the Georgians. It was for Europe, too, and, yes, America, although our pride prevents us from admitting it. I mean, what were we gonna do? Drop the 82d in there? Oh, wait, even if we wanted to, aren't they kind of tied up with another mission? What, we were going to go nuclear, over Tbilisi?

Get real.

Maybe the Russians learned something from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Something about "not getting bogged down in a land war in Asia"? Something about "easy to seize, but hard to hold"? The kind of lessons that, ahem, we don't seem to have learned from Vietnam?

Maybe I'm a Putinist stooge, but to me it looks like a textbook military intervention. Go in quick, go in hard, kill everything that doesn't run away (or doesn't run away fast enough), and right before you get on the helicopter say "Bye. Don't make us come back, y' hear?"

Ah, I see. We're America, hence the good guys. They're Russia, hence the bad guys. Meanwhile, we seem to just keep on using air strikes against Pashtun wedding parties. Even if it's completely justified, riddle me this, Batman: does that make the Pashtun like us more, or like us less? Does that make it easier, or harder, to sell the Pashtun on the line that we're America, and hence the good guys?

I could be wrong about this, you know, but that's how I see it.

Selfishness?

2008-11-10T19:02:00.001-08:00

A thought, only a thought. Is there a point at which it becomes acceptable to worry about the impact on America, vice the impact on the world? That is, is there a time when we define "we" more narrowly? And conversely, is there a point at which it becomes acceptable to worry about the impact on the world, vice the impact on America? Perhaps the simplest example I can think of is the IWW vs. the AFL-CIO.

Discuss!

Krugman doesn't seem to grok Bastiat

2008-11-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, doesn't seem to have heard of Bastiat and the Broken Window fallacy. Of course, if all the broken windows are in other countries, then I guess the Broken Window fallacy isn't so bad. Of course, we still ended up with all those dead guys.

Takeaway:

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.

At some cost, one must add, to "external actors."

Tony Blair with a ranch

2008-11-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn (another wordsmith) on Bush, conservatism and so forth.

Takeaway?

As we've seen these last few months, John McCain was so accustomed to running against his party the old dog was incapable of learning the entirely novel trick of running for it. What about the other star names in this year's primary season: Rudy Giuliani? Well, there's a pro-life gun-nut. Mitt Romney? Technocrat governor of a deep blue state. Mike Huckabee? Compassionate conservatism on steroids.
In other words, I don't think the problem these last few years has been "right-wing extremism".

Tough times ahead for this blogger

2008-11-10T04:37:00.001-08:00

But don't worry, I'll come through. I finally got the name "Ahmadinejad" down pat, and one day I'll stop trying to spell "Barack" as "Barrack" or "Barak." The Obama part is easy, but that first name trips me up, between thinking of a military housing unit, and a former Israeli prime minister.

Undaunted, however. That's me.

Truckers and Lorry Drivers

2008-11-09T18:32:00.000-08:00

I don't just want to run a link farm here, but I enjoyed this review of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's in a British site. Very surprisingly, however, it references both Smokey and the Bandit (labeled as a "libertarian trucking movie") and Convoy, both single and film version. And who remembered that SAM PECKINPAH made Convoy?

I swear, the stuff you can stumble upon, whilst surfing dem dere intarw3bz!

The Brothers Hitchens: they do have a way with words

2008-11-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The whole thing is worth a read. Agree or disagree, that's some powerful wordsmithery right there.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Miller's Crossing

2008-11-08T20:20:00.001-08:00

Verna: What you doing?
Tom Reagan: Walking...
Verna: Don't let on any more than you have to.
Tom Reagan: ...in the rain.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Sasha Lebed

2008-11-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

* (On the Soviet-Afghan War) "We began the war with lofty aims but ended up with a war against the people."
* (On the War of Transnistria): "I am proud that we helped and armed Transnistrian [separatist] guards against Moldovan fascists."
* (On the War of Transnistria): "I told the hooligans [separatists] in Tiraspol and the fascists [government] in Chisinau -- either you stop killing each other, or else I'll shoot the whole lot of you with my tanks."
* (On the Chechen War) "Unprepared, untrained boys have been thrown to face bullets. It is a criminal power that sends hundreds of its citizens to certain death."
* (On Chechen capital Grozny) "Here we have a Russian city, bombed to bits by Russian planes paid for by Russian taxpayers who are now going to have to pay a second time to rebuild it."
* (On the Russian government) "Those who profit are the ones at the top. They keep the doughnut for themselves and give the hole to the people."
* (On the Russian Minister of Defence Pavel Grachev) "I don't like prostitutes, whether they are wearing a skirt or trousers."
* (On the ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky) "The Lord God's monkey."
* (On the Western democracies): "They support Yeltsin who helped start the war in Moldova. I stopped it. He started the war in Chechnya. I stopped it. Who is the greater democrat then, he or I? Is democracy war or peace? I think it is the latter."
* (On the Russians) "Most Russians don't care whether they are ruled by fascists or communists or even Martians as long as they can buy six kinds of sausage in the store and lots of cheap vodka."
* (On himself) "I am not without sins. There cannot be an airborne assault general who has no sins. I spit on popularity ratings. I live and serve as I see fit."

Appeasement! or: Another Good Word Gone Bad

2008-11-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

I stand before you crestfallen. I have discovered a dirty little secret about myself. Only the thin veil of internet anonymity allows me to confess this, as it is something to which I could never, in person, admit. Like Neville Chamberlain (in Munich! in 1939!) and like Ronald Reagan (cut and run from Lebanon!) later on, I have discovered that I am an appeaser.

Dirty sounding word, isn't it?

For most of my life, certainly, for most of my political life, by which I mean my life while interested in politics, appeasement has been a dirty word.

Quite frequently, it's linked to Neville Chamberlain, oh, and Munch! and 1939! But I'll bet you didn't know that. It takes a keen and insightful mind to notice those little details.

Sorry, I'm dancing around the issue. I am trying to hide my shame. I am trying to put off having to relate, under the thin tissue of internet anonymity, the sordid tale of what happened.

Here's the word.

The other day, my wife was upset with me. Deep down, I think she just wanted to annex Schleswig-Holstein, or maybe it was Alsace-Lorrain, but the point is, she was upset with me. She said it had something to do with the fact that I hadn't done the dishes.

And I . . . oh G-d it's hard to admit . . . I appeased her. I wrapped up what I was doing, and then I went and did the dishes.

Y'all see where this is going, right?

Merriam-Webster says that appease means "to bring to a state of peace or calm," or "to cause to subside" or, and here's the killer, pacify or conciliate, especially in the sense of "to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions usually at the sacrifice of principles."

Well, that's only the third definition. (I'm not vouching for Merriam-Webster in particular, but I don't think any kind of straight-faced argument can be made that the primary meaning of appease is "to abandon your principles.")

We have taken a sufficiently fine and honorable word, of long and regular usage, and perverted it to always mean Munich, always mean 1939, always mean Neville Chamberlain (who was in Munich! in 1939! and an appeaser!). We have cheapened its meaning in the pursuit of lockstep ideological conformity. Every conflict, every dispute, someone's gonna come running out and start talking about how any compromise with the other side is appeasement.

I speak, here, particularly of fo-po, or foreign policy.

Should I have not appeased my wife? Should I have said, "Not only will I not do the dishes, but you'll go do them right now?" Should I have further said, "And if you don't get to it tout de suite, you'll taste the back of my hand?"

No, no, and no, really I shouldn't have done that.

Now I'm hungry, and I think I'll go appease my appetite.

So a plane crashes in Mexico DF . . .

2008-11-05T06:53:00.001-08:00

The New York Times notices that the world didn't stop just because Obama won the horse race. "Mexico's Interior Minister Killed In Plane Crash."

Relevant bits that leapt out at me:

Mexico’s interior minister and seven others onboard a government jet died Tuesday night when it crashed into a tony business district here during rush hour, igniting cars and sending dozens of people to local hospitals.

The minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño, 37, had been one of President Felipe Calderón’s closest advisers and a rising star in the National Action Party. He headed the government’s security apparatus and was the president’s point man in the increasingly bloody drug war.

And, of course,

As an investigation began, officials said that the crash appeared to have been an accident and that there were no signs of foul play.

Let's just juxtapose those thoughts: A rising star in the PAN, who "headed the government’s security apparatus and was the president’s point man in the increasingly bloody drug war" dies when his plane falls from the sky, and no foul play is suspected.

Umm.

Yeah.

And I thought watching 24 required a massive suspension of disbelief!

Spinning on a dime

2008-11-05T06:27:00.000-08:00

Hey, anyone want to bet that the GOP starts taking a different view of the unitary executive now?

Presidential signing statements?

The authority of the president to arrest anyone he deems a terrorist, without judicial review?

Foreign adventurism?

Vast new bureaucracies?

The idea that "we had our accountability moment, and that's called the . . . elections"?

Hey, go figure.

A friend e-mailed, worried that Texas would go Dem, wanting me to vote

2008-11-05T04:43:00.001-08:00

My friend, if I did vote (and I didn't), it wouldn't have been for McCain. The only reason I would have voted for him was to be voting for Palin, and that's not nearly enough to make up for my opinion of Mad Bomber John.

He is everything I despise about the Republican Party. He is not from "real America." He gets props for his service, but he was a legacy, and the idea that the son of John Sydney McCain II, and the grandson of John Sydney McCain, would do anything but join the US Navy is simply laughable. He was a military aristocrat, an officer from a family of officers, in the most autocratic and aristocratic of services, the US Navy. The impression I've got is that he sold out the POW/MIA activists, repeatedly---the very image of why I pretty much hate officers (many, if not most, of them). That is, he doesn't value what the British call the "other ranks."

He was always happy to cross the aisle . . . and go to the left. When he crossed the aisle, it was always for, what, again? Immigration "reform" or campaign finance "reform" or horsetwaddle like that.

He chased women all the time. When you're a young man, that's a good thing . . . but when you stand before God the Father and say you will cleave only unto this one woman . . . and you keep on chasing other women, then you're not much of a man yourself. John McCain isn't much of a man.

We are in for hard times, we are in for bitter times. George W. Bush can skulk home to Crawford, ruined by listening to the wrong advisers, in part, because he could not make peace with his (earthly) father. I'd probably like W. more than George Herbert Walker Bush. But Poppy was the better President, by far.

Iraq is lost. Iraq is now a de facto colony of Iran, and the Iranians have been empowered by our stupidity. The surge did not work. It has not been working. The surge was stupid. Anyone with even the most elementary understanding of counterinsurgency knows that a limited "flood the zone" type assault does not work. The insurgents go home, clean their rifles, nail their wives to make more babies to win the next insurgency, and wait, and rest, and get better.

Afghanistan is looking the same way. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's anywhere close to becoming Arizona, or even Arkansas.

The GOP has turned its back on America, for a long time now. Time for America to turn its back on the GOP.

Note: This is the e-mail I sent back to my friend, nearly verbatim. I edited it to remove the bad language I sometimes, reflexively, use in private, and to clarify a point that wasn't quite clear.

44?

2008-11-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

It sure looks like Barack Obama has won the presidential race.

I didn't vote for him, but lots of people did, and I am moderately hopeful that he will shed a lot of his campaign rhetoric, and really represent change. Despite the variety of issues he supports, which I oppose, I do have some real hope that he'll change disastrous US foreign policy blunders.

The first black president? I've got to admit, that's pretty cool.

Only in America.

My congratulations to President-elect Obama.

In an otherwise shattering election for the GOP . . .

2008-11-05T04:24:00.001-08:00

It is instructive and worthwhile to remember that one Republican---one non-RINO, one REAL Republican----ran unopposed.

That would be in the 14th Congressional District for the State of Texas.

That'd be the man who has clung, anything but bitterly, to God, to the Second Amendment, to babies, to fiscal responsibility, to limited government, the man who clung, in short, to the Constitution, the man who opposed the war in/on Iraq before Barack Obama did, the man who opposed the PATRIOT ACT, the man who opposed the bailout, the man who opposed immunity for the telecoms. The man who opposed amnesty for illegal aliens.

That'd be Ron Paul, y'all.

In your heart?

You know he's right.

Because things change. . . right? Right? Right?

2008-11-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago in Oklahoma the son of an Okie preacher knelt to pray
He said Lord I wanna be a Christian soldier just like you
And fight to build a new and better day
Now many years and miles from Oklahoma
That same young Okie boy still kneels to pray
But he don't pray to be no Christian soldier anymore
He just prays to make it through another day
Cause it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun
And it hurts to have to watch a grown man cry
But we're playin' cards writin' home havin' lots of fun
Telling jokes and learning how to die

Now the things I've come to know seem so confusin'
It's gettin' hard to tell what's wrong from right
I can't seperate the winners from the losers anymore
And I'm thinking of just giving up the fight
Cause it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun
And it hurts to have to watch a grown man cry
But we're playin' cards writin' home ain't we hadn't fun
Turning on and learning how to die

Kris Kristofferson from, what, like 1970?

Cause there's nothing like that going on now, right?

Ain't no Okie boys kneeling to pray, are there, in some foreign land?

I'm just sayin'.

A possible upside to a McCain victory?

2008-11-01T15:08:00.001-07:00

With "Bomber John" McCain clawing his way back to life, like an IRS vampire which was not completely staked, I find myself desperately looking for some reason, any reason, to be glad if he wins.

I may have found one.

It occurs to me that Andrew Sullivan's head might simply explode if Barack Obama does not win the presidency. Failing that, maybe he'll just go back to his husband and cuddle, whimpering, for a few years.

At least that would spare us his peculiar variety of nose-in-the-wind "conservatism." (If anyone can explain to me the logic that led Sullivan to support Ron Paul, Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain AND Barack Obama, I would be grateful, as this is a task which I cannot master, and I've mastered the который clause!)

"Measure seven times . . . "

2008-11-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

I am a cautious progressive of conservative temperament, with neither "progressive" nor "conservative" being used in the current vernacular of our political climate. I am not progressive in the current political sense of the word. I do not favor the dread hand of state regulation, I do not believe that we can wave a magic wand and poof! everything will be better. I am not conservative in the current political sense of the word. I do not favor the dread hand of state military intervention, I do not believe that we can use a military application of a forward policy to meddle, to liberate, to force Qataris to become Kansans, or Afghans to become Arizonans.

I am progressive in that I believe in progress. I think we can make things better. Here I speak not only of things, but of ideas as well. Our things have gotten vastly better, in many ways. Our ideas? Not so much . . . but, in many ways, yes, better. I think that if we use faith and reason, two of God's greatest gifts, we can make progress. "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . " and all that.

I am conservative in that I am afraid of making a misstep. I have had many ideas, some of them were quite good. Some of those quite good ideas? They were simply incompatible with reality. They didn't work. Great ideas put me in mind of Thomas Edison and the (soon-to-be-banned-by-federal-law) incandescent light bulb. How many times, again, did Edison come up with incandescent light bulbs that didn't work? Doesn't the number "ten thousand" stick in the mind?

What if our grand new ideas are wrong? (Whatever they are.)

Folk wisdom, I think, mostly comes down on my side. Yes, there is "he who hesitates is lost" but there is also "look before you leap" and the wonderful congruence between Anglo-American and Russian wisdom, expressed in the parlance of the building trades. The Anglo-American version, with which I grew up, is expressed as "measure twice, cut once." The Russian version is even more cautious: Отмерь семь раз, отреж один раз. Measure seven times, cut once.

The concept of federalism in the United States was, I think, a concept of allowing fifty little laboratories to try out different approaches to life. (Fifty today, of course, latterly many fewer.) Federalism would allow California to be California, and Maine to be Maine, Texas Texas, and so on. If Texas (for instance) came up with a good, workable plan, a new idea, a better way, a great leap forward, and it worked out, then perhaps Maine and California and those other states could watch its progress, learn from its mistakes, and adopt a similar but hopefully better policy. If Texas' policy was bad, however, or misguided, short sighted, or just plain stupid, the other states would not necessarily be forced to suffer through those policies. If California sneezed, the rest of the nation would not have to catch cold.

