Pejman Yousefzadeh makes a great point regarding myopic pettiness and the Iraqi elections:

Those who deride this expression of defiance and this irrevocable march towards freedom will themselves be derided by history--and rightfully so. No one thinks for a moment that Iraq's challenges have come to an end, but for all of the obstacles placed in the way of the Iraqis, this day represents a smashing triumph. In the meantime, let us have a laugh at our would-be President [John Effin Kerry], who showed himself today to be petty and unqualified to speak of and to our better selves as a nation--or of and to our values abroad.

My thoughts exactly.

Consanguinity defines the degree of relationship between persons who descend from a common ancestor. A parent and child are related by lineal consanguinity, aunts and uncles to nieces and nephews by collateral consanguinity.

Ginny, at the ChicagoBoyz website dwells on an interesting subject as it relates to Iraq: Consanguinity, anyone?

Mark Twain’s description of the Grangerford/Shepherdson feud and James Webb’s Born Fighting take different perspectives on a tough, independent strain central to American culture. The Grangerfords give honor to Pilgrim’s Progress and Henry Clay’s speeches; they decorate with Highland Marys and graveyard art. Their religion (predestination and brotherly love, while the guns are left at the door) echoes that hardy angularity Webb likes. But, of course, gone wrong, this can also produce a feud of honor over a pig. Gone wrong, it isn’t honor but tribalism. Faulkner, a writer of mythic and complex sensibility, appreciated the power of the passion that underlies such feuds, one he describes as “the old fierce pull of blood.” He counters it with the great ability western thought encourages: an ability to see the “other” as human, (as, indeed, burning with a spark of divinity). This leads us to transcend our blood loyalties, move from revenge to justice, from blood loyalty to national loyalty. Seeing all others as our brothers - ah, that is the great gift our tradition has given us. Webb sees the broader, more self-conscious and rational values that also permeate that tradition. But that primal urge, that fierce pull of blood, is always a part of us, a prioritizing we cannot help but feel.

The power of the tribal loyalty Twain captures was fresh on my mind when I happened upon “Cousin Marriage Conundrum". Steve Sailor argues that “the ancient practice [of consanguinty] discourages democratic nation-building.”

Maybe, maybe not. History is going to start answering that question.

On a related note, many folks that I know are absolutely shocked to learn that first cousins may legally marry in the state of Florida. But they can. Check out section 741.21, Florida Statutes.

Thanks to Ed Driscoll for linking to the Forbes slideshow on "The Bubble Bowl" that was Super Bowl 34.

Seems like a long time ago.

You have to check out these billboards that will soon go up in Southern California:

Billboard Number 1:

Billboard Number 2:

That’s what I call tweaking them where it hurts.

TMLutas gets it right about Peggy Noonan – garbage cans & pressure cookers, Peggy?

I think that Peggy Noonan almost gets things right in her current column on the President's 2nd inaugural. Unfortunately almost doesn't count and she errs seriously in how she views 3rd world dictatorships.

Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as--ugly imagery coming--garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage--the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists--pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

This is something of a mixed metaphor because garbage cans are not normally under pressure. You may get an increase in odor if you remove a lid, but not a messy explosion. The contents of the garbage can are generally inert.

 

This is not so in those dictatorships. The tyrants are more lids on pressure cookers than garbage can lids. This makes a big difference because in a pressure cooker, it is the lid that creates the danger.

He later on notes:

We can choose to help keep the lid on and get hurt by the shrapenel when we fail or we can help pop the lid off in a controlled way and expand our capability of cleaning up the inevitable little messes that result. In some cases, the cleanup crew will mostly be wearing a uniform. In many other cases, it will not.

 

I am hopeful that in a future speech, President Bush will make it clear that freedom is not a state that is limited to promotion by political action, that economic and social freedom are equal actors in the struggle to liberate the world. There was a bit of that in his speech but most seem to have missed commenting on it much. The assumption among the commentariat is that a political actor was talking about political freedom but Bush himself did not make any such distinction.

 

In Peggy Noonan's "garbage can" world, her solution makes a very adult sort of sense. We do not actually live in that world but a more complicated one where the clock is running on a problem that she does not seem to recognize. I too, hope for a "Return to Planet Earth" headline soon but the character who is returning is somewhat different.

Yeah, I find her apparent inability to recognize that we don’t actually live in that world she presupposes curious as well. So it goes.

TMLutas also gets it right about the Boston Globe’s proper take on the Shia slate of candidates in Iraq. Check that out, too.

The struggle for the Democratic Party in the South continues. Here is the North Carolina example:

In one corner, the establishment:

ED TURLINGTON
RESIDENCE: Grew up in Sampson County. Lives in Raleigh.

AGE: 47

OCCUPATION: Attorney with Tharrington Smith. Law partner of former state party Chairman Wade Smith and former law partner with former Sen. John Edwards. Also works as a lobbyist. Among his clients last year were the N.C. Association of Broadcasters, the N.C. Association of Convenience Store Owners, Lucent Technologies Inc., Carolina Asphalt Pavement Association and Time Warner.

POLITICAL RESUME: State director for the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in 1984; executive director of state Democratic Party, 1985-86; special assistant to U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford, 1986-87; chief of staff to Lt. Gov. Bob Jordan, 1987-89; aide on Sen. Joe Biden's 1988 presidential campaign; Gov. Jim Hunt's chief of staff, 1993-96; Hunt's campaign manager, 1996; aide to former Sen. Bill Bradley, 1997-99; deputy campaign manager for Bradley's presidential campaign, 1999-2000; general chairman of Edwards' presidential campaign, 2003-2004, state co-chairman of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, 2004.

In another corner, the insurgency:

JERRY MEEK
RESIDENCE: Grew up in Fayetteville, recently moved to Raleigh.

AGE: 34

OCCUPATION: Plaintiffs attorney who works with Wade Byrd of Fayetteville, one of the state's best-known trial lawyers.

POLITICAL RESUME: At age 17 was the youngest delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988. Was Cumberland County Democratic chairman at age 25. Elected the state party's first vice chairman in 2003.

Bet on the insurgent. Democrats have lost their minds and will follow the trial lawyers right over the cliff. Although John Edwards is a trial lawyer, he’s clearly an establishment guy and something of an anomaly. If the Democrats in North Carolina are having this kind of monumental battle, with folks loyal to Howard Dean fairing well, the Democrats are in deep, deep trouble. And have yet to hit rock bottom.

From the Mail & Guardian in South Africa:

  Zanzibar  No more jail time for Zanzibar’s young mothers

  Burundi  SA deputy president’s advice to Burundi’s president

  Côte d’Ivoire  Ivorian opposition wants UN to organise elections

  Swaziland  Poor turnout for Swaziland strike

  Zimbabwe   ‘Zimbabwe is not a banana republic’

  Uganda  Regional drought sparks energy shortage in Uganda

  Zimbabwe  Zimbabwe sculptors struggle with sales

  Somalia  Gunmen want mosque at desecrated cemetery

  Burundi  Burundi’s neighbours oppose constitutional change

  Zimbabwe  MDC: ‘Damned if we do ...’

  Burundi  Burundi to hold referendum in February

  Côte d’Ivoire  Mbeki meets rebel leader from Côte d’Ivoire

  Ethiopia  Ethiopia to provide free anti-retrovirals

  Democratic Republic of Congo  New bid to set DRC election date

  Swaziland  Swaziland’s Aids orphans still a contentious issue

  Democratic Republic of Congo  Little optimism over DRC peace process

  Malawi  Malawi judges go on strike for 4x4s

  Kenya  Kenya wildlife deal ‘against all ethics of welfare’

  Rwanda  Genocide film premieres in Kigali

  Côte d’Ivoire  Côte d’Ivoire’s air force flies again

  Africa  Scourge of polio returns to Africa

  Ivory Coast  Mbeki holds talks in Ivory Coast

  Zimbabwe  MDC worried about Zimbabwe’s election body

And here’s an item from the HAVE WE HEARD THIS STORY BEFORE department.

‘All they ever do is make promises to Africa’

While the world’s richest and most powerful meet in the snowcapped mountains of Switzerland to lament Africa’s dead and starving, the people here advise them to save their breath -- they’ve heard it all before. "It should not be just talk, talk, but do, do something," said Charles Davies, a newspaper editor in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Yes, we’ve heard this before. From both sides.

The Washington Post has an interesting review of Essie Mae Washington-Williams and her new book, Dear Senator. Written by an academic, it is (of course) negative:

This is all pretty gauzy stuff. "Dear Senator" shows no concern about Thurmond's inappropriate, abusive appropriation of a vulnerable young household servant; instead, it offers only the hearts-and-flowers version of the story. (The corner of each page is adorned with a curlicued ribbon, lest readers have any doubt that this memoir should be read as a romance novel.)

Okay, the woman has affection for her father. I’m not shocked by that. In fact, I’m quite sympathetic to the woman.

What I’m sure, however, will be more problematic for black people is this review from the capital of South Carolina in The State:

“Dear Senator” is intimate, historic, gripping and gossipy.

The memoir by Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the long-secret biracial daughter of the late Strom Thurmond, also is a good read for the classroom or the beach.

The new 223-page book is, first of all, the universal story of a castoff child. Youthful rejects — Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Shakespeare’s Cordelia, even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter — make for page turners.

Most readers, however, will view “Dear Senator” as a lifelong journey into a Southern Gothic netherworld, with dueling white-black mind-sets.

That, per se, isn’t the problematic part. The Washington Post piece seems to be from a stereotypically black perspective [black female professor at D.C. university], The State piece seems to be from a stereotypically white perspective – that’s just my personal bias.

Here, however, is the problematic part (not for me but I’m sure for others) of the review in South Carolina and it is (especially) the very last sentence in the review that will truly get the gums to bumping and phone lines humming:

Washington-Williams writes her children persuaded her to write her memoirs to tell the truth about her life. She also acknowledges plans to contest Thurmond’s will played a role in her going public. She hired a high-powered lawyer to fight the Thurmond family if they denied her relation.

Old Strom would have understood. He was a fighter, too.

Despite a long life in the Thurmond family closet, Washington-Williams is not bitter. Instead, she claims her dual heritage with gusto.

“I am every bit as white as I am black, and it is my full intention to drink the nectar of both goblets.”

Well.

Well, well, well. I’m with you Essie Mae – I really am. But you can bet your bottom dollar that last line ain’t going to go down well with black people. Not. At. All.

What a fantastic take-down of the self-evident bias of the New York Times editorial pages from Captain's Quarters today.

The Times gave me its answer today, and quite frankly, I don't see how Mr. Rosenthal thinks that this is any kind of defense. In fact, when looking further into their editorial, it loses even more credibility and looks more like shabby ankle-biting all the time.

I agree. In fact, it looks like a textbook case demonstrating that the supposed “paper of record” is anything but.

If you read nothing else today regarding the War in Iraq, read Austin Bay's post from yesterday.

This week’s column is available at StrategyPage. The column expands on a couple of points I made in a recent post about the Iraqi elections, Bush’s “democracy on the offensive” strategy, and “technological compression.” Bill Buckley’s and Peggy Noonan’s tepid responses to Bush’s speech have troubled many readers. Buckley and Noonan have either missed or ignored the political challenges of instant global communications, rapid intercontinental transportation, and weapons of mass destruction. (They aren’t the only ones.) The consequence of transportation and communication: we all live next door to one another. The consequence of advanced mass destruction weaponry: a small group can kill millions of innocents. How do we craft a strategy, an integrative, implementable political vision, that accomodates this technology but protects the freedom of expression, the freedom of movement, all of the freedoms Americans cherish and demand? My column lays out the strategic case.

