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Friday, January 30, 2004
Why Global Warming Might Be Good for America
There’s a lot of talk going around about a Fortune article on a study by a Pentagon think-tank which examines the possible effects of drastic climate change. Prepared by the team around Andrew Marshall, the legendary Defense Department Director of Net Assessment, the report discusses in detail a number of the potentially dire consequences of Global Warming (which, oddly enough, would actually lead to cooling in parts of the Northern Hemisphere). Already some are pointing to this study as a reason to undertake the favored anti-growth measures of the left (restrictions on industrial emissions, reduction in Fossil Fuel use, etc). In fact, based on this report and others, I see little reason to do anything. This does not mean that I deny that the report might be potentially true: it means that I don’t see a real downside for the United States if it is.
While it is true that the United States would suffer some negative effects as a result of a drastic change in climate, most of these effects are easily offset by the United States’ large population, physical size, geographical position, and resource base. So what if climate change results in marginally lower crop yield? After all, the United States already produces far more food than it uses in a year and, if needed, could produce substantially more. While there is a danger of a refugee crisis along the Southern border, I imagine that such a crisis would give a future President carte blanche to wall off the US-Mexican border and fortify it with mines and artillery. And if, in the end, the United States has the need for more water or energy, it could always coerce Canada into providing it and, failing in that, it could simply conquer Canada. I do not deny that there would be some negative effects in America but, as the Forbes article explains, the United States, “survives without catastrophic losses.” With the right leadership, I imagine that the Republic could not only come through such a period without substantial losses: it could actually make substantial gains. The real burden of global warming falls on countries outside of the United States: on Europe, Africa, and Asia (Australia, like the United States, is positioned to do well out of the crisis). The same effects which would marginally effect America would produce severe storms, prolonged droughts, and crop failures in China. It would freeze Northern Europe while burning up Southern Europe and causing the flight of millions of refugees. It would utterly devastate the Middle East, thereby ameliorating one of the great problems of the present day. Worst-case scenarios of the results of climate change begin, to me at least, to look like a strange sort of global Passover. The Angel of Death passes over the land, smiting the wicked and ungodly Kingdom’s of sin which defy the will of America while leaving the righteous American Republic standing, untouched and mighty. Some might object to my apparent wish that harm befall all of America’s enemies and competitors. I don’t see how any real objection can be raised: for it is not enough for America to succeed, others must fail. While wealth is not a zero sum game, power is. It is possible for you to gain wealth and I to gain wealth and, therefore, for both of us to be happier as a result. I, however, cannot gain in power without someone else losing some of theirs. In this scenario, then, the United States gains in absolute strength merely by maintaining the same relative strength because everyone else is losing their strength and, therefore, their power. Imagine a world where all of America’s enemies and competitors have been reduced to the status of beggars and supplicants, meekly pleading for a little American aid. It’s almost enough to make one wish that climate change could begin tomorrow. True, it saddens me deeply to think that any harm at all might fall upon faithful Britain, but I see little reason why the United States, armed with increased power by the decline of all its enemies, could not provide major aid to one of the only other nations on the Earth that is worthy of survival. Some mix of subsidized resettlement in America and Australia, combined with extensive aid, could allow the British people to maintain a lifestyle equal (if not better) to that they enjoy today. The same goes for Israel. Naturally, this would lead to all sorts of conflicts between other nations. The report conjures up nightmare scenarios of a three-way clash between India, Pakistan and China, Eastern European invasions of Russia, or inter-European wars. Frankly, I see little reason why this ought to alarm me. After all, if India and China are busy destroying eachother, they will certainly be short on time to plot against America. The best path to victory isn’t to fight: it’s to convince your enemies and competitors to kill eachother. Obviously none of this can be the stated policy of the United States. “We’ll be fine, so the rest of you bastards can all burn in hell” might sound great to me, but I doubt it would sell as national policy. And, in any case, the possibility of serious and sudden climate change actually remains rather small. Given this, why should we seek to make drastic changes in our lifestyle and economy? There is only a small chance of climate change and, even if such change does occur, it will probably be (on the balance) a plus for us: so why sweat it? A policy of benign neglect (combined with covert planning) is what is called for. Let the world do as it wishes, and live with the consequences. It is possible that this may lead to additional anti-American anger, at least in the short run. However, I suspect that most of the angry people will decide to direct their anger at more convenient targets such as their governments and their neighbours. If the rest of the world wants to set out to stop “Global Warming” that’s fine by me: they’ll hurt their own economies more than that of the United States and, thereby achieve our aim absent the chaos. If they don’t wish to, then they shall reap the consequences if and when they come. This is a dangerous world, one in which America is threatened by many foes. We must take, and utilize, whatever advantage we can find. Who knows what the years ahead may bring: we might find that global climate change will bring our Kamikaze, a divine wind which will save us from the rising Chinese threat. Thursday, January 29, 2004
Attack of the Petty
The latest Bush decision to set these people screaming is the call for an increase of between $15 and $20 million in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Yes, you heard that right, $15-$20 million. That’s it.
Now, some of you might still object because of some of the truly bizarre “art” which has been funded by the NEA over the years. What’s this money going towards, then? One word: Shakespeare. Yes, that’s right, people and pitching a fit and threatening to not vote for the President over a few million dollars to bring Hamlet and Henry V to various communities which might otherwise not get to enjoy them. (Actually, the plays being presented this year by the ‘Shakespeare in American Communities’ project are: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, which slightly saddens me since Henry V is my favourite play). What’s really funny about this is that most of the people screaming about this are probably the same people screaming over how most of our popular culture has become a cesspool of filth. Its one thing to complain, it’s another do actually do something about it. Now I realize that some people are already preparing to shriek, “No enumerated power!” at me but, seriously, let’s get real. There are plenty of worse ways for the government to spend money than to give a few million dollars to Classical Music, Opera, and Shakespearean plays. Hell, if my memory serves me correctly, I seem to recall that the companies that Shakespeare was a member of were named ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ and ‘The King’s Men’, suggesting that, without government funding, we might have found ourselves without much of the Bard’s work in the first instance. People like to say, “If people want art, they should pay for it”: but let’s face facts. If the only cultural forms which were allowed to survive were those that could be entirely self-funding then within a few years we’d have nothing left other than Left Behind books, rap music, blockbuster movies, and hard-core pornography. That might be a-ok with a lot of libertarian types, but it certainly isn’t with me. Frankly, if it were my choice, I’d be for raising the money for public broadcasting, the NEA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities- so long as measures could be taken to ensure that they will remain under the control of the right people. The greatest documentary of recent years and, I believe, the greatest piece of patriotic art of the final decades of the 20th century- Ken Burns’ masterpiece The Civil War was made possible through NEH funding. So long as we can have more stuff like that, I see no reason at all why we shouldn’t be prepared to pay something for it. All great nations have subsidized art and other great patriotic and cultural works. Most of the best composers were indirectly funded by the state (of course, technically they were funded by noblemen, Lord, and Kings, but we know where that money came from in the first place). Why not subsidize lavish, epic, patriotic films that the big studios might otherwise never make? Why not make great culture accessible to all of the people? Frankly, I think that it’s time to make a major propaganda push in the War on Terrorism. I see no reason why we shouldn’t have modern day equivalents of all of those movies made during the Second World War: “Twenty-One Days to Baghdad” or something along those lines. The people, after all, need to be constantly reminded of “why we fight”. Frankly, for these purposes, a budget of a few billion dollars wouldn’t be at all out of order. But that’s really aside from the point here. Some claim that, by having the state fund productions, some of us are imposing our taste on others. And, to that, I say: so what? Anyone who claims that there is no objective difference between a generation raised on rap music and a generation raised on the classics is a fool. Wednesday, January 28, 2004
JFK Isn’t the Front-Runner
This is, in some ways, everything that I could have hoped for. John F. Kerry might well, for the moment, be in the lead: but that lead is far too fragile at this time to honestly crown him as the “front-runner” for the Democratic nomination. Nay, what looks likely now is a long and bruising fight for the nomination which leaves all of the contenders broke, battered, and bloodied. This race is moving too fast and is far too confusing to, at this point; make any truly accurate prediction of the final result. It should be recalled that, just a month ago, virtually every major pundit and political insider was proclaiming Howard Brush Dean III the Democratic nominee. We’ve still got more than a month to go until Super Tuesday. That’s a lot of time for gaffes, scandals, and whatever other nonsense can be dreamed up.
Some are living under the false impression that this will be settled within a week. February 3rd will be helpful to Kerry only if he manages to win virtually all of the primaries that day, which seems unlikely. More likely is that, attempting to administer the final blow to his opponents; Kerry will over-extend himself by seeking to run the table and, therefore, will expose himself to a vicious counter-attack. What happens if, next week, Edwards wins in South Carolina and Clark wins in Oklahoma, with the rest of the primaries being variously split and Dean performing well (20% or so) everywhere? Who’s the ‘front-runner’ then? One of the great disadvantages of the short primary schedule is that it allows candidates to survive who would otherwise be driven from the race. In the old system, Clark would have been out of the race after last night and Dean would be tottering on the edge. The rapidity of the season now gives them a second chance. In other words, by giving people less time to think and manoeuvre, the rapid-fire primary schedule gives time for little more than frantic scrambling. The race now must look ahead to March 2nd, which offers the best chance of a decisive day in this contest. If Kerry can beat back the other candidates, if he can raise enough money, if he can avoid getting hit too much, he can emerge as the nominee by winning California and New York on that day. Or, maybe not. Suppose that Edwards wins South Carolina, polls in the teens in the North, and wins Tennessee and Virginia as well. Dean manages to win Michigan, Washington, Maine, and a few other scattered primaries, keeping himself in the fight. Kerry wins the rest, but fails to really emerge with a clear lead. Then, on March 2nd, the fight between Edwards and Kerry over who is more electable manages to hand Dean a narrow win in California, while Kerry takes New York, Ohio, and splits most of the rest of the North with Dean. Edwards wins in Georgia. But then, a week later, Edwards sweeps “Southern Tuesday”, winning Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Who is the front-runner then? And, by this point, there aren’t enough primaries left to really tip the balance to one side or the other. And all of this, I might add, is assuming that Clark is on the way out. Were he to win Oklahoma and Arizona on February 3rd, he’d be right in the fight with everyone else. The most notable thing about this fight is that none of the Democrats really disagree with eachother about everything. The details of their exact plans differ slightly, but those differences don’t matter very much anyways since any of their plans will be mauled and rewritten by the Congress. What does this leave us with, then? Biography and attacks. John Kerry and Wesley Clark will both try and run on their military backgrounds. Watch for this to get truly nasty over the next little while, with Clark and Edwards using various tricks to attack Kerry for his anti-war activism, while Kerry and Edwards will probably seek to attack Clark for his record as NATO Supreme Commander. There probably won’t be ads in the subject, but a lot of people in South Carolina will soon be (or possibly already are) getting some… interesting… phone calls. At the same time, John Edwards will be attacked for having so little experience, while John Kerry will be attacked both for his liberal voting record and his lack of legislative accomplishments in the Senate. At the same time, Dean will attack Kerry and Kerry’s people will suggest that Dean is mentally unstable. John Edwards will have a hard time being heard over all of the attacks. If I were Howard Dean, I would go before a camera somewhere tomorrow and announce that I’d had a change of thought on gay marriage: I’m now for it 100%. In order to sell this, I’d find a really sympathetic gay couple and movingly explain how they convinced me of the moral rightness of “treating all people equally” or some other nonsense. I’d then attack all of the other candidates for opposing gay marriage while, at the same time, I’d tout my record in Vermont. The main reason why Dean and the other major Democrats have yet to take this position is obvious: they fear it will kill their chances in a General Election. But Dean’s got little to lose: he can’t fight in the general unless he first wins the nomination. Polls show that gay marriage is supported by both a majority of Democrats and a majority of young voters. This would put Dean back on the cutting-edge of the race issue-wise and would force everyone else to respond to him. Frankly, it would expose the stupidity of the present position of all the major Democrats on the issue (for Civil Unions, against gay marriage, but opposed to doing anything to try and stop gay marriage because it would be ‘mean spirited’ to do so). In any case, there’s little to do now but wait, watch, and research all of the likely nominees. Hopefully, we’ll have until Boston to do so. Treason
A list has been published of people who were bribed with Iraqi money and oil by the former regime.
From the MEMRI: Canada: Arthur Millholland, president and CEO of the Calgary-based Oilexco company, received 1 million barrels of oil. Then, look at this: Making money first drew Arthur Millholland to Iraq. He thought getting involved in the Oil For Food program would leave his company, Oilexco, in good standing when the sanctions ended. But it didn't take long before he became disillusioned with the program and an outspoken activist. The transformation was simple. ``You can't ignore what you see,'' says Millholland, 40, the company's president, from his office in Calgary. ``It's appalling.'' When he first saw starving children on the streets, he thought that buying Iraqi crude oil - he pays the United Nations which in turn gives Iraq food and medicine - would make him feel like he was helping. It hasn't worked out that way. ``It's a huge problem. The Oil For Food program is just a Band-Aid. It's not going to fix anything.'' Lifting the sanctions is the only way to make the lives of ordinary Iraqis better, he believes. Yep, a real 'activist' there. Here's another one: United States: Samir Vincent received 10.5 million barrels. In 2000, Vincent, an Iraqi-born American citizen who has lived in the U.S. since 1958, organized a delegation of Iraqi religious leaders to visit the U.S. and meet with former president Jimmy Carter. And, then, we find this: Many people are mobilizing to effect a change in this failed international policy. Iraqi-born U.S. citizen Samir Vincent, who has lived in the United States since 1958, calls action on the embargo a “political dead end.” He and Dr. Joseph Ritchie, also a private citizen, decided to go down a different road—away from politics and politicians, toward the world of religious belief and influence. The two businessmen prevailed upon Dr. Billy Graham to invite the Iraqi religious leaders to visit several sites in the United States—and later, London, England. Vincent, a Chaldean Catholic, was with the delegation throughout the U.S. visit. Their travels—to Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Plains (Georgia) and New York City—began inauspiciously with an hour-and-a-half grilling by U.S. immigration officials. Dr. Ritchie placed his private plane at the service of the three Iraqi churchmen. Later, he remarked that he was most inspired by their interfaith partnership in this quest to end the sanctions. When he is asked if things are moving in a good direction, Dr. Ritchie says, “Anyone of goodwill who listens for an hour to the entire scenario wants to end the embargo, but Americans listen to soundbites. We have to deliver the message in soundbites.” Samir Vincent should be executed for treason. Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Utter Nonsense
The Daily Kos is crowing over how 2500 people in the (uncontested) Republican Primary cast votes for Democrats. This is utter nonsense.
In 2000, in a contested Democratic Primary, 5613 write-in votes were cast for Republicans. http://www.politics1.com/vote-nh.htm In 1996 about 9000 write-in votes were cast for Republicans: http://www.state.nh.us/sos/presprim1996/dsumpres.htm Hell, in 1992 there were 2700 votes for Republicans cast in the Democratic Primary. In 2000, when there was a contested Republican Primary, 2200 votes were cast for Democrats. In 1996, in a contested Republican Primary, 2000 votes were cast for President Clinton. http://www.state.nh.us/sos/presprim1996/rsumpres.htm In short, any assertion that this is somehow a big deal is, to put it mildly, complete bullshit. Vietnam Was Winnable
One of the strangest assertions which has popped up in response to my comments about John Kerry’s treasonous behavior during the Vietnam War is that the war there was somehow fundamentally “unwinnable” and, therefore, those who opposed the war were justified. This is nonsense, the defeatism of the seditionist brigades crystallized into the conventional wisdom and spoon-fed to the gullible and stupid through the state-sponsored leftist indoctrination camps which are laughably labelled ‘schools’. Vietnam was absolutely winnable in a military and strategic sense. It was not won for exactly two reasons: the politicians waging it lacked the will to win and a large segment of the population, their minds diseased by the traitorous ideology of the modern left, deliberately set out to hand victory to the enemy.
