Instapundit links to Oxblog’s analysis of the Istanbul Summit, and publishes part of an email by reader Eric Bainter, who worked in NATO during the 80s and 90s. Bottom line: given NATO’s gaps in both capabilities and will, how real is the alliance? It’s an important question, and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s recent comments are sobering.

Patrick Belton’s summary of the key issues facing NATO is solid, and he also throws some worthwhile advice for both Bush and Kerry. In some ways, however, he begs the larger question about NATO and its future - and there was one item in particular that could be misleading. We’ll address both issues.

Patrick notes:

“What comes out of this is a capabilities gap. Of 1.4 million soldiers under Nato arms in October 2003, allies other than the US contributed all of 55,000.”

Read the Rest…

It couldn’t have happened at a better time. It couldn’t have been stage managed by Hollywood and come off with any more impact. And the expansion of the coverage into the broader subject of prisoner treatment by US Forces is exactly where the issue needed to evolve for maximum effect.

The photos and video from the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Graihb prison by a group of junior enlisted US Army reservists has presented to the US and to the World with an opportunity that would have been almost impossible by any other means. And it has, and is, playing out almost perfectly. What is the opportunity? To showcase exactly how the system of Western Democracy, conducted with openness and public involvement, really, really functions. No amount of manufactured advertising, consuming hundreds of millions of dollars, could have gotten the lessons on how a modern Western Democracy functions, with real issues, with as much impact as this one has.

We’ve witnessed a free press take information from a ‘whistleblower’, and grab hold of the issue with an almost seemingly single minded vengeance. It has elicited a continual stream of commentary from both the left and the right - in many ways resembling more of a bar room brawl than a reasoned discussion, but the opinions and viewpoints are flowing. The ‘opposition’ within the government itself is highly engaged, sometimes going to the point of almost absurdity for theatrical effect in the use of the issue for political purposes.

And the number of people that have been arrested, or hauled off to jail, or simply ‘disappeared’ for their part in these activities? Exactly zero. The number of articles that were pulled or heavily altered due to pressure from the government? Exactly zero. The number of newspapers or television outlets that have been shut down over their coverage of the events? Exactly zero. The number of minority political party members that have been harassed or imprisoned for challenging the majority party, and the members of the executive branch in power with scathing condemnation? Exactly zero. Actually, it is these very activities, integral parts to our way of life, that demonstrate what is different about democracy, the democratic process, and what kind of system we embrace.

What exactly have all these people been talking about? The inner workings of our government’s executive branch. And the executive branch has been remarkably forthcoming, releasing internal documentation of behind the scenes deliberations, discussions, and opinions formulated for our decision makers. The decision makers themselves have discussed openly the policies and decisions that were made, based upon those inputs. While much hullabaloo has resulted from the content of documentation that normally does not reach the light of day, this facet is of tremendous value, and highly instructive to observers looking at the American system from the outside. The discussion of prisoner treatment has started to approach the level of argument over fundamental principle - about US policy, and its interaction with the world community at large, and these discussions are being brought into the open, instead of being hidden away in back rooms.

The very existence of this trail of documentation, the results of meetings, discussions, and debate within the executive branch itself, demonstrates beyond any statement formulated for public release, that our government, and the people in it, had a genuine concern for where the boundaries were, and are. This documentation shows directly the effort put into making sure that what was being done in the name of our nation adhered to the rule of law - versus simply being the general application of the whim or will of a single person or small group of individuals regardless of what was right or wrong. Whatever may be said about the content of those discussions - they were free wheeling, encompassing a full exploration of the subject by serious, responsible people, with the goal of making sure we ‘got it right’. Also, while deliberations were made, and decisions formulated into policy on the topic, it is not yet a settled matter. It has not transformed into a monolithic entity immune from constant questioning and re-examination. Our officials have explained the process of how the decisions were reached, and detailed the policies that were implemented, but they have not become totally entrenched with the viewpoint that those decisions and policies are immutable. They recognize that the true nature of the discussion is about the ideals and policy itself - not simply a denunciation of the process itself, or their presence in it - despite the use of personal and ad hominem attacks by some that primarily object to the personalities with a hand on the lever of power, regardless of issue.

How does this relate to Abu Graihb? And how can what happened there be described as ‘getting it right’?

It relates to Abu Graihb in that what happened for a very short time in a single cell block of that prison was definitely not ‘getting it right’. When that happened, it was not swept under the rug. The participants were not praised, they were prosecuted. The mere occurrence itself triggered a sweeping re-examination of the issue of prisoner treatment, in a very public way. The wailings of scapegoatism are most certainly premature, as we are simply witnessing the opening moves of what will most likely be a rather lengthy examination of the events, and the participants, by our legal system. An examination that we will have a virtual ringside seat for. No secret trials. No ‘whatever happened to’ speculation. It will be known, to anyone with an interest in finding out.

That…that is the opportunity of Abu Graihb. It doesn’t demonstrate how we are magnanimous in victory, or charitable in times of need - it shows the world how our country, and our system, functions and deals with the unpleasant, as well. How we will willing inflict ourselves with a black eye, when the possibility that much worse than a black eye is happening.

The core story of Abu Graihb, while a favorite whipping post topic of the media for weeks, doesn’t play with regular people the same way it works for editorial types searching for a hot ticket item, or jihadi propagandists seeking low hanging fruit to justify their despicable acts. As Al Jahzeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim observed in a recent interview on the Charlie Rose show on PBS, people on the ‘Arab Street’ recognize that the acts committed by the soldiers at Abu Graihb was not true torture. It was humiliation, certainly, but it was obvious amateur hour shenanigans that lacked even the imagination displayed by American High School students in similar situations. And the Arab Street, or any other World ‘street’ can readily contrast the buffoonery of those reservists with the work of the pros on the payrolls of Saddam, the Nazis, the Checka, or the KGB. They can easily compare the reaction of the US government and media to the demonstrated performance of the regimes and media in Iran, or Syria, or even the relatively open Egypt. And they know instinctively that there is a difference. And no amount of hyperventilative Jihadi propagandizing about the matter can erase that fact.

The examination of these events, and the treatment of prisoners by US Forces in general, has by and large revealed the events at Abu Graihb as aberrant, outside the norm, salacious rumors and promises of ‘more shocking yet to come’ aside. So far, that promise has proved out to be not much more reliable than staple tele-drama teaser lines during sweeps weeks. And probably will consist of more of the same, with the ‘more shocking’ portion being over inflated hype. This is the most likely scenario, in that with the progress of the investigations and Congressional inquiries to date, if events absolutely more heinous than what we’ve seen already actually did occur, indictments would most probably have already been issued.

It has happened. And it shows in a way that opening schools, or restoring electricity, or standing up a ministry in Iraqi hands ever could about what America, and the Western Democratic system, is all about.

[Originally posted at Silent Running]

(Note: The author originally posted this on Dean’s World where he was Guest Blogger.)

Georgia Senator Zell Miller, the Republicans’ favorite Democrat, will be speaking at the GOP convention. And it’s being described in news stories (and on web logs) as something of a coup.

Miller has assumed a role in recent months akin to the late Governor John Connelly of Texas, who switched from being a Democrat to a Republican under President Richard Nixon. Only in this case Miller, who is retiring from the Senate, is not actually switching parties. In a larger sense, his status reflects the exodus over the years of many conservative Democrats to the GOP fold. Only in this case he hasn’t formally left.

According to news reports, Miller will give his speech on Wednesday night of the four-day August convention in NYC. The Bush campaign’s proud annoucement is expected Monday.

Needless to say, Democrats aren’t exactly pleased:

Bobby Kahn, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, said he wasn’t surprised.

“Maybe I’ll switch to the Republican Party so I can speak at the Democratic Convention and bash Bush,” Kahn said. “It makes about as much sense.”

Kahn was a top aide to Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes, who appointed Miller to the Senate following the death of Miller’s predecessor, Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell.

“I advocated his appointment,” Kahn said of Miller. “He said he would be independent and he was for a while, but he hasn’t been lately. He’s been in lockstep with the Republicans and I don’t know what’s happened to him. It’s really kind of sad.”

Miller isn’t going to change significant poll numbers on this race, nor will any of his comments lambasting his party be a big revelation (but they will liven the convention up). He has had a high profile for a while now with his criticism of his party and various Democrats via his lively book, plus appearances on radio and cable talk shows.

HOWEVER, his appearance will underscrore how the Democratic party’s center has shifted over the years. That Joe Lieberman is considered by many to be a conservative Democrat shows how greatly the party’s center of gravity has changed.

More than anything, his speech will be a way for him and the GOP to irk the Democrats…but it won’t change whatever poll results are prevailing at the time, and won’t change the Bush-Kerry-Nader dynamics.

And, in the end, he’ll be overshadowed by the Convention’s real star — California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The signs don’t look good now for Ralph Nader in his drive to get on most state ballots: the Green Party has nixed giving him their endorsement, thus denying him access to 22 state ballots where the party he headed in 2000 will run.

This leaves as his biggest backers people on the Democratic far left and some conservative Republicans, who are working mightily (and openly) to try and get him on the ballot in states such as Washington.

Nader’s latest setback came at the Green Party’s national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the party, after two rounds of balloting, chose California lawyer David Cobb. The party is enmeshed in anti-war efforts in the US and Cobb wants to try to convert it from a splinter party into a party with wider appeal.

So it seems clear the Greens had to choose between continuity (Nader was their candidate last time but irked a lot of them) and someone with newer ideas who is not viewed as on the political descent.

So who supports Nader? In the past week he has gotten into a shouting match with African-American Congressmen (the screeching reportedly came from their side) who want him out of the race, continued denounciations from Democrats and Democrat-linked pundits and bloggers, etc. His clearest areas of support can been seen in:

—The Far Left. Liberals Howard Zinn, professor and author, and Noam Chomsky, author and linguist, indicated this week that they’ll vote for Nader in their home state of Massachusetts, figuring their votes will make a statement but won’t take away from John Kerry’s vote total. Their vehemently anti-war stance reflects the typical Nader voter, who feels Kerry is too much akin to Bush on the Iraq issue.

—Conservative Republicans. Various stories have surfaced about GOPers helping fund Nader and working diligently to get Nader on the ballot in various states. One of the most fascinating comes from the Seattle-P.I. which reports:

Two conservative groups have been phoning people around Oregon this week, urging them to attend Ralph Nader’s convention Saturday in hopes of putting Nader’s name on Oregon’s presidential ballot.

The groups make no bones about their goal - to draw votes away from Democrat John Kerry and help President Bush win this battleground state in November.

“We disagree with Ralph Nader’s politics, but we’d love to see him make the ballot,” said Russ Walker of Citizens for a Sound Economy, a group best known for its opposition to tax increases.

The Oregon Family Council also has been working the phones to boost attendance at Nader’s event - with the idea that it could help Bush this fall.

“We aren’t bashful about doing it,” said Mike White, the group’s director. “We are a conservative, pro-family organization, and Bush is our guy on virtually every issue.”

Even if it comes from an unusual source, Nader can probably use the help, given that this will be his second attempt to win a spot on Oregon’s ballot.

Apparently Nader could indeed use the help. The PI again:

In April, Nader held an evening rally in Portland that was intended to attract 1,000 people needed to sign petitions to put him on the ballot. Only 741 showed up.Nader placed some of the blame on supporters tuning in the NCAA basketball championship game, which occurred the same night, rather than attend the rally.

Earlier this week, Nader named Green Party activist Peter Camejo as his vice presidential candidate, in a bid for Green Party support. It was clearly a futile effort..

One of the more interesting aspects of the fuss over Nader is how both parties seemingly have incredibly short (and expedient) memories in the outrage department…

The Republicans want Nader to run, forgetting their howls of indignation over how Ross Perot helped tip the election to Bill Clinton. The Democrats had no problem with that…

The Democrats now howl with outrage over Nader as a spoiler, but not once decried Ross Perot’s role in helping Bill Clinton’s coalition get into power.

Nader has been consistent in his outrage over parties claiming he is a spoiler, correctly noting that third parties are indeed allowed to participate and represent other views under our constitution, although the system is clearly set up to make it nearly impossible for them. He then undermines his argument by claiming there’s no difference between the two parties (tell that to opponents and proponents on the various issues that bitterly divide the two parties).

Without the Green Party, the task of getting him on a competitive number of ballots will now be left to Nader’s most loyal supporters, the far left and their tacit allies on the right.

UPDATE:
—- Centerfield’s Todd Pearson: “Good for them. Anyway, I might still vote for Bush, but I wouldn’t want him to eke out a victory because of Nader. The country needs either Kerry or Bush to have some semblance of a mandate.”
—The Left Coaster: “One would think that if Ralph Nader had any decency or cared at all for real progressive values, he would denounce the efforts of the right wing groups working to put him on the Oregon ballot. Nader once had a reputation for consumer rights. Now he is shown to be an egoist and spoiler who doesn’t care that he doesn’t have sufficient backing to get on the ballot without the help of the right wing.”
—Preemptive Karma:” This forces Nader to wage a state by state battle to get on each state’s ballot for November.”
—James Joyner (on conservative efforts for Nader):”This is somewhat less sleazy than efforts by one party to influence the primaries of another party, although not by much.”
—Steven Taylor (headline):”Intriguing: Greens Reject Nader”

Most conservatives are absolutely baffled by the liberal perspective on foreign policy and defending America. That’s because many of the left’s positions seem totally counterintuitive….well, for Americans. Their views would make perfect sense if say an Iranian mullah or Iraqi insurgent held them. But, that’s neither here nor there, since the goal of this column is to explain how the left looks at foreign policy, not why.

So, imagine yourself to be a liberal. I know that’ll be quite difficult for many of you, but just pretend you’re wearing a tie-dye shirt and Birkenstocks, chant “no blood for oil” a few times, and then try to muster up some sympathy for the endangered Howling Dung Beetle and that should put you in the right frame of mind.

Now that you’re thinking like a liberal, like a Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy, perhaps it’ll be easier to understand why you…

…think that fighting back against terrorism is futile because it creates a cycle of violence. So you see killing terrorists only produces more terrorists? Just as killing Nazis in WW2 only produced more Nazis & bombing Hiroshima led to huge upsurges in Japanese recruiting.

…claim to favor deterrence to intimidate our enemies into leaving us alone…until we’re attacked, at which point you counsel not responding.

…simultaneously believe Iraq was a “war for oil” and blame George Bush personally for higher gas prices.

…claim that we’re acting “unilaterally” in Iraq despite the fact that there are currently more than 30 nations with men on the ground supporting us there.

…blame “neocons” for somehow manipulating the country into war in Iraq for shadowy and sinister purposes despite the fact you’re not even sure exactly what a neocon is.

…think it’s vitally important that we not only put our self-interest aside, but make great sacrifices, to gain the approval of nations like France, Russia, China, & Germany, that history has shown are going to nakedly pursue their own self-interest no matter what we do.

…believe that before 9/11, Bush should have started jailing suspicious characters, closed America’s airports, and warned all Americans of impending doom based on the flimsiest of non-specific information. But now, after we’ve been hit by terrorists and have much better intelligence, you laugh at the color coded alert system and consider it to be nothing more than a political ploy designed to perk up Bush’s poll ratings.

…say that only the United Nations can legitimize a military venture…well unless a Democrat is in office, in which case it’s fine to bypass the UN whenever it’s convenient like Bill Clinton did when we bombed Kosovo.

…are willing to do whatever it takes to defend the American public from terrorists…as long as the French and Germans say its OK.

…believe 9/11 was just a handy dandy excuse to get rid of the Taliban so we could run a vulnerable, fragile, oil pipeline that Unocal gave up on back in 1998 through a country teeming with warlords, jihadis, & Taliban dead-enders.

…incessantly trash patriotic Christians as dangerous extremists, but cry “bigotry” whenever someone criticizes radical Islamists who support terrorism and hate America.

…support spending tax dollars hand over fist on everything from free needle exchanges for addicts to water stations in the middle of the desert for illegal aliens, but become a fiscal conservative when anyone starts talking about funding the military, our intelligence services, or missile defense.

…only cared about the fate the Iraqi people when Bush was talking about going to war. When Saddam was torturing them you had nothing to say and now that they’re relying on our help to build a democracy, you believe we should pull out and leave to their fate. But of course, if we pulled out and things fell apart, you’d then again care about the Iraqi people…at least until the November elections.

…look at the Middle-East and think the primary problem there is Israel, a successful, pro-American democracy, not all of the corrupt, terrorist supporting dictators and fascists who hate America, oppress their own people, and want to drive the Israelis into the sea.

…spent the eighties claiming Reagan’s attempt to bring down the Soviet Union was futile and that it could never work, only to spend every day since the Berlin Wall fell saying that you knew all along that the Soviet Union was about to collapse and Reagan had nothing to do with it.

Congratulations! You now understand how the left looks at foreign policy and defending America. So, if you ever get caught in the middle of a peace rally or the Democratic National Convention, hopefully you’ll be able to bluff your way out without getting called a fascist or having a “no blood for oil” sign shoved in your face!

Gore’s Lunacy Deepens

From Hog on Ice.

Clarify something for me. Am I a “digital Brown Shirt”?

Al Gore gave a speech the other day, and here is a quote from a Town Hall story on same:

Gore accused the Bush administration of working closely “with a network of ‘rapid response’ digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.’”

Gore gave that speech before the American Constitution Society at Georgetown University’s law school. I don’t know if you understand what that means.

Every law school has clubs. I’ll explain why.

Practicing law isn’t that hard, so lawyers are a commodity. They’re fungible. There are a few stars, and there are some areas of law which require actual brains, but generally, as long as you hire someone bright and responsible, it probably won’t make much difference if it’s Lawyer A or Lawyer B.

So lawyers who aren’t particularly bright join a lot of clubs and societies in order to pad their resumes and try to make themselves seem special. They’re like the nerds who cluttered your high school’s chess club and student council.

These clubs are totally pointless and achieve absolutely nothing worthwhile. They are a complete waste of time, apart from the small boost they may give to the careers of their members. Presumably, the American Constitution Society fits this description.

In order to excuse their existence, law school clubs and organizations arrange for speakers. At the University of Miami, my alma mater, they bribed students to attend by ordering pizzas. So you go to these things and you try to keep your eyes open while some old ambulance-chaser prattles about the grand and noble practice of law, and then you rush the pizza table in hopes of arriving before the fat girls can get there.

This is the kind of appearance to which Al has been reduced. I just wanted to give you a little perspective.

Anyway, Al mumbled a bunch of lies and half-truths intended to convince the students that Bush had deliberately deceived us in order to justify invading Iraq, and that the world would be a warmer, fuzzier place if only we had had the good sense to vote for Al.

I don’t get the “digital brownshirts” remark at all. I don’t know if he means Matt Drudge or conservative bloggers or what. It may well be that Al thinks that somewhere out there, there are a bunch of androids with digital brains and brown shirts, following reporters and editors around while playing mp3’s of Bush speeches.

Perhaps from the podium at Georgetown, Al saw a wall of imaginary guys resembling Brent Spiner, standing behind the students, waiting for their opportunity to switch on their mind-control rays.

Al Gore is insane. We already knew he was a compulsive, shameless, artless liar. That has been proven beyond dispute. But he’s also batshit crazy.

I’ve been telling people this since 2000. I wish I could link to a video of the debate where he showed up dressed like President Reagan, with his hair done up in the Reagan style, and with Reagan-mimicking rouge applied to his cheeks. You may not remember. He even did Reagan’s signature head-bob while he talked. It was like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, only there was no punchline.

And what about that bizarre moment when he stomped over to George Bush’s side of the platform and stared at him with a broad Xanax grin on his face? What was that all about?

It should have been clear right there that not all of Al’s delegates were answering roll call, but people are reluctant to come out and say that a Presidential candidate isn’t firing on all cylinders. Even for his opponents, it’s a hard thing to believe.

According to the Town Hall piece, privately, political operatives in DC express concern about the Madness of King Al.

Here’s another quote:

In anticipation of Gore’s speech, the Republican National Committee on Thursday circulated an “Anger Management” brief, quoting various Washington insiders who recently described Gore as “out of control,” in need of psychiatric help, “in full hatred mode” and unstatesmanlike.

It’s sad that the press continues to cover this rapidly deteriorating wack job as he spirals into the mud of history. It’s even sadder that liberals can’t admit electing him would have been disastrous. Imagine him pulling this crap in the Oval Office.

PRESS SECRETARY NAOMI WOLF: Al, the Press Corps is waiting.

AL: Just a moment, Naomi. I’m receiving vital last-minute information.

NAOMI: From whom?

AL: From Zerdok the Master Penguin. Via my magical tinfoil codpiece, crafted by tiny elves who live in my pants.

NAOMI: You’re going to take that off before you go out, right?

I know liberals are going to defend Al, saying we conservatives call everyone who disagrees with us “crazy.” Well, we do, and they are. But we don’t do it with this degree of sincerity and tenacity. And when we say “crazy,” we generally mean “unwilling to confront the obvious truth.” When we say it about Al, we mean something more like “likely to demand press credentials for his imaginary friends or disrupt state funerals by exposing himself.”

If we had elected this nut, right now, Joe Lieberman would probably be President, and Al would be on a permanent vacation in a padded chamber at the renamed Camp David Berkowitz.

President Lieberman. It reads like “Pwesident Fudd.” Beside Joe Lieberman, Walter Mondale looks like Lyle Alzado in the throes of a steroid rage.

I don’t know who Al was dithering about in his speech, but in my defense, I would like to state that at the moment, I am wearing a yellow shirt. And unlike Al’s, it doesn’t have sleeves that tie in the back.

So now it turns out that Vice President Dick Cheney used the “f-word” in talking to a Democratic Senator.

We assume this will be a huge issue on Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, etc., all of whom made a monster issue over language John Kerry used when he apparently got mad at a Secret Service agent a few months ago and swore at him. Remember that big issue on the radio, cable t.v. shows and blogs?

It was suggested that it showed Kerry didn’t have the temperment to be in the White House. NOTE: We considered that B.S. — WHOOPS! — baloney then, given the language political officials generally use off camera (and kids use in their everyday lives) then…and we consider this horse….sheddings…now.

But here is the report. We ASSUME the talk show radio hosts — if they indeed have principles — will be making an issue of this, since they were so upset when a Democrat did it:

Typically a break from partisan warfare, this year’s Senate class photo turned smiles into snarls as Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly used profanity toward one senior Democrat, sources said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who was on the receiving end of Cheney’s ire, confirmed that the Vice President used profanity during Tuesday’s class photo.

A spokesman for Cheney confirmed there was a “frank exchange of views.”

Using profanity on the Senate floor while the Senate is session is against the rules. But the Senate was technically not in session at the time and the normal rules did not apply, a Senate official said.

The story, which was recounted by several sources, goes like this:

Cheney, who as president of the Senate was present for the picture day, turned to Leahy and scolded the senator over his recent criticism of the vice president for Halliburton’s alleged war profiteering.

Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, and Democrats have suggested that while serving in the Bush administration he helped win lucrative contracts for his former firm, including a no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq.

Cheney’s office has said repeatedly that the vice president has no role in government contracting and has severed all financial ties with the Texas-based oil services conglomerate.

Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He resigned when he became George Bush’s running mate.

Responding to Cheney’s comment, Leahy reminded him of an earlier statement the vice president had made about him. Cheney then replied with profanity.

Leahy would not comment on the specifics of the story Thursday, but did confirm that Cheney used profanity.

We are SURE we will hear that Leahy started it first, and all kinds of rationalizations like that, from the folks who so bitterly went after Kerry for his language. That’s because there are few principles in politics anymore — just blasting your foes (Democrats and Republicans do it) for expediency, then finding a way to make sure Your Candidate gets away with it if he does the same thing.

But it was a silly thing for Republicans to make a big deal over when Kerry did it, and it’s a silly thing for Demcrats to make a big thing over it when Cheney does it. And if you want to send me an angry email on this you can stick it up your.. assorted laundry hampers.

Get out your CD with the old Twilight Zone series’ theme song and put it on as you read this item that shows the objectivity and world view of a high (and he must be smoking something) Saudi Arabian official. This gem of a quote from the lively blog Fringe:

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah blames Israel for Paul Johnson’s beheading: “Zionism is behind it. It has become clear now. It has become clear to us. I don’t say, I mean… It is not 100 percent, but 95 percent that the Zionist hands are behind what happened.” Talk about your classic case of denial and projection.

We bet if you asked Prince Abdullah “Do you know what denial is?” he’d say: “A river in Egypt?”

