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April 30, 2006
Can You Believe They Said This? (Times Two)
Mark Tapscott pulled this John McCain quote from the ionosphere where McCain seems to be spending more and more time:
"He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform....I know that money corrupts....I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government."
Is he insane? Earth to McCain: Conservatives do not believe in the perfectibility of people, and the legislative bodies they form. We are not going to surrender our right to free speech in exchange for any person's definition of "clean government."
I've been somewhat suspicious of McCain for a while, though not nearly as much as a lot of other conservatives. But this settles it: if he gets the nomination I'll vote third party, or just stay home.
And today, from John Derbyshire notes in The Corner:
Watching Meet the Press roundtable on the gas price kerfuffle.Russert, challenging Energy Secretary Sam Bodman: "Oil demand is up. Supply is down. So why are prices rising?"
Er...........
Er....indeed.
April 29, 2006
Israel, Iran And A Very Difficult Choice
Two weeks ago Michael Totten tried to get down to the Israel/Lebanon border from the Lebanese side--and was stopped by the Lebanese army at their last checkpoint before entering the Hezbollah-occupied zone. (Hezbollah, you recall, occupies the southern section of Lebanon, including the border with Israel. The Lebanese army is not allowed there.) The Lebanese officer in charge adamantly refused to allow the American Totten to enter the border zone, implying all the while in ominous fashion that the situation had degraded to a perilous state of tension. He gave no details.
By the other day Totten had circled back to Israel, come up to the border from the south and was allowed to approach the border in the company of an IDF spokesman (hat tip to LGF). Along the way they met a lieutenant on border patrol duty:
“How dangerous is it here, really?” I asked the lieutenant.The Israelis have acquired a reputation for military superiority against their Arab opponents--but one must remember the Yom Kippur war in 1973. (See here and here.) Finally convinced of the seriousness of the threat against it, the Israeli government still declined to make a preemptive attack on Syria and Egypt. They attacked Israel six hours later. Ironically, the decision to forego a preemptive attack, which caused disastrous losses the first two days of the war, allowed the US resupply the Israelis later in the conflict; if the Israelis had struck first, public opinion in the US and world political pressure would probably have precluded any US aid.“I say this to my guys every morning: Everything could explode at any moment. Just after I said it this morning a bus load of pensioners showed up on a field trip. An old woman brought us some food. It’s crazy. They shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”
“What’s happening here is very unusual," Zvika, the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesman, said. But he wouldn't tell me what, exactly, was so unusual. Shortly after I left the country, a story broke in the Daily Telegraph that explained it.
Iran has moved into South Lebanon. Intelligence agents are helping Hezbollah construct watch towers fitted with one-way bullet-proof windows right next to Israeli army positions.
Here's what one officer said:
This is now Iran's front line with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbollah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it.More powerful weapons, including missiles with a range of 30 miles, are also being brought in.
But with the nuclear card on the table in eight years later 1981, Israel showed no hesitation--the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak was destroyed in a daring and extremely risky raid by the Israeli air force. Iran is much more populous and much farther away from Israel than the Iraqi reactor at Osirak--there's not just one, but many cards on the table.
I hope Israel doesn't fall victim to the powerful urge to fight the last war.
The Special Ops Hunt For al-Zarqawi
AJ Strata highlights an in-depth examination in the Marine Corps Times of the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The report reveals both the successes and the agonizing near-misses in the war-within-a-war against the leader of al Qaida In Iraq.
Very interesting stuff.
April 28, 2006
Standing Clear While Your Opponents Self-Destruct
Some members of the pro-illegal immigration lobby continue to saw through the tree branch upon which they are sitting:
British music producer Adam Kidron says he just wanted to honor the millions of immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S. when he came up with the idea of a Spanish-language version of the national anthem.The initial version of "Nuestro Himno," or "Our Anthem" comes out Friday and features artists such as Wyclef Jean, hip-hop star Pitbull and Puerto Rican singers Carlos Ponce and Olga Tanon.
Some Internet bloggers and others are infuriated by the thought of "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung in a language other than English, and the version of the song has already been the target of a fierce backlash.
"British music producer Adam Kidron says he just wanted to honor the millions of immigrants ..." Now, that's funny. Of course it's obvious to a child that Kidron is seeking to create a sensational fracas, but I don't think he's got a good handle on the big picture. And since when do British music producers give a hoot about immigration to the US, legal or otherwise? As they would say in England, "Pull the other one, Kidron."
"The Star Spangled Banner" in Spanish? I think I've got a great idea for their next move: reissue the American flag in red, white and green.
Posted at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)Immigration: The Heart Of The Matter
Speaking on the immigration crisis, Mensa Barbie puts it plain:
International law requires four criteria for a functioning, sovereign state: Permanent population, a recognized territory, a functioning government and the capability to conduct international relations.
Emphasis in the original. This echoes a point I've made before, and I think it's so fundamental it bears repeating:
It appears to me that the arguments made by the pro-illegal immigration side all are based on one lynchpin assumption: that the United States has no inherent right to make laws regulating its own borders; any laws so enacted need not be adhered to by those wishing to come here from Mexico.Every pro-illegal pundit starts by ignoring the basic illegality of the immigrants' status. This is more than just an argument about a possibly prejudicial label; it strikes straight through to the subject of "what are the inherent rights of a sovereign state?"
Lots of commentators have made this point implicitly, but Mensa Barbie is one of the few bloggers I've found who explicitly locates the crux of the argument exactly where it belongs: in international law and the rights of all sovereign nations. In a way, it's a distillation of the miasma of multiculturalism that's seeped into every crack of American life. Just as multiculturalism champions every culture except that of the United States, so do the reconquistas allow a blatant double standard by seeking to prohibit US enforcement of laws that every other country of the world enforces without question.