There is something about Vietnam which cannot be repeated often enough: the American armed forces did not lose a single major battle in the field. While no reliable count of the number of communists killed by our forces in that war exists, it seems reasonable to assume that more than ten of the enemy died for each loss of our own. Those areas where the military had difficulty (high aircraft losses, poor unit cohesion, etc.) were almost entirely the result of goofy policies imposed upon the military from the outside. The war was not lost because America’s warriors were defeated on the field of battle. It was lost because a disloyal cabal, in keeping with its own agenda, deliberately set out to betray America’s heroes. Seditionists and traitors in America, seeking to advance their own agenda, deliberately stabbed their country in the back. So, how would the war have been won? By aggression, audacity, and ruthlessness. First, all prohibitions against attacks on North Vietnam proper would have had to have been lifted, turning the entire country into a free-fire zone. A major part of the logic underlying the theory that the Vietnam War was ‘unwinnable’ is the idea that the war was a ‘people’s war’, and that such wars cannot be defeated. This is patent nonsense: any insurrection or guerrilla war can be put down by an army in possession of sufficient force and the will to use it. Deploying hundreds of thousands of US troops into the country was a bad idea. A terrible one, in fact, driven largely by the desire of President Johnson to appear to be active as a way of insulating himself against charges that he was soft on communism. The Nixon Administration’s strategy of steadily reducing American forces while training and equipping the South Vietnamese to replace them was a fundamentally sound one which should have been adopted from early on. Additionally, it would have made a great deal of sense to revert to the earliest strategy used in the war: deploying small groups of US Special Forces to individual hamlets to guarantee security and work with the people. This strategy was abandoned because it was considered to be slow, and potentially dangerous (after all, the VC or NVA could overrun a Green Beret Squad, but not an Infantry Battalion). This would, I believe, have gone a long way towards winning the “hearts and minds” of more of the South Vietnamese. Assuming that these tactics were adopted early enough, we’d see the US troop strength in the country rapidly reduced, and never would there be half a million soldiers stationed across the country, making tempting targets for the communists. Other Special Forces would be used to make aggressive raids into North Vietnam itself, ordered to destroy bridges, dams, and other things that aircraft then lacked the precision to destroy. Such missions, obviously, would be dangerous and result in heavy losses. However, they would result in far lower losses than hundreds of senseless air raids which cost hundreds of aircraft for few concrete successes. Instead, I would use the considerable US air power in theatre to make war upon the North Vietnamese people. If we accept the concept that (at least for the North Vietnamese) the war effort was a “people’s war”, then it logically follows that the North Vietnamese people were as much an enemy as their masters in Hanoi. Defeating them, breaking their will to resist, is the key to winning the war. For saying this people will accuse me of “advocating genocide.” Nothing, in fact, could be any further from the truth: genocide would be trying to kill all Vietnamese people; we would simply be trying to kill exactly the number necessary. While it is, of course, necessary to avoid overkill, this ought not to be done at the greater risk of underkill. I would have assembled a fleet of about one hundred and fifty B-52D bombers and supporting aircraft, using this as my main strike weapon. Some attrition would naturally occur, but I would seek to keep this fleet at this strength on a constant basis. Modified to allow them to carry about 60,000 pounds worth of bombs, this fleet would, if carrying out daily raids, be capable of dropping about 1.5 million tons of explosives on North Vietnam in a single year. To put it another way, this fleet would drop a quantity of conventional explosive equal to the Hiroshima bomb each and every week. This fleet would have been turned against the civil infrastructure of North Vietnam. Clearly, hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs did little against isolated jungle trails- so I’d pick a better target: downtown Hanoi. Terror bombing had a strong effect against the Japanese in the Second World War, and I imagine that it would have a similar effect against the communists here. Under heavy escort, this bomber fleet would have been used to systematically destroy the capability of the North Vietnamese to wage war or, for that matter, to function as a civil society. One must recall that, at this time, the US did not have the advanced weapons that it has today. Repeated raids against major bridges did little damage while costing hundreds of aircraft. When attacked with precision-guided weapons late in the war, these same bridges were destroyed in a single stroke. Lacking these weapons, there is little choice but to return to the tactics of World War Two: massive raids. Naturally, these raids would have an official military target but these would, given the technology available, serve as little more than an official aiming point. At the same time, I would have unleashed chemical agents against North Vietnamese food production. The extensive use of various pesticides would, naturally, be a covert operation, but it would nonetheless receive extensive support. The goal of this would be very simple: to force people to set out as refugees in search of reliable crops. The hope here, of course, is that they would therefore disrupt North Vietnamese military activities and that, possibly, they will seek to head south for a bowl of rice and the protection of US forces. Naturally, one reason that such actions were not taken was the fear of Russian or Chinese intervention. Frankly, I think that such fears were often exaggerated or used as an excuse for inaction. Russia, after all, didn’t start World War Three when the United States finally got around to mining North Vietnamese harbours in 1972, and I don’t imagine they would have if the United States had chosen to do so in 1964. The problem wasn’t that Vietnam was unwinnable, it was that the United States- as a result of the actions of a well-organized group of traitors- was unable to take effective and proper action to win the war. Remember this, when you look at John Kerry. However heroic his service in war, he ultimately chose the side of treason. He worked to undermine the war which he now places on the top of his resume, he sought to dishonor and render worthless the sacrifices of the men who he now claims to venerate. If he’s elected President, what will he do? Unlike many others, John F. Kerry has never sought forgiveness for his disgusting and dishonourable action. In fact, he followed them up by fighting for a nuclear freeze, seeking to handicap the CIA, fighting for communism in Central America, and signing on with every other fashionable cause of the treason legion over the past three decades. Already, because of him and his ilk, 55,000 dead American boys have been spat upon. By him, and those who joined him in his immoral cause. What will he do to those who fight the war of this generation? Will he betray them, as he did those other gallant heroes? And to this you might say, “John Kerry served honourably in the United States Navy. He’s a war hero.” This may well be true but, don’t forget, Benedict Arnold was a war hero too. Sunday, January 25, 2004
American Thermopylae
“Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws we lie.”-Inscription on the Monument at Thermopylae
As the armies of Persia swept into Greece in 480 BC, many of the Greek city-states joined together in an alliance to defend their homeland. One of the strongest defensive points on the Greek mainland was Thermopylae, a narrow valley. There the allied armies held off the much larger Persian army for days until, finally, a traitor showed the Persians how to break the Greek defenses. With hours to spare, all of the allied forces beat a hasty retreat. All, that is, except for the Spartan King Leonidas and three hundred of his soldiers. They fought a delaying action, giving their lives that the other Greek armies might escape and fight again. Finally, with a great effort, the Persians overwhelmed the Spartans, killing each and every one. But, by their valiant stand, they had bought enough time for the population of Athens to be evacuated and the great Athenian Navy to be prepared for battle. When the Persians finally sought to make the final assault on Athens, they were met by the Greek Navies at Salamis, where, led by Thermostoclies, the Athenians destroyed the Persian fleet and, in so doing, saved Western Civilization. It would not have happened, were it not for the sacrifice of the three hundred. Most people will tell you that the United States lost the Vietnam War. I, personally, am not so sure if that it is the case. Certainly, given that the North Vietnamese communists were the ones left in possession of the field, it must be conceded that (whatever the reasons) they won the battle. However, viewed in context, Vietnam begins to look less and less like a horrible debacle and more like a valiant delaying action whereby America, by its sacrifice, made possible the prosperity of present-day Asia. Think about it for a moment. If the United States had taken the advice of the Howard Dean’s of that day, and simply allowed Communism to overrun Vietnam in 1964, what would have happened? Does any sane person really believe that they would have simply stopped at their own borders? The horrors of Cambodia would have been repeated in Thailand, Burma, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines, and countless other nations of whose existence the average American remains blissfully unaware. Millions, and maybe tens of millions, would have died. I bring this up because I expect that, if John F. Kerry wins the Democratic nomination, we will get to hear a lot about his service in that war. While I do not deny that Kerry served heroically or that his military service was anything less than laudatory, I do assert that his most important role in that war was off the battlefield. The greatest blow that John Kerry struck in that war was not on behalf of the United States of America, but on behalf of its enemies. No objective person can deny John F. Kerry’s treasonous behavior during the Vietnam War, nor can any moral and decent person excuse, rationalize, or forgive it. If we accept the notion that Vietnam was ultimately an American Thermopylae, a delaying action which made possible a later and greater victory, then we must understand that John Kerry’s role in this event was not analogous to that of Leonidas and his Spartans who, despite the certainty of death, fought honourably to the end, but to that of Ephialtes, the man who betrayed them. Little is known about Ephialtes beyond that singular fact. For all I know, he could have been a heroic solider, a wonderful father, and a loving husband. But all of that is stained and, indeed, rendered worthless by his betrayal of the cause of his countrymen. Ephialtes thought he saw the way the wind was blowing, the Persians were going to win, and so he got in line. John F. Kerry, with his finger always in the air, saw his chance: and he took it. He became a national figure by spitting upon the honor of every morally decent man who fought for the American cause in Vietnam. Ephialtes ended his life as a reviled traitor, on the run and with a bounty on his head. If there were real justice in this world the same would hold true for John Kerry and his ilk. How dare John Kerry now try and run on his experience in Vietnam. How dare John Kerry, who threw away his medals (except, of course, he only pretended to do so), now try and be elected President because of them. How dare John Kerry, who sought (and received) an early discharge in order to run for Congress on an anti-war platform allow his followers to attack George W. Bush over a few missed (and made up for) National Guard training days. Vietnam, despite its ultimate strategic utility, was and remains a stain upon the honor of the nation. For all those we saved elsewhere in Asia, we still abandoned our South Vietnamese allies to communist tyranny and doomed the millions in Cambodia who were murdered by communist death squads. We must never forget this, and we should never forgive those who are responsible. By this I refer not to the leaders and soldiers of Vietnam who, however, disgusting and immoral their ideology, we worthy opponents in the contest of war. By this I refer to those Americans who, for reasons of belief or ambition, deliberately sought to undermine their nation while at war. Those very same people, those traitors who stabbed all decent, honest, and honourable Americans and humans in the back by opposing the just war in Vietnam, are still with us today. We do not wish that our present battles in this war should become as Vietnam, bitter defeats redeemed only within the context of history. Rather, we desire victory today. Our enemies in their war are not just “over there”, they are here as well, at home. The most dangerous enemy America faces today is not the al-Qaeda bomber, ready to defend his right to self-detonation. The most dangerous enemy the United States has today are the soldiers of the party of treason right here at home. There is a simple reason for this: the arms and ability possessed by the Islamic world today are so slight that there is no victory that they can win without the assistance of their allies right here, in America. Islamists can kill Americans, but not win the war. The enemy can only win victory by working to break our will and thereby allow the fifth column here at home to take control. The heart of the enemy beats not only within the savage barbarians who would murder us by the millions, but also within the chests of those who would, by design or stupidity, implement policies which would give victory to our enemies. The enemy is not just the terrorist, but the friend of the terrorist: and the terrorists have no greater friend than those who care so much for abortion and buggery that they would wilfully turn control of the nation over to those who would allow the victory of the terrorists. There is a tendency, even amongst my fellow extremists, to distinguish between “loyal” Democrats (like Joe Lieberman) and “disloyal” Democrats (like Dennis Kucinich). But the truth is this: a Democrat is a Democrat, regardless of what adjective is used beside the word. It doesn’t matter whether they elect a peace Democrat on a war platform or a war Democrat on a peace platform, the end effect will be the same: a victory for our enemies. It is the institution, and not the individuals, that matter. The party itself is a disloyal institution which has sought to prostitute itself out to each and every single enemy of America for more than two decades. Patriots want another Vietnam even less than traitors do. We do not wish to, denigrated and insulted, support a desperate holding action whose effect can be seen only in retrospect. We want to defeat the enemies of America now. We want to kill them now. We want to exterminate them altogether. We must now march in unison towards a single goal: the complete and utter evisceration of the enemy. Anything else is a distraction and any opposition to this goal is treason. Saturday, January 24, 2004
Who to Strike Next?
We face many challenges in the War on Terrorism. One of them is maintaining a sense of forward momentum while at the same time not overreaching or overextending our forces. This makes the selection of the first post-Iraq target a difficult task.
Iran is almost certainly out. While it would be technically possible to invade that nation and overthrow the Ayatollahs, doing so would not be practical at the present time because it would require the commitment of virtually all available military resources and would create the danger of a guerrilla war which would span both Iraq and Iran. Additionally, there is a strong possibility that the Iranian government may, in the relatively near future, be toppled from within. Syria makes a tempting target. It is militarily weaker than Iran, and could probably be defeated as easily as Iraq was. However, an invasion of Syria brings with it the risk of extending the guerilla war just as an invasion of Iran does. Moreover, a Syrian invasion brings the risk of drawing the United States directly into the battle in Israel. While I agree that North Korea must, sooner or later, be dealt with: it cannot be dealt with by half-measures and, frankly, I wouldn’t counsel any President to launch a major nuclear attack during an election year. Of course, if the North Koreans were to take further measures to bring about a crisis, it would be an entirely different matter. File this under “maybe.” The Americans perhaps provide the best opportunity for action. We have recently discovered that Cuba provided extensive military intelligence to Iraq before and during the conflict there. So far as I’m concerned, that’s an act of war. If necessary, I’m also quite certain that other causes for war can be found. But communism in Cuba is contained, and will probably die with Castro. While Cuban socialism remains a nuisance, it can probably be dealt with by the means of patience. In any case, Cuba is not the nation most responsible for the renewed spread of communism in this hemisphere, nor is it the nation with the most extensive links to our enemies overseas. That dubious ‘honor’ goes to Venezuela, led by Hugo Chavez. For, while Cuba continues to be active: the money and energy is now there. Frankly, we wouldn’t have this problem if the people who launched a coup against Chavez in 2002 had been sensible enough to kill the guy when the arrested him. But they weren’t, and so here we are. Chavez retains some measure of support among his people. How much exactly, I do not know. People within that country are attempting to recall him, but have yet to be successful. Certainly, by any objective measure, he is opposed by a strong minority, and perhaps even a majority. In any case, action against the Chavez regime in Venezuela would not exactly take the form of a straight invasion. Rather, it would look something like a “Coup-plus”, a well-organized coup supported by American military force, followed by a transition back to democracy. According to his former personal pilot, shortly after September 11th, the Chavez government gave a substantial amount of money to al-Qaeda, disguised as aid to the Afghan people. This is not the only suggestion that Venezuela is aiding terrorism. The former head of the nation’s border-control service says that he was pressured to cover up the identities of “Middle Eastern terrorists” passing through the country and on into the United States. Venezuela is also known to be passing weapons and money on to the communist FARC terrorists in Columbia. The nation has signed alliances with the former Iraqi regime, Libya, and Iran. All in all, it makes the perfect next target. Unlike in many of the other nations we are facing, there is already a large class of people ready to govern the nation after the destruction of a hostile regime. This makes the task of military action far simpler. The Venezuelan military is fairly weak and, in fact, much of it is probably of an anti-Chavez orientation. While it is certain that some percentage of the Armed Forces are pro-Chavez I strongly suspect that, under the pressure of war, they would rapidly be found hanging from every available lamp post and telephone poll. What will be left to deal with then are the various paramilitary forces assembled by the government. These forces could be hopefully dealt with by various means, preferably by indigenous forces. Naturally, it’s also nice that Venezuela has a lot of oil (and, in fact, are the primary oil supplier to the United States in our hemisphere), but that’s decidedly secondary to the removal of a regime that sponsors terror. Also wonderful is the fact that a certain segment of the left has an extreme affection for South and Central American communists which is certainly not shared by the American people as a whole. They would howl very loudly in response to such action, which would further help in exposing their pro-terror and treasonous nature. The time has come to strike against the terrorists again. We’ve hit them in Iraq, we’ve hit them in Afghanistan, and we’ve hit them elsewhere. It’s time to hit them in the Americas as well. Thursday, January 22, 2004
The Judas Legion
The ‘conservatives’ are out to get the President now. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough of them to be worrying. What are they upset about? Broadly, there’s upset about increased Federal spending, the proposed immigration reforms, and a subset of other, decidedly secondary, issues (gay marriage, the PATRIOT Act, etc.). Why are they dangerous? They’re dangerous for the same reason that domestic fifth columnists who have sought to undermine the War on Terror are dangerous: they’re supposed to be on our side, and it’s damn hard to fight a battle with a thousand people seeking to emulate Assan Akhbar hidden in your camp.
Far too many people today are unwilling to make the compromises necessary to get by in political life. There’s a dangerous tendency among conservatives to demand the absolute victory, when such a victory is impossible, and to refuse smaller victories, even when they are. In three years in office, President Bush has waged two successful wars, cut taxes twice, outlawed Partial Birth Abortion, killed the Kyoto Treaty, discarded the ABM treaty, ended the possibility of US participation in the International Criminal Court, forced Libya to surrender it’s WMD programs without firing a shot, conducted the largest government reorganization in fifty years by creating the Department of Homeland Security, announced plans for a Moon base and trip to Mars, begun construction of an anti-ballistic missile shield, captured Saddam Hussein, killed or captured two-thirds of the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, and done countless other smaller things which would take pages to list. Has he done everything that a conservative would want? No, of course he hasn’t. Could he have done everything that conservatives are now demanding? No, he couldn’t have. Come the winter of 2008-2009 (God willing) pundits won’t be talking about how President Bush is “searching for a legacy”, they’ll be debating which of his many legacies is most important. Now, I admit, that I too am concerned about Federal spending. But let’s get serious: what would you have the President do? A President can only do so many things at one time and if he decided to really fight Congress over the budget, as Clinton often did, there would be little room for him to do much more than fight over the budget. Which would you rather have: a slightly lower rate of increase in discretionary spending, or the liberation of Iraq? Because, fundamentally, that’s the choice that you’d be making. During the Second World War, FDR allowed many of his previous New Deal programs to be cut or eliminated (including the Civilian Conservation Corps) in order to gain enough political support to wage the war effectively. In this war, President Bush has clearly made the decision to (temporarily) let Republican mania for budget-cutting fall by the wayside in order to keep together a working coalition with which to wage the war. This is the sort of responsible decision that a statesman has to make from time to time, as painful as it might be. As for the adding of the prescription drug benefit to Medicare: that’s something that was going to be done either way. The fashion in which the Republicans passed it does, eventually, set the way for future privatization. Let’s face it: the American people aren’t going to lose their addiction to universal entitlements without some very careful manoeuvring. Frankly, I’m all for junking Social Security and Medicare- but these are things that cannot be done outright. In fact, the only way I can think of to break these programs is to gradually and deliberately sabotage them. The way to reduce public support for Medicare and Social Security is to reduce the number of people who benefit from them. The way to do this is two-fold. First, higher income will be removed from the rolls by means testing which, of course, will be supported by the population as a whole, who are usually eager for a way to soak the rich. As the opposite end, various programs should be developed (most likely private retirement and medical accounts) which will encourage the young to opt out of the public system. Eventually, people not drawing (and not planning to draw) from these programs will become a majority of the population and these programs will cease to be thought of as entitlements and come to be seen as welfare programs. Thereafter, we will be able to attack and destroy them as though they were conventional welfare state nonsense. But that’s all in the future. For the time being we must face the reality that a prescription drug benefit was going to be passed either way- by one party or the other. Better, I think, to get our version (and the political credit) than to let them have theirs. By passing this, President Bush has done the same thing that President Clinton did when he signed a Welfare Reform bill before the 1996 election: he robbed the other party of a key domestic issue. The conservative rage over the immigration thing is similarly silly. What exactly would they have the President do? A program of deportations, a la the 1950’s era Operation Wetback (sorry, but that was the real name) would be deluged in negative media coverage of the worst sort. We’d get hundreds of emotional, heart-wrenching, stories about poor ‘undocumented workers’ who simply “wanted to have a better life for themselves and their families”, etc. Oh, yes: and we’d end up with Hispanics voting Democrat by the same percentage as blacks do today and that’s about the last thing we need. Another stupid criticism of the President revolves around the myth that the Chief Executive somehow has the power to prevent companies from moving jobs overseas. Frankly, short of nationalizing the companies, I don’t really see what exactly anyone expects the President to do. Seeking to artificially maintain an 20th century industrial economy in the face of the information revolution is every bit as silly as trying to maintain, as some did, an agricultural society in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Of course some jobs are going overseas. But let’s keep things in perspective: the unemployment rate is that below 6%, which used to be the lowest level of unemployment that economists thought was possible without triggering inflation. We’re undergoing economic change here. Now, that isn’t always pretty or fun: but it’s a reality that everyone has to live with. My Grandfather was a commercial fisherman. Had we followed the paths of some families, my father could have then become one, and then I could have become one, and I could be sitting here right now whining about the lack of work for fisherman. But my father didn’t become one because he clearly saw that the future in that industry was less then bright. I hear a lot from men in their mid-thirties who complain of lost manufacturing jobs, and from men in their mid-twenties who used to be computer programmers. This is what I have to say to them: I’m sorry, but your jobs aren’t going to be coming back- ever- and no one can make them come back, no matter what they say. At best, we might be able to bring your jobs back for a year or two by instituting onerous tariffs, but the golden age trigged by these developments would be swiftly interrupted by the Global Depression triggered by the same cause. If you’re going to vote for a Democrat because you think that George W. Bush is responsible for your being laid off- you’re not only a traitor and supporter of al-Qaeda, but stupid as well. The Democrats don’t have a plan to bring your job back, or anyone else’s for that matter. The only jobs that the Democrats will create are jobs for liberal academics who will suddenly find themselves appointed as the Undersecretary of State for Adulterous Affairs and ‘sex educators’ who will be recruited as part of a massive government effort to teach the ins-and-outs of buggery to Kindergarteners. The Democratic jobs plan is a lot like their plan for fighting terrorism: they’re going to talk about it a lot. I can’t think of a single major Democrat who has a plan for creating jobs that extends beyond the level of the need to talk about creating more jobs. The dearly-departed Richard Gephardt (who was suddenly hailed as a statesman, when his failure in the Iowa Caucuses signalled the fact that we’d probably never have to look upon his waxy, Zombie-like face ever again) claimed that zero unemployment is possible and desirable. He didn’t elaborate on that statement, though I’d have liked him to. I know of exactly one system of organization that makes zero unemployment possible and (to the best of my recollection) that peculiar institution is rather explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment. As for the gay marriage issue: there are far, far, far more votes (especially for a Republican) in opposition to homosexuality than there are in support of it. Let’s face it: homosexuality isn’t going to be outlawed any time soon. It would be much better (from the perspective of homosexuals) for them to be represented within the Republican coalition than outside of it, for this very reason. So long as the Log Cabin Republicans and people like Andrew Sullivan remain faithful and loyal supporters, there is every reason to listen to and respect their views. But, if they wish to oppose the President, then they can go straight to Hell, so far as I’m concerned. Freed of the need to cater to the homosexual minority in the Republican Party, we shall be free to truly demagogue on the issue and use it to divide and destroy the Democratic Party as well as to purge coward moderates and liberals from the Republican Party. Running a full-throated campaign against gay marriage, with a general overtone of disapproval towards homosexuality, will bring a chorus of approval from a large part of the nation. In the areas where it will bring a real backlash, well, we weren’t going to win there anyways. Once we’ve got control of the Federal Government, we can punish those areas (and their politicians) by systematically stripping them of every single dollar in Federal money. That’s what many of these opponents fail to recognize and understand: we’re playing for big stakes here. The little wins that we are accumulating are all in the service of the ultimate goals to which many of them profess to be devoted. By increasing the Republican base and working to bring about the final destruction of the Democratic Party, we are doing the Lord’s work of bringing about a real victory for the right in America. We will convince people to hand us power, and then we shall make a truly effectual use of that power. In the interim, it’s long past time for all conservatives and Republicans to shut up and unite behind the President. Wednesday, January 21, 2004
The Transformation of the American Political Scene
We are witnessing a transformation of the American political scene unlike any other in memory. The Democratic Party is moving towards a well-deserved death, and the Republican Party is moving towards ‘majority party’ status. For the next decade or so, the Republican coalition will be held together by the crisis of the War on Terrorism. When it is over, I expect that we will have two parties in American again, but that these parties will be ideologically unlike those we know today.
