VJ Day

Sixty years ago today Japan surrendered. This followed the dropping of two atomic bombs. Was this justified? Read the plans for Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan before answering. Keep in mind that the Japanese forces were three times stronger than American intelligence estimated. The Japanese planned to use kamikaze planes to sink up to 400 troop transports. Even schoolgirls were given awls and told to kill at least one American.

The traditional modern arguments against the use of the bomb are that the Japanese would have surrendered anyway (Ha!); we needed to end the war before the Russians could get involved (after giving away major concessions months earlier so that they would get involved); or that we were racists, willing to nuke a different race but not Europeans (who we defeated with much less effort). I'm not buying any of these arguments. The Japanese were prepared to fight for every scrap of ground in the hope of making the victory too costly for us. It might have worked. There is no question that it would work today. Compared to World War II or Viet Nam, we have only had a handful of dead in Iraq but the Left has already declared it a defeat for the US.

We are not the people our parents were.

Exploitation

Cindy Sheehan is getting a lot of press because of her campaign to talk with President Bush about why her son was killed in Iraq. The left is cheering her on. The Huffington Post, for example, is filled with posts about what a great American hero she is. Comparisons with Rosa Parks are frequent. Why are they so excited?

First some background. Like everyone else in the military, Casey Sheehan volunteered. He also reenlisted in August, 2003. When his unit was sent to Iraq he insisted on going along even though, as a HumVee mechanic, he did not have to go. He was killed April 4, 2004, around six weeks before his 25th birthday.

In June of 2004, Cindy met with President Bush along with other parents of soldiers killed in Iraq. The Reporter described it this way:

The meeting didn't last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son's sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

While meeting with Bush, as well as Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, was an honor, it was almost a tangent benefit of the trip. The Sheehans said they enjoyed meeting the other families of fallen soldiers, sharing stories, contact information, grief and support.

For some, grief was still visceral and raw, while for others it had melted into the background of their lives, the pain as common as breathing. Cindy said she saw her reflection in the troubled eyes of each.

"It's hard to lose a son," she said. "But we (all) lost a son in the Iraqi war."

The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

"That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together," Cindy said.

Her happiness didn't last long. She now describes the meeting this way:

Instead of a kind gesture or a warm handshake, Sheehan said she immediately got a taste of Bush arrogance when he entered the room and "in a condescending tone and with a disgusting loud Texas accent," said: "Who we’all honorin’ here today?"

"His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence when it was my son who died for his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had and it took me almost a year to even talk about it," said Sheehan in a telephone conversation from Washington D.C. where she was attending a July 4th anti-war rally.

Sheehan said the June 2004 private meeting with the President went from bad to worse to a nightmare when Bush acted like he didn’t even want to know her name. She said Bush kept referring to her as ‘Ma’ or ‘Mom’ while he "put on a phony act," saying things like ‘Mom, I can’t even imagine losing a loved one, a mother or a father or a sister or a brother.’

"The whole meeting was simply bizarre and disgusting, designed to intimidate instead of providing compassion. He didn’t even know our names," said Sheehan. "Finally I got so upset I just looked him in the eye, saying ‘I think you can imagine losing someone. You have two daughters. Imagine losing them?’ After I said that he just looked at me, looked at me with no feeling or caring in his eyes at all."

Dispite her dissatisfaction with her first meeting, Sheehan still wants a second meeting. This is being covered in the news as a reasonable request. After reading her open letter to George Bush published in a Not In Our Name newsletter in December, 2004 and her email about Nightline, we get a different picture of Cindy.

In the letter to Bush she starts out:

It has been two days since your dishonest campaign stole another election…but you all were way more subtle this time than in 2000, weren’t you? You hardly had to get the Supreme Court of the United States involved at all this week.

She also refers to her (nearly 2 year old son) as her "brave and honorable man-child".

When talking about Nightline she complains about them using parents who support he war and about the treatment that she got when she was on. It seems that Ted Koppel felt that she was emotional.

She goes on to say:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy...not for the real reason, becuase the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn't changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq...in fact it has gotten worse.

(note: PNAC the Project for a New American Century.)

After examining Cindy's own words it is obvious that 1) She is obbsessed with her son's tragic death; 2) She believes and repeats every conspiracy theory advanced by the far left; 3) She has no desire to have Bush explain anything - she simply wants a chance to yell at him; and 4) This would not satisfy her nor would anything less than Bush being forced out of office and arrested.

At the heart of it is an unhealthy fixation on her son's death. This woman needs to talk with a grief councilor, not the President. That's not the real problem here. The problem is that the left is egging her on. Michael Moore posts her column on his web site. She testified at John Conyers "impeachment hearing". I already mentoned the Huffington Post. Most of the left is reacting the same way.

And why not? She believes what they do but she manages to project a moderate image. None of them are going to suggest counciling as long as she advances their adgenda.

The thing is, if Cindy wins then we all lose. Iraq will be much more of a war zone than ever. Al Qaeda will have further proof that Americans do not have the heart for a protracted struggle. The end results will be disasterous.

And the death of Cindy's heroic man-child will have hurt the US for decades to come.

It is understandable that Cindy Sheehan cannot take the long view but the rest of us have to.

A couple of final points:

1) Great suffering does not impart great wisdom. Sheehan is subscribing to conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact. The biggest one - that the war in Iraq is being fought for Israel instead of the US - fails to explain exactly why Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel than Iran or Syria.

