Lying About Lying

Since the CIA leak investigation didn't produce much, Democrats took up the strategy of claiming that Bush lied. We hear it from them again and again. Bush lied. He distorted and cherry-picked intelligence. A well-written answer for that is here. The main point is that too many Democrats also said that Saddam was re-arming.

The current Democratic response is to say that Congress didn't have access to all intelligence. They only got a summary. While true, it does not explain why the Clinton administration was saying the same things as Bush.

So why are they doing this? The obvious reason is that they hope to cripple Bush politically. Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on why democrats who voted for the war have signed on to the Bush Lied campaign.

Because, as I've noted, Democratic politicians voted for the war, but their activist donor base opposes it. They're boxed in, and claiming that they were misled seems like a way for them to explain away the contradiction while going on the offensive against Bush.

But there is more to it than that. Yes, some democratic leaders in Congress seem to be forced to take this route but they are just going along with the MoveOn/Sheehan/Moore wing. These people really believe it.

Look at all of the things that this group accuses Bush of doing. While numerous sources are on record as saying that Saddam was re-arming, Bush knew otherwise then pushed the war, anyway.

According to these people, Bush decided to go to war with Iraq around 9/13/2001. Some even say that he decided to go to war sometime in 1999 in order to raise political capital. This is only one of the reasons given for the war. The real reason - that given Iraq's sponsorship of terrorism and use of WMDs, Saddam was too dangerous to stay in power in a post-9/11 world - is never even considered.

Instead we are told that Bush wanted to raise political capital, that he wanted to enrich Halliburton, that he was seeking revenge for a plot to kill his daddy, that he wanted to clean up the blot on his daddy's record (leaving Saddam in power), or that it was a private feud between the Bushes and Saddam.

These people look at everything that Bush does in the worst possible light. His tax cuts were not to stimulate the economy, they were just to benefit the rich (and no one but the rich). Standard reviews of new environmental actions are portrayed as rolling back existing regulations. I look at Bush's growing deficit and attribute it to a moderate who doesn't want to cause the pain that tight fiscal controls would induce. The anti-Bush crowd claims that he is trying to cripple the government's future by running up the deficit.

And world-wide terrorism is a response to Bush. Nevermind that planning for 9/11 started in 1998 or earlier.

Dr. Sanity has a good piece on this. It is his opinion that democrats are afraid of terrorists and are projecting their fears onto Bush as a defense mechanism.

Bush becomes the "criminal mastermind", so devious, so evil, that everything he says is a "lie", everything he does is part of a vast global conspiracy. His family has intimate ties to Bin Laden and the Saudis; He is trying to enrich his oil business friends; He is trying to avenge the insult to his father by getting rid of Saddam; He plans world domination etc. etc. I could go on an on, but you get the point.

There is probably something to this. He goes on to say:

What is most funny is that these psychologically naiive individuals simultaneously think of Bush as this "criminal mastermind"--a genius of evil; and also as a complete moron who isn't capable of uttering a sentence without making a hash of it; or that his brain is controlled by the equally evil Karl Rove.

That is why the CIA leak was so important to them. They were convinced that Rove would be arrested (preferably "frog-marched" out of the White House) and Bush would be denied his brain. Some of the more delusional also hoped that the probe would go onto include the entire run-up to the war but the big prize was always Rove. Don't forget that prominent democrats demanded his resignation as soon as Libby was arrested.

Dr. Sanity calls for democrats to act like adults and recognize the real threat. Too bad it's not going to happen. The democrats have already started their counter-attack. It boils down to ignoring any statements about Saddam made by the Clinton administration and insist that Bush manipulated what information Congress had access to. This may help the democrats but it hurts the country.

How Bad Was the Election?

The story I keep seeing on the news: Republicans lost two governor's races and all of Schwarzenegger's ballot initiatives lost. Bush's unpopularity is dragging down Republicans in general.

Here's a completely different spin;

Voters in California and Ohio voted down ballot initiatives seen as benefiting the minority party (in California they would have helped Republicans, in Ohio they would have helped Democrats). Ohio, a crucial swing-state, voted down issues two to one issues introduced in the wake of 2004's hard-fought election.

In other news, Democrats kept control of two governor's offices.

Sure looks different when you put it that way, doesn't it? Granted Ohio doesn't have a move star governor, but it is considered a swing state. If the issues had gone the other way I am sure that it would have been reported. After all, it could have affected control of Congress.

The MSM wrote their narrative before the first votes were cast. The election was yet another referendum on Bush so the only things that were reported were events that fit this narrative.

Believing Their Own Spin

At one point, Saddam had WMDs. These included poison gas, weaponized Anthrax, and a nuclear program that was close to producing atomic weaponry. After the Gulf war, he agreed to destroy these and UN weapons inspectors monitored his progress. Saddam kept making it harder for the inspectors to do their jobs, finally expelling them in 1998. It was universally assumed that this meant that he was re-arming. (Actually, he was trying to build long-range missiles which were also denied to him by the cease-fire agreement.)

When the Bush administration was making its case for war, they identified a number of reasons that Saddam should be overthrown but they decided to push the WMDs as the primary case (the Downing Street Memo referred to this a "fixing on WMDs".) At the time most prominent Democrats agreed. John Kerry told about going to the CIA and being personally assured that Saddam had WMDs.

The world assumed that Saddam had WMDs but the world was wrong. Saddam was convinced that the only thing that kept him safe from Iran was the threat of WMDs so he hinted that he still had them. Also, some expatriates from Iraq told stories about WMDs in order to incite an invasion.

The Democrats know this. They should have read the same reports that I have.

Yes, Bush said that Saddam had WMDs and Bush was wrong. But being wrong and lying are two different things. If Bush lied then so did Clinton, Gore, and Tony Blair, and a host of others.

Partly because of Joseph Wilson's op-ed column (the one that started the Plame leak investigation), the Bush-haters have been insisting that Bush knew that there were no WMDs and lied about it to the world. They've said this so often that they started believing it.

Many Bush-haters were expecting that the Plame investigation wouldn't stop with who leaked Plame's name. They expected it to continue into the entire WMD issue. When this did not happen, Democrats went ballistic. That is why they shut down the Senate last week. The Democrats were demanding a new investigation, one that would show that Bush lied.

They should be careful. They are not going to get what they want - a declaration that Bush lied, that he ordered reports to be changed, and that he created the forged niger/yellowcake document. It will not happen. The most that they can get is an admission that Bush believed some reports over others. Along the way all of the major Democrats will get tarred right along with Bush. That can't help anyone.

The whole "Bush lied" mantra is being used to try to de-legitamize the war. If they can show that we should not have started it then they can whip up support for an immediate withdrawal. That would be a disaster for Iraq which will degenerate into a nasty civil war, for the US which will lose all claim to superpower status, and for the world. The beneficiaries will be militant Islam which will be able to claim victory over the world's most powerful nation and the America-haters.

I doubt that most of the people chanting "Bush lied" have thought things through all the way. They are too busy calculating how to turn the country against Bush in time for the 2006 congressional elections.

It used to be that politics stopped at the border. No matter what internal politics were going on, polititians were united once the country went to war. The Democrats may soon find out why this was true. If they succeed in pulling down the Bush administration they will be faced with an enemy that they strengthened.

Dirty Tricks?

In a recent column, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) said:

What was the CIA thinking sending Joseph Wilson on a secret mission to look into nuclear weapons matters without swearing him to secrecy? It's almost as if the Agency -- whose director, George Tenet, had told President Bush that the case for WMD was a "slam dunk" -- actually wanted the mission to produce a hostile Op-Ed in the New York Times. Either that or they're just idiots, but either way it seems that some people at the CIA should be losing their jobs.

It is hard to believe that Wilson was not sworn to secrecy, or at least that he had to send any public statements to the CIA for approval. Not only was Wilson sent to Niger by the CIA, his wife works for them. Plus, as a former ambassador, he should know something about keeping secrets.

It is assumed that he felt so strongly about Bush's "falsehoods" that he had to go public but we now know that the report he turned in did not match his op-ed column.

The left has been totally accepting of Wilson and the CIA recently. This is because the CIA in general and Wilson in specific have been undercutting Bush. Still, it wasn't that long ago that the left thought that the CIA was worse than the KGB. There are still people who believe that the CIA is behind most of the world's drug trade. According to some theories, Crack was introduced into the US just to kill off minorities. The left has gone from blaming the world's ills on the CIA to supporting them unquestioningly.

So no one is looking critically at the CIA. The right is used to trusting them (at least somewhat) and the left has gotten over its hatred of them.

Still, the CIA's operations used to be know as dirty tricks.

Now, what if Wilson did pass his op-ed column past his wife's superiors? At the time, Wilson was maintaining that he had been sent by the Vice-President's office. That would inevitably lead to the following conversation:

Reporter: Is it true that you send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?
Vice-President Cheney: No, he was sent by the CIA.
Reporter: Why did they send him?
VP Cheney: His wife recommended him.
Reporter: What does she have to do with it?
VP Cheney: She works for the CIA.

You can substitute Karl Rove or Scooter Libby's names. It makes no difference. The important thing is that Wilson's column was bound to raise questions that would lead to the White House leaking Plame's identity. If the CIA approved the column ahead of time they should have seen this coming. They may even have been counting on it.