Technology, Liberty and Terror. That man is on to something. And I love Peggy Noonan but I do think he nails it regarding her column last summer and her response to the inaugural address. I also think some Reaganites (subconsciously) are responding to Bush possibly superceding Reagan.

This post by Austin Bay also demonstrates one of the beauty of blogs – reader interaction. One of his commenters talked about the Bush Honeypot Doctrine and linked to this column from the McDonough Heritage Group.

Bin Laden’s vision of luring the Americans into the mountains of Afghanistan where he hoped to relive the glory days of the mujahadeen defeat of the Russians has been utterly dashed by President Bush. Of course the Americans could have set up their jihadi honeypot in Afghanistan but they took notes during the 1980s while the Russians got pranged in the mountains and Pentagon planners knew that repeating the experience would not be very clever.

Oh, the Americans came to Afghanistan alright, but then they did something that bin Laden and all his 7th century “masterminds” couldn’t imagine: after swabbing the deck with the Taliban, the Yanks marched into the heart of the dar al-Islam, planted the Stars & Stripes, poked the jihadis in the eye with a sharp stick, and announced that they are here to stay awhile. This doctrine is straight out of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.

So now when bin Laden calls out to his ummah to take up arms and join the jihad to meet the Infidel army head-on, instead of traveling to the Afghani mountains, they are obligated to seek their destiny in Iraq. The terrain in Iraq, whether it be the hard-pan desert or the primitive mud and cinderblock urban settings, is an American general’s dreamscape.

That truly sums it up.

Collin May has a provocative point of view on what the recent Tsunami proves regarding future American policy (Hat tip to Instapundit):

The first was the now notorious comment by Jan Egeland, responsible for coordinating United Nations humanitarian efforts, to the effect that the developed world was “stingy.” Whatever his intention by making these remarks, they certainly reflect the old UN's heavily bureaucratic attitude which assumes that the UN alone, as a pseudo-government, can deal with “global problems.” And of course, in the UN’s eyes, every problem requires a “global” response.

 

Egeland’s comment also reflects a certain European view that contends that the state, and in this case a universal state, should be responsible for the welfare of humanity. Not surprisingly, this view is not shared by the United States, which looks far more to private and community-based actions to resolve social problems. Given this context, Egeland’s complaint was seen as most directly attacking the United States. And if you’ve worked in the UN/NGO community you’d know that this sort of assumption would not be wholly off the mark.

 

This leads us to the second event. While American diplomats derided Egeland’s slip of the tongue, the US engaged in an activity that said far more than any words could regarding the new international order. Without any concern for the UN, the US proceeded to set up a core group of nations to deal with the disaster. Partners in the group were Australia, Japan and India. It is this alliance that will matter most to the US in the future. The four big Pacific democracies, three with strong Anglo-Saxon histories, will most likely develop into the central alliance of the twenty-first century.

May concludes with an acknowledgment that the United States (under the leadership of President Bush – although this is unstated, it is understood) has delivered a quite firm message:

The United Nations, which has long been a forum for anti-American, as well as anti-Israeli rhetoric, was being told to shape up or it would simply become as irrelevant in humanitarian affairs as it was in military ones. Apparently this is a message that was communicated to Annan by some high-profile friends of the UN, who have been warning him that the UN without American goodwill is nothing, and that the UN had better make some changes to get that good will back. So even this organization, one the French thought they might be able to use against the US during the Iraq war, was now finding itself having to adapt to the new realities of international affairs.

 

And, as if to reinforce the point that the formation of the core group was intended more as a political lesson than an actual working proposal on the aid front, the group quickly turned over authority for the humanitarian operation to a now chastened United Nations when international donors met in Jakarta. It is unlikely that comments about the “stingy” developed world will be heard again soon. But look for the core group, the big four alliance, with its strong British heritage, to pop up again, as it will most likely be the key political alliance of this century, presenting a sharp contrast to the European approach to democracy.

So much for counterproductive American unilateralism. Thank you, Mr. President.

The Orlando Sentinel has the news:

In producing a television movie of her favorite love story, Oprah Winfrey lined up good friend Halle Berry to star, entrusted the script to a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and lavished attention on the project.

Yet the talk-show queen has a long-term hope for Their Eyes Were Watching God, the film of the 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville's most celebrated resident.

"My goal is to get as many people to see it as possible and to elevate Zora Neale Hurston," Winfrey says. "If two weeks after the film Zora Neale Hurston's name is on the best-seller list, we would have won."

Oscar-winner Berry takes the central role of Janie Crawford, whose search for fulfillment takes place in Central Florida. The film will air from 9 to 11:30 p.m. March 6 on ABC.

Way to go, Oprah.

Finally, some Democrats are fed up in this state:

Pro-guns, pro-business, pro-family and patriotic — sound like the GOP?

Nope, it's the Mainstream Democrats, a group of Florida lawmakers touting personal responsibility, morals, patriotism and efficient government to woo back voters in a state where Republicans dominate politics on all but the local levels.

Good luck to you but I’m afraid it’s too little, too late to reverse their well-earned status as the minority party in Florida. Still, we need a responsible party on the other side that’s willing to say to its’ constituents certain hard facts that they need to hear.

Get on with it. And for a start, start staking out positions that allow you to deal with this mess in Orange County.

Arthur Chrenkoff has a great, informative post on the upcoming Iraqi elections and lists the leading political parties (and their formation, in and of itself, is a great American success story) and provides this list of links for further perspectives:

BBC: “Iraq election: Likely candidates”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: “Analysis: Campaign Season Under Way In Iraq”

The Daily Star: “New political landscape emerges in Iraq”

Live from Dallas: “Announced Iraqi political coalitions”

Healing Iraq blog: “Election Mania”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: “Iraqi Political Groups -- Part II”

Associated Press: “Main players in Iraq's election”

Associated Press: “Major political groups fielding candidates in Iraq's election”

Chrenkoff also added this information regarding in-country and out-of-country sites of interest on this important election:

On Sunday, January 30, Iraq goes to the polls - a number of sites and blogs is keeping an eye on election developments: Friends of Democracy offers great grass-roots reporting from Iraqis around the country. In addition, you can check out these blogs: Iraq Election Newswire; Iraqi Election Diatribes; Liberating Iraq; and Truth on Iraq.

Michael Totten is on fire, and in this post he links to Tom Franks writing in The New Republic:

Then there was the pooh-poohing of elections--any elections. Former soldier Stan Goff (supposedly of the Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) spoke at length about the evils of capitalism and declared, “We ain't never resolved nothing through an election.” This drew loud, sustained applause. Nothing to get worked up about, I thought; just a leftist speaker spouting lunacy. But today it seemed particularly bad. It wasn't just that I was missing what might be lovely canapés (or perhaps spring rolls being brought about on trays with delectable dipping sauce); rather, it was the thought that the speaker was dismissing something that Afghanis of all ages had recently risked their lives to participate in, something Iraq's insurgents view as so transformative that they are murdering scores of Iraqis to prevent it. No, what I needed to counter this speaker was not a Democrat like me who might argue that elections were, in fact, important. What I needed was a Republican like Arnold who would walk up to him and punch him in the face.

Hoo-ahhhhhh! I like Michael’s closeout line:

Welcome to the non-partisan, equal-opportunity, big-tent Militant Middle.

Bleeve dat; the more the merrier.

Roger Simon makes a strong point about the Social Security debate:

[I]n all this partisan brouhaha over Social Security, one thing suddenly struck me (probably struck a lot of others a long time ago). Those of us who are lucky enough to have business or union pensions (like Members of Congress and the Writers Guild of America, for just two examples), which almost always pay out vastly more money for our retirements than Social Security, know that those plans depend for their future stability on prudent stock investment. I don't hear anyone complaining about that - from either side of the aisle.

True dat.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, with a right on the money assessment of the President’s inaugural address:

I liked Bush's speech a lot. I liked how he focused on tyranny and oppression and freedom and liberty, and eschewed democracy and made a point about saying we don't seek to impose it on others in some culturally unrealistic way.

I liked how he pushed the big points and didn't mention the current details, which I don't think belong in such a speech, which is naturally written for the ages (and it was Mark Gerson's swan song).

 

Best analysis I heard was on “Here and Now” from presidential historian who said Gerson reaching for Declaration of Independence linkages, and I like that because it reminds us that U.S. is source code for current era of globalization and that we lead simply because we're just further along in this historical process.

 

I think it was right for Bush to talk mostly foreign affairs, because they have defined his presidency.

 

All in all, I found the speech very much in line with PNM's vision, and I think the criticism about it promising too much just misses the point of what that sort of speech is designed to do, plus I hate the logic that says, “if you can't do it all right away, then you shouldn't imply you're going to do it anywhere.” That is an asinine slippery-slope argument that basically says, “perfection or hypocrisy--those are the choices.”

Those are the choices alright--for non-action. And that's just not Bush. As I said in Esquire this month, the man's is the “just do it” president, and that's what we basically need at this point in history, even if he'll never be my first choice.

Bush: the “Just Do It” presidency.

Works for me.

Jonathan Adler makes an interesting point while contrasting the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society:

Unlike the typical Federalist Society conference, few panels were devoted to a dispassionate investigation of legal questions. At the environmental panel, where I was the token representative of an alternative view, half the questions were of the “how do we get the message out and win” variety, and ignored the substance of the discussion. Yet whenever I've spoken at a Fed Soc conference, the questions and discussion always focus on more substantive questions of law and policy.

What brought this to mind is that, last week, the Case ACS chapter sponsored an anti-inaugural event. Posters advertising the meeting showed pictures of Bush and encouraged students and faculty “to the left of far-right” to attend and speak out about the prospects of Bush's second term. This certainly struck me as more partisan than the typical Fed Soc promotion. I am sure it's possible that some Fed Soc chapter has hosted an equivalent event, but it would not be the norm. I think this is because, at their core, the differences between the two organizations is far more than ideological. The Fed Soc is focused on ideas out of which activism sometimes flows (and sometimes does not), whereas the ACS is more directly focused on activism itself. The irony is that the ACS is trying to reproduce the Fed Soc on the left -- thus far, they are failing.

I think he's on to something here. This sheds light on posts I've made in recent days linking to Roger Kimball and to Michael Totten. As Kimball quoted Aron, “enlightened thinking tends to be superficial thinking” so it is far easier to conclude that activism, and only more activism, is what is required.

Sorry for the delay in acknowledging this, but Captain Ed himself of Captain's Quarters Blog linked to my post on Fox News Channel panel discussion of the Inaugural Address. THANK YOU, SIR!

America is charging hard with A Leap in the Dark:

This kind of commitment to the outcomes of  the democratic process, even if they are unwelcome, represents a very considerable risk. Unnoticed in Peggy Noonan's critique of President George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Speech as having 'too much God' was the fact that it invoked a wholly different paradigm from Ronald Reagan's City on a Hill. Bush's peroration did not come from Winthrop, but from the Declaration of Independence. Reagan had asked:

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

But as the shining city stood, so too would the outer dark continue to enfold it. In Winthrop's original formulation, America was condemned to be a City on a Hill; forced to keep the fires lit against the night. "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses . . ." On the day the light failed, other, dark spirits would alight beneath the extinguished torch. But the Declaration of Independence contained a new element; the suggestion that the flame could not be contained, because all men could be kindled by it. Logically it was the flame, not the torch of liberty, that was invincible; that once released could not be restrained. The light would go to the nations, until the darkness was no more. It was an altogether more dangerous proposition. There were hints in Bush's Second Inaugural Speech that he understood or at least had thought about the sheer hazard of it.

Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. ...

... Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

... We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of Liberty.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength tested, but not weary we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

Actual foreign policy is unlikely to be formed in such absolutist terms. The usual considerations of national security and commercial gain will probably play a large part in concrete decision making. But unless the 'proclamation of liberty throughout all the world' is wholly rhetorical, it undoubtedly represents a step into uncharted paths.

Read the rest of his post; it’s full of links and possible counterpoints.

Philadelphia versus New England; that should make for a great Super Bowl for Jacksonville.

Austin Bay says al-Zarqawi is playing into our hands:

Z-Man’s been suckered. Z-Man is the troops’ nickname for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s jefe in Iraq. Z-Man has declared a “fierce war” on democracy. Z’s taken Bush’s bait– except the Presiden’ts “bait” of promoting democracy and declaring war on tyranny and 0ppression isn’t mere bait, it’s essential American values. The ideological dimensions of the War on Terror (The Millenniumn War) were there from the get-go, but the Presiden’t inaugural address has focused them. That’s a huge step, I think, to obtaining the kind of resilient victory and secure peace the American people deserve.

My first “it’s a fight for the future” column ran in November 2001. (The link will take you to a StrategyPage archive.) Here’s a key thought from that column: “In soundbite format, the strategic collision between Bin Laden-type extremists and America may well be one of “imperial restorationist” versus “liberating reform.”

Yup– a week before the Iraqi election Zarqawi has come out in public for imperialism, in his case Islamo-fascist imperialism.

The media and blogosphere have been focusing on the philosophical and theoretical elements of Bush’s speech and America’s “democracy on the offensive” strategy. But the strategy seeks to address a very concrete issue: “technological compression.” Technological compression is a fact of 21st century existence–and it is the superglue bonding American foreign policy idealism and foreign policy pragmatism. I think my Weekly Standard article of January 3, 2005 frames it accurately: “Technology has compressed the planet, with positive effects in communication, trade, and transportation; with horrifyingly negative effects in weaponry. Decades ago, radio, phone cables on the seabed, long-range aircraft, and then nuclear weapons shrunk the oceans. September 11 demonstrated that religious killers could turn domestic jumbo jets into strategic bombers–and the oceans were no obstacles. “Technological compression” is a fact; it cannot be reversed. To deny it or ignore it has deadly consequences.” (See The Millennium War.)

The Hell Formula For The 21st Century comes at the issue from another angle. “Sept. 11 made it impossible to tolerate the wicked linkage of terrorists, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. Terrorists plus rogue states plus WMD – that’s the formula for hell in the 21st century.”

That’s some good chit. So is this:

As to the comment, it “looks like there might be a plan,” follow this link to “Know Your Enemy”, a column of mine dating from late January 2003. As far as I can tell it’s one of the first public airings of “Iraq as a strategic trap for terrorists.” I know some in the blogosphere started calling this “the fly-paper strategy” in April or May 2003.

A few key thoughts from that column: “If you know your enemy, the strategic challenge is to use that knowledge to force him to fight on your terms. It’s even better if that fight on your terms is a fight he cannot refuse. “

“Strategy is always about applying one’s own strength to an opponent’s weakness. Al Qaeda’s historical pattern is to wait patiently, for years if necessary, and carefully prepare a terror operation until it’s certain of success. Prior to 9-11, with little pressure on its hidden network (succored by the Taliban, Wahhabi petro-dollars and, yes, Iraq), Al Qaeda could take its time to spring a vicious surprise attack – surprise and visionary viciousness being its strengths and the gist of its “asymmetric” challenge to America’s “symmetric” power. “Fear us, America,” was the message, “because Al Qaeda chooses the time and place of battle, and when we do you are defenseless.”
“…Which leads to the subject of decisive U.S. military action against Iraq and its role in defeating Al Qaeda. “

“The massive American build-up around Iraq serves as a baited trap that Al Qaeda cannot ignore. Failure to react to the pending American attack would demonstrate Al Qaeda’s impotence. For the sake of their own reputation (as well as any notion of divine sanction), Al Qaeda’s cadres must show CNN and Al Jazeera they are still capable of dramatic endeavor.”

This column ran in most of the newspapers that carry it. It was out there.

I first remember reading about the flytrap from David Warren in July 2003. It seemed an accurate analysis to me and, even better, it appeared to be a great strategy then and still does. Here was David’s focus:

At the moment it appears that most of the infiltration of Iraq is coming from the west, through Syria, and consists of Lebanese-based Hizbullah elbowing their way into Saddam's old territory. Their intention is to do to the U.S. Army in Iraq what they did to the Marines in Beirut in 1983. The chief source of both men and materiel is what Gal Luft has called "Hizbullahland" -- the 1,000 square kilometre patch, that Hizbullah now rules under Syrian protection, which was formerly Israel's security enclave in southern Lebanon (until they withdrew in a peace initiative in the year 2000).

Hizbullah itself (the "Army of Allah" -- Shia, and ultimately financed and armed by Iran's ayatollahs) are directing their attention less and less towards the "Little Satan" of Israel, and more and more towards the "Great Satan" of the U.S., as events unfold.

This is exactly what President Bush wants. To engage them, away from Israel, in mortal combat. To have an excuse for wiping them out -- a good, solid, American excuse, from which Israel has been extracted. The good news is, Hizbullah's taking the bait.

So has the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. This whole “flytrap” thing applies domestically, as well. The incredible thing is to see this realignment in real time and see the conscious disbelief of so many who refuse to acknowledge what is obviously occurring all around them.

Florida's Liberty Ball on Inauguration Night was a big success:

Within seconds, the president and first lady — who wore a white gown covered with sequins — were dancing to a medley that included I Could Have Danced All Night from the musical My Fair Lady. Behind them, Jeb and Columba joined in.

Florida Republican Party Chairman Carole Jean Jordan, who watched from the floor of the cavernous convention hall at the Washington Convention Center, said Bush's appearance brought tears to her eyes.

Recalling the state party's final three-day get-out-the-vote effort — which reached nearly 3 million voters — Jordan said: "A lot of these people have never been to an inauguration, have never worked in a campaign.... They worked for him and they've come here to celebrate."

Now, 2006.

 

From Hugh Hewitt's vantage point, here is the organizing line for the whole speech and Hugh’s opinion seems to dovetail with that of Karen Hughes who said the theme was Liberty:

"From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?"

Did I miss that yesterday? I think I did but I do seem to remember the folks on Fox mentioning the “did our character bring credit to that cause” line. Hugh went on to write:

These are the [two] questions that have not yet been fully answered and about which debate rages every day both here and abroad.  But they are the crucial questions, and the president's speech was intended to and did in fact focus the country and the world on the right questions, and eloquently frames the view that matters most, that of generations not yet born.

It was a great speech. For a couple of decidedly different takes, check out Professor Bainbridge.

She [Peggy Noonan] goes on to observe that the speech had moments that make "you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts." Exactly. Indeed, the President seems to have succumbed to the same failure as modern liberalism; namely, that man is perfectible provided those who rule us are allowed to act upon the desires of their "good hearts." It's Hillary Clinton's "It takes a village" crap with private retirement accounts and tax cuts.

This is the divide; some folks want to stick with an old Republican Party approach and President Bush sees a “revolutionary” opportunity to cement the Republicans as the GOVERNING party (foreign and domestic) for the next few decades.

To do that, you have to govern. And to govern, you have to do that from a bigger tent.

 

Shannen Coffin at National Review Online shared this funny joke told by former Attorney General John Ashcroft at a pre-Inaugural bash:

It's a story about his visiting a first grade class and taking questions from the kids. One of them, Johnny, gets up and says, in a tough voice, "Mr. Ashcroft, I have three questions [and this is the part I'll mess up]. First, why did you cover the statues at the Justice Department? Second, why are you holding people in Guantanamo Bay, and third, does the PATRIOT Act intrude on our civil liberties." Before the AG could answer, the recess bell rang and the kids all ran out on the playground.

After recess, little Sally, picking up where it was left off, stood up and said: "I have five questions. First, why did you cover the statues at the Justice Department? Second, why are you holding people in Guantanamo Bay, and third, does the PATRIOT Act intrude on our civil liberties. Fourth, why was recess thirty minutes early today? And fifth, what did you do with Johnny?!?"

Not bad, not bad at all.

 

Samizdata surely scored when they posted their “Quote of the Day” on the 19^th:

"We're reckless arrogant stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks because pussies get fucked by dicks, but dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just wanna shit on everything. Pussies may think that they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn't appropriate, and it takes a pussy to show 'em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves. Because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy crazy world. But I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're gonna have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit"

 

- said by a member of Team America in the movie of that name. Says Christopher Price, who posted this in a comment here this morning: "Its got one of the best explanations of US foreign policy that I've seen in a long time. Kind of like what Condaleezza Rice was saying yesterday, but more succinct."

Now that’s what I call a Q-U-O-T-E, quote, quote, quote!

Quote:

 

The European ideologies of the last century have left the stream of history and will not, cannot acknowledge it.

Wretchard the Cat

January 21, 2005

Unrepentant

 

What we are witnessing, ironically, is the soft racism (meaning paternalism) of the Marxist/Socialist European. They simply will not drive the train in the 21^st Century and the folks in New Europe are already well-acquainted with that position. France and Germany are not. They are about to have no choice in the matter, however.

Fox News Channel had fantastic coverage after the Inaugural Address. Brit Hume seems to be the best in the business, to me. On his panel were Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol, Mort Kondracke, and Fred Barnes. All were asked at one time or another for their opinion on memorable lines, either for being Kennedyesque or otherwise memorable. Here is my recollection of their collective thoughts on the most memorable lines from the Address, and the lines are presented in order of their appearance in the text of the Address:

 

1.  The Panel [noted as the only basic reference to Iraq]

For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. And then there came a day of fire.

 

2.  Mort Kondracke [noted as a line that may resonate in history]

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.

 

3.  Bill Kristol [noted as a line that may resonate in history]

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

 

4.  Carl Cameron [noted for its Middle East implications]

America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

 

5.  Carl Cameron [noted for its Middle East implications]

America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.

 

6.  Mort Kondracke [noted as something on an oblique shot at President Carter]

In the long run, there is no justice without freedom and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

 

7.  The Panel [the highlighted line was noted as one that may resonate in history]

Today I also speak anew to my fellow citizens. From all of you I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet, because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom.

 

8.  Fred Barnes [noted as one that may resonate in history]

By our efforts we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

 

9.  Bill Kristol [noted as one that may resonate in history]

I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile and evil is real and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself, and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.

 

10.  Not mentioned (I don't think) by the crew on Fox but I think it’s important to the President’s speech

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives.

11.  Not mentioned (I don't think) by the crew on Fox but I think it’s important to the President’s speech

Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our nation life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people.

