From David Frum: Why the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth ads are so effective
http://aei.org/news/filter.all,newsID.21086/news_detail.asp
And I simply can’t resist
including a quote used in Frum’s column to help explain why George W. Bush is so much more endearing than John Kerry.
We all know how Kerry handled his acceptance speech at the Boston Convention – Johnny One Note (supposedly reporting
for duty), and he never dealt with his complicated Vietnam War-era service and DISSERVICE at all. Because he couldn’t
or wouldn’t. However, the Bush acceptance speech at the Philadelphia Convention in 2000 had this line:
"I believe in grace because I've seen it, and peace because I've felt it, and forgiveness because I've needed it."
Nuff said.
**********************************************
August 25, 2004
Please review this commentary
from the Cafe Hayek website on the ability of modern folk to find A Dark Lining around Every Silver Cloud.
This interview
is evidence that bright people can find the downside of any piece of good fortune – but that the same bright people
do not necessarily possess the wisdom to weigh the downside properly against the upside.
It’s a national disease
evident across many different stratums of society.
**********************************************
Michelle Malkin has had an interesting back and forth with folks on the question of
interning Japanese during World War II. Burl Burlingame, a military historian who disagrees with her on the merits, nevertheless
sent her these sage words about that moment in history:
. . . I think
internment [the West Coast evacuation/relocation] was a dumb idea that backfired and was counterproductive. It also invited
criticism that, no matter how well-founded, still resonates. In a free society, guilt can be used as weapon.
On the other hand, second-guessing is a scholarly sport these days. Decisions made under the stress
of crisis never consider the long-range implications, particularly those made by military personnel, who are trained to act,
not react. It "seemed like a good idea at the time" to relocate Japanese-Americans, and just let the Constitutional chips
fall where they lay. There was a coast to protect and inadequate resources to do so.
Here's a simple point often overlooked -- internment would never have happened if Japan had not
attacked the United States.
Some of the responders
on your website downplay the presence of Japanese submarines off the West Coast. As my book "Advance Force" points out, these
craft did not have the incredible success the German subs did off the East Coast, but they also had incredible distances to
travel, fewer resources to prosecute attacks and a battle plan that, for the most part, ignored commercial traffic. Still,
the Imperial Japanese Navy was sinking shipping right up to the end of the war-- and let's not forget the mission to destroy
the Panama Canal in the summer of 1945, nor the thousands of balloon bombs that carried incendiary weapons and were being
readied to carry anthrax when the war ended.
War is a mean business.
It is directed by people who want to kill the enemy. It is not spun for long-term public-relations value . . . No one was
in any mood to assuage armchair critics 60 years in the future.
Common damn sense. Not everything
has to be made into such a raw issue.
**********************************************
I also am intrigued by this post
(Kerry Hasn't Changed) from the ChicagoBoyz website comparing the performance of John O’Neill
and John Kerry from the 1971 televised “debate” on the Dick Cavett Show. Not surprisingly, Kerry’s assumptions
have not stood the test of time well:
Last night I watched
C-SPAN's broadcast of John Kerry and John O'Neill on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. Both O'Neill and Kerry came across as very
sharp, very good debaters. Both scored rhetorical points. O'Neill was effective at putting Kerry on the spot about his generalizations
about U.S. soldiers committing
war atrocities. Kerry was smoother, more polished, more confident, and on some occasions was able to use his confidence to
make O'Neill look like he was pushing too hard. (Nice trick.)
I was struck by
the substantive differences between Kerry and O'Neill's worldviews, and by the extent to which their respective arguments
have held up since. O'Neill cautioned that precipitate withdrawal of American forces and support from South Vietnam could lead to a bloodbath
-- a suggestion that Kerry scoffed at. The passage of time reveals that O'Neill was prescient and Kerry was naive.
Kerry also seemed
confident that the Vietnamese communists could be counted on to negotiate in good faith about the return of U.S. prisoners. Again, Kerry
looks naive from the vantage of history. And he seemed to miss the big picture: that South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos -- imperfect but relatively
open societies -- were under attack by communist imperialists determined to impose totalitarian rule. Where O'Neill was leery
of handing victories to our enemies, Kerry talked as though he believed the communists would stop bothering everyone if only
the United States would withdraw from
the region, and if only the South Vietnamese government would take some civics lessons. In Kerry's view it seemed to be all
about us. Needless to say, the 1970s and 1980s, with Vietnamese boat people, the horrors of reeducation camps and the Khmer
Rouge's genocide, the communist expansion into Africa and Central America, the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan and the failure of "detente"
in U.S.-USSR relations, were not kind to Kerry's view.
