Monday - December 19, 2005

Quote Of The Day

“Some look at the challenges in Iraq, and conclude that the war is lost, and not worth another dime or another day. I don’t believe that. Our military commanders do not believe that. Our troops in the field, who bear the burden and make the sacrifice, do not believe that America has lost. And not even the terrorists believe it. We know from their own communications that they feel a tightening noose and fear the rise of a democratic Iraq.”
-- President Bush, December 18, 2005

If it’s any consolation to President Bush, most Americans don’t believe it either. The Democratic Party is sliding down a greased path to oblivion with their constant hate-Bush propaganda. I see nothing wrong with people disagreeing with the war, nor do I believe the current strategy is 100% perfect. By the same token though, I am incensed at Democrats who pontificate and declare that “we’re losing” and “we can’t win”. Opposition is one thing but this attitude in the Democratic Party leadership is another thing entirely. It borders on treason.

The Democrats did this once before and almost managed to self-destruct. That was 1968, and I believe was the beginning of the party’s decline into historical irrelevance. In the thirty-seven years since then, they have managed to elect only two Democratic Presidents and have lost control of both the House and the Senate. Now, they are on the verge of losing it all and appear to have no desire to stop the mad scramble to commit suicide. The main problem that creates for the rest of us is that, like a suicide bomber in the Middle East, they seem intent on taking out the rest of us with them.

Whether you believe in the war or not, the simple fact is that we’re in it and we stand to lose too much if the constant harassment and negativity doesn’t stop. The time to argue over the justification for the war against terror or the war in Iraq is when everything has settled down. Second-guessing the President and publicly espousing defeatism is destructive in nature and only places our troops in jeopardy by encouraging the enemy. The time to stick together is now. We can argue over the details later ... when our troops have come home and, because of their sacrifices, we can debate the whole matter in comfort and safety. Until that day, none of us are safe ... Republicans or Democrats.

Posted by The Skipper     on 12/19/2005 at 08:16 AM   
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   Thursday - December 15, 2005

Coultergate

Ann Coulter is thoroughly ticked off at Democratic persecuters prosecutors and wants to know why she can’t get arrested or at least indicted ....

WHY CAN’T I GET ARRESTED?
By Ann Coulter Wed Dec 14, 8:11 PM ET

I’m getting a little insulted that no Democratic prosecutor has indicted me. Liberals bring trumped-up criminal charges against all the most dangerous conservatives. Why not me?

Democrat prosecutor Barry Krischer has spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find some criminal charge to bring against Rush Limbaugh. Political hack Ronnie Earle spent three years and went through six grand juries to indict Tom DeLay. Liberals spent the last two years fantasizing in public about Karl Rove being indicted. Newt Gingrich was under criminal investigation for 3 1/2 years back in the ‘90s when liberals were afraid of him. Final result: No crime.

And of course, everybody cool in the Reagan administration was indicted. Or at least investigated and persecuted. Reagan’s sainted attorney general Ed Meese was criminally investigated for 14 months before the prosecutor announced that he didn’t have anything (but denounced Meese as a crook anyway). I note that nobody ever wanted to indict Bob Dole or Gerald Ford (except, of course, other Republicans). In the Nixon administration, liberals even brought “Deep Throat” up on charges—and he was one of you people! What, now I’m not even as hip as “Deep Throat”?

I’ve done a lot for my country. I think I deserve to be indicted, too. How am I supposed to show my face around Washington if I haven’t been “frog-marched” out of my office by some liberal D.A. looking to move to D.C. for the next Democratic administration? What’s a girl have to do to become a “person of interest” around here? Mr. Krischer, where do I go to get rid of my reputation?

- There’s even more hilarity from Ann here ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 12/15/2005 at 12:23 PM   
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   Wednesday - November 30, 2005

The Other Blog

If you get a chance today, drop by the other blog (The ArgoKnot). Be prepared to get an earful. Aphrodite is on a rampage and she’s mad as hell at people who are trying to get murderers freed from death row. She says kill ‘em all and forget about sorting them out.

If that isn’t enough to get you going, Chaucer just received his own personal copy of the Koran .... from CAIR. Our philosopher proceeds to slice and dice both the book and the religion of morons behind it. Look for a fatwah to be issued any day now.