 

12.  Mort Kondracke – Peggy Noonan [noted as open to criticism for lack of modesty but genuinely Dubya-esque]

Renewed in our strength, tested but not weary, we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

 

Peggy Noonan opined that the speech was a mission statement of sorts and that she was told it was designed to provide a window into the President’s soul. She also thought specific lines and the overall tone might make it open to shallow Democratic complaints of it lacking in modesty. Karen Hughes said the overall theme of the speech was liberty.

 

I’m listening to the President’s address and can’t help but think it is a tremendous compliment to the United States Army and their ad campaign – An Army of One.

His ownership society idea fits quite nicely with that theme, it seems to me.

Today, of course, is Inauguration Day. President Bush, I still believe, is going to go down in history as one of our greatest Presidents. This will be true not only because he did not blink in the face of a worldwide challenge, he conducted his actions and led the nation with a remarkable balance of firm and resolute reason and faith.

That is America at her best. A model republic at her birth, a model republic in the world of today.

Roger Kimball introduces me to the French philosopher Raymond Aron in the blog Armavirumque

As the sociologist Edward Shils noted in an affectionate memoir of his friend, Aron moved from being a declared socialist in his youth to becoming "the most persistent, the most severe, and the most learned critic of Marxism and of the socialist--or more precisely Communist--order of society" in the twentieth century. Shils spoke of Aron's "discriminating devotion to the ideals of the Enlightenment."

The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron's discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason's power is always limited. That is to say, if Aron was a faithful child of the Enlightenment--its secularism, its humanism, its opposition of reason to superstition--he also in many respects remained a faithful grandchild of the traditional society that many Enlightenment thinkers professed to despise.

Enlightened thinking tends to be superficial thinking because its critical armory is deployed against every faith except its faith in the power of reason. Aron avoided the besetting liability of the Enlightenment by subjecting its ideals to the same scrutiny it reserved for its adversaries. "In defending the freedom of religious teaching," he wrote, "the unbeliever defends his own freedom."

And not vice-versa.

David Warren, holding firm on his critique of Darwinism and the priesthood of Evolutionary Theory, has two more columns on the subject:

My own wild slash, as a sometime member of the “Occam's Razor gang”, is that Darwinian evolution is unnecessary. If it didn't exist, biological inquiry would not be slowed in any way. It might even be accelerated. The general notion that the whole living world is tied together in a “great chain of being” was available to the pre-Socratic Greeks, and is casually acknowledged in Augustine. It is conveyed, pre-Darwin, in the poet Baudelaire's notion of “correspondences”. It is implicit in Mendelian genetics.

What distinguishes Darwinism, in the end, is the nasty figurative edge to it, the popular use of it to communicate “nature red in tooth and claw”. It became associated very early with Victorian atheism, and does the missionary work of the old Bloomsbury set that lost its Christian faith in the mid-19th century. It is an ideology that continues to reach beyond the strict realm of biology, into areas of philosophy and theology with which it has nothing to do. It sells a cosmos that is blind, random, purposeless.

Biology is not a “pure” science and even among the supposedly pure sciences there are reasons to believe that the prevailing explanations remain our best approximations of “perfect” understanding.

In a follow-up column, “Still Digging,” David returns to the mystery of the subject:

There is never quite enough space to explain everything, but I think a lot could be explained by reminding my reader that “evolution”, per se, is nothing to do with Darwin. For it is nearly half as old as historical time. Indeed, Charles Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus, had a semi-coherent theory of evolution. What Charles added was the obsession with “natural selection” -- which he himself began washing his hands of in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species.

But even that “theory” (evolution by natural selection) was fully anticipated by Empedocles, a Sicilian of the 5th century B.C. (Aristotle shreds it in his Physics, Book II.) So writers like me and readers like you should probably stop using the words “Darwinism” and “evolution” as if they were interchangeable.

Readers keep asking me what is my alternative to “Darwinism”? I don't have one.

But here is my basic thought, in all its naive glory. The splendour of nature and the heavens used to serve as an overwhelming persuasion to the idea of the holy. Now it is converted to the uses of scientism. How, without interfering with real science, do we take it back?

Clearly that’s one of the primary challenges of the 21^st Century.

Here’s a great post from Michael Totten trying to work through what makes otherwise sensible Democrats become raving lunatics:

Anyway, it finally clicked, what separated me from the left-wing herd for many years even before 911. So many of them are activists. I’m not – not in any way shape or form whatsoever. I’m a book-reader, an intellectual, and a writer. I’m interested in history and ideas. They are interested in activism and power. You can’t tell an activist that Al Gore is a blowhard and a phony, or that Saddam Hussein ran a filthy regime that had no right to exist. These ideas are important to intellectuals, yet they are obstacles to activists. These ideas, whether they’re true or not, help the Republican Party. Therefore, to an activist, anyone who points them out must want to help the Republican Party. Otherwise, why do it? They certainly wouldn’t. It flies in the face of their job description.

My friend and editor (at the LA Weekly) Marc Cooper is a leftist intellectual. He likewise isn’t an activist, at least in part because he has many years of bad experiences with them under his belt. He links to an essay in Lip Magazine by Doug Henwood, Lisa Featherstone, and Christian Parenti, also left intellectuals, who butt heads with the same (literally) mindless beast.

Totten then makes this important point:

Such people may not wish to get “bogged down in analysis.” But that only means they’ll get bogged down in something else, something worse: a reactionary anti-intellectual quagmire. If dissidents are democracy’s anti-toxins, deliberately brainless reactionaries are its toxins. They’re also thugs, and about as much fun to hang out with as fundamentalist religious fanatics and book-burners.

Read the rest and the links within his piece; good stuff.

More on the similarities between 1990's Algeria and 2005 Iraq from Melanie Phillips:

By way of a contrast to Sir Max's relentless defeatism, the admirable Amir Taheri, writing in Arab News, comes up with a fascinating comparison between Iraq and Algeria. In the early 1990s, he says, the Algerian terrorist campaign had two objectives: to destroy the Algerian army, and to prevent the any elections. Almost by instinct, the Algerian leaders stumbled upon the holding of elections as a way of mobilising popular opposition to the terrorists, because while few are willing to kill or to die, most are willing to vote. Taheri writes:

 

'The turning point came in 1995 when Algeria organized its first ever pluralist and direct presidential election. This is was not an ideal election. The candidates were little known figures that had appeared on the national political scene just a couple of years earlier. None presented a coherent political program. To make matters worse the terrorists did all they could to prevent the election. They burned down voter registration bureaus and murdered election officers. Masked men visited people in their homes and shops to warn that going to the polls would mean death.

 

'And, yet, when polling day came it quickly became clear that the terrorists, in the forlorn attempt at stopping democracy, were, as in so many other instances in history, facing certain defeat. Never in my many years of journalism had I seen such enthusiasm for an electoral exercise anywhere in the world. The “silent majority” spoke by casting ballots, not because it particularly liked any of the candidates but because it wanted to send a message to the terrorists that they had no place in Algeria.

 

'That one election did not make Algeria a democracy. Since then Algeria has held three more presidential and a dozen local and parliamentary elections. None of these exercises have been perfect, and Algeria may need dozens more elections, which means many more years, before it can achieve the standards set by mature democracies. But the Algerian exercise has made one fact clear: The only way to defeat terrorism is by involving the mass of the people through elections.

 

'Algeria was the first major Arab country to be attacked by Islamist terrorists on a large scale. It is also the first to defeat them.'

That, my friends, is worth remembering.

Polipundit has the goods:

At this moment, the Republicans’ 231 House seats are the most they have held since 1947. The 55 Senate seats are the most the GOP has held since 1929. The Republicans now control 72.54% of the law-making power, the most since 1909. The 200 House seats held by Democrats are the fewest since 1947, and the 44 Senate seats the fewest held by Democrats since 1929.

Note also the progression of power through Administration changes. Slowly, the change in Congress means that even a change in the White House will not return the Democrats to their glory days.

Fewest since 1929? That’ll do it.

Dean Esmay continues his thought-provoking assault on the conventional wisdom surrounding the subject of HIV-AIDS transmission, etc. Here are links to the chronology of posts on the subject:

Related Posts (on one page):

1.     HIV Discussion

2.     By the Way

3.     Discussions on the Challenge

4.     Falsifying the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis

5.     Coming Tomorrow: A Single Damning Demonstration

6.     Science Questions

7.     HIV Discussion: Supplemental Materials

8.     That Annoying Brainteaser

9.     The Brainteaser That Changed My World

10. Six Questions On The HIV-AIDS Hypothesis

11. Has The Status Quo Changed?

12. Those “Safe” AIDS Drugs

13. America's Generosity (And Australia's!)

14. Forcing AIDS Medication On HIV+ Children

15. A Conversation

16. HIV Skepticism

17. Scientific Dissenters

Still very interesting. Dean has also thrown out this challenge:

I'm rather astounded at the level of the discussion the HIV matter has come to. I have a good bit of data on the controversial charts we published last week. Apparently part of the confusion stems from mislabeling: the “incidence” of HIV would have been more clearly labeled as the total number of HIV-infected individuals found in the population. It's that level, which has remained fairly stable over a 20 year period, which most starkly draws the entire question of an infectious epidemic into sharp relief. That's CDC data--data they don't make easy to find, mind you.

I've got an open challenge: who can find me any year between 1985 and now in which the total number of HIV+ persons in the U.S. did not number between 800,000 and 1,000,000? I tried and couldn't.

Also: Who will find me an epidemeiologist who will defend that as the pattern of a new infectious disease spread by sexual contact, blood transfusions, and sharing needles?

We’ll see how the debate develops and whether the challenges are accepted

 

Here are two reports on Florida’s newly proposed 61.6 Billion Dollar state budget submitted by the Governor yesterday:

St. Pete Times

Tallahassee Democrat

Here is the continuing truism that many Democrats will never admit; the St. Pete Times ends their report on the budget this way:

Bush said Florida's steady growth in new jobs and a recently improved bond rating prove the soundness of his fiscal policies.

Even a self-styled fiscal conservative such as Bush has not been able to stop growth in spending in the nation's fourth-largest state. In 1999, the year Bush took office, the budget he sent to lawmakers was $46.8-billion. The one he rolled out Tuesday represents a growth in spending of more than one-third since he took office.

Legislators will write their own spending plan and pass it in early May. The governor has the power to veto budget line items.

"I think it sets the framework for what the House does," said Rep. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, the House's chief budget writer. "I think you'll see the House carefully evaluate it. We do have a role for legislative oversight, but the governor's budget is definitely an important starting point."

Hmmm. $46.8-billion then, and $61.6-billion now. Mean ole Jeb hasn’t been that mean, has he?

 

Could it be that we will FINALLY have a Floridian in the White House? Professor Bainbridge thinks that is a very definite possibility:

If you're not subscribing to the Economist, you're missing some of the best (and most balanced) MSM reporting and commentary around. I'm especially fond of the Lexington column on US politics, whose latest column tackled the question of whether America would elect a third Bush in 2008:

Think of all the qualities that make an ideal Republican champion and Jeb has them in spades. He is the governor of the archetypal swing state: Florida is a multicultural hodgepodge with a red-state north, a blue-state south and 27 electoral votes. He is something of a multiculturalist himself: his wife was born in Mexico, his three children were once dubbed “the little brown ones” by George senior, and he is a convert to Roman Catholicism. Neatly, his governorship runs out in 2006. ...