Two ideologies are dying in America: Leftism and Social Conservatism. I say that is a committed social conservative, and I say it in sorrow. Traditional, Pat Buchanan-style social conservatism will dead in America within twenty years. Leftist statism, like that of Ted Kennedy and the other aging grandees of the Democratic Party, will die with its leaders. This means that, in the future America, there will probably be a broad economic consensus behind free markets. In the back of the minds of much of the present-day left-wing of the Democratic Party lurks hostility towards capitalism and the profit motive. This is largely missing among the young (the protests of the anti-WTO crowd notwithstanding). So what will that leave us with? We will be left with ‘social conservatives’ who look broadly like conservative-leaning libertarians today (think of Andrew Sullivan, at least before he started celebrating the virtues of promiscuous sex) and ‘social liberals’ whose ideas are wild even by the standards of today. The social ‘conservatives’ of the future will probably accept homosexuality without the blink of an eye. Instead, they’ll be railing against new social evils: polygamy, a slip in the accepted age of consent, and other things along those lines. The Republican Party of the future will, superficially, look like the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century. This, however, is not the best comparison. Rather, it will be something more of a return to the Whig roots of Republicanism, to Henry Clay’s “National System”. The Republicans will not be, exactly, the party of ‘big government’ so much as the party of ‘big-thinking government’. Over time (and with rising expenses) support for massive social programs will fall and then evaporate, as the payees come to vastly outnumber those being paid. Instead, Republicans will be the party of what, for lack of a better term, I might call ‘internal improvements’. They’ll want government funded space exploration (and, probably sooner than you think, colonization). This is much the long-term direction that President Bush is taking government in now. Republicans, in other words, will be the party of Alexander Hamilton. Republicans will be the party of humanitarian Empire. Even decades from now, small groups will be stationed across the globe for various reasons. Republicans will, in the fashion of many British imperialists, seek to use that power to better the people whom they must guard. Look for a lot of ‘big projects’, like President Bush’s AIDS initiative. Finally, Republicans will be the party of immigrants. This is clearly the long-term goal of Karl Rove and others and, I believe, they will eventually pull it off. Similarly, look for a return of blacks to Republican ranks, though not to the extent that they support Democrats today. Over the course of a generation or two, under changed conditions, I expect it to be a rather easy sell. Look for a lot of “party of Lincoln” talk. The second party will be the more ‘conservative’ of the two. It will be something of a fusion between libertarianism and present-day conservatism. It will be, for lack of a better term, the “party of no.” It will be hostile to government programs, hostile towards (or uncertain about) the Empire, and broadly opposed to immigration. Naturally, it will be a minority party, but it will help to keep the Republicans honest, and manage to win from time to time. It would not shock me if, eventually, these people even ended up under the ‘Democratic’ banner. Fragments of the left and the old right will remain, but they will be isolated and probably hold no more than a few scattered offices across the country. Eventually, most of our old battles will be washed away by demographics. The young, however many of us feel, is largely accepting of homosexuality. Eventually, therefore, gayness will be totally mainstream. The young are broadly pro-choice, but secure enough in that position to avoid the pro-abortion extremism of the present age. Abortion will be available, but more restricted than it is today. Reasonable anti-abortion measures will not be opposed when the fear that abortion altogether will be outlawed disappears. Disputes over biotechnology will all be settled in favor of further development. Aside from a small faction, this generation is the most pro-technology in history, and growing more so with time. While disputes over genetically-modified food will continue in Europe, they will be almost unknown in America. Racial issues in America will be almost meaningless within a few decades. As young minorities replace the old, affirmative action will gradually fade from memory. So, probably, will the Confederate flag. The biggest challenge to all of this will come with the great medical/pension crisis of the next few decades. Baby Boomers will devise big government solutions to their problems. I expect that they will seek to bail out Social Security by seizing the assets of private pension funds and retirement accounts. Social Security will be expanded into a National Pension, which encompasses all other pensions. This idea should surface some time around the year 2015, when the Baby Boomers really begin retiring in earnest, and I think that we’ll probably fight at least one Presidential election over the issue (or something like that). Look for that to be some time after 2020. Naturally, I could well be entirely wrong. If pundits can’t get what’ll happen in an election a week away right, why should we be able to get what will happen in twenty years right? But it’s worth talking about. The reality of demographic change presses the matter on us all. Our politics are changing. I do not entirely welcome this, but we must come to deal with it and plan for the future. Drudge Must Have Something on Edwards...
There's a rather cryptic message about John Edwards on the Drudge site. I don't recall anything like that on his site ever before.
Let Them Starve
Reading the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly, I was once again confronted with the stark truth of the financial crisis that faces much of the West in the years ahead. According to some estimates, the cost of Medicare and Social Security over the long term, will amount to $45.5 trillion. That’s trillion, as in one million times forty-five and a half million dollars. In order to meet this burden, by 2075, Federal spending would have to grow from 19.5% of GDP to 39.7%. In short, the present Social Security system, as well as Medicare, is totally unaffordable.
Few people want to face the realities of what this really means. The abstract way in which we plan for this impending disaster often reminds me of how, during the Cold War, military planning exercises would occasionally uncover disasters so seemingly unstoppable that the planners would respond by simply refusing to think any further about the problem. The reason why we face this problem is simple. We designed these programs when people lived, on average, to less than seventy and when there were far more working than retired people. Moreover, at the time we came up with this stuff, medical care was far less expensive than it is today. Advocates of universal health care often remark on how “everyone deserves the best health care available”. While that sentiment might be noble in theory, it is impossible in fact. For all of our rhetoric, there must be a natural limit as to exactly how much we are willing to pay for health care. Given the wide variety of medical treatment available today, if we decided to actually give everyone the best care possible, we could easily end up spending half of everything we reproduce on medical care. Because seniors use far more health care than anybody else, most of these expenditures would be made with little material return. From a monetary point of view, we’d be (and are) spending vast amounts of money to keep people alive for the sole purpose of allowing us to lavish more money and benefits upon them. As the Baby Boomers pass into retirement and old age, they will expect us, the young, to pay for them. Frankly, I’m at a loss as to why I ought to. If we still get to retire as sixty-five by the time I get to retire, we’ll be close to half-way through the twenty-first century. I don’t expect to be seeing much in terms of government largesse. Why should I pay for Baby Boomers who don’t want to care for themselves? The Baby Boomers are responsible for almost all of the problems that we have in society today. It is they who have created the moral sewer in which we live. It is they who have promoted abortion, homosexuality, and other deviant practices. It is they who worked to undermine the valiant American effort in Vietnam and are working to undermine our cause in Iraq today. Why should we go bankrupt for their sake? Sorry
To those of you who were arguing in the comments section. I've switched my comments software in the hopes of keeping things stable.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Now there's what I'm talking about
Here's what I'd use for my space-based weapons.
The Fall of a Nation
Canada was a great country once, or so I am told. I don’t remember when it was, but there are still some others living who do. I was born after the start of the decline, after the rise of Trudeau and all the rest of it. There are lessons here for the surviving defenders of the West: you too will suffer the same fate as this country if you are not careful.
This is Canada today: if things go the way they appear to be going then in the next election we will be left with the following choices: a liberal (Belinda Stronach), a liberal Liberal (Paul Martin), and a really liberal liberal (Jack Layton). The candidacy of Belinda Stronach for the leadership of the Conservative Party (and her apparent status as the front-runner) is enough to make any moral conservative sick. Many conservatives, even normally sane ones, will probably support Stronach on the grounds that she “can win”. This is what we’ve come to. We’re so desperate to win that we’re willing to nominate a woman who supports gay marriage, is pro choice, supports throwing more money into the sinkhole of nationalized health care, and the rest of whose political positions are generally indistinguishable from those of our esteemed Prime Minister. Insofar as I can tell, Ms. Stronach’s principal qualifications for the job are as follows: she was born to the right parents and she’s pretty. I hate to point out the latter, but it’s inescapable. The thirty-seven year old Stronach is indeed a looker. This, from what I’ve seen, is supposed to be her main selling point. “Sure,” her supporters say, “her political positions are indistinguishable from those of the people we’re supposed to be defeating, but she’s REALLY HOT!” If this woman is qualified to be Prime Minister of Canada, then Paris Hilton ought to be the next Governor of California. After all, she’s also a rich heiress who is moderately attractive and has spent a lot of time in the news as of late. There’s also the Clinton issue. Oh, yes. Ms. Stronach is a Friend of Bill. Perhaps more than a friend. I don’t really know, though there have been rumors. Frankly, I think that most nations ought to prefer a leader who, at the very minimum, we can be assured, beyond a shadow of a doubt, has not had sexual relations with William Jefferson Clinton. I’m a member of the Conservative Party. In the past I’ve given my time and money to the Canadian Alliance and, at the present time, I fully intend to do so in the future. But, if this woman is elected as the Party Leader, I will not only cease giving any support of any kind whatsoever to the Conservative Party, but I will reluctantly cast my vote for the Liberals. If one must see your home country destroyed altogether, better to have your enemies do it than have it done by people who are supposed to be your friends. A party which elects such a woman as leader is a party that is unworthy of the support of principled and morally decent people. Despite the likelihood that support for Stephen Harper (who I should tell you, in the interests of full disclosure, I plan to vote for) will be strong among the former members of the Canadian Alliance, it remains possible that Stronach could win, even with a minority of the vote. This is because the leader will not be elected on the principle of “one man, one vote”. Rather, the leader will be elected by a complicated system which accords all ridings equality. This means that an Albertan riding, with five hundred voting members, would have the same weight as a Quebec riding with ten. In other words, the election could be thrown to Stronach by a number of ‘rotten boroughs’ in the East, where Conservative membership is light. This does not mean that I regret my support for the merger. Without it, we were going to be killed in the next election. But, as I said at the time, I’m going into this with clear eyes. I, for one, will not accept a party which seeks to bind conservative to the collection of pathetic socialist platitudes which are laughably labeled ‘Canadian values’. There isn’t much time left to save this country. Frankly, unless we make a real comeback in this election, I think that this country is done. This is worth a fight, but we ought not let that blind us to the bigger goal. If we don’t succeed, then let’s secede. Monday, January 19, 2004
Ka-Boom!
Iowa’s Democrats blew up the Presidential race tonight. Forget everything that you thought you know, forget everything that the media said, this is now, as General MacArthur said after the Chinese intervened in Korea, an entirely different war. Contrary to months of assurances, Dean did not have Iowa wrapped up. The Deaniac legions which invaded Iowa have been crushed as thoroughly as those that the Romans marched into Teutoburg Forest. I would not be at all surprised if the post-midnight hours find a drunken Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III raging against Varus.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Dean is done. Not yet, at least. He’s got far too much money for that. At this point it is possible that Clark, Dean, Edwards, or Kerry could win the nomination. Within a few days, polls in New Hampshire (which already showed Kerry clawing his way into second place) will probably show the French-looking Senator in the lead. Edwards will probably hit about fifteen to twenty percent, Clark a little under twenty, and Dean about twenty-five. I suspect Dean might well pull out a victory in New Hampshire because he has the money. Look for him to pour it into the state: after all, he raised it to spend it. Anyone who tells you that they can see what will happen next is a liar. This campaign is going to be chaotic and confused through, at the very least, New Hampshire. Tonight knocked Dick Gephardt out. Now, in the next few weeks, we have two more ‘must win’ primaries for other candidates. In order to win the nomination, I think, Howard Dean must win in New Hampshire and John Edwards must win in South Carolina. Wesley Clark and John Kerry will be alright so long as the perform within expectations. A Dean who fails to win in New Hampshire is finished, even if he is unwilling to initially admit it. The one lie we’re going to hear a lot in the next few days is this, “afraid of choosing someone who was seen as unelectable (Dean) Iowa Democrats opted for electable moderates.” Those of us who care about America need to begin fighting this lie right away. I’d bet good money that a majority of Americans will have never even heard of John Kerry or John Edwards before tonight. The next little while will heavily help to shape how the public thinks of them. If John Kerry gets branded as a “heroic Vietnam veteran” and John Edwards gets branded as a “Grisham-esque crusading lawyer” we’re going to have a much harder time of things than if John Kerry gets branded as a “ultra-liberal from Massachusetts who enjoys marrying for money” and John Edwards gets branded as an “ambulance-chasing shyster”. Real patriots need to start smearing these left-wing douchebags before the media gets a chance to begin playing up their “good” qualities. Of the four still-viable candidates, who would we most like to run against? How will we fight them? John F. Kerry, of course, is an individual with treasonous tendencies and a voting record roughly equivalent to that of Ted Kennedy. Yes, I’m aware that Senator Kerry is a Vietnam veteran with a distinguished combat record. That doesn’t change the facts of what came afterwards. John Kerry may have fought well in Vietnam but, the moment he got home, he dedicated himself to fighting equally hard against his former comrades. He was the founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one of the leading disloyal groups of that day. He was a leader of the ultimately successful efforts to dishonor the sacrifice made by America in Vietnam and to rob the South Vietnamese people of their freedom. Never forget that. He might have served in combat, but so did Benedict Arnold. The primary difference between the two, based upon Kerry’s history of opportunism, is that the North Vietnamese lacked the capacity to satisfy Kerry’s ambitions with offers of a General’s commission and titles. We must never forget this. 55,000 Americans died in the defense of freedom and John Kerry helped lead the effort to betray them and render that sacrifice worthless. And why did he do this? Simply to satisfy his own ambitions. In fact, Kerry actually left the Navy early to run for Congress on an extreme left-wing platform that included a plan to, “eliminate CIA activity” and ensure that American troops are only, “dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.” He proceeded to marry well, marrying a very rich woman. Eventually he divorced her and married a very, very, very rich (and older) woman. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Kerry is something of a male gold-digger. He’s always had his eye on the prize. When he graduated from Yale he delivered a speech in which he attacked US foreign policy. When he sought to run for Congress a second time, in 1972, he lived in three different districts in two months, looking for somewhere he could win (he lost). Eventually he ended up getting himself elected as Michael Dukakis’ Lieutenant Governor and then to the US Senate, where he consistently aligned himself with the gathering shadows of treason and subversion. He was against the first Gulf War, he was for a nuclear freeze, and remains opposed to all restrictions whatsoever on abortion. He’s a man who, despite his recent claims to the contrary, has never seen a tax he wouldn’t like to raise. He’s also opposed to the death penalty and was a supporter of the infamous Massachusetts furlough program which let Willie Horton out of jail to brutally rape a woman. The Breck girl, Senator John Edwards (Handsome-North Carolina), on the other hand, is hard to criticize for anything he’s done in public life, because he’s done nothing in public life except shill for his fellow ambulance-chasers and lay the groundwork for a Presidential run. Entrance polls from Iowa showed that he held a strong lead among women. This, insofar as I can tell, is due more to his looks than to any other factor. Frankly, this is the main danger in letting women vote. It would be a danger for men as well, were it not generally the case that more female politicians look like Bea Arthur than Britney Spears. Edwards is the dangerous one, I think, if we let the media give him a nice write up. We cannot ever let anyone forget that he’s a parasite, a scumbag lawyer who made his money chasing after personal injuries. At heart, he’s no different than all of those lawyers who advertise on TV at 2AM promising to get you a better settlement out of that car crash. We can, if we attack with sufficient audacity, turn Edwards’ image against him. He’s all style and no substance. Beneath everything, he’s a far-left liberal. Pro-abortion, pro-gay, and everything else that goes with it. Edwards will be harder to run against for the simple reason that, unlike many of the other candidates, he’s not obviously insane. A campaign against Edwards will be tough, and probably have to be fought on the issues. Luckily for us, Edwards remains a dark horse. Wesley Clark, the third viable candidate, will probably fight Edwards for the nomination all across the South. Clark has more money than Edwards, a stronger base of support, and more endorsements. If Edwards cannot follow up this win with wins elsewhere in the South in the next few weeks, he’ll be finished. He might well be a possibility for the Vice Presidency, but Vice Presidential picks only matter at the margins. For this reason, Republicans in the South ought to get out and vote for the worst candidate with the best chance of winning. In most cases this will be either Dean or Clark. All things considered, I think that we’d rather face Howard Dean than Wesley Clark, and rather Wesley Clark than John Edwards. And, what of General Clark? A large percentage of Democrats seem to be convinced that, simply because he’s a General, Clark will be invulnerable on national security issues. In fact, nothing is further from the truth: if the Democratic nominee is Clark, the campaign will focus in on military and security issues even more than it would otherwise. Clark, in fact, is strong on national security on the outside and weak on the inside. Clark, it must be remembered, was fired from his job (or, to be exact, forced into early retirement under threat of firing) as Supreme Allied Commander Europe for what his boss at the time, General Hugh Shelton, described as, “integrity and character issues.” Think about that one for a second. In American history there have been two fired Generals who harboured Presidential ambitions: George McClellan and Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was a national hero- one of the victors of the Second World War- who was fired over a legitimate military disagreement in which most of the American people took his side. He returned home to one of the largest parades in American history and gave a speech before a Joint Session of Congress that is remembered and quoted to this very day. McClellan lead the Union Army through about a year of war, organizing it for victory, before being fired as a result of his timidity and constant refusal to engage Southern forces which he claimed (bizarrely) to be vastly numerically superior to his own. In any case, neither became President (with McClellan being soundly defeated by Lincoln) and both were national heroes who, at the least, could claim some real military accomplishments. The theory behind the candidacy of General Wesley Clark seems to be that he American people are so stupid that they’ll assume that any man who gets to wear four stars must be competent. This theory is… not borne out by American history. The only war that Clark commanded was the seventy-eight day fiasco in Kosovo, where the military power of the United States proved largely impotent against the might of Serbia and the air campaign was partially undermined because at least one French officer (apparently on the orders of the French government) was passing military secrets on to the Serbs. Why exactly General Clark would support the concept of fighting a war only with our European ‘allies’ alongside after he went through is somewhat mystifying. In Kosovo the United States did virtually all of the fighting (with, naturally, a little help from the British) while America’s European ‘partners’ found and used various methods of obstruction. In fact, in his first book, Waging Modern War, Clark came off as somewhat hostile to the senseless concept (which he now heartily endorses) of waging war by committee. In fact, by most accounts, one cannot find a single senior officer who liked General Clark. Most, it would seem, were of the opinion that he would never have achieved four-star rank were it not for the intervention of the Clinton White House. Most felt that he was a chameleon, what Colonel David Hackworth calls a ‘perfumed prince’, a politician in uniform. Clark does not scare me. As for the Mayor of Vermont- I’m now praying for him to win. His speech tonight was… something. I’ve made the case against Dean elsewhere, so I’ll be brief here: that fellow ain’t right in the head. Seriously. We cannot let up in the struggle for the American future, this contest in defense of our heritage of liberty. We must never keep in mind what we are really fighting for. If a Democrat wins in November, than al-Qaeda wins the war, and millions of Americans will eventually die as a result. President Bush is the main enemy of the Islamists just as Osama Bin Laden is the main enemy of America. A vote for anyone other than President Bush, then, is a vote for al-Qaeda. We cannot forget this, and we cannot let anyone who would even contemplate the act forget it either. The battle rages on all fronts, and we must be prepared to take and support all necessary measures. Sunday, January 18, 2004
Time to Confront China
In the long term, the People’s Republic of China is a much greater threat to the United States than Islam. This is because the terrorists have only one means by which to beat America and the West: violence. We can meet violence reciprocally. China, however, seems to take the long view. They mean to beat the United States, to become a greater power, by peaceful competition. This is intolerable and cannot be allowed to come to pass, however high the ultimate cost may be.