Former Vice President Al Gore (again) threw down the verbal gauntlet in super-blunt remarks aimed squarely at the Bush administration — and the question continues to be: is this a new-found Gore voice, a once-stilled Gore voice, or a surrogate-ventriloquist like voice using Al Gore like a wooden you-know-what?

It’s fascinating to watch Gore’s political performance these days since it is at stark varience with his bland-as-unsweetened-oatmeal performance during the 2000 campaign. And depending on where you sit on the political fence, we’re sure you can find other adjectives as well to describe (with revulsion or admiration) his latest pronouncements.

Some Reuters-reported highlights from his latest speech at the Georgetown University Law Center:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Thursday accused President Bush of telling “an artful and important lie” soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to set the stage for war on Iraq.”

Using the word “lie” is about as blunt as you can get. Is it our imagination or does it seem like Gore is linking up with Howard Dean’s constituency?

“Beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public’s mind,” Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University Law Center.

Gore……cited the recent report by the Sept. 11 commission saying no credible evidence existed of a link between the Iraqi leader and bin Laden. He said Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to argue for a connection between bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and the deposed Iraqi regime because it supports their push for war in Iraq and justifies “some of the new power they’ve picked up from the Congress and the courts” since the 2001 hijack attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people,” Gore said. “Indeed, Bush’s consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie — visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth.”

So now you have “intentionally misleading” and “lie” out there as political charges — a notable escalation in political rhetoric (the validity or falseness of the charges are a separate issue) in our political culture.

But the biggest addition to “mainstream” political rhetoric is in the news story’s final paragraph:

In an hour-long address punctuated by polite laughter and applause, Gore also accused the Bush administration of working closely “with a network of ‘rapid response’ digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.”’

The phrase “digital Brown Shirts” combines computer imagery with Nazi imagery. So now we have some people on the right suggesting (or saying) people on the left who don’t agree with them are traitors or hate America — and people on the left (which is where Gore is clearly positioning himself) suggesting (but not quite saying) that some people on the right are akin to Nazis.

It’s going to be a looooong campaign. And there seems no prospect that polarization will decrease.

When my parents left Cuba in the late sixties, they were resigned to the fact that they would probably never set foot on the island ever again. They would never see their home again, or their town. They would never again walk the parks where they courted in their youth. They prayed that they wouldn’t be separated from their families for ever, yet knew that chances were they would never see some of them again. Their loved one’s voices had to be locked in memory because exiling would take them a world away.

For years after they arrived in the US they knew little, if anything, about the lives of the families left behind. Phone calls were non-existent, letters sent either never arrived or were censored by Castro government officials. It was the sad reality of the Cuban diaspora.

Back then Castro had the economic support of the Soviets. His regime didn’t need US dollars to keep its economy going. So once you exiled, once you left Cuba, that was it. You were no longer Cuban. You were a Gusano. A traitor to la Revolucion. Once you left, you were gone, and Fidel Castro did not allow you back, under any circumstances.

We were real, honest to goodness political refugees. Exiles.

Today’s Cuban “exile” really isnt an exile. Exile means banishment, and today’s Cubans that have come to the states are not banished from Cuba. On the contrary, they are welcome to visit the island. Encouraged even. It’s not just that their families need them, the government can’t survive without them. That’s why Castro wants them to come back, again and again and again.

There has been quite a lot of commentary and news recently regarding the Bush administration’s tightening of restrictions against the island. Critics say Bush is pandering to the Cuban-American vote in Florida. Other critics say the restrictions are dividing the Cuban community. Either of these critiques may be true. To which I submit a hardy SO WHAT?

Every four years, every presidential candidate comes to South Florida with a mouthful of promises and Viva Cuba Libres! Every single president since Kennedy has courted the Cuban-American vote. It’s nothing new. They come down, tell us they are going to fight to take down Castro, then when elected shuffle some papers around and make little adjustments to their Cuban foreign policy. It’s automatic. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

I do however, take exception to certain Cuban-Americans or Cuban “exiles” criticizing the new restrictions. Statements like: “Bush’s priority should first of all be to not keep Cuban families apart” are ridiculous to me. As if now it’s Bush’s fault that they left the island, sought political asylum, and can’t see their families agian. Guess what? That’s what being a political exile is. That is the hard reality of it.

If you could not have lived without your family you should not have left in the first place.

Every Cuban that exiled to the US up until the ‘80’s knew this and accepted it. Freedom isn’t free. You need to earn it. When you left Cuba the only hope of ever seeing the island again was when Castro’s regime was gone. History. The US government didn’t make you leave Cuba, the US government didn’t make you leave your family behind. There’s only two people responsible for that, you and Fidel Castro. Castro made the decision to screw your life up, you made the decision not to accept it so you left. It’s that simple.

This new generation of Cuban refugees are a product of Castro’s revolutionary ideology. Most are completely apolitical. They could care less who is Governor, Senator or President. Unless, of course, the Governor or Senator or President impedes their ability to forward dollars to their family in Cuba or to visit their family in Cuba. Then, all hell breaks loose.

And I feel for these people. I know what it’s like to leave family behind. I know what it’s like to have aunts and uncles die before ever even meeting them as an adult. I am a Cuban exile. I came here not to make money but to be a free human being. My family left Cuba when I was four years old and there is not a day that goes by where I don’t imagine what my life would have been had my family been able to stay.

My aunt, one of the first women to carry me as a baby died before I could ever meet her. She was my father’s sister. She died in the late seventies. My father lived with the fact that for the last ten years or so of her life, he was not there. He was not able to be a part of her life. I remember the day she died even though I was a child because I had never seen my father cry. I had never seen his spirit broken. I had never seen him on his knees.

Yet however painful it was, he knew he had done the right thing. It was a difficult choice but he stood by it. He knew that in order to save his family he would have to sacrifice.

Sacrifice.

That is the price of freedom.

By Val Prieto
Crossposted at Babalu Blog.

So now a 33-year-old South Korean whose only “crime” was that he was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time has been mercilessly beheaded by Al Qaeda militants. And we have a clear pattern — a new political modis operandi.

And what have we learned? A lot.

First, what have we seen over the past year? The beheadings of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson and now Kim Sun-il, the 33-year-old South Korean interpreter kidnapped in Baghdad Thursday by Islamist militants. Coincidence? Not at all. These beheadings reflect goals brutally pursued with possible political implications for various countries’ internal political scenes and for the international scene.

Here are some lessons and thoughts:

(1)The U.S. is now engaged in a four-fronted terrorist war: the U.S. homeland, Afghanistan (holding and pattern and nation building stage), Iraq (consolidation of the victory that Sadaam forces and Al Qaeda militants are trying to yank away before authority is handed over to Iraquis on June 30), and Saudi Arabia (opposing stepped up efforts to destabilize the Royal Family).

(2)The beheadings have little if anything to do with religion. They are about instilling blood-curdling fear to break the will of the populations of various countries. It is no longer just aimed at the U.S. but ANY coalition countries, companies or agencies (including the United Nations).

(3)It’s all about body count. The terrorists have shifted strategy from a quantitative body count (911; Madrid) to a qualitative body count (symbolic victims such as an American Jewish journalist, an American Jewish businessman, an American mechanic aiding the Saudi Arabian military, and a South Korean on the eve of his country sending more troops to the region).

(4)They will likely raise the bar of barbarity to get publicity and continue to shock with the same impact. So far the victims have been males in their 30s and 40s. Will they choose a woman — or a child? Or a group?

(5)Beheadings are not unusual in that part of the world as punishment — but they are swift. Yet the terrorists’ victims suffer a terrifying, humliating prelude, then a slow, excruciating death akin to the slaughter of screaming animals. There is a large degree of sadism in this that goes way beyond politics. The goal is to make non-fundamentalist societies feel impotent — to terrify beyond anything witnessed since Adolph Hitler’s time.

(6)The beheadings are political tools aimed to accentuate tensions within the societies or cultures at which they are aimed, much as the Madrid bombings were timed to impact the elections. The South Korean’s murder is just the latest blatant example. The goal is to have companies and countries yield to the fears of workers, investors, or their citizens and to flee the area.

(7)All of this is accelerating — not coincidentally — as we approach the June 30th turnover of authority to the new Iraqui government. It is likely to get worse in coming weeks, worse after June 30th and definitely worse the closer we get to elections here in the United States.

(8)The Saudi Arabian government’s moment of truth has arrived. They are being attacked full force now; the language of the killers is aimed at appealing to the lower-classes in Saudi Arabia and to the Arab street.

(9)Evidence of Saudi Arabian security force’s complicity with terrorists is now clear in the death of Paul Johnson. What other “parallel police/military” forces played roles in the abductions of the other men in Pakistan and Iraq? If the Saudi Arabian government does not purge its security forces it is in for even bloodier events — or its eventual erradication.

(10)If there is any religious significance, it’s in the use of the sword. But snatching someone off the streets, videotaping a terrified victim sweating or pleading for his life, setting a deadline with outrageous demands, then butchering him (or her) like a cow is cheap, not as hard to pull off as a 911 — and gets tons of international media and Internet publicity. It’s shockingly cost-effective for them.

So the bad news is that governments are going to have work to have well-prepared advance worst case scenarios ready for more — and even worse — outrages. Families will have to understand that when their loved onces are snatched and they see the video with the demands their relative is effectively dead.

The good news — in a round about way — is that as more horrifiying incidents occur, people (and governments) accept them and learn to live with them. It would have been unthinkable in 1954 to be searched at an airport or have to worry about hijacking or terrorism; now it’s a fact of life and people don’t like it, but they’re used to it. And the mixed news is this: more than ever governments are understanding they have to exterminate the terrorists before the terrorists exterminate them.

Meanwhile, given beheadings’ impacts, goals and — sadly — cost-effectiveness, it’s an outrage that is likely to continue….as once again the level of violence that becomes commonplace increases.

That Sounds so…Republican

From Hog on Ice.

I guess I need to go back to school, because I thought liberalism was all about sharing the wealth and helping the worker. Turns out I was totally wrong, as the situation at Air Amerika Radio shows. According to an AP article, the folks who started the “network” misrepresented their assets to investors and new executives, and then they threw a $70,000 opening bash, which they are now paying for by withholding salaries from their employees.

Kind of sounds like they’re into Castro’s brand of socialism. The big dogs get the meat, and the workers get the bone. Well, really, isn’t that the ONLY kind of socialism? From labor unions to the former USSR, socialism has always been a way to funnel wealth to the bosses.

Here’s a telling quote:

“When you believe you’re doing work for the greater good, you don’t question as much,” says Javier Saade, a former Air America executive vice president.

Hey, how shocking, coming from a liberal. “We started a business and didn’t think about whether it would actually make money (i.e. “work”), and now we’re amazed that it’s in trouble.”

Ayn Rand should rise from her grave and kick that guy right in the balls.

Compare that to Fox News. Murdoch sat down and asked himself what was the best way to make money in cable news. THEN he chose the ideology, or purported lack thereof.

As for the lies about the company’s capital, that’s consistent with liberal thought, too. “Truth” is an antiquated term. My truth isn’t necessarily your truth. And logic is a male-created, Eurocentric construct intended to enslave little brown people and people with tits.

Lenin would be proud. Well, except for the part about Air America heading for the drain. At least the USSR lasted seventy years before collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

Al Franken says it doesn’t matter, and he points out that Fox lost money early on. Al, that’s brilliant, until you note that while it lost money, Fox built market share. Air America’s stations have lower ratings now than they did when you idiots showed up. And Fox was adequately capitalized. They didn’t steal Lauren Green’s paycheck to keep the lights on. Fox had the money to keep going while it attracted viewers who would later support an income stream. Air America is losing viewers, and it has no financial cushion to rest on, and even if it did, what good is it to spend money on a company that shrinks every day?

Liberal economics at its best.

Look for Air America to disappear within three months, and don’t be surprised if criminal investigations ensue.

That’s what happens to lying liars.

That’s one of several questions posed by Donald Sensing, a former military man who is now a man of the cloth — and who has one of the most thoughtful conservative weblogs on the Internet. In a fascinating piece, Sensing dissects where we are in the terror war and suggests there are four possible outcomes:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their religious and political cultures so that terrorism does not flourish.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East, the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Indeed, that is about as complete a realistic analysis as you can get — since no one seriously expects the Nader/Kucinich approach of just pulling the U.S. out of the area is going to happen (despite what some on the right may suggest about John Kerry he is almost on the same wavelength as GWB on the war, even though it can score campaign points to claim otherwise).

And Sensing, who constantly shows on his site that he can look at and deftly outline multiple scenarios, chillingly (and realistically) adds this:

“A terrible danger is that we could someday be well underway to achieving our long-term objectives and still get struck by a catastrophic attack inside the US. ….Which brings me back to my original questions: Does anyone doubt we must win this war? And does anyone still doubt that we really are at war?”

Not Ralph’s groceries…but third party candidate Ralph Nader, who apparently has concluded The People aren’t clamoring for him so he’s going to try a sideward snare of his former vehicle, the Green Party.

First the news report:

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader selected longtime Green Party activist Peter Camejo to be his running mate on Monday, a move sure to boost his chances of winning the Green Party’s endorsement this week and its access to ballot lines in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Camejo, an investment adviser from Folsom, Calif., had been one of two leading contenders for the Green Party’s presidential nomination.

The announcement came in advance of the Green Party convention beginning Wednesday in Milwaukee. Nader, who ran as the Green Party candidate in 2000, is not seeking the party’s nomination but he has pursued an endorsement from the third party.

“Camejo shares my concerns for economic and social justice as well as the urgent need to protect our environment,” Nader said in a statement before introducing him at an afternoon news conference.

One Green Party leader said a Nader-Camejo ticket would have a very strong chance of winning the party’s endorsement.

Etc. etc. etc. Then there’s this:

Nader also has been endorsed by the national Reform Party, which gives him access to the ballot in at least seven states, including the battlegrounds of Florida and Michigan.

So he’ll be on the ballot — and there could indeed be a re-run of 2004, when the Democrats basically patronized Nader, tolerated him and didn’t bother to debate his ideas or his stupid claim that the two parties are the same (tell that to Republicans who didn’t like Democratic environmental policy; tell that to Democrats who are flabbergasted at Bush environmental policy; tell that to proponents and opponents of abortion who worry about who will be on the courts; tell that to proponents and opponents of stem cell research; tell that to those who believe in the new pre-emptive strike security or the more traditional collective security).

And his choice for Veep? Camejo has run unsuccessfully for California Governor and is as inspiring a stump speaker as Dan Quayle. Ezra Klein of Pandagon writes:

Ralph has chosen his running mate — Peter Camejo, the Green’s perennial failure for Governor in California. Politically, the reasoning is clear. The Greens are holding their convention in a couple of days, Ralph wants their ballot access but not their constraints, so his VP choice proves his (unstated) loyalty. He’ll get their endorsement and thus move up to orange on the “pain-in-the-ass advisory”.

The pick is kinda funny, though. Generally, VP’s have achieved something, often an electoral something. Camejo has failed badly, often by spectacular margins. He was the Socialist’s candidate for President in 1976 and lost that one, a streak that has continued to this day…. So congratulations Ralph, you did it. After looking high and low, you’ve found someone less successful electorally, and worse on the stump, than you. May voters flee from your oratorical path.

But voters won’t. Even though Democrats may ask them to “strike,” some of their constituency will shop at Ralph’s…….

Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens has reviewed Michael Moore’s new anti-Bush film Farenheight 911 in Slate and here’s part of what he says:

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

Hey! It sounds like he’s writing about my blog!

He then launches into a painstaking examination of the film, it’s assumptions and contradictions.

Whether you’re a Moore fan or foe or just someone who feels they must see the movie before they can genuinely defend or denounce it, you need to read this whole piece. From the standpoint of writing, it’s brilliant (and whether you like Moore or not, it’s FUN to read). Here’s his final point:

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Those last two lines: HEY! He IS talking about my blog!

UPDATE: Michael Moore is being Michael Moored via a new book, as Greg Piper notes here.

Anti-semitic incidents are accelerating at such a rate in France that Jewish Agency officials believe tens of thousands of Jews may immigrate to Israel — and a top Nazi hunter is urging them to get out now.

The prominent French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld bluntly told the Jerusalem Post this weekend that French Jews would be better off leaving their country.

“One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that even if you want to fight against a wave of anti-Semitism, the best [thing] is to leave if you can,” he said, and noting Arab-Jewish tensions he added:”“There will be an escalation of attacks [against Jews] in Europe, and especially in France.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency said a report compiled by the agency had found 30,000 out of France’s 575 000 Jews were considering leaving for Israel and he characterized French Jews’ situation as increasingly “difficult.” This comes on the heels of French Justice Minister Dominique Perben reporting that 180 anti-Jewish acts had been recorded so far this year.

Many Americans often seemed puzzled (and some enraged) by France’s attitude towards the war on terror and especially by the events leading up to the Iraq war. But there is a reason — internal domestic politics…and that’s why the Jewish community finds itself increasingly beset with blase, half-hearted or blatantly incompent government responses to accelerating hate crimes. Front Page magazine noted:

France is home to the largest Muslim community in Europe — estimated between 5 and 8 million, roughly over 10 percent of France’s total population. In the past few years, the radical element of these French citizens has grown quickly, and is quietly overpowering more moderate Muslim voices. Many French Muslims idolize Osama bin Laden and consider the destruction of synagogues and assault of Jews to be justified retribution. These worrisome phenomena are caused by a number of things: increasing influence of radical imams in French mosques, the penetration of Saudi Wahhabism and extremist satellite networks spreading their propaganda.

Nazi Hunter Klarsfeld offers a bleak verdict of the situation: he feels “things cannot improve” in France for Jews. And he attributes the growing number of attacks to the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beamed into French Muslims’ homes by rabble-rousing Middle East Arab TV stations via satillite, plus France’s foreign policy which he calls “openly pro-Arab.” The final ingredient in the mix, he says, is “years and years” of French public and media support for the Palestinian cause.

This has implications for the United States because all this taken together makes it clear France will never support U.S. Middle East foreign policy, even if the Bush administration is replaced by a Kerry administration.

In the longrun, as the Arab population there increases in size and political clout, it also means less support for the United States in what will be a decades long war on terror. If France has been an ally but iffy at times, it’ll likely be more iffy more times in the future.

(The Real Dummy thanks Allah Is In The House for the tip.)

Dan Darling has an exhaustive pair of reports on the 9/11 commission and its findings (Part 1 | Part 2) over at winds of Change.NET. He is not impressed, and writes in an email:

“I’m not sure how interested you are in the nuts and bolts aspect of this kind of stuff, but I just figured I’d throw this your way to show you just how truly whacked-out the findings of this commission are entirely apart from the issue of Iraq and al-Qaeda. If this is the state of our intelligence agency, the whole WMD thing is starting to make a lot more sense now.”

One of the hardest thing for any politician is to try not to lose their cool. Sometimes it can work to their advantage, sometimes not.

In the case of former President Bill Clinton he is in a sense again a politician since he is on a massive media and bookstore tour to sell his new memoirs book. He’s trying to get people to be curious enough to buy his book but he needs more than core Democratic supporters to make the bucks to sell the huge number of books printed.

All politicians wear something of a happy face, even when they’re angry. Rage isn’t allowed to show…but it apparently did in an interview slated to air later this week with the BBC’s David Dimbleby. It apparently occured when the BBC interviewer pressed him about the Monica Lewinsky affair. The Telegraph story about Clinton’s purported loss of temper (CAUTION: how much of THIS STORY is hype to get ratings for their interview??) reads, in part:

His outrage at the line of questioning during the 50-minute interview, to be broadcast on Panorama on Tuesday night, lasts several minutes. It is the first time that the former President has been seen to lose his temper publicly over the issue of his sexual liaisons with Ms Lewinsky.

The President initially responds to Dimbleby’s questions by launching a general attack on media intrusion. When the broadcaster persists with the question of whether the politician was truly penitent, Clinton directs his anger towards Dimbleby.

The atmosphere, which was initially warm, then turns decidedly chilly. One BBC executive who has seen the interview, which took place in a New York hotel last Wednesday, said: “He is visibly angry with Dimbleby’s line of questioning and some of that anger gets directed at Dimbleby himself. As outbursts go, it is not just some flash that is over in an instant. It is something substantial and sustained.

“It is memorable television which will give the public a different insight into the President’s character. It will leave them wondering whether he is as contrite as he says he is about past events. Dimbleby manages to remain calm and order is eventually restored.”

QUESTION: When will politicos of all ideologies and parties learn that a dramatic confrontation with a reporter seldom can benefit them? It’s then hyped as reason to read/see/hear the interview to get readers/viewers. If this interview is as it is described (and it may NOT be since this news report is definitely written from a specific political viewpoint) seasoned political pro Bill Clinton did not act like a seasoned political pro.

But that could also help him sell more books. And that, folks, is how celebrity (and literacy) works in our 21st Century World……

UPDATE:
— NY Times says Clinton’s book is a ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
—Newsweek calls Clinton memoir ‘Hardly an Edge-of-Your-Seat Experience’
—Mathew Yglesias says Clinton’s appearance on Meet the Press shows Clinton foes will never get sex off their minds:”But so here we have it. Where was the Clinton legacy? Nowhere. It was just sex, sex, sex…Do we care about any of the things — the good things and the bad — that happened under Clinton’s watch? No. Sex. Scandal! It’s really and utterly moronic.”
—Wizbang’s Kevin Alyword on the Times’ pan:”Is the nations most influential newspaper part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy as well? No doubt Clinton supporters will be making such accusations. If the book is as bad as the Times says it is that’s a shame, because the subject matter held such promise. Love him or hate him, Clinton was interesting.”
—Poliblog’s Steven Taylor says he won’t be buying the book, and NOT because of ideological reasons. He doesn’t like bios, and: “As someone whose profession involves writing, I figured that a 900+ page book written in such a relatively short span of time by someone not writing full time and who wasn’t a writer by trade would almost certainly be poorly written and have a rushed feel to it.”
—Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes: I just saw him and he is still quite impressive on television. He makes his case quite well and it was the kind of interview that would intrigue viewers (unless they hate him) to buy the book.

And what about your truly, Joe Gandelman, aka The Moderate Voice? TMV LOVES bios…but the book is too long and so he’ll read the excerpts in the magazines and wait for the TV movie.)

Today’s Wall Street Journal online has an important opinion piece written by Michael Chertoff, a judge with the 3rd Circuit US Court of Appeals. In it, he notes some of the critical policy and legal issues we as a nation need to debate and decide if we are to effectively defend against terrorism in a coherent way while balancing security against civil liberties.

The positions we take on these matters will have a huge impact on our lives and on the tenor of US democracy over the next months, years and probably decades. Most of us here at Winds of Change aren’t lawyers, but we (especially those who are US citizens) have a responsibility to think these matters through carefully and make the difficult tradeoffs that must go into an effective response to the challenges of terrorism abroad in our time.

So … here are the judge’s comments. Your thoughts and responses solicited.

Read The Rest…

John Kerry today:

“This administration took its eye off of al-Qaeda, took its eye off of the real war on terror in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan and transferred it for reasons of its own to Iraq,” Kerry said. “And the American people are paying billions of dollars now because of that decision. And most importantly, American families and American soldiers are paying the highest price of all.”

Asked what Bush’s true motivation was for attacking Saddam’s government, Kerry said that is a question for the administration.

“It is clear that the president owes the American people a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose that it now turns out is not supported by the facts,” Kerry said. “And that is the finding of this commission.”

Kerry’s grievance?

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said the commission’s report is evidence that Bush misled the nation in setting out the case for war against Iraq.

“The president and the vice president, on a number of occasions, have asserted very directly to the American people that the war against al-Qaeda, the war against terror, is the war against Iraq,” Kerry said after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport this afternoon.

But what was Kerry saying when he had to vote on the war?

It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it. . .

A brutal, oppressive dictator, guilty of personally murdering and condoning murder and torture, grotesque violence against women, execution of political opponents, a war criminal who used chemical weapons against another nation and, of course, as we know, against his own people, the Kurds. He has diverted funds from the Oil-for-Food program, intended by the international community to go to his own people. He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel.

I mention these not because they are a cause to go to war in and of themselves, as the President previously suggested, but because they tell a lot about the threat of the weapons of mass destruction and the nature of this man. We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future. It is the total of all of these acts that provided the foundation for the world’s determination in 1991 at the end of the gulf war that Saddam Hussein must: unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless underinternational supervision of his chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems… [and] unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear weapon-usable material.

