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Sunday, October 31, 2004
The Decisive Battle of the War
Tuesday’s election is shaping up to be the decisive battle of the Global War on Terrorism. If Bush wins the election, we’ll probably win the war. If Kerry wins, we’ll probably lose. Not since 1864 have the American people been asked to make such an important decision. For the first time in one hundred and forty years the people must choose between a candidate whose policies will eventually bring victory in the war and one whose policies will inevitably lead to defeat.
The election, however, is not merely a decisive battle in that war. It is also a critical battle in that other war: the culture war, the war for the very soul of America. The fight on Tuesday is fundamentally a religious war, a battle for the very soul of America against evil forces which seek to consume her and destroy that which makes her great. The Chance to Score a Real Win: It is not just the terrorists and the Democrats, but all of the enemies of the American people have set their hopes upon a Kerry victory. If Kerry wins on Tuesday, the cheers won’t be heard only in the bathhouses of San Francisco and communist bookstores of Madison: the loudest cheers will emanate from Paris, Ramallah, Tehran, Pyongyang, and other enemy cities. Those