A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Tour-Human-Consciousness-Impostor/dp/0131872788/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I need to do a better job of keeping my Blog up to date with my reading. I have a tendency to read a book, be excited about the next book, and rather than taking the time to make a few notes in the Blog, I start reading again. I recently finished the subject book by V. S. Ramachandran. It is a very short book, and quite accessible for books on the subject. The main assertion is that by taking detailed looks at small unusual brain syndromes we can come to a better understanding of standard brain mechanisms, including those that give rise to consciousness.

There is a condition called “Capgras Delusion” where the patient thinks their mother is an imposter. It can also happen with other people or even pets, but the specific initial case involved the mother. What is happened seems to be that the linkage of emotional content to the face has been lost. There is a place in your brain called the Fusiform Gyrus that recognizes “objects” including faces, but this has to be linked to “emotional content” in the Amygdala for you to “feel it is your mother”.

There are a number of examples like this discussed … phantom limbs, and his favorite, synesthesia, a condition where the senses are mingled. A musical note might be perceived as a color, or the number 5 may be seen as red and the number 6 green. It turns out that this kind of cross-wiring is quite common, as much as one in two hundred people, and seven times more common in artists.

He hangs quite a lot on synesthesia, including the development of language, long a mystery to strong materialists and evolutionists. He asserts that there is enough “standard cross wiring” in all of us so that there are “basic connections” that all peoples have built off to create language from grunts, groans, squeals, etc. One has to admire the level of faith that very intelligent people will go to in order to avoid the idea that there is some “intelligent design” in the universe. As Luther said, humans are creatures of worship, so we worship something. Ramachandran has a firm faith in the god of randomness.

There is a fun chapter on art that attempts to create 10 universal laws of art: Peak Shift, Grouping, Contrast, Isolation, Perceptual Problem Solving, Symmetry, Abhorrence of coincidence, Repetition-Rhythm-orderliness, balance and Metaphor. I won’t go into them all, but for someone not very adept at understanding art, it was an interesting set of ideas. The artist is executing “the lie that revels the truth” (Picasso). By causing our brains to fire in ways that a “faithful reproduction” of what the artist is trying to get across, the artist creates a work that is “more faithful than nature” in conveying the information to a HUMAN brain.

The book ends up with a series of discussions of consciousness, this time led off with a condition called Cotard’s syndrome where the patient claims to be dead. In this case the vision centers have been cut off from ALL emotional content, so the patient has no feelings of anything around them. Interestingly such patients are very resistant to intellectual correction. Once such a delusional model has developed the connection (or lack of) to emotion seems to prevent then from seeing the reality that others can see. Somewhat like trying to talk your best friend out of marrying their 3rd alcoholic spouse it would seem.

Maybe the reason that I don’t get around to putting all the books in is because I write too much! All in all a very good little book on the subject, interesting, well written, and highly recommended.

Madison and Time

The last couple of days were spent going down to Madison WI and touring the campus with my oldest son and wife. Lots of memories flood back to my brain as I walk State Street and the campus, as the first time that I was down there was my Sophomore year of HS for state speech tournament. The town seemed unbelievably big to someone coming from a farm near a town of 2K with a HS class of 140, and the University seemed completely beyond conception to a person whose Father had graduated 8th grade and Mother had done a two year teachers college. I was awed.

I made two further trips there in HS, one for speech and one for a few days at a state 4-H event. Both still real adventures. My view of college was “something you do to enable you to get a better job”, something that I never really saw the error in until years after taking my current job. What you believe about life is as least as important as the abilities that you may or may not have. I believed Madison was beyond my capabilities, and therefore it was.

Things are different now. With over a quarter century at a large company with many personal and business trips to many cities and a few other countries, Madison has shrunk quite a bit, but it is still a big school. The college kids have gotten A LOT younger, but it is still a very impressive University and it is high on my son’s list of hopes, along with getting into Naval ROTC. So many bittersweet feelings to see someone you love so deeply on the doorstep of adult life with all the opportunity, challenge, risk, decisions, competition, promise, dreams, unknowns and determination sweeping them onward. It is the way that things are meant to be, and there is so little more that a parent can do beyond love and prayers. There are a lot of special times in parenthood, but this one seems especially poignant.

The truth that no matter what the discussions, books, movies, or thoughts we think, we only live a single life is a sense that floods over me at a lot of occasions. We can plan for and envision the future, we can talk or read of how others experience events, but the reality of living them is often quite different. While I might wish that the school for the first to leave the nest was closer still than 3+ hours away, there is nothing else to wish for than the best that gives his life what he desires. There is lots of drama to be worked out in the next year.

In a bigger picture I was struck by the energy and optimism of a major US University in the face of the daily pessimism that the MSM provides. When I first went down there in ’72 the culture was still the radical “tear down the country” view at a university where they had bombed the math building in ’70. We walked by that building and the tour guide mentioned the bombing and pointed to the difference in the bricks on the building, they purposely didn’t match the color.

It is a much quieter place than it was in the ‘70s, and the focus is on academics and sports, and quietly (with parents around) that it is “the #1 party school”. The single reference to politics during all the presentations was to the effect that, yes the school is politically active, and maybe liberal (MAYBE?), but it also has the 2nd largest number of Young Republicans of any US campus. The students doing the talking to prospective students were certainly talking about cooping, interning, and getting job offers from major US corporations … not marching down State Street.

Who Needs Air America?

Found this little gem this evening at http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/18/leakprobe.ap/index.html

When Air America was started it’s proponents claimed that something was needed to “answer Fox News and Talk Radio”. Fox news never goes this far.

The level of close-up and the unflattering nature of the picture coupled with the heading tells you all you need to know, but this is SUPPOSED to be “news”, not editorial. I’ve written on this topic before, but this is so completely over the top that it is hard to imagine even talk radio attempting to put out this level of mis-statement, even if they DID label it as “editorial”. It is at the same level of “fact” as the Rather manufactured documents. Some basic points:

• The whole statement of “slash and burn assault” is completely ridiculous. Want to compare it with the Clinton administration and James Carvelle coming out and saying of Paula Jones; “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park and you never know what you will dredge up”? How about finding out and disclosing a 30 year old affair by Congressman Henry Hyde? The list was constant and endless. The previous administration was completely “slash and burn” and had two guys … Carvelle and Begala dedicated to doing just that. The MSM LOVED it!
• It was well known in Washington that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, and she hadn’t been undercover for 6 years. There never was anything to leak, and there wasn’t any damage caused. The whole “damage” is press created. Rather than create false documents this is a “create a false story in broad daylight” … since one set of people only follow the MSM we can tell them whatever we want and make it a “real story”.
• The whole “faulty British Intelligence” discussion was investigated by an independent prosecutor in Britain, and the head of the BBC that brought up the “sexed up” claim was the one forced to resign.

It seems there is currently no limit to the level of malfeasance of the MSM. If a Democrat was forced to submit to these sorts of scrutiny, bombing Chinese embassies, making deals with North Korea to give them nuclear reactors and fuel, donor maintenance events, no controlling legal authority, and perjury would all have been nasty problems. For a Republican administration all that is needed is to make up a problem out of whole cloth and keep reporting on it. There is a good reason why reasonable Americans that would rather not waste their time reading information that is less accurate than the National Enquirer have just decided to just ignore the MSM entirely and go elsewhere.

Miers Forces

I’ve read a number of well written articles on the Harriet Miers nomination from the right of all sorts. The forces seem to pretty much stack up like this:

The extreme Bush / WH loyalists – These folks remind me of the MSM and “Standard Democrats” during the Clinton Lewinsky fiasco. The “stand by your man” crowd. Fortunately this is a very small group, since I’d argue that the label “conservative” doesn’t apply here. Consistency IS an issue for conservatives, ideas DO matter, and keeping promises is IMPORTANT. Bush has done a lot of good things, but this isn’t one of them, and supporting him in a gross error is just being a boot licking lackey.

The Paleo-Con opportunists – Bush was never their man. They may have held their nose and voted for him twice, but they don’t like Iraq, they don’t like any of the spending, they don’t like the people in the cabinet, and in general they still smell the county-club bluish blood of Bush Sr and Prescott on W. This is an opportunity to do the “see, we told you so” and they are enjoying it as much as a Paleo over enjoys anything while waiting for the sky to fall.

The Religious Right – They are a confused lot. Their leadership in the form of Dobson and others is saluting this woman because they have blessed her as “one of them”. A lot of the troops aren’t nearly as much the country bumpkins as the media would like to portray them as, but still, they are pretty sure they know what a skunk under the deck smells like when they smell one, no matter that Dobson tells them it is the neighbors nice black and white kitty.

The MSM – The feeding frenzy is wide open. They opened a wound with Katrina, Bush started floundering around, and now an unforced error. Delay, the Plame affair, falling poll numbers, things couldn’t be better. True, the voting in Iraq looked positive and the deficit is down by 23%, but those stories have been solidly buried. They feel they finally have the evil Bush on the ropes and they want him DOWN. Things haven’t been this good since Abu Grab. They have the House and Senate already in the “D column”. They may have forgotten the Republicans greatest asset. They get to run against Democrats.