China, with about 1.2 billion people, a growing economy, and increasing military power, is destined to become a Superpower unless someone stops it. All things being equal, the Chinese economy will catch the American one some time during the third decade of this century. Chinese military power, at least within Asia, will be superior much quicker than that. In a few decades China’s power-projection capabilities will probably equal those of the United States. Due to China’s system of government, its actual ability to use power will probably be stronger than that of the United States. We must declare it openly that it is totally unacceptable that any power other than the United States be a superpower. We must understand that any world system not ruled by the United States, especially one ruled by China, will not be one worth living in. We must know that it is worth dying, and killing, to prevent the Chinese ascent. The rise of China to leader of the world would mean the probable end of Western Civilization and, certainly, the end of human progress as we have known it. It would be the end of our three-thousand year heritage of liberty and the birth of a new, foreign age. The day when a foreign nation comes to be the ruler of the world will be the day on which this world ceases to be worth living in. Any unified and dynamic Chinese polity is, over the long term, destined to power. Therefore, we must seek a solution in China’s past: warlordism. Even today, beneath the surface, there are major regional differences within China. Our ultimate goal, then, should be to see the present Chinese nation partitioned into a half-dozen or so mutually-hostile and preferably perpetually-warring states. This would lead to a great expenditure of Chinese resources: financial, natural, and human, in vicious internal conflicts, which would gradually suck the dynamism and strength of the nation. This strategy begins with five areas that are already evident, but then expands into others. First, Taiwan must be defended and held at all costs. While it is true that, as a general rule, nuclear proliferation is a bad idea, I do not believe it to be so in this case. A nuclear-armed Republic of China would drive the People’s Republic crazy and would be largely invulnerable to attack. Moreover, it could be used as a base for other forms of subversion. Even if a fanatical Chinese government were to ever come to power and determine to seize Formosa, it could not do so without paying a terrible price. Second, extensive aid should be given to pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, including money and, possibly, weapons to more radical groups. This is not so much because I am interested in bringing about democracy in China (which I, for one, believe to be largely impossible), but because I hope to provoke the Chinese government into acting against the activists. What happened at Tiananmen Square probably set back the Chinese efforts at being fully accepted into the international community by at least a decade. Imagine what those same activists could do with a few hundred million dollars in covertly-supplied money. Third, extensive aid should be supplied to the followers of Falun Gong. Again, I have no great love for the followers of this ‘religion’, there’s a group of them who line up every morning in the park I walk thought and, quite frankly, I think that they’re little more than another weirdo pseudo-cult. However, they are clearly a powerful force within China itself and aid to them is bound to increase social disorder and alienation from the government. Fourth, China’s large and growing Christian population should be funded and encouraged to geographically concentrate in areas of potential future value, especially those accessible from the coasts. This will allow these people to provide the nucleus of future pro-Western states in a divided China. Also, an increase in Christianity is likely to provoke an increase in the persecution of Christians which is likely to raise anti-Chinese sentiment in the West. Fifth, extremely covert efforts should be made, through the use of agents placed within Islamist groups, to direct some of the fury of Islam against China. Ideally, with proper encouragement, Moslems in Western China might be incited to launch several terror attacks which, in turn, would hopefully lead to a crackdown on Moslems within China which, finally, would cause al-Qaeda and similar groups to fully add China to its enemies list. After all, while killing the enemies of America is a wonderful thing, getting the enemies of America to kill eachother is truly the Lord’s work. Naturally, if we are to truly break Chinese power, much more will have to be done. Cyber-attacks of China’s emerging electronic infrastructure would, I suspect, have a very strong effect. So might other forms of economic sabotage. Additionally, links will also have to be forged with various malcontent groups in various regions. Of course, we will have to be prepared for economic retaliation. However, at this point such moves would hurt China just as much as it would hurt the United States. If anything, over the long term, China would lose far more in losing access to American markets than vice versa. Military retaliation is also a possible, but less likely, possibility. A firm show of American resolve to confront China should help to curb this. Perhaps the United States could, in concert with some of the other claimants, seize the Spratly Islands. Naturally, this would probably not be an out-and-out US military operation. It would be better to equip Taiwan (who claims the Islands in full as well) to evict the five hundred or so Chinese soldiers stationed on the various little rocks. Presumably this would be done after Taiwan becomes a declared nuclear power under some sort of deal whereby a large percentage of the revenues from the islands (which are believed to have massive oil and gas deposits) would flow to the United States. Some will level various accusations at me for putting forward this plan. Let them. I am fully willing to admit that I consider any outcome which sees the United States cease to be the sole superpower in the world are unacceptable: morally, politically, and militarily. American power is, and must be, eternal. We cannot lose it unless we lack the resolve to keep it. It is America, and only America, that can lead humanity into the stars and its next stage of evolution. It is only America that can carry forward those great traditions of the West, our peculiar heritage, onto eternity. So many have sacrificed and died, that we might be where we are today. Do we truly wish to throw away all of that? Better to die a thousand deaths than to consent to live in such a world. Comments
They're back and I mean to keep them, unless against they cause the site to slow to a crawl.
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Reflections on the Eve of Battle
We’re a little more than a day away from the true beginning of the Democratic Primary Season. Every candidate is marshalling his forces for the attack. They will march at dawn. Frankly anyone who says now that they know how the events of the next few days will unfold is a liar. Everyone has plans for battle, but no such plan survives the first contact with the enemy.
The campaign season to date has led me to two unshakeable conclusions. First, the Democrat Party is a thoroughly diseased and debased institution, one which cannot even command the loyalty of most of its own supposed members. The only thing holding it together today is hatred of President Bush and, quite frankly, even that isn’t working very well. The Democrats are torn asunder by two factions: a ‘moderate’, DLC, faction which is mostly fond of America and another Copperhead faction which actively hates America. More on this later. The second conclusion I have come to is this: Dr. Howard Brush Dean III, the Mayor of Vermont, is totally unfit to be the President of the United States. Forget politics for a second. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with me knows that I hate Howard Dean and would like nothing more than to see him win the nomination in a bruising fight and then lose to President Bush in a McGovernesque landslide come November. But the health of the Republic is something that, for me at least, transcends politics. Dr. Dean is, by his own account, mentally unfit to occupy the supreme executive office in the land. This must be of the utmost concern to anyone concerned with the nation. In an interview with People Magazine, Dean admitted that, upon hearing the news that the Governor of Vermont had died and that he was now Governor, he began hyperventilating and suffered an anxiety attack. According to anxities.com, a web site which caters to people with anxiety disorders, a panic attack’s symptoms can include, “increased heart rate, dizziness or lightheadedness, shortness of breath, inability to concentrate, and confusion.” Moreover, by many accounts, people who have panic attacks are prone to suffer recurrences of such attacks. Dean says that the attack occurred because, “To suddenly get told that you have responsibility for 600,000 people — it provokes a little anxiety.” Think about that for a second. If this man had an anxiety attack on being told that he had responsibility for 600,000 people, then how on Earth is he ever going to be response for three hundred million people? Think about it folks. Put that good of your country above faction. We live in a dangerous world. ICBM’s can reach this country from another in just a few short minutes. What happens on the day when missiles are flying, the Secret Service is rushing the President onto the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the Secretary of Defense says, “Mr. President, the first nukes will land on American soil in fifteen minutes”? What happens if the President suffers from hyperventilation and confusion then? Go back to 9-11. Remember the moment when, in that Florida classroom, Andy Card stepped up to President Bush and told him that a second plane had hit the second tower, that America was under attack. How would the world have reacted had President Bush responded to that news by going into convulsions? When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, Harry Truman was hastily called to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt gave him the news. Think about that. In the middle of a global war, the most terrible war in the entire history of the world, Harry S. Truman of Missouri is called in and informed that he is now the most powerful man in the world. How did he respond? By taking command, and taking charge. We don’t demand perfection of our leaders, but we must demand that they not respond to a crisis by passing into an incoherent state. Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t like the rest of the Democrats running for President either, in fact, I hate them. But that doesn’t mean that I’m so crazy that I would prefer to give that man even a chance at the White House simply to keep, say, John Kerry, out of it. Forget policy differences for the moment. After all, even if the worst-case scenario were to come to pass, there’d still be enough Republicans in Congress to keep even say, Al Sharpton from doing something totally insane. We’re talking about a man who is simply unfit to be President due to his temperament and psychological state. When I read about Dean’s “you sit down” outburst in Iowa last week (where he yelled at a man to sit down, after he asked a hostile question) I didn’t think much of it. I’ve been at enough political meetings to know that there are often questioners who are out to make themselves the focus of the meeting. But then I saw the video of the incident. It wasn’t a playful comment, or even a merely firm one: it was one born of fury. I ran for School Board once and had to sit though about twenty Town Hall meetings. I’ve been through a half-dozen or so other campaigns, and I’ve never seen a politician: even some sixth-rate amateur running for City Council is some seventh-rate town, really explode the way Dean did in response to such a relatively innocuous question. Dean wasn’t politicking there: he was really angry and just couldn’t control himself. Altogether, what I’ve observed of Dean over the months suggests to me that he isn’t ready for prime time. After all, there are about thirty Mayors in the United States who are in charge of more people than Dean was as Governor of Vermont. The last Mayor to seek to make a serious run for the Presidency was John Lindsay in 1972, and he was at least the Mayor of New York City. In fact, I would argue that even Dennis Kucinich had a far more difficult job as the Mayor of Cleveland than Dean had as Governor of Vermont. If the Democratic Party is to have any hope of survival, it needs to take this chance to purge the modern Copperheads from its ranks. They are a cancer eating away at flesh of a once-proud institution. While this contagion takes many forms, the largest body of them is the Dean faction (though more and more of them seem to now be spreading to other campaigns as even some of the rats begin to wise up and flee the S.S. Dean). Howard Dean did not create these people. In fact, in a very real sense, they created Howard Dean. The rise of the Mayor of Vermont is not due to the fact that he has any spectacular appeal, it’s due to the fact that the MoveOn.org crowd had to have someone run for President on their behalf, and Dennis Kucinich, what with the bankrupting of Cleveland, the ‘Department of Peace’, his Vegan diet, and all the rest of it was just a little to wacky for them. So the turned to the little-known former Governor of Vermont who, lacking the handicap of having served in Congress, seemed easy to reshape and refashion. Plus, of course, there was the gay unions thing as well. A little-discussed fact is the high percentage of activist liberals who are homosexuals. This, I am certain, was a major factor in the crowning of Dean. Deep down the MoveOn types are filled with a deep loathing for America and Americans. They hate Christianity and they hate the flag. If you talk to them one-on-one over a few drinks, they’re usually honest enough to admit to you that they think America “got what it deserved” on 9-11 or that, alternately, the Bush Administration was somehow complicit in the attacks. One of the greatest dangers of internet politics is the mainstreaming of conspiracy-theorizing, previously limited to the lunatic fringe. A visit to mainstream Democratic web sites today will find countless people ready to swear to the existence of the sort of vast covert plots which were once the near-exclusive domain of Lyndon Larouche and the John Birch Society. This is true on the right as well (or at least was true during the Clinton years) but it was never quite so widespread. After all, no Republican Presidential candidate every suggested that the “Clinton Death List” was an “interesting theory.” Ann Coulter is fond of saying that, if the American people knew what liberals really believe, they would want to boil them in oil. That’s closer to the truth than what most of the far-left these days believes which is, namely, that if the American people knew what liberals believed they would respond by launching a revolution and declaring America a people’s state. Because the far-left is convinced that their beliefs are not only correct, but potentially popular as well, they therefore have come to the conclusion that they thing keeping them down is a conspiracy so vast that is dwarfs the one depicted in the X-Files. They think that the George W. Bush (who is simultaneously dumber than a Chimp and the evil leader of a world-wide cabal) is assassinating political opponents (notably Mel Carnahan and Paul Wellstone) staged the 9-11 attacks, and it behind all sorts of other miscellaneous acts of evil (such as triggering the recent Earthquake in Iran). Because these people are the ones with the energy, they are controlling the Democratic campaign. If given the chance these people will cripple American power and sign the world over to the Chinese. They will end the War on Terror and, in so doing, doom millions of Americans to die in future terrorist attacks and consign hundreds of millions of others to a life of abuse and servitude under increasingly-powerful Islamist regimes. They will assist in the renewed rise of communism in South America and inflict countless other evils upon the human race. I believe that all of this will happen if, by some chance, Howard Dean is allowed to become President because, having secured his election by the support of such people, he will find it impossible to shake free of their grasp. In the Civil War, Copperheads were not necessarily in favor of the South or slavery, they just weren’t in favor of doing anything about them (or to save the Union either). These new Copperheads have no love of Islamists (except so far as they hurt their enemies, Americans and Jews), but they aren’t interested in doing much about them either. I do not suggest that a Dean Administration would bring about the disasters outlined above by action, but by inaction. Now if the time for loyal Democrats, those people who, in the words of Joe McCarthy, are “without a party” to take back what is rightfully theirs. A Democratic Party that once more becomes the party of Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and, hell, even Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson, is not one that I would vote for but, at the least, one I would respect. Think about all of this, as the days roll inexorably forward. America needs a two-party system to be strong. One party government is, inevitably, corrupt and corrupting. But, given the choice between corruption and treason I, and many others, will choose the former. Mark my words; it will happen one way or another. Either the present-day Democratic Party will revive in a new, patriotic, form or it will die and, eventually, the Republicans will faction- in all probability along conservative-moderate lines. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. This Man is Unfit to be President
Howard Dean had a panic attack when he found out that he'd become Governor of Vermont? Yeah, he's the one we want as President alright. What the hell would he do if their was a nuclear attack? Or even a 9-11 style attack?
Forget politics: the man is simply unfit to be President. Friday, January 16, 2004
The Fall of Howard Dean
If only he’d kept his mouth shut a little bit longer. Back on December 12th (before, even, the capture of Saddam Hussein) I noted the fact that Dean was seemingly unable to, despite half a year of fawning publicity, break 25% in national polls of Democrats and predicted that Dean was about to follow the course of John McCain, Gary Hart, and all those other highly-heralded candidates who seemingly come out of nowhere and then fade as fast as they rose. Had Dean won the nomination, the general election campaign would have been an awful lot of fun. I suppose that Democrats have begun to see that as well. They might agree with his stances but, looking at some of his gaffes, they must have nightmares about what Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III, Democratic nominee for President of the United States, might let slip on October 20th.
The only way for Dean to win the nomination was going to be for him to win Iowa, ride that to a huge win in New Hampshire, then win at least half of the February 3rd Primaries as a way of proving his national viability. As things stand today, it doesn’t look like he’s going to take Iowa and his lead in New Hampshire appears to be in extreme danger. In fact, as things stand today, the Democratic field looks to be almost back at the beginning. I can see Wesley Clark winning the nomination, I can see John Kerry winning the nomination, I can see Dick Gephardt winning the nomination, and I can even see John Edwards winning the nomination. Some of these scenarios, of course, are more likely than others: but all remain plausible to some degree. It is equally plausible that the Primaries might not leave anyone as the nominee. This is, to put it mildly, a Republican dream. It is already quite clear to me that any nominee other than Dean is going to have a hard time bringing onboard Dean’s supporters. Moreover, Dean has the money, temperament, and base to wage a bloody fight, even if his hopes for a knock-out win are shattered over the next ten days. One of the things that makes this campaign so interesting is the ability of the internet to tell us what the core supporters of various candidates are saying. This is true, most of all, of Howard Dean. The machine that has lifted him into power isn’t capable of stopping on a dime. If Dean, as I now expect, loses in Iowa (and perhaps even New Hampshire) his supporters will not accept this as the honest verdict of the people. Rather, they will attribute any such loss to sinister conspiracies, media bias, and various other forms of malfeasance. What we are looking at now is, at the very minimum, a month-long Democratic Götterdämmerung, an apocalyptic battle of epic proportions. If you think that the campaign has gotten negative now, wait until Howard Dean is down five points in California on the eve of the primary there. His followers’ cult-like devotion will be well-tested in the months ahead. Frankly, I now wish that we hadn’t gone after Dean so much as we did. I’m still hoping, against all hope, that Dean will be the Democratic nominee. Bush would probably have won 65% of the vote, up against the guy. It was actually Dean’s rise that was also his undoing. The Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party was determined to get the guy from the start, but it was really the conservatives who did it in the end. People would often say to me, “why, if you think Dean is such a bad candidate, are you spending so much time attacking him?” The best answer I can think of is this: it seemed like a good idea at the time. For a little while it seemed like fawning media attention, combined with the short primary schedule, would propel Dean to the nomination, so we might as well get started with the attacks. The truth is, the guy was just so easy to whack, it was hard to resist. I mean, a guy who leaves a Church over a bike path hardly sounds like Presidential timber. The assaults were so much fun that all of us on the right got a little carried away. Then, seeing how easily Dean would be defeated, the media (which loves a fight anyways) jumped in as well. Now I’m worried that the nominee will be John F’ing Kerry who, versus Howard Dean, has the major advantage of being apparently sane. While I suspect that he’ll be beatable, he won’t get blown apart in the same fashion as the Mayor of Vermont would have. But, perhaps, it will be General Wesley Clark, who might be aptly characterized as General George McClellan II, who will be equally easy to destroy. In any case, whoever the nominee is will be bruised and broke by the time they’ve been crowned. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the coming months. Thursday, January 15, 2004
Into the Stars
When I hear the objections raised by some to the exploration of space, I often recall the story of the great Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho. A eunuch, Cheng Ho supervised the construction of a great fleet and, in the early years of the 15th century, launched voyages which ranged across the Oceans, reaching as far away as Australia and Africa. His ships were massive, the size of a modern destroyer, and would have been easily capable of reaching as far away as the coast of North America, had they so chosen.
