Not that there's anything wrong with that.

W/t Gateway Pundit

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I Fear a Backlash

Now that a goose group has claimed responsibility for the forced landing in the Hudson, I fear a backlash against all geese. We must know that this is only a splinter faction, and doesn't respresent the attitude of all geese, and certainly not of fowl generally.

So I will not tolerate any intolerance against geese, ducks, loons, chickens, or turkeys here.

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What's the Use?

Ross Douthat at The Atlantic writes of Armageddon, and the choice to retaliate or not to retaliate after the fall of a national capitol.

As Douthat has it, the British Prime Minister has break-the-glass orders with nuclear submarine commanders at the bottom of the ocean for what to do in case London were vaporized, King and Parliament with it. Ross wonders what Reagan would have done, and speculates that after his country were razed, Reagan may not have retaliated. He suggests that the Lion of Reykjavik would have lain down with the Wolf of Glasnost, saying that at that point, "What's the use?"

The utility of following through with destruction of their following destruction of ours is simple: lovers of liberty must oppose tyranny with every tool at their disposal. If the submarine fails to deliver retribution, evil men will dictate the history books. There, done.

The more interesting question is if the submarine commander would be bound to follow the orders of a dead Prime Minister.

Military doctrine, upon which the Geneva Conventions are based, holds that an officer's legitimacy stems from his loyalty to the State. Supposing that State no longer to exist, or to have been captured by opposing forces, the commander would be a rogue actor, or a member of the armed resistance, should he choose to obey the orders written in the safe.

But does the State no longer exist once its administrative offices and its Head are so much glowing dust? I think no easy answer to this question is possible, because there are levels of existence. If a State loses its monarch, bureaucracy, executive leadership and entire flag officer corps, does the State exist? Perhaps the question can only be answered post hoc, should the citizens of the State reformulate it into something able to control its territory.

Supposing the entirety of the nation's is land rendered inhabitable, or during the time in which the State is nonfunctional, we still have our submarine (or lunar base) commander, out of communication with the rest of the race. He may have information as to the source of the destruction that came upon his nation, or he may lack it, and in any case he will be confronted with some amount of uncertainty.

During the Cold War, he might safely have assumed that the former Soviet Union were the responsible party, and could be counted blameless for expending his arsenal against any high-value targets he could reach.

But in the 9/11 era, even a worldwide intelligence network may fail to uncover the source of mass destruction. An incommunicado commander, wishing to remain hidden, would have somewhat less certainty over how to retaliate, and against whom.

But such a commander would be loyal not just to a chain of command or the laws of a particular nation, but first to the noblest lady of our civilization: Liberty herself. If he could band together with like-minded warriors at sea, and perhaps find some undefended shoal to call home, they could once again breath the air as free men. Their war would continue until victory or defeat, by enemy or age.

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Obama To Save Millions of Jobs; Hamas to Save Millions of Israelis

Over at The Minority Report, Mike DeVine says:

Obama first promised to create 2 million jobs in two years, then said he would create or “save” three million. Currently, over 154 million Americans are employed. We do not believe that even the disastrous policies of Obama and the Democrats will force more than 151 million out of work. At the end of 2009 and even 2010, more than three million jobs will have been “saved”.

Similarly, by having such keen grasp of the military arts, the geniuses at Hamas have cleverly avoided hitting very many Israelis with the hundreds of rockets they have fired at Israel. Thus, in a display of unprecedented liberality, they have spared millions of Israelis.

And yet, still I side with Israel.

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I Stand With Israel

American and European liberals are of course complaining about Israel's attempt to root out the terrorists in Gaza. The response is "disproportional", they say.

But while that implicitly acknowledges that Israel is defending itself (being in response to mortar attacks by Palestinians against civilian Israeli targets), it also presupposes that a response must be proportional. Why?

War is not about fairness. War is about defeating the enemy so thoroughly that he gives up and admits he was wrong to attack you in the first place. It's about discrediting him with a giant argumentum ad baculum, the appeal to force, because none of your valid arguments appear to work. Like all such appeals, it must be accompanied by the valid arguments or it will not prevail.

Because while the appeal to force and its direct application in the form of military attack is not a reasoned argument, it is not an invalidating one. That is, the application of force doesn't mean the side using it disproves its point; it simply doesn't prove it.