I don't know what
O'Neill's like now, but my impression of Kerry is that his worldview hasn't changed significantly since 1971. He still sounds
like that old broken record from the Dick Cavett Show -- confidently posturing, making sweeping negative generalizations about
the U.S., assuming good motives of other countries, avoiding specifics, and trying to be on both sides of an issue when someone
calls him on one of his generalizations. This kind of behavior may be tolerable in a debate, where all that matters is scoring
points, but a president has to be able to understand the big picture and make decisions. Kerry didn't, and still doesn't,
appear able to do that.
Not good for John Kerry. Not good at all.
**********************************************
August 24, 2004
Fantastic column in the London
Telegraph today from Mark Steyn about John Kerry, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the Democratic
Party/Mainstream Media/Hollywood Elite response to the Swift Boat veterans.
How cocooned
from reality do you have to be to think you can transform one of the most divisive periods in American history – in
which you were largely responsible for much of the divisiveness – into a sappy, happy-clappy, soft-focus patriotic blur
without anybody objecting? Most Vietnam veterans of my acquaintance loathe John Kerry, and, if he
wasn't aware of that, he's too out of it to be President.
Boo-yaaaaaahhhhhh!
**********************************************
For a succinct explanation for
why I felt it necessary to leave the Democratic Party, a British Marxist does a pretty good job of explaining it. Take it
away, Norm Geras of normblog:
The belittling
of the strengths and virtues of the political democracies which exist, along with a willingness to recognize as democratic, or at least supportable, political movements that wear it on their face that they are not;
a readiness to contemplate political alliances or, short of that, broader alignments of moral solidarity in which common cause
is made with movements which do not feel bound by democratic or related standards; a willingness to make apology for, or mutter
evasively or remain silent about, means of political struggle which are morally criminal, and to overlook that there are norms
of both ethics and law constraining what is permissible even in pursuit of a just cause; the
displaying, consequently, of a light-minded disregard for what are now universally applicable human rights requirements, except
when they are invoked to criticize Western governments - all of these tendencies indicate that, despite the terrible experiences
of the twentieth century, for a significant sector of the left the commitment to democracy is skin-deep; this part of the
left has still not assimilated one of the primary lessons of those experiences, that without a foundational and consistent
attachment to the norms of democracy and human rights the left is lost.
What accounts
for the failure to assimilate that elementary lesson? Once again, I don't pretend to offer an overall answer. Impressionistically,
however, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that part of the reason is a kind of anti-imperialist reductionism. This is the battle, the enemy, of the left: imperialism, as embodied first and last
in the US; and as supposedly embodied today in George W. Bush. Every
other question, every principle, becomes subordinate to the need to oppose it and him - to the sacrifice of the credibility,
reputation and sometimes moral standing of those so governed.
There are a hell of a lot of
Democrats walking around afraid to say that they are at war with the United States of America, but they most definitely are. And I’m sick
of carrying the water for them.
**********************************************
Then, here comes Wretchard, explaining the dilemma John Kerry and the Democrats now face:
If any proof
were needed that the Sixties were dead, the subterfuge of the Democratic Party would be Exhibit A. Instead of running under
their own colors, or barring that, changing them, they have decided to sail beneath a false flag, as if under a cloud of shame.
That in itself is tacit admission that they can no longer walk in their own guise;
and what is worse that they cannot look themselves in the face, nor go into battle daring to win nor willing to lose in their
own name, as is the mark of men.
As Zell Miller said, A National Party No More.
**********************************************
August 23, 2004
A review
of the August timeline for John Kerry, and it ain’t pretty. But the mainstream media
is making their best effort to protect the public from realizing John F’n Kerry is a fraud.
**********************************************
From the
Mail & Guardian in South
Africa:
Africa Roundup
**********************************************
What is it about women and food
and sampling the stuff at the grocery? Good discussion from Michael of the 2blowhards website.
**********************************************
Jim Kalb, a “traditional”
conservative or paleo-con based at Yale University, tries to outline a primary problem with post-modern liberal thought
in a piece titled Zen and the Art of Anti-Liberalism, where he says:
Liberalism
can be understood as a view that evolved
and triumphed in a contentious political environment through a sort of philosophical jiu-jitsu.
It wins all arguments by not arguing but rather using its opponents' own force against them. Liberalism claims it has no points
of its own to make, it accepts all your points just as they are, and all it wants is to be able to do so, which requires you
to agree to the general principle that all points everyone makes get accepted just as they are. Thereafter, of course, it
turns out that for all points to be accepted equally everything has to be run by experts who claim to be neutral facilitators
but nonetheless end up deciding everything important — in other words, by intrusive liberals. By then it's too late.
