Scio, Scio

Neocons Ru(i)n the World, Sayeth Yon Hippies and Paulites.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:40:41 -0700

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the neoconservative movement? It often feels like folks who support the Iraq War in particular and the War on Terror in general are unreservedly labeled neoconservative, neocon, neopig, baby-killer, etc. In truth, support for the war has never been the exclusive domain of neoconservatism, which philosophy is a convenient political ally for conservatives like myself.
There are some differences between neoconservatism and what I would consider an archetypal American Conservative. Neocons are not, in my experience, all that committed to social conservatism. This isn't bad, per se, at best it means they are simply focused on other issues. Their actual beginnings are quite interesting for someone who has only learned of the neocons through the media. Burned by liberalism many ages ago, these intellectuals brought their considerable smarts to bear in the fight to spread American notions of liberty and representative government while preserving American interests. At least I thought so. The real truth is slightly different.
I read a piece by Jonah Goldberg on the topic. Here's a snippet:

Obviously, supporting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to support the Iraq war. But it works the other way around as well. Support for the Iraq war doesn’t automatically make you a neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense after 9/11, argues in his new memoir, War and Decision, that democratization didn’t rank very high among the Bush administration’s early priorities. Moreover, the administration’s mistakes in Iraq — perhaps including the war itself — have less relationship to ideology than many think. “It is possible,” as Kagan notes, “to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine.” (Just ask newly hired Hamas spokesman Jimmy Carter.)

Oooh, burn. But the point he makes later is that what many people call neoconservatism, that is the "doctrine of democracy promotion abroad, moralism in foreign policy and unilateralism toward these ends when necessary..." is not the original meaning of the idea. It was a domestic philosophy.
In the original sense, neoconservatism was the rejection of the idea that we can create a utopia on this earth through government. It was the realization by former liberals that the progressive ideals that were championed throughout the 20th century lead to fascism and oppression. At the very least they lead to stagnation and dependence, as evidenced by Europe.
I see a lot of people who want to reject the idea that individuals should be the captains of their destiny. I see a lot of people whose rejection of neconservatism has less to do with any war and much more to do with the role of government in our lives. Many people have a vested interest in growing government.

The question I ask myself is whether the current political climate allows the liberals to step back and really examine their views. For the liberal leaders, this is obviously not in their interest. But for the people who mindlessly condemn neoconservatism without being able to explain its basic origins and principles...there's hope they will see sense before they are duped into electing a person who will put us on the path taken by Europe.

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Coming to America, Pope-Style

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:43:22 -0700

I was reading an article about the pope's visit to America, and was pleased to see that it was positive. I'm excited about this opportunity for American Catholics to see and hear the pope address them directly. It doesn't happen every day, you know.
But this article, well, it was funny. Because it was humming along just fine until the very last paragraph. Here it is:

Soprano Kathleen Battle has been enlisted to sing "The Lord's Prayer" - a decision the White House defended as appropriate despite the overt insertion of religion into a public event. "I think we've struck the right balance," Perino said. "Many people across America and across the world say that prayer in order to provide themselves comfort and confidence in getting their day started."

Notice anything funny there? Because to me, it looks like we're debating whether we should sing a song that mentions God when we're hosting the freaking Pope. Does it matter if it's a "public event?" We put God on our money, and we have prayer before the sessions of Congress. This doesn't rise beyond that level of public acknowledgment of God.
I believe the courts have determined that the use of "God" on our money is defensible from a standpoint that it is not an endorsement by the state of a particular religion, but is merely in this day and age a reflection of our shared traditions and history. If our mottos were coined today I'm sure they would sound something like the Obama campaign rhetoric, but fortunately they were laid down in a time when men were able to speak openly in a public forum of their faith and its influence on their decisions.
May my grandchildren see the end of political correctness, I pray.

Keep watching this Pope, my friends. That includes you who aren't religious, and you who are primarily concerned with other things. He may surprise you. Suffice it to say that he can explain better than most of us why we believe what we believe about life, death, and what comes after.

Viva il Papa!

