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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The Causes of Defeat

It has, in recent days, become fashionable in some circles to blame Conservative MP’s such as Cheryl Gallant, Randy White, and Scott Reid for the failure of the Conservative Party to form government in the recent General Election. “If only,” the theory goes, “they’d kept their mouths shut about social issues, the Liberals wouldn’t have scared away moderate voters in Ontario and we’d have won.” Frankly, I think that’s doubtful. If those three were so repellent to voters, they wouldn’t have re-elected all three of them by overwhelming margins. Randy White managed to win 61.3% of the vote in a riding where immigrants make up a quarter of all residents, hardly what the Eastern Establishment would consider ideal Conservative ground. Cheryl Gallant won in a riding which had, previous to her election in 2000, remained Liberal even through the debacle of 1984, when the Liberals were reduced to just forty seats across the entire nation. And she won with 55% of the vote, running twenty-four points ahead of the party in Ontario as a whole. Frankly, there’s some evidence to suggest that the problem with the Conservative campaign wasn’t that it failed to drive people like Randy White and Cheryl Gallant away, but rather that it failed to embrace them and the formula which brought them victory.

Dick Morris, who skilfully managed President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, later explained how, in designing the themes for that campaign, he looked for what he called “60% issues” for Clinton to push. These issues, which polls showed that more than 60% of the public agreed with Clinton on, were then deliberately pushed to the front of the campaign. Typically they were micro-issues: such as violence on television or volunteer service. They were, in short, the sort of things which wouldn’t really upset anyone and were hard for Republican challenger Bob Dole to oppose or counter. It is my opinion that this is the sort of campaign that the Conservatives sought to run nationally: a campaign which would work to convince the public that the Conservative Party was not, as the Liberals would surely charge, “extreme” and could be trusted. The problem with this is that the resultant campaign left the public with very little idea of what the Conservatives would actually do and, therefore, left them extremely vulnerable to Liberal charges of a “hidden agenda.” In this sense, and this sense alone, did Randy White and the others harm the campaign in that, when the higher-ups in the campaign sought to muzzle them, they confirmed in the public eye the impression that there was a hidden undercurrent of something beneath vacuous Conservative promises of more money for public health.

What, then, would have been the solution? Simple: embrace social conservatism and try to sell it directly to the public. While some may say to that, “well, Canada isn’t a socially conservative country,” I’d simply point out that it doesn’t have to be in order to elect a socially conservative government.

As a thought experiment, let us suppose that roughly 40% of the Canadian population might be described as socially conservative and 60% as socially liberal. Well, if one assumes that the Conservatives have the social conservative side of things essentially to themselves, while the social liberals in the country are divided amongst the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc, and now the Greens, it becomes entirely clear to me that the Conservatives ought to and, indeed, must articulate a socially conservative position if they are ever to have a shot at forming a government. The road to 24 Sussex doesn’t depend upon a Conservative Party whose platform calls for implementing Liberal Party policy in a less-corrupt fashion then the Liberals; it depends upon a Conservative Party which is capable of inspiring the people with an alternative vision of Canada.

Remember, in Canada, all you need to form a majority government is about 40% of the vote. But, since only about 60% of the people actually bother to vote, you really only need the support of about 24% of the people to win 40% of the votes and, potentially, 100% of the power. Once you have the allegiance of that quarter of adults, you pretty much don’t have to care about or listen to anything which anyone else says which, upon the whole, ought to be considered a good thing, seeing as neither the Liberals nor the NDP have ever had a single good idea in the entire history of either party.

Some may say, “Well, Reform and the Alliance tried to do that and failed.” The answer to that is this: no, they didn’t. Once campaign time rolled around, Reform in 1997 and the Alliance in 2000 promptly ran away from or hid most of the Conservative positions they held (the best social conservatives ever got were promises of referendums on various issues) and tried to tell everyone how, really, they were just as far to the left as the Liberals.

We don’t want 60% issues designed to inspire warm feelings. The Liberals already cornered the market on “Canadian values” a long, long time ago. What we need are “40% issues”, the sort of issues which would motivate social conservatives to crawl over broken glass to vote for the right. Some might say that such a campaign and strategy would be “divisive”, and so it would be. But why should that bother any of us? The left slimes us in one dirty campaign after another and we’re still sitting back and worrying about hurting the feelings of our enemies? To hell with them all.

See, even though we’re outnumbered among the population as a whole, social conservatives have one great advantage. Think about it for a second. When you picture a “social conservative”, who do you picture? I see a woman like Elise Wayne or a man like Stockwell Day. Middle aged, gainfully employed, and generally reliable. When I think of a social liberal, I think of a twenty-one year old community college student reading the latest issue of Maxim Magazine in a dilapidated basement somewhere. Which of the two is more likely to vote if properly motivated? The ranks of the social left are greatly inflated by a vast collection of largely useless debris who, in many ways, are more of a liability than anything else.

Instead of dissembling about gay marriage, Stephen Harper should have said something like this:
“The Conservative Party supports the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. If elected, we will withdraw the Liberals’ reference to the Supreme Court on the issue and pass a new law affirming the traditional definition. We hope that the Supreme Court will respect the independence of Parliament and the democratically-expressed wishes of the Canadian people. However, if they do not do so, we will be left with no choice but to use the Notwithstanding Clause in this matter.”

This would have been a brilliant strategic move, not only because it would have solidified support among social conservatives, but also because it would have divided the Liberal Party between supporters and opponents of gay marriage. Given the divisions within that party the Liberals, when faced with such an unequivocal statement, would be left with little choice but to make a series of vague pronouncements on the subject, leaving a major opening for the NDP on the left. I doubt if it would have cost the Conservatives more than a handful of the votes they won, as the Liberals fear campaign pretty much convinced everyone who could be convinced that a Harper-led government would do just that anyways.

Similarly, the Conservative campaign should have made the reinstitution of Capital Punishment a central theme in the campaign. The death penalty, we’d explain, would only be used for the worst offenders: people like Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo, but it would be used. Hard-core death penalty opponents were never going to vote Conservative in any case, and making such an issue central to the debate would cast the other parties in the uncomfortable position of being the defenders of Robert Pickton’s right to life.

Law and Order, in fact, should have been a central part of the campaign. Take a look at Chuck Cadman, the only MP elected as an Independent. What cause is he primarily identified with? In one word: justice. Short of becoming an advocate of public be-handings for shoplifters, it’s pretty much impossible to be too tough on crime.

For example, in the week before the election, we began to hear (though not on the campaign trail) the story of Martin Fraser, a thirty-one year old criminal who has already been convicted of sixty offences, including six rapes, who once claimed his ambition is to become North America’s greatest serial killer, who has been declared an “incurable psychopath” and who, by the way, is about to be released from prison despite the fact that his release is opposed by his own mother and the fact that the local Chief of Police is so certain he’ll reoffend that he’s assigning police offices to watch him around the clock. Why the Conservatives failed to exploit this case (and others like it) is simply beyond me. If I were in the Conservative war room, I’d immediately have had a television ad cut (and rushed to air) that went something like this:

STEPHEN HARPER: The Liberals are at it again, trying to convince the Canadian people that I and the new Conservatives are too “scary” to be trusted with power. Well, I’ll tell you what’s really scary.

CUT TO: Picture of Martin Fraser

STEPHEN HARPER: This is Martin Fraser. He’s thirty-one years old and, at this point in his life, has already been convicted of more than sixty crimes, including six rapes.

CUT TO: List of Fraser’s crimes scroll down a black screen quickly.

STEPHEN HARPER: The prison doctor calls him in “incurable psychopath” and he says that his ambition in life is to become the greatest serial killer in the history of North America. Even his own mother says he belongs in jail. And, you know what? Our Liberal justice system is about to put him back on the streets to threaten our communities and children. That’s what’s really scary in this country, not Conservative tax cuts for families or the rebuilding of our armed forces, but Liberal justice.

CUT TO: Text which reads “On June 28th, protect your family: Vote Conservative.”

Frankly, there were a few other good issues which popped up near election time which the Conservatives should have run with and didn’t, probably out of fear of offending “moderate” voters. For example, a few weeks before the election, it was revealed that Canada is allowing people to obtain refugee status in this country simply on the grounds that they are homosexual and homosexuality is not as favored in their country as in this one. Many of these people were infected with HIV but, because they entered as refugees, they were allowed to bypass our laws against people with AIDS immigrating to this country. In other words, we let in foreign homosexuals to serve as a one or two decade-long drain upon our already-strained medical system.

This is not the hour for retreat, if we have any chance at winning. Either we must stand on principle, and hope for rewards, or it is time to give up the ghost and move on. The coming months will tell.

posted by Yoshi at 4:09 PM

Monday, June 28, 2004

There's Only One Option

The Congress should suspend the writ of Habeus Corpus in all terror-related cases.

As for the terrorists in Gitmo, the response to the Supreme Court's decision should be as follows, "they have made their decision, now let them enforce it."

All sane people should be able to see that Islamic terrorists, their supporters, and their sympathizers have no rights that anyone else is bound to respect.

posted by Yoshi at 8:03 AM

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Just Because They Can: Why Anyone With a Brain Will Vote Conservative on Monday

If you don’t get out to the polls and vote Conservative tomorrow, you’re a damned fool. More than that, you’ll be a damned fool who may well be sealing the fate of Canada. Tomorrow, the 28th of June in the two thousand and fourth year of our Lord, will be a decisive day in Canadian history. Either we will, as a nation, will stand up to the Liberals and say, “enough, we will accept your corruption no longer”, or will collectively choose to lie down on our stomachs, taking up the ideal position for servicing your average Liberal. Friends, if the Liberals are re-elected tomorrow, my only advice to you is this: lie very still and think of Medicare.

In his recent $35 door stop, My Life, Bill Clinton claims that what made his affair with Monica Lewinsky particularly bad is that he did it, “just because (he) could.” That’s the case with the Liberals here and now. They no longer feel the need to seriously cloak their corruption and incompetence in the mantle of true Canadianism or whatever other such nonsense they might dream up. They stole your money just because they could. Because it was there and because they were sure that they could get away with it. If they are re-elected, the Liberals will behave less as our government and more as our Kings. Given once more the keys to 24 Sussex, they will rape, ravage, and pillage your wallet just as thoroughly as the Mongols of Genghis Khan once did Central Asia.

That may sound overly harsh but it is also, in my opinion, entirely correct. If the Liberal Party can win an election after all of the corruption, arrogance, and contempt for the Canadian people that they have displayed, then they will sleep soundly in the knowledge that they will be re-elected regardless of whatever they do, so long as they remember to throw billions into the health care sinkhole at election time and scream “American” and “abortion” enough times to rally roughly a third of Canadian voters to their standard. If the Liberals are not punished for their sins by reduction to the level of an opposition party, they will not fail to behave even more brazenly in the future.

Now, some of you may be thinking of voting Liberal (or New Democrat) in the hopes that, well, you can reduce the Liberals to a minority and force them to govern with New Democratic support. Why any sane person would welcome such a development is utterly beyond me. It was the Liberal-NDP coalition governments of the past which tore the Red Ensign from our flagpoles, burdened us with Medicare, forced bilingualism upon us, and generally which did most of the things which are responsible for the sorry state of modern Canada.

It would be even worse now. In the 1960’s, at the least, the NDP were still strongly influences by old fashioned Tommy Douglas-style democratic socialism a creed which, for all of its faults, wasn’t recognizably crazy. Today, of course, after a decade away from the mainstream the Federal NDP has become a collection of the nuts among the lunatics, a group of individuals who have a fanatical devotion to a collection of weirdo fringe causes which they will demand to see addressed.

I can’t think of a better recipe for disaster: you take a group of people (the Liberals) who will do anything to stay in power and you pair them up with another group of people (the NDP) who will demand everything in exchange for their support. Why, the NDP might even try to make a man reputed to have paid support payments of $1000 a month to a male prostitute (who was fifteen at the time the “relationship” began) our Foreign Minister. Whoops, too late: the Liberals already did that. God knows how much further the NDP would go.

“Punishing” the Liberals by giving them enough seats to rule as a minority government with the NDP is a lot like punishing your teenage son, after he drunkenly drives the family car through the garage door, by giving him back the keys to the car with only three-quarters of a tank of gas on the condition that his drug dealer friend tags along.

So why won’t some of you vote Conservative? Iraq? Give me a break. We don’t have any troops to send to Iraq. Had we supported the war under the leadership of a Prime Minister Stephen Harper, our contribution to the war effort would likely have been the dispatch of naval vessels to join the Allied forces in the region. Which, by the way, we did anyways thus getting ourselves into a situation where our forces were sent into harm’s way in a war that our government refused to support. Speaking of putting our forces into danger, the Liberals are in no position to talk. In order to gain domestic political cover for its decision to oppose the Iraq War, the Liberals dispatched troops to Afghanistan who lacked the equipment or training to complete the mission they were assigned and, in so doing, stretched our Armed Forces nearly to the breaking point.

What else? Abortion? Give me a break. In the best case scenario, a Conservative government might (just might) try to curb the practice of infanticide… err… “late term” abortions, in which a baby’s skull is crushed and its brain sucked out. But I doubt if they’d be even that brave. The chance of a Conservative government outlawing first trimester abortions (read: virtually all of them) is essentially zero. Even if the Conservatives win a majority, there’ll be at least fifty “wet” or “red” Tories among that numbers, especially on this issue. A measure to ban all (or virtually all) abortions would be lucky to get twenty votes in the House of Commons (out of three hundred and eight, in case you were wondering).

Guns? All the Conservatives have promised to do is get rid of the Liberals gun registry, which registers only the rifles and shotguns of hunters and farmers, which has cost one thousand times what it was originally projected to cost, and which has yet to prevent a single crime in several years of operation. In other words, the Liberals have wasted $2 billion of your money to do nothing but harass innocent and law-abiding citizens. And they’re prepared to waste as much more as you’ll let them, just because they can.