You've already in effect agreed than none of your points can have practical consequences, because that would deny equality
to other inconsistent points and oppress their proponents.
He then lists “a collection
of [nine] pointed questions designed to dramatize the gap between what liberalism claims to be and what of necessity it is”
that really do serve to focus the debate concerning modern society. Is this debate even being engaged at our HBCU’s?
**********************************************
And while we’re at it,
don’t miss this discussion regarding what modern folk Worship. Power (success, influence, organization) or Desire (sex, pleasure,
consumerism) or Form (creativity, artistic or otherwise). Hmmmmm.
**********************************************
August 20, 2004
I have to say
I was ashamed FOR Chris Matthews Thursday night
on MSNBC Hardball. He put on a ridiculous display, literally CROSS EXAMINING Thurlow as if John Kerry was his best-paying
client. He did this by putting words into Thurlows' mouth and rather shabbily trying to bait him into a position or two that
clearly was not his.
Absolutely shameful; and to top
it all off, the man (Matthews) had the audacity to ask for TANGIBLE PROOF that John Kerry had some political game plan re:
his service in Vietnam to go after medals quickly and get out of country quickly.
Huh? Tangible proof? Sounds like
Mullah Omar in Afghanistan playing his little charade prior to the Green Berets arriving -- remember him asking over and over,
with respect to providing sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, What proof do you have? What proof? As if we were in a court of law
and required to demonstrate facts above and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt.
Absurd!
Here's what I want some reporter,
military or otherwise, to acquire -- [1] a list of all service members granted
three or more Purple Hearts in Vietnam, [2] a list showing, on average, how long it took those warriors to earn those Purple
Hearts, [3] a list showing how many of those Purple Heart winners ended their tour early (and how early), and [4] a list detailing
how many of those three-times or more Purple Heart winners were enlisted vs.
commissioned officers.
That ought to begin to shed some
quite clear and objective light on this subject, don't you think?
**********************************************
August 19, 2004
Wow! Has anyone seen this response
from Larry Thurlow, one of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth members who has criticized John Kerry’s record of service
in Vietnam? Today, the Washington Post made a rather slick
attempt to discredit the man (by using the citation from his award for valor during the incident in question) but Thurlow
was ready for them and has fired back, with gusto:
Thurlow: I am convinced
that the language used in my citation for a Bronze Star was language taken directly from John Kerry’s report
which falsely described the action on the Bay Hap River as action that saw small arms fire and automatic weapons
fire from both banks of the river.
To this day, I can say without a doubt in my mind, along with other accounts from
my shipmates—there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the
river that day.
I submitted no paperwork for a medal nor did I file an after action report describing the
incident. To my knowledge, John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the
incidents that occurred on the river that day.
It was not until I had left the Navy—approximately three months
after I left the service—that I was notified that I was to receive a citation for my actions on that day.
I believed
then as I believe now that I received my Bronze Star for my efforts to rescue the injured crewmen from swift boat number three
and to conduct damage control to prevent that boat from sinking.
My boat and several other swift boats went to the
aid of our fellow swift boat sailors whose craft was adrift and taking on water. We provided immediate rescue and damage control
to prevent boat three from sinking and to offer immediate protection and comfort to the injured crew.
After the mine
exploded, leaving swift boat three dead in the water, John Kerry’s boat, which was on the opposite
side of the river, fled the scene. US Army Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who was on Kerry’s
boat at the time, fell off the boat and into the water. Kerry’s boat returned several minutes later—under no hail
of enemy gunfire—to retrieve Rassmann from the river only seconds before another boat was going to pick him up.
Kerry
campaign spokespersons have conflicting accounts of this incident—the latest one being that Kerry’s boat did leave
but only briefly and returned under withering enemy fire to rescue Mr. Rassmann. However, none of the other boats
on the river that day reported enemy fire nor was anyone wounded by small arms action. The only damage on that day
was done to boat three—a result of the underwater mine. None of the other swift boats received damage from enemy gunfire.
And
in a new development, Kerry campaign officials are now finally acknowledging that while Kerry’s boat left the
scene, none of the other boats on the river ever left the damaged swift boat. This is a direct contradiction
to previous accounts made by Jim Rassmann in the Oregonian newspaper and a direct contradiction to the “No Man Left
Behind” theme during the Democratic National Convention.
These ever changing accounts of the Bay Hap River incident by Kerry campaign officials leave me asking one question…if no one ever
left the scene of the Bay Hap River incident, how could anyone be left behind?