The White House – The bunker mentality is operative. Peggy Noonan had a great column last week http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ “Fasten Your Beltway, It’s Going to be a Bumpy Ride”. When you start calling your own people sexist and elitist, you are driving in the ditch. I remain convinced that “something is up” at the WH, but other than my “drinking metaphor” I have no clue. The political ears suddenly all went tone deaf and we have a sudden administration personality change. Beats me, but they have lost it for the moment.

The Lefties – They are happy about fighting on the Right and anything that is bad for Bush is hard to not be a little happy about. There is some confusion here too however. The term “evangelical Christian” is not a term they like to see associated with someone wearing black robes. They are enjoying the fireworks, but realize that when the party is over they likely have to get this woman voted down, and after that they wonder what they will get.

Me and all the reasonable, intelligent people that agree with me ;-) – The shock is wearing off. Bush decided to shoot himself and he is bleeding, so where do we go from here? What is the best way out from this point? My feeling that the worst thing is to get her confirmed, therefore I am in huge agreement with Noonan … Meyers withdrawing is best, not getting her out of committee is next, and if need be, she has to be voted down in the Senate. One hates to be in a coalition with Teddy Kennedy, but Politics is a messy game. If the WH doesn’t come to this could get even messier, thank God this is ’05 and not ’06, or it would be real trouble. There is LONG time to go until the off-years, plenty of time for recovery, but so far no signs of that.

Not an enjoyable time for most conservatives, but there is still the possibility that it could turn out OK. Having a little honest squabble in the ranks from time to time can help people of principle sort out what is really important and come together stronger when the dust clears. It could also fracture the Reagan coalition and begin the rise of the Democrats too, but while the MSM is hopeful of that, so far they show now signs of having anything to run on other than “we are not Bush” at this point. Winning an off-year with no platform isn’t going to be that easy a task even if Bush keeps trying to screw up the pudding.

Quiet Please

It appears that there are a couple of pieces of good news well buried in the MSM. First the most secret, the deficit dropped $93 Billion in one year, a reduction of 23% with no increase in taxes and complete lack of control on the spending side. If anyone could see their way clear to reduce THE RATE OF GROWTH in spending to something like the inflation rate we would be back to surpluses in no time … or at least just prior to 2008 when Social Security can no longer fund itself from the payroll tax.

An article off CNN will be available for awhile at http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/14/federaldeficit.ap/

The article even included the following now little reported fact: “The White House and most economists say the truest measure of the deficit is relative to the size of the economy. In those terms, the deficit measured 2.6 percent of gross domestic product. The 2004 deficit, by contrast, equaled 3.6 percent of GDP. That is well below the post-World War II worst-ever record, a 6 percent figure set in 1983 under President Reagan.”

I love that paragraph. First of all “The White House and …”. Why wouldn’t one simply say that economists, mathematicians, news people without bias, and in fact anyone that understands numbers in any way realizes that numbers must be compared in a context? Absolute dollar figures unadjusted for inflation are very misleading. Quoting deficits as anything OTHER than either a percentage of GDP or adjusting for inflation is more a statement of political bias than it is an attempt to convey information. Well, even though that is true, I guess the MSM couldn’t very well state it could they? It is also interesting how they combine “post-WWII” and “worst-ever”. Wouldn’t “post-WWII” pretty much cover it? “Worst-ever” would seem to make one think of something else. Why wouldn’t one say something like “The worst figure since FDR’s record deficits was in 1983 during the Reagan administration? Oh, that’s right, FDR was a Democrat, those are the good guys.

If there were an unbiased media it might be useful for people in a democracy to know that a growing economy has reduced the deficit 23% in one year and that the current deficit numbers are well off historical highs. People might be able to make rational choices with information like that, but a headline of “Deficit Drops Below Last Years Record” with an immediate promise it will rise again next year and they bury the story should be good enough to make sure nobody much gets the news.

The second piece is the VERY quiet voting on the constitution in Iraq. Apparently the MSM realized that they were too shocked the last time around and actually reported the story for a couple of days, so this time they are gong to be even more silent in hopes that the good news will be unnoticed, hopelessness on Iraq will be maintained, and the Bush poll numbers can continue to suffer.

It appears that turnout was larger than in January. In January there were 347 violent attacks during the election, this time there were 13. Sunnis turned out in significant numbers and two heavily Sunni provinces voted against the Constitution as expected, but unexpectedly, two Sunni provinces appear to have voted in favor. To anyone but a Terrorist or liberal these would be very positive signs that would deserve strong reporting at a minimum. Determining what side the MSM isn’t very hard to do.

Fighting the Last War

The following is stolen from The Best of the Web, I couldn’t see how to write the sentiment any better.

"In a letter to his top deputy in Iraq, al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader said the United States 'ran and left their agents' in Vietnam and the jihadists must have a plan ready to fill the void if the Americans suddenly leave Iraq," the Associated Press reports from Washington: 

"Things may develop faster than we imagine," Ayman al-Zawahri wrote in a letter to his top deputy in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam--and how they ran and left their agents--is noteworthy. . . . We must be ready starting now." . . .
"More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media," he wrote.

Is Iraq another Vietnam? Zarqawi thinks so, as do "antiwar" politicians here in America and many in the media. And in this respect, at least, Iraq does resemble Vietnam: America's enemies and domestic opponents of the war, acting in sync if not in concert, are attempting to defeat the war effort "in the battlefield of the media."

But there the similarity ends. For one thing, the media are nowhere near as monolithic, or as powerful, as they were during the Vietnam era. Arguably the war in Vietnam was lost when Walter Cronkite declared as much after the Tet Offensive. Cronkite's lapse into advocacy was, as Newsweek's Howard Fineman argued in January, the beginning of the end of "the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press." Cronkite and his successors squandered the public trust they had earned, with the result that no journalist today--no, not even your humble Moose Blogger!--comes anywhere close to wearing the mantle of "most trusted man in America."

For another, there is no serious antiwar movement today. Antiwar protests in 2005 consist of the same crackpot rent-a-mobs who long before 9/11 were disrupting meetings of groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Cindy Sheehan is a case in point: Sold by the media as a grieving Everymom, she turned out to be an America-hating lunatic. Thus, as we noted Monday, there is no move among American politicians, outside the Angry Left fringe, to withdraw from Iraq or defund the effort there.( The Senate voted last Friday to give President Bush $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism, money that would push total spending for the operations beyond $350 billion. The vote was 97-0)

But what about those public opinion polls that show a majority of Americans think liberating Iraq was "a mistake"? The same polls show a majority opposing a precipitous pullout. This seems to be a contradiction, but it really isn't. The idea that Iraq was a "mistake" reflects anxiety about another Vietnam-like defeat; the opposition to withdrawal reflects a determination not to let that happen.

In short, those who hope for another Vietnam appear to have succeeded, for the moment, in persuading most Americans to fear another Vietnam. But that is a far cry from persuading them to accept another Vietnam.

One of the many things I never understand about the left is if it gives them any pause to be in agreement with the people that one would assume are their enemies as well as the enemies of all civilized people. Guys that like to set up roadside bombs, cut off peoples heads with glee, and unquestionably took credit for 9-11 are matter of factly saying that they are thinking that the anti-war folks and the MSM in the US might be “winning” soon, which would bring the troops out of Iraq, so al-Qaeda should “be ready”.

Since I eschew the “left is stupid” idea, I’m left with thoughts like the following:

• They are incompetent or deluded on this. They either don’t care to follow the news well enough, or have decided that there is some conspiracy making things like this note up and the terrorists are really living in fear of the US leaving Iraq.
• They simply don’t care. 9-11, or “9-11x1000” they feel the US deserves it, and it doesn’t matter what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each US soldiers life is just too precious and it doesn’t matter how many future civilians may be lost.
• What is important is that Bush proves to be a failure. In some ways, the higher the cost, the better. This US system, and especially any US with Republicans in charge needs to be changed by any means possible. If that takes a US loss in Iraq and massive terrorist attacks on US soil, it is a small price to pay for “a decent government in Washington”.

My gut tells me it is some version of “all of the above” with a lot of Bush anger and wishful or avoidance thinking about the future to drive the not caring or not looking at who their bedfellows are. This is a problem that goes way back though. The Jane Fonda’s, and even the John Kerry’s of the Vietnam era really didn’t seem to mind being associated with Ho Chi Minn or other North Vietnamese leaders that turned out to be responsible for the massacre of millions. In an even bigger picture others had no problem with being on the side of the USSR or agents of the USSR in Nicaragua, Cuba, or other places. This isn’t a new phenomenon for the left.

One can only hope that the BOW is right about the polls and Americans are able to see beyond the MSM into what needs to be done, even (especially) when it is hard.

Ending Age of Anxiety

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-101062-2

I suffered through to the end of “The Age of Anxiety”. Sometimes I REALLY wonder why I go to all the trouble of reading both sides when it is obvious that at least the left is proud to completely ignore any view but their own. This book is one of those “serious intellectual works” where it seems the author would be embarrassed to ignore the idea that there are AT LEAST two sides to most issues, and we are all in danger of doing exactly the same thing as our “sworn enemies” (McCarthy in the case of this book) if we fail to be aware of that.

I hadn’t realized the connection between Kennedy and McCarthy in that old Joe K made a deal with Joe M so that he wouldn’t come into the state to campaign for Henry Cabot Lodge who JFK defeated. JFK neglected to vote on the McCarthy censure vote. That was interesting and something that had escaped mention in any of the previous anti-McCarthy indoctrination I had received in my education or other reading. The attempts to complete the link from Hitler through McCarthy to Bush were very weak. Not even any “amazing quote material”. It was obvious that Haynes got “a little emotional” about the 2004 election.