I could see it. Indeed, as Lexington went on to observe, the case becomes even stronger when you look at the competition:

The case for sticking with the Bush formula becomes even stronger when you look at the other Republican candidates. To the party's increasingly conservative rank-and-file Mr Giuliani is a pro-choice divorcé who once roomed with a gay couple, John McCain an ageing maverick who was rude about the Christian right, and don't even get them started on Ah-nuld's past. The others look either too partisan to sell to the general public (like Rick Santorum) or just too boring to excite anybody (like Mitt Romney). Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado, saw his star fall when his party lost both chambers of the state legislature; Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, could face a bloody primary challenge from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison; Bill Frist, the Republicans' efficient leader in the Senate, lacks star quality.

Jeb!

Make sure you read the original post because it walks through all of the apparent challengers. Pretty convincing case at this time for the “Florida Boy” Governor.

 

Isolated knowledge silos? TMLutas, citing Todd Zywicki, discusses his/their opinion that constitutional law analysis regarding commercial speech is a mess. So, here’s how he indicates law school students can help solve the problem:

If nothing else, law school students, in their yearly analysis of these cases could come to reasonable conclusions about the source of the economic theories of these opinions. In fact, they probably already do but nobody's actually distilling that intellectual work and populating a standard database with it.

What a concept! Educational institutions actively seeking to have a utilitarian impact in the midst of all their theoretical ruminations? Well now:

If such a thing were done, you could then take the results back to the economists and find out how much of our constitutional analysis of commercial speech is based on fundamentally flawed economics. If most of it is, the chances of the Supreme Court reviewing new challenges to the status quo goes up. The chances of getting district and appellate courts to ignore stare decisis rises too.

On the other hand, if a lot of the analysis is based on articles which themselves are based on sound economics, there really is no problem. The difficulty is that with all that yearly wasted analysis going on in law school classrooms, we really can't tell which case is more true.

True dat.

 

David Brooks:

There is an essential asymmetry in American politics today. There are three conservatives in this country for every two liberals. A Republican can be quite conservative - like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush - and still win the White House. But only one Democratic presidential candidate has won over 50 percent of the vote in the past 40 years (Jimmy Carter got 50.1 percent in 1976).

That means Republicans can rely on their core instincts and still win, while Democrats cannot. If you look at the race for Democratic Party chairman, you get the impression this is a party that understands this and will seek out people who see the world differently.

But if you look at the campaign against Social Security reform in Congress, you see a party still believing the old ideas will work if only they are pursued more ruthlessly.

This is a delusion. Newt Gingrich did help Republicans regain the majority. But that doesn't mean his tactics, even in caricature form, will work for the Democrats, whose problems are deeper. The truth is that Democrats probably need a leader who will make liberals feel uncomfortable, the way Clinton did, not someone who will make them feel righteous and good.

I guess they are going to insist on going over the cliff, bitching and moaning the whole way.

 

Deacon at PowerLineBlog has a good post up on a discussion panel he attended recently concerning Tom Wolfe’s book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, involving David Brooks, Christina Hoff Sommers, John Derbyshire, and Michael Dirda as panelists. Deacon wrote:

Brooks and Derbyshire admire Wolfe's book because of its virtuosity and because, in addition to entertaining, it asks serious questions about morality, biology, and the issue at the intersection of these two realms -- determinism. Brooks and Derbyshire have different takes on where the book comes out on some of these issues. Brooks sees Wolfe as rejecting the metaphor that we are merely conscious rocks in motion -- in other words, that there is no such thing as a soul. Derbyshire seems less sure that this is where Wolfe stands, as am I.

Sommers and Dirda both have the same primary objection to Charlotte Simmons. Both believe that the book fails to present an honest portrait of college life today. Sommers thinks that the real story on college campuses is not rampant sex, but rampant workaholism and resume building. Citing various studies, she noted that sexual activity on campus is declining and that, in general, the present generation of college students is more studious and less vice-ridden than were generation x and the baby boomers. Sommers also thinks Wolfe missed the real scandal on campus today -- the strangeness and lack of rigor of the liberal arts professoriate. Dirda disagreed with the last point, but generally was in accord with Sommers about the rest. However, he based his disagreement with Wolfe's picture of college life less on empirical arguments about what college students are actually doing these days than on his sense that Wolfe is too moralistic, too rooted in a 1950s sensibility.

There's no doubt (and Brooks and Derbyshire admit) that Wolfe has overstated the extent to which sex dominates modern campus life and has understated the seriousness of today's undergraduates. But I believe, based on what I've heard from my college-age daughter and her friends, that what Wolfe describes is very real. That it amounts to a subculture rather than the culture does not, in my view, undermine the book's worth. This is particularly true inasmuch as Wolfe does not claim to be capturing the entire culture and, indeed, presents a number of students who stand (rather sullenly to be sure) outside the sex-crazed subculture. More damning, I think, is the fact that Wolfe presents no happy characters and none, other than Charlotte, who is virtuous. As Brooks points out, however, this is standard Wolfe. Had he stuck to presenting businessmen in this light, who would have objected?

It’s Deacon’s last paragraph, however, that struck me:

To me, the point is that Wolfe's book, in Derbyshire's words, shines light into dark and very real corners and, in doing so, asks important and troubling questions. All that plus a great plot, great language, great humor, and basketball? I've got to cast my vote with Brooks and Derbyshire.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think I agree with Deacon. But it occurs to me that his position is basically how the nation views African Americans. A great plot, great language, great humor, and basketball? Yup. Ask important and troubling questions by shining light into dark and very real corners? Yup. Allow a subculture to define the culture (of what is, essentially, a subculture [African Americana] itself)? Yup.

Hmmmm.

 

Great story on Dr. Condoleezza Rice that is interesting in more ways than one:

In September 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy for three of the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. What King could not know was that, within earshot of the blast, just blocks away at her father's church, was another little black girl, a friend of the youngest victim, who 42 years later would be on the verge of becoming America's foremost diplomat.

This year, the Martin Luther King holiday, marking what would have been his 76th birthday, falls on Jan. 17. The next day, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opens hearings on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state.

It's a stunning juxtaposition that offers those who knew King, lived that history and ponder his legacy an opportunity to wonder: How might they explain Rice's rise to him? And what would he make of it?

She is, after all, the literal fulfillment of King's dream -- a woman judged not by the color of her skin but by the content of her character. She is also living proof that King's eulogy was prescient, that "these children -- unoffending, innocent and beautiful -- did not die in vain."

So true. Yet another reason why I love that woman. But what I found very was the end of the article. See if you agree:

For Denise McNair's father, talking about Condoleezza Rice brings home what was gained and what he lost.

"Denise was my only daughter at the time, and (she and Rice) were in the same kindergarten at the Presbyterian church where her daddy was pastor," Chris McNair said. "She'd be 53 today. You do wonder what she would have been doing. She was always a leader."

McNair has followed Rice's career and even visited her for a few minutes at her White House office a couple of years ago. Her politics are not his, he said, but "I take my hat off to her," and to Bush for nominating her.

But McNair notes the irony that just this past Nov. 2, Alabamans voted narrowly against removing antiquated language from the state Constitution requiring separate schools for "white and colored children."

On Jan. 17, he will be the keynote speaker at Valparaiso (Indiana) University's annual Martin Luther King convocation. His speech is titled "Birmingham and the Unfinished Agenda."

We simply have no clue these days how to pick our battles. How many black people in Alabama really give a good G.D. about antiquated language in the state constitution supposedly requiring separate schools? Something tells me they really don’t give a good G.D.

Unfinished? As if that agenda will ever be “finished,” as it’s presently defined.

 

One of the saddest realizations for me is just how much the Democratic Party and their operatives have been involved in election fraud. Michelle Malkin quotes from a correspondence she received from one of her readers:

 

A state representative has been asking the Milwaukee Election Commission for information on the number of votes cast by voters who voted and registered on the same day (Wisconsin Law allows voters to register at the polls the day of the election). By law all same day registers are to be validated by mail immediately after the election (Their votes get counted regardless of their status).

 

Rep. [Jeff] Stone finally received an answer Monday of [last] week. He was told that there were 8,300 same day votes and approximately 900 were unable to be delivered. Assuming about one third of the same day votes will not be verified because there is no such address, etc., that would mean approximately 2400 illegal votes were cast. Sounds bad! Well.....

 

Rep. Stone today received a call from the Election Commission. They were a little bit off. They actually had 73,000 same day votes cast. 10,000 voter registration cards could not be sent because they have no addresses or incomplete or inadequate information. Using the same one third return rate that means in Milwaukee alone more than 25,000 illegal votes were cast. You can expect that the cities of Racine, Kenosha and Madison to have similar results.

 

Blatant election fraud. At some point, that party is going to have to admit that the sort of fraud they are countenancing simply is not happening on the other side. Instead, you have straw men set up against new technology while they strategize on how to keep manipulating the old process.

 

 

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has a post up in honor of Martin Luther King Day that is going to require some comment down the road.

 

THE QUESTION, then, is this: if “race” is now “culture,” and “culture” is an anti-essentialistic social construct, how can we account for our “differences”?  Clearly, pigmentation is not full proof; after all, many of those who think of themselves as black don’t “look black,” just as many of those who think of themselves as white may not “look white” (historically, this failure of perception to secure racial identity manifests itself in this country in the 19th and early-20th-century phenomenon of “passing").  Which would suggest that the answer, if it is the aim to continue the project of racial identity, must rest elsewhere—with the constructionist’s notion of culture. 

 

BUT IF CULTURE IS DEFINED as the set of beliefs and practices adopted or performed by a specific group of people, then the idea of using “culture” as a means of determining race is equally problematic. Under such conditions, all that is required to adopt a particular racial identity is to believe in the things that “they” believe in, to practice the things that “they” practice. Which means that once we stop believing those beliefs or practicing those practices, we’ve ceased to belong to that culture, ceased to belong to that race.

 

Whatcha think?

 

Maybe I’ll get to it during Black History Month, right? Right!

 

 

Blog God, Wretchard, speaks of newsrooms as agents on the wrong side in the new war of the 21^st Century:

 

The most salient difference between the Global War on Terror and the great conflicts of the 20th century, such as World War 2, is that there is literally no more front line. It therefore came as no surprise that the media -- that is to say the newsrooms, editorial desks and reportorial -- proved but one more foxhole in the conflict. The Jerusalem Post (hat tip: The Counterterrorism Blog) describes how some representatives of major wire services and news agencies were in the paid service of terrorist organizations.

 

One point in his post is that there has been a return (because of the new technology that allows for blogs, etc.) to the old ways requiring individuals to weigh incoming information and not simply rely on brand name news providers. Yet, those name providers remain powerful. Wretchard sees a silver lining nevertheless:

 

Fortunately for most there is the salvation of the common senses: the ability to observe the real through the packaging, and to learn from the airplane crashing into the tower facts we could not read in the newspapers. One of the strangest consequences of the development of Internet was the reimposition of the need for each individual to learn things for themselves. It is a task most would gladly do without, but it is the burden of sentience and the price of freedom.

 

The burden and the price, that sums it up.