You can run, obfuscate and lie
– but you can’t hide, John Kerry, you damn sure can’t hide.
**********************************************
From the Mail &
Guardian in South Africa:
Africa Roundup
**********************************************
Darryl Dawkins, Central Florida’s good ole Chocolate Thunder himself, has a strong take on the differences regarding Black Basketball versus White Basketball:
"Black basketball
is much more individualistic," he says. "With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, the basketball court
in the playground or the schoolyard is one of the few places where they can assert themselves in a positive way. So if somebody
makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you've got to come right back at him with something better, something
more stylish. And if someone fouls you hard, you've got to foul him even harder. It's all about honor, pride, and establishing
yourself as a man."
Once the black
game moves indoors and becomes more organized, the pressure to establish bona fides increases. "Now you're talking about high
school hoops," says Dawkins. "So if you're not scoring beaucoup points, if your picture isn't in the papers, if you don't
have a trophy, then you ain't the man and you ain't nothing. Being second-best is just as bad as being last. And if a teammate
hits nine shots in a row, the black attitude is, 'Screw him. Now it's my turn to get it on.'"
If young black
players usually cherish untrammeled creativity, white hooplings mostly value more team-oriented concepts. "White basketball
means passing the hell out of the ball," says Dawkins. "White guys are more willing to do something when somebody else has
the ball — setting picks, boxing out, cutting just to clear a space for a teammate, making the pass that leads to an
assist pass. In white basketball, there's a more of a sense of discipline, of running set plays and only taking wide open
shots. If a guy gets hot, he'll get the ball until he cools off."
Hmmmmmmmm. I think I agrees.
**********************************************
Many people in this country insist
that President Bush is intellectually-challenged. Many of those same people place great weight on the merit of the Scholastic
Aptitude Test for not only admission to college but for judging the quality of that college based on its average SAT scores.
So, chew on this:
The New Yorker magazine
revealed in 1999 that Bush scored 1206 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test: 566 Verbal,
640 Math. While there is something crass about focusing upon a future president's exam scores, these numbers possess a
blunt honesty lacking in much of the carefully contrived folklore about politicians' brains.
Bush's 1206 is a
better score than it may seem to younger people because the Educational Testing Service "recentered" (inflated) SAT scoring
in the mid-'90s. Bush's score is the equivalent of a 1280 under today's dumbed-down
scoring system.
So, he has a damn good SAT score;
he received his Bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League school; he served in the National Guard as a pilot; he earned his
MBA from the premier Business School in the country; he successfully, with some help from Daddy to be sure, worked in the
business world; he won election as Governor of the second-largest state in the nation; and he was elected President of the
United States.
But he’s stupid?
Ohhhhhh-tay. Or maybe (just maybe)
his opponents are.
**********************************************
August 18, 2004
More on Czeslaw Milosz:
normblog tribute to Czeslaw Milosz
His poem, Campo dei Fiori
Washington Post news of his death
Cal Berkeley Press Release
And here is one of his interesting
poems, pulled from this website:
Ars Poetica by Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a
more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without
exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a
thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood
in the light, lashing his tail.
That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an
exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so
often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.
What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who
behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at
changing his destiny for their convenience?
It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may
think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.
There
was a time when only wise books were read,
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the
same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
And yet the world is different from what
it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,
thus
earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is
to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out
at will.
What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under
unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
Berkeley, 1968
translated by Czeslaw Milosz
and Lillian Valle
**********************************************
More indications of just how
bogus the whole election voting machine controversy in Florida was, this time from Nassau County, and note that the retiring President of Bethune-Cookman College was
involved in this test run:
The system Nassau County uses can print out every
ballot record if needed, she said. Three redundant memory chips store all votes cast on each machine, and the machines themselves
can't be hacked into because they're neither networked together nor linked to the Internet, Cannon said.
Nassau County's system eliminates the overvoting problem with punch
ballots, in which more than one candidate could be chosen in a race, but still allows voters the option to not choose a candidate in a race, Cannon said.
We should be proud of the pro-active
steps we’ve taken in Florida. We’re a national leader in this regard and Democrats
are incredibly stupid to be manipulating nuggets of out-of-context information in an attempt to indicate otherwise.
And, here’s a snippet from
the story in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that seemed to start the latest round of nonsense (of course, this was buried
deep in a story supposedly discussing great flaws in the machine):
“The most
important thing to take from the [Sun-Sentinel] survey findings is that both electronic systems and precinct-based optical
scan systems dramatically reduce voter error. … The Florida numbers demonstrate
a substantive improvement over the 2000 presidential election,” said Alfie Charles, vice president of business development
for Sequoia. Palm Beach County uses machines from that
company.