Even if you disagree with much of the Conservative platform, you should still vote Conservative on Monday because the Conservatives are the only party with a realistic chance of displacing the Liberals and governing the country. What are a few hundred thousand votes for the Green Party going to mean? Not a damned thing. The Liberals will look at them and laugh. Only a vote for the Conservatives is a vote to throw the Liberals out of office and kick them to the curb.

And, if you don’t vote Conservative, get ready to pay for it. Because the Liberals will be back for more of your money. And more of it. And then some more after that. Just because they can. What are you going to do about it?

There’s a coincidence tomorrow. June 28th is not only Election Day this year, but it’s also Tax Freedom Day, the day when the average Canadian stops working for the government (paying taxes both direct and indirect) and starts working for themselves once more. The average Canadian today pays 48.8% of their income to the government in taxes of all types, many of them hidden. Are you getting services from the government worth half of your income?

Make no mistake about it: the future of the country is hanging in the balance. Some of you might, successfully, be scared away from voting Conservative by Liberal attack ads, but many of us are made of stronger stuff. We’re sick of government theft of our hard-earned money. We’re tired of left-wing activist judges dictating to us what kind of society we have. We’re furious to see that our country would seemingly rather count France among its friends than America. And, one way or another, we’re going to do something about it.

It’s time for the Canadian people to stand up for their rights. It’s time for Canadians to defend their families. It’s time for Canadians to demand better. Tomorrow, vote Conservative.

posted by Yoshi at 9:20 PM

Fahrenheit 9/11 Review

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie which, as someone once said of my columns, contains more lies than words. Of course, in keeping with his reputation for honesty, Moore doesn’t outright lie so much as deliberately distort, confuse, and omit. The film is trash: but make not mistake, it’s cleverly developed and laid out trash which is designed to (and will) lead many to jump to the wrong conclusions about the world.

This is a movie directed towards two distinct groups of people: radical Bush-haters who will believe anything bad said about the President and people who have barely opened a newspaper in the past three years and who, therefore, have only a vague (an thus easily malleable) understanding of recent history. The movie so much as true as based upon true events, drawing what it wants from them, sorting them into the order it wishes, and then redacting everything which doesn’t fit its worldview (which, in essence, can be summed up by three words: “Bush is evil”).

Let’s begin with the opening, where Moore tells his version of events in the state of Florida during the 2000 election. Moore begins with the networks calling the state for Florida, ignoring all of the questions about those calls (such as the fact that the state was called when the polls were still open in the conservative Florida part of the state which falls into the central time zone and that the networks called the state for Gore even when they wouldn’t call states Bush was winning by a much larger margin for him). He then goes on to demonize Fox News and John Ellis (who was merely one member of Fox’s election team) for then calling the state for Bush. Notice the omission, the first of many the film will make: no mention whatsoever is made of the fact that, after calling the state for Gore, all of the networks then retracted the call hours before Fox then went on to call the state for Bush. He then goes on to repeat the tired liberal claim that had, in fact, all the votes been counted, Gore would have won, failing altogether to mention that Bush won the initial count, the recount, and maintained his lead through the bizarre process mandated by the Florida Supreme Court in which various individuals sought to psychically mine votes from a few selected Democratic counties in an effort to manufacture enough votes for Gore. He also pulls up the tired myth of “disenfranchised” black Democrats without mentioning either the evidence that felons (the overwhelming majority of them, naturally, being registered Democrats) managed to vote anyways or the shameful Democrat effort to disqualify military ballots on absurd technicalities.

Moore then goes on to the formal count of the Electoral College ballots, where a number of boorish members of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the course of making asses of themselves as usual, tried to object to the ratification of the election result. Moore treats the effort as though it were somehow substantive, rather than a little bit of irrelevant political theatre (even had, somehow, the radical left of the Democratic Party forced a vote, they’ve have been defeated by the Republican majorities in both houses or Congress). Frankly, I found the incident hilarious at the time and I found it so again. If anything, the spectacle provides the best argument I’ve ever seen against the creation of majority-minority districts which, it appears to me, ensure that the only black members of Congress are men who wouldn’t be out of place at a meeting of the Nation of Islam and women who appear to have, in bearing, grammar, and dress, to have stepped out of a 1970’s sitcom.

By this point (only about ten minutes into the film), Moore’s already lost any idea of what point he was trying to make (aside from his “Bush=Evil” theme). He gives us a lot of shots of Bush Administration officials being made up prior to appearing on television (he returns to these later). I’m not really sure what point he’s trying to make here. Is he suggesting that other politicians don’t get made up before they go on television or that Bush’s officials are somehow bad people because they do? From this point on, his arguments lose what slight coherence they once had.

The film begins to argue that Bush paid insufficient attention to terrorism prior to September 11th, accusing him of spending 42% of his time on vacation (with one of the pictures of Bush on “vacation” being, hilariously, of him and Tony Blair together at Camp David) and claiming that, pre 9-11, he was unable to get anything done. This all ignores, of course: the $1.3 trillion tax cut, No Child Left Behind, and the withdrawal from Kyoto, the ICC, and the ABM treaty, all of which the left seemed to think a pretty big deal at the time. Regardless, the point here isn’t to make sense: it’s to throw as much crap as possible at Bush and hope it sticks.

In the course of this, Moore goes back through the familiar litany of criticisms about Bush’s performance with regard to terrorism prior to 9-11. Hitting a low point of distortion, even for him, Moore claims that a CIA Presidential Daily Brief told President Bush that “Bin Laden was planning to attack the United States with hijacked airplanes” a phrase which, while literally true, strips away all context, such as that the threat was, of course, then seen in terms of traditional hijackings and that Bin Laden had maintained a constant threat to the United States for half a decade at that point.

Of course, as all of these criticisms do, they give no indication of what, exactly they would have had Bush do about them? Ground all fights? Round up all potential and possible members of al-Qaeda? Declare Martial Law? What would the Michael Moore’s of the world have had to say about that?

One punch that Moore noticeably pulls is over the matter of Bush’s Air National Guard service. While the movie briefly mentions Moore’s referring to Bush as a “deserter” in January of this year, he make almost no further mention of the issue, avoiding any snide remarks or substantive attention to the issue of Bush’s supposed “AWOL” status. This leads me to think that it’s probably, at long, last, a dead issue. If Michael Moore can’t bring himself to seriously use it, then no one will.

The Air National Guard records, however, are used as a jumping-off point to where Moore really wants to go, the connections between Saudi Arabia and the Bush family. Major James R. Bath, who served with Bush, was an advisor to the “Bin Laden family”. I use quotation marks, because the Bin Laden family is massive, a fact which Moore never bothers to mention. Osama Bin Laden is the seventeenth of fifty-two children sired by his father. Osama himself has a number of children as, presumably, do many of his siblings. Given these numbers (and this isn’t accounting for other relatives) there are, in all likelihood, several thousand people out there related to Osama, most of whom have probably never met him (given that he hasn’t been in long-term residence in Saudi Arabia for about two decades).

In a scene which, if it came from any other filmmaker, would be declared to be blatantly racist, Moore shows an extended sequence of President Bush and his father shaking hands with various Saudis (and, perhaps, other Arabs). What point this is supposed to make, I’m not sure, beyond that Bush is evil because he’s connected with scary-looking Arabs. At one point the film criticizes the United States for allowing a representative of the Taliban to come to the United States pre-September 11th (I thought these people were in favor of diplomacy!) and attacks President Bush for having dinner with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador, on September 13th, 2001. Apparently Moore is somehow of the opinion that the President of the United States ought to have had nothing to discuss with Saudi Arabia’s representative at that point. Or he’s looking for an excuse to show more pictures of Bush and scary-looking Arabs. Your choice.

As for the story of “$1.4 billion” in Saudi money that has gone into the businesses of the Bush family, their friends, and various other related groups, I’d sure like to see the exact dollar breakdown (I’d bet good money that the $1.4 billion figure was arrived at by the same process that is used to inflate the membership of some organizations: namely, counting anything associated with the Bush’s in the remotest way as money that has gone to them). Of course when, as the film state, the Saudis have a trillion dollars in assets in the United States, it’d probably be hard to find anyone in any big business, let alone the oil business, who isn’t tied closely to the Saudi Arabians in one way or another.

At this point we get to see the famed “seven minutes” of footage of Bush in the Florida Elementary School on September 11th itself. I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to get out of this (well, I know what Mr. Moore wants, but in general…). I mean, what exactly was the President supposed to do? He’s clearly taking a moment to think things through. Remember, at that time in the day, no one had any clear grasp on what was going on. At the same time, certainly he was aware that new arrangements for his travel would have to be made. As for the bizarre assertion that he should have left for his own physical security: if there was any real danger, the Secret Service would have dragged him bodily from the room, if necessary.

Of course if, on hearing the news, Bush had immediately gotten up and sprung into action (doing what, exactly, I don’t know), that footage would be in this film as proof that “Bush Knew” or whatever other nonsense Mr. Moore wishes to peddle at this particular moment.

We then launch into the story of the invasion of Afghanistan, in which Moore advances two totally contradictory arguments. First, he allows Richard Clarke to accuse the United States of using insufficient force in Afghanistan (leaving out, of course, that staging such a force would have taken months, months in which al-Qaeda would have skedaddled). Then he advanced the kook-left argument that the Afghan War was, naturally, really about oil (or, in this case, natural gas), namely the construction of a pipeline across Central Asia. To prove this, he trots out stories from 1997 about the Taliban attempting to negotiate a deal to construct such a pipeline (post-Taliban Afghanistan has since agreed to such a deal). Of course he never explains why the “evil” companies behind such an endeavor wouldn’t simply have bought off the Taliban, instead of going through the convoluted process of triggering a war and then having to deal with the chaos of present-day Afghanistan.

Later, Moore launches into the PATRIOT Act, with help from Rep. John Conyers and “Baghdad Jim” McDermott. However, in the process, he proves the virtues of the law. Following an extended rant about all of the evil things that the PATRIOT Act supposedly does, Moore then cites three examples of “violated” civil liberties, all of which have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Act. First, he shows a peace group in Fresno which was infiltrated by a local cop (a decision, of course, entirely up to the local sheriff), then a man who was visited by the FBI after some people at the gym turned him in for making pro-terrorist comments, and then a woman who the Transportation Security Administration wouldn’t allow to bring breast milk onto a plane. Presumably, Moore wants us to think that these are all examples of the evils of PATRIOT, though he’s careful never to, in words, claim that any of the actions occurred due to the legal provisions of the Act (though, if one was unfamiliar with the it, you would assume they did).

Now the movie (the same movie, I might add, which earlier went to extravagant lengths to criticize the Administration for failing to react to signs of terror) goes off on a tangent about terror alerts, claiming that they were designed merely to frighten the public into compliance. Moore can have it one way or the other, but not both. Either the threat is real (and wasn’t watched closely enough prior to 9-11), or it’s a manufactured product of the Bush Cabal. It can be one or the other. But not both.

By the time the movie finally gets to the Iraq War, Moore’s simply lost all focus whatsoever (and perhaps some of his connection with reality as well). The movie depicts pre-war Iraq as a paradise, with children playing amid scenes of carnivals and opulent restaurants (and what sort of people, I ask, would have been dining in fancy restaurants in Saddam’s Iraq?). The scene is then interrupted by an extended montage of Allied Air Power smashing Ba’athist buildings in Baghdad, the only sequences in the entire film which managed to cheer my heart, if only a little.

At this point we veer off in every which direction, with one bizarre scene featuring a pair of nondescript old women reciting, at length, Democratic talking points in a restaurant somewhere in the middle of nowhere. What point this scene is supposed to have, I don’t know.

Soon, we’re off to visit with the US Army in Iraq, which doesn’t seem nearly as demoralized as Moore would like us to think. If that’s the worst footage available (and, given Moore’s attitude towards the military, I’m quite sure it is), then things are going a lot better than we think. The footage also comes across as already quite dated, making references to the uprising of the Shiites under al-Sadr which, of course, has already been suppressed. What little film Moore has of supposed “abuse” of Iraqis by American troops is so mild as to be laughable (the Iraqi terrorists are placed in hoods and photographed. The horror!).

Another scene, in which US troops burst into an Iraqi home on Christmas Eve, is clearly meant to be horrifying, but comes across as a prudent and firm action by American troops (Moore never bothers to tell us why the American Army wants the young man they’ve come for, but I assume that if he were innocent, Moore would be shouting it from the rooftops).

Moore recycles the old allegation that the Bush Administration is “cutting veterans’ benefits” when, in truth, it is doing no such thing. This allegation is based upon the fact that it plans on cutting overall veterans’ spending. However, this isn’t a function of Administration greed, but of biology. By far the largest group of veterans in the United States are those of the Second World War who are dying at a fast clip, thereby reducing the number of veterans and the need to spend money on them.

Another scene takes us back to Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, which he depicts as a sort of third-world hellhole, with Marine recruiters running around like a 19th Century Royal Navy Press Gang. Now, I’ve never been to Flint, Michigan but, given Moore’s depiction of Toronto’s suburbs in Bowling for Columbine (where no one locks their doors, or would ever think of doing so!), I assume the real state of affairs there to be rather different.

The climax of the film features the mother of an Army Sergeant killed in Iraq (from Flint, naturally) whose obvious grief is unseemly (and, I think, unscrupulously) exploited by Moore in an effort to hammer the point home. There isn’t really anything left by this point in the movie, and Moore mostly uses the grieving mother to claim that protestors are patriotic and offer a scene of a confrontation in front of the White House between a lunatic Korean peace protestor, the mother, and an eminently sensible woman who tells the grieving mother that she ought to blame al-Qaeda, and not George Bush, for her son’s death. That woman’s views, of course, are not given an airing here: we’re only interested in blaming George Bush.

