In the second presidential debate, most of the snap polls showed Obama had won; but the two focus groups whose results I saw, the Luntz group on Fox News and the MSNBC focus group, unambiguously showed Romney as the winner. As I wrote earlier, those whose business is necessarily adversarial — meaning the Progressivist, activist press, political pundits, and even a smattering of conservative lawyers — saw the second debate through very different eyes from the rest of the country:

Maybe attorneys tend to view a debate as they would a legal argument in court, scoring on specific points and authorities, on argument and who “wins” it, on who can best use objections to keep his opponent’s evidence out of the record, and on who does the best job of submitting juror instructions that the judge accepts.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are looking for something very different: We want to see a candidate who can supply genuineness, sincerity, empathy, reassurance, a hopeful vision of the future, and a leaderly demeanor. We don’t want glibness, aggression, or menacing body language; we’re unimpressed by well-memorized talking points we’ve heard a hundred times before. We can taste defeatism and faux enthusiasm in a candidate the way you can taste overcooked barbecue even before you bite into it.

I suspect the laity look, more than anything, for nominees with a plan to get from here to there; one that is specific without drifting into the tall grass; plausible without sinking into logical lemmas and ponderous proofs; and gradual enough that we don’t have to suffer radical dislocations and the upending of everything we believe into something foreign and frightening.

Watching the polls since then tells us “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey was wont to say; post-Debate II, Romney continued to rise in the polls, both national and the determinative state polls. So punditry, jounalism, instant polling, and grumpy lawers aside, we must conclude that Romney won the second presidential debate as well; it was then two to nothing, GOP leads.

This time, however, the signs aren’t as clear as in the first debate; they’re not even as clear as in the second: Snap polls show that Barack Obama won on “points;” in the Luntz focus group on Fox News channel after the debate, a little more than half of the panel thought that Barack Obama won that portion of the debate about foreign policy, the ostensible subject.

But hold on thar, Hoss; regardless of the listed subject matter, this debate was not about foreign policy. It was about the economy. How do we know? Because that’s what the whole election is about, who can fix the economy and bring jobs back to America by getting the blasted, rent-seeking gummint out of the dadblamed way.

Foreign policy is vitally important… to about 3% of the electorate. The rest just want to be reassured that the candidates aren’t idiots (Poland isn’t dominated by the Soviet Union) or crackpates (let’s bring home all our troops stationed abroad, line them up along the southern border, and have them link arms to stop all them Messakins sneakin in!) Show the voters that much — reasonably bright, not obviously gibbering — and they’re satisfied enough to turn back to the real $16 trillion donkey in the dining room: the economy, stupid.

And guess what? The Luntz focus group also found that whenever Romney managed to drag the economy into the conversation, he won those portions of the debate, big time.

Bottom line, Paul Mirengoff was technically right that Romney was not “playing to win” the debate, but right for the wrong reason: Romney was playing to win the election instead.

That has been the core misunderstanding among both conservatives and liberals all along, though the moderate and undecided voters “got it” way back: Mitt Romney gamed these three debates brilliantly, moreso than did any other presidential candidate in the entire history of the “debate” era. He never intended to “win” any particular debate, if by win we mean rank higher on the judges’ scorecards; he always intended to win the goldurned election. You know, the real goal.

That was where Obama made his critical mistakes in the second and third debates; he was persuaded that you win an election by winning the debates on points. Well, that and spending a Zeppelin-ful of money to convince voters that Romney was a rich, bloody-handed Koch-sucker.

Obama was misinformed.

So how do you win an election? Ultimately, by capturing the hearts and minds of the electorate — for which you will surely need a number of resources, including money, campaign adverts, position pages, time spent personally campaigning, surrogates to plead your case, endorsements, and the fierce urgency of a ground game to get out the vote (GOTV).

Did I mention money? Yeah, Zeppelins-ful, on both sides, for a change. But Romney never took his eyes off the real goal: Not zinging your opponent in a nasty commercial, not a premature victory lap, and not winning debates by the crabbed rules of college debate teams… but being elected President of the United States of America.

Romney carefully painted a portrait of presidential bearing and gravitas, knowledge and wisdom, specificity and the political chops to carry it out, and the courage to point out that Emperor Obama has no clothes. Since that last clause was demonstrably true, the end result is — well, not quite inevitable; it ain’t over till the fat lady votes — but extremely likely: Mitt Romney is going to win this election.

The presidential debates were part of that portrait, but only a part. They had a goal; they fulfilled that goal, and then some.

Romney’s campaign by far out-organized the bewildered, flustered, inconstant, panicky, and now desperate Obama campaign. And that is why he’s going to prevail on November 6th… and why he deserves it.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Here’s the lede:

A day after fumbling a predictable and straightforward question posed by Mitt Romney last week — are Americans better off than they were four years ago — the Obama campaign provided a response on Monday that it said would be hammered home during the Democratic convention here this week: “Absolutely.”

That answer, “absolutely,” comes from Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign mangler, at the Democratic National Convention on Monday:

In fact, on Monday the campaign settled on a definitive answer of, as the deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter put it, “Absolutely.”

There it is, in black and white (or whatever colors you’ve chosen for your font and background): Stephanie Cutter has categorically, unequivocally, hysterically answered that “better-off” question for all time: Ab-so-lootely we’re better off now than when Obama assumed the position. Absolutely!

Who could argue with that?

Let’s not be unfair; Cutter did go on to give detailed and specific reasons why we’re better off:

Followed down a hallway by a local news crew asking the “better off” question in the convention center here, Ms. Cutter described the economic scene four years ago — the auto companies teetering near bankruptcy, bank failures — and said, “Does anyone want to go back to 2008? I don’t think so.”

I’m not so sure: Perhaps those voters who lost their jobs under the Obama administration long for 2008, which they might see as the golden age of employment.

Today’s real unemployment/underemployment rate — what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the U6 labor underutilitzation rate — includes those unemployed and actively looking for a job, those unemployed who would like to work but have given up in despair, and those who are working part time but want to work full time.

That U6 unemployment number is significantly higher now than it was when Obama seized the reins of power.

Back then, on January 20th, 2009, the U6 rate was 14.2%. It had been rising in the waning days of the Bush administration; and it continued rising throughout Obama’s first year, hitting a peak of 17.1% in December, 2009.

That big run-up of 2.9% represented nearly 4.5 million more people unemployed or underemployed than when Obama was inaugurated.

The U6 rate stayed more or less around that point for another year, then finally began to drift downward a little in December, 2010. It wafted back towards the “inauguration rate” over the next year, hitting 14.5% in March, 2012; but then the U6 unemployment number took off again. Today it hovers at 15.0%… still noticibly higher than it was when Obama was sworn at by the Chief Justice. The 0.8% rise in the U6 rate from 2009 corresponds to 1.24 million more Americans out of work or underemployed than when Obama’s term began.

At no point has total unemployment/underemployment dropped back down to Obama’s inauguration rate; on employment, the president is still underwater. Those hoping for employment are certainly no better off today than they were four years ago… and I doubt the extra one and a quarter million unemployed/underemployed Americans are mollified by the fact that Barack Obama seized General Motors and gave huge bailouts to his Big Banking cronies.

Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland echoed Cutter’s claim anent Obama’s stellar record on job creation, though he offered a slightly more cautious version:

Mr. O’Malley provided another answer on Monday on CNN: “We are clearly better off as a country because we’re creating jobs rather than losing them. We have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession. That’s why we need to continue to move forward.”

But they’ve also “not recovered” all the extra jobs lost in the Obama recession; they’re still short, as we noted, by 1.24 million jobs since inauguration.

Forward! Progress! Ab-so-lootley!

Let’s press on, guvnor. Surely there must be some objective measurement to back up Stephanie’s cutting ejaculation of “Absolutely!”

Oh, here we go; Slow Joe Biden issues an unanswerable proof:

Speaking in Detroit on Monday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during a union rally, “You want to know whether we’re better off?” He answered: “I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

Well, yes; it’s true: Osama bin Laden is dead. On the other hand, his organization, al-Qaeda, and its kissing cousins in the Taliban, are significantly more powerful today than they were at the end of Bush’s term. So there is that.

Throughout all of 2008, 151 Americans were killed in Afghanistan by enemy action, according to the notoriously right-wing news source, the Hufflepuffington Post. But last year, that number had exploded to 398, down from 492 in 2010. Seems like quite a lot more Taliban/al-Qaeda activity, especially for a war whose expiry date has already been announced.

And of course, radical Islamism in general (Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, et al) has been on the march for the last couple of years. It’s true that one extremely bloody mass murderer was finally taken down — by U.S. Navy SEALs, by the way; not by Barack Obama personally, no matter what he may fantasize. But as George W. Bush warned during his presidency, bin Laden, or even al Qaeda, is not the entirety of radical Islamism; in fact, Iran is the most dangerous radical-Islamist power, and it has been since the 1979 revolution.

President B.O. has done virtually nothing to check the overarching threat of jihadism and its related components, from nuclear weapons; to massacres of Jews, Christians, and Animists; to subversion of democracies or emerging democracies; to cross-border warfare; to “lawfare” and other elements of dawa, supporting sharia law by means short of violent assault. In fact, Obama reserves his strongest condemnations not for radical Islamists, but for Israel, the lone fully democratic nation in the Middle East.

With the uninhibited rise of radical Islamism across the world and even here in the United States on Barack Obama’s watch (the Fort Hood massacre, for example), we are not better off on terrorism than we were four years ago… even with the death of an old man hiding in Pakistan.

Joe Biden’s second point is technically true: General Motors is, in some sense, still “alive” (though I don’t quite see how the attribute of “life” comports with the general Democratic Progressivist rejection of corporations as “persons” under the law). However, all those former stockholders of GM — millions of Americans (including a great many retireees) in their 401K plans and pension funds — might not feel better off… as their holdings were looted by Obama to give his Big Labor pals a stock jackpot. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Maybe the Democrats are happy to stand on bailouts for bankers, “Government Motors,” and claiming credit for the heroic deeds of America’s Special Forces; but it does seem just a little squirrelly to me.

Their next point… oh. Oh dear; I’m afraid we have managed to plod all the way through the triumphalist New York Times article. There is nothing else in the article.

Yet isn’t it peculiar that in this entire litany of reasons in the New York Times why we’re better off today than we were four years ago, not a single Democrat points to ObamaCare or the trillion-dollar “stimulus?” It’s as if the two signal achievements of the Obama administration have faded, like the Cheshire Cat, leaving only their deficits behind.

NB: In the photograph accompanying the Times article, we see two people sporting “I ♥ ObamaCare” bumper stickers; alas, those two “people” are in fact cardboard cutouts — with no faces. I don’t think they’re any better off either than they were fours years ago, when they might have been living spruce trees. (I also find it amusing that Obama himself now accepts the derisive term “ObamaCare” for his MIA government medicine program, which used to be called the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” Heh.)

We began this inquiry with the Reagan/Romney Riddle: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” I reckon we’ll just have to watch the debacle spectacle unfold to see what evidence they can cite, besides that already (?) introduced, to justify Cutter’s Comprehensive Confirmation: “Absolutely!”

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Protesters ["Occupy Charlotte"] numbering as many as 700 people have gathered in the business district of Charlotte, N.C. ahead of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The anti-war and anti-capitalism demonstrators huddled in Frazier Park on Sunday ahead of their planned march. The group picked Charlotte for publicity because it is the location of the 2012 Democratic National Convention which is scheduled to convene on Tuesday in Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena.

The protesters had signs suggesting that the group included union workers, anti-war veterans, and undocumented immigrants. [I.e., the usual gang of idiots. -- DaH]

“Capitalism is holding back the human race,” one sign read. “Bail out people, not banks,” another sign said.

At the same time, the Godfather, Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago (and erstwhile chief of staff of Barack Obama’s Casa Blanca), has sent fifty Chicago cops to the Democratic National Convention, notwithstanding the parlous state of affairs in the Windbag City:

On the heels of a weekend which ended with 2 more dead and 22 more injured from Chicago street’s gunshots, persons attending the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina are shocked and confused to see about 50 Chicago police officers assisting with the Convention’s security.

Another surprising move regarding Chicago and the Convention this week is that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will be present to give a speech on Tuesday when Chicago is allegedly near-collapse with a teachers’ strike likely to begin within a week as the city is crowned the murder capital of the country.

Does this mean that forty-four years after last time (1968), we’ll once more enjoy the spectacle of Chicago thugs cracking the skulls of Lefties rioting at the Democratic National Convention? Hot rats! (Paging Messrs. Hoffman, Rubin, Hayden, “and the rest.”)

Truly, the wheel has come full circle. As an earlier mayor, Richard J. Daley, put it back then, “The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder!”

One can’t hardly contain oneself, can one?

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

~

Several people have bashed yesterday’s [actually, six days ago now] convention speech by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; I name no names, but you know who you are. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Chris Wallace, and you too, Juan Williams!) The argument is that Christie spent too much time talking about ideas, philosophy, the future, and his ample self, and not much time at all savaging Barack “You didn’t build that” Obama or buttering up the actual nominee (official now), Willard Mitt Romney.

I say that’s all a bunch of hogwarts. That criticism tells me only that Messrs. Wally and Willy utterly fail to understand the extraordinary and irreversible change wrought, not by tea partiers (they are only one manifestation of the movement), but by the popular front for liberty that coalesced on February 19th, 2009 — just thirty days after President B.O. was anointed, adored, and installed upon the Hog-Butcher Throne.

On that day, CNBC business editor Rick Santelli denounced the Obamic scheme to refinance defaulted mortgages. George W. Bush had pushed through Congress a plan to re-value the “troubled assets,” mostly mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that banks were holding as reserves, but whose values were a complete mystery, even to the banks themselves. But Obama radically altered that sensible plan in favor of a populist, Progressivist scheme to reward something-for-nothing borrowers for buying far more house than they could afford, and taking out mortgages they couldn’t possibly repay.

Santelli exploded on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (how apt!), railing against the loss of liberty, individuality, personal responsibility, truth, justice, and the American way. To whoops and cheers among the CME traders, he even called for them to hurl those debased and valueless MBSs into the Chicago River, à la the Boston Tea Party.

Santelli didn’t start the fire; individual flickers, flare-ups, and hot spots had hissed and spit over the previous decade. But on that day of freedom, he pulled together all these slow-burning fuses and bound them into a true popular front for liberty, independence, Capitalism, and Americanism. He sparked a simultaneous explosion of revulsion at crony capitalism (its other name is “Liberal Fascism“) and an explosive determination to rebuild America — not via yet another radical socioeconomic “revolution;” more like a religious revival, restoring what the United States had been missing since some time before the “Progressivist” era of anti-Constitution, anti-Founding Father Woodrow Wilson. Americans began to crave more liberty and less government.

Since then, tea-party movements have erupted in every state of the Union. They seized control of the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections (and particularly in the primaries that preceded the general), and now the popular front for liberty looms large to take the country itself by storm on November 6th.

Personally, I love this movement; it’s just what has been lacking in all previous attempts (including Reagan’s) to roll back socialism and Progressivism and return to individual liberty, self sufficiency, and honest Capitalism that Alexis De Tocqueville extolled in Democracy in America.

I have writ rhapsodies in red about the popular front for liberty stretching back to February 20th, 2010 (almost on the anniversary of Santelli’s revivalist rant), encompassing nineteen blogposts since then (see below [voluminous links excised to prevent being returned to the penalty box]). But those critics of Christie’s speech — did you think I’d forgotten the subject? — have fallen into the trap of “same as it ever was.” They cannot break free of the red meat, attack dog paradigm of twentieth-century campaigns.

Wally and Willy pooh-pooh the Christie speech because he didn’t rake Obama over the barbecue pit personally, by name; Christie didn’t run down his policies, peculiarities, and pomposities; his diction, gait and sartorial sense; his patterns of pronunciation, prandial pleasures, haircut hilarities, taste in tobacco; his earballs and earmarks, and every word he has ever uttered, including “and”, “of”, and most especially his very favorite word: “I”. (There’s no “we” in “narcissism”!)

The speech crickets want to make this contest, every contest, a clash of titanic personalities. They don’t understand that this crucial election is not a choice of chumps; it’s a long-overdue Armageddon of axioms and ideas.

Christie very ably (and subtlely!) articulates the ideology of the popular front for liberty: self-reliance, traditional American virtues, American exceptionalism, Capitalism, limited government (limited in size, scope, and especially reach), balanced budgets, low taxes, and even lower spending.

He did not need to throw Obama under the Romney campaign bus. Christie stakes his argument on the moral clarity of tea-party ideas and ideology.

Over the past few months, Barack Obama’s character-assassination squads have spent hundreds of millions of dollars (quite literally) portraying Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Republicans in general as bigots, racists, one-percenter plutocrats, and homophobes; bitter-clingers, furiously waging a war against all women; a war driven by rage, impotence, misogyny, and seething hatred.

Many undecided voters must have tuned into the Republican National Convention with trepidation, wondering if they would see howling jackals slavering over their raw meat and bloody petrodollars. After all, that’s what the President of the Untied States warned them they would see.

So the last thing in the world we need at this convention is an angry, denunciatory speech attacking Barack Obama. It would play right into his clenched fist.

The time for that raw anger has come, and it has gone. Now is the time for up-tempo, upbeat speeches of hope — real hope founded on a workable plan to defibrillate the economy and jumpstart the job market — and change… change back to what has made America unique ever since its founding: We are the only country in the world founded on the basis of a capitalist economy and an ideology of individual liberty, utterly unlike the mass, interest-group, faux “liberté” of the French Revolution, which perverted the very idea of true liberty.

Liberty can only apply to individuals, not marching mobs; that true liberty is what has made us the greatest nation that has ever existed, not only in power but the most moral national as well; whence comes our powerhouse economy (even today), and why we have universally, if sometimes grudgingly, been accepted as the last resort of conscience against tyranny in the world.

But the advance of liberty is occasion for joy, not ugly rage: The speeches at the RNC must be uniformly positive, futurist, and Reaganesque.

If they are, Americans will be stunned by the chasm between what they’re watching on the screen, and the vile distortion and caricature they were sold by the Democrats. Voters will finally perceive how they have been lied to and disrespected by Obama and all the president’s men. Barack Obama will bear the brunt of that backlash, and the election will become a referendum between Reaganesque and Nixonesque.

That will be the tipping point, where a narrow victory for Romney, without coattails, turns into an utter rout of Progressivism — with a firm mandate for the popular front for liberty.

Chris Christie’s speech may not be the “same as it ever was,” “usual suspects,” red-meat affair that liberal Democrat Juan Williams hoped to see; instead, it is an extremely effective “new way” argument for the twenty-first century. It carries the virtue that even folks who like the Big Stick as a person can nevertheless reject his ideas in the ballot box. With clear conscience and no lingering taint of racism, voters can punch the chad for a return to the Constitution-based politics of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

To which I can only say, about bloody time!

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

This summer’s much-anticiapted Hollywood blockbuster, “The Dark Knight Rises,” is getting an unusual boost from Democrats and other foes of Mitt Romney who are eager to tie the Gotham crushing villain to the GOP presidential candidate. Their angle: the mask-wearing, “Venom” gas breathing bad guy has a name that sounds just like Romney’s former investment firm that President Obama has been blasting as a jobs killer.

“Bane” is the terrorist in the new movie who drives the caped crusader out of semi-retirement in the final Batman movie. Democrats, who believe they have Romney on the ropes over the president’s assault on his leadership at Bain Capital, said the comparisons are too rich to ignore.

I say again,

I suppose this might be a very persuasive argument, if the voting population was entirely composed of adolescent boys and aging, spherical anime fans. Bonjour, les enfants!

The self-dubbed, self-deluded, most intelligent president of all time, the One, the lightbringer, whose advent will cause the Earth to cool and the oceans to subside (any minute now), appears to be pinning all his hopes upon a series of sound bites, one-liners, lies, and now — on the freak similarity of names between a successful, job-boosting, private-equity firm and a comic-book villain from the DCverse.

Am I missing something here, or has the president gone bananas?

“It has been observed that movies can reflect the national mood,” said Democratic advisor and former Clinton aide Christopher Lehane. “Whether it is spelled Bain and being put out by the Obama campaign or Bane and being out by Hollywood, the narratives are similar: a highly intelligent villain with offshore interests and a past both are seeking to cover up who had a powerful father and is set on pillaging society,” he added.

It would be comical, if it wasn’t so villainous. All one can do is look at the denizens of D.C. and marvel.

But thank goodness that some Democrats, here and there, have a little more bottom, gravitas, than to turn to a comic book (yes, yes, “graphic novel”) and its attendant movie in a plaintive and desperate attempt to put Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the rear-view mirror… something the Obama campaign has utterly failed to do after years of campaigning and hundreds of millions of dollars pounded down the rathole. Still, some Democrats, at least, cling to the innate dignity of the office and democratic election and confine their campaign themes to serious, weighty issues:

Democratic strategist Karl Frisch suggests a Romney comparison instead to Mr. Burns, the devilish nuclear power plant owner on the Simpsons. “The similarities are endless.”

All right, I know when I’m licked. I guess the Obama nation is like Solla Sollew, where we never have troubles — at least very few. Since we have evidently solved the troubles from our sour economy, our mind-numbing deficit, our collapsing foreign policy, the looming government takeover of all medical care, crony Capitalism Fascism, our pending surrender withdrawal from two wars we had already won, Climategate, Solyndragate, Holdergate, Amnestygate, and our regulatory regurgitation, we might as well wallow in ComiCon-induced cognitive craziness on the campaign cul-de-sac.

But if we’re leading with animated American icons, then I suggest a more apt comparison: Barack H. Obama as — you’re way ahead of me! — Wile E. Coyote, the hapless half-smart slowfoot who is constantly losing the race to much smarter, speedier, and invariably more cheerful Roadrunner. (Whose first appearance was in a 1949 Warner Bros. cartoon titled “Fast and Furry-ous.” You can’t make this stuff up!)

Quick, somebody break open that box from Acme Mendacity and Demagoguery! Something in there is sure to turn the tide…

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Then some time later, he changed his vote to align himself with the liberal justices… after he had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous importuning, bullying, and lightly veiled threats from Left-leaning news readers, from congressional Democrats, and from la Casa Blanca itself:

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy – believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law – led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold….

Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it….

There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the Court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the Court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the President himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.

Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.

It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.

The three conservatives (Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) and the more libertarian Justice Anthony Kennedy, are evidently furious with Roberts for his betrayal of his first vote and throwing away the chance to put an emphatic exclamation point to the slap-back against the creeping cancer of the Commerce-Clause. So irate that the quartet utterly refused to join in any portion of Roberts’ opinion, even the parts with which they (separately) concur:

The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.

Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts’ decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.

This is an amazing (and developing) story. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internets; I am certainly unable to pronounce on the accuracy or truthfulness of Crawford’s analysis. But surprising congratulations are in order to her and to her employer, CBS News, for having the courage to grab the Big Stick by the tail and look the facts in the face.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

However, the so-called penalty for not buying medical insurance can, in theory, be “reasonably” considered a federal tax… thus, not the mandate per se, but the punitive imposition of taxes for failing to comply with it, can be justified under Congress’ general taxing authority.

In other words, when Congress passed the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, what Democrats actually enacted was a trillion-dollar tax hike on the American people… coupled with a vast array of regulations, controlling every aspect of health insurance, that is odious, outrageous, and offensive to liberty.

If the Romney campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) do not immediately cut commercials dubbing this president the “Trillion-Dollar Taxman,” then they should resign in disgrace.

Note that the Obamunists also attempted, fortunately without success, to enact another, even more staggering tax increase — the “carbon tax” that was the central part of Barack “Big Stick” Obama’s Cap and Tax scheme — which could have ended up far more costly even than the trillion-dollar ObamaCare tax itself.

And now they threaten to raise taxes even higher by smugly allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. Yet despite this cascade of “revenue enhancements” that dwarf all previous tax attacks, Obama persists in hurling us into financial oblivion via his trillion-dollar-a-year deficit-spending addiction. The cataclysm we now face certainly validates what conservatives and libertarians have said for many decades: The motto of Big Government is and will always be, never enough!

There is no logically conceivable limit to taxation, no magic level that would cause Democrats to say, “All right, that’s enough tax; from now on, we must reduce the deficit by cutting spending.” Even a tax rate of 100% is insufficient for the insatiable government maw: Even in a state of pure socialism, where the government brazenly asserts that the entire GDP belongs to the Dear Leader, the acolytes of totalitarianism can still monetize debt by simply printing enough “fiat” money to pay it off in worthless paper… at the cost of Weimar-Republic style hyperinflation (at its peak, from January to November 1923, 2.7 billion percent).

In a very real sense then, Big Government can even “raise taxes” on those already paying everything they earn to the feds: Whatever allowance the government gives to the people for basic necessities, that money itself plummets in real value until the paper itself is far more valuable than the currency printed on it. (If only currency were edible!)

Frighteningly, that appears to be the path that Democrats are, if not eager, then at least prepared to follow. Call it the Grecian burn; but who’s left to bail us out?

Jettisoning the last vestige of Democrat rule has become a matter of national survival; the Left has made it an existential imperative, a holy crusade. If November’s vote does not reflect that paradigm change, if it’s another “business as usual” election, then we may be doomed as a people, at least for generations. And it may ultimately turn out that the skeptics in 1776 were right: As soon as the people discover they can vote themselves largess, then Democracy may encode its own final collapse.

Throw the bums out; we have no other option.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

But the rag long ago ceased even to pretend to objectivity or journalistic integrity; over the decades, it twisted itself into nought but a mouthpiece megaphone for millionaire liberals, retweeting any cockamamie policy pronunciamento issuing from the current leaders of the Democratic Party. (Which, for many years now, has generally been the most ideologically radical-Left branch of that party.)

The Times has become Garrett Morris on the old Saturday Night Live, cupping his hands and bellowing — for the supposed benefit of hearing-impaired viewers — “OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT…!”

But what could have happened to bring that East-Coast bundle of pulp paper and squid ink to such a sorry state? Here, Exhibit A: The Times‘ fawning, hagiographic “report” on the ascension of Islamist Mohamed Morsi, long the number-two policy maker in the Muslim Brotherhood, to the presidency of Egypt. The article spans three screens of webness — yet never once gets around to analyzing what the Brotherhood is and what sort of government it demands.

Readers know they’re in trouble from the very first words of this piece of — of journalistic malpractice:

Egypt’s military rulers on Sunday officially recognized Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood as the winner of Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, handing the Islamists both a symbolic triumph and a potent weapon in their struggle for power against the country’s senior generals.

Mr. Morsi, 60, an American-trained engineer and a former Egyptian lawmaker, is the first Islamist elected as head of an Arab state. But 16 months after the military took over at the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Morsi’s victory is an ambiguous milestone in Egypt’s promised transition to democracy.

Why an “ambiguous” milestone? Is the Times going to tell us that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood support and abet terrorist bombings in order to bring about a radical-Islamist theocracy, as in Iran? That it calls for a Sharia-based theocracy to rule Egypt? That is has threatened to renege on the Camp David Accords, which ended (everyone thought) the multidecadal war between Egypt and Israel? No; the Times has in mind a very different impediment to true democracy:

After a week of doubts, delays and fears of a coup since a public ballot count showed Mr. Morsi ahead, the generals have showed a measure of respect for some core elements of electoral democracy — they have accepted a political opponent over their ally, former Gen. Ahmed Shafik, after a vote that international monitors said was credible.