In practical terms, the use of force will fail as long as the opponent fails to internalize defeat. If reason is on his side, he will fail to be defeated, no matter how badly he's beaten on the battlefield.

The true danger therefor in the use of force is not using enough to win. And when the opponent is using it, not using force is a sign that you don't believe in your own position.

From AoSHQ:

It's been said before but it is worth repeating a thousand times: if Hamas, Hezbollah, and most of the Arab states (and Iran) laid down their weapons tomorrow and forgot about their plans to dissolve Israel, there would be peace in the Middle East. The Israelis could forget about the fences and the Palestinians might one day have something approximating a Western standard of living. On the other hand, if Israel laid down its weapons tomorrow, the country would be utterly annihilated, the Israelis killed to the last man, woman, and child.

- Gabriel Malor

------------------
Update (20081229 0848): Dore Gold of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs does a more thorough job of defeating "proportionality":

To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.

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Transcript From U.N. Chat Room

NDA: UR terist!1!!
Pak: UR infidL!!1!
NDA: UR unclen etr of ded things
Pak: mmm - tasT cows! LOL!!1!
NDA: unclen h8tr
Pak: U wash w/ p00
NDA: UR 3d world country liv in hut
Pak: will pwn U w/ nuke
NDA: from fish boat, terist?
Pak: from sutcas, infidL!!1!
NDA: 3d world country: no sutcas!1!! use fish boat!1!!
Pak: 1st world country w/ nuk 4 U!!1!
Pak: U ansr fon 4 joos & wash w/ p00
NDA: have job, not liv n hut lyk U
Pak: liv n city & eat tasT cows LOL!!1!
NDA: not aftr nuk on grass roof LOL!1!!
Pak: ur bom ki11 r cows 2 LOL!!1!
NDA: betr ded than smel ur stink
Pak: U stink !
NDA: O good 1 dum455!1!!
Pak: Dingaling oo! git fon iz joos!
NDA: LOL hear dat? iz osama? nope fon not ring cuz no fon in hut LOL!1!!
Pak: 3G ifon w/apps & not smel lyk p00
NDA: tru dat lyk on fish boat!1!! nuke on way kwik hide LOL put on burka!1!!

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For Want of a Nail..

Some things never change. The tiniest of errors often do, under the fog of war, lead to the greatest disasters.

And so it is with Mumbai. Who knew that, for lack of a simple memo, hundreds of people had to die?

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Michael Rubin Nails Islamism

Writing at The Corner, Michael Rubin takes on what is so troubling with the Western response to Islamic terrorism. Are terrorists good Muslims? Who cares! Read the whole thing, as it's only a couple of paragraphs. The money (my emphasis):

While it’s fashionable to argue that terrorists in Mumbai do not act out of religion, but are simply misguided, the fact of the matter is that they justify their actions in Islam. For the purposes of policy and security, religion should be what its practitioners believe it to be rather than what academics or outside commentators say it is. It is much more important to determine how terrorists are brainwashed in madrasas, then passing judgment on whether what they believe conforms to what academics believe Muslims should believe.

All the talk about whether Al Qaeda practices Islam, or whether we should avoid a backlash against Muslims, misses the point. There should be a backlash against anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation, who excuses or condones terrorism.

Further, as Rubin says, forget the question of whether it's based in religion or not. Because terrorism catches hold somewhere in the maturation of these devils, and it is foolish to cast aside a potential source as politically incorrect.

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What Year Is It

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.

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Dean: Former Senator Obama Now Controls Senate

Democratic Party boss Howard Dean has voiced his approval that disgraced former Presidential candidate Barack Obama, despite resigning amid a Justice Department probe earlier this month, is still behind the scenes assigning leadership roles.

Obama, elected to head of the Executive Branch despite allegations of fraud and intimidation, chose former Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) to head the coveted Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Howard Dean told TPM Election Central that handling Joe Lieberman Senate Dems caved to pressure from Obama, and have come to accept the new role for the Legislature in the coming Obama regime. "He called the shots, and that's fine," Dean is reported to have said.