It seems to me that today we have cast not only federalism, but conservatism, indeed, caution itself, to the winds. In almost every sphere of life, we have overturned the verities of the past in favor of grand new ideas. We press on, hurly burly, seemingly convinced that no one in the past has grappled with the issues we now face, or, at least, never grappled with those issues with the insight, wisdom and moral clarity we bring to bear.

A belief in progress says we can change things for the better. A belief in conservatism asks the green eyeshade questions: what will this get us? what will this cost us? what could this get us? what could this cost us? what are we overlooking? (Note: those are all different questions.) Faith, you might say, and reason.

Hopefully without being reduced to a Hamlet-like level of incompetence, inactivity and indecision, one must ask "what if I'm wrong?"

What about, say, immigration? Do we want high levels of immigration into America? If so, what kind of immigrants do we want? If we were to bring, say, millions of low-skill Mexicans into our country, as indeed we seem to have done, what are the probable and potential upsides, and what are the probable and potential downsides?

(Note: while there is not always an upside, there is always a downside.)

What about, say, the invasion/liberation of Iraq? Do we want to become involved in a land war in Asia? (Even Southwest Asia?) What are the probable and potential upsides? What are the probable and potential downsides?

Did we measure seven times, or even twice, before we took up the saw and cut?

Some actions, once taken, cannot be undone. I remember the old saying, "When you draw your sword against the king, throw away the scabbard." "Crossing the Rubicon" has the same connotation: when you take your army across the Rubicon, you declare yourself in opposition to Rome, and you'd best throw away that scabbard.

When I was working construction many years ago, I cut a board, neat and clear, with a circle saw. It turns out that I cut it too short. The crew chief clapped me on the shoulder and told me to go and find the board stretcher. There is, of course, no such thing.

Measure seven times, cut once.

Oh, and the mass immigration thing, and the liberation of Iraq? How have those worked out for us? Has the upside we were promised come true, and even if it has, has the downside we were cautioned about come true as well? Have there been blowback, unintended consequences, unforeseen circumstances?

Perhaps the immigration example is not to your taste, nor the Iraq example. Gay marriage? Global warming, a la Kyoto? The Great Society, or welfare reform?

"And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire," indeed.

Old School

2008-10-31T20:40:00.000-07:00

If you want a good way to start a fight (if not an intramural knife fight to the death over a foreign minister's wife!), just ask a collection of gun nuts, firearms fanciers or people who take responsibility for themselves, "What's the best carry gun?"

It is a great way to while away the hours!

Essentially you want a pistol that carries like a bitsy Beretta .25, hits like a .30-06, is accurate like a Pardini .22 rimfire match pistol, and is as reliable as a hammer. (And not just any hammer, but something like an Estwing Sure Strike solid steel hammer.)

Today, thanks to the genius of the market (and as an entirely unintended consequence of the high capacity magazine ban enacted under Bill Clinton), there is a broad variety of handguns eminently suited to personal protection, and handgun ammunition has benefited,and massively, from brilliant designers attempting to build a better bullet.

If there is a down side to these new and probably better options, it is that they tend to appeal to our cupidity for newest-fastest-lightest-polymerest-differentest. Sometimes new junk crowds out old classics.

The revolver pictured above is one of those old classics, and it remains the pistol I have carried most often. It is a Colt Cobra, in essence an aluminum alloy framed version of the famous Detective Special. Humphrey Bogart carried many a Detective Special (and its longer barreled brother, the Police Positive Special) in films noir in the 1930s and 1940s.

The precis from Wikipedia is an accurate description and summary of the Cobra. It is a light weight, six shot revolver. It is somewhere between Smith and Wesson's "carry revolvers" on the J frame and K frame in size. To my hands, the J frame is too small, the K frame is a little bit big, and the Colt D frame is just right for a six shot .38 Special. (The Colt D frame is close enough in size to the Smith and Wesson K frame that speedloaders for the two are interchangeable.)

My version from the 1950s has a slightly shorter ejector rod, and slightly smaller sights, than my early 1960s version, but the sights are still sharp, distinct, and dialed in for standard 158 grain .38 Special ammunition. If you pull the trigger without moving the sights, the sights will be dead on with this handgun load. The trigger pull stacks slightly towards the end, but is smooth, and well suited to my handgun shooting preferences. I find I shoot better with a long smooth trigger stroke, vice a short crisp trigger stroke, which is only proof once again that I am a weirdo.

For me, it carries easier than a modern, double stack autoloader of about the same size, something to do with its dimensions and where its thick, and where its thin. It is more accurate than I am, and when I maintain a modicum of practice I find it an easy revolver to shoot quickly and accurately.

In places, the bluing on the frame is worn. Where the bluing is intact, it presents a finely polished finish that will never again be offered on a standard production handgun, and the grip frame and topstrap are matte blued to provide a pleasant, and subtle, two-tone effect.

It does not have tons of power, nor oodles of bullets. It is a defensive firearm, almost purely. It is a tool for a free man to have, with which to defend his life, his liberty, and his God-given, inalienable rights.

Me?

I like it just fine.

Frum and Williamson Knife Fight to the Death over Anne Applebaum!

2008-10-31T19:47:00.001-07:00

We remember Anne Applebaum's column in Slate complaining about how anti-intellectual the GOP has become, and how it prevents her vote for John McCain? (Yes, it was she who I referrred to as the Polish Foreign Minister's Wife.)

This has caused a schismatic knife fight to develop over at the National Review. Just as the bloodiest wars are civil, the very best knife fights are among intellectuals (said in context) over schismatic deviations and heresies.

The short version: Kevin D. Williamson wrote a blog post attacking Anne . . . the Polish Foreign Minister's Wife's Slate article. David Frum, in his own NRO blog, charged to the defense of the Polish Foreign Minister's Wife, pointing out that she was "the author of the definitive history of the Soviet Gulag."

Frum's concluding paragraph was in the "more in sorrow than in anger" mode of fake sincerity:

Anne is my friend, and of course it angers me when my friends are criticized. But this is not personal. How small has the house of conservatism shrunk when it can find no room for Anne Applebaum? What has happened at NR when this generation's greatest living expert on the crimes of communism can be dismissed as an unserious and dishonorable person?

Yes, yes.

Engaging in a bit of Maoist self-criticism, Mr. Donaldson clarified his ideological deviationism, umm, I mean, he pointed out that he thought Anne Applebaum really was a swell gall, just kind of, you know, elitist.

My broader point is that Barack Obama isn’t only a presidential candidate — he’s a class marker, an item of conspicuous consumption. Applebaum is at pains to distinguish herself from the “mob” supporting McCain, and I am amused by how often Obama’s supporters marvel that he was editor of the Harvard law review, as if that were a qualification for the presidency rather than a qualification to sit on the Senate rules committee. I don’t think it diminishes Applebaum’s work, or personal integrity, to note that she has presented in this article a case that is not convincing, therefore, “It's Hard to Believe Anne Applebaum.”

The problem with Maoist self criticism, however, is that sometimes it makes you want to leave a shiv in the back of your accuser. Donaldson concludes:

Frum is absolutely correct that in these disappointing times some conservatives have become far too ready to “read out” those with whom they disagree; I wouldn’t presume to do so with anybody of Anne Applebaum’s standing, of course, or David Frum’s, though I’m pretty sure that the Big Tent isn’t quite big enough to include Senator Obama, whatever his other virtues.

Ha ha, ha ha! Yes, indeedy! Some conservatives have become far too ready to "read out" those with whom they disagree . . . no one of Anne Applebaum's standing, of course, or David Frum's.

Wait, some conservatives . . . far too ready . . . "read out" . . . does that jog a memory? Why yes, yes it does!

David Frum in 2003, that memory is jogged. I think it was called "Unpatriotic Conservatives." Wasn't it? (Why yes, yes it was!)

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves "conservatives."

Sounds like disagreement!

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

Sounds like reading out!

And who were these anti-war conservatives who were junking the commitment to American interests and values, ignoring threats and appeasing enemies?

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.

No one of Applebaum's standing, of course, or Frum's . . . umm, wait a minute? I have read, and widely, the vast majority of the men Frum read out of the movement. Perhaps I'm blinding myself, but if I compare any one of these men, let alone take them in aggregate, to David Frum, the comparison is . . . well, how do you compare something to nothing? (The nothing, that would be Frum.)

Just as sacred cow makes the best hamburger, the very best knife fights are intramural. Like a picador, man. Like a picador.

Note: Edited to replace "along" with "alone" in the penultimate paragraph. My bad.

Zen interventionism, if you will

2008-10-31T04:21:00.000-07:00

Justin Raimondo is quite possibly my favorite commentator, with a focus on anti-war issues, and takes a look at Obama. His take is very similar to mine, in fact, his take generally informs mine. (I've been reading Antiwar.com every day for about ten years.)

He writes of mail he receives whenever he cautions that Obama is not the antiwar candidate some (many) people take him to be:

The common assumption of these letter-writers is that Obama is just trying to "pass," so to speak, as a warmonger. Once he's in office, peace will break out all over. What evidence do we have for this? None whatsoever.

And in conclusion?

But – and I hate to tell you this, but somebody has to -- the politics of fear and deception have not been patented by the Republicans. Look for the Democrats to add their own ingredient to this bipartisan recipe for overseas disasters: the politics of guilt. White liberal guilt, to be sure. We'll be smack dab in the middle of Africa's feuding tribes faster than you can say "Samantha Power."

And that's the best case scenario. In the worst case, the Dennis Ross faction of Obama's emerging foreign policy movers and shakers will maneuver us into a confrontation with Iran, and relations with Russia will deteriorate to a new low as NATO escalates its eastward expansion. In any case, those who are working to effect a fundamental change in American foreign policy have a duty to take Obama at his word -- hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Justin Raimondo is not popular among the neocons/anti-jihadist right. And there have been times when I thought his work had holes in it, places where my own knowledge pointed in a very different direction than that in which Raimondo pointed. But as I have said in the past, I expect my heroes to have feet of clay. Neither his unpopularity with the crazier, more interventionist neocons nor his occasional misstep are reasons to miss his thrice-weekly columns at Antiwar.com, however.

Obama is a blank slate, I believe he has consciously so modeled himself, and if we see in him what we wish to see, based on nothing more than our own preferences and Obama's airy generalities, then who is the fool? Is it Obama? Or is the fool us?

Ask Pogo.

Thoughts on linking and annotation

2008-10-30T08:37:00.001-07:00

I'm still evolving my annotation/linking style. In some earlier posts, I linked as often as I could, but I have tapered off. Now, for instance, in my discussion of the Winter War and Christopher Lee in the post below, I don't include a single link. Why dat?

Part of it is the revolution in search engines. If you want to know more about the Winter War and Christopher Lee, you just google, or ask, or yahoo "Winter War" "Christopher Lee" and shazam, there you have it.

If I discuss a particular article, I'll include a link.

Hey, I'm just doing what works for me, and I don't pretend I am right!

I loves me some intarw3bz!

2008-10-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

I love the internet. The opportunity to find new information while spinning off on a tangent is, simply, a hoot to me. Maybe it's my disorganized mind?

I started off looking for information on the T-34 tank, because I was playing a video game where that tank features, and it didn't look quite right to me. A few moments of typing, and I discovered that the T-34 in the game doesn't really look anything like a real T-34. OK, problem solved!

But . . . but wait, that's not all!

From reading about the T-34 I segued neatly into reading about the Winter War of 1939, between the Finns and the Soviets. (And I think the Winter War would be a great video game, too, giving you the chance to kill Godless Soviet Commies without having to pretend to be a Nazi, but that's a different tangent on which one could spin.)

So there I am reading about the Winter War and I discover that Christopher Lee was a British volunteer with the Finns!

How cool is that?

(Note: Mr. Lee admits that he never saw combat, as the detachment of volunteers he was with was considered too valuable from a PR standpoint to risk in battle. Still. Still!)

Slate explains white supremacist numerology

2008-10-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

Slate outlines the meanings behind some white supremacist numerology.

88 and 14. As the Times article explained, the number 88 represents the phrase "Heil Hitler," because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. White supremacists are also fond of the number 18 to represent the initials A.H. (Other tight-knit groups use a similar code: The Hells Angels, for example, are attached to the number 81.)

Weaker, I think, when they turn to the mystical skinhead significance of the number 5:

the number 5 represents resistance to law enforcement in the form of this five-word response to interrogation: "I have nothing to say."

Willing to go out on a limb with me here? Maybe it has something to do with the Fifth Amendment? Resistance to law enforcement? Right against self-incrimination? (Hey, if I said "The right against self-incrimination" that would be FIVE WORDS. FIVE. Five.)

I officially, and for real, now feel old

2008-10-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Rotten Tomatoes is doing a James Bond retrospective, from someone who had never seen a single James Bond movie.

The parts where he explains how seeing Goldfinger gave him a whole new appreciation of Austin Powers? That was my Metamucil moment.

Did I say "OODA-loopy" and "New York Times" in the same post?

2008-10-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the New York Times is the gift that keeps on giving. Let's take David Brooks column from yesterday. (Please!) Brooks' The Behavioral Revolution opens thusly:

Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.

Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.

Although I freely admit that I am only marginally familiar with Boyd's OODA loop concepts, this article seems to be heavily sympatico with Boyd's work. However, if I rightly recollect, Boyd placed the emphasis on the second stage, not the third, and explicitly noted that our orientation is heavily influenced by our own biases, predispositions and experiences. This contradicts the assumption that people "are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest." It all comes down to the question of whether our orientation is rational or not.

Brooks spends the rest of the column attempting to shift the presence of bias over to his "first O", that of perception. Although he might never have been exposed to Boyd's work, he trudges the path Boyd blazed, with a little "right wing deviationism" thrown in for fun.

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.
This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

Who'd a thunk?

Friedman on the Mullahs

2008-10-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading the new column by Thomas Friedman, "Sleepless in Teheran" in the New York Times. Ordinarily I'm not a big fan of Friedman's, but in this column he advocates talking with Iran, an idea I find appealing. Even when I like some of his ideas, I'm startled by the shoddiness of his column. Now, I understand that being a regular op-ed writer is probably the newspaper equivalent of academic tenure, and so you're allowed to run free, or freer, without the rigorous scrutiny (presumably) applied to non-"name" journalists. And, of course, I am aware of the ongoing tribulations of the Times on the financial side---stock about to be downgraded to junk status, all that.

But read these two paragraphs, and riddle me whether or not an editor might have wanted to take a look at them:

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.
As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad — and then the collapse in prices in the ‘80s helped bring down that overextended empire.

Hmm. So it was the collapse in global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union, except that it was also the collapse in prices in the '80s that helped bring down that overextended empire.

Friedman goes on a review of the economic missteps and miscues of the mullahs, the heavy social spending, the domestic subsidies of the FIRE sector (wait, I made that one up) and concludes that if "(oil) prices stay low, there is a good chance Iran will be open to negotiating over its nuclear program with the next U.S. president."

Like Thomas Friedman, I think that would be a very good thing. I still think his reach is exceeding his grasp when he writes:

That is a good thing because Iran also funds Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and the anti-U.S. Shiites in Iraq. If America wants to get out of Iraq and leave behind a decent outcome, plus break the deadlocks in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, it needs to end the cold war with Iran. Possible? I don’t know, but the collapse of oil prices should give us a shot.

Wait, we're going to get out of Iraq, AND leave behind a decent outcome? To paraphrase Moynihan, only if we define decent outcome down. (And I think that's inevitable.) And while we're at it, we're going to break the deadlocks in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine? That's mighty ambitious.

While I can stipulate Friedman's assessment of the straitened economic circumstances Russia and Iran now find themselves in, I think he's overlooking another country undergoing some straitened economic circumstances. (That would be us, or at least, the US.) I don't mean to get all OODA-loopy here, but the process of weighing your assets and liabilities against your potential gains and your potential losses, discounted for risk, is something that has to be ongoing and dynamic. (To Mametize this, "things change.")