Finally, Moore closes with a final argument, quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, by which he seems to argue that the War on Terrorism is being manufactured simply for the sake of keeping society in line. Of course, naturally, he omits the entire context of the quote (which, in the book, is a part of Goldstein’s book within a book which may or may not be simply another layer of the totalitarian state’s edifice of oppression).

In short, the film is utter nonsense. But it’s effective and unusually manipulative nonsense. In other words, it’s a perfect Moore movie. Those of us from the sane side of the political spectrum are going to be spending months (and perhaps years) attempting to rebut the ramblings of some of our friends who happen to see it and pick up bits and pieces of its nonsense.

Of course, in a real way, it’s alarming that such a film would be allowed to be exhibited at the present time. Its content is plainly treasonous: designed to aid and comfort the enemies of the United States. When Hezbollah is offering to help you distribute your movie, you’re miles past the fine line which divides “dissent” from treason.

posted by Yoshi at 1:09 AM

Saturday, June 26, 2004

I Can't Believe I Missed This

While looking for information on a forthcoming anti-Conservative rally in Vancouver, I discovered some absolutely delightful news:

Our local leftist bookstore burned down in April! And I missed it! I'm kicking myself. That place always bugged the hell out of me when I drove past it.

(And they didn't have any insurance! Figures).

posted by Yoshi at 5:14 PM

Friday, June 25, 2004

Accepting Risk in the Fight Against Terror

I’m fairly sure that it was the brilliant nuclear warfare theorist (and noted futurist) Herman Kahn who explained that in a situation where a human being is left with a choice between a course of action which would certainly kill ten thousand people and one that has a one in ten chance of killing one hundred thousand people, the overwhelming majority will opt for the latter over the former. This is a natural human instinct: one which is willing to risk a worst-case outcome in search of an optimal outcome. A majority, even, I suspected would choose a course of action which had a 50% chance of killing one hundred thousand people over one that would definitely kill 10% of that number.

This calculation has a great deal of relevance to the War on Terrorism. In this war, we must make a fundamental choice: will we tolerate certain levels of terrorism (accepting some level of loss as simply the cost of living) or will we seek to wipe the terrorists out? Fundamentally, this is the choice before us. Implicit in the anti-war argument is the idea that the War on Terrorism is the result of an American overreaction to a problem that needs to be managed, rather than destroyed. Within the argument for a managerial approach to terrorism (arrest some terrorists, appease some of their grievances, and tighten security) is the acceptance that some Americans will die in terrorist acts, just as they did during the last two decades of the last century.

The alternative approach carries with it great risks, but also greater rewards. While it is true that, in confronting the terrorists directly, we risk making the situation even more dangerous, it is equally true that the revolutionary approach (capture or kill terrorists and topple governments that support them) is the only one which carries with it the possibility of a total success. Whereas a managerial response accepts terrorism as a fact of life, a revolutionary approach treats it as a contagion to be wiped out.

Of course, in the longer term, the arguments flip. A managerial response to terrorism is attractive because it promises the possibility of nothing more than a trickle of casualties, but it carries with it a very high risk of a bolt-from-the-blue event of cataclysmic proportions. The revolutionary approach, on the other hand, guarantees a steady steam of losses, especially among the US Armed Forces (and the civil populations of friendly nations), but it makes a catastrophic event less likely. By engaging terrorists in their homeland, we reduce the possibility that they will be able to stage major operations in the United States.

The temptation will be for any future Administration to adopt a managerial attitude towards terror. After all, such approach promises short-term stability and offers, over the long-term, the lowest possible level of losses. However, it is also the approach that carries with it the greatest danger in the long-term. While it is entirely possible that, if left alone, the terrorists will restrict their activities to such a degree as to remain below the radar, much as they did during the 1990’s, it is likely that they would use such a period to rearm, train new forces, and plan future operations: just as they did in the last decade.

Therefore, in order to choose the optimal course in the long-term we must, in the short-term, choose a course which runs counter to natural human instincts. In directly confronting the terrorists, we face the certainty of higher losses than those we would face from merely trying to contain the problem.

What does this mean in practice? It means following and extending the Bush doctrine. We must plant the seeds of liberty in the heart of the Middle East and, as they sprout and grow, defend them against all enemies. We must turn the entire region into a killing ground, where terrorists are drawn into traps and slaughtered. Offering targets to the enemy, as we have done in Iraq, guarantees losses, but it also offers the only real chance we have to draw thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of terrorists into the open where they can be killed.

In short, it comes down to one word: kill. It’ll cost money and lives to kill terrorists, but it’s the only option which gives us a chance to avoid a catastrophic event.

posted by Yoshi at 1:10 AM

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

The Movies Hollywood Doesn’t Make

I was looking forward to seeing this summer’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate until I saw the recent trailer which reveals that the villains of the original film (communists) have been changed to an evil corporation (or, as Denzel Washington’s character is heard to remark in said trailer, a bunch of “rich people”). Like the original movie, the remake centers on a group of American soldiers who are kidnapped and brainwashed (during the Korean War in the original, during the First Gulf War in this version) as part of a plot to subvert the government of the United States. One would think it to be natural, given the age and the setting, to make the villains Islamists. Except, of course, it isn’t.

In the nearly three years since September 11th, I cannot think of a single major theatrical release made since 9-11 which has featured Moslem terrorists as the enemy. There may be one which I am forgetting, but I don’t think so. At least two movies which would have featured Islamic terrorists, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage and the adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears were changed to make them feature terrorists of other nationalities. In the case of Sum, the well-drawn Islamists of the Clancy novel were replaced by cartoonish neo-Nazis whose nefarious plot made essentially zero sense (since the Europe they were planning on re-Nazifying would surely be destroyed in the course of the apocalyptic nuclear war between the United States and Russia that they sought to trigger).

I can think of three films released since September 11th which has dealt with military or war-related themes in a fashion which could be broadly described as pro-American: Ridley Scott’s brilliant Blackhawk Down, Mel Gibson’s great We Were Soldiers (in my opinion, the best movie made to date about the Vietnam War), and Bruce Willis’ mediocre Tears of the Sun (I exclude the awful Civil War film Gods and Generals from the list, as no one but I and fifteen other people in North America saw it). Of these, only Blackhawk Down featured an Islamic enemy and even that film had cut from it lines which linked the Battle of Mogadishu to September 11th. The other two dealt, respectively, with the first battle of the Vietnam War and a group of Navy SEALS on a rescue mission in Nigeria. In other words: not a single theatrical film has been produced about the military response to the events of September 11th or the War on Terrorism.

This is truly a remarkable development. During the Second World War, the theatres filled with war-themed fare. Not only was this good for the studios (such movies were profitable), but it was good for the country as well in that it both helped remind the public as to the nature of the enemy and to boost morale. So why, then, has Hollywood eschewed the same course this time around? There are two answers: one is business-related, the other is ideological.

First of all, if one is to understand anything about modern Hollywood, one must understand that “American” filmmaking is a multinational industry in the truest sense of that word. For example, Wolfgang Peterson’s recent film Troy cost $225 million to make and market, but it’s only grossed $125 million to date in North America. That makes it a flop, right? Wrong, because it’s also grossed $313 million so far in the rest of the world. By the time worldwide DVD sales are finished, the movie will probably have made Warner Brothers a profit of several hundred million dollars. Troy is not alone. The recent Harry Potter film has made, to date, roughly $200 million in the United States (and Canada) and $270 million overseas (without even being released in all markets there yet). The third Matrix film flopped domestically, taking in just under $140 million, but more than made up for it by raking in about $286 million overseas. The enviro-horror film, The Day After Tomorrow, has made $170 million domestically and $278 million overseas.

When we understand these numbers it becomes easier to understand why, from a business perspective, none of the studios have taken the risk of making a major film about the War on Terrorism: it wouldn’t sell well overseas that, today, is the primary target market for the American film industry. American studios aren’t making movies designed to pack in the crowds in Peoria- they’re making them to sell in Paris. A $200 million summer blockbuster about the war in Afghanistan or Iraq might, under ideal conditions, gross $300 million in the United States, but it would make next to nothing overseas.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason why Hollywood hasn’t touched the war so far. I can think of a number of movies which could be made fairly cheaply and would probably sell. Certainly, with all of the creative minds in Hollywood, some way of being helpful to both the country and to the studio’s balance sheets could be found. But Hollywood isn’t interested in finding such a way because it is consumed with an overriding obsession with the destruction of George Walker Bush.

Hence why Hollywood is willing to throw millions into films like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and John Sayles’ Silver City but has yet to produce a single pro-Bush film for theatrical release. Why? I can understand why an amoral studio head would finance Fahrenheit 9/11 (it’ll probably make a good return on the $15 million or so that have been invested in its production and marketing), but I can’t comprehend why (if not for ideological reasons) the studios would not bother financing low-budget movies which take the exact opposite tack. Imagine, if you will, a documentary based upon Ann Coulter’s Treason (which, at $30 bucks a piece, sold half a million copies) or a positive bio-pic about Ronald Reagan. The former, I’d imagine, could be made and marketed for $10 million and would probably make at least two or three times that (and possibly more, depending on how viciously the media attacked it). A Reagan bio-pic, if well done, could probably be made for $50 million or so and could easily top $100 million, if the reaction to his recent death is any indication. A smart executive would have put such a film into pre-production a few years ago, ready to shift into gear and launch into theatres less than a year after his death.

Well we’re at it: why the hell was the film adaptation of Left Behind allowed to be produced by a fifth-rate studio on a shoestring budget” Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth was the top selling book of the whole of the 1970’s. The Left Behind series of books were the top selling book series of the 1990’s. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, among real Americans, there’s a massive interest in tales of the Christian apocalypse. The first person to make a $100 million blockbuster which treats the subject respectfully and is of even halfway-decent quality is going to make about half a billion dollars. So why hasn’t Hollywood (which just threw away more than that remaking Around the World in 80 Days) done it already? The answer can only be that they are blinded by their own bigotry.

So what, then, is the answer? I can see only one: new players need to enter into the industry. Hollywood as the center of the cultural wars. We cannot, as many cultural conservatives have, merely write it off. It has massive powers to educate, to inform, and to misinform. To simply cede it to the enemy is to surrender in the culture wars. With his The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson showed the way.

Independent conservative filmmakers need to tap the same sources of money as other conservative industries have and create a “counter-industry”, just as happened in the realm of book publishing, cable news, and radio. Just as publishers like Regnery and Random House’s Crown imprint have made loads of money by providing a conservative alternative and just as Rush and Fox News have done the same, there’s a massive chance for the right entrepreneur to make billions by producing well-made films which appeal to the same conservatives who buy Ann Coulter’s books, listen to Sean Hannity, and watch Fox News.

posted by Yoshi at 10:36 PM

Monday, June 21, 2004

A Time for Action

More than one war in history has been provoked by the unlawful seizure of sailors by a hostile nation. One of the primary factors behind the War of 1812 was the British impressments of American sailors from ships on the high seas. In the first two decades of the 19th Century, the United States launched repeated attacks against Moslem pirates in North Africa because they would not stop seizing Americans ships and crews. Iran’s action yesterday, in seizing three small British patrol boats and their crews, falls squarely within this tradition. This seizure of British vessels represents a blatant act of piracy and it should be punished as such.

The infamous outrage committed by Iran against the Royal Navy calls for a violent and deadly response. No ship of Her Majesty’s Navy, at any point in the world, should ever be sullied or molested by an Islamist boot. No sailor of that Navy should be detained against their without cause, let alone by a third-rate third-world cesspool. Iran should either be made to release the crews and ships (and pay appropriate reparations to both the individual sailors and to the British Government) or it should be punished by the force of arms. If any harm should befall a single British seaman, then Iran should pay a hundred-fold for that crime against all decent mankind.

Pirates, of course, were traditionally subject to summary execution. So it should be with the criminal scum responsible for this. It would be a truly glorious thing to watch a dozen or so members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard swinging from their necks high above the decks of a British frigate.

Not that I expect any of that to happen, of course. We live in a modern age. We’ve evolved above such brutal violence (and Britain doesn’t have the death penalty anymore, not even for offenses under the laws of war!). Of course, one wonders if treating a Third World nation who randomly seizes your sailors as though it were a nation with a legitimate place among the community of nations qualifies one as civilized.

An invasion of Iran isn’t the answer to this. Invasions should be reserved for the really big provocations. Historically, when this sort of thing happened the Royal Navy wouldn’t conquer the country responsible, they’d just move offshore and fire a few broadsides into their largest coastal city to ensure that the citizens of an upstart nation would remember their place in the world. That’s what this calls for: a gentle reminder to Iran delivered in the form of explosive ordnance.

If I were Tony Blair I’d order every available British ship to the region and, if the hostages were not released, I’d find the nearest Iranian ship and sink it. Iran has no modern anti-submarine weapons (they’ve got a trio of poorly maintained Kilo-class submarines), so I imagine that a pair of the Royal Navy’s nuclear attack submarines could do the job. Hell, even if they do release the hostages, I’d wait for one of Iran’s bigger ships to go out to sea, and then I’d order it sunk and deny any knowledge of what happened (the Brits must still, I imagine, have some of those old Second World War torpedoes they used to sink the General Belgrano about which would, of course, be rather hard to trace).

Of course if (as seems entirely possible, given recent events) a horrible fate should befall the British hostages, the appropriate response is obvious. With the help of the United States, Britain should destroy the entire Iranian Navy (and the Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard) in a single afternoon and then, to ensure that one hundred Iranian terrorists dies for every British dead, all known bases of the IRGC should be blown straight to hell. This, of course, carries with it a serious risk of overkill which should be avoided at all times, except at the risk of underkill.

posted by Yoshi at 8:19 PM

The Terminal Film Review

Two Stars

I’ll admit it; Stephen Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can is one of my favorite movies, in large measure because it drew from such rich source material. Frank Abagnale Jr. (as played by Leonardo DiCaprio), in that film is a man who cannot follow any rule. Whether he’s impersonating a pilot, forging cheques, pretending to be a Secret Service agent, or running the night shift in a Georgia hospital, Abagnale is a man who delights in shattering every rule he comes across. The lead character in Spielberg’s new The Terminal, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), is as great a contrast as can be found: a man who will break a rule only after living in an airport for nine months, who will do so only with virtually an entire airport’s staff at his back and who, even then, will do so only reluctantly.

