Selfishness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* (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

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 . . .

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

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

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?

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 . . .

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?

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'.