Arrogance and Ignorance

Power Line: Blindly Committed to Defeat

I've been struck on many occasions how arrogance and ignorance go together. There are none so sure than those who are completely wrong. I'm also struck by how often that Democrats manage to get exactly what they claim that they hate nearly right after they get power.

For 8 years they talked about Reagan being a "lightweight", "just lucky", "only about spin" and just in many ways "not engaged". Then they elected Slick Willie who fit all of those to a tee, but was SO out of touch that he was having sex at the office. One can't get much more disengaged in their work that that! The supposed "Reagan Naps" were pretty mild by comparison.

They believe W is the prototype for "arrogance and ignorance", but after reading BOs book and watching him in action, I think they haven't seen much yet. Bush has always been a guy that knows his limits and surrounds himself with help. BO seems to think that he knows everything while he blathers about 10K dead in Kansas from a tornado, visiting 57 states and his uncle liberating Auschwitz. He is sure he "knows it all", only it is pretty clear even while the press is pitching him softballs, that the first term Senator with no leadership experience is just like a first term Senator with no leadership experience that thinks that he knows everything.

A legend in his own mind
Blindly Committed to Defeat

John McCain invited Barack Obama to go with him on a trip to Iraq; Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, responded dismissively:

"John McCain's proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don't need any more 'Mission Accomplished' banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq's leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don't want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer."

Jim Geraghty notes that Obama has been to Iraq once, for two days in 2006. Geraghty makes the legitimate point that Obama seems to be willing to meet with just about anyone in the world except our generals in Iraq:

"And isn't Obama vulnerable to the argument that a man who's pledged to meet unconditionally, one-on-one, face-to-face with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really ought to meet at least once one-on-one with Gen. David Petraeus?"

Fair enough, but what is most striking to me is the unattractiveness of Obama's reply to McCain. Burton sneeringly suggests that when McCain has gone to Iraq it was merely a "stunt," not a legitimate effort to understand conditions on the ground. And Burton displays the combination of arrogance and ignorance that is the trademark of the Obama campaign, declaring, as an article of faith and contrary to the facts, that the Iraqis are making no political progress. Burton's retort is a naked expression of the blind faith in defeat that has become one of the ugliest features of contemporary liberalism.

30 Years in a Week

A week from tomorrow I'll have achieved the milestone of 30 years employment at one company. I could retire in a week at age 51 for between 1/4 and 1/3 of my salary. I have no intention of retiring anytime soon, but that is a good feeling. Sitting out on the back deck looking at the new master bedroom suite being installed and enjoying a beautiful evening. There are a lot worse ways that life can go!

Things like 30 years have a way of making one think back, and the symetry of "the 8's" for me is interesting when I think about it. From '68, when I was 11 at this time of the year and turned 12 in the fall, I recall having a painted turtle that we called "snappy turtle" at the time they were talking about Robert Kennedy's assassination. I recall that a little, but one of my most favorite memories from childhood was that Christmas eve when we were over and my Aunt and Uncle's home where they had COLOR TV! ( I bought my first color TV the 2nd year of my now 30 year career, in '79). I was mesmerized as Apollo 8 circled the moon and read from the book of Genisis. For a science and areospace interested boy raised in a fundamentalist church, there was a lot of symbolism going on there. During my career, James Lovell, the pilot on that mission and the commander of the ill-fated but "successful failure" Apollo 13" came and talked at an inventors breakfast that I was invited to, which was a great memory of my work years. So 40 years ago is a solid memory.

30 years ago I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and started my career. Everything I owned at the time was moved down in my new Datsun 200SX. We had a gas crisis that summer as gas went about .50 a gallon for the first time in history, and people were complaining about high prices and how "it was always going to go up". Wow, times have really changed in 30 years! I started out at the princely sum of $15K a year which was a high salary that expanded rapidly as inflation took off like a rocket--the salary expanded, but the take-home really didn't as taxes were not indexed for inflation in those days and the biggest beneficiary of my raises was the Government. Even with all those tax dollars, Jimmy Carter felt strongly that a "great malaise" had settled over the nation and our best years were behind us.

By '88, morning in America had come and I was a new father. It was a very dry year, and it was the first time that I went fishing with the core of the current fishing trip gang. It was also an election year and Bush 41 would take the reins from by far the best President of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan. I will be very surprised if we have another President while I draw breath that even comes close. So '88 was a memorable year.