2) The anti-war protests started in 2001. Not In Our Name, which Sheehan is affiliated with, was protesting as far back as October, 2001 - almost before the dust settled from the first bombs dropped on the Taliban. Sheehan is simply part of a pre-existing movement. Comparing her to Rosa Parks who was a civil rights pioneer is rediculous.

Thomas Paine

For Eric Alterman's second book review he chose ON THOMAS PAINE AND THE PROMISE OF AMERICA By Harvey J Kaye.

For too long we have allowed the right to appropriate the nation’s history, define what it means to be an American, and corral American political imagination. It is time for liberals and radicals to recover their fundamental principles and perspectives and reinvigorate Americans’ democratic impulses and aspirations. And we must start by reclaiming, and reconnecting with, the memory and legacy of Thomas Paine and the progressive tradition he inspired and encouraged. Doing so will remind us of not only what we stand in opposition to, but, all the more, what we stand in opposition for…

The Wikipedia biography of Thomas Paine shows him to be a strange choice for the left's mascot. He was born and raised in England. He moved the the United States (he was the first one to suggest the name) just before the revolution and he moved back to England soon after the Revolutionary War ended.

He moved to France to avoid arrest for his book Rights of Man and was an apologist for the French Revolution. He could not stomach the terror and was imprisoned. He was supposed to be executed but the jailer made a clerical error when marking his door and he survived. He eventually moved to New York in 1802 where he died in 1809.

Paine was not so much in favor of separating church and state - he simply hated organized religion and considered Christianity to be a total fabrication. Instead he was a committed deist.

A number of his ideas were ahead of their time. He was against slavery and for minimum wage and redistribution of wealth.

Come to think of it - a European who is afraid of religion and wants to redistribute wealth... maybe he is a good mascot for the Democrats.

What Went Wrong with Liberalism? Part III

I made two posts covering what I agreed with from Eric Alterman's review of Douglas S. Massey's book, What Went Wrong with Liberalism?. Now I'll look at the parts I disagree with and the parts that Massey forgot.

Massey sees the Niet Nam war this way:

The arrogance and self-righteousness of liberal elites manifested themselves in yet another way. The same liberal architects who promoted civil rights and social welfare also prosecuted a costly foreign war on the basis of lies, deception, and subterfuges that callously abused the faith and trust of the working class. As subsequent tapes and archives have clearly shown, liberals in the Johnson administration—including the president himself—manufactured an attack on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin to secure congressional authorization for military intervention in Viet Nam. Then they systematically lied to voters about the costs and consequences of that engagement and its ultimate prospects for success.

The Vietnam War forcefully underscored the fact that liberal elites made the decisions while working class whites paid the price, thus reinforcing a politics of class resentment manipulated so effectively by conservative Republicans. The soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam were disproportionately drawn from the America’s working and lower classes. The sons and daughters of upper middle class professionals—the people who held power, influence, and prestige in the Great Society—by and large did not serve in Vietnam. They avoided military service through a combination of student deferments, personal connections, and a skillful use of medical disabilities. Tellingly, once the system of student deferments was abandoned and the children of the upper middle class faced the real risk of being drafted through random assignment, direct U.S. participation in the war quickly ended.

To blue collar workers in the north and poor whites in the south it looked like liberal lawmakers favored the war as long as someone else’s children were serving and dying as soldiers, but as soon as their precious offspring were put at risk, they quickly ignored the sacrifices of the working classes, forgot about the 60,000 dead, and abandoned hundreds of POWs and MIAs in their haste to leave Vietnam. The ultimate result was the evolution of a working class mythology of sellout by unpatriotic liberal elites (“America haters”), epitomized cinematically by the movies and roles of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood, whose tag lines were appropriated to great political effect by Ronald Reagan.

To be sure, Viet Nam had a major effect on liberalism and the country but not quite the effect that Massey describes. Early in the war there was some resentment about college deferments making View Nam "rich man's war, poor man's fight". The college deferement was being scaled back years before the war ended - around half way through. Further, the deferment was not a "get out of war free" card. It simply delayed when you could be drafted. It also let college graduates enter the service as officers instead of as enlisted men. That is why John Kerry enlisted in the Navy and George Bush in the TANG - their deferments were up.

By the time Johnson's duplicity came out the country was distracted by other matters. This may matter to hard-core liberals but not to most Americans.

Besides, Nixon and Watergate were much bigger scandals (I wonder why?).

What the war did do was encourage a huge block of anti-war protestors to become anti-American. This combined with the civil rights campaign to convince people that, rather than being "a shining city on the hill," America was an imperial power bent on conquering the rest of the world. To these people, Viet Nam was not about stopping communism, it was about crushing a nationalist movement. This is where the blame-America first crowd came from. Since many of them started as college students getting a deferment from the draft, they flooded acedemia.

The question is, how did they end up dominating the Democratic party to the extent that they do?

There are a few answers to this. The Democrats have always been more open to communists and socialists. During Nixon's term, anti-communists such as JFK had been were effectively purged from the party. Instead the Democrats embraced the peace candidate, George McGovern, probably the most liberal major ticket candidate of my lifetime. This cemented the Democrats as the party of peace-at-all-costs and the party of socialism.

The war and Watergate had a very different effect on the Republicans. Many people came away from the early 1970s thinking that the problem was not the US government, it was government in general. The bigger it is and the further away it is the less it is to be trusted. This led to the rise of Libertarians and Libertarian-leaning Republicans (like me).