There’s that and more good reading. Go ahead and get your editorial fix for the week and give ‘em a piece of your mind while you’re there. Be careful around the lightning bolts coming down on idiotarians though. Sanity could result ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/30/2005 at 10:17 AM   
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   Tuesday - November 15, 2005

How’d We Miss This?

Life could not get much better.  The family is all healthy, deer season opens on Saturday, the project I’ve been under water with for the past two years looks like it is about to be completed and Steven Den Beste is writing again.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2005 at 02:56 PM   
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   Monday - November 07, 2005

French Intifada

This is without a doubt the best commentary on the current crisis in France you will ever get. It comes from the New York Post and was written by a gentleman named Amir Taheri who is editor of the French quarterly “Politique Internationale,” and a member of Benador Associates in Paris. I present it here in its entirety for your education and better understanding of how deeply troubling this mess is to all of us ....

WHY PARIS IS BURNING
November 4, 2005

As the night falls, the “troubles” start — and the pattern is always the same. Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats. The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.

These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control. The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France’s bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to “impose the laws of the republic,” and promised to crush “the louts and hooligans” within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no “outburst by criminal elements” that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.

By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of “an unprecedented crisis.” Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots. How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars. Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not been present in that suburb for years. The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something — which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.

Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths — who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years — got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted. Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms. With cries of “God is great,” bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee. The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.

Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the “occupied territories.” By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million. But who lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent.

In these suburban towns, built in the 1950s in imitation of the Soviet social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in crammed conditions, sometimes several generations in a tiny apartment, and see “real French life” only on television. The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into “proper Frenchmen” within a generation at most. That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of the pupils are native French speakers.

France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation: the obligatory military service abolished in the 1990s. As the number of immigrants and their descendants increases in a particular locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for “calmer places,” thus making assimilation still more difficult. In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture. The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.

Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the “millet” system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs. In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist “hijab” while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks. The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced “places of sin,” such as dancing halls, cinemas and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local administration.

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out. “All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities. President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered — and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a “ticking time bomb.” It is now clear that a good portion of France’s Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into “the superior French culture,” but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire. So what is the solution? One solution, offered by Gilles Kepel, an adviser to Chirac on Islamic affairs, is the creation of “a new Andalusia” in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.

The problem with Kepel’s vision, however, is that it does not address the important issue of political power. Who will rule this new Andalusia: Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen? Suddenly, French politics has become worth watching again, even though for the wrong reasons.

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/07/2005 at 06:44 PM   
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   Monday - October 24, 2005

Help Wanted

This week’s editorial has been posted at the other blog. The subject this week is the Marquis Of Queensbury rules and the Geneva Convention. Go take a look-see and give me your opinion. At the very least, you’ll get some food for thought.

On a related subject, I am looking for people who like to think and write. I want to add three or four people to the crew of the Argoknot. My plan is simple: each person will post an editorial (2,000-3,000 word) on a specific day of the week. You can choose whatever subject you please as long as it remains within the context of conservative, rational discussion of current events. You can even choose the day of the week you wish to post each week as long as you promise to post each week. I have chosen Mondays for myself but all other days are open for any aspiring writers out there. The blog tool is WordPress and is quite easy to use.

Send me an e-mail at (allan “at” argoknot.com) if you’re interested. The crew members chosen will have full posting and editing privileges. I will take care of all site maintenance and promotions. Initial pay is “zero” which is 100% of what I get paid but if the blog takes off like this site did, perhaps later on we can split advertising revenue. I make no promises except to give you full freedom to write about what interests you.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot ... you will have to choose a Greek philosopher or historical figure as your “nom de plume”. I already have dibs on Plato but the rest are open. The Argoknot is an equal opportunity employer so the offer is open to men, women, foreigners, blacks, whites, Asians, Jews, Muslims ... even critters from Mars are welcome to apply.

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/24/2005 at 10:27 AM   
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   Sunday - September 25, 2005

Why?