Saddam Hussein signed that agreement. Saddam Hussein is in office today because of that agreement. It is the only reason he survived in 1991. In 1991, the world collectively made a judgment that this man should not have weapons of mass destruction. And we are here today in the year 2002 with an uninspected 4-year interval during which time we know through intelligence he not only has kept them, but he continues to grow them.

I believe the record of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior which is at the core of the cease-fire agreement, with no reach, no stretch, is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force, if necessary. The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons.

I’ve read over their complete statement on the subject and am in the process of preparing a full point-by-point critique of it, but just based on what I’ve read so far, this reads like a media report rather than a serious piece of analysis.

There are so many omissions of rather important points of data, misleading statements, or claims that are demonstrably false, notably the claim that the al-Qaeda role in the Riyadh National Guard and Khobar Towers bombings was ambiguous or that there is uncertainty as to whether or not al-Qaeda was involved in either the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka. The frequent references to bin Laden’s public statements on subjects like the Riyadh bombing as providing insight into whether or not he actually ordered the attack is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the commission. The claim that the public signatories of bin Laden’s declaration of war did more for show than anything else is likewise more than enough to make anyone who has carried out a serious study of the Egyptian or Pakistani Islamists grit their teeth.

Read The Rest…

So what’s the real story about the coverage of what’s going on Iraq? We see the scary stories, the burned out cars, the bodies, etc. but is it telling the whole story? And if you raise that question does it mean you’re media-bashing and trying to purge negative news from newspapers and TV screens?

These issues are being raised thoughtfully on several fronts today. Most notably, by Greg Piper and by Fringe, both of whom use an article by Jay Rosen as a takeoff point. At issue is too biased versus what Rosen calls too “narrow” reporting.

And there is an issue to be addressed here: as someone who worked for the news media and in the news media for many years, many folks would be amazed how on major stories where there is indeed thoughtful planning regarding news mix, story selection, and staffing there may be a glitch: the story may become too compartmentalized, with too many parochial departments involved in too many aspects with poor coordination despite bigwig marching orders.

There is also the unmentionable issue of office politics — where one editor may want to get a piece of a story with one of “their” reporters and good-faith cooperation with another department or reporter suffers (careers are made by page one stories).

It’s also a fact of life that a positive story usually gets placed inside the paper (or at the end of a broadcast), or is done as a feature or, if it can really hold up, saved as canned product for a “slower” day. The stated reason for this is the size of the news hole (or amount of broadcast time sans commercials).

In other words, in many cases inept, incomplete, or seemingly biased coverage isn’t a matter of planning it that way. Like something we won’t spell out here, it happens.

Is former Senator Sam Nunn about to make a return to the national stage? And would that be a plus or actually a minus for someone whose initials are JFK?

Will Collier of Vodkha Pundit points to a newspaper item claiming that Nunn is a frontrunner in the John Kerry Veepstakes and writes:

Dubya should be so lucky.

Nunn might be the only potential VP mentioned thus far who’s even duller than Kerry on the stump, and while his accent definitely isn’t Boston Brahmin, he’s no less the patrician. He led the Senate fight against approving the first Gulf War, and hasn’t been a significant player in national politics since losing that vote. Nunn’s party is on its way to being shut out of power in his home state, and the last time he stood for election was nearly eight years ago.

As for those who think Nunn could help Kerry win Georgia, I have but one question: Did Lloyd Bentsen help Dukakis win Texas?

I’ve said it ‘afore, and I’ll say it again: I live in Atlanta, and Bush couldn’t lose Georgia even if he were caught in bed on live television with the proverbial dead girl or live boy, plus a shaved goat tied to the bedpost.

Hey: that would make a great new reality show!

President Reagan’s stand against Soviet communism resulted in the liberation of over 700 million people behind the Iron Curtain.

President Reagan did more to actually advance freedom across the globe than any other human being in the history of the world. Individual liberty has never had a greater champion than President Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Or as was much more eloquently put by Baroness Margaret Thatcher in her eulogy to President Reagan:

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With thanks to The Gipper-

President Ronald Reagan, the Great Liberator, and his Great Strength and Love, Nancy Reagan: White House grounds, 11/21/81

George W. Bush has liberated over 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has courageously carried Ronald Reagan’s torch of liberty into the 21st century.

I’ll vote for individual liberty every time. I’m voting for George W. Bush.

But Ronald Reagan will always be my favorite President. And his legacy as a champion of freedom (700 million people freed behind the Iron Curtain; economic freedom returned to the United States) will never be matched.

Photo via the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Here is the full text of Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy to President Reagan:

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Yet they were pursued with almost a lightness of spirit. For Ronald Reagan also embodied another great cause - what Arnold Bennett once called ‘the great cause of cheering us all up’.

His politics had a freshness and optimism that won converts from every class and every nation - and ultimately from the very heart of the evil empire.

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This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

Terrorists who sized Lockheed Martin worker Paul Johnson have now issued a 72-hour ultimatum: if Saudi Arabia doesn’t free Al Qaeda militants, they’ll kill him.

As is now the custom, the threat comes on an Islamic website with photos of the all-but-condemned-to-death prisoner, who looks terrified and humiliated.. And it isn’t good news for Johnson or his family that it’s posted on a credible website.

In fact, what few are saying is this: unless he escaped (and a miracle like that did happen once) there is no way he is going to survive since there is no way the Saudi government is going to meet this demand — and the terrorists know it. So within three days there will likely be another Internet-aired bloodfest, method of massacre yet unknown. The bottom line is: the terrorists want and need to scare foreign workers out of the Royal Kingdom and you don’t sow fear by releasing a prisoner.

That the Saudi government knows what it’s facing is abundantly clear by these comments from Adel al-Jubeir, the government’s foreign affairs advisor who immediately noted that his government has a no-negotiation policy with terrorists (as any thinking government would have to have):

“Their strategy is to try to sow fear in people’s hearts, and to panic, and to cause an exodus of foreign workers from Saudi Arabia, in particular Westerners…They are trying to scare foreign workers into leaving Saudi Arabia because they believe it will weaken the Saudi economy and consequently weaken the Saudi government, but they are mistaken.”

Some abroad — and in the United States — might be tempted to ask: Can’t we reason with them? Can’t we win their hearts?

It’s abundantly clear the answer is a resounding no. And if you don’t believe it, note that the terrorists have already changed their demands. At first they had captured him (they said) to treat him the way they said American guards treated Iraqi prisoners at the center of the prisoner abuse scandal.

But how they’ve changed their tune — making a demand they know full well the Saudi government cannot meet, so they can kill Johnson in a public, horrorific way to send a message to other foreignors and weak-kneed governments to quit Saudi Arabia.

And, indeed, if you go back and read all the news stories and analyses in the immediate aftermath of 911 Osama bin Laden’s key goal from the start was to drive the United States and foreignors out of Saudi Arabia — and establish a more pure (read that TALIBAN STYLE) government in Saudi Arabia.

So we should pray for Paul Johnson — the latest human being deemed expendable in the terrorists’ bloody chess game to manuever Saudia Arabia back into a distant past.

I had just finished up a program at the Benjamin Branch Library. The crowd was leaving and I was packing up, walking in and out to the car, constantly on the move. A group of seniors came into the side conference room where I had been situated and started getting ready for their meeting. One senior came in, sat down and said:

“I felt the earth move under my feet.”

I thought he was talking about Carole King’s song. The others looked at him like they were puzzled, too.

“I felt the earth move under my feet. No kidding,” he told us. “I was out there and I felt it — and other people looked at me and slowly nodded. They felt it too. The ground was rolling under my feet. I felt it. It was strong.”

One person in the library said: “It felt like a sonic boom.” Another person in the parking lot said, “It was definitely an earthquake. Not a sonic boom.”

I called home to check on the visitors waiting for me there, my foster son Tom, his 8 year old daughter Kayla and 12 year old son Greg. The kids had been there with a friend and Tom was to join them later.

“I was in my car going to your place and didn’t feel it,” Tom said. “But Kayla did. She said all the windows rattled and it was loud.”

San Diego felt a 5.2 earthquake today and how much you felt the quake located some 45 miles out in the ocean near the U.S. Mexico border depends on the kind of ground upon which you were situated. For instance, Glenn Reynolds, AKA InstaPundit points to two San Diego bloggers who felt more than I did:

—Lt. Smashreported: “A major jolt just shook my office. Biggest I’ve felt in several years.” And his San Diego readers left their comments, some reporting a big shaker, others more like a bump.

—Steve Den Beste at USS Clueless: “Whoa! Just had an earthquake here! Sharp enough jolt to startle, but not enough to damage anything. I’m not really used to that kind of that kind of thing.”

This mini-quake — which I apparently didn’t feel since I was moving so much loading up the car — brought back memories of the BIG quake I had lived through…the infamous Sept. 1985 Mexico City earthquakes that killed some 9,000 people.

Mexico City had suffered two earthquakes, an 8.1 and a 7.3. I was then a reporter for the San Diego Union. And when the initial earthquake struck all Spanish speaking reporters were deployed to Baja California for reaction…and I was one of them. I was assigned to the Tijuana Airport and told to bring my passport just in case.

But then the order went out to send everyone to Mexico City…and that meant me…so I hopped on a plane with my notebook, the clothes on my back and the paper’s corporate American Express card.

Cut to Mexico City. I’m interviewing people in a church. One lady is in tears, talking about how she can’t find her husband. Others are in shock. Some are eating food brought in by volunteeers.

Suddenly the woman cries out: “Oh, my God! It’s happening again! Another earthquake!”

I instinctively said, “What do you mean? I don’t hear anything” since I had been told a big earthquake sounds like a train chugging along. But Mexico City was different. The tremors there were more like a twirl than a train. And when I looked up, I could see a lightbulb dangling from a wire on the ceiling quickly swinging back and forth, like a clock pendulum out of control. And I realized I felt a motion that almost made me sea sick. It was the second 7.3 quake.

Everyone ran out the door and stood in the quad…but there was nowhere to hide. Big, towering buildings were around us. Power lines. The buildings looked unsteady, some of the powerlines were moving. Dogs howled. We stood there and I clutched my newspaper identification card, putting it in my shirt pocket so they could let my parents and family know what had happened to me. But the main earthquakes were over.

For a few months after that I’d wake up in the middle of the night, finding myself standing underneath a door frame. The horror and helplessness had been so etched in my mind that it was as if I had been preparing for another Big One but this time at home.

Today wasn’t the same as Mexico City. Not by a longshot. But we do live in California. And some chapters remain to be written in our history.

Gary Farber’s home blog is Amygdala.

The larger issue of current public debate is far greater than torture.

In past wars, presidents have claimed special powers. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and allowed accused traitors to be tried before military courts. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order authorizing the military to intern thousands of Japanese Americans.

In those instances, however, the president acted with the approval of Congress. Rarely, if ever, have the president’s advisors claimed an authority to ignore the law as written by Congress.

The legal memo, written last year for the Defense Department and disclosed this week, did not speak for President Bush, but it claimed an extraordinary power for him. It said that as the commander in chief, he had a “constitutionally superior position” to Congress and an “inherent authority” to prosecute the war, even if it meant defying the will of Congress.

Read the Rest

I know at least 3 bloggers that have full emergency kits ready to go in case of flood, fire, or other disaster. They’re great ideas, and they can and do save lives - but what should go in them?

You have questions, Winds of Change.NET has answers - and people you can ask for clarifying information, if you wish:

• Marc “Armed Liberal” Danziger’s Super First-Aid Kit is useful in so many situations. If you stock only one of these kits, this is the one most likely to be used.

• Blaster’s Bug-Out Box. “Remember, it isn’t being paranoid, it is being prepared. And, from a practical standpoint, if you keep some stuff like this around, you won’t be standing in line at the grocery store before the next snowstorm or hurricane or whatever other emergency might come.”

• Marc “Armed Liberal” Danziger has one, too… but it’s a “Get Home Kit,” and he explains the difference. This is a small, cheap day pack that we can leave in the car or at the office, and a set of supplies at home once you get there.

• Kim du Toit is another member of the Bug-Out Box brigade, which he describes as a “Grab-and-Go” - complete with details and even pictures. Mr. du Toit, who grew up as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, also has a grab-and-go kit for his family’s emergency guns. YMMV.

Dan Drezner, filling in for Glenn Reynolds on MSNBC’s GlennReynolds.com, takes up the issues of polarization, distrust of the news media, how conservative talk show radio has fallen into an ideological rut — and the emerging role of blogs.

He suggests that rather that blogs are not yet another intellectual circling of the wagons around already fixed but rather outlets that can foster debate and changes in thinking. And he points to himself:

The thing is, I still think he’s right. The act of blogging — and interaction with smart bloggers I disagree with — has forced me to develop, hone, alter, buttress, or refine my own views on a regular basis. In other words, blogging has led me to engage in more — and hopefully better — argumentation. I have no idea whether I’ve persuaded anyone, but I’d like to think I’ve forced my readers to think as well.

In my very first post as a blogger, I quoted Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors as follows: “We can all have three new ideas every day before breakfast: the trouble is, they will almost always be bad ideas. The hard part is figuring out who has a good idea.” For Rauch, the liberal scientific enterprise was the way to separate good scientific ideas from bad. For me, the blogosphere is now a vital part of separating good ideas from bad in the world of politics.

Absolutely true: take a few hours and go through blogs that are coming from a political space totally different than yours (left or right) and you’ll find some serious thinking is going on and the perceptions you had may be changed slightly by the time you’re through. Or, at the very least, you’ll find get some new respect for some folks with whom you don’t agree.

Gee, for years I thought it was just ME.

Andy Looney…I mean Rooney…has been on CBS forever. And he clearly must have a friend in high places at CBS since for years he has done his “humor piece” at the end of 60 Minutes. Now, I know he reads a piece, but I usually consider it a piece of something other than humor. But I thought it was just me. What do I know?

When I was a student aspiring to be a journalist, I’d read lots of books by columnists such as the late great Mike Royko. Now, in this post I’m using the “I” a lot, but you could always tell one of Andy’s “pieces” even if you quickly scanned it because he always uses the letter “I” repeatedly. We don’t have one of his books in front of us, but it’d read something like this:

I I I I paper clips I I I I I I administration I think I think I I I I I economy I I I I press relations I I I I I women’s lib I I I I I I

But you get the idea. Rooney was apparently amusing enough (must have been for his big bosses) to stay on the air for years talking about the minor irritations of life. But in recent years more than ever he has begun commenting on the bigger issues. And Heaven Forbid The Moderate Voice (my aka name..), who lived through the Vietnam War years, should make an insensative ageist comment, but let’s do it anyway:

Isn’t it time for Andy Rooney to move on, get off television, or be helped to move on (or kicked off)?

Perhaps he could be sent to Cuba and read his humor commentary to terrorist prisoners who are being interrogated. They would quickly confess.

It isn’t an age thing. It’s not a political thing. It’s an obnoxious thing.

Andy Rooney is to television humor what telemarketers are to dinnertime. Andy Rooney is to perceptive analysis what Jack In The Box is to fine cuisine. Andy Rooney is to laughter what an appearance by Osma bin Laden is to a Bar Mitzvah.

What provoked me to confess that I immediately switch off 60 Minutes because Andy Rooney is now the self-absorbed Bob Saget of the senior set is this item run by Seattle blogger Greg Piper:

Jeff Jarvis does a Mexican hat dance on the latest idiocy from cacophonous curmudgeon Andy Rooney, who said on the Don Imus radio show that American soldiers in Iraq can’t be heroes because they’re “victims” who “don’t have an occasion to rise to.” Why is CBS still giving this hateful harrumpher a paycheck?

We agree with Greg. Rooney is now out there in Dennis Kucinichland.

And just as amusing.

(NOTE: This was run on Dean’s World where I was guest blogging on the day of Ronald Reagan’s death. I later posted it on my own blog.)

Even of you didn’t agree with all of his policies at the time, you cannot but shed tears at hearing of the death of former President Ronald Reagan.

What can you possibly say about a president who left office the most popular president in U.S. history?

A lot.

A lot will be said and has been said about Ronald Reagan but the overriding quality he brought to office was something that had little to do with ideology — something politicians of both parties can’t duplicate.

It was his unshakeable, total, sincere optimism in the United States, its people, destiny and political process. In the 1960s, the late Minnestoa Senator and Vice President Humbert Humphrey was often pointed to as the key practioner of the politics of joy. But in the 80s, Reagan took it up several notches. And he became the embodiment of the politics of optimism and joy.

Pundits can (and will) list his many accomplishments. Among them: his role in bringing an end to the cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall; his role in lifting conservatism from a limited political philosophy often considered on the fringes of his own political party during the sullen days of Barry Goldwater to a mainstream philosphy that plays a key role in the United States today; solidification of the Republican majority; personification of the perfect way to deliver Oval Office speeches and press conferences; the trimming of government services in keeping in line with conservative philosophy (still highly controversial since some moderates and liberals adamently fought it)…and much more.

Yet there was one thing about Ronald Reagan: political handlers will find him impossible to clone.

Maybe it’s because of the divergent forces that helped shape him. He was shaped by his childhood, early experiences as an actor, experiences in Hollywood politics, and the California governorship during the turbulent 70s.

And no matter what, he never lost his authentic sense of optimism and joy — and he infused that in the country, even in many of his political foes. That’s why the term “Reagan Democrats” meant something beyond mere slogan creation. They gladly crossed political lines not to vote against someone, but for someone — and for something.

The death of a President is always a time for reflection and reaffirmation — and somehow it seems even moreso on this day….when America has lost its most famous and joyful optimist.

I was very fortunate. I had a personal glimpse of Ronald Reagan and he was a watershed in my own zig zag political history. Today, I don’t belong to any party, but there was a time when I was a Democrat, then a Republican, then a Democrat, then a Republican. And in 1980 I became one of the famous Reagan Democrats.

He won me over even though I didn’t agree with most of his policies his policies. I had been overseas writing for newspapers such as The Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Daily News from places such as New Delhi and Madrid. By 1977 Jimmy Carter was in office and I was in Spain and, as usual, often interviewed diplomats who were in excruciating pain in their dealings with the Carter administration.

I had heard things about Reagan as governor of California and was NOT convinced by that. He was too conservative for me, circa 1976. Then, in early 1980, my dying uncle from Los Angeles told me on the phone:”Ronald Reagan will be the next President of the United States. He has such a sunny disposition and people like him.”

In the end, Reagan won me over because of the way he conducted his campaign because I was ready to risk a change and he was in effect saying “We can do it!” For a wavering voter, he provided enough credibility and consistency to get my vote.

But those aren’t my two anecdotes that to me typify Reagan and his era. The two:

(1)My former foster son Tom (who is now in his early 30s) had a mother who had cerebral palsey since birth. Even though he was a young kid, he knew about the Reagan budget cuts and was very upset that his mother’s government money had been slashed.

So one sunny day in the early 80s, President Reagan came to San Diego. He bounded out of his car and ran over to a crowd and, known for his love of children, immediately saw blonde-haired Tom and stuck out his hand.
Tom, angry due to his mother’s own anger over budget cuts, just looked at the president’s hand and abruptly turned away. I’m told Reagan just looked puzzled, then went about his business. Yet in time Tom got to like Reagan.

(2)A year or two after he left office, I had to do a show in a huge air hanger at the Marine Base Camp Pendleton. I was told I would be going on right after the special guest. When I got there the special guest was former President Ronald Reagan. He was sitting at a table on a long stage getting ready to deliver a speech to Marines coming home after Gulf War I.

He had to share the stage with some kids. And before the event began you could see his eyes light up when the kids approached him, his joy in talking to them, a huge smile, twinkling eyes — and their genuine joy in talking with him not just because he was someone who had been president but because he was CONNECTING TO THEM on a personal level.

He wasn’t talking down to them. He looked them in the eyes and connected with that little spark that’s called the human spirit.

And that’s what he seemingly did, as few other presidents had done before (probably the only parallel in recent times is John F Kennedy). It’s something that transcends party, policy or spin. It’s the ability to truly connect and be with someone, rather than trying to manipulate or sell someone.

In the end, when all the words are written, it may boil down to this, and you can’t say this about other politicians of any party: there was a seeming innocence about Ronald Reagan, almost a purity of thought.

That’s why when he wrote Americans saying he had Alzheimer’s disease and would “begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life” it caused a bittersweet lump in many throats and left a sadness in many hearts.

And now his long journey is over.

It sounds as if Al Franken & Co are now making progress in their struggle to prove that liberal talk shows can carve out a market in a right to center-right skewered medium. Rick DeMent notes that some of the all-important numbers indicate that in NYC Franken had better demographics among highly-sought-after listeners than a certain talk show host who has Talent On Loan From God (and a divorce attorney as of last week).

WHY?

It really does come down to entertainment. The schtick is politics. But the hours shared must be entertaining or listeners will tune out. Rush Limbaugh is simply a great broadcaster — even if you hate his views. Mario Cuomo was not; he was a scold and frustrated philosopher who had been given a microphone as a political statement. The result was zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Air America — with all its huge corporate woes, problems in lining up stations, etc. — is presenting programs that have some entertainment value so far. Writes Dement:

The success of the right wing talkers was due to the personalities, not the politics. Rush Limbaugh is great radio, he was tailor made for the medium. He is polemic, acerbic and he knows how to manipulate his audience. I loved listening to the guy and * paid * to see two of his live shows….

Now Air America has some problems, and one of them is that fact that they are using Al Franken as “personality” to anchor the line-up. This is a huge mistake because Franken is simply not a radio personality. Randi Rhodes on the other hand is a seasoned radio personality and she is everything Rush Limbaugh is, polemic, acerbic and full of (expletive deleted by Joe). But more importantly she is great radio and highly entertaining.

But this all begs the question, why is it that it took politicos to get liberal partisan talk radio on the air? … It is oddly strange (or strangely odd if you prefer) that the so-called liberal media would all but shut out liberal partisan radio when it’s obvious to anyone who has half a brain that it would attract an audience, and by extension make $$$.

…The bottom line thought is that those who try to make the case that ratings are a function of partisan politics are barking up the wrong tree. Ratings are a function of great entertainers and your political point of view has little or nothing to do with it.

Indeed: with the NYC demographics it’s difficult to believe that, no matter what the challenges, Air America will sink…not just yet. The ratings numbers are a lifeline. The real test will be when they get some more stations to displace ones lost in key cities, when they’ve been on a while, and if station owners and advertisers see the shows garnering the kinds of ratings that make good BUSINESS sense in radio…which is a part of show BUSINESS.

The U.S. Supreme Court has just kicked a red-white-and-blue political timebomb down the field.

It has dismissed on a technicality the controversy over the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance — thus leaving the actual issue for a future court to decide in an inevitable future challenge. The details:

An atheist’s attempt to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance failed on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court avoided the constitutional question and ruled he could not bring the challenge on behalf of his daughter.

The ruling in one of the most important cases of the term was based on the technicality that Californian Michael Newdow could not bring the case because he did not have legal control over the 9-year-old girl. It left open the possibility of future challenges.

The 8-0 decision overturned a controversial ruling by a U.S. appeals court in California that reciting the phrase amounted to a violation of church-state separation.

Clearly this issue will come up again…but after the elections. It would have been seized upon by the hard-core left and hard-core right and each side would have tried to batter the other with it, pointing to the need to get a court more firmly sympathetic to their side. Even so:

Three court members — Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas — disagreed that Newdow could not bring the case.

They said they would have decided the merits of the dispute and ruled the words “under God” do not violate the Constitution.

Prediction: the issue will come up again within a year.

The White House rejects calls by Nancy Reagan to change its policy on stem cell research as the White House press sec sez:”“The policy remains the same. We are looking at other ways to combat disease.”

Add this latest twist (Laura Bush pretty much said the same thing a few days ago) to Ronald Reagan Jr.’s little dig at GWB during his eulogy for his Dad and it does not look like the Reagan family will be out on the hustings working ferverishly for George Bush’s re-election.

Prediction: they’ll endorse him but won’t break their necks for him…and if Nancy speaks at the Republican Convention her speech may contain a highly newsworthy line or two…

Fresh car bombings in Iraq bring a fresh wave of “They want us gone!” chants.

Yes, they do. But they anti-war people refer to the wrong they chants.

Of course there are people in Iraq who resent and resist the presence of the U.S. and coalition forces. They are the same people who resent and resist democracy. Basically, they are terrorists and thugs, leftover scraps of Saddam’s army. And really, why would they want us there?

In a democracy such as the one being formed in Iraq, there is no room on the governing council for terrorists. There are no government employment forms with a blank space that says: List all thuggery experience here.

They are the people who will suffer the most from the absence of a brutal dictatorship. They are the people who lost jobs and whose gravy train has come to a grinding halt.