Personally, I want to get the Iranians back on our side. Not necessarily the mullahs, not necessarily this regime, but somehow, someday, I want the Iranians back on our side, and so when Friedman calls for ending the cold war with Iran as the key to Middle Eastern progress, I'm down with that, homey.

Doubtless all good liberals will cringe when Friedman quotes Karim Sadjadpour on negotiating with the Iranians by analogizing to negotiating with a Persian carpet merchant---and it do have a whiff of "ethno-cultural stereotyping" to it!---but it doesn't really bother me, and I think it shows a good grounding in reality. (I look forward with equal enthusiasm to Freidman's comments on negotiating with Israel being like negotiating with a Jewish money-lender. Yes?)

Unfortunately, of course, a big dollop of love for the Democratic nominee for president lies in the middle of this poorly edited but reasonably sensible article.

Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran’s mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone down. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the country their leaders call “The Great Satan” has just elected “a guy whose middle name is the central figure in Shiite Islam — Hussein — and whose last name — Obama — when transliterated into Farsi, means ‘He is with us,’ ” said Sadjadpour.

You know, I wish I could see the magic of Obama, but I don't. For me he's like Seinfeld: a politician about nothing, and what's worse, an uninteresting politician about nothing. While the GOPniks are running around screaming "He'll get tough on Israel! He'll sit down to negotiate with Iran! He'll slash the defense budget by a quarter! He'll yank us out of Iraq!" I find myself muttering under my breath, "If only." But I think he's just another politician, blither-blathering whatever he thinks people want to hear until he gets his hands on the keys to the executive washroom. Still, I curiously find myself loathing him somewhat less than John McCain, because I fear that McCain really would start a serious war somewhere, like with Iran or (God forbid) Russia.

I have a final nit to pick with the closing paragraph.

“When you ask young Arabs which leaders in the region they most admire,” said Sadjadpour, they will usually answer the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. “When you ask them where in the Middle East would you most like to live,” he added, “the answer is usually socially open places like Dubai or Beirut. The Islamic Republic of Iran is never in the top 10.”

Could any of that be due to the fact that most Arabs probably don't speak Farsi? How much business does the Islamic Republic conduct in Arabic? Is there any anti-Sunni prejudice, or any anti-Sunni policies, in effect in Iran? I, frankly, have no idea, but wouldn't be surprised if there were. Then again, people frequently voice admiration for revolutionary leaders while preferring to maintain their own safety, security and stability.

Because NATO doesn't stand for North Atlantic anything . . .

2008-10-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Bush Endorses NATO Membership for Albania, Croatia

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26, 2008 – President Bush kicked off the weekend by signing agreements endorsing Albania and Croatia as NATO members and called on other Balkan and former Soviet countries to join the alliance.

And as they used to say on the late night tv commercials, "But wait there's more!"

As if letting Albania (!) and Croatia into NATO isn't enough, the Most Socialist President in US History also extends the hand of friendship to other nations yearning to breathe free:

Bush reiterated U.S. support for others to join NATO, including Georgia, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, and Serbia if it chooses. These countries “remember the pain of tyranny,” and, as a result, “treasure the blessings of liberty,” he said.

Russia only gets one finger, and it's not from the hand of friendship.

Remember, kids, just because its called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization doesn't mean it has to have anything to do with, you know, the "North" or the "Atlantic" or any of that nonsense. Besides, the Adriatic is very, very similar to the Atlantic. Both, for instance, are salty and wet.

Ha ha! That "other George W." that President George W. Bush used to talk about, he was so silly! All his blither-blather about avoiding "entangling alliances" and suchlike! Ha ha! Ha ha!

Ha ha! That "other George Bush" that President George W. Bush is related to, he was so silly! All his blither-blather "promises" to the Soviet Union that NATO would not be expanded if German reunification was permitted! Ha ha! Ha ha!

Cathy Young gets her mad on

2008-10-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Cathy Young is no supporter of the Russian Federation. She has engaged in a tussle with Glenn Greenwald over the South Ossetian War of 2008, which I attempt to parse here.

The initial impetus for the dust-up came when Greenwald wrote a post at Salon about “Our diverse and vibrant democracy.”

One of the two major presidential candidates is repeatedly lying to the American public about one of the most significant geopolitical events of the year. The other candidate has adopted the lie because doing so is more politically expedient than refuting it.

As a result, the vast bulk of the American citizenry has a completely false understanding of a war that took place this year between our "stalwart ally" and our New/Old Scary Enemy (namely, that the New Scary Enemy launched an unprovoked attack on our sweet and innocent democratic ally). That lie is then used to depict the New Enemy as a Grave Threat and to justify proposed NATO membership for the victimized ally, an extremely dangerous policy which all four major candidates, with varying degrees of qualification, fundamentally endorse (thus further eliminating any discussion, debate or dissent over it).

Ms. Young was not going to take this! Posting at Reason, “Sympathy for the devil: why is the American left making excuses for Putin’s Russia?”, she wrote that Greenwald’s take was “blatantly false—and reveals much more about the mindset of the left than about the state of American democracy.”

Ms. Young asserts that no one (save only Moose Killin’ Sarah Palin) thinks the Russian actions were unprovoked, simply “serious aggression” and, later, “naked aggression” (from McCain) which was “unacceptable” and “unwarranted” (the latter two from Obama). Ms. Young further asserts that this view is dominant in Europe, linking to a Council of Europe resolution. That resolution notes that:

5. However, the start of shelling of Tshkinvali without warning by the Georgian military, on 7 August 2008, initiated a new level of escalation, namely that of open and full-fledged warfare. The use of heavy weapons and cluster munitions, creating grave risks for civilians, constituted a disproportionate use of armed force by Georgia, albeit within its own territory, and as such a violation of international humanitarian law and Georgia’s commitment to resolve the conflict peacefully.

And

6. At the same time, the Russian counter-attack, including large-scale military actions in Central and Western Georgia and in Abkhazia, equally failed to respect the principle of proportionality and international humanitarian law and constituted a violation of Council of Europe principles, as well as of statutory obligations and specific accession commitments of the Russian Federation as a member state. It led to the occupation of a significant part of the territory of Georgia, as well as to attacks on the economic and strategic infrastructure of the country which can be deemed to be either a direct attack on the sovereignty of Georgia and thus a violation of the Statute of the Council of Europe, or an attempt by Russia to extend its influence over a “near abroad” state in violation of its accession commitment to denounce such a concept.

I didn’t know that counter-attacks, however excessive they might be, constituted aggression, let alone serious or naked aggression. Perhaps Ms. Young counted on few people clicking through to read her links. (In fairness, Ms. Young does prefer to use Obama’s “unacceptable and unwarranted” language.)

She then asserts that “Clearly, what irks Greenwald is not that Russia's actions in Georgia are viewed as unprovoked but that they are viewed as (to quote Obama) unacceptable and unwarranted.” Maybe she’s right—but I don’t see it that way. From my reading of Mr. Greenwald’s post, what irked Greenwald was that the lie “is then used to depict the New Enemy as a Grave Threat and to justify proposed NATO membership for the victimized ally, an extremely dangerous policy which all four major candidates, with varying degrees of qualification, fundamentally endorse.” In other words, my impression is that Mr. Greenwald was referring to the dangers of expanding NATO membership to Georgia, without debate.

But back to the Rolling Stones post: Ms. Young accuses Russia of engaging in “blatant provocations toward Georgia, apparently including the downing of a Georgian reconnaissance drone over Abkhazia.” Ms. Young glosses over the last paragraph of the AP report, which reads:

The observers’ report said both sides had violated an Abkhazia cease-fire agreement — Russia by shooting down the drone and Georgia by flying it over Abkhazia.

The blatant provocation, then, was shooting down a UAV which Georgia had (in a blatant provocation?) flown over Abkhazian airspace.

Well, whatever. Then Ms. Young concludes “Sympathy for the Devil” with a confusing paean to the good old days when the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union:

When Cold War-era leftists pleaded for a more understanding view of the Soviet Union, they were at least arguing on behalf of a power that, despite its abuses, at least outwardly embraced many "progressive" ideals: free medicine, housing and education, extensive social services, secularism, women's rights, relative social equality. The Putin/Medvedev Russia is the opposite of everything today's left supports: It's a land where billionaires flaunt their $20,000 watches and $350 million yachts, social services are slashed to a minimum, religion is entangled with the state, ethnic bigotry flourishes, labor unions are trampled, and homophobia is rampant and officially condoned.

Ah, the good old days!

Indeed, in his follow-up post, “The Russia/Georgia conflict and the tactics of 2002" Greenwald writes, that those who

“oppose the ill-conceived, dangerous plan to turn Georgia into a U.S. protectorate through NATO membership and other entanglements -- are smeared as Putin apologists and guilty of sympathizing with, acquiescing to, and even supporting Russian tyranny.”

Now I know neither Mr. Greenwald nor Ms. Young, but have read a reasonable selection of their articles and postings, and I have never seen Mr. Greenwald display any particular affection for the Russian state. He’s writing about the dangers of expanding NATO to include Georgia, folks, not implying that we should join with Russia to stamp out a revanchist Georgia!
In the tit-for-tat world of the blogosphere, Ms. Young felt the need to further clarify her position, in a post at Reason under the title "Cathy Young Responds to Glenn Greenwald Re: The Left and Putin's Russia.” She makes five main points, none of which seem relevant or on-point to me, and concludes that:

Do I think Greenwald loves the Putin regime? No, of course not. Do I think his (often deserved) revulsion at the Bush administration's policies has turned into a knee-jerk tendency to be against whatever the "neocons" are for, and consequently into a very real moral blind spot? Yes, and this blind spot is nowhere as evident as in Greenwald's glib, reprehensible dismissal of Georgian democracy.

Of course, if she had actually addressed the issue of potential accession into NATO by Georgia, she would have been responding to Greenwald’s post, and not simply praising our plucky little democratic pal Georgia.

Alexander Cockburn is not in the tank for Obama

2008-10-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

Writing in the Independent, Cockburn (and it's pronounced Coburn, I now understand) writes that he's "been scraping around, trying to muster a single positive reason to encourage a vote for Obama."

Obama's run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Obama has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with Washington lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.

So the wife of the Polish Foreign Minister is for Obama

2008-10-27T20:31:00.001-07:00

So the wife of the Polish Foreign Minister writes this column about why she can't vote for John McCain. I hadn't read too many of her columns before I realized she had a kind of a forward policy approach to foreign policy and a particular hard-on for Russia. That was BEFORE I knew she was the wife of the Polish Foreign Minister.

The article was in Slate.

A few howlers leapt out at me. Maybe she is absolutely correct in her comments, but that's not how it looks to me.

She writes that it's "his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party" that, finally, repulses her. My ears pricked up at this!

Her take on what constitutes a rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party is, shall we say, different than mine. Way different. My first clue to this was her praise of John McCain as "a true foreign-policy intellectual."

Bomb-bomb-bomb
Bomb-bomb Iran.

A true foreign policy intellectual.

Bomb-bomb-bomb
Bomb-bomb Iran.

A true foreign policy intellectual.

Then my suspicions were confirmed: Mrs. Polish Foreign Minister is one of them there National Greatness conservatives, she loves America because of all this power we've got (we had, we've got, we had, whatever) to throw around.

Her admiration for John McCain stems from his foreign policy pointy-headedness, his respect for budgetary sensibility and his disdain for torture, and his willingness to betray conservative principles on issues like immigration and, well, mostly just immigration. All that is trumped, however, but the aggressive anti-intellectualism of his party. And Moose Killin' Sarah Palin.

She doesn't come across as too enthused about Obama, however.

Barack Obama is indeed the least experienced, least tested candidate in modern presidential history. But at least if he wins, I can be sure that the mobs who cry "terrorist" at the sound of his name will be kept away—far away—from the White House.

Let's keep them peasants and their pitchforks in their place, dern it!

Everything I need to know, I learned from Lord Palmerston

2008-10-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”

Everything I need to know, I learned from Smedley Butler

2008-10-27T07:29:00.001-07:00

War is a racket.

Conversations with Mikheil Saakashvili on Obama the Anti-War Candidate

2008-10-27T06:57:00.001-07:00

The New York Times had a puff piece with Mikheil Saakashvili. (For the life of me, I keep on typing "Mikhail" which was the accepted Latin transliteration of Микаил and am tempted to type it, now, as Mik-HEIL just for cheap Godwin laughs. No, I don't like Saakashvili, not one bit.)

The article's title was "An American Friend."

No, not the Wim Winders film.

While John McCain's enthusiasm for military interventions, and the fact that his chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann is, err, was, a lobbyist for Georgia are well known, Obama enthusiasts prefer to think of their candidate as "anti-war."

Here's Saakashvili:

Did you watch our presidential debates? It sometimes seems like the one subject the candidates agreed on is the necessity of supporting your country, a former Soviet satellite state that has recently been warring with Russia. I was personally very surprised that the candidates were so passionate about Georgia. Of course, John McCain has been many times to Georgia and knows it firsthand. Obama said absolutely all the right things.

and

Do you think Georgia will be accepted into NATO in December, when the next vote is scheduled? It’s the $100 million question. I was reassured by Senator Obama, who said that we should have a NATO Membership Action Plan. Whether we get it, we’ll see.

As Pat Buchanan wrote at the height of the South Ossetian War of 2008,

From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.

Change? Hope? Admittedly, the belief that we should undertake military commitments to defend Georgia are a somewhat novel change, and one I hope no one seriously considers, but then again, I rarely get the change I hope for.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Stealers Wheel

2008-10-27T06:55:00.001-07:00

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

The Tan Fuhrer

2008-10-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

Well, word "on the street" is that we're looking at a historic election this year, with forces of hope and change set to sweep away the ancien regime, and inaugurate Barack Obama as the once and future king. I mean, next president.

For me, this brings to mind the phrase that Jeff Cooper used to use to refer to the right Rev. Jesse Jackson---"the tan Fuhrer." Jeff Cooper was a Marine officer in WW2, holder of a master's degree in history from Stanford, and chief promulgator of the "New Technique" of handgun shooting. I'm pretty sure everyone knows who Jesse Jackson is.

While the election has not been held, it sure looks like Barack Obama is set to be the tan Fuhrer for real and for true.

What? I'm calling the Democratic nominee for president a Fuhrer? Well, that kind of goes with the office, these days. As someone once remarked, "It'd be easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as I'm the dictator."

For the last eight years, the Republican party and Republican activists have enthusiastically supported the expansion of presidential authority under the rubric of the "unitary executive." The Republican party and Republican activists have fervently argued in favor of "signing statements" wherein the president signs a bill into law while reserving the right to ignore those parts of the law that he finds unduly restrictive of his "inherent authority" or disadvantageous for the good of the nation. For six years, the Republican party and Republican activists have argued that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by the legislative branch back in September of 2001 established a de facto and de jure regime under which the president could do, well, just about anything he wanted to. You know, arrest US citizens without 4th Amendment protections. Use "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture) on foreigners at home and abroad, and on US nationals, at home and abroad. Wage war on such nations, states, peoples and groups as he finds planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks of 9/11.

(Note: I really wish that I could have typed, in place of "the Republican party and Republican activists" the phrase "conservatives." However, none of that was conservative.)

Well, shazam, as Gomer Pyle used to say.

Here's a news flash: that power is still going to be in the executive come January 20 of 2009.

In the event that Barack Obama does become president, I imagine that the Republican party will rediscover its enthusiasm for a restrained executive, will rediscover its belief that legislation ought to undergird exercises of presidential authority, and in short will rediscover that actions have consequences.

Good luck with that. You did it to yourselves, caught up in the heat of the moment, convinced of the righteousness of your cause, convinced that electoral politics, like international politics, had arrived at the end of history. You have sown the wind, and now you will reap the whirlwind.