The Skipper’s post below about Israel’s latest retaliation against Palestine elicited a number of responses and it got me thinking. There have always been groups of people hated or denigrated. When I think of this country’s history, certainly Blacks and Irish come to mind as groups that were hated. But Israel has been hated forever. From the king of Babylon through Hitler and even today, Israel has been the object of scorn. Why? You can see economic or political reasons (or excuses) for hating this group or that group for a season, but Anti-Semitism has been with us for 3,000-4,000 years. Why? What causes a small group of people to be so generally hated? What have they done as a nation that is so generally vile that they are universally denigrated? I’m not talking about events in the last year, but the last couple of thousand years. I have an idea, but want to hear yours first.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/25/2005 at 04:31 AM   
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   Tuesday - September 06, 2005

In the Meantime

Bill Whittle has posted Tribes.  Go read it (and the other essays if you haven’t yet).

It is time well spent.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/06/2005 at 09:19 AM   
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   Sunday - September 04, 2005

John Tierney: Stop Taxpayer-Paid Insurance

Ben Franklin Had the Right Idea for New Orleans

Why is New Orleans in so much worse shape today than New York City was after the attacks on Sept. 11? The short answer is that New York was attacked by fire, not water. But then why are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding? Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For most of history, fire was far more feared than flooding. Cities repeatedly burned to the ground. Those catastrophes occurred sporadically enough that politicians must have been tempted to skimp on fire protection - like levee maintenance, it was a long-term investment against a calamity that probably wouldn’t occur before they left office. But urbanites learned to protect themselves through two innovations Benjamin Franklin introduced to America. He started a fire department in Philadelphia, as well as its first fire insurance company. Other cities followed, often with the firefighters organized by insurance companies with a vested interest in encouraging public safety.

Their customers had a vested interest, too, because they had to pay higher premiums if they lived in homes or neighborhoods that were prone to fire. As fire insurance became a standard requirement for homeowners, they and their insurance companies kept pressure on politicians to finance firefighting and tighten building codes. As a result, the risk of a fire leveling a city like New York is lower than ever. Although the number of fires has dropped so much that experts routinely advise cities to close firehouses, voters’ fondness for the stations makes local politicians loath to close any.

But as we’ve learned this week, few people seem to care passionately about maintaining levees or preparing for a predictable flood. They’ve left that to Washington, which promised to hold back the waters and absolved coastal dwellers from worrying about hurricanes. Starting in the 1960’s, the federal government took over the business of insuring against floods. It offered subsidized insurance to people in flood-prone areas, encouraging seaside homes that never would have been built otherwise. Even at bargain rates, most people went without flood insurance - only about a third of the homes in New Orleans carried it.

People don’t bother to protect themselves because they figure - correctly - that if disaster strikes they’ll be reimbursed anyway by FEMA. It gives out money so freely that it has grown into one of the great vote-buying tools of the modern presidency. Bill Clinton set a record for declaring disasters, and then President Bush set the single-state spending record in Florida before last year’s election. Now it’s New Orleans’s turn. Since Washington didn’t keep its promise to protect the city, the federal government should repair the damage and pay for a new flood-control system. But New Orleans and other coastal cities will never be safe if they go on relying on Washington for protection. Members of Congress will always have higher priorities than paying for levees in someone else’s state.

The federal government has a role in coordinating flood control among states and in organizing outside disaster relief, but the locals should fight floods much the same way they fight fires. Fifteenth-century Dutch burghers didn’t have the financial or technological resources of today’s Louisianians, but they managed to hold back the sea without the Army Corps of Engineers. Here’s the bargain I’d offer New Orleans: the feds will spend the billions for your new levees, but then you’re on your own. You and others along the coast have to buy flood insurance the same way we all buy fire insurance - from private companies that have more at stake than do Washington bureaucrats. Private flood insurance has come to seem quaint in America, but in Britain it’s the norm. If Americans paid premiums for living in risky areas, they’d think twice about building oceanfront villas. Voters and insurance companies would put pressure on local politicians to take care of the levees, prepare for the worst - and stop waiting for that bumbling white knight from Washington.

Email: tierney@nytimes.com

Text of this article at the New York Times (registration required - free).

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/04/2005 at 01:22 PM   
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Man-Made Disaster: The Welfare State

Excerpt from ”An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State” by Robert Tracinski ....