That would be a dirty trick.

Expectations and Reality

I checked the Huffington Post earlier today after the Scooter Libby indictments were announced. They are ecstatic, convinced that the trial will include a full investigation into the reasons for invading Iraq. They are sure that Bush knew that Iraq had disposed its WMDs and that the entire case was forged.

They base a lot of this on Joseph Wilson. He's the one who started the whole mess when he wrote an op-ed column claiming that the Vice-President's office sent him to Niger to investigate reports of Iraq trying to buy Uranium yellowcake. Wilson said that his report indicated that this never happened. What's more, he knew as soon as he saw the final report that it was wrong.

Robert Novak wrote a column stating that Wilson had not been sent by the Vice-President, he was sent by the CIA at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA employee. Wilson responded by complaining that his wife was a covert operative and that Novak had ruined her career and put her life in danger. He wrote a book on this, claiming that the administration was ruining his wife as a warning to others. The leak investigation came out of these complaints.

The left lapped it up. Wilson became a hero. Kerry signed him up as a foreign affairs advisor and hosted Wilson's web site.

Then reality caught up with Wilson. It seems that he had been less than honest. He was sent by the CIA instead of the Vice-President and his wife had recommended him for the position. His report indicated that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake and he had never seen the final report since he did not have security clearance for it.

His wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee but she was no longer doing covert foreign assignments. Moreover, it is possible that someone who read Novak's column might have looked up his wife's name and blown her cover but it is not that likely. By going public, Wilson made sure that the world knew who his wife was. Then they did a photo spread for Vanity Fair so everyone knew what she looks like (she wore a scarf and sunglasses as a disguise).

The left seems stuck on 2003. They do not admit that Wilson lied about the yellowcake nor do they recognize that Saddam is known to have had WMDs at one point - he even used them. There was no need for Bush to fake evidence.

Similarly, it is very unlikely that a trial of Libby will go beyond the leak investigation.

In many ways the left's reaction to Wilson is the same as to the forged TANG documents last year. In both cases, the evidence was too good to examine closely. The left needed them to be true so they didn't look too carefully. In both cases, even after the proof turned out to be wrong they refuse to admit it.

The guys over at Huffington have pinned their hopes on the wrong person. Wilson is a dead end and nothing involving his can lead to the investigation they want nor would that lead to the results they desire.

Back to the 19th Century

To hear most activists, all we need to do to stop global warming is buy hybrid cars instead of SUVs. Here is a more realistic account of what life will be like by 2020 in England if proposed programs are implemented.

IF you enjoy long hot baths while sipping chilled white wine, you may be in for a disappointment.

[...] Fridge-freezers may be banished and replaced with cold room pantries, and energy consumption could be rationed, as food was in the post-war years.
Innovations such as patio heaters, plasma televisions and electric toothbrushes would become labeled as antisocial in the energy-saving age, as would owning more than one car. According to the forecast, domestic central heating may also have to be heavily regulated

All of this will happen unless Britians immediately cut back energy use 20%.

Keep in mind that the standard of living in England lagged significantly behind the US through much of the 20th century. This article refers to central heating as being post-war but my first house had central heat and it was built in 1910. Neither that house nor my current one (1920) had anything like a "cold room pantry". Going back to room-heaters and cold-rooms would mean a jump of more than a century for most people.

The problem with the debate on global warming is that warming is presented in the most simplistic and alarmist terms (sometimes in cute flash animations). Solutions are presented as either cheap or money-creating. Critics are dismissed as oil company stooges.

The facts are: 1) Moderate warming has been occurring since the mid-19th century. 2) There is a great deal of evidence that the world was in a cold-spell from the 14th through the mid-19th centuries so some warming is expected. 3) Some component of the detected warming may have been human caused but no one has come up with a viable model to distinguish between natural and human-induced warming. 4) Warming will have to increase a great deal before any of the horror stories can happen. 5) There are significant benefits to a warmer world such as a longer growing season. These are never discussed or even acknowledged. 6) The costs of trying to reduce carbon emissions are enormous - far greater than world leaders let on. 7) The Kyoto protocols were never meant to stop global warming, they were only introduced as a first step with the real cuts coming later. Even with its modest cuts, Kyoto has been a colossal failure with most signatories being out of compliance.

The problem is that Green activists seized on warming as being a bad thing and use it to further their agenda. Currently, any time anything happens in the world, it is ascribed to global warming somehow. If we don't cut through all of the hysteria soon we may find ourselves living in conditions our grandparents were glad to leave behind.

Been Left so Long it Looks Like Center to Me

Eric Alterman wrote a couple of columns recently about the polerization of American politics - here and here. What got him started is the book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy which maintains that Republicans have moved to the fringe right while Democrats are unchanged. This ties in with What's the Matter With What's the Matter With Kansas? which holds that Republicans exploit fringe issues in order to mask the real issues.

Alterman also quotes a poll showing that Americans align with Democrats on all of the important issues.

In a May survey published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 65 percent of respondents said they favor providing health insurance to all Americans, even if it means raising taxes, and 86 percent said they favor raising the minimum wage. Seventy-seven percent said they believe the country "should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.'' A September Gallup Poll finds that 59 percent consider the Iraq War a mistake and 63 percent agree that US forces should be partially or completely withdrawn.

If this is so, then why do Republicans hold the majority, not only on the federal level, but also in most state and city governments? Obviously, either Republicans are inhumanly good at exploiting fringe issues or there is something wrong with Alterman's arguments.

One problem is that the parties are not defined by a few issues. Few people are single-issue voters. Most people vote for the people they trust, not the people who promise them the most. This is the flaw in What's the Matter With Kansas. It starts with the assumption that Democrats have the average workingman's best interests at heart and Republicans don't. By assuming that a few hot-button issues define the race (mainly universal insurance), the Democrats cannot understand why voters would turn them down.

Another problem is that there are a lot more big issues than the ones Alterman quotes and many of these do draw single-issue voters. Gun control is high on this list and Democrats are on the wrong end of that one. In fact Democrats are so dismissive of this issue that they seldom recognize it.

Then there is the way that the questions are worded. The one-line questions are pretty simplistic. There are trade-offs on all issues. Would 65% of Americans still agree if you asked "would you support universal health insurance even if it meant that your taxes would rise and the quality of your health care would decline?" What about this one, "the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment even if it means losing your own job or home?" (A lot of people assume "whatever it takes means that other people will pay.)

Then there is what the fringe issues tell us about a candidate. Gay marriage is often given as an example of a fringe issue. It does not affect most Americans and it is used as a wedge issue, but... it also says a lot about how a candidate views his constituency. Traditionally the family is the heart of American life but the family unit has been under assault for decades. To people who believe in the family, gay marriage is yet one more attempt at devaluing the family. Candidates who support gay marriage are advertising that they have a different value set. On top of that, it indicates that the candidate is willing to make society-wide changes on the basis of tiny special-interest groups.

As for polarization, which party has moved? To me, it is the Democrats. Issues that once used to be limited to fringe elements are now mainstream. Members of Congress have asserted that President Bush caused September 11 in order to push his agenda. If an elected Republican had said something like that, he would have been censured by his own party. Al Gore, the 2000 standard bearer, repeatedly compares Bush to Hitler. Weeks after releasing a movie asserting that Afghanistan was only invaded so that an oil pipeline could be built and pronouncing Islamic terrorists to be freedom fighters, Michael Moore was given a place of honor at the Democratic National Convention.

Democrats are increasingly intolerant of average Americans. Instead of upholding Americans' right to worship, the ACLU has been trying to eliminate religion from public space. Howard Dean has announced that his base is the "Merlot Democrats". When your base is wine-drinking elitist you have left the middle.

The Republicans are having real problems right now. Katrina was a public relations disaster. Bush has a rebellion on his hands over the Supreme Court and spending. The Top Republican Congressional leaders have been implicated in criminal activity (although it is likely that both will be found innocent). The Plame leak investigation continues.

The problem for the Democrats is that public relations are not acting like a teeter-totter. Public perception of the Democrats has not gone up as the Republicans have gone down. Some of this is because people like Alterman keep telling the Democrats that their problems are not internal, they are just the victim of Karl Rove's dirty campaigning. For all their problems, the Republicans are still more in touch with the majority of Americans.

Telling Comment

Eric Alterman was reviewing the DVD collection of the 1950s Superman series. He led with this:

Those were the days, huh, when the “American way” was synonymous with “truth and justice.” Well of course, it never was. But it was a whole hellova lot more credible than under Messrs. Bush and Cheney.

He can't pass up an opertunity to denigrate Bush or America. The "Well of course, it never was." part is a nice summary of what he thinks of America, past and present. I would like to know if any country ever lived up to his high expectations (and why he hasn't moved there).

What's wrong with Walmart?

Last week Leno showed the premiere of a new animation by JibJab. They made some amazingly even-handed animations during last year's election. There was nothing even-handed about this. It was an attack on Walmart (under the name of "Big Boxmart".