Remember, as Bill Clinton once said, "You can't love your country if you hate your government." Hey, hasn't that been an operative meme over the last eight years as well?

If I did not look forward to the day when my daughters would be able to read over this blog and see what their old man had said, I would dip into my reservoir of truly explicit USMC language and express my true opinion of the Republican party, and Republican activists.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .

2008-10-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most centralizing-executive-power, invading-other-countries country of them all?

I've probably used the Nietzsche quote before, where he warns that when you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares long into you. And I've thought about Bill Buckley's quote that to defeat the evil Godless Commies, we had to become, if not evil Godless Commies ourselves, then at least Soviet-Lite. And I know I've thought some about projection, about seeing reflections of ourselves in others, particularly in "the Other" (which, for all my life, hasn't been Obama, but the Soviet Union).

And so America, and Americans, look at the Soviet Union. Wait, did I say Soviet Union? I meant to say "Russian Federation." And so America, and Americans, look at the Russian Federation, and what do we say?

We say that Vladimir Putin has concentrated executive power in his administration while reducing the power of the legislative branches.

We say that Russia is an aggressive and expansionist empire looking to control the world.

We say that Russia overreacts militarily to provocations.

We say that Russia uses energy policy as a political weapon to control or influence other states.

We say that the Russian news media is in the hip pocket of the Putin/Medvedev tag-team administration, and doesn't provide accurate information on "what's really going down."

We say that Russia destabilizes the international order by recognizing new, made-up states, basically taking a whiz in the face of the Westphalian system.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, those faults we see in them are ours, that's all.

Let's see here. Concentrating executive authority? Think about the unitary executive theory and signing statements. ("I'll approve this law, except the parts that I don't like, because I'm the president.") Aggressive, expansionist empire? Just how many countries do we garrison at present, voluntarily or involuntarily? Military overreaction to provocations? Compare and contrast the very limited incursion into Georgia with our ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Energy policy as a weapon? Look at the pipelines and ask yourself again about Afghanistan and Georgia and why we're now BFF. News media in the hip pocket? The "liberal benchmarks" of the New York Times and the Washington Post are enthusiastic cheerleaders for the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying water for the PTB. Destabilizing the international order with made up states? That's spelled K-O-S-O-V-O. (Or is it K-O-S-O-V-A as the Albanians prefer?)

We have become what we beheld, and strangely, we are content.

Note: At or about 8:38 a.m. CDT on 28 October I revised this post, because I stupidly wrote "Russian Republic" when I meant to say "Russian Federation." My bad.

Man, there's that whole "privatizing the costs, socializing the benefits" meme again

2008-10-25T06:36:00.000-07:00

Karen DeCoster rips up on AIG for partying like it's 1999, on the USG dime.

Ordinarily, you don't hear DeCoster talking up government regulation of private businesses. Ordinarily, that's because that's just not one of the arrows in her quiver.

Then again, these aren't ordinary times.

Ordinarily, I don't much care for populist mobs of peasants (that'd be me, hi Mom!) with pitchforks and pitch torches storming the commanding heights of the von du zus and other elites.

Ordinarily.

Ordinarily.

Wait, ordinarily do people who run big businesses so throughly into the ground as to demand eleven-digit federal bailouts get million dollar a month consulting fees? ELEVEN DIGITS, folks.

Cognitive dissonance kicking in . . . .

2008-10-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

A post at National Review which approvingly quotes an article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute?

As my dear old Nanny might have said, "Well I swan! My eyes got as big as teacups!"

Institutions worth more than liberty

2008-10-23T05:25:00.001-07:00

Anthony Gregory writes in the American Conservative, reviewing Justin Raimondo's Reclaiming the American Right.

Money graf:

Conservatism today is not too ideological or insufficiently traditional. Rather, it is ideologically devoted to the wrong traditions. It sees the U.S. empire, the police state, the Republican Party, and other right-wing symbols as proxies for freedom, as institutions worth more than liberty. It has adopted coercive nationalism and utilitarian collectivism and cast away the traditions of constitutionalism, freedom, and natural law on which bourgeois values depend.

To be, or not to be . . . not to be.

2008-10-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, that's just about the most hilarious shite ever, enough to have made The Last Action Hero not quite the worst movie ever made. And that's without taking into consideration that I got the worst grade of my life by submitting a paper arguing that Hamlet was a comedy.

The only band that matters

2008-10-22T10:46:00.001-07:00

Everything I need to know, I learned from Miller's Crossing

2008-10-22T10:07:00.001-07:00

If I'd known we were going to cast our feelings into words, I'd have memorized the Song of Solomon.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Leonard Cohen

2008-10-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

I've seen the future, brother, it is murder.

Tribal politics

2008-10-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with tribes?

Tribes?

The Texas tribe. The American tribe. The Christian tribe. The teuful tribe. The "Western-Civ" tribe. The Scottish tribe. The gun-nut tribe.

Moynihan was wrong.

All politics is not local. All politics is tribal.

It all depends, of course, on how you define your tribe.

So, how come you don't have an M16 (or AR15) yet?

2008-10-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

Lt. Colonel Hal Moore: I think you oughta get yourself an M-16.
Sergeant Major Basil Plumley: Sir, if the time comes I need one, there'll be plenty lying on the ground.

I'm just sayin'.

When did Obama decide to run?

2008-10-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

After watching the first season (or first day) of 24, I can't help but think that, maybe, just maybe, it was after Dennis Haysbert won America's hearts as the first black POTUS.

Games people play

2008-10-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

Obama plays poker.

McCain plays craps.

Putin plays chess.

Nope, don't mean nothing. Nothing! We're America, dammit!

No, I WAS wrong

2008-10-21T07:38:00.001-07:00

I remember, back in the day, back when Sandbox I was winding down, I thought Poppy Bush (т.е., George Herbert Walker Bush) was flat out wrong to not pursue Saddam Hussein's forces back into Iraq, all the way to Baghdad, and remove him from office.

I was wrong.

I was so very wrong. I was focused on "could we do it?" and not on "and then what would happen?"

I've mentioned the Coen Brothers' movie Miller's Crossing in the past, because I dig on it so much. Now I'm thinking of an exchange between Tom Regan and Leo O'Bannon.

I don't have me the transcripts, but the exchange went something like this.

Leo: You do anything you can to help your friends, the same way you do anything you can to kick your enemies.
Tom: No, Leo, you do things for a reason.

It just works out better if you've thought through the reason.

Looking back on my enthusiasm for getting rid of Saddam, my face flushes crimson. Maybe Poppy really SHOULD have gone to Baghdad, but that ain't the way it looks to me.

Guns and butter?

2008-10-21T07:28:00.001-07:00

While thinking back on the "most conservative administration in history" (excuse me while I hack up a lung laughing, no, wait, I really CAN keep a straight face) it occurs to me that we need a new phrase to describe the "guns AND butter" philosophy espoused by the Bush the Lesser Administration.

I think I know what to call it.

You work it as a contraction, you take parts of both words and fuse them together.

Guns?

And butter?

"Gutter."

Oh, if that crack about "most conservative administration in history" above got your goat, let me enumerate. We've had massive new unfunded liabilities to seniors (Medicare drug benefits), lavish tongue baths to diversity, strong presidential action to "regularize" "undocumented" workers, centralization of the state organs of security, back-breaking simultaneous paeans to Islam as the religion of peace combined with kill-the-dirty-towelheads xenophobia and two and a half wars funded by Japanese and Chinese credit.

And the trend lines, o my droogies, they ain't looking so good.

Brezhnevschina

2008-10-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

I've traveled some in the Former Soviet Union, and worked for a couple of years in Kazakhstan (with side business and pleasure trips to Mongolia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan), and I always enjoyed talking to people about their lives. I've always been interested in the Soviet Union, and its predecessor and successor states.

I can't claim this as authoritative (i.e., "I could be wrong!") but a lot of people talked to me about the way things were under Brezhnev (and his successor party heads).

By that point in time, pretty much no one believed in the "Soviet system." No one really believed that the workers of the world should unite and cast off their capitalist oppressors.

But there was some stability, and if you were smart and worked hard and had some luck and knew the right people, you could make some money, have some status, do okay for yourself.

In Russian, adding "-schina" to someone's name turns it into a new noun, meaning "Age of X" or "reign of X". I don't think anyone's used the term Brezhnevschina before, so it's my very own little term of art.

For me, it means, "We all know it's a fraud, but there's still money to be made pretending, so we keep on going through the motions."

So . . . would that make it the Bushschina? I mean, here, now, for us.

We still talk the smack: freedom, democracy, capitalism. Does anyone still believe that smack? More particularly, does anyone still believe that the United States Government represents that smack?

I suppose I can take comfort in the more euphonious-sounding impending "Obamaschina."

Right?

Everything I need to know, I learned from Ronald Reagan

2008-10-20T07:02:00.001-07:00

"Trust, but verify."

It sounds better in Russian, of course.

"Верить, а проверить."

Everything I need to know, I learned from Scarecrow

2008-10-18T20:56:00.001-07:00

CHOICES
by SCARECROW

had a talk w/G-d last night,
this was his offer:
all my sins forgiven,
all my debts paid,
everyone i ever fucked over or fucked,
reborn and made to feel clean,
no more pain for my eyes,
bulldozers and tanks
rust into anthills,
nothing more ever dreamed of
or manufactured to melt the skin,
hunger not even a word,
only one language - love.

Yeah,
all this,
all this,
or I could have stars on my boots.

And you should see them babe,
everyone wants a pair.

Note: I copied this poem down from a journal, probably twenty years ago, and have no idea where it came from, nor who, beyond the nom de plume, the author is. I humbly plead "fair use" in reproducing it here, and will provide proper citation if it is produced to me.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Percy Shelley

2008-10-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Bill Bixby.

2008-10-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

"Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

I likes me some meat

2008-10-18T19:52:00.001-07:00

I am prone to self-doubt. I mean, "I could be wrong" as the title, that's filed under "Clue, Some Kind Of." Sometimes I wonder if I've secretly turned all left wing, gone all prog, like a piece of meat goes bad in the supermarket if it sits there too long. Generally this is preceded by a putative conservative calling me some variation on faggot Godless commie.

Fortunately, the internet is full of places where I can easily check if I have succumbed to a, shall we say, more sinister political belief. (Umm, that's sinister as derived from the Latin term for left handed, playing on the popular understanding of the "left" and "right" wings.)

It doesn't take much roaming around for me to conclude that I fit in with "good movement leftists" about as well as I fit in with "good movement rightists," which is to say, not at all.

The left, we can posit, don't really dig on meat. This is not to slander the fine barbecue-loving Democrats that make up, one hopes, most of the Democratic Party, but speaks rather to the more rigorous adherents of the fringes. Vegetarians, vegans, Veejer (wait, that was Star Trek Something or Other), PETA advocates, or just folks who prefer to think that meat is generated, pre-shrink wrapped, in supermarkets around the world. I'm going out on a limb, here, and I don't have the statistics to back me up, but I'd venture that those folks are mostly left wing.

That's one of the ways I can tell I'm no commie pinko. Because just between you and me and the fence post, I likes me some meat. Hell, I loves me some meat.

I believe I am evolutionarily a carnivore, with the whole "eyes in front" thing going for me, with the whole "growed to rip flesh not chaw cud" teeth thing going for me. I believe I digest meat better than grains, and from time to time I see internet headlines about how our brains require amino acids found in meats to fully develop. Hey, all that could be nonsense.

What isn't nonsense is how much I likes me some meat.

I likes me some cow.

Like the commercial from a few years back said, "Beef, it's what's for dinner." For me, beef is the staple, it's the everyday thing. It's a floor wax, and a dessert topping! From the high-falutin' filet to the lunch bucket ground hamburger, it's the little black dress of the carnivore's feeding wardrobe. You can accessorize your beef just about any which way and it'll turn out satisfactory. We've cracked the code on beef, plus we're relying on cow farts to stave off the oncoming Ice Age. Fart, Bessie, fart!

I likes me some pig.

I pity observant Jews and Muslims because they have done themselves out of pork products through their piety. There are atheists out there who posit that every religion is a sham and a fraud, and while I don't buy into that (in my heart of hearts I do think I have a spiritual relationship with God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that I'm racking up karma points by attempting to walk with my Savior and that there is, in the end, a Plan however I am unable to fathom it, but I'm just saying) I think in such a case a good faith argument could be made that getting to eat pork is enough reason to do some schismatic heresy-shaking. Unlike beef, pork to me has a distinct, wonderful yummilicious distinctness. (Beef is pretty much "just meat.")

Bacon? Foshizzle my nizzle. Ham, either thick sliced steaks or honey glazed slices of just hocks tossed into the red beans and rice? Shut yo' mouth good. One time back in the day, one of my Daddy's clients sent him a peppered ham, had a good, thick, 1/4" rind of peppers on it. I remember the taste of that ham TO THIS DAY, I tell you. Ahem. To this day.

Now chicken and lamb, they have their place, as do all of God's other little critters. About venison, enough words simply cannot be said, so I shan't say a thing. And I've had some mighty fine elk and moose. Huh, that brings Palin to mind, who was, by causing mass anti-hunting spasms, probably the inspiration for this post. But other meats, they are of tertiary importance compared to beef and pork, and I want to get to sleep sometime tonight, and if I start going off on individual meats, I'll be here all night.

Loves me some meat. Yeah I do.

In my way, I'm a sensualist, a hedonist. Not a libertine, mind you (although I could be wrong) but a hedonist. I try to relish the sensations of the physical world, like the feel of grass between your toes, the pleasant itchy annoyance of a mosquito bite (somewhere in Clavell's Shogun someone says "life is pain") and oh my goodness gracious the taste of meat in your mouth. Maybe it's bad, maybe it's evil, maybe it's rotten, but you can't deny that meat tastes good in your mouth, even if it's "good like a fresh hit of crack" good. (Or wait, are kids these days just doing meth? Damn, it's hell to get old.)

I love ripping meat apart in my mouth. Bite down, there's that big explosion of flavor, sometimes a rush of juices, something primeval about it, something very rooted, something very grounded. Something very traditional. (We just do those traditions a lot more than people throughout history have been able to.) It's not a pellet, it's not something plasticized and hydrogenated for your protection, not something shot through with preservatives and processed into nothingness. (Even a hot dog, hey, lips and assholes, man, as they said in the East Texas poultry business, "parts is parts.") It's something real. It's something that was living, and not "living" like a plant turns towards the sun and produces phyloplankton, but living like it had a face and a heart.

And because I have a conscience, which means I'm a liberal . . . or maybe a conservative, I get confused, but anyway . . . the meat that tastes the best is meat I've made for myself. "Making meat" is another way of saying "getting your deer" and it sums it up in wonderful, beautiful, brutal simplicity. I won't lie, I'm no great hunter, I'm barely even a hunter, been hunting six or seven times and only bagged one deer and one pig. Both Bambi and Wilbur were thoroughly consumed, and with great relish, I will point out.

Aside from the health benefits of being leaner and free of hormones, antibiotics and other stuff of the nightmares of Upton Sinclair, meat you make for yourself is more moral. Rather than being industrially produced and processed, meat you kill for yourself has probably lived a more or less free existence, running around and rutting and fighting and mating and, you know, eating acorns. (Not, sadly, ACORNs.)

So yeah. I'm no commie pinko, because I likes me some meat.

Wait---John McCain, and Barak Obama?

2008-10-18T19:35:00.001-07:00

Now, I don't care what form of political belief you subscribe to, but I find it inconceivable that these two clowns, who I have referred to as Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, are the best that America can do.

As someone else once said, if you want to disprove evolution, just compare George Washington and George W. Bush.

And if you think I was favoring Mad John the Bombing Clown McCain over Barack "I saw the first season of 24 and know America is ready for a black President" Obama, then, please, feel free to mentally transpose Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber in the initial paragraph of this post. Trust me, I won't bitch. For me, really, it's a coin toss as to which is worse, it's like asking, "Do I use the straight razor on my left wrist first, or my right wrist?"