Yet they didn’t choose. Why? The reasons are complex but, in short, they can be summed up as such: China’s leaders thought that they had better things to do at home, they feared that such efforts might lead to foreign complications, and that they were excessively expensive. Sound familiar? If China had gone on, the entire history of the world would have been different. Chinese colonies would probably have been planted in Australia, Africa, and perhaps even in the America’s. In the place of European ascendancy, the world may have instead seen a Chinese ascendancy. Those who are opposed to space exploration are petty, small-minded, and unable to see the future that is right before their eyes. Travel into space is more than a mere dream, it is a key element of the further advancement of humanity. We live in a system of planets, all of which are ours- even Europa, despite what some might say. More to the point, space is the key to the American future. Whoever owns the stars will be the master of all humanity. No other nation, no other civilization, or other race can be allowed to take his honor. Space must be American just as Virginia or Colorado is American. It is our collective destiny, our birthright. Because, mark my words, if we do not get there then someone else will do so. The immutable laws of history dictate that, when there is a field for military and strategic advance open- someone will take it. Those who would rely on treaties and UN resolutions forbidding the militarization of space are as foolish as those who once relied upon the League of Nations to bring about the abolition of war. Some will ridicule those who dream of ‘Space Empire’ or speak of the future colonization of the Moon and Mars. Yet these will be the realities of the future, whether we are willing to accept them or not. The control and colonization of space will not only render humanity less vulnerable to the random chances of fate (an asteroid strike, for example) but it will also forever forestall the rise of another great power upon the Earth. Think about it for a moment. A single Star Cruiser, maneuvered into position, could drop dozens of weapons onto a target seconds after launch. Defending against such an attack, short of the use of other space vessels, would be essentially impossible. A handful of such ships could, if necessary, wipe an entire nation off the face of the Earth. In the face of such power, most rational nations would have no choice but to accept permanent American world rule. I do not mean to suggest that this will be a rapid process. It will be an effort of decades, even centuries. But it will, in the end, be worth it. Humans will have colonies in this Solar System and probably beyond, it is merely a question of whose colonies they shall be. It might also be worth pointing out that, if aliens do exist, there is little reason to assume that they will be, as most have postulated, more advanced than we are. There is an equally good reason to believe that they will be less advanced. Would it not be prudent then to be prepared to restrict various alien races to the surface of their home planets? This, of course, assumes that faster-than-light travel is possible. I, quite frankly, have no idea if it is. But, to base our policy on the assumption that it is not would be supremely foolish. It may even be that we will find alien races that will have to be destroyed, lest they pose a threat, or that we will find races of servile aliens which might prove useful to us in other ways. I don’t know if we will, and we won’t know unless we try. I realize that the above might sound far out, so let me point out a more practical advantage: minerals. Once we establish a true human presence in space, we can begin to explore for valuable extraterrestrial resources. The discovery of large, off-world stocks of any number of minerals might prove to be invaluable to the United States, especially if other nations were restricted to the Earth. Imagine if the nation were to explore a massive gold-laced asteroid. Now, were space under American control, it seems possible that such a find could be covered up and the gold quietly released into market, thereby turning a massive profit for the nation. Space-based, zero-gravity manufacturing is also believed to offer a number of advantages, allowing for the creation of goods with greater precision than is possible on the Earth. With sufficient planning, it seems possible that all space construction could eventually take place off-Earth, thereby allowing for the construction of ships of designs which would not be possible were it necessary to launch them from the surface of the Earth. This would also save considerable expense. President Bush is, after three decades of delay, finally placing us back onto the right track. We must sail into the stars with aggression, determination, and vigor. By the conquest of space we will help to realize the goals of man here on Earth. Wednesday, January 14, 2004
The Insanity of Modern Canada
Sometimes there are things happen in this country that shock even me. This week, on the Kanesatake Indian Reserve in Quebec, a series of events transpired in response to the efforts of the Chief to crack down on rampant organized crime that are simply so bizarre as to defy description.
Grand Chief James Gabriel called in Native police from other reserves to respond to drug and contraband cigarette sales on the reserve. How did the people respond to this? Simple: by gathering in a mob, burning down the Chief’s home, and then besieging the police station for more than a day. Now some of the local native ‘elders’ are apparently looking into ‘banishing’ the Chief for his actions. How did the government of Quebec respond to these criminal actions? By negotiating with the criminals and giving in to their demands. This is modern Canada, a nation where our efforts to show ‘sensitivity’ towards minorities extend to the level of bending to the will of violent mobs. The proper response of a government, any government worthy of the name at least, to an attack upon a police station is obvious: an armed body of men should be assembled and dispatched to lift the siege. If those engaged in acts of violence refuse to respond to verbal warnings, they should then be fired upon. It is utterly intolerable that any government should willingly submit to the will of a mob. Of course, that’s just how things in this country have gone. As thing stand today, one of the leading contenders for the leadership of what has laughably been named the ‘Conservative’ Party is a billionaire heiress whose previous claim to fame is that she is rumored to have had a romantic relationship with none other than William Jefferson Clinton. Oh, and let’s be clear here: I don’t mean back when he was in law school or something like that. I mean just last year. True, she is being presented as the ‘moderate’ candidate in the race, but the mere fact that such a person could be a plausible candidate for leader gives one a fair idea as to the moral fortitude of most ‘conservatives’ here in Canada. Now, in the interests of full disclosure I should admit that I, in fact, am a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada, but that doesn’t mean that I’m happy about it. Should this woman (Brenda Stronach is her name, not that it much matters) manage to win the leadership, I shall burn my membership card and vote for the Christian Heritage Party, or some other grouping with no chance of victory. Tuesday, January 13, 2004
More Election News
For this who, later tonight, want to check on how the Reverend Al does in the DC Primary, the link is here.
Check Drudge for some stuff on Moveon.org (not yet posted at this time). Jimmy Carter to Endorse Howard Dean?
Joe Trippi (the Campaign manager for the Mayor of Vermont) was just on CNN's Crossfire hinting that Jimmy Carter will endorse Dr. Brush this Sunday in Plains, Georgia.
This might well help Dean win in Iowa. But it isn't going to be much of a help in convincing people that he's strong on foreign policy. Private Warfare
One of the best ways to increase the pressure in the War on Terror is to increase public involvement. Now, I have previously discussed ways to increase the military, propagandize the public, and generally aide the war effort by such means. What I’m talking about here is different. We should encourage private efforts in the war; allow individuals to take the fight to the enemy in imaginative ways that the United States government might well be unable to do. What I propose is that the Congress pass a law empowering the President to issue letters of Marque to individuals who wish to act as privateers.
Let’s step back a moment. What is a letter of Marque? In essence, it is a formal instrument issued by a state authorizing an individual (or, typically, a ship) to take private military action, typically against the commerce of an enemy. This was a practice that was common into the 19th Century. During the Civil War the Confederate government authorized privateers to act. Under Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution the Congress is explicitly authorized to issue such instruments. Privateering is based upon a combination of the profit motive and patriotic spirit. People attack the commerce of an enemy, but are allowed to keep the proceeds of any such mission. Terrorists and rogue states are, for the most part, highly decentralized and operate in tiny cells. Governments can attack them, but additionally, they can also be met by small private counter-terrorist groups. After the September 11th attacks a single computer expert (a pornographer by trade) managed to knock down dozens of enemy web sites. During the Iraq War hackers took down (and kept down for some days) the English-language web site of Al Jazeera. These activities were all, technically, illegal: but they were to the manifest benefit of the United States. There is no reason why the Federal Government could not issue letters of Marque to individuals authorizing them to, for example, steal money from the bank accounts of terrorist supporters and keep it legally. At sea, privateers could be authorized to strike against North Korean commerce. I don’t know what a ship full of SCUD missiles is worth today, but I imagine that there must be some profit in the enterprise. If North Korea wishes to continue to ship illicit cargo, I see little reason why it should not be seized by illicit means. In theory, all North Korean commerce could be subject to seizure by private individuals. The same is true in the case of Iran. What is the cargo of a single Super Tanker worth? It must be easily in the millions, leaving aside the material value of the ship itself. One can easily imagine all sorts of private groups buying and outfitting ships for effecting such seizures. Moreover, just a few such missions would massively raise the cost of commerce for the North Koreans or Iranians, who would then have to either escort their ships or arm their crews. This could even extend to individuals. The United States Government could maintain a list of known terrorists, terrorist supporters, terrorist financers, and terrorist sympathizers with a price on their head. You can get anyone to kill pretty much anyone for a million dollars. These bounties have a smaller effect when they are placed on senior officials (IE: Osama Bin Laden) because those individuals tend to be guarded by extremely loyal supporters. However, against individuals on the lower-end of the spectrum, I imagine that they would be very effective. Anyone who kills a person on the list ought to be given (with appropriate vetting) $1 million, a Presidential pardon, a new identity, and resettlement in the United States for oneself and one’s immediate family. How many in impoverished Moslem nations would be happy to kill the local al-Qaeda chieftain in exchange for all of that? Naturally this could get expensive over time. But think about it. $10 billion would, under this plan, buy 10,000 dead terrorists. That, in my opinion, is more than a price worth paying. It should not simply be the terrorist leaders with a price on their head: everyone associated with terror should have one. I have no idea how many killings would actually take place, but I am fairly certain that at least some would. This would have a chilling effect upon terrorist operations. How do you plan operations if you can’t be sure if one of your martyrs isn’t about to cut your throat? Winning this war requires innovation. Not merely new military tactics, but a new way of thinking about war. The destruction of terrorism requires a multi-front war. This means three things: attacks on the terrorist homelands, defense of the homeland, and low-level war against the terrorist themselves. The final step will need to be conducted both by special forces and by individuals. In the war on terrorism everyone is a target and everyone is a fighter. Monday, January 12, 2004
Remember When...
I said that Dr. Dean's wife would end up being a serious campaign issue, especially in the general election?
Well, the Old Gray Lady starts to roll out that theme today. The Educational Quagmire
It takes about five seconds after the start of a war for the left (and, most regrettably, some on the right as well) to begin screaming about a ‘quagmire’. The word itself has been reduced to something of a joke by this pathetic practice. ‘Quagmire’ takes its place alongside the ‘fierce Afghan winter’ and ‘unbearable Iraqi summer’ as a tired scaremongering phrase, absent of any real meaning.
Yet the word still has applicability. What would you say if we waged a war that lasted decades, which cost ever-increasing amounts of money, and featured constantly diminishing results? “Quagmire” would be an apt description of such a continuing fiasco. Such is the best way I can think of to sum up the state of contemporary education in America. A quagmire. A never-ending nightmare which shows no signs of improvement if we are such fools as to continue down the straight line. We are told that there is only one way to improve education: to spend more money. Yet this is self-evidently untrue. Asian nations spend considerably less than the United States on education and get consistently better results. Washington, DC spends more than the vast majority or jurisdictions in the country, yet consistently fails to produce students who have mastered even the most basic of skills. The problem is a lack of original thinking when it comes to how children are educated. Even the solutions favored by conservatives: school vouchers, stringent testing, and the like are based upon the premise that our present methods of educational organization are the best we can have. Everyone wishes to tinker with the system: to spend a few more dollars, to hire a few more teachers, to let parents have a few more choices. Yet few, if any, of those who speak or write on education seem to see the self-evident truth that the problem is not so much the details of the system as the system itself. Our schools today are, in basic structure, not very different from the ones that our parents or grandparents may have gone to. Certainly, the people who go to them are very different: we’ve all heard people muse on the lack of gun violence in their day. But people still go to thirteen years of school (including Kindergarten) and then, if they wish to, go off to college or university. They still get the summer off, still go for hours something like 9AM-3PM, and do all of the other things that their ancestors did. A student from 1950 might have a hard time fitting in socially or adjusting to technology, but they would certainly recognize the structure of the day and year. The second unaddressed problem is this: we spend a lot of time talking about how people teach, but we spend surprisingly little addressing what they teach. Those alterations to the curriculum are largely done to tailor things to the political fashion of the day, not in the interests of actually improving the quality of learning. First of all, we need to change the way that kids learn. There’s no reason to give students the entire summer off anymore. As I see it, there’s little reason to give them more than a few weeks off, spread throughout the year. The long summer is an anachronism, a legacy of a pastoral age. What it translates to in our day is a great deal of time spent each fall re-learning and re-acquiring the skills learned the previous year. Second, I see little reason why we need to keep kids in school for the entire day. If we were to schedule students in multiple ‘shifts’ (perhaps from 8AM-12PM and 1PM to 5PM) great savings could be made in school facilities. But we should look deeper at that. Why do we keep people in schools for thirteen years? Do they really, in that time, learn thirteen years worth of information, or is much of that time wasted? Personally, I believe that it is. At least two years, I think, could be shaved off the length of schooling, leading to high school graduation at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Some (mostly on the left) attack schools for spending their time training people to be future corporate drones. Most of those who make such attacks would much rather that these children be exposed to daily lectures from former Soviet commissars, in the hopes of turning them into leftist drones. Yet still, at the most basic level, they have a point. One of the major advantages of our present system would appear to be that people are trained to spend a lot of time sitting around, doing pointless things, and being bored. Shortening the length of education would happily reduce the time available for pointless busywork. The final two years of high school would be replaced by two years of near-mandatory “National Service”. This would not have to be military in character. People would be allowed to perform all sorts of useful duties. Those who did choose military service would be put through basic training and infantry training but would be kept in units separate from the rest of the Armed Forces. Units would be organized on a local basis, perhaps even reviving the colors and names of Civil War regiments. This program would be designed to serve several purposes. It would be a leveling influence in society, promoting social equality and racial tolerance. It would provide individuals with a deeper knowledge of the virtues of citizenship and the greatness of their country (naturally, part of the ‘National Service’ project would involve further education). One would be allowed to opt out of the program under certain circumstances, but such persons would not be allowed further public education and would be ineligible for Federal jobs. Nor would such persons be allowed to vote in Federal elections. Key in making this possible would be a complete national program of curriculum reform. We need to strip everything down to the basics and rebuild it from the ground up. This would begin with literacy and place a heavy emphasis on the great books of civilization and of America. It would remove extemporaneous nonsense inserted for the sake of political correctness. It would work, from Kindergarten on up, to bury within children a spirit of patriotism and a deep love of country. Basic science and math would be required for all, but advanced scientific and mathematical education would be encouraged only for those with a natural aptitude. Overall, the importance of English, History, and Civics would rise while that of science and math would fall (except for those students with abilities in the latter areas). This system would not, as I imagine it, send nearly as many people to college. There is, in my opinion, too much emphasis on higher education today. The main effect of trying to “send everyone to college” is to turn college into an extension of high school. As things stand today, in a few decades, a Bachelor’s degree will be considered as basic as a high school education is today in large measure because someone with a Bachelor’s degree will, as a result of the dumbing-down of education, know no more and possess no more skills than a high school graduate of an earlier generation. Of course, trying to reform education is a lot like banging your head with a sludge hammer, mostly because the Teacher’s Unions, which have a vested interest in the present, inefficient, system because it maximizes employment of even the worst teachers. This, I am afraid, is simply a cross we shall have to bear. The perpetuation and intensification of the present system is insanity. Sunday, January 11, 2004
Good 'ol Derb
Listen: Britney Spears is an instrument of Satan. The poor girl has sold her soul, or had it stolen from her. That travesty of a marriage was not for nothing — it was a union in evil! Its issue will be the Antichrist, and the world will be his dominion. These are the Last Times. You have been warned.
The Kooky Schemes of the Future Left
I’m often surprised that the left has yet to begin to embrace kook economic schemes. After all, income ‘inequality’ is increasing, consumers are heavily burdened by debt, and public pensions are threatened with a catastrophic collapse. The crisis, I suppose, is not yet here. But it will come.
How are we to deal with the great mountains of consumer debt which exist in this country? Are we to expect people to pay their bills? Of course not. It will not be long now before, under the pressure of some economic crisis, some segment of the left hits upon the obvious solution to the problem: hyperinflation. Think about it for a moment. Let us say that you owe $10,000 on three Credit Cards, have a car loan for another $10,000, a personal line of credit for $5000, and a mortgage of $100,000. You have a family income of $60,000 a year, less after taxes, so really you owe something like three times what your family makes each year and, when you deduct the money you need to live on, you really just have enough to pay the interest on these debts. Now, you’ll be fine: so long as none of your burdens notably increases and so long as you remain working. But what happens if something causes this house of cards to come tumbling down? That’s easy: you go bankrupt. This happens all the time. But what happens if, in some future crisis, this happens to many, many over-leveraged Americans? They will cry out for government relief and, I am quite certain, there will be demagogic politicians willing to give it to them. Now let us say that you were to simply put the mint on overtime, turning out massive quantities of cash which the government would then simply distribute. What happens next? The price of everything goes up, the value of the dollar crashes, and before long people will be paying for a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of $100 bills. This has been seen time and time again all over the world. So what’s the advantage of this? Easy: if a dollar today is worth .001% of what it was worth three months ago, you can clear all of your debts in a single afternoon of work. This, of course, would have all sorts of disastrous side effects. Banks would rapidly close their doors, people’s savings would become worthless, and international trade would collapse. Of course, any government interested in deliberately creating such a situation would, in all likelihood, be a government hostile to international trade in any case. Savings would be lost but, in such a scenario, the middle and lower classes would long ago have spent all of their savings. Moreover, after a sufficient period of time had passed, the old dollars would be invalidated and a new, sound, currency issued. In other words, the trade would be pitched as a few difficult months and everyone owns their house and car free and clear. Now, let me be very clear. I’m not advocating this. It’s a terrible idea. But it’s been proposed before. That’s what William Jennings Bryan, “Free Silver”, and the “Cross of Gold” were all about: coinage of silver would have generated inflation and thereby reduced debt burdens. After all, inflation does not hurt those who possess fixed assets (homes, farms, etc) as those whose assets consist of stocks, bonds, and other such things. Similarly, Shays’ Rebellion, in 1786-1787 was launched by those who wanted the government to issue paper money as a way of providing relief to the indebted farmers of Western Massachusetts. Another thing to watch for, as the years go on, is a call for Social Security (and other public pension programs in other countries) to be bailed out by the confiscation of funds held in private pension funds and retirement accounts. After all, we are facing obligations in this area which run into the trillions of dollars. As taxes soar and benefits are cut, those who are caught unprepared will begin to look jealously upon those who are. So, what’s the solution? Easy: nationalize all pensions in the United States, public and private, and confiscate all money held in registered individual retirement accounts. That might sound Communistic. That’s because it is. But still, cannot one hear the cries of some future politician? How can we let grandmothers starve while corporate executives earn pensions of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? After all, everyone was already paid for the work they did, why should they be paid any more than anyone else for not working? We’ll see a lot of this sort of garbage in the years ahead. Faced with increasing debt burdens, overwhelmed pension systems, and other strains some will call upon the people to adopt appealing-sounded quick-fix solutions. As always, there will be a powerful constituency willing to listen. Saturday, January 10, 2004
Should Welfare Recipients be Allowed to Vote?
Self-interest is an important factor (some might even say the most important factor) in the economic sphere. The same is not true in politics. A politics driven entirely by self-interest is a politics wherein the people vote themselves a raise every few years.