Virtually everything that the Republicans and their minions did was a “McCarthy like dirty trick”, but the Democrats were just pure and incompetent. MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and others making accusations about Bush knowing about 9-11 in advance got no mention at all. I thought he was going to completely avoid Rathergate, but he finally DID mention it as simply an example of “incompetence”, not bias of course. He naturally hates Fox … “The years since 9-11 have produced some of the best reporting in my lifetime – and some of the worst, mostly on ideological cable outlets such as Fox News”. The left had a total MSM monopoly, and they find it "dangerous" that any alternate views are allowed. (perhaps they need a "Ministry of Truth"? 

 The Swifties get mentioned as especially egregious, and all their claims are “false”. There is no attempt to indicate that John Kerry never releasing his war records which would either prove or disprove their claims is needed. He simply knows they are lying based on how he sees the universe … much like McCarthy, but in reverse, “facts optional”. He talks of Max Cleland being taken down by a “McCarthyistic smear” and then says that he lost “three limbs in combat in Vietnam”. That is a provably false … he doesn’t have a purple heart because the limbs were lost in an accident at a US base, NOT in combat. The Democrats and the MSM made up the “smear” … Max Cleland lost his seat the old fashioned way, by voting on the department of homeland security in a manner out of step with his constituency.

Haynes unwittingly proves that “McCarthyism” is a term that needs to be expanded to include gentlemen from the left like himself, but for the left,  “business as usual” doesn’t require a name. In just the last couple weeks alone only my feeble reading has Bill Bennett being “McCarthy like smeared” by being called a racist and Al Gore bringing out the Nazi smear with “Digital Brownshirts” for bloggers that support the president. The only odd thing about “McCarthyism” is that for a brief period, a demagogue of the right stooped to use the technique that for the left is simply their daily mode of operation. 

"Racism", "homophobia", "sexism", etc are the left's version of "Red Baiting", and they use such smears constantly. 

Gore Sighting

The former VP and inventor of the internet has surfaced yet again to warn us that our Democracy is at grave risk. Why? For starters since people are watching too much Television, a point that I’d tend to agree with him on, but mostly, because there are media out there now that report both (or many) sides of issues. In Al Gore’s America, “Democracy” is imperiled by views other than Al’s being presented.

The speech is long and ill-formed as a lot of Al’s ideas, I pulled some excerpts and will provide some comment.

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.”

Yes Al, when only one side of an issue is covered things are MUCH more “clear”, but “clarity” is no substitute for “truth, information, knowledge, facts” or a whole host of other good terms.

“Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more than the world average.” I completely agree, far too much,  and a very bad choice. He doesn’t indicate how he might change that … potentially if those that select TV have less worthwhile lives in terms of accomplishment, happiness and standard of living, they might learn to make other choices? Usually liberals like Al don’t believe that people should live with the consequences of their choices, so other than “lament”. His point here is unclear.

“And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.” 

 The “strangeness” seems to be that people voted for Bush and Republicans for office in the face of all manner of thing that Al sees as completely their fault and “unpardonable”. Apparently an “Al marketplace” is a lot like the old USSR where there was one kind of soap and they either had it or they didn’t. Al sees the US “idea marketplace” as having been “destroyed” by the introduction of ideas and people that don’t agree with Al.

“As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."” 

Somehow Al seems to have forgotten that Dan ran a news story trying to effect an election with fake documents and lost his job because of that. In the “good old days” of course CBS would have “protected their sources” and kept the “documents” under lock and key so nobody would have been the wiser. Ah yes, the world with a “marketplace” of all the same ideas … “fake but true”, and EFFECTIVE at least in the past from Al’s view. Pity. It is easy to understand why Al and Dan lament the passing of the infallibility of the MSM.

“As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.” 

 He gets a bit more clear here I think. Opinions that don’t agree with Al have no place in the “marketplace of ideas”. The proper way for a good liberal intellectual to deal with such ideas is to call them names. Liberal intellectuals and playground bullies have a lot of the same sensibilities and apparent level of maturity. If you can’t defend your beliefs, try to pass a law that limits speech so you don’t have to. What a great way to defend “democracy”.

“…And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” 

We persist in the name calling only we go for the Nazi theme now. If the media isn’t 100% in “Goose Step” against a Republican president 100% of the time, the most rational thing to do is to play that Nazi card. That McCarthy was SO terrible calling people commies. Nice intelligent people call others Nazis! It makes it all clear how the left is so far superior to the right when it comes to name calling. The left has a name for the phenomenon when the finger points their way “McCarthyism”, when the finger points the other way there is no name. “Normal” doesn’t require a name.

“It is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.” 

 Ah, the “summation”. I found it amazing he never mentioned Fox directly … perhaps he just forgot. There is some evidence that an Al Gore "Democracy” CAN’T actually survive the conservative position being presented, so since one has to assume from this speech that it is HIS view of “Democracy” that we need to preserve, he is probably right. If people are allowed to see more than one side then ideologues from the left like Al will be labeled as such and most people will reject their views.

A grave risk indeed.

Broken Promises

The left has been crowing about “the end of the Bush Administration” at least since Katrina, but it appears that today was the day. I wrote before about Bush the elder’s attempt to appease the left by breaking his no new taxes pledge earlier. Bush the Jr breaking his campaign promise to appoint in the mold of Thomas and Scalia TWICE is impossible to even understand.

There are those that say that we don’t KNOW how either Roberts or Miers will turn out in the future, but that is the point. Neither does Bush! The promise was to appoint in the mold of Thomas and Scalia was made clearly during the election, and it was well known what mold they were of at the TIME THEY WERE APPOINTED! It makes little difference at this point if they turn out to the most conservative judges in the history of the court. There is nothing in their records that would lead one to believe they would so turn out, and since liberalism is a far wider and easier path to travel, those that aren’t specifically and clearly identifiable as conservatives by the time they are middle aged almost never are.

Post Katrina there is a shift and loss of control in the Bush administration. It has come on many fronts; the excessive response to Katrina in dollar figures, the apology for slow response to Katrina where none was needed, the out of control press interactions and flying around the country in advance of Rita, and even the very odd distancing from Bill Bennett on the “aborting blacks” non-comment. If Blacks don’t like Bennett being AGAINST their babies (and all others) being aborted, maybe it explains why they are FOR the liberals wanting to see a higher percentage of their babies aborted.

This shift seems too out of character and too sudden for it to be “accidental” to me. The rumor was jokingly raised in a conversation today that “Bush is drinking again”. I have no reason to believe that is true, but it would be as good a metaphor as any for the behavior.

Appointment of a 60-year old Harriett Miers to the Court is a move that simply defies logic. Republicans have waited for over 20 years to have what is supposedly a conservative president and a 55 seat majority in the Senate after millions of dollars and hours of contributions to elect all of the above. This kind of slap in the face to the faithful that have raised the money and done the work is extremely likely to result in the loss of both houses of Congress in next years elections, followed no doubt by the loss of Iraq. It has the makings of a debacle of epic proportions and there is simply no reason to be seen. This is a decision that has a huge chance of kicking off a slide back to the hopelessness of the Democrat 70’s as the heart of the Republican party throws up it’s hands and decides there simply never was any use in the dedication to the cause of preservation of the Constitution of the US.

Potentially the reason for the slide will become clear in the next few months, or maybe it is simply that the Bush genetics can’t handle poll numbers below some minimal threshold and lose contact with reality. I don’t believe in “giving up hope”, but this is a “tester”. The thought occurs to me that although Bush has failed to use a veto, it may be time for the Republican controlled Senate to take the bull by the horns and vote this nomination down. This nasty racist Republican was DREAMING of Janice Rogers Brown. What a sad substitute this is!

Freak O Bennett

Reading a book on McCarthyism and having the Bill Bennett deal come up while reading it is almost too weird. Last week on his radio show, in the process of REJECTING an argument that abortion is economically to blame for there not being enough young around the pay the social security bills of the old, Bill Bennett said:

“It's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could--if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

It turns out that he later credited the discussion to the book “Freakonomics” by Steven D Levitt (Economist) covered in this Blog under “The Criminal Roe Effect”. Levitt is an economist and points out that since abortion disproportionately takes the lives of black, single parent, and poor children, and those groups have higher crime rates, abortion reduces the crime rate. The book was published earlier this year and is a NYT best seller … not a complaint has been heard about IT or it’s authors as being “racists”.

The comments from Bennett of course immediately elicited the charge of “racist” and the expected set of calls for his radio program to be removed from the airwaves by the FCC, including from Harry Reid and John Conyers.

The closest name we have for this “McCarthyism of the left” is “Political Correctness”, but that is a term that is far from chilling enough. “Racism” and “Sexism” are used as one way bludgeons by the MSM and Democrats to enforce their own form of thought control whenever the opportunity arises. Robert Byrd gets a pass but Bill Bennett is jumped on and every attempt is made to silence his speech entirely. Haynes Johnson recoils in horror when CONSUMERS decide to boycott the Dixie Chicks after their claim on foreign soil that they were “embarrassed that the President was from Texas”, but elected Congressmen trying to take Bill Bennett off the radio for making a comment that is technically irrefutable and previously published in a best selling book is completely acceptable.