Boiled down, the editors and writers at the Times were terrified that those rightwing generals would snuff out the flame of freedom being unleashed by the radical Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood. But the military failed to attempt the expected coup d’état… what a relief! Now we’ll have heaven on Earth in the Middle East!

This paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the article, casting Mohamed Morsi in the role of William Wallace from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, revolting against a brutal military dictatorship, yet demanding only freedom, civil liberties, and the impartial rule of law. The generals who have ruled Egypt since former president and dictator Hosni Mubarik was ousted are the bad guys, you see — which of course they are. But, reasons the Times (though I use “reasoned” advisedly), if the generals are bad guys, then surely their enemies, the Muslim Brothers, must be the good guys! Why, they can’t both be bad guys; that wouldn’t make sense.

That is, it wouldn’t make sense to an adolescent mind simmered in the witches brew of pop-culture dualism, which fairly describes the typical New-York liberal: Bad guys are opposed by good guys; it follows that the enemy of my enemy must be my brother… or in this case, my Muslim Brother.

Throughout the piece, Morsi and the top ranks of the Jamʿiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (a.k.a., the Muslim Brotherhood), including Morsi’s mentor, Khairat el-Shater, are invariably referred to as leaders, democratically elected, discriminated against, yearning only for the freedom to practice their own religion; while those who oppose the Ikhwan, theocracy, radical Islamism, honor killings, and the like receive instead epithets such as rulers, dictators, and strongmen. The Ikhwan are portrayed like unto the patriotic, colonial American Congress, struggling against the wicked and arbitrary dictatorship of King George III; this election is the Nile equivalent of the American Revolutionary War; and Morsi is George Washington.

The reality is more ambiguous and shady and far less black and white.

(Sidebar: When liberals rail against the “black and white thinking” of the Right, they are projecting their own foibles upon their disputants. The Right, not the Left, is better able to distinguish shades of gray and even color, rather than see a stark contrast between good and evil — the “1% vs. the 99%,” for one glaring and very current example.)

Flushed down the memory hole is the inconvenient truth that the Ikhwan was founded in 1928 as a fascist militant organization fighting against British rule of Egypt; since then, it has frequently denounced in words, yet equally frequently embraced in deeds, terrorism, authoritarianism, perpetual and unnecessary war, endless assassinations, extortion, bribery, and brutal, Quran-based totalitarianism. It has also spawned many murderous terrorist offshoots (spiritually, politically, or both), including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda. Bin Laden complained that the Ikhwan’s principles were sound, but they weren’t ruthless enough in execution.

Typically, angry and aggrieved Moslems join the Ikhwan, become thoroughly radicalized and Islamisized, then become impatient and found their own, more violent organizations; Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s former Number Two and now likely the spiritual leader (and still at large), exemplifies this pattern.

The Wikipedia article on the MB is somewhat tepid, attempting to be non-judgmental; but even so, it cannot help but note a few facts that seem to have flown below the New York Times‘ radar:

The Brotherhood’s credo was and is, “God is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” The Brotherhood’s English language website describes the “principles of the Muslim Brotherhood” as including firstly the introduction of the Islamic Shari`ah as “the basis controlling the affairs of state and society;” and secondly work to unify “Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism”.

Note that by “foreign imperialism,” they do not merely mean occupation by other nations; they apply the same label to anyone, even a native, who is insufficiently radical in his Islamism, or who has too great a committment to true democracy, to individual liberty, to Capitalism, or to religious freedom. If the Ikhwan ever gets enough votes to fully control Egypt, look for that election to be the last they ever see, or at least the last free and fair election. Once the Muslim Brotherhood scales the heights, they’ll pull the ladder up behind them.

They also fundamentally reject freedom of the press; the Ikhwan believe that the only rightly-guided purpose of the press is to indoctrinate all in the ways of the Quran and how to implement them in sharia law… a point the Times might consider and reconsider as it cheers on the Brotherhood’s mounting success.

And of course, the Ikhwan also believes in dissembling about its real beliefs, like Yasser Arafat, the Brotherhood uses the hoary, old, but repeatedly effective PLO trick of disseminating an English-language version of its charter — full of paeons to Western freedoms — while keeping the true, Arabic-language version hidden away from Western eyes, and stuffed chock-a-block with repression, violence, hatred, racism, terrorism, and absolute intolerance.

Speaking of which, here is Muslim Brotherhood spokesman, Dr. Mohamed El-Sayed Habib, First Deputy of the Chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, interviewed on Ikhwanweb, the official website of the Ikhwan; he enunciates the party line in the FAQ:

We believe that the political reform is the true and natural gateway for all other kinds of reform. We have announced our acceptance of democracy that acknowledges political pluralism, the peaceful rotation of power and the fact that the nation is the source of all powers. As we see it, political reform includes the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be, and the freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations, freedom of assembly, etc.

How freedom-minded of them! But Habib continues in the same question:

It also includes the dismantling of all exceptional courts and the annulment of all exceptional laws, establishing the independence of the judiciary, enabling the judiciary to fully and truly supervise general elections so as to ensure that they authentically express people’s will, removing all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil society organizations, etc.

Somehow that lofty pronouncement seems to be in a bit of tension with the Ikhwan’s stated goal of enshrining Sharia law as “the basis controlling the affairs of state and society.” That is to say, turning Egypt into a totalitarian theocracy run of, by, and for militant radical Islamists — where everybody else is relegated to the second-class status of dhimmi; where women can be slain out of hand by their fathers or husbands for any insult to the family honor, real or imagined; where the charge of takfir (un-Moslem), true or false, opens the accused to penalties ranging from looting his assets to torture to slavery to summary execution by stoning; where infidels are without rights in their own lands — and where “infidel” can mean little more than supporting a different sect of radical Islamism than the leaders support; and where one and only one religion is given dominion over the people — certainly appears to be a prime example of “exceptional laws,” and Sharia courts are hardly a bastion of an independent judiciary.

Yet the Times has discover none of this; or else, having discovered it, has quickly disowned it, blotted it out, as conflicting with the pre-cooked narrative, “the way things ought to be.” They stubbornly persist in seeing the world through a prism of good liberals, such as Mohamed Morsi, Khairat el-Shater, and Dr. Habib, engaged in eternal struggle against wicked tyrants, bandits, fraudsters, “patriots,” and religious fanatics — such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI, 80%), the Koch brothers, and Soon-to-Be-President Mitt Romney.

It is for that utter blindness to any fact that fails to fit — hence is not “fit to print” — that thinking people on both Left and Right have abandoned the pinched and drained paper of Pinch Sulzberger. They are now demanding, typically from online news sources, something, anything, with more depth and breadth, sophisticated news analysis, and a relatively unbiased outlook than has been found in the Times for donkeys’ years.

Something like, say, Highlights, or the Weekly Reader.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

And I promise that the sentence above will be the longest and most convoluted in this post.

Krauss purports to prove, whether he admits it or not, that God did not create the universe, and indeed does not exist at all. His thesis culminates with what he alleges to be a scientific — i.e., non-supernatural — answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, which he sees as the crux of what his cohort, militant atheist Richard Dawkins, who wrote the afterword to Krauss’s book, would call the “God delusion.” (I’ll deal with this — the “God of the gaps” argument, a.k.a. the Thunder Fallacy — in more depth below.)

Krauss’s answer to his question is thus: Contemporary quantum mechanics demonstrates that what we have historically called “nothing,” an absence of any physical substance, is in fact something, quantum fields interacting with other quantum fields; and that the original “nothing-something” can reformulate itself as “something-something,” that is, physical particles and suchlike.

Distinct quantum fields can combine in various ways. When they combine in some ways, they create physical particles — electrons, protons, neutrons, other, more exotic critters, and their quark building blocks. But when they combine in other ways, they create “things” that have no mass, no charge, and no other detectable properties… in other words, what earlier scientists would have called “nothing.” (I’m doing my best here as a non-physicist; but even if I get the specifics of Krauss’s scientific argument wrong, that doesn’t change my point, as you will see.)

Under current theory, quantum fields can interact, break up, and realign themselves into different configurations. Which means that fields that are currently combined in ways that create so-called “nothing” can recombine in ways that create physical somethings.

And that is what he means by saying he has solved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Albert’s critique is a bit of handwaving — appropriate because he’s responding to an argument by Krauss that is a lot of handwaving. Albert essentially argues that, by Krauss’s own description, previous ages of scientists, philosophers, and theologians were simply wrong to think that “empty space” actually comprised literaly nothing; it was always something, to wit, quantum fields arranged in certain ways. Therefore, Albert argues, even Krauss agrees that the universe was not created out of nothing but rather out of something; and the title of Krauss’s book is misleading.

And who, Albert argues, created the quantum fields in the first place, not to mention the rules by which they can combine, and the rules preventing them from combining in other ways? Albert argues that all Krauss has done is push divine Creation back one step: Instead of asking, “Who or what created the physical world with us on it?”, we must instead ask, “Who or what created the quantum fields and the physical rules that govern them, such that our physical world came into existence with us on it?”

Which is logically the same question, and Krauss is simply begging it.

Krauss complains that his critics are moving the goal posts. The theologians said that God must exist because how else could the universe be created out of nothing; I have proven that physics itself says things can be created out of nothing; but now the critics say that’s not good enough, because those very theologians were wrong about nothingness in the first place!

Is that unfairly moving the goal posts? No; and for Krauss to maintain that it is ensnares him in the same trap that has caught many religious folk, when they argue, e.g., that evolutionary theory keeps “moving the goal posts.”

Evolutionary science evolves — pun noted — because all science evolves. By the very nature of science, theory is constantly checked against observation; and when empirical measurement finds anomalous results, they must be explained. If they cannot be explained by finding some demonstrable error in the testing or analysis of results, then current theory must be changed to accomodate the new observation.

Science is therefore self-correcting, in a way that other disciplines are not. That is not a bug, it’s a feature.

However, philosophy, to the extent it is grounded in physical reality, must necessarily also change along with the scientific concensus: When Johannes Kepler discovered that the planets orbited the sun, not in circles (with or without “epicycles”) but rather in elipses (squashed circles), philosophy, including religion, had to change its fundamental theory that God pushed the planets around in circles because He is perfect, and the circle is the perfect curve.

Likewise, contemporary religion must remake itself to take into account the scientific truths that the species of Earth, including humans, physically evolved from simpler creatures; and also that quantum theory indicates that what appears to be nothing can reorganize itself into what is obviously something. It’s not “moving the goal posts;” it’s simply philosophy accepting the evolving nature of scientific understanding. Why should that get Krauss’s knickers in a twist?

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Krauss’s (or Albert’s) science; but fortunately, there is no need. The better critique is to get at the core of Krauss’s argument and bypass the question of who or what created quantum fields.

And here it is: Who cares if Krauss has an explanation of how physical somethings can spontaneously spring into existence from nothing? How could that prove the nonexistence of God? The only logical connection that would make that argument work is that Krauss must assume that there is one and only one reason why believers believe in God: because they think there is some “gap” in scientific understanding that can only be filled by God.

Plug that gap, and poof! No more need for God. This, Krauss appears to think he has accomplished.

Francis Collins, author of in indispensible book the Language of God (which I did read) — former head of the Human Genome Project — calls this the “God of the gaps” argument, and it goes much like this:

1. Current scientific theory cannot explain why X occurs.
2. Thus there is a gap in science.
3. Aha! That gap must be where God lives! Clearly, God causes X to occur every time it’s necessary.

But what happens when scientific theory is changed, as above? Suppose science does now explain very nicely why X occurs? What happens to the God of the gap?

There are two general classes of response: The gapper can quibble whether new theory A really does explain gap X; or he can find another aspect Y, a deeper part of X, that is not fully explained by current theory… and aha again, that’s where God actually lives!

Yep, it’s turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down. But that other aspect Y is almost necessarily narrower and more technical than the original X. And as Collins (who is himself very Christian) argues, the gaps in which God lives get smaller and smaller, until finally He is squeezed right out. And that’s why “God of the gaps” theologians oft become atheists: They run out of gaps in which God can hide.

More melodramatically, I call this argument the Thunder Fallacy — that we need God to explain the thunder and lightning, the floods, the earthquakes, and the other scary threats that seem to arise out of nowhere. They’re punishments by God for some sin we have committed.

But isn’t that quite a primitive, petty, and meagre conception of what is supposed to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-good being? I don’t know why the sun shines, so God created it. I don’t know where people came from, so God individually created them. I don’t know how the Bernoulli Effect works, so God reaches down and grabs all the airplanes, holding them in the sky. You may as well say it’s ju-ju.

Your dog doesn’t understand how food keeps appearing in the magic bowl; but to humans, there is a simple explanation. Alas for Fido, it’s simply beyond his ken. And much of the universe is beyond the ken of even the most genius human being; but is everything unexplained therefore unexplainable?

Krauss phrases his killer question as a “why,” but it’s actually a “how” — Under quantum field theory, how, by what mechanism, does something materialize out of what appears to be nothing? Assume Krauss is correct: How in cosmos does that prove there is no God?

Even if it’s possible for a universe to spring into existence ex nihilo, by itself and without being created by God, how does that prove that our own universe was not created by God? At best, Krauss can prove that we cannot use the Thunder Fallacy, the God of the gaps argument, to prove that the existence of Universe requires special creation by God.

Krauss might be able to demonstrate that God is not required to create a universe, but he surely cannot demonstrate that there is no God, or that God did not create this universe; maybe God is not a necessary condition for our universe, but He certainly would be a sufficient one, if He existed. Likewise, believers cannot use science to prove that God does exist and did create this universe, for the same reason you can’t crack a walnut by hitting it with a hard calculus equation: Nutcrackers and mathematics are both useful tools, but they’re hardly interchangeable.

And that is all Krauss has done; he has clearly shown that the existence of God cannot be proven by scientific reasoning… an insight that philosophers and theologians latched onto several centuries ago: If God’s existence and/or nature could be proved by pure reason, argue the religious, then there would be no need for faith.

Speaking as a bona-fide agnostic — not like most, who declare themselves agnostics but in fact are cowardly atheists — I have always understood that God can neither be demonstrated nor refuted by logical or scientific means; He cannot be measured or deduced. I wrote a paper about it at university nearly 35 years ago, and it was an ancient, almost trite argument even then.

Congratulations, Lawrence Krauss… your scientific ontogeny has recapitulated philosophical phylogeny!

All right, all right, so my critique wasn’t any more concise than Albert’s after all. But by golly, it’s more universal and doesn’t fall prey to the Thunder Fallacy. So there. Krauss’s argument that something can arise from what used to be called nothing proves nothing at all about the existence or nonexistence of God. It proves only that that particular “gap” in science has (perhaps) now been filled, thus it cannot be hiding a mysteriously shy and reticent Almighty.

But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Perhaps that’s the reason many on the Left attacked Sarah Palin for giving birth to her son Trig: Progressivist “ethicists” must have wondered why she didn’t just procure an “after-birth abortion.”

The idea that we should allow post-natal killing of babies is, of course, both monstrous and insane; it’s so bizarre that only a card-carrying “ethicist” could hawk it. John Hinderaker naturally rejects such an atavistic, I would say satanic ethic, which flies in the face of thousands of years of Western thought. He’s not one to accept a lunatic assertion just because it’s asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics!

Alas, he then immediately accepts the lunatic assertion next door — because it’s asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Hinderaker buys the same ethicists’ corrolary proposition:

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus.” [Emphasis added -- DaH]

Logically, then, Hinderaker (and nearly all right-to-lifers) would have to agree with the following syllogism:

1. Since said ethicists admit that the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of a newborn;
2. And since all decent and moral Westerners believe that the moral status of a newborn is the same as that of an adult (i.e., that killing a newborn is morally the same as killing an adult);
3. Thus the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of an adult;
4. And therefore, medical ethicists have “proven” that abortion is murder. Quod Erat Demonstrandum!

And thereby hangs the tail.

In the pro-lifers’ effort to prove that abortion is akin to actual murder, as well as in the ethicists’ effort to prove that murder is akin to mere abortion, both sides begin from the very same premise: That there is no moral distinction between a zygote, an embryo, a foetus, and a newborn baby. That is, they accept Premise 1 in the syllogism above.

Contrariwise, I demonstrate the philosophical vacuity of that claim by noting that it goes to prove both that killing a newborn is murder, and also that killing a newborn is not murder.

In general, a premise the leads to a logical contradiction suggests that the premise itself is faulty; that’s the generic structure of what’s called Reductio ad Absurdum: To prove proposition X, you assume its opposite (which can be written ~X) then demonstrate that ~X leads to a contradiction, that is, both conclusions A and ~A at the same time.

This isn’t exactly that situation; for one, there is more than one flaw in both syllogisms. Also, it’s certainly possible that one side is right and the other simply wrong, which eliminates the contradiction. Still, it’s a good bet that Premise (1) is just wrong. As further evidence, most pro-lifers reject it viscerally, even while championing it rhetorically. “Do as we say, not as we do!”

For instance, if (1) above were true, then pro-lifers would treat every early-term miscarriage as a death, and they would hold a funeral for the fertilized egg and mourn for months. Which obviously the vast majority do not. There is certainly sadness; but it’s more the sadness of lost opportunity, what might have been, than the kind of long-term grief that accompanies the utterly tragic death of a newborn baby. To be utterly blunt and Spockian about it, I cannot imagine even Sen. Santorum showing his kids a heavy menstrual flow containing a miscarried fertilized egg. It’s just not the same thing.

And on the flip side, many, many pro-choicers who support abortion nevertheless utterly reject infanticide; and they don’t think of it as “after-birth abortion.” I would guess that more than 99% of Americans — and probably more than 95% of pro-life conservatives — do not de facto treat a miscarriage as they would the death of a newborn; even more telling, the same ultramajorities would not even treat abortion the same as they treat infanticide.

If a mother who engages a physician to murder her newborn, nearly everyone in America would demand that not only the doctor but the mother herself be sentenced to life in prison or even the death penalty. But how many demand life (or death) for women who obtain an abortion?

There is no way to spin it: Even right-to-lifers by and large treat early-term abortions very differently than they would treat infanticide or late-term abortions. Except for a tiny, easily dismissed subgroup, we all discriminate between those two very different acts. Even those who condemn abortion do not call for the same punishment as they rightly demand for infanticides.

Right-to-lifers often argue, against their own actions, that there is no logical place for humanness to begin other than conception (and, as a hidden assumption, they generally equate humanness with moral personhood). But of course, there are many other points that folks can and historically have believed constitute the beginning of moral personhood, e.g.:

1. At conception (week two — remember that you begin counting from the last menstruation, typically two weeks before pregnancy).
2. When the fertilized egg implants itself to the uterine wall, indicating that it’s now a pregnancy (fourth week).
3. When it first begins to divide, indicating that it’s growing (shortly after implantation).
4. At the “Gummy Bear” stage, when it takes on the basic mammalian (quadruped) shape, as seen via ultrasound (sixth week).
5. When the foetus first begins to move, still only detectable via medical equipment (eighth week).
6. When a doctor can first detect a heartbeat (week 10 to 12).
7. At “quickening,” when the mother can first feel the foetus move (about halfway through gestation, week 20-21).
8. When the cerebral cortex becomes “human,” in the sense of developing the brain structures that will allow the eventual baby to use language and think in a human way, as opposed to merely a mammalian or even primate way (eighth month, roughly half-way through the third trimester).
9. At birth.

And on beyond zebra…

10. When the baby draws its first breath (traditional Jewish teaching is that the soul enters the body at that point).
11. At the severing of the umbilical cord, indicating complete autonomy from the mother’s body.
12. After some months or years following the birth, when the liberal “ethicist” finally decides he likes the baby enough not to kill and eat it.

Any one of these points can logically be chosen as the beginning of moral personhood — the point at which the developing foetus or baby should be considered a person and be afforded the moral rights of all other persons. Most of them have, at one time or other in history, been chosen by some society, primitive or sophisticated; for an extreme example, a number of societies have considered children expendable until they reached a certain age.

In fact, I would say that societies are largely defined by who they consider to be “persons.” The more savage a society, the more it tends to restrict personhood to a smaller and smaller subset of the population; they exclude members of non-allied tribes, children under some set age, often women in general, those of insufficient status (especially slaves), those who violate the law, those with mental or physical deformities, those with afflictions or conditions, those thought to be witches or sorcerers, and so forth.

We Americans must choose at what stage of development personhood obtains, as must every society. But we must choose on the basis of a real consensus — based upon how folks act in real life, not some theoretical construct divorced from day to day life. And since real people in the real world do not treat, and never in our history have treated miscarriage the same as the death of a newborn, I think it prudent to find a consensus somewhere north of conception but south of birth.

This doesn’t require that everyone believe that the consensus point marks the place that Nature and Nature’s God give us our souls… the consensus point marks only the point at which our society confers legal personhood, pledging to protect, thenceforth, the rights and liberties of the new legal person.

Therefore, pace, John Hinderaker, but… a right-to-lifer can no more call it “proven” that abortion is as morally bad as infanticide — than can a heartless secularist call it “proven” that infanticide is no morally worse than abortion. Many rational and logical points in foetal development other than either conception or birth can demarcate potential persons, which as yet have no moral rights, from actual persons who certainly do.

I said “north of conception but south of birth”: When any pre-natal point other than conception is chosen, then necessarily, during some of the earliest weeks of gestation, the entity is not a legal person, and abortion is legally allowable. On the other hand, during the later weeks of gestation, the foetus becomes a child and is legally a person; after that point, not only would abortion only be allowed if required to save the mother’s life (not merely her “health”), but every effort must be made to save the child; removing a baby from the womb without attempting to save its life would constitute negligent homicide at the least.

As you can see, logically, we cannot even begin to proceed deciding what to do about abortion until we first establish a national consensus on where we shall define legal personhood to begin. This national consensus cannot be too close to either extreme (conception or birth), because a forced “consensus” is not a concensus at all but a diktat… and experience teaches that a law that is utterly rejected by a large portion of ordinary members of society is a prescription for disaster, perhaps even leading to national suicide. (Cf. same-sex marriage/polygamy in America.)

Alas, we have never grappled, as a society and in a meaningful way, with the definition of personhood; in particular, when it’s conferred and whether there are entities that are biologically human but will never be accorded personhood — an anencephalic baby, for example, or a human being so severely retarded that he or she has none of the most basic attributes we associate with persons.

Of course, nothing stops a society from choosing to confer “created rights” upon non-persons, pre-persons, former persons, or even animals, protecting both those who are expected to develop human-like consciousness, those who never had human-like consciousness, and those who had it at one time, but through disease or misadventure, no longer retain it; note laws protecting those in an irreversible coma, laws prohibiting cruelty to animals, and laws against desecrating the dead. But such laws are actually to preserve the sacred dignity of the persons who love such non-persons.

A state should thus be allowed to choose to protect the rights and liberty of pre-natal life even if it’s not yet legally a person. But all states should be mandated to protect the rights and liberties (including the right to life) of anyone already a person via the national consensus.

My personal choice for the national personhood consensus is Point 8, the humanization of the cerebellum; I believe in a soul, but I believe it can only live in a human, not animal brain; until the brain develops human-like functions, I cannot see that a soul would find a place to fit. But this is likely too far along in the pregnancy to be generally accepted.

Among those who don’t believe in ensoulment, I’m sure you would still find much disagreement about when the entity becomes a person, from conception to deciding the kid is cute enough to live (assuming that doesn’t disrupt the Progressivists’ lifestyle). But we seem to have settled upon a de-facto consensus as somewhere within the second trimester.

For a number of reasons, therefore, I nominate quickening (Point 7) as the logical national consensus for when our society confers legal personhood:

• It’s about halfway through the second trimester, hence halfway through the pregnancy; it’s a nice, round number, and we all tend to like round numbers.
• It’s easily detectable by routine doctor’s examination; hence, such an examination would be determinative for legal purposes.
• It marks the first time the expectant mother can actually feel that the thing inside her is a living being, moving of its own volition; she cannot deny that she has another life growing inside her.
• In Western history, It’s one of the points during gestation that has been frequently chosen by societies for the moment of ensoulment.

(Notice none of these reasons depends upon the specious Roe v. Wade criterion of “viability,” which of course varies depending on the current state of medical technology.)

But whichever point we as a society finally choose, we need to get started on that conversation. Without it, the only principled action we can take regarding abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights is the Monkey Moot: screech hysterically and fling poo at each other.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Let’s make a movie with no real plot in the classic sense, no growth in the characters, no mental or emotional breakdowns. A movie where nobody ever questions his own morality in defending his country. A movie where, when a compadre is killed in battle, the others just carry on the fight, instead of crouching over the body and erupting into hysterical melodrama.

One where, in a supreme coup of “patriotism,” the director hires actors who are actually current or former military personnel, from the very same kind of unit portrayed in the film. How little, patriotic hearts must go pitter-pat at such indulgence!

By all means, let’s show the unenlightened booboisie, the American people, a movie comprising one victorious battle after another, even though we all know the overarching campaign is a lost cause. Never mind the inarguable facts; show the popcorn munchers a movie where the men are always willing to make “sacrifices,” and where the United States is always the good guy who will ultimately triumph, no matter how bad things may look.

Even when there’s a setback, by all means, show us only soldiers who suck it up and do it better next time — and without the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that constitutes drama in the minds of sophisticated New York film crickets. No doubts, no introspection, no existential angst; how is that realistic? How does that show the inevitable bestialization of the warmongers?

A movie with no “boy meets girl” or even “boy meets boy” love story, and where alternative lifestyles simply don’t exist! A movie where men are men (as if gender can ever truly be deterministic), and men don’t discover their feminine side or the inherent inequality of traditional marriage. Heck, a movie where wives refuse to cry until after their husbands or boyfriends have left, because they don’t want to “burden their men” with worry when they’re about to go on a deadly mission.

Yeah, a movie like that. How nice. Just lousy, damned propaganda; rah-rah, flag-waving Americanism. How disgusting. It’s nothing but anti-art; what kind of a brainwashed, mind-melded moron would want to see that garbage? What’s the real point… to bump up military-recruitment stats? Make it seem that war can ever be noble? To “lift morale,” for cripes’ sake? What a low and vulgar consciousness that bespeaks. Who could possibly imagine the brilliant lights of cinema paying even the slightest attention to such “all-American” bubblegum like that.

What film critic could possibly praise trash like — trash like — I forget, what’s the name of that filthy piece of propaganda we’re talking about?

Oh yeah: Films like They Were Expendable (1945), about those crazy, new, fast, maneuverable, and barely armored PT boats, which took on Japanese cruisers and destroyers in the Philippines during World War II. The movie starred, and was partially directed by, Lt. Commander Robert Montgomery (who actually commanded a PT boat during the war) and John Wayne — two conservative Republicans — along with liberal Democrat Donna Reed. It’s considered a classic film today.

~

The war against radical Islamism has never been “Barack H. Obama’s war,” despite the fact that he is the current Commander in Chief — and despite the fact that, as he brags at the drop of a hijab, he is the man who “got” Osama bin Laden. (Oh, sure, the CIA and the SEALs were the ones who actually tracked bin Laden for years, infiltrated into the wilds of Pakistan, hunted him down, entered his compound, took out his bodyguards, and pulled the trigger to send him to the boiling pitch of Jahannam… acting on orders under a program initiated by George W. Bush. But Obama signed the order! Clearly, he deserves the lion’s share of the credit.) But that war was never Obama’s war.