People receiving unearned benefits from the government ought not be allowed to vote. Now, let?s get this straight. I?m not talking about Social Security, Veteran?s benefits, or even unemployment compensation: I?m talking about payments for doing nothing. Specifically, I?m talking about ?welfare? benefits. Allowing people who are receiving funds from the state to vote (and, therefore, allowing these people to vote for more benefits for themselves) is an inherently destructive force in a democracy. I do not mean to deprive them of the vote indefinitely, merely for the duration of time they fail to make a worthy contribution to society. Someone receiving unearned money from society thereby ought to forfeit the right to make decisions as to how that society is run. People will accuse me of being ?anti-democratic? for making such a proposal. In a sense, I am. The Founders never meant for the American Republic to be a ?democracy? in the modern sense. They meant for it to be a constitutional republic, wherein the rights of the people are secured and the wise elevated to rule. I very much doubt if any of the Founding Fathers would look upon America?s modern mobocracy and approve in whole. Democracy can be a good thing: but only when it is an informed democracy tempered by responsibility. Someone who is reliant upon public charity to provide for their own survival is clearly not living up to the responsibilities of citizenship. Allowing them to vote is a destructive force within a democratic polity in that they tend to be driven entirely by self-interest. An examination of the areas with the highest number of welfare recipients leads to an obvious conclusion: people on welfare who vote almost universally vote for liberal Democrats who then seek to cement their loyalty by raising their benefits. Winston Churchill was fond of saying that the greatest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. He was right. The quality of our political life will be vastly improved by an upgrade in the electorate. Recent polls have shown that a high percentage of the American people believe that the phrase, ?from each according to his ability to each according to his need? is in the Constitution. People who believe this clearly lack sufficient political knowledge to decide who gets to run the country. I don?t believe that most of the Founders ever believed in universal suffrage (meaning, within the context of the Constitutional debate, universal suffrage for white men). Instead, there were always meant to be all sorts of barriers limiting the vote. Not barriers putting the vote out of anyone?s each altogether, but sufficient to make sure that people who wished to vote would actually have to earn that right somehow. Along similar lines, I believe that it is time to revive (and I mean really revive) a practice which is now generally viewed as archaic: tests for voters. Before someone can register to vote, an individual should be expected to take (and pass) a challenging test with questions about the history of the United States, its form of government, and its Constitution. This, I believe, should be considered a basic qualification for voting. Naturally I will be accused of advocating these reforms for the sake of faction. After all, some will point out, it would certainly be Republicans who would benefit from such changes and Democrats that will be hurt. I make no apologies for this, it is merely the price that Democrats deserve to pay for relying upon the votes of the dependent, the lazy, the useless, the ignorant, and the stupid. Democrats are often heard bemoaning that white voters in the South vote for Republicans against their own ?economic self-interest.? This is one of the problems of the modern Democratic Party; they are so used to winning votes through demagogic appeals to the greedy and indolent that they cannot conceive of a group of people who might vote on patriotic interest. They believe that everyone can be bribed, if the bribe is sufficiently well-packaged. Rather than appealing to the baser instincts of the electorate, we ought to be seeking ways to improve the quality of that body. Clark Gains
Tracking polls now have Clark behind Dean by only fourteen points in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, other polls show quite clearly that Clark is becoming the national anti-Dean.
Friday, January 09, 2004
The New Florida
I hate to say it, but I think that the chances of the Mayor of Vermont, Dr. Howard Brush Dean III, to be the Democratic nominee are fading rapidly. Democrats, as a whole, may be crazy: but they’re not that crazy. All across the country, there are probably thousands of loyal Democratic voters asking themselves if they really want a candidate who, a few days before the election, might pop off and tell a reporter that Christians are “simple-minded” or say any of a number of other things of staggering stupidity. This, of course, is a bitter disappointment to me. I was looking forward to seeing Dean get torn apart in November. I guess I’ll have to settle for seeing him get torn up now.
Luckily for those of us who have grown so fond of the Mayor, he’s not the type to go down gracefully. Neither are his followers. In response to the negative trends in Dean’s numbers, his campaign has seemingly hired a medium to consult with the ghost of Richard Nixon. The American Research Group, which is conducting a tracking poll in New Hampshire (which has shown, in a week, the race go from 39-12 Dean over Clark to 35-20), has reported that someone has been phoning older unaffiliated voters and telling them that they’ve missed the deadline to register as Democrats in order to vote in the New Hampshire Primary. But, when one person told the caller that they were thinking of voting for Howard Dean, the person told them that they were, in fact, eligible to vote. Which, of course, since New Hampshire allows independents to vote in either primary, they are. Now, of course, some Dean supporters are already claiming that this is either a Republican dirty trick or a trick by one of the other campaigns. This, to say the very least, seems extremely unlikely. Given that, according to the ARG President, this popped up in a number of calls, it seems likely that someone was calling a lot of unaffiliated New Hampshire voters to do this. It couldn’t be, as some have suggested, one Republican or Clark operative pulling a dirty trick with a phone book. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Dean’s campaign managers authorized any of this. As I pointed out long ago, the enthusiasm-driven nature of the Dean campaign is a double-edged sword. While these people are helpful and energetic, they are also dangerous to the campaign. The Dean campaign’s volunteers seem, to me at least, to consist of a group of college aged kids with lots of free time and money who are universally convinced of their own righteousness. Seeing as they are college-aged Democrats, we also know that they are, therefore, of dubious morality. What this means in practice is that they are going to make a lot of stupid mistakes that political professionals would never make. I think that this is the case here. Some Dean volunteers, worried about their favourite Metrosexual’s drop in the polls, decided to do something about it. Keep an eye on this story, I suspect that it will be getting some play in the next few days. Similarly, expect to see the Iowa Caucuses get ugly. While it is certainly true that the Dean campaign itself wouldn’t encourage people to vote illegally in the Caucus, something tells me that more than a few of those brimming-with-enthusiasm kids who’ve travelled to Iowa is going to try anyways. All for the good of the country, of course. In fact, I have a slight feeling that Iowa is going to turn into something of a fiasco. Dean will probably carry a lead in the polls into the caucuses in Iowa. The Dean supporters will wait out the day confident of their lead in the polls (maybe five points or so) and then Dick Gephardt will be declared the winner. This will not please them. What will have happened is simple: the other candidate will, in precincts where they have less than 15% support, swung votes to the leading candidate. These will be screaming and hair-pulling over this. In fact, I already can hear the screaming on Democratic Underground. The Dean supporters, having failed to previously study the rules of the caucuses, will immediately invoke the holy name of Florida in their attacks. The caucus system, they will insist, is an outmoded anachronism, like the Electoral College. I’m starting to worry that Dean might not even win New Hampshire. That, I think, would pretty much finish him as a serious candidate. All of the other serious contenders can win without New Hampshire. Dean, however, has staked so much on it, that he could not. With New Hampshire he still has some chance, without it he’s done. It seems like a day can’t go by without something getting worse for the Dean campaign. Almost all of the talk about the tapes of his appearances on a Canadian public affairs program has, so far, centered on his derogatory comments about the Iowa Caucuses. We haven’t even really got yet to his remarks about how Republicans who opposed affirmative action are “out and out racists” (something that other leading Democrats usually imply, rather than say) or his declarations that the death of Yassir Arafat would be a ‘tragedy’ and that a Hamas takeover of the Palestinian leadership would be a “good and bad thing.” I’m sure we’ll hear more about all of that. Actually, I’m really curious to get a look at those tapes. I’ve read that, at one point, the host of the program told our friend the Mayor of Vermont that he ought to be Secretary of State. Given that this was a Canadian public affairs program, in order for him to have impressed the host so he must have made some statements which would place him among the crowd that considers Michael Moore a ‘reactionary’. So, it looks like that this leg of the flight is going to be over soon. I guess that’s a good and bad thing. Ummm... Wow...
UPDATE: Read every word of this interview. It's really just amazing in its candor.
I've read Benny Morris' Righteous Victims, and always had the impression that he was something of an anti-Zionist. Not so. This is actually rather amazing, and does not portend well for the days ahead: "A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy." "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing." "I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered." If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential." Q: Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs? "The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified." The Scum on DU
Check out this post:
The FBI, after a shootout with the USSS in which several officers from both agencies were killed, raided the White House, the U.S. Naval Observatory home of the Vice President, and arrested the President and Vice President on charges that include treason, murder, conspiracy, and perjury. After breaking down the door to his Pentagon office, investigators found Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and an un-identified man dead from self-inflicted gunshots. Democratic front runner Richard Gephardt was rounded up with a number of other prominent Senators and held as a material witness in a possible war crimes tribunal to be convened in the Broxn, New York in three days. A boy can dream, can't he? But these people aren't traitors or unpatritoic. No sir. Sinking Dean
The trend in NH is for real, folks. It's now down to 35-20 Dean versus Clark, whereas a week ago it was 39-12 Dean versus Clark. That means that, in the space of a week, Clark has closed the gap from 27 points to fifteen. If this were to continue at the same rate over the next week, the polling would be 31-28 Dean versus Clark, within the margin in New Hampshire.
His comments about Iowa are going to kill what boost he could have had from the Harkin endorsement. Without the Harkin endorsement, those comments would probably have sunk him in Iowa. What's really interesting is this comment, from the American Research Group tracking poll: Over the past 2 days of calling, a number of older respondents registered as undeclared voters have reported that they have received telephone calls from a campaign informing them that they will not be allowed to vote in the Democratic primary because they missed the deadline to switch parties. A respondent discovered, however, that when she told the caller that she was thinking about voting for Howard Dean, the caller told her that she would be eligible to vote. Now, I doubt that the actual Dean campaign is stupid enough to do something like this. What I don't doubt is that there are Dean supporters dumb enough to try exactly that. We're seeing a pattern of Dean supporters becoming increasingly aggressive and dirty over time. Watch, someone will catch some Dean volunteer trying to illegally vote in Iowa. I'd bet a lot of money on it. And, even if it's just one, the other campaigns will jump upon it and do serious damage. Stupid Non-White Men
The history that we teach students today is deliberately depersonalized and, when personalities must be mentioned, it is mostly in the interests of knocking them down a peg or two. George Washington owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson had sex with them, Abraham Lincoln was a racist who wanted to send them back to Africa, etc. It is more than just an effort to avoid the “great man” theory of history. Rather, it is a conscious attempt to demythologize our greatest leaders, to rob them of their rightful place in history, and to shake the faith of young Americans in their country and themselves. Almost no figure is immune to these smears. Almost.
Now, let’s set something straight. This isn’t a racist article, far from it. As those of you who have seen the pictures of me floating about the internet know, I am ‘non-white’ (or, rather, half-white, a product of miscegenation). But I think it’s time to take on the Holy Trinity of secular heroes of the left: ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. While figures like Robert E. Lee and Winston Churchill get gradually written out of history, in favor of broader, less personal history which, typically, will focus on the ‘plight of women and minorities’ at the minor cost of omitting tiny details like the Battle of Gettysburg from the study of the Civil War, these new heroes are raised up and mythologized to take their place. It isn’t that the left hates the ‘great man’ theory, they simply prefer other men. Some might identify ‘non-violence’ as the primary connection between these men. This is far from the truth. As history shows all of them were, either through action or inaction, willing to condone violence to achieve their aims and that all of them, to some degree, aligned themselves with evil powers to achieve their ends. The primary connecting factor here is moral turpitude passed off as virtue. Not to put too fine a point on it but, ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, the celebrated ‘pacifist’ and leader of the movement for Indian independence, was a sex pervert who declared that the proper response to the Holocaust would have been for European Jews to commit mass suicide as a form of protest (how violence to the self aligns with the principles of non-violence and what exactly the response to this of the rest of the world, given that they would also theoretically be constrained by the same principles, was not explained. Let me go back for a moment. I did, after all, just refer to the revered Gandhi as a “sex pervert.” In his seventies, Gandhi slept in the nude with teenaged and pre-pubescent girls, supposedly as a way of testing his “ability to resist temptation”. He also would administer enemas to them and have enemas administered to him on a daily basis. He was utterly obsessed with bodily functions, even to the point of drinking his own urine, which he believed had healthful effects. Eventually, Gandhi’s inept leadership of the independence movement would lead to post-independence massacres in India in which an upwards of four million were hacked to death by crazed mobs. Some legacy. Some hero. We often hear the J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI denounced for investigating Martin Luther King during the 1960’s. Before such denunciations are made, we ought to ask a question: just what did they find? Martin Luther King, that supposed paragon of Christian virtue, had numerous affairs with married women. This has been admitted to by, among others, Ralph Abernathy, King’s principle deputy at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC and King also had numerous connections with the Communist Party. Several of his chief aides, such as Stanley D. Levison and Jack O'Dell were former members of the party. Levinson, despite formally leaving the CPUSA, continued to donate money to it. Towards the end of his life, King crossed the line from being a mere civil rights leader to become one of the principle spokesmen of the treasonous forces which, ultimately, stabbed the morally decent Americans who supported the Republic’s worthy cause in Vietnam and set in motion events which would mean the genocide of millions and a denial of freedom in Indochina foe what has now been more than a quarter of a century. In a speech in 1967 he called the United States the, “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and spoke glowingly of how, “shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.” His agitation took on an increasingly communistic tone, with him calling for a, “radical revolution of values.” And, quite certainly, the revolution of values he had in mind wasn’t of the sort that Ronald Reagan had. Especially not when he was saying that the, “edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”, essentially calling for the overthrow of capitalism. Finally, there is Nelson Mandela, the living icon of the international left. A few years ago, Canadian MP Rob Anders caused an uproar when he objected to a motion in Parliament to pass, by unanimous consent, a bill giving Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship. Anders later said he objected because Mandela was a “communist and a terrorist.” He later apologized for his comments. He ought not to have. Mandela was, in fact, both things. He wrote a manuscript entitled How to be a Good Communist and his party, the African National Congress, has close links with the South African Communist Party. ANC members, to this day, address eachother as ‘comrade’. This, naturally, is never mentioned in adulatory accounts of his life. Similarly, although Mandela is well-known for being a ‘political prisoner’, it is, in fact, true that he, “participated in planning acts of sabotage and inciting violence.” This led Amnesty International to declare, in 1985, that Mandela was not, in fact, a political prisoner. So why, then, is their all of this admiration for these men? For men who slept with little girls, cheated on their wives, plotted the murder of others, refused to resist Nazis, sympathized with communists, and actually were communists? The answer is two-fold. First, they fought against the West. The modern establishment, as we all know, hates Western civilization and everything it stands for. That is why they insanely try to tell us that trash written by Third-Worlders, such as the fabricated “Autobiography” of Rigoberta Menchu is the equal of the works of Shakespeare. Second, they understand a fundamental need for heroes and, to this end, they had to find someone to put in place of all of the dead white guys who people used to admire. They couldn’t bear the thought of replacing these dead white guys with some more ‘stupid white men’ (as gasbag forger Michael Moore might call them) so they canonized some ‘stupid non-white men’ instead. It’s time that we teach children to admire people who fought our enemies, rather than people who sympathized with them. Martin Luther King may well have done worthy work in the field of Civil Rights, but that does not disguise or excuse his treason over the issue of Vietnam. It is possible that Gandhi did a good thing in working for Indian Independence, but that does not excuse the bloodshed he brought about or his refusal to confront real evil. Let’s have real heroes again. Men with names like Lincoln, Churchill, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Jackson, Hamilton, MacArthur, Roosevelt, Patton, Grant, Sherman, and Lee. Let us celebrate the guardians and defenders of our great civilization once more. Thursday, January 08, 2004
Do the Democrats Have a Chance?
Ed Koch is going to be voting for George W. Bush. So are Zell Miller and Christopher Hitchens. All for pretty much the same reason, as Koch sums up:
I intend to vote in 2004 to reelect President Bush. I will do so despite the fact that I do not agree with him on any major domestic issue, from tax policy to the recently enacted prescription drug law. These issues, however, pale in importance beside the menace of international terrorism, which threatens our very survival as a nation. President Bush has earned my vote because he has shown the resolve and courage necessary to wage the war against terrorism. Stop it, Brush!
If Howard Dean keeps going on like this, he's going to go down in flames far too early.
In another January 1998 episode, he also speculated that there “will probably be good and bad” if Hamas takes control over the Palestinian leadership. Oh, yes, and this: The next great tragedy is going to be Arafat’s passing Of course that was long before he started running for President, but still. I mean, taken with the reports of his supporters bizarre attempts to launch dirty tricks against the Kerry campaign in Iowa, I'm beginning to wonder if one of his opponents have pictures of this guy with a dead girl or live boy.* *On reflection, almost certianly not. If Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III was caught with either, his supporters would donate another few million to him and discuss the many virtues of homosexual pedophillia and child sexual abuse/murder. Back to the Moon (And to Mars!)
A perfect move. Bush is going to announce plans for going back to the Moon. It will be paid for, in large part, by retiring the useless, dangerous, and expensive shuttle fleet.
UPDATE: I'm hearing that the plans include a Moon Base. Excellent. I'm looking forward to visiting the Moon.* *And yes, I know that about twenty of you will email me telling me to stay there, go ahead. UPDATE II: NASA as a whole is going to be massively overhauled and redesigned to work jointly with the DOD. This is wonderful news. Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Stop Making It Easy
Here's a headline that let's you know a campaign is in trouble: In Shift, Dean Starts Watching His Words (NYT)
From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people." -Howard Dean Come on- how is he going to win the nomination if he keeps this up? A Sound Immigration Policy
I’m going to hurt my reputation as a radical right-wing lunatic by coming out in support of the immigration reforms proposed by President Bush. In the last few days I’ve seen more than a few normally sensible conservatives fly off half-cocked over this. I believe that this, in large measure, comes because they’ve commented before reading the proposal. Now, I’m a staunch opponent of illegal immigration and, in general, immigrants who refuse to integrate into the country in which they live. I’ve warned of the rise of the Aztlanites and the dangers of la Reconquista. Keep all of that in mind as I say the following: this is a good policy, this is sound policy, and this is something that we ought to support.
Let’s get one thing straight: this is not an Amnesty. Period. An Amnesty, such as the one that President Reagan signed in 1986, would place illegal aliens in the United States on the path to citizenship. This, in fact, would do exactly the opposite. It would force those who have illegally entered the country to pay a fine (or ‘fee’ as the President termed it) in order to simply bring their status up to that of temporary worker. What this would do is match up foreign workers with jobs that no American wishes to take. Get it? This is simply a reflection of economic and political realities. These people are already here: underground, untracked, and unmonitored. By giving them some sort of legal status, the government not only helps to protect them from abuse- it also makes it easier for them to be deported if necessary. In broad outline, it’s a great plan. Now is where the Congress steps in. In order for this to work, a few things need to happen. First, security along the border has to be stepped up in order to prevent entries which do not pass through US customs and immigration services. Obviously these can never be prevented altogether, but the dimensions of the problem can be greatly reduced. Second, mechanisms need to be built in which ensure that those who enter on temporary visas leave the nation when those visas expire. Third, strong efforts need to be made to ensure that those already in the nation are properly registered. This, I think, can be achieved by offering a combination of penalties and benefits to employers and employees. There will be those, of course, who will scream to deport them all. This is a sentiment that might be noble in spirit, but is impossible in fact. Have you ever contemplated the logistics of detaining and deporting twelve million people who can hide among fellow members of their race who are legitimately in the United States? And, of course, each of those twelve million people would almost certainly be entitled to a hearing of some sort, followed by years of appeals. Does anyone have any idea what it would cost? I would conservatively estimate it at several hundred billion dollars, when all is said and done. And that, of course, assumes that there wouldn’t be a violence response to such an act which, of course, there would. By registering these people (and believe me, if they can get American Social Security benefits, they certainly will register) we are getting them to turn themselves in. By writing into law that those who lose their jobs of commit criminal acts must return to the nation of origin (and writing time-limits for stays into the law) we are providing for the phased, orderly, and gradual deportation of these people. It isn’t a perfect solution, to be sure. For one thing, it fails to sufficiently punish those who have illegally violated America’s borders. But it is, I think, as good a solution as we are going to get. This is a smart political move as well. Those screaming that they aren’t going to vote for Bush as a result generally fall into three categories. Normal people who haven’t read the full story, and will eventually calm down. Libertarians, who are unaware that the Libertarian platform calls for totally open borders. And, finally, radical paleo-conservatives and Constitution Party members who scream that they won’t vote for Bush time he does just about anything. Others will grumble, but they’ll support the President in the end. Those in the former groups, who actually were going to vote for the President and won’t as a result, number at the most a few thousand, largely living in states which will vote for Bush unless he’s caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy or in states (California) which will only vote for him if he’s caught with a live boy. Is Dean Done?
Is Dr. Howard Brush Dean III’s campaign for the Presidency finished? No, not yet. But it is in danger and, quite frankly, I think that his prospects of a knockout victory in the earth weeks of the campaign are essentially finished. The rapid-fire primary schedule, devised by Democratic leaders in the hopes of speeding the selection of a nominee, is going to have the opposite effect. Normally the length of time between Presidential primaries gives time for candidates to realize that their fundraising is drying up, make rational decisions, and consolidate support. It also gives time for someone to clearly emerge as the national ‘front-runner’. Instead candidates will be faced with a barrage of primaries which will, I think, sow confusion and bitterness.