 

John Podhoretz has apparently written up a fantastic piece on Commentary magazine called “The War Against World War IV.” In case you’re wondering, World War III was the Cold War, a war against worldwide Communist domination. I haven’t had a chance to really read it (the beginning deals with the flawed exit poll and how some have tried to narrow the result to some basic moral value/gay wedding thing and lessen the mandate for President Bush) but here are two paragraphs from early in the piece where Podhoretz argues that the poll results get at something much bigger from two very different ends of the stick:

As it happens, a few commentators associated with the religious Right are themselves opposed to the Bush Doctrine, which gives them, too, an incentive for minimizing its role in the President’s victory. But even those religious conservatives who support the Bush Doctrine have inadvertently played into the hands of his antagonists, both domestic and foreign. That is, by claiming the lion’s share of credit for November 2, they have made it a little easier for the antiwar forces to deny that the election held on that day was a referendum on the Bush Doctrine, and that it has the wind of a solid majority of the American people behind it.

Yet for all its intensity, this entire debate over the relative importance of moral values and the Bush Doctrine may stem from a complete misreading of the polls. For it is not in the least self-evident that the vague category of moral values was taken by the people who participated in the NEP survey merely as embracing abortion and gay marriage alone. On the contrary: in all probability they understood it more broadly to mean the traditionalist culture in general.

I think I agree with that.

Ra^therGate

The single most informative column to date is by Tony Blankley:

My first question is from whom is the review panel and its hired lawyers independent? Who paid the law firm for its hundreds, probably thousands of hours of research? I assume CBS paid them.

I hadn’t really thought about that but it’s a fantastic point.

So the lawyers hired to independently investigate CBS have a lawyer/client relationship with CBS. Presumably, as a senior member of that firm, Independent Review Panel Member Richard Thornburgh also has CBS as a fiduciary client. Thus, unlike similarly named government independent investigations — this one is paid for by, and carried out on behalf of, the target of the investigation.

As my paternal grandmother might, “Hush yo mouth!” It’s the law enforcement / legal paradigm all over again, just as was the case with the Clinton approach to the Global War on Terror. So, in discussing Mr. Thornburgh, Blankley says:

He has been honest with his factual report, and, by being so, he has helped CBS appear to be coming clean with the public.

But where he has boldly sought and reported the objective facts, he has been cautious and inconclusive regarding the subjective characterizing of those facts.

Summary? The law firm did its job, four employees of CBS were thrown from the train, and the corporation keeps on keeping on. The public, however, that CBS is charged to serve, was disrespected and given the shaft.

Ra^therGate

Dorothy Rabinowitz offers up this curious opinion in the Wall Street Journal:

Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi deserve credit for their report. Among all the reasons cited, one could also add their failure to succumb to any temptation to universalize CBS's offense, their disinclination to meditate on the nature of journalism and the frailties of its practitioners. They focused on facts, uncovered evasions and lies without averting their eyes, confronted all the significant issues stemming from this saga, and did it all in eminently lucid and astringent prose. It's hard to ask for much more.

 

There will be, in our future, other stories like the one that gave birth to this drama--investigations driven by zeal, political and otherwise, devoid of proofs, reported by journalists interested only in testimony supportive of their charges. But it will be some while, we may guess--and not only at CBS--before a producer will be able to undertake one without apprehension about some blogger waiting to pounce, or, more simply, the memory of the National Guard story and its aftermath. The ghost of "60 Minutes," Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2004, could be around to do its haunting for a long time to come, and a good thing it will be.

 

Good as far as it goes, which isn’t far. If Jonathan Last can detail just how far short this report falls when compared with the New York Times response to the Jayson Blair, it makes you wonder why so many can’t. Last wrote:

Unlike the New York Times, which painstakingly re-reported Jayson Blair’s stories and aired all of the factual dirty laundry, the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel seems to have done little investigating of its own.

Sure did. And Last continued:

Surely the blue-ribbon report had the responsibility not merely to critique CBS standards and practices, but to help us find out the truth about the incident at hand. To return to the New York Times analogy, it would be like judging the Jayson Blair case without knowing what he had and hadn’t made up. By assiduously avoiding conclusions of any kind, the report has left only one possible conclusion: The Thornburgh-Boccardi panel believes that the way in which CBS went about its business may have been improper, but that the story they produced wasn’t necessarily wrong. If anything, this represents a step backward in the official reckoning of the case.

Right, right, right. Now, time for the coup de grâce:

Well, if the documents weren’t forged and Mary Mapes acted with no political bias, then her firing would have been unjust and she really would be a scapegoat. But since there is abundant evidence that the documents were forgeries and that political attitudes were important in driving the story, the better conclusion is that the CBS Report is a whitewash.

Ssssssssssssssssmoking!

Ra^therGate

Ed Morrissey on the sorry state of affairs of Dan Rather:

When seen in context, Rather's performance during this scandal is shockingly dishonest and deliberatly misleading. He seems to have no sense of loyalty to the truth or to his viewers; in fact, his actions appear quite contemptuous of the public. How could Moonves expect to retain any credibility for any story fronted by Rather in any capacity at CBS? Moonves may think that the storm has passed -- but as long as Dan Rather continues to represent CBS, their news organization will have no credibility whatsoever.

Captain Ed does a damn good job in his piece zeroing in on the real party responsible for RatherGate, Dan Rather.

A theme that really bothers me is the whole More Boots On The Ground nonsense, and Wretchard does a good job citing folks who debunk that myth. That thing obviously started with the cadre of United States Army officers at the Pentagon. They were initially right – Rumsfeld was, like most Navy officers, too dismissive of the Army. That comes from envy – they (the Navy and the Air Force, too) know there’s a very real reason that West Point is called the United States Military Academy, and not Annapolis. Those Army officers also had to listen to stupidity heaped upon stupidity in the 1990s when people were talking as if all we really needed as a true ground force was a United States Marine Corps, and that we could actually cut the Army not simply from 18-to-10 divisions, but to six or eight divisions. I well remember reading about that kind of foolishness coming from Navy and Marine types.

Fewer and fewer people are talking with that kind of mindset these days, thank God.

But . . . that has led to unnecessary bitching and moaning from that cadre of Army officers who still want to take out Rumsfeld. Add that to other Rumsfeld enemies in the State Department and elsewhere and you have some serious enemies.

But you have to give the Secretary of Defense his due – he was oh so right on many things (e.g., not simply the need for transformation but HOW the force needed to be transformed), and to his credit he has backed the hell up and is properly respectful of the obvious centrality of the United States Army.

All of that preliminary discussion (and I know it rambled on) leads me to the point of this post. Included in Wretchard’s post is this infuriating snippet on the Central Intelligence Agency:

Hart says it is extremely difficult to recruit people into the clandestine service of the CIA. It is hard to reach them to recruit them in the first place. The universities with the highest concentrations of talent are hostile toward the CIA.

Now, that’s just an outright lie and demonstrates the mindset of this former high-ranking CIA operative. To me, he’s committing the same sin the Army guys did. His entity was cut far too much in the 1990’s, and needs to transform itself but this guy doesn’t quite get just how much the MINDSET of the agency needs to change. The utility of the grunt on the ground in the CIA needs to be enhanced and to best achieve that goal, you don’t need Ivy League grads.

Many will disagree, but we really don’t need people from Harvard or Stanford for those jobs. In fact, it is preferable that we DON’T have operatives from those schools. America’s strength is that there are plenty of talented and willing citizens at the major state universities capable of doing what the CIA needs done. If some of our elitists would just accept that fact.

Here is what I don’t get about the chicken-little approach to the War in Iraq – the absolute refusal to view it within any sort of real context. They remind me of Mary Tyler Moore back in the day on the Dick Van Dyke TV Show, sobbing “Ohhhhh, Rob – there’s been another EXPLOSION in Iraq!” Good God almighty, people, get a grip. And here’s a clue:

We certainly regret the murder of 100 Iraqis by terrorists. But, to put this in perspective, even if we assume that this elevated rate of 100 plus fatalities per ten days, out of a population of 25 million, were to continue on an annualized basis, the deaths would total around 21 per 100,000. That is just one-third higher than the death rate due to traffic accidents in the United States, and well below the U.S. traffic fatality rate as recently as the 1970's. Infuriating, yes. Debilitating, no.

Roger that, mate.

 

 

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters Blog has an exhaustive look at the CBS fiasco. There’s so much there that I’m still trying to digest it but this initially caught my attention for no other reason than so many folks noting the report finding a lack of political bias:

Mapes denies it, but she quite obviously used her position as a CBS News producer to pursue stories which interested her. No one at CBS assigned Mapes to pursue "intermittently" the TexANG story. As far back as 1999, Mapes was opining on internal e-mails to CBS management and Dan Rather that “in his military career, Bush was truly born on third base.” She believed that Bush had received preferential treatment even though she never found any evidence to support this. In fact, she acknowledged the lack of any objective factual support of this assertion in a strategy e-mail to CBS that proposed working around a lack of evidence:

Significantly, Mapes indicated in the April 1999 e-mail that she had been informed that there was no waiting list for President Bush’s TexANG unit at the time he entered. She posited the “darkest spin” that then-Colonel Walter Staudt, then in charge of the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, deliberately kept these spots open “to take in the children of privilege . . . while maintaining deniability.” Mapes told the Panel that she never found any proof for this theory. (page 46)

Now, the panel (and apparently CBS) showed no shock about a CBS producer basically saying that they could concoct a story denigrating Bush while the facts indicated the opposite. No one told Mapes to stop, and CBS allowed her to continue pursuing the story.

How can this be explained outside of bias?

Here is where you kick back, nod approvingly, and say, “Indeed.” Morrissey goes on to explain that, try as she might, Mapes could find no damaging evidence nor even corroborating eyewitnesses to supposed misconduct by the President. So, naturally, Morrissey has a common sense thought occur to him:

After that, Mapes doesn't do anything significant with the story until 2004, when Bush began his main re-election campaign. Before going into detail on that effort, this timing begs a serious question, one that the CBS panel doesn't ask. If indeed CBS and Mapes considered this newsworthy outside the framework of political bias, why didn't CBS pursue the story during the first Bush term?

Give up the ghost, CBS, just give up the ghost. Morrissey continues with the chronology, as provided by the just-released report. Anti-Bush operatives in Texas and Democratic operatives in Texas begin reaching out to Mapes but their main man, Burkett, is known to be unstable and laid down a remuneration demand into the mix. Good old Mary Mapes was undaunted, as was CBS:

Thus Mapes agreed to pursue financial rewards with a source that could influence the outcome of the election -- not because that person had evidence of wrongdoing by George Bush or even that he had benefitted from the wrongdoing of others, but simply because Burkett could supply them documents that would influence the election, regardless of their reliability. Mapes knew that Roberts already considered Burkett a crank after working with him, and she didn't care.

How can that not be positive and convincing evidence of bias?

To any reasonable person, it can’t be.

 

Roger Simon has a good post up on the relevance of network news anchors. I liked this comment by one of his readers:

An anchor man is like Tide Soap. He is a brand. His value is as a brand - it's not like Dan Rather has an special talent that couldn't be found in some significant percentage of the population.

The next time you see anyone whose value is as a brand (and that includes lots of actors and singers), and they are making political statements, just visualize - it's Tide Detergent talking to you.

Posted by: John Moore ( Useful Fools ) at January 10, 2005 05:55 PM

Tide Soap! Just another brand! That’s exactly what I’m going to think the next time I hear an entertainer say something I consider to be politically stupid.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web site finds an oops in the CBS News report involving its own report:

If Only They Had One of Those Newfangled Spell Checkors
"Some critics said the documents were most probably forgeries prepared on a modern word processer."--CBSNews.com, Jan. 10

Oh well.