No, the war against radical Islamism has always been seen as Bush’s war… hence good liberals see it as unalloyed evil, folly, and madness. Any movie extolling the virtues of its warriors is, by definition, propaganda.

Inexplicably, liberals have never affixed that libelous label to the heroes of Roosevelt’s war. After all, that’s totally different.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

• For Rick Santorum, the Obamunists plot to smear him as a religious fanatic who wants to erect a theocracy on American soil, and as an ultra-social-conservative lunatic who wants to disenfranchise the entire female sex, burn gays at the stake, and reinstate official government racism, if not the return of slavery itself.

  Alas, Santorum plays right into this strategy by his increasingly hysterical denunciations of Obama as “not a Christian;” he may well not be a Christian — I think his religion is Progressivism; but as electoral strategy, attacking your opponent as irreligious is not calculated to reassure the mushy middle that you’re fit to serve as POTUS.

• For Mitt Romney, their scheme is both simpler and more complex: The Kingpin of gangster government intends to “smear” Romney for being a wealthy man.

  This is simpler, in that nobody can deny that Mitt Romney would be the richest GOP presidential nominee of all time (that is, since the Republican Party was founded in 1854); he’s worth between $190 and $250 million. (JFK — Kerry, not Kennedy — is probably the richest nominee ever; but he doesn’t count as a counterexample, since he’s a Progressivist Democrat, hence by definition busy saving the world, man!)

  But the strategy is also more complex, in that Obama must show not only that Romney is rich, but that there is something disreputable about this; and he must convince tens of millions of voters who are not already “Occupiers” and “99 percenters.”

I don’t really care about Santorum’s response to the inevitable Obamic attacks; I doubt he’ll be the nominee; and if he is, having seen him in action now, I believe he’ll win only if the economic climate is such that any Republican would win… a pious hope, but unlikely.

Thus, Obama will be forced to pivot his slanderous traducements from “evil conservative!” to “one percenter!”, and he’s stuck with trying to explain to the American people why multi-millionaire Republicans like Romney are inherently unfit to command, while multi-millionaire Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry (and Barack Obama) are inevitably great leaders.

And that last is the chink in Obama’s playbook, meaning no disrespect to Jeremy Lin; it lies within Romney’s power, if not within his will, to utterly destroy that meme of attack — or better, to drive it right back into Obama’s court with an overhead smash. He can! But will he?

Will a Capitalist nation (sort of) implicitly reject anybody who’s rich? Egad, I hope not; I can only hope that America has not sunk so low that it treats wealth itself as suspect, and sees liberal Fascism as its cure. Rather, I believe Americans admire achievement; and I believe they understand that wealth “inequality” is precisely what drives the economy, while enforced income equality would kill it… just as water that is all at the same level can do no work: Hydraulics requires some of the water to be higher than the rest; that’s what makes the waterwheel, or the turbine, go round and round.

Romney need never apologize for his wealth; instead, he needs to say something along these lines:

My opponent accuses me of being successful and wealthy — “rich” is the term he uses, I believe. All right, I confess; I am wealthy; I am rich. And you now how I got to be that way? By following the American dream.

My friends, I inherited a lot of money from my dad, George Romney, who worked for decades in the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan. I also inherited a first-rate education. I kept the education, but I gave my entire inheritance to my alma mater… not because there’s anything wrong with money or with parents passing along the fruits of their labors to their kids, but because I wanted to be my own man, to see what I could accomplish on my own. So I can honestly say I’ve earned every dollar I have.

Unlike my opponent, nobody gave me a suspiciously huge book contract when I was an obscure law student at Harvard; when I was an obscure law student at Harvard, I was simultaneously an obscure business student at Harvard; and I didn’t have time to write a dream book about my father, anyway… or put my name on some radical professor’s book, as the case may be.

I also never got a sweetheard land deal from a lobbyist and campaign fundraiser who was later convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering. So you see, I didn’t have the advantages growing up that my opponent did.

Instead, I worked hard, played by the rules, and kept faith with my family, my friends, my competitors, and my God. And I succeeded, as so many others have done before and after, some more, some less. I thank God everyday for the United States of America, for liberty, and for the Capitalism that allows not only the privileged but the downtrodden to rise to heights limited only by their own talent, drive, persistence, and their refusal to accept artificial limits on achievement. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas.

My opponent is a great believer in limiting achievements. Four years ago, all he could talk about was vague “hope and change,” and how his presidency would heal the Earth, calm the oceans, and how the lamb would lie down with the lion. A pocketful of stimuluses, ObamaCares, and trillions of wasted spending later, not too many folks think they’re better off now than four years ago. Except the lion, who got a nice rack of lamb on the deal.

This time, all my opponent can talk about are the few minor things he did that more or less worked, tiny islands in a vast sea of failure, diminished expectations, and a long, steady collapse of the American dream and of America itself… if we let him.

Let’s not.

Yeah, I’m rich. And I want all of you here, everyone hearing these words, to become rich too — or to write the great American novel (without a ghostwriter), or invent a molecule-sized computer, or design the most beautiful shopping mall ever built, or become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Whatever your dream happens to be, never be ashamed or apologetic about succeeding. Be joyous! Be proud! I’m proud of the companies I helped save when I worked at Bain Capital and made a pile of money; and I kick myself for the companies that we couldn’t save.

But that’s Capitalism: In order to earn the right to succeed, you must accept the right to fail. Failure can be painful, but it teaches us to do it better next time.

There have been times I’ve failed, and times I’ve succeeded. On the whole, I like winning better than losing, not just for me but for everybody.

I guess that makes me both a Republican and an American!

All right, all right, I got a little carried away; but I was having fun cheering and defending achievement, wealth, and Capitalism with joyous abandon; I never apologize for anything but not doing my best.

Barack Obama is my political antiparticle, forever begging forgiveness for the achievements of his betters.

I reckon that makes him a liberal.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Rather, that was one of the very reasons for enacting ObamaCare in the first place.

As many of us said back in 2009, the purpose of ObamaCare was never to give health insurance to needy people who couldn’t afford it. First, that category was nearly empty:

• The deserving poor were already covered by Medicaid; and if necessary, its qualification threshold could have been temporarily lowered to allow more people to benefit — say, by expanding availability to those who had recently lost their jobs (hence health insurance) but were not yet living below the Medicaid poverty line.

• The biggest chunk of those who did not have health insurance comprised the rich (who prefer to pay for their health care as necessary, rather than buy insurance), and the young, healthy, and shortsighted, who can afford health care but choose instead to gamble that they won’t get so sick or injured that they need expensive treatment. Making such a choice, even if it turns out to be a big mistake, is part of individual liberty. The proper “solution” is to allow us that liberty, then hold individuals accountable for their own decisions; actions have consequences. (Innocents swept up in those bad decisions, such as children, can be helped separately.)

• Finally, a small percentage of the uninsured could have afforded a cheaper, stripped-down policy, but cannot afford the “Cadillac” health-care plans whose costs are driven up by government mandates and regulations.

  For those unfortunates, the easiest fix — which would have benefitted everyone else as well — was to eliminate all the government meddling the caused the problem in the first place: Requiring health insurance by law to cover a littany of specialized services; policies that make it difficult for insurance companies to offer greater variety in policies, such as a medical savings account coupled with catastrophic care (which encourage more parsimony among patients, as they must pay to refill their MSA if depleted); regulations prohibiting insurance companies from offering policies cross-state and cross-border; overly plaintiff-friendly (and especially lawyer-friendly) medical malpractice laws; and so forth.

Real problems, such as people with pre-existing conditions (the faux “casus belli” for the war against private insurance), could have been handled the same way bad drivers are handled for automobile insurance: Create an “assigned risk” pool among health insurers to spread the cost; allow a reasonable increase in rates for those with such conditions, and have a reasonably short waiting period (e.g., six months) before full coverage occurs; and allow for temporary government assistance for those who truly cannot wait and incur unpayable costs. (This isn’t laissez-faire Capitalism, of course; but it’s a reasonable and inexpensive compromise between liberty and safety net.)

Such reforms would have cost a fraction of the trillion dollars that ObamaCare expropriated from the private sector. In fact, once the lifting of government mandates and the squelching of “jackpot justice” malpractice suits lowered actual health-care costs, insurance reform might have wound up cheaper than the original system it replaced. And in any event, it would have been a move towards greater freedom of choice for employers and individuals.

But the Obamunists had precisely the opposite purpose from the beginning; rather than freedom, their ultimate goal was to put more Americans than ever before under the iron boot-heel of the government. Never was it about health insurance for the poor and uninsured; it was always about the federal government seizing control not only of the health care of individuals but also nationalizing those state and local health programs already in place. ObamaCare was, first and last, a power grab by the federal government at the expense of states, local governments, and individual Americans.

So please, let’s not imitate Captain Renault in Casablanca — shocked, shocked to discover that Barack Obama has violated our First-Amendment right to freedom of religion! In fact, that specific mandate was at the heart of ObamaCare tyranny: a frontal assault on the Catholic church in particular, which is so virulently hated by the gay-activist and feminist wings of the Left.

The only element of this policy that should shock anyone is the unbelievably hamfisted way that Obama decreed it: A politically savvy politician would have patiently held off until after the election, giving himself two years to allow the furor to die down.

Instead, the president once again mistook unanimity among his left-liberal friends for a Progressivist “consensus” among the American people; he lives in a bubble of epistemic closure, talking only to true-blue believers on the left. I formerly gave him the nickname “Lucky Lefty,” because (a) he is left handed, (b) he is left-leaning, and (c) he was extraordinarily lucky. Well he’s still (a) and (b), but not so much (c) anymore, so I can no longer call him that.

Obama’s new nickname is “Bubble Boy,” honoring his world view.

But what’s done is done and cannot be undone; Obama has ripped off the mask, and he can’t put it back into the bottle. We now see ObamaCare in all its naked savagery and unAmericanism. Thank goodness for Obamunist “dumbth!”

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

But I recoil in horror from others, notably his demand that schools teach the “scientific alternative” to evolutionary biology (by which he means the thoroughly un-scientific and misnamed “intelligent design”); and he is completely opposed to embryonic stem-cell research funding, without consideration that such research can probably be done without destroying the embryos. (I’m using Wikipedia’s list of some of his positions, though I did backtrack as much as possible to the primary-source interviews and Santorum’s own site.)

But considering the second part of the question — whether his positions on social issues are so extreme as to drive me away, despite his fairly good fiscal and foreign policies (which are at least somewhat better than Romney’s) — I’m on firmer ground. Santorum supports House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI, 96%) spending-cut plan and pushes for moderate reforms to Medicare and Social Security, but nothing spectacular like privatization (too bad). On the foreign-policy front, he supports the War Against Radical Islamism (WARI) and wants to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites (good if he can pull it off, bad if he tries and fails).

So which side wins? Although I am appalled by what a friend of mine refers to as Santorum’s “Flat-Earth Catholicism,” I just don’t think it would ever come up in a Rick Santorum presidency, not substantively. I doubt any state is going to attempt to outlaw “sodomy,” adultery, or contraception; and even if it tried, surely the opinion of the POTUS would matter little if any in the ensuing court fight.

Where the social stances might really matter, however, is in the election itself. I’m not worried that President Santorum would install a “Nehemiah Scudder” style prophetic theocracy (though 2012 is the very year the Rev. Scudder takes over, according to Robert Heinlein’s “future history” timeline!); but a great many voters might fear just that. Irrational, yes; but elections rarely turn on rational and logical cogitation alone. Would Santorum’s goofier social stances so frighten away voters not on the religious right?

Yes, probably some. But how many? Fortunately, most of Santorum’s apostasies from the norms of modern thought are fairly technical in nature, such as the distinction between science and so-called “intelligent design,” which looms very large indeed within the real scientific community but likely induces nothing from the mass of voters but a puzzled “Eh?” Most of the social positions will just zoom along below the electoral radar.

I believe the biggest danger would be Santorum’s suggestion that, contrary to the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, Americans have no fundamental right to privacy. Such a stance may make sense in a technical, legal sense, at least as the Court clumsily expressed the thought in the case in question; but the vast majority of Americans passionately believe that there exists a fundamental core of individual liberty, inside of which government may not legislate.

The Court shouldn’t have called it “privacy;” and it certainly shouldn’t have concluded (in Roe v. Wade) that the right of “privacy” includes the right to abort zygotes, foetuses, and even babies within minutes of being fully born. (Actually, I believe that last position is an abomination even under Roe; my, what progress we have made!) Ne’theless, nearly everybody agrees that there is an irreducible shell of personal liberty surrounding every man and woman that protects him from a totalitarian government run amok.

I can prove my case with a single example: Does anybody believe that it would be constitutional for a state to enact a law proscribing how many times per week a husband and wife are allowed to make love in their own home?

If you answer No, then you necessarily believe that (a) such a law breaches that fundamental core of individual liberty, the irreducible shell; and (b) there are inviolable limits to federal and state government beyond those explicitly written into the Constitiution.

To the extent that voters believe Rick Santorum’s dismissal of a “right to privacy” means he rejects the irreducible shell of personal liberty described above, said voters will be very likely to vote for Barack H. Obama over the “theocratic” Rick Santorum.

Santorum’s vital task, then, is to reassure Americans that his thinking on what most people envision when they hear the word “privacy” is still aligned within the mainstream of modern thought; that he does not advocate government control over aspects of life that the huge majority believe belong to the conscience of the individual, not the diktats of a Council of Experts.

If Santorum can assure voters — including the arrogant author of this post — that he is not a “Flat-Earther” on any social issue that really counts, then we might be persuaded to support him more than Mitt Romney. That is, until and unless Santorum’s campaign collapses like all the other not-romneys before him.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

The bare bones of the agreement our president is hammering out with the Taliban is this:

• Americans unconditionally withdraw all forces from Afghanistan.
• We give up all objection to the Taliban returning to power (as part of a “coalition” with the Karzai government * ).
• We build a headquarters compound for the Taliban.
• We announce that we are no longer enemies with the Taliban.
• We release all Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay and allow them to return to Afghanistan — and resume the activities that landed them in Gitmo in the first place.
• We issue an apology from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan; after which Obama goes barefoot and bareheaded to Kandahar, where he bows deeply from the waist and begs forgiveness — for George W. Bush’s wickedness.

(That last bullet point isn’t official; I’m just logically extrapolating.)

In the Power Line post, John Hinderacker theorizes about what President B.O. has in mind:

[T]he Afghanistan war is deeply unpopular [it is? I thought that was the good war! -- DaH], and Obama wants to run for re-election next November on the boast that he “ended two wars.” The baleful consequences of re-installing the Taliban in Afghanistan will not appear until long after the next election campaign, which is all that Obama cares about.

John implies, I believe, that the maneuver will have the desired effect: Obama will be lionized for being the peacemaker, Bush reviled as a warmonger, and this will give Bubble Boy a swift boost into a second term. But bear in mind that traditionally, the closer we approach an election, the more pessimistic become the lads at Power Line.

I have a different take on the political outcome of Obama “workin’ the machinations behind the scenes,” as Louis Farrakhan might put it. Rather than a political triumph for Obama, I see a soft spot that even the Republican Party will be able to hit while dead drunk and with one eye tied behind its back — which, to be honest, is the way it usually campaigns.

Here’s the plan. We wait until Barack Obama begins strutting and chest thumping about how he has “ended two wars,” then we respond thus:

President Obama has discovered a super-easy way to end any war quickly: just surrender. We prematurely withdraw from Afghanistan at the same time we prematurely withdraw from Iraq, leaving the door wide open to an Iranian invasion; what a diplomatic masterstroke! Obama becomes the first president in American history to lose two wars… simultaneously!

It seems the One We Have Been Waiting For actually believes that surrendering to two different gangs of radical Islamists is America’s greatest national-security triumph, and he expects us to reward him with another term. Even worse, these are two wars that we had already won — that is, until Barack Obama took over and found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Heckuva job, Mr. President.

I have no idea who gave him the cockamamie idea to bring the Taliban back in Afghanistan and to prematurely withdraw from Iraq and allow Iran to take over. It’s as if in 1945, after the Germans surrendered in World War II, FDR had entered into secret negotiations with the surviving Nazis to withdraw all American troops, then help restore the Nazi Party to power again in Germany… while simultaneously encouraging the Soviets to seize control of Japan, China, and the Philippines.

Even Jimmy Carter stands in awe of such a colossal concatenation of catastrophe.

Barack Obama has pulled off a feat that none of us thought possible: His foreign and national-security policy has failed even worse than his domestic and economic policy… a breathtaking achievement!

I say, bring it on; how I long to have that debate. What is Obama going to argue? “Look, it has been three months already, and the Taliban has not yet reinstated mass torture-executions of Christians, moderate Moslems, and uppity women!”

Well of course not: Part of Obama’s secret deal with the Taliban requires them to hold off until Obama is safely reelected… probably the only clause of the contract they will fulfill; and then only because having Barack Hussein Obama continue to occupy the White House is in the Taliban’s best interest, and Iran’s as well.

All that’s left is to declare all American hydrocarbon fuel off-limits at the very moment the Iranians decide to blockade the Strait of Hormuz; then the cosmic Obasmic failure will be complete, thorough — and irreversible.

* Note that the Taliban and Hamid Karzai’s government are deadly, sworn enemies; how’s that parlay going to work out?

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

But we will know — and very soon, too. I have in mind an infallible test, one that the Godfather might not even realize he’s taking.

There is little that a candidate for public office can do to punish a political operation that is savaging the principal. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to (a) push a positive public-policy agenda for the voters, (b) respond to political attacks by competitors and launch his own counterattacks, and (c) chastise third-party liars and libelers clandestinely dispatched by ideological enemies.

He just has to shrug off (c) and hope that nobody believes the slanders anyway; he simply doesn’t have the option of nuking the craven dastards properly — that is, while he’s still in the game scrambling for nomination or election.

But it’s all topsy-turvey once a candidate drops out of the running. At that point, he has given up all hope of election this cycle… so he has nothing left to lose by crushing his tawdry traducers. In fact, if he is to run again in the future with any hope of success, he is obliged to clear his good name; else his next opponent will cheerfully resurrect the old and unanswered charges, jump-starting the scandal serenade once again. The once and never again candidate would be forever barred from running for president, governor, congressman, or Chairman of the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society.

Thus we come to Mr. Cain, who abruptly announced yesterday that he is no longer in play to be President of the United States… who thus is also finally free to fully answer his accusers — most specifically Miss Ginger White, a longtime “friend” who now claims to have engaged in a 13-year sex romp with the erstwhile CEO of Godfather Pizza.

And so at last we come to the test: Now that Cain has dropped out of the race, if he is an innocent victim of calumny, he must go after Miss White in court.

If Cain sues White for libel and slander, her only defense would be truth. She certainly cannot claim never to have said that they had a long-term affair; she said it on national TV. Nor can she claim that she caused him no damages; arguably, it cost him his shot at the presidency! Neither can she rely upon his status as a public figure (which of course he is), because she certainly knows for a fact whether they had an affair; therefore, if they did not, yet she said they did, then that would certainly satisfy the requirement of “actual malice.”

No, no, and no; her only defense is to claim truth. But in such a case, my non-lawyer understanding is that truth is an “affirmative defense”… meaning the burden of proof shifts to the defendant, Miss White, to prove that they did indeed have an affair. Cain would not have to prove they didn’t; White would have to prove that they did. If she could not, she would lose her case; White would be slapped with potentially ruinous damages, and more to the point, Herman Cain would be utterly vindicated.

In fact, although there is no logical connection, if a court were to find Miss White liable for libel, or if she ‘fessed up and apologized, that verdict would cast grave doubt in most people’s minds about all the other accusations against Cain as well; that’s just how people think. If the worst charge against him is demolished as a mean-spirited, vicious falsehood, who’s going to believe the lesser charges? Only those who never would have voted for him anyway.

Contrariwise, if the dame really can produce the complete cell-phone records she claims to have — including the content of text messages and e-mails that show it really was an affair, not merely friendship — then Cain himself would surely know it. In that case, he might make loud noises and wave his hands in the air, but he would never run the risk of actually filing a lawsuit he was destined to lose. Fighting such a high-profile case and losing it would crush his reputation far flatter than raging to the skies but avoiding a court of law like an atheist shies away from a cross.

So that is the acid test of Herman Cain’s veracity and fidelity: Simpy put, if he files a charge of libel and slander in court and dares White to claim “truth” as a defense, then he is very likely innocent of the charges.

But if he fumfahs around, rattling the bars of his cage but never actually making a federal case out of it, then I will fairly conclude that he’s guilty on all counts.

As I said, I reckon we’ll know pretty soon; Cain’s lawyer, Lin Wood, has already demanded those records from White; but he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. Now that Cain is a civilian once more, he’s going to have to either fish or get off the pot.

And then we’ll all know whether he was a man with a mission — or a man with a secret.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

First, the poll’s respondents are actually adults, not likely voters; Time derives the likely-voter percent by using a tried but provably untrue turnout model: asking respondents, “hey, you gonna vote?” Anybody who said “Yes” (838 out of 1,001) is listed as a likely voter. (The poll didn’t even ask whether said likely voter bothered to vote in 2008 or 2010.)

In the last election (2010), a whopping 37.8% of adults turned out to vote. In fact, in the banner year of 2008, when turnout was the highest in four decades, when We were all Waiting for the One, turnout hit a record high of 56.8% of adults.

It’s gibbering madness to fantasize that next year’s turnout will be 84% — higher than has ever been measured going at least as far back as the Disputed Election of 1824 (turnout 26.9%), a four-way cage match between Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, and Henry Clay — all in the same Democratic-Republican party, funnily enough — which ended climactically with the House of Representatives picking Quincy Adams, after he (seemingly) bribed Speaker of the House Henry Clay by offering him the job of Secretary of State.

Assuming turnout for the 2012 election is the same as in 2008 — which itself is extraordinarily unlikely — that still means that a third of those who insist they plan to vote… won’t. And as usual, most of these “phantom voters” will be Democrats. Conclusion: The actual turnout will be significantly more conservative than the wet-dream turnout that Time envisions.

(The highest recorded turnout was close, however, to Time’s fairy-godmother wish; 81.8% of voting-age men voted in the centennial election of 1876, between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, considered probably the most corrupt presidential election in American history — including twenty disputed electoral votes.)

Second point, as easily seen by the complete results, even the pool of respondents itself oversampled liberals and oversampled Democrats.

Party trust and support

Q5. REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU USUALLY VOTE, OVERALL, WHICH PARTY – (THE DEMOCRATS) OR (THE REPUBLICANS) — DO YOU TRUST TO DO A BETTER JOB IN DEALING WITH THE MAIN PROBLEMS THE NATION FACES OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS?

Democrats: 42% Republicans: 31%

Q6. IN POLITICS AS TODAY, ARE YOUR VIEWS BEST REPRESENTED BY THE (DEMOCRATIC PARTY), (REPUBLICAN PARTY), THE TEA PARTY, ANOTHER PARTY, OR DO NONE OF THE PARTIES REALLY REPRESENT YOUR VIEWS?

Democrats: 30% Republicans: 17% Tea Party: 12% None: 35%

(Note that there are more self-described Democrats, 30%, than self-described Republicans and tea partiers combined, 29%.)

“Tea Party” support and impact

Q8. ON ANOTHER ISSUE, IS YOUR OPINION OF THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT VERY FAVORABLE, SOMEWHAT FAVORABLE, SOMEWHAT UNFAVORABLE, VERY UNFAVORABLE, OR DON’T YOU KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE TEA PARTY TO HAVE AN OPINION?

Very fav: 8% Somewhat fav: 19% Somewhat unfav: 9% Very unfav: 24%

(Combined favorable: 27%; combined unfavorable: 33% — unfavorable = +6 points.)

Q9. HAS THE THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT HAD A POSITIVE IMPACT ON AMERICAN POLITICS TODAY, A NEGATIVE IMPACT, OR HAS IT HAD LITTLE IMPACT?

Positive: 34% Negative: 40% Little: 25%

Q10. DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A MEMBER OR FOLLOWER OF THE TEA PARTY, OR NOT?

Yes: 6% [11%] No: 93% [88%]

(Numbers in [brackets] indicate subpool of those who say they are familiar with the “Tea Party.”)

Occupy Wall Street support and impact

Q11. IN THE PAST FEW DAYS, A GROUP OF PROTESTORS HAS BEEN GATHERING ON WALL STREET IN NEW YORK CITY AND SOME OTHER CITIES TO PROTEST POLICIES WHICH THEY SAY FAVOR THE RICH, THE GOVERNMENT’S BANK BAILOUT, AND THE INFLUENCE OF MONEY IN OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM. IS YOUR OPINION OF THESE PROTESTS VERY FAVORABLE, SOMEWHAT FAVORABLE, SOMEWHAT UNFAVORABLE, VERY UNFAVORABLE, OR DON’T YOU KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE PROTESTS TO HAVE AN OPINION?

Very fav: 25% Somewhat fav: 29% Somewhat unfav: 10% Very unfav: 13%

(Combined favorable: 54%; combined unfavorable: 23% — favorable = +31 points!)

Q12A. IN YOUR VIEW, WILL THIS PROTEST MOVEMENT HAVE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON AMERICAN POLITICS TODAY, A NEGATIVE IMPACT, OR WILL IT HAVE LITTLE IMPACT ON AMERICAN POLITICS TODAY?

Positive: 30% Negative: 9% Little: 56%

These are the shibboleth questions, those that fairly clearly demarcate respondents as either mostly liberal or mostly conservative. Notice that in each case, the poll shows a decided tilt away from conservativism and towards liberalism, which I believe is very much at odds with the actual voting electorate today, at least based upon the 2010 election results.

I could be wrong; mayhap voters flirted with conservative policies and politicians for one electoral moment but returned to the liberal fold in the past year. However, unless you’re willing to buy that idea, you needn’t fret about this Time poll: It’s more than likely heavily weighted towards the Left, as are most polls commissioned by left-leaning media giants — especially in the “present emergecy” of a pending Obamic defeat.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

But I reject the very premise that this happy death will affect Obama’s electoral chances whatsoever. Here’s why.

President B.O. has long since proven himself a fool as far as actual governance goes; but if he tries to grab credit for the death of Qaddafi, killed by as yet unknown rebels within the anti-Qaddafi alliance very loosely controlled by the so-called National Transitional Council, Obama will prove himself a fool even as a politician.

(As of this moment, AP is trying to push the meme that Qaddafi’s death is part of “a string of foreign policy victories this year for the Obama administration” for Obama; but the President himself is disclaiming personal credit. For a man as conceited as he, that can only mean even he thinks it will not be helpful to his campaign. Consider: The killing of Osama bin Laden was clearly of tremendously greater significance to Americans than the killing of Qaddafi; yet the former assassination yielded only a two-week blip in Obama’s approval polling, before it resumed its slide towards Obamic irrelevancy.)

So why doesn’t this “victory” translate into a big boost to Obama’s faltering reelection campaign, even on the foreign-policy front?