I don't think there was so much about '98 that stands out. We shipped Java, which I hope isn't the last big successful project of my career. We had already moved to our current home 3 years before. The thing that seems crazy is that 10 years ago doesn't even seem long - in fact, it is hard to believe that '98 is already 10 years back. I suspect that is a common sense for those of us advancing in years just a bit.

Guess that is enough reminiscing for one night. I may be prone to do a bit more of that with the upcoming anniversary.

Feeling Bad About Economy

This is a great little CNN example of "keeping the sheep on the right track". I wonder how many times in American history you COULDN'T go out and find a family that would tell you "things are bad"? They don't list their income, so we have no idea what they mean by "solidly middle class". The article contains a bunch of polls about "how bad things are" and claims it is the worst since the recession of '82 -- but that is only in POLLS, it states NOTHING about actual economic numbers. Not surprising, because those would show it isn't even a recession since the GDP hasn't dropped for even a single quarter yet.

So why would CNN have this as their headline story today? Are we in Iraq? Afghanistan? Was there NO negative news they could find from any of those places? I see that they DO have "Bush's EX press secretary is selling a book in which he says he THINKS he lied for the President". Zowie, nothing much more honorable than ex-employees making a buck selling books making claims that they know will be popular, THAT has never happened before!

Power Line on "Fall of Conservatism"

Power Line: They only look brain dead

The guys at PL are more critical of the piece than I was, but make some excellent points. The are more optimistic than I am at this point, I certainly hope they are right.

This formulation may be better for a conservative return to power, but I'm worried that the cost of another Carter will be far higher in lives and treasure this time around:

Packer assumes, without any supporting analysis, that he’s got the future right.
Packer is quite taken with the following formula: Goldwater was to
Reagan as McGovern is to Obama. But Reagan won two landslide victories
and completed a two-term presidency of which most Americans approved.
Obama has accomplished none of these things. Thus, the appropriate
formula might just as easiy turn out to be: Carter was to McGovern as
Obama is to Carter.

Slick on the MSM

Bill Clinton: 'Cover up' hiding Hillary Clinton's chances - CNN.com

It has been gratifying this election cycle to see the Clinton's suddenly realize that the MSM is biased. What a startling revelation that must be for them. They even thought it was RIGHT biased as in "vast right wing conspiracy" as presented on the Today Show by Hillary.

I found the following to be especially touching and probably true. How hard is it for Democrats to see that the MSM wants BO at this point? Imagine if the MSM REGULARLY filtered the news against a set of views that you held.

"If you notice, there hasn't been a lot of publicity on these polls
I just told you about," he said. "It is the first time you've heard it?
Why do you think that is? Why do you think? Don't you think if the
polls were the reverse and he was winning the Electoral College against
Senator McCain and Hillary was losing it, it would be blasted on every television station?"

He added, "You would know it wouldn't you? It wouldn't be a little
secret. And there is another Electoral College poll that I saw
yesterday had her over 300 electoral votes. ... She will win the
general election if you nominate her. They're just trying to make sure
you don't."

Are We Safer?

Power Line: Are We Safer?

It is an article of faith among Democrats and the MSM that the Bush Administration has made us "less secure". We regularly hear how "foolish" Iraq is and how it is a HUGE "recruitment vehicle for terrorists".

Will there ever be a requirement for some empirical measurement of that supposed fact? Wouldn't the truth of that require an actual terrorist attack? The article shows a nice little list of terrorist attacks on US citizens around the world prior to our taking action in Iraq (back to the '80s). There is a strange "lucky symetry" with the number of attacks in the five years since we went into Iraq. They have dropped to ZERO.

The article gives some ideas as to "why that may be", but they leave out an obvious one. We have been told THOUSANDS of times by the MSM that "Saddam had no connection with international terrorism and there was NO WAY he was a threat to the US". That has been told to us so many times that if there is ANY truth to the idea that "repetition makes even the most outlandish of claims believeable", people HAVE to believe that negative to have been proven.

Anyone with a basic understanding of induction understands that 1000's of examples CAN'T prove a negative. The "Black Swan" book that I'm reading now calls induction the "turkey problem". To the Thanksgiving turkey, it would seem completely reasonable to "induce" that each and every day a benevolent member of the human race arrives with food, and I will always be well cared for. A few days in front of Thanksgiving some year, the birds induction is proved horribly wrong right at the point at which his sample size of "looks good so far" seemed "certain".