 

John Podhoretz has a conclusion as good as any on Ra^therGate:

But here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether CBS executives met in a room, twirled moustaches and gave each other high-fives about getting George Bush. What matters is that they turned their airwaves over to someone who was clearly in the grip of an obsession.

And here's the other thing. They were able to do such a thing because they did not see her obsession as an obsession - because, no doubt, most of them wanted it to be true, too.

That's what happens when you're blinded by bias. Thornburgh and Boccardi didn't want to say so. The world doesn't need them to say so. The world knows the truth.

Bingo. The jig is up and we do know the truth.

 

Patterico has an interesting post and discussion going (based on another suggestion from Jay Rosen at New York University on the value of transparency in the Ra^therGate affair. Both are good discussions.

 

I’m reading an informative interview on the Reason website. Here’s a particularly relevant Q&A:

Reason: We live in a time when even socialists grant that capitalism is better at producing things. What about The Road to Serfdom and Hayek remains especially relevant in the 21st century?

Caldwell: His critique of the way “science” gets used in social settings. Science is a very powerful tool that has brought a lot of technological and material progress. But the mistaken notion that we can plan social structures and social realities and social institutions in the same way that we can accomplish goals like putting people in space is very, very seductive. That belief is something that never goes away. Hayek’s critique of that mind-set is part and parcel of The Road to Serfdom and many of his other writings. Road is part of a larger effort called “The Abuse of Reason Project,” which attacked what he eventually called “rationalist constructivism,” the idea that we are able to reconstruct or correct society along rational lines.

He argued that you can’t easily improve on what he called “spontaneous orders.” There are many situations in which an order has arisen by individuals following rules. They often can’t articulate why they follow the rules, some of them are moral rules, whatever, and this has lead to a certain amount of coordination of people’s activity. To the extent that it’s done, that it’s allowed, groups that have followed those rules tend to prosper. That’s what he defined as “a spontaneous order.” This can occur among animals that are noncommunicating, and it can occur among humans and various social institutions. Language, the market, money, and more reflect this.

To simply come in and say, “OK, this stuff all needs changing,” ignores that social evolution has taken place through time. We can all see the problems that exist in various institutions, but it’s particularly dangerous when you try to make wholesale changes, rather than piecemeal ones, within social institutions to try to achieve better ends.

The way socialism was implemented in the 20th century is one of the pre-eminent examples of what goes wrong when you try to reconstruct society along more “rational” lines.

The limits of reason echo throughout our present politics. This is amplified later in the interview with this question:

Reason: What do you think Hayek’s legacy in the 21st century will be?

Caldwell: To the extent that the ideas in papers like “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” get developed, that could be a big part of his legacy. He didn’t get very far in developing the concept, but it’s the basis for his claims that what we can know in the social sciences is ultimately very limited. It holds that pattern predictions are the best that we can often do when it comes to society. He suggested that it’s better to provide explanations of the principle by which something works than to make precise predictions of how people will act.

That bears repeating, it seems to me: it’s better to provide explanations of the principle by which something works than to make precise predictions of how people will act. History has certainly proven that.

Jim Geraghty at TKS has posted an incredible e-mail from Mary Mapes regarding the report issued by CBS . . . and she taint happy one bit

 I am shocked by the vitriolic scape-goating in Les Moonves's statement. I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations — ratings rather than journalism. Mr. Moonves's response to the review panel's report and the panel's assessment of the evidence it developed in its investigation combine not only to condemn me, but to put all investigative reporting in the CBS tradition at risk.

 Mary the Martyr continued:

 It is noteworthy the panel did not conclude that these documents are false.

 Uhhh, yeah. It is noteworthy – namely, that they did everything but state that obvious conclusion. But, of course, Mary had to conclude with a flourish befitting a moonbat:

 I believe the segment presented to the American people facts they were free to accept or reject, and that as those facts were presented, there was nothing that was false or misleading. I am heartened to see that the panel found no political bias on my part, as indeed I have none. For 25 years, I have built a reputation as a fair, honest and thorough journalist. I have had 15 wonderful years at CBS News and four very bad months. I love and respect the people there and I wish them every good fortune.

That’s a truly telling response by Ms. Mapes. Incredibly informative. And it does not speak well of her at all . . . or CBS.

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Ra^therGate Report

RatherGate.com; RatherBiased.com; memeorandum.com; Instapundit.com; PowerLineBlog.com;

That’s just for starters; this news will be chewed on for weeks.

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Nelson Mandela’s son, Makgatho Mandela, 54, dies from AIDS:

On Thursday [January 6^th], as he announced the cause of his son's death, the 86-year-old former president said: "Let us give publicity to HIV/Aids and not hide it, because [that is] the only way to make it appear like a normal illness."

Makgatho's wife Zondi died of pneumonia last year.

The struggle of life for Nelson Mandela continues. But, for an interesting addition to this discussion that I haven’t really been able to check out (but the little that I’ve seen looks interesting as hell), check out this post from Dean Esmay:

Now, an interesting fact is that the mainline AIDS establishment has for years been loathe to acknowledge people who are HIV+ but refuse medication and never get sick. See, for example, the recent documentary The Other Side Of AIDS, which interviews a number of people who are HIV+ and healthy, some going on 20 years now. See also support groups such as Alive & Well, and related groups found in New York, Portland, San Diego, and Toronto, with numerous members who are HIV+ but refuse to take the "safe" cocktail medications. Many of these groups have been around as long as ten years, with members who can document HIV+ status of 10, 15, even 20 years and are still alive and well--and med-free. See also Kim Bannon.

Wow, talk about an interesting angle on a complex story!

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Jason Van Steenwyk comments on the dumber and dumber calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation:

Wanna help troops? Bitchslap the cocktail-swilling milquetoasts on the editorial page of the New York Times who are so easily spooked they want to postpone the elections in Iraq, and the defeatist mopes at The Nation who as recently as October were pushing for a cut-and-run by the New Year. Publicly excoriate them. Make them out to be the fools that they are. Commit the nation to winning.

And worry less about what the insurgents are doing to us and worry more about what we're going to do to the insurgents.

The U.S. military did not do these things because of Rumsfeld's choices.

It's clear that Kagan [in the latest edition of The Weekly Standard] doesn't quite know what the military has or has not done. Nor does he offer a productive plan to utilize additional troops he thinks we need.

I tell you, there were no proposals on the table to expand the Army by enough troops to take on the missions he delineates. All of them defensive missions, by the way. Not one idea about how to reach out and clobber the insurgent.

What a loser.

Yeah, what he said.

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Wretchard the Cat, explaining indirectly that we are preparing to take action against Syria (and that makes me a happy man):

The apparent confidence of the "Senior State Department Official" that Iraqi elections will be held on time is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that US strategy is entering a new phase. The refusal to postpone the elections, the likely voting patterns and the absence of a deal to almost guarantee that the incoming Iraqi government will be largely Shi'ite and Kurdish. The uncompromising position of the Sunni insurgents will create a post-electoral Iraq where they have been largely excluded: a choice they have strategically embraced. With Syrian sanctuary and extensive clandestine networks in Sunni areas surrounding Baghdad, the insurgents hope to destabilize the new government, believing the America too overstretched to take on Damascus directly.

The more the American military struggles to stabilize Iraq, the Syrians may reason, the less likely the Bush administration will be to directly confront the Damascus regime or try to dictate changes in the Middle East. Tied down fighting in Iraq, the thousands of U.S. troops deployed across Syria's eastern border are not so unnerving. As it is, patrolling the border area, vast and desolate and reminiscent of West Texas, is a relentless challenge for the Marines and a new group of Iraqi border agents.

The US was clearly content to stay on the defensive while it attained its strategic goal of creating a new Iraqi State. Now that achievement is in sight the US is faced with the choice of whether to remain on the defensive over go over to the attack. As long as Damascus can persuade the new Iraqi government it will not directly threaten it, Syria and the Ba'athist holdouts can hope to eventually pry the incoming government in Baghdad away from the Americans. One way the US can neutralize that potential danger is to pre-emptively transform the new Iraq into a direct threat to Syria. It is possible that US planners are examining offensive options that do not necessarily involve a conventional invasion of Syria. What seems certain is that US leaders are rapidly approaching a new decision point.

As so many folks continue to focus on those fewer but more spectacular attacks in Iraq, the United States military is steady on the case.

****************************************************************************************************************

Yet another window into the soul of the Democratic Party in Florida, and it ain’t pretty:

"I sat here for the last 30 minutes and observed why I stopped coming to these meetings," County Commissioner Addie Greene said toward the end of the quarrelfest.

"The lack of decorum, lack of respect is abhorrent," scolded Ramona Young of Boynton Beach, who came with thoughts of joining the DEC and left with serious doubts. "It goes to show you why we couldn't win an election."

Dysfunctional and in decline – this is Exhibit A.

****************************************************************************************************************

The Governor, Jeb Bush, is releasing his proposed budget this week:

Bush will announce proposed policy changes and enhancements on reading initiatives for Florida middle schools today and return to the Capitol on Tuesday to release his recommendations on Medicaid -- likely to be one of the dominant themes in the legislative session beginning March 8.

Education and social services are the largest components of the state budget.

Should be an interesting legislative session in Tallahassee this year – come to think of it, when isn’t it?

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January 9, 2005

Andrew McCarthy, writing on the recent hearings in the Senate on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, praises Arlen Specter:

New Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter performed his most valuable service of a very long day in about five minutes of questioning — during which he exposed the emptiness of the high dudgeon by confronting these experts with the so-called "ticking bomb" hypothetical: A bomb is about to be detonated in a major metropolitan area, likely to kill perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the military has as a captive a known terrorist who, we have reason to believe, has knowledge which would allow us to save those lives if we could get him to provide it. Are you saying, the senator asked, that torture — even in a non-lethal method, requested by a responsible high official, and perhaps even supervised by a federal court — would be absolutely impermissible? That we must stand down while those thousands are massacred?

The answers were fascinating. Cutting through the dizzying circumlocution, each witness either stubbornly declined to answer the question or grudgingly acknowledged that the situation made torture (of the non-lethal type described above) at least acceptable if not permissible.

And McCarthy properly castigates these stereotypical representatives of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party:

A number of us have tried to grapple with the hard stuff about the war against terrorists — the intersection between abiding respect for human dignity and the imperative of pressing for intelligence that might save human life. We don't pretend that this is easy, that it's black-and-white, or that expressly licensing coercive interrogation — even a minimal form of torture — in the most dire situations would not potentially open the door to human-rights abuses that should be universally condemned. It would. That's why it needs to be thought through with sensitivity.

But the critics should do us all a favor: If you're going to talk the talk of righteous indignation, be ready to walk the walk. Be ready to tell Americans exactly what protections you want to give to the terrorists. Be ready to tell Americans that you would prohibit coercive interrogation even if it were the only way of saving a hundred thousand of them.

If you're not ready to do that — because you full well understand that your position is not one even you can defend when the questions get hard — then don't waste our time. Get out of the way of serious people like Judge Gonzales. People who don't pretend to be perfect, who don't claim to have all the answers, and who are not so smug that they think they can afford to take life-and-death options off the table — even as they pray they will never have to use them.

Life and death. ‘Nuff said.