• The death of Qaddafi does not signify the end of hostilities; it signals only the transition from rebellion against tyranny to full civil war. The NTC controls nothing; there are countless armed militias and armies based in many different regions throughout what used to be called Libya (I say that because I expect the country to fracture into several countries — de facto if not de jure!) These armed groups will never peacefully surrender their arms (hence their power) to any one of the many factions; they will fight their way to a seat at the big table. Does Obama really want to claim “credit” for a massive civil war with tens or hundreds of thousands of dead in a failed nation of only six and a half million?

• Because Obama tried to do this on the cheap, without sending any serious contingent of the American military, we shall have next to nothing to say about the ultimate configuration (if any) that X-Libya takes. It could easily end up more like Afghanistan than like Turkey or Iraq, and might even be more like Iran. Does Obama really want to claim credit for Libya going from a brutal fascist dictatorship under Qaddafi to a brutal, radical-Islamist dictatorship under a Muslim Brotherhood-based terrorist coalition?

  Oh yeah; that’ll boost his reelection chances.

• Any putative political benefit the administration might hope to gain due from the Libyan situation already happened when Qaddafi was driven from power months ago; the dénouement of Qaddafi’s bodily death is actually an anticlimax. It will likely produce nothing but a shrug from voters before they return to worrying about the economy and Obamacare.

• Finally, the entire country knows that Obama tried to “lead from behind” in the Libya adventure; he refused even to take the lead role in the NATO involvement, let alone the lead role in the fighting.

  We mostly fought with drone planes armed with Hellfire missiles. While this reticence may have been justified, given the uncertainty of outcome, the One cannot then turn around and believably claim to be Dwight David Eisenhower, or even David Petraeus. We did little, and the whole world knows it.

Maybe it was a good we did little; frankly, I wish we had done even less. But passive acquiescence isn’t the “right stuff” on which a jubilant reelection is founded. I believe that Obama has maybe a 30% chance of being reelected; weirder things have happened in presidential years. But the chance that the death of Qaddafi will in any way influence the American presidential election is nil, as near as makes no difference.

The 2012 election — like every presidential election — will turn on three cosmic issues, none of which lines up in Obama’s favor:

1. The voters’ assessment of Obama’s character and tenure, which at the moment is hovering just slightly above the similar assessment of George W. Bush in 2008.

   But of course, Bush wasn’t running for reelection then; sorry, B.O.

   This assessment alone is the strongest force pushing towards Obama’s defeat: As president, he comes across as weak, vain, vacillating, pompous, incompetent, cowardly, bullying, and peevish; and his policies have almost uniformly enraged the electorate ever since the passage of Obamacare (without a single Republican vote).

2. The continuing and deteriorating economic situation, exacerbated by policies such as the trillion-dollar stimulus; the failed attempt at a second, half-trillion-dollar bride of stimulus; the tax increases; continual threats of more punitive actions against “the rich” and more redistributionist policies; the staggering number of major, new regulations inhibiting business from recovering; the terrible economic uncertainties stemming from Obamacare; Obama’s war on fossil fuels and nuclear power, which has crippled our ability to develop sufficient energy to run a rich country of 300 million souls; and the economic “epistemic closure” of the minds of his advisors and cabinet members, the pandemic of ignorance about Capitalism actually works, which has ripped through the organs of government like fast-moving financial neurovirus, leaving every public civic agency and institution in a state of anti-market madness.

3. The utter folly of Obama’s foreign policy, notwithstanding AP’s “string of foreign policy victories.” This election, foreign policy is of lesser impact than the other two elements of reelection; but it’s still significant, both for the disrespect and mockery which other countries now turn upon America (where once was respect and even fear), and also for the forced kow-towing to Red China (we’re so desperate for their investment, which keeps us from total collapse), and our inexplicable, fatalist acquiescence to the provocations of Iran.

   Iran’s obvious contempt for us as adversary rose to a crescendo with the massive terrorist bombings Iran tried to perpetrate on American soil, attacks thwarted only because the FBI and DEA took time out from their busy schedule of funneling automatic weapons to Mexican drug lords to befool the Iranian agent at the core of the terrorist attacks.

Those three questions — assessment of the first term, of the economic state of the Union, and of foreign policy — are the three legs of the reelection stool for any president. They vary in respective importance from election to election, depending on the situation; but taken together, they nearly always determine the outcome. And the voters’ assessments of President B.O. are in freefall on all three fronts.

Can Obama turn it all around in the remaining twelvemonth? It would take divine (or diabolical) intervention to reverse the trendline and pull off what would be the greatest electoral comeback in American history.

But even the possibility of such intervention is stifled by Obama himself, who appears, astonishingly, to believe that he’s been a spectacularly good president, that he still enjoys the 70% approval he had right after being elected, and that the people simply love his policies; he thus sees no reason to change even jot or tittle of policy or demeanor. The President thinks that all he must do to be swept into a second term by general acclamation — possibly without even the fuss and feathers of an election — is just explain himself better, so the rabble understand his transcendent brilliance and how lucky America is that he has deigned to become our philosopher king. He thinks that he needs only give another speech or two, or fifty, and all will be well.

But for most Americans and for some time now, his speeches have had the opposite effect: They solidify dissent and convince voters that Obama is even more clueless today than in 2008. When charged with being all hat and no cattle, the very worst defense the accused can offer is — another speech!

For these and many other reasons sufficient to my mind, I cannot see Barack H. Obama managing to pull yet another rabbit out of his sleeve. He had a phenomenal run of luck in 2008, both in world events and in picking the perfect opponent; but such “perfect storms” happen only once in a century. To slightly paraphrase George Orwell, the liberal-fascist octopus has sung its swan song.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

I can’t even make fun of this self parody. The mind boggles. Imagination fails me:

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

Oh for heaven’s sake, gentle readers, close your gaping mouths! We are not a codfish. Let us continue:

In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful….

The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable….

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

They could be spacewhales who sing us into oblivion! Or… or… the aliens could be gigantic balls of sentient phlegm that slime the Earth to death! Or intelligent carrots and absorb us for fertilizer! ¡Rabanos radiactivos!

But the most chilling scenario was undoubtedly suggested by the world renowned globaloney philosopher king, Nobel-Prize winner, and former presidential loser, Algore:

“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence(s)] because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

Great leaping horny toads, Mankind may be on the verge of invasion by extraterrestrial eco-nuts!

Not that the authors of the paper have any inherent political bias, you understand; as can easily be seen from this excerpt from the study itself, they have a completely open mind about what would constitute good aliens and bad aliens:

As a starting point, it is helpful to think of ETI as trying to maximize some sort of value function.2 Specifically, they are trying to maximize intrinsic value, which is something that is valuable for its own sake. Intrinsic value contrasts with extrinsic value, in particular instrumental value, which is valuable because it causes additional value. One can place intrinsic value on many different things, such as life, ecosystems, happiness, knowledge, or beauty. Human ethics is often anthropocentric in the sense that it places intrinsic value only on human phenomena, such as human life, human happiness, or other human factors. Such anthropocentrism is selfish on a civilizational scale because it involves humans only placing intrinsic value on the interests of their own civilization. In contrast, a universalist ethical framework would place equal intrinsic value on certain phenomena regardless of which civilizations possessed these phenomena. For example, a universalist civilization that places intrinsic value on life will place equal intrinsic value on all life, regardless of which civilization (or non-civilization) the life is part of. In this case, the civilization will try to maximize the total amount of life, regardless of whose life it is maximizing. If instead it places intrinsic value on some phenomenon other than life, then it will try to maximize that phenomenon wherever it occurs.

So you see, the authors give us a bipartisan compromise: Good aliens are socialist collectivists, while bad aliens are — ugh — selfish capitalists. But what about us humans? Where do we rate on the consciousness scale, from lowly selfishness to lofty universality?

Conflicts between humans are often, though not necessarily always, rooted in selfishness. These conflicts include struggles for power, land, resources, prestige, and many other instruments of self-interest. Even when human conflicts have overtones of being for some higher purpose, such as for liberty or against oppression, the basic desire for the survival and flourishing of the self often remains a core motivation. Likewise other conflicts we see throughout the sentient animal kingdom appear to be motivated by the desire for instruments of self-interest such as survival, food, or territory [35]. While non-sentient species (animal or otherwise) may also appear to act in their own self-interest, it is inappropriate to attribute intent to them because intent is presumably a property of sentience.

And lest you imagine that the author of the Guardian article was just reading more into the report than the scientists actually wrote, let me hasten to reassure you. From the report itself:

The possibility of harmful contact with ETI suggests that we may use some caution for METI [messages to ETI]. Given that we have already altered our environment in ways that may viewed as unethical by universalist ETI, it may be prudent to avoid sending any message that shows evidence of our negative environmental impact. The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere over recent time may be a poor choice for a message because it would show a rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide from human activity. Likewise, any message that indicates of widespread loss of biodiversity or rapid rates of expansion may be dangerous if received by such universalist ETI. On the other hand, advanced ETI may already know about our rapid environmental impact by listening to leaked electromagnetic signals or observing changes in Earth’s spectral signature. In this case, it might be prudent for any message we send to avoid denying our environmental impact so as to avoid the ETI catching us in a lie….

Another recommendation is that humanity should avoid giving off the appearance of being a rapidly expansive civilization. If an ETI perceives humanity as such, then it may be inclined to attempt a preemptive strike against us so as to prevent us from growing into a threat to the ETI or others in the galaxy. Similarly, ecosystem-valuing universalist ETI may observe humanity’s ecological destructive tendencies and wipe humanity out in order to preserve the Earth system as a whole. These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets. We acknowledge that the pursuit of emissions reductions and other ecological projects may have much stronger justifications than those that derive from ETI encounter, but that does not render ETI encounter scenarios insignificant or irrelevant.

Somehow, no matter what the danger, the solution is always the same: limit ourselves, cut back, be more eco-friendly, stop exploiting resources, and for God’s sake, smash the looms!

I’ll conclude by extracting a comment of mine upon an earlier post, which through a bizarre coincidence is exactly on topic for this post:

Brad Linaweaver and I once collaborated on a tetralogy of SF novels “based” on the Doom video games. I put based in quotation marks because, while the plot of the first book (in which we were just getting our feet wet, never having novelized a game before) was taken fairly directly from the game, for books 2-4, we simply wrote pure space opera with only a miniscule connection to the supposed source. (That’s why readers like the last three books best — and gamers can only stand to read the first.)

But the logic of the game itself compelled us to have an interstellar war, and Brad and I made the conscious decision to come up with an actually logical rationale for such a thing to come about.

I daresay I’m much more qualified to speak on the topic than is Stephen Hawking, for all his degrees and awards: He knows far less about science fiction than I know about physics.

I cannot tell you how Brad and I struggled to come up with any plausible reason why one technological civilization would ever attack another one on another planet. Try it sometime!

The main source of international conflict on Earth has always been a fight over resources and room; but if one has routine and ready access to space, resources are so abundant as to be nearly valueless, save for the utilitarian needs; and there is such a staggering amount of room that even Daniel Boone would feel lonely.

For every planet that has sentient life, there are thousands that do not; some will have some combination of flora, fauna, and microorganisma (I know that’s not a real classification but should be clear in context); other planets will be barren but still possess a wealth of minerals, crystals, and other useful chemicals.

In addition, there are likely many times more asteroids than full-sized planets, some condensed from minerals, others various varieties of frozen gases or liquids — including more water than anyone could possibly need, for you V fans.

Isn’t it far easier for an alien civilization to exploit resources not protected or guarded by sentient beings, who might, after all, find a way to fight back effectively? If one has interstellar travel — a must for interstellar conflict! — then one has an almost limitless larder at one’s backdoor, without the necessity of subduing or ousting any residents.

So what’s left? Some kooky religion that requires conquest? But religions too arise from scarcity; and in the post-economic environment of the entire galaxy, it’s hard to imagine such a dangerous and destructive religion lasting very long without bringing about its own destruction. After all, nobody can rely upon always being the biggest baddie on a playground of three hundred billion stars sprinkled across eight trillion cubit lightyears. (And even that’s restricting ourselves to just one of 170 billion galaxies! If aliens have intergalactic travel, I doubt they would even notice our existence.)

Heck, with natural and artifactual resources everywhere, on uninhabited planets and regions of space, it’s even hard to come up with items worth trading for! The only valuable items that spring to mind are:

• Technology
• Art, music, literature
• New philosophies
• Food recipes readily adaptable to one’s own nutritional needs
• Personal servants, who likely would charge an arm and a tentacle for the status that such a servant would confer upon his employer: “I’m so rich, I can afford to hire a valet! I just wish he wouldn’t be so demanding…”

Such intellectual creations would be the only media of exchange, since they are the only new things under the suns.

Far more likely than interstellar conflict is interstellar snubbing: Aliens, who have probably met many different alien civilizations already, would likely see ours as nothing more than “mostly harmless.” They would no more want to go slumming on Earth than you or I would enjoy hanging out with remote African pigmy tribes who had never heard of the wheel.

All right, maybe we’d be visited by alien anthropologists (though probably just grad students); but they would likely try to stay out of sight, so as not to spook the primitives.

We would be astonishly lucky to encounter an alien race that cared enough even to tell us that alien races existed!

If globaloney is a radical solution in search of a problem, then justifying it by the chance that passing extraterrestrial intelligences will be so offended by carbon dioxide that they wipe humanity from the planet (“and let that be a lesson to you!”)… then I submit that the globaloney-meisters are clutching the bottom of the galactic straws.

The rebirth of sanity can’t come soon enough.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

• For society’s sake, it’s best the consensus of the people sticks to the traditional values of monogamy, loyalty, decency, and faithfulness; but for liberty’s sake, it’s best that the people’s government sticks to encouraging, not enforcing, such tradition.

And the other is more flip but equally true in my opinion:

• Extremism in defense of conservatism is — still extremism.

A momentous civil-liberties lawsuit in Utah pits two opposing forces against each other, forever locked in battle unto the end of time (like that old Star Trek episode). Both sides spin their arguments around the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, like planets orbiting the same sun. On its face, the Court simply struck down all federal and state laws against “sodomy,” however defined; it did not make any findings anent marriage.

But each side accepts the same central folly, spinning the consequences of of that supposition in opposite but equally extreme directions. Side A, which we generally call the Dark Side, abuses and twists that case pretzel-like in order to argue that laws banning polygamy are unconstitutional (as the same partisans also argue that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional); by extension, Side A argues that every state in the United States of America must immediately allow “plural” marriages.

The flip side — which conservatives ironically call Righteousness — uses the same argument used by polygamists: Some radical marital “reformers” make paralogical arguments, twisting the principle of simple liberty and “the right to be let alone” into a paeon to perversity; therefore, conservatives argue that liberty itself is suspect and must be curtailed. Side B ripostes that citizens must be legally prevented from doing icky things that might nauseate decent folk and frighten the horses.

But let’s get less airy-fairy and more specific:

The suer is Kody Brown, who stars in a TLC “reality” show called Sister Wives, which I’ve never seen; the dissenter is Power Line’s own Scott Johnson. And yes, on this subject, both are equally extreme and impervious to reason.

Brown argues from Lawrence that if a man has the right to cohabitate — to live with — more than one woman, then clearly he has the right to marry them all. That is a complete non-sequitur, of course; the principle of liberty means we can do as we please, so long as we’re not harming others. In Lawrence, the Supreme Court found (albeit via flawed reasoning from the noisome Griswold v. Connectucut) a principle of liberty that it nevertheless true; it ought to be considered “self evident”… that there is a fundamental right to a zone of independence around each individual, inside of which government cannot intervene save to protect another and non-consenting individual.

That us, under liberty, if two adult men want to have intimate relations with each other, privately and without coercion, then government cannot arrest them for it. Likewise if one man and three women want to have intimate relations, or two men and one woman, so long as all are consenting adults. Prior to Lawrence, trysts of this sort were lumped under the label “sodomy” and were criminal acts under the laws of a number of states. For that matter, the same statutes often criminalized certain types of sex between husband and wife — fellatio and cunnilingus, for example. It was an extraordinary, pre-modern burst of authoritarianism, now defended only by some movement-conservatives.

I assert that a government with the legal power to dictate what sexual positions a husband and wife, or any other group of consenting adults, can legally perform is a tyranny of the most grotesque and unAmerican sort, where citizens are owned by the State.

Yes, I know full well that the Founding Fathers, to a man, supported such laws against sodomy; they were wrong. They were misled by the emotional and religious baggage of their society and upbringing, which prevented them from seeing that the logic of their own arguments for liberty belied their emotional inconsistency, just as it belied acceptance of slavery and of state-established churches. Either one believes in freedom of conscience; or one believes that ultimately, the State can condemn you for dissent, thoughtcrime, or nonconformity. There really is no middle ground.

But granting the fundamental right to do something perverse does not obligate society to applaud the perversity: The same freedom of conscience that says I cannot stop Brown from living with three “sister wives” in addition to his legal spouse likewise prevents him from forcing me to sanctify such a relationship by calling it “marriage.” But that is exactly what Kody Brown demands:

Reality-TV star Kody Brown and his “sister wives” may not intend to be an example of the “slippery slope” in the gay-marriage debate, but their new lawsuit against Utah’s anti-polygamy laws bolsters the argument that legalizing marriage for same-sex couples could open the door to recognition of other kinds of marriages.

Mr. Brown; his legal wife, Meri Brown; and “sister wives” Janelle Brown, Christine Brown and Robyn Sullivan, who appear with their 16 children on “Sister Wives” on TLC, want Utah’s anti-polygamy laws declared unconstitutional and unenforceable on their “plural family.” [Emphasis added -- DaH]

I readily admit there is a serious problem with the Utah statute, if it’s being accurately and honestly reported by the Washington Times (and I have no reason to believe otherwise): The law evidently bans not only polygamy itself, the marrying of more than one wife, but something more sinister:

In the Brown lawsuit, Mr. Turley and Mr. Alba said the Brown family, members of the Apostolic United Brethren faith, has committed no crime except to live together, “motivated by their sincere religious beliefs and love for one another.”

States cannot “criminalize consensual intimate relationships, including homosexual relationships, between unmarried adults,” the lawyers wrote, citing the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

And yet Utah has a law that forbids a legally married person from “purport[ing] to marry another person or cohabit[ing] with another person,” the lawyers wrote. [Emphasis added -- DaH.]

With this and other anti-polygamy laws, Utah “criminalizes not just polygamous marriages, but also an array of plural intimate relationships and associations of consenting adults,” Mr. Turley and Mr. Alba wrote.

In other words, the Utah law bans not only plural marriage, it appears also to ban plural living arrangements, even those not legally blessed as “marriage.” Only one of the women with whom Brown lives is his legal wife; to the eyes of the law, the rest are just honeys.

The Brown family’s “basic liberties and equal protection” are being violated, they added, asking the court to “preliminarily and permanently” block enforcement of Utah’s laws that ban and criminalize polygamy.

I absolutely agree that the “basic liberties” of Brown and the individual women are violated by the Utah anti-polygamy statute, but only to the extent that it criminalizes living together. But I reject the “equal protection” argument, the ground used in most cases that seek to overturn the traditional definition of marriage; and in any event, the solution to the unconstitutionality of one part of a law is not to toss the entire law out, but to make the smallest possible change consonant with the demands of liberty, as enunciated by the Court.

In this case, toss out the part that bans “cohabit[ation] with another person,” but keep the part that bans declaring such relationships legal “marriage.” That is, ban polygamy but not shacking up.

This is where the logic of the Left flies to flinders: Under liberty, you can do a great many bizarre, outre, unconventional, kooky, or perverse things; but one thing you cannot demand is that society embrace and ratify your perversities and eccentricities, a democratic State’s imprimatur and nihil obstat. You have the right to give yourself a high colonic with Liquid Draino, but it’s a stupid idea; and don’t expect me to shout “mazel tov” when you finish.

I would have thought it obvious: I am allowed to write what I please; but the State isn’t required to support my writing or even give me a prize. In the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson, “duh!” But it appears that Brown believes that anything he has a right to do, he also has a right to demand official praise for doing.

In a freakish twist of fate, contemporary conservatives appear to have locked themselves into supporting the same paralogia, albeit to prove the opposite conclusion.

It seems monstrous to me to argue that any government, even at the state or local level, can put you in prison for using an unapproved sexual position in the privacy of your own home. But when movement conservatives argue that Lawrence v. Texas should be overturned — as nearly all of them do — that is precisely the position they stake out: They’re all in favor of “individual liberty” — but not when that means engaging in sex that conservatives don’t like. Casual day has gone too far; there oughta be a law!

If it was simple prejudice, t’would a simple task to point out the hypocrisy; more than likely, a fair-minded person would admit being led astray by thinking with his heart, when the proper organ for such cogitation is further north. But our movement-conservatives (with whom I typically ally) buttress their glandular rejection of homosexuality and polyamory with specious, backwards reasoning: They argue that Lawrence must be wrong because it leads to overturning traditional marriage. Or as a pal of mine says, “It can’t be true, because it would be so dreadful if it were true!”

In other words, conservatives typically argue that the liberal argument is right: If you have a right to cohabitate with anybody, that necessarily implies a right to marry anybody.

Therefore, you have no right to cohabitate. (Supposed “reductio ad absurdum.”)

But the absurdity is not Lawrence v. Texas; the absurdity is inventing a nonexistent and inconsistent rule of inference, that allowing an action means approval of that action… the invalidity of which we surely have proven by now (ad nauseum).

But here is Scott Johnson making that exact argument in the Power Line post:

Now comes Professor Jonathan Turley to the defense of polygamy. Professot Turley represents one Kody Brown, a man, and his four wives and 16 children — who, he notes in a New York Times op-ed column, are the focus of a reality program on the cable channel TLC called “Sister Wives.” One of the marriages is legal and the others are what the family calls “spiritual.” Professor Turley is lead counsel in the recently filed lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Utah law criminalizing polygamy….

Professor Turley relies for his argument on the logic of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision overturning state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. Professor Turley has a point — indeed, some of us criticized the Lawrence decision on precisely that ground — though Justice Kennedy’s opinion waltzed away from the question of polygamy. And it didn’t even mention laws against bestiality and incest. Perhaps Professor Turley will undertake the glorious cause of extending Lawrence to them in another case.

The link, supplied by Scott himself, points to a Power Line post of his from 2003, just after the Court decided Lawrence. Here is the smoking gun:

In one sense the Supreme Court’s opinion today in Lawrence v. Texas, asserting the existence of a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, was utterly predictable. Thirty years ago the liberal constitutional scholar John Hart Ely wrote a classic law review article (“The Wages of Crying Wolf”) condemning the jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence is in a sense only a few steps further down the jurisprudential arc that will end, as Justice Scalia notes in dissent, in the constitutional right to homosexual marriage, prostitution, bigamy, and adult incest.

There is a trivial sense in which Scalia could be right; lawless judges can seize upon and twist the language of Lawrence to argue something radically different from the actual findings. However, the true source of Scott’s position would seem not to be reason and logic but something more atavistic: a visceral loathing of certain icky kinds of sex (as opposed to other, more privileged positions and partners). He continues in lurid prose:

Among the founders, sodomy was universally condemned as a crime against nature. It was illegal in each of the thirteen states existing at the time the Constitution was ratified and the Bill of Rights was adopted. In Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, it was a crime punishable by death. When Jefferson wrote an amendment to the criminal code lessening the penalty for sodomy, he nevertheless classed it as a crime with rape, polygamy, and incest.

Today the Supreme Court declares that homosexual sodomy constitutes “a form of liberty of the person in both its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.” Justice Kennedy, the author of this nauseating palaver, is obviously so in love with what he thinks is his own eloquent rhetoric that he fails to notice his laughable double entendre. What is not funny, however, is the destruction of the recognition of the laws of nature and nature’s God on which our true rights depend. The Supreme Court’s opinion today is an act of political destruction that should be recognized as such.

All that — for holding that private sex between consenting adults is none of the State’s damn business! It’s a marvel Scott didn’t toss in heresy, treason, crimes against humanity and the future, and the ritualistic summoning of the Elder Gods as further indictments. (I can only infer he was so hopping mad, he didn’t think of them.)

So what do we have? The same conservatives who are outraged that the government dares tell them what to wear, how much to eat, where to recreate, who to choose as their doctors, how to finance and invest, and whether companies can fly corporate jets, now welcome (with gusto!) government control of sexual relations.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The only distinction between the activities above is that the last is the most personal, the most intimate, and lies most thoroughly within the “zone of independence” of them all. Is the conservative argument that the more private and emotionally intimate the activity, the greater the authority of the State to control and regulate it?

Where else does that priority hold? What parents teach their children about right and wrong is surely more intimate and private than what they teach them about fashion and hairstyle; should the former therefore be subject to rigid governmental review and control, with only the latter trivia left to the discretion of individual parents? The argument is risible.

I wish I could call it a straw-man construction, but I can think of no other reason why conservatives argue that the State can tell us who to make love to — but for God’s sake, don’t monkey with our Happy Meals!

But lose not sight of the point: Scott Johnson embraces the cri de coeur from fellow movement-conservative, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that the freedom to be intimate with whom you want (rather than with whom the government allows) is logically equivalent to license to legally marry persons of the same sex, close relatives, and persons already married, and license to commit the inhumane crime of bestiality and even the horrific, violent crime of forcible rape! Yes, I can certainly see that those acts are all of a feather.

And where is Scott’s argument why this should be so? It doesn’t seem facially obvious to me. Would he likewise argue that if government allows nude beaches, we’ll be constitutionally required to legalize public orgies in middle school? The route between point A and point B on the “slippery slope” seems no less preposterous than the connection between decriminalizing “sodomy” (in private, among consenting adults) and legalizing bigamy, same-sex marriage, consanguineous marriage, bestiality, and rape.

I don’t know about Scott himself, but I speculate that for most conservatives, they have no real syllogism; their “thoughts” on this issue are actually feelings, emotional responses that have no, and need no rational explanation.

Where does this leave us? It’s not the only issue on which conservatives can be as mulish and irrational as liberals. Immigration and drug policy are two others, but the worst is modern biological evolutionary theory. The last is the most similar example to conservative allergy to sexual liberty:

1. Many dyed in the wool atheists — including Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, Philip Pullman (of the wretched His Dark Materials books) — insist that accepting the idea of evolution by natural selection requires one to reject God and faith and embrace atheism.
2. A large number of conservatives with inadequate scientific schooling — including Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Ben Stein — completely swallow the liberal argument.
3. Therefore, being unwilling to reject God, they instead reject modern evolutionary biology, casting overboard more than a century of brilliant and apolitical science.

In fact, there is no logical or rational connection between allowing sexual freedom and requiring the definition of marriage to include any old relationship somebody might want; just as there is no reasoned conflict at all between biological evolution and faith in a theistic God, as Francis S. Collins conclusively proves in the Language of God; but there you are: Conservatives reject both as unthinkingly and reflexively as liberals denounce the Koch brothers, and for eerily similar reasons.

So I say again: Extremism in defense of conservatism is certainly less annoying than the liberal strain… but it’s no less extremist — and no more rational.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

This idyllic intro-interlude quickly morphed into “gangster government,” as Michael Barone put it: a lethal combination of legal bribery from unions and other special-interest groups, followed by wholesale privileges (literally, “private laws“) granted to favored constituencies, from auto-worker unions, to teachers, to gays, to federally privileged minorities, to Silicon Valley, billionaires, to silicone-mountain Hollywood elites. The president had discovered that democracy is messy, and even those who disagree with Obama are allowed to vote, protest, organize, and voice their opinions.