Our MSM has convinced most Americans of two negatives. 1). Saddam had no WMD and 2). He had no connection with international terrorism that could be a threat to the US. To think otherwise is to be a fool. It is a definition of "fool" that has a lot more to do with being a sheep than it does with any connection with the rules of logic that have been understood back to the Greeks.

At this point, what evidence would it take to prove that we were safer in 2000 than we are now? Since 9-11 happened in 8 months after Bush took office, and the attack on the Cole took place in October of 2000, I'd think that for the Democrats and MSM to be correct, we have to have at least two terrorist attacks of greater significance before 9-11-2009. We constantly hear the assertion that we are less safe. Don't we need to have some specifics on how we might be able to test that lack of safety, and also evaluate the probable BO administration on how much safer we then become in the future? What is the use of making constant claims of us being "less safe" unless you are going to stand up to some proof of that being the case?

As you know, I'm a huge believer in the assessments of Democrats and the MSM, so I guess I'll expect two or more very serious terrorist attacks between now and 9-11-2009 since our safety has been lowered so much over the brilliant security record of Slick Willie. I can also trust that after those attacks, BO will lead our nation to tremendous increased safety and a giant leap forward in world stature. Potentially we can look for a return to the halcyon days of the Carter Administration?

Mistreatment of the Military, Memorial Day

Millionaires in the Making Millionaires in the Making: The Shifrins «

When I looked at the link title, I was thinking "Generals". A couple of Captain's, 3rd level of officer up the ranks. O-3. I look at this as GREAT, and not that surprising when one thinks of it. We naturally only hear about the buck private that overspends, loses money gambling and maybe has a drug or alchohol habit to boot, and then "how the country has failed them".

Have to give CNN credit, a little snippet of good news! Wow, the world could be so much more upbeat with just a smidgen more of this. They must be getting revved up for the "good times of BO" that are just around the corner.

Technopoly

I found this little book by Neil Postman hugely thought provoking and important on many fronts, even though I work in the heart of "technopoly". Unlike many skeptics with a bit of luddite orientation, Postman is way less arrogant. He freely admits that he has no real solution to the problem, although my view is that he bypasses the obvious solution and focuses on a less desirable solution as an atheist.

The subtitle is "The Surrender of Culture to Technology" and opens with a story from Plato's Phaedrus about Thamus, a great Egyptian king. Thamus entertained the god Theuth, who was the inventor of many things; numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy and writing. Thamus finds each of the inventions lacking, and has this to say of writing:

"Theuth , my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you who are the father of writing , have out of the fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to excercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their rememberence by externeal signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupoils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society".

Thamus is wrong in missing the fact that writing DOES provide value. Where is very right however is in realizing that no technology has only a single side. When one picks up a technology, both you and the world are changed, and it seems that it is typically an irrevocable change.

"A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe."

All technology contains an "ideology". In the case of the printing press, that ideology was mainly "power to the people", which many in modern society tend to agree with, BUT it was a major factor in huge changes (the reformation, rise of a better educated common man, democracy, etc)

One of his least favorite technologies is the technology of the IQ score. It has created the idea that something that we can't even define adequately at all (human intelligence) can be expressed by a simple integer that is explanatory of a host of things. He argues convincingly (as have others) that the idea is pure fantasy. Mooses are all in agreement on this priniciple, since we tend to not do well on IQ tests and would much rather they were invalid.

Postman argues that in the 19th century we had a "technocracy":

"The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clang to the philosophies of their fathers".

(He did not specify if their clinging was "bitter" ;-) ) He argues that the Sopes Monkey Trial was the point at which we shifted to "technopoly":

"Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy."

It is at this point that I largely part company with his conclusions. He seems to have made the "guns kill people" error here. There is MORE than "technology" going on here, for "something" HAS made prayer in schools, teaching of creation in schools already illegal, and that "something" may be well on it's way to attempting to make religion itself illegal. I'd name that "something" liberal facism, but whatever it is, it isn't "technology". While there are aspects of truth in Postmans attempts to paint technology as the "bogeyman", primarily, "technology is a tool". As he has obviously made his peace with writing, like all tools, it can be used to write great books like his (and I DO think this is a worthy and useful book), or skinhead pamphlets. The choice isn't implicit in the technology, only the option.

He makes a good argument that in a technopoly, the "information immune system is inoperable. Technology is a form of culutural AIDs, which I use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome". We used to have a lot of "gatekeepers". He does a good job of talking about how curriculum in schooling is still a valid gatekeeper and how the "rules of evidence" that declare broad swaths of information "inadmissible" are the only way that the institution of our courts can operate. "...in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves."