We're looking at a choice between a socialist big government true believer and a socialist big government true believer. And here I thought G-dubs and Al Gore's 2004 throwdown was as low as America could go! See Marx on Hegel, under the heading "History Repeating: Tragedy and Farce."

Inconceivable!

(You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. )

Everything I need to know, I learned from John Prine

2008-10-18T19:24:00.001-07:00

"I ain't a-hurting nobody, I ain't a-hurting no one."

Funny How Things Change

2008-10-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

I could be wrong, you know.

There’s plenty of things I don’t understand about this world. Nietzche said that if you stared long into the abyss, the abyss stares long into you at the same time. Of course, in one of my favorite movies, Blazing Saddles, someone quoted Nietzche to the effect that what does not kill us makes us stronger, and the response to that was, “Blow it out your ass, Howard.”

I like movies. I think a movie can be just as legitimately an art form as a fine novel, or a lovely song, or even a sonnet or an ode to a Grecian urn. Of course, there’s plenty of junk movies out there, to go along with junk books, songs, sonnets and odes. (I think Ode to Billy Joe would be one of the latter, but I haven’t seen it in years and years, since the mind of man remembereth not.)

Maybe one of the reasons I like movies is that I’ve watched a bunch of ‘em. Back when I was a kid growing up in Texas, in the Reagan years, I had a yen for what you might call fine cheese. By gum I liked movies where the evil Godless Communists took it in the neck at the hands of the right thinking forces of freedom. Now some of them were so bad that even I couldn’t really enjoy them. One of those “so bad” movies was Red Scorpion with Dolph Lundgren, which I even remember now only because, as it turns out, Jack Abramoff was involved in the production. (We should have figgered him for a no count sumbitch on the basis of that movie alone, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, I think that the two movies I’ve got stuck in my mind now are pretty good. At least, they made an impression on me, and I remembered them fondly, enough so that I bought them when they came out on DVD, just to have. These movies are Red Dawn and The Beast, or perhaps The Beast of War. We seem to be living in strange times, because those movies resonate with me lately in ways that are, umm, diametrically opposite to the way they used to.

Red Dawn was widely dismissed as a crackpot fantasy when it came out, because it was about a Soviet invasion of the United States. A quick precis of the film runs like this: Godless commies invade America, a few high school kids E&E (escape and evade) their way up into the Colorado mountains and begin a resistance movement, using their high school mascot as their code name. Go Wolverines! Written by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius, and directed by Milius, Red Dawn featured names that would later go on to, arguably, bigger and better things, names like Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson (who looked yummilicious in her tattered cammies and is arguably responsible for some of my fetishes to this very day) and Charlie Sheen, and some fine vintage performances by skilled hands Ron O’Neal, Powers Boothe, Harry Dean Stanton and Ben Johnson.

Let’s face it, you just don’t see Ben Johnson and Superfly working together just every day, do you?

Milius managed to push all the right buttons with this film. An opening scene shows a bumper sticker saying “You’ll take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” and immediately after, a Soviet paratrooper is, in fact, prying a gun from the cold dead fingers of its owner. The Cuban colonel in charge of the operation has his men go to the gun dealers and collect their 4473s to get a record of who’s been buying guns. Liberals, it is fair to say, just hated this movie, despite how yummilicious Lea Thompson looked in her tattered cammies.

The Wolverines set up their operation, up in the mountains, and enjoy some successes against the Soviet occupiers, including some lifted closely from then-current events in Afghanistan (which will tie into the second film’s discussion, below).

The scene that sticks in my mind, though, comes when one of their own has turned against the Wolverines (appropriately enough, the mayor’s son), and they find out that he’s swallowed a tracking device. They execute the mayor’s son and one of the Soviet troops who’d survived only to be captured.

Matt Eckert (Charlie Sheen): What's the difference, Jed?
Robert ( C Thomas Howell): I'll do it.
Matt Eckert: Shut up, Robert!
[to Jed]
Matt Eckert: *Tell me what's the difference between us and them!*
Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze): Because WE LIVE HERE!

Because we live here. That’s enough reason to kill an intruder in your country. He’s an intruder in your country. Protecting your home is one of the oldest, and best, reasons to fight.

Because we live here.

I actually had a dream about this scene. I dream a lot, I’ve got enough Irish in me to be all dreamy and lyrical sometimes, and mostly I don’t remember my dreams too well, but I remember this dream, because it was just about that scene, except it wasn’t Matt and Robert and Jed talking. It was Ahmad and Suleiman and Ali. And it wasn’t a captured Soviet invader, and a turncoat American, that they were talking about executing, it was a captured American invader, and a turncoat Iraqi.

Because we live here. Reason enough, ain’t it? When you boil it all down? Now I’m not talking about some wetback from Chapultepec looking to wash dishes and cut lawns and send his money home to Mama and Papa and the family, I’m talking about foreign invaders on your soil, foreign soldiers who are in your country to fix it.

Somehow these days I just see Red Dawn through whole different eyes.

The other movie I wanted to talk about today is called The Beast of War. It was a pretty small drama, about a Soviet tank during the invasion of Afghanistan. During operations, the tank gets cut off from the rest of its unit, and takes a wrong turn, and is being stalked by the mujahadin. Directed by Kevin Reynolds (there’s that name again) from a play by William Mastrosimone, The Beast of War features George Dzundza at his scenery chewing best, a very young Jason Patric, Stephen Baldwin and Stephen Bauer. Interestingly enough, it was filmed in Israel.

Quick precis of the film: the cut off tank is being stalked by the mujahadin, and the tank commander, played by Dzundza, slowly flips his lid. He executes one of the tankers, an Afghan who manages to combine being a good Communist with being a good Muslim, and then abandons his tank driver, played by Jason Patric, for protesting the murder. Patric asks for mercy from the mujahadin, who take him prisoner. Eventually, he helps the mujahadin to destroy the tank, and is then rescued by a Soviet helicopter.

Dzundza is superb in this film. You can regard him as a madman or simply as a desperate military leader, and be none too far off in either case. When his character, Daskal, was eight years old, he’d fought against the Nazis in defense of Stalingrad, earning the nickname Tank Boy, since his comrades would tie a rope around his waist and lower him onto Nazi tanks, to place Molotov cocktails under turrets and cannon.

Patric too is quite good in The Beast of War. He plays Koverchenko, a sensitive intellectual who is nonetheless a fairly good soldier, and who believes in the rightness of what they’re doing. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, after all, to combat Muslim extremism, to bring, if not exactly democracy, but modernity and civil rights for women and stability to the country. Yeah, you probably see where I’m going with this one. Koverchenko is appalled by the brutality displayed by Daskal.

Daskal gets most of the good lines. He’s a tanker, all the way through, and it’s obvious that he loves his tank. When a Soviet helicopter spots the tank and offers them a ride home, Daskal refuses. “Get back in the tank,” he says. They ask him why. “Because I said to.” They say that they’re going home. He says, “Yeah. In the tank.” The troops ask why they can’t take the helicopter. “Because we’re tankers.” After the tank is crippled, he says, “Out of commission, become a pillbox. Out of ammo, become a bunker. Out of time, become heroes.” He's talking about blowing themselves up.

It is the tension between Koverchenko and Daskal, obviously, that fuels the movie. Initially, Koverchenko respects and fears Daskal for his efficiency and military skills, and for his history in fighting for their homeland, but eventually he is forced to ask, “How is it that we’re the Nazis this time, sir? How is that?”

I carry no brief for the late and unlamented Soviet Union. Stalin was a butcher, but the Nazis DID invade the Soviet Union, and the Soviets suffered on a scale that I, as an American, find almost literally incomprehensible. I saw the burial mounds outside of Kiev, just great heaping hills where they’d put the bodies. I had bad dreams about it for a long time. The battle for Stalingrad made Kiev look like a picnic. The Soviet Union did monstrous things, both within and without its borders, but the change from Tank Boy, fighting in defense of his homeland, to Daskal the crazed invader, is a change that I am worried about.

I’m not saying that the U.S. military is the Nazi party, or the SS, or even the Wehrmacht. I served four years of good, faithful and honorable service in the United States Marine Corps, and remain proud of the service I gave, and glad I gave it, to this day. But like I say, there are things I don’t understand. I don’t understand how our Department of Defense is involved in dang near every country, everywhere in the world. I was proud of my country when I served, which, thank God, was during peacetime. I thought we stood for cornball shit like Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Later on, I lived and worked in Kazakhstan for a few years. I met some former Soviet troops, including some who’d served in Afghanistan. They were just guys now, you know. Drivers, salesmen, computer techs. They’d done their time, got out, and moved on. They’d been proud of their country when they served. They thought that the Soviet Union stood for cornball shit like Truth, and Justice, and the Soviet Way.

Like I say, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand.

A while back, I found an article that William F. Buckley had written in the 1950s, talking about how, to defeat the Soviet Union, we had to become somewhat sovietized ourselves. We had to have a strong, standing military, we had to have a strong executive, we had to sacrifice some of our liberties, in order to remain free. We did those things, and we outlasted the Soviet Union. Sometimes I think back on Red Dawn, though, and wonder if it might not have been better if we hadn’t made those sacrifices, and that it might not have been better if the Soviet Union had invaded us, and we’d gone up into the hills, and potted Soviets at long range with deer rifles, and fought and beat them the American way. During World War Two, the Japanese thought about invading the United States, and concluded that 200 million or so cowboys hiding behind every cactus with a deer rifle would put a crimp into their plans. Sometimes I think we looked long into the abyss, and the abyss, she looked long into us right back. Sometimes I think we learned all the wrong lessons from the Soviet Union.

Now all things old are new again. We’re the ones invading, err, liberating, Afghanistan, and Iraq, from the forces of Mussulman reaction, we’re the ones putting in quota systems to ensure equitable female representation in the parliament, we’re the ones bombing a desolate country, we’re the ones using helicopter gunships and unmanned aerial vehicles with Hellfire missiles against villagers with jezails and Short Magazine Lee Enfields and Kalashnikovs, scenes that boiled our blood in Rambo III. But the mujahadin aren’t freedom fighters any more, they’re terrorists.

And sometimes I wonder, how is it that we’re the Soviets this time? How is that, sir?

NOTE: I wrote this three or four years ago. There's not that much I'd change, come to think of it.

Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife: A Kipling Interlude

2008-10-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

I ain't got any words to say about this: to my mind, it speaks for itself.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Rudyard Kipling

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Joe the Plumber? Joe the UNLICENSED Plumber?

2008-10-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

Where have I heard something like that before?

Oh yeah.

Little flick by some Brit. "Brazil" I think it was called.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Late breaking update: Umm, Tuttle was HVAC, not plumbing. Still, a guy with a wrench, and no license.

In times of crisis . . .

2008-10-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that in times of crisis, you have to cling to what you believe in.

Like, say, a philosophy of limited government. I heard the Decider blathering on recently about how no one is happy with, you know, having the government assume control of the commanding heights of the economy, but it was a time of crisis.

Like, say, the Constitution of these here United States. Ordinarily, we at least pay lip service to quaint anachronisms like the "Bill of Rights." (You know, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, thus, part of the Constitution, thus, the supreme law of the land.) But, because some people out there don't like us---and thus, we are in a time of crisis----we need to put them aside. Just, you know, temporarily.

Look, when things are easy, things are, well, easy. Easy times don't test your beliefs. Hard times test your beliefs. When things are easy, you can just go merrily along, and not worry too much about your beliefs, because your beliefs aren't being tested. It's when everything goes tits-up, it's when things get hard, that you have to cling to what you really, no I mean really really, believe in.

Do you believe in free markets? Well then, believe in them, and when things go bad, keep right on believing in them. If you believe in free markets, when the FIRE sector of the economy goes into the toilet, you keep right on believing that free markets are the way to resolve the issue. Look, if that mass of sliced and diced, securitized and monetized aggregated mortgages is suddenly revealed to be so much sound and fury, signifying nothing, then the way to resolve the issue is to let the markets find the natural price. If that price is a lot less than we've been pretending it is, then we've been wrong about the price. The only true price is a price something will sell at.

Do you believe in the Constitution? Well then, believe in the Constitution. Separation of powers, strictly enumerated things the government can do, and courtesy of the 9th and 10th amendments, a long and unenumerated list of things the government can not do. If you believe in, say, freedom of speech, or double jeopardy, or the requirement of probable cause before issuance of a search warrant, or wiretapping, or things like that, then you have to believe that those things are true, even in a crisis.

Saying that you believe in the Constitution, except when it's inconvenient, such as in a time of crisis, is saying that you believe in the Constitution not at all, because it is in crisis that we reveal ourselves.

Let me analogize. I spent four years in the United States Marine Corps. I was not a grunt (i.e., combat arms, i.e., infantry, armor or artillery) and I served during peacetime. I was proud to be a Marine, I was an heir to a long history of general Marine ass-kicking-ness, I took the job I had to do seriously. But no one ever handed me an M16A2 and said, "Hey there, Teuful, there's bad people coming and we need you to delay their advance while we reposition for a counterattack. And by the way, this is a one-way ticket." I talked the talk, but I never had to walk the walk. Now, in a time of crisis, would I have saluted smartly, done a quick function check on my rifle, and held the line? Would I have dropped my rifle and headed for the hills like a spotted-ass ape? Would I have held fast to my beliefs? Or would I have thrown them over like so much "well that was then and this is now" po-mo rationalization?

I'll be honest: I don't know.

I think--I like to think, I prefer to think, I do, in point of fact, think---that I would have done a quick function check of my rifle, said a prayer, and held the line. But I could be wrong about that. I didn't face that kind of "time of crisis" during my service.

Let's say you believe in marriage as a covenant between two people and God, that marriage is a unification of two halves into one whole, and that you will cleave only unto your spouse, for better or for worse, through good times or bad, until death do you part. But then, you start arguing with the Old Lady/Old Man, and harsh words are spoken, and then the Cute Chick/Hot Stud you work with, or see in the course and scope of your daily life, throws you a wink and a nod. (And as we all know, a wink is as good as a nudge, eh wot?) Well, you know, it's a time of crisis . . . .

Amidst the snark

2008-10-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

Got a brother-man in pain right now, medevaced to Hamburg with five kidney stones. I talked with him on a spotty connection and he told me some icky-ooky stories. I don't want me no kidney stone, nosirree!

Lew Rockwell on the MSM

2008-10-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

"The normal range of opinion is from Pravda to Izvestia."

Rockwell asks, "Are the Media Hurting Obama?"

Everything I need to know, I learned from Solzhenytsin

2008-10-17T06:39:00.001-07:00

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

Everything I need to know, I learned from Miller's Crossing

2008-10-17T06:32:00.001-07:00

"Nobody knows anybody, not that well."

Everything I need to know, I learned from Gen. Mattis

2008-10-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

Everything I need to know, I learned from Roadhouse.

2008-10-17T06:25:00.002-07:00

"Be nice, until it's time to not be nice."

Everything I need to know, I learned from Bill and Ted.

2008-10-17T06:25:00.001-07:00

"Be excellent to each other."

Primer popping, enhanced by FastFire

2008-10-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

As you may know, I am probably an inveterate gun-swapper. I'd like to think that I've mostly gotten past the point of thinking each new toy is going to be "tha best evah" but, well, who knows.

Today I ventured out to the shooting range on the West Side of town (should I call this the West Side Story? No, probably not), to put some rounds through a 9mm, and a .45.

The 9mm is a Smith and Wesson, from their "gun of the month" phase of things. It's one of the first metal framed Smith autopistols I've owned, the other one is the bigger and heavier version of this one. The 9iq (9mm In Question, pronounced "Nick" of course) is a S&W 6944. If you're all hep to 3d Gen S&W terminology, you probably know what that means, or can, at least, make a stab at breaking it out. Most people AREN'T hep to S&W terminology, so I'll spare you the google-fu.