For the life of me, I cannot see how people who lived through the 1970s could have come away with the conviction that what was needed was more government.

But, forgotten in all of this is one of the biggest blocks of FDR's coalition - labor. What happened to it?

The AFL-CIO is in a bad way. Their biggest members just split off. The portion of the population belonging to unions is was down.

On of their problems is their past successes. Some of the industries they had the most success in have been devistated. Railroads are the classic example. Due to union demands the railroads could not compete with trucks for frieght. What had been one of America's powerhouse sectors now scrapes along with government assistance.

Unions have been squeezed from the left and the right. Globalization means that formerly union jobs have gone overseas. Environmental regulations have closed industries such as mining in the unionized east and encouraged it in the non-unionized west.

To make matters worse for big labor, a sizable percentage of their membership votes Republican. Between not trusting Democrats to defend the country and Democrats' rejection of traditional culture and anyone rural or poorly educated, this should not be a surprise.

What Went Wrong With Liberalism? (part 2)

Yesterday I wrote about part of Eric Alterman's review of “What Went Wrong with Liberalism?” by Douglas S. Massey. I am continuing that today.

There is a section on the effects of the Viet Nam war. I am going to skip that part for now. I disagree with the chronology and the cause and effect given so I will save that for a rebuttal. For now I am expanding on the parts that I agree with.

Which brings us to this:

Economically, Johnson’s attempt to support guns and butter without raising taxes laid the foundation for inflationary spirals and stagflation in the 1970s. The 1973 oil boycott would have dealt a serious blow to the U.S. economy under any circumstances, but the fiscal excess of the Great Society combined with the Vietnam War turned what in Europe and Japan were severe but manageable recessions to a disastrous brew of inflation, unemployment, and long-term recession in the United States.

A particular challenge to liberals stemmed from the fact that high rates of inflation in the 1970s produced rising nominal wages but declining spending power in real terms, causing a serious problem of “bracket creep” in the federal tax system. In the course of the 1970s, more and more Americans were pushed by inflation into income tax brackets that were originally intended to apply only to the very affluent. Middle income Americans were working harder for less money in real terms, but were being taxed at higher and higher rates.

High inflation also brought about an escalation in the value of real assets, particularly housing. Families with modest incomes suddenly found themselves owning homes—and paying real estate taxes—far above what they could really afford. Rather than sympathizing with the plight of middle class families struggling to pay taxes in an era of stagflation, however, liberals viewed rising tax revenues as a source of easy money. Bracket creep and asset inflation offered liberal legislators a seemingly costless way to raise taxes steadily without ever voting to do so.

But there were costs. The unwillingness of Democratic legislators to adjust tax brackets or accommodate the inflation of housing prices set the stage for a middle class tax revolt. As is often the case, the revolution began in California. By a large majority, voters in that state passed Proposition 13 to cap property taxes permanently at unrealistically low levels. Riding the wave of middle class anger and resentment, won a landslide victory over the hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980, and one of his first acts was to cut tax rates sharply and to reduce their progressivity. When combined with a massive increase in defense spending, these actions shut off the flow of money that had financed the expansion of liberalism. Following a path that led from intervention in Vietnam to hyperinflation to bracket creep, liberal Democrats, through a remarkable combination of arrogance and self-righteousness, dug their own graves in the 1970s and created the political conditions whereby conservatives could achieve their cherished goal of “de-funding” the New Deal.

It was economics that really brought Reagan into office. The economy was poor under Nixon/Ford but it was intollerable under Carter. Inflation was in the double digits (by contrast, it has been running at less than 2% for years - 1/10 the rate of the 1970s). This was bad. Very few people received cost of living increases high enough to meet the inflation rate. Banks paid at best 5% which meant that the value of your savings were dropping. Many people tried investing in real estate, gold, and collectables as a hedge against inflation.

The progressive tax rate made things much worse. The top income tax rate was 70% with numerous steps inbetween. Almost any cost of living increase pushed you into a higher tax bracket which meant a larger percentage of your income went to the government. If the annual inflation rate was 10%, you had to increase your income by 12% just to stay even.

No one could keep up and nearly everyone lost ground in terms of real spending power. It only made matters worse that the government was part of the problem.

The late 1970s were an economic disaster. The only thing that saved many families was the number of women getting jobs. Prior to the 1970s, a family could easily exist with a single wage earner. By 1980, most women worked. In this case, an economic shift coincided with a social shift so it was not commented on much. Regardless, due to the inflation of the 1970s, a typical family with two wage-earners had less buying power than a typical family with one wage-earner in the 1960s.

None of this was a secret. Everyone knew that they were falling behind, year by year. At the same time, state and local politicians raised taxes citing inflationary pressures.

When Reagan proposed tax cuts, it was to a population that felt over-taxed. Although it passed a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, all of the opposition came from Democrats. Reagan also put through spending cuts to help pay for the tax cuts and this was also opposed by Democrats.

Reagan used the debate to label his opponents "tax and spend Democrats".

Interestingly, Democrats still have not figured this part out. Here is part of one person's reply:

... Rather than offer pros and cons on his arguments I feel compelled to comment on his statement concerning taxes and its affect on the support liberalism receives from the working class. Cutting to the chase: Americans are not overtaxed and I am sick of hearing this phrase repeated ad nauseum. In fact, the belief in over taxation is a red herring begun by anti-tax groups to drum up support for their beliefs. The main problem with taxation in America is that Americans see little direct benefit from their tax dollars. Considering how much we pay combining all forms of taxation, I think it fair to say Americans come nowhere close to getting their money's worth.