He doesn't say "why" there can be no transcendent purpose. Certainly there are many million Christians in the US (which he believes is the only Technopoly so far) that would disagree with him that there CAN be no transcendence. My fundamental split is that I disagree with him on that point. The choice of transcendence MUST be a human choice. It can be inhibited by technology (constant diversion for example), but I see the choice as clearly remaining.

"..cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself. It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional tecture through a clusxter of symbols that cal for respect and allegiance, even devotion."

At this point he touches on religion and rejects it as a way out and then touches on Allan Boom's "Great Books", espoused in "The Closing of the American Mind" and rejects that as well. His solution is based on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", which I haven't read, but can't quite imagine if thousands of years of religion and culture are not sufficient to the task at hand, how one book is going to be. I'll have to put it on my list.

Very much a highly regarded book. Well written and well reasoned. Oh yes, I almost forgot. He really hates polling and goes through many problems with it, but the one I'll likely remember. Two priests wrote to the Pope asking for guidance on smoking and prayer. One phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" to which the reply was that it was not because prayer ought take ones full attention. The other phrased the question: "Is it permissible to pray while smoking?" Which received the answer that it was, because we are to pray without ceasing. Any further questions as to why polling is an inherently ridiculous technology?

Wines Of (cheap) Distinction

One of the side aspects of our firepit has become the chance for my wife and I to sit down and have a bottle of wine as we discuss whatever is happening with kids, the world, church, our plans, and way too often, work. "Sometime" I'm going to get a MUCH better ordered wine list than this, but having a bottle of wine that we really enjoyed last night led me to the idea that a blog post that I linked and updated from time to time was "a way":

• Smoking Loon Merlot, 2005, Firepit 5-25, purchased at RCLS Auction. Very low tannin, smooth. Looks like it only got an 81 from Wine Spectator, 2003 got 85, 2004 84, so they may be worth looking for. Looks like it can be had for <$10 a bottle.
• Little Penguin Cabernet Savignon, 2005, 2006. The Spector gave the '05 an 88 and the '06 an 85. We haven't had a bottle we didn't like, but we may need to do more research to see if we can find some '05 around. This can be had for < $6 a bottle.
• Apothic Red ... we call it "Apathetic" ;-) $7 a bottle, blend, we love it. 
• 
  

A Little Luck

I got a Gander Mountain "Scratch Off" offer in the mail that said you needed to go into the store to have it scratched off to be valid, and only after you scratched it off would you know how much you would save. Sort of a cute little idea to get folks into the store, but it let you believe that not very many would have the "30% off maximum" since they used their little device to lure you into the store.

I have no idea what % they did of 30%, but I was lucky and have been looking to get a gun safe for quite a while, so I'm now the proud owner of a "Franklin Series 35 cubic foot" that is rated for an hour at 1200. It is going in a corner of the basement, so I'm thinking that should be more than sufficient, "just in case". I'm also planning on running a LAN cable into it and putting my main backup disk server in there so that family pictures, iTunes and digital records will be pretty secure.

The piano moves are contacted, so hopefully it will be moving from the store into the house next week and I will likely throw some pictures out here somewhere.

Gouging on Oil?

Power Line: Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless

The one little tidbit in this excellent coverage that is especially apt is the following:

Another theme of the day's testimony was that, if anyone is "gouging"
consumers through the high price of gasoline, it is federal and state
governments, not American oil companies. On the average, 15% percent of
the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4%
represents oil company profits. These figures were repeated several
times, but, strangely, not a single Democratic Senator proposed
relieving consumers' anxieties about gas prices by reducing taxes.

How Democrats look at the world is pretty amazing. Profits = Bad, Taxes = Good. We hear endlessly about the size of oil company profits and are constantly told how "they are the problem". The MSM virtually NEVER reports that simple number that taxes average 15% of the cost of fuel, and the profits are only 4%. Even more strange, the idea that a "tax moratorium" is a stupid idea is claimed to be foolish (I guess because BO doesn't like it), where we CONSTANTLY hear that oil company profits are "way too high". How can that be? 15% off would be completely worthless to consumers, but 4% off would be a huge help?