I know, I know...not all voices on the pro-illegal side are as radical as the reconquistas, but the underlying point remains: the US has the absolute right to enforce its own immigration laws.
And only after the borders are secured can we turn to the issue of the resident illegals.
Posted at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 27, 2006
Does Newt Really Have A Chance?
Ed Morrissey focuses on a man whose potential candidacy for the presidency seems to draw either sneers or dismissive chuckles...but I wonder. Ed thinks that Newt Gingrich is one of the few candidates who is exhibiting presidential-caliber thinking on the immigration issues, and he highlights a Washington Times report on the former Speaker of the House:
Mr. Gingrich said he sympathizes with illegal aliens participating in protests and placed blame for the illegal immigration problem on businesses and the federal government."I do not blame someone who leaves poverty to seek prosperity," Mr. Gingrich said during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. "They showed up here to work under a social contract and then [the government] tried to change the terms."
Emphases mine. I've said the same thing: when confronted with the choice to better one's life or continue to subsist in grinding miserable poverty, the decision is easy. The causes of the disaster lie elsewhere.
There's no doubt that Gingrich is a smart guy, and he's articulate. And there's a distinction: his articulateness is not an end in itself--he uses it as a tool to communicate his clear strategic thinking. Some politicians are good thinkers but poor communicators, GWB being the prime example, God love him. Others (and this is a much more populous category) can speak well, but their thoughts are disordered, illogical or mendacious. Note that of course this doesn't preclude Gingrich from being wrong; he certainly has been before. But in the current hyper-polarized climate, the ability to distill grand strategy into easily presentable units and then effectively present them to your electorate is becoming a necessary skill.
A skill that is unfortunately not on display in the Senate.
Bad news from the Hil: an amendment introduced by Senator Tom Coburn challenging the Railroad to Nowhere has been defeated by a 49-48 vote.Voting against $700M for the Railroad to Nowhere: Harry Reid, Senate Democratic Leader
Voting in favor of $700M for the Railroad to Nowhere: Senator Bill Frist, Senate Republican Leader
Hat tip to Bill Quick, who notes:
We have to wake up the Stupid Party, before it completely merges itself into the Republicrat Statist Party.
Sounds like 1994 again. Hey, didn't we start off talking about Newt Gingrich?
April 26, 2006
Snow vs. The Pretty Faces
Hugh Hewitt comments on the appointment of Tony Snow as White House press secretary (via Newsbusters):
Perhaps the best thing about this appointment is the very hostile WH press corps is suddenly confronted by an individual who has already out achieved them in the world of media, which means he knows their tricks and he knows their vanities. There are some smart folks in the WH press room, but there are plenty of pretty faces as well, and they know that Snow is a whole lot smarter than they are.
I'm really tired tonight, and Hugh provided a good snarky laugh, so I'm passing it along.
And I'm delighted at Tony Snow's appointment.
Posted at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)City Journal Examines Houston, New Orleans And Impact Of Katrina
Nicole Gelinas has an article in the current City Journal on how Houston has responded to the challenge of dealing with the thousands of New Orleans residents fleeing hurricane Katrina--residents who arrived here literally overnight in late August of last year. (Hat tip to The American Thinker.)
As you would expect from City Journal, the piece is a comprehensive examination of the multi-faceted problem that confronted the greater Houston area, and one area really caught my eye: the influence of Katrina victims upon the Houston crime rate.
I recently had a conversation with a liberal friend who was skeptical of any "Katrina effect" on the crime rate here. At that time I couldn't make a definitive reply, because even though I knew that the homicide count had increased, I didn't know if the homicide rate had gone up. Ms. Gelinas answers the question, and then some:
In fact, as Houston has slowly acknowledged, Katrina evacuees pushed up Houston’s rates for some crimes, particularly homicide, not just the raw number of offenses. Houston’s post-Katrina crime surge is an extension of the pre-Katrina violence of New Orleans’s criminal underclass. Before Katrina, New Orleans had the highest murder rate of any big U.S. city, almost four times Houston’s, with 58 people killed per year for every 100,000 citizens. The murder numbers Houston has racked up since Katrina prove that violent New Orleanians haven’t changed their ways, but only their scenery.Since Katrina, Houston police have identified New Orleans evacuees as either suspects or victims (or often both) in more than 30 Houston-area homicides. Of an evacuee population of 175,000, this works out to a per-capita annual murder rate of about 34 per 100,000, well above Houston’s pre-Katrina rate.
That's not good news, but it's by no means the scariest part of the article. What is truly chilling is further confirmation of the epic dysfunction of the New Orleans and Louisiana governments--in particular the criminal justice system:
How much more effective is Houston’s criminal-justice system than New Orleans’s? In New Orleans, according to its nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Commission, 7 percent of those arrested for a crime ultimately served prison time, compared with 58 percent in Houston. In New Orleans, only 12 percent of those arrested for homicide are ultimately incarcerated for that crime; in Houston, it’s 47 percent. In New Orleans, 18 percent of robbery and 12 percent of drug-distribution arrestees ultimately serve prison time; Houston’s numbers are 60 and 71 percent. Compared with national averages, Houston’s results aren’t stellar, but the city’s obvious superiority to New Orleans demonstrates how poor policing, poor prosecution, and poor sentencing nurtured the Big Easy’s criminal underclass.
Emphases are mine. And note that Gelinas is careful to point out that Houston's record is merely average, which amplifies the stupendous dysfunction of New Orleans' system.
Nicole Gelinas hits on much more than the snippet I've included here--see particularly here comparison of the Houston Independent School District and its corresponding district in New Orleans.
Highly recommended.
April 25, 2006
The Incompatibility Of Shari'a And Democracy
Miranda Devine writes in the Sydney Morning Herald about the infiltration of Australia's Muslim community by fundamentalist jihadists (hat tip to LGF).