The 6944 is a double action only (DAO) version of the S&W "minigun." The minigun (which ain't, when all is said and done, all that mini, btw) was originally released in the 2d Gen of S&W autopistols, and was a bobbed version of the main line "59" derivatives. (The 659 was the big stainless steel version, the 459 was, I think, the big alloy version, etc.) It's a twelve shot 9mm. Note: the S&W DAO pistols "halfway pre-cock" the trigger, so repeat strikes on a dud primer are out.

I was shooting offhand, unsupported, at 7 yards. Not a real long way, but pretty decent groupings---especially since I was switching from left hand to right hand after each shot. I used a mix of Wolf and Magtech 9mm ball ammo (115 grains in both cases).

Verdict? This is a decent little pistol. Recoil is mild, the trigger ain't bad at all (somewhat short and heavy compared to a Beretta 92D I'd picked up earlier), and while it's not tiny, it's significantly smaller than the 5946 that is its big brother. With a double stack magazine, it is a little fat through the butt.

The other pistol I shot was a Glock "21/30." Thanks the the miracles of polymers, by the time I got it the butt had already been trimmed from the full size "21" butt to use the shorter, ten round, magazines from the Glock 30 (hence the name). It's got about an inch more barrel than the smaller Glock 30, "and I'm the only kid on the block."

I've shot the 21/30 before, and like it. I prep the trigger---taking up the slack, and then letting it break, and when I do things right, it is a pretty dang accurate little popper. The new thing today was that I'd put a Burris FastFire on it. I was inspired by the use of red dot optics on fighting rifles/carbines in our current Mesopotamian adventure. Actually, I'd liked the idea of red dot optics for a long time, I just never got off my ass and put one on a pistol until now.

The FastFire is a virtual dead ringer for other small reflex sights---Trijicon makes one, and the progenitor was the J-Point and then the Docter Optik sight. It is small and lightweight, although it DOES bulk up the pistol some.

Since it's a red dot sight, I tried to focus on the target, and then move the dot over the target. Yowee and shazam!

I only ran fifty rounds through it---forty rounds of Magtech .45 ACP ball, and ten rounds of Winchester ball. At first I alternated left hand and right hand, then said, "Let's pretend I'm really a lefty." (No cracks, please!) I stuck to the left hand, using a modified Weaver stance---left arm only slightly bent, right hand pulling back with right fingers wrapped around left hand. I put ten rounds into a single chewed out hole. Oh it was bigger than "one round of hardball" but not by all that much.

Now, the way it's set up at present, the FastFire attaches to a mounting plate which is attached to a dovetail blank which goes where the rear sight used to be. That means it rides at least 1/4" higher than it would it the slide was milled to accept the FastFire directly. I want to shoot this setup some more, but the initial results were very gratifying.

Reflex sights? There may be something to the idea after all!

At the same time, now I think I need to try out a laser sight

Not quite shoes, not quite mittens . . .

2008-10-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

Check these out: Vibram Five Fingers.

As the title of the post says, they're not quite shoes, they're not quite mittens. Naturally, one of my friends dubbed them "shittens." (Note: later on my beloved sibling pointed out that they're more like "shoves" since mittens don't have separated fingers. But "shoves" don't flow like "shittens" do, do it?)

Since I try to be somewhat self-aware, I can freely admit that my interest in these shoes, err, mittens, err . . . these things, probably grew out of my deeply conformist decision to start wearing pants again. Hey, it's tough to find a job where wearing a kilt is a part of the job description! I got a call or two from a pipe band, but the only musical instrument I play is the radio.

Anyway.

There's the good, and the bad, about these shoes. I'll start off with the bad.

They look silly. Remember, this is coming from a guy who wore a skirt for a few years! They look a little too . . . slipperish. While "shoe" or "footwear" is a pretty elastic concept, here in the Greater West we tend to bring certain "social constructs of shoeness" to the table. (OMG, I'm sounding so SO MARXY!) And we expect shoes to completely cover the top of the foot (for men, anyway), and probably to have laces or buckles or something. I have actually thought about a "top cover" for these shoes, to give them at least a "deck shoe" appearance. Sometimes I dare to think really goofy thoughts.

Let's see, what's the other bad part about these puppies?

Well, so far as I can tell, it's just the looks. (Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!)

Well, I lied. I'm still working out my ability to easily slip into these shoes. The toe pockets require sliding your foot in just right, otherwise you end up with two toes awkwardly squeezed into one toe-pocket. (Can we call them toe-pockets? Or would just "the toe" be better?) If you consider taking ten or fifteen seconds to get the toes aligned just right a drawback, then there are two drawbacks.

Upsides?

They breathe very well. The Vibrams have basically only two components: the Vibram sole and the stretchy nylon-type material. The body of the shoe breathes well, and doesn't build up heat. Foot sweat is a non-issue. When I drove up to Gainesville recently, I wore the Vibrams for the second leg of the trip up, and I'd been wearing my Keene sandals before that. The Keenes were freshly washed and air-dryed, and still my feet got warm and sticky and sweaty after about an hour on the road. Switching to the Vibrams, my feet were cool and dry the whole way up.

Road feel. You get better "road feel" from the Vibrams than you get with almost any other shoe. Let's compare with a "traditional" running shoe, shall we? (Note: what we think of as "traditional" these days is very damn seldom related to any kind of tradition with history behind it, witness "modern traditional" running shoes like those churned out by Nike, Adidas et al. Long dang way from a Chuck Converse, is all I'm saying.) A traditional running shoe will provide lots of support, lots of cushion, lots of orthotic influence. The Vibram takes a completely different tack. If a Nike insulates you from the road, like a mid-1970s Lincoln Town Car, the Vibram is a MG TC. They let you sense it all, the transition from asphalt to concrete to grass to sand.

You can wiggle your toes. Maybe it's only become important to me after seeing Die Hard, but I do a lot of toe wiggling. Side to side, up and down, all kinds of goofy stuff. Essentially, the same kind of hand stretching exercises, only below your knees! Your toes are not pinched together inside a shell with the Vibram, and the nature of the sole allows independent toe movement. Jerry Lee Lewis could play an arpeggio on the piano with his toes, if'n he was wearing Vibrams.

They may be silly, but I like them. I have worn them a good bit lately, and they really do feel like you're going barefoot. To me, that's a good thing. I'm not sure how much credence to put into the "barefooting movement" in terms of health claims, but I know that these are very comfortable.

I've worn them "just walking around", and driving, and even two times to Memorial Park, where I huffed and puffed around in a three mile circle with a fifty pound pack on my back. Even at the park, while my feet did feel much more "muscle sore" than in the past, there was none of the "bad pain." ("Bad pain" is the pain that doesn't comply with USMC definitions of pain as "the weakness leaving your body" but more along the lines of "dude I broke something.") Walking on rocks was a touch uncomfortable, but that thin sole IS Vibram, so it wasn't nearly as painful as being barefoot. Walking on gravel wasn't painful at all, but kind of "stimulating."

So there you have it.

Shittens.

Despite their unorthodox look, I can enthusiastically recommend the Vibram FiveFingers line of footwear. While not appropriate for a professional environment, I think that they represent a bold new approach to "what footwear is." Plus they represent a way to let your freak flag fly without tattoos or piercings.

So foshizzle.

Accountability

2008-10-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

You know, between watching the second season of "24", thinking about Mathias Rust, watching the ongoing shenanigans on Wall Street, wondering desperately about how to change my "gainfully unemployed" status and hearing Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber prat on about how Afghanistan is on the verge of turning into Kansas if we only send a couple more brigades, I think I've realized that I just don't know what constitutes treason any more.

Guest Post: The Berlin Airlift

2008-07-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

Note: This blog post was NOT created by me, but by a close friend of mine, "SSgt Guinness." Many years and miles ago, I was SSgt Guinness' squad leader for a while, and we have remained tight. I'm proud to call him my friend, and proud to post this guest comment about the Berlin Airlift.

While my dad was in the Army, I had the opportunity - albeit without a choice - to move around a lot and see a lot of the U.S. and the world. Of all the places we lived, there's no doubt in my mind that the two years we lived in West Berlin made the biggest impact on my life, my future, and how I've come to view the world in my lifetime.

We arrived in late 1979, just after my 5th birthday. I flooded my parents with questions about The Wall, the Russians, why people couldn't live together, all the other things I couldn't quite understand at the time. By the time we returned to the States, I had grown to understand a lot of the history, culture, and politics of the city. But it was only years later that I began to fully understand and appreciate one of the greatest humanitarian efforts in modern history - the Berlin Airlift.

It was 60 years ago that the Soviet military blockaded Berlin, shutting down rail, road, and boat traffic to the city. General Lucius Clay, who was appointed as the civil/military governor for the occupied zone, rightly concluded that leaving Berlin would be the wrong thing to do. Although the the Soviets would likely resolve all "technical difficulties" causing the blockade immediately, it would be a huge loss of prestige for America - not just her government leadership, but her military as well. All this, not to speak of how the lives of two million Germans could be changed forever.

Now, keep in mind that I hate math, statistics, and having numbers thrown in my face to make a point. But in this instance, I think the numbers give a good basic understanding of how monumental this effort truly was. On 24 June, 1948, there was enough food in the city to last 35 days, and 45 days' worth of coal. The next day, 32 US aircraft flew in 80 tons of supplies. Four days later, the RAF began flying in supplies as well. Based on numbers generated by Clay and legendary Air Force General Curtis LeMay, American and RAF pilots in C-47s, C-54s, RD-5s, DC-4s, and the venerable Avro York began flying almost 278,000 sorties in and out of the city that would continue for 15 months. 2.3 million tons of food and supplies were taken into the city, at the rate of roughly 5,000 tons per day loaded at 3-4 tons of cargo per flight, depending on aircraft type - the larger birds held around 10 tons. Tempelhof Airport had aircraft touching down every ninety seconds for the bulk of that 15-month period.

The picture I'm painting here (and the definite impression that I have of the Airlift) is one of constant activity, countless moving parts, and true selfless dedication to accomplish a mission - in this case, helping Berliners to not only keep their city, but live life as they had prior to the blockade. I'd imagine one other big factor in those very early days of the Cold War was being able to roll up your sleeves as part of a team and give the Russkies a big one-fingered wave while you were at it. Despite all this, the pilots who flew these missions knew how vital every single flight was - particularly the first flight, piloted by the late Jack Bennett. I can only sort of imagine what it's like knowing that you'll be on the ground again in an hour, yet still wondering if it'd be wheels down or in a burning heap of potatoes and avgas.

This, to me, is THE PICTURE of the Berlin Airlift. I saw it a lot as a kid, all over Berlin - it is to the Airlift what the Suribachi picture is to the Marine Corps.

What really drives home the significance of the Airlift for me is that to this day, all Germans - and Berliners in particular - remain grateful for what the American and British pilots did for them. Tempelhof Airport, one of the very few remaining structures that was built ground-up by Hitler's Reich, became an icon of the Airlift. I'll tell you something - when you have lifelong residents of the city which was the beating heart of the Nazi regime actually fighting to preserve something the Nazis built - that speaks volumes about what Tempelhof represents in their hearts. Sadly, their efforts failed and Tempelhof will soon be swept aside for a larger Berlin airport.

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but I think Berliners in general would call it a travesty that most Americans never heard of the Berlin Airlift. I know it pisses me off a little bit. Just to narrow it down further from my perspective, as a serving member of the Armed Forces: there are many proud moments, legendary battles, and timeless heroes who have formed a legacy that I strive to carry on every day I put on this uniform. For my money - and especially in light of America's post-Korea views of her military - you'd have to dig pretty deep to find an operation more selfless, more righteous, and more deserving of respect and admiration than the Berlin Airlift. Regardless of the circumstances or the politics surrounding the entire affair, it came down to American and British fighting men putting their lives on the line to help two million strangers keep their own.

If that's not as good as it gets, I really don't know what is.

The three prongs represent the only three air corridors opened for flights to & from Berlin during the Blockade; they remained the only three air routes authorized for Allied/NATO and commercial traffic until the wall fell in 1989.

Greek Wine

2008-07-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

Nice article here from the LA Times on Greek wines. I frickin' LOVE Greek wine. I'll admit, though, that I'm also a big fan of the retsina, derided in this article as "medicinal, resin-tinged Retsina, one of the more archaic, not to say weird, modern evocations of ancient tradition."

For some reason, it reminds me of Bill Murray in "Stripes," saying, "Maybe I shouldn't have drank all that cough syrup this morning."

But retsina is nothing like cough syrup!

All Options On the Table?

2008-07-09T21:47:00.001-07:00

Hey, if all options are on the table for dealing with Iran, umm, what about negotiations? You know, between THEM and US.

This thought has been on my mind some

2008-07-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

I was reading Jim Lobe's blog on Neocon humiliation and something tangential leapt out at me.

I quote:

Indeed, it was shortly after the war that Podhoretz steered ‘Commentary,’ the flagship publication of the American Jewish Committee, sharply to the right on foreign-policy issues, in particular, and that Rabbi Meir Kahane, who popularized the slogan “Never Again” with its multiple connotations of humiliation, shame, militancy, and rage coming out of the Holocaust, founded the Jewish Defense League. (This was before “Never Again” was appropriated by anti-genocide movements that wanted to make the idea universal, rather than specific to Jews, as Kahane had intended.)

(The whole thing is worth reading, this is a tangential thought, so only a snippet of a quote.)

I'd been thinking about "Never again" and the easy, and the hard, lessons that one can learn from something like the Holocaust.

The easy lesson is: Never again, to us.

The hard lesson is: Never again, not to anyone.

Yeah I DID mention "The Road Goes On Forever"

2008-07-07T16:30:00.001-07:00

. . . but little did I know it made the "Above the Law" Top Ten Law Songs.

I might quibble about some of the choices, but #1 (with a bullet?) obviously DOES deserve to go to the Clash. "The only band that matters." Yeah, I'm still a Clash fan, too.

. . . then there is no such thing as torture.

2008-07-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens got waterboarded, and of it he writes, "Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

He agreed to be waterboarded, and he agrees that it is torture. Although he equivocates, I think he comes down solidly on the right side. I expect my heroes to have feet of clay, for they are as all men are, flawed, fallen and fallible. I also expect my enemies to have things in their favor, to occasionally see a truth I might miss, to sometimes be fighting just as hard for their beliefs as I like to think I could, or would, fight for mine. There is much where my opinion diverges from Christopher Hitchens', including God and Iraq. But Bully for him. Good show.

Speaking of Texas Supergroups . . .

2008-06-29T06:47:00.001-07:00

My old man got into the blues in the early 1970s, which pretty much meant I did too. Naturally we gravitated towards Texas artists, and it was mostly Lightning Hopkins I listened to, down in the Wards acoustic or electric country blues, generally just Lightning and his guitar. Lightning Hopkins and Willie Nelson, man, and just as Texas was full of country singer songwriters there was no shortage of great bluesmen in the state, either. Freddie King, Lightning Hopkins, Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Billy Gibbons . . . anyway, a long list.

Just as The Highwaymen were a country supergroup, Alligator Records put together a one-off album featuring Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, and Robert Cray. Cray's style was always a little smooth and overproduced for my taste, but on "Showdown!" he cuts loose and stands tall and equal to the fiery Johnny Copeland and the ice-cool Master of the Telecaster Albert Collins.

The entire album is solid. Check out the picking in this cut:

Rock. Solid.

Park Your Lexus Under the Olive Tree For a Friedman Unit or Two, and Rebuild America First

2008-06-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

Anxious in America

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 29, 2008

Just a few months ago, the consensus view was that Barack Obama would need to choose a hard-core national-security type as his vice presidential running mate to compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience and that John McCain would need a running mate who was young and sprightly to compensate for his age. Come August, though, I predict both men will be looking for a financial wizard as their running mates to help them steer America out of what could become a serious economic tailspin.

I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue.

It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed.

Up to now, the economic crisis we’ve been in has been largely a credit crisis in the capital markets, while consumer spending has kept reasonably steady, as have manufacturing and exports. But with banks still reluctant to lend even to healthy businesses, fuel and food prices soaring and home prices declining, this is starting to affect consumers, shrinking their wallets and crimping spending. Unemployment is already creeping up and manufacturing creeping down.