The greatest flaw in The Terminal is that its premise strains the limits of credibility. People come out of the theatre after seeing the film both amused and confused. “That could never happen,” they say. And they’re probably right. The entire premise of the movie requires one to believe that a man could live in an American airport terminal for the better part of the year, with that information available to the public, without anyone outside of the airport taking notice of this fact. In reality, I think, there’d be a dozen camera crews there to film human interest stories within a week and some sort of special accommodation within another forty-eight hours.

Of course, that being said, there really is a story of a man who was trapped in an airport terminal for a very extended period. In fact, he’s still trapped there to this very day. He’s been there since 1988. Of course, it happened in France. An Iranian man named Merhan Nasseri has been living in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for sixteen years, ever since he was robbed of his United Nations refugee certificate and his passport on his way to Britain. The Parisian authorities wouldn’t let him out of the airport without his papers and the Belgians (who’d issued his passport) wouldn’t reissue them unless he came in person.

Sadly, the real-life Viktor Navorski didn’t get to romance the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones (who plays a Flight Attendant carrying on an extended affair with a married man), instead Nasseri eventually went insane and now refuses to leave the airport, despite the fact that he’s been granted French residency and was paid $250,000 for the rights to his story for the production of this movie. He refuses to sign his French residency papers on the grounds that they list his nationality as “Iranian”, when he claims to be British (in fact, he now styles himself “Sir, Alfred Merhan” with the title, comma and all, having been taken from a mistake in a British immigration letter).

It was, perhaps, all of this which kept me from really enjoying the film. Upon the whole, the story it tells is a sad one, and most of the filmmaker’s attempts to disguise that fact misfire. Spielberg seems to be unsure if he’s making a drama about a man who is victimized by government bureaucracy (and his own stubbornness: the chief of Airport Security who serves as the film’s “villain” deliberately tries to let him leave and have him granted asylum in the United States) and trapped by a horrible civil war in his homeland or a comedy simply about a man trapped in the airport.

The one serious (and slightly political) complaint I have about this film is that it goes to rather great lengths to depict the Department of Homeland Security and others elements of the American government as committing the sins of others. By all accounts, the DHS has nothing on the French for stupidity and laziness. I noticed this too in the trailer for the upcoming remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which changes the villains from Communists (as they were in the original film) to a “rich conspiracy” launched by an Evil™ American corporation.

In the end, The Terminal wants to be a charming fantasy, but falls just a little bit short of the mark. Hanks, as good as ever, is failed by a plot which fails to be compelling and a supporting cast which, with the exception of Zeta Jones, is broadly average.

posted by Yoshi at 1:37 AM

Saturday, June 19, 2004

My Poco Friends

From my "scary" book The Northern Abyss:

We live in a dangerous world, a world in which the friends of civilization are greatly outnumbered by its enemies. The great Western traditions, those that flow from Greece, from Rome, from Britain: they are ours and we are their guardians and protectors. The peculiar heritage of liberty is our birthright: and its defense is our obligation. Canada cannot be allowed to turn against, to reject, that heritage. We cannot, we must not, go down the road of serfdom, of immorality, or collectivism.

This is not the end of our war. Rather, it is barely the beginning. This country, with its wide land and diverse people, is a microcosm of the battlefield as a whole. Those who would seek to impose upon the decent people of this world a new and post-modern version of morality must be exposed and defeated.

I wish to live in a world where human progress, economic, technological, scientific, and material is continuous. I which to live in a world where the enemies of civilization: terrorists, rogue dictators, and others meet a swift and violent end. I wish to live in a world where human freedom is unlimited, but where self-restraint is regarded as an integral part of those freedoms. However, if we continue down the present road, we shall never see a world such as that.

Instead we shall live in a world were individual greed, in every sphere, reigns supreme. We shall be consigned to a world where the enemies of freedom are always strong, and where free peoples are forever bowed in fear. It shall be a world where progress is stifled by regulation, where the productive are shackled by confiscatory taxation, and in which the moral are forever out-shouted by the immoral.

-Adam Yoshida, The Northern Abyss

Welcome, welcome.

Frankly, if my opponents wish to anonymously attack me, I'm fine with it. I just wish they wouldn't cut up my words.

Here's the article they quoted.

Now, here's how they've presented it:

"(There) should be no quarter offered to the bandit scum who continue to kill and harass our armies... During the Philippine Insurrection then-Colonel John J. Pershing... is said to have deterred Islamic fanatics by having them executed with bullets dipped in pig fat, then wrapping them in funeral shrouds made of pig skin, covering them in pig entrails, and buying them facing down, so that they could not see Mecca... It might also be best if some of the troops of the new Iraqi Army were allowed to witness such an event, lest they entertain any idea of conducting a rising of their own."

Now, here's the real quote:
Fourth, there should be no quarter offered to the bandit scum who continue to kill and harass our armies and make the lives of the Iraqi people more difficult than they need be. During the Philippine Insurrection then-Colonel John J. Pershing (the same man who would command all American forces in the First World War), it said to have deterred Islamic fanatics by having them executed with bullets dipped in pig fat, then wrapping them in funeral shrouds made of pig skin, covering them in pig entrails, and buying them facing down, so that they could not see Mecca (the Islamic religion, or at least the extreme form of Islam practiced and preached by the terrorists, holds that those killed and buried in such a way would be denied entrance of paradise). He allowed several prisoners to witness this spectacle and then set them free. The insurrection on Mindanao ended shortly thereafter. It might also be best if some of the troops of the new Iraqi Army were allowed to witness such an event, lest they entertain any idea of conducting a rising of their own. However, they must also be made to understand that such actions will only be taken against those who used Armed Force against Allied soldiers or their fellow Iraqis.

I've bolded the sections they left out of the Article. Notice the difference? Notice how they deliberately cut out my expression of concern for the Iraqi people, the reasons behind such an action, the results of the use of the practice in the past, and the note that such measures would be used only against armed resistors?

Come on folks. If you're going to attack me, do it honestly. The Good Lord knows that I've said my share of genuinely stupid things.

Also, why on Earth would you direct people towards my book? It's one of the most moderate things I've ever written because, of course, when writing a book I took the time to give things some sober second thought, moreso then blogging allows.

posted by Yoshi at 6:00 PM

A Dangerous Man

I don’t think that there’s any question that Michael Moore should be considered a traitor. When Hezbollah (or a Hezbollah-affiliated group) is offering to help distribute your film, you’re miles past the hard-to-see line that divides “dissent” and treason.

I have a hard time imagining what the Second World War would have been like if the subversive brigades had been in action then. Frankly, I often think that the only reasons they weren’t was that we were allied with the Soviet Union and, therefore, World War Two was the only sort of war that their kind could support.

Seriously, can you imagine a Michael Moore running around during that war? His films would probably mock President Roosevelt for his paralysis and intimate that he has conspired to get the United States into the war with the purpose of inflating the profits of his Jew financier friends. They’d explain the connections between the Roosevelt family and Adolf Hitler.

You’d have to be crazy not to see the effects of Moore’s films. Not only do they turn otherwise sane people against the United States and its policies, but they also provide a great deal of material and support for the enemies of American abroad. For all that Moore’s books and films have sold in the United States, I’d bet that they’ve sold another five copies overseas. If a poll were to be taken of the world, I’d bet that you’d find that Michael Moore is one of the five most popular Americans.

It would be simple to dismiss Moore was the idol of the stupid and ignorant. But that isn’t entirely true. Moore manages to suck in millions of people all across the world with his clever and emotionally deceptive propaganda. It spreads like a disease, with individuals being inducted into the cult of Moore through their friends. To the politically uninitiated, the arguments of a clever down-market demagogue like Moore have great resonance. It turns individuals into evangelists, with the strong-willed bowling over the weak.

Moore reaches people who otherwise would never be reached. He’s the only person releasing political documentaries which are designed to appeal to a mass audience. In all likelihood, that’s because he’s being funded by people more interested in political effect than profit. Frankly his new films ought to be regulated by the FEC.

Of course, we should do more than that. I have no doubt that someone behaving the same way he did during America’s earlier major wars (the World Wars, the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War) would have rapidly found themselves in serious trouble. Someone making movies so anti-American that the Germans were trying to distribute them in occupied Europe would have, at the very least, found themselves in jail for the duration. At the worst, well, you figure it out.

The real problem is that the suggestion that someone should be jailed (or perhaps even executed) for treasonous behavior is so shocking that most people would find it laughable. Why, punish treason? It’s unthinkable these days. John Walker Lindh signed up with al-Qaeda and fought against the United States, including in actions where an American was killed, and all he got for his crimes was twenty years. Another American citizen plotted to detonate a radioactive device in an American city and the thing most people seem to be concerned about is if he’s been given adequate access to counsel. What nonsense!

People view patriotism and treason as simply political positions, rather than viewing one as the default position of any good American and the other as a crime. To far too many people, believing in American victory and calling for American defeat is no different than favoring tax cuts or opposing them.

As much as I fanaticize about watching Michael Moore do a perp walk, I don’t harbor much hope that it’ll come to pass soon or, well, ever.

The only solution, then, is to fight back against them in the realm of ideas. Michael Wilson, a documentary filmmaker, is hard at work on a movie entitled Michael Moore Hates America. We need to support him and those like him. We need to fight our way back into the popular culture, clawing through blood-filled trench after blood-filled trench. It’s a lousy option, but it’s the only one open to us.

For now.

posted by Yoshi at 12:57 AM

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

The “Plamegate” Nonsense

As I predicted almost a year ago, a cadre of Democrats continue to pound away on the Valerie Plame issue, with the same sort of people who consider Jane Fonda’s jaunt in Hanoi to be an exercise in patriotism ranting about Republican “treason.” Well, I say, if any “treason” occurred here, it was certainly not on the Republican side. Whoever “outed” Ms. Plame as an employee of the CIA (assuming, of course, that it was someone in the White House) committed an act of true patriotism: bringing into the light of day the activities of an individual who was, quite clearly, obstructing US intelligence efforts.

The general assumption seems to be that, in response to Joe Wilson’s heroic effort to reveal the real truth™ about the intelligence behind the Iraq War, a vindictive White House leaked the information about Ms. Plame’s employment in order to “get revenge” on the great Joe Wilson. Naturally, reality differs with this account of events. According to Robert Novak (who wrote the column outing Plame) the information was initially provided to him in a casual fashion, by an individual unaware of its significance. In fact, that Ms. Plame worked for the CIA was common knowledge around parts of Washington. Was this part of a nefarious Bush plot? Hardly.

According to Vanity Fair magazine, “On the third or fourth date, (Plame’s husband Joe Wilson) says, they were in the middle of a 'heavy make-out' session when she said she had something to tell him.” What was that? Oh yes, that she worked for the CIA. All this, by the way, in the words of Joe Wilson- the man who is trying to make a career out of the “crime” against his wife. It seems to me that if anyone was truly indiscrete here, it’s Valerie Plame. While I am not a CIA operative, it would seem to me that blowing your deep cover on the third date would appear to be a practice not in conformity with security regulations.

And, of course, while we know nothing of the personal moral character of female virtue of Valerie Plame (aside from the fact that she married Joe Wilson), it doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility that her true identity could have come to whoever told Novak by other means. After all, by most accounts, Valerie Plame is an attractive modern professional woman who, in all probability, had more than her share of “third dates.”

Then there’s the issue of just what on Earth Joe Wilson was doing in Niger in the first place. He was sent there to investigate intelligence reports that Iraq has acquired uranium in that country. Apparently, he was sent there at the instigation of his wife and, once there, he spent a few days meeting with government officials who assured him that no such sale had taken place before he, accepting their word, returned home.

I’m sorry, but since when has it become an acceptable practice for CIA employees to dispatch their spouses on sensitive missions overseas? “Oh, honey, can you go to Niger for me?” sounds a little dubious. Especially when it’s quite clear that both Wilson and Plame were opposed to the war.

In fact, the entire “Plamegate” affair is best an example of what’s wrong with a large part of the CIA. The Agency has, through the years, seemingly continued its old practice of recruiting largely from elite universities and largely people with a background in economics, or languages, or political science. In short, they’re recruiting liberals. For all the popular image of the CIA as an organization populated by dark reactionaries who’ve stepped right out of late Cold War-era thrillers, the culture of the CIA appears to, in fact, be not all that unlike that of any other elite modern organization (say, IBM or Merrill-Lynch).

This is a problem. The idea of an intelligence agency populated with modern working women with twins parked in day care is absurd. I, for one, would be a lot more comfortable with a CIA full of angry super-patriots prepared to do anything it takes to advance the American cause. Additionally, the CIA ought not be headquartered anywhere near Washington, as another major problem appears to be that employees of the Agency end up becoming part of the Washington social whirl.

It’s time for Democrats to get over themselves. Valerie Plame was not wronged: if anything, she deserved her fate. In any case, American security hasn’t been hurt one bit by the removal of his absurd “agent” from power.

posted by Yoshi at 7:14 PM

Yoshi Talk #1- The Canadian Election

Here it goes. Click here to download.

posted by Yoshi at 4:27 PM

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

The Coming of the Bush Landslide

President Bush is going to win this November. Not only is he going to win, he’s going to win by a big margin. At least as big a margin as President Clinton won by in 1996 or his father won by in 1988. We might even be on the way to an LBJ, Nixon, or Reagan-style landslide for the President. I know that some will find this prediction absurd but remember: six months ago many of you were taunting me about the inevitable election of President Howard Brush Dean III.