First of all, I think that Dean is going to lose in Iowa- something that will shock the media. He’s going to go in with support of between 25% and 30%- ahead of Gephardt and far ahead of the rest of the pack. From the look of the polls, most of his supporters will assume that this will translate into a victory. This, however, ignores just how the Iowa Caucuses work. The difference between a primary and a caucus is a meaningful one. In Iowa, convention delegates are elected precinct by precinct. In each, voters are asked to stand up for the candidate that they support. If any candidate gets less than 15% of the vote, their supporters can choose another candidate. All across Iowa on January 19th, the supporters of candidates who fail to achieve 15% of the vote are going to cross over and vote for the one candidate with a chance of beating Dean in Iowa: Dick Gephardt. Dean will come in second place in the delegate count. While the number of delegates that Iowa chooses is not meaningful, the feeling created as a result is critical. Dean’s increasingly cult-like supporters, who seem to be boosted by any setback, will immediately accuse the other campaigns of conspiring to deprive them of victory (which the other campaigns will, in fact, have actually done). Various Deaniacs will insist that Dean is the “real” winner of the Caucuses and invoke the bitter (for them) memory of Florida in 2000. Eight days later, on January 27th, Dean will win in New Hampshire. However, he will shock many by underperforming. Tracking polls seem to show Dean’s numbers in New Hampshire stalled in the high thirties. I don’t think that he’s going much higher than that there, either. Given the amount of time that Dean has campaigned in New Hampshire, I’m fairly sure that most of the undecided have already written him off for one reason or another. The real story of New Hampshire will be the rise of General Wesley Clark, who will shock many by surging at the last minute and managing to win 25% of the vote. Coming up hard after New Hampshire will be the February 3rd primaries. This will be one of the decisive days of the campaign. If Dean can score several convincing wins, then the nomination becomes his to lose. However, if he only wins one or two primaries that day, then the odds are that the nomination fight will drag on through the spring. Dean supporters have made much of the fact that Dean is in the lead on Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Carolina: the key February 3rd fights. However, what they ignore is this: those leads are soft. In Arizona he polls at 26%, in Oklahoma 24% and South Carolina 16%. Clark is in second place in all three of those states, and within the margin of error in Oklahoma (21%) and South Carolina (12%). If he manages to do well in New Hampshire and receives much positive media coverage as a result, there is a strong possibility that he will take all three primaries. In South Carolina there is a wild care: the performance of the Reverend Al Sharpton who, at the present time, ties Clark there for second place. If Sharpton makes a strong second-place showing in South Carolina or, perhaps even manages to win, it will become the story of the night. This will engender further paranoia amongst Democrats because it is fairly well known that there are a number of South Carolina Republicans who are planning on voting for Sharpton in the primary as a means of trouble-making. If Clark puts in a good showing on February 3rd, he might even be able to wrest the “front-runner” title away from Dean. Or, at the very least, the race might be considered a toss-up. After all, if things have gone as I’ve speculated, the delegate count might look like this on February 4th: Clark: 140 (Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Carolina) Gephardt: 119 (Iowa and Missouri) Dean: 77 (New Hampshire, Delaware, New Mexico, and North Dakota) Of course, if Sharpton were to win South Carolina, then Gephardt would narrowly hold the lead. But, in any case, the race would now be essentially back the beginning. In order to win the Democratic Nomination a candidate needs to win 2158 of 4315 delegates. It’s even trickier than that, however, because 714 delegates to the Convention are ex officio- Democratic officeholders and members of the DNC. In other words, in order to clinch the nomination before the convention, a candidate will need to win about 60% of the elected delegates. A month of smaller primaries and caucuses passes before “Super Tuesday” on March 2nd, when 1151 delegates are selected. Of these let’s give the Democrats Abroad to Dean, along with Washington, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Hawaii. Michigan is tough to gauge. If Gephardt is going strong, I would think that his labor ties would stand him well here. But it’s a primary which allows internet voting, which I would think would favor Dean and Clark with their more internet-savvy followings. I’m feeling generous, so let’s give it to Dean as well. That leaves Tennessee, Virginia, Idaho, and Utah to the leading anti-Dean candidate, probably Clark. So, where would that leave us in the delegate count? Clark: 332 Dean: 325 Gephardt: 119 A few others will have picked up a few delegates here and there, but not in large numbers. John Edwards is in fourth place in South Carolina, let alone the rest of the nation, Kerry can’t win his home state and Lieberman lacks any natural base within the party. Sharpton and Kucinich will retain dedicated followings but, in general, will not be a major factor (though Sharpton will probably score well in some Southern primaries). At this point 894 of the 3601 elected delegates will have been selected. Dean will have to win 1833 of the remaining 2707 delegates in order to clinch the nomination without the support of Democratic ‘super-delegates’. However, of the remaining elected delegates 731 will be from the South and 213 will be from Border States. In other words, it will be mathematically impossible for Dean to clinch the nomination without winning at least some Southern and Border States areas where, right now, he polls poorly even among Democrats. If Dean doesn’t win California, New York, and Ohio on March 2nd, it will be very difficult for him to secure the nomination in any case. So, let us suppose that the rest of the race goes as follows. Dean manages to win most of the states with liberal voting bases, including most of the larger states. He wins California and New York, but he loses both Ohio and Pennsylvania. He does well in a few Southern states, but fails to win any. Gephardt fails to win, but remains in the race, polling at a steady 20%, in the hopes of being eventually chosen as a compromise candidate. The final delegate count might look something like this: Clark: 1613 Dean: 1607 Gephardt: 119 Ex-Officio: 714 Unpledged: 82 What we have here is a deadlock. In the two months that would follow, we would hear much about a Dean-Clark or Clark-Dean ticket. This, however, I believe to be unlikely. By the time that the primaries are done, there will be so much bad blood between these two that their working together will be nearly impossible. All of this leaves me both hopeful and disappointed. I fear that the Democrats will junk Dean and choose someone more electable. However, this also opens the door to the best of possibilities. A battered Dean might barely scrape over the finish line, thereby causing moderate Democrats to vote for Bush or stay home. Or, better yet, his supporters might, in their rage, lead him into bolting. The dangerous thing about leading a mob of angry people is that it’s hard to judge who that anger might be turned against. It’s easy to see the Deaniacs launching a major third-party bid out of the belief that 2004 is the year to ‘purify’ the party. Their paranoia and arrogance will help in this as, should Dean not win the nomination, a majority of Dean supporters will probably conclude that the result came about by trickery and deception. Like I said- I can’t wait. Tuesday, January 06, 2004
The 9-11 Memorial
I rather like the design that has been selected. Simple. Elegant. It's something that, I suspect, won't look horribly dated in the future, as some design involving thousands of lights and such might. Quiet. Solemn. I can't think of a better choice.
Whoops
Well, yeah.
Hey, I Won an Award
I don't think that it's meant as a positive award, but hey- I'll take what I can get.
*"Turning Japanese" Award for the Best Case of the Vapors, Blog Division - Adam Yoshida First winner, too. The previous winners of the regular award include Peggy Noonan and Andrew Sullivan. The Gathering Storm (Part One)
Let me tell you where I stand. I believe that we are entering a period of extreme crisis for the West in general and the United States in particular. In the coming years we will face the possibility of the destruction of our three thousand year heritage of liberty. Only the West can rule and only the United States can lead the West. Any other outcome would mean a turn back into an age of barbarism. Any other outcome would mean a world ruled by the enemies of decent man. Better to let the missiles fly, the world burn, and billions die than to live in a world ruled by the Chinese or Moslems. Neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet. But, of course, I would rather not it come to that. But, if we are to see the survival and flowering of the West, then we shall have to be ready.
Does anyone here think that what we have seen in the last few years is the end? 9-11 was only the beginning of what our enemies have in mind for us. The next time will be worse and so will the time after that. Will our people have the will to stand up when terrorists kill a million with a nuclear bomb? Or when they spread diseases which leave millions sick, dead, and dying? I fear that the inclination of the people, especially as time moves on and the present generations move into power, will be to appease threats and allow our enemies to rule the world. China wants to conquer Taiwan? No problem. Arabs want to drive the Jews into the sea? None of our business. Mexico wants California back? Well, we stole it from them in the first place. Civilizations fall because the resolve of the people falters. This crisis is upon us now. The American people do not, as things stand at present, have the will to lead the world through this new century. If they are to gain that will, they need to be led, cajoled, bullied, and propagandized into submission. Some might say that such statements are anti-democratic. They are. Democracy is worthless when it cannot perpetuate itself. Abraham Lincoln put the question best when he asked, “must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Democracy is useful only as an ends onto a means, not as and end in and of itself. That is why, when people ask me if the United States should respect an election in which the Iraqi people elected communists or Islamists, I always respond in the negative. Democratic decisions can further the ends of evil. The Algerian army was right when, in 1991, it refused to respect the results of elections that radical Islamists won. Pinochet was right to seize power rather than allow Allende to bring Chile into the communist bloc. Had, during the Cold War, British voters elected a radical Labour Government bent on taking the UK out of NATO and into the Soviet bloc, it would have been right to overthrow the British government and replace it with a military regime. We must recognize this very important fact in the years ahead. Sometime after a massive attack which kills millions of people, a large (and loud) faction of the American people may be for peace at any price. They cannot be allowed to have it. It is better to abridge democracy for the moment, in the hope of a later restoration of republican principles, than it is to allow the people to vote for national suicide. While today we are not at such a stage, I fully expect that someday we will be. Any objective viewer can see that the challenges we will face in this century will be the greatest faced by any civilization in the entire history of the world. Meeting these challenges will require our courage, our cunning, and all of our strength. We will know moments of sheer terror. Those who thought they would live lives of unlimited prosperity will come to know privation and want. Cities will be destroyed, nations burned from the face of the Earth, and millions of Americans will die right here, on American soil. That is what we’re up against. We’re looking straight into hell and, unless we see it plain and clear, we aren’t coming out the other side. The Death of Old Europe: I recently sought to write someone on the future of Europe. I went in with fears of a French-led European Union and came out with doubts if, by the year 2050, there will even be a geopolitical entity which resembles the Europe that we know of today. The massive Moslem immigration into Europe, combined with the failure of the Europeans to integrate these people into their societies does not auger well. The Europe of a few decades in the future will probably either we well on its way to becoming the richest part of the Islamic world or will end up under the control of a collection of Le Pen-types with somewhat genocidal tendencies. Of course, seeing that at this moment one in ten Frenchmen is a Moslem (and that percentage is rapidly increasing), one wonders just how much success someone like Le Pen would have, even if they chose to seize their objectives by the force of arms. A France whose population contained fifteen million unassimilated Moslems would probably be ungovernable, except by a weak socialist government making constant and ever-increasing concessions towards Islamic militants or by a military dictatorship. More probably it will be the former followed by the latter. Europe is afflicted by the same disease as parts of America are, only in a much more advanced stage. When Pim Fortuyn, a militant homosexual who had pictures of Lenin and Trotsky hanging in his home, spoke out against the rise of Islam in the Netherlands (when Moslems make up a substantial minority of the population- and the size of that minority is rising) spoke out against the rise of Islam in Europe, he was branded as a ‘racist’ and assassinated. Europe will not confront this problem until it has to and, even then, it will be too late. France has recently taken a good step in attempting to ban the Islamic headscarf from schools. But watch: when confronted, they will eventually choose to back down. After all, how many Frenchmen is the government willing to sacrifice to put down the riots which will occur if they actually try to enforce such a ban? The answer should be: as many as are required. But it will turn out to be: none at all. Europe, for all of its efforts to recapture its old glory, is paralyzed and dying. Europeans are gradually disappearing from the face of the Earth. Already, I think, the fate of some European nations, in particular France but also probably others, are sealed. In the coming years the victories of Charles Martel, Ferdinand V and Isabella I, Jan Sobieski, and others will be nullified by European cowardice and inaction. The Fate of Israel: I do not expect, in the year 2050, that there will be a State of Israel like we have today. The most likely scenario is that, sooner or later, the Moslems will get nuclear and biological weapons, and they will use them. Israel will strike out with its own nuclear weapons, but it will do little good. However good Israeli anti-missile systems are, it would only take a handful of nuclear weapons to totally destroy the State of Israel. Of course the war in Iraq (and the wars to follow in the Middle East) will delay this outcome. But they cannot, I think, stop it in the end. A handful of nuclear weapons and Israel will be gone, forever. It need not even be a state that does the deed. In a supreme irony, it is entirely possible that the leaders of a future democratic Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia will come to ceremonies to mourn the ‘Second Holocaust’, to lay wreathes and dedicate memorials. But still, I think, it will happen in the end. Israel has sworn that Masada will not fall again. But they lack the will to do what is ultimately necessary to stop one from happening. As in Europe, demography is destiny. Even if the leaders of the Islamic world were to cease their hostility towards Israel, there would still be some Palestinian terror cell, hidden somewhere, quietly assembling a few nuclear bombs. Maybe Israel will find the will to stop them in time, but I doubt it. After all, if they cannot be convinced of the obvious need to physically expel Muslims from Israel by years of suicide bombings directed at civilians, then nothing will ever convince them of the necessity. Maybe I am wrong. But I doubt it. Most likely, the ragged and sick survivors of Israel will end up being resettled in the United States, where they will become the most dedicated of all patriots. After all, they will have no other place left to go. The second most likely option is that a State of Israel will still exist, but with a vastly reduced population which must be perpetually guarded by American troops stationed across a battle-scared land. Even if, in any given year, there is only a 1% chance that Israel will be subject to an attack with weapons of mass destruction, over a period of decades that chance adds up to a virtual certainty. The Enemy Within: The United States itself will face its greatest internal crisis since the Civil War, as unimpeded illegal immigration is allowed to continue. Before too long illegal Hispanics will be a majority in some areas of the American South-West. Poor, uneducated, and without attachment to the American Republic, they will be ripe for the blandishments of demagogues, who will make Mexican nationalist appeals to them. When they are a majority, they might demand to go or to reunite with Mexico. And many decent Americans will, out of exhaustion or a misplaced sense of fairness, wish to let them go. After all, they will say, they are the ones that live there. Will we have the will to resist then? In addition to the Mexican threat, there will be an increasing danger from individuals who will seek to subvert the American Republic in order to meet internationalist goals. How will we meet that challenge? What will we do when, during some future war, neo-copperheads threaten to take power? The Rise of China: Chinese power will rise as time goes on. China will become the dominant player in Asia and, as time goes on, an economic equal of the United States. There is little reason to think that the Chinese will not act aggressively once they are in power, especially if not challenged by the United States. China means to be the superpower in the world. They are working methodically, building up their economy and their military power. When the moment is right, they will make their big play. This is the world which we will come to see in the years ahead. A collapsing Europe, a threatened Israel, a divided nation, and a rising China. Monday, January 05, 2004
Why I’m Against the Federal Marriage Amendment
The answer to this is simple: it won’t pass. I like it in principle, but I don’t believe that we’ll be able to get it on through the Congress and, even if we do, I don’t believe that it will be ratified by the required number of states. Gambling and losing on the FMA would be a very bad idea. Even if we were to get it passed by the Congress and thirty-seven states, which would be a remarkable achievement, we would still fail, and we would still have gay marriage.
Now that does not mean that I, as David Brooks and some others do, favor gay marriage. I am very much opposed to it, and still mean to stop it. The Democratic strategy on this issue is really quite clear. Leading Democrats will insist that they oppose gay marriage, all the while winking at their gay (and pro-gay) supporters. They will then oppose any effort to pass a FMA by insisting that the Defense of Marriage Act already forbids gay marriage in any state that does not want it. When the Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act (which, I am reliably assured, it will) they and their friends in the media will run out the clock. By the time supporters of the FMA manage to get going again, outrage will have dimmed and tens of thousands (or perhaps a few hundred thousand) gays will already be married. They will then continue to claim that they do not “personally support” gay marriage while opposing an effort to move against it on the grounds that the FMA would ‘divorce’ people who are already ‘married’. The best case for generating outrage about gay marriage (and fighting back against it) is the idea that a gay marriage in a state which supports the idea (say, Vermont) would, because of the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, effectively legalize gay marriage in a state where an overwhelming majority of the people opposed it. This is what the Defense of Marriage Act is meant to prevent, expect that the DOMA is plainly unconstitutional (because of the full faith and credit clause). The only reason that it has not yet been struck down is that there are no married gay people to challenge it. As soon as there are some, they will challenge it, and it will go down. The answer then is obvious: we need to put the Defense of Marriage Act in the constitution. As much as I dislike the idea of gay marriage, I see little reason to object if Vermont or some other state wants it. I might choose to live in that state anyways and accept it, or a might choose to move to another state in order to be away from it. Given the chance to choose, I suspect that a dozen or so states would eventually legalize gay marriage, and most of the rest would outlaw it (at least for the time being). Where we can gather the most support is on this point: the will of the people of a state should, in matters that affect only residents of that state, be largely supreme. If the people of Georgia do not wish for abortion to be legal, why should the Federal Government force them to accept it? While this solution will mean allowing gay marriage in some areas and abortion in some areas it will, overall, greatly reduce the spread of these evils. It is worth noting that, in the entire history of the United States, only a single Constitutional amendment has been passed with the objective of achieving a legislative aim: the 18th Amendment, which instituted prohibition. Many other amendments have been proposed to achieve aims that are essentially legislative in nature, but only this one has passed. People are reluctant to modify the Constitution, and for good reason. What I propose is an amendment designed to restore the balance set out by the 10th Amendment. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not even going to try and fully word the Amendment in question (or figure out how to reconcile it with the 14th Amendment). But what we need is an amendment which gives the final word on domestic issues to the state. Something like, “No act of Congress or Judgement of any Federal Court shall interfere with the domestic affairs of any state, provided that the state in question continues to guarantee a form of republican governments to its people.” Like I said, I’m not a lawyer. Naturally, the second advantage of such an amendment is that it would allow states to begin to restrict abortion once again. As things stand now, Roe v. Wade is unlikely to ever be overturned, and a ‘Human Life’ Amendment will never pass the Constitution. Better for us to win something than lose everything. I am, and remain, a bitter opponent of gay marriage. Yet I see no way of stopping it from coming to some states. It is best for us to win what we can while we can. The only thing which would change my mind on this would be if other conservatives would step forward and declare themselves ready for a knock-down, drag-out, fight across all fifty states focused on this issue. But they aren’t, we’ve already seen that, and there’s no point fighting a battle which we are doomed to lose with an attendant loss of prestige. If we pass this amendment, we win. If we try for the full FMA and fail, we’ll fall far. The Mayor of Vermont
There are fifteen counties in California with a population higher than that of the State of Vermont. There are twenty cities with populations larger than that of Vermont, and another ten with populations which are roughly equal. Vermont has a population that is 98% white and about 90% of people have graduated from High School. In other words, as Governor, Dr. Howard Brush Dean III had a job which, almost certainly, was easier than that of countless Mayors and County Executives across the nation. Think about this: Bill Clinton was mocked for coming from a small state, yet Arkansas is about four times the size of Vermont and much more diverse. Why isn’t the Mayor of Seattle running for President?