Charles’
point was bolstered by a report on the Oct. 7, 2003, California recall election by Henry Brady, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Brady found that more
than 7 percent of the voters using punch card machines cast flawed ballots, such as undervotes and overvotes. About 1.3 percent
of those using touch-screen machines cast defective ballots in that California election.
Not to mention that it’s
impossible with the touchscreen machines to cast an overvote but this is not the case with the optical scanners. Nuff said.
**********************************************
Well, how about that Charley!
The homestead in Northeast Florida was not damaged at all. My mother was visiting in Miami
and missed all the action. My second sister, who refused to evacuate a low-lying area near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa,
dodged a serious bullet. My oldest brother, in southeastern Orange County, was vacationing
in Maine but his house was damaged. My niece in Orlando is still without power but
her house was not seriously hit. My oldest brother's father-in-law has a business that sustained serious structural damage
in Orlando. And this radar image, I think, brings back the anxiousness I felt as Charley approached my relatives
in Orlando. It is Charley, with his Eye Wall still well-defined many miles inland, sweeping up towards the
heart of Central Florida around 8 p.m.
on the night of Friday the 13th.
What a storm!
**********************************************
At worst, the administration
can be accused of threatening to act [and eventually acting] in a unilateral manner if it doesn't get most of what it wants
through multilateral institutions. Which is pretty much how all great powers have acted since the invention of multilateral
institutions.
Daniel Drezner
The New Republic
Online, February
12 2003
**********************************************
Here's a quote from
an interesting guy I had never heard of who passed away in the last week. He grew up in the never-never-land of Poland or Lithuania or . . . well, he grew up behind the Iron Curtain and came to see
Communism for what it really was.
"A true opium of the people is a
belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are
not going to be judged."
Czeslaw Milosz
Thank you, Arthur Chrenkoff.
**********************************************
August 13, 2004
As of 1:30 p.m. it looks like the entry point for Hurricane Charley is going to be somewhere
in the area around Bradenton down to Fort Myers down to Naples:
Great radar provided by WINK, Channel 11, Fort Myers of the hurricane
Great radar provided by WZVN, Channel 7, Naples of the hurricane.
Florida Radar from the Orlando
Sentinel. You can track the progress of the storm, statewide, from this site.
Also, it’s beginning to
look like this may be a Category 4 monster.
In Tampa-St.Pete, keep up with
Hurricane Charley as it approaches the Bay Area with this link from the good folks at
the Tampa Tribune and Channel 8.
**********************************************
Here’s a good, appropriate
take on that McGreevey news conference up in New
Jersey Thursday from Jeff Jarvis:
McGreevey's
reality TV
: As I mentioned earlier, a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Rubin, called me earlier tonight to talk about McGreevey's announcement as television. What remarkable television it was.
On the one hand,
this was reality TV with more raw, real human drama than any reality TV ever aired and more bluntness than any political speech
ever given. Knowing what was going to happen for a few hours before he came on camera, I expected a duck and feint job from
a politician. Instead, we saw an emotional, forceful, courageous announcement of a man's secret.
But on the other
hand, this was utterly unreal. Roiling just below the surface were a dozen other stories that were not told: There are the
reports that the man who forced McGreevey's secret out was his gay lover whom McGreevey hired for a $110,000 state job for
which the man was utterly unqualified. There was his wife, standing there as if stoned. There was the hard-slap realization
that McGreevey had used this wife and one before and children by both marriages as his beard for his political career. There
was the contention that McGreevey was now using his gayness to obscure other sins and crimes. There was the story of an apparently
devout Catholic who did the sin thing. There was the anguish of a gay man in the smoke-filled closet. There was the political
intrique of maneuvering to avoid an election in November and keep the governor's office in Democratic hands. There was the
media's role in helping to keep McGreevey's secret. There were the other secrets waiting to come out: the story of the broken
leg and God know's what else. All this down the road in the home named Drumthwacket. Unreal.
McGreevey's speech
looked like a blast of steam but that hid the witches' cauldron of bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble.
Usually, what we
see in media -- and in politics -- is the unreal masking the real. Here, the real masked the unreal.
Unfortunately, Jeff then went
on to rob his piece of much of its power – he said the news conference was tactically perfect. Oh really? I think it
was tactically boneheaded and transparent. Jarvis (and, apparently, many in the media) are oblivious to how women are going
to respond to this. Average women. Like my sisters. They are going to be enraged that this lying politician perpetrated his
fraud AND THEN HAD HIS WIFE STAND UP THERE for his sorry benefit. Also, there are going to be many Christians
appalled at his news conference and the media response. I sure as hell am.