There is a new wave of sophisticated, articulate Islamic fundamentalists trying to spread the word among moderate Muslims in Sydney. Young men, wearing regular clothes, with neatly trimmed beards, broad Australian accents and fluent in Arabic, they appear to be fully assimilated, second-generation Australians.But they belong to a political group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) that calls for the creation of a global Islamic state, or caliphate, under strict sharia law.
The message from these young men is one of division, non-assimilation and rejection of the values of the "kafir" - non-Muslims. [...]
"Islam can never coexist one under the other or one within the other," [HT organizer] Soadad [Doureihi] told the crowd [at a public lecture at earlier this month.] [...]
Soadad had a message for youth: "They must be aware of the plot of the kafir, the plot of the Western society to enforce on them a palatable Islam . . . Secularism is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim. Democracy is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim also."
Emphases mine. I'm only a third of the way through Mary Habeck's Knowing the Enemy : Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror, but I've read enough to recognize the fundamental ideas of the jihadist: that since God is the only being who deserves worship, only God is sovereign and only His laws have any significance.
It then follows naturally (in jihadist theology) that no human has any right whatsoever to make their own laws. Any system of government other than shari'a--Islamic law--is a direct affront to God and must be eliminated. Indeed, the jihadists go so far as to claim the no one can be a true Muslim unless they follow shari'a. This is very important because it effectively "excommunicates" (in the jihadists' eyes) millions of Muslims who live under moderate governments, and serves as justification for the jihadist murder of other Muslims.
Even though I haven't finished it, Habeck's book should be required reading for everyone. The knowledge she conveys is vital for the protection of all that Western civilization has accomplished; and that knowledge also allows us to recognize that the jihadists have tarred millions of moderate Muslims with their murderous brush.
To a jihadist, it's very much a case of, "Give me shari'a, or give me death."
April 24, 2006
Teachout On Armstrong
Terry Teachout favors us with a snippet from his upcoming biography of Louis Armstrong, Hotter Than That. Teachout notes that by 1927 Aaron Copland thought that jazz might be able to carry the full spectrum of human emotion: stretching out well beyond mere party music, the new American music could handle as well the emotions of "love, tragedy, remorse.” But to connect with the mainstream (and I guess there's always been a mainstream, throughout history) and to become truly popular, jazz would require an artist that combined virtuosity with charisma. Teachout:
Such a man existed, and there were those who had an inkling of his potential. When Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael first heard Louis Armstrong playing with the Creole Jazz Band in 1923, they were staggered. Carmichael set down his reaction in his memoirs: “’Why,’ I moaned, ‘why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?’ I meant it. Something as unutterably stirring as that deserved to be heard by the world.” Five years later it was being heard by the patrons of Chicago’s Savoy Ballroom, the buyers of race records, the fortunate listeners who happened to tune into Carroll Dickerson’s broadcasts from the Savoy—and no one else.Musicians, to be sure, received Armstrong’s records as life-changing revelations. When Artie Shaw first heard them, he became “obsessed with the idea that this was what you had to do. Something that was your own, that had nothing to do with anybody else….I realized I was no longer playing music, I was playing an art form, something bigger than music.” But even if the Armstrong-Hines recordings of 1928 had circulated more widely at the time of their release, it is still doubtful that they would have made much of an impression on the public at large, consisting as they do of jazz and blues tunes unevenly played by a scrappy little band dominated by two titans. Even on the sides that featured Armstrong’s appealing voice, he was restricted to wordless scat vocals, vaudevillian novelties, or blues-drenched laments like “St. James Infirmary,” the mournful folk ballad about a man who goes to the morgue to behold his lover on a slab: “I went down to St. James Infirmary/Saw my baby there/Stretched out on a long white table/So sweet, so cold, so bare.”
In order for the rest of the world to hear and embrace Armstrong, he would need a more accessible repertoire and a more flattering setting—both of which were close at hand….
Great stuff--Terry Teachout is one of my favorites critics and I can't wait for the book to come out.
Exactly How Unrealistic Is An Immigration Barrier, Anyway?
In my local mountain biking discussion group, someone posted a note concerning the Minuteman Project's proposal to use private funding to build an immigration barrier across portions of the US-Mexican border. Several others questioned the cited cost--some said it was $250 per foot while others mentioned $150. This was my rather offhand reply:
The US-Mexican border from Brownsville to San Diego runs just under 1500 miles. Lets split the difference and say the barrier comes in at $200/ft. That comes out to be a little over $1.5 billion. That's a lot of money, right?Well, for the year 2003 the Department of Health and Human Services spent $503 billion. That's over 330 times as much as the barrier would cost--and the barrier would be a one-time expenditure (not counting maintenance which would not be insignificant). HHS spends that half a trillion every single year, and it's probably more by now.
It looks like $150 per foot is the number that's being thrown around, but I can find no substantiation yet.
Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 22, 2006
Gerald Ford On Rumsfeld And The Generals
Academic Elephant notes that former president Gerald Ford has issued a pointed defense of Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Ford:
I have been extremely troubled by the efforts of a group of retired generals to force the resignation of our Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. President Bush is right to keep him in his post. It is the President’s decision - and his alone.Allowing retired generals to dictate our country’s policies and its leadership would be a dangerous precedent that would severely undermine our country’s long tradition of civilian control of the military. It would discourage civilian leaders at the Department from having frank and candid exchanges with military officers. And, today, at a time of war, such an effort sends exactly the wrong message both to our troops deployed abroad and to our enemies who are watching for any signs of weakness or self-doubt.
This is spot on. In reality, the retired generals' opinions have no more weight than any other citizen's. Better informed? Of course. More important (in the sense that their opinions should influence the chief executive)? No way.