Clarence Thomas is submitted to a high tech lynching over a 10 year old claim that he MENTIONED an X rated movie and a potential pubic hair on a can of Coke. NOW and all other women’s organizations remain completely silent when Bill Clinton is accused of dropping his pants in front of a female employee.

What the left wants, and has had for most of the past 50 years is “one-way McCarthyism”. They define the term, and make the term to mean “from the right”, and never acknowledge that they do the exact same thing only using a much wider set of levers than just “Communism”. They carry it out with a broad set of groups from the NAACP, NAARL, NOW, Sierra Club, ACLU as well as the MoveOn.orgs and others. Those that fail to follow the proscribed “correct thinking and speech” are subjected to any means of censure possible by the powers of the left. They hated McCarthy because he provided them a taste of their own medicine. They continue to hate all else but the bleating of their own voices in unison.

Living With McCarthy

I seem to be in a liberal book reading mode lately and am about half way through “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” by Haynes Johnson. The book has received some lefty accolades and it looks as if it’s intent is to tie the idea that “Terrorism” isn’t really a threat, just like the left found “Communism” to not be a threat, so attempts to stop terror are a lot like McCarthyism.

The book begins with a long discrediting of McCarthyism as if such a think would ever be needed to be done for the millionth time, it is already an “ism” after all. The book however does a boringly complete recounting of the minutia of the giant edifice of “accepted thought” or “what we all know” in this country as presented by the union left educational system and the left media. To be a Christian on the right in this country is to live with “institutional McCarthyism” every day of your life. McCarthy provided the left with a brief period of “going too far” in the early ‘50s and they still will never forget the “horror” of it, and will make sure we don’t either.

The simplest little example in a nutshell is on page 31 of the book: “He was not interested in ideas, except in appropriating the thoughts of opinions of others if they helped him exploit an issue like Communism. His law degree and native intelligence notwithstanding he was ill-educated, had no sense of history, and was incurious and carelessly ill-informed about the great public questions-again, like Communism-that he addressed with such assurance. He did not read books, with one fascinating exception: Hitler’s Mein Kampf”.

Let’s substitute “Facism”, “Like Hitler”, or “Nazi” for “Communist” and think of how the left regularly deals with the right. For this discussion we will forgo the fact that the Nazis were against ALL religion, and the party was the National SOCIALIST Party of Germany less like Republicans and more like another party we know about, but facts have never been very interesting to the left anyway. How often does the left try to demonize people with a conservative view with comparison to Hitler? Constantly. I especially enjoyed Al Gore talking about “Digital Brownshirts” during the 2004 campaign.

There is very little evidence that McCarthy had any Nazi leanings, and making a case that a lawyer read only one book would seem to require more evidence than Mr Johnson provides, but there it is, and in quite sophisticated form. McCarthy is “stupid” … although couched in terms of being “poorly educated” and “incurious”, and he is tied to that “ism” that is constantly used by the left in exactly the way that McCarthy used Communism, only far more powerfully since it is used by the MSM and the educational system, not just a Senator with hearings. Of course, it would be much easier if it was only a SINGLE “ism”.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, references to religion, criminalization of various forms of business behavior and environmentalism, the list could go on. The party of Jim Crow is the Democrats, and Bob Byrd is an actual ex-Clan member who ON CAMERA on Fox News Sunday referred to “White niggers”. However, an off-hand comment by a Republican that can be CONSTRUED to be “racist” is cause for a firestorm as was the case with Trent Lott, and now with Bill Bennett. (I hope to write a Blog on that later, but one point. In the best selling book “Freakonimics” by famous economist Steven Levitt, the abortion/crime link is discussed at length). Charges of “racism” as regularly leveled against the right and virtually never against the left. It is a far more natural human tendency, we ALL are good at “same/different”, to be “racist”, or “to prefer like”, which makes it very much easier to destroy someone for an “inappropriate comment”. It correct and important for humans to rise above our natural tendencies, we just need to realize that is what we are all doing.

The sections in the book on “McCarthy book burning” would make one laugh if they didn’t make you cry as our nation moves to expunge any horrible reference to God from any connection with school at the public square that we can. To a lefty, the charge of “Communist” is a completely foolish charge … and the idea that a book espousing some overthrow of the US or another would not be appropriate is a horror. Of course making a claim that a lawyer read only one book, it was Mein Kampf, and thus tie him to having Nazi sympathies is only reasonable. How does a lefty make a complaint like that, and not recall the current complaints about your “library card” being sought by investigators.

The litany of ills of that horrible “McCarthy era” … how people had to testify, how they could lose their jobs, how books were removed, is somehow less terrible to a conservative Christian in the 21st Century. The wrong statement about Gay Marriage can jeopardize jobs today. Even protesting Abortion in certain areas is heavily restricted. Mention of God in public education can cost your job, and books and documents that contain it are removed every day. If you are not a Democratic Politician, one female that “feels harassed” … whatever the reason, it is her “feeling” that counts, is good enough for loss of a job. All manner of business behavior is constantly criminalized … from record keeping, projections, who is told about business/profit information, and new items are added to the list all the time. “Selling a stock and making money”, an action that one would hope is at the core of the American economy, becomes “suspicious” as the anti-business fervor of the left and MSM ever rises.

Is some of this “paranoid”? Of course, but then why isn’t “McCarthyism” 50 years after the fact a discussion of “paranoia”? The giant danger of the leftness of the MSM and the US educational system remains that balance is completely lost and only one side of the story is even realized. Knowing that one is blind allows one to take action to compensate. Huge swaths of the American electorate are as blind to a conservative view as humans are to x-rays.

Roberts Red Democrats

Two things strike me about the Roberts vote in the Senate. The first is how Republicans are always identified in the media as “partisans” but Democrats rarely are. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was approved 96-3 with the makeup of the Senate Democrat 57, Republican 43 … not a lot different from today’s 55/45 split, yet the Republicans overwhelming supported the right of a Democrat President to appoint a qualified but VERY liberal justice to the Supreme Court. Naturally, the media gave them no credit for it, and has no quarrel whatsoever with the Democrats only supporting a much more moderate justice with 22 of their number voting against. What does partisanship mean?

The more interesting point is the breakdown of just how far to the left a lot of the country is, and how important it is for a Democrat Senator with any Presidential hopes to appease the left of their party even if it is likely that such a vote will hurt them in the actual election. They know that the purists in their base will give no quarter on this issue, so we find Hillary, Kerry, Biden, and even Barak Obama (long future hopeful) voting against. Even more interesting, we find 13 of the Democrat Senators for Red States voting for, and only 3 voting against. Reid, Harken the left looney from IA, and interestingly Evan Bayh from Indiana who is considered to be another Presidential hopeful, but unlikely since he is Pro-Life, and life is something that the core of the Democrat is foursquare against.

If you have any thoughts of being a Democrat Presidential contender you have to make your allegiance with the Pro-Death core of your party. If you are a Democrat from a Red State, you realize that you vote against highly qualified and probably overly moderate court appointees by the President that your constituency voted for is sure to get you (correctly) labled the next time you run as “out of touch with your constituency” as it famously did Tom Dachle and others in the last two elections.

Bait and Switch

I suffered through “ Bait and Switch” (B&S) by Barbara Ehrenreich. Don’t ask my why I really put myself through these things, but I also read “Nickel and Dimed” (N&D) her previous “gem”. The only reason I can see for calling this book B&S is that the accolades on the back cover were for N&D, and she never actually delivered on this book.

In N&D she took the time to go out and get 3 or 4 minimum wage jobs and report to us that minimum wage jobs aren’t a lot of fun, and it is very hard to get anywhere at one over a 3 month period or so. At least she didn’t get a government grant to impart this gigantic piece of wisdom to us. She did seem to work hard doing the book however, and it is good to see a liberal woman with a $30K Mortgage deduction learning that it is possible to work very hard and not get a lot of pay. Had she grown up on a farm this piece of wisdom could have been gleaned much earlier in life and not been such a revelation when it finally occurred to her.

The premise of B&S is that she will go out and get a “good job” of $50K a year or better in hated Corporate America. She creates a fictional Public Relations background and proceeds to go to a bunch of “Networking events”, tries “Career Coaches”, and even goes for a “Corporate Makeover”, but unsurprisingly she doesn’t get a job. Since she doesn’t get a job and she meets a number of people that are following her same path she comes to the conclusion that the idea that one can get a good job in a US Corporation these days is “futile”, a favorite word of the American Liberal and the Borg on Star Trek Next Generation. I’m thinking the connection is “obvious”.

Along the way she manages to run into some events in Atlanta where Christianity and Networking are combined. This is of course quite offensive to Barbara the Atheist who firmly believes that while the correctness of liberalism and socialism are something to be shared at every opportunity possible, religion is something that should definitely be kept to ones self. (she is currently a vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America … something not mentioned in the book)

She is also offended by the idea of personal responsibility. In the following quote she does the obvious “all or nothing” overstatement, but the point is clear. “But from the point of view of the economic “winners” – those who occuply the powerful and high-paying jobs – the view that one’s fate depends entirely on oneself must be remarkably convienient. It explains the winners’ success in the most flattering terms while invalidating the complaints of the losers.”