It opens in a sweatshop in China making products ("crap") for Walmart. It then jumps to an American with a beer-belly going shopping, maxing out his credit cards on crap (they used that word a lot) that he didn't need. The next day his job was moved to China and he was stuck working at Walmart until death. Apparently it would have been ok for him to buy crap if it had been American made crap.

JibJab may have been a light-hearted cheap-shot but PBS's Frontline looked at the issue in detail (it was actually a repeat episode). After showing talking heads arguing facts over off-shoring, they closed with a segment on RCA, the last American TV manufacturer. The head of RCA said that he could compete with anyone on an even basis but Chinese TVs were being dumped in the US market and (horrors!) Walmart sided against him.

Lots of things were not said in this segment. The issue of dumping was passed over pretty quickly. Were TVs being dumped? Was there proof? How big an effect did this have on the market? These questions were not answered.

Something else that was unadressed is the whole question of why we were down to one US TV manufacturer? This takes a long view. When I first started paying attention to TV prices (around 1970) you could get a 13" black and white TV for around $100. A similar TV now costs $30. $100 will get you a 19" color TV (at Walmart). For $120, you can get a 13" TV with a built-in DVD player.

Figure in 35 years of inflation and today's TVs cost less than the profit margin on a 1970s TV. No one cares about who made the TV. You know it will work and have a good picture so buyers look for the most features in their price-range. TVs have become commodities.

For as long as I can remember, American manufacturers have had problems competing in commodities. Profits are razor thin and things like fluctuations in exchange rates can make all the difference.

That's why Americans don't make TVs any longer and why Walmart is full of Chinese goods. We go to Walmart for commodities. Frontline should have asked why Chinese companies can sell to Walmart cheaper than American companies.

But Walmart is not unique in this. I don't think that any of their competitors are any different, so why the fuss.

The Chinese angle is a recent twist to the anti-Walmart campaign. Other complaints are that their pay is too low and that they drive mom-and-pop businesses out of business.

I am always confused about these complaints. The mom-and-pop hardware store largely vanished decades ago, driven out by K-Mart, Sear Hardware, and other Walmart competitors. What's more, mom and pop may make a decent living from their hardware store but they usually pay minimum to their few employees. Walmart's average is nearly $10/hour plus benefits.

Why didn't anyone protest K-Mart back when they were the #1 retailer?

Granted Walmart is bigger and better than any of their competition. They are big enough to make unreasonable demands on suppliers and they are one of the top retailers of groceries, DVDs, music, magazines, and toys. To many on the left, big business is always bad. Big business equals big oppressors.

Again, that doesn't explain the lack of an anti-K-Mart or anti-Target campaign. So what is it?

I'm guessing that it is religion. The Walton family wears their religion on their sleeves. They refuse to carry soft-core skin magazines such as Maxim and they have forced alternate, cleaned-up versions of some CDs.

The left is secular and tends to be scared of anyone with a hint of Christianity.

I could be wrong about this. I've never seen anyone admit it in public, but I don't think so. As I have pointed out, no one ever complains about Walmart's competitors.

Trashing Condi

Moreen Dowd recently wrote a sneering column about Bush promoting unqualified women. One of her examples was Condoleeza Rice. Why was she incompetent? Because she didn't stop 9/11.

This has become a reflexive reaction among the left to Condi. She should have stopped the plot. After all, she was the security advisor. If she had just paid attention to the August memo "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US" she would have deduced everything else.

Ok, at some level the person on top does take responsibility for what happens on her watch, but is this critisism justified?

Let's look at Richard Clark. He was the person in charge of monitoring Al Qaida during both the Clinton and early Bush administrations. While it was Rice's job to evaluate all threats to the US, it was his job to watch Bin Laden. If Rice didn't know about 9/11, it is because Clark didn't know about it to tell her.

Clark has an excuse. He blames everything on Bush. He claimed that Bush didn't shake the trees. Clinton was supposed to have asked all of his cabinet members constantly what they had done to stop terrorism. They in turn, asked the people below them. Eventually it got down to the guards at the Canadian boarder who recognized the millennium Bomber and arrested him. If Bush had just done as Clinton had done, 9/11 would not have happened.

Clark's account does not match what really happened. The boarder guard in question was never given any instructions about terrorists. He was looking for drug smugglers. When he saw someone who was visibly nervous he searched the man's car and found a bomb instead of drugs.

So Bush is off the hook. Shaking the trees didn't stop bombers, tight boarder control did. That puts Clark back on the hook.

So who cares? Clark left government service years ago while Rice is Secretary of State.

Except, Clark was also an advisor to John Kerry. Had Kerry won the election, Clark would certainly have gotten the job of National Security Advisor. This was a campaign point for Kerry. Everyone knew that the man who missed 9/11 would be given a high post on the Kerry administration.

So why no outrage? Why didn't any of Condi's many critics say anything? Because they don't really believe what they are saying. It's just an excuse.

Rethinking Colin Powell

In a recent column, Thomas Friedman once again attacked President Bush for attacking Iraq with too few troops. You would think that a smart man like Friedman would know why Bush didn't use more troops - he doesn't have them. An article last year in Slate did the math. Once you subtract the Navy and Air Force and allow for troop rotation and personnel needed to keep bases open, you only have around 80,000 troops left to constitute an occupation force. In order to boost the numbers to the 100,000-150,000 that we have had, Bush had to call up the reserves and short other areas.

Of course, Bush cannot stand up and tell the world that we don't have enough troops to occupy a 2nd rate, broken-down country like Iraq. Our reputation as a super power would be gone forever if he did. But we aren't really a super power any longer, at least not in terms of available troops.

We used to have a lot more troops. Under Reagan we had enough troops to fight two wars at once with enough left over to slow a Soviet invasion of Germany until more troops could be brought in.

After the end of the Cold War, Bush I cut the army back to enough troops to fight a single war. This was cut further under Clinton who assured that we only needed enough troops to fight one war at a time.

It would be easy to blame Bush I and Clinton for leaving the military cupboard bare but I blame Colin Powell and the infamous Powell Doctrine. While this is not how he phrased it, the Powell Doctrine boils down to the maxim that we should not get into a war with anyone unless we can crush them quickly then leave. He held that the American people are not able to sustain support for a war that lasts longer than a few weeks and that we should not stick around to put things back together. Further, we would rely on high-tech, low-risk attacks so that American troops were at lower risk than in training. Prior to 9/11, we bombed countries into submission then turned them over to the UN or NATO. With Iraq, we bombed them, ran over them with tanks, then established UN sanctions.

After the Gulf War, everyone was sold on the Powell Doctrine. That was how all future wars would be fought. We did not need a big occupying force because we would never occupy anyone. Bush I and Clinton bought it. It meant that they could cut the military and balance the budget.

September 11 changed our world view-point. We could no longer avoid fights just because they would get messy.

So here we are. We can vaporize anyone in the world. We can probably overthrow anyone short of China or Russia. But we cannot occupy them.

neither can anyone else. The few countries with larger militaries than we have (China, for example) do not have the supply lines needed to invade a distant enemy to say nothing about occupying them.

Ever since the USSR exploded their first atomic bomb, it was obvious that all-out wars between super powers were a thing of the past. Smaller regional conflicts are still possible and, as the world's remaining super power, we keep getting called in to stop the conflicts but, thanks to the Powell Doctrine, we are very limited on what we can actually accomplish.

Pointed Prizes

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. I'm underwhelmed.

Maybe I'm not as innocent as I used to be but it seems like the Peace Prize has gotten so political as to render it meaningless. In 1992 the committee wanted to send a message about how evil Christopher Columbus and the Europeans were so they made a point of giving awards to Native Americans. They gave one to Jimmy (malaise) Carter as a pointed comment to George Bush of how they think an American president should ask. Now, with Iran and Korea pushing ahead with their nuclear programs, they give the award to the person who is supposed to stop this from happening. And they say that Bush rewards failure.

At least they didn't give it to the victims of nuclear weapons.

The Singularity is Coming, or Is It?

There has been a lot of buzz about a new book by Ray Kurzweil predicting "The Singularity". Here is one example. Here is another. This one goes into detail.

Basically, when the Singularity comes, humanity will merge with self-aware computers to become god-like. Normal humans will find themselves obsolete.

I'm not worried for a couple of reasons.

First, Kurzweil is predicting based on current trends. One of these is Moore's Law which says that the complexity of computer chips doubles every 18 months. Kurzweil uses this to predict how complex computers will be in 40 years.

The thing is, Moore's Law is actually Moore's Observation. Moore, a top engineer at HP at the time, observed in the 1970s how fast compuer complexity increased. This became self-fulfilling when the marketing people at Intel got ahold of it. Currenty Intel executives are convinced that their stock will drop precipitously if they fall behind Moore's Law so they throw enourmous resources at maintaining this rate. This means that rather than being a hard and fast law, it is a marketing concept.

Eventually Moore's Law will run into physics. To see what I mean, look at flight.

The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903. Their flight was nothing more than an extended hop. They realized this and kept it secret for nearly two years. By 1905 they had an airplane that could stay in the air for a half hour (until it ran out of fuel) and was fully controlable. It could fly at speeds of nearly 40 miles an hour.

Fifteen years later planes could fly reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour. By WWII jets were invented and the speed of sound was broken in 1947. The SR71 Blackhawk first flew in 1964. It could fly at mach 3.3 (three times the speed of sound).