Think about it for a second. Really think about it. The economy is booming: even the media can no longer deny it. By November the economy looks like it will be stronger than it was in either 1996 or 1984. Remember, there’s a great deal of lag time in the economy. The recession which began in October of 2000 wasn’t felt until a few months into 2001. In 1992 the recession was over by the time Election Day arrived, but the people didn’t know it. Nothing short of a Stock Market Crash or other, similar, calamity will cause enough damage to the economy so that the people will feel it before Christmas. And, in any case, the economy shows few signs of serious trouble. Increases in interest rates will eventually slow growth a bit, but not until long after we’re into President Bush’s second term.

John Kerry’s stopped talking about “Benedict Arnold CEO’s”, one of the more popular applause lines of his primary campaign. Now he blames his speechwriters for it. When he talks about the terrible economy now he just sounds silly, a lot like the California Democrats last year marching under their “No on Recall, Yes on Bustamante” banner. Most of modern politics, of course, is simply a form of artful lying. However, for those lies to be successful, they at least have to have the feeling of plausibility.

Last December the Democrats were all explaining how the election would have nothing to do with the war- it would all come down to the economy. Now they’re claiming that it’s going to be all about Iraq. But Iraq is fading as an issue as well. While much of the media and left-wing political establishment would like for it to be the new Vietnam, it simply isn’t. The people don’t feel that way. There are no mass demonstrations. No angry rioting. The anti-war movement, such as it is, consists of a mob of second-tier movie stars, angry hunch-backed communists handing out newspapers in flannel jackets, and drug-addled college students.

In the end, I think, the Abu Ghraib “torture scandal” will hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans. While, in the short term, some were so repulsed by the pictures as to begin to question their support for the war (and therefore their support for Bush) the contrast in reactions between that of the President and his opponents provided a helpful distinction that will stick in the minds of many voters. The President responded with indignation, yes, but also with steady leadership. The offenders were prosecuted and things went on. Everything was kept in perspective.

Compare this with the reaction of hysterical Democrats who tried to lynch the man who is widely-regarded as the best Defense Secretary in memory and who then compared the “torture” pictures to the September 11th attacks. While most Americans don’t exactly approve of torture, they didn’t feel too badly for the “tortured” terrorists either. The overreaction of the Democrats made them look weak and it made them look incapable of providing the sort of resolute leadership needed to win the war. By November no one but the sort of ultra-partisan Democrats who ramble on about their “MIHOP” and “LIHOP” scenarios will give a damn about Abu Ghraib, but they will retain their doubts about Democratic leadership in wartime.

Four other factors mitigate the potential political downsides of Iraq.

First, the transition to a new civilian government appears likely to go off in a relatively smooth fashion. While it is certainly likely that bombings and other attacks will continue, the swift action taken by US forces in April and May against both the terrorists in Fallujah and the militias of Moqtada al-Sadr seem to have forestalled any general uprising against the new government.

Second, the United States has lined up substantial international support behind the end of the occupation effort. The US mission in Iraq is now UN-sanctioned. This defuses the complaints of many moderate Democrats who focused almost their entire opposition to the war on this single point. With the French and everyone else onboard for the continuing mission the “we-should-have-done-this-with-the-international-community” crowd will either have to shut up, line up, or sign up with the “no-blood-for-oil” folks. Since virtually all of John Kerry’s plan for Iraq has been to “internationalize” the mission, this renders many of his complaints moot.

Third, there’s a real sense of Iraq fatigue out there. People are interested in what’s going to happen in the future, but they’re not so interested in what happened in the past. The Democrats have already shot their wad on the “no WMD” and “no al-Qaeda links” departments. Any developments in these areas, therefore, are likely to favor the President (IE, any development likely to get wide play now would be the discovery of additional WMD or a public airing of Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda).

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, John Kerry has nowhere left to move on Iraq. His single big idea (to “rejoin” the international community) has already been co-opted. He can’t move to the right of Bush, because he’ll lose his base. He can’t run too far to the left, because he’ll drive moderate Democrats into the Bush camp. He can’t run too close to Bush either, since he’ll anger his moody and unpredictable base by doing that as well. The best he can do is what Al Gore called for in his recent MoveOn.org speech: refuse to give specifics on the grounds that “the situation is too fluid” and intimate that he has some Nixonian “secret plan.”

To add to all of this, John Kerry’s got the additional headache caused by his remaining in the Senate. If he resigns his seat now, after the Republican Governor has called for him to do so, the story will be that he was “pressured” into resigning due to his failure to represent the state he was elected to represent. If he doesn’t, the Republican Senate Leadership is going to schedule votes on every issue of importance, forcing Senator Kerry to either put himself on the record or to remain AWOL from the Senate.

Senator Kerry is having Vice Presidential problems as well. This is very well demonstrated by his extended effort to woo John McCain. After the very public speculation that he’d choose the Senator (the media’s favourite American politicians), anyone short of Hillary Clinton (and she’s not going to accept) is going to be a let-down. While the conventional wisdom holds that he’s going to take one of his primary opponents- someone like Gephardt, Clark, or Edwards, I expect he’ll roll the dice and go for something a little out of the box. My guess? He’ll either opt for former Senator Max Cleland (the war hero whose “patriotism was questioned” by evil Republicans) or Georgia Congressman John Lewis who would, of course, be the first black Vice Presidential nominee. Of course, remember the fate of the last Presidential candidate who made a truly wild pick and choose the first woman for Vice President and, as for Cleland, I truly doubt that his newfound Ron Kovic act would play very well outside of partisan Democratic circles.

Kerry has a final problem, one that can turn a possible defeat into an utter humiliation: Ralph Nader. Think about this scenario. Kerry stumbles through the Summer, falling steadily behind the President after the end of the Democratic convention. President Bush comes out of New York in September with a ten point lead in the polls (say 52% to 42% with 5% for Nader). John Kerry’s fall campaign can’t seem to close that gap. Despite the repeated urging of partisan Democrats, he doesn’t move further to the left on Iraq. What happens next?

It’s obvious to me that if a Kerry who’s playing for the centre in October and behind by a fairly large margin will be defeated by an even larger margin. Why? Because the ultra-leftist wing of the Democratic Party will begin shrieking that Kerry is losing because he hasn’t moved too far to the left and then will switch to Nader in an attempt to “teach Democrats as lesson.” Such a scenario would be self-reinforcing. Leftist Democrats move to Nader, which causes Kerry’s numbers to drop, which leads more Democrats to shift to Nader on the grounds that Kerry’s numbers are dropping. Such a scenario might result in a final result with Bush scoring 55% of the vote to 35% for Kerry with 10% or more for Nader. A best-case scenario, to be sure, but not an impossible one. I expect to see something more like 48% for Bush, 42% for Kerry, and 5% for Nader.

I may well be wrong. We’ll see. But I don’t think so. If January 20th, 2005 isn’t the day of George Bush’s second inaugural, I’ll give $50 to Greenpeace in John Kerry’s name. That’s how confident I am.

posted by Yoshi at 10:11 PM

Sunday, June 13, 2004

The Destructive Nature of Multiculturalism

Roger Kimball nails it in this article in The New Criterion.

To get a sense of what has happened to the institution of American identity, compare Robert Frost’s performance at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 with Maya Angelou’s performance thirty-two years later. As Huntington reminds us, Frost spoke of the “heroic deeds” of America’s founding, an event, he said, that with God’s “approval” ushered in “a new order of the ages.” By contrast, Maya Angelou never mentioned the words “America” or “American.” Instead, she identified twenty-seven ethnic or religious groups that had suffered repression because of America’s “armed struggles for profit,” “cynicism,” and “brutishness.”

posted by Yoshi at 10:37 PM

Liberals Use Subliminal Advertising

Grig, a poster at the website Freedominion.ca has discovered the Liberals have attempted to insert a subliminal message into their new ultra-negative ad which attacks the Conservative Party and its leader, Stephen Harper!

In the part of the ad where a gun is shown, a single frame shows the gun being fired. This is the very definition of subliminal advertising- an attempt to introduce a feeling into the viewer without their knowledge. The message “the Conservatives are going to shoot you”, in essence. One frame. And, if you look at it, it’s no accident.

Here's the Gun:

Then:

And then:

One frame, folks. One frame. Look at the fringes of the screen- it doesn't go to all white, it's clearly a blast.

For more on this blatantly immoral tactic, see here. It’s already been posted on Pierre Bourque’s website!

posted by Yoshi at 9:17 PM

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Federation Civil-Military Relations

I'm just watching a Star Trek DVD I got from Zip.ca (the Canadian version of Netflix), and it occurs to me that the Federation appears to be a military dicatorship of some sort. Frankly, we see about zero evidence of any actual Civilian government- and (I'm watching All Good Things right now) I notice that Admirals tend to say things like "Starfleet Command has decided" or "I've decided", versus "the President decided" or whatever.

Just an odd thought for Saturday night.

posted by Yoshi at 11:07 PM

Film Review: Saved!

**

Saved! is the story of Mary (Jena Malone) a high school senior at a Christian High School in Baltimore who becomes pregnant while trying to “save” the soul of her gay boyfriend. I won’t bother describing the rest of the plot at length, because it’s mostly irrelevant to the film, which is meant to be a series of sharp blows against modern Christianity but instead comes off as a series of faintly-amusing gags designed mostly to pander to the prejudices of a certain sort of people. Mary’s best friend is Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), the ultra-devout leader of the “Christian Jewels.” Hilary’s brother, Roland (Macaulay Culkin) is a wheelchair-bound cynic who eventually ends up dating Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the school’s only Jewish girl. Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, White Oleander) plays the son of the school’s principal, who seeks to court Mary.

Some have erroneously charged that Saved! is an anti-Christian film. It isn’t. For the movie to actually be anti-Christian, the producers of the film would have to first figure out what they wish to attack and, second, fire something other than Nerf rounds at it. Rather than an anti-Christian film, what we have is a film which seeks to push its own brand of soft (or “tolerant”) Christianity while, at the same time, projecting their idea of what “intolerant” Christians are like (imagine, for a moment, what a film written by Ann Coulter about the lives of Democrats would look like).

The movie isn’t really a send-up of Evangelical culture as a whole- it’s meant to be a satire of the whole “Christian Youth Group” culture which has sprung up in recent years. The problem here is this: the sort of soft Christianity the film seeks to push (a Christianity sapped of theological content in favor of vague “what would Jesus do”-style blathering) is exactly that favored by most Christian youth, especially the sort who go to the sort of school depicted in the film.

At one moment, fairly early on, the movie begins to show great promise. At an assembly to open the school year, the Principal steps onto stage and begins a routine which encapsulates all the awkwardness of the Christian effort to adapt to popular culture. “Who’s down with G-O-D?” he shouts, in a hilarious moment which should ring absolutely true for anyone who has ever seen a “Christian Rave” or any of the other perverse efforts by some Christians to pander to popular prejudices.

Frankly, the problem is that the movie doesn’t really know where it wants to go from there. A whole movie could be made about the vapid nature of modern Christian youth culture. Instead, however, the producers want to graft their own hatred of the religious right onto these school-aged kids. Anyone who thinks that the sort of kids who walk about in Jesus gear spend their time muttering about “deviants” and such has a clearly distorted view of reality. What could have been a really good satire of the absurdities of things like “Christian” heavy metal instead becomes a heavy handed story which tries to bash you over the head with its generic message (“tolerance is good”).

What saves the film from awfulness is a pair of brilliant performances from Culkin and Amurri. Despite the notable handicap of being Susan Sarandon’s daughter, Eva Amurri is simply radiant here. Her Cassandra is easily the most vibrant character in the entire movie, lighting up the screen whenever she’s on it. The sub-plot of the romance between her and Roland provides the movie with much of its life. Culkin, who’s been largely absent from the screen in recent years, proves here that he has at least a modicum of actual talent.

Jena Malone’s performance here is strong, but both she and Mandy Moore suffer from poorly-written roles. Jena Malone’s Mary is alternately so stupid as to be hard to sympathize with or so boring as to drive one to sleep. Moore’s Hilary is meant to be the evil villainess, but largely comes off as bland and unconvincing. Her final scene, in particular, makes almost no sense whatsoever. The main cause of this particular problem is indecision on the part of the filmmakers- who remain unsure if her character is supposed to be evil or a source of comic relief. The writers would have done well to take a page from Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, where Rachel McAdams turned the character of Regina George into a pitch-perfect villainess.

Saved! isn’t a cause to upset anyone. It’s an average film which, I’d say, will appeal mostly to people who see within it an appeal to their own prejudices.

posted by Yoshi at 1:23 AM

Thursday, June 10, 2004

An End to Liberty?

In voicing his somewhat reluctant approval for the Constitution Benjamin Franklin declared that he believed that the government which would be created by it was, “likely to be well administered for a course of years,” but, he added, he was quite certain that it would, “end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. ” Franklin instinctively understood what many today fail to grasp: liberty does not come without a cost and a people unwilling to sacrifice for freedom cannot maintain its blessings.

Speaking a few years later, President John Adams declared that:

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Our Constitution depends upon the faith, honesty, and charity of the people. It was never meant to be parsed, dissected, and interpreted as though it were a prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi. The Constitution was meant to be a compact among the people, not divine writ handed down from on high. When everyone is looking for the easiest and most legal way to cheat their neighbour, the people become (in Franklin’s phrase) incapable of self-government and instead can only be effectively managed by a despot.

The Founders learned something obvious from history: while arbitrary rule does not work, neither does direct rule by the masses. The public as a whole is too easily consumed by popular passions, too rash in its judgement, and incapable of individually grasping the details of every issue of government. More than that, when an individual is given literal powers of self-government the result is that an individual will pursue their self interest rather than the national interest.