I imagine that among the insurgents, radicals, resistance or whatever you want to call these groups (I prefer the term murdering terrorists, myself), are those who had lively careers under the tutelage of Saddam.

The guy who was in charge of dragging people out of their homes to vote on Election Day.

The guy who rounded up “volunteers” to carry signs during Saddam’s birthday celebrations.

They guy who sharpened the axes that were used in the beheadings.

The guy who drove the bulldozer that covered the bodies of dead Kurds.

The guy who rounded up young women for Uday to rape.

The guy who was in charge of the children’s prison.

All of the men who murdered, tortured, raped and imprisoned innocent Iraqis at Saddam’s behest.

So yes, of course they want the U.S. gone. With the new form of governing that we bring to Iraq, the careers of these men are basically in the toilet. No longer will Saddam’s opulence trickle down to them. No longer will they be able to kill at will or use their power for evil. At least not with government approval.

So when I see a photo like this one or a report like this:

Dozens of people gathered around two of the vehicles damaged in the blast, hammering on them, waving debris and jumping on their roofs, chanting: “America is the enemy of God.”

I just have to think to myself, who would bomb people who are working on the infrastructure of their country? What kind of person would kill the very people who are trying to rebuild the electricity grid?

The answer seems pretty obvious. It would have to be someone who does not want the infrastructure rebuild. Someone who does not want the city put back together with better electricity than it had before. Someone who does not want schools and hospitals built, someone who does not want new roadways installed or markets to open.

For all intents and purposes, we will call these people terrorists. Why? Because they are. No square quotes. Just the word. Terrorists. Replace the they in the opening paragraph here with terrorists.

Fresh car bombings in Iraq bring a fresh wave of “Terrorists want us gone!” chants.

The terrorists hate us. The terrorists do not want us in their country.

As Homer would say, Doh! It was obvious all along, wasn’t it?

Now, this could all very well be conjecture on my part, but based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve read, I don’t think so. Also, common sense tells me that people who lived under an oppressive, tyrannical, death squad regime, people who lived in squalor and fear while others who bowed to the evil principles of said regime lived in luxury and without fear, they would want the coalition forces there. They would want change and want democracy.

I listen to Ali an Omar. I listen to Zeyad. I listen to Ays. I listen to Alaa, who says:

Dear Mr. President
Calm seas and easy winds do not test a ship’s worthiness, but it is the tempest and the hurricane that show her true metal. Strength is measured by the intensity of stress that can be withstood. And here we see you standing like a mountain towering over the raging elements.

I would hope that the majority of Iraqis are of the same thinking. Do you think the people benefiting from and smiling because of Spirit of America are shouting for us to go home? I doubt it.

I would assume (and yes, I know all about assumptions) that the terrorists are in the minority. Unfortunately, it is the minority who have the guns, bombs and means to strike out at what they consider their enemy. Which would be democracy. The U.S. and coalition presence represent that enemy so it would stand to reason that they would gather their forces and put their career skills - honed under Saddam’s regime - to use.

There’s also another they at play here. See, the bombers and shooters are not always Iraqi. Sometimes they are from Jordan or Libya. Sometimes they are members of al-Qaeda or one of those AQ offshoots. So why would they care if democracy was coming to Iraq? Simple. There would be one less country in which they could hide out. One less country to trade weapons and ammunition with. One less country to recruit from. And one more country that the godless Americans are ruining for them. To them, the war in Iraq represents several things: an opportunity to kill Americans; a way to make American and it’s nation building dreams look bad; a way to destroy the confidence American citizens have in their country; a way to possibly bring down the Evil American Empire; a way to recruit new members into their martyr’s brigade, a brigade whose main purpose is to destroy everyone who does not follow their way of life.

So, who wants us out of Iraq? Who are those people dancing around the charred bodies of fellow Iraqis? Who are these people not only murdering their own countrymen, but destroying any progress being made towards democracy and stability?

My bet is that they are not ordinary Iraqi citizens. My bet is on terrorists. And frankly, I really don’t care what they want or what they think. They can jump up and down and curse the USA all they want, it does not make their cause noble just because they are “protesting” against the horrible, evil people of the United States of America, despite what the people over here think.

The people chanting “God is Great, America is Evil!” and the people dancing around bodies and smiling in the face of their dead countrymen are of the same mold (and sometimes the same people) who beheaded Nick Berg, who hung the bodies in Fallujuah, who killed Daniel Pearl, who crashed a few airplanes on September 11, 2001. They hate us. They always did. And now, we are in their zone, in their part of the world, trying to take away their guns and power. Of course they hate us. Of course they will do anything to stop the transfer of power, to stop the forthcoming democracy.

That’s who they are. And yes, they want us gone. Too bad.

Of course, this only what I surmise from what I take in. I am not speaking for Iraqis. They speak well enough for themselves and from Omar right down to the Iraqi governing council, I can pretty much assume (there I go again) that they’re not standing arm in arm with the terrorists who are killing their own people.

President Bush

Margaret Thatcher

Former President Bush

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney

Gary Farber is a new contributor at Winds of Change.NET. H’s home blog is Amygdala.

A reminder:

bq.. “Karnes hadn’t been near the World Trade Center. He wasn’t even in New York when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Conn., working in his job as a senior accountant with Deloitte Touche. When the second plane hit, Karnes told his colleagues, “We’re at war.” He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

The small barbershop in Stamford, Conn., near his home, was deserted. “Give me a good Marine Corps squared-off haircut,” he told the barber. When it was done, he drove home to put on his uniform. Karnes always kept two sets of Marine fatigues hanging in his closet, pressed and starched. “It’s kind of weird to do, but it comes in handy,” he says. Next Karnes stopped by the storage facility where he kept his equipment—he’d need rappelling gear, ropes, canteens of water, his Marine Corps K-Bar knife, and a flashlight, at least. Then he drove to church. He asked the pastor and parishioners to say a prayer that God would lead him to survivors. A devout Christian, Karnes often turned to God when faced with decisions. “

It’s an amazing story. Read The Rest…

I am 25 years old. I was barely 11 when the Berlin Wall came down. I was almost 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed. When I was 16, I visited Berlin and freely walked through the Brandenburg Gate. At 21, I moved to Uzbekistan to work as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Even though the Soviet Union hasn’t existed for about half of my life, I have vague memories of fearing it as a child and I’ve studied, experienced, and been concerned with the fallout as an adult.

I don’t expect people to know the nitty-gritty details of Soviet history, but Lawrence Martin’s op-ed is hideous historical revisionism. The heart of the argument is true—Gorbachev was more instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union than Reagan. At best, Reagan catalyzed the collapse, causing the developing cracks in the economy to widen by exploiting their fears of our weaponry, and perhaps more importantly, working very hard to isolate the Soviet economy from its sources of hard currency. By the time that Gorbachev was in office, he was in control that he honestly thought he could steer towards openness while maintaining its socialist character.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was an unintended consequence of both Reagan policies and Gorbachev policies.

The end of the Cold war was not unintended, and Ronald Reagan is the man who deserves the credit for ending it. Ironically, throughout the history of the Cold War, it was the Democrats who initiated the fiercest and most hawkish displays of our military power (Cuba, Vietnam) and the Republicans who calmed relations with our powerful enemies (China, Soviet Union). There’s no shame in facing up to this for either party and there’s little use in downplaying the achievements of the other side.

I don’t expect either side to conspicuously honest in this debate, but Lawrence Martin smudges the hell out of the argument by conflating the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union—two distinct events.* I’ve spotted, here and there, lately, the notion that Gorbachev was a peaceful man devoted to making the Soviet Union into a wonderful democratic country. I’ll give that he made things better, but the man was far from a saint.

It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice — actors don’t like to be upstaged — but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.

“Sweeping democratic revolution” is a phrase I would be hard pressed to find any takers on in the former Soviet Union. It’s laughable, really. Keep in mind that Gorbachev never put himself in a position of having to be elected. Instead, the Congress of People’s Deputies was elected, chose a Supreme Soviet, who in turn chose Gorbachev to lead.

In R.R., the Soviet leader knew he was dealing with an archetype Cold Warrior. To bring him around to “new thinking” would require a rather wondrous set of works. And so the Gorbachev charm offensive began. The first offering, in 1985, was the Kremlin’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests. “Propaganda!” the White House declared.

Then Mr. Gorbachev announced a grandiose plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2000. Just another hoax, the Reagan men cried. More Commie flim-flam.

Then came another concession — Kremlin permission for on-site arms inspections on Soviet land — and then the Reykjavik summit. In Iceland, Mr. Gorbachev put his far-reaching arms-reduction package on the table and Mr. Reagan, to global condemnation, walked away, offering nothing in return.

There’s more fudging. I trust you can see the primary problems here on your own. First, there’s little reason to believe that Gorbachev was serious. The Soviet tradition of saying wacky shit continues today in North Korea, and rather than try to seal the whole deal right off the bat, Reagan insisted in smaller steps and built-in mutual verification. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s prudent.

Glasnost and perestroika became the new vernacular. For those in the White House like Richard Perle, the prince of darkness who still thought it was all a sham, Gorby now began a withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.

A date would be nice, right? Well, here’s one for you: 1988. That’s when the Soviet withdrawal happened. Gorbachev came to power long enough before that to have, were he truly a man of peace, withdrawn those forces earlier. The bottom line is that he could not afford it any longer—not in men or money. The deaths of ethnic Russians was becoming such a problem that they became more or less unavailable for duty in Afghanistan. Instead, Gorbachev recruited troops from ethnic minorities to offer up for slaughter in Afghanistan (I can’t remember what history book I read that in unfortunately).

He released the dissident icon Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of other political prisoners. He made big strides on freedom of the press, immigration and religion. He told East European leaders that the massive Soviet military machine would no longer prop up their creaking dictatorships. He began the process of something unheard of in Soviet history — democratic elections.

He released a high-profile dissident. Great. Many others remained. Yes, he made things better, but the Soviet Union was still exercised arbitrary rule and Gorbachev could, and did (as I’ll point out later), take rights away when he felt like it.

Elections only happened at the Soviet Republic (Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, etc) level. Like I said, Gorbachev never faced the people himself. When he did run for President of Russia in 1996, he received about 1.5%

As for the East Europe point. Date: 1989. By this point, the USSR was in economic dire straits and Eastern Europe was ready to explode. He wisely realized that the Red Army would not, after Afghanistan, be able to face violent revolt across Eastern Europe. After he let them go, they ran, fast. The Warsaw Pact countries crumbled nearly immediately.

However, Gorbachev never extended this privelege to the Soviet Republics. Rumblings of independence were brutally crushed in Tbilisi and Vilnius.

By now, the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind. Nearing the end of his presidency, he came to Moscow and he signed a major arms-control agreement and warmly embraced Mr. Gorbachev. A journalist asked the president if he still thought it was the evil empire. “No,” he replied, “I was talking about another time, another era.”

I’m sorry, but this is simply laughable. “Reeling?” Hardly. Reagan ended his presidency successfully, leaving behind a Soviet Union so battered by a combination of Gorbachev’s failure to reform the economy and our economic pressure that there was little room left but for Gorbachev to negotiate. More importantly, these two men came to trust one another enough to go through with arms reduction treaties. This is largely attributable to personalities. Reagan, by accident or design, had a sunny personality. It was important.

But he had decided that the continuing clash of East-West ideologies was senseless, that his sick and obsolescent society was desperate for democratic air. His historic campaign that followed wasn’t about Ronald Reagan. It would have happened with or without this president. Rather, it was about him, Mikhail Gorbachev: his will, his inner strength, his human spirit. As for the Gipper, he was bold and wise enough, to shed his long-held preconceptions and become the Russian’s admirable companion in the process.

Gorbachev made the decision because he recognized the internal weakness of the Soviet Union. He was utterly unwilling to fix the heart of the problem—the structural weakness of the Soviet command economy. Martin is right that Gorbachev would have pursued domestic reforms without Reagan, but would the man who said this,

“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things:

One, we want the Americans to withdraw conventional forces from Europe.

Two, we want them to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe.

Three, we want the Americans to stop proceeding with Strategic Defense Initiative.”

retreated from the outer reaches of his empire without a figure like Reagan?

Look, it does no one any favors to pretend that Ronald Reagan single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union. He didn’t. He was one helluva catalyst though. I have little doubt in my mind that were it not for his policies going into effect when they did, I would have been so unlucky as to have had to pass through the Wall to see Berlin’s museums in 1996.

It also does no one any favors to pretend that Mikhail Sergeevich was anything more than he really was.

Conflating two distinct (but connected) events to give Gorbachev all the credit is an insult. Insofar as leaders of either country are assigned credit for ending the Cold War, Reagan deserves the lion’s share. He led the US during the reigns of three Soviet Leaders. He was tough, as he should have been, with the first two, and recognized the willingness and desire to negotiate in Gorbachev, a leader from a different generation than all previous Soviet leaders.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is a much stickier issue. Like I said above, Reagan policies were an important catalyst. Gorbachev’s policies were more immediate causes. We could even go way back and blame Stalin’s ethnic minorities policies or even his economic planning.

That’s neither here nor there though. Martin’s wrong on the important point of Gorbachev’s character and intent. He was no democratic saint. He had little use for the expansive freedoms of Western Europe or the US, glasnost was anything but a smooth march forward, and perestroika? Well, it never happened in the right places.

As Reagan makes his final journey into the West today, it’s very fitting to think of how we will recognize his contributions to the US. Personally, I hold some amazing memories—experiencing the warmth and fraternity of Russians, freely moving throughout Berlin, celebrating Independence Day openly and loudly in a former Soviet Republic—that serve as treasured monuments to a kind, idealistic man who helped slay a hideous beast.

[This is mostly cross-posted from The Argus]

We received this from the National Center for Public Policy Research; if a liberal think tank wishes to forward their perspective, we’ll gladly post it as well …

Paying Our Respects to Ronald Reagan: Is It Worth Waiting Eight Hours in the Heat? Absolutely

Like tens of thousands of other Americans, staff members of the National Center for Public Policy Research and members of the black conservative leadership group Project 21 have been paying their respects to former President Ronald Reagan.

So that their experiences might be shared by other Americans who have not been able to participate personally in remembrance events, a description of their experiences observing the state funeral procession and paying respects in the Capitol Rotunda have been posted on the National Center’s blog at www.nationalcenter.org/Blog.html.

Sample comments:

At 1 am, five-and-a-half hours after we entered the line and eight hours after we left to meet the caisson, we were finally on our way home. Eight hours of standing in heat that caused some to pass out. Eight hours to walk past a flag-draped coffin for just a few minutes. Was it worth it?

Absolutely. I never met the man, but Ronald Reagan is one of the most important people in my life. My first work in politics was as a high school volunteer in his re-election campaign. Admiration of his policies and style of governing made me want to study political science in college. Preserving his legacy is why I came to Washington. It was the same for my wife. Not only am I thankful to him for what he did to strengthen our nation and bring freedom to the world, but also for playing a role in introducing me to my wife.

And

It’s not very easy for four-year-old children to understand that a giant has left us, but as Ronald Reagan bequeathed to our children and millions of others a safer, more prosperous world, he deserved what thank you they could give him.

In this case, it was by hanging around a hot sidewalk at Constitution and Louisiana Avenues… And, I hope, by beginning to get a little germ of understanding that there is such a thing as a United States of America; that good men and women protect it, and great men and women protect it especially well…

We were still among the crowds when we heard the cannons begin the 21-gun salute. People around us stopped, and turned the face the Capitol. We couldn’t see if through the trees, but the sound was loud and clear. We counted, silently. No one moved until it was over…

We’d both expected the sight of the caisson to be the most moving part for us. We found that it hadn’t been. Instead, that moment came while we were watching the missing man formation. The jets flew by, wave after wave. Then, in the last wave, one jet separated, and flew up and away.

The cloud cover was low. As we watched, the jet vanished into the sky.

The National Center also published in January a refutation of allegations that Reagan’s 1980s were at “Decade of Greed,” available at Reaganomics: Were the 1980s the Decade of Greed?, and also has posted online a collection of the text of various Reagan speeches at its Archive of Historical Documents.

[The following was written by Tom Donelson and orginally appeared here. It is reprinted with permission of the author]

History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave

I found this quote upon the Internet and loved it. This describes Ronald Reagan. He was both wise and brave. The day he survived his assassination, the bravery of Ronald Reagan was shown. Joking while death stared him in the eye, Reagan reassured a nation as well as his own family.

In assessing the Reagan Presidency, one has to understand the America that existed 24 years ago and the pessimism that existed. For Reagan, he stood against the tide of history that existed and changed it. That is what measures his greatness.

What was America and the world like in 1980? The following accurately describe the World as it was then:

· The Soviet Empire was at its apex with domination not only in Eastern Europe but the Russians were busy establishing bases in Central America, at critical points in Africa and appeared to finishing up a campaign in Afghanistan.
· The American Economy was struck by low growth and high inflation and there were many who were telling us that we had reach the era of limitation where resources were slowing running out. The American dream was dead and we had to manage the decline.
· Other experts were asking us to imitate the German or Japanese model of export led economy and in the case of the Japanese, an Industrial policy of the government picking and subsidizing select industry.

When Ronald Reagan suggested that the era of limitation was strictly man made and not a reality, he was considered an old fogey and out of touch with the economic reality. When Reagan suggested that the Soviet Empire was vulnerable and ready for the Ash heap of History- he was laughed at. Experts consider the Soviet Empire on the ascendancy and there were no way that the solid Soviet Empire would collapse economically, much less militarily. Reagan ideas challenged the academic and foreign policy elites. They were wrong and he was right.

Within three years of Reagan leaving office, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Empire imploded. Germany and Japan have been stuck in slow or stagnant growth for nearly a decade and are no longer models to be emulated. The United States has been involved in a nearly 25 yearlong economic expansion with two minor recession blips that has created millions of new jobs and new industries. The average American has more in his house than ever before and now we no longer fear the future.

Reagan set in place the American Century and saved what was consider the free world and expanded it. Today, more people has tasted freedom because of Reagan and not just politically but economically as well.

In 1972, I voted for George McGovern and 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter. In 1980, I voted for Ronald Reagan and became a Reagan conservative, which I am still today.

Contrast Reagan with Nixon and you have the difference between what being Republican means today vs. in the early 70’s. Nixon was one of the most intelligent men to enter the White House and the least principled. Nixon Foreign Policy was managing a nation in decline and his policy basis began with the idea that America position in the world was diminishing. His policy was not about elevating America but slowing the eventual decline. His economic plan was surrender to the Keynesian dogma of the time and he also surrendered to the environmental ideas that we were running of our energy. Nixon was a pessimist and that is why is policies failed. They fail to take in account the American spirit.

Reagan rejected the pessimism of Nixon and added an optimism that was missing in conservatism. Look at his policy and you will understand why:

· His emphasis on tax cuts was more than just an economic tool to revive the economy but a moral idea that how much a government took from its people was a leading indicator of economic freedom a nation had. The more taxes removed out of the economy, less economic freedom the individual will have.
· Reagan looked to the future whether it was Strategic Defense or the computer age, he understood that there were ideas and products that were trapped inside the minds of individuals unknown to us and just waiting for the right time to explode. Who would have thought that today, we could own computers small enough to fit in our purses with more power than many of the main frames that populated the scene at the end of the 70’s?
· The average America worker is now a capitalist as nearly half of Americans now own stock and since the Reagan prosperity, nearly 30 trillion dollars have been added to the income of American workers through the stock market!
· Reagan united social and economic conservatism and showed both that each belong together.
· His belief in democratic institution and economic freedom extended to beyond America and to the world. Today, the world is a better and freer place because of Reagan- the war on terror not withstanding.
Reagan also changed the nature of conservatism. John Micklethwaith and Adrian Wooldridge of the British journal, The Economist, wrote that Reagan “brand of conservatism is unique to America,” and he changed the nature of American conservatism. They noted that his creed was “seemed a matter of emotion rather than philosophy… Mr. Reagan plainly had no conservative equivalent of Mao’s Red Book, no uniform that fitted all his followers. Indeed, the movement that gathered around him (and still gathers around Mr. Bush) was similar to a medieval army, with people wearing the tunics of different causes, such as property rights or the right to life.” These gentlemen noted, “Traditional conservatism was based on six principles: a suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; unashamed patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; a pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism; and elitism.”

Reagan according to these authors issued a conservatism that less dependent upon what was written in dogma but what appealed emotionally- conservatives are what conservatives do. Reagan, like all conservatives, mistrusted the power of government and had an uncomfortable alliance with it. Government was the protector of rights when limited to its proper role but it could be the monster that devoured liberty if left unchecked. There is that fine line from which extensive government can pass over before it became a threat. Reagan, like many of us today, was ever attentive on establishing boundaries.

Reagan was an unabashed believer in American exceptionalism and that too is a feature of modern day conservatism. His talk of a “City on a Hill” was his description of an America that was unique to the world and a needed asset. He considered the American model the superior model, even with all of its imperfection. Finally, Reagan, like modern day conservatives view liberty as the top priority over equality. Equality as defined by Reagan is not just about rights but opportunities and skills. Liberty assumes that some Americans will make more money than others since they are more skill in the ways of business or talent; Liberty assumes that some Americans may prefer a more simple life style and willing to earn less to obtain it. Equality assume that results were more important than opportunities. As these gentlemen noted, “he also took a Western approach to individual freedom, whether it was allowing people to carry guns or tolerating a high level of inequality.”

However, Reagan was not elitist and let be blunt, most elitist did not find Reagan appealing. Reagan never viewed America as a hierarchy where everyone knew their place. On the contrary, Reagan closest association were self made men and women and they broke into the established order as Reagan had done. Reagan was from Middle America and through his skills, made himself a millionaire. To be a capitalist is to oppose the establish order since capitalism is about change. What is on top today may be out of business tomorrow, for Capitalism is a much about creative destruction of the existing order as it is about creating a new order to fit the needs of the customers.

Finally Reagan was a pragmatist who understood temporary alliance to advance his cause. He would ally himself with elitist like Buckley or fundamentalist Christian but it was on his terms not there. Buckley, who began his career yelling for history to stop, became an optimist who found that history in many ways was on his side and it was the left who trying to yell Stop!

Reagan conservatism, like American conservatism, is different from the European conservatism for it believes in evolutionary change in the social arenas and radical change in the world of economics. It is driven by individual liberties and achievements and is amenable to the American experience. Hell, it is the American experience. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge wrote, “As for brawn, there are no European equivalents of America’s anti-tax crusaders, gun-rights activists or religious right. America has 200 Christian TV channels and 1,500 Christian radio stations; nothing similar exists in Europe. ..These foot soldiers have changed American conservatism since Mr. Reagan left office. In particular, social conservatives have given Mr. Bush’s presidency a much harder line on moral issues than Mr. Reagan, an easy-going divorcee, would have appreciated. But it is still plainly the same movement, particularly in its Southern and Western heartland.”

It is a movement that can be somewhat contradictory for it is based on human emotion as well as human ideals. Look at Reagan view on marriage and homosexuality. In 1984, he stated, “ man and a woman. It is the means by which families are created and society itself is extended into the future. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is the means by which husband and wife participate with God in the creation of a new human life. It is for these reasons, among others, that our society has always sought to protect this unique relationship. In part the erosion of these values has given way to a celebration of forms of expression most reject. We will resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.” But yet, in 1978, he wrote, “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”

Even today, there is confusion within the ranks of conservatism on this issue. Some like the Vice-President is willing to allow localities to decide the status of marriage, others are prepare to take a harder line on this issue and others yet are willing to say, let individuals do what is best for them. The only agreement that all agree on is that this is a decision best left to the people and allow for institution to “evolve over time to fit the need of the greater society.” Since Marriage has both an economic utility as well as moral utility, there is wisdom in such a stance and certainly had the abortion issue been left to individuals to decide, the issue would have been decided. Abortion would be legal to certain extent to reflect the concern of the woman but protection provided to recognize the unborn. In other words compromise- something that is so American and so conservative.

Reagan accomplishments are many and great. He led a nation out of economic malaise and ended World War III (know in history as the cold war) without a major conflict. There are lessons for the present day as well but his principles still can guide us.

· American moral strength and freedom are as important in the war against Islamic fascism as it was against Communism.
· Economic liberties are still important and need to be advance further.
· Institutions matters and changes to them need to be evolutionary.
· Finally, the strength of America lies in its people and their can-do spirit that is still the strength of America

Mr. Donelson is the CEO of Donelson Publilshing and Research. He has written on a wide variety of issues from economics and foreign policy to sports and culture. He is now a consultant, lecturer and writer.