We pretty much have the core of the liberal socialist ideal. YOU are NOT responsible, nor is anyone else who has succeeded or not succeeded. Barbara and her friends will be VERY happy to “fairly” decide just how the pie ought to be divided thank you very much! Somehow my guess would be that she would still keep whatever house she has that provides her with a $30K mortguage deduction .. but hey! She deserves it! Her heart is in the right place and MUCH smarter than any Capitalist Market system, so we ought to just hand her the keys.

Barbara had a number of petty criticisms of major US Corporations … too many personality type tests, to vague on what kind of skills required, too much rah-rah, too many standards of dress, and a host of others. Her liberal superior attitude remained intact, but at least corporate America was intelligent enough to figure out that they didn’t want to hire her commie butt! That alone ought to provide proof that something is right with the folks in our major US Corporations!

She closes up with the classic socialist liberal bromides about “why can’t we be more like Eurrope”? Without of course mentioning stagnant economies, sky high unemployment, gas prices that would make the whiners go into spasms and a future that makes our worries about unfunded future liabilities seem like no concern at all. A very sorry excuse for a book without anything in the way of new ideas and just the standard wallow in the liberal swamp of “futility”. Only for a liberal Barbara, only for a liberal

Generational Storm

I finished up “The Coming Generational Storm” (CGS) while up on a fishing trip to Winnibigosh. The weather is actually beautiful on our fall trip, maybe a good reason to do it a bit earlier in the future as we have this year.

CGS can be summarized as saying that we have been far to profligate for far too long in making promises to the old and eventual old, and the house of cards is about to crash … soon. Interestingly, we are better off than Japan and most of Western Europe with the exception of Great Britain. These guys try somewhat hard to be even handed, so I’d say they are “mostly in the middle” politically. They do their share of Bush bashing, but they point out that unlike the rest of Western Europe, and thanks to Margaret Thatcher, England has kept a lid on Government pensions and the growth of their medical system so they have a decent chance to avoid the perils of ever increasing liabilities and reduced population to keep paying that beset Japan, the rest of Western Europe, and to a lesser degree, the US.

The core of their claim is that we have an unfunded future liability of $51 Trillion listed in decreasing order of severity when Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the national debt are counted. They maintain that there is no way we are going to cut benefits or raise taxes at anything like the rate required to pay that liability so the most likely outcome is hyperinflation and a wrecked economy. If we were so inclined, they propose the following plan that could still work:

1. Immediately stop accrual of benefits under the current Social Security(SS) program.
2. Current retirees and workers get whatever they have already accrued under SS.
3. The SS payroll tax is eliminated and replaced with equivalent investment into Personal Security System (PSS) accounts
4. A new federal retail sales tax of 12% that would reduce over time is initiated to pay off the benefits under the old system.
5. Workers PSS accounts are shared 50/50 with their spouses.
6. The government does PSS accounts on behalf of disabled and unemployed
7. The government matches PSS accounts on a progressive basis.
8. All PSS balances are invested in a single market weighted global index fund of stocks, bonds, and real estate.
9. The government guarantees the real principle that workers contribute to their PSS accounts.
10. Between ages of 57 and 67, workers PSS balances are gradually sold and transformed into inflation protected pensions.
11. If a worker dies prior to 67, any remaining PSS balances are transferred to PSS accounts of the workers heirs.

They spend a lot of time on the whys and wherefores, and I’d have to say that while I don’t agree with it all, they make rational arguments and it does have a bit of “pain for everyone” so if the world was rational, there is some chance it would be accepted. It doesn’t appear that the world IS rational however, so they indicate that it is time to “buy land and stock ammo”. Well, they aren’t actually that morose, but somewhat close.

In preparation for hyperinflation downsize but own your home, save, save, save, but not in 401K accounts since the government is going to be taxing those like crazy. Get in inflation adjusted securities, very broad market indexes that have an overseas component as well, and even some gold. While the pre-industrial life tended to be “Nasty, Brutish and Short”, they seem to be setting up for a case where the boomer old age will be “Nasty, Brutish, and Long”.

The book is a depressing but worthy read. I like to be a bit more optimistic than they are, but they do an excellent job of making the future look dark and knocking down any hopeful ideas one might have on how it could get better; technology/productivity improvement, globalization efficiencies, smarter immigration, people working longer … etc. In their world nothing works and doom wins. That is always a hard view to completely ignore, for it is certainly true that in the long run we are all dead.

Playing Democrat

Since his speech from New Orleans it is obvious that the Bush apple hasn’t fallen as far from the tree as one would have hoped. Bush 41 famously decided that doing tax increases “just like a Democrat” was sure to get him some admiration for “courage” in the media and a lot of votes from “Blue Dog Democrats” (those that retain some contact with reality). They naturally hated him just as much, and his Republican supporters loved him a lot less, so he was turned out of office by Billy the re-nosed womanizer who got to validly claim that BUSH had lied.

Enter Katrina, Bush 43 and over a decade of time. One would think that Republicans would just get used to being hated by the MSM, Hollywood, the guilty very-rich and those who can’t get over wishing for a perfect world in this one, but apparently not. I’m sure it hurts to have your poll numbers down, but there aren’t ANY federal elections this year, and even next year Bush isn’t running for anything. I certainly hope Karl Rove is on vacation or just having a bad non-hair day, or the situation looks grim for the pro-America team on how to operate day to day.

The right idea following Katrina would have been to spend as little Presidential time and Federal dollars as possible on the Sin City of the fever swamps. It is much better to have people hate you cheaply than it is to have them hate you while they line their pockets with most of the $200 Billion you pass their way and invest the rest in strip clubs and brothels that will be underwater when the next Cat 4 or 5 hits. When you pay to be hated expensively with other people’s money, sometimes the people you are taking the money from start to like you a lot less as well.

The MSM has harped about “Bush never apologizes” as if they would point to such an act as some sign of “goodness”. They wanted it of course, but now that they have it for a situation caused by nature, broken local government, and broken state government, they view it as blood in the water and naturally seek to get some body parts to go with the appetizer. Sadly, Bush seems intent to provide them a feast. The idea of going to Texas in advance of Rita was as bad as political ideas get, and answering a reporters question as “One thing I’m NOT going to do is get in the way …” is worse than Clinton claiming “I’m still relevant”. At least he was claiming to BE relevant, Bush was only claiming to “NOT BE an obstacle”. If you are a “D”, you can get away with such things, as an “R”, the sharks will just get more excited. Deciding not to go anyway, then going on the return trip, shows a Presidency adrift for the first time since 9-11.

It is true we are all human, but Republicans in the WH can’t ever show it. A surreptitiously photographed note wanting to follow the proper protocol for getting a potty break at the UN becomes a news story when you are a Republican. Oral sex in the Oval Office with an intern is a “private matter” when you are a Democrat. Will he “get over it”? It certainly remains to be seen, but he needs to get back to his bearings and realize that a Republican can absolutely NOT allow themselves to be “controlled by events”, or they will be torn to pieces. The greatest real problem is that with the propensity to throw money at New Orleans Bush has returned to ill-conceived idea that Republican Presidents can buy votes (or VERY expensive poll numbers) like Democrats.


There is SOME truth that votes can be had in red states for things like farm bills and defense spending, but when it comes to drug benefits for the elderly and massive pork for minority groups, the money is even more wasted than the usual federal rat-hole. Oldsters that are more motivated by dollars than values will always know where their federal bacon is most plentiful, and minorities are perfectly willing to accept any amount of money from a Republican and maintain their 90%+ Democrat voting record. There is however a limit on how many dollars actual Republicans can watch being thrown in the toilet before they decide it isn’t really worth going out and voting for massive waste of funds with a red vs a blue tint. Bush risks having the same effect on his base as dear old dad. He did get a second term, but events of the past couple of weeks point to the very real possibility of it not being a good one.

Conspiracy,

I suspect that every human enjoys a good conspiracy theory now and again. The left has a number of goodies:

• Bush knew about 9-11 going to happen from “his friends the Saudis”, and did nothing on purpose because he knew it would be good for him politically.
• The whole Afghanistan war was to make way for a pipeline from Azerbaijan so that some of Bush or Cheney buddies could get rich(er). Sometimes it fits with the whole 9-11 plot in some elaborate way, sometimes it doesn’t.
• The whole Iraq war was “cooked up” to variously make Halliburton stock go up, provide oil money for some other set of cronies, cure some GW fixation with getting back at Saddam for trying to assassinate his daddy, or some other idea or all of that above.

While a good conspiracy theory needs very little evidence to get going in the minds of people that think it would be “shocking” if it were true, there are usually some set of news stories, memos, “heard on the street” kinds of things to give it some level of credence, at least if you are pre-disposed to believe it.

The interesting thing to me about the ones above is what kinds of people buy into them … Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, 90% of Hollywood … oh, maybe that really isn’t THAT amazing, and of course there is the excess of booze in the Kennedy case, age and booze can be a bit hard on the brain cells. I digress, the point is they do movies like Fahrenheit 911 on such things, millions of lefties go and cheer, and they have the director sit next to an ex-Prez at their last convention (the rabbit killer that only lusted in his heart and spared the Oval Office carpets).