So we went from 40 mph to 2,175 mph in sixty years. If we extropolate from there then we should have planes that can fly 10,000 mph or faster but the SR71 continues to be the fastest plane built. Flight ran into the laws of physics. Friction is a real problem at these speeds, both as drag and as heat.

This is happening with computers. Computer complexity is increased by making finer etching in silicon but we are approaching the limits. You cannot etch smaller than an atom.

Speed is another issue. Clock speeds keep increasing but there are limits here, also. We already hit the limits of memory. While engineers put more memory on a chip they have not made it ru any faster in some time. There are tricks for getting around thisbut they are tricks and they have their own limits.

So the idea of Moore's Law continuing for the next 40 years is unlikely.

The next problem with Kurzweil's predictions is self-aware computers. He assues that once computers are powerful enough they will be self-aware.There is no reason to think this. We think in ways that are very different from the way computers work. While scientists are researching exactly how we think, we do not know when this will be solved or how computers will need to be changed to simulate thought.

Kurzweil makes a lot of other predeictions dealing with genetics ond other sciences but I doubt that he is any closer with them.

Floodwalls Built on Sand

NBC aired a report saying that there were questions about the strength of the floodwalls lining the 17th Street Canal when they were built ten yeas ago. You can read a print version here.

A 1998 ruling, by an administrative judge for the Corps' Board of Contract Appeals, shows that the contractor, Pittman Construction, told the Corps that the soil and the foundation for the walls were “not of sufficient strength, rigidity and stability” to build on.

For the last month the left has been blaming Bush personally for the levee failure saying that he cut funds that would have shored up the levees (although the levees did not fail, the floodwalls did).

Since Bill Clinton was president when the floodwalls were built I guess he must have been personally responsible instead. Clinton and political consultant James Carvell must have known all about the problem with the walls (actually, Carvell might have since this is his turf). Did they knowingly allow defective floodgates to be built out of racism or were they hoping that the walls would break during a Republican administration?

No, I don't take any of this seriously but I can make as good a case against Clinton as the left has been making against Bush. Maybe they should appologize. (ha!)

Cindy's Smiles

Stories vary on the attendance at last weekend's anti-war protests - everything from 2,000 to 250,000. The most widely carried wire service report quoted the organizer as saying that they met the goal of 100,000. This is meaningless since organizers always say that they met their targets. Regardless, it is obvious that they were short of the estimated million who protested at the start of the war.

The Instapundit pointed out that there is no real anti-war movement. No major politicians showed up and the protests are led by the anti-American left. Christopher Hitchens points out that they are not anti-war, they are anti-American.

Never the less, Cindy Sheehan had a bit of fun hugging Jesse Jackson from the rear. Check out her smile here.

Cindy has been doing a lot of smiling recently. Two days later she was still smiling when she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk.

Why was she smiling? She says that she was having fun plus:

There is another and more important reason that I was smiling. I had not genuinely smiled since Casey was killed in Iraq. I thought my hope was buried along with my son and I was in a pit of hopeless despair. Camp Casey gave me back my hope because America came out in huge numbers to support us and they raised their voices with ours in unison to take our country back and to hold this administration accountable for the lies and mistakes that are killing tens of thousands of innocent people. There were hundreds of thousands of regular Americans who came out to protest the war and Bush's policies this past Saturday. Hundreds of faithful Americans turned out for our interfaith religious service Sunday night next to the Washington Monument. The so-called religious right doesn't have a monopoly on God. I am so pleased that the people of America are becoming active participants in Democracy and America is ready to put their money where their collective mouths are: to bring our troops home and hold BushCo accountable. It is a wonderful thing to be doing something that makes a difference and it is a wonderful and miraculous thing to have my hope back. That is why I am smiling.

She hasn't smiled since Casey died? What was that goofy expression on her face when she pressed herself against Jackson?

Regardless, I think that the real reason that she was smiling was that she managed to attract a camera again. Her Saturday protest totally failed at getting press. It seems that everyone was paying attention to Hurricane Rita instead of Cindy. Cindy has this to say:

Now about Hurricane Rita: I woke up on Saturday morning filled with excitement. I knew that the rally and march were going to be amazing events and I was thrilled to be a part of them. I switched on the TV and turned on CNN and for 2 hours, I watched one of their reporters in front of the same downed tree and it wasn't even raining. I knew that there was a hurricane and it was damaging. At the point of the news cycle though, I thought CNN could be covering other news. 40 soldiers have been killed this month so far in Iraq and countless Iraqis have been killed. The war is still going on and the news has been dominated by hurricanes and the terrible aftermaths. I actually think the mainstream media has been doing a good job of pointing out the dropped balls in the Gulf States. However, CNN and other mainstream news outlets ALWAYS report other news besides the illegal occupation of Iraq.

[...] I was also disappointed that that tragedy superseded the protest coverage. Wolf Blitzer called our protests: Insignificant.

Saturday was the most important event in peace history in decades. The numbers were underreported and the wonderful energy was unreported by the mainstream media. With the MSM there will always be something more important than covering the atrocity of Iraq: Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Terry Schiavo, The Runaway Bride, etc. It is time we hold our media accountable, too. Balanced coverage of all issues and some investigative reporting would be extremely refreshing.

I am sorry for what seemed to be an insensitive remark about the people who were affected by Rita, but that was not my intention. I am very aware that the failed policies of the Bush administration have all put us in the same boat, so to speak, and we need to take responsibility for righting the wrongs here in our country and in Iraq.

To Cindy, everything has to be about her. If the MSM chooses to pay attention to a major storm instead of her protest then she wants to hold it accountable. And I'm at a loss at why she thinks that Bush is responsible for Rita.

Wolf Blitzer was right. The protests were insignificant. Cindy managed to rally her base but her support never went beyond that and she is 14 minutes and 59 seconds into her fifteen minutes of fame. Even a second arrest is unlikely to be very well covered.

Actually, I wouldn't have bothered writing about it if it wasn't for her smile.

Manufactured News

In the days after Katrina we were treated to daily reports of how quickly a city can sink into depravity. As the world looked on, we wondered how America could come to this? Of course, some were quick to respond that racism was somehow to blame.

If you were paying close attention you noticed that all of the reports came from one place - New Orleans. No where else was reporting this kind of lawlessness or violence. This raised a new question: what was different about New Orleans?

One difference was the level of reporting. Most of the hurricane's devastation was ignored in favor of shots of flooded streets. In the rush to find new stories, reporters repeated nearly anything that they were told, especially if it came from an authority figure.

Which is the second difference. Most city authorities try to downplay reports that make their city look bad. Not Mayor Nagin. Early on he was quoted as saying that the death toll would be 10,000 or more. What was his source for this? He made it up. As time went on, he found that he could get on Oprah by repeating the worst stories he had heard. On Sept. 6 he was on Oprah and told the world about piles of dead bodies and babies being raped at the Superdome. Police Chief Compass, who was also on Oprah, added more details about general lawlessness including alledging that the Ritz-Carlton hotel had been taken over by armed thugs and his own daughter had been raped there. Nothing of the kind happened.

The official murder count for the week of flooding was four - a typical week for New Orleans.

Articles about the misinformation have appeared but it is too late. America has been given a black eye. A lot of the foreign press including the BBC exaggerated the already-false stories. Any follow-up they do will be buried. The world now thinks of America as one storm away from barbarians.

Probably this is part of why Chief Compass resigned.

Congressional hearings began this week on what went wrong. I wonder how closely they will look at the stream of mis-information and its source. Mayor Nagin might get another national TV interview yet.

The Democrats Roberts Problem

John Roberts is well-qualified for the post of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. By all expectations he will be more moderate than Justice Renquist which will move the court slightly to the center. During his hearing Roberts came near to promising that he would respect the precedent of RoeVsWade. Nothing in his background is controversial which was implicitly acknowledged when the Democrats demanded privledged documents.

Given all of this, there is no valid reason to oppose Roberts' confirmation. Democrats should go ahead and vote him in and thank the stars that Bush didn't nominate Scalia or Thomas for Chief Justice. Most Democrats in the Senate know this.

But this response has the far left really upset. Posters on Huffington and elsewhere want a real fight. They want blood. Groups such as MoveOn are egging them on. One column on Huffington wanted to know what good an opposition party is if it doesn't oppose? Another complains that the Democrats always promise to fight the next battle but not the current one.

None of these people give any good reasons for opposing Roberts. The implication is that anyone Bush nominates must be unacceptable just because Bush nominated him.

This creates a big problem for Senate Democrats. If they don't fight Roberts then they anger the left wing that is spoiling for a battle.

On the other hand, if they oppose Roberts then they lose the public relations battle with the rest of the country. After all, if they oppose Roberts they will oppose anyone Bush nominates.

As the winner of the election, Bush gets to nominate justices. This is not a surprise - it was a campaign issue. That means that Bush gets to change the makeup of the court and with a Republican majority in the Senate it means that any qualified nominee should be confirmed.

If the Senate Democrats give in to the extremist wing then they are handing Bush a PR win in the fight to replace O'Connor. If they don't they risk offending MoveOn, Soros, and a vocal minority.