From The Australian:

Mr Chirac warned against trying to impose democracy from outside the region. “Democracy is not a method, it’s a culture,” he said. “Reform is not imposed from the outside. It is accomplished from the inside.”

— statement by the President of France at the recent G8 summit, apparently in reference to the 6 June 1944 imposition of a culture of democracy on France by outside forces.

Excerpt from paragraph 14 of a June 8th New York Times article (registration required) describing Pentagon memos [from 2002] prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques approved for use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot:

Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group’s review.

I just shaved and made myself some cold, prepackaged food for dinner. Guess I’m into self-torture.

Writing in Reason Online, Chris Bray pens an excellent article full of telling bon mots. From the journalist who is awed by the fact that Army Rangers carry machine guns and grenade launchers, to the Wall St. Journal colleague who asked if the Marines fought in WW2, Bray’s article is worthy for its anecdotes alone. But he also has a serious point, and it’s one worth paying close attention to:

bq.. “Schneider’s piece is symptomatic of news media that often don’t have the foggiest idea how the military works, and don’t really appear to care…. “To many young reporters these days,” said longtime journalist James Perry in a 1997 lecture at Washington College, “wars and soldiers and serving your country are vague concepts….

Reporters who cover the military without understanding it don’t just muff a few basic facts about what kind of soldier carries what kind of gun, or which service does what. They also fail to apply the right skepticism in the right places, or even the right credulity in the right places, and so end up swinging in a wild arc between breathless adulation and naive condemnation. They surrender many of the necessary tools for questioning the authority of the armed forces, and render nearly useless the check and the balance of the Fourth Estate on a major power of government. They create confidence where there should be wariness, and fear where there should be strength.

They get it wrong, and it counts.”

They do, often - and it does. Dale Franks of QandO has the links. It seems like a simple problem that could be cured by some basic diligence, research; and professional standards that demand real subject expertise to the same level as, say, sports journalism. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, which leads one to wonder why not.

So it’s doubly interesting to note that this problem may extend beyond the media. Former Clinton NSC staffer Heather Hurlburt leveled an eerily similar criticism at the Democratic Party back in November of 2001:

Read The Rest….

By David Henry

From Submandave :
A Departure from Reality

“This year’s presidential election so far offers a choice in foreign policy, between a neo-Wilsonian who has made the promotion of democracy and human rights a central tenet and an old-school realist who believes it more sensible to focus on managing concrete threats to U.S. security”

This is the contrast made by columnist Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post between Bush and Kerry. He goes further in comparing Bush’s policy and thinking not only to Wilson but Carter “on a rhetorical scale.” This view, however, fails to recognize the key difference between Bush and both Wilson and Carter, this difference being that under Bush’s guidance there are about 50 million people who now breath the air of freedom and stand poised to enjoy the blessings of democracy. In this regard, one would be more accurate to compare the rhetoric of Bush with that of Reagan, another president whose action in tandem with rhetoric was essential in the freedoms now enjoyed throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Of course, it is easy to understand how Mr. Diehl fails to see this, as he demonstrates his detachment from reality in bemoaning the “stunning incompetence of [democracy promotion] in Iraq.” That he makes this pronouncement on the heels of the ahead of schedule sovereignty turn over and in the face of planned elections later this year is evidence of either a blind departure from the conventions of logic or blantant denial. If this is an example of “stunning incompetence” I invite Mr. Diehl to provide a counter example of competence.

To contend with the piece’s characterization of Kerry’s position again stretches logic and evades a key point of the so-called Bush doctrine. Fundamental to the doctrine is the commitment to not wait for threats to metastasize before dealing with them. I am reminded of an experience in my youth, when we were living in a less educated rural area. My mother was having lunch in a small diner when a fire erupted in the kitchen. They evacuated all the patrons and, before long, the volunteer fire department showed up.
Their first priority, of course, was to pose in front of their engines so the local paper could get some good shots. One patron pointed at the diner, thick black smoke billowing from every opening, and asked the chief why they weren’t fighting the fire. “That’s not fire,” he answered, “that’s smoke, and you can’t fight smoke.” Soon thereafter the roof collapsed, and as the flames shot into the sky the chief cheerfully said, “Now there’s a fire! We can fight that,” and so they did. While I fully recognize the danger of a preemptive policy, I would still rather have a nation policy of aggressively defeating emerging threats rather the just managing concrete threats.

The final departure from fundamental logic is in the author’s confidence that Kerry would actually be successful in “managing concrete threats to U.S. security.” The main basis for this confidence was that his “smart focus” on repairing the damage done to U.S. alliances will somehow be a panacea to inoculate all our national security concerns. Not only does this completely ignore the strong, continuing and uninterrupted cooperation the U.S. has had in Iraq with both its strongest military (U.K.) and economic (Japan) allies, but extrapolates conflicts chiefly with four countries (Germany, France, China and Russia) as indicative of the entire world. But let’s look at what these damaged alliances really mean to our national security. In no case has the alleged disruption been reflected in trade, so there has been no economic repercussions that may, indirectly, affect national security. As such, we must look at the military effect for the most part. In the case of both Russia and China, with whom we have never had close military ties, this is completely a non-issue.
Likewise for Germany, as one would not expect military support in times of external crisis given the restrictions imposed by their Constitution. This then leaves us considering France who, while not militarily insignificant, is still not a showstopper to anything we may need to do. Of course, there are the intangibles, such as international respect, support and cooperation, but considering the back-room dealing that was being done with our enemies while these countries ostensibly were our allies, one is very tempted to say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Despite the token admissions of a lack of post-Sept. 11 vision, this is largely dismissed by Mr. Diehl as seemingly being more significant for the perception of threat than a realization of actual threat. This and his faithful intoning of the “Iraq is a failure” mantra in the face of all contradictory evidence leads me to conclude that while we may disagree if Kerry is a realist, I have no problem asserting that Mr. Diehl certainly is not.

In case you were wondering, the diner burnt to the ground.

The following was taken from Gary Farber’s weblog:

THEY CAME AT DAWN. Darfur, again.

A UN official who has travelled extensively throughout the region said yesterday: “If you go 1,000km from here to Chad you will not see a single village intact.”

During a three-hour flight over Darfur, hundreds of blackened and scorched villages were starkly visible against the red desert. Mrs Mousa walked for three days to reach Kalma after the Janjaweed militia attacked her village, Shatee, west of the Mara mountains, two months ago.

“They came at dawn, at 4am. They came on horses, donkeys, camels and Land Cruisers. They burnt the houses and killed the men and many of the male children. I don’t know if my husband is alive or dead.”
[…]

Tom Quinn, the MSF medical team leader in the camp, said he went to five graveyards ringing the camp last week and counted 131 mounds of earth, gauging the size of the body by the length of the mound. “Of the 131, only 13 were adults,” he said.

You have the power to agitate about this. To your friends. To your neighbors. To your local media.
Most of all, to your politicans.

You can help, yourself. Oxfam is trying to help; find out how to donate here.

More here.

For information on the condolence book for President Reagan, his funeral services, his memorial fund, and to read tributes to President Reagan, go to the site set up by the Reagan Presidential Library here.

“Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.”

- President Ronald Wilson Reagan

President George W. Bush’s remarks on the passing of President Ronald Reagan are here.

Via the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, here are some more quotes and photographs:

“…peace is the highest aspiration of the American People. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it, we will never surrender for it, now or ever.”
- January 20, 1981

“…there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”
- January 21, 1981

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
- June 12, 1987

Reagan Family Portrait (left to right) Jack, Neil, Ronald (4 years old), Nelle, 1915, Illinois

Ronald Reagan’s high school football photo
1927, Dixon, Illinois

Ronald Reagan visiting with fans during the filming of “International Squadron,” 1940, California

Ronald and Nancy Reagan on their wedding day
March 4, 1952
William Holden’s Home

Ronald and Nancy Reagan with daughter, Patti and son, Ron
1960, Pacific Palisades, California

Ronald Reagan being sworn in as Governor of California with son, Ron (private ceremony) January-67, Sacramento, California

Ronald and Nancy Reagan returning home from George Washington Hospital following the assassination attempt
April 11, 1981, White House

Ronald Reagan in summit meeting with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, November 19, 1985, Geneva Boathouse, Switzerland

Ronald Reagan giving speech at the Brandenburg Gate
June 12, 1987, West Berlin, Germany

Ronald Reagan departing the U.S. Capitol his last day in office
January 20, 1989, Washington, D.C.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declares February 6, 2004, “Ronald Reagan Day” via proclamation.

Via the Reagan Ranch Program - President Reagan’s last words to the nation:

“In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

Send condolences to President Reagan’s family here.

This is a duplicate of the orginal post on the nikita demosthenes website.

One day after the death of Ronald Reagan, I can’t help but think back to that quote by Flaubert,

“Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

How do you explain the totality of Ronald Reagan to people who were too young to remember him, disinterested in politics, or even to those who just can’t understand the depth of feeling that so many people in this country have for the man?

It’s a difficult task, one that is perhaps beyond my abilities, but for Reagan’s sake, I must make the attempt.

Certain figures in history, like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Winston Churchill, were not simply titans among men, but came along at a particular point in history where their talents were most needed.

So it was with Reagan.

Before Dutch came into office, this country was in real trouble. Back then, it really was the “worst economy since the depression”, Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh in the public’s minds, and the Soviet Union was viewed as the stronger of the two super powers by many people. In those days, some people genuinely wondered if America’s best days were behind her and school children, myself included, feared that a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States would end all life on this planet. Those were dark days for our country.

Then along came Reagan.

While many people believed America’s day sun had passed, Ron Reagan said the best was yet to come — and he was right. In his eight years in office, Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military, turned America’s economy around, slashed taxes, helped create 19 million jobs, and perhaps most importantly, broke the Soviet Union.

In a break from the policies of his predecessors, The Great Communicator spoke openly of the Soviets as an evil empire, launched a massive military build-up, including the “Star Wars” program that the Soviet Union feared it could not match, freed Grenada from Soviet rule, supported anti-Communist freedom fighters around the world, spent billions to bleed the Kremlin dry in Afghanistan, and did everything he could to create enormous financial pressure on the red menace.

In 1991, after Reagan had left office, his efforts paid off and the Soviet Union fell, freeing hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans from the grip of the Russian Bear. That would been thought to be beyond belief before 1981, but Reagan’s policies made it possible.

However, merely noting Reagan’s accomplishments is not enough to convey why Reagan was so beloved. How do you explain to people Reagan’s patriotism, his infectious optimism, his abiding faith in God, or the confidence he had in the people of America in a time when so many others were apprehensive and uncertain about our future?

Reagan was like a bigger than life hero from one of his movies. He showed up when America and yes, even the rest of the world, needed him most, saved the day, and then rode off into the sunset, leaving all of us with a debt of gratitude that we could never fully repay.

Hopefully, what I’ve written will help people who don’t know Ronald Reagan as we felt we knew him, understand what he meant to people. He was a man like no other and losing him for a second time after Alzheimer’s robbed him from us long ago, has been a grievous experience. I can only hope that the Gipper’s family and friends take comfort in the warm appreciation that he’s receiving from the public and that somewhere up there, there’s somebody shepherding our “thank-yous” and “goodbyes” to Ronald Reagan’s ears.

Godspeed Gipper! We’ll miss you and we’ll never forget what you did for us.

When I was 17 or so, I was ranting about some piece of US foreign policy when my father looked at me with level eyes and said, “Buddy, if you’re not a liberal when you’re 18 you got no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 28 you got no brain.”

Reagan was president then, and I was not a big fan. Now that I’m well into my mid-30s (“middle aged,” my wife says), I’ve come to appreciate and admire Reagan. He was the essential optimist at a time in which America desperately needed optimism. At a time when Jimmy Carter was telling us we should be confident, Reagan gave us reasons to be confident, and led the way through his own confidence and optimism. Many presidents have spoken of the shining city on the hill; Reagan truly believed in it.

I’ve also come to admire Reagan for his fundamental belief in the power of rhetoric … rhetoric in the classical sense, not the current and bastardized sense of double talk by evasive politicians. Reagan understood and respected the power of his words, and he understood better than anyone since FDR (yes, better than Kennedy) the power of presidential discourse in making great things possible.

Reagan has six speeches listed in American Rhetoric’s list of the 100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century (the list was complied by two professors of Rhetoric and Communication, who asked 137 leading scholars of American public address to recommend speeches on the basis of social and political impact, and rhetorical artistry):

• The “A Time for Choosing” speech, 1964
• His first inaugural address (the “Putting American Back to Work” speech)
• The “Evil Empire” speech, 1983
• The “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech, 40th D-Day anniversary, 1984
• The “Space Shuttle Challenger” address, 1986
• The “Tear Down This Wall” speech, 1987

Only FDR and JFK have as many on the list. Some people, though, try to taint Reagan’s oratory as less substantive than some of his predecessors. These people remember him as the Actor President, noting with a curled lip that Reagan was all sizzle and no steak. But they forget that his most noted speeches were policy speeches wrapped in soaring oratory, and not soaring oratory alone.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The Time for Choosing speech, a campaign address in support of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 campaign, is actually in speech in which Reagan outlines what would become the Republican agenda 20 years later: the importance of small government over large, of empowering individuals to pursue their own interests, and of preserving America as “the last best hope for man on Earth” through winning the Cold War. He said that day:

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ‘round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits—not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

The “Putting America Back to Work” speech is remembered first as an eloquent and vital inaugural address, but in it Reagan declared his intentions to reduce the size of the federal government, return power to the states, reduce taxes, strengthen the country’s ties with its allies, and act with force in the world if required. This speech also closes with these lines, some of the greatest presidential rhetoric ever spoken:

This is the first time in our history that this ceremony has been held, as you’ve been told, on this West Front of the Capitol.

Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history. At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man. George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence. And then beyond the Reflecting Pool, the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond those moments, monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom.

Each on of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under such a marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division.

There, on the Western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy fire.

We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle
depended on me alone.”

The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds; to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.

Compare those words to these from Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech …

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

The answer to America’s crisis of confidence is … energy policy? Compare these two speeches and the difference between telling Americans to be confident and giving them a reason for confidence should be clear.

I vividly remember the Evil Empire speech, and in particular I remember thinking “this maniac is trying to get us all killed.” But what Reagan was doing in this speech before evangelical Christians was sending a message to the Soviets that the policy of the United States would not be one of a nuclear freeze … that to do so would reward the USSR for its military buildup. Reagan knew the Soviets supported a freeze because it would freeze their military advantage, and more important, would free their economy from an arms race they could not afford. In this speech he was letting the Soviets know he knew, and that he wasn’t going to fall for it.

We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace. But we can assure none of these things America stands for through the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some.

The truth is that a freeze now would be a very dangerous fraud, for that is merely the illusion of peace. The reality is that we must find peace through strength.

I would agree to a freeze if only we could freeze the Soviets’ global desires. A freeze at current levels of weapons would remove any incentive for the Soviets to negotiate seriously in Geneva and virtually end our chances to achieve the major arms reductions which we have proposed. Instead, they would achieve their objectives through the freeze.

A freeze would reward the Soviet Union for its enormous and unparalleled military buildup. It would prevent the essential and long overdue modernization of United States and allied defenses and would leave our aging forces increasingly vulnerable. And an honest freeze would require extensive prior negotiations on the systems and numbers to be limited and on the measures to ensure effective verification and compliance. And the kind of a freeze that has been suggested would be virtually impossible to verify. Such a major effort would divert us completely from our current negotiations on achieving substantial reductions.

He was also letting his allies and enemies know the gravity he attached to the Cold War: that he saw it not simply as an imperial arms race, but as a battle of philosophy regarding the freedom and potential of man. He was saying to his peers worldwide: “Liberty=Good, Totalitarianism=Bad, and I’m never going to forget it, so don’t ever expect me to let up on the pressure.”

The “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech, which Reagan gave 20 years ago today at the 40th D-Day anniversary in 1984, is one of his most eloquent. But this too was a policy speech. After showering appropriate praise upon the Rangers who climbed those cliffs 60 years ago, Reagan let the USSR and western Europe know that the policy of the United States would be to welcome improved relations with the Soviets, but that they must first change their ways. As he said then:

It’s fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II: 20 million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action.

It was then that he articulated the second point of policy: than until that change came, the US would actively strengthen the NATO alliance.

The “Space Shuttle Challenger” address was poetry, not policy, but it demonstrated the power of the president to salve our wounds during times of national grief … perhaps the most eloquent such example since Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Even here, though, he offered vision and outlined our direction as a nation:

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s take-off. I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.

I’ve always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.

We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.

Finally, the “Tear Down This Wall” speech, delivered in 1987. This speech represents the third element of what, along with the Evil Empire and Pointe du Hoc speeches, became a triumvirate of Cold War policy addresses by Reagan. That day he said:

We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace , if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join the community of freedom. Yet, in this age of redoubled economic growth, of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete. Today thus represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safer, freer world.

In this speech he completes his Cold War storyline: from we believe totalitarianism is evil and a threat we’re not afraid to fight (Evil Empire) to we’ll welcome you into the fold but you have to give up the fight (Pointe du Hoc) to the conclusion—now is the time; join us in creating a better world for people everywhere, and use Berlin as a symbol of your good intentions. And we now know that the storyline he offered is precisely, and not coincidentally, how history eventually unfolded: from standoff to cautious engagement to reconciliation and partnership.

Ronald Reagan believed words were important … that they meant something and should always be taken seriously. He believed that presidential discourse was more than political discourse, it was a means of getting things done: of shaping America, of articulating vision and charting direction, and of pressurizing the social and political system to achieve grand outcomes.

He knew that once a president of the United States says something, the toothpaste is out of the tube. Rather than fear that finality, he used his oratory with courage and conviction, making declarations that gave us reason to feel better about being Americans, that initiated paths of policy that led toward outcomes he desired, and that ultimately led us closer to that shining city on the hill.

In 1995, Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to the American people announcing he had contracted Alzheimer’s disease:

My fellow Americans, I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.

Upon learning this news, Nancy and I had to decide whether as private citizens we would keep this a private matter or whether we would make this news known in a public way.

In the past, Nancy suffered from breast cancer and I had cancer surgeries. We found through our open disclosures we were able to raise public awareness. We were happy that as a result many more people underwent testing. They were treated in early stages and able to return to normal, healthy lives.

So now we feel it is important to share it with you. In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition. Perhaps it will encourage a clear understanding of the individuals and families who are affected by it.

At the moment, I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done. I will continue to share life’s journey with my beloved Nancy and my family. I plan to enjoy the great outdoors and stay in touch with my friends and supporters.

Unfortunately, as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes, I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage.

In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future.

I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

Thank you, my friends.

Though never spoken, this text was the ultimate entry in Reagan’s oral history. And even in the end … indeed, in his very last line of public address … he reminded us of his confidence in us and our future. Here’s hoping he rests in peace and sunshine.

Due Dilligence: Cross posted here.

A comprhensive list of D-Day writings from around the blogosphere, compiled by Black Five. There are personal stories, photos, music and touching poetry, as well as informative articles. All you need to know about D-Day can be found in the links below.

“In the final choice, a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Welcome to a MilBlogs And Friends Special Edition of the Sixtieth Anniversary of D-Day! On June 6th, 1944, over 150,000 men landed by air and sea in Normandy to liberate Europe from Nazi oppression. Operation Overlord planned for the invasion of the 50-mile stretch of coast to be completed in just 24 hours.

First, I must thank Greyhawk of the Mudville Gazette who brought us all together and provided the graphic above. He’s our Eisenhower (or maybe Patton).

Below you will find links to extraordinary bloggers telling the stories of D-Day from their unique perspectives. Instead of term paper descriptions, you’ll see the beaches and cliffs of the Normandy coast, you’ll read letters of the survivors and hear about the great sacrifices made by our neighbors to the north…and you’ll never forget the Greatest Generation.

Let us begin:

Joe Katzman (Blackfive’s favorite Cannuck) at Winds of Change covers one of my parts of D-Day - The Canadians at Juno. The Canadians had some of the toughest fighting ahead of them on Juno Beach, and their objective was to stop the Germans from targeting the Americans on Omaha Beach. They performed brilliantly on June 6th, driving deeper into France than any other landing - and engaging the 21st Panzer before it could crush the American beachhead at Omaha. This is the story of one of the Canadians in Juno’s first wave: Jim Wilkins, B Company, The Queen’s Own Rifles.Includes a map and photo.

Chap of Chapomatic has written a post about the X-Craft - a small submarine that the Royal Navy used during the invasion and the impact it has on Chap’s job today in the US Navy.

Sgt.Hook has a post about the valiant Coast Guard coxwains who were part of the landing. A Coast Guard coxswain on an LCVP later remarked, “My eyes were glued to the boat coming in next to ours, and on the water in between, boiling with bullets from hidden shore emplacements, like a mud puddle in a hailstorm. It seemed impossible that we could make it in without being riddled.”

Grim Beorn of Grim’s Hall has written about the Scot’s role in the Invasion of Normandy. Grim adds in an email, “Since BBC Scotland has decided not to do a D-Day memorial for the Scots who fought there, we who have not forgotten will try.”

Winds of Change guest blogger J.K.L. has a piece about the deceptions that were launched to keep the Germans guessing. Imagine preparing to land more than 1,000,000 men on 50 miles of beach. There will be more than 2,700 ships, 2,500 landing craft and 700 warships. Preparations for an assault on this scale couldn’t be hidden or kept totally secret, so what could be done protect the identity of the actual target and confuse the enemy?

Dennis Morehouse of Fix Bayonetts has a post - Rescue at Normandy-The Matchstick Fleet - which tells the tale of the Coast Guard’s 400 rescues during the D-Day landing.

Serenity has a post about the personal accounts of the heroes of D-Day. She provides pictures and links to more information about them.

Mammamontezz has written a poem - “Red Surf” - that’ll be one of the most heartfelt poems you’ve read in a long, long time.

Charlie of Budaechigae has a post about one of the most interesting characters of the war - a Korean who was conscripted into the Japanese Army, captured by the Russians, conscripted into the Red Army, captured by the Germans, forced to defend portion of Utah Beach, and captured by the US Forces.

Blake of Laughing Wolf has an excellent post about the deception efforts - D-Day + 60 Years: The Maskirova (the deception by General George Patton). It’s an amazing story.

Dogtulosba Ink. has an examination of the German Fortress Europe defenses from a US Army Engineer perspective. He’ll have more later on what our Engineers did to breech those defenses.

Teresa of Technicalities posts about the news media reaction to D-Day. As Teresa writes, “To those waiting at home it was not a day for rejoicing, it was a day for prayer, hope, fear, and contemplation.”

Patti of Iraq War News - and who is related to George Patton - provides memories of the Patton family about one of General Patton’s aides. For those who have seen the movie Patton, you’ll instantly know which aide is remembered.

Deb from Marine Corps Moms has a great post (titled appropriately enough) - Home Front. As the allied forces fought for victory on the beaches of Normandy, those at home waited, watched, and worried. The home front was a vital part of the war effort and everyone was urged to contribute. Are things different today? Yes and no. The home front is still a vital part of the war effort and everyone can contribute.

Ith of Absinthe and Cookies has a really interesting post about the brave women of Britain’s Special Operation Executive who risked torture and death at the hands of the Nazis collecting vital intelligence for the Allies in occupied Europe.

Greyhawk of the Mudville Gazette is forecasting the weather and will be talking of the war soon.

Jennifer of Jennifer’s History and Stuff has a series about what life in France was like before the invasion - French History: The Occupation. Jennifer writes, “…the Occupation is the most-studied period of French history.”

Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping has written about The awful stakes of D-Day: The alternate history of June 6, 1944 is too terrible to contemplate. He describes D-Day as one of the “pivot days of human history.”

Eric the Straight White Guy has a post (his words, not mine) about “…a few jarheads that were present during the landing on Normandy.”

John Cole of Balloon Juice writes about the men who fought in D-Day from the small town of Bedford,Virginia. His post has pictures, maps, and accounts of the Virginians.

Harvey of Bad Example (a former Sailor) has a post about the humor of the day. Why do a post about the humor of WWII and D-Day? According to Harv, “Because back during the early 40’s, Americans didn’t fear their enemies. They made fun of them.”

Vox of Vox Popoli writes of the memories of war and how those of us of later generations remember their sacrifices.

Emigre with a Digital Cluebat offers up a poem dedicated to those who made the ultimate sacrifice on D-Day.

David of Airborne Combat Engineer has a post about the role of the Airborne Forces (Paratroopers and Gliders) in Operation Overlord.

Paul at Iraq War News has a photo-filled post about Combat Photographers.