**********************************************
Michelle Malkin has posted an interesting Diversity Test on her website designed for
folks in the media. Here are her twenty questions; next week I’ll post my responses.
Q1. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life.
Q2. I think my taxes are too high.
Q3. I supported Bill Clinton's impeachment.
Q4. I voted for President Bush in 2000.
Q5. I am a gun owner.
Q6. I support school voucher programs.
Q7. I oppose condom distribution in public schools.
Q8. I oppose bilingual education.
Q9. I oppose gay marriage.
Q10. I want Social Security privatized.
Q11. I believe racial profiling at airports is common sense.
Q12. I shop at Wal-Mart.
Q13. I enjoy talk radio.
Q14. I am annoyed when news editors substitute the phrase "undocumented person" for "illegal alien."
Q15. I do not believe the phrase "a chink in the armor" is offensive.
Q16. I eat meat.
Q17. I believe O.J. Simpson was guilty.
Q18. I cheered when I learned that Saddam Hussein had been captured.
Q19. I cry when I hear "Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood.
Q20. I don't believe the New York Times.
**********************************************
August 11, 2004
Under a curious headline (Touch-screens dealt a blow), the Miami Herald reports (after dispensing with typical reportorial
bias trying to gin up a problem) the following news:
. . . state officials
point out that the report also shows that in 2002, Florida achieved a dramatic
reduction in the number of votes that weren't counted compared to the 2000 presidential election.
The overall percentage
of votes that weren't counted -- which includes overvotes and undervotes -- went from nearly 3 percent in 2000 to less than
1 percent two years later.
The report also
shows that touch-screen machines allowed zero overvotes, where a voter accidentally selects more than one candidate in a race.
Three times fewer instances where votes were NOT counted? Now, THAT’S
news.
A spokeswoman for
Secretary of State Glenda Hood contended the undervote difference between touch-screen machines and optical scanners was insignificant.
''Historically,
the rates are at an all-time low,'' Jenny Nash said. ``The rates may be different but it's still less than 1 percent.''
Nevertheless, Democrats and reporters
are beating the drums about vote machine problems. I’ve had at least one incredible conversation with a Democratic partisan
who can’t seem to accept the fact that Supervisors of Elections in Florida
are constitutional officers beholden to no one in state government (meaning, Jeb Bush or the Secretary of State) – they
run their own shop and get their money from the local county commission. And guess what? The majority of minority voters affected
by these machines that are being demonized reside in our three largest counties, all in Southeast Florida
and all controlled by Democrats.
Interesting spin, Democrats,
but a bogus story nevertheless.
**********************************************
I’ve always had a hard time comprehending
precisely what people meant or where they were coming from with the term political correctness. Today, Jonah Goldberg (while discussing feminism) provided a quasi-definition of political
correctness that helps greatly:
political correctness is/was in many ways an attempt by the puritain left to reinvent Victorian morality
without any reference to God or religion or tradition, rooting it instead in victimology and neo-Romanticism.
Okay. Got it.
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August 10, 2004
Damn good news on three fronts delivered by Wretchard
the Cat from the Belmont Club:
All three
developments (1, encircling the Sadr Militia; 2, fixing our target on Iran; and 3, disrupting al Qaeda) convey the huge sweep of the War on Terror and reveal both how far American efforts have come and how long the road that
remains. The key theaters of conflict, evident only in outline in early 2002, are coming into clearer focus. They are:
- stopping WMD
proliferation;
- destroying transnational
terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda;
- strongarming
or toppling selected regimes like Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Two regimes, Afghanistan and Iraq, have
been toppled. Intelligence and police operations are ongoing on every continent. And the Guardian fears it has only just
begun. The geographical scope of the struggle is staggering: pursuit across the Arabian peninsula, North Africa, Southwest Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. The instruments of struggle are equally various. Defensive
security, diplomatic pressure, covert operations, bilateral training, special operations and conventional combat. An old world
is being torn down and a new one -- for better or worse -- is being created "in a fit of absentmindedness". The falure by
the Left to articulate an alternative vision of a post-September 11 world except in the negative has banished what should
have been the most momentous public policy debate of the last 50 years into the outer dark. By declaring discussion of the
transformation of the world illegitimate and then only belatedly presenting a Presidential candidate whose countervision consists
of a "secret" but unstated plan, liberals have effectively left matters in the hands of President Bush. It is a staggeringly
reactionary performance and a fundamentally unhealthy one. Because the one certain thing is that the antebellum world, the
universe of September 10, can never be restored.