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them. The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/04/2005 at 08:36 AM   
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The Blame Game Begins

Who Lost New Orleans?
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Even the disasters and tragedies that at first unite us in grief or anger – Pearl Harbor, 9-11 – end up dividing us. New Orleans will be no exception. Books are yet being written on how Kimmel and Short, the commanders at Pearl, were scapegoated. Had we not broken the Japanese code? Did not FDR know by decoded intercepts the night of Dec. 6 that Tokyo had terminated talks and this meant war? Why was Gen. Marshall horseback riding the morning of Dec. 7, as aides frantically searched for him to alert Pearl?

Despite the 9-11 commission report, questions remain about the warnings received and advance knowledge President Bush had or should have had about what was coming. With the Katrina disaster, however, we are not going to have to wait months for the accusations and recriminations. They have already begun, and will poison our politics for years. Even as the hurricane was coming ashore, Robert Kennedy Jr. was attacking Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour for his role “in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.”

Because of “Barbour and his cronies,” wrote Kennedy, “we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence. ... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and – now – Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”

Kennedy was seconded by Germany’s environmental minister, Jurgen Tritten, who mounted his hobby horse – the hurricane was the result of the global warming Bush has ignored – and rode, rode, rode. Columnist James Glassman tore into these twin distortions of reality and exploitations of disaster. But the RFK-Tritten attack was ineffectual. No rational American is going to believe that, had Bush signed Kyoto, New Orleans would not be underwater. It is on the more serious matters that rancorous argument is about to begin, and deep divisions are about to be driven into our society.

First, it seems self-evident that those in the path of the storm who had the least suffered the most. Those who had no way out were left behind, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, perished. From TV pictures of the 20,000 crammed into the Superdome and the hundreds hauled off rooftops, most of them, it appears, were African-American. Conversely, TV footage of looters happily at work – taking not just food and water, but jewelry, guns, electronics and booze – reveals them, too, to be disproportionately African-American.

As demands arise that the National Guard and Army shoot looters to end the anarchy, the race demagogues will go to work. For if that orgy of rioting, looting, shooting and racial assaults on Korean and white Americans that was the Los Angeles riot of ‘92 can be excused by apologists as a justified reaction to the Simi Valley jury’s refusal to convict the cops who whaled on Rodney King, assuredly raucous voices will be raised in defense of the New Orleans looters.

But ultimately, the attacks will come around to a single target, President Bush, and they will run along these lines:

First, he was out of touch in Crawford, not alert to what was coming – and, indeed, photographed fooling with a guitar the day the storm hit. Second, despite the investment of scores of billions, the Gulf Coast, on his watch, was unprepared for a Category 4 hurricane. Third, when the need arose for the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard to save the poor of those states, and defend lives and property after the storm, 7,000 Guardsmen were not on the Gulf of Mexico, but in the Persian Gulf.

Bush’s priorities are about to be challenged, and Katrina will turn America’s eyes inward, even as the crisis on the Mexican border is turning America’s attention away from the Syrian border. The antiwar movement has a new argument: What in Iraq is more important than Mississippi and Louisiana? As the cost of the disaster mounts, the questions will tumble, one upon the other: Can we afford both Iraq and resurrecting New Orleans and the Gulf? Which comes first? As the Gulf poor have lost most, ought not taxes be raised on the rich to pay for both?

Finally and critically, there is the question of why the levees broke and New Orleans was inundated, lost for years if not forever. As of Monday, the city had been spared. The French Quarter was dry. Then came the deluge. And there are print and TV allegations that funds allocated to strengthen the levees were diverted or cut by the Bush administration. Soon, we will be hearing and reading of recommendations by some officials that the levees be strengthened, and of decisions by other officials that the money be used on something else.

The scapegoating has begun. It will be deadly serious. The stakes are the highest. The ultimate objective will be to break the Bush presidency. Katrina and “Who Lost New Orleans?” will be as pivotal to Bush’s second term as 9-11 was to his first.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/04/2005 at 08:03 AM   
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   Friday - August 26, 2005

Cindy’s Brain

am trying to put myself inside Cindy Sheehan’s brain. She thinks I (and others) are “right-wing nut jobs”. I know this to be untrue because I am conservative but not far out on the “right wing” and I’ve never been diagnosed with a mental condition of any kind, other than a brief period of depression after my mother’s death in 1991. Plus, I have a regular job so I don’t need to be any kind of “job”. I work hard, collect my paycheck and pay my bills. Nothing extraordinary about any of that. In short, I’m just your everyday average “joe” .... except my name isn’t Joe.