Just as with Cindy Sheehan's anti-war crusade, the anti-Roberts push will alienate moderate (electable) Democrats from the radical left.

The Democrat's Cindy Problem - part II

If I was a congressional Democrat, chances are that I would be hoping for Cindy Sheehan's anti-war campaign to flame out and blow away. After failing to talk with President Bush, she now announced that she expects every member of Congress to meet with her to answer these "simple" questions:

• President Bush has said that brave Americans like my son Casey have died for a "noble cause." What is that "noble cause "?
• How many more lives are we as a country willing to sacrifice in Iraq?
• How many are you personally willing to sacrifice?
• What are you specifically doing to bring our sons and daughters home from this needless war?

The catch here is that Cindy has already decided what answers are acceptable so even members of Congress who meet with here can end up on her Hall of Fame and Shame. In fact, a meeting can end up looking worse than refusing to meet. Dianne Feinstein had an aid meet with Cindy. This earned Feinstein an entry detailing how rude the aid was and why Cindy rejected Feinstein's responses. Compare this long entry with the one-sentence entries for DeLay and Hastert.

By most measures Dianne Feinstein is one of Congress's more liberal members and a frequent critic of President Bush. That is not enough for Cindy. She gives negative marks to anyone who does not endorse her position of "bring the troops home now".

Likely 2008 candidate, Hillary Clinton has scheduled a meeting with Cindy. It is hard to see how this can go well. Either Hillary will endorse Cindy's position and apologies for her pro-war votes or Cindy will denounce her. While this will help Hillary position herself as a moderate, the moderates are not paying attention right now. It is the anti-war, anti-Bush, Howard Dean faction that is watching and they already dislike Hillary. This could turn into white-hot hatred if Hillary is not careful.

Cindy has a big anti-war rally scheduled for this weekend. The best thing that could happen for Hillary would be if Hurricane Rita takes up all of the media's attention. Since Katrina, Cindy's road show has been starved for ink. The only mention they got in weeks was when the NYPD shut them down for not having a permit (there has been speculation that they didn't get a permit in order to get coverage). If Cindy is not able to generate any further coverage her supporters will move on elsewhere.

That still doesn't address a central problem that the Democrats have had since McGovern - no one trusts them to keep the country safe. Prior to McGovern there were a lot of hawks in the Democratic Party and the anti-war people were non-aligned. While it makes sense to pick up a big voting block like the anti-war crowd, they are not the majority. When Americans feel threatened they turn away from the party of peace and appeasement. The only two democrats elected since McGovern ran during times when Americans felt safe enough that economics were the main issue.

At some point the Democrats will have to eject their anti-war wing, especially the Cindy Sheehan fanatics. They are too unrealistic to ever be trusted with the country and they drag the party down with them.

Katrina Myths

This article should put to rest any rumors that the Bush administration was responsible for the levy failures that flooded New Orleans.

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood-protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

[...] But with the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals — and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

Nothing here about inadequate funding. The implication is that corrupt contractors used inferior materials.

Also, the MSM made a lot of jokes about Bush's statement that no one expected the levees to break. Here's confirmation further down the same article:

Former senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) said he remembers numerous briefings from Corps officials about the danger of a hurricane overtopping the New Orleans levees. But he says he never envisioned a scenario like this one. "This came as a surprise," he said.

Another myth is that the federal government was slow or just didn't care about the people still in New Orleans. It has been poorly reported (I think that it was limited to Fox News) but the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were prevented from bringing in food and water. Here is an account.

Given the endless hyping of the 10,000 dead figure and numerous descriptions of bloated corpses floating in the water when both were highly exaggerated it is obvious that the MSM wrote their narative before the storm had lifted. Bush and the federal government were going to be pictured as failing to help the common people. As with any good story, reporters hate to let the facts get in the way.

Bush didn't help matters by waiting so long before being seen being involved. He should have cleared his schedule the day the hurricane hit and he should have made a tour of the destruction before returning to the White House instead of looking down from Air Force One.

With another major hurricane heading for Texas, we will see what happens. The new narative might be how much improved federal response is or how much better Texas authorities handle a disaster than Louisiana authorities.

Debating the War

Last week Christopher Hitchens debated George Galloway on the Iraq war. This is an interesting matchup. Hitchens is a former leftist turned neoconservative. Galloway, an unreformed leftist, is a MP representing the most Moslem district in Britian. He is currently on an anti-war tour of the US with Jane Fonda.

Eric Alterman has this to say about the debate:

I was disgusted to watch the Hitchens/Galloway debate on CSPAN yesterday. Both are brilliant debaters without much care whether the points they are making are consistent with the known evidence. Galloway is a considerably more offensive individual, and while he’s right about much of what he says regarding Iraq, he’s right for all the wrong reasons. He is the face of that part of the global left that really does abhor democracy and blames Israel for everything.

Alterman's description of Galoway is rather mild. He was ejected from the Labour party for encouraging Iraqi insurgents to kill British soldiers. He has also been implicated as a recipient of nearly a half million dollars in oil-for-food bribes.

A transcript of the debate is here. A couple of Galloway's points stand out. Here is the first:

Are you with the foreign occupation of Iraq, or are you with the right of the Iraqi people to be free and to resist the foreign armies who have violently invaded them.

Saddam attempted genocide against his own people but Galloway refuses to recognize this. Then of course, there is the paradox that the US will leave when the resistance ends.

And the second:

It won't matter, how many fly-swats we invest in, how many PATRIOT Acts we pass, how many anti-terrorist measures we pass. If you live beside a swamp, no amount of fly-swats will protect you from the monsters who will come out of that swamp. We have to drain that swamp by stopping that support for Sharon's Israel, his apartheid war, his crimes against the Palestinians.

It all comes down to the Jews. Saudis killed Americans in order to help Palestinians agaisnt Israel.

Cindy Shehan has said things very similar to both of these statements and she continues to be the most visible face of the anti-war movement.

So, when Eric Alterman says that Galloway is right for the wrong reasons, what does he expect? Why are the anti-war leaders also anti-democracy?

Then there is the anti-semitism. Ever since September 12, 2001, the left has been making noises about root causes. This is usually thinly disguised code to mean that we should cut all ties with Israel.

I read the influential blogs from both the far-right and the far-left. What the right says in private is pretty much the same thing that they say in public. The far-left, on the other hand, feels the need to clean up their language. Shehan disowned some of her statements. The anti-war group International ANSWER is a front for socialists.

Then there is the logical disconnect within the anti-war movement. Four years ago the woman's group Not In Our Name was demonstrating in favor of the Taliban. How in heaven's name can any American woman say anything in favor of the Taliban? The same is true when Shehan acts as though Iraq was a paradise prior to the US invasion. Galloway has gone as far as suggesting that the socialists and the Islamists make a common cause against the West.

The people opposing the war need to look more closely at the adgenda being pushed by their leaders. I doubt that most people who oppose the war ethically are in favor of the socialist platform they are supporting.

How Low Can They Go?

Starting slightly before Hurricane Katrina his the Gulf Coast, the left descided to blame as much as they could on Bush. They started by blaming the storm itself on Bush. If only he had signed the Kyoto Protocals, the storm would have been a gentle shower.

There were lots of recriminations about the speed of the response. News viewers saw the Mayor of New Orleans in the packed Superdome asking where reliefe workers were when they had been turned away, either on his orders or the Governor's orders. They feared that people would not leave the Superdome if they had food and water.

The left found some recent figures on money spent on levees and concluded that Bush cut flood-control funds to pay for Iraq.

They also insisted that the reason that the federal response was so slow was because everyone in the National Guard was in Iraq.

Or that no one wanted to mobilize troops to help poor blacks. This got a lot of attention.

Most recently, posters at the DailyKOS announced that Bush had the Army Corp of Engineers blow the levees. This was echoed by Louis Farrakhan:

Farrakhan also shared his thoughts on how the levee breached in the first place.

"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry," Farrakhan said.

Conspiracy theorists point out that the poor black areas received the worst ofthe flooding while the rich white areas and the tourist spots received little damage. The French Quarter might even be open by this weekend.

So is there anything to the allegations? Of course not.

First, the areas hit hardest are the lowest ones. The older and richer parts of the city are built on higher ground.

Second, the 25 foot crater is a myth. Here's what the Army Corp of Engineers says:

Floodwalls were breached in the 17th Street Canal, at two places in the London Avenue Canal, and at two places in the Industrial Canal, Suhayda said. Naomi said last week that one of the Industrial Canal breaches likely was caused by a loose barge that broke through it.

Suhayda said that his inspection of the debris from the 17th Street Canal breach suggests the wall simply gave way. "It looks to have been laterally pushed, not scoured in back with dirt being removed in pieces," he said. "You can see levee material, some distance pushed inside the floodwall area, like a bulldozer pushed it."