And speaking of Gerald Ford, this is a great opportunity to declare how much I detest Chevy Chase, the connecting link between Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey in the chain of dumb-and-dumber comedians.
Posted at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)April 21, 2006
A Little Perspective On The EMP Threat
J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker has a common sense examination of the threat posed by an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack. You've probably heard of EMP touted as a worst-case scenario for a nuclear attack against the America by a jihadist country--it involves detonating a nuclear device high in the atmosphere over the US. The resulting surge in electromagnetic radiation could in theory wipe out a large percentage of our electronic infrastructure.
But as Mr. Dunn points out, there are huge technical problems that the Iranians, or anyone else, would have to overcome. The EMP-as-weapon theory originated from a Cold War-era test the US conducted in 1962 in which a 1.5 megaton weapon was detonated at an altitude of 240 miles over the South Pacific, resulting in electrical infrastructure damage over 1000 miles away in Hawaii. The most obvious problem is the nuke itself: at 1.5 megatons, this was a thermonuclear device, i.e., a hydrogen bomb. H-bomb technology is probably another order of magnitude higher on the difficulty scale than "simple" atomic bombs; this is a distinction that all too often falls through the cracks.
Not only was the 1962 test device thermonuclear, it was miniaturized enough to fit on a missile--which requires even more cutting edge technology, both for the warhead and the missile. These problems and more are laid out very cogently by Dunn.
He by no means dismisses the threat. After all, the 9/11 hijackers managed to launch a sophisticated, well coordinated attack that surprised everyone. And it's certainly within the realm of possibility that Iran could simply buy a fully-assembled, miniaturized nuke, or at least the plans to build one. Or "borrow" a team of Soviet or Chinese nuke scientists looking for work.
But Dunn does a good job of providing a counterbalance to some of the doomsday gloom.
Posted at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 20, 2006
Whither The State Department (Again)
As a commenter said:
Lets face it,unless a whole lot of people wake the fuck up real soon we're seriously screwed.
"We" meaning those of us on the Right. Strong language perhaps, but spot on.
Posted at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Bush, Immigration And The Pulse Of The People
Michelle Malkin presents some depressing data on workplace enforcement of immigration law (via PoliPundit). Even though a commenter noted that the sources for Michelle's numbers might be mixed, the trend doesn't lie: even considering only the Bush years starting in 2000, the number of "workplace arrests" has steadily fallen from 953 in that year to 159 in 2004. And even more telling is the evidence that the "catch-and-release" strategy is still firmly in place. Malkin:
Just ask local and federal law enforcement officers in the Galveston, Texas, area, where in January of this year, following a collaborative effort between local police and area ICE agents, some 62 illegal aliens were caught at a day labor site...and released after local open-borders activists from LULAC kicked up a fuss and Washington ordered its local ICE agents to cave in. It happens every day.
Something else that happens every day is the organized effort exerted by the Catholic church to flout our immigration laws.
Every day of every week of every year, a newly arrived illegal immigrant, usually a young man at the end of a long and dangerous journey, knocks on Mark Zwick's door at Casa Juan Diego[, a] small complex of buildings a couple of miles west of downtown Houston. [...]Zwick lets them in. He gives them a bed, food, medical help if they need it. He will help them get their first job. If they are on their way elsewhere, Zwick will pay their fare and give them a ride to the bus station.
So what if it's a crime to harbor illegal immigrants, to transport them, to help them avoid apprehension. Those are the laws of man, which do not apply if they contradict the laws of God.[...]
Catholic social teaching states that there is no such thing as an "illegal" immigrant.. All people have a God-given right, more fundamental than the rights of a nation to control its borders, to seek better lives anywhere they can
It is this doctrine that has allowed the Catholic Church in America, from the Conference of Bishops down to lay activists such as Mark and Louise Zwick, to become perhaps the most powerful voice among opponents of efforts to restrict immigration and stem the tide of illegal and legal immigrants.
Emphases mine. Allowing this kind of blatant, organized law-breaking is another illustration of the disconnect between the Bush administration (and therefore DHC) and the electorate--and that electorate includes not only the conservative base, but also a lot of centrists both Republican and Democrat. My mother is a devout Catholic and unredeemable FDR Democrat yet she has been expressing exasperation to me over the constant haranguing of her priest on this subject. Democrat or no, her common sense tells her what the score is.
I wish GWB could. Perhaps this report indicates some positive developments. (Again, thanks to PoliPundit.) While I'm not about to forget what Karl Rove has done for Republicans, I think the immigration issue has enough potential energy to knock a big chunk out of the good work he's done.
April 19, 2006
Michael Yon Reports
Michael Yon has a new and extensive post up (hat tip Mark at Decision '08), in which he analyzes the current situation in Iraq and explains his view that Iraq has been in a "civil war" for quite some time now. Yon is clear-eyed about the massive problems that still confront both Americans and Iraqis:
The biggest threat to this mission, and by extension to the future stability of this region and the long term security of the United States and our allies, is and always has been the inability to see, hear and communicate the truth to the American people and our allies. In the final analysis, it is not going to matter if the French support our mission in Iraq, but once Americans turn away from their soldiers in the field, we’ve lost.[...]
But he does hold out for the possibility of success:
We are not getting the truth through our media, or our civilian leadership. Yes, Iraq is in civil war, but there is no doubt in my mind, not the slightest doubt, that the new Iraqi security forces are becoming stronger all the time. It’s not certain if they are strong enough to hold back the enemy on their own or if we need to increase the efforts of our military in a coordinated measure. But the fact that an American general recently invited me to see that progress is an indicator that our top military leaders are confident. An Army general would not have invited me back to Iraq to see a fiasco, and the mere fact of his invitation is a ray of hope.