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Iraq War Misconceptions

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:49:02 -0700

National Review Online has a tremendous piece by Frederick W. Kagan on Iraq. Specifically, the common myths associated with the war that many on the left side of the spectrum continually cite as reasons we have lost, will lose, or must withdraw from the present conflict.
Do the nattering nabobs really know the counterpoint to their arguments? I would think not. So often I see a parroted claim about the war that can be no more supported than the rantings of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Conservatives who have conviction but not the knowledge to back it up must educate themselves so as to better exploit this weakness. Liberals who wish to better defend themselves may also find the article useful.

Let's just ignore for now the sobering fact that no amount of information will make any of us actually change our minds, and just enjoy the opportunity to learn.

The article's long, as something like this would have to be, but it's not overlong. Five years of the left pulling out every conceivable objection to the war have left Kagan a big job. He tackles it handily and you should read the whole thing. However, I provide a snippet to draw you in:

The War Costs Too Much
An increasingly popular talking point of the antiwar party is that the war simply costs too much and that we must end it and refocus on domestic priorities. This talking point has a number of variants:
The “$3 trillion war.” Simplistic economic analysis declares that the war has cost the taxpayers $3 trillion since its inception, implying that this is a $3 trillion dead loss to the economy — a price too high to pay.
Modern economics has long understood that the notion of a one-for-one guns-versus-butter trade-off is simply wrong. A high proportion of money spent on defense goes back into the U.S. economy in the form of salaries paid to the more than 5 million Americans employed directly or indirectly by the Defense Department, and payments to the defense industry and the long and complex supply chains from which they draw their raw materials. Military spending has traditionally been a form of economic stimulus, and wars more commonly end recessions or depressions than start them. That’s not a good reason to start a war, but neither is it a good reason to lose one. The impact of the current war on the U.S. economy, finally, is far smaller than the impact of previous major conflicts. Military spending in World War II ranged from 17.8 percent of GDP to 37.5 percent; in Korea from 5.0 percent (in 1950 — 7.4 percent in 1951) to 14.2 percent; in Vietnam from 7.4 percent to 9.4 percent. Current expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars bring total defense expenditures to something well below 5 percent of GDP. Even granting the simplistic and misleading $3 trillion figure, $3 trillion is about 5 percent of the nearly $60 trillion American GDP over the five years of the war.

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Killer Troops, Imaginary Horrors, Overblown Anti-War Pisspots...

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:45:06 -0800

I defy anyone to argue with Mark Steyn. The man is simply a genius. He makes me depressed by exposing how utterly screwed up the West's collective head is. Is it any wonder that an Islamic group in Canada was trying to have him muzzled?

At some point conservatives will have to abandon the polite tolerance we've had for liberal inanities and fulfill their expectations by calling out the militia and rounding them up, Planet of the Apes style. Har Har, of course I'm joking. Or am I? I've been accused of worse while arguing about less important things.

What's at issue here is that the absurdity of this generation's anti-war stance is without bounds. Steyn drags it out into the light and clubs it like a baby seal.

UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but ... fake.
By Mark Steyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”
No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”
Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”
“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.
Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.
It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered: “Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”
Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.
So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.
The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.
In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.
A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?
Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.
Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

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Michigan Goes Romney, Nomination Still in Doubt

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:06:49 -0800

So if it hasn't been made clear by now, this race for the Republican nomination is a bit different than usual. We've got different winners in the early primaries, and South Carolina looms as a make or break state for more than one candidate.
It may interest a very few to know that I have decided to support Fred Thompson, at present. While I prefer him to Romney, I would not hesitate to vote for Mitt in the absence of Fred.
Here's a nice analysis of the results from Michigan, courtesy of my old stalwart, National Review.
What an exhausting campaign this is to follow. I can't imagine running it. I may make a post outlining why I prefer one candidate over the other soon.