And finally, it appears that someone starts saying that the flooding was deliberate whenever the city floods. Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu remembers a 1957 hurricane:

But Betsy passed far enough away to the west so that the waters of Lake Borgne and Lake Ponchatrain, which normally caress the city limits, were not pushed up into the city by fierce winds, overpowering levees and flood walls. This was everyone’s nightmare scenario. Even so there was serious damage. My grandmother’s house in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward was flooded to about four feet. Dark rumors flew that city officials had colluded to dynamite the levee, thereby taking the pressure off the rest of the city while abandoning the “poor folks” to their fates. “I heard dat explosion,” one on Grandmother’s neighbors told me, with great intensity. The perennial state of bureaucratic corruption that characterizes New Orleans politics lent credibility to the rumor, although nothing city officials had accomplished to date would support the degree of proficiency necessary to accomplish such a complex task as picking the exact spot to blow the levee and the precise charge with which to accomplish the mission.

Just like the "stolen election", this will go into urban myth, releated by Bush detractors and believed by too many.

Staying On-Message and Anti-Bush

In 1992 Hurricane Andrew swept over Florida. Not long after the governor (Jeb Bush's Democrat predecessor) complained to the media that the federal government was being slow to respond. This got the headlines. The fact that the governor was slow to request aid was relegated to the bottom of an inside page. This added to the perception that G. W. H. Bush was aloof and out-of-touch and contributed to his defeat that November.

I doubt that any Democratic operatives have forgotten this. They have been working overtime, with some success, to create the same impression about G. W. Bush and Katrina. Even before the floodwaters started rising in New Orleans, the far left was blaming Bush. At that point, the best that they could come up with was global warming. If Bush had only joined Kyoto a few months earlier then the oceans would have cooled and the storm would have been a gentle breeze.

Next they started insisting that Iraq had drained so many troops from the National Guard that they were unable to respond to a domestic crisis. This had as much basis as the global warming theory - none.

Then they struck paydirt. Bush had cut funds for levee work. It didn't matter that this would have been a 20-40 year plan that could not possibly have made a difference so soon or that the levee that failed was upgraded just this Summer. They had something that they could pin on Bush.

Things got even better when the Mayor of New Orleans started complaining about the slowness of relief workers. It didn't matter that his police force had lost control of the city and that relief workers had turned back in the face of gunfire. It also didn't matter that the Governor of Louisiana had been reluctant to authorize federal control. She worried (with cause) that once the feds took over they would blame the current mess on the state and local authorities (the ones in charge to that point).

So far most of the MSM has taken the lazy route and followed the Democrat's pre-written storyline. There has been a lot of coverage that Bush cut levee funds. Much less covered is that presidents have been cutting levee funds since Jimmy Carter. Also not reported is that there was a floodgate project proposed in 1977 that would have made the levees proof against a Category 5 storm. This was stopped by environmentalists.

Here is one timeline supporting the left's storyline. While much of it is accurate, it has some significant omissions. Bush declared a state of emergency on Saturday, August 27 and was urging residents to evacuate on Sunday, August 28.

Democrats are also playing "gotcha", trying to find quotes that prove people knew that the levees would fail. This is an example: the Think Progress timeline has this headline, "LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE". If you read the linked story you find that what it really says is:

Forecasters feared Sunday afternoon that storm driven waters will lap over the New Orleans levees when monster Hurricane Katrina pushes past the Crescent City tomorrow.

“Some levees in the Greater New Orleans area could be overtopped,” he said.

The model showed a storm surge of as much as 16 feet moving up the Mississippi River and topping levees in Chalmette and New Orleans. High water flowing from Lake Pontchartrain through St. Charles Parish would also flood over levees into Kenner.

I hope I don't have to explain the difference between a storm surge coming over the top of a levee and a levee collapsing.

The Sep. 6 Daily Show had a similar "gotcha". They showed a levee engineer talking about flooding and told us that she was predicting levee collapse.

This sums up the problem with the Democrats' storyline. It just isn't true.

Similarly, the MSM has spent most of its efforts reporting on New Orleans. This is understandable. It is the largest city affected and it continues to be a developing story. The rest of Katrina's devistation consists of flattened communities, just like any other major hurricane.

The focus on New Orleans allows activists to insist that Bush is moving slowly because the victims are poor and black. while this is true of the thousands of people left in New Orleans, it ignores the areas hit hardest by Katrina. This includes the whitest counties in Mississippi. In this case, the Democrats don't even have to write the storyline. They can just react to the newscasts.

Don't Blame Bush

It turns out, Bush cannot possibly be blamed for the flooding in New Orleans. The section of levee that gave way was renovated just this Summer. It was thick cement instead of packed earth. The engineers in charge admit that this was the section they thought was least likely to fail.

Worse for the editorial writers were statements by the chief engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen Carl Strock: "I don't see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case. Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place."

See more here including a discussion about Louisiana's sinking coastline.

This article looks at our current vulnerability to hurricane strikes because of the amount of development in danger zones.

Adjusted to 2004 dollars, Hurricane Andrew of 1992 was the costliest hurricane on record, at about $44 billion. It remains to be seen whether the Katrina event will exceed this record. If it does, it will be more attributable to the desire of so many people to live and build in coastal areas than to the inherent strength of the hurricane itself. Indeed, if we ask the question, "which land falling hurricane in U.S. history would be the most expensive if it happened today?" the clear front-runner would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. It is estimated that, if that hurricane occurred today, the costs would reach about $110 billion.

Plenty of Blame to Go Around

The Huffington Post and the Democratic Underground are blaming everything that went wrong on Bush. Their reasoning - he cut money for levees and he folded FEEMA into Homeland Security. They also think that he caused global warming which caused the storm.

In reverse order, even if you do believe that global warming is happening, Kyoto is not meant to stop it, only to slow it slightly. Since it just went into effect this year, there is no way it could have mitigated Katrina. Other data shows that big hurricanes happen.

Feema and Homeland Security seem like a good fit to me. There is not a lot of difference between responding to a man-made disaster and a natural one.

As for the levees, piling up dirt to hold back huge bodies of water is a bad idea. The levees are in constant need of repair. When one fails it fails spectacularly.

Now, this is where the blame starts spreading. The Huffposties point out that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the top three predicted disasters. There was also talk a year ago of doing a new four year study on New Orleans surviving a category 4 or 5 hurricane.

This does not prove what the Huffposties think it does. If anyone knew about the danger of levees breaking, it would be the mayor. The current Mayor says that he did not expect it. The same is true of his predecessor. I believe them. The disaster plans only make sense if you assume that the levees will hold and the pumps will work.

The plan has worked before. The last time a hurricane hit near New Orleans it dumped a lot of water on the city. Parts flooded but the levees held and the pumps got rid of the water. People only had to stay in the Superdome for a few days.

That's what they expected this time. That's why they let so many people stay behind and why the Superdome is so poorly stocked.

This points to failures that go back much earlier than Bush. In fact, it was recognized when New Orleans was founded that it is in an unsafe place.

Then there is what I sad earlier about levees being a bad idea. This is especially true when the levees sink on their own and have to be constantly added to.

The trouble is that no one will tell people who are living in an unsafe place to move. Consider this exchange in Huffpost

"Americans' hearts go out to the people in Katrina's path... But if the people of New Orleans and other low-lying areas insist on living in harm's way, they ought to accept responsibility for what happens to them and their property."
from a Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American newspaper editorial Wednesday, echoed by House Speaker Dennis Hastert in the Chicago Daily Herald Thursday, who said rebuilding New Orleans "doesn't make sense to me."

"That's like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it's built in an earthquake zone... Or like saying that after the Great Chicago fire of 1871, the U.S. government should have just abandoned the city."
former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., responding to Hastert's comments.

Yes it is, senator and we need to be aware that large sections of California will eventually be destroyed. There are estimates that it will cost as much as the entire US GNP to de-contaminate and rebuild New Orleans. Is this a cost that we can bear?

An additional problem is the number of people who decided to ride out the storm. Glenn Reynolds has complained before about hurricane hype. News stations boost ratings by telling you that storms are stronger than they are. When a real monster comes, people don't give it proper respect because they think they have been through a similar one before.

But the real blame goes to random chance. Higher than expected waters breached the levees. It should have been expected but it was not. Everyone knew that it would happen eventually but expected that it would be in someone else's lifetime. This has been going on for nearly two centuries. Trying to blame any specific person is pointless.

It Must Be Bush's Fault

It can be addictive reading the Huffington Post and seeing how many ways they can blame Bush for the disaster in New Orleans. No matter what he does, it is absolutely the wrong thing. Here are some examples:

Arianna herself on the Flyover President.

The president's 35-minute Air Force One flyover of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the perfect metaphor for his entire presidency: detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in America's suffering -- whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina -- from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.

And if he had toured the disaster area personally from a helecopter she would have complained that he was taking up valuable resources that could have been used to rescue survivers.

Laurisa Alexandrovna - a classic.

On September 11, 2001, The Vacationing and un-elected President of this country was tooling around on his holiday and even making time to fit in a little PR in Florida too

So Bush is at fault for not reacting to 9/11 before it happened?

So while children are drowning and others are floating around, dead in the water, the wannabe Yale cowboy struts around the set of his faux town hall meetings, has a bit of cake with John McCain, and takes in some fresh air in Colorado.

This is echoing Cindy Sheehan's complaint. How dare Bush do anything when people are dead? There's more but if I dig any more I'm going to need a rabies shot.

Dal LaMagna (among many others) complains about the number of National Guard in Iraq.