Mike's post is a must read, as usual. And the photos he includes are perhaps even more powerful--the caption to one showing US troops with smiling Iraqi children: "Our soldiers shouldn’t have to wait til these Iraqi kids get old enough to tell the world about the difference they’ve made."
No kidding.
Posted at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Just In Case...
you haven't seen it, Howard Kurtz has a great profile of Brit Hume in the Washington Post. (via The Corner).
We sure could use a few more Brits Humes in the media.
April 18, 2006
The Making Of A Marine Officer
Last night I finished reading Nathaniel Fick's One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. I've been in a bad habit of starting books and not finishing them; that was not a problem with this one.
Nate Fick retraces his journey from a civilian majoring in the classics at Dartmouth to Marine officer, through 9/11 and into Afghanistan--and that story is fascinating in and of itself. But the emotional crux comes with Frick's account of his leadership of his elite recon platoon in the initial assault on Iraq.
Fick keeps his account largely apolitical: it is clear he loves his country and honors its founding ideals. But he has very little to say about the larger political debates that shaped the war, and his neutral references to the President and Secretary of Defense illuminate his dedication to the idea of civilian control of our military.
By second half of the book I was impressed with the thoroughness of all the Marines' training; the author had convinced me that he and his unit were unsurpassed in the world in professionalism. And so it was curious that as I followed Fick and his recon platoon across Iraq, a sense of unease grew in my gut. I knew of course, from reading countless other war memoirs, that combat scrambles the best plans; that being on the receiving end of machine gun, mortar and artillery fire can stress even the best-trained individual; and that no one is perfect, neither the men under your command nor the officers above you, nor yourself. I found myself wondering that if an elite unit is dealing with questionable tactical planning and officers with dubious combat leadership, what's up with the rest of the military?
Nate is honest about his own mistakes as well as those of his superiors--and clearly lots of things went right instead of wrong. But by the time Fick got back to the States, I was sick of the confusion and tension--I was almost ready to let the Middle East consume itself in violence, without American involvement.
But in closing, Fick recounts his visit with a friend to the Antietam battlefield--and his posing of the question, "Was it a waste?"
"No," she replied. "They won, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. They freed the slaves, the way you freed Afghanistan." [...]Staring down at the water, I measured my words, running through a justification I'd given myself a thousand times before. The good was abstract. The good didn't feel as good as the bad felt bad. It wasn't the good that kept me up at night.
Fick comes to the conclusion that seems to be nearly universal among combat veterans: he loves his country, but ultimately he fought for his men.
I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn't beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's not why we did it. We fought for each other.
Maybe that's not the answer that will warm a neocon's heart, but that's not Lieutenant Fick's concern. His job was to accomplish his mission and fight his unit professionally and as humanely as possible. As I read somewhere, a Marine drill instructor said, "Let the other SOB die for his country, we want you alive!"
I'm sure there are other books that effectively convey the Iraq experience, but this one is a great place to start. Highly recommended.
A Role Model For Harvard, et al.
Glenn Reynolds highlights a university's exemplary behavior in the face of a free-speech conflict.
Bravo, indeed.
Posted at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 16, 2006
Art Tatum, Oh Yeah!
The virtuosity of jazz pianist Art Tatum was, and still is, astonishing to behold (according to legend, classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz was brought to tears by Tatum's prodigious dexterity).
Terry Teachout highlights this video clip of Tatum playing Yesterdays on TV in 1954.
Even though I noodled around on the guitar for years, I've come to the (highly arguable) conclusion that the piano is the ultimate instrument for jazz. Even though both instruments are among the very few that can play both single-note runs and chords, I think the piano has the edge because it allows use of all the digits of each hand. The piano's extreme versatility suits jazz's almost limitless improvisational demands.
In any event, Tatum is beyond amazing.
Posted at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 15, 2006
Once Again, The Big Tax Lie Goes Unchallenged
MSNBC reports on a poll that reveals how clueless most Americans are when it comes to the US tax system (hat tip Macsmind):
People think the middle class, the self-employed and small businesses pay too much in taxes, the poll found. And they think those with high incomes and big businesses don’t pay enough. The survey was conducted in the days before the mid-April deadline for filing income tax returns.
That's spot on, transparently obvious--a sterling job of journalism in exposing this news. Democrats have been hammering this canard for election after election, and so we continue to read the MSNBC story with bated breath to get to the payoff where the record is set straight...only it never comes.
The oh-so-professional journalists once again leave the big lie sitting untouched, and it's up to MacRanger to point out the truth:
Fact is that The Top 50% pay 96.54% of All Income Taxes (The top 1% pay more than a third: 34.27%).
And that's old news.
April 14, 2006
Hoist With Their Own Words
John B. Dwyer at the American Thinker provides an invaluable history of some of the second guessing, hindsight-enabled critics of the Iraq war. Here's but a sample:
Okay then, who said this?The United Nations believes that Saddam Hussein may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX (nerve gas)… we face a clear and present danger… terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York City had in mind the destruction and deaths of 250,000 people….Answer: Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen on November 15, 1997.
Who said this?
The world hasn’t seen, except maybe since Hitler, somebody quite as evil as Saddam Hussein. If you don’t stop a horrific dictator before he gets started too far, he can do untold damage….Answer Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright on February 20, 1998.
And so on and so forth. The whole piece is well worth your time.
Many of us on the Right admit that there is plenty to debate about how the war has been prosecuted. Unfortunately those types of discussion make up about 1% of what gets broadcast into the ether about Iraq--the rest is craven political opportunism in its most naked form.
How contemptible.
April 13, 2006
John Bolton: En Fuego!