He totally missed that Massey was talking about tax policy 30 years ago and goes on to talk about today's taxes. HE also seems totally ignorant of how poorly "old Europe" is doing. Like many liberals, he only looks at the services that the government is currently providing, not things like the unemployment rate (several times ours) or the rate of economic growth (a fraction of ours). It's that sort of thinking that holds the Democrats back.

What Went Wrong With Liberalism?

Last week Eric Alterman reviewed the book, What Went Wrong With Liberalism by Douglas S. Massey. I only know of this book through Alterman's review (actually a synopsis rather than a review) but it got me thinking.

First, this is an actual look at why liberals no longer control the country placing blame on the liberals. This is in contrast to the popular view following the 2004 election that people were voting against their own economic interests because of irrelevant artificial hot-button issues (gay marriage) created by Karl Rove. Massey's book assumes that liberals have a real problem, one that they created themselves.

Here's one example:

As the civil rights movement shifted out of the south, liberal democrats naturally encountered resistance from entrenched social and political interests in northern cities. Rather than acknowledging the sacrifices that were being asked of working class whites and their political bosses, and attempting to reach a political accommodation that offered benefits to counterbalance them, liberal elites treated lower class opponents as racist obstructionists to be squelched using the powers of government. Rather than outlining a political argument to explain why desegregation was in their interests and providing money to ease the pain of transition, liberals turned to the courts and executive branch to force working class whites and local political bosses to accept whatever changes they mandated from above.

Civil Rights always had a troubled existence in FDR's coalition. Neither FDR nor JFK never really cared for it but during the 1960s it became a core principal of the Democratic Party. By itself, this should not have been a problem but, as implemented, it has been a wedge issue splitting off voters ever since. That is because this is a two-fold approach. One is to assure equal rights and the other is to address past injustices.

Examples of poorly qualified individuals winning jobs/college admissions/contracts/appointments are too numerous to quote. Probably everyone who is white has either been passed over or knows someone who was passed over because of race. This goes beyond simply explaining policy. The surest way to alienate a voter is to hurt him through a policy that benefits someone else.

A related issue is how school desegregation was handled. In the old South, black students were bussed past the good schools to poorly maintained schools. In effect, two different school districts existed. This was wrong. But, that is not what happened in the North. I remember the court hearings in Columbus from 25 years ago. It was proved that Columbus always assigned students to the closest school regardless of race and that all schools were funded equally. However, some real estate agents had steered blacks to areas where they "would be more comfortable living with their own people". On this basis, desegregation and school bussing were ordered.

Since the 1960s, Democrats have expanded their Civil Rights agenda to include such groups as illegal aliens. The idea that people who should not be here should get taxpayer-funded benefits is another wedge issue separating Democrats from regular tax-paying citizens. In recent months Democrats have started supporting the rights of foreign terrorists detained on foreign soil.

Increasingly, Democrats offer very little for white, middle-class, straight males and not much more for white, middle-class, straight women. They are seen as the party of special-interests. Granted, whites are declining in demographics but they are still far too large to be ignored.

This posed a special problem for such candidates as Howard Dean and Wes Clark and even far-left Ralph Nader. Their appeal is mainly to white, middle-class men but this is no longer a big enough group within liberals to elect a nation-wide candidate.

More on Alterman's piece later.

Republican Beats Iraq Vet

The Democrats ran Paul Hackett, a veteran of Iraq (including the battle of Fallujah), in a special election in southern Ohio. He lost. Now, what to make of it?

The Democrats claim to be happy because they were more competitive in this district than they have been in 30 years. They hope to reproduce this strategy elsewhere to better results. The Republicans are happy because they won.

There are extenuating circumstances. Every week brings out new reports linking lobbyist and coin dealer Thomas Noe with the possible theft of $4 million of public money. Hackett hoped to link his opponent with this. As a long-term strategy, this probably will not help the Democrats. It is limited to Ohio and will be in the distant past by the 2006 Governor's race.

While I am sure that Hackett had a platform, he didn't run on it. He ran on his war record. It almost seems unpatriotic not to vote for him. Again, this is not a good long-term strategy. Many Democrats dislike the military. Even if they were to retake Congress by running Iraq vets, they would not get along well with their new members.

I am still a little unsure about where Hackett stands. He is supposed to be anti-Bush. His web site says that he thought that the war was a mistake from the beginning yet he volunteered to go. Now that he lost, he is talking about volunteering to go back. Plus he seems to agree with Bush's current policies of replacing American troops with Iraqi security forces. Was Hackett as anti-Bush as he says?

On other issues, he is for hybrid cars and government assistance for trial lawyers. He skirts the issue on handguns, denies that there are any problems with Social Security, and proposes some sort of government help with health care. His positions could have been (and possibly were) written by a political consultant. There is no new strategy here.

Probably the Democrats were making a fuss over this election because they need a win. With the Ohio party looking worse every day, they had an opportunity. It didn't come through but they still have to keep the troops pumped up.

Living Up to Expectations

Some Republicans supported Howard Dean as head of the Democrats. They figured that Dean could not stop shooting off his mouth.

Recently he lived up to this expectation:

The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.

Ignoring the fact that it is not exactly Bush's right-wing court, he has not appointed a single justice yet, how do we reconcile this statement with the fact that the court's liberals voted in favor of Kelo and its conservatives voted against it. Dean has it backwards. I can think of three possible explanations. None of them reflect well on Dean:

1) Dean didn't check the voting record. He simply assumed that a horrible decision like this must have come from the conservatives.