But back to the subject of Cindy’s brain. Upon close examination, we perceive a large block or enflamed brain matter in the frontal lobes. This section is called “grief” and is enlarged at the moment. There are large supplies of blood being forced into this section as this part of the overall brain matter is experiencing enormous pain and inflammation caused by the loss of a loved one, her son. The boy she raised from birth is dead. He lost his life on a lonely battlefield, several thousand miles away from her and she feels a deep loss in her life. The little boy she taught, groomed and loved from baby to man is no longer in this world.

There is nothing she can do to replace this gaping hole in her life and her brain is suffering from the problem of not knowing how to fill that hole. There does not appear to be anything that means as much to her as her son did. She has further exacerbated the loss by alienating herself from her husband, who has filed for divorce. I don’t claim to know the reasons for the breakup. All the public knows is that the divorce was filed by her husband because of “irreconcilable differences”, according to the official divorce petition.

The hole in her life just grows biggger and bigger and the grief section of Cindy’s brain continues to grow and grow until it overwhelms the entire brain, blocking out all else. Cindy is awash in the pain inside and her brain is starting to malfunction. This malfunction is easily evidenced by her persistent vigil in Crawford, Texas insisting on a meeting with the President Of The United States, who has already met with her and tried to console her once before. Why this insistence on meeting the leader of the free world again? What can she tell him that he doesn’t already know? Does she not understand that he is privy to knowledge about world politics and the security of America that she has no access to? What can she possibly add to his already overloaded (but not yet malfunctioning) brain that would help anyone?

When President Bush refused to interrupt his vacation and meet with her, she found a national audience in the media, which had nothing better to report on this month and who have shown a pronounced bias against the President in the past. Cindy’s brain now had a platform from which she could share the pain in her head with everyone. Grief is always a lonely thing and any individual’s first response to grief is to share it. That is just human nature.

Unfortunately, something happened then that made this a problem for every American: Cindy’s brain was joined by several hundred other malfunctioning brains which have been in severe pain and grief since November 7, 2000 when George Bush won the Presidency. Suddenly, Cindy had a whole bunch of new friends and Cindy’s brain had other similarly malfunctioning brains to commiserate with.

Like them, she has adopted their strident, vulgar accusations and language. She called Presdient Bush a “lying bastard” and a “filth-spewer and warmonger.” Further quotes include: “and if you think I won’t say bullshit to the President, I say move on, cuz I’ll say what’s on my mind.” and “It’s okay for Israel to occupy Palestine, but it’s - yeah - and it’s okay for Iraq to occupy - I mean, for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it’s not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon. They’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites!”

And the beat goes on. Drums keep a-pounding rhythm in her brain.

This morning I read that Cindy has returned to her vigil in Crawford and the camp is now swollen with leftist, anti-war activists, most of whom have their travel expenses paid for by organizations like MoveOn.org which were organized after the 2000 election to try to drive George Bush from office and over-rule the American people’s decision in that election. The camp now has caterers, medical facilities and even an “orientation tent”. That last sounds pretty ominous to me. Do these people with malfunctioning brains really need “orientation” or is some evil force trying to take advantage of these malfunctioning brains, while they are in a weak state, to bend them to some unknown purpose?

Things at the camp are starting to settle into a pattern now, it seems. According to the post from Cindy, last night the campers were treated to a concert by none other than Joan Baez, who was kind enough to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.

When I arrived at Camp Casey II this afternoon I was amazed at what has changed since I was gone. Now, we have a huge tent to get out of the sun; caterers; an orientation tent; a medic tent (with medics); a chapel, etc.

So, after Joan Baez gave us a great concert tonight, I got up and I talked about Casey. About the sweet boy who grew up to be a remarkable young man. Joan sang the song Joe Hill In it Joe Hill says: “I never died.” Well, looking out at the faces here at Camp Casey, and knowing that for everyone who is present here, there are thousands of others who support our work, I am convinced that Casey never died, and he never will. Joan also sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A thousand angels waiting there for me? I know Casey will be waiting for me when it is my turn, and I know when I finally get there he?’s going to hug me and say: “Good job, Mom.”