Even though Hillary has pointed out to there being a “vast right-wing conspiracy” on National TV, we on the right just don’t seem to get many of our leading lights out there peddling conspiracy theories. It certainly isn’t for lack of “potential”, there is ALWAYS potential. Here are a few dots that the conspiracy minded could connect if they wanted:

• I read an article in US News last summer that Jim Wallis, author of “God’s Politics: How the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t get it” has been meeting with Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and other Democrats to work on a strategy for “winning back values”. The bottom line of the article was that they needed to focus on “care of the widows and orphans”, and what they really needed was an EVENT to crystallize their superior position on that issue.
• It took repeated calls from the Bush administration to get ANY evacuation called from New Orleans, and even with the calls, the evacuation was grossly inadequate and offers of using a train, busses, and other items were explicitly turned down by either the Mayor or Governor. Hundreds of school and city busses sat in their lots and were flooded out rather than being used to evacuate people.
• People were explicitly told by city officials to go to the Convention Center and Superdome, and these buildings were explicitly NOT supplied with water, portable toilets, emergency lighting, medical supplies or security personnel.
• The Louisiana STATE office of emergency management DENIED access to these facilities by the Red Cross on Tuesday, the day after the Hurricane when they wanted to provide water and medical supplies to the people there.
• No information was provided up the ladder via usual channels that assistance was specifically needed by people at those facilities, however reporters were encouraged to go there and begin to interview people.

So, do I think that the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, the DNC and CNN cooked up this scheme to get the ball rolling as a kickoff to a “Democrat Values Initiative”? Nope, I don’t … I certainly don’t give them credit for being that smart or organized for starters. I think they could have done such a thing with a “reasonable expectation” that nobody would be “seriously hurt” and not be aware that things would go as bad as they did, but in no way do I think they even WOULD try to do such a thing if they thought there was a reasonable chance people would be killed (and they would have to be even bigger idiots than I give them credit for to not see that).

All of which goes to show you that my opinion of liberals and Democrats is WAY higher than their opinion of George Bush, Dick Cheney, the US Military, American Business and a whole lot of their standard demons. They explicitly DO think that all of the above are REGULARLY doing “conspiracy things” to “make money”, “gain power” or other such reasons that will certainly take both American and other lives. Democrats at high levels and the media REGULARLY assert conspiracies very much like my fantasy stated above as “facts”, with much less “supporting data” than I have presented. They do whole books on such things (Al Franken, “Lies …” for example) only in place of CNN they use Fox news and Conservative Radio … but it is a conspiracy just the same.

Anything that happens can always be “explained” by some “conspiracy” or even “space aliens” if one is so inclined, all that is really required is ignoring the simple maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Do I REALLY think that conservatives should play such games? No, it would make us just as daffy as the left, but I think that an occasional observation of how easy it would be to “spot something” is healthy. Besides, just because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “vast left-wing conspiracy” really doesn’t mean that there ISN’T one. If Hillary thinks that such a thing exists on the right, maybe she has a good reason because she knows of what she speaks due to her knowledge of the left? ;-)

Beam Me Up

The MSM has done a great job of creating the story that the FEDERAL response to Katrina was “slow”, “incompetent”, “woefully inadequate”, etc. Today on CNN they used this headline to get the false point across for the 1000th time.



Indeed, the “story” has often become the public reaction and polling data on how bad people feel about how bad the response was. Isn’t it interesting that there isn’t a single story that provides ANY data about how fast or how large the responses were to say that last 5 or 10 hurricanes? Wouldn’t an objective measure of “horrible” be something like “hours or days difference” from the “standard response”? It would seem like a “fair assessment” (not likely from the MSM when a Republican is in the WH) might include some small words about what might be different from other hurricanes or floods … New Orleans being below sea level so the flood just stays and has to be pumped out, very limited roads into the city, and those damaged by the flooding. Little things like that.

At least there is the Internet now, so some folks that actually do hurricane relief are starting to make their opinions known. A lot of what follows is stolen from . The following is from Jason van Steenwyk, a FL Gaurdsman that has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history. I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:
- More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.
- The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.
- Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.”

A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:
"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network. You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region."

"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

The between hookah hits is priceless, and really fits well with the journalism majors that I knew in college. The MSM, and unfortunately a lot of Americans seem to believe that a “fact free analysis” is all that is required when it comes to a “Blame Bush” approach. What relief effort do they hold up as being “the best”? How fast was it, and how much was done in what period of time? Doesn’t it seem like a rational person would have to ask those kinds of questions before they would be satisfied that this was “the worst ever”, “totally unacceptable”, or some other scathing evaluation like we see every day from the MSM on this one? Doesn’t it have to be compared to SOMETHING? Apparently not if all you need for justification is another hookah hit. Beam me up.

9-11

Everyone that was mature enough to have memories of 9-11-2001 can remember where they were and how they heard. I personally was at work and about to go into a meeting that included a person from Haifa Israel. His sister worked in one of the towers, which added a more personal level. Fortunately she got out. It was a perfect blue sky clear day here in MN as well, and a day that our department had a golf outing that we decided to not cancel. No matter what anyone did that day, it was a strange day that we realized that the world would never be the same again. Much more than the JFK assassination (which I also remember) or the Challenger, which are the other two shocking negative days that I would put in the somewhat the same category, but 9-11 was unique.

What made it unique to me is that evil moved up to a new level. Plenty of people have been shot before and will be again, Presidents had even been shot. Assassination had been around for a long time and will be around forever. The Challenger was memorable, but it was an accident at the limits of technology, surprising, but not really shocking after a moment of thought. The unparalleled impact of 9-11 was that a group of people in a non-war situation would seek to kill as many people as they possibly could with no specific demands, even though the fact they could fly a sophisticated aircraft proved that they had opportunity for a better life. All Americans were targets, and we realized would always be targets, and for a least a week or two we came together and understood that.

That tiny bit of unity didn’t last long, and provides my second personal mind-change from 9-11, but let me go back to the first for a moment. Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City at least had a “target” … “the FBI”. He was a monster that killed plenty of innocents including children, but at least one would guess that once he was done killing all the FBI folks, he would be done. Nations having wars of course kill huge numbers of civilians, but without going into the morality of war, one can argue that it is a very costly competition at a nation level. Nazi Germany of the USSR winning at war could have certainly been horrendous for Americans, but the parameters of war, however distasteful had been around for a very long time, and will be around for a very long time to come.

9-11 ushered in a different view. Here were groups of people from around the globe banding together for the explicit purpose of killing as many Americans as they could, but with no explicit purpose for the killing. Maybe revenge, maybe because they felt powerless, maybe as some surrogate target for Israel, maybe because they simply wanted the power that they called “the great satan” to feel pain. The act was the message. “We are here and you will notice us” maybe comes as close as any meaning. For the first time we knew that there were people that would use ANY means they could get access to for the purposes of mass killing. Nuclear, Biological, Chemical … the limits were gone. They signed no agreements and made no statements of restraint. All Americans became targets of killers that explicitly decreed that no law or morals would stand in their way when it came to killing us.

For a week or so, we shared the threat as “Americans”, but my second great lesson came as the liberals began to leave that fold one way or another. Some of the earliest discussions were “Why did we deserve 9-11?”. Some others came up as Bush and others called the terrorists “cowards”, or “evil”. Many on the left considered it very “brave” to commit suicide in the interest of killing thousands, unsurprising since they sometimes find it “brave” to commit suicide when it is only ones own life being taken. Once life is not a gift from a higher power that comes with responsibility, both the taking of ones own life and the lives of innocents can be just as admirable with a plane and a building as it is with euthanasia and abortion.

Which brings us to “evil”; that too being a concept that made the liberals very uncomfortable, since even in the face of 9-11 such a claim was too judgmental to be applied to those intrepid warriors with box cutters. This quickly gave way to “Why do they hate us”, “We deserved it” followed shortly by “There is too much flag-waving and we are being asked to give up too much (searches at airports) and too little (economic sacrifice)”. Once Bush decided to actually take action in Afghanistan, the farthest of the left completely peeled off, and with a bit more than a month of action over there Daniel Schorr of MPR labeled it a “quagmire”, just before the Afghan cities started to fall to allied hands like dominos. Poor Daniel, he was so hoping for a quagmire.

The months right after 9-11 changed my mind about liberals. I used to believe that they were well-meaning people with a different view of America. I came to realize that America was optional to them. Since they live with an abstract view of what America (or some country) OUGHT to be, the continuation of this America was very optional, and in many ways deserved to be attacked of even destroyed. This America, or even Democracy held no special place in their minds, and other concerns, even hatred for a single President could consume their minds and especially their emotions to such a degree that all else was easily forgotten.

Those were the lessons that I learned for 9-11. For middle of the road to conservative Americans I think we re-learned that freedom isn’t free and must be constantly defended, plus, the task of defense has to include both offense and defense. Fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq is way cheaper in lives and capital than fighting them in New York, Washington, and every other large American city. Liberals didn’t learn any lessons, they never do. Since the abstract perfect world that they have in their minds always remains abstract and perfect, and this world always remains far inferior, there is very little reason for them to learn.

Blocking The MSM

The story broke on Fox news last Wednesday that the LOUISANA STATE Department of Homeland Security had blocked the Red Cross from taking water, medical supplies, and food into the Superdome on the Tuesday after the hurricane. Friday I saw the story up on CNN, and thanks to some help from a friend was able to find it yet today:


I’ve heard a few left-leaning people report the story as “The Department of Homeland Security”, or “FEMA” (which reports into the FEDERAL Department of Homeland Security” blocked the aid. I have no idea if the “heard on the street” view of these generally anti-Bush people is “wishful hating”, or if it is the result of actual misreporting. It is very easy to see how even a good and unbiased reporter could accidentally leave out “Louisiana State” and just say “Department of Homeland Security”, and it is obvious that someone with bias would WANT to leave it so that it appeared that the federal department messed up and the problem was closer to the White House doorstep.