Faced with such disunity and “chaos” coming from bitter people who cling to their religion and their guns, what was a newly anointed Keeper of the Vision supposed to do? Naturally he had to turn to criminal mobs to appease the liberal mobs who made him — and who could break him just as easily.

But at last, after years of increasingly dirty (and incompetent) governance coupled with crony “capitalism,” the administration of Barack H. Obama slithered into its third and terminal phase: extortion government, in which the President of the United States directly threatens to inflict grievous damage, in a planned and calculating way, upon the most vulnerable of his own people — unless his political opponents kow-tow to his every demand. (Actually, as Barack Obama considers himself a “fellow citizen of the world,” perhaps he doesn’t consider them “his people” in the first place.)

In a sense stronger than merely symbolic, Barack Hussein Obama has become Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, architect of the French Revolution, the bloodiest community-organizing mob action in history.

Witness: France during the Terror had the guillotine, the “national barber;” America, held hostage, has the deficit — the national credit card. The administration has maxed out the national credit card (even gone over the limit), and the president is beside himself that he cannot continue charging, charging, and charging to pay for his caviar tastes in government largess.

So today, in a fit of pique, Obama threatens that unless Republicans agree immediately to a Brobdingnagian hike in the national credit card’s credit limit and to trilliions of dollars in new taxes and spending, he will deliberately, and with malice aforethought, refuse to send out Social Security and Veterans Benefits checks.

From CBS:

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

“Look what you made me do!”

But of course, the administration is responsible for all federal spending. Congress can only appropriate; it’s up to the Executive actually to send out the checks. And that means the president has the legal authority and obligation to prioritize spending.

In this case, he has the duty to privilege certain spending — interest and principal payments to bond holders and “entitlement” payments to seniors and veterans, among others — over other types of spending, including payments to doctors and hospitals under ObamaCare; block grants to states; foreign aid; funding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, paying vendors and federal contractors; paying for travel by government employees (including the president, Mrs. President, and their posse/entourage); money to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and every other federally funded foundation or institute (no matter how worthy); and even paying federal workers.

Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated by Congress every year for porkbarrel projects in the districts of powerful representatives and senators.

Money comes into the American treasury all the time: quarterly tax payments, corporate taxes, employee withholding, sales of government property, fees, licenses, and so forth. I understand that such continuous income greatly exceeds the bare-bones payment obligations of the United States government — entitlement payments and debt service. In other words, we have enough revenue to meet those obligations; just not enough to meet them in addition to all the other expensive projects that the Obamunists want to fund at the same time. (What’s most galling, of course, is that Barack Obama himself and his cronies in Congress are the very culprits who brought on this terrible financial catastrophe in the first place. “Look what I made you make me do!”)

The obvious solution presents itself.

Every large corporation must have a budget; and every such budget must, among other requirements, prioritize the corporation’s financial obligations: What gets paid first? What gets paid second, third, nth? I suspect that if a publicly traded corporation was so mismanaged that it didn’t even have a contingency plan for what bills to pay if it experienced a sudden revenue shortfall, not only would it be liable for massive lawsuits, but the SEC and the Justice Department might open a criminal investigation of the corporate officers.

Thinking of the federal government as the nation’s largest (if not the world’s largest) corporation, then mustn’t it, too, have a heirarchy of payments to guide the president during a temporary shortfall? Isn’t the obvious lack of such an emergency plan, resulting in threats to withhold pledged funds to those who could literally die from such embezzlement — which is what the president’s threat amounts to — the very definition of financial malfeasance and nonfeasance?

But this sort of hysterical extortion is the liberal’s stock in trade. I cannot begin to count how many times a Democratic governor or mayor has responded to reduced revenues by threatening to furlough police and firefighters first, before even considering laying off the thousands of non-essential government workers, from state license form filler-outers and scrutinizers, to inspectors who prowl neighborhoods to make sure nobody has the wrong kind of front lawn or too high a fence, to complicated “diversity” (affirmative action) schemes, to pothole repair, to state highway construction, to light rail, to establishment of new state parks, to city-hall barbers, to spiraling billions to state “education” funding.

It’s a vile and shabby trick: Pandering to the liberal mob, Obama attacks the weakest and most vulnerable citizens by directly threatening them with penury and starvation unless Republicans cave. “Nice pension you have there; sure would be a shame if something was to happen to it…” Such intimidation of America’s own citizens is so thuggish, so antidemocratic, so unAmerican that it easily rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors in the meaning of Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Any ordinary person would burn with shame to threaten the old, the sick, and wounded vets just to enact his pet policies, against the clearly expressed will of the people. I can only conclude that Obama’s narcissism is so advanced that he has become a functional sociopath — the anti-Clinton — literally incapable of feeling anybody’s pain, responsive only to his own sense of aristocratic entitlement and his outrage at being thwarted.

Obama’s “audacity” is positively brazen; it doesn’t even occur to him to conceal his real motivation. He nakedly commands this issue to go away until after his presumed re-coronation next year:

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he wants a deal that would allow the U.S. to avoid confronting the issue again until after the 2012 elections and vowed on Monday that he would “not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension.”

He insists that both sides “put politics aside” — and simply enact the Democratic minority agenda. There’s post-partisanship for you, Chicago style. What’s next? Will President B.O. take a page from the National Lampoon? “If Republicans don’t raise taxes and jack up the debt ceiling, we’ll kill this dog!”

November 2012 cannot come soon enough. I only wonder… if Barack Obama continues on the path he has trodden for the past two and a half years, will he become the first incumbent president to lose all fifty-seven states?

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Now that New York State has approved same-sex marriage — rather, now that the New York State legislature has done so, probably over the objections of a strong majority of its own citizen constituents — we need a battleplan to hold the line against this becoming the norm.

Why? So what if the federal circus courts begin striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in this and that circuit, forcing states that oppose SSM nevertheless to have it de facto anyway. What’s the big deal?

The “big deal” is that once same-sex marriage (SSM) has become nearly universal around the country, then we’re going to see the same terrible effects on our society that we already see in Europe: diminished interest in marriage (it’s no longer special), more domestic violence, even quicker divorces, a marked drop in the fertility rate, massive importation of fecund immigrants who have no loyalty whatsoever to the United States… and of course ever greater pressure to also allow polygamy and polyandry, group marriage, and so forth.

Pro-SSM people (like Patterico) are fond of making the argument that somebody else’s SSM doesn’t affect his own marriage; his marriage is still just as strong! Just as strong, perhaps; but not just as special as it used to be, not when any random association between two or more people of any gender can also be called a “marriage.”

It’s like counterfeiting money: If I print my own twenty-dollar bills, that doesn’t physically change the real bills you have in your wallet at this moment; they don’t magically change into newspaper, the ink doesn’t turn a different color, Andy Jackson doesn’t morph into George Soros. In that sense, my counterfeits don’t directly affect your sawbucks… but my counterfeits indirectly devalue your real bills, creating uncertainty about which currency is real and which is fake, how much is out there, which is truly legal tender and which an ersatz copy that, if discovered, is worthless.

My counterfeit currency spreads fear, uncertainty, doubt. Private counterfeiting is as bad as rampant money-creation via the Federal Reserve; worse in the sense that at least the Fed must report on its activities from time to time.

By this analogy, traditional marriage is the currency backed by some form of specie, that which gives the institution of marriage itself the very cache and social benefit that same-sex couples want to claim for their own. Contrariwise, any other form of union that is legally called marriage is the fiat or counterfeit currency; it piggy-backs on the real institution of marriage, hoping some of the moral, emotional, and sacred virtue rubs off.

Marriage is quite a special social institution; that’s why it’s the one to which we entrust child rearing. But to paraphrase Dash in the Incredibles, when everything is “special,” then nothing is special.

So what to do, what to do? With the third largest state in the U.S. falling, I fear that train has left the station. Even if there is a later referendum in New York and the people reverse that decision, already hundreds of thousands of people across the nation will have flown to the Bug Apple and gotten legally married. And as we’re finding out in California, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle again, even if it was let out in despite of the voters.

You can’t fight something with nothing; we need something positive to fight for, not just something negative to fight against; we can’t allow ourselves to be put on the defensive by the Left and by libertarians who oppose legal marriage altogether. I believe there is only one answer: The Covenant marriage movement must become a popular front, just as the Tea Party movement already has.

Covenant marriage (CM) as a distinct legal institution arose comparatively recently, in response to the jump in the divorce rate in the 1980s. It differs significantly from normal legal marriage in ways that make it vastly more exclusive an institution:

• In a CM, couples must first undergo pre-nuptial counseling before they can marry.
• They agree to limit the grounds for divorce from the standard normal around the country — if either party wants a divorce, that’s grounds for divorce — to a much narrower set of grounds, usually spousal or child abuse, felony conviction, or adultery. (If a state allows a CM couple to negotiate its own covenant, there can of course be more or fewer grounds for divorce.)
• Any CM passed by citizen demand would, by its enabling legislation, be restricted to the traditional definition of marriage — one man, one woman. Creating a new form of marriage to exclude non-traditional groups of people being married is the only reason that CM legislation is likely to be passed in most states.
• CM is non-denominational and can be performed by civil authorities as well as religious; there’s no religiosity requirement.

But how could CM become “the savior of marriage?” It’s clear that the law cannot confer any greater legal status upon a couple married under CM than normal marriage confers upon the two, three, n-number of males and/or females who “marry” under that regime.

Yet that very point should make it harder for the courts to subvert CM: Same-sex couples (and later, groups of people larger than two) cannot argue that they’re excluded from legal marriage, up to and including the name “marriage.” They have the same legal rights and status, insofar as the secular law is concerned. Therefore, they have no legal ground to demand that Covenant marriage be forced to allow same-sex, polyamorous, group, incestuous, or under-aged marriages. The only difference between normal and Covenant marriage is that the latter has a number of restrictions not found in the former.

True, CM confers no more legal rights than normal marriage; but extra legal rights were never really the source of the specialness of marriage — except perhaps the legal right for spouses not to testity against each other. (That last will certainly have to be revisioned when polyamorous marriages are allowed, unless we want entire Mafia families and street gangs to “marry” each other, so that nobody can squeal.)

No, the specialness of marriage has always flowed from its exclusivity and its permanence… which is why the Left has persistently attacked both those qualities by (a) twisting the definition of marriage towards making any association of any number of people a “marriage,” and (b) making it easier and easier to walk away from a marriage upon the slightest pretext, provocation, or whim.

By restoring exclusivity and strengthening permanence, CM becomes the “real” marriage, and ordinary legal marriage just a trendy domestic partnership. And if that is how people begin to see it, we’ll see more and more traditional couples getting married under Covenant, so they can demonstrate to the world their commitment to, and determination to work at, the union.

Ordinary legal marriage will persist, and will still confer the same legal status and rights; but it will probably fall into greater and greater disrepute among the majority: “Oh, you won’t marry me with a Covenenant marriage? What, you want a back door out whenever you get bored with me? Drop dead, you creep!”

Women especially will have good reason to demand a CM or nothing: They know better than most men how vital is an intact family, with a male father and a female mother, when raising children.

A few caveats, none of which changes the basic equation:

• It’s very unlikely that Congress will pass a federal version of CM. Nor should it. We have an enviable system of federalism; let it work! Each state can decide what exact kind of Covenant marriage to allow, if any, in its enabling legislation.
• Even if your state enacts a strong version of CM, it cannot make it illegal for one of the partners to move to another state, establish residency, and then get divorced under that state’s no-fault divorce law that doesn’t recognize the covenant. That’s the price of liberty.

• There will never come a time when normal marriage is abolished altogether; because if it did vanish from a state, then the Left could once again raise the spector of “unequal treatment.” Specious though it is — gays and straights alike are constrained in who they can marry; neither can marry a sibling, for example — the judiciary has signalled that it is ready to cram SSM down our throats, and to hell with voters.

  But that’s a feature, not a bug; when state citizens must actually make a choice which type of marriage to enter into, they necessarily will have to think longer and harder about it that with a normal legal marriage. (As of course we all should, and do, if we believe it to be a solemn vow.)

Just as tea parties have swept the nation in a “popular front“ — and I believe I was the first person to so desribe them, back in February, 2010 — I see Covenant marriage doing the same (with a vast overlap, most likely). And that means those of us who support traditional marriage no longer need wage a defensive war, trying to protect every state, city, village, and farm from the contagion of the “love bug,” the untenable and cockamamie meme that “love is all you need” for marriage.

That bit of wrongthinking leads directly to our present discontent, the conclusion that any two or more people who “love” each other should be allowed to marry… men, women, siblings, fathers with their daughters, forty year olds with fourteen year olds, one man with eight women.

Instead, we can revert to the traditional American strategy of opening our own offensive. Rather than try to defend the status quo ante, we fight to implement a new form of marriage that is more exclusive and more permanent, bucking the leftist trend towards inclusion and impermanence. We slap both kinds of marriage on the table, then let the people choose. I predict that after an astonishingly brief time, “normal” marriage, with its unspecial universality and unserious provisional nature, will sink into desuetude, the last step before moribundity.

Americans may be many things, but not generally a mob: When the Left forces mob-rule upon us — or more accurately, when they gin-up mobs to force tyranny upon the rest of us, with themselves as smug, self-satisfied tyrants — we the people have a glorious history of rising up against them. This is true whether it’s the tyranny of socialism, the tyranny of “diversity,” or the tyranny of perversity.

As SSM spreads and infects more and more states, CM will grow alongside and surpass it in every venue. Soon the Obamunists will be fighting the defensive war, clinging to their “inclusive” definition of marriage. We achieve victory within the culture, despite — even because of — the Left’s victory in the courts and legislatures. As an institution that is far more societal than legal, a solid victory within the culture is of much greater moment and future value than merely winning legal and legislative battles on the ground.

As the pushback becomes a wave, then a tsunami, and more and more states enact some version of Covenant marriage, then we’ll once again have an exclusive and durable form of union to offer in preference to the liberals’ and leftists marriage-lite. I sense that people, most especially young adults, have grown tired of weak tea and tolerance of everything, including intolerance itself. They crave something permanent, solid, bigger than themselves.

Give us Americans the choice, and I believe we will once again lead the rest of the world out of its moral morass.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

I am a bit shaken, for example, by this speech of Ryan’s, delivered last Thursday to the Alexander Hamilton Society, outlining his views (Ryan’s, not Hamilton’s) on foreign and military policy. In particular, I am troubled by the lack of specificity, of any real plan to defeat the axis of radical Islamism, of any real understanding of what such a long war entails, and especially by the “on the one hand, on the other hand” dithering that reminds me rather disturbingly of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 85%).

Heck, Ryan doesn’t even seem to have much of an opinion on non-economic domestic policy either, at least as far as one can tell from his official website. His interests seem somewhat limited, although if he runs, I’m sure he’ll flesh them out some; his only committee assignments are the Budget, Ways and Means, and the Ways and Means subcommittee on Health — which I presume primarily deals with health care from an economic perspective. Ryan is a green-eyeshade accountant, good on economic issues; but the presidency encompasses so much more than that!

He gives us no discussion of strategy in the long war, neither grand nor regional strategy. His only reference to our greatest cultural and wartime enemy, Iran, and its national (Syria) and extra-national extensions (Hezbollah), is almost farcical in its perfunctoriness:

In Syria and Iran, we are witnessing regimes that have chosen the opposite path. Instead of accommodating the desires of their peoples for liberty and justice, these regimes have engaged in brutal crackdowns, imprisoning opposition leaders, and killing their own citizens to quell dissent….

We have a responsibility to speak boldly for those whose voices are denied by the jackbooted thugs of the tired tyrants of Syria and Iran. [Emphasis added.]

This is straight out of Lewis Carroll:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

Our Iran strategy is to verbally chastise them? And what else? What are we going to do to counter Iran’s determined war against us, against our allies in the Middle East and Europe, and its existential threat to Israel?

Anent Israel, he has little of substance to say:

What we can do is affirm our commitment to democracy in the region by standing in solidarity with our longstanding allies in Israel and our new partners in Iraq.

Meaning what? Does he support or oppose a Palestinian state? With what boundaries? Contiguous, even if that means Israel must be cut in half? I wish he would just spill the beans about what he really would do, were he living in la Casa Blanca.

How about the other prong of the axis: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other extra-national threats to the United States and the West? He never really addresses this scourge squarely; in fact, he only mentions al-Qaeda once:

Our ability to affect events is strongest in Iraq and Afghanistan, where for the last decade we have been fighting the scourge of global terrorism. In these countries, we can and we must remain committed to the promotion of stable governments that respect the rights of their citizens and deny terrorists access to their territory.

Although the war has been long and the human costs high, failure would be a blow to American prestige and would reinvigorate al Qaeda, which is reeling from the death of its leader. Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.

Would anything here sound strange or bizarre coming from George W. Bush — or Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 73%), John Kerry, or even Barack H. Obama? This is simply hand-waving: He recognizes that since we have troops in those two countries, we have more of a say there; that we like stable governments that respect rights; and that it would be bad if we screwed up now. It tells us exactly nothing about Ryan’s strategy for the Middle East and Central Asia.

What’s his plan for eliminating, or at least crippling, the wave of violent, anti-American, anti-Jew, anti-democratic, thoroughly radicalized Islamism? Has he one? Has he even thought about it?

Ryan does recognize that there’s a series of revolutions going on in Arabia (or perhaps one many-headed, revolutionary hydra). Here is his prescription, such as it is:

In the Arab Spring we are seeing long-repressed populations give voice to the fundamental desire for liberty [on the one hand...]. But we are also seeing the risks that emerge when the advancement of freedom is stunted for want of the right institutions [on the other hand]. In such societies, the most organized factions often lack tolerance and reject pluralism. Decades without a free press have led many to treat conspiracy theories as fact.

It is too soon to tell whether these revolutions will result in governments that respect the rights of their citizens [on the one hand...], or if one form of autocracy will be supplanted by another [on the other hand]. While we work to assure the former [on the one hand...], American policy should be realistic about our ability to avert the latter [on the other hand].

I hate that formulation, which Kerry made famous in 2004; I suppose it’s intended to sound above the fray, taking the long view, seeing all sides. But what the heck does it mean as a practical matter?

• What criteria should we employ to separate new “governments that respect the rights of their citizens” from those where “one form of autocracy will be supplanted by another?”
• Should we help the revolutionaries that appear to fall in the first category?
• If so, how? With American forces, with arms, with “advisors,” with humanitarian aid, or just with brave words of exhortation?
• Should we interfere with revolutions that appear more like the latter category, say those that appear headed towards creating a sharia state ruled by Hamas or the Ikwan, the Muslim Brotherhood?
• If so, how? Merely with strong words of denunciation, with monetary aid to the existing government, with intelligence sharing and advice, or with actual U.S. troops helping put down the latest incarnation of the Moro Rebellion?

It’s nice that he hopes the rebellions are led by democratic republican nation-builders; but as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. What actual policies would Ryan push?

Ryan tells us he opposes promiscuous budget-cutting in the Department of Defense (though I’m sure we already knew that):

A more prosperous economy enables us to afford a modernized military that is properly sized for the breadth of the challenges we face. Such a military must also be an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people. The House-passed budget recognizes this, which is why it includes the $78 billion in defense efficiency savings identified by Secretary Gates.

By contrast, President Obama has announced $400 billion in new defense cuts, saying in effect he’ll figure out what those cuts mean for America’s security later. Indiscriminate cuts that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous to America and America’s interests in the world. Secretary Gates put it well: “that’s math, not strategy.”

But what is Ryan’s vision of the ideal military for the United States in 2013 and beyond?

• What mix of traditional combat units and units organized more for counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare does he forsee?
• What mix of expensive high-tech and cheaper low-tech?
• How much should we rely on air power versus boots in the mud?
• How much should we invest in battlefield intelligence — including exotic (and expensive!) new intel platforms?
• What is his position on gays being allowed to serve openly in the military and women being allowed to serve in overt combat roles?

On virtually every issue other than the budget and intimately related programs, Paul Ryan’s policies seem vague, if not MIA, a fluffy cloud of good wishes and skyhooks. I’m not saying he doesn’t have specific visions or ideas about them, nor even that they would be antithetical to my own positions; I simply can’t say, because he won’t enunciate his non-economic positions with clarity and precision.

In fact, if you read the entire speech, he appears observe everything on America’s plate through the crystal goblet of economic policy. For example, he is scornful of President B.O.’s proposal to cut $400 billion from the Pentagon budget (over some number of years), yet proud of his own proposal to cut $78 billion — solely (it seems to me) because Ryan’s plan, unlike the president’s, is that of “an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people.”

Well that’s fine. It’s nice to be fine. Who could be opposed to efficiency and responsibility anent taxpayer dollars? But given the military’s function, there are other overriding concerns.

Ryan mentions grand strategy as an afterthought, never making any attempt to define it or flesh it out. He is either unaware of (or uninterested in) designing a force structure based upon the missions we expect them to undertake; he focuses instead like a laser pointer on how much we can afford to pay.

And what about non-economic, non-budgetary, domestic policies? Where does Ryan stand on vital issues such as:

• The right to self defense (on his website, he sees gun rights only in terms of “Sportsman’s Issues”)
• Defending DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act
• Card check (I presume he’s agin’ it, but has he ever said so in a policy speech?)
• The misuse of the Endangered Species Act to shut down farms, recreational facilities, factories, power plants, and suchlike
• A federal law requiring picture ID for federal elections and allowing states to implement the same requirement for state and local elections

Hard to say where he stands, as not a single one of these issues is so much as mentioned on his website.

He does discuss immigration policy; his position is quotidian within the Republican Party, falling somewhere between Hugh Hewitt and John McCain — e.g., he supports 700 miles of actual fencing plus a “virtual fence,” but he opposes an immediate “path to citizenship” for existing illegal immigrants. Nothing here but standard positions that could be enunciated by 90% of the Republican congressional conference.

His energy policies seem adequate, though I’m not a fan of his insistance upon “alternative energy” and “conservation” (the latter means continuing to increase the CAFE (combined average fuel economy) standards by government fiat, rather than allowing the market itself to take care of the problem. Again, there’s nothing original or particularly interesting here: He wants to streamline regulation of gasoline refining and nuclear power plants. I can’t tell if he supports ethanol subsidies.

None of this gives me confidence that Ryan would be a leader on any issue other than the economy. None of this encourages me to call for him to be drafted into the presidential snoozeapalooza.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

The president, during his 2008 campaign, assured activists for the illegales that he would find a way to extend amnesty to the estimated twelve to twenty million illegal aliens. But of much greater weight than merely keeping his word, he evidently is sniffing wavering support among American Hispanics for the perpetuation of his atrocity administration: Perhaps the formerly steadfast Obamic Hispanic cadre has grown perturbed by the lousy economy, unconscionable unemployment, staggering spending, metastasizing debt — and the daily assaults by his administration on the small businesses that might raise Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from hardship to ownership.

American Hispanics could even decide, God forbid, that the very socialism and “Progressivism” they fled from in Latin America might still be just as wicked and unacceptable here in the land of the fee and home of the rave. Therefore, the AHs might conclude that Barack Obama has had his innings; and now it’s time to return to fiscal sanity by voting for Tea-Party Republicans.

Or at least, so President B.O. appears to fear; for he has marched to the border to proclaim border-security utopia:

[Obama] made the case that with more Border Patrol agents, a border fence and falling crime rates, he has checked border security off the to-do list, and it’s time for Congress to write a legalization bill — an issue that has stalled since 2007, when it failed in a dramatic bipartisan filibuster on the Senate floor.

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done,” he said.

“But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us.”

Yes… move them back where they were a couple of years ago. (This source shall hereafter be known as “the story.”)

Out of 1,969 miles of border between the United States and Mexico, some 873 miles — 44.3% — are under “operational control,” according to the Border Patrol. Operational control means “the Border Patrol has the capacity to deter illegal crossers and pursue them when they’re spotted;” of course, under that definition, violent crime in Juarez is likewise under operational control, because the cops are free to chase suspects through the streets. (Whether they catch them is another question.)

(This source shall hereafter be known as “the editorial”.)

But it seems that even such a loose standard is too tight for the Obamanistas, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet “Bonaparte” Napolitano was dispatched to Congress to enunciate a new measuring stick for border security; from the story:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last week told Congress that she is scrapping the “operational control” yardstick and will come up with a new definition to measure border security that does not require the border to be entirely sealed – something she said is not achievable.

The editorial goes into somewhat more detail:

The Obama administration has cooked up a novel way to calculate what a great job his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been doing in stemming the flow of aliens flooding over the border from Mexico. In March, Ms. Napolitano stood on a bridge connecting El Paso to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and proclaimed border security to be “better than ever.” In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, Ms. Napolitano claimed that the meaning of “operational control” of the border is “archaic” and that she intends to devise a “more quantitative and qualitative way to reflect what actually is occurring at the border.” She said she wants an index that would include a measure of how many persons have been deterred from even attempting to jump the border.

By counting these theoretical illegals – as opposed to real ones – Ms. Napolitano’s border-security mission becomes much easier. While hundreds of thousands actually cross over annually, compared to, say, Mexico’s entire population of 112 million, they represent a tiny fraction. Preventing border crossing in a computer model or a spreadsheet allows Ms. Napolitano to proclaim “mission accomplished” without having to actually crack down in a way that would offend left-wing open-border advocacy groups.

Describing the projected deterence of millions of phantom Mexicans who might (or might not) have contemplated entering the U.S. illegally, but who chose in any event not to do so, as a great “success” of Obamic border control — and then using that suspicion of success to argue for immediate legalization of illegals — takes a proud place among the miraculous verbal confabulations of this administration:

• “Leading from behind.” (Not to be confused with bleeding from the behind.)
• “Spending reductions in the tax code.” (Not to be confused with reductions in spending.)
• And of course, who could forget the most obvious parallel: all those jobs that were “created or saved” during the period that crass Republicans refer to as a recession: Sure unemployment skyrocketed when Obama took the oath of office; but imagine how many millions, billions, of fictional jobs would have been lost had Canal-Zone immigrant John McCain won!

Take Obama at his word: He has achieved a stellar but imaginary victory over invisible lawbreakers who didn’t jump the border when they very well could have, had they actually existed. Perhaps those phantom illegals just stood in bed because, with our current 9% unemployment, not enough jobs have been created or saved for them.

So those are the facts: Mohammed came to the mountain, lest the mountain vote Republican. But what’s the real issue here beyond mere fact-mongering? Only this; here are the elements of Barack Obama’s dream immigration bill — or so he claims:

While the president was speaking, the White House released a blueprint for a four-part plan to address immigration: maintain border security enhancements; phase in mandatory electronic checks for all employees; revamp the legal immigration system; and grant a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrants who go through a background check, haven’t committed crimes, pay fines and back taxes and wait at least eight years before getting a green card.

Sound familiar? It should: The “blueprint” appears to have been essentially Xeroxed from McCain’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which George W. Bush pushed heavily (as the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007).

Of the blueprint items above, the most important was the least discussed: “Revamp the legal immigration system.” I have written extensively about this issue; alert readers will discover that I fall into precisely none of the usual categories.

I am guided by two aphorisms that I have eructated over the years:

1. First, there is no wall so strong that a million people cannot knock it down.
2. But equally true, invited guests don’t sneak through the window; they knock on the front door.

The corollary to (2) above is that anyone who is trying to sneak through the window is crashing the party, and he deserves everything he’s got coming to him. He’s a no-goodnik.