John Hood
So, it’s Mitt Romney by, oh, a quarter mile. By the previous standards of this quirky and often-silly electoral season, the political talk shows ought to start speculating about Romney’s strategy for November and columnists ought to be tossing around potential veep picks. It’s all still way too early, of course, which was also true last Tuesday night in New Hampshire and the previous Thursday in Iowa. The GOP race remains competitive. Both practicality and politeness argue for letting voters in other states have their say before packing it in.
Apologists for the other candidates will discount Romney’s win by pointing to his native-son status, the exceptional nature of Michigan’s economic challenges, the lack of a real Clinton-Obama fight to boost political interest, and the weather. The apologists will be right. But where were they when Romney defenders pointed to the idiosyncrasies of Iowa and New Hampshire, and the odd media snub of Wyoming’s Jan. 5 vote (which actually awarded more delegates than Granite State voters did)?
If there is a deeper significance in Romney’s Michigan success, it is that the conservative establishment within the Republican Party retains influence and cohesion. Among the GOP candidates, the divide is between two candidates on the one side (Romney and Thompson) running as conservatives in the traditional triad of economics, foreign policy, and social issues and three candidates on the other (McCain, Huckabee, and Giuliani) running as conservatives in one or two of those issue sets but not all three. The latter group essentially believes that the current GOP coalition is inadequate to defeat either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the fall. Romney and Thompson disagree, believing that Republicans must secure their base and then pitch independents on particular issues where the Democratic nominee will lack credibility or be out of step.
For good or ill, the conservative establishment agrees with the optimists, Romney and Thompson. These establishmentarians don’t feel inclined to abandon conservative principles that they believe are both correct and politically effective. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, many of them have gravitated to Romney (with a smaller group preferring Thompson on grounds of either resume or consistency). The Michigan results please them, though few seem to have yielded to irrational exuberance. That is wise. Super-Duper Tuesday is still to come, then a long, hard slog to November.
— John Hood is chairman and president of the John Locke Foundation and author of Investor Politics.

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Damn These People.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:57:11 -0800

I was watching C-Span this morning, not ten minutes ago, getting ready to do a number on a peppermint pie leftover from Christmas. I love peppermint pie with something approaching unnatural strength. Some boring Senate thing was on the screen, but as I read the ticker I was shocked and appalled to read

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated in Suicide Attack

"Holy $#&%," I exclaimed as I rushed to the computer to gather information. My peppermint pie even now lies uncovered and half-forked into, as I rush to keep myself current.
The woman was a political entity before my time, surely. And she was pretty much fired and charged with corruption in absentia, but for a political leader to be assassinated in such a way is always a shock. These are the people who are positioned to keep things running, who are connected with the movers and shakers in any country. No matter their politics, when they are killed a country has lost a resource.
Pakistan's only hope to pull itself out of the muck of radical Islamic theocracy and into a stable constitutional state is that its political leaders are allowed to make their case without fear of being murdered. I don't believe Pervez Musharraf is responsible for this attack, but I do believe that this highlights just how much control the central government in Pakistan has. That is, not much. When (not if) this blows up into a riotous mob, Musharraf will be hard pressed to keep things from devolving into further bloodshed. He's managed to hold on so far, but now he's got a martyr on his hands.

This is big news. Big news.

Damn these people for their ignorance, and I thank God (not Allah, he's obviously been on vacation) that I live in the United States of America. Despite what its detractors say, the US doesn't kill political opposition, and we have the stability to maintain the rule of law even when the opposition is dangerously close to being John Edwards.

Update: Ha. I forgot. They have nukes, too!

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Spread the Word

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:22:18 -0800

Enjoy this article from National review, get pissed, and tell somebody. I think that even if you disagree with Steyn, you have to wonder at the audacity these Muslim groups have...and the complicity of this Canadian organization in stifling debate on the subject.

Free Steyn
By the Editors

Our readers know Mark Steyn well. His witty and learned commentary appears in every issue of National Review, and in many other English publications across the world. What Steyn’s American readers may not know is that a Muslim advocacy group in his native Canada is doing its best to muzzle him.
On December 4, the Canadian Islamic Congress announced that it had filed a complaint with three of Canada’s “human rights commissions” over an October 2006 article that Steyn had published in Maclean’s, Canada’s leading news weekly. “This article completely misrepresents Canadian Muslims’ values, their community, and their religion,” said Faisal Joseph, an attorney representing the complainants, in a press release. “We feel that it is imperative to challenge Maclean’s biased portrayal of Muslims in order to protect Canadian multiculturalism and tolerance.”

The article in question was adapted from Steyn’s recent book America Alone, which argues that Western society may be irrevocably altered — and not for the better — by unassimilated Muslim immigration. It’s no surprise that this thesis is controversial, probably in part because Steyn makes his points so well. But the real threat to tolerance here is the CIC, which would have the state impose penalties on those whose writings it disagrees with.

In doing so it only provides evidence for Steyn’s thesis. Another group of Canadian Muslims — the Muslim Canadian Congress — has said as much, denouncing the CIC’s complaint for affirming “the stereotype that Muslims have little empathy for vigorous debate and democracy.” But at the moment, the CIC’s push for censorship advances. Of the three human-rights commissions to which it submitted its complaint, two have agreed to hear the case. (The third has yet to decide.)
Since their founding, Canada’s human-rights commissions have done less to protect the rights of minorities than to undermine the liberties of everyone. To get an idea of what they’re like, consider the recent case of Stephen Boissoin.
Boissoin, a Baptist minister, learned that the Alberta Human Rights Commission was funding an initiative that described homosexuality as “normal, necessary, acceptable and productive.” Boissoin objected to this and wanted to make his views known. As he put it to a Canadian Internet publication: “[I] felt that as a taxpayer, and indirect funder of this initiative through my tax dollars, I had a right to communicate my opinion which is reflective of my religious beliefs. In an attempt to do so, I decided to potentially share my opinion at large by submitting letters to the editor in newspapers.”
The publication of one such letter brought a complaint from a “social justice” advocate, and Boissoin was dragged before the very body he had complained about — the Alberta Human Rights Commission. That was 2002. It took five years of anxiety-filled and expensive legal proceedings for the commission to rule against Boissoin. They determined that he had violated Alberta’s laws because there was, as one commission member put it, a “circumstantial connection” between the publication of the letter and an incident of gay-bashing. “Circumstantial connection” is of course another way of saying that Boissoin had nothing to do with it. One wonders in passing whether the same can be said of the Koran, and which side the commission would take if Maclean’s published a few choice Koranic passages on homosexuality.
Even if the human-rights commissions eventually rule for Steyn and Maclean’s, the proceedings will be costly, and will intimidate others who wish to express controversial views. To his great credit, one conservative Canadian cabinet minister, Jason Kenney, has spoken in defense of Steyn. Some of the Canadian press is coming to Steyn’s defense as well. We hope the chorus swells.
And we hope Americans raise their voices too. So far the U.S. media have paid little attention to the case, but it should matter to us. Steyn’s writings — even those in Canadian publications — have a large and influential American readership. We trust those readers prefer that Canada remain free.

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Mark Steyn on Thanksgiving

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:54:56 -0800

Mark Steyn is one of the most interesting conservatives to read, in my opinion. Here, he discuss what America has to be thankful for. As a Canadian, he is quite the student of America and our doings. I've highlighted particularly fun parts for you. I hear a lot of talk about how badly we're doing in America, mostly from Sean Penn, but for all that we're still miles beyond Europe in terms of liberty. What do you think?
And tip of the hat to Dox for showing us we're winning in Iraq, too.

American Treasure
Giving thanks.
By Mark Steyn
Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”
Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!
But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.
Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced’n’diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.
So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

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P.O.V.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:52:12 -0700

It occurs to me that the debate over global warming and climate change breaks down along fairly ideological lines. Apart from the obvious conservative-liberal split, I have come to think of people as having one of the following attitudes as it pertains to the environment, planet, and relevant issues:

Custodial - meaning that the primary role of humans in the environment should be as caretakers and guardians of endangered animals, plants, ecosystems, and habitats. These people are generally alarmed and saddened when a species goes extinct, or there is a prospect of gradual change in our climate. Or when they seize upon so-called evidence that change in the climate has already occurred. They may be whiny and obnoxious, but without their efforts we would not have places like our national parks.
Development - meaning that the planet and its resources lay open to our use, and that we should make the most of that fact. Cut down forests and build houses for people. Raise animals and slaughter them for food. Engage in mining operations and gather materials to develop technologies that make human life easier, better, or more productive. These people are generally portrayed as villains on the show Captain Planet. They may draw too deep from the well at times, going from legitimate use to exploitation. But the attitude is necessary to make the sort of progress we've seen in the last century.