Drill Sergeant Rob of An American Soldier takes a look at the way the soldiers of Operation Overlord trained for war, from Basic Training to the Devon Coast in England prior to the invasion. And a look at how it parallels some of the training we conduct today, including how little the basics have changed over the last sixty years.

Michael at The Common Virtue has an interesting post about the Enigma machine. Captured German communications played a key role in defeating the Axis powers. The German military used the Enigma machine, a typewritter-like device, to code transmissions. With the help of captured Enigma machines, the German codes were broken and the Allied nations were able to monitor German troop movements and supply routes. These same codes lead to information, and disinformation, in conjuction with Operation Overlord on D-Day.

Andrew Olmstead has a post about the training our troops underwent for preparation for landing at Normandy. He includes the high price some training excercises incurred and their impact on D-Day.

Hans Nyberg has some really cool panorama photo shots of the D-Day locations. Check out the Pointe du Hoc to see how it must have looked to the Army Rangers. There is also the Pegasus Bridge, St. Mere Eglise, and the HMS Belfast.

Theif’s Den has a post and a radio blog with music from today and from the D-Day era…

Juliette of Baldilocks has posted President Reagan’s speech atop the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc.

Sarah of Trying to Grok has written about perceptions of D-Day by German students and thanks Joe and Tommy.

Cool Blue Blog has a post about Omaha Beach and the USS Arkansas (his father served aboard the Arkansas).

Paul at Sanity’s Edge has a post about the Bangalore torpedoes and a link to the Reed Interview.

[Given on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, reprinted from here]

We stand today at a place of battle, one that 40 years ago saw and felt the worst of war. Men bled and died here for a few feet of - or inches of sand, as bullets and shellfire cut through their ranks. About them, General Omar Bradley later said, “Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.”

Some who survived the battle of June 6, 1944, are here today. Others who hoped to return never did.

“Someday, Lis, I’ll go back,” said Private First Class Peter Robert Zannata, of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion, and first assault wave to hit Omaha Beach. “I’ll go back, and I’ll see it all again. I’ll see the beach, the barricades, and the graves.”

Those words of Private Zanatta come to us from his daughter, Lisa Zanatta Henn, in a heart-rending story about the event her father spoke of so often. “In his words, the Normandy invasion would change his life forever,” she said. She tells some of his stories of World War II but says of her father, “the story to end all stories was D-Day.”

“He made me feel the fear of being on the boat waiting to land. I can smell the ocean and feel the sea sickness. I can see the looks on his fellow soldiers’ faces-the fear, the anguish, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. And when they landed, I can feel the strength and courage of the men who took those first steps through the tide to what must have surely looked like instant death.”

Private Zannata’s daughter wrote to me, “I don’t know how or why I can feel this emptiness, this fear, or this determination, but I do. Maybe it’s the bond I had with my father. All I know is that it brings tears to my eyes to think about my father as a 20-year old boy having to face that beach.”

The anniversary of D-Day was always special to her family. And like all the families of those who went to war, she describes how she came to realize her own father’s survival was a miracle: “So many men died. I know that my father watched many of his friends be killed. I know that he must have died inside a little each time. But his explanation to me was, `You did what you had to do, and you kept on going.”

When men like Private Zannata and all our Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy 40 years ago they came not as conquerors, but as liberators. When these troops swept across the French countryside and into the forests of Belgium and Luxembourg they came not to take, but to return what had been wrongfully seized. When our forces marched into Germany they came not to prey on a brave and defeated people, but to nurture the seeds of democracy among those who yearned to bee free again.

We salute them today. But, Mr. President [Francois Mitterand of France], we also salute those who, like yourself, were already engaging the enemy inside your beloved country-the French Resistance. Your valiant struggle for France did so much to cripple the enemy and spur the advance of the armies of liberation. The French Forces of the Interior will forever personify courage and national spirit. They will be a timeless inspiration to all who are free and to all who would be free.

Today, in their memory, and for all who fought here, we celebrate the triumph of democracy. We reaffirm the unity of democratic people who fought a war and then joined with the vanquished in a firm resolve to keep the peace.

From a terrible war we learned that unity made us invincible; now, in peace, that same unity makes us secure. We sought to bring all freedom-loving nations together in a community dedicated to the defense and preservation of our sacred values. Our alliance, forged in the crucible of war, tempered and shaped by the realities of the post-war world, has succeeded. In Europe, the threat has been contained, the peace has been kept.

Today, the living here assembled-officials, veterans, citizens-are a tribute to what was achieved here 40 years ago. This land is secure. We are free. These things are worth fighting and dying for.

Lisa Zannata Henn began her story by quoting her father, who promised that he would return to Normandy. She ended with a promise to her father, who died 8 years ago of cancer: “I’m going there, Dad, and I’ll see the beaches and the barricades and the monuments. I’ll see the graves, and I’ll put flowers there just like you wanted to do. I’ll never forget what you went through, Dad, nor will I let any one else forget. And, Dad, I’ll always be proud.”

Through the words of his loving daughter, who is here with us today, a D-Day veteran has shown us the meaning of this day far better than any President can. It is enough to say about Private Zannata and all the men of honor and courage who fought beside him four decades ago: We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.

Thank you.

My grandmother’s wake would have seemed like a party to a stranger who happened upon us in the funeral home parking lot, our cars set up like tailgaters at a football game; drinks pouring, most of standing huddled and shivering in the cold, yet laughing and smiling. We were celebrating grandma’s long life and telling the same, wonderful stories we had been sharing for years, stories we would pass on to our children. Grandma was old, she had lived a full life and left us with a rich legacy of memories and recipes.

This is how I will deal with the death of Ronald Reagan. I will celebrate all he meant to me life. And for someone whose graduated from high school the year Reagan was elected, he posed a rather large impact on my young adulthood. As with grandma, not all the stories will be great ones, not all will make me laugh or smile. But they are part of his legacy, and we will discuss them at dinner or while watching his funeral procession on television or while hoisting a drink to him later on tonight.

I was eleven when LBJ died, yet I remember it vividly. I watched part of his funeral at my aunt’s house, on her black and white tv and I remember thinking - however absurdly - that presidents should not die. I had no idea at the time of LBJ’s rather dark legacy (nor had I any way of knowing that thirty years later, I would form a rather bizarre obsession with the man and his politics), but it just seemed very surreal to watch the funeral of a former president on television. Instead of exploring these thoughts, I went outside to play, making the conscious decision to remain oblivious to history.

Here I am 31 years later, flipping through every news channel, wading through every news site and blog, soaking up every single piece I can find about Reagan. The contrast between what you can find here and here is very interesting; I wish I had paid more attention when I was eleven because it might have laid an interesting ground for my political formation had I read the LBJ obituaries. I can’t imagine that they appeared anything like Reagan’s do today.

Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s was to grow up with the words Cold War hanging over your head every day. We had air raids in school where we had to hunker under our desks or squat down in the hallway with our heads tucked between our legs. Just in case the Russians bomb us, they said. And that is really what they said. Our teachers and parents were not shy about our reasons to be afraid; they had not yet heard the term political correctness, they did not make any attempt to couch their hatred of the Russians in polite terms. The Russians were our enemy. They were the Red Menace. The Commies. The people who would “push the button” that would send us orbiting into space towards certain death.

There was always that provocative button. For years, I would dream about this button, think about it, fear it and my imagination would let it grow to nightmare proportions. In my mind, I saw a windowless room, dark and cold. In the middle of the room was a glass case. Ensconced in that case was the big, red button. Russians sat around this glass case all day, fingers poised, faces continually contorted in a mixture of defiance and power. Just one word. One whispered word from a head commie, one wrong word from an angry American, and that’s all it would take. An electronic panel would slide open and the button would automatically glow a sinister, bright red. Maybe it would flash. And the commies that had been gathered around the glass case, just waiting and waiting, would draw straws to see who got to push the button. But the biggest, baddest commie of all, some guy who, in my young, frightened mind, had a face full of pock marks and scars, making him uglier and redder than all the other commies. He was tall and broad and his eyes glowed like fiery coals. He would slowly inch his finger into the case while his comrades watched, rubbing their hands together in maniacal glee. Sometimes they even drooled with anticipation. And then the large, grubby index finger would poise over the button -hesitating for just one moment while the other commies held their breath and then a moment of complete silence while the head commie slowly pushed down on the red button. A map of America would appear in my head at that moment, a perfect mushroom cloud rising from the center and spreading outward. We were dead.

For most of the years that dream sequence plagued me, I was of the mind that America was a bad guy. I was aware that we had a “button” as well (hence the popular term at the time, “push-button war”), and whatever news I read led me to believe that Americans were strong-arming the Russians into playing the button card. If you don’t behave nicely, I’ll have no choice but to kill you! That should be spoken in a highly affected Russian accent, by the way.

Along comes Reagan. I was in the midst of a flower-power, no-nukes stage, one which saw me wanting to move to San Francisco so I could commune with the over-aged hippies still lingering on Haight Ashbury. So I did what any 18 year old, first time voter with liberal tendencies would have done. I voted for John Anderson. He wasn’t Reagan and he wasn’t Carter and he had the same name as that guy from Yes (even though the musician Anderson spelled his name Jon). You would think that a faux liberal like myself would have been enamored of Jimmy Carter, but his handling of the Iran hostage crisis irked me; he was a wimp of the highest order. I suppose the warning bells were being set off in my mind even then and I had I listened they would have been telling me that I wasn’t really a liberal; I just liked smoking pot and listening to the Grateful Dead.

The years of Reagan’s presidency spanned the same years that I went from stupid teenager to grown woman. Reagan was inaugurated the January after I graduated high school. He remained president until shortly before I gave birth to my first child. That’s a lot of growing up I did under the presidency of one man.

I grew to love Ronald Reagan. Even through the Iran/Contra crisis, even with Nancy’s Just Say No campaign, I loved his presidency. He wanted us, more than anything, to be proud to be Americans. He offered us hope where Carter had only offered us (or myself, at least) despair. He made us feel strong and powerful, which was just what we needed at that time.

I loved Reagan, the man. His smile warmed me. His personality made me feel as if he were speaking just to me every time I watched him address the nation. He cried with me after the Challenger explosion and spoke words that filled my heart with a bittersweet hope:

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them…

Ronald Reagan was a father figure. Even a grandfatherly figure. His smile was genuine, his heart big and gracious. So I looked for Ronald Reagan to dispel my fears, to help me learn about pride of country, to feel good about the future. And he did all that. Lest you doubt Reagan’s impact on my Russia-phobia, look at all things that happened during his presidency:

• 1983 Proposes Strategic Defense Initiative
• 1986 Gorbachev ends economic aid to Soviet satellites
• 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev resolve to remove all intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe
• 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev sign treaty to remove all medium and short-range nuclear missiles
• 1989 Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan
• 1989 Poland becomes independent
• 1989 Hungary becomes independent
• 1989 Berlin Wall falls
• 1989 Communism falls in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania
• 1988 Soviet empire is over

For one who grew up with such an intense fear of the Russians that she dreamed about them nightly, those events were life altering. Reagan was the hero who would vanquish my nightmares of the red button forever.

I did slip back into my liberal tendencies for a bit after Reagan left office. But the groundwork for my conservatism had been laid by President Reagan. His idea of “peace through strength” is why I supported the first Gulf War. It was that idea that would become the basis for my abandoning liberalism in 2001. It was that idea, in fact, that always made me a bit of an outcast amongst my more liberal friends. My love for Ronald Reagan was something I hid from them, for fear of being thrown out of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (yes, there is one of those). Yet it was Reagan’s ideology that gave me the push I needed after 9/11 to embrace my true self and my true politics.

I have never been more comfortable than I am here in Reagan’s World, where pride in your country is a good thing, where hope always remains, where the future is something to look forward to and not fear.

The Red Menace is long gone. The nightmares of the red button have evaporated. There are other enemies to meet, other wars to win, other fears to quash. I truly believe that if we continue to work towards Reagan’s’ vision of America’s future, we will not only win, but we continue to spread the prosperity of democracy throughout the world, making us all richer in the end.

This is my celebration of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

(Cross-posted from AEBrain, the Blog)

From the ABC :

Fewer than 50 per cent of French people think France has a moral debt to the United States 60 years after the Allied D-day landings, according to an opinion poll published on Saturday.

The poll of 1,000 people on May 25 and 26 showed 48 per cent of respondents thought France, which was liberated by US and other Allied forces during World War II, had a moral debt to the United States. Fifty per cent thought it did not.

The poll was published by Le Parisien newspaper hours before US President George W Bush was due to arrive in France for the anniversary of the D-day landings on June 6, 1944.

And from The Australian :

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the first German leader ever to take part in the D-Day commemorations, has said the momentous events on the beaches of northern France also represented a victory for Germany.

“The victory of the allies was not a victory over Germany, but a victory for Germany,” Schroeder said in a letter due to be published in a German newspaper tomorrow.

The German leader said he regarded his participation in the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings due to take place tomorrow as “a great honour for my country and for (German) democracy”.

He added in the letter, to be published in the weekly Bild am Sonntag, that Germany could commemorate the events with “its head held high”.

He said that no one expected Germans to feel guilty for the crimes and the genocide created by an indescribable regime. But he said: “We are responsible for our history.”

Friday’s Washington Post’s Inside the Beltway column contains a story about President Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech, the WWII Memorial, and censorship.

According to Inside The Beltway, while visiting the memorial Bob McEwan encountered a group had gathered to read the determined words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he announced the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.”

One woman, says Mr. McEwan, read the words aloud: “With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounding determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph.”

Suddenly, the woman became visibly angry: “Wait a minute,” she told her husband. “They left out the end of the quote. They left out the most important part. Roosevelt said — ‘so help us God.’… I know I’m right. I remember the speech.”

The couple shook their heads and walked away.

As Mr. McEwan puts it, “The people who edited out that part of the speech when they engraved it on the memorial could have fooled me. I was born after the war. But they couldn’t fool the people who were there. Roosevelt’s words are engraved on their hearts.”

Those exact words were: “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounded determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.”

This story piqued my interest. I found an interesting history of the drafting of Roosevelt’s “day of Infamy speech here. “So help us God” was indeed part of Roosevelt’s speech. How could the designers of the memorial censor Roosevelt. Why would they even consider doing so?

How would D-Day have been presented today? Over at Silent Running, they’re blogging it live, through the Magic of BeebVision™.

Kiwi Bob, Attached to 45 RM Commando
Wind Rider, coming to you live from SHAEF
Tom Paine, on assignment with the US 1st Army
Murray Hill, in the field with the British 6th Airborne
Mike Hackmeister, front line reporting with the US 29th Inf Div.

Where will the Allies land, when will they attack? Can they succeed or will we see another Dieppe?

The body isn’t even cold yet, and the worst barnacles Commiefornia has to offer have slouched themselves awake…

AP: Reactions to Death of Ronald Reagan

“We all know Reagan’s legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.” — actor Danny Glover, at an anti-war rally in Los Angeles.

Quoting Ronald Reagan from 1947 at the HUAC:

CHAIRMAN: There is one thing that you said that interested me very much. That was the quotation from Jefferson. That is why this committee was created by the House of Representatives: to acquaint the American people with the facts. Once the American people are acquainted with the facts there is no question but what the American people will do the kind of job that they want done: that is, to make America just as pure as we can possibly make it. We want to thank you very much for coming here today.

REAGAN: Sir, I detest, I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.

Reagan exposed Paul Robeson privately. Danny Glover exposes himself publicly.

Former president Ronald Reagan was a very quotable man.

Who could forget this one?

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

It is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. Ronald Reagan -First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin. September 25, 1987

I hope you’re all Republicans. [To surgeons as he entered the operating room]March 30, 1981

We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free. Normandy, France, June 6, 1984

“The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology.”

“…peace is the highest aspiration of the American People. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it, we will never surrender for it, now or ever.”

I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency — even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.

[If you have a favorite Reagan quote, we’d love to hear (read) it]

“Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.”

            —- Ronald Reagan, in a Speech at the 1992 Republican Convention

…perhaps the Pope should stop Catholic priests from raping children.

Just a thought.

The Rev. Paul Shanley

The Archdiocese of Boston knew that one of its priests, now accused of rape, spoke in favor of sex between men and boys at a 1979 meeting that apparently led to the founding of a national group advocating the practice, according to court documents released Monday. The documents also show archdiocese officials knew of sexual misconduct allegations against the priest, the Rev. Paul Shanley, since at least 1967, but continued to allow him access to children in different parishes for three decades.

The above information on The Rev. Paul Shanley is from this story in USA Today.

The above photograph of The Rev. Paul Shanley is taken from this story on WTOP News.

Via Gibbs Magazine:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

I mean - really - our prison guards were making prisoners wear panties on their heads (big deal - it sounds like fraternity rush to me) - but they weren’t raping them!

And the prison guards are going to prison because of the military’s investigation - unlike the great majority of pedophile priests - who go to prison only after prosecutors wade through the Catholic Church’s cover-ups.

Let’s me clear: for the Pope to lecture anyone or any organization on any moral subject is the height of hypocrisy. Again: “The study found that 4,392 of the 109,694 priests who served from 1950 to 2002 had been accused of sexually abusing 10,667 minors”. Obscense. Loathsome.

We need to criticize these grotesque acts out loud - and often.

How many prisoners were abused in Iraq? Thirty, fity, one-hundred?

How many boys, girls, men, and women, have been raped or otherwise sexually molested by Catholic priests over the years? Over the centuries? Answer: ten of thousands. Again: “The study found that 4,392 of the 109,694 priests who served from 1950 to 2002 had been accused of sexually abusing 10,667 minors.”

See, also: The Boston Globe, The Sydney Morning Herald, Fact Index, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, bishop_accountability.org, USA Today, and WTOP News.

This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

This is a reprint of an essay I posted to my blog earlier this week.

We can’t well judge where we stand on victory in Iraq - and how much more needs to be done - without stepping back and reviewing what our objectives there were in the first place. I’m not looking so much to answer all these questions in this one entry as to frame the issues:

1. Removing the Regime: As I’ve explained repeatedly before (see here, for example) and will no doubt return to again soon, the first and primary reason for the Iraq war was the nature of the regime itself - implacably hostile to the United States, planted at the center of the region that has been the epicenter for terrorism against the United States and its allies, immune to outside persuasion or pressure, safe from any internal revolt, and unpredictable in its actions. The regime’s record on numerous issues supported the conclusion that it could neither be changed nor safely ignored. Recall just one example, one of the most critical facts about Saddam Hussein’s regime: after September 11, when nearly all of the world’s worst dictators - Castro, Khaddafi, even Arafat - were lining up to give lip service to denouncing the attacks, Saddam’s state-run media was trumpeting them with front-page celebrations. The Ba’athist regime put up murals cheering the attacks. All of which underlined why the United States Congress had passed, and President Clinton signed into law, legislation making “regime change” in Iraq the formal policy of the United States. Removing the regime would also take care of its appalling human rights record.

The objective of removing the regime was, of course, accomplished by mid-April 2003, which is what anyone who was paying attention understood to be the “Mission Accomplished” announced by President Bush a few weeks later. The final nails in the coffin were the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein and the December 2003 capture of Saddam himself. While it’s true that some ex-Ba’athists are starting to resurface in the new Iraq, notably in the Fallujah Brigade tasked with pacifying Fallujah (and now the head of the new provisional government), that’s as unremarkable as the presence of ex-Communists (like Yeltsin and Putin) in post-Soviet Russia, given the lack of alternatives to being in the Ba’ath party while Saddam ruled the country. There’s nothing to fear in terms of the regime rising again in anything resembling its prior form, especially given how much of that form was dictated by the personality of Saddam Hussein himself.

2. Removal of the WMD Threat - While the human element was Iraq’s chief threat, the regime’s persistent pursuit of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, nuclear - was, famously, the subject of international debate for years before the war dating back to Israel’s bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. On the issue of WMD programs, we can feel pretty good about what we’ve accomplished - we know that the regime was continuing to, at a minimum, ‘keep its powder dry’ in terms of maintaining the know-how and capability to ramp up production of chemical and biological weapons, which are cheaper, quicker and easier to produce and transport than nuclear weapons; that that capability was concealed from weapons inspectors; and that that capability is now dissipated.

Actual weapons - including the large stockpiles previously identified by the UN (and cited by President Bush) but not accounted for - are another matter. If we ever get comfortable that there really were no such stockpiles by the time of the war, of course, that would be good news; a propaganda victory for war opponents, but good news nonetheless. On the other hand, if there’s one thing that’s made me genuinely nervous about the aftermath of the war (or perhaps the interminable 14-month “rush to war”), it’s the possibility that WMD materiel made its way to Syria or into the hands of rogue individuals or groups, including Al Qaeda or other international terror groups. Thus, it remains premature to declare victory on this front, and we may never really get to the bottom of the question.

3. Eliminate Iraq as a Terrorist Safe Haven: Regardless of the continuing debate over the extent of Saddam’s active operational and financial assistance to various terror groups, the incontestible fact remains that Iraq before March 2003 was (as Iran and Syria remain) a black hole on the map into which terrorists of all kinds - Zarqawi, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Ansar Al-Islam, possibly some of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers - could disappear or encamp without fear of being apprehended or reliably traced. For the moment, that aspect has been greatly diminished - it’s true that we haven’t found Zarqawi, but then fugitives in the US have been known to evade capture for years as well, and there have been many, many foreign terrorists captured or killed by US forces there. There’s at least been very significant progress in reducing the freedom of terrorists to move into Iraq as a safe haven. And, of course, Saddam is no longer pumping cash into the suicide-bombing operations in Israel, which is good.

4. Prevent the Re-Emergence of a Hostile Regime: Obviously, this is the big-ticket endgame right now, and one that might ultimately require us to play power politics, since neither the Shiites, the Sunnis nor the Kurds can create a dangerous rogue regime in Iraq if the other two groups retain some base of power. The major danger would be an Islamist theocracy controlled by Iran under someone like al-Sadr (who’s pretty well discredited and weakened at the moment, although the careers of the likes of Khomeini and Saddam suggest that a guy like this is a continuing danger to bounce back until he’s actually dead or in permanent US custody).

5. Prevent the Descent of Iraq into a Failed State: The opposite pole, and the first of the objectives that represents an objective of the reconstruction rather than the war (although Christopher Hitchens, among others, has argued that Iraq was headed this way anyway) is preventing anarchy - if Iraq winds up looking like Somalia, it will resume its status as a place for transnational terror groups to congregate. Again, the jury’s still out, but the growth of local institutions in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south hopefully could create a fallback position where if post-occupation Iraq started to crumble, there would be hope of salvaging parts of the country from anarchy.

6. Building a Role Model: Most of the objectives of the Iraq war were negative - get Saddam out of power, stop the spread of weapons and terror groups, etc. The positive goal - building democracy in Iraq - has attracted mountains of scorn, but when you consider that we had little choice but to try to rebuild the place anyway once we’d removed the existing regime, why wouldn’t we want to use all the persuasive powers at our command to try to provide a positive example to the rest of the region? Needless to say, this aspect of President Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom” has a ways to go, although there’s no reason to suspect that there won’t be elections by January - the more troubling question is what comes after that. My own bottom line: regardless of the shape it takes, if the resulting institutions provide accountable government that the Iraqi people are happy with, that alone will put pressure on the neighbors to shape up. Considering the number of former tyrannies around the world that have transitioned to functioning or semi-functioning democracies in the last 20 years without any U.S. troops at all, and sometimes in the face of bitter-end internal resistance, faltering economies, and/or inhospitable cultural traditions, I hardly consider this an unrealistic endeavor.

7. Humanitarian Reconstruction: Rebuilding roads, schools, hospitals, etc. Keeping the lights on. By all accounts, this is going well. In fact, we made significant progress just by putting and end to the failed sanctions regime, which gave the “containment” policy a brutal cost in human life.

8. Prevent Iraqi-on-Iraqi Violence: At the end of the day, this is Iraq’s problem, not ours, although we obviously need to keep violence from overwhelming the other mission objectives. The US media has tended to elevated this to Job One in Iraq, thus missing the entire point of the exercise.

(I’m ignoring “prevent violence against US troops,” since that’s not so much an end goal as something we’re trying to do while working towards our goals; in military terms, force protection is an ongoing priority but not a mission objective - if every other job on the list was done, we could keep the troops safe just by bringing them home. The importance and difficulty of protecting our forces has, of course, been a critical concern through all of this.).