The straws in the wind are hard to ignore: If you visit any car dealership in America today you will see row after row of unsold S.U.V.’s. And if you own a gas guzzler already, good luck. On Thursday, The Palm Beach Post ran an article on your S.U.V. options: “Continue to spend upward of $100 for a fill-up. Sell or trade in the vehicle for a fraction of the original cost. Or hold out and park the truck in the driveway for occasional use in hopes the market will turn around.” Just be glad you don’t own a bus. Montgomery County, Md., where I live, just announced that more children were going to have to walk to school next year to save money on bus fuel.

On top of it all, our bank crisis is not over. Two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs analysts said that U.S. banks may need another $65 billion to cover more write-downs of bad mortgage-related instruments and potential new losses if consumer loans start to buckle. Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.

“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

We used to try harder and do better. After Sputnik, we came together as a nation and responded with a technology, infrastructure and education surge, notes Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. After the 1973 oil crisis, we came together and made dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. After Social Security became imperiled in the early 1980s, we came together and fixed it for that moment. “But today,” added Hormats, “the political system seems incapable of producing a critical mass to support any kind of serious long-term reform.”

If the old saying — that “as General Motors goes, so goes America” — is true, then folks, we’re in a lot of trouble. General Motors’s stock-market value now stands at just $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota’s $162.6 billion. On top of it, G.M. shares sank to a 34-year low last week.

That’s us. We’re at a 34-year low. And digging out of this hole is what the next election has to be about and is going to be about — even if it is interrupted by a terrorist attack or an outbreak of war or peace in Iraq. We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.

That's Tommy Friedman, a big brain thinker for the New York Times.

Here's Merle Haggard, a redneck guitar picker from Okieland. In 2005. (How many Friedman Units ago was that?)

Why don't we liberate these United States
We're the ones who need it the worst
Let the rest of the world help us for a change
And let's rebuild America first

Our highways and bridges are falling apart
Who's blessed and who has been cursed
There's things to be done all over the world
But let's rebuild America first

Who's on the hill and who's watching the valley
Who's in charge of it all
God bless the Army and God bless our liberty
Dadgum the rest of it all

Yeah, men in position but backing away
Freedom is stuck in reverse
Let's get out of Iraq and get back on the track
And let's rebuild America first

Why don't we liberate these United States
We're the ones who need it the most
You think I'm blowing smoke
Boys it ain't no joke
I make twenty trips a year from coast to coast

YouTube embedding is disabled, but here's the link.

So who's the big brain now? And remember, there's all kinds of ways to run down our country, but when you're running down our country, man, you're walking on the fighting side of me.

File under "stick figures are fun"

2008-06-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

The mortgage loan crisis, in 45 simple, albeit profane, pages.

Clickity pop here.

Warning! Some adult language.

It's like I'm addicted to beating on National Review

2008-06-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

Joe Klein's “Divided loyalties” [Peter Wehner]

Time magazine political columnist and blogger Joe Klein has posted his reaction to a column today by David Brooks of the New York Times.

Brooks credits President Bush for his decision, in the face of enormous political pressures, to embrace the so-called surge strategy in Iraq. Klein chalks this up not to President Bush’s knowledge of tactics or strategy but to Bush’s stubbornness — while Klein, who presents himself as a man in possession of enormous knowledge and sophistication about counterinsurgency doctrine, merely happened to be wrong in his fierce opposition to it. In any event, Klein admits he was wrong in opposing the surge and has proper praise for General Petraeus, which is admirable.

OK, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Wehner says Klein regards Bush as stubborn, and lucky in his stubborness, while Wehner regards Klein as a self-regarded COIN guru, who was wrong. Yet Klein admits he was wrong and has nice things to say about Perfect Peter.

First off, the story of the surge isn't written yet. If you think back, lo, to the dark mists of time when the surge was devised and sold, first to Bush, then to America, a "reduction in violence" wasn't to be considered evidence of success. The surge was to buy time for the Iraqi government to enact certain vital benchmarks.

Wait, let me quote the relevant portion of the Man his-own-self, George W. Bush, addressing the nation in January of 2007.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

I think the quote is relevant, since it came right after President Bush said,

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

Now, for those of you who never spent time reading counterinsurgency theory, let me 'splain something. The surge was going to reduce hostile activity in Baghdad, that was a given. It was a given because damn few people are stupid enough to stand up to the striking force of the United States military in anything resembling a fair fight. Since we're playing "world cop" let's look at it from a police standpoint. We put 20,000 more flatfeet on the ground. That's just gonna effect crime.

Violence was also going to go down in Baghdad because everyone knew that those boots on the ground were temporary. Go read your TO&E tables for the US Army. Tell me how many combat divisions we have. Look at the reserve component. Think about troop rotation schedules.

Now, if our enemy in Baghdad is an Arabic (or Persian!) Fu-Manchu, this ain't gonna be news to him. So if you're a cunning fiend, and you know there will be a temporary increase in highly trained, decisively armed shoot'n'looters, and further that said shoot'n'looters are only going to be in town for about a year . . . what do you tell your guys to do?

Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

You tell your posse to chill out, re-up their weapons quals, maybe a little intensive religious indoctrination, send 'em back home to the old lady for a few weeks, or months, to be with their family. Meanwhile you wheel and deal, calling old enemies and old friends and seeing what you can do to shore up your support in the 'hood to your north (or south, east, or west).

Let me be clear, here. You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't pick an infantry fight with the US Army (to say, ahem, nothing at all about the US Marines). In anything even resembling a fair fight, we will stack bodies like cordwood. We will run the table on them. We will hurt 'em, and bad.

So you tell your posse, "chill out, brothers" and in the meantime you let the occupying forces fall into a nice, sloppy little occupation-duty lull. And you watch them, oh my yes you do. You watch them and note that Sgt. Hernandez might be only medium-ranking among the company officers, but the troops hop to it when he says boo. You note down Sgt. Hernandez for an early bullet. You get to know exactly what time the commissary trucks make their runs.

Wait---this is obvious, right?

Remember: In an insurgency, the counterinsurgents have to win, but the insurgents only have to stay alive, and maintain some political viability.

Oh yeah---I still think that political viability in Baghdad is probably spelled "Moqtada al-Sadr."

So, basically, I think it's too early to write the story of the surge, for sure and for certain. Let's see what happens after a few combat brigades rotate back out. I mean, that's what we're waiting for, right?

Back to NRO:

But then Klein goes on to say this:

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked—still smacks—of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Put aside the fact that Klein himself, swept up in the success of democratic elections in Iraq in 2005, was quite sympathetic to what he now refers to as “neocolonialist legerdemain.” The “divided loyalties” charge is an ugly smear, one that ignores, among other things, the vast non-Jewish and non-neoconservative support for the Iraq war. (For example, the use of force resolution passed with 77 votes in the Senate – the overwhelming majority of which were cast by non-Jews and non-neoconservatives).

Wehner points out delicately that Klein HIMSELF was a neocolonialist back in '05! Then Wehner, frankly, loses his nut. "The “divided loyalties” charge is an ugly smear, one that ignores, among other things, the vast non-Jewish and non-neoconservative support for the Iraq war." Yeah. Hey, I'd be happy to apply the same standard to all those Arab-American foreign policy elites, checking them for dual loyalties to, oh, Saudi Arabia or (snicker) Lebanon or (chortle) Syria. Oh wait. We don't really HAVE any foreign policy elites like that, do we?

And why, exactly, is the question of "divided loyalties" a smear? Are our tribal affiliations really so shallow a thing? As a Celtic-American mixed mutt (with, doubtless, plenty else thrown into the mix!), I feel a certain tribal loyalty to Scotland, to Ireland . . . It's not exclusive, and it's not deterministic, but it's there. Sure. Why shouldn't it be?

Or is Wehner saying it's a slur to even consider that men like (the various) Kagans and (several) Kristols and Doug Feith and Wolfowitz might feel a certain, in no way reprehensible affinity for the State of Israel?

With a straight face?

Wehner continues, in a different albeit no-less-loopy vein.

And on the matter of Iran: isn’t it reasonable to assume that if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon it will pose an enormous threat not simply to Israel but to the region (including other Arab states) and the interests of America? And doesn’t it matter that Israel is among our closest allies, a nation of extraordinary achievements and virtues, and one with whom we have security agreements? This doesn’t necessarily lead one to support U.S. military strikes against Iran in order to prevent Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, & Company from possessing a nuclear weapon. If Klein is against that, fine; he should make the argument on prudential and policy grounds. But arguing that those who favor using military force against Iran and happen to be Jewish are driven by “divided loyalties” is despicable and libelous.

Whee doggies, we just need a reasonable assumption to attack them dirty Persians! I find myself asking, Is that the standard we apply? "Could be?" Why, if so, is it even a reasonable assumption? Is it because Iran has a long history of foreign aggression? (Aside from Xerxes. Gotta give Xerxes props.) Do they have, well, the Wehrmacht? Can we point to a recent event and say, "Here, this is where the Islamic Republic of Iran pursued a really reckless and destabilizing foreign policy?" If there is such an event, or events, the neocon press is not doing a good job of communicating them to me.

I think it's fair to say that a nuclear armed Teheran would dramatically reshuffle the balance of power in the Middle East. As a conservative, I'd thus rather not see them get nukes. As a Christian, I pray fervently that they don't get them. (That's because, as a Christian, I think nuclear weapons are an abomination before God, and don't think anyone should have them.) Just because I'd rather not see the Iranians be nuclear capable, though, doesn't necessarily mean I'm willing to go to war to stop them. I think the consequences of a massive series of air strikes against Iran's known or suspected nuclear sites would be, on the whole, more destabilizing and dangerous than letting them get the bomb.

I could be wrong, but that's not an unreasonable position.

Then, of course, Wehner deigns to notice the elephant in the living room (i.e., Israel---surprise!) and concludes, essentially, "and what is wrong with that?" Well, nothing---and it certainly can be argued so, from Wehner's "prudential and policy grounds." Why, then, do we not do so? Why not debate the merits of the current US relationship with Israel? What does it cost us? What could it get us? What's the worst that could happen, and how likely do we think it is? What's the best that could happen, and how likely do we think it is? I pretty much believe in the power of the marketplace of ideas (hey, Christianity's done pretty well over the past couple of millenia!), and would be game to bring the US-Israel relationship into that marketplace.

Wehner probably didn't mean that, though.

I will reiterate that I do not understand how accusations of dual loyalty could be despicable or libelous. The State of Israel exists. There is a coterie of the US foreign policy elite who are deeply supportive of Israel, and more particularly, of the policies advanced by Israel's Likud party. Some members of this coterie are Jewish. Some members of this coterie have been deeply involved with the formulation of Israeli and/or Likud strategic analysis and policy making.

Not, I say, as I put on my Seinfeld hat, that there's anything wrong with that.

Joe Klein appears to be a man who cannot control his anger and even hatred toward those with whom he has policy disagreements. It is a sad thing to witness. And those who care for Klein should do him a favor and urge him to give up blogging, which allows his unfiltered rage to make its way into print and embarrass him and the magazine for which he writes.

06/24 04:41 PM

Well, isn't that special.

She stepped out in the alley with her single shot .410

2008-06-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

Maybe we've been too serious here, too much "gravitas" (remember THAT meme?). Well, since I'm all healthy mind in a healthy body grand-kilted-theory-of-everything I am going to steal a few minutes to brag on Texas.

Now, my kind of patriotism, or nationalism, or regionalism, isn't about "Yay we're great and you guys all suck!" So bear that in mind, while I tell you how much Texas kicks ass.

I guess you could file this one under "My long hair just can't cover up my red neck."

The clip above is the Highwaymen doing a song written by Joe Ely and popularized by Robert Earl Keen, and everything about it gets me going like bagpipes skirling and a good cup of hot coffee.

The Highwaymen? Johnny Cash. Waylon Jennings. Kris Kristofferson. Willie Nelson. Great jumping hornswaggles! These men wrote the soundtrack for my youth, and to this day I am "infused" with some of their spirit. Hard living Christian redneck commie pinkos, pretty much, with an anti-imperialist little c conservatism that helped form how I see the world. I'll modestly point out that not all of 'em were born in Texas---Johnny Cash was born in Arkansas, after all. (Let me lift a pint to diversity!)

Waylon Jennings was born in Littlefield, Kristofferson in Brownsville, and Willie Nelson in Abbot. Those are all in the GSOT, y'all, in case you didn't know.

Robert Earl Keen? Houston native (GSOT).

Joe Ely? Amarillo (GSOT).

Singer-songwriters, every one of 'em. They don't just sing their own songs, but they've written songs that just grab you, if you're Texas-inclined.

Let's take this song.

Here's the lyrics:

Sherry was a waitress at the only joint in town
She had a reputation as a girl who'd been around
Down Main Street after midnight with a brand new pack of cigs
A fresh one hangin' from her lips and a beer between her legs
She'd ride down to the river and meet with all her friends
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Sonny was a loner he was older than the rest
He was going into the Navy but he couldn't pass the test
So he hung around town he sold a little pot
The law caught wind of Sonny and one day he got caught
But he was back in business when they set him free again
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Sonny's playin' 8-ball at the joint where Sherry works
When some drunken outta towner put his hand up Sherry's skirt
Sonny took his pool cue laid the drunk out on the floor
Stuffed a dollar in her tip jar and walked on out the door
She's runnin' right behind him reachin' for his hand
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

They jumped into his pickup Sonny jammed her down in gear
Sonny looked at Sherry and said lets get on outta here
The stars were high above them and the moon was in the east
The sun was settin' on them when they reached Miami Beach
They got a hotel by the water and a quart of Bombay gin
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

They soon ran out of money but Sonny knew a man
Who knew some Cuban refugees that delt in contraband
Sonny met the Cubans in a house just off the route
With a briefcase full of money and a pistol in his boot
The cards were on the table when the law came bustin' in
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

The Cubans grabbed the goodies and Sonny grabbed the Jack
He broke a bathroom window and climbed on out the back
Sherry drove the pickup through the alley on the side
Where a lawman tackled Sonny and was reading him his rights
She stepped into the alley with a single shot .410
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

They left the lawman lyin' and they made their getaway
They got back to the motel just before the break of day
Sonny gave her all the money and he blew her a little kiss
If they ask you how this happened say I forced you into this
She watched him as his taillights disappeared around the bend
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Its Main Street after midnight just like it was before
21 months later at the local grocery store
Sherry buys a paper and a cold 6-pack of beer
The headlines read that Sonny is goin' to the chair
She pulls back onto Main Street in her new Mercedes Benz
The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Now, if that doesn't capture the zeitgeist for you, I don't know what would. There's the desperation of small town America. There's the redneck outsider, the rebel in trouble with the law. There's the pernicious influence of "city folk." (Hey, it WAS a "drunken out-of-towner" who put his hand of Sherry's skirt.) There's doomed love, and ruthless pragmatism, and shotguns and dead cops.

It is as perfect as "Breathless." Heck, I think it's the redneck Breathless.

And no matter which version I'm listening to, Ely or Keen or the Highwaymen or anyone else who's done it, I just about always get goose bumps over the line "She stepped out in the alley with her single shot .410."

Proof of Iranian cooption of al-Qaida?

2008-06-24T04:47:00.000-07:00

Michael Ledeen has argued, for quite some time, that Iran is the root of all evil. Well, at least that Iran has operated in a meaningful operational way with al-Qaida. In National Review Online's group blog, The Corner, Ledeen provides a link to an Asharq Alawsat newspaper commentary by Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya television.

Writes Ledeen:

Read it all. He knows what he's talking about. And if you have time, please tell George Tenet and his experts, who spat at the very idea that Sunnis could work with Shi'ites.

Very well, then. I clicked on the link.

I am . . . unmoved.