2) Dean did know who voted but he forgot, assuming that a decision favoring big business must have come from conservatives.

3) Dean knew perfectly well who voted for what but he knew that this was a bad decision. Most people do not pay attention to who voted. Dean figures that by blaming conservatives he can turn this into an anti-Bush point. Dean is trying to Bork the entire court by blaming bad decisions on conservatives and giving liberals credit for good decisions, regardless of who voted how. This could work. A recent column by Tom Teepen "proved" that Bork "Borked" himself by being outside the judicial mainstream. Rather than relating facts, Teepen repeated the baseless accusations. Years later, the Borked version is being repeated as truth. If the Democrats keep twisting the Supreme Court's voting record, people will start believing their version rather than the truth.

This last possibility assumes that Dean is a shrewd political operative who is willing to lie about important points.

Touch But Don't Look

Democrats are worried that teenagers are viewing porn. Their solution? A new tax. It is unclear quite how this will keep kids from accessing the sites, but that is not the point. Democrats want to be seen as concerned about child access to pornography (not to be confused with child pornography).

A week ago Hillary Clinton led the charge against Grand Theft Auto - an ultra violent game that, when some special codes are entered, also has an explicit sex scene. Again, th worry is that young teens will see some sex.

Reportedly this is the new strategy to fight the Republicans.

Too bad Democrats are so inconsistent. The same people who want to shield teens from seeing sex have no objections to them having sex.

Consider their objections to abstinence-based sex ed. They insist that the kids are/will have sex anyway so we must not tell them that this is bad.

What about abortion for teens? Democrats are all for this. No parental notification needed. I've always been a bit puzzled by this attitude. It's not like a girl can skip the abortion and hide the pregnancy (ok, it can happen but it is rare). They must be afraid that a these girls will not have an abortion. I've complained before about some people actually being for abortion in all cases.

Anyway, the Democrats are against teens viewing sex without their parents' permission but they insist that we assume the kids are having sex and that we make it easy to hide pregnancies.

I don't think that this is their magic bullet.

It's All Relative

When I was growing up it was generally taught that America was the best country in the world. We are the world's oldest and most successful democracy with freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. We have a working separation of powers between the different branches of government. Our model as a melting pot successfully integrated people from nations that had warred on each other for centuries.

In the late 1960s, during the Viet Nam war things changed. Cultural relativism came in. America's faults were suddenly discovered and magnified.

By the time my daughter was in grade school they were teaching that the relocation of Japanese Americans during WWII was the same as the Holocaust. Never mind that we gave our prisoners food, shelter, and weekend passes while the Nazis starved and gassed the Jews.

In 1992 we hammered over the head with stories about how good the Indians were compared with the rapacious western civilization that displaced them.

We are constantly reminded that several signatories to the Declaration of Independence owned slaves.

American colonialism is the root of all of the world's ills, even in former European colonies.

And of course, there is the Bush = Hitler mantra of the far left.

The reason I brought this up is a column by Andrew Barnes printed in the July 23 Columbus Dispatch. Barnes was writing about religion. He started with his own Christian upbringing and contrasted that with today's Christians (a standard rhetorical trick). He then went on to complain that people who argue for policy changes based on religious morality are not open to compromises like normal people.

Then he said that Christians who desire social change are exactly the same as violent Islamic terrorists, only their methods are different.

Funny, I thought that only Republicans and Sith Lords dealt in black and white. What happened to nuance? Did Barnes really mean to equate organized religion's support for civil rights with the Taliban?

Regardless, it's not what they want that is the problem. Constitutional freedoms allow for Christians to argue against abortion and for Moslems to argue for the establishment of Sharia as long as they follow the proper forms. It's when you start blowing people up that you have crossed the line.

The Other 9/11

It's hard to know what to make of this story. Someone was just convicted in India of being part of a plot to hyjack two planes and crash them into London landmarks on September 11, 2001.

AN INDIAN man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001.

Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament.

[...] Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.

Here's the part that makes me wonder:

Mr Solker said that police from Britain, Australia and the US had been to India to see evidence against Afroze, but had not requested extradition.

Bad Timing

Recently the anti-war left got a boost with the publication of a new book, Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. This book purports to be the first in-depth look at suicide bombers from 1980 to the present. Among the findings:

FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.

FACT: The world's leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka - a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.

FACT: Ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of coherent campaigns organized by large militant organizations with significant public support.

FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, one major objective of al-Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf region, and as a result there have been repeated attacks by terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.

FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies–including the United States–have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective.

This book has been getting a lot of buzz. Last week it was the basis of articles in the Columbus Dispatch and Slate.

This book is just what the anti-war left wanted to hear. According to it, we are not fighting a religious war. We are actually in a struggle against a nationalist movement to reclaim a country from the government left behind when the Europeans retreated from their colonies.

Framed this way, the whole war against terror is exactly like Viet Nam. These are all loaded terms used by the left to describe the Viet Nam War.

The trouble is that it doesn't match the most recent bombings in England or Egypt.

In England the chief suspects were born in England. As Fareed Zakaria points out

Nor can foreign policy really explain such rage. The invasion of Iraq clearly has greatly enraged many Muslims, radicalizing some deeply. But can a disagreement over foreign policy really make a Briton like Germaine Lindsay, who had never even visited Iraq, kiss his pregnant wife and child goodbye and go out and blow himself and others up?