How many disasters have you seen where there Red Cross wasn’t visible in the thick of things very early on? Not many I’d wager, yet they weren’t here this time, and apparently this explains why. This action seems to be a clear major mistake, but my interest isn’t so much that “heads roll” at the State of Louisiana as it is that the facts be carried by the MSM.

I can think of a simple explanation why this story gets no MSM play. It would water down the “Bush incompetence” story and start to bring State and Local officials into the limelight and it seems that the MSM is going to avoid that at all costs. Why is the country divided? If you believe that FEMA blocked aid to people at the Superdome, AND you already hate Bush, this is certainly enough to get you ticked off. If you generally support Bush or don’t much care and find out that the STATE blocked the aid, but the MSM wants to report it as if the FEDs blocked the aid, one might get the idea that there is bias in the MSM.

Seascape

Today was a work sponsored holiday where our area was bussed out to lunch and a play. The play was Edward Albee’s “Seascape”, and from a purely entertainment / acting point of view was “just fine”. I checked up on it and it won a Pulitzer prize, so at least someone thought it was good.

The play centers on a middle aged human couple on the verge of retirement where the man would like to “just relax”, and the woman would like to “be active and find adventure”. The dialogue is sometimes witty and funny, but the subtext is that the basic meaning of life is “having a good time”. Certainly no “higher purpose”, or even “serve your fellow man”.

Just before intermission, a pair of odd looking lizard creatures shows up. The second half of the show is a dialogue between the human couple and the lizard couple. The lizard couple are “highly evolved” (for sea lizards), and are ready to graduate to life on the surface. A good deal of time is taken up trying to show the absurdity of any “human superiority” … we are merely “animals with clothing”. Strangely though, rather than reason, the thing that sets the humans apart from the lizards is emotion. While less well versed in key things like “what is an airplane”, the lizards seem quite reasonable.

In retrospect, this was the part of the play I found the most objectionable. Possibly I’m just a foolish pet lover, but I feel somewhat certain that animals know emotion. They certainly seem “happy” to see a person on arrival, fearful of the vet, “bored” when nobody wants to play, and “sad” when it is obvious that the family has packed up and they are going to be left alone for some period. I see less evidence of “reason”, although I hold out some reservations that cats work to train their owners to provide them with an optimum life ;-)

Cat training aside, reason is the separator. Many an animal can throw just as good a hissy fit as a Hollywood director, but they aren’t likely to do higher math or even write a program that says “Hello Reality” anytime soon.

Negative Advertising

I was up early enough this AM to watch a bit of Don Imus on MSNBC. For those that don’t know him, he is an irreverent pseudo cowboy that broadcasts from NYC, but is either #1 or close to it as a radio personality inside the Washington beltway. He has a lot of politicians and media people on. McCain, Kerry, and Biden are favorite politicians, Tom Oliphant from the Boston Globe and Tim Russert from NBC news are on there quite a bit. Russert was on this AM.

It seems that his shtick of early AM, seems like just joshing around, off the wall comments gets folks to let their hair down a bit and they seem to enjoy pontificating on there even a bit more than normal. Russert did masterful job of talking about how “After 911 the Bush people just wanted to keep moving forward with the war on terror without investigation, and after no WMD were found in Iraq they had the same idea again, now they seem to think that the time to figure out what went wrong in New Orleans is after the rebuilding.”. He went on to discuss how we can do both, and there needs to be deep study, because the American people seem to have been “lied to” about homeland security as they were “lied to” about WMD. The Federal Government has failed, and we need to understand why.

Russert was very smooth in his “drawing of connections”, and even managed to touch ever so slightly that things might have not been done “perfectly” by the city and state governments, but then moved right back to “responsibility being at the top”. While Russert is MSM, I wouldn’t have previously put him in the rabid Bush-hater class, but his performance of this AM and I hear on his “Meet the Press” show on Sunday show that he is drifting to the “rabid class”.

For the left, the “let’s beat on the Federal Government since it is run by Bush” has to be a bit pyrrhic. As they savage FEMA, Homeland Security, and whatever other surrogates they can find for the hated Bush, most people are simply going to get the message “Government Doesn’t Work”. The very people who cheer for ever more massive federal bureaucracy are forced to paint it as powerlessness and ineffective. Of course they “mean well”, they REALLY only want to savage Bush, but since he is President, people get confused and think he is part of “the government”.

Someone wrote a piece for the back of US Nudes and World Retort (better known and US News and World Report ;-) ) long ago, in which they brilliantly pointed out that if Coke and Pepsi discovered negative politics to the extent that the US parties discovered it after Watergate, nobody would be drinking soft drinks in this country. The airwaves would be full of shocking exposures of rotting teeth, heart attacks from obesity and caffeine, mice, fingers and all matter of deleterious found in containers and on and on. In general, they avoid negative advertising because they BOTH want to keep selling their product, and they know that negative ads would hurt BOTH them and their competitors.

What is the MSM media and and the Democrats really “selling” when they go after Bush? Well, what they THINK they are selling is that he is a horrible President, and by extension Republicans are horrible, and so voters should vote for Democrats for Congress and the Senate in ’06. But how likely is that to work? It works GREAT with the already Bush hating mad as hell 20% who immediately parrot the “Bush is incompetent, Bush hates Blacks, Republicans cut the budget so the dikes failed, etc”. It sounds good in their echo chamber. People like to bitch as well, so for a few weeks a few more sheep may pick up the bleat, but is that going to last for over a year?

But what is the BIG message? “Government doesn’t work”. We spent a bunch of money on Government and it didn’t help. In fact, they have missed a HUGE chance to point out that Government DID work … it worked in Mississippi, it worked in Texas, it worked all over Florida last year as 3 hurricanes were dealt with. It also is working big time from the feds … lots of choppers rescuing 10s of thousands of people who failed to heed a warning, federal and National Guard troops bringing order and aid, the Corps of Engineers fixing the levees, pumps flown in from across the whole country. The very folks that are the biggest fans of government, which in general IS working are forced by their hatred of Bush to give that very government a black eye.

Most people understand that it is the “system” that works more than the temporary occupants of various elected and appointed offices. As a conservative I’m often amazed by how well it really does work … even under Bill Clinton, so dedicated to the Presidency that he not only brought pizza into the office, but sex as well. Talk about competent leadership. It is big and often bloated, but nearly everyone at all levels is very likely to try their very best to deal with a hurricane where lives are at stake. If must be so hard to be a lefty and have Bush be this horrible buffoon that is completely incompetent … so much so that he is “criminally negligent” in his handling of a natural disaster, yet he keeps on beating your party in elections. Even worse, how fragile does that make the Federal Government? How many people in how many places of work rely on word from the very top to react to the basic tasks of their business? Like none?

Bias is expected, but if they stay on this track the MSM and the Democrats have a very legitimate chance to hurt themselves and the causes they claim to support far worse than they hurt Bush.

Too Few Rs

As I watch and listen to the coverage of the Katrina recovery I’m struck by the horrible problem that arises when there aren’t enough Republicans in the chain of command in a situation. As I’ve said before, I actually think that the media coverage of Republicans would be pretty good if it was the same coverage that was given to Democrats. Situations like New Orleans and Mississippi show how different the coverage really is. We need a lot of government watch dogging, it just needs to be bi-partisan … neither party can be trusted to do a good job without watching (and likely only a marginal one WITH close watching).

The Mayor of New Orleans, Raqy Nagin is Democrat, as is the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux. They have been mentioned, usually complaining, and but one could instantly look at this situation and realize that no matter what FEMA does, there is a TON of blame to be applied to local or state government. I could tell right away they had to be “D”, because things looked bad and there was no “R” visible next to their names. A group of friends and I have a lot of fun with media stories off CNN … if it is a rare positive story and there is no political designation next to the elected official, we know it is an “R”, and for certain, if things look bad an there is no “R”, it is ALWAYS a “D”.

Since the whole chain to the federal level in the Kristina story for New Orleans/Louisiana is “D”, all blame for everything … evacuation, response, maintaining order, looters getting mosquito bites, etc all has to flow directly to the first “R”. I understand this is a special case since Bush hatred is the leading Main-Stream Media (MSM) sport, so they view this as just another target opportunity.

One doesn’t hear nearly as much bad news and complaint out of Mississippi whose Governor is an R. Very strange, they actually took more of the brunt of the storm, but nobody is shooting helicopters over there, and in fact people are being evacuated there from not only Mississippi, but Louisiana as well. The REALLY sterling example is Texas. Public radio kept trying to find some hole in how refugees from New Orleans could possibly be handled in Texas. Strangely, Texas had cots, portable showers, kits of toiletries, and an entire preparedness plan for dealing with 10s of thousands of hurricane victims. Why? They have a few coastal cities … Galveston, Corpus Christi, etc. and practice every year for a hurricane like Katrina. Texas was highly prepared, current Governor J. Richard Perry, previous governor George W Bush. There can’t be anything GOOD over there, too many “R”s, so the MSM treats it as if emergency preparedness is some sort of accident that somehow just failed to happen in Louisiana.