The fact is that Democrats don't like business, executives, and especially not the oil industry. They have been working to restrict them for 50+ years, and it is pretty obvious they have been very successful. Our oil industry is anemic by world standards ... accounting for single digit percentages of reserves and refining capacity. Largely due to government decisions that we have made to restrict exploration, drilling and refineries, we have arrived where Europe arrived decades ago as likely going to always be a high cost oil market. Congratulations Democrats and MSM! You have successfully put the US in a hole that hurts the lowest income people the worst and is likely to be a drag on the economy for decades to come.

Will US Business and Technology find some innovative way to dig us out? Hydrogen, better electric cars, fusion, solar, coal gassification, or some way that I have no clue about? I sure hope so. No doubt BO will do all he can do to make that less likely by restricting capital flows through higher taxes, but the innovation momentum kicked off by Reagan won't wind down immediately (well, unless BO takes even worse actions than I expect to stop it). I like to think there is always hope. Investors, innovators and producers always fight against long odds, it is just that at some points they get a lot longer.

Kennedy Cancer

The deification of Teddy from the press has arrived. Like a lot of things, if that cut both ways for Democrats and Republicans it would actually be fine with me. When Reagan got Alzheimer's we had to have a lot of time spent in the press basically saying "that explains a lot of what he did in office", and an awful lot of the farther left press saying essentially "he deserved it".

There is an odd connection in the Reagan / Kennedy comparison, because Kennedy essentially traded his very real shot at the Presidency for a night out with a young secretary that ended in her death. If Chappaquiddick doesn't happen, then I wonder if Carter to Reagan ever happens? We will never know, but given the Kennedy mystique, I think anything short of the death of the young lady under suspicious circumstances, and Teddy makes it to President. Teddy made his choice and this history happened. It is heartwarming to hear the press talk about him "surviving a car accident"--in fact, so well that by his official story he could swim to the mainland and call the authorities in the AM.

I'm a Christian, so I certainly hope I don't get what I deserve, and I hope Teddy doesn't either. We all die; cancer, Alzheimer's, accidents, heart attack-the list is long and nothing all that fun to dwell on. We all die of something--we don't get to pick, no matter our power attained in life, we find that some things are beyond our control. Some level of "remembering the good times" is to be expected from the MSM, but the press certainly didn't avoid "the rough spots" for Reagan at the time of the Alzheimer's announcement. Iran Contra, deficits, etc. I'm not saying that they should have ignored the rough spots. Reagan was flesh and blood, just like Kennedy, but I don't recall Reagan ever saying anything like this, as Kennedy did on Robert Bork:

"The President, should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision on the Supreme Court.

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."

Aside from the well known boozing, womanizing and death of Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy has always played hard-ball politics. AT LEAST as hardball as anyone on the right. Again, I don't have a problem with that, it is just a fact. He managed to have Robert Bork defeated, he worked very hard to have Clarence Thomas defeated with every technique he could come up with, reasonable and over the top. He played very hard, and his hardness has often been returned in kind. That fact ought to be included in the stories along with his kindness. I assume he has been kind, at the very least to those he liked, and no doubt, in some cases to others. It is also clear from the record that this man is not one that has failed to "give punches".

So far I haven't heard any nut job from the right talk about "he deserves a painful death" as MANY from the left have for Reagan, Bush, Cheney and others. I suppose someone will do that, since there are certainly right-wing nut jobs as well as left wing ones, but I hope they are very few and far between. We all get to face the grim reaper in one form or another, the long lists of folks from the left that like to heap painful death wishes on Republicans is something that I find reflects especially badly on those of that stripe. Disease and death happen and only the most ultimate of fascists try to make them ideological issues (as in the left with AIDS/Reagan).

One of the VERY common things that the press loves to do is to try to arouse people's emotions against Republicans. "If it was HIS son or daughter killed in Iraq, THEN how much would he support the war"? Somehow one never reads in the MSM how the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne might feel about a sitting US Senator that left their daughter in a car under water, where all the evidence we have says that she died over hours, breathing her last in an air bubble while that US Senator tried to come up with the right lie to keep his career alive. The feelings of of her parents are forfeit by the MSM for what they see as the greater cause of liberalism. It is also basically top secret that John McCain's son is in Iraq -- and he supports the war.

The other common emotion is "how would they feel if THEY didn't have health insurance, maybe they wouldn't be so greedy and vote against national health insurance THEN!". Guess what, in England there would be no treatment for Kennedy under their plan. It would be hospice time. Will the MSM be looking into that very much? If Kennedy was forced to live under the health system that he supports, he would not be treated. Emotions might be quite different--and maybe even more removed from the picture since people might realize that National Health is just a "trade off", not some huge "sure win for all".