Charles Johnson says John Bolton continues to rock, and who can deny it? Charles notes that Bolton has engineered a blockage of a depressingly familiar UN censure of Israel. From Reuters:
The United States on Thursday blocked a U.N. Security Council statement drafted by Arab nations and aimed at putting pressure on Israel to stop military strikes on Palestinian targets.U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the draft, even after three days of intense negotiations, “was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so, and needlessly so.” [...]
Washington does not have formal veto power when it comes to council statements. But it was nonetheless able to block the draft single-handedly because council rules require that statements be unanimous supported by all 15 of its members. During Thursday’s closed-door negotiations, the United States effectively killed the text by seeking amendment after amendment until Qatar, the council’s sole Arab member, gave up the fight.
Asked by reporters to confirm that Washington alone had opposed issuing the statement, Bolton responded, “If I were the only holdout, I’d be proud of that fact.”
Emphasis mine.
Gee, Bolton stopped the UN from criticizing a country for defending itself. The UN is a paragon of morality, isn't it?
Roberts, Alito, Bolton. Just imagine the what we could get done if we had a dozen more people like these in Washington.
MEChA's Agenda
Dave at Logical Meme highlights an article in Human Events by Rep. Charlie Norwood, who surveys the pro-illegal immigration movement and finds that mainstream organizations like The National Council of La Raza are giving cover to virulently anti-American reconquista groups:
Key among the secondary organizations is the radical racist group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA), one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West. [...]MEChA isn't at all shy about their goals, or their views of other races. Their founding principles are contained in these words in "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" (The Spiritual Plan for Aztlan):
"In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal gringo invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny. ... Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. ... We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada."
That closing two-sentence motto is chilling to everyone who values equal rights for all. It says: "For The Race everything. Outside The Race, nothing."
Emphasis mine. I guess MEChA has nothing to say about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Given MEChA's hatred of all things European, I eagerly await their renouncement of Spanish as the native language of the future state of Aztlan.
Posted at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)April 12, 2006
Will The Republicans Seize The Day On Illegal Immigration?
John Hawkins is having the same thoughts as I am about the impact of the immigration issue on the fall elections--for the most part. I agree with John the Republicans are mismanaging their leadership of Congress by missing the overwhelmingly clear message being broadcast by their electorate: "We want the borders secured!"
I disagree with John, and the House, in that I'm against classifying illegals as felons. What are we going to do, book them and insert them into our overloaded criminal justice system? Our jails and courts can't handle the strain, and thus there wouldn't even be any deterrent factor involved. I don't want to see them in court, I want them kept out in the first place, and immediately deported if caught crossing illegally. And the word "felony" sounds needlessly punitive and polarizing to me.
I'm not really mad at the dirt poor guy who breaks our laws by crossing the border illegally--given his choices and future I might well do the same. I'll tell you who I am mad at: the illegals who once here demand that the US act as if it were a province of Mexico; I'm mad at Vicente Fox and the other smug and corrupt Mexican socialists who have perpetuated their country's third world status, and who lecture the US while ignoring Mexico's own brutal class prejudice; I'm mad at the decrepit labor unions and the retro-Stalinist emotional cripples who inhabit International ANSWER, both of whom are using these illegals for their own purposes; I'm mad at those in the Marxist liberal arts academy who for their own reasons actually believe the reconquista/Aztlan meme; and I'm mad at the Republicans whose leadership on this issue has quite honestly been more reminiscent of Jacques Chirac than Ronald Reagan.
John is right in acknowledging the potent electoral force that is (still) there for the taking; on the other hand if the Republicans don't get their act together and tap that potential for the good, this issue will explode in their faces and they and their Congressional majority will be gone.
April 11, 2006
Palestinians Ask UN For Permission To Continue Unilateral Attacks
The Hamas-led Palestinian government has protested to the UN about the lethality of Israel's self-defense. Ed Morrissey notes an AP report:
The Palestinians called on the U.N. Security Council Monday to take urgent action to stop what it called an escalating military campaign by Israeli forces that has led to a dramatic increase in Palestinian casualties in recent days.
Hamas has done nothing, of course, to stop the attacks upon Israel by rockets launched from Palestinian territory. Israel continues to defend itself with typical effectiveness--Palestinian rocket maker Iyad Abu Alinin was recently eliminated by the Israelis along with four colleagues. Tragically, Alinin's three-year-old son was also killed in the attack. The deaths of innocent children will cease when the Arabs realize that Israel has a right to exist. But as Ed notes:
When asked, the Hamas leadership insists that the Palestinians retain the right to fight against occupation. If that's the case, then the Israelis have the right to fight back.
Hamas can insist on any number of points, but the reality might intervene. From The Independent:
The inner security cabinet decided to continue freezing the payment of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority, which admitted yesterday that it was unable to pay the wages of 140,000 public employees. The United States and the European Union last week suspended aid to the Hamas government, which refuses to recognize Israel or renounce violence.
It has been predicted that Hamas might have trouble converting its underground tactics into official state policy, and its mewling to the Security Council indicates those predictions were accurate. As a commenter to Ed's post put it succinctly:
The UN cannot save Hamas.Posted at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
April 10, 2006
The Sixty Four Dollar Question
Cliff May notes the huge number of protesters marching in simultaneous demonstrations in more than sixty cities, and wonders
This is a remarkable organization feat. Who’s behind it?It requires a lot of money to put together an effort like this. Who’s supplying it?
And what is their real agenda?
Do the MSM have any interest in such questions?
The MSM didn't bother with those questions back in the '80s when protests were organized to prevent deployment of the Pershing II missiles in Europe, and the MSM isn't going to start asking those questions now. But John Hinderaker has asked the questions, and he has some answers:
One of the groups organizing tomorrow's demonstrations is a Communist organization called International A.N.S.W.E.R. [...]Last Wednesday, there was an A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting in Washington, D.C. at which A.N.S.W.E.R.'s National Coordinator, Brian Becker, and Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director of Latino Movement USA, spoke about illegal immigration as an aspect of the socialist movement and about the upcoming demonstrations. [...]