We’ve got more than 118,000 National Guardsmen and women on active duty either in Iraq or supporting war efforts there, which clearly makes the number of people available for our own disaster-relief services smaller.

We’ve got about 4,300 National Guard currently supporting the cleanup efforts from Hurricane Katrina, now believed to be even more catastrophic in human and economic terms than Hurricane Andrew.

Where is the perspective?

Actually, the number is up to 26,000 guards called up to help with the disaster. This is more than have been mobilized for any prior disaster.

Harry Shearer posts constantly. In one he asks

from the President's late Wednesday afternoon White House remarks tell the whole story. As he enumerated the impressive-sounding statistics, he added, in a fillip intended to sound determined and forward-looking, "And we're just getting started." Some of us are already wondering, what took you so long?

Let's see - the storm hit Monday morning. It was Tuesday before the damage could be assessed. By that time, Bush had already ordered that a response package be put together. He announced the specifics Wednesday afternoon. I doubt that a response that specific has been put together that fast before.

In a different one he writes:

Fortunately, some in the very old-fashioned newspaper business have been covering budget issues. Hence, this summary of articles cataloguing the steady reduction in federal funds for shoring up the levee system, and the 17th St floodwall, in the New Orleans-Jefferson Parish area.

I could write a book on the trade-offs involved. Bush critics want to see more spent on supplies for the troops in Iraq but don't want the money to come from anywhere. There is the question of how much federal money should be spent on a purely local issue (that's a book in itself). Then there is the problem that the current levee system was never meant to withstand a category 4 hurricane and a massive storm surge. Regardless, it is all Bush's fault.

Then there is the all-time champion post. It's Reagan's fault .

Still I am wondering if those voters in Louisiana and Mississippi who helped polluter-allied Reagan win in 1980 would have found themselves fated differently under a second Carter term. If Carter came in, we could have had an alternative fuels program and tighter auto emission standards in effect by now. Sparked by his prodding, we might have had decades of global warming controls in place.

Whose to say if those steps might not have rendered the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf even 1/100th of a degree cooler than they are now?

Right. The least effective president in modern times (with the possible exception of Gerald Ford) would have stopped global warming. At a time when climatologists thought that the next ice age was coming. Global warming was first announced as a theory in 1988 and Carter's second term would have ended in 1985.

It is possible to find fault with anyone if you look hard enough. I could point out that a rich woman like Arianna could be spending all of her time raising money and materials to help. Instead she complains about others.

Could Bush have responded differently? Yes. Would it have made any difference given the unpresidented magnitude of the storm? No. The moonbats at Huffington just love to find excuses to bash Bush.

When Everything Goes Wrong

Likely nothing could have saved Biloxi. Residential buildings are not made to withstand 140 mph winds and heavy flodding and even if new housing could there is no way to retrofit existing buildings . New Orleans is a different story. It was spared the worst of the hurricane. As of yesterday morning things looks fairly good. Then came the floods.

Last night on Nightline former New Orleans Mayor, Mark Morial admitted that they made a lot of bad assumptions in disaster planning. They thought that the levees would hold, that the pumping stations would continue to function, and that the Superdome would be usable indefinately. Most emergency planning was based on the assumption that order would be restored within a few days.

Instead, things are a mess. The city is flooded with water still pouring in. No one can say when the levees will be fixed. Power, water, and gas service will be out for weeks, maybe months.

The Superdome lost power Sunday night. The bathrooms stopped working some time ago. The roof leaks. The floor has water on it. The emergency generators are threatened by rising water. The arena is currently sheltering between 20,000 and 30,000 people. There are plans to move them to the Astrodome, possibly for the rest of the year. No one is quite sure how the evacuation will happen since the 450 busses cannot get near the arena. Possibly boats will have to be used.

No one knows how bad the death toll will be. With water reaching the rooftops, an unknown number of people could have drowned in their homes with more trapped in their attic. Current Mayor Ray Nagin estimates that thousands are dead.

Unfortunately, this was a disaster waiting to happen. It has long been recognized that New Orleans was a problem. They almost bragged about being below sea level. It took enormous effort just to keep the city dry in normal times. Disaster planning was mainly limited to picking up after a Category 3 or less storm. A half billion dollar, ten year project to shore up the levees was finished a few years ago. Immediately more money was requested to raise the levees. It seems that they subside so the work never ends.

Just a year ago it was officially admitted that the city could not survive a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. The Army Corp of Engineers wanted to do a $4 million, four year study to find ways for the city to survive.

Of course, the bloggers at the Huffington Post and the DailyKos blame Bush for everything. The budget for levee work was cut over the last two years and the study on surviving a major hurricane was never started, both due to budget cuts.

In assigning blame, we can discount the study completely. Even if it had begun a year ago nothing could have come of it until it finished in 2009. Add in a decade or so for implementing the recomondations. That gives you the minimum date that New Orleans could have been ready for Katrina.

As for the levees, they were pronounced solid but subsiding. The levee that broke was worked on this Summer.

Would a few hundred million dollars of work have raised the right levee in time for this storm? I don't know and neither does anyone at Huffington or Kos. They just want something else that they can blame Bush for.

Granted, Bush wasn't giving New Orleans much long-term help but we are talking about long-term projects. Katrina hit decades before New Orleans could possibly be prepared.

The real problem is New Orleans itself. Having a major city in a bowl between two large waterways is insane. The flooding was inevitable. No one wants to tell an entire city that they are living in a disaster waiting to happen.

Katrina

I started on a post last Friday comparing the anti-war movement in 1968, 1972, and now. I'll finish it one of these days but the oncoming threat of Katrina changed my priorities. I've been to New Orleans twice in the last five yeas and I really liked it, especially the French Quarter.

At first it looked like the city would be spared. Then the levee broke and the city flooded. The governor ordered everyone remaining in the city to evacuate.

No one is counting bodies yet but it s likely that hundreds or thousands of people are dead. The city will be uninhabitable for weeks. Cleanup will take months or years.

This might be the time to ask an important question - should New Orleans be rebuilt? It is so vulnerable to flooding it might be better to abandon most of it. Leave the French Quarter and the Garden District. Both of them were built on high ground. The rest of it is too low to be safe.

There is no good reason for New Orleans to stay were it is. It was originally built on the Mississippi but the river keeps trying to move. That is what the river does. It moves. That is how the Delta was created in the first place.

As it is now, large portions of New Orleans will need to be leveled. They are sitting submerged in an unknown mixture of sludge, sewage, and toxic chemicals. There is no way to safely clean a house that has soaked in this mess for days. Probably people will try and become sickened.

A lot of businesses will never re-open. Those that survived the hurricane and the flood were looted. If they survived all of that, their market was wiped out. This is a vicious cycle. If too many businesses are closed then unemployment will dry up the money needed to keep other businesses open. The tourist industry will be dead for months or years, especially with the highways in ruined.

Normally I have little sympathy for people who build in a flood plain or on a cliff and get hit by the inevitable natural disaster. I do feel bad for New Orleans. But is it wise to rebuild a city in a bowl between a lake and a river?

In the meantime, the New Orleans Times-Picayune is blogging current events.

Note to the goofballs at the DailyKos - a hurricane is a force of nature, not an act of George Bush. Mobilizing the National Guard on Sunday would not have helped. The plan to evacuate to the Superdome was hatched by a black mayor, not Bush as a plot to kill n_____s and being anti-Red Cross doesn't win points.

War Protests - Then and Now

Note - I started this post before Hurricane Katrina while Cindy Sheehan still dominated the news.

There is a strong desire to recreate the 60s in today's anti-war protests (actually to recreate the period from 1967-1973 when the war protests were at their peak). Many of the same leaders are weighing in. For example, Joan Biez has been singing at Camp Casey.

Since the Viet Nam War ended, every conflict that the US enters into is examined to see if it will become another Viet Nam (or a "quagmire" which is used interchangeably). This has become a knee-jerk response for all conflicts. The bombing attacks on Kosovo were described as a quagmire after a month. Journalists started questioning if the initial attack on Iraq was turning into a quagmire two weeks into it, just days before Baghdad fell.

The infamous Powell Strategy was supposed to be the antidote to the Viet Nam Syndrome (VNS). The VNS proposes that Americans do not have the fortitude for a long bloody conflict. Accordingly, we will not attack a country unless it is with such overwhelming force that the conflict was short and casualties were negligible. It also calls for an "exit strategy" meaning that an international force will move in to handle the messy part after we are done.

This in turn feeds the war protesters. One of their original complaints was that Bush did not have an exit strategy for Iraq. The fact that Bush's exit strategy which consists of creating a stable government and a trained army that can keep the piece resembles Nixon's exit strategy from Viet Nam further enrages them.

There are a lot of differences between the current protests and the ones from the 1960s. Some are in the nature of the war, some are in the nature of the protests.

A big one is with the age of the protestors. The current face of the movement, Cindy Sheehan, is old enough to have marched in Viet Nam protests. In the 1960s it was a given that war was something that older people did, possibly for financial gain. The slogan, "Don't trust anyone over 30" was common. There was also the general feeling that war was not natural to human nature. If we could just get everyone to stop fighting for a while, war would never happen again. Think of John Lennon's song "Imagine."