Where are the clearly defined goals in these bombing? Britain was a leading partner in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but Egypt was against both.

Al Qaeda has always had the opposite of clear goals. They never claimed credit for September 11. The FBI had to figure it out and many people still don't believe that they did it.

A terrorist group with clear goals immediately takes credit for their actions and gives a list of demands that will stop further acts. We know in general what bin Laden's goals are from statements that he has made but he has been very poor about making concrete demands. The closest he came was a couple of years ago when he offered a truce for any European country that pulled out of Iraq - a truce that was quickly broken when Spanish authorities discovered further plots even after they recalled their troops.

All of this should seem self-obvious but people were accepting Dying to Win anyway.

It's hard to imagine this continuing after the last three bombings. Had terrorism been confined to Iraq and the Middle East in general then Democrats would have started the 2006 Congressional campaign saying that all we need to do is withdraw our troops and terrorism will stop. Once the Viet Nam parallel is fixed, this is inevitable. The Domino Theory did not happen therefore the spread of terrorism will not happen.

But they can only say this as long as the bombs are limited to Iraq. Once the bombs started going off in Europe and Egypt this whole argument evaporated.

We are still left wondering what al Qaeda's goals are? It isn't getting US troops out of Saudi Arabia. We pulled most of our troops some time ago.

It's not just Iraq either, or if it is then we have a positive connection between the bombers and Saddam.

It might be about revenge for overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Too bad Kerry identified this as the "right" war (if Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time then Afghanistan must have been the right one).

But probably it is because they hate us - our permissive culture and democratically elected government.

UPDATE: This article explains that Egypt is a target for having a generally pro-western government. Egypt was the first Moslum country to make peace with Israel and it accepts hugh amounts of foreign aid from the US. This is at odds with the concept that al Qaeda is after specific political goals and in line with the concept that they are generally at war with the West.

UPDATE II: Jane Fonda is going on an anti-Iraq war bus tour.

The New Marxism

Fareed Zarakia was on the Daily Show last night talking about the London bombings. One comment he made got me to thinking. He was talking about the disaffected youth being attracted to al Qaida and mentioned that not so long ago they would have been attracted to Marxism.

There are several parallels that can be made between Marxism and the militant version of Islam sometimes called islamofascism.

A big one is their total disregard for innocent life. To their adherents, both movements are more important than any individual's life or even any group of individuals.

Both want to set up a utopia with a dictatorial central government. Both believe that this must be a violent revolution vs the French Revolution.

Both attract disaffected young men from middle class families in industrialized nations. Much has been made of the nationalities of the 9/11 hijackers but most of them grew up in Europe. The number of terrorists with connections to Britain is surprising. More big-name bombers and attempted bombers are British than Saudi.

Both see their cause as inevitable.

Both movements intend to make mainstream religions subservient. Under Marxism, religion is discouraged. Under islamofascism, only the Suni version of Islam is allowed.

Both movements have charismatic but sociopathic leaders. Both Che and bin Laden are immortalized on t-shirts.

When implemented, neither movement has been the utopia that was promised. I think that the USSR was the world's longest-lived communist country and it finally fell apart from economic stress. The Taliban embodies islamofascism and Afghanistan was a wretched place under the Taliban.

Both movements see the combination of democracy and free market embodied by the US as weak and decadent.

There are significant differences in content between the two movements. Marxism is a political movement with atheism as its official religion while Islamofascism is a religious movement with the goal of recreating the Caliphate to handle politics.

On the surface the two are distinct. Marxism is open to all but Islamofascism is only open to Muslims. This difference vanishes when you take conversion into account. For example, Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a convert.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism has declined. Many who would have been Marxists are affiliated with the Greens or various anarchist groups, or both. While they believe in violence, they tend to smash windows and burn buildings under construction and they are not part of an actual armed revolution.

It is likely that there will always be disaffected youths and that in wealthy nations, there will be enough to take up the cause of violent revolution. When viewed in this light, there can be no resolution with the terrorists. They are not as interested in building something new as with tearing down the old.

Unavoidable

How often have you heard someone from the left say, "I supported the war in Afghanistan but not Iraq." This article points out that the overthrow of Afghanistan enraged Moslums at least as much as Iraq. Also, the bombers from July were from Leeds, not Bagdad.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Australian prime minister John Howard's response to questions about links between the London bombings and the invasion of Iraq.

Both point out how difficult it is to retire from the war on terror. The radicals have lots of greivances against us, many of them pre-dating George Bush.

Even the radical member of Parliament, George Galloway found himself in trouble during his most recent campaign. A group of radical Muslems burst into his room and threatened him for participating in democracy. When we say that they hate our freedoms, democracy is high on the list. It has been singled out by bin Laden and others as an obomination.

Thomas Fiedman wrote a recent column pointing out that, while Islam has a long history of tolerating other religions, Islam has always had the power. Believers in other religions had to pay tribute and otherwise respect Islam.

The point is that radical Islam declared war on us independently of anything that George Bush or Tony Blair ever did to provoke them.

Court Fight

Less than 24 hours after Bush announced his first candidate for the Supreme Court, MoveOn.org announced a Stop Robert campaign. Originally their web site simply labeled Roberts a "conservative." After reflection, they stepped this up. Now Roberts is a "right-wing lawyer and corporate lobbyist." An entry quoted in the Daily Kos says why they took this tack:

Blasting Roberts as a corporate lawyer is an excellent smear tactic. People hate lawyers. They dislike and mistrust big corporations. It also conveniently happens to be true -- just as it was literally true that John Kerry is an upper crust Bostonian married to a woman with a fuckload of dough. Sliming Roberts as a corporate lawyer is probably more effective than attacking him for his views on abortion or other social issues, since a.) the paper trail is better and b.) it can be used as a wedge to separate him from some of his socially conservative but downwardly mobile supporters.