Link them together and you get this: Enforcement alone cannot solve our problem with illegal immigration; there simply are too many illegals entering daily for the beleagured Border Patrol to find and process. The only real and lasting solution includes both enforcement and also drastic reform of the legal immigration system, so to accomplish two main goals:

• Giving would-be legal immigrants a path to citizenship that is predictable, just, and biased in favor of those immigrants who already have American values.
• Thus relieving the pressure on the enforcement policies.

We have no great interest in keeping out immigrants who want to come to America because they believe in the American creed of liberty, Capitalism, “In God we trust,” and “E pluribus unum;” in fact, those are precisely the immigrants we want, because they add to the melting pot of assimilation, rather than the salad bowl of “diversity.”

Right now, the vast, vast majority of those crossing over illegally are thoroughly Americanized, and would pose no threat and violate no laws, but for the arbitrary, arcane, and insane rules of the USCIS and the INS before them. But because we treat those illegals the same way we treat mules for Chihuahuan drug cartels, slave traders, and radical Islamist terrorists, we have no resources left to catch the real bad guys sneaking in among the sea of desperate good guys just trying to do what’s best for their families.

And because the legal immigration system is unjust, unpredictable, and arbitrary, we drive into the desert those who would ordinarily be invited guests — whence they do their best to sneak through the window, after the front door is slammed in their faces without a word of explanation, a morsel of consistency, an inch of a safe pathway, or a shred of hope.

So far, no politician for or against an immigration reform bill has told me exactly what reforms would make us safer and what would make us more vulnerable; and until that communications task is complete, none of us can have any idea whether the bill du jour is worth buying or not.

Alas, I do not believe the Obamunist really gives a rat’s hoot about immigrants, legal or il-; he cares only about the people who choose to vote for Obama come 2012. Legally or il-.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Given that tabula rasa, we must identify at least a few of the conundrums:

• Most urgently, can Petraeus actually master an out-of-control, leak-crazy, internationalist progressivist CIA… or at least render it somewhat less anti-American?
• Does the appointment mean that the CIA will actually become more like it’s “predecessor,” the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II? That is, will the CIA show more interest in furthering America’s military aims and less in trying to pick the next president?
• Does the appointment mean that David Petraeus is interested in heading into electoral politics next?
• Does it show Petraeus is going to “come out” as a Democrat to run against the Republican incumbent in 2016?
• Does it mean Obama has changed his mind about the need for the United States to have a strong and vigorous intelligence community to further American goals… or does it mean Petraeus has grown in office and now supports Obamunism, full and stark?

• What will happen to the Afghanistan war effort as Petraeus withdraws, ushering in Marine Lt.Gen. John R. Allen as Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) — a man who has no Afghanistan experience whatsoever? Though Gen. Allen certainly does have battlefield experience in the War Against Radical Islamism: He was Deputy Commanding General in al-Anbar province, Iraq, during the Iraq war.

  But what type of commander is he? Is he like Petraeus, with a deep understanding of contemporary counterinsurgency strategy? Or is he more akin to the Shinseki-ites devoted to the Powell Doctrine of endlessly refighting WWII in all the dorky, little countries found in what Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of the Pentagon’s New Map, aptly calls the “Non-Integrating Gap?”

I doubt anyone can answer these questions authoritatively at this juncture in time, as Nixon was wont to say; but they are indeed critical queries.

And here is the last and most pregnant:

• Will the appointment receive vigorous examination during Senate confirmation hearings, in order to answer some of these unknowns, among others? Or will Republicans and Democrats alike give the war hero a pass — the former because he is a war hero; the latter because he will have been appointed by the Obamacle, whom all Democrats must prop up and buttress in every imaginable way for the 2012 election?

At the moment, President B.O.’s deft and crafty move has handed us a Petraeus in a poke.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

By inaugurating what could be the first $1 billion campaign in history so early, Obama has gotten the jump on a scattered GOP field reluctant to take the plunge and hits the starting line months earlier than George W. Bush did for his 2004 reelection bid.

Hope!

Note that this is the amount Obama personally plans to raise; it doesn’t include the expenditures by the Democratic National Committee, monetary and in-kind contributions by labor unions and “Progressivist” corporations (that would be most of them), and of course moneys raised and spent by “independent” political groups, such as MoveOn.org, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, MALDEF, National Council of La Raza, CAIR, Big Media, the Mafia, and so forth.

The early announcement is not surprising; under Obama’s personalized version of the Live-In Constitution, the oath of office at the end of Article II, Section 1 reads:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully campaign for the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend my continued occupation of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, come regulatory hell or confiscatory taxes.

The current campaign-spending record is $740.6 million, spent in 2008 by some fellow with the amusing, sound-alike name of Barack H. Obama — which itself eclipsed the previous record of $345 million spent by George W. Bush for his successful 2004 reelection by a whopping 115%.

Change!

(John McCain also outspent Bush in the same 2008 election, but by a paltry $23 million.)

The odds are good that Obama can do it — raise the money, that is. (I wonder how much of it will come, directly or indirectly, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, from his stimulus scheme?) But that begs the more arresting question: Does such staggering spending truly guarantee reelection for the Obamunist?

In general, the political establishment says yes, it does. The nomenklatura believe that there is a direct, one-to-one correspondence between money spent and votes received. Thus, our spendthrift president merely extends his claim that all government spending is stimulative to the equally vacuous premise that all campaign spending is effective: You may not like ObamaCare the first fifty times you see a commercial extolling it; but the 51st time — or the 74th, or the 293rd time (billion-dollar pockets run deep) — it will seem suddenly brilliant and indisputable.

Hence the meme that the biggest campaign spending spree wins the election, via argumentum ad infinitum. What I tell you five thousand times starts to sound true.

I cannot seem to find a site that lists the campaign expenditures for each major candidate for every presidential election; but I’m sure that it’s usually the case that the biggest spender wins. However, I’m equally sure that there have been occasions, even in electing a president, where the biggest spender was the biggest loser.

Here is what’s wrong with the reasoning. Most of the time, the guy with the most money is also the guy with the largest number of contributors. But recently, we’ve begun seeing a disconnect between those two measurements. In particular, with every election, the Democrats become more and more the party of the rich and agitated. Nowadays, the mean average size of Democratic contributions is considerably larger than for Republicans: The pachydermic pretender receives much smaller checks from many more people, while the Donkey king receives humongously larger checks from a much smaller number of contributors.

When average contribution amount per contributor is similar between the parties, then moneys received is a good proxy for electoral support. But when a large gap yawns between the parties, then a candidate can receive less money overall than his opponent, yet still have a significantly larger base of support in a one man, one vote election.

At that point, the big-money low-support candidate must use some of that moolah, not to put too fine a point on it, to butter-up, browbeat, bribe, and even bamboozle voters to support him:

• Vote for Joe because that’s what all the smart people like you are doing.
• – because you won’t get a moment’s peace if Joe loses.
• – because Joe will “bring home the bacon” (and make you pay for it later in taxes; but you’ll pay them anyway, and this way you’ll get something as well as forking something over).
• – because Joe supports everything you stand for… and everything your mortal enemy stands for, too!

In the present case, for example, President B.O. will spend hundreds of millions of 2012 dollars trying to make voters believe that his reelection he is a spending-cutter, strong on national defense, a great believer in American exceptionalism, a health-care reformer, and above all, a big-time job creator; that he’ll “soak the rich” for trillions of dollars of free money, just for you; that if you vote Republican, your grandmother will be forced to live under a rock and eat dog food; and that Obama’s reelection is inevitable anyway, because he’s the strong horse!

Imagine an ad buy pushing all of the above… a billion dollars worth. Well, you don’t need to imagine; just wait a couple of months, and you can watch it unfold in “reel” time.

So why aren’t I putting my head through a noose and pulling the trigger? Because something monumental has changed since the election of Bill Clinton: Americans are no longer hogtied to the Magpie Media. “Intellectual dissent” no longer comprises a chronically constipated George Will sniffing in on This Week with David Brinkley. Today, with a myriad of channels through which the average Dick and Jane can harvest the news, from outré television outlets like Fox News Channel and CBN, to conservative news-sites like Newsmax or the Washington Times, to a yearly raft of conservative books, to YouTube, Farcebook, Twitterdom, and direct e-mail. Patterico put it succinctly:

One of the most important points of Andrew Breitbart’s new book is that conservatives can use New Media to fight Big Media’s narrative — and to reshape it according to the truth.

Obama focuses obsessively on trying to control the new media; he seems unaware that nobody possibly can: Even if the president spammed every e-mail account in the United States, I doubt he would net more than a handful of “road-to-Washington” conversions. Because the new media is to a large extent a distributed, non-local, unregulated, non-heirarchical communications model — one that is rapidly being folded into the Popular Front for Liberty — the very act of trying to dominate it turns consumers off.

If Obama is as ham-fisted with new media as he has been with the old, even his supporters will find themselves unmotivated to motivate to the polls; they will stay home in droves next year.

Presidential candidates need to learn what information and politicking their potential voters truly want from them. And honestly, what most of us really want is a deeper, more adult discussion of policies, as opposed to condescending head-patting and tut-tutting, coupled with extortive threats and sepulchral prophecies of doom. Democrats are real wizards at firing off phosphoric fabulation; but their content, based upon the Think Progress and Hufflepuffington Post model, leaves so much to be desired that often it can’t even inspire the choir.

This election, this time, the GOP has the substance, the gravitas, and also the means to slither around the three-headed gate-keeper to get meaningful information into the hands and minds of the voters. And not all the money in the world spent spewing the same old Spam in a can is going to give Lucky Lefty any advantage against any reasonable Republican nominee. (Note I said reasonable; if the GOP nominates Donald Trump, all bets are off.)

Obama may still win; but if so, it will certainly not be because he burned his mountain of cash like a Kwakiutl potlatch.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

All it takes is an enemy ruthless enough, and little-enough concerned about retaliation, to get his hands on such a device, mount it on a missile, and “pull the trigger.”

And according to ABC News, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is just this close to developing an NEMP; and North Korea has already used non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons (NNEMPs) against American and South Korean forces in the Korean peninsula… and shows interest in exporting such weapons to radical Islamist countries and organizations:

The North is believed to be nearing completion of an electromagnetic pulse bomb that, if exploded 25 miles above ground would cause irreversible damage to electrical and electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, radio and radar, experts say.

“We assume they are at a considerably substantial level of development,” Park Chang-kyu of the Agency for Defense Development said at a briefing to the parliament Monday.

Park confirmed that South Korea has also developed an advanced electronic device that can be deployed in times of war.

The current attempts to interfere with GPS transmissions are coming from atop a modified truck-mounted Russian device. Pyongyang reportedly imported the GPS jamming system from Russia in early 2000 and has since developed two kinds of a modified version. It has also in recent years handed out sales catalogs of them to nations in the Middle East, according to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo.

(This post is dedicated to all those on the Left — and the “Realists” on the Right — who mocked George W. Bush for including North Korea with Iran and Iraq in his original “Axis of Evil” speech.)

Detonating an NEMP high above North America would devastate not only power and communications but the economy (obliterating internet-based financial transactions and electronically stored financial data), transportation (disrupting electronic monitoring and control of everything from traffic signals to freight-train switching to commercial air traffic control), and even our military, much of which relies heavily on GPS navigation and site determination — though United States forces do still train extensively in low-tech navitation and warfare. The electromagnetic pulse would wash across the entire continental United States, plus the southern part of Canada and northern Mexico, like a tidal wave of voltage-lava, melting all the circuits in its path unless specially shielded.

Such a strike would be utterly devastating, resulting in trillions of dollars in damages… and tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, both direct (from crashes) and indirect, from loss of medical records, the inability of emergency services to respond to life-or-death situations, utility and power shutdowns, and economic dislocation. Recovery would likely take decades. And there is absolutely nothing we can do at this time to prevent or even mitigate it; shielding every electrical circuit in the U.S. heavily enough to resist an NEMP would dwarf the cost of all natural disasters and terrorist attacks of the last century combined.

A nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack starts by detonating a nuclear warhead in the high atmosphere; this produces a burst of gamma radiation, which triggers beta rays — that is, high-energy electrons moving at more than 90% the speed of light — between 20 and 40 km altitude. The gamma radiation is deflected at right angles by the Earth’s magnetic field to create an oscillating electric current in the atmosphere. And this oscillation in turn generates a pulse or burst of electromagnetic energy. [Beta-ray correction per commenter Count to 10. Thanks!]

When this EM firestorm strikes the surface, it will have a peak power density of 50,000 volts and millions of megawatts, easily enough to fry most modern transistors and microcircuits. Since the pulse from detonation to peak value takes only 5 nanoseconds (five billionths of a second), and the entire first component (E1) of the EMP effect is over at about 1 microsecond (one millionth of a second), protection technology — designed for much slower lightning strikes — generally cannot react quickly enough to save the delicate printed circuitry that run our electronic devices these days. Any modern device without thick passive shielding will likely be destroyed or severely damaged.

There are additional secondary effects of an NEMP, dubbed E2 and E3, that are respectively similar to lightning strikes (E2) and electromagnetic storms caused by very severe solar flares (E3); surge-protectors can ordinarily handle those — unless they are compromised, damaged, or destroyed first… which is exactly what phase E1 of a Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse attack accomplishes. Thus the E2 and E3 phases are often much more devastating than are natural lightning strikes and EM storms.

So far, the North Koreans have not detonated any NEMP device; the EM pulses they have used to jam or damage our GPS and other electronic devices are non-nuclear, and their range is much more limited; but the principle is the same. NNEMP weapons (non-nuclear) use a non-nuclear method to generate the initial burst of energy, generally chemical explosives; the energy front is sent through wave-shaping circuits or microwave generators, thence through an antenna:

This is the second time North Korea has sought to interfere with military communications. Pyongyang is thought to have been behind a failure of GPS receivers on some naval and civilian aircraft during another joint military exercise in August.

South Korea’s minister of defense at that time had reported to the Congress, warning that the North poses “a fresh security threat” capable of disrupting guided bombs and missiles by sending signals over a distance of up to 60 miles.

However Russia, which sold North Korea the non-nuclear devices that it has used against South Korea and its allies (including the United States), also has an arsenal of the nuclear version; the only force we have to rely on to safeguard against North Korea getting its hands on an NEMP is the basic “decency” and “good sense” of Putin’s post-Soviet paradise. Color me unreassured.

The effect of an NEMP detonated over the United States would be catastrophic; but what would be our response? More appropriately, what are we doing to prevent it from happening in the first place?

I’m sure nuclear scientists have tackled the technological aspect of the threat; but we could also begin shielding vital systems, switches, and lines; infiltrating our own Korean-speaking and -looking agents into the DPRK to find out how far they’ve gotten, rather than overrelying upon intelligence-sharing from the Republic of Korea (South Korea); and even using backchannel communications to warn North Korea’s sponsors (mainly Russia and China) that if Kim Jong-il actually utilizes one, we will consider it to be a nuclear attack on the United States — and we will respond appropriately, both against North Korea and anyone we believe helped them. Or might have helped them.

Obviously, much of the anti-EMP research is heavily classified, and I have no idea how far we’ve gotten. Is there a wide-area techie defense against an electromagnetic pulse? But I’m far more worried about the political aspect: Simply put, I do not trust the Obama administration to do anything effective on either front. I don’t believe they are taking the threat seriously; President Barack H. Obama surely believes that his peerless “smart diplomacy” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, coupled with his slavish kow-towing to Red China and Russia, will induce the DPRK dictator to back away from his threats to wipe America out via a nuclear EMP.

And even if Kim — or his looming successor, Kim Jong-un, a.k.a. “Lil’ Kim” — committed the unthinkable against us, what would the Obamunist do about it? He has shown himself incapable of responding to a military threat, incompetent at running a war, and averse to the point of revulsion to defending the United States or retaliating upon our attackers. More than likely the president would issue a very stern diplomatic communique through the proper channels (once radio communications, television broadcasts, word processors, and teleprompters were brought back online); file a criminal and civil complaint in the International Court of Justice at the Hague; and furiously tingle his bell.

And even more likely, that is what Kim believes Obama would do (and not do); which makes it ever so much more probable that North Korea will go right ahead and use the first NEMP they acquire against us… or at least threaten to use it unless Obama capitulates and gives Kim — well, whatever he demands, again and again. Nothing works better than nuclear blackmail, when you have an anti-American coward and weakling in the White House.

If there is a God, and if He believes we’re on His side, then let’s hope He ensures that the DPRK does not get a nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon; at least not until we have a president who takes seriously the primary duty of the office: to protect American territory, the American people, and America itself from violent attack by foreign princes and terrorists.

Otherwise, “American exceptionalism” will take on a new and very tragic meaning.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

“The president has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” Mr. Holder said. “The president has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”

All I can say is — thank goodness! Three cheers for Obama’s moral resolve and newly grown spine — because that smirking trick of his clears the decks for for legal challenges to be answered by attorneys for House and Senate Republicans, who actually support traditional marriage and oppose the same-sex inversion of marriage.

And before going one nanometer further, I once again strongly support and defend both the repeal of Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of forcing gays in the military to remain in the closet, and also the seminal U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas overturning all “anti-sodomy” state and federal laws. In other words, I have not budged on any of my positions:

• I support allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
• I support the fundamental liberty of consenting adults to have any kind of sex they want, so long as it does not cross the line into assault, battery, homicide, or public exhibition.
• But I completely and adamantly oppose instituting same-sex marriage (SSM).

Back to Lucky Lefty, the Obamunist. Note the traditional liberal hubris and megalomania: First, he is not content to leave findings of constitutionality to the courts; Obama has discovered somewhere in Article II of the Constitution a clause that allows him to nullify, by presidential diktat, any federal law he dislikes, even though duly enacted by Congress and signed by the president. Second, he seemingly could not care less what voters in the United States think about the definition of marriage; he has concluded that SSM is cool with him, and the rest of us should simply fall in line.

But it’s not as if he even believes that he can prevent such defenses, thus forcing — as the state of California and its new (and its former) governor are trying — to deny all potential defenders standing, then eighty-six the laws due to lack of defense. Rather, the administration seems almost giddy at the thought of Congress defending traditional marriage, while the president attacks it:

The decision effectively throws the defense of DOMA into the lap of Congress, which can instruct its own attorneys to defend federal laws. Mr. Holder said he had informed members of Congress of the decision so that “members who wish to defend the statute may pursue that option.”

Supporters of traditional marriage immediately called on the Republican-majority House to intervene in the DOMA lawsuits.

“With this decision, the president has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Congress,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “It is incumbent upon the Republican leadership to respond by intervening to defend DOMA, or they will become complicit in the president’s neglect of duty.”

Many on the left are likewise giddy to the point of vertigo, calling the president’s principled act of unprinciple a tremendous victory for the forces of radicalism and transformation, hastening the eventual Europeanization of the United States.

But not so fast; lefties may be missing the point.

When the Attorney General or the Soliciter General of the United States undertakes to defend a law under constitutional assault, the courts surely consider that defense much more seriously than some outside, third-party, amicus curae brief; I’m sure they privilege those arguments, since it’s the official policy of the United States. Thus, if the administration’s defense is deliberately lame and incomplete, the law stands in grave danger of being overturned… even if a better argument was available but unused.

And evidently, the administration has been doing exactly that, offering an intentionally impaired defense of DOMA while ignoring winning arguments that have prevailed in state cases, hoping that the feds’ feeble efforts will “fail” to uphold DOMA; the crafty Obamunists will then have gotten a major policy change while leaving their own hands clean, thus sidestepping voter vengeance:

While it was sudden, Wednesday’s move did not come out of nowhere. Opponents of same-sex marriage had grown increasingly frustrated with the administration for what they called its underzealous defense of DOMA and its omission of key arguments.

In a brief filed Jan. 13 in defense of DOMA at the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department states that “the administration supports repealing DOMA,” but that the department must do its job to defend the law “as long as reasonable arguments can be made in support of their constitutionality.”

Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, told The Washington Times recently that he suspected the administration of purposely tanking its case.

“They purposely avoid arguments that are winning time and time again in court,” he said. “Even scholars on the other side of this issue have said, ‘What is going on here is wrong.’ Anyone who cares about constitutional government should be very concerned about what’s happening in the DOMA case.”

But Obama, Holder, and the entire administration are now openly at war with traditional marriage while aiding and abetting same-sex marriage, and congressional conservatives have been given the green light to vigorously defend the sanctity and necessity of a legal marriage being between one man and one woman. That very fact means that DOMA has a much greater opportunity to be upheld yet again.

Inadvertently, the tremendous victory is ours, not theirs, a gift from the smug and cocky Left. As usual, “Progressivism” overreaches and draws back a stump, setting itself up for voter blowback as well.

Thank you, mask man!

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

We couple this with the iconic antisemitic rant another drunken Mel Gibson made — rather, the same Gibson during a different debauchery — while being arrested for DUI, and the pattern is fairly clear: In his heart, Gibson is a raging antisemite.

And as a USDA-certified non-religious Jew, that makes me very, very proud of him.

We pause briefly to allow readers to finish caroming around the room, flapping their arms like emperor penguins trying to take to the air.

Settled again? Good; I can explain what in blazes I mean very concisely…

We all have demons; no one but a saint is so free of evil that he hasn’t even a single moral blindness, a single skeleton in his skull. On those issues, the beast screams to be released to rend and eviscerate someone who, while he may be irritating or offensive or even thuggish, doesn’t actually deserve the level of irrational vitriol or violence that we feel, in those moments, like dishing out.

How many of you — be honest — had flashes of rage following the 9/11attacks that induced fantasies of flattening the entire Arab world with nuclear Armageddon?

But wait, think a second time: Should we really kill hundreds of millions of people, the vast, vast majority innocent of that act of war, out of sick revenge at what, at most, half a hundred people plotted and maybe fifteen or twenty thousand actively applauded? All but the mad among us quickly suppressed that first idea and swallowed our rage, choosing instead to do as George W. Bush said: Find the people who knocked those buildings down and kill them personally, or capture them and hold them indefinitely, crushing every scrap of usable, actionable intel out of them. (Or at the very least, if we couldn’t keep silent about our general fury at Arabs and Moslems in general, we confined those ravings of universal slaughter to close friends who wouldn’t broadcast our intemperance to the world at large.)

And who here has never, ever, ever been so enraged by some nitwit driver that he hasn’t screamed out loud, in his car, that he was going to ram the son of a bachelor and drive his car into a telephone poll? Sure, we yell it… but if we retain our sanity, we don’t actually do it.

Civilization is largely a voluntary act of mass repression; and that’s a good thing. An awful lot of thoughts and desires we experience throughout a given day should be repressed, jammed down so deep we barely feel them except for a burr in the brain — notwithstanding that stupid sixties philosophy of “let it all hang out” and “never repress what you feel.”

Sometimes it takes a heroic effort to suppress saying or doing something that Seems Like a Good Idea at the Time™, but upon sober reflection would be a horrific and life-destroying indulgence. But that’s one of the prices we pay for living in a society, surrounded by other people.

I’d say that the definition of a civilized human being is the ability to look past anger to a later time, when we will have calmed down, and imagine ourselves saying, “My God, what have I done? My life is ended!”… then to return to present time and not do it in the first place.

Those with the loudest demons have the greatest struggle; and quite evidently, Mel Gibson’s demons are very loud and vile indeed. But the point is, when not in the madness of strong drink, he does manage to suppress them. He suppresses them so well that until that videotaped, besotted rant during his arrest, I daresay the vast majority of us had no idea he struggled with such internal Hell.

Some Gibson critics have tried to claim that his movie the Passion of the Christ was antisemitic; I believe they do so precisely because they realize that to condemn Gibson, they must show that he indulges his demon even when stone cold sober… as when he is writing and directing a movie.

Yet I watched that movie as a Jew (having been “primed” to believe it would be antisemitic); and while I was unmoved by the story, I certainly felt no stirrings of anxiety over religious persecution, as I did when watching Leni Riefenstahl’s the Triumph of the Will, glorifying Adolf Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally.

In fact, in the twenty-one Gibson movies I’ve seen, including Passion and Apocalypto, both of which he only wrote and directed, I’ve never seen anything to indicate he was a deliberate Jew hater or “homophobe.” Knowing as I now do how he must struggle against the irrational illnesses of racism and xenophobia, I am astonished at what a great job he does.

Gibon’s conscious, intelligent mind realizes one of two things, the first more creditable than the second but both being acceptable marks of civilization:

• Either that his “feelings” are simply wrong, as feelings frequently are; and there is nothing inherently inferior about Jews, gays, or any other human, even if he believes that some of the things they do — deny Christ, engage in the “abomination” of homosexual acts — are sins. He may honestly believe he must hate the sin but love the sinner.
• Or at the very least, he must believe that he cannot live in this American society and express such loathing that is rejected by nearly everybody else here (Europe and the Orient are friendlier to Jew hatred); and Gibson must believe that the benefits of living in the United States outweigh any personal satisfaction he might derive from venting venom at Jews and gays. And that, as I said, is practically the definition of a civilized man.

I don’t know which, but either way, Mel Gibson “gets it” — when he’s sober. And he doesn’t seem to be a habitual drunkard; such incidents are few enough and far enough apart that they still shock us.

Of course Gibson still has a drinking problem; anytime someone allows himself to get so drunk that he cannot control his inner demons, he is a menace to himself, and what is infinitely worse, to the rest of society. But I feel as proud (as a fellow civilized human being) of his personal achievement as I would of a kleptomaniac who controls himself and does not steal, or a drug addict who steers clear of the needle, or a believing Catholic who is gay, yet who lives a celebate life so as not to commit what he believes to be sin. It must take a mental effort of mind-over-glands more monumental than most of us can imagine — a true “triumph of the will” — for Gibson to bottle his imp of rage and hate and cast it into the sea, even if it does occasionally come bobbing back ashore when he’s in his cups.

By contrast, I have heard many and many a man or woman of the Left openly, brazenly, almost tauntingly fling antisemitic, anti-gay, and racist ideas and epithets into the maelstrom of his political and ideological madness without having touched a drop of “the creature” all day. Which, by the way, is practically a textbook definition of barbaric savagery.

Even as a Jew, who would you rather luncheon with: Mel Gibson? Or Special Assistant to President Barack H. Obama Samantha Power, head of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights?

The defense rests.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

So Monday — the 292nd anniversary of the death of Blackbeard the pirate, but does anybody care? — the New York Times reported a curious controversy that surely is the most emblematic embarassment of the administration of Barack H. “Lucky Lefty” Obama:

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

Cue “Three Stooges” music: “Oh, a wiseguy, eh?”

I was not particularly startled by the fact that the Obamacle’s negotiators cannot tell a Taliban from a tally-ho; with this duffer, who drills the ball into a knothole and calls it a hole in one, I expect nothing better.

But what really numbfounds me is the next line in the Times story:

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

That is, evidently, we were under the mistaken impression that we were paying the Taliban to negotiate with us. One can only conclude that our progressive president is so desperate to show some progress (on anything!) that he’s even willing to bribe our enemies to sit down and pretend to talk to us.

So upon consideration, I really can’t feel all that upset about what happened over the past three months (red-faced and humiliated, sure, but not upset). When all is said, I’m actually rather grateful that all that money we’ve been forking over only went to a con man.

In fact, considering the alternative, I’d say we got a bargain.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

I’m somewhat optimistic (just a bit) that maybe Barack H. Obama will be able to change course, at least a little, so that we don’t have complete civil war for the next two years — which might well turn off the electorate that just elected the GOP.

In the wake of the midterm elections, the president — after hilariously proclaiming that the Democrats only lost because the TOTUS* didn’t do a good enough job explaining to voters how Obama plans to radicalize America — has actually offered two very substantial concessions to traditional American values:

Mr. Obama this week already has moved, at least slightly, on two major issues.

He said he no longer believes he can pass a broad energy bill that would impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and instead called for all sides to work on renewable and clean energy sources, such as nuclear power.

The White House also signaled movement on tax cuts — the issue that deeply divided Congress just before it left town in September, and that will await lawmakers when they return this month.

Mr. Obama earlier said the Bush tax cuts that went to wealthier Americans must be allowed to lapse. But asked about a temporary extension, Mr. Gibbs said Thursday that Mr. Obama would “be open to having that discussion and open to listening to what the debate is on both sides of that.”

One possibility I’ve seen floated would be to extend the Bush tax cuts until — drum roll — early 2013. The point is clear: If Obama loses reelection in 2012, then the next Republican president can try to make the tax-cuts permanent, if he can overcome the Democrats in the Senate.

But if B.O. is reelected, he will have a substantial argument that the American people don’t want them to become permanent, else they would have elected the Republican — who will, naturally, run on a platform that includes permanizing the tax cuts.

And of course Republicans on Capitol Hill would be overjoyed to work with the president and many Democrats in expanding our nuclear reactor force to take the place of as many coal- and oil-powered electricity plants as possible.

All it really would take would be to dramatically streamline the approval process and grant partial legal immunity to nuclear projects, to protect them from baseless lawsuits by environmentalists, which could stymie construction forever. As it happens, a number of environmentalists have already rationally concluded that nuclear power is less damaging to the environment than burning oil and coal; so the opposition is already divided.

I see these as much more significant than does the Washington Times‘ Stephen Dinan. By throwing both Cap and Tax and the Hands-Free Tax Increase under the bus, I think the Obamacle augurs that the era of big transformation has ended — for a time, at least. It’s hard to imagine him permanently giving up his ultimate goal of remaking America as a Eurosocialist welfare state; but Obama is obviously gobsmacked at the moment, unable to conjure a scheme to pull it off.

I still don’t see him as a Clintonian triangulator; but perhaps he is so unused to defeat that, for a while at least, he will be too stunned to resist the pressure to make concessions. Another way of looking at it: Maybe for a few months — before he shakes himself, like a cartoon victim of an explosion, and returns to his natural self — the One will find himself bowing at the waist and kow-towing to his personal, American “enemies,” the way he’s already used to doing to America’s foreign enemies.

Quick, let’s take advantage while it lasts! When Obama comes back to his old, arrogant, messianic self, then Republicans can return to fighting him, hammer and tooth. But perhaps by then we’ll have some substantive and substantial accomplishes under our belts… all the better to head into the 2012 showdown.

* TOTUS: Teleprompter of the United States

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Note: Figures updated to take into account the fact (which I previously forgot) that Alaska and Hawaii were not admitted to the Union until 1959; so the U.S. Senate had only 96 senators before 1959.

Since the House of Representatives has 435 seats (and has since 1913), compared to the Senate’s 100 (post-1959) or 96 (pre-1959), one Senate seat “equals” 4.35 House seats (post-1959) or 4.53125 (pre-1959), in a numerical sense. Therefore, I have combine the pickups in the two chambers of Congress by that formula: The total number of House seats won, plus 4.35 (or 4.53125) X the number of Senate seats won, equals the “win-factor” of that election. Since that gives us a single number measuring the sweep of an electoral victory, we can use it to rank them.

Here are the top five post-War historical benchmarks in countdown order, based on win-factor:

5. 1974 mid-terms: Democrats gain 49 House seats and 3 Senate seats; win-factor = 62.1
4. 1994 mid-terms: Republicans gain 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats; win-factor = 88.8
3. 1946 mid-terms: Republicans gain 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats; win-factor = 109.4
2. 1948 presidential: Democrats gain 75 House seats and 9 Senate seats; win-factor = 115.8
1. 1958 mid-terms: Democrats gain 49 House seats and 16 Senate seats; win-factor = 121.5

(1958 was kind of an oddball election; it’s only number one because of the enormous pickup in the Senate.)

So what would it take for this election to grab the top spot, the biggest pickup of the entire post-War era? Here are a few examples; for each number of Senate pickups, I list the minimum number of House seats to break the 1958 record:

• 8 Senate seats and 87 House seats (win-factor = 121.8)
• 9 Senate seats and 83 House seats (win-factor = 122.2)
• 10 Senate seats and 79 House seats (win-factor = 122.5) — 78 House seats would exactly equal the 1958 record
• 11 Senate seats and 74 House seats (win-factor = 121.9)
• 12 Senate seats and 70 House seats (win-factor = 122.2)

Submitted for your viewing pleasure. Wagering is encouraged. And remember: If you must drink, drive responsibly.

Pop that corn, kick back, and enjoy those returns!

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

A traditional-values group is jubilant at the renewed likelihood that Mississippi voters — among the most pro-life in the nation — will have a “personhood” measure on their 2011 ballots….

Measure 26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to say that “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

I think the theory is that, at whatever point the entity becomes a legal person (fertilization or later, as the state initiative specifies), aborting it is killing a person and can only be justified on grounds that would justify killing someone who had already been born (perhaps only to save the life of the mother). One presumes a determination that the entity was a person would also turn an assault that led to miscarriage into a homicide.

The flip side, of course, is that before reaching the personhood-point, the entity is not a legal person; it does not have a “right” to life; and it can be legally aborted for much lesser cause, perhaps even for convenience.

Of course, Misisipi (is that too few?) notwithstanding, a “personhood” initiative need not specify fertilization as the point at which personhood obtains. A state initiative could specify some other point of gestation instead; some other, not quite so anti-abortion group could put a measure on the ballot to declare that personhood began at the beginning of the third trimester, or when it reached some particular developmental stage. (My personal preference is that the foetus becomes a person when the cerebral cortex activates, which should be detectable in each individual case, if absolutely necessary, via a PET scan.)

In Colorado, for example, abortion prohibitionists tried a similar initiative two years ago, Colorado Amendment 48; it was crushed at the polls by 46 points, 73 Nay to 27 Yea. But an initiative that set personhood to begin at some defined later point in the pregnancy might have a much better chance of passing in a less-conservative state like Colorado or California, Florida or Washington, New York or New Mexico. I suspect most folks are more comfortable defining personhood as occuring later than conception — but long before the eighth or ninth month, possibly even before the third trimester.

My point for decades — ever since Roe v. Wade, actually — has been that both sides are fighting the abortion wars bass-ackwards; instead of pushing for laws banning abortion or court cases declaring abortion a sacrament, we should begin with first principles:

1. You first must decide at what point of gestation, between conception to birth, the growing entity becomes a legal person.
2. The personhood decision can only be made via a vote by the peoples’ representatives in the legislature or by the people directly by referendum.
3. The personhood point must be written into the state constitution, not merely the state code, to prevent state judges from simply throwing it out at whim.
4. It must pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court, so that local federal district and circus courts cannot throw it out, either.
5. After which, abortion and every other related question will simply fall out without tears from the personhood determination.

But wait… If each state can pass its own personhood amendment setting a unique point where the entity becomes a legal person, and if some states can decline to pass any personhood initiative or bill at all, then won’t a disparity exist from state to state on the legality of abortion? You might have a case where a girl could get a abortion in one state but not in another.

Why yes, Poindexter, it will; but that’s a feature, not a bug: It’s the essence of federalism. If somebody doesn’t like the personhood declaration in his state and the abortion and assault laws it yields, then he can move. Just as he can move if he doesn’t like the taxes in his state, or the way the state and local law-enforcement authorities handle drug cases, or the policy of his state on health insurance, energy, water, welfare, banking, business licences, or having to use a “jug handle” to make a bleeping left turn (hello, Garden Staters!)

There are no internal passports required; if you don’t like your local laws, move to a different locality. And if you are a sexually active female under the age of consent, and you live in a state like Mxyzptlki that declares a zygote to be a legal person, thus banning abortion — then perhaps you should rethink your social relationships, at least until you’re old enough to move to Colorado, or somesuch.

So even though I would personally vote against Mrs. Hippie’s Measure 26, since I don’t believe one fertilized cell constitutes a legal person, I applaud the fact that the state is trying to define personhood first, before embarking on a campaign to end abortion. On one of the great moral arguments of our society, the rest of the United States should look to Mississippi. (There, see? We may veer back and forth; but we always comes our right in the end.)

Everything is back to norbal.

Cross-posted to Big Lizards…

Too, Whitman was overall more focused and on-message, more believable, and more coherent by a long shot. Brown by contrast rambled on like your crazy uncle who lives in the basement, hurling out incomprehensible numbers so rapidly that even I, who follow politics like a fiend, couldn’t follow him. Half the time, I had no idea what the heck he was even talking about.

NBC anchor and ultra-liberal Democrat Tom Brokaw actually did a pretty good job of being even-handed this time; I have a feeling even he and his cohorts are rather skeptical of another term for Mr. Brown. But Brokaw lost control frequently, as each candidate ignored Brokaw’s attempts to move on to the next question and instead persisted in responding to what his opponent said. I applaud this; I’m much more interested in follow-up As between the candidates than in listening to Brokaw’s carefully stage-managed laundry list of Qs.

I cannot imagine that Jerry Brown did himself any good with this debate. For one thing, Whitman was the clear aggressor; she was on offence, leaving Brown to play defense. (Very defensively: Brown’s shocked look, as he peered left and right whenever she attacked his record or his campaign proposals — What… me? You’re mean me? — was simply priceless!)

But Whitman certainly regained the aura of leadership that she held before the first debate, which I didn’t see (it wasn’t broadcast, only webcast). Once polls finally start flowing here in the Golden State, I expect we’ll see Whitman moving up at Brown’s expense.

But let’s get to the juicy stuff…

The gaffes – Whitman flubs the whore shot

Brokaw brought up the “whore” incident… and I expect I must explain exactly what that was:

Background: Both Brown and Whitman had been seeking the support of police and fire-fighter unions, but Whitman got all but one of them. In particular, both campaigns went after the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

Whitman is pushing for reform of public-employee union pensions, which are bankrupting California (and many other states); she wants to switch those pensions from defined benefit funds — where a specific, dollar-amount monthly pension is awarded after retirement — to defined contribution funds, where the state contributes a specific amount to a 401K plan, to which the employee also contributes. The former leads to economic catastrophe, as the pensions rise and rise without limit, eventually eating up the entire state budget; but the latter are more manageable, with the state contribution being strictly limited.

So Whitman wants to switch to defined contribution for future hires; but she makes an exception for police and firefighters (about 25% of public retirees) — on grounds, she says, that they put their lives on the line every day for Californios.

About a week or so ago, Brown called up the LAPPL, hoping for an endorsement; he got voicemail and left his pitch. But either he or a staffer inexpertly hung up the phone, and an ensuing lively conversation among Brown and his campaign workers was recorded for posterity on the LAPPL’s answering machine.

In the course of that discussion, some still unknown (or at least unrevealed) person suggested calling Meg Whitman a “whore” because she had agreed to support a “defined benefit” pension fund for police and fire pensions. One presumes the caller meant the term in the sense of “will change her position for money;” but the word certainly has a very nasty connotation when applied to a particular woman.

Since the Police Protective League had already decided to endorse Meg Whitman instead, because she would crack down harder on crime and criminals, they decided to share the unintended recording with various newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the L.A. Weekly.

So as I said, Tom Brokaw asked about the “whore” comment, which he called the “hundred thousand pound gorilla in the room,” during the debate. Specifically, Brokaw asked Brown whether the word “whore,” applied to a woman, was as bad as the N-word applied to a black person. After a half-apology, Brown dismissed the comparison — eliciting loud moans throughout the audience; at that point, the crowd was thoroughly on Whitman’s side, and she could have hammered the point home.

But then Brown turned the tables, demanding to know whether Whitman had reprimanded her campaign chairman, former Gov. Pete Wilson, for calling Congress generally a passle of whores. Evidently caught off guard, Whitman responded very lamely: “Now you know that’s a completely different thing,” she said (to the best of my recollection).

This immediately flipped the audience against her; they hooted derisively. In the end, I think it became a neutral issue, rather than hurting Brown.

What should she had said? I have a much better answer… and had she been prepared for the countercharge, I suspect she would have thought of this as well. I would have advised her to say the following:

I think it was rude and offensive when Pete said that, fifteen years ago. But it’s one thing to use an offensive term as a general attack on Congress — it’s much, much worse to use that same word to directly attack an individual person, an individual woman. One of the best scenes in the movie Mean Girls was when the girls’ gym teacher got them to stop calling each other “ho’s,” and taught them instead to give other girls — and boys — the respect we all deserve.

Because it really is different, of course, to talk about a parliament of whores than it is to point at a particular woman and call her, personally a whore. If you’re interested (and even if you aren’t!), here is the 1995 Pete Wilson comment in context, followed by the Brown campaign worker’s comment in full:

After learning that a federal judge had ruled California might be liable for up to $500 million in damages over its issuance of IOUs during a budget crisis in 1992, [Gov. Pete] Wilson lashed out at Congress for having approved the Depression-era Fair Labor Practices Act.

“I don’t blame the judge; he is interpreting the law,” Wilson said during a speech before the National Association of Wholesalers Wednesday. “I blame the Congress for being such whores to public employees unions that they would pass that kind of legislation.”

And the Brown campaigner:

In the call recorded by the Los Angeles Police Protective League (which sent the audio to the Weekly and other outlets), Brown seems frustrated by pressure to vow to protect law enforcement pensions at a time when such benefits are under scrutiny for the heavy burden they place on taxpayers.

” … I have been warned if I crack down on pensions … they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em … a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.

His associate then says, “What about saying she’s a whore?”

Brown declines the offer to colorfully portray Whitman in television as a patsy to the police unions.

The gaffes – Brown’s Homer-Simpson moment

Jerry Brown performed his own interpretation of one of those scenes where Homer is thinking the truth and telling a fib, but he gets mixed up and accidentally thinks the fib and tells the truth instead.

Whitman had hit Brown several times with the fact that the police and firefighter unions were all supporting her, while the other, less savory public-employee unions were all financing Jerry Brown’s campaign — and incidentally paying for the “independent” attack ads against Whitman.

Brown objected strenuously, trotting out his endorsement by the California Police Chiefs Association. Now bear in mind, police chiefs are not the same as police officers; in fact, police chiefs (or police commissioners) often aren’t even police officers at all, and may never have served for a single day on the streets. They are politicians appointed by other politicians (mayors, city councils) to supply civilian control to the police department.

Even when the police chief is an actual cop, he has generally long since ceased doing real police work, becoming an administrator instead; and he is never picked for his policing ability but rather for purely political reasons. So it’s no surprise that the CPCA and the LAPPL are often at odds with each other… for example, when the Los Angeles Police Department’s Chief of Police throws rank-and-file officers under the bus over an excessive-force accusation, rather than defending the cops.

Anyway, Jerry Brown objected to Whitman saying she had the support of police and firefighters; he wanted to say he has the backing of the chiefs of police, but it didn’t quite come out that way:

Brown, meaning to say “I’ve got the police chiefs’ backing,” instead started “I’ve got the police chiefs in my back [...]” before pausing to correct himself. Whitman interrupted, laughing as she said, “I think he said he’s got the police chiefs in his back pocket.”

Doh!

While I don’t think such minor gaffes generally make much of a difference in a race (there are exceptions, such as President Gerald Ford misspeaking in a debate, saying that Poland wasn’t dominated by the Soviet Union), I nevertheless believe that Brown’s gaffe was much worse than Whitman’s: She only said that calling a group of people “whores” was not the same thing as calling a specific individual woman a whore; this is true, even if it sounds a little trite, in the absence of explanation.

But Brown inadvertently blurted out a deep truth: He has the police chiefs, and indeed the non-security-related public-employee unions, in his back pocket… and more sinisterly, they have him in theirs.

This plays directly into one of Whitman’s campaign themes, that Brown is beholden to all the various left-liberal money machines who paid for his campaign; and he will do their bidding if he gets back into the governor’s mansion. By contrast, Whitman’s self-funded campaign leaves her independent of the special interests, owing nothing to anybody but the California voters.

Wrapping up

Democratic partisans swear that Brown delivered a “TKO” to Whitman in this debate; Republicans say she mopped the floor with him. But bottom line, as best I can call it, folks who are actually deciding who to vote for on the basis of this debate are much more likely to swing to Meg “Glam With a Plan” Whitman than to Jerry “Crazy Uncle” Brown.

I suspect that isn’t very many people… but in a race this close — Brown is ahead by 5.33% in the RCP average — even a small number of people landing on Whitman’s side can give her the victory. But we really can’t tell much; inexplicably, there hasn’t been a poll released in either this race or the California U.S. Senate race in nine days, just 20 days out from the election.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

On September 18th, Forbes Magazine published a fascinating and very controversial article by Dinesh D’Souza: “Obama’s Problem With Business.” The subhead is a little more specific: “The President isn’t exactly a socialist. So what’s driving his hostility to private enterprise?”

The thesis — that President Barack H. Obama is not a socialist but an anti-colonialist — is startling; but the more one thinks about it, the more it seems to explain:

From a very young age and through his formative years Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

The White House tore into the D’Souzan article, but even more so into Forbes itself for daring to publish it, according to Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post (moving soon to the Daily Beast):

Dinesh D’Souza has drawn a torrent of criticism with a Forbes cover story that accuses President Obama of adopting “the cause of anti-colonialism” from his Kenyan father….

“It’s a stunning thing, to see a publication you would see in a dentist’s office, so lacking in truth and fact,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says in an interview. “I think it represents a new low.”

Gibbs is meeting with Thursday afternoon with Forbes’s Washington bureau chief, Brian Wingfield, to discuss his objections. “Did they not fact-check this at all, or did they fact-check it and just willfully ignore it?” he asks.

To which Forbes had a canny response:

The magazine would not make Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000, available for comment, or any other editor. The biweekly did issue a statement: “Dinesh D’Souza’s cover story was presented as an analysis of how the president thinks. No facts are in contention. Forbes stands by the story.”

Kurtz turns smuggish by proxy, concluding his hit piece with this:

Columbia Journalism Review this week called the D’Souza article “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and “the worst kind of smear journalism–a singularly disgusting work.”

So there.

But Ryan Chittum’s piece at the CJR, which includes the indictment that D’Souza’s article is “fact-twisting” and “error-laden,” astonishingly cites not a single factual error. Not one! The entire rant (it’s too much an adolescent whine to qualify as analysis or even critique) is pure invective and remarkably fact free. Truly it must be read to be believed, though the reader may come away with a diminished respect for the Columbia Journalism Review, and indeed the entire Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. No, really.

The closest Chittum comes to finding error is this:

The atrociousness isn’t limited to the smears. This, for instance, has to be one of the stupidest paragraphs ever written in Forbes (emphasis [Chittum's]):

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling — but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro — not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

Get that? The oil that Petrobras pumps will only go to Brazil because it’s owned by Brazil. So Hugo Chavez will sell us his Citgo gas, but Lula won’t? And even if it somehow did (it should be noted that Petrobras has an American affiliate), that would mean Brazil would need less oil from elsewhere, which means more for us. Supply and demand, dude. Oil is fungible. Gah.

Yes, we “got that”: D’Souza concludes that Barack Obama supports Brazillian oil exploration: It’s wonderfully anti-colonialist if third-world Brazil controls its own vital resources! But he opposes American oil exploration anywhere and everywhere in the United States (say — that’s a fact!): American resource independence would be dreadful… the colonial American empire must be kept in continual check; and one way to do that is to drain our resources buying oil from our rivals (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and our enemies (Iran, Venezuela).

One may disagree with the analysis, but the paragraph should be comprehensible.

With admirable economy of rhetoric, D’Souza chose not to belabor the point in Chittum-level words (as we were compelled to do above). Instead, D’Souza clung to the hope that readers would have a comprehension level somewhere north of high school.

In this assumption, D’Souza evidently erred; but then, perhaps his target audience was a skosh more elevated than the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review… say, at least the level of a legal secretary, or a sci-fi fan, or a pajama-clad blogger, any of whom should have had no difficulty parsing “one of the stupidest paragraphs ever written in Forbes.”

Gah.

Kathleen Parker, also at the Post is beside herself, melding the vitriol of Ann Coulter with the snidery of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.; she is, if anything, even more fact-free (if one’s factual content can possibly be less than zero):

Of course I knew it all along. President Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist and that’s why he doesn’t get us. He’s a ticked-off African.

So goes the latest in Obama-theory, originated by the usually rational conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza and endorsed by none other than Newt Gingrich, Republican anarchist and onetime speaker of the House of Representatives.

Cue soundtrack to “Twilight Zone.” Or “Psycho.” Or, I dunno, Tarzan summoning an elephant stampede to quash yet another pestilential imperial invasion.

Powerful stuff! Who could argue with any of it?

So, what does D’Souza actually say? He says Obama’s anti-business domestic policy and anti-American foreign policy do not come from Marxism or even European style socialism. D’Souza writes, “The real problem with Obama is worse — much worse.” The president’s anti-Americanism comes from his deep-seated anti-colonialism, which he “inherited” (via “dreams”) from his biological father. And who was Barack Obama, Sr.?

• A man who grew up in Kenya, studied at Harvard, had a family in Hawaii — then abandoned his wife and infant son Barry to return to Kenya.
• A polygamist and habitual drunkard who finally killed himself in a drunk-driving accident.
• A scholar and economist who in 1965 published an article in the East Africa Journal, “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” on colonialism and its supposed continuing legacy.

What exactly is anticolonialism anyway? D’Souza explains:

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America….

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Is this truly what Obama believes? D’Souza lists some of the oddities of Obama; at first blush, they do seem only explicable as examples of anti-colonialism. And let’s begin with Ryan Chittum’s all-time favorite D’Souzan point:

• Obama applauds Brazillian domestic oil exploration but deplores American domestic oil exploration. D’Souza: “Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more.”
• Obama’s “carbon tax” proposal is the same policy writ larger.
• He doesn’t seek to nationalize the banks but to “decolonize” them — to bring them under government control. “Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks [to] maintain his control.”
• “For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them.”
• Anti-colonialism also explains Obama’s tax and spending policies: He is redistributing income — spreading the wealth around, as Obama himself put it — to return plundered loot to its rightful owners.
• He applauds the “Ground Zero Mosque” because (a) the 9/11 attacks were the catalyst that “unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan,” and (b) because he believes that some radical Islamists and terrorists are simply resisting American imperialism. (Oddly, a number of American libertarians suffer from this same delusion, which may explain why so many of them voted for Obama in 2008.)
• And of course, the rest of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and national-security strategy seems tailor-made to deplete American independence and shatter our superpower status in favor of a powerful, international body run primarily by third-world countries — a body that would have actual sovereign power over the United States, Europe, and other colonial oppressors.

None of this makes any sense, D’Souza argues, unless Obama believes as his father believed:

As [Barack Obama, Sr.] put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.”

One might object that Obama couldn’t possibly believe America, of all countries, was a “colonial power”: We’ve never invaded other nations for the purpose of incorporating them into a putative American “empire;” or plundered a native population of their natural resources; or forced them to buy crappy, cheaply manufactured products for exorbitant prices; or inflicted a separate-and-unequal legal system upon a foreign population; or any other hallmark of the colonialism of Spain, Portugal, France, or Belgium, the truly horrific colonialism of the Moslem countries, or even the much more benign English model. (The crimes of the English in India fade to a whiter shade of pale compared to the nightmare of the Belgian Congo or the African nations conquered by Arab Moslems.)

Of course, America certainly did oppress blacks and other racial minorities for nearly 190 years; but racism — which most nations practiced as bad as or worse than the U.S. did — does not constitute “colonialism.” Both are evil, but they are distinct evils.

However, to a glib anti-colonialist, lack of colonial history is no impediment to a charge of neo-colonialism:

Today’s neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said — who was one of Obama’s teachers at Columbia University — wrote in Culture and Imperialism, “The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force.”

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

(As Alexander Meiklejohn said, some crimes are so heinous, not even innocence is a defense.)

Reckon you can rationalize anything if you’re clever enough — and if you’ve unfettered yourself from the shackles of fact, drinking deep from the fountains of fancy.

Does “anti-colonialism” explain all the odd behaviors of the One We Unfortunately Have? Hard to say, but we are inclined to believe it explains a great deal. At least we should all agree on one point: Obama does not like the America he knows. He does not believe in traditional American values, American exceptionalism, the Pax Americana, or the unique and wonderful quality of our country. Does this come from his father’s colonial-ectomy? Who can say?

Whatever the reason, President Barack Hussein Obama does not represent the America we love; in fact, he wants to recreate it according to his own dream (or his father’s). That alone is reason enough to say that we the people must terminate his agenda, before he and his acolytes succeed in implementing the dreams from his father.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards.

Four facts appear undisputed:

1. In 2000, Whitman used an employment agency to hire a housekeeper, Nicandra “Nicky” Diaz Santillan, at $23 per hour.
2. Santillan had earlier presented the agency with a California driver’s license and Social Security card, copies of which the agency provided Whitman.
3. Those documents were in fact fraudulent — they belonged to one of Santilan’s sisters who lived in San Francisco.
4. In 2009, Santillan disclosed to Whitman that she was an illegal immigrant and that the papers she had shown to Whitman were fraudulent; at that point, Whitman let her go, as the law requires.

A couple of days ago, grandstanding liberal activist attorney Gloria Allred — who has donated money to Jerry Brown, Whitman’s opponent in the gubernatorial race and an ancient relic of an earlier, loonier time in California history — called a press conference to announce that she was representing Santillan (in what action?), whom she calls her “client.” She triumphantly announced all of the above points, including that Santillan was in the country illegally and had used fraudulent documentation to get herself hired by Whitman. (I’m not sure how this helps her client, unless her real client is Jerry Brown.)

Allred also produced a 2003 letter to Whitman and her husband, Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV, from the Social Security Administration… not from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it was called then. The letter “raised discrepancies” about Santillan’s documents, which even AP says was only “a possible tip-off that she could be in the U.S. illegally.”

In fact, as Whizbang reports, the Social Security letter was about retirement and disability insurance… and the only reference it made to immigration was to forcefully note that nothing in the letter should be used to infer Santillan’s immigration status!

The letter is posted in its entirety at TZM Documents, and it includes this paragraph:

This letter does not imply that you or your employee intentionally provided incorrect information about the employee’s name or SSN. It is not a basis, in and of itself, for you to take any adverse action against the employee, such as laying off, suspending, firing, or discriminating against the individual. Any employer that uses the information in this letter to justify taking adverse action against an employee may violate state or federal law and be subject to legal consequences. Moreover, this letter makes no statement about your employee’s immigration status.

Hm.

Allred argues that the letter constituted absolute evidence that Santillan was in the country illegally… and that Whitman must somehow have known about it and realized she was employing an illegal all the way back in 2003.

My problem with this hit job is simple: Can somebody please tell me exactly what charge Gloria Allred is leveling at Whitman? I know this can’t be right, but it seems for all the world as if Allred — liberal activist, immigration activist, and feminist activist — accuses Whitman of failing to harm Allred’s client in a timely manner.

Whitman didn’t fire Santillan in 2003 on the basis of a simple inquiry letter from the SSA — a letter which threatens “legal consequences” against anyone using that letter as the basis of “laying off, suspending, firing, or discriminating against the individual.” Instead, she waited until Santillan actually informed her she was illegal. Only then did Whitman reluctantly fire her longtime friend and housekeeper, as the law requires.

Am I misunderstanding this? Is Allred’s attack on Whitman really that the gubernatorial candidate failed to jump to conclusions, failed to violate state and federal law, and failed to fire the woman at the first conceivable opportunity, only doing so when she had actual proof that Nicky Diaz Santillan had defrauded her and was breaking the law?

(And suppose Whitman had fired Santillan back in 2003; would that, then, form the basis of Allred’s attack… that Whitman broke the law by discriminating against her friend and employee without any solid evidence of illegality?)

More bizarreness:

One of the state’s largest public employee unions immediately released a Spanish-language attack ad accusing Whitman of a double standard on illegal immigration.

You mean… one standard for businesses, which requires them actually to investigate the residency status of their employees — and another standard for individuals, which requires only that they not knowingly hire illegals? That’s the “double standard” that outrages the Hispanic community in California?

What would they prefer? A mandate that even private individuals hiring maids, nannies, and housekeepers launch full-scale investigations and background checks to determine who is here legally? I suspect the natural response to such a draconian requirement would be not to hire anyone at all, but simply to make do without.

Somehow I’m not getting the point of this entire hit piece. It appears that an ultra-liberal Jerry Brown surrogate, Gloria Allred, is charging Meg Whitman with failing to racially discriminate against Santillan.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

A space ambassador could be appointed by the United Nations to act as the first point of contact for aliens trying to communicate with Earth.

I’m not frightened, I hasten to add, by the prospect of us discovering alien civilizations, or even by the prospect of alien civilizations discovering us. I’m absolutely convinced that there is no even vaguely plausible reason why extraterrestrials would care one way or the other about us, unless we somehow gave them cause for anxiety:

• We couldn’t possibly pose a serious threat to any civilization that could cross such vast distances: A single lightyear is 5,874,589,924,200 miles, or about 25 million times the average distance from Earth to the Moon; and the distance between civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy would likely be measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of lightyears. What are we going to shoot at them — an ICBM? We’d have better luck with a pea-shooter.
• All conceivable natural resources are widely distributed throughout the galaxy; and even if they weren’t, a civilization that could even attempt interplanetary travel, especially at hyperluminous speeds (so they’re not spending millenia on every trip), would necessarily have such advanced science and technology that it would be easier to create any needed elements, materials, and structures than to journey hundreds or thousands of lightyears to take them away from somebody else. Forget about the V scenario!
• The distances are simply too great to bother crossing them except on very important missions involving either trade or some other equally vital cultural imperative. I doubt comparatively primitive humans qualify… except perhaps for anthropological survey missions, probably conducted by alien graduate students. (Say, maybe that explains all the UFO sightings: The kids doing the field research are not yet experienced enough to avoid detection!)
• If there is any intelligent life at all in the galaxy apart from here, then there are likely tens of thousands of alien civilizations — not just one or two. We would probably get a minor inscription (“mostly harmless”) in a database, and that’s all.

So what am I worried about? It’s contained in that phrase I used above: ETs wouldn’t care a whit about us unless we give them cause for anxiety. And the easiest way I can think of offhand would be… if the very first point of contact for an alien survey vessel was the United Nations!

I can picture the spacefarers recoiling in horror and vowing to stamp out the contagion of socialism, pandering to radical religious imperialism, and hive-mindedness; and that is what scares the bejesus out of me.

Please, Secretary General Nanki-poo, don’t do us any more cosmic favors.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

It’s not just the 10-point deficit — which will probably instantly drop to about a 5-point deficit, now that she’s the nominee. The problem is the problematical nature of the problem-child herself: Christine O’Donnell is simply a lousy candidate; she only won in the primary because Tea Partiers wanted another scalp, and they didn’t care about the long term consequences (where “long term” in this case means “49 days from yesterday”).

She can’t answer simple policy questions, she has a history of financial flakiness, she has no experience in office, and she seems a bit, well, loopy. As we get closer to November 2nd, I believe her manifest unfitness for the job will cause the gap against her to widen, not shrink, as her primary-victory bump recedes; she’ll end up losing to Democrat Chris Coons by about 7 or 8 points.

But honestly, I don’t see what all the hysterics are about. Until recently, I didn’t believe Republicans had a chance in a million of picking up ten Senate seats this year — which is what it takes for the GOP to seize the majority. But now, I think we have an excellent chance — with or without Delaware.

Here are the 19 Democratic seats up for election this year::

We assume Republicans will pick up all seats labeled Safe Republican, Likely Republican, Lean Republican, and Toss-up. There are no seats currently held by the GOP that fall in the categories of Toss-up, Lean Democrat, Likely Democrat, or Safe Democrat; thus, we assume Republicans will hold all their current Senate seates. Thus, we should have a net pickup of ten from the low-hanging fruit alone… and note that does not include a pickup in Delaware, which RCP now rates as “Likely Democrat.”

But in a strong GOP year like this one, we should pick up at least half of the “Lean Democrat” seats; that gives us an additional seat from either West Virginia or Connecticut, for a net pickup of 11 for Republicans.

Finally, there are three “Likely Democrat” seats; I’d bet that with a Cat-5 Republican hurricane, we can even pick up one of those, choosing from Delaware, Oregon, or the New York special election (to fill the seat currently occupied by Kirsten Gillibrand, appointed to Hillary Clinton’s seat after the latter became Secretary of State). That means a net pickup of 12 seats for the GOP… just based on current polling. (And I expect the polling to get even better for the Republicans by election time, since Democrats seem intent upon alienating as many voters as humanly possible.)

I allocate all the “Safe Democrat” seats to the Democrats.

That means, when the smoke clears, I predict the GOP will hold 53 seats in the U.S. Senate, while Democrats (and third-party groupies) will hold but 47. On a good day, we hold the other “Lean Democrat” and maybe a couple of the “Likely Democrat” seats for a majority of 55 Repubs to 45 Dems. If the day breaks badly for the GOP, we capture only the Republican-leaning and toss-up seats for a scant majority of 51 Repubs to 49 Dems.

But were we to fail even to achieve a majority, that almost certainly means we lose several of the toss-ups, as well as all the Democrat-leaning races. Under those distressing conditions, we’ll probably lose half the toss-ups, thus ending up with a net pickup of only seven, for a total of 48 Repubs to 52 Dems… still enough to sustain a filibuster but not enough to hail Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 96%).

The odds that we would pick up exactly nine Democratic Senate seats, such that Christine O’Donnell’s victory yesterday would actually cost us the majority, seem remote to say the least: Either we’ll easily surpass 10, or else we’ll fall significantly short of that mark.

So let’s all buck up, support O’Donnell (as the National Republican Senatorial Committee is now doing, with the maximum contribution allowed by law), and understand that a GOP majority in the Senate is not going to hinge on Delaware, come what may.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

I’m all in favor of restaurants deciding (without State coercion) to offer salads and vegetables and fruits on their menus; sometimes I’ll buy them — I love Souplantation, for example, a restaurant that is basically nothing but a huge salad bar. But voluntary cooperation is not what Mrs. Obama has in mind; she makes her intention quite clear:

Right now, many restaurants are making a point to offer fresh produce and healthy choices aimed at kids and adults. Others are serving more low-fat dishes, whole grain breads, fruit on the side. Some are even offering kid-size portions of the meals they serve on the main menu. And chefs across the country are partnering with local schools to help them make healthy choices.

But as positive as these examples are, the reality is it’s just not enough. Together we have to do more. We have to go further. And we need your help to lead this effort.

The time for talk, talk, talk is over. We need action, action, action!

And action the government has taken:

As part of “Let’s Move,” we’re setting a goal of doubling the number of schools that participate in the Healthier US Schools Challenge by next year. And we’re working with schools and food suppliers to offer more fruits and vegetables and to cut down on that fat, sugar and salt.

And, finally, we’re working with mayors and other local officials to make our cities and towns healthier and to highlight restaurants that agree to serve smaller portions and promote more nutritious options.

So I hope that all of you will join with us in these efforts. Together, we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy, healthy choice.

We can make a commitment to promote vegetables and fruits and whole grains on every part of every menu. We can make portion sizes smaller and emphasize quality over quantity. And we can help create a culture — imagine this — where our kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.

It’s not an exaggeration to call this nutritional battle plan “Orwellian” because of the mindset that clearly motivates it: Michelle Obama rejects the crazy idea that choosing what and how much to eat is part of freedom of choice, and she dismisses with nary a thought the even more risible notion that we ourselves must be held accountable for the consequences of the choices we make. Rather, the Fist Lady sees the federal government as the nation’s health conscience, substituting its judgment of what is best in place of our own, and in place of parents’ judgment on behalf of their own children.

The terminus of the arc of this mindset was expressed very clearly in an Italian pronunciamento of the 1920s: “Everything inside the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” — and chillingly analyzed by Robert Anton Wilson in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: “Everything not compulsory is forbidden…. Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

The mindset — don’t think, don’t choose, just sit quietly and wait for instructions — has likewise been explored in detail in works as varied as classical-liberal Friederich Hayek’s the Road to Serfdom, 1944, and modern-liberal Philip K. Howard’s the Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America, a full half-century later.

Simply put, the more government decides, the less taste the citizen has for making his own decisions. In very short order, an infantalized people begin to avoid making any decisions at all, waiting all the while for someone to tell them what to do. The end result is a craving for order-taking and the self-immolation of will; we become, in Ayn Rand’s term, truly “self-less.”

Ironically, Mrs. Obama enunciated a structurally identical argument in her harangue to the National Restaurant Association:

But here’s the catch. See, feeding those cravings [doesn't] just respond to people’s natural desires, it actually helps shape them. The more of these foods people eat, the more they’re accustomed to that taste, and after a while, those unhealthy foods become a permanent part of their eating habits.

What we see here has been noted by many that passed before us: Liberals reject moral reasoning; they want total “freedom” (license) to do whatever they want, then preen about it. But they must fill the “rules” gap with something; it’s scary not to have any rules at all. So they elevate health concerns to moral imperatives: Thou shalt not eat too large a portion; thou shalt not eat anything made with white flour; and this above all — thou shalt not eat the deadly poison, salt! (Or breath the deadly pollutant carbon dioxide; but that’s a rant for a different post.)

To the war on portions, white bread, and salt, add the wars on fat, peanut butter, sugar, sugar substitutes, mac & cheese, Mexican food, Chinese food, Italian food, fast food, tobacco, war, doctors, playgrounds, sunshine (skin cancer!), and recreation (as in recreational use of any natural resource) — a war on everything but the lawyers, praise Burger (but not burgers).

(Exceptions granted to the Anointed, of course: They’re saving the world, for Gore’s sake; they can’t be expected to hew to the same laws that govern the rabble.)

All the little wars collide into a giant Ur-war in which every enemy behavior, activity, or comestible is condemned for being “bad for children and other living things.” The freak show that composes the Committee for Science in the Public Interest (and how’s that for an Orwellian name!) is revolting, and has already seized the presidency, cabinet, and much of the Congress.

Of course, to maintain loyalty in war, governments often resort to wartime censorship; the State must keep a lid on opinion-mongering, especially opinions about the war itself, its necessity and conduct. In the case of the vital Ur-war against unauthorized freedom for the unenlightened, it’s already here; Mrs. Obama announces the plan:

Our kids don’t learn about the latest fast-food creations on their own. They hear about them on TV, advertisements, in the Internet, video games, and many other places. And as any parent knows, this marketing is highly effective.

As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else’s, to raise my kids. But we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids.

A study last year found that only a small percentage of advertising aimed at kids promoted healthy foods, while most promoted foods with a low nutritional value. And let’s be clear: It’s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren’t healthy. It’s also going to be critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy.

And if there’s anyone who can sell healthy food to our kids, it’s all of you, because you know what gets their attention. You know what makes a lasting impression. You certainly know what gets them to drive their poor parents crazy because they just have to have something.

So I’m here today to ask you to use that knowledge and that power to our kids’ advantage. I’m asking you to actively promote healthy foods and healthy habits to our kids.

Everything because of the kids. Nothing apart from the kids. Nothing against the kids.

Today she only “asks,” as your teacher might “ask” you to hand in that overdue book report; tomorrow, she — or her minions at the FCC and FDA — will command, using the full force of government action, action, action.

The penchant for controlling all speech and communications becomes a compulsion; compare this amusing directive from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which lobbies for private health insurers. Sebelius (I don’t think she’s in Kansas anymore) was infuriated when AHIP issued a report noting that ObamaCare had already driven a number of insurers to raise their rates, in order to pay for expanded benefits demanded by the new law. The secretary responded:

It has come to my attention that several health insurer carriers are sending letters to their enrollees falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act. I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases….

Given the importance of the new protections and the facts about their impact on costs, I ask for your help in stopping misinformation and scare tactics about the Affordable Care Act. Moreover, I want AHIP’s members to be put on notice: the Administration, in partnership with states, will not tolerate unjustified rate hikes in the name of consumer protections….

We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014. Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.

Americans want affordable and reliable health insurance, and it is our job to make it happen. We worked hard to change the system to help consumers. It is my hope we can work together to stop misinformation and misleading marketing from the start.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Sebelius

Recall, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed, Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%) informed us that we would have to pass the bill in order to find out what was in it. Who knows? Perhaps it did give Sebelius authority to regulate private speech about ObamaCare. (The Sedition Act “was good for Woodrow Wilson, and it’s good enough for me!”)

More generally, the Harpy Brigade of nanny secretaries appears to be well along the path of total control over new media. Now Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (I don’t think she’ll ever take off her rainbow shades) appears to covet the power to “police the world wide web” and even “shut down parts of the Internet” if she perceives a cyberthreat.

How long, I wonder, before Napolitano’s lidless eye begins seeing blogposts or online newspaper stories critical of the Obama administration as exactly the sort of threat that needs nipping in the bud? The administration has already informed us it has “zero tolerance” for “misinformation.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And who controls communications controls the present. Of course any liberal-fascist State, or any other form of socialism or socialism lite, must control and ultimately own all communications to have even a hope of implementing its directives — which will tend, with every passing season in the natural progression of “five year plans,” to become more irrational, unpredictable, and against basic human nature.

The Obamacle and his acolytes in the administration and Congress must realize that the popular front for Capitalism and against government expansion and intrusion depends upon the ability to communicate, particularly over the internet. Ms. Napolitano must be greedily eyeing that medium and longing to get her mits on it, particularly if she harbors any dream of running for President of the United States herself. Certain things are better left unsaid; it’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

But in the end, it will all go for nought; because Team Obama long ago lost the battle for communications when its excesses and failures lost even the normal channels for liberal-fascist policy: the antique media of newspapers and television. Today, one is as apt to read a denunciation of Obamunism in the New York Times (or see in on Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show) as in the Wall Street Journal or the National Review.

Today, it’s the popular front that controls the present… from which you may draw your own conclusion.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

• Many on both sides the aisle have described the threat by Rev. Terry Jones of the Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, to burn Korans during a self-proclaimed “International Burn a Koran Day” as a “bottom” of anti-Moslem bigotry and insensitivity; but is it really? Or does it mark the bottom of our willingness to be “sensitive” to Moslem feelings, even when those feelings are backed by blatant extortion and threats?
• On another front, when (if ever) do we reach the bottom of our own deeply held principles, such as religious tolerance and property rights, when actual national and cultural survival is at stake? Must we, as Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX, 91%) demands, follow our principles even to the point of extinction?
• Finally, we have the root-bottom axiom from which all other axioms, principles, and fundamental rights arise… the Zeroth Principle: The people will do what they must, no matter what law, religion, or creed demands, to survive as a people. Have we already reached that point, or is it far enough in the future that we needn’t worry about the cultural imperative just yet?

Until we confront these three bottoms, we’re just flibbertigibbets and whirligigs in the hurricane of the war against radical Islamism. So let’s take a look.

Nota bene: After mostly writing this post, I learnt that a “deal” was — or was not — cut to cancel the Koran burning in exchange for moving the GZM to… well, somewhere else: Rev. Terry Jones of the Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, who had threatened to burn the Korans, says “was;” the imam of the GZM, Feisal Abdul Rauf, says “was not.”

At first, I thought this tossed the entire post into a cockeyed hat; but then I reflected that, apart from the uncertainty of whether the deal is on or off, everything I have to say about it is universal and timeless (as always!)… so I have no reason not to plough right ahead. Excelsior!

In response to Rev. Jones vow (or threat) to lead a Koran-burning on Saturday, Moslems across the world have vowed to go on a mass killing spree; already, they’re burning American flags and chanting “Death to Christians!” in anticipation of a delicious round of international riot and ruin. President Barack H. Obama is alternately begging and ordering Jones to call it off (which he may or may not have done). Even Gen. David Petraeus chimed in, warning that the burning could result in our troops being attacked.

As to the latter, it’s a 100% certainty: After such a Koran burning, Moslem insurgents will attack our troops. But of course, it’s also a 100% certainty that if the burning is called off — Moslem insurgents will attack our troops. So it goes.

Shouldn’t we stop the Koranic holocause, somehow prevent Rev. Jones from disposing of his church’s private property via the incinerator? (Hm, what would Ron Paul say?) Or even if such interdiction is too destructive of our First Amendment, shouldn’t we at least redouble our efforts to persuade Jones to forbear, deal or no deal?

Before answering that question, let’s think a second and a third time; there are more reprecussions, no matter what path we choose, than the few we’re encouraged to obsess upon to the exclusion of all others. And let’s start with…

Moslem sensitivity

We’re told “we” can’t burn Korans — or even allow our soldiers to carry personal Bibles into Afghanistan — for fear Moslems will be offended. When offended, they lash out with bloodthirsty savagery, killing innocents. (The Bibles were burnt instead — burnt by American “military officials;” religious sensitivity, thy name is irony!)

But what behavior doesn’t cause Moslems to lash out and kill innocents? They riot, loot, slaughter, and burn in response to everything America, Israel, and the West do — from supporting freedom; to caricaturing some unnamed imam with a bomb for a turban; to allowing military guards at Guantanamo to touch the Koran with their “unclean” hands; to the continued existence of Jews; to attempts to end chattel slavery in Sudan; to allowing unshrouded females and schooling for girls; to the presence of Westerners on the “sacred” soil of Saudi Arabia; to the refusal of the West to “return” Palestine, al-Andaluz, Vienna, England, Africa, Europe, Asia, and eventually South America to the rightful grasp of the ummah; to Salman Rushdie writing the Satanic Verses; and to the presence of El Al at the Los Angeles International Airport. It all provokes the same violent reaction, including (inter alia) mass murders of Christians, Jews, and imperfectly conforming fellow Moslems. (See also this Emo Phillips routine, especially starting around 2:35.)

For that matter, if America were to crawl on its hands and knees and lick Ayatollah Khamenei’s and Ayman Zawahiri’s sandal straps, that too would spark an orgy of violence and slaughter. In fact, that would be the quickest route, since the real Moslem motivation for such rapine and atrocity is their perception that they are the strong horse, while the West is the weak horse; any action on our part that encourages this belief will (you guessed it) lead to riots and butchery of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Animists, wishy-washy Moslems, and the like.

Do we not finally comprehend, at some point in this crisis, that Moslem “outrage” is a calculated political tactic deliberately ginned up by Moslem leaders to pressure the West to make concession after concession? It is a form of Dawa, “soft jihad,” playing upon our liberal guilt and conservative principles to gain for radical Islamism much of what they demand, without the radicals having to confront real armies that can actually obliterate them. When that revelation finally sinks in throughout the American people and their counterparts in the rest of the West, we shall abruptly find the bottom of our “sensitivity” to Moslems’ perpeturally wounded feelings.

And I think we’re just about there, judging from the polling on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (GZM).

Freedom of religion and other farces

But to heck with Moslem sensitivity, which we all agree borders on hysteria. What about our own deep principles, such as “religious tolerance,” upon which our country was founded (according to President Obama)? Here, he says it directly:

Obama told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview aired Thursday that he hopes the Rev. Terry Jones of Florida listens to the pleas of people who have asked him to call off the plan. The president called it a “stunt.”

“If he’s listening, I hope he understands that what he’s proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans,” Obama said. “That this country has been built on the notion of freedom and religious tolerance.”

Should such religious tolerance be absolute? If so, it would be the only fundamental right or deeply held tenet that is.

Contrariwise, America was not founded on generic religious tolerance; many American colonies had colonial churches and were pretty intolerant towards other sects; and many retained them as state churches, with special privileges including state monetary support, after the American revolution. And in any event, even today, we certainly do not blindly support “absolute religious tolerance”: We outlaw American Indian peyote rituals, religously based child abuse (beatings, clitorectomies, refusal of medical care, child rape), and of course, human sacrifice. Or animal sacrifice, for that matter.

What America was actually founded upon was religious freedom, among others; and those two, freedom and tolerance, can easily be antithetical. In particular, we cannot tolerate religion (radical Islamism) that cannot tolerate freedom.

This paradox is one specific instance of the the great fallacy of tolerance: You cannot, in the name of tolerance, tolerate those seeking to impose their intolerance upon the rest of us; to do so is to become a willing accomplice in bigotry and discrimination.

The controversy over Cordoba House, the putative “Ground Zero Mosque,” is a perfect example, a tar baby that has ensnared everyone from Obama to Rep. Ron Paul and many other libertarians, liberals, and conservatives who argue that our American principles of religious tolerance and property rights require us not merely to allow Feisal Abdul Rauf to build Cordoba House but to celebrate his doing so — since he assures us that, regardless of appearances, the GZM’s purpose is “interfaith outreach,” not Islamist triumphalism.

In particular, Paul issued an official statement that, in essence, insists we adhere to “principle,” even if it leads to the utter destruction of the culture that professess those very principles:

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque….

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable….

Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam–the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia….

This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

In other words, Rauf is a uniter, America is a hater, and we deserved what happened to us in 2001. And we need to apologize and make amends by offering the Islamist victory shrine at Ground Zero.

This is classic sophomoric libertarianism that runs afoul of the more general principle of freedom; for there is ample evidence that Rauf actually supports radical Islamism: He is a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood; he cannot admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization; he believes (as does Paul himself) that American foreign policy was complicit in 9/11; and Rauf wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1979 — which he now refuses to repudiate — praising the totalitarian, theocratic, sharia state established in Iran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Rauf knows very well the mosque will be seen by Islamists around the world as a “victory shrine” celebrating the great martyrdom at the World Trade Centers; and that he supports that mission.

So by insisting that the American people “tolerate,” or even applaud, Cordoba House in its present location, supporters of the GZM necessarily demand we tolerate those who express the ultimate form of intolerance against us: the mass butchery of Americans and others on September 11th, 2001. It is inherently paralogical — a state of cognitive dissonance that is no stranger either to Barack Obama or Ron Paul.

The Zeroth Principle

But there is a deeper bottom below even our own foundational principles in America and the rest of the West. Call it the Zeroth Principle which underlies all other axioms: In the end, people will do what they must to survive and to preserve their culture, no matter what other laws or principles may say. In other words, sometimes you just have to shoot the bastard first and apologize later for “violating his rights.”

Idealogues neglect to factor in the Zeroth Principle all the time, but they do so at their peril; we saw the Zeroth in action in Iraq, when the Sunni in Anbar and other provinces finally decided it was impossible to live under the insane and fickle rules of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Life was utterly unbearable, despite the Iraqi Sunni’s agreement (in theory) with al-Qaeda… so the former rose up and obliterated the latter, and to hell with the Koran, sharia, and Moslem solidarity!

Folks will do what they must to survive, they and their culture, and you can’t stop them. It doesn’t matter if you point out that the principles by which they live — sincerely live — require them to accept the unacceptable and endure the unendurable; they will reject it and drive it out, and principles be damned. They understand that the Zeroth Principle trumps all others: What you cannot endure you must change or destroy. Sometimes you just have to shoot the SOB and justify it later.

And that is where Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and Feisal Rauf just don’t get it; but the Rev. Terry Jones does. We have about reached the end of our collective rope anent Moslem bullying, extorting, whining, and special pleading; we have had enough. At this point, I think an actual majority of Americans is at the point of saying that religious tolerance is all well and good, but we want these radical jackasses out of our hair and out of our lives. It’s a tipping point: If the government won’t do it… then we’ll do it ourselves, and the powers that be won’t like how we do it.

In fact, we’ve hit a triple-whammy tipping point:

• You bureaucrats had better do something about the Islamist problem — or we will.
• You’d better do something about illegal immigration and fraudulent voting and Mexican drug wars slopping over into America — or we will.
• You’d better do something about government intrusion in our lives — or we will!

So Republicans and Democrats alike (and Libertarian loonies) had better start swimming, or they’ll sink like a stone. (I place my bet on the first over the latter two.) From now on, when Moslems (radicals or “moderates”) whine and threaten, we’re going to tell them to take a long walk on a short pier. Come November, Congressman Taxaholic and Senator Nannystate are going to be pounding the pavement looking for honest work. And one way or another, we the people will not allow an Islamist victory shrine on the ashes of the World Trade Centers.

This is what I’ve been yammering about ever since February in my post “What Makes Lefty Run?“: This is what a popular front for Capitalism, Judeo-Christian culture, and American exceptionalism looks like, up close and personal:

• If Moslems want to burn Bibles, fine; then they should shut their falafal holes when Americans burn Korans. And if they riot and kill and try to conquer the world, then don’t be surprised if we bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert their citizens to Christianity. (If we make plain that we are the strong horse, that last task won’t be so difficult!)
• As a small minority in the West, Moslems live and thrive at our sufferance; their job is to assimilate as much as possible — and shut up about the conflicts that remain. (Like Jews in America, who wouldn’t dream of insisting Congress enact laws forcing everyone to wear a yarmulke and keep kosher.)
• And if radical Islamists think we’re going to let them dance on the mass grave of 3,000 Americans and other Westerners, then it’s time to tell Imam Rauf to go pound sand down a rathole.

So to answer my own question from above — yes, I believe that if the Dove Outreach Center burns some Korans, Moslems will “retaliate” by killing some Christians and Jews in Pakistan, or Iran, or Qatar, or Indonesia, or France, and by attacking American soldiers who are keeping the peace in various Islamic countries. And yes, that is an enormity; but it’s not our enormity, nor even Rev. Jones’ enormity; moral guilt fully belongs to those who commit actual murder in response to mere symbolism.

And in the meantime, I’m glad Islamists suffer the humiliation of no longer inducing the terror they once wielded, and of seeing their own books burnt; and I really don’t give a hoot that some religious Moslems who don’t support jihad (or at least not much) also feel humiliated and maybe even a little frightened. It’s more urgent that the West finally rouse itself, stand up, and fight back, both physically, though our military forces, and especially symbolically, through such metaphors as burning Korans and driving the GZM off of GZ. Symbols are especially vital in rallying the people and stoking the flames of the popular front.

Sober conservatives cautioning against what Terry Jones wants to do may have the technical right of the argument… but those willing to stand up and fight, consequences be damned, have its heart and its soul.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…