A lot of the anti-war movement was self-interest. The first protesters were draft-age men. An early slogan was "Hell no, I won't go." To the protesters, the cause was insufficient. Communism scared the over-30 generation but many in the under-30 crowd embraced it. At worst, it seemed that South Viet Nam was as corrupt as North Viet Nam. Many protesters felt that the Vietnamese would be better off under the communists. The domino theory (that the fall of Viet Nam would encourage communist revolutionaries elsewhere until everyone was communist except for the NATO alliance) was dismissed as paranoid.

Another difference was that the protesters were originally apolitical. One of the biggest protests in 1968 was against the Democratic Party national convention. This degenerated into a "police riot" with policemen clubbing civilians seemingly at random.

The anti-war movement took place at the same time that the civil rights movement was at its height and overlapped with the women's movement. These movements fed on each other and gave a general feeling that society was about to undergo a fundamental shift. As soon as the hippies were in charge, peace and toleration would reign.

By the 1972 election the war had gone from being "Johnson's War" to being "Nixon's War". The left wing of the Democratic Party courted the various movements and nominated a candidate, George McGovern, who swore that his first official action would be to recall the troops.

He lost by a historic landslide. Not only were the protesters he represented in the minority but he also ran an historically incompetent campaign. In addition, support for the war had grown as a reaction to the protests.

Jump forward three decades. What has changed?

The protesters haven't. Many of them are the same people who protested in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus of the protests has moved from the campus to symbolic locations. Students are no longer afraid of the draft (despite MTV trying to scare them). Every soldier volunteered. Some may not have realized what they were signing up for but none of them were taken involuntarily.

The protesters are very political. All of them are left-wing and hate Bush intensely. Many object to anything he does reflexively. Some of the original protest organizations such as Not In My Name have a strong anti-American bias and oppose any war that the US engages in. Ironically, some of the people who protested the invasion of Afghanistan were protesting the Taliban's treatment of women in 1999 and 2000.

This also leads them to sympathize with anyone who opposes Bush. Michael Moore called Baathists "freedom fighters". Cindy Sheehan uses that term to describe the foreign terrorists who kill more Iraqis than Americans. To these people, Bush is the ultimate source of evil. Unlike the 1960s and Communism, there is no little domestic interest in Islam. While t-shirts of Che are still found you do not see (many) Americans wearing Saddam or Osama shirts.

We have learned a couple of things since the Viet Nam protests. Hardly anyone in a position of power thinks that Iraq would be better off if we pulled out immediately. This was not true during Viet Nam. By the early 1980s many former protesters admitted that would not have protested in favor of North Viet Nam if they had known how brutal the fall of Saigon would be.

We also know that the other side is listening. I doubt that the Vet Nam protesters ever considered that the VCs knew about the protests and were holding on until internal pressure forced the US to withdraw from the war. Now we have Osama quoting Michael Moore.

It is now a week into September as I finish this post. Cindy Sheehan packed up her protest and started a bus tour. The press has forgotten her. As of this date, the August anti-war protest has all the importance of the 2001 shark attacks. A poll showed that Cindy failed to influence most Americans and the ones she did influence are evenly split - as any now support the war because of her as oppose it.

So there is no real anti-war movement. There is just a short-lived news story and a lot of anti-Bush sentiment.

Hillary and Cindy

By all accounts, Hillary has a lock on the 2008 Democratic presidential candidacy. The power brokers love her. She has managed to be a leader in the Senate, taking moderate positions and working on her foreign affairs credentials. There are still a few potential problems for her. As Kerry found out, is it hard to run from the Senate. You not only leave a voting trail behind but you don't get a chance to demonstrate much leadership. Candidates from both sides have already announced themselves. Hillary will have to choose between waging a real campaign for re-election or bowing out gracefully.

None of these are insurmountable.

A bigger problem is that Hillary drives many people crazy. Some of them are on the right and will fight hard to stop her I don't think that this will turn into the white-hot rage that Democrats have for Bush but it will not be pretty. This too is surmountable.

Hillary's biggest challenge will come from the left. When Bill was president they were outraged by his triangulation. His presidency was far more moderate than they expected and they have not forgiven him for that.

The groundswell for Howard Dean was an attempt to turn the party back to the left. This continued when they made Dean the party chairman.

If you read the comments from Cindy Sheehan's supporters, they are furious that Hillary voted for the war and even more furious that she is not leading the fight against it (they feel the same about John Kerry).

In 2004, around half of the anti-Bush money came from Soros-funded organizations like MoveOn.org. These are Cindy's biggest supporters. Camp Casey went from a lonely woman's protest to a movement because of backing from groups like MoveOn.

So what should Hillary do? Granted the poll numbers on Iraq right now show Americans favoring a quick pull-out but the mid-term elections are still fifteen months away and the presidential race is two years after that. If the peace movement wins, our troops pull out, and Iraq dissolves into chaos then anyone involved with the peace movement will be tainted. If the peace movement loses and we still have troops in Iraq in 2008 the peace movement will be furious.

Standard election logic says that Democrats have to turn out the vote in order to win but no matter what Hillary does, she is likely to alienate a good-sized chunk of voters.

Even worse, anyone embracing Cindy is going to get slimed. Cindy left her own trail of anti-American remarks. She has disowned the one about her son dying for Israel but she sent the original email to too many recipients. Several people have come forward and said that she did write it exactly as shown.

Don't think for a moment that Karl Rove doesn't know this. If Hillary or any other candidate is pictured with Cindy he will find himself disowning her. This is the worst thing that can happen to a campaign.

The best that the Democrats can hope for is that the war winds down, that the peace activists wear themselves out, and that the economy is the main issue in 2008. Any Democrat who has to choose between supporting Cindy and rejecting her will lose.

Questions for Cindy

Cindy,

When you get back to Crawford and find yourself sitting around waiting for the President to bike down the road to see you, maybe you could take a little time and answer some questions for me? I know that you are busy so I made them multiple choice.

You want an hour of the President's time to answer the question "What is the "noble cause" MY son died for." From statements you have made elsewhere, it sounds like you will only accept certain answers. Anything to do with ridding the world of a mass murderer and creating the middle east's first democracy appears to be unacceptable. Exactly what responses will satisfy you? Please circle all that apply:

• The war in Iraq was for oil.
• The war in Iraq for the jews in Israel.
• The war in Afghanistan was for oil.
• The war in Afghanistan was to pass the Patriot Act.

You have said that your protest isn't about "you" personally. You have also said, "How dare he go on vacation and live a normal life when he has ruined mine by his lies?" and in response to a news story that said "'I've met with a lot of families,' Bush said. 'She doesn't represent the view of a lot of families I have met with.'", you said "I never said I did. I want one answer: What is the "noble cause" MY son died for." How do you reconcile these statements:

• Just because I'm the center of the universe doesn't make things about me.
  
• I was wrong. It is all about me after all.

You wrote this statement, "People say Casey is ashamed of me and I dishonor his memory! I knew my son better than anyone on earth and I know he is appalled by the continued carnage in his name." Given that Casey supported the war right up until his death, do you believe that knowledge of his death would have turned him against it?

• Yes, I know him better than anyone else and he was a hypocrite.
• What he wanted doesn't matter. I know what he should have wanted.
  

How do you reconcile these statements: "Then bring our troops home." and "This is the biggest smokescreen from him yet. I didn't ask him to withdraw the troops, I asked him what Noble Cause did Casey die for."

• I'm not asking him to withdraw the troops, I just want him to bring them home.
• No blood for oil.
  

On what do you base this statement? "Too bad George didn't give them that option before he invaded and occupied their country resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. I bet they would choose to live in a peaceful country free of foreign occupiers."

• Even a mass murderer like Saddam must have been better than Bush, right?
• I saw the scene in Fahrenheit 9-11 with the kids flying kites.

You do remember that Saddam was given the choice of cooperating with weapons inspectors or facing the consequences?

• Saddam who?
• Say what?

You wrote, "If he (George Bush) cares so much about an Iraqi Constitution, why doesn't he take some time from his busy vacation activities and read the US Constitution. He may find out that he started an un-Constitutional war in Iraq." Given that the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war and that they passed a law authorizing the invasion of Iraq that means that every president in the last sixty years (except Carter) has conducted an unconstitutional war.

• Impeach them all. Bwa ha ha ha!
• George Bush ruined my life.

You wrote, "Does anyone else know what "democratic" means? It simply means majority rule. Not some high-minded, free-floating, pie in the sky ideal. It means 50 percent plus one. Up to 62% of Americans think our troops should be coming home soon. That is a majority, so why don't we force our employee, the president, to do what we want him to do?" Do you understand how a representative government works?

• Polls count for more than votes.
• I'm sure that Bush stole the election(s)

You wrote, "We know you had to "fit the intelligence around the policy" of invading Iraq. Do you realize that the quote was actually "fix the intelligence" as in "fixate"?

• Yes, but I was hoping that you wouldn't know.
• Oops, Freudian slip.

What are you really hoping for?

• The impeachment of George Bush
• The impeachment of Bush and Cheney.
• The impeachment of every neo-con from the President down to the guy who cleans up the dog sh_t.

Note, all of the Cindy quotes are from her blog on Huffington.