Contrast the two. On the one hand you have Custodians who might put everything in test tubes and never let another Amazonian parasite go extinct, or halt forestry efforts to save owls who are displaced anyway when their owl-homes burn due to overgrowth. Then you have Developers who might turn our planet into one of those weird sci-fi factory worlds or who would build condos on Indian burial grounds or something.
Both perspectives have their legitimate points. My sympathies lie mostly with the Developers. They have a much tougher time pleading their case due to its pragmatic nature. Custodians only have to flash a picture of a panda cub or get a celebrity to chain themselves to a tree to convince people to support them.
What I feel we're seeing now is a clash between those who are very alarmed at the changes in our planet, and those who are rather laconic about the whole thing. The "alarmists" feel a sense of righteous indignation at anyone who refuses to jump on the wagon. These people cry out that we have to save the planet now, now, now! They lack perspective. Meanwhile, the folks who aren't so upset about it bristle at the notion that they are somehow equivalent to Holocaust-deniers. They dismiss the arguments of the scientific community because if they disagree they are lumped in with gentleman like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Is there a middle ground? I think so. We can be stewards of the environment without trying to put it into stasis. We can adapt to changes in the environment, develop resources and maintain our standard of living while at the same time take good care of what we have.

Global climate change is certainly a challenging issue for future generations and for us today. But I maintain that we are smart enough to confront it without dramatizing it, without panicking, and without punishing ourselves in a misguided attempt to "save" the planet. It's all a matter of perspective.

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This Tuesday in September

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 07:50:34 -0700

Where’s the War?
The placidity of the domestic front.
By Mark Steyn

Oh, it’s a long, long while from September to September. This year, the anniversary falls, for the first time, on a Tuesday morning, and perhaps some or other cable network will re-present the events in real time — the first vague breaking news in an otherwise routine morning show, the follow-up item on the second plane, and the realization that something bigger was underway. If you make it vivid enough, the JFK/Princess Di factor will kick in: You’ll remember “where you were” when you “heard the news.” But it’s harder to recreate the peculiar mood at the end of the day, when the citizens of the superpower went to bed not knowing what they’d wake up to the following morning.

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they’ll wake up to in the morning: There’ll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other — last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon — in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA’s 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person’s assassination or that a couple of gran’mas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping centre. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a “war on terror,” there has been in America no terrorism.
In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has “kept America safe.” But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: If a “war on terror” has no terror, who says there’s a war at all? That’s the argument of the Left — that it’s all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long. Judging from the blithe expressions of commuters doing the shoeless shuffle through the security line at LAX and O’Hare, most Americans seem relatively content with a permanent national-security state. It’s a curious paradox: airports on permanent Orange Alert, and a citizenry on permanent …well, I’m not sure there’s a homeland-security color code for “Gaily Insouciant,” but, if there is, it’s probably a bland limpid pastel of some kind. Of course, if tomorrow there’s a big smoking hole where the Empire State Building used to be, we’ll be back to: “The president should have known! This proves the failure of his policies over the last six years! We need another all-star Commission filled with retired grandees!”

And that would be the relatively sane reaction. Have you seen that bumper sticker “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB”? If you haven’t, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime which thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn’t quietly offed some of these dissident professors — or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, “Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11.” According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That’s why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That’s how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq.

Apparently, 39 percent of Democrats still believe Bush didn’t know in advance — or, at any rate, so they said in May. But I’m confident half of them will have joined Rosie O’Donnell on the melted steely knoll before the Iowa caucuses. If Iraq is another Vietnam, 9/11 is another Kennedy assassination. Were Bali, Madrid, and London also inside jobs by the Bush Gang? If so, it’s no wonder federal spending’s out of control.

And what of those for whom the events of six years ago were more than just conspiracy fodder? Last week the New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 lawsuits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated. The law firm Motley Rice, diversifying from its traditional lucrative class-action hunting grounds of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint, is promising to put on the witness stand everybody who “allowed the events of 9/11 to happen”. And they mean everybody — American Airlines, United, Boeing, the airport authorities, the security firms — everybody, that is, except the guys who did it.

According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one’s death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they’re after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they’ll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen. But that’s the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he’s retained counsel. Last week, it was Larry Craig. Next week, it’ll be the survivors of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear test in Westchester County. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out, a legalistic culture invariably misses the forest for the trees. Senator Craig should know that what matters is not whether an artful lawyer can get him off on a technicality but whether the public thinks he trawls for anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child’s death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth.

In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalisms and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial’s “crescent of embrace.” In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will “have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are.” On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.

— Mark Steyn is the author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

I believe that nobody says it better than Steyn, so I won't try. Suffice it to say that anyone who believes that September 11th was an inside job will not be welcome on this blog should they air that view.
I get really fighting mad on this day every year.

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