Unfortunately for A.N.S.W.E.R., the meeting was attended by a couple of bloggers from Vital Perspective, who taped the meeting and reported on it on their site. They shared their audiotape of the proceedings with us, and we have posted a short excerpt on Power Line Video. In this excerpt, you can hear Becker wonder whether there are undercover policemen present (he forgot about bloggers), pose a tough question to his audience, and speculate about how illegal immigrants could be the "catalyst for a broader class struggle, even possibly a revolutionary struggle."
News flash for Brian Becker: the illegals aren't interested your stupid, worn out class struggle. They want all the products of a well-functioning free market economy based in a liberal democracy that honors property rights and the rule of law--products that neither you nor their native country could provide if you "struggle" for the next thousand years.
Update from Byron York, who attended the march in Washington D.C.:
By the way, I looked for Brian Becker, the veteran organizer for the neo-Communist group International ANSWER, which has been involved in some big immigrant events. I didn't see him, and one rally staffer I spoke to seemed anxious to suggest that ANSWER had no role in this particular gathering. However, there were a lot of yellow "Amnistia -- Full Rights for All Immigrants!" signs, which were produced by what is called the ANSWER Coalition.Posted at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
An Instructive Hypothetical Situation
According to Jack Fowler at the Corner, Tucker Carlson on his show The Situation relayed the following email. It's worth reprinting it in full.
Enter Mexico illegally. Never mind immigration quotas, visas, international law, or any of that nonsense.Once there, demand that the local government provide free medical care for you and your entire family.
Demand bilingual nurses and doctors.
Demand free bilingual government forms, bulletins, etc.
Keep your American identity strong. Fly Old Glory from your rooftop, or proudly display it in your front window, or on your car bumper.
Speak only English at home and in public and insist that your children do likewise.
Demand classes on American culture in the Mexican school system.
Demand a Mexican driver license. This will afford other legal rights and will go far to legitimize your unauthorized, illegal presence in Mexico.
Drive around with no liability insurance.
Insist that Mexican law enforcement teach English to all its officers.
Good luck!
Good luck is right. The Mexican authorities wouldn't put up with that kind of behavior for a second. As they shouldn't. As we shouldn't. And yet we do. In this one way, it would be nice if we were a little more like Mexico.
Of course, the reconquistas and their enablers aren't interested in the inherent logic contained in this email.
April 09, 2006
Denial Of Reality...Again
Call it spring fever. Companies feeling upbeat about the economy yearned to add to their employment rolls - and they did.Employers added 211,000 jobs to their payrolls in March. That helped push the unemployment rate down to 4.7 percent, matching its lowest point in 4 1/2 years.
"Call it spring fever fever"? Yeah, sure...that's what it is. I'd call it denial of reality, by the Left. There's no way it would be those Tax Cuts For The Rich (tm), now would it? Of course it wouldn't, because it seems like every time taxes are cut, revenues to the federal government go up. But we mustn't let those stinking facts get in the way of our little personal fantasies, now would we?
(Sorry for the pissed off mood--the reason is a little too close to home to cast in stone. So there it is.)
Posted at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 07, 2006
Congression Republicans: Flirting With A November Death Wish
DJ Drummond at Polipundit notes that the Senate avoided a train wreck by failing to pass an immigration bill.
At the same time I think the Republicans also sidetracked (seemingly unintentionally) something else: certain annihilation in November. If this pathetic kludge of a bill had passed Congressional Republicans would be perfectly teed up for a Tiger Woods-like wallop by the voters in the coming election. (My seven year old could spot the utter uselessness of specifying time-spent-in-country as a condition for distributing benefits--every illegal in the country would have suddenly spent exactly 4 years 364 days here, etc.)
Meanwhile Charles Krauthammer (via LGF) has the sequence right: First A Wall -- Then Amnesty.
April 06, 2006
The Knowledge Deficit
Since the Whole Language method of reading instruction has been described as the rote memorization of every word in the English language; and since the basic premise of WL is that learning to read is as natural as learning to speak; and since WL is still the dominant method used in public schools, it stands to reason that kids arriving in first grade with a deficiency in their spoken vocabulary will be at a severe disadvantage when reading instruction (such as it is) begins: their capability to memorize will never match their increasing spoken vocabulary.
E.D. Hirsch examines this ongoing problem in his new book The Knowledge Deficit. Linda Seebach recently reviewed it (hat tip to Joanne Jacobs):
Hirsch's point _ not a new one, of course, but with each passing year, it becomes clearer that he is right _ is that understanding what you read depends on your being able to fill in from your own knowledge all the things the writer assumes readers will know and therefore doesn't mention.Learning to decode _ that is, to identify printed words with their spoken equivalents _ is challenging enough for many children, especially if their teachers have been stuffed full of romantic nonsense about how easy and natural reading is. (It isn't.) But it isn't even close to sufficient for successful academic performance beyond the early elementary grades.
Many disadvantaged children enter school with less exposure to the kind of language they will hear there, and significantly smaller vocabularies, than their more fortunate peers. That already makes learning to read harder for them. But matters get worse as they get older, because by fourth grade or so, children begin to acquire both new words and new knowledge from what they read.
Emphases mine. Reading performance drops after the first few grades because the kids' capacity for retaining memorized whole words has been overwhelmed. And since they don't know how to employ phonetic decoding to decipher longer words, they wander off down the path that leads to adult functional illiteracy.
And note: "progressive" educators will jump to their feet to protest, "But we promote a balanced approach to literacy instruction--we use phonics when appropriate!"