This is why the American Republic was endowed with a number of institutions whose specific design was to filter, moderate, and conciliate the public will. The problem is as such: modern technology and innovations (the media and polling in particular) are chipping away at the carefully-laid wall between the mob and the rulers.

I do not mean to decry self-interest. Ambition is (and will always be) one of the driving forces of civilization. However, it is wrong when the self-interest is conflated with the national interest. People who forget Christ’s admonition to render onto God what is God’s and onto Caesar what is Caesar’s quickly come to lack the ability to divide what is in their own interest from what is in the interest of the country as a whole. The result is three hundred million people are trying to pull in three hundred million directions. For this reason, the business of government in America was always intended to be conducted by virtuous individuals who would go on to serve the public interest. The creation of various filtration systems for governance was always meant to allow the rulers to understand (and act upon) a national interest different from the selfish interests of each individual.

The problem today is one of restoring Constitutional rule and limited government both. Modern American government does not (for the most part) operate according to Constitutional rules, it operates by pseudo-Constitutional interpretations which simultaneously manages to rely upon the discovery of hidden meanings within plain text while at other times adhering to a Jeffersonian literalism.

Limited Unlimited Government:
It is one of the greatest tragedies of our age that the Constitution of the United States, a document based upon the principles of limited government, is now used to justify what is, in essence, a form of government with no restraints but the minds of a handful of judges. Thus is the Constitution perverted to create a strange and monstrous hybrid of limited and unlimited government. The traditional right of society to collective uphold its own moral values and celebrate its religious heritage is thereby denied while, at the same time, government is allowed to claim sweeping and intrusive privileges in other areas.

The Founders never wanted to create a nation whose form of government was the mob. In fact, they specifically argued against any such arrangement by inserting a number of deliberately anti-democratic features into the Constitution. Consider:

• Senators were to be chosen by state legislatures and were to provide direct representation for the states (this was later altered by the Seventeenth Amendment).
• The method of selecting Presidential electors was left vague, but it seems certain that few people had in mind that they would be selected by a direct vote.
• Universal suffrage (not even universal suffrage of white males) was specifically not prescribed, and was not generally practiced.

It seems evident that the intention of the Founders was to create a limited constitutional republic were level, educated, and wise heads would generally carry the day. The early institutions of the United States were designed to filter the popular will. To provide “representative” government, not direct democracy. Yet, when watching the operations of the modern American electorate (and, indeed, the electorate of any modern ‘democratic’ nation) I am often reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar where Brutus and Mark Antony speak to a mob of Romans following Caesar’s assassination. First Brutus explains that, while he personally loved Caesar as a man, he had to be killed because his ambitions were dangerous to Rome. “Let him be Caesar!” shouts one of the Romans of Brutus, altogether missing the point. However, by the time that Brutus is finished speaking, the crowd is thoroughly convinced that the assassination was justified and are therefore grateful to the conspirators. Then comes Mark Antony who, in a biting, sarcastic, stirring and emotional speech, convinces them that Caesar has been wronged and, by the reading Caesar’s will (which promises a cash payment to every man) spurs them to riot.

The result of all of this in modern American is a sort of pseudo-Constitutional rule. Modern government calls upon the letter of the Constitution to support its positions, but routinely violates the spirit of that document. Government is given wide-ranging powers to infringe upon the economic liberties and property rights of the people while, simultaneously, tiny extremist groups secure for themselves an unlimited freedom from the approbation of society, absurdly insisting that the Constitution grants individuals the right to buggery, abortion, and gay marriage. Regardless of what one thinks of any of these practices, no fair reading of the Constitution suggests that the protection of these “rights” was ever intended (or, for that matter, contemplated) by the framers.

It seems fairly apparent to me that if we were to yank any of the authors of the Constitution forward in time two centuries and asked them whether the document they created banned the public display of the 10 Commandments on Government property and legalized homosexual sodomy in every state in the Union, they would answer no to both. It is not even, I contend, a matter of whether or not you or I approve of governmental displays of religiosity or of homosexuality- it’s a matter of law and government. If nothing in the Constitution bans the display of the 10 Commandments, then why did a Federal Court order them hauled away from the Alabama Supreme Court? If nothing in the Constitution as written forbids Texas from passing an anti-sodomy statute, why are they now forbidden to do so?

Franklin’s Despots:
This is the sort of despotism that Franklin spoke of. The shredding of the Constitution has left a system in such disorder that someone had to step in and impose actual rules. Since no one else would, the Supreme Court and every inferior court in the land has done just that.

Consider the case of Roe v. Wade for a moment. Whatever you think of abortion, it seems entirely obvious to me that there is simply zero chance in 1973 (or today, for that matter) that the Congress would have nationally legalized abortion in such a sweeping way. Why, then, is Roe v. Wade law? The answer is quite obvious: “because the Supreme Court says so.” The only way that Roe (or any of the cases which have since affirmed and superseded it) will ever end is if the Supreme Court itself overrules it at some point in the future.

The ruling of the Court in Roe was far more radical than anything which was being seriously proposed at the time. The “Uniform Abortion Act”, then being circulated by the American Bar Association allowed abortion:

(W)ithin 20. weeks after the commencement of the pregnancy [or after 20. weeks only if the physician has reasonable cause to believe (i) there is a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother or would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother, (ii) that the child would be born with grave physical or mental defect, or (iii) that [410 U.S. 113, 147] the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or illicit intercourse with a girl under the age of 16 years].

However, the Supreme Court felt differently. Where the ABA’s (liberal in and of itself) suggested abortion law (and the New York law on which it was based) would have restricted abortion to a limited set of cases (admittedly, with the “mental health” exception serving as a rather obvious loophole) the Supreme Court simply legalized all pre-viability abortions, regardless of reason or necessity. More than that, by its wording, it made the restriction of post-viability abortion so difficult that it took three decades for a law banning such procedures to actually go into force.

This isn’t a case of the Supreme Court simply interpreting the law (a power which, in any case, was never granted to it but rather simply seized by John Marshall). This is the Supreme Court legislating without being considered subject to any review or higher authority. The Court has, in essence, been vested with unlimited power to order whatever it likes. Whether it uses that power for good or ill is immaterial, for it should not have such power at all.

What do you call a system which vests near-absolute and uncontested power in a small clique? “Despotic” is the best I can do.

The Freedom Curve:
A few days ago I drew up something that I’ve labelled “The Freedom Curve” which, I think, well illustrates our present quandary. You can make one yourself. Draw a half-circle on a piece of paper. The exact center of the resultant curve represents the ideal society- the freest which can ever exist. Now, at the bottom of the left side of the curve mark down the word “totalitarianism.” This is the society of the state: an existence where all individual rights are subordinated to the will of the states and where freedom simply ceases to exist. Now, on the right side write down “anarchy.” This is the society where the cult of the individual, the sect of selfishness, reigns utterly supreme. Here too, freedom ceases to exist because in a world where we care only for ourselves we can have no respect for the rights of others. Here the laws of the jungle prevail and freedom dies because freedom cannot exist without a civilization to cultivate and defend it.

What we must seek, then, is the point of balance. What exists between totalitarianism and the ideal society? What exists between anarchy and the ideal society? Draw two more points, at the mid-point between the balance point and the extremes. Between totalitarianism and the center write “monarchy” and between anarchy and the center write “modern democracy.” Now you have a much clearer picture of where we are and where I stand. A traditional Monarchy, for all of its faults, is typically much freer than a totalitarian society, but it is far from ideal. Similarly, the democratic nations of the West are freer than a society which has slipped into anarchy, but we are also separated from the ideal.

What, then, lies in that center? A free society, yes, but what sort of free society? I put it to you that what lies there is something we in the West have already experienced: call it Constitutional Republicanism, call it Constitutional Monarchy: call it what you like. It is the details that are important. What we require, especially in this day and age, is a government which respects the rights of individuals but also understands that no right can continue to be effectively exercised if that right is unlimited and not tempered by the basic needs of decent society.

Where freedom is made unlimited freedom ceases to exist. No freedom can exist without limitations. No right can exist without consequences. When we presume that there exists a right for an individual to do what they want, whenever they want, and however they want we create a society where the rights of other individuals now lack effectual protection.

Virtually everyone (save a few anarcho-capitalists) agrees that we cannot have a free market without any regulation whatsoever. A totally unregulated free market would be swollen with hucksters selling defective goods in a deceptive fashion. In a market without regulation people would swindle eachother with impunity and your money would be safe only when it was held in gold, secured to your person, and defended by your own gun.

Of course, no market without regulation can actually exist. Those markets in our society that exist without legal regulations tend to be regulated by a force far more effectual than Congress- namely, violence. If you don’t pay your loan shark he doesn’t take you to court- he has your arm broken. In some ways, this is a much more efficient system. However, I think that pretty much everyone can agree that the trade-off of freedom in exchange for that efficiency is rather excessive.

This, however, ties back into my original point: an arena in which freedom is unlimited will eventually collapse back in onto itself. A market that exists without any regulation will rapidly find itself ruled by violent criminals. What, then, are we to take of a society that exists virtually without regulation?

If we deny, as many would like to do, the right of society to make “moral laws” (as the Supreme Court essentially did in Lawrence v. Texas), then we make any sort of control of society short of mob violence essentially impossible. And where we allow any practice, however immoral, to take place without the restraint of law (moral decency having long since evaporated) the ultimate result can be only a single thing- descent into anarchy until some other force arrives to restore order.

Towards a Restored Constitutional Order:
The best way to revive the Constitution is to admit the need for limited and representative government. This, ultimately, means less “democracy” rather than more, as most now see it. The problem with an overabundance of direct democracy is that such a practice transforms a system is a despotism of the majority.

A restored Constitution must enhance the power of the Congress at the expense of the Courts while, at the same time, making the Congress less tied to the day to day will of the people. For this, I see a requirement for at least two Constitutional amendments.

First, the 17th Amendment should be repealed and state legislatures once more empowered to select Senators. This would greatly change both the character and the composition of the Senate. With voters no longer electing Senators in Congressional elections writ large, many more colourful members would make it into the Senate, thereby increasing both its ability and its intellectual capacity. More importantly, a direct link between the states and the Federal Government would be restored. Senators selected in this way would likely be zealous guardians of the rights of their states.

Second, something (most likely a Constitutional Amendment) must be done to bring the courts into check. The most obvious solution would be an amendment affirming Congressional supremacy over the courts. Such an Amendment could, perhaps, allow the Congress to override any decision of the Supreme Court in the same way that the Congress can override a Presidential veto. Such power would likely be rarely used, but its mere existence would certainly work to create renewed respect for the legislative branch on the part of the judicial.

The restoration of the Constitution will require hard work, just as its initial creation did. We will never achieve perfection, but we might just get good government.

posted by Yoshi at 10:11 PM

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Oderint Dum Metuant

By this November the occupation of Iraq will be over. A free Iraqi Government will be in place and whatever US forces remain in-country will be leading a United Nations-sanctioned multilateral force. Violence will continue, but at reduced levels. The Shiite militias of Moqtada al-Sadr have been destroyed in battle, the others dismantled. Insurgent activity has been drastically reduced, with most of the continued resistance coming from Islamists who, undoubtedly, we are also killing in great numbers. The war must, in other words, be considered a smashing success by any rational means of accounting. The Iraqi people are free. Thousands (and possibly tens of thousands) of terrorists have been killed. The rest of the Moslem world has been taught a lesson whose consequences are reshaping the region. In other words: not bad. Not bad at all.

What serious argument now exists against the war? John Kerry’s sole idea about Iraq has been to “internationalize” the occupation. It has been done. And, in any case, that stage of the operation is coming to an end in twenty days. What more could John Forbes Kerry have done? Made the vote in the UN Security Council unanimous? Whoops, too late for that.

Remember a few months ago when John Kerry was promising that his first act as President would be to go before the United Nations and “rejoin the community of nations”? It sounded absurd then. It sounds absurd and pathetic now, like California Democrats shouting “No on Recall, Yes on Bustamante” last year or Gerald Ford passing out “Whip Inflation Now” buttons in 1974. Rejoin the community of nations? We’re leading them. What John Kerry wants is for America to be led by them.

The nonsensical claims that President Bush’s actions have somehow “harmed” America’s relations with its allies are demonstrably false. Just look at the reactions in Germany and South Korea to a long-overdue American re-examination of its military commitments in those nations. If George Bush’s policies had really driven the people of those countries into an anti-American frenzy, don’t you think they’d be shouting for those troops to get out now instead of demanding that they stay put?

Oh, there’s a lot of personal animosity out there towards George W. Bush, don’t get me wrong. But, really, who cares? Oderint Dum Metuant. Would you rather that world leaders love an American President (but generally not respect him, for they know that they can have their way with him) or that they hate an American President, but fear him as well? People in some parts of the world may hate George W. Bush, they may well loathe him beyond all imagination, but they also now know that he means what he says and that failure to obey him will probably result in death.

For an example of this on a small scale, look at the crises which occurred in Liberia and Haiti last year. How many here doubt that, if Bill Clinton were still President, we would still be pondering what to do about those situations? Presidents Aristide and Taylor might well have liked Bill Clinton, but they’d have done so secure in the knowledge that he’d never have forced them out. Jesse Jackson would still be shuttling back and forth and some complicated peace deal would be being worked out by negotiators in some American city so we could have another set of unworkable and useless “accords” for Clinton to brag about.

