Choices, Walls, Models

I am reminded of the story of the person fleeing the old USSR confronted with the set of choices of "soap" in a grocery store in the US. In the USSR they could MAYBE get a bar of soap, but here there were tons of bars, liquids, hair, body, scents, colors ... simply too much choice. They were paralyzed with indecision.

Having 9 computers around the house if I count desktops and laptops including work machines for my wife and I, an e-mail and web-page site on a local magnaspeed.net, as well as a Mac laptop and at least a place to PUT a web page at Mac.com and I find myself with something akin to that paralysis. So for my "unscented bar", blogger.com for now ;-)

Listening to NPR and the rest of the lefties today I was struck by their level of glee and starvation for ANY " bad news" from Iraq. In a week when the newly elected Parliment is just getting down to business, we get breathless reporting on the "CRUMBLING coalition" because Italy is going to pull out. Those that want success and democracy of course always live with the concern that "bad things are just a bomb away". It has, and always will be easier to kick down the barn door than to build a new one. The left has made their bed with "The Disaster of Iraq", and if reality doesn't match their dire view their credibility will be further eroded, so they hunger for things to go badly.

Even the local liberal paper today raised the ugly spectre (to them) of "What if Bush was right?". If I make a simple prediction, like "it will snow tomorrow", there is always SOME chance I will be right. The decision to hold Saddam to the UN resolutions was never that simple, but like any choice, only a fool (or apparently a liberal) would decide there is ZERO chance of the choice being shown to be correct.

One definition of intelligence is "the ability to predict the future". Reagan said that the USSR was an "evil empire", and that we would "consign them to the ash heap of history". Liberals told us he was a fool, the USSR wasn't evil, and any idea that they were going away was so wrong as to be a sign of insanity. Today of course, they tell us it was "obvious all along, and Reagan had nothing to do with it". Their model was completely non-predictive, and what is more, they have failed to learn from their lack of prediction, so are unable to improve on their model for future use.

This time they have staked their reputation on Iraq not becoming a democracy and the situation there never improving to the point where it can be seen as a good decision to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussien. If the elections in Iraq turn out to be "The Berlin Wall of the Middle East", the liberal model will have failed to make a correct prediction about the future in a major way for the 2nd time in a generation.

How obvious is it that the liberal position is more intelligent?