According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1970 book on death and dying, there are seven distinct stages of grief: (1) Shock or Disbelief that the loss has occured. (2) Denial is the stage in which the person refuses to accept the loss has occured. (3) In the Bargaining stage, the person attempts to reconcile the loss by making deals with other people, sometimes also with Diety. (4) Guilt is marked by statements of “if only I had done/been . . . “. (5) Anger is a natural stage everyone must pass. Anger may be directed toward the loss, the person lost, or even Diety. (6) Depression is a stage that comes and goes throughout the grief process. Resignation at the end of the depression indicates that the truth of the loss has been accepted and the person is ready to move on. (7) Acceptance and Hope means that you understand your life will never be the same but it will go on with meaning and hope.

I empathize with Cindy Sheehan over her loss but sooner or later, she and her brain are going to have to get through Stage 5. The new friends she has found are hopelessly locked in Stage 5 as are their friends in the Democratic Party and Hollywood and the mainstream media. They must all be willing to accept their loss and resign themselves to the fact that they need to move on. Only then can all these malfunctioning brains even begin to reach acceptance and the hope that things will get better for all of them.

If not, then the rest of America will eventually have to deal with the problem of all of these malfunctioning brains in a way that brings them through their grief and back into the society of normal human beings. That may be the hardest task any of us “right-wing nut jobs” may ever face.

Disclaimer: No, I’m not a psychiatrist .... but I play one in the Blogosphere.

Posted by The Skipper     on 08/26/2005 at 11:33 AM   
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   Friday - August 05, 2005

Viewpoint: Media Bias

just finished reading this story about the Department Of Defense being forced to release pictures of flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The DoD was forced to do this because of a lawsuit filed by Ralph Begleiter under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). Now, I don’t know for sure what Mr. Begleiter’s political leanings are but I can guess, considering he worked for many years as a corespondent for CNN and currently is a tenured professor at the University Of Delaware, teaching journalism. My guess, based on that and his background is that he leans strongly to the Left in his opinions. A journalism major who worked at CNN and is now a tenured professor at an elite East Coast univeristy. Three strikes and he’s out.

For the record, I managed the team of developers and database administrators who built the FOIA tracking and monitoring software for the US Air Force back in the early 90’s (if you’re in the USAF and using that software, please don’t call me - I just did what I was told to do). As such, I gained a lot of insight into the FIOA law and all the intricacies of its implementation. The requests have to be recorded diligently and follow-ups maintained and archived until the end of the world. Every path the request takes and all persons signing off on release of documents has to be recorded. Redacted information has to be maintained side-by-side with the released information in case of further legal entanglements.

As far as I’m concerned FOIA is a piece of crap law that should never have been implemented. We all want a certain degree of transparency in our government so we can keep an eye on the critters who are spending our money up in DC but again (as I have asked here many times) where do we draw the line? There are certain pieces of information that, if released, can cause damage to our country through leaking valuable information or just having a bad effect on morale of our troops and their families. The latter is what, in my opinion, Professor Begleiter’s lawsuit has accomplished.

No one wants any of our troops to die in battle, especially their families. What purpose does it serve to show flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers? Is it a sign of respect for the brave troops who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country? I wish that were so but it ain’t necessarily so (with apologies to George Gershwin). No, you hear the Liberal Left (and Professor Begleiter) say that war is evil and we should not be in Iraq and by showing the coffins of the dead, they can remind Americans of the tragedy of war and hopefully change US policy with these constant reminders of the cost of war, and get our troops back home before more get killed .... .... .... That, of course, is rampant bullshit.

Perhaps there are a few idealists on the Left who believe that party line. If so, they are being misled by the elites of academia and entertainment as well as the Democratic Party. The real purpose of filing lawsuits to gain possession of these pictures and display them all over the media is simple: to discredit George W. Bush and the Republican Party. To hear it from them, the entire Democratic Party and all of the media were opposed to this war from the very beginning, even as all those Democratic Senators stood on the steps of the Capitol just after 9/11 and sang “God Bless America” before going inside and voting the President power to take the war to the enemy and providing massive funding to do so (everyone except John Kerry, who still hasn’t decided whether he voted for it or against it or when he did either).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this FOIA request is a sucker punch directed at the troops, their families and the American people, in general, especially those in red states. The object is to lower morale back home as well as in the barracks overseas. It has to be hurting the troops because you know their families are writing them with the news from home and they have to watch their dead comrades in arms being blasted across the TV screens back home and they have to be wondering if they’ll be next.