 

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Amir Taheri, on a little-noticed revolution bubbling up from the surface in the Middle East due to American leadership starting with President Bush. Firstly:

I cannot tell you what the events of 2005 will be. But I can tell you what the undercurrents that shape events are. The first concerns the concept of political power and its provenance. This is changing in a dramatic, though little noticed, way. Traditionally, power in the Middle East has been shrouded in mystical fog, its origins traced to divine will, military conquest, charismatic leadership and revolution. That view is now changing as more and more people in the region look to elections, that is to say the expression of people's will, as the proper origin of political power — a power exercised in the interests of the whole community.

Secondly:

The second undercurrent likely to be with us in 2005 is terrorism in its many guises. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars served as needles that pierced old festering blisters. The destruction of the Taliban and the Saddamites forced terrorists of all ilks out of the woodwork to fight open battles. Having geared themselves for a gangrene strategy, that is to say low-intensity warfare to wear out Arab and Muslim societies over a long period, these terrorists were dragged into open combat in both military and political battlefields where their defeat, no matter how long it takes to accomplish, is certain.

Thirdly:

The third undercurrent that merits attention in 2005 is the deepening desire for reform. For the first time ever, reform and changes have become the main themes of Arab politics. Last year dozens of conferences and seminars were held on the subject, and the 2005 calendar is dotted with many more.

Cynics would dismiss all these as nothing but a talk athon. But in politics, talk does matter. The change of Arab political discourse, from one obsessed with religious themes, to one concerned with matters such as economic development and educational excellence, is a leap toward modernity.

Well done, Dubya. As the author notes, none of this is guaranteed. Nothing in life is. But, no one can doubt that the President has engaged the process of tackling serious issues in that region. America can’t do it all, it will not be accomplished quickly, and there will certainly be incessant bitching and moaning. Still, the first step has been successfully taken. America has said to the terrorists: You looking for me? Here I be, bitch. Right outside your front door.

 

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George Will, making a very good point about Social Security:

Surely the beginning of wisdom is to begin not with such speculations [meaning, the relatively rosy expectations by the Democrats] but with the question asked, in a Wall Street Journal essay, by Edward C. Prescott, co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in economics: "If we could wipe the slate clean, what kind of government retirement program would we build from scratch today?" In no 15-year period in the last eight decades has the growth of stocks ever been negative; in no 20-year period has the average growth been less than 3 percent, which is better than the rate of return on Social Security assets. So if we were starting with a clean slate, surely we would consider some use of the market to be prudent rather than risky.

And then makes an equally good point about the nature of politics right now:

The political problem is this: Even if the future were knowable and we knew that the Social Security solvency problem actually is smaller than Bush assumes, he would still favor reform involving personal accounts funded by a portion of payroll taxes. He believes such reform would be conducive to civic virtue, as conservatives understand that — individualism, self-reliance, limited government. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get many Democrats to toss their caps over the wall for that.

Quite right.

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January 8, 2005

 

I found this incredible story in the Gainesville Sun today, documenting the steps taken to try and identify (since August 2003) a dead baby found floating in a local pond:

 

The Sheriff's Office paid $1,250 to DNAPrint Genomics Inc., a forensics lab in Sarasota, to conduct genetic ancestry tests on a bone sample from the infant's remains.

The results showed that there was a "very high probability" that the child was of sub-Saharan African ancestry and a "high probability" that the parents and or grandparents were of Caribbean descent, Troiano said.

The tests are part of the DNAWitness program, a new patented test offered since 2003. Scientists compared the baby's genetic strains with 176 genetic markers endemic to different ancestries - such as European or sub-Saharan African genetic strains.

 

Damn! Has DNA research advanced that far? And it begs this question – with the African American population so heavily infused with admixtures of European and American Indian ancestry, exactly how are the probabilities in those 176 genetic markers itemized for categorization? I think I want to believe that they are in fact capable of accurately doing what they say they have done – but I have to admit my B.S. alarm is going off and I suspect there is quite a bit of “art” being passed off as “science,” and I will keep that suspicion until someone convincingly demonstrates otherwise.

 

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Is the New York Times in all of its arrogant wisdom and certitude against the idea of happiness? Apparently so:

 

The New York Times Book Review has always reviewed the latest wrinkles on Freud, Jung, and (just today) the sexual abuse of children But no review of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, no review of George Vaillant’s Aging Well, no review of David Myer’s The American Paradox, no review of David Whitman’s The Optimism Gap, no review of Kahneman, Diener, & Schwartz’s Well-Being (the Nobel Prize is apparently not enough to make it “heavyweight”), no review of Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon’s Good Work. Only one of the dozen or so recent serious books on happiness has been reviewed, Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox. It is a balanced and thoroughly researched study of striking economic and social progress since 1950 juxtaposed to no increase in happiness over the same time period. Finally taking notice, the New York Times Book Review denounced it as “slapdash nonsense.”

Now, if it can consistently do that in the field of social science, surely such an attitude must be reinforced and prevalent throughout the paper, right? Don’t forget, also, that the opinion cited above is from an avid daily reader of The Times for forty-years who also is a Professor at an Ivy League school. This is how the opinion piece cited above cites the author:

 

Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. is the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, the founder of the field of Positive Psychology, a Past President of the American Psychological Association (1998), and the author of 21 books including his most recent best seller, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.  With Chris Peterson, he is co-author of the newly-released Character Strengths and Virtues: A Classification and Handbook.  He is also the co-founder of Authentic Happiness Coaching LLC.

 

Nattering nabobs of negativism in the citadel of the Democratic Party have unintentionally created a political party that only knows (really and truly) how to bitch and moan. Thanks to Roger Simon on this post; and check out his readers comments.

 

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Patrick Ruffini throws down the gauntlet on the Social Security debate:

In the last few weeks, the Democratic strategy to distort the truth about personal accounts has congealed. Here's what they're going to do. They're going to claim that Social Security's solvency crisis is no more than a "myth", a ruse for the Republicans "hidden agenda" to "dismantle" the program. They're going to ignore the mathematical certainty that a relatively static number of workers cannot indefinetely support a mushrooming number of retirees. And as the White House official (on blogs, we attribute correctly) adeptly points out, this certainty is compounded by the wage indexation of benefits -- meaning that no matter how quickly tax revenues grow, benefits will grow just as fast, making it impossible for traditional Social Security to ever close this funding gap.

But let's leave aside the question of solvency. The bottom line of this whole debate remains that modernizing Social Security with personal accounts is the right thing to do. Even if Social Security were perfectly solvent, it would still be the right thing to do. You accuse us of having a "hidden agenda." Let's spell out in clear terms of what that "hidden agenda" actually is.

And what, pray tell, is that hidden agenda?

When Democrats carp about a "hidden agenda" always bring the debate back to this cornerstone. Responsibility vs. doing the thing that's failed over and over again. Modernization vs. a stuck-in-'35 mindset. Growth vs. stagnation. More vs. less.

These are the terms upon which the future of Social Security must be debated, liberal red herrings aside.

Because Republicans do have an evil "hidden agenda."

To make you rich.

Strong, strong statement Patrick. I think you've set the table and it's time to dine. Let the debate begin.

 

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Here’s an ugly peak back at American paternalism and its ability to severely impact even those closest to you:

What really happened? The website Lost Among Us is less polite than the wires:

When the confines of a convent weren't enough to contain restive Rosemary Kennedy, the patriarch of that Massachusetts dynasty had his beautiful, soft-spoken but slow eldest daughter lobotomized to gain control.

But the operation, performed in Washington, D.C., by a famed neurologist with strong ties to San Bernardino, went terribly awry. At about the age of 23, her ability to care for herself had been hacked away.

This woman who had been presented at court to the king and queen of England remains today in a cottage built for her at a school for exceptional children in Wisconsin, an infant of 85 in the care of nuns.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., father of President John F. Kennedy, didn't tell his wife, Rose, when he ordered the operation on their daughter.

The sad tale of Rosemary Kennedy is well documented by author Laurence Leamer in "The Kennedy Men 1901-1963" and by Jack El-Hai, a Minnesota journalist, and others.

In lobotomy, the surgeon slips an ice pick-shaped instrument behind the patient's eye and with a sweeping motion severs the frontal lobe, where emotion, personality and will are believed to reside, from the rest of the brain. It is then repeated behind the other eye.

Once in vogue and widely practiced, including many times at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, it has fallen from favor and has been largely discredited.

It was introduced at Patton in 1951 by the theatrical and flamboyant neurologist who developed the procedure, Dr. Walter J. Freeman Jr., the same man, who with his partner, James Watts, lobotomized Rosemary Kennedy.

So the lobotomy didn't improve the quality of life for JFK's sister; it nearly destroyed it. And the furtive whispers Joseph Kennedy sought to avoid by the operation grew due to the operation.

R.I.P Rosemary.

Wow. I’d like to believe the man meant well but that’s some pretty damning information.

 

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January 7, 2005

 

Want a quick overview on the whole Social Security Crisis issue? Take a look at this Q and O Blog post on the Trust Fund shenanigans. Many will not be surprised that Paul Krugman is central to the disinformation campaign. For instance:

 

[T]he real problem in Krugman's criticism begins here . . .

 

Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

 

Here's another truth: the "large and growing trust fund" consists of....future debt. That money's already been spent, baby. When we do have to dip into the Trust Fund, we'll be that much farther from balancing the budget.

• Backstory: Trust Fund surpluses have been added to the General fund to create a "Unified Budget" since 1970 -- this accounting gimmick was made law by the Budget Act of 1974.

 

• Recently: this has worked out to the marked benefit of Washington, which has been able to add "trust fund" assets to the General Fund, to create the appearance of a budget surplus.

 

And then Jon Henke made this further point, focusing upon an analysis of budget numbers and the trust fund numbers during the period from 1998-2003:

 

YEAR             BUDGET SURPLUS                        T-FUND SURPLUS [net]

1998                             $69b                                        $99b

1999                             $126b                                      $124b

2000                             $236b                                      $151b

2001                             $127                                        $162b

2002                             -$158                                       $159b

2003                             -$375                                       $155b

 

See that number on the right? That's the net increase of the Trust Fund . . . only, we just toss it in with general revenue every year, and spend the hell out of it.

At some point--2018 [2028, if you include interest]--that free ice cream helping us pay for our current budget is going to....go away. It will be replaced by obligations. And debt. Lots of debt. Debt as far as the eye can see.

And that debt will be on top of any other structural and discretionary debt-spending.

 

Context, context, context. But read the comments to the post, there are some good points made, I think, on both sides of the debate.

 

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Included in one of the comments to the post cited above is reference to a contextual document that included an informative chart.

 

With the new federal Fiscal Year 2006 budget coming out in February, it is undoubtedly useful to any upcoming discussions on that budget for some reference point data regarding prior budgets.

 

Scott A. Hodge is President of The Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank, and that outfit produced this chart presented below on the last fiscal year budget of all Presidents since 1981. The Tax Foundation may be contacted at (202) 464-5103 or Scott Hodge may be e-mailed at Hodge@taxfoundation.org:

 

Presidential Comparison (all figures in $billions) Bush FY '05 Proposal Clinton 2nd Term Last Fiscal Year 2001 Clinton First Term Last Fiscal Year 1997 G.H.W. Bush Last Fiscal Year1993 Reagan 2nd Term Last Fiscal Year 1989 Reagan 1st Term Last Fiscal Year 1985 Carter Last Fiscal Year 1981 Revenues        Total Revenues in Current $ $ 2,036 $ 1,991 $ 1,579 $ 1,154 $ 991 $ 734 $ 599 Total Revenues in Constant $2004