The MSM does everyone in the country a disservice with the huge level of bias since with the exception of the 20% and growing of the angry left, MOST people want things to work as well as possible with as low a cost as possible in tax dollars. When a local community is below sea level, has no reasonable evacuation plan, and certainly no plan to house people displaced by the storm, that would mean that the local government is extremely screwed up, and it needs to be reported. The Superdome with no bottled water, portable toilets, portable generators, etc? Who were they kidding? That wasn’t a “plan”, it was at best a bad idea. How can 150 school busses be sitting out in the flood waters in New Orleans with people complaining “I had no way to get out”? Did the city have no plan to use public means to evacuate people? How can you live below sea level in a hurricane area and not have a solid evacuation plan?

New Orleans and Louisiana have both inept and corrupt government, but since it has a “D” next to it we have to try to blame the Federal Government and the story gets lost. I’m not going to go do the research myself to try to compare Katrina response with ND Floods in ’97, Andrew in ’92, or Mississippi River Flooding in ’93 when many towns in MO and IL were in flood conditions for over 100 days. I’m sure however that if the handling of those disasters had significantly better handling by FEMA, we will find out, which is GOOD. If FEMA has gone down hill and it is Bush’s fault, it OUGHT to be pointed out and dealt with. I live here, I want both parties to do a good job and poor results to be pointed out when they actually happen. There is no way to evaluate the FEMA performance at this stage. We have never had to deal with a city below sea level that failed to evacuate, had no plan to deal with the situation once it happened, and had residents shooting at the rescue personnel.

To see the MSM media absolutely ignore what is certainly and abysmal performance on the part of the elected officials in New Orleans and Louisiana with attempts to “blame it on FEMA” is even more reprehensible that their usual left wing nut performance. Ineptitude and corruption of local officials have proven to be a lethal combination here. To see some elements of the MSM and a decent portion of the angry left bleating sheep just see it as another opportunity to “blame Bush” shows that for many, partisanship is all that counts. I have no problem blaming the federal government and Bush if the failure of the local government is handled badly, but we at least need to recognize that the local governments in the New Orleans case could scarcely have done worse.

Human Values

I’ve heard a few pundits and politicians lament the rampant lawlessness and looting in New Orleans with some variation of; “Usually disasters bring out the best in people, I don’t understand and am very distressed by what is happening in New Orleans …”.

Due to the background noise from the American media and our education system; many people seem to have lost touch with yet another piece of reality. Disaster bringing out the best in people WAS a key part of that horrible America prior to 1960 that the left has done everything it can to get rid of. The America where God, Family, personal responsibility, mutual respect, adherence to higher ideals, local community, self reliance, and helping your neighbor were shared and common values.

The liberal values start with there not being any God, personal pleasure being the highest value, everyone is a victim and they are “owed”, you are not responsible for yourself, and certainly not for your neighbor. Responsibility is farmed out to “the wealthy”, “corporations”, or some other corrupt entity that is no doubt not giving you what you justly deserve. Property and people with property deserve no respect, and in fact are to be seen as “victimizers”, they probably obtained it at your expense. There is no higher ideal than looking out for #1 and getting what you “deserve” by any means possible. Your local community is powerless, only the Federal Government has any power and responsibility, which they never live up to because of “big money” or “the ideology of greed”.

“Human Nature” is pretty close to liberal values, and like all values, does indeed come out in time of crisis. If you believe in God and an everlasting soul, when you witness the awesome power of nature and see death and destruction, you are very likely to be moved by your own powerlessness. You will probably feel gratitude that you survived, and the idea that your life is fragile and in Gods hands. You are very likely to be motivated to follow your values even closer than normal, help your fellow man, completely eschew any thoughts of obtaining property and looting, and dedicate yourself to a thankful response for having been spared.

If your values are “human” (liberal), when you see that nobody is watching, feel that you have been victimized by not only the normal demons of society, but now by the randomness and meaninglessness of nature as well, you feel that it is “payback time”. You are now in charge, authority (which hasn’t done you right) isn’t there, and the goodies are ripe for the taking, so why not? If you can get a gun and take some shots at “the man”, maybe that is all the better, you may never get a clean shot at those folks that have failed to provide you what you deserve again. Some idiots in a helicopter trying to help someone else are foolish cogs in a corrupt and random system, worthy of your scorn, and “targets” to feel the sting of your justifiable anger.

Look at Mgadishu or Rawanda. What we are seeing in New Orleans is very much “human nature”, and it is an early flower of the kind of America that was planted in the sixties and continues to be planted by the left today. What we mistakenly came to think was “human nature” was actually “American Values”, completely unnatural to man, but instilled by Church, School, Community, and family with loving effort back in the days when all those institutions and more … like the Scouts, 4-H, and even the social and fraternal organizations were revered and supported in this country. It wasn’t the “best of people” that came out in crisis, but the “real nature”, the core values that were a shared part of a great nation.

The press will do all in their power to prevent Americans to see this simple truth. LA in the Rodney King riots, New Orleans after Katrina, THIS is the America that the left is working to create, and has successfully created for those parts of society that have been most vulnerable to their agenda. Look closely, human values unencumbered by reverence for the divine have a smell that is precisely like the lord of human values.

Ernie Pyle

Some oldsters have occasionally commented “Why is there no Ernie Pyle in the current war”? For those of us that weren’t around for WWII, Ernie Pyle was an embedded journalist that wrote about the war from the perspective of the low level fighting men in a very folksy way.

There is one major reason that there isn’t any Ernie Pyle in the mainline media today, and that is because some of the news would be good, positive, and lead people to believe that the war was important and that we in combination with the Iraqi military are winning it. That isn’t an impression that very much of the mainstream media would like Americans to see, so it isn’t very likely that they are going to support regular dispatches from an Ernie Pyle.

The fact that none in the mainstream media are not going to support such reporting is less of an obstacle in the age of the internet however. http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/ is a Blog by Michael Yon who is an independent writer with US troops in Mosul Iraq. Many of his accounts are gripping, certainly not all are of that “good, positive” sort either … it is just that he is there and seems willing to report objectively, which is more than can be said for most of the US media.

For the left in this country, the loss in Vietnam was their shining victory. The combination of the media, university professors and students, and various radical groups around the country were able to do what no foreign power had ever done. Defeat the USA in war. That pinnacle of American impotence was maintained and even “improved” upon in the eyes of the left as by 1980, America cowered in front of students in Iran, and proceeded to lose 7 servicemen and accomplish nothing in a failed rescue attempt that should be known by all as “The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic”.

Since the media can’t pray, they wish upon a star every night that Iraq becomes “another Vietnam”. Since it isn’t a jungle, it isn’t communist, it isn’t split into a North and a South, and were we to leave, it isn’t clear what would fall to whom, they are never very specific of what they mean, but everyone of course knows what they mean.

They want America to lose. As badly as possible.They will do anything in their power to create if needed, and support in any way they can, an anti-war movement. They want a precise time for a pull out, even if it means that terrorists would just have to lie low and win after the date (probably ESPECIALLY if it means that). This is one of those cases where assuming that liberals are stupid would actually be “kinder” since one could then postulate that they just “don’t know” what would happen if the US is forced to pull out of Iraq and it is taken over by terrorists, but as I’ve said before I refuse the “liberals are stupid” path … even though in this case it pretty much only leaves the “liberals are evil” condition as an alternative.

I suspect in this case there IS some of the “I’m so mad I’m stupid” case of cutting off ones nose to spite their face. The hatred for George Bush, and the general fear of a strong US is so consuming for them that they absolutely refuse to look at consequences and just want to be able to point to Iraq as a failure and “another Vietnam” no matter what. It is much the same as the WMD issue. Certainly everyone knows that Saddam HAD WMD, he killed tens of thousands of Kurds using gas. The very same people that chortle about WMD not being found used the threat of Saddam using WMD as one of the reasons to not go to war. However, it remains a core tenant of liberalism that consistency is not an issue. To a conservative, if YOU also knew that Saddam had WMD, and actually used that fact as a reason that the US should not go to war in Iraq, you would be completely EMBARRASED to suddenly call Bush “stupid or disingenuous” for knowing what you knew, since that would be tantamount to calling YOURSELF names.

That would be true if you believed in consistency, but if you are a liberal, you don’t, so it is no problem. I suspect that most liberals assume that the WMD was either destroyed at the last minute, moved out of the country, of still hidden in the desert somewhere just as conservatives do. The difference is that they could care less … even it was moved out and is now in terrorist hands. They LOVE the fact that they can use the lack of WMD against the whole of the US intelligence, military, and of course the administration. Being wrong is weak, and the more weak the US is, the more they like it.

Thus the fervent hope for “another Vietnam”, which since there are no real parallels between Iraq and Vietnam in reality, simply means “public opinion turns against the war and America is forced to pull out in disgrace”. On that day the media and the left raise a lusty cheer, for not only has America failed, they will point back to that failure as the cause of all manner of ill, and to prevent the country from having the confidence to rise to challenge even students holding hostages for a very long time. They will have done all they can do to cause the failure, and they will lament the failure as an abyss that is not recoverable, and smirk. They will point to the “meaninglessness of the soldiers deaths”, and smile, how wonderful for all to wallow with them in the pit of a meaningless world.

Give Michael Yon a read, Ernie Pyle lives, he just has to be suppressed by the left these days.