Insiders speculated that had Obama failed to select Lieberman, the Independent Senator would have blocked his plans to make fundamental changes he intends once installed in office. The Lieberman selection also gives Obama some wiggle room with Jewish voters nervous about his support of Arab plans to partition Jerusalem.

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Ayers: Terrorism Doesn't Exist

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn continue to say that it's not terrorism unless you are the U.S. Government.

Part of me really hopes Ayers stays in the news for four years. He's a walking, partially sentient trooth machine. Here he describes the Obama victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park:

But they were also celebrating—there was—you could kind of cut the relief in people’s feelings with a knife. I mean, it was the sense that we were going to leave behind the era of 9/11 and the era of fear and war without end and repression and constitutional shredding and scapegoating of gay and lesbian people, on and on. And there we were, millions, in the park, representing everybody, hugging, dancing, carrying on right in the spot, forty years ago, where many of us were beaten and dragged to jail.

We're going to leave behind the era of 9/11 because we voted it away.

"Scapegoating" of gay and lesbian people? When have gays and lesbians been blamed for anything, falsely or not?

Al Qaeda gets a vote, too. And they really don't like gays and lesbians, pal.

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Obama: Let the Terrorists Win One For a Change

Apparently the only way that Barack Obama can figure out to keep Palestinian terrorists from launching bombs on Israel is to give it to them.

Advised by every realist foreign policy adviser who has been on Meet the Press in the last 50 years to let the Palestinians have East Jerusalem, Obama has drawn on his vast experience as an executive to give it away while the giving's good.

Why does anyone think this is a good plan? Because it was drawn up by the King of Saudi Arbia? He's not in control of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbullah ... is he? If he's in control of Al Qaeda Hamas, and Hezbullah, then we have no business talking to him until he's in Gitmo. If he's not in total control of Al Qaeda Hamas, and Hezbullah, then he can't be sure that the terrorists won't use East Jerusalem as a close-in base from which to attack Israel.

The radical Islamists have sworn to the destruction of Israel. This looks like it brings them a step closer, and all they have to do is stop shooting rockets long enough to move the launchers to the Palestinian side of Jerusalem.

w/t the amazing Gateway Pundit.

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Bush, McCain, Obama, Iraq

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.

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Without Preconditions

Ace quotes the Obama web site as saying that Obama "supports direct, Presidential-level talks with Iran without preconditions".

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our enemies, friends, or neutral countries.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting at the appointee level without preconditions.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our foes at the Presidential level.

The problem is meeting at the Presidential level without preconditions. Obama always tries to weasel, putting forth the straw man argument that Henry Kissinger supports meeting without preconditions, but fails to mention that he supports that only at the surrogate level.

The Obama campaign is fond of noting that the Bush Administration has met with Iran, so it's OK if Obama and Ahmadinejad do. But they fail to note that it is not President Bush himself, but lower-level officials, who attend the meeting.

I don't think we should meet with Iran at all, unless it's to accept their unconditional surrender. You don't negotiate with terrorists.

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Islamabad Marriott Owner: "I am not scared."

When terrorists bombed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, they probably thought they were striking a blow for Islam or some such crap. What they actually did was to alienate their customer base.

The idiot terrorists are going to turn the rest of Pakistan against their cause. What little sympathy they had will evaporate.

Pakistan is angry.

I am not scared. I have seen death very closely, this doesn't bother me. If I had been here I would have run after the bombers and caught them.

-- Sadruddin Hashwani, owner of bombed Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan

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Where Obama Gets His Ideas

Reading Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. Zakaria is a Yale alum with a Harvard PhD. From Zakaria's site for the book:

Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.

Of note is this magazine interview (pdf).


In an upcoming article for Newsweek, Who is the Real Appeaser?, Zakaria slams President Bush for not talking to Hezbollah. I don't like his logic, but a thorough analysis will have to wait.

w/t Instapundit (via an AoSHQ comment)

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Iron Man

I was a comics nerd as a kid, before it was anything like cool. It was so uncool, in fact, that my nerdy next door neighbor friend and I were the only comics nerds in our school, along with 1598 kids who didn't know Iron Man from iron pyrite (whatever that is). As far as I know, anyway, because comics were too uncool to talk about.

Before going to see it this weekend, I pulled out my copy of Marvel's Son of Origins of Marvel Superheroes and flipped through it before giving it to my son to read before the show. I'd forgotten how campy the story was.