The big question is why are they doing this? By all accounts, Roberts is one of the best qualified nominees possible. He may be conservative, and this is not settled, but he is not likely to be a crusading conservative.

Roe v Wade will not be affected. Most court watchers counted six votes for upholding Roe including O'Conner. At most this would make the vote 5-4 in favor.

Probably all of this is just going through the motions. MoveOn and the Democrats have been saying for years that we had to give them money to either keep Bush out of the White House or keep him from appointing conservative judges. Never mind that Clinton got to appoint liberal judges, Bush cannot be allowed to appoint conservative ones.

So Bush picked a compromise candidate. Lieberman admits that he has no objection and that will probably go for enough Democrats in the Senate to prevent a filibuster.

But these groups raised all of this money for a fight. If they don't demonize Roberts and fight him as hard as they can they will not get any money for the next fight. They are stuck going through the motions.

This will not help the left in the long-run. They are likely to lose. Bush picked a non-controversial candidate. There is no real dirt on him, at least none that turned up in the last 48 hours. They can try to manufacture some.

If they succeed they will get the Republicans really upset. After all, this is a compromise candidate.

If they lose they will upset their constituency, the people who selected Howard Dean because they want to see Republican blood.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter is upset that Roberts is not conservative enough.

But unfortunately, other than that, we don't know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever

Funny thing - in the same column she lists Justice Thomas as a good justice. He was the ultimate stealth candidate. He refused to give his views on anything during his confirmation. That's why the left resorted to painting him as a sexual predator.

But then maybe Coulter is mad because she wasn't nominated. She actually is qualified and anyone would look next to her.

Reverting to Form

London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, surprised me on July 7 when he condemned the terrorist bombing in London. Livingstone is known as Red Ken because of his politics which tend to support Palestinian terrorists over Israel.

Red Ken returned to form in a recent statement in which he blamed the bombing on the war in Iraq and on "... 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil."

Ken's view of history overlooks a few important events such as World War II and the Cold War. Surly Ken is not going to blame current governments for Hitler's capture of the Arabian Peninsula as he drove into Africa. It is true that we supported several corrupt governments but the worst excesses were during the Cold War when tin-pot tyrants could take bids on which side would give them a better aid package.

As for the war in Iraq, it is an unknowable. Yes, the terrorists say that this is their motivation now but the shoe-bomber claimed that the sanctions on Iraq motivated him and no one ever made an official statement on what inspired September 11.

The punchline of a recent Doonsbury is that they hate us for our freedom.

Since Bush said it, it must be self-evidently false. Right?

Except they really do consider democracy an abomination to say nothing of Western culture which encourages all sorts of things banned by the Koran.

Would the London bombing have happened if England was not in Iraq? Maybe not. Would other bombings have happened elsewhere? Almost certainly. The problem is that there is no way to tell. Our lack of resolve in the face of previous bombings encouraged September 11. We have Osama's own word on it.

What about the flypaper analogy? Funny thing about real flypaper - it catches lots of flies but not all of them.

Some Forgotten Details

In the coverage of Rove's emails, a lot of facts have gotten lost. I had to remind my wife what the whole thing is about. Much of what is being reported on the news is incomplete or inaccurate. I thought that this would be a good time for a recap.

In his State of the Union address prior to invading Iraq, President Bush stated that British intelligence learned that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Africa. Shortly after that, former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an editorial saying that Bush had lied, that Wilson had been sent to Africa to investigate the charge and found that it was false. He went on to say that he knew that the final report was wrong immediately because it named the wrong officials as confirmed by Google.

A few months after this, Robert Novak wrote a column attacking Wilson's credibility. Among other things, Novak mentioned that Wilson was not particularly qualified to have done the investigation and only got the job because his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, recommended him.

Wilson shot back charging that his wife's status as a CIA employee was secret. He wrote a book insisting that his wife's identity had been revealed specifically to endanger her life and that this was meant as a warning to any other whistle-blowers.

Democrats took up the charge, some going so far as to insist that Novak should be charged with treason.

So far this has all been covered in the re-cap. Now we get to the part that is being ignored.

Around a year ago it came out that Wilson is a liar and a political hack. He was hired because his wife recommended him. The report he turned into the White House indicated that Iraq was trying to buy Uranium, just the opposite of what he was claiming in public. As for his claim that he knew immediately that the final report was wrong - he made that up. It turns out that he has never seen the report. He does not have security clearance for it.

It is also unclear just what Valerie Plame's function is. At the time of Novak's article she was an analyst based in DC. No one seems to be sure if she ever did any field work or if it was within five years of the leak. Her daring life as a Jane Bond might be another of Wilson's fabrications.

So Rove was trying to shield the White House from a cheap political attack based on lies. In the process of defending the President, Rove told how Wilson got the job and in the process, let slip why Plame was in a position to get her husband a job. He does not appear to have meant for this information to get out but it did.