That won't do. A "balanced literacy program" is simply a sop thrown by "progressives" to parents who are concerned with the habitually lousy reading scores generated by American kids. If a program starts a child with whole words, it's Whole Language--no matter when phonics are introduced. You can't require a child to write a story before you've taught him how to hold a pencil; likewise phonemic instruction must come first.
Seebach says that advantaged children learn between 2,000 and 5,000 words a year from the ages of two through seventeen, so we can expect such a child who's just entering first grade to know about 12,000 words, on average. Yet Diane McGuinness (1) claims there is an upper limit of about 2,000 words when test subjects are asked to match abstract symbols with words. In other words, if a child in a WL classroom is given little or no knowledge of phonemic building blocks than she is forced to treat the entire word as an abstract symbol, and with a vocabulary numbering in the tens of thousands of words she will be at a disadvantage right off the bat in the WL memorization game. By the time she reaches third grade her spoken vocabulary will have continued to increase at several thousand words a year, far outstripping her powers of word memorization.
And of course the foregoing is all based on the abilities of an advantaged child--one who grows up in a home rich in literacy. For a disadvantaged kid attending an inner-city school, the problems will be compounded exponentially.
(1) Diane McGuinness, Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It, 1st Touchstone edition, 1997, p. 38.
April 05, 2006
How Deep Can We Sink? Maybe I Shouldn't Ask...
"Un. Be. Lievable."
That's John Hawkins reaction to this story in the Washington Times (via Powerline), detailing the blocking by Democrats of an amendment to the immigration bill now under consideration that would bar illegal aliens convicted of felonies from obtaining US citizenship.
Yes, you read that correctly: the Democrats want to include those convicted of serious crimes in their plan to grant amnesty to those that have already blatantly flouted the laws of the sovereign United States. What sort of crimes? Hawkins (all emphases mine):
Granted, this would not apply to rapists or murderers. But here are some of the crimes that Democrats believe people should be able to commit without disqualifying themselves from being considered for American citizenship;"(B)urglary, assault and battery, possession of an unregistered, sawed-off shotgun, kidnapping and alien smuggling."
It appears to me that the arguments made by the pro-illegal immigration side all are based on one lynchpin assumption: that the United States has no inherent right to make laws regulating its own borders; any laws so enacted need not be adhered to by those wishing to come here from Mexico.
Every pro-illegal pundit starts by ignoring the basic illegality of the immigrants' status. This is more than just an argument about a possibly prejudicial label; it strikes straight through to the subject of "what are the inherent rights of a sovereign state?"
It should be clear to everyone: the US holds the legal, moral and ethical high ground in this debate.
But Harry Reid continues to sink further into the pit of abject pathetic petulant weaseldom. From the Times story:
Republican Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas restated the purpose of their amendment and appeared incredulous that anyone would object to it."I do not have to explain in any more detail than what I have as why I don't want to move forward," Mr. Reid said. "I don't agree with the amendment. I don't think it's going to benefit this legislation that is pending before the Senate and I'm going to do what I can to prevent a vote on it."
Later, Mr. Reid added, "We're not going to allow amendments like Kyl-Cornyn to take out what we believe is the goodness of this bill."
I beg your pardon, Senator Reid? You don't have to explain yourself? Oh, but I think you do--I'm not at all grasping the idea of "the goodness of this bill".
There's no other word for my reaction to this than the one John Hawkins used.
Unbelievable.
Blankley On DeLay
As press secretary for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Tony Blankley had ample opportunity for watching Tom DeLay work. Today in Townhall.com Blankley examines DeLay's career in the context of the cut-throat nature of political party leadership. Good stuff as always from Blankley.
Posted at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)April 04, 2006
Rumsfeld On Weinberger
Academic Elephant reports on Donald Rumsfeld's eulogy for Caspar Weinberger, and highlights Rumsfeld's conclusion:
His goal was an era of hope and peace, one in which the people of Eastern Europe lived in freedom, one in which the Berlin Wall no longer divided families, but instead existed only in memory, or its shards sold as souvenirs of a discredited era.Today we live in that world, a world made safer and freer by cold warriors like Cap Weinberger.
If it wasn't for bloggers like AE, Weinberger's death, along with his contributions to ending the Cold War, would likely have passed without notice--after all, the mainstream media still has a problem with Cap's boss.
Conservative Outrage Plays Into McKinney's Hands
Bob Weir in The American Thinker dissects Rep. Cynthia McKinney's serial flouting of the House security rules and her attempt to get away with it (hat tip to Lorie Byrd):
Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia congresswoman who hauled off and slugged a Capitol Police officer, said the officer started the incident by “inappropriately touching and stopping” her after she walked past a security checkpoint at a House office building.“Let me be clear. This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black (emphasis added) congresswoman,” McKinney said.
Are you as tired as I am of hearing people use their race, gender, religion, immigration status, ad nauseam as a get-out-of-jail card every time they break the law? It’s quite evident that we have fostered a culture of spoiled brats who have learned how to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their illegal, immoral and unethical behavior.
My take on this is that Cynthia McKinney is concerned only with the impression she makes upon the few thousands of voters back in Georgia who are responsible for the position she holds. I think every single action, every single pronouncement that McKinney makes is crafted to maintain her image; she is all about staying elected, and she cares nothing about her supposed service to the congress--and by extension the people--of all the United States.
Bob is right, of course, but McKinney cares not a whit about the opinion of Bob Weir, myself or anyone outside her home district; in fact the more outrage she can generate, the better, as long as it doesn't upset the forces that keep her in office. She requires a stage, and she must maintain her position at all costs. That means playing to the basest and most reactionary emotions of her constituents.
Hell, if FDR himself arose from his grave and admonished McKinney to mend her publicity-hound ways, I bet she'd pull a Bella Abzug and tell him to go screw himself--that would play so well on the local news back home in Georgia.
Posted at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)