How do I feel about Kennedy now that I know he is dying? It doesn't make much of a difference to me, since I know I am dying and I knew he was dying as well all along-- neither one of us knows when. This information likely increases my chances of outliving him, but there are no guarantees. I wish him peace with God, as much remaining time as can have reasonable quality for him and as pain free a death as possible. Finding out that we liked the same Scotch wouldn't even make me agree with him politically, a reminder that we are both going to die is even less likely to so so.

Success! (So Far)

This is from Taranto, "Best of the Web" at WSJ and is right in line with what I have been noticing. From the sounds of this, apparently even the NYT agrees that Iraq being "out of the news" means that there is solid progress there again. Could there EVER be a time when the MSM and the Democrats would say something like; "We were premature when we said that Iraq had descended into civil war and the situation was not recoverable. It IS being recovered and we applaud the success of the US and Iraqi troops and will do what we can to help it continue".

Is that possible? Nope, I don't think it is. The Democrats and the MSM have declared Iraq "the worst decision ever", "a lost cause", "civil war", "a tradegdy", "a waste", just too many times to be willing to acknowledge success there. It is a matter of ideology, not reality.

Mission Accomplished?
Yesterday New York Post columnist Ralph Peters issued a dare to the New York Times:

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times.

Today, the Times took him up on the dare:

Iraqi forces rolled unopposed through the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Tuesday, a dramatic turnaround from the bitter fighting that has plagued the Baghdad neighborhood for two months, and a qualified success for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

As it did in the southern city of Basra last month, the Iraqi government advanced its goal of establishing sovereignty and curtailing the powers of the militias.

This was a hopeful accomplishment, but one that came with caveats: In both cities, the militias eventually melted away in the face of Iraqi troops backed by American firepower. Thus nobody can say just where the militias might re-emerge or when Iraqi and American forces might need to fight them again.

The Times put the caveat right in the headline--"Operation in Sadr City Is an Iraqi Success, So Far"--and we do not seem to remember the paper being so careful to hedge its bets when reporting on setbacks for America's side. Still, it's nice to see our colleague at the Post get results.

Are We Still in Iraq?

Power Line: Success that probably only the Democrats can reverse

I just did a quick scan of the headlines today, not one mention of anything from Iraq. Last month there was a brief flurry of news as the Iraqi army ran some operations in Basra and Sadir City flared causing some loss of American life. Naturally, the media and the Democrats indicated that "defeat is proven yet again, it will only get worse". Nancy Pelosi was over there recently, but since even HER reports were upbeat, they have received virtually no coverage. (she must have missed the news from Harry Reid that Iraq was a "lost cause".) For all practical purposes, Iraq is out of the news. I wonder what that means? Do you think things are going well, or badly? Which would play more to the Democrat hands, and thus be more likely to reported?

We are talking about a party here that having a lot of trouble picking one from a field of two. Their strongest suit is always pointing out everything in the world that they find to be "hopeless", "unfair", "a lost cause", etc. Their weakest suit is always actually getting anything productive done on any front.

Imagine

Michelle Malkin: Obamanation, NRO

I was looking for another post by Michelle on BO gaffes and ran into this. Apparently from over a year ago. I always love Democrats who claim that the lives of soldiers that died in the service of their country were "wasted". On one hand, I do admire their honesty, because that is what most of them believe. I think John Lennon had the liberal view pretty close with "Imagine":

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today


Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace


You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one


Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world


You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

It fits in so many ways. Here we have a guy that was worth at least 100's of millions of dollars with homes around the world singing about "no possessions". Beyond that, someone who thought that if there were "no countries" there would be nothing to "kill or die for" gets killed by someone basically just because he was famous. There would seem to be a message in there somewhere and it is doubtful that John understood it.

No God, No Country, No Possessions. Just the self lost in a meaningless cosmos. Given that, what would "wasted" be? Dying for something other than personal pleasure?

Here are the words of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, who died in a 2005
firefight in Ramadi:

“Obviously if you are reading this then I have
died in Iraq . . . I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to
do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why
we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that
they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or
vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is
why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.”

John Lennon, BO, or 90%+ of Democrats can have nothing but contempt for such words and when they are honest believe that Jeffrey Starr "wasted his life".

Imagine