9. Flypaper The notion that our troops would serve as “flypaper” - attracting jihadist fanatics to Iraq to kill them rather than have to hunt them down elsewhere - always struck me more as a sliver lining to the cloud of the insurgency rather than a positive goal. It’s not that we actually want people attacking our soldiers. But if they are going to pour into Iraq, killing a lot of them is a laudable goal that will advance our ultimate war aims, and the casualty figures from the front suggest that we are indeed doing this at a fairly high volume.

10. Get the Wells Pumping: Nobody seriously argued that oil should have been a valid reason for war - we could have increased Iraq’s production by lifting UN sanctions - but given oil’s importance to the Iraqi, world and US economies, getting the wells pumping at full tilt was obviously an important thing to do. From what I’ve read, that’s going fine, although it may be some time before Iraq can really tap into its full potential as an oil producer.

11. Reorganize US Base Structure: Basing US troops in Saudi Arabia, of course, was not only expensive and inefficient (like the Germans, the Saudis could be picky about where they would let us go), but also an irritant cited by bin Laden as a grounds for jihad. We seem to be headed towards the first leg of this objective, getting our bases out of Saudi Arabia, and for now we have temporary bases in Iraq from which to stage more operations against the likes of Syria and Iran. But it’s an open question whether the new Iraqi government will agree to long-term basing rights.

I’ve probably forgotten something, and I’m also leaving off some of the more intangible objectives, like demonstrating US resolve, sending a message to other dictators, improving the future credibility of UN resolutions, repaying the Kurds and Shiites for abandoning them in the past, etc. I’m also ignoring the end of the oil-for-food boondoggle, since that wasn’t and couldn’t have been fully appreciated as a war aim before the war.

President Reagan not Doing Well

From Hog on Ice.

One of the great figures of the twentieth century may be about to leave us. Ronald Reagan, 93, has experienced a sudden decline over the last few days, and his family is gathering at his side.

Hateful academics and liberal historians may never admit it, but Ronald Reagan did more for the cause of freedom than any man in modern history. As the former Soviets have acknowledged, President Reagan’s policies, more than anything else, led to the collapse of Communism. And Communism has caused more unnecessary death and suffering than any other political system that has ever existed. Not even Naziism comes close.

It is thanks to President Reagan that Communism’s hope of spreading to the U.S. and Western Europe is dead forever. It is thanks to President Reagan that children in the former USSR and places like Poland and East Germany now grow up in relative freedom. There is no Iron Curtain. There is no Berlin Wall. If you were born after 1980, you don’t understand what that means. It’s like saying, “There is no cancer.”

It’s a pity we didn’t see his equal before the Cambodian Communists murdered hundreds of thousands of people for crimes such as wearing eyeglasses, or before a cruel Communist regime gained a foothold in Vietnam, turning a bustling country of industrious people into a poverty-stricken, oppressed backwater and aid sink.

I wish he were here with us now, active and capable, to help answer the left’s childish, shortsighted attacks on our current President, who, in some ways, is cast in the Reagan mold.

I can’t pray for him to linger, but I can pray for a humane passing, and I can thank God for blessing us with him in the first place. I hope you will do the same.

(Repeated over at A.E.Brain, the Blog)

Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Most readers will at least have some basic idea of what that day was, though it’s likely that at least some won’t.

A thoughtful and intelligent reader, HullBreach, wrote about a previous historical article :

I’m going to have to poke around a bit, I’d like to learn more about what went on. I remember talking about the time leading up to WW2 in my College history classes, but there was never any king of Anti-war movement mentioned. Only an “uneasyness” about going to war in Europe again. Very interesting.

I wonder if I’ll tell my kids about something like this some day.

That last line makes him perceptive too.

Looking about me, at the many good-intentioned and well-meaning folks who truly do believe that Bush=Hitler, that it’s All About Oil, and as Maureen Dowd said in the New York Times :

World War II had such stark moral clarity in history that it’s almost irrelevant in providing lessons about conflict in a grayer time.

…it seems that recent History is something that hasn’t been taught all that well. Back at the end of 2002, I talked with a Leftie of my acquaintance who, while reviling George W. Bush as an Evil Moron, saw World War II as an unambiguously moral and just war, that no-one of any sense could possibly have criticised.

It is for these people that I present the following, a re-write of a lengthy response to HullBreach.

Pretend it’s 1941.

From Schoolnet.co.uk

In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Charles A. Lindbergh claimed that the “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration”. Soon afterwards Gerald Nye argued “that the Jewish people are a large factor in our movement toward war.”

Here’s a slight re-write so you can gauge the impact of this at the time :

In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Astronaut Neil Armstrong claimed that the “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the Israelis, the Neocons and the Bush administration”. Soon afterwards Senator Edwards argued “that the Likud Neocons are a large factor in our movement toward war.”

Strong Stuff. So what was the extent of opposition to any military move against Hitler? What was 1941’s ANSWER? It was the America First Committee. Never heard of it? Must have been some radical fringe group, right? You think there’s been opposition to a morally dubious and probably illegal Iraq War, compared with wholehearted US support versus Hitler?
From a Charles Lindbergh site :

America First Committee, founded in September 1940, was the most powerful isolationist group in America before the United States entered World War II. It had over 800,000 members, who wanted to keep America neutral.

That’s EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND members, at time when the USA’s population was much less. By today’s terms, it would be over a million, and some.

But what about the rest of America? Surely at least 50% of people supported war against the Axis? From the Houghton-Mifflin Companion to American History : Isolationism

But in 1940-1941 many still supported the noninterventionist America First Committee. Isolationists failed to block proposals by the Roosevelt administration to aid victims of Axis aggression with methods short of war. Nonetheless, 80 percent of Americans opposed any declaration of war against the Axis states.

80 PERCENT. You think opposition to the Liberation of Iraq is high, with between 50 and 30 percent against it?

Roosevelt managed to secure a conscription act - the Selective Service and Training Act - on the 16th of September, 1940, at a time when France had just fallen, and it looked like England would soon follow. But a year later, in 1941, with Hitler blitzkrieging Russia but with England saved by the Battle of Britain, it was renewed…. just. From the Washington Times :

In 1941, it wasn’t much different. Despite German, Italian and Japanese aggression on three continents, the American public showed no appetite for war. On August 12, 1941, legislation to create the Selective Service to facilitate military conscription was bitterly debated and passed the House by one vote.

One Vote. The difference between the US being able to engage in Operation Torch in Africa and defend Guadalcanal in the Pacific in 1942, and… not.

But surely the Palestinian Flags that appear in every anti-war demonstration show that there’s something new, Islamic Americans flocking en masse to criticise Bush the Warmonger? Cries of ‘Allahu Ackbar’ and ‘Down with Bush’ echo at each demonstration. And CAIR has how many thousand members? Well imagine if the CAIR-led parades were led by a full EIGHT THOUSAND wearing face-masks and Hezbollah gear. From an article on the German-American Bund :

Actual membership figures for the G - A Bund, are not known with any certainty, but reliable estimates place membership at 25,000 dues paying members, including some 8,000 uniformed Storm Troopers. The G - A Bund carried out active propaganda for its causes, published magazines and brochures, organized demonstrations and maintained a number of youth camps run along the lines of the HITLERJUGEND (Hitler Youth). …A February 1939 rally of the G - A Bund in Madison Square Garden drew a crowd of 20,000 who consistently booed the American president and chanted the Nazi Heil Hitler. The G - A Bund closely cooperated with the “Christian Front” organized by the antisemitic priest, Father Charles COUGHLIN.

And that leads me to the Michael Moore of 1941, Father Coughlin. But he was far Moore(sic) popular than Michael, even Michael Jackson.

…some observers claimed that Father Coughlin was the second most important political figure in the United States. It was estimated that Coughlin’s radio broadcasts were getting an audience of 30 million people. He was also having to employ twenty-six secretaries to deal with the 400,000 letters a week he was receiving from his listeners.

Think about it for a minute. How many Media Superstars, let alone TV political commentators, regularly reach audiences of this size every week today? And how many get such a deluge of letters, many containing donations to the Anti-Bush, Anti-Neocon, Anti-War cause? But surely Father Coughlin was relatively moderate . No Bush-Hating Moonbat. No “it’s all about OIL.

Coughlin’s opinions became more extreme. In September 1940 he described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “the world’s chief war-monger”. The following year he wrote in Social Justice: “Stalin’s idea to create world revolution and Hitler’s so-called threat to seek world domination are not half as dangerous combined as is the proposal of the current British and American administrations to seize all raw materials in the world. Many people are beginning to wonder who they should fear most - the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”

Again, I’ll re-write so you get at least a glimpse of what it must have been like at the time.

Moore’s opinions became more extreme. In September 2003 he described President George W.Bush as “the world’s chief war-monger”. The following year he wrote in Who Stole My Election? “Bin Laden’s idea to create a world Caliphate and Saddam’s so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction are not half as dangerous combined as is the proposal of the current British and American administrations to seize all the Oil in the Middle East. Many people are beginning to wonder who they should fear most - the Bush-Blair combination or the Bin Laden-Saddam combination.”

Sound all too familiar? As if these words came from yesterday’s paper?

After Pearl Harbor, the American People united behind Roosevelt though. As Maureen Dowd said :

Although conservatives compared Saddam to Hitler, America did not have to be persuaded with “actionable” intelligence before confronting Hitler. That dictator was an individual weapon of mass destruction.

..and Congress declared War on Hitler on December 8th. Except they didn’t.

Congress only declared war on the Japanese - and astoundingly, the vote wasn’t unanimous. Arguably Hitler’s greatest mistake was to declare War on the USA on December 11th. It’s entirely possible that despite Roosevelt’s pressure to go to war against Germany, that the Congress would only have supported a war against Japan.

Because Hitler had no more a part in Pearl Harbor than Saddam had in 9/11. In fact, from the evidence now available, rather less.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

And those who can remember are condemned to teach those who can’t. Now there are many, many differences between then and now: for example, the US dead during training for D-Day exceeded the total US killed in Iraq and Afghanistan up to now. (743 were killed by a German torpedo attack on a single day in May 1944). Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians, were killed during the Liberation of France in 1944. And France had less population than Iraq and Afghanistan combined do today.

But as for the Anti-war movement against that ‘obvious weapon of mass destruction’, Hitler, then there are many striking parallels. The major difference was that in 1941, many Republicans were Anti-war simply because a Democrat was in the White House, rather than the reverse.

Don’t fall for the New Defeatism (and thank goodness we weren’t such big wimps during WWII).

Or, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

Thank goodness the Bush Administration is “staying the course” - rather than retreating behind our borders in a fit of perpetual hand-wringing and self-doubt.

Indeed, “retreating behind our borders in a fit of perpetual hand-wringing and self-doubt” appears to be the official foreign policy position of Democrats and anti-war activists everywhere. The real shame is that, lately, even some Republicans have been seen and heard “going wobbly.”

It’s funny how - in the midst of our celebration of “the Greatest Generation” - many of our leaders feel no shame in their utter lack of vision or courage in their foreign policy thinking.

Aren’t we calling WWII Americans “the Greatest Generation” for a reason? Shouldn’t we emulate them? In short, shouldn’t we proud that: (1) we decisively won the war in Iraq - with amazingly low casualties, historically speaking, (2) we’re bringing democracy to Iraq, and (3) we’re helping to rebuild the neglected infrastructure of Iraq. Like “the Greatest Generation,” shouldn’t we all be pulling together for this laudable cause?

I think we should be just as proud of our new Iraqi “Marshall Plan” as were were in re-building Germany and Japan after WWII.

This is a copy of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

I was composing something uplifting and noble for D-Day. Then I heard a snippet of Kerry’s latest bull-bleep and I was off on a tear. This piece is long, so if you have the attention span of a gnat, vote for John Kerry and move along now.

Kerry calls extending military enlistments ‘backdoor draft’

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Democrat John Kerry on Thursday accused President Bush of creating a “backdoor draft” by requiring thousands of soldiers to remain in the military if their tours of duty extend to Afghanistan or Iraq.

One day after the Army delivered the news to active duty soldiers and reservists, the presidential candidate raised the specter of the nation inching closer to a draft as he criticized the Bush administration for stretching the military too thin, complicating the mission to create a stable Iraq.

Kerry said the Pentagon’s expansion of the “stop-loss” program — a device that prevents military personnel from leaving when their time is up — may have increased U.S. forces by 30,000 troops, “but this has happened on the backs of the men and women who’ve already fulfilled their obligation to the armed forces and to our country — and it runs counter to the traditions of an all-volunteer Army.”

The administration has “effectively used a stop-loss policy as a backdoor draft,” Kerry said during a speech on modernizing the military at the Truman Presidential Library.

The Army, struggling to find fresh units to continue the occupation of Iraq, announced Wednesday that thousands of soldiers who had expected to retire or otherwise leave the military will be required to stay if their units are ordered to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do you recall this? “An Approach to Sizing American Conventional Forces for the Post-Soviet Era: Four Illustrative Options,” authored Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Aspin’s Threat-based, Building-block Approach
In a recent paper entitled “An Approach to Sizing American Conventional Forces for the Post-Soviet Era: Four Illustrative Options,” Congressman Aspin provides a remarkably succinct and dismissive tour d’horizon of potential future worldwide military threats. After describing the collapse of the Red Army and citing the view of the Defense Intelligence Agency that the former Soviet Union “will have no capability to directly threaten the United States and NATO with large-scale military operations,” Aspin concludes that =D2residual ‘Soviet’ conventional forces will be incapable of external aggression for years to come” and could not restore that capability “without years of warning time for the United States and our European allies.”

Aspin then identifies a handful of other countries with relatively large military forces which could conceivably use those forces in ways that might provoke a U.S. military response: Iraq, Iran, and Syria in the Middle East; Libya in North Africa; North Korea and China in the Far East, and Cuba in this hemisphere. Using standard military measures to assess the armed forces of these seven countries, Aspin finds that except for China (whose large forces are “lightly armed and not very modernized”), the potential troublemakers generally have ground and air forces less than half as powerful as those of pre-Gulf War Iraq. Even the strongest, Syria and North Korea, are little more than half as powerful.

After noting that political constraints make aggression by any of these countries unlikely, Aspin develops a “Desert Storm-equivalent” U.S. force structure that could easily counter any aggression, should it occur. The Desert Storm-equivalent force comprises seven Army and one and one-third Marine ground force divisions; eight Air Force tactical air wings (plus 70 heavy bombers); and four aircraft carriers. (This includes one Army division and some ships that were not present in the Gulf but might have been helpful, in Aspin’s judgement; and it excludes some Air Force and Marine tactical aircraft, two aircraft carriers, and one Marine brigade that were present but not needed or useful, in his view.)

Having pinpointed unlikely but conceivable future threats and developed a slimmed-down U.S. force structure more than ample to meet those threats, Aspin re-expands future U.S. force and spending requirements in two ways. First, he uses relatively high estimates of the cost of each force component. Second, like Defense Department officials, Aspin sets out options for much larger forces that would allow the United States to conduct several major military operations (that is, wars and invasions) simultaneously.

Aspin’s lowest budget option—the $200 billion a year Option A—would provide forces capable of conducting another Gulf War and at the same time an operation like the U.S. assistance to the Kurds (“Operation Provide Comfort”).

Option B, estimated to cost $213 billion yearly, adds forces for U.S. support to South Korea in a war with North Korea.

Option C, at $234 billion annually, funds additional forces for a military action like the U.S. invasion of Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) and for force rotation in a protracted quarantine as an alternative to war in a Gulf-type crisis.

Option D—a $255 billion alternative to the President’s 1997 budget—would provide forces for a second “Provide Comfort” operation and strengthen U.S. military support to South Korea (or a comparable contingency elsewhere).

In sum, Aspin’s threat-based building blocks demonstrate that the President’s (Clinton) budget— which does not specify either threats or responses—would allow the United States simultaneously to conduct another Gulf War, help defend South Korea in a major war with North Korea, invade a small third world country, and protect two large indigenous populations from abuse by military dictators.

John T. Correll, Editor in Chief, Air Force Magazine wrote this editorial shortly after the election.

National defense was not an issue in the 1992 election. The voters weren’t interested, or so the pollsters said, and the defense programs laid out by the candidates got no more than superficial examination.

A popular misconception, touted by the Washington Post and others prominent in analyzing the campaign, was that Gov. Bill Clinton and President George Bush had fundamentally the same positions on defense. That is not true.

Mr. Clinton’s position was a virtual clone of “Option C,” the detailed plan written by Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in challenge to the Base Force plan of the Bush Administration. Mr. Clinton’s campaign statements followed Option C straight down the line, not only in concept but also in specific details of cost and force structure.

This points to a defense program that would be below the Base Force projection by about 200,000 troops, eight fighter wings, three army divisions, two aircraft carriers, and $60 billion over five years. That is not a trivial difference. The armed forces would shrink toward 1.4 million active duty troops, almost 40 percent below their peak strength in the 1980s. Capabilities would be closely measured to meet threats that are immediately apparent and not much more.

Despite the Pentagon’s objection, think tanks and military strategist’s opinion, they forged ahead with a massive draw down of US military force and readiness. You may note that they were totally unprepared for the expansion of terrorism, attacks within the US and the new global threat that 9/11 presented was not even on their radar.

The Base Force Meets Option C

Mr. Aspin says the Pentagon is wrong and that we can dispense with more troops, divisions, wings, and ships.

The most picturesque criticism, however, came from Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff, who said that Mr. Aspin got his numbers wrong and that his Desert Storm Equivalent would be more accurately termed “Desert Drizzle.” The force structure options suggested by Mr. Aspin and his staff “are a recipe for military disaster,” General McPeak said.
[…]
Force mix. The Guard-Reserve issue is a political nuke. So far, most of the defense reductions have been made in the active-duty force, with Congress blocking attempts by the Pentagon to make corresponding reductions in the National Guard and Reserve.

In March, Secretary Cheney sent Congress a list of 830 Guard and Reserve units he proposes to reduce or inactivate. Most of the reductions would be in the Army Reserve component, which is at present larger than the active-duty Army.

Most of the alternative force proposals, including Option C, strike hardest at the active-duty force. In a remarkable position paper published in February, the National Guard Association declared that “the existing Total Force Policy and the emerging Base Force policy are competing strategies.”

Challenging the Pentagon head-on, the Guard Association says that the Army should have 10 active-duty divisions and ten National Guard division equivalents, rather than 12 active-duty divisions, six reserve divisions, and two cadre divisions as projected for the Base Force.
[…]
Estimates of the requirement. Mr. Aspin’s main claim is that his estimate of force requirements is better than the Pentagon’s, which he derides as “defense by subtraction,” calculated by obsolete “top-down” methodology, leading to “less of the same.”
[…]
His working paper postulates four options, but three of them are obvious throwaways. His keeper is Option C. “Compared to the Pentagon’s proposed Base Force,” Mr. Aspin says, “Force C would put proportionately more emphasis on naval power projection, Marine Corps expeditionary forces, and our National Guard and Reserve Forces.”

By the mid-90’s the JCS opined:

Despite its smaller size, our military must retain an appropriate mix of forces and capabilities to provide the versatility to handle today’s challenges and to provide a hedge against unanticipated threats. Combat forces must be balanced with capable supporting forces, active duty forces must be balanced with appropriate Reserve capabilities, and force structure must be balanced with infrastructure.

Bill Clinton approved, SecDef Cohen implemented and Kerry voted for force reductions, so how the hell does he blame the Bush administration for the force shortage?

Oh…that’s right, he counts you possessing little memory of the Clinton administration’s flawed military “planning” and failed global strategy.

This is not campaign hyperbole; it is outright trickery, distortion and lies, lies that may get millions of us killed.

Bye, Tenet

From Hog on Ice.

George Tenet is resigning. For “personal reasons.” I’m guessing one “personal reason” is that, personally, he would rather resign than be fired or Vince Fostered.

So far, this is the only big American player who has been shown to have been overly eager to invade Iraq. He gave the President WMD information that was wrong, and when the President expressed doubt, Tenet used the term “slam dunk” to describe the evidence. No one else has been shown to have been quite that goofy.

It seems believable, coming from Tenet. At the 911 Commission hearings, he came across like one of the stars of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I halfway expected him to call the commissioners “dude.”

We were right to invade Iraq. We reasonably believed Hussein was stockpiling WMD’s, and we correctly believed he sponsored terrorism, and evidence is now coming to light, showing that in all likelihood, he was working with Al Qaeda prior to 911. And we knew that regardless of what weapons he had before the invasion, he had had illegal weapons in the past and was almost sure to make them again in the future.

Since the war began, the Al Qaeda/Iraq connection has been firmly established. Nick Berg was beheaded by top Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Al Qaeda and other terrorists have flocked to Iraq to battle the US. Better there, now, than here, later. Iraq has become our flypaper, and that’s a wonderful development.

Al-Zarqawi himself expressed anguish over how effectively we have battled Al Qaeda in Iraq, exclaiming, “By God, this is suffocation!”

But the left wants Bush out because they can’t get over the 2000 election, so as far as they’re concerned, the WMD misinformation is not only grounds for an electoral defeat, but for impeachment. And some leftist shock jocks have actually said Rumsfeld and Bush should be killed.

I don’t know if Tenet screwed up. He’s a Clinton holdover, so it would certainly be to Bush’s benefit to depict him as just another incompetent political appointee, elevated to greatness by bumbling Arkansas trailer trash. I do know that in the decades prior to 911, the left gutted our overseas intelligence-gathering capabilities, and I know Clinton admits letting bin Laden go, even though he knew bin Laden was likely to attack us later.

I’m glad he’s out. I have seen plenty of evidence that his competence is questionable, and none that he is particularly capable. So let’s get a new guy we can count on.

Dudes.

From an undelivered political speech scheduled for December 12th :

In the slogans and propaganda that have been hurled back and forth during these months of war, there has been much discussion of those qualities of American life call Democracy and Freedom. Committees have been found to defend and to befriend democracy, and to fight for freedom.
Our President says … that it is our mission to spread, by force if necessary, various forms of freedom throughout the world.
I believe it is time to define exactly what we mean by democracy and freedom. These are qualities too sacred to our country, to our traditions, and to our hopes, to be left to the irresponsible use of slogans and propaganda.
It is meaningless to talk about fighting for freedom or defending Democracy unless we have first established, deep in our minds and hearts, what freedom and democracy really mean.
I believe in freedom and I believe in democracy, but I do not believe in the form of freedom and democracy toward which our President is leading us today. I say that democracy is gone from a nation when its people are no longer informed of the fundamental policies and intentions of its government. I say that the word freedom is a travesty among men who have been forced into war by a President they elected because he promised peace.
If democracy means anything at all, it means that the citizens of a democratic state have the right to be informed about, and to vote upon, the major policies of their government. If freedom means anything at all, it means that free citizens have the right to decide whether or not they send their men to die in foreign wars.
A democratic people must be an informed people, a trusted people. If we do not know what our government is doing or what it intends to do; if we have no right to vote upon the issue of foreign war; if our news is to be censored and
mixed with propaganda, as in the totalitarian states; if our citizens are to be drafted, and our national economy upset, by a President who ran for his first term on promises of economy… then ours is no longer a free and democratic nation.
Men and women of Massachusetts: Freedom and Democracy cannot long exist without a third quality, a quality called Integrity. It is a quality whose absence is alarming in our government today. Without integrity, freedom and democracy will become only politicians’ nicknames for an American totalitarian state.
[…]
Our nation has been led to war with promises of peace. It is now being led toward dictatorship with promises of democracy. The battle cry of freedom is being used to regiment our people.
It is time to strip the masque from the leadership we have been following. It is time to find out what ideas and what beliefs march behind the words waving on its banners. Many of us are tired of listening to promises that are made
“again, and again, and again”, and then turn out to be nothing more that the “oratory” of a political campaign.
Have you ever stopped to think how ridiculous it is that this democratic nation has twice, within a generation, been carried to war by Presidents who were elected because they promised peace? Have you ever realized how absurd it is
for us in America to have committees who claim, in one breath, to stand for freedom and democracy, when in the next breath they demand that the Government of this country declare war while the majority of our citizens are opposed to it?
Our President has spoken of four freedoms that should be spread all over the world. I believe it is time to ask him about other freedoms that he left unmentioned, freedoms that apply to us right here at home. For instance, let us
address this question to our President:
Do you or do you not… believe in the freedom of the American people to decide their own destiny by means of the vote? If you do believe in this freedom, how do you explain your thrice stated election promises of peace, in the light of your leadership to war? If you say that conditions have changed since the election, and if you still say you believe in democracy and freedom, why are you
unwilling to submit the question of foreign war to a referendum of the people? […]
Mr. President: Is this your idea of democracy and freedom? Is this your standard of integrity, after promising us again, and again, and again, that our boys would not be sent to fight in foreign wars?
The American people have a right to answers to those questions, Mr. President, and if they are not forthcoming, do not be surprised when you find among us a new movement, a movement for democracy and freedom of a different sort; a
movement which has integrity as the ideal at its peak.
[…]
And what is our objective? Are we to die by the millions to make the world
safe for ideals of freedom and democracy that are denied to us in our own country? Are we to spend unlimited American lives, throw American business into bankruptcy, and harness our children and our grandchildren with debt, in a crusade to make democracy safe among foreign nations who don’t desire it?
Before we crusade for freedom and democracy in foreign nations and on foreign continents, let us decide how we intend to apply these terms at home, how they are to be applied to use, here, in what we have called the foremost
democracy on earth. How are we to apply freedom and democracy to our right to vote on vital issues, to our right to determine our own destiny either in peace or in war, to our right to be accurately informed about the policies and the actions of our own government.
[…]
Before we spend unlimited billions for foreign war, before we crusade so blithely for four freedoms across the seas, before we send the spirit of America “to stand on foreign ground”, let us make sure that the roots of freedom and
democracy are firmly planted in our own country, and that these words, dear to the heart of every American, stand for more than the campaign slogans of politicians and the propaganda of foreign agents.
Men and women of Massachusetts: It is time for a new movement in this country, a movement with its roots in American traditions, and with its branches in American ideals, a movement which is not tied to political parties, and which says what it means, and which means what it says, a movement which carries on its banners the words – Freedom, Democracy, Integrity.