Even if some setbacks occur in the next month or
two, how in the hell can the American people vote this administration out? They’ve simply done a fantastic job of governing
during trying times.
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Strong words from Jonah Goldberg on the No Child Left Behind initiative of President Bush:
Leaving no child behind is an impossible standard for the federal government. Indeed, if
truly implemented, such a standard would constitute a colossal and unprecedented waste of resources. For want of a much better
analogy: In toxic waste clean-ups, the first 90 to 99.9 percent is relatively cheap to scoop up. It's the last little bit
that is impossibly expensive to deal with. The same holds for children. The vast majority of kids can be educated, and educated
well, fairly cheaply, assuming parents, bureaucrats, and communities are all on board. It's the exceptions — the learning
or physically disabled, the emotionally maladjusted, the criminally insane or simply the children of such folks — that
prove costly. Now some of these kids obviously deserve special efforts, but that doesn't mean they deserve special efforts
from the federal government. And yet that is precisely what the no-child-left-behind standard requires.
And because it
is an impossible standard, saying "no child left behind" is the impetus for an unending stream of rationalizations for increasing
government involvement. Some kids straggle behind because their parents are jerks — or simply not around. Get me Uncle
Sam! Some kids are left behind because they won't stop stabbing other kids in the head with sharpened #2 pencils. Let's start
a new program! Some kids are left behind because, well, that's life when you're trying to educate tens of millions of children
across a vast continent with differing views and cultures. And yet the no-child-left-behind standard demands that each and
every failure is evidence that government needs to become more, not less, involved. As long as one child is left behind, the
work of the government in Washington remains undone. It's
like strapping the carrot just out of the reach of the mule's mouth. No matter how much forward "progress" the beast makes,
it will never actually reach the goal because the goal is an impossible one. And, in cases like the definition of poverty,
the bureaucrats and social planners are constantly making sure the goal is impossible by moving the goalposts.
When pundits analyze military
missions (in Somalia, for example, with the Black Hawk Down incident) there is often a discussion about “mission creep”
and the effects thereof. It is in that context that I am beginning to get a handle on the Conservative critique not only
of social legislation but many social initiatives, as well. This opinion by Goldberg is a good example of that and I think
he makes a good point, even if he goes too far with his spin on the African concept of “it takes a village to raise
a child,” etc. The concept is right on the money – it’s the attachment of governmental responsibility that
is problematic.
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There are reports that the European
Union says there is no ongoing genocide in the Sudan. This reminds me of a documentary I viewed over the weekend (on the
Discovery Channel, I think). Jonathan Stack was the producer of Liberia: an UNCIVIL
War which included an outrageous clip of some Liberian claiming that if
only the United States had told the Liberians (in essence) that it would not save them from themselves before the disaster
became fully formed, this would have allowed Liberia to go to the European Union and they would have surely helped. Hah! The
same so-called “union” that wouldn’t do anything on the European continent in Kosovo? Bosnia? But, hey, blame America 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week – can’t
go wrong that way.
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August 7, 2004
Interesting “spin”
from Bill Hobbs on the latest economic news that is being “spun” against
President Bush.
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The White House, and yes – the same one that’s under the leadership of President
George W. Bush, has announced a new minority entrepreneurship initiative. He discussed this at the National Urban League but,
of course, that wasn’t really of concern to the journalists covering the event. Here is a portion of the press release
on the initiative:
President
Bush on July 23, 2004 announced a new initiative to expand business ownership and entrepreneurship among minorities. The Administration will undertake a unique association with
the National Urban League (NUL) to create an entrepreneurship network. Supported by the Business Roundtable and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the NUL network will include one-stop centers for business
training, counseling, financing, and contracting.
The U.S. Small Business Administration
(SBA), the Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), and other Federal entities will combine their
resources to help NUL local offices provide sustainable outreach and incubation of minority enterprise.
The NUL is a non-profit,
nonpartisan, civil rights and community-based movement that serves over 2 million people, providing services, research and
policy advocacy to help individuals and communities reach their fullest potential. Primarily working with African-American
communities, its 105 professionally staffed affiliates located in 35 states work to close equality gaps at all economic levels
and stages of life, and offer recipients a chance to give back as volunteers.
Good move, whether credit is
given or not.
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August 6, 2004
Thanks to Norm Geras of normblog for this telling account regarding one the decisive moments during classic
military phase of the War in Iraq. It’s from General Tommy Franks new book,
American Soldier, and it demonstrates what will be increasingly true in the coming years
– many of these snap judgments and assumptions (especially the negative ones) will prove to be factually wrong, quite
wrong in fact (this is a British publication with British spelling in this quotation):
The big sandstorm was even worse than predicted.