People have accused me of being obsessed with Howard Dean and, I must admit, I am to a certain extent. I don’t have nightmares about John Kerry, Wesley Clark, or Joe Lieberman in the White House. I don’t like any of the above and would never vote for them on account of their party affiliation: but they don’t scare me. They’d all do a much worse job that any Republican, but I don’t expect that they’d destroy the Republic. Of Howard Dean I am not so sure. Dean reminds me of the Greg Stillson character from Stephen King’s book/movie/television series The Dead Zone. He’s the leader of a mass movement, he’s come out of nowhere, and pinning down exactly what he thinks is difficult. Reading the words of the brainwashed members of the Dean cult, I begin to wonder just what he has planned if he wins the election. His remark in a debate on Sunday that he’d balance the budget in the sixth of seventh year of his Administration (which made the audience laugh) carried behind it some troubling implications. Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III doesn’t want to be the President of the United States; he wants to be King of the United States. Now, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t think this to be such a bad thing. I’m a fan of strong executive leadership: when it is in the service of the country. I wouldn’t mind a President with ambitions to glorify the Republic and all the rest, but I don’t think that’s what Dean has in mind at all. The ‘flexibility’ shown by Dean on the issues is, I think, different than that of Bill Clinton. Despite the events created in the fevered minds of some, William Jefferson Clinton wasn’t an evil man; he was merely a weak and ineffectual one. Bill Clinton was generally willing to change his political positions because, for him, the end he was seeking was popularity. I am quite certain that if he had been born in another time in another place, Bill Clinton would have been perfectly happy to be a Hamiltonian Federalist, a Jeffersonian Democrat, a Clay Whig, or to adopt any of a number of political belief systems to suit his needs. Bill had no hidden agenda, which which was there belonged to Hillary who, the more I think on it, truly was the Lady Macbeth of the Clinton Administration. Let’s go back to Vermont for a second. Dean sough to rule that state as an autocrat: winning support by regularly threatening legislators and doing all sorts of other things. That, I think, is the real reason that he’s sealed his records from his time as Governor: he doesn’t want his style exposed. Dean’s whole career in public life is one of the pursuit of power. Yet, unlike Bill Clinton, he seems uninterested in the personal uses of power. Why go to Medical School, if one means to immediately enter state politics? Why run for Lieutenant Governor at such a young age, unless one means to be Governor? Now, I’m not decrying Dean for his ambition, for I generally approve of such things. Rather, I am noting how Dean has moved through the ranks, changing his political affiliation as each day has required. I remember reading a novel once, entitled The Red President. In it, a young, handsome, moderate Democratic Senator from Virginia who manages to win the White House turns out to be a secret communist. Now, I’m not suggesting that Howard Dean is a communist. But I do wonder this: how would we stop a President who hid his true political self for decades until he entered the White House? We need to know what Howard Dean really believes. Little bits and pieces float to the surface. Last year he made a comment about how the United States will not remain the world’s greatest power. He later retracted it, but I think he meant it. His suggestion that Bush may have known of 9-11 in advance and his doubts as to the guilt of Osama Bin Laden (the latter swiftly retracted) also provide glimpses of someone who is secretly much farther to the left than any of us know. I’ve previously called Dean the ‘post-American’ candidate, and I increasingly begin to believe that to be the truth. Howard Brush Dean III remains, I think, truly a product of his generation, moreso than Bill Clinton ever was. For all of his sixties baggage, Bill Clinton was (as President) more of a Yuppie than a Hippie. On Dean, I wonder. I think that he’s convinced of the evil and wickedness of a majority of the American people and that he’s convinced that the United States is a dangerous rogue power which needs to be restrained. As President, I believe, he will seek to use his power, and his cult, to attempt to forever tie down the United States and transform American culture. A vote for Howard Dean means gay marriage. A vote for Howard Dean means the crippling of American military power. A vote for Howard Dean is, effectively, a vote for the terrorists because, as his policies make clear, if Dean is elected the terrorists will win. Sunday, January 04, 2004
The Rush Limbaugh Case
I wonder if the person in charge of the prosecution, State Attorney Barry Krischer, is the same Barry Krischer (an Attorney from Palm Beach, apparently) as the one who has given money to Democrats.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
We Stand at Armageddon
There is a great and growing danger of complacency among Republicans. As it becomes increasingly clear that President Bush will probably win re-election this November, and probably do it by an overwhelming margin, there will be an urge to let up. There will be a temptation to, in the interests of making sure everything runs something, run a positive and relatively quiet campaign. Some will, out of a natural sense of sportsmanship, seek to reign in the more rabid Republican partisans.
We need to resist these temptations. We need to resist complacency and over-confidence. I do not deny that I believe the eventual victory of the President to be certain: but there is much more at stake than that. This is a war and, in this war, we must expand our aims. Before we fought for a limited objective: the re-election of George Walker Bush. Now we must aim higher. In this, the two thousand and fourth year of Our Lord, we have a chance to annihilate the Democratic Party once and forever. We must either have their unconditional surrender, or we must grind their bones to dust. Republicans should consciously set out to make the 2004 campaign the most vicious in memory: there must be no surrender, no retreat and, most of all, no quarter for our enemies. The Democrat Party needs to be wiped from the face of the Earth. Democrats will not approve of such talk. They refer to it as ‘eliminationism’ and seek to use it to tar Republicans with the brush of fascism. They weep about the suppression of ‘dissent’. What they have forgotten is this: the difference between dissent and treason. It is not treason to have a dissenting opinion on tax policy, abortion, gay marriage, or any of a multitude of other issues. The opinions held by a majority of Democrats on these issues might be execrable, but there is nothing disloyal about them. The Democratic Party must be destroyed, not because of its opposition to tax cuts but rather because, in this war, the party as an institution has become nothing less than a tool of the enemy. A symbiotic relationship has developed between the Democrats and the enemies of America. For a Democrat to win the election, America’s enemies have to be successful in attacking America. For al-Qaeda to win the war, a Democrat has to be successful in winning the election. Think about it for a moment: if Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III is elected next November, who will benefit the most? The French? Iran’s Ayatollah’s? Kim Jong Il? Yassir Arafat? All of them stand to gain from the election of a Democrat to the White House. The last three Democratic Presidents have been national security disasters. Lyndon Johnson took us into Vietnam, but lacked the will to win. Jimmy Carter allowed a massive Soviet build-up, lectured Americans about their ‘fear’ of Communism, stood by as the Ayatollahs seized power in Iran, and finally let the Moslems humiliate America by holding the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage for a year. Bill Clinton withdrew from Somalia (thereby inspiring Osama Bin Laden to launch is war against America), failed to react to numerous al-Qaeda attacks, allowed Saddam Hussein to defy America for eight years, and (with the help of Jimmy Carter) appeased the North Koreans, thereby allowing them to acquire nuclear weapons. So, who wins if Howard Dean wins? The answer is obvious: al-Qaeda does. At the present time Osama Bin Laden and Howard Dean have exactly the same objective: the defeat of George W. Bush. From this perspective, it is hard not to conclude that every vote cast for Howard Dean is a vote for al-Qaeda and, indeed, nothing less than a pair of bullets fired into the brain of some future American who will be doomed to die in a future terror attack as a result of the cowardice of a Dean Administration. Now, some might admit to the truth of this but respond with that old truism: one should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to sheer incompetence. This might be true (and it certainly was true in the case of Lyndon Johnson). Certainly, a victory for the Democrats would be a victory for the enemies of America, but does that really make Democrats traitors? The answer is simple: yes. Now, this does not mean that all individual Democrats hate America or are traitors: it merely means that the Democrat Party, as a collective entity, is indeed the ‘party of treason’. By now it ought to be obvious to any rational person that the election of a Democrat on the present platform of the Democratic Party would give “aid and comfort” to the enemies of America- yet Democrats persist in seeking to elect a candidate on that very platform. Why? Because the Democratic Party as a collective body has decided that issues are more important than country. Go and look at the Howard Dean campaign blog. On the left side of the page you will see links to all of the various groups which have been formed to support the Dean. Gays for Dean, Environmentalists for Dean: all of these various factional groups for Dean. These are the very same factions that, together, make up the modern Democratic Party. In large part, that party today is little more than an agglomeration of single-interest groups. Talk to a gay rights activist, or a minority activist, or an environmentalist. Listen to what they say and then ask yourself a single question: when it comes down to it, which means more to them- the defense of the realm, or their single issue? The experience of countless Presidents has shown that, most of the time, it is virtually impossible for a President to spend that much time or energy on domestic policy during wartime. The activists know this and, because of this, they seek to refocus the energies of the nation on their petty little issues. They place a higher value on the protection of buggery than they do on the protection of Boston. We live in an age of terrible danger. Our enemies have, or soon will have, the power to wipe our greatest cities from the map and shall do so if we ever give them a chance. Yet, inevitably, if the normal state of politics goes on eventually there will be a Democrat elected who will give them just that chance. Keeping this in mind, we must therefore understand that this is not an ordinary election. We are on the edge of the abyss, where we stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. Ahead of us lies the possibility of a better world and behind us rests death and nothingness. However dearly it comes, absolute victory must in the end be ours. Friday, January 02, 2004
Jonah Goldberg is Wrong
I’ve long been a fan of Jonah Goldberg’s work. He’s usually funny and often right. But, in his attack today on Pat Robertson, he’s dead wrong. What upset Jonah was Pat’s statement on the 700 Club that, in essence, George W. Bush is going to win next year because God wants him to win. I don’t really agree with that. From what I’ve seen God is more interested in punishing humans than he is in helping them. But, in any case, I’m not a theologian.
My problem with what Jonah has to say is that it is yet another example of the efforts of some Republicans and conservatives to ingratiate themselves with some sectors of society by deriding the people who are at the base of the genuine conservative movement. In the search for ‘South Park Republicans’ who may or may not remember to vote between the time they spend smoking dope and watching Anime, they love to bash the people who do a great deal of the heavy lifting for Republicanism. “I’m a conservative,” they say, “but I’m not that sort of conservative.” John McCain based a large part of his campaign on this shtick. Some conservatives go after people like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Roy Moore, and General Boykin because, in seeking ‘respectability’ they are willing to cannibalize our own. Our popular culture likes to mock men of faith, and so ‘respectable’ conservatives seek to distance themselves, lest they too be tarred. The problem with professional conservatives is that they spend far too much time among the political classes and not enough among the people. I know a great many people who came to conservatism via Pat Robertson and the 700 Club. His show neatly packages politics into something that many average Americans can watch and enjoy. A Shameful Poll
CNN and Time should be ashamed of themselves. Over at Democratic Underground they’re crowing about a new poll which shows President Bush ahead of Howard Dean by only six points (52% to 46%). Of course, what they miss is this: the poll, as conducted, is shamefully biased.
First of all, they drew a poll sample consisting of simply “adult Americans.” This is downright silly. Voters generally trend more Republican with their level of involvement in the political process (or, to put it another way, the more one knows about politics, the more likely one is to be a Republican). That is why polls of ‘likely voters’ almost always look better for the GOP than polls of ‘registered voters’. At the very most 55% of adult Americans will vote next year (and even that seems unlikely). But here’s the real trick. Of the 1004 people interviewed for the poll, 399 were Democrats or Democrat-leaners. All of those people were registered voters. Now, normally, adding registered voters to the poll (versus all adults) helps the Republicans: but in this case all of the people screened to determine if they are registered voters were Democrats. Now, this means that 40% of the sample was guaranteed for the Democrats from the beginning. How was the rest of the sample broken down? It doesn’t say, but I’d be willing to bet good money that it didn’t contain 40% Republicans. It probably contained either 30% independents and 30% Republicans or 35% Republicans and 25% Independents. Maybe it was even broken down 35% Independent and 25% Republican, in an effort to reflect the relative standing of the various parties in 1983. This is important because there’s no way that 40% of all adults nationwide are Democrats. Individual self-identification as a Democrat has been on the decline for decades, while Republicanism has been on the rise. In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll 31% of adults Americans identified themselves as Democrats, 31% as Republicans and 31% as Independents (with 6% choosing ‘other’). The real news in this so-called poll, is just how well President Bush was have scored among independent voters and even Democrats. Think about it for a second. The poll sample contained 40% Democrats and the best any Democratic candidate could do was 46%. That means, as I read it, that not only is the President winning more than half of independent votes: but he’s also winning virtually every Republican vote and at least some Democratic votes. Basically, the national component of this vote is a sham. Much more accurate are other recent national polls, such as the CBS news poll (which has Bush beating Dean by twenty points and the feared ‘generic Democrat’ by nine) and the ABC News/Washington Post poll which has him ahead by eighteen points. What is revealing in the CNN/Time poll is the stall of the Dean campaign. In selecting the Democratic nominee, Dean is the first choice of just 22% of registered Democrats nation-wide. This is a drop over other polls (from the middle of December) which put him at or nearing 30% support. As things stand now, if Dean wins the nomination, he will be the choice of only a quarter of the Democratic Party, rammed through because of the division of the opposition and the cult-like dedication of his supporters. He isn’t moving upwards and his recent misstatements make it unlikely that he will. At this time in 2000, George W. Bush had the support of about 60% of Republican voters, and John McCain still gave him a good fight. We’re almost to Iowa and, from Iowa, the Democratic primaries will come gushing on. Given his divisive personality and wild statements, I don’t think that there’s any way for Dean to even gain 40% of Democratic support for a few months- and that’s only if he runs a perfect campaign from here on out. Which he won’t. I mean: what kind of a fool does one have to be, as the former Governor of basically all-white Vermont and with a name like Howard Brush Dean III, in order to claim that, “dealing with race is about educating white folks”? Is he trying to sound like a nutcase? One really begins to wonder. That’s the good news and the bad news. I don’t think that Dean will manage to win the nomination. That’s good, because the guy is kind of scary. It’s bad, because the walloping he would have received (and, if we’re lucky, still might receive) in November would have become synonymous with ‘landslide’ for the rest of time. Thursday, January 01, 2004
The Next Attack
Well, we’ve made it into 2004 without a major terrorist attack. New Year’s terror fears seem to have become a part of the annual tradition. I remember being shocked when we made it into the year 2000 without a major attack (thanks to Jordanian security and some alert US Border Guards), but I wasn’t so surprised this year. Every time a major day or event comes up (Ramadan, the 4th of July, Christmas, September 11th, etc) we rush into a frenzy, anticipating attack. And yet, they never come. This is hardly surprising: if I were al-Qaeda I wouldn’t strike during a major alert either, but I would pretend I was in order to throw Allied security forces into a panic.
I don’t know what is going on with all of these flight cancellations. It could be that al-Qaeda is planning an attack or, it could be, that they’ve created a series of dummy e-mail accounts and other communications tools merely to simulate ‘chatter’. All of these cancelled flights could be the result of one guy in Pakistan, with sufficiently sophisticated computer equipment, pulling random flight numbers off of web sites and sending them in cryptically-worded emails. But then, it could all be quite real as well. That is why we must go on alert like this: we have to do something, and we don’t know what else to do. However, sometimes I fear that, as Generals plan to fight the last war, we are planning to thwart the last terrorist attack. If I were in charge of al-Qaeda, I wouldn’t be messing with hijacking planes. It’s the sort of stunt that can really only be pulled off once. The next time someone attempts to hijack an American plane, they will be beaten the death by passengers or shot by an Air Marshall. Even if they do manage to get control the plane, the odds are quite high that they will end up being shot down. The only sort of operations I can see al-Qaeda trying with planes are bombings, attacks conducted by Islamist air crews, or perhaps the chartering of private planes. And I wouldn’t even be bothering with that. A point often missed is this: al-Qaeda doesn’t merely wish to kill people for the fun of it (although, most certainly, some of its members do). Rather, al-Qaeda and its ilk wish to kill exactly as many people as are necessary in the process of achieving their goals. Terrorist attacks aren’t meant as opening steps towards an American genocide, but rather they are a calculated military effort to coerce the American people into going along with (or to stop obstructing) the Islamist agenda. That agenda is simple and easy to understand. First, the Islamists wish to eject Americans from the Middle East and destroy the State of Israel. Second, they wish to destroy the various governments of Islamic world and establish in their place an Islamic state under total Shariah law. Finally, they wish to give the rest of the world a choice: covert to Islam or agree to pay a special tax and live in a state of virtual slavery (this is called ‘Dhimmitude’). In other words, if the American people were willing to give up Israel, find new fuel sources, and watch as an Islamic Empire gradually swallowed African, Central Asia, and Europe, the American people would have generations of peace in which they could peacefully enjoy the antics of Paris Hilton and debate what new rights to invent for homosexuals. Therefore, the Islamist goal is not to defeat the United States on the field of battle: they simply want to make the costs of challenging Islam so high that the American people will decide to give up the cause of freedom and elect someone like Howard Dean as the President. In fact, the main Islamist goal in this war is not the defeat of America: it is the defeat of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. It should not be this war. Both of America’s political parties should be committed to the defense of freedom, but it is not so. America’s loyal Democrats no longer have a party. The Democrats today are the party of appeasement, abortion, and buggery. If elected President, Howard Dean will, in the fine tradition of his two Democratic predecessors, not only willingly consent to having the Republic ass-raped by Moslems, but he’ll be happy to perform the act sans lubrication. The greatest victory that al-Qaeda could ever win would be to elect that man President. Every single person who votes for or gives money to Howard Dean is putting a bullet in the head of some future American. At this point in time, given the obvious and inevitable results of the defeat of the President next year, giving money to the Democratic Party is as morally indefensible as giving money to al-Qaeda. Keeping all of this in mind, were I commanding al-Qaeda, I would not launch another attack like that launched on the World Trade Center. For most Americans, given distance of time and space, such attacks take on an otherworldly quality, seeming not quite real. The best way to defeat the President is to rob him of his advantage on security and terrorism. The only way to do that is by making Americans feel less secure. The way to do that is to hit them where they live. If I had nineteen men in the country today (as al-Qaeda had on 9-11), I would arm them all with AK-47’s and ammunition and form them into eight teams of two men and one team of three. I’d dispatch them to suburban areas away from the coasts. And then, at noon on some random day, I’d send them to attack nine carefully-selected suburban high schools. The schools I would choose would have large student populations and be relatively far from police stations. Moreover, where possible, I’d try to choose schools in areas with low gun ownership. I’d also desire that the student populations be largely white and wealthy. The thing that stunned me about the Columbine Massacre was just how low the casualties were in the end. With all of that firepower at the command of the terrorists that day (let’s call them exactly what they were), many more could have died. I regard it as nearly a miracle that they did not. Think about your typical suburban high school with about two thousands students. On a typical day, how many students could a pair of men armed with assault rifles and grenades kill? Twenty? Fifty? One hundred? More? I honestly don’t know and, in a real sense, it doesn’t actually matter. The point isn’t the number of the dead, it’s the effect. Such a strike would send a message: we can attack anytime and anywhere. Now, some might think that such an atrocity would increase support for the war. I’m not so certain. It would, in the very short tem, do so of course. But if, combined with the attacks, al-Qaeda launched a barrage of messages threatening more attacks and attached to those threats specific demands, I wonder just how many Baby Boomer parents would be willing to accept disgrace and a loss of national honor in order to safeguard their children. Given few alternatives, al-Qaeda’s demands might even sound reasonable to some innocent people. After all, they would ask themselves, are the lives of Israelis really worth risking our own lives? Al-Qaeda can win if the American people find that they now prefer disgrace to danger. Attacks like 9-11 seem almost like a force of nature. Apocalyptic. A smart strategy by al-Qaeda now would seek to explicitly connect attacks to American actions and would put the attacks in a comprehendible form. Quotes of the Year
Here, folks, shows well the point of invading Iraq.
"This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end." -Uday Hussein, Rapist, Thug, and Murderer “I will do whatever the Americans want because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.” -Col. Moammar Gaddafi, Leader of the Ongoing Libyan People's Revolution |