Of course, the left hates Rove with a passion. They are sure that without him they would still control the country and that the road to retaking Congress and the White House begins with removing Rove. Accordingly they are jumping all over the story and distorting the facts. Look at this example from Keith Olbermann:

In his ‘story guidance’ to Matthew Cooper of Time, Rove did more damage to your safety than the most thumb-sucking liberal or guard at Abu Ghraib. He destroyed an intelligence asset like Valerie Plame merely to deflect criticism of a politician. We have all the damned politicians, of every stripe, that we need. The best of them isn’t worth half a Valerie Plame. And if the particular politician for whom Rove was deflecting, President Bush, is more than just all hat and no cattle on terrorism, he needs to banish Rove -- and loudly.

As a news anchor, Olbermann certainly knows that the work that Plame was doing when the story leaked was not covert investigation so her value was not destroyed. Olbermann is simply working himself into near hysteria in order to justify getting rid of Rove.

Blame Bush First

While watching coverage of the London bombing, I wondered how long it would take the Left to blame Bush for causing it.

Not long. A few minutes later I saw footage of Hillary speaking in the Senate. She was saying something about how Bush needed to spend more on national security (for Britain?).

By the weekend a consensus appeared among the mainstream left that the bombing repudiated Bush's "flypaper" strategy in Iraq - that it is better to have the terrorists attacking our soldiers in Iraq than our civilians in America. Never mind that this seems to have been perpetrated by a small group within Britain while September 11 involved people from multiple countries and three years of planning.

Eric Alterman started with a story saying that authorities are investigating the possibility that the terrorists trained in Iraq and ran with it. In Alterman's alternate reality a routine investigation becomes a certainty with the implication that the British terrorists would not have been able to learn bomb making without Iraq.

All of that is nothing, though. Comments at the Daily Kos suggested that Bush and Blair arranged for the attack themselves in order to distract people from the G8 conference. All of this got so bad that Kos removed the comments.

Others remain. Here is one conspiracy monger who is convinced that the British set up July 7 and that the US set up September 11.

All of this ignores a few important points. The most important is that the terrorists were attacking us prior to Iraq or even Afghanistan. They began planning September 11 in 1998 while Clinton was still president and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians looked promising.

We are not dealing with reasonable people. Withdrawing from Iraq is currently their top demand but if they are successful, what will their next demand be?

Yes... but

The 3rd episode of 30 Days was supposed to show how the Muslims living among us are victims of September 11-inspired paranoia. There were numerous comparisons made to the Oklahoma City bombing. What was missing was any realization of why Muslims in general are treated with suspicion in America. They did demonstrate it, though.

Part way through the show the current victim was arguing about terrorist bombing with his host. The argument was cut off in the middle by a call to prayer but not before we heard part of a "yes... but" statement.

When hundreds of people were killed in Oklahoma City, very few people cheered. Hardly anyone said that the bombing was justified and everyone who did say such a thing was treated with suspicion.

There was some suspicion that the Oklahoma City bombers were affiliated with radical white separatist Christians. The basic tenets of these groups have been disallowed by all mainstream Christian denominations.

That cannot be said of September 11. We saw pictures of Palestinians literally dancing in the street. The Taliban protected responsible people.

And Muslims in America say, "Yes, the bombings were bad, but they were justified."

Until the most common response from the Muslims living among us is, "The killing of innocent civilians is unconditionally wrong," then they are splitting their loyalties and we do not know which side they really favor.

An interesting development, according to the New York Times (I read it in a dead tree edition so I don't have a link), what had been Britain's most radical mosque is not calling for members to help bring the latest bombers to justice.

Is Rove Right?

In a June 22 speech on the state of conservatism, Karl Rove said:

But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time toÂ… submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be" to "use moderation and restraint in responding to theÂ… terrorist attacks against the United States."

Democrats went ballistic over this. There were calls for Rove's resignation. Keith Olbermann's response is typical:

In the ravings of Karl Rove against liberals (and the ravings of liberals against Karl Rove), I am reminded of yet another in my endless supply of pop culture references: The Twilight Zone episode called "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

[...] Think of how we responded — politically — to 9/11. First there was overwhelming non-partisanship. Years of deteriorating relations between the parties vanished; were even apologized for. And within three years the Republicans were insisting that a Democratic presidential victory would mean more terrorist attacks.

There is an interesting retorical trick at play here. Rove said "Liberals" but everyone is responding as though he had said "Congressional Democrats." He didn't and that makes all the difference.

An article here lists some of the liberal organizations that were against invading Afghanistan. I remember seeing a "Not in our Name" protest in November, 2001. A women-only group wore black dresses and veils to show solidarity with Afghan women against US oppression (I suspect that these same women were protesting Afghan women's oppression by the Taliban a few months earlier).

So, is it fair for Rove to smear all Democrats because of the actions of some fringe elements?

Yes, when these elements include George Soros's Open Society Institute and MoveOn.org. Half the financing for Kerry's campaign (the anti-Bush half) came from these sources. When you take someone's money it implies that you support their views.

This touches a huge problem that the Democrats have. Since McGovern in 1972 they have been the party of peace. A big wing of the party is against war for any reason. Congressional Democrats in 2001 knew that this was an unworkable position but since then the peace activists have mobilized to retake control of the party. You don't have to look any further than the current DNC chairman, Howard Dean.

I admit, I'm not sure of his stands on Afghanistan. They don't matter much anyway since no one was paying attention to him until 2003 when he briefly emerged as the Democrat front-runner on the basis of his anti-war stance.

As long as the America-is-wrong/the terrorists-are-right wing of the party has such a prominent position Rove is justified in his comments.