The article is short, and Ledeen quotes but one section, where al-Rashed asserts that "The paradox is most striking in the case of Al-Qaeda, the most extremist Sunni organization, which has joined, in the full sense of the word, the Iranian apparatus." Immediately after this phrase, however, al-Rashed writes that the alliance began "in the wake of the defeat of Al-Qaeda and the organization's flight from Afghanistan to all Sunni countries."

Very well, then. Please note that al-Rashed is saying that al-Qaida did not cooperate with Iran until after the US invasion of Afghanistan.

al-Rashed asserts that al-Qaida fled from Afhganistan "to all Sunni countries." Yet the only country he talks about al-Qaida fleeing to is . . . Iran. That would be Shia Iran. Huh.

al-Rashed continues, "We were initially puzzled by the rumors that Iran had arrested a group of fleeing Al-Qaeda members who crossed its border from Afghanistan, only to realize later that the story had far deeper implications." He never says who "we" are, or why "we" were initially surprised by Iran's arrest of al-Qaida members. Could it be because al-Qaida is theologically opposed to the Shia sect of Islam? Could it be because the Iranians have a similar opposition to Sunnis? al-Rashed does not say.

al-Rashed submits:

Like any other extremist Sunni organization, Al-Qaeda does not consider Shiites and other Muslim sects to be Sunnis or followers of the Prophet's family, and therefore it must fight against them. I do not want to give further evidence of Iran's pragmatism. It is an extremist, theocratic Shiite regime that holds Sunnis as infidels.

So extremist Sunni organizations consider the Shia to be infidels, and the Shia Iranian regime reciprocates the warm feelings. Yet al-Rashed doesn't want to give "further evidence of Iran's pragmatism." Huh.

Somewhat confusingly, al-Rashad then states "Proof of this is that Iran's followers committed massacres and evicted people from their homes in a way unprecedented in Iraq's history." Umm, proof of what? Proof of Iran's pragmatism? Or proof of Iran's hatred of the Sunni? I must be low on the blood level in my caffeine, but I cannot make sense of this argument.

It seems to be asserting either a) Iran regards Sunnis as infidels, and thus used Shia co-religionists to purge Sunni neighborhoods in Iraq, or b) Iran is pragmatic, and so used Sunni groups to purge Shia neighborhoods in Iraq. If a) is correct, then it undercuts the thesis that Iran and al-Qaida are in cahoots. If b) is correct, then Iran is not a Shia theocratic regime, and does not really regard the Sunni as infidels, and is using them as a cat's paw against the Shia Iraqi regime. If b) is correct, it also makes it hard to understand why Ahmadinejad was feted during his recent, red carpet state visit to Baghdad.

I suppose it is possible that Iran and al-Qaida are in cahoots. This article, long on discursive commentary and dreadfully short on facts, or links, or reasoned argument, does nothing to convince me. Perhaps Michael Ledeen is a subtler thinker than I (an honest possibility), and I am simply missing the substantive meat here. But I am unmoved by this argument.

As a side note. One of the gripes against the neocons who have pushed for war, war, war is that very damn few of them have worn the pickle suit. (Pickle suit being term of art for the old green jungle camouflage utilities worn by the striking arm of the United States Government.) With that said, and recognized as at least generally true, let us take a moment to recognize Michael Ledeen's son, currently enduring OCS at Quantico. (That would be Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, y'all.)

Ledeen writes:

We're just back from the Marine Base at Quantico, where our youngest is attempting to survive Officer Candidates School. Not easy, which is one reason why the Marines are such an amazing team.

Yut.

I'm not bad, I'm misunderstood.

2008-06-20T06:22:00.001-07:00

Good/bad.

Black/white.

Right/left.

Democrat/Republican.

Up/down.

Us/them.

We like to categorize things. We like to apply our reason to situations. We like to discriminate. (Discriminate is a fine word, which shouldn't be polluted, as it is today, with the very narrow sense of "racial discrimination" which is code for racism. Fine word, discriminate. Underused. When was the last time you heard a phrase like "a gentleman of discriminating tastes"?)

Our reason, of course, is not infallible. We make mistakes. We take mental shortcuts. We put things into categories that are convenient for us--and sometimes we're wrong.

I have opposed our Mesopotamian adventures from the get-go. Before that, I was very concerned about our Afghan adventures. I have regarded the presidency of George W. Bush as a stain upon America, upon American history, culture, and constitutional order.

In mainstream popular opinion, people who do these things tend to be Democrats. Thus, by the simple and natural categorization process I outlined above, a lot of people have listened to me, or read what I have written (not here, since I'm only a beginning baby blogger), and categorized me as a Democrat--and, more, as a moonbat.

It is, gentle reader, to laugh.

Human beings are complex, and thus, without in any way tooting my horn, I too am complex. In this instance, at least, I do not fit into the neat paradigm of "pro-Bush, Republican/anti-Bush, Democrat."

My concerns for the last ten or fifteen years have mostly centered around foreign policy, more than domestic. A simple reason for this is that we have, in my honest opinion, two major parties of social democrats (in the European sense) who prance around in the clothing they wore sixty years ago. The Republicans are perhaps slow socialists, and the Democrats fast socialists, but they're all socialists. And so it's foreign policy that I focus on.

Some of that is because of the time I spent wearing the pickle suit. "Pickle suit" was one of my friends' term for the camouflage utility uniform we wore when we were on active duty in the United States Marine Corps. Before I joined the Corps, I sat down and thought for a long time about what being an American meant to me, and what it had meant to me (in a material sense). I didn't join the Corps because I wanted to go to war and kill bodies---but because I realized how lucky I am to be an American, and because, in my way, I wanted to stand on that wall between us and them, and to protect me and mine. As a disposable asset of the United States Government, then, I thought about foreign policy a lot. Where were they going to send me, if they sent me anywhere, and why would they send me?

In the event, I pretty much never went anywhere, and never did anything, and while I am proud of my service in the USMC, I'm not claiming to be a hard-charger or high-speed, low-drag, extreme tactical operator. I was a linguist, and that barely even qualifies as being a Marine.

Some of the time I spent focused on foreign policy was because I worked abroad for several years. I worked in former Soviet Central Asia, in Kazakhstan, and I spoke the language at work and at home while I did it, and I read a lot more European and Asian news reports. Suffice it to say, I was exposed to points of view beyond those of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and People.

Those things, together with where, and when, and to whom I was born, have all influenced my perception of the world. I know I see things differently than my father did, and than my grandfather did, and differently than people of my generation who grew up in other circumstances, other regions, other countries, other classes, other religions, other, in other words, stuff.

Religiously, I am quite Christian. Socially, I am quite conservative. Politically, I am quite libertarian. Legally, I am quite the constitutionalist, and by that I mean in the Ron Paul mode. My parents received and read both Ron Paul and Gary North in the late 1970s, and I have, on and off, continued the association. It is for the foregoing reasons that I have been appalled at the George W. Bush administration, and my objections include each category (religion, social theory, politics, and legal theory).

I could be wrong, but I think that in none of the categories set forth above do I have much agreement with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in America.

Why, then, do I so loathe the actions taken by the Bush Administration?

I am not as conversant with Augustine's just war theory as I should be, perhaps, but I think our Afghan intervention clearly qualifies as just (i.e., in response to an attack) and that our Mesopotamian adventure does not. Despite the hysterics of the pro-war faction in early 2002, Iraq had not attacked the United States. Saddam Hussein had been a client of the US, not that this is much of an endorsement. After all, we cooperated with Joe Stalin, and he's at the top of my personal list of monsters. Saddam, too, was probably a monster. Many regimes are headed by monsters, though, and as some dead white guy once opined, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

As a conservative, I am loathe to take giant steps. "Look before you leap" is kind of a watchword of mine, and the times I have leapt without looking have frequently reminded me why I want to look, before I leap. For the entirity of my life, the United States had pursued a more or less traditional balance of power foreign policy. The Cold War gave us a neat categorization of good and bad, and the possession of nuclear weapons made the case for careful balancing. After 9/11, a certain frenzy seemed to overtake our foreign policy elite. We spoke in nearly apocalyptic terms of an end to evil, of remaking the world to remove whatever root causes were behind these heinous attacks.

The main reason I had voted for George W. Bush the first time around was that I really liked his criticism of Bill Clinton for being, ahem, internationally adventurous. I remember, with the disappointment of a jilted suitor, Bush's comments about a more humble foreign policy. These things comport with my conservative instincts. Change the world? Ha! How'd that whole "New Soviet Man" thing turn out?

It turned out about like I'd expected. Man is not a blank slate. Afghans are Afghani, Americans are American. Where and when and how you're born, and how you're raised, those things are important. (Isn't this, after all, self-evident?) We can change things, we can make progress . . . but we can also make mistakes. There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. I remember an old line about how the only people who never make mistakes are people who never make anything.

But as a conservative, I want to be able to mitigate the effects of our mistakes. Not only do I want to look before I leap, but I want to be able to "leap back" whenever possible. What if I leap into quicksand? Let's try Policy A---and let's not commit to it entirely, not before we've shown that Policy A actually works, and does not provoke Counterpolicy B, or Unintended Consequence C. To me, this seems like common sense. (I could be wrong.)

As a libertarian, I am, on general principles, suspicious of the motives, means, and ability of government to achieve its stated goals. Many people conflate "libertarian" with "libertine"---and, indeed, an awful lot of mainstream libertarianism is of the abortion-on-demand, huff hash, spit on the Pope and burn the flag sort. I'd call that libertinism, too. But my libertarianism is different. (Yes, I'm special. Wheee!)

My libertarianism does not worship the market. (I worship God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ who redeemed us of our sins.) I know that the market can make wrong choices, sometimes hideously wrong. But I favor freedom, the ability of people to choose for themselves how they'll live. I think that freedom of choice is one of God's gifts to man, and that maximizing that freedom will lead to the least bad outcome.

As a libertarian, I don't think I need to comment overly on why I'm opposed to the massive centralization of state authority in the hands of the executive branch of the United States Government. We need fewer laws, not more. Some old Italian guy once said that the more laws you had, the more corrupt your state was going to be. Once more, I think that this resonates with "traditional American culture."

From a constitutional standpoint, I think the Bush Administration has provoked, or nearly provoked, a constitutional crisis. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding Gitmo detainees? I think it was prompted not only by social concerns about human rights, but also institutional pushback from the judiciary. If you think back to the Padilla case, the executive branch of the United States Government asserted that it had the right to arrest an American citizen, on American soil, without a judicial warrant, and to detain such an American citizen indefinitely, in an undisclosed location, without benefit of counsel or appeals to judicial remedy.

Friends, that's a pretty bold rethinking of our constitutional order.

The executive branch of the United States Government has also given the thumbs-up to enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, stress positions, and "light pokes or shoves" that have resulted in numerous deaths among US detainees. In order to approve these techniques, the executive branch of the United States Government asserted that the president could countermand US statutory law, treaties signed by the United States, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and common/constitutional law. Constitutionally speaking, I ain't down with that.

Now lest the foregoing sound too liberal, let's play "Well, what would YOU have done?"

I would have gone into Afghanistan with fire and sword, with the explicit and avowed goal of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden for terrorism and a direct attack upon the United States. I would have told the Taliban that they could either step aside, or step up. If, as it eventuated, Osama bin Laden had sought refuge in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (former North West Frontier Provinces), I would have pursued him with, once more, fire and sword.

And I would have made explicitly clear to the states in the region that once we got Osama bin Laden, we were going home. We would stay until we got him, and then we would leave. Afghan for the Afghanis! Pakistan for the Pakistanis! We would not be coming to bring them the benefits of Western civilization, we would be coming on a manhunt and, if necessary, a punitive raid. But we WOULD NOT BE STAYING. After Jefferson smashed the Barbary pirates, did we stick around? No, we sailed for home and good beer and smiling wenches and a victory celebration. The job was done---let's go home.

I would have treated captured members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban as Enemy Prisoners of War, or Prisoners of War (EPW/POW, depending on your vintage). I would have said, "They are scum and they do not deserve this, but we'll treat them that way anyhow, because we're better than they are." (And by "better" I do not mean some limp, pallid moralism, either. By "better" I mean that it is my honest belief that a limited government, socially conservative free market society simply kicks butt.)

My idea for going into Pakistan has been mocked, and eyes rolled at it. Yet today, we're still sending Predator drones to make Hellfire strikes into Pakistan, which looks more and more like Cambodia to me, only, you know, drier. We have invested ourselves into the protection of the Afghan government headed by Hamid Karzai. Why? Why do we care who runs Afghanistan?

I'll admit, initially, I was scared of our intervention into Afghanistan. How many empires have the Afghans stymied? (Lots. Alexander the Great, the British, and the Soviets, to name only the most prominent.) The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized the problems all those empires had had with Afghanistan: they stayed. Afghanistan is like a hot potato: it's easy to grab ahold of it, but it's hard to hold onto it for long.

Well, I never wanted to hold onto it. In, out, punitive raid, smash some stuff, kill Osama bin Laden, and come back home to a big pulled-pork barbecue.

As for Saddam Hussein? Well, he'd still be feeding people into the wood chipper if I was king, I guess. Monster, yeah buddy, but the world is full of 'em. Tough for the rest of the world, I guess, but no real business of America, so long as vital American national interests aren't too threatened. (And I'd draw a mighty thin list of truly vital American national interests, too.) At the risk of being all Christian, let's remember that Saddam Hussein's government included a Christian as vice-premier, or vice-president, or something like that. Figger the odds on the next time that happens in the Middle East, why don't you.

So here, in brief, is my argument about George W. Bush. He bought into this world changing nonsense that he mocked when he was a candidate. He took his eye off the man who really did hit us on 9/11, to go after targets of opportunity elsewhere. He decided that the mission of the United States was to bring freedom and democracy to the Arab/Muslim world. He decided that if the president does it, that means its not illegal. (Cf., Richard Milhous Nixon.) He let the PATRIOT ACT, a laundry list of power-grabbing by police and intelligence agencies, whip through Congress without review or approval. He's burdened America and Americans with vast new bureaucracies like the TSA and the DHS, and he's used America's striking arm as a police force in civil wars in both Iraq and Afhganistan. He bet that we could change the world, and I think he bet it all on one roll of the dice.

Now, was there a potential upside? Hella yes there was. If we could change the world to make it more like America, that would be a good thing. If we could bring freedom and democracy to the mostly benighted Arab/Muslim world, that would be a good thing. If we could make "them" more like "us" then that would be a very good thing.

I don't know if the things I outlined above would have worked. I'll be honest: they might only not have worked, but they might have worked out worse than what the administration actually did.

I'm just saying, when I express my honest loathing for the Bush administration, don't you drop me into the moonbat wing of the Democratic party category. I've got my own reasons for loathing them, and they're conservative, Christian, libertarian, constitutionalist reasons.

All the news . . . that fits our agenda

2008-06-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

I used to read National Review, although I never subscribed. I still read the online edition, although mostly as a form of cardiovascular exercise. (I mean, heart racing, blood pressure spiking---that's got to be a form of exercise, doesn't it?)

I've noticed, though, that when bad news comes out, the corridors of NRO echo with the sound of silence.

Although you wouldn't know it from reading the Corner, "A Senate hearing Tuesday is investigating the origins of aggressive interrogation techniques used by the United States against terrorism suspects." That's from Voice of America.

The AFP headline was Harsh interrogation methods stain U.S. image, endanger soldiers: experts.

Slate's was It Was Top Down, Stupid.

CNN said Military lawyers objected to harsh interrogation techniques.

The LA Times: Torture began at the top.

In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank wrote "Abu Ghraib? Doesn't ring a bell."

As for the National Review, and it's blog The Corner . . . well, they talked a lot about how Barack Obama is kinda freaky. And Ireland and the EU treaty. June 2008 archives here.

Yeah.

Cause we all know that the NRO was against them there enhanced interrogation techniques. Right?

You know, my kids, when they were very little, thought that just by ignoring something it was as if that thing didn't even exist.

But that's when they were REALLY little.