Reddish brown dust formed a high dome in the western desert and rolled over southern Iraq
- and over 170,000 coalition troops. Visibility dropped to 10 metres or less. Rain pounded down through the red dust, turning
the air to mud.
Our long logistics convoys crawled ahead, however, eventually
linking up with the armour and infantry units that were managing to creep forward during lulls in the sandstorm. And, as the
troopers inched on, scouts and special forces reconnaissance teams infiltrated more Iraqi positions, identifying the precise
GPS co-ordinates of enemy armour and artillery.
As the sandstorm rose in intensity and movement on the
battlefield virtually stopped on March 25, Gene Renuart came to see me. He said he had been talking to Buzz Moseley, commander
of Centcom's air component.
"Don't tell me, Gene." I held up my hand. "There's going
to be an air force coup. My palace is surrounded."
"Not yet, boss. We've actually been discussing how to
take advantage of this shitty weather."
Gene called for Jeff Kimmons, and the two of them spread
a stack of reconnaissance pictures on the conference table.
"We can use the sandstorm to destroy the Republican Guard
formations," Gene said, pointing to the orange blocks of the Medina and Hammurabi divisions spread out south of Baghdad.
"They started to manoeuvre a little when 3rd ID's scouts
pushed north," Jeff explained. "Then the sandstorm blew up, and they decided not to move because we seemed to be bogged down."
"Where'd they get that idea?" I asked.
Gene pointed to the television on the wall. Some retired officer was holding forth, saying: "We are seeing what the military
calls a 'pause'. The coalition has stopped to rearm and refit. They've sort of run out of steam..."
"The enemy formations haven't moved for 16 hours," Jeff
said. "They're hunkered down. The old see no evil, hear no evil..."
What Gene and Jeff were suggesting was a tactic that might win this war, at a time that many were characterising
as our darkest hour.
That night B-52s, B-1s and a whole range of fighter-bombers
flew above the dense ochre dome of the sandstorm, delivering precision-guided bombs through the zero-visibility, zero-ceiling
weather. I was confident we were looking at the end of organised Iraqi resistance.
I sat alone in my office watching the air picture. Strike
aircraft of all sizes were moving over a wide, curved kill zone that stretched from Al Kut in the Tigris Valley in the east to the Karbala gap in the west. The sand continued to blow. The Republican Guard units were hunkered down, and
they were being destroyed piece by piece.
The bombardment, which lasted from the night of March
25 to the morning of March 27, was one of the fiercest and most effective in the history of warfare. Nobody in the international press understood what was happening. All
the embedded reporters were with ground units, except for some with ships. There were no correspondents in the cockpits of
our strike planes or in the targeting cells in the combined air operations centre.
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August 5, 2004
Donald Sensing makes a great point about that flavor-of-the-decade terrorist syndicate,
al Qaeda:
Al Qaeda seems to have two categories of threats:
1. "Hear us roar" threats that are mostly bluster designed
to let us know they are still fighting.
2. Misdirection threats of significant specificity designed to increase the
fog of our counter-terrorism measures.
Actual targets - Khobar barracks, African embassies, USS Cole, the 9/11 targets,
the Bali disco, Madrid trains - are not pre-threatened . They are simply attacked.
He also has a good point to make
about the so-called "dated intelligence" the media has been curiously buzzing about.
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You know, all of the discussion
about Mary K. Letourneau seems to describe her in this context: 34-year-old school teacher who
had sex with, and two children for, her student. To me, the more proper (and shocking) context to me would read something
like this: Mary K. Letourneau, at the time a 34-year-old mother of four who initiated sex with (and subsequently birthing two children for) a twelve-year-old.
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What’s up with Alan Keyes soliciting for the Republican nomination to be the junior Senator in
Illinois? And what’s up with them selecting him? Bad move by
both. Don’t either the GOP in Illinois or Keyes comprehend just how historically cynical this looks?
And, on top of that, they turn down a black woman from Illinois
in favor of Keyes?
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August 4, 2004
A chronological review of my
“From Within The Veil” columns, to date – beginning with the most recent:
7. The Problem of the 21st Century
6. Underground Economies
5. Genius of Ray Charles
4. Definiton of a Gentleman
3. Owning Your Citizenship
2. Claiming Ownership
1. Tuned In, Turned On, Dropped Out
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From the Mail &
Guardian in South Africa:
Africa Roundup
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