So Iron Man the movie gave me deja vu. The cave, Stark's hit-and-run sex life, Pepper's "Sometimes I even take out the trash" line -- almost every scene was like instant replay from somewhere.

But it was better than the comic book. Using terrorists instead of some Viet Nam leftover, or setting it as a period piece, allows much more modern relevance. Not only that, but it fits with the Bin Laden style of leveraging Western technology against its creators; in that, Marvel was prescient.

The best part of the movie was that Tony Stark didn't become a full-on liberal crusader for ending capitalism and saving the spotted owl. He just realizes his errors, and wants to correct them. Given Hollywood's typical stupidity, I was expecting a moonbat lecture on global warming; what I got was a good movie.

I didn't expect all the Audis, either.

I can't wait for the Avengers. If they play Captain America straight, and don't moonbat him up, people will line up around the block.

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Torture, again? Yawn.

The Washington Post is aghast that the President should assert the power, in time of war, not to allow the use of torture to defend us against foreign enemies. They point to a declassied memo, the text of which they may or may not have in full, justifying such methods as do not "shock the conscience".

There's a problem with that, of course, in that consciences differ.

But neither was the author of the memo writing a tutorial.

No sane person likes torture. No patriot wants to see his country defeated. So if we can avoid techniques which "shock the conscience", as the memo insists we must, we can avoid both torture and defeat.

And that is everyone's goal.

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A Human Pendulum

Fool me once, shame on me.
Fool me twice, the full weight of the law and multinational military force on you.

An editorial at NRO details the current, predictable situation caused by the continued power grab made by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends). Unable to win political support for himself, al-Sadr has attempted to use violence to get his way. But his amateurish and repeated efforts show that his real intent is to win power for himself, not to establish a secure Iraq. He swings back and forth, sometimes suing for peace, but only when his prosecution of war has failed.

The Dhimmocrats and their coconspirators in the liberal main scheme media has tried to spin the latest effort by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) as some general setback for the Administration's policy in Iraq, rather than simply a result of the continued power grab by this one guy. Now that he is standing down his forces, otherwise known as giving up, it's time to finish him.

For his latest round of rebellion against the legitimate, duly elected governing authority of his country, I think it would be a beneficial step for all humanity of Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) were made into a human pendulum, or otherwise were made to assume room temperature.

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When Anti-Semites Come to Dinner

Rafael Medoff at NRO notes that the State Department purposefully watered down a report on human rights abuses, especially in China, North Korea, and:

Now it is the Palestinian Authority’s turn to benefit from the State Department’s excessive generosity. On March 13, State released an 84-page report [PDF] on “Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism.” While describing anti-Semitic incidents in various countries around the world, the report was oddly reticent when it came to the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Searching the report, I could find scarce mention of Palestine, and yet by all accounts this is the region of the world in which enmity for Jews and Israel is at its sharpest. Could this possibly be part of an effort to appease Mahmoud Abbas, in preparation for his May visit to the White House? After all, Abbas is not just a noted Jew-hater, he got a Soviet Phd in Jew hating.

President Bush wants to achieve something in his final days in office: peace in Palestine. To achieve that goal, he appears willing to overlook not only past sins, but current ones as well. For instance, in the wake of the murder of eight rabbinical students, Israeli group Palestinian Media Watch says that the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper (under Mahmoud Abbas' control)

... describes the murderer of eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem as a "groom" and his burial as his "wedding celebration." The story in Mahmoud Abbas's Al Hayat Al Jadida goes on to evoke the neighborhood Jabal Mukaber's "week of anticipation... preparing themselves for the wedding procession."

The term "wedding" is the expression commonly used in PA society, and in PA schoolbooks as well, to describe the death of Shahids - Martyrs for Allah. According to Islamic tradition, they will wed the 72 Dark- Eyed Maidens (Virgins) of Paradise. [emphasis PMW]

Until, and not before, the PLO. Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority renounce acts of violence by civilians against civilians to achieve political ends, and acknowledge Israel's right to exist, they should not be allowed to set foot on American soil, and a fortiori, should not receive the public relations benefit from being seen hugging and shaking hands with the President of these United States.

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