Given all the fuss that Aristide kicked up over Haiti last time, something really must have put the fear of God into him and I’ll give you one guess as to what that one thing was. As I imagine it the conversation went something like this:

“Father” Aristide: A coup is being organized against me be thugs and reactionary elements, I retain the support of the people!
Bush’s Envoy: The people rioting in the streets?
Aristide: They are being manipulated by outside forces, while others hide in their homes. I am an elected President; the international community has an obligation to support me!
Envoy: I don’t think so. Your rule has brought utter chaos to the country, sir.
Aristide: The transition to democracy is difficult. You know this. You have an obligation!
Envoy: None which we recognize. Look, Mr. President, we’ve got better things to do than worry about your little shit-hole of a country. This crisis must be settled: now.
Aristide: I would be willing to work with some of the rebels. The more moderate ones. Invite them into by Cabinet and work out a power-sharing deal.
Envoy: No, now.
Aristide: You mean, resign? I’m an elected head of state! You can’t force me to resign. Who is America to decide who will govern Haiti?
Envoy: Go, now, or we leave you to them. (Gestures in direction of the noise)

Presumably, at that point, “Father” Aristide saw the logic of the proposal. As a result, he left office and a reasonable new government was installed in Haiti. That was months ago and things sure seem to have settled down. Same for Liberia, another perpetual trouble-spot for other administrations.

When George W. Bush is re-elected this November he will automatically become the most powerful President in the history of the United States. This will be especially true if he is re-elected by an overwhelming margin. Why do you think that France and others consented to having the UN bestow its blessing upon the liberation of Iraq? Because they think that Bush is going to win the election and they’re going to have to deal with him for the next four years.

Contrary to the fantasies of some, most of the world is not insane. Most Great Powers are not about to form some sort of cooperative bloc to counter US power. In his second term, especially if he’s got a more-strongly Republican Congress as his back, President Bush will have essentially a blank cheque to do whatever the hell he wants in the world. Invade Cuba? Who’s going to stop him? Deal with Mugabe? Other African leaders might publicly cry for the Zimbabwean leader, but they’ll all work to make their own accommodation with America.

Give George W. Bush another four years and, I’ll bet, the present regimes in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Zimbabwe will all be gone. So will a lot of other leaders who happen to cause trouble.

This is what all sane, honourable, and decent human beings desire: a world that bows to America, not an America that kow-tows to the worthless refuse that make up much of what is laughably called the “community of nations.” John Kerry promises to follow those people. George Bush will lead them.

posted by Yoshi at 11:07 PM

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

No to Secession

Several people have emailed me in regards to the efforts of some misguided activists to promote the secession of the State of South Carolina and the creation of a “Christian Republic” within the new nation. Most of these people have, for some bizarre reason, assumed that I would be sympathetic towards such an endeavour. To put simply: I am not. While I expect this utterly stupid effort to fizzle shortly, I hasten to add that if, by some miracle it is successful, I’d hope to see South Carolina stomped and burned even more thoroughly than it was by Sherman. That was, after all, the whole point of the exercise: to teach those recalcitrant Southerners the folly of their ways.

Today Andrew Sullivan has taken notice of the group, denouncing them in a fashion you might expect. In any case, a few nutty ultra-Christians aren’t the secessionists to be worried about.

If you want to look at somewhere where there might actually be a serious secession movement in a few years look at California, a state flooded with Mexican immigrants (both illegal and legal) who have never renounced their loyalty to their former country and whose children are brought up with the silly notion that the Southwest was somehow “stolen” from Mexico and that, by rights, it ought to be Mexican.

I would be shocked if, by 2030 at the latest, there wasn’t a fairly large minority in that state seeking some form of independence from the United States. Moreover, I would not be shocked if many of the American people outside of California were willing to give it to them.

That might sound shocking, but think about it for a moment. We’ve been taught that people who happen to possess land ought to have their own “state” and that people who come to America ought to keep their own culture. Would it shock anyone if the Americans of 2030 figured that, “well, if a majority of them want to join Mexico, they should be allowed to do so”? I wouldn’t. In fact, given the fact that by then everyone alive will have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea of the American Southwest having been “stolen”, I wouldn’t be shocked if it were a fairly popular cause in certain circles.

Well, some may say, if a majority favours independence, what right have you to object and would you do to stop them? The answers are thusly: I am a patriot, with a million Americans dead on the battlefield standing beside me. How would I stop them? I can answer that in one word: violence.

Anyone advocating the secession of any part of the United States who has any serious hope of success ought to be arrested for treason and executed. Anyone taking up arms in such a cause should be fought and any areas supporting an armed insurrection should be put to the torch.

Even if every single person in California supported secession, I would not agree to it. Better to depopulate the land by pillage and fire than to ever submit to such an indignity. Any soil that is American today must be American forever and anyone attempting to alter this immutable law of the Lord ought to be put to the sword.

The same goes for the puny group of South Carolinian secessionists. I don’t much care that, on many issues, I probably agree with them. The issue of America herself comes before any other issue. Any issue. If my best friend took up arms against America I would kill him in an instant. The same with any son of mine, though with a slightly deeper shade of regret.

Some might ask then, how can you admire Bobby Lee (or Stonewall Jackson, or James Longstreet, or NB Forrest)? The answer is simple: I admire them for how they fought, not what they fought for. I’m willing to forgive them for their cause only because they, and their native lands, were all punished for their wickedness. Just as I might admire some future Californian Hispanic who fights well for the things in which he believes while praying for the destruction of his home and his own death.

posted by Yoshi at 10:54 PM

More Craziness From Our Friends at DU

Here they express their love for Robert Mugabe and his abolition of private land ownership in Zimbabwe.

posted by Yoshi at 9:40 PM

Monday, June 07, 2004

If Only...

I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.

If only this son of a bitch had died back then, perhaps killed by a lucky blow, the world would be a better place.

posted by Yoshi at 10:15 PM

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Failure of D-Day

By modern standards the events of June 6th, 1944 must be judged a failure. This does not mean, obviously, that the invasion failed but that the planning and execution of Operation Overlord were riddled with the sort of errors which, today, would almost certainly result in widespread calls for the resignation of the commanding General and the firing of the Secretary of War.

A few months before the invasion occurred US troops engaged in a training exercise were attacked by German torpedo boats at Slapton Sands. According to official records, some seven hundred and forty-nine servicemen were killed in that single incident. By way of comparison, a total of eight hundred and twenty-two US troops have died of all causes since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom roughly fifteen months ago. Should General Eisenhower been fired for “incompetence”? Was this a demonstration of “ineptitude” by the Roosevelt Administration? Or was it simply one of those awful things that happen in war?

On D-1, American, British, and Canadian Paratroopers who were supposed to soften up German forces mostly missed their target zones. They ended up tangled and confused, with units intermixing. Heavy casualties occurred. They fought well but, given that things didn’t go exactly according to the plans set out beforehand, clearly something went wrong. Should the Allied command have been sacked? Or should we have merely resolved to learn what we could and accept that sometimes (usually) things go wrong in war?

The first men who landed at Omaha Beach came under much heavier fire then expected. They found an entire German Regiment waiting for them on the beaches. A Regiment that Allied intelligence had missed altogether. As a result, the landings at Omaha Beach were the toughest and the bloodiest. Should all of the Allied Intelligence Chiefs have been removed? Should Congress have called General Bradley back to Washington to testify before an independent commission? Or should they have understood that, because the enemy seeks to deceive us, intelligence information can never be perfect and it would be foolish to expect it to be so?

There were, of course, many more failures and many more bad decisions made before and on D-Day. Some of them were bad enough that men were fired for them. But most were simply accepted as the inevitable consequence of war. Those who demand perfection in military operations either lack all understanding of history or are pandering to those who do.

Operation Overlord widely (and rightly) celebrated as one of the greatest moments in American history was as clouded by folly, error, and stupidity as any other endeavour in the history of guilty man. Does this make it an unworthy thing? Do the mistakes make the operation itself a mistake? Of course not. No sane person would make such an assertion.

The people of 1944 understood this. There can never be a perfect war: only a successful one. What Bismarck said of laws and politics is true of war as well: you’d rather not know what goes into making it.

When one considers all of the mistakes that accompanied D-Day and other American operations in the past, Operation Iraqi Freedom begins to look like one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed military operations in history. In just over a year a force never exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand Americans conquered a country of more than twenty million, rooted out many of the worst elements of its society, revived its economy, and set that country on the road to democracy.

There were mistakes, of course. The Iraqi Army ought never to have been disbanded as it was. It needed to be purged, of course, but it also needed to be rebuilt much faster. Additionally, it’s now fairly clear that it would have been better to follow the inclination of the Defense Department and sped up the transfer of power rather than playing about with Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority. But that’s all detail. Focusing on the little imperfections causes us to miss the big picture.

No reasonable person has ever asserted that the errors of Overlord made it not worth doing. If will only do something when you are certain of executing it perfectly, you will do precious little.

It’s time to get beyond the chorus of the defeatists and the naysayers. If we’d listened to them we’d have lost every single war in America history. Error is a fundamental component of war just as it is of any sport. The team that wins the Super Bowl isn’t the team that makes no errors, it’s the team that makes the fewest. Critics of the way the war in Iraq has been waged are a lot like a sports commentator raging about the three points the opposing team scored in a 56-3 win.

Our forbearers had the courage to disregard the grumpy warnings of the perpetually gloomy. Wars are not won by the indecision which comes along with the search for perfection.

posted by Yoshi at 10:28 PM

Win One for the Gipper

Already the left has begun to advance the argument that, because of the controversy over Senator Paul Wellstone’s funeral, Republicans should not try to “take advantage” of the death of Ronald Reagan. What nonsense. No one ever claimed that Democrats could not invoke the name of the late Senator Wellstone to advance their campaign. People were upset when his funeral was transformed into a political rally. If Democrats who show up at President Reagan’s funeral are booed (as Independents and Republicans who showed up at Wellstone’s were) or if people make political speeches attacking Democrats at the funeral, then we’ll talk. Until then, the left needs to sit down and shut the hell up.

Of course we ought to use the death of President Reagan for political purposes. He, the father of modern conservatism, almost certainly would have wished us to do so. His death is a moment to focus people on the greatness of his legacy and, thus, make them more inclined to support his ideological successor, George W. Bush. This is what the educational establishment likes to call a “teachable moment”, one in which Reagan can reach out from beyond the grave to better the cause for which he lived so many years of his long life.

We should use this time to teach people how Reagan’s tax cuts, assailed then just as Bush’s are now, set the stage for America’s economic renaissance. People forget it now but, before Reagan, it was widely believed that the United States was in a permanent state of decline and would soon be overtaken by nations with strong, centrally planned, economies such as Japan and West Germany.

The people should re-learn how all of the sophisticates and intellectuals scoffed at Reagan’s notion that Communism was a failed ideology which could be destroyed by a solid blow. Almost forgotten now is how virtually the entire establishment claimed that Reagan’s simplistic and “black and white” view of the world was straining relations with our more sophisticated European allies and endangering the world. Sound familiar?

Ronald Reagan was a great man, one of the greatest of the century, and a great President, one in the same tier as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Yet his work is not secure. Reagan’s work, in bringing America back and making her strong and confident once again, can still be undone by his opponents.

Bush’s enemies today, most of whom were Reagan’s enemies in the 1980’s, claim to want a “humble America”. They don’t want that at all: what they want is a humbled America. They want to see the United States humiliated, the swagger taken out of its step. The same John Kerry who denounced the invasion of Grenada (now widely recognized as a turning point in the Cold War) as a “bully’s show of force” is the John Kerry who today seeks to undermine America’s war in Iraq.

The same Democrats who denounced Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” even as they worked their hardest to spend the fruits of those reductions are the same Democrats who today promise to undo President Bush’s tax cuts. Against the demonstrable effectiveness of Reagan’s policies, they offer us once more the same “solutions” which failed in the past.

It’s notable that every liberal who managed to shove his face before the cameras in the wake of Reagan’s passing lauded him for “bringing people together.” It’s funny because he sure didn’t bring them together. As I recall (and surely I am not the only one) the left spent most of the Reagan years accusing him of being a lunatic who was going to destroy the world in a nuclear war, who enjoyed stealing from and starving the poor, and who was personally responsible for both homelessness and the spread of AIDS.

It is for us, the living, to carry on the fight for those things in which Ronald Reagan believed. We must make a strong America, one ready to be an advocate for democracy in the world. An America where taxes are low and the economy allowed to grow unchained. That’s the real legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Just as Reagan pursued his crusade against the Soviet Union, so we to must continue ours against the forces of Islamism. Reagan would have understood, I think, that the forces we face cannot be reasoned with: only confronted and destroyed. And he would have known, just as we know, that there can be no compromise in the defense of America. The United States doesn’t ask anyone for permission before it defends itself.

The victory of John Kerry in the forthcoming election would mean the undoing of much of the Reagan legacy. Defeat in Iraq, which would surely follow a Kerry victory, would humiliate and demoralize America just as defeat in Vietnam did. Raised taxes and regulations would hamper the economy. Emboldened by America’s defeat, our enemies would again be on the march throughout the world, just as they were in the 1970’s.

We need to go out and win this one for the Gipper. While his earthly life might be over, the things for which he fought are still alive so long as we keep fighting for them. He’ll always be with us, just so long as we remember him and fight for the things that be believed in.

Use his death to advance our cause? You bet. As the Lord slowly took him from us, he was left capable of rendering only one last service to the cause for which he had lived: a death which would remind us of those things that are sacred to all real Americans. This gives us a chance to pause and reflect. A time to remember that America has been in danger before and, because of him and men like him, it has always pulled though and come out greater than it was before.,

Reagan always believed that America’s best days were still ahead. I believe that as well. This is an idea which will only live so long as we carry it within our hearts and pass it on to the generations that come after. That’s the real legacy of Ronald Reagan: the revival of that view of America as the shining city on the hill, a beacon to all whose hearts are open.

Ronald Reagan’s body may soon be a’mouldering in the grave- but his soul is marching on. Let’s keep it that way.

posted by Yoshi at 12:21 PM

Saturday, June 05, 2004

Reagan Tribute

I'm working on one, but it won't be done tonight. I want to get it just right.

posted by Yoshi at 8:47 PM

"Now he belong to the ages"

Ronald Wilson Reagan, dead at 93.