The Author of the speech? No, not Senator Kennedy. It was by Charles Lindburgh, and was due to be delivered to the America First Committee on December 12th, 1941.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I was one of the snobs who hated the design of the World War II memorial. As a native Washingtonian, I felt sad to see L’Enfant’s empty, perfect stretch of mall, elegantly anchored by the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, broken up.

And while heaven knows we could use a triumphalist moment about now, the architecture seemed so ugly for such a beautiful victory, and so 19th-century German for such a 20th-century American ode to heroism.

But when I went Friday and saw all the adorable World War II veterans rolling in wheelchairs, walking slowly with canes or on their own, sitting on the benches that encircle the fountains, taking pictures with children and grandchildren, meeting up with their old buddies, the memorial was suddenly a lovely place to be.

It may not be perfect as a piece of architecture, but it’s perfect as a showcase for the ordinary guys who achieved the extraordinary.

Thrilled with their moment in the sun in their usual humble way, inspecting the memorial they earned 60 years after D-Day, they looked in that setting as shining and valuable as jewels in a Tiffany’s window.
[…]
World War II had such stark moral clarity in history that it’s almost irrelevant in providing lessons about conflict in a grayer time.
[…]
Although conservatives compared Saddam to Hitler, America did not have to be persuaded with “actionable” intelligence before confronting Hitler. That dictator was an individual weapon of mass destruction.
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 30th May 2004

Condescending Arrogance and Invincible Ignorance often go together like that. But it’s not often you see such egregious examples so close together.

As the ANSWER-esque speech (and by a truly great American Hero) shows, Dowd’s ‘Stark Moral Clarity’ was far less so at the time. There’s a reason why the comparisons between Saddam and Hitler, and between 2004 Iraq and 1946 Germany are often made, it’s because the parallels are so striking to anyone who’s bothered to study the issue. But some will always prefer to keep their ignorance intact. No doubt in 2062 the Maureen Dowds of the era will be talking about the ‘Stark Moral Clarity’ of the Liberation of Iraq holding no lessons for conflict in a ‘grayer time’ too. But hopefully without quite so much condescension to the ‘adorable little people’ currently serving in the Sandbox.

…to protect the guilty.

Some past reports of the US Occupation have not been widely publicised. They reveal a consistent story of administration bungling. Anyone who believes that a country so drastically mismanaged and chaotic will have a stable, Democratic government in the next twenty years is obviously a deluded NeoCon.

MisQuotations from articles by the New York Times :

January 6
…The third report is by General MacNarney on the American Occupation Zone in Iraq. And that report, like the reports of General Ironhewer before him, and like virtually every newspaper dispatch coming from that zone, is a further recital of what must be considered thus far a failure. The primary cause of this failure is a confusion of purpose on the highest-level of policy-making. But there has been clear evidence of failure, also, in administration.

December 18
United States CENTCOM Headquarters announced today that plans had been completed for initial Iraqi elections in January at Tribal or Town levels in the Western Military District. A statement said that the vast majority of Iraqis remained passive in attitude towards politics and displayed no disposition to take over civic responsibilities.

December 2
An exhaustive compilation of opinions of Iraqis in all walks of life on the reaction to the United States occupation of their country was released this afternoon from the Confidential status under which it was submitted to officiakls of the United States Forces in CENTCOM recently.
Bitter resentment and deep disapointment was voiced over the Americans’ first six months of occupation, though there was some praise for the improvements in transportation, health conditions, book publishing and entertainment.

A later report shows that the problems are not confined to the American sectors, and are far worse than the other reports would indicate, with widespread starvation.

March 23
British Occupation Officials announced today that they were prepared to use military armor to quell Iraqi hunger rioters in the British zone.
Mobile armored squads have been organized to put down riots and root out sabotage groups taking advantage of tension resulting from the general hunger, the British announced.
Armored cars will join military forces protecting food convoys as soon as additional ‘difficulty’ occurs, the announcement said.
Severe restrictions are to be placed upon the Iraqis to prevent them from buying and devouring their entire month’s rations ‘in a few days’, authorities said. Iraqi officials said that this had happened on a large scale in Basra this month.
The British expressed doubts that 70 per cent of Basra’s population was without bread because of this practice, as the Iraqi civilan officials claimed.
“Checks within the last twenty-four hours show that bakers’ shops still have adequate supplies of flour.” one British official said.
“We believe the looting yesterday was the result of a highly vociferous minority.”

And finally, the post, via Tim Blair, that caused me to do some digging :

The Iraqi attitude toward the American occupation forces has swung from apathy and surface friendliness to active dislike. According to a military government official, this is finding expression in the organization of numerous local anti-American organizations throughout the zone and in a rapid increase in the number of attacks on American soldiers. There were more such attacks in the first week of May than in the preceding five months of the occupation, this source declared.

Before commenting on the above, readers should go and check the original source documents, many of which have been published on the net, because as Tim Blair said, “Some words may accidentally have been altered during transmission.”

Kerry, the only Senator not to vote for the Project BioShield Act, spent today telling anyone who would listen (i.e. the mainstream media) that the U.S. is not adequately prepared for Bioterrorism.
The Associated Press quotes Kerry:

Hospitals are overburdened, Kerry said, and essential drugs and vaccines have not been adequately developed.

[. . .]

Kerry said as president he would appoint one person to oversee all bioterrorism programs, budgets and strategic priorities and to work with state and local leaders pursuing preparedness goals.

In his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush called upon Congress to prepare the U.S. for bioterrorism with Project Bioshield:

I ask you tonight to add to our future security with a major research and production effort to guard our people against bioterrorism, called . The budget I send you will propose almost $6 billion to quickly make available effective vaccines and treatments against agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague. We must assume that our enemies would use these diseases as weapons, and we must act before the dangers are upon us.

Less than a week later the White House fleshed out the details of Project Bioshield. President Bush’s Project Bioshield is much more comprehensive than Kerry’s proposal to “appoint one person oversee all bioterrorism programs.” Project Bioshield will:

Provide funding for the development and delivery of new medical countermeasures. This funding will enable the government to purchase vaccines and other therapies as soon as experts believe that they can be made safe and effective.

New National Institutes of Health programs to speed research and development on medical countermeasures, including more rapid hiring of technical experts.

New FDA emergency use authorization to permit the effective use of such treatments in an emergency, if alternative treatments are not available.

Congress passed the Project BioShield Act of 2003 on May 19, 2004. The vote in the Senate was 99-1. The only U.S. Senator who did not vote for the Project BioShield Act was, that’s right, Kerry.

Does Kerry not know what the Senate voted on or what President Bush proposed? Or does Kerry simply not care so long as he can get his sound bites?

Who had the greater capacity to harm the United States: Hitler’s Germany, Imperial Japan, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

I think the answer has to be Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Saddam Hussein before the liberation of Iraq

Adolf Hitler before the defeat of Nazi Germany

Emperor Hirohito before the defeat of Imperial Japan

The kind of conventional military attack which Imperial Japan used at Pearl Harbor could work only once. Thereafter, any attempt at a conventional attack of the United States - by Imperial Japan or Hitler’s Germany - would have been rebuffed long before it made it to the American coastline.

Those oceans that once protected us (to paraphrase Secretary of State Colin Powell) still did protect us back in the 1940’s. In other words, it would have been a long, time-consuming, and suicidal mission for Imperial Japan or Hitler’s Germany to try and attack the American homeland in the 1940’s after we’d been awoken to the danger by Pearl Harbor. American conventional forces would have stopped the attack long before it reached the American homeland: in the Pacific (for an attack coming from Imperial Japan) or in the Atlantic (for an attack coming from Hitler’s Germany).

Yet, despite the warning similar to Pearl Harbor which this country received on 9-11-01, we are not in a similar position to stop a similar (i.e., terrorist) attack, before it reaches our homeland. In short, such a terrorist attack would not be delivered via convential means by ship or airplances coming over the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. In other words, as Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice have often stated, our oceans no longer protect us.

Rather, if Saddam Hussein was still in power, the same WMD materials that he used to murder tens of thousdans of Kurds - and many Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war - could have been delivered to the U.S. homeland in suitcases or other innocuous containers travelling in normal commercial shipping or via civilian leisure travel.

Certainly, Saddam Hussein had just as much desire to harm America as did Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan. See, for example, this post by Baseball Crank about how Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was one of the very few nations in the world to actually praise the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks on America. Also, Saddam Hussein had attempted to assassinate the American head-of-state (G.H.W. Bush) during the Clinton Administration - and had harbored the al Qaeda organization which had been attacking America and American interests since at least the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Indeed, recent publications on this topic detail the intricate relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda.

In short, Saddam Hussein had the desire to harm the United States - and had a greater ability to actually harm the United States than Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan.

Accordingly, those who praise American motives and ideals in conjunction with World War II make little sense when they, in the next breath, denigrate American motives and ideals in Iraq. (I’m looking at you, Mike Wallace of CBS). In both wars - World War II and Iraq - America sought to: (1) stop a threat from abroad, (2) leave democracy in place of the dictatorships we were toppling, and (3) rebuild the the infrastructure of the nations we were defeating (e.g., via the Marshall Plan in Europe and via our on-going work to repair, and sometimes newly build, the infrastructue in Iraq).

So, when President Bush compares the war in Iraq to World War II, he is entirely corrrect. For example, Bush was quite right at the U.S. Air Force Academy when he said:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

(The above emphasis is mine).

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a greater threat to the United States than Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan. Those Democrats and others who are so quick to praise American motives and ideals during World War II cannot be consistent when they denigrate American motives and ideals in the war in Iraq.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt [a “chicken-hawk” to use the modern-day opprobrium of the Left]

President Harry S. Truman

President George W. Bush at the U.S. Air Force Academy on June 2, 2004

Sadly, one might even suspect that when Democrats and leftists denigrate American motives and ideals in Iraq it’s for no other reason than the Party label of the current American President. The fact that such partisan tactics were not used by the Republican Party during World War II (or were certainly used to a much lesser degree) apparantly doesn’t deter them.

The old cliche is a cliche for a reason: “Politics should end at the water’s edge.” Unfortunately, for some Democrats and leftists, even national security and American democratic ideals take a back-seat to partisan politics.

This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

Instapundit pointed to an article about the Eurofighter program yesterday. Almost 20 years in the making, beset by politics, and facing cost overruns and performance issues, the next-generation fighter jet looks like a poster-child ad for the hopelessness of the EU joint approach in the defense industry.

The news that Britian will look to sell almost half its fleet abroad before the first planes are even delivered, and will take delivery of the most needed variant (ground attack) last, is just another nail in the coffin.

It’s a sad end, no doubt. But look closer. The Eurofighter was beset by the European disease - but it’s also heir to a larger trend that has significant implications for the U.S. defense industry…

Read the rest…

Big surprise: CBS “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace and USA Today founder Al Neuharth used the WWII Memorial dedication as an opportunity to engage in Bush-bashing.

The U.S. and its Coalition partners have liberated over 20 million people in Iraq, but Mike Wallace says it’s not a “noble enterprise.” Per NewsMax:

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The mainstream media isn’t liberal at all. Yeah right.

The Democrats have an actual foreign policy other then all-Bush-bashing, all-the-time. Yeah right.

Via NewsMax.

This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

Some of my proudest blogging moments have come from the work I did with both Chief Wiggles and Spirit of America (which is carrying on the Chief’s work). So it pleases me very much to see that Marc Danziger, aka Armed Liberal, has signed on to be COO of Spirit of America.

What Jim Hake started with SOA is nothing short of amazing. His vision and goals are admirable; the way he has put turned his vision into reality and has made his goals attainable says as much about Jim Hake the man as it does about Jim Hake the businessman. And I do believe he has hit up on the internet’s greatest commodity when it comes to getting project like SOA noticed. I speak, of course, of bloggers. Employing and relying upon bloggers - and their readers - gives anyone a a huge resource of publicity that just can’t be bought.

Need a little info on SOA? I turn to Jeff Jarvis for that:

Spirit of America is going to let us all do more. It carries on the work and spirit of Chief Wiggles and Operation Give and countless individual soldiers who have had their families back home send baseballs and frisbees over to give to kids — but in a big way. They will raise millions of dollars to respond to requests from the streets of Iraq for material such as tools, help with media (both TV and weblogs!), help start microbusinesses owned by Iraqis, and help bring sports back to the Iraqi youth. Eventually, SoA hopes to be a conduit for needs in Iraq and contributions from America.

Think of it as open-source nation-building.

Spirit of America is already helping. Last week, Kerry put together the shipment of 15 pallets of tools to send to Iraqi.

Spirit of America is now embarking on a lofty goal:

In the next few weeks, the organization hopes to sign up a million Americans as contributors, volunteers or simply people who are interested enough to pay attention.

Be one of those million. There are thousands of things you can do to help SOA. Maybe you have days and days worth of time to give, maybe you only have a few seconds. Whatever your availability is, SOA will have some way for you to help.

I can’t stress the importance of what SOA is doing. I’ll quote Jeff Jarvis again:

If we can help the Iraqis build their nation and their democracy and if we can connect with them on a personal level — if, to be blunt, we can demonstrate that Americans are not ugly — then we create a foothold for democracy, freedom, modernity, civilization, and just friendship in the Middle East.

This is not about pro-war or anti-war. There are no sides in this. There is just doing; just helping one nation reach out to another, making the way for peace and civility to flow between them.

You will not stop hearing about this from me. I’m going to do everything I can to help SOA not only reach their goal of one million American volunteers; but I will help them in any other way they need. I think this is the most important thing we can do at home to help win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and make the road to democracy and peace one paved with fulfilled intentions.

Get involved.

Blog Iran passes on this impassioned plea from Ramin Parham:

bq.. “In my article, I related the story of Tannaz, an Iranian student, and asked the question the West is facing: Between Jannati, Secretary of the Guardian Council of the Iranian theocracy, and Tannaz, which one will you choose? A few years ago in Serbia, between Milosevic on one hand and the Serbian students and Zoran Djindjic on the other, a united West chose the students and their leaders. Today, the entire Balkan region has been stabilized and democratic nations are being built. Tomorrow, in Iran, which way will the West go? Will we all harvest the seeds of democracy or the grapes of wrath and resentment of a disillusioned youth? That is the question.

For Reggie, Charlie, and Tannaz to celebrate Democracy Day in a freedom parade in Tehran, we do not need bullets. Rather, to witness the Iranian D-Day we need the West’s immense information-projection power. We need the West’s vastly influential think tanks to advocate a policy of freedom for the people, not détente with a regime whose Majlis (Parliament) inaugurates with chants of “Death to America” and whose Friday “prayers” serve as recruiting speeches for suicide bombers.

We need congressional hearings and testimonies given by young Iranians describing the hopelessness of existence under theocracy; the complete lack of normalcy and dignity; the day-by-day attrition of life. We need a tiny fraction of the West’s financial support channeled to the families of Iranian political prisoners and jailed journalists with international monitoring. We need your soft power, and all of it. We need it in a barrage of heavy-media artillery, think-tank platforms, and the solidarity of Western NGOs. We need U.S. and EU campus events with young Iranians “yearning for freedom” standing hand in hand with Western students. We need Western artists lending their music and their voices to the Joyless Generation.”

If you’re interested, the entire article is available at NRO of all places.

Hungarian Ambassador Simonyi discussed the power of Rock & Roll in an excellent Guest Blog series here at Winds of Change.NET. Does the mullahs’ atomic program give this kind of ‘soft power’ strategy enough time to work? I’m not sure it does - but I know that we should start anyway, and make a serious attempt.

The Europeans are too corrupt to follow, of course, too busy cutting deals with Iran’s theocratic jailers and torturers. “Blood for Oil,” indeed. That still leaves the USA - and this is an option America absolutely has not pursued seriously enough.

Stronger, please.

Tonight we passed four million unique visits to Command Post since March 20th, 2003:

If we could track each person down and send a thank you note, we would. Since we can’t, thanks for your loyalty and you support, and as always, thank you for reading The Post.

On to the next million!

This email came in today from reader Redneck Texan:

I have noticed you like to use your Op-Ed section for special posts, and want to see if you would consider a topic for me.

Yours and Michele’s creation has introduced a lot of people to the world of Blogging. I was wondering if y’all might ever have the patience to sit through a “Ask the Command Post” Thread.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on such questions as:

Why you created this massive disruption to my spare time?

How you gathered up Contributors?

Are you happy with the direction your comments function has taken?

Comment Registration?

Are you losing interest is this endeavor ?

Bandwidth Costs?

Just a suggestion, but I think many others might have these same questions.

Sure, why not. You ask them, we’ll answer them. Use the comments, and know that Michele and I are usually of the same mind, but not always, so we’ll answer separately. Also know that we’ll probably want to keep some things private, but since you’ve all signed on for respectful discourse in the comments, we’re certain you’ll respect that as well.

So … fire away, and we’ll answer them as you post them.

From Vietnam Vets For The Truth

Communist Vietnamese Honor John Kerry, the War Protestor, as a Hero in the Communist Victory over the United States in the Vietnam War.

In the Vietnamese Communist War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the “War Crimes Museum”) in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), a photograph of John Kerry hangs in a room dedicated to the anti-war activists who helped the Vietnamese Communists win the Vietnam War. The photograph shows then-Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry being greeted by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Comrade Do Muoi.

Jeffrey M. Epstein of Vietnam Vets for the Truth acquired the photograph over the Memorial Day weekend as America was commemorating its military heroes. Epstein’s organization, Vietnam Vets for the Truth, had issued a general request last week for photographs documenting Kerry’s activities on behalf of the enemy. Bob Shirley, a Vietnam Swift Boat veteran (www.pcf45.com), sent the photograph to Epstein in response to that call. Shirley recently joined over 200 other Swift Boat veterans in signing an open letter questioning Kerry’s fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

Photograph of John Kerry meeting with Comrade Do Muoi, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, in Vietnam, July 15-18, 1993. Photo taken in the War Remnants Museum (formerly the “War Crimes Museum”) in Saigon in May 2004.

Jeff Epstein explains the importance of the photograph:

“This photograph’s unquestionable significance lies in its placement in the American protestors’ section of the War Crimes Museum in Saigon. The Vietnamese communists clearly recognize John Kerry’s contributions to their victory. This find can be compared to the discovery of a painting of Neville Chamberlain hanging in a place of honor in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in 1945.”

Photographer Bill Lupetti, who is currently visiting Vietnam, took the photographs in Saigon during his recent visit there. Lupetti, a former Hospital Corpsman, is also a Swift Boat veteran.

Below the photograph of John Kerry are explanatory placards in English, French, Vietnamese, and Chinese. The English placard reads:

“Mr. Do Muoi, Secretary General of the Vietnamese Communist Party met with Congressman and Veterans Delegation in Vietnam (July 15-18, 1993).”

Senator Kerry may argue today that his anti-war protests did not render support to the enemy in time of war and that his activities did not violate the definition of treason given in Article III, Section 3, of the US Constitution. This exhibit paying tribute to Kerry in the War Protestors Hall of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City tells a very different story. The Vietnamese communists clearly feel that the American anti-war protestors were a very important force in undermining support in the United States for American war efforts, a force that contributed materially to ultimate communist victory in 1975.

On Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes show on Friday, May 28, 2004, Rear Admiral Roy Hoffman (USN, Retired) accused John Kerry of being a traitor because of his anti-war activities. This photo, which demonstrates the extent to which the Vietnamese communists acknowledge that he supported them during the Vietnam War, corroborates this charge. (Hoffman, the former commander of the Swift Boat force and one-time Kerry’s superior officer, is Chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth (SwiftVets.com).

Vietnam Vets for the Truth (KerryLied.com) was established for the sole purpose of organizing a rally pointing up Kerry’s lies during the so-called “Winter Soldier” hearings in the US Senate in 1971. The rally, appropriately called “Kerry Lied,” will be held on Capitol Hill on September 12th.

Posted By John Moore (Useful Fools blog) at 01:17 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

In an interview with the Washington Post, Kerry indicated that as president he would “play down the promotion of democracy as a leading goal in dealing with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and Russia, instead focusing on other objectives that he said are more central to the United States’ security.”

In many ways, Kerry laid out a foreign policy agenda that appeared less idealistic about U.S. aims than those of President Bush or even fellow Democrat Bill Clinton. Although Kerry said it is important to sell democracy and “market it” around the world, he demurred when questioned about a number of important countries that suppress human rights and freedoms.

[. . .]

During the interview, he eschewed the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that are commonplace in Bush’s speeches and news conferences. At one point, he stumbled over the words when he tried to emphasize his interest in promoting American values: “The idea of America is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we’ve developed in this world.”

Of promoting democracy overseas, Kerry said: “How fast you can do that and how rapidly others can embrace it and what can be expected over a period of time varies from place to place.” Emphasizing his interest in setting realistic goals, he added: “Beware of the presidential candidate who just sort of says with a big paintbrush we’re going to make everything all right overnight.”

Kerry is mistaken in concluding promoting democracy is in the middle east is not an objective central to U.S. security.

In The Age of Sacred Terror Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon explain that the roots of Islamic extremism which spawns evildoers like Osama Bin Laden lies in the anger and frustration from all the difficulties under which they live—the poverty, unemployment, oppression. The only to eliminate the roots of the extremist movements is to give these people hope. To do that requires freedom and democracy. These sentiments are also expressed by Professor Bernard Lewis.

Last December the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal published an article by Lewis, entitled “Democracy and the Enemies of Freedom.” In that article Lewis sets forth the objectives of the American military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq: first and more immediate, to deter and defeat terrorism; second, to bring freedom and democracy, to these countries and the rest of the Middle East. Lewis writes that while establishing democracy in the Middle East will not be quick or easy, history suggests it is possible.

The creation of a free society, as the history of existing democracies in the world makes clear, is no easy matter. The experience of the Turkish republic over the last half century and of some other Muslim countries more recently has demonstrated two things: first, that it is indeed very difficult to create a democracy in such a society, and second, that although difficult, it is not impossible.

The study of Islamic history and of the vast and rich Islamic political literature encourages the belief that it may well be possible to develop democratic institutions—not necessarily in our Western definition of that much misused term, but in one deriving from their own history and culture, and ensuring, in their way, limited government under law, consultation and openness, in a civilized and humane society. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance towards freedom in the true sense of that word.

Lewis then explains that we are engaged in a titanic struggle of global dimensions. If you read his books and grasp what type of civilization the terrorists want to impose on the entire world, you understand that we must not only take on this fight; we have to win it.

The war against terror and the quest for freedom are inextricably linked, and neither can succeed without the other. The struggle is no longer limited to one or two countries, as some Westerners still manage to believe. It has acquired first a regional and then a global dimension, with profound consequences for all of us.

President Bush understands what is at stake and has set us on the correct, probably the only course, which can guarantee that our way of life survives.

In a recent interview in The Atlantic Online, Professor Lewis stated that he was “cautiously optimistic about what’s happening in Iraq.” He is more concerned about “what’s happening here in the United States.” He’s afraid we will abandon the Iraqi’s as we did in 1991. I pray we stick with President Bush and win this fight.

From California Yankee.