So what does Professor Begleiter and the Liberal Left have to gain from this abuse of FOIA (and that’s all it really is, an abuse of the law for personal gain)? They want to destroy the war effort, plain and simple and what they hope to gain is even simpler: discrediting President Bush and the Republicans so the American people will vote in the next elections for the Democrats who would never have gotten us entangled in this mess and who have a better plan for America than the evil anti-abortion, religious fruitcake, fascist Republicans.

What’s the difference between a Leftist college professor with an agenda and a terrorist “insurgent” in Iraq? Not much. Not much at all.

Posted by The Skipper     on 08/05/2005 at 11:53 AM   
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   Tuesday - May 24, 2005

Viewpoint: Nuts!

am not pleased with last night’s “compromise” by Senate Democrats and Republicans. From where I sit, the Democrats are “The Party of NO!” and Republicans are “The Party Of NO BALLS!”. I’m convinced John McCain is “The Manchurian Candidate”. Something happened to him while a prisoner in Vietnam and I am pretty sure he was brainwashed to come back and destroy America. Why else would he stand up in front of that microphone last night and talk about what a great statesman Robert Byrd supposedly is? Gag me, OK? Then ol’ Bob “KKK” Byrd himself doddered up to the microphone and quoted Benjamin Franklin. My teeth started to itch, listening to that senile fool.

Even worse was John Warner gushing over ol’ Bobby Byrd. What in the hell is wrong with Republicans in the Senate nowadays? For God’s sake, guys! Read my lips: Republicans won the election .... Democrats lost. Got that? No? Well, let me make it easy for you - the American people (that would be me and the other assorted citizens of this great republic) voted in November and a majority of us decided we wanted a government that was conservative and mostly Republican. We tried to send you deaf idiots a message that we’re fed up with all this liberal, politically-correct, multi-national, anti-heterosexual, anti-Christian crap. Why aren’t you listening?

HELLO? CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

What choice are you giving us, sirs? Must we defect from the Republican party? Do you really wish to give the Democrats back full power to continue to bankrupt the country and destroy the Republic? That is what will happen if you persist. Caving in to the Democrats is an insult to the millions of votes we cast for all of you. We asked you to go to Washington to work on our agenda, not the Democrats’ agenda. We’re tired of their madness.

While we’re on the subject, who gave any of you the right to use the words “Senate”, “good faith” and “trust” in the same sentence. That is so wrong. The English language was never meant to be abused like that. You know good and well the Democrats will never live up to their word. They only know two words: “NO” and “WAAHH”. They will stab you in the back before they’ll give an inch and when they drive the country’s car off the road into a lake, they will leave the rest of us to drown. Just ask Teddy Kennedy.

Here’s what we want you to do: grow a set of nuts, OK? Hillary Clinton has a set (just ask Bill). Monica Lewinsky has a set (that belong to Bill). Barbara Boxer has a set(on loan from Teddy Kennedy). Howard Dean has a set (OK, in all honesty he is completely nuts). In fact the Democratic party and their liberal friends are all nuts. Without nuts, you can’t get these idiots under control. Grow a pair, OK?

You are surrendering to these nutcases without even a decent fight - a fight we engineered in the last election. We paid for this fight and we won’t be satisfied until we get it. Don’t surrender to them another inch, you hear? What you did last night was surrender to their whining, weeping, complaining, crying and lying. That is a slap in the face to an American tradition. We never surrender. We never give up. We don’t give a damn what the consequences are. We are Americans and we never give an inch.

Don’t believe me? Just hark back to the night of December 22, 1944 in the little town of Bastogne, France where the 101st Airborne was holding on to the town by the skin of their teeth against overwhelming German forces and when asked to surrender, American General Anthony McAuliffe sent the Germans a message .... ”NUTS!”

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/24/2005 at 09:36 AM   
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