Goodbye, Sir.

posted by Yoshi at 1:59 PM

Friday, June 04, 2004

Edwin Stanton

For some reason the words of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton upon the death of President Lincoln echo in my mind:

"Now he belongs to the ages."

Whether he passes now or in the future is immaterial. In the end Ronald Reagan will be remembered as the greatest world leader since Winston Churchill and the greatest President since Franklin Roosevelt or perhaps, even, Father Abraham himself.

"If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace?"

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

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

We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

And so, good-bye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. "

posted by Yoshi at 11:07 PM

Sad News...

Earlier tonight a source on Democratic Underground reported that former President Ronald Reagan is near death. This is sad and yet uplifting news. No decent person, yet alone a man so great as Ronald Wilson Reagan, should be made to suffer through what that man and his family have.

If you want to see what contemptible shit most partisan Democrats are, I invite you to read this thread at Democrat Underground.

Now, let's make this clear: I use strong language and I wish death upon the enemies of America. But I would never revel in the death of any American President, even those (such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) that I hold in contempt. Let's review a few remarks, shall we?

Lou_C says: "Bonzo's owner wouldn't want shit buried by his pet chimp", of the former President.

Dolo Amber says: I didn't know pure evil could die!

Mike_C says: at the last minute it will leave his body... and briefly inhabit every bullet killing an innocent victim of U.S. foreign policy everywhere on Earth before returning to Hell with a smile on its face.

impeachbushnow says: in the case of Nancy, Im sorry but she deserves every single thing she has had to deal with over these past 20 years. My Father -in-law just passed away last month after having Alzheimer's for the past 10 years so I have a pretty good understanding of whats involved. Yeah, it is a living hell not only for the person but for those in the family. I'll say it again, she got everything she deserved.

I'm going to stop now. Reading what these bastards say already has me wanting to find the nearest liberal and beat him unconcious.

God Bless Ronald Reagan and may he guide him on his journey into the next life.

At this hour I cannot help but wonder if, even now, he will do one last service to his country by using the last means available to him to assist his spiritual successor.

posted by Yoshi at 10:48 PM

Thursday, June 03, 2004

The Coming of the Anglosphere

In what will be a shattering development, the UK Independence Party (the only major political party in Britain which favours British withdrawal from the European Union) looks sure to capture at least 20% of the vote in the elections for the European Parliament on June 10th. They may well even place either first or second in the race. At this point, if everything breaks just right, it’s also possible that Canada will soon have a Conservative government committed to closer ties with the United States and Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, will be re-elected. In other words, the time is right for a fresh idea to be proposed.

What I propose is this, in the near future, representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be invited to Washington (or London, or Ottawa, or Canberra, or Wellington) to develop and sign a treaty which provides for a formal Alliance between these countries and creates a common market for all. All tariffs and virtually all labour mobility restrictions between citizens of these nations would cease to exist.

A formal structure for military cooperation would be devised. Each nation would retain its right to undertake independent military action and no other nation would be bound to join (though all would be bound to join in the event of an attack on the soil of another member). However, the terms of the treaty would deny any signatory the right to actively oppose action taken by another or to deny another the use of any bases set aside by the treaty for such action. Thus would the theoretical “Anglosphere” become a sort of combination of NATO and the old European Economic Community. To avoid the pitfalls of the European experience the terms of the treaty would explicitly forbid any trans-national meddling in the affairs of any member of the Alliance by any other member.

Out of necessity, the Alliance would be restricted only to the five nations I’ve named above or, in other words, to Britain, the United States, and what were called the “white” Dominions. The reasons for this are obvious: these five nations are the only five in the entire world which share sufficient commonalities to allow for the creation of such a close alliance without much trouble. Americans who are understandably alarmed at the prospect of tens of millions of Third Worlders streaming over the borders in the event of the creation of an economic union spanning the Americans are unlikely to be particularly menaced by the prospect of the transfer of a few million Britons to America (and a few million Americans to Britain) or any of the other scenarios which would develop in such a situation. In order to avoid the problem of having refugees enter the nation with the easiest standards (probably Canada or the UK) and then moving on to nations which are harder to immigrate to (the United States and Australia) only citizens of each nation would be granted this freedom. Additionally, each nation would retain the explicit right to exclude any individual it wishes for security reasons and to bar citizens originally from a third country.

Moreover, since all of these nations share a roughly equal level of economic development the problems inherent in other free trade deals (whether or not the benefits which come with the acceptance of those problems are worthy compensation) are unlikely to develop here. If anything, the relatively higher-taxed and more heavily-regulated economies of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are likely to be forced to liberalize further in order to compete with the United States. Of course, for these four members, the hardships of bringing their economies into line are likely to be swiftly ameliorated by the strong economic growth they would then experience.

I’m not sure what to call this alliance. The “League of Good Nations” was one that quickly came to mind before being discarded. That probably isn’t really the point, in any case.

People who reject the present international order are often tarred by their opponents are “isolationists” or “Little Englanders”, as though the European Union and the United Nations were created by divine writ and made eternal by the will of the Lord. Most people who oppose the UN or the EU don’t object to alliances or trade agreements, they just object to the ones that exist, both on the grounds that the present agreements work poorly and that they soil the good names of our nations by forcing us to bind ourselves to the unworthy: the French or the Chinese, for example.

We are for internationalism. It’s just that we’re for good internationalism. We know who our friends our and we will defend them to the uttermost. Of those nations whose association with us promises greater security and prosperity, we welcome a close and just alliance. What we object to is the exercise of pretending that anyone should give a damn what Somalia thinks about the world or that we should take into consideration the views of Bangladesh when formulating our foreign policy.

To me, at least, it seems utterly sensible that we ought to solemnly affirm our glorious Anglo-American heritage and find a new use for it in this century. It’s quite clear that one of the trends of the coming years will be the consolidation of regional power. However, given the political culture of the rest of the Americas (and the economic status of the same), it would be foolishness to attempt to bind our fate to theirs. Either we will spend the next decades constantly bailing our supposed “partners” or our gift of access to the American market will allow them to develop and demand a real say in the world. Neither development would be in the American national interest.

Better then, I think, to create a global power bloc based not upon proximity but upon blood, honour, and heritage. Our nations have stood together in some of the worst moments in the history of humanity: and we have prevailed. Together, in the new and hostile world we face today, we can prevail once again.

Other nations might later be allowed to join in the defense alliance and the free trade aspects of the deal but, absent the consent of all five signatories, the internal mobility of persons would be restricted to the original signers (though, perhaps, if they leave the EU as well the Irish might be allowed to join with equal standing to the original members).

Frankly, beyond the superstitions of a few addled anti-Americans (and a few hard-core xenophobes in the United States) I see no reason why this proposal shouldn’t be acted upon without delay. After all: what wrong can come from allowing the free movement of American goods and people into Australia and the reciprocal movement of Australians and Australian goods into the United States?

The creation of such an alliance would mark a realignment of the power in the world. An increasingly-European United Kingdom would be returned to its roots, as would an Australia which increasingly sees its future in Asia. Additionally, the probable prosperity of an American-allied Britain might well prove to be fatal blow to the project for European unity. Imagine being a German or a Pole twenty years hence and seeing your nation stuck with massive social services bills, millions of Third World Migrants, an anaemic growth rate, and unemployment over 10% while your British neighbours enjoy twice the growth and half the unemployment in their low-tax, deregulated jurisdiction.

Now is the time for new thinking. The events of the past several years have given us a real chance to throw off the shackles of the old power structure which have gripped us ever since the end of the Second World War. We must seize the moment and bring about the realignment of the world.

posted by Yoshi at 10:29 PM

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Necessary Evil

William Manchester died yesterday. He was eighty-two. Frankly, I was surprised to learn that he was still alive at all. I own a number of his books (American Caesar, one of my favourites, The Glory and the Dream, The Arms of Krupp, and both volumes of his projected three volume biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, which will now sadly never be finished). I’d actually read the second volume of The Last Lion only last month so, upon hearing of his death, my mind drifted to a passage which had remained caught in my head. Describing the widespread sexual degeneracy of Weimar Germany, he lingers on the person of Anita Berber, a glamorous showgirl who was the idol of thousands of young girls across all Germany. Anita, he says, danced naked, mainlined cocaine and morphine, and had sex with both men and women on top of bars while men and women watched and fondled eachother. Anita, he then goes on to note, was dead at twenty-nine and so, by then, was the Weimar Republic.

Most histories of Weimar Germany show that it was a far more sexually “liberated” (to use the modern parlance) place than almost anywhere else in the world. Why? It seems to be a result of a combination of factors but, in the broadest sense, it seems to be that the horrors of the First World War and the seeming hopelessness of the future left many of the Germans of that day with nothing to live for but the present. For these people there were no Teutonic ancestors urging them on, their myths had been shattered on the battlefields of the Great War, just as had the belief that the German nation and people shared a common destiny. This ultimately left the German people vulnerable to any madman who came along and promised to restore order to the resultant chaos.

I find it funny that many of the same people who push crackpot theories about the need for “sustainable” economic development simply fail to perceive that our present social structure is far less “sustainable” than our economic one. Our present culture is infected by a sick nihilism, a deliberate ignorance of history and a sense of fundamental despair about the future, a sorry state which endangers all of us.

I fear that either our civilization will be consumed by the chaos of the coming years or that it will be hijacked by some band of Totalitarian-minded madmen who offer it the false hope of revival through the regimentation and control of the state. People, after all, are more likely to embrace solutions which match their own prior convictions and what, in twenty or thirty years, will the “prior convictions” of the average American be? I fear also that that only path to restoration is fraught with difficulty, terror, and death. The cure, in many ways, will be more unpleasant than the disease.

People often accuse me of being a totalitarian, but I reject the charge. I wish nothing more than to restore and older, more free, and more confident America. An America of people who work hard and are rewarded for that work. An America where our history (our real history, that is) is known and cherished. An America where ghetto “culture” stays in the ghetto. A better, stronger, purer, and more moral America.

People fail (or refuse) to comprehend the totality of the crisis which lies before us. We must meet, and deal with, the threat of a rising China, of Islamism, of Latin American radicalism, and come to terms with the problems of a crumbling Europe. We must somehow save an economy threatened by the massive social services burden that the Baby Boomers expect the generations that come after them to bear.

We must do all of this while we contend with a demographic collapse, with waves of un-integrated immigrants, and with a populace generally unwilling to make even the smallest of sacrifices in order to meet these threats. Thus is the struggle which lies before us.

Herein lays the confusion: how do we solve these conundrums? The only possible way is through the use of extreme measures- many of which may sound nearly totalitarian in their conception but which would be liberal (in the best sense of the word) in practice. Some of these measures would be evil, yes, but they would be a justifiable and a necessary evil. As Machiavelli explained, evil acts are sometimes necessary to meet a crisis. Evil can be justified so long as there is no other reasonable means of recovering a situation and its use is restricted to moments of necessity.

For example, it might have been “evil” to drop a hundred nuclear bombs on China during the Korean War, but it would have been a justifiable evil in that it would both have brought the war in Korea to a victorious conclusion for the United States and it would have headed off any future threat posed to the world by China. Similarly, it might be “evil” to have Michael Moore and other “dissenters” hauled before a military tribunal, tried, and hanged for treason- but it would be certainly justifiable if the only alternative were to be defeat in Iraq. The death of every single anti-war protestor in the entire world would be an entirely justifiable and completely moral act if the alternative were to be defeat. No situation ever justifies American defeat. Even if the United States were to be faced with conquest and occupation by a coalition consisting of the rest of the world it would be morally preferable to let the missiles fly and burn the Earth to ashes than to allow America to be conquered. A world in which a power, or combination of powers, capable of conquering the United States existed probably wouldn’t be worth living in anyways.

In this we must always understand this truth: the survival of the United States of America and the maintenance of its power justifies any action, however extreme it may be. The United States is the New Jerusalem, the chosen country of the Lord, it can do no wrong. It can be poorly led and its people can do great wrongs, but America itself can do no wrong.

We must bring death and destruction to all enemies of America and we must reclaim her from the cabal which has seized control of her culture and seeks to pervert and distort the values of its young. We must take back Hollywood from the band of deviants who presently use it as a bully pulpit to indoctrinate the young in the values of the left and who make their money by making movies for world market, rather than for the American people. We must take back the schools and throw out the books which teach PC revisionist anti-Americanism. We must purge the negative slant from American history and teach the good. Instead to stilly stories, designed to help self-esteem of various minority groups, children should be indoctrinated to revere the truly great men of history: the people who really count. Men like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Oliver Cromwell, King Henry V, King Edward I, Pope Urban II, Augustus, Pericles and others whose names have nearly disappeared from the narratives of history taught to our young. We should thrill and inspire children with the stories of the great statesmen and bold soldiers of the West. Instead of spending entire semesters telling children about domestic racism and the role of women in the Second World War, they ought to have the citations of winners of the Medal of Honor read to them- stories of men so heroic that, if they appeared in an action movie, you simply wouldn’t believe them. Instead of a school system designed to create a generation of young Gandhi’s, Mandela’s and King’s, we should seek a generation filled with people who aspire the magnificent examples of our real history.

Hope can be found in the great men who came before us and met challenges as terrible as any that any man has ever faced. Winston Churchill, defiant and alone, in the awful summer of 1940. Abraham Lincoln, faced with the prospect of defeat and dissolution of the Union, in 1864. Britain, defiant and alone again, saved from invasion by the brilliance of fair Nelson. The three hundred Spartans, doomed to die, standing up to the might of Persia at Thermopylae. These must be our examples. These must be our heroes.

America cannot be allowed to go the way of the Weimar Republic- we cannot allow it. The fate of the world depends upon us in this generation who remain animated by the ancient spirits that guided our ancestors. It is only through our determination, our will, and yes, ultimately, our blood that the world may be saved.

posted by Yoshi at 10:42 AM