This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
It's from a whole blue-on-blue essay.
You're not a coward merely because you're afraid to seek the truth when it might not conform to your views ... rather your chickensh** views are shaped by the fact you're a coward.
He can't speak English, and doesn't know anything about our history, customs, or way of life. In fact, up until now in his life he has allowed others to care for his every need and want. He has lived his entire life thousands of miles distant from the United States.
But Michael has one thing that above all entitles him to American citizenship: the blood of a hero in his veins.
That's him, there on the right.
Because Michael H Ferschke III is the infant son of Sgt Michael H. Ferschke, Jr., a Marine killed in Iraq in 2008. He ought to grow to maturity among those who appreciate the sacrifice his father made for liberty.
And his mother Hotaru Ferschke is just the one to teach him.
[Originally posted at 20090114.0902, updated 20090116.1040
Thanks to FM in comments, I fixed the stupid name SNAFU.]
w/t Dan Collins
Victory happens when your former enemy agrees that you were right all along.
in your world?
According to Jonah Goldberg, the geniuses and mere honorees who think they are geniuses on the left are now changing their tune. Instead of calling for a new New Deal now that evidence is piling up that it made the Great Depression worse instead of better, they're saying we need another World War II.
There are at least two problems with that line of thinking.
First, World War II was caused by Hitler's ascent, which was caused by -- wait for it -- The Great Depression. If we're in an economic crisis of that magnitude, then a solution will present itself forthwith.
Or, if we listen to those who say that terrorist Islamicism is caused by economic conditions in the Middle East, perhaps a solution already has presented itself in the form of commercial jets colliding with New York skyscrapers.
Secondly, doesn't the left constantly complain about the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq? Or perhaps the problem is merely that they didn't get the money.
Just because a solution presented itself for the Great Depression, that doesn't mean it was the only possible solution, or that a solution would require government action. We had an economy before the Depression, and it's quite possible that we could have had an economy again without resorting to all-out war.
Simulating a war, as implied by a WWII without the fighting, implies that we don't have an enemy worth fighting right now.
Finally, the point I set out to make: the conditions now are not the same as in 1929, nor even 1941. We lack excess capacity of resources such as oil and steel. The resources we have are largely tied up productively, except where environmental laws keep them out of production. In particular, many of the "green" technologies the left hopes to create will require recycling items that currently have value, destroying that value (taking it out of the economy).
For example, if the government forces everyone to use electric vehicles, or if it becomes prohibitively expensive to operate or maintain them, that will mean that a lot of value on consumer balance sheets will simply disappear.
The economy is not as bad as the news says it is. We're in a healthy cycle of renewal, in which some people are finding that they lose money, or that their investments in 401Ks and houses aren't worth as much for a while. It's normal, and no government action is needed.
But the action we're going to get -- these huge bailouts and economic "stimulus" packages -- are going to deepen the crisis of confidence into a really bad time.
And now that Obama has been elected, there doesn't appear to be anything anyone can do about it.
Legal counsel for aged Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) claimed in open court that his client is immune from laws which limit ordinary citizens.
Murtha is being sued for saying that Marines involved in an incident at Haditha, Iraq, were "murderers" guilty of "war crimes".
From the via Malkin:
Assistant U.S Attorney Darrell Valdez, who represents Murtha, argued that a member of Congress is “absolutely immune” from a defamation suit because there’s no circumstance in which speaking to the media is not within the scope of a lawmaker’s employment.
Why did we get Iraq?
The basic problem was a peacetime President elected in reaction to Bill Clinton's style and errors, forced to deal with a world gone mad.
Because of Bill Clinton's slick style and personal morality issues, people didn't want someone with a slick style and morality issues. So here was GWB, with the image of a twelve step graduate and simple speaker. He got elected.
Then comes 9/11, and he's totally unprepared, I think. We all were. Like most people, I thought he did very well right after 9/11, with his doctrine that harboring a terrorist is being a terrorist.
But Iraq was pretty iffy. Was Saddam really the one to attack next? His relationship to 9/11 was tenuous at best, even though he clearly supported and encouraged terrorism and anti-Americanism generally. And everybody thought he had WMD. I was uneasy because I thought we should do one war at a time, but in the year and a half between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, it became more and more reasonable to think Saddam Hussein was hiding something. I wondered why we were waiting, giving him time to plan his defenses.
I turned out that his defenses, if he had prepared them, were pretty ineffectual.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, was bravely telling his anti-war constituency in Chicago, much to their delight, that the war was bad.
Suppose someone stands up on a clear day to say, "RAIN!". It doesn't rain, but there he is the next day shouting "RAIN!". Some clouds roll in, but no rain. The next day, there he is, shouting "RAIN!". Sure enough, it rains. Should you hail him as a prophet, even though the next day is clear and he continues to shout "RAIN!"?
So it is with Barack Obama. His one tune for several years was to be against the Iraq war, to call for withdrawal in the face of defeat, even though that would have meant chaos and complete strategic weakness for the United States for decades.
No, once the decision to take out Saddam Hussein was made, we were stuck with that decision. We could not withdraw without having our sacrifice go for naught, and without losing the trust of every ally and potential ally anywhere in the world. We had to show loyalty and constancy in the face of hardship and seemingly impossible odds. Thanks to John McCain we did show loyalty and courage as a nation, and things are going our way now.
But while you can topple a government with air power and 100,000 troops, you can't hold a hostile area the size of California with that. And once we went in, we could not afford to leave without nation-building. The key error of the Iraq war is the repeated mistake of Viet Nam: failure to go all in. I blame Rumsfeld, and Bush's inexperience and penchant for stubborn loyalty.
I'll vote for John McCain, even though I don't like a lot of what he's done, because I don't like anything about Barack Obama except that he's black. But on the Iraq war, John McCain was right all along. He'd been arguing that more troops were needed right from the start, and was one of the early voices for getting rid of Rumsfeld. In retrospect, we'd have been a lot better off with him the last eight years.
When Democrats talk about Obama, they should focus on him as the fulfillment of Dr. King's Dream.
But really, they should quit talking about Obama. Talk instead about health care, the environment, the economy, and that kind of thing. Domestic stuff.
And they should put the blame for the price of oil on the war in Iraq.
They've been blaming oil companies and speculators, and now would have a hard time switching gears and making it stick. O'course, the MSM would pass the story along. But if they'd starting saying "See what happens when you start wars?" when oil hit $90/bbl, they'd own both issues now. They could have people convinced that we may have won the war, but at a cost of $4 gasoline.
(It's not logical to blame the price of oil on the war in Iraq, but since the speculators are sensitive to Iran's threats to blow up Israel, and Iran is fighting us in Iraq, it makes enough sense that some people would swallow it. That may be enough to allow people to ignore the Democrats long-standing refusal to allow more domestic oil production).
Barack Obama, who doesn't deserve a U.S. Government paycheck, has claimed that the success of our efforts in Iraq was not due to the surge in forces there, but only to the uprising of Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda.
He said the fact that it happened at the same time as the surge was just coincidental. In reality, without the surge, showing the Sunnis that America was going to win, they would still be cowering and afraid of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, which Obama once said wasn't in Iraq.
He called the defeat of the Shiite militias such as the former Mahdi Army of Muqtada Al-Sadr their decision to decrease the footprint of their military components. In reality, they have a decreased footprint because after the surge most of them have no more feet, or heads, or heartbeats. Because of the surge.
After all of the success, he says the surge was still a mistake. Our troops and their great successes he attributes to those they liberated.
I call for Obama to resign from the Senate and drop out of the race for President.
Barack Obama has been calling for a pullout from Iraq for years. Now that the battle is largely won, and there will soon be no need for a war-sized contingent of Americn troops there, it's time for that to actually happen. But it isn't because of anything Obama said. It's because of what John McCain said.
All during the war, McCain consistently called for increased troop strength in Iraq, declaring that he had "no confidence" in Donald Rumsfeld and his inadequate numbers. Obama consistently called for throwing in the towel, as he's still doing. His time frame varied from immediate withdrawal to some vague schedule implemented on consultation with generals of his choosing. He didn't ask the Iraqis, because he wasn't ever there long enough to lose jet lag, much less talk to anyone.
Obama, having stumbled onto a 16-month withdrawal schedule, must have been pleased when Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki said that 16 months was about the right amount of time for a US drawdown.
The only problem is that Al-Maliki only wants the US to leave if things stay stable. His motivation is not that the US leave, but for Iraq to stand on its own, without the US presence. So his motivation for wanting our troops to leave is that they are no longer needed. Victory has been or soon will be achieved, so it's time.
Obama, in his partisan zeal to achieve defeat in Iraq, got something right in spite of himself.
It seems that geography is making a comeback in its battle with ideology.
In Iraq, tribal forces have risen up to reclaim control of their territory from the transnational terrorists. Now, via Ace, they would like to show their Afghan counterparts how to do the same.
They would also like to supplant the sectarian Sunni vs Shiite electoral map in Iraq with one based on tribal association.
Some might question the philosophical underpinnings of such a shift, being a move away from using differences in abstract beliefs for political grouping and toward using ancestry. But religious beliefs will still play a big part in Iraqi politics, just inside the tribal system. Arab culture places a high value on paternal authority, and failing to include the tribal organization in the political structure of the country creates at best a dual power structure, and at worst invalidates the democratic one.
In the United States, the Democratic Party primary saw both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama use protectionism in an attempt to curry favor with the voters. But what they are really tapping in to is not some economic theory of harm in selling our products overseas. The source of protectionism's appeal is the fear of globalism, that we will be at the mercy of foreign powers, especially foreign corporate and banking interests.
The world over, it seems the pendulum is swinging away from the imagined, and back to the real. I doubt it will swing very far.
[Updated: w/t Gateway Pundit, via Ace]
Lt. Andrew Grayson, accused of ordering evidence destroyed in the Haditha case, has been acquitted. It turns out that the Marine Corps has a policy of not allowing images of corpses to be kept on personal cameras. Grayson was following the book by ordering them deleted.
The Court Martial must also have decided that Grayson did not believe a war crime to have been committed, because evidence of a war crime would have trumped the rules against carrying "trophy" images.
Congressman Jack Murther (D-PA) could not be reached for comment.
Mike the Marine hits the target, capturing both the war-weary homesick irony and determined ass-kicking awesomeness that is the American fighting man. Click the title.
w/t Harvey.
With all the radicalization on the left, and moderation on the right, there is plenty of room for a third party.
Hillary would have to swing to the right quite a bit and run as the girl from Winnetka.
She could say, "You know I've always wanted health care for everyone, and now the country wants that, too. But I'm not a moonbat or a troofer. And I voted to go into Iraq, but that job is finished, and we've won! We can bring our troops home and go on fighting terrorists elsewhere in the world."
Hillary would have to choose a man who would be, or appear to be, strong on national defense.
She would have to do some focus group work on the economy, to position herself as being pro-SMALL business. One thing small business people worry about is providing health insurance to themselves and their workers. Hillary could make the argument that the government should do that. On taxes, she could say that she's for what works.
There are a lot of people (not me) who would vote for her. I think a lot of moderately conservative women would like to see a woman president, if she didn't come with all the Demoonibrat baggage.
Veep? Rudy, or Colin Powell.
A story by Avram Goldstein of Bloomberg.com says that suicides among Iraq war veterans could "eventually" exceed the death toll by combat. The statistics bear that out, but the comparison is misleading. I don't know if the spin was provided by Goldstein or by his source, Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes for Mental Health (NIMH). But that prediction could have been made ahead of time, if we had known how few American troops would die in Iraq.
The spin of the story continues the meme that we should never enter into war, because even if troops aren't killed in battle, serving in war raises their risk of suicide.
Now, I'm not discounting the awful tragedy of suicide, made even more tragic when someone so deserving of honor is involved. But the story makes it seem as though the reason war veteran suicides will top combat deaths is that their suicide rate is so high. The suicide rate among all male veterans is twice as high as for civilians, and we can expect the same for veterans who serve in Iraq.
Even the same number of civilians who have never been to war would have more suicide deaths than the 4000+ who have thus far died in Iraq.
The suicide rate in the United States is about 17 per year per 100,000. Considering that 1.6 million troops have served in Iraq, that means we would expect about 16 * 17 = 272 suicides per year for Iraq veterans, if they were typical of the population. Over the next 40 years, that would easily top the figures for those killed in action. Since casualty rates are expected to continue to be much lower at the tail end of the war, these figures will be even more pronounced.
To make these two statistical measures relate accurately, we should say not that the suicide rate will be higher than the combat death toll, but should note how few who serve in Iraq will actually die there. Of the approximately 1,600,000 who have served in Iraq, 4500 dying is a loss of
I decided to make a little list of the problems with the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).
I didn't watch the Clinton/Obama debate last night on ABC. I didn't want to put myself through two hours of tee-ball questions about things that don't matter to me, like who can promise to support the troops with the best form of socialized medicine.
Luckily for me and for you, good reader, others were kind enough to watch and even give a running commentary.
Josh at the Talking Points Memo was unhappy with it:
What I didn't like about the debate, though, was the debate itself. Not only were most of the questions on partisan gotchas and frivolous points. But more importantly the questions upon which the candidates were pressed the most were ones that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items, sometimes explicitly so -- on taxes, capital gains taxes, gun rights, Iraq, etc.Josh, that's because those are the questions which are most difficult for the candidates to answer, and most likely to take them off autopilot.
He's not accepted Ayers' endorsement for President, but he most certainly got down on his hands and knees and accepted it in order to gain entree into Chicago politics.Obama after complaining about "manufactured issues," says, "this is what I'm talking about... He lives in my neighborhood, he's a professor of English. Not someone I've accepted endorsement of, it's not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular basis... (!) He did detestable acts when I was eight years old."
I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, a man who has suggested the death penalty may be appropriate for those who perform abortions.
In a dull repetition of melodramatic echo, never quite dying out but never fully explained, we hear the phrase "illegal war" applied to the conflict in Iraq.
"Illegal war" means that by the very existence of the war a law has been broken. But whose law has been broken? Is it a law of the United States, or some other law, say perhaps of France or Sweden, or more likely, of the United Nations?
The United Nations doesn't have laws, despite what some power-grabbing third worlder might think. It's an organization, not a nation or sovereign entity. At most, its leadership can say that a member country is in violation of its treaty obligations, which is a different thing from being "illegal".But even so, the United Nations authorized the use of force against Iraq (not just against the government of Saddam Hussein, but of Iraq), though such authorization is not necessary for the United States, sovereign nation that it is, to go to war against some other sovereign nation. We are subject to United Nations edicts only by our own consent. And yet, in this instance and every other of which I'm aware, we have complied with U.N. dictates.
If a law of the United States, then which United States law is it that has been broken? It can only be that the very Constitution has been "shredded" by the use of the armed forces without a formal declaration of war, And yet the Constitution gives the President the authority as Commander in Chief, and to the Congress to declare war and to establish funding and regulations for the armed forces.
Of course in the United States our laws come to be laws when the Congress passes bills and the President signs them, or when a Court decides something (which is then subject to review by higher courts). Congress can change a law made either by itself or by judicial decision at any time, with or without the President's approval.
Now, Congress has issued several bills authorizing the use of force against Iraq (not only against the government of Sadaam Hussein, but of Iraq) which the President duly signed into law, both six months before and several times after the President followed through on that authorization. Congress can, at any time, rescind its authorization. Congress can defund the war at any time also, without the President's approval.
According to WhatReallyHappened.com, the war is illegal because there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) found, but of course, the authorization says no such thing, and there were WMD found. They also claim that the authorization is only valid against the people involved in 9/11. But here is the text they claim says this:
... acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
But that says terrorist organizations including those responsible for 9/11, not only those responsible for it. That authorization included Saddam Hussein as a supporter of international terrorism, whether he was directly involved in 9/11 or not, and it includes our current enemies in Iraq, many of whom do belong to the Al Qaeda organization responsible for 9/11. It also includes Iran, when they operate in Iraq.
It therefore must be that the war is illegal despite Congress having authorized it, and having voted several times to continue its authorization; and despite the fact that the President has certainly given his authority for the work in Iraq; and that the Supreme Court has allowed these actions to continue in the numerous attempts which have been made to bring suit to stop it.
There must then be some other branch of the government which is violating the law.
My money's on Haliburton.
I spent this morning doing Spring cleaning. Not around the house, but at the little cemetery wherein are interred the last several generations of my wife's ancestors. Global Warming delayed the start of Spring until today.
I've always been fascinated with cemeteries. From the one in Alvin, Wisconsin where I hope to spend my underground years to the Old Granary Burying Ground in Boston, I especially like looking at the headstones, noting the vital statistics and especially the epitaphs of earlier generations.
At the cemetery today were a number of veterans of the Civil War, and even a Revolutionary War veteran or two. Many of the stones were illegible now, if they'd ever carried an inscription. Note to self: brass plaque.
After looking at all the markers for my wife's kin folk, we raked leaves, picked up litter, and gathered tree limbs that had fallen over the winter, all of which we put into piles to be burned.
While raking the leaves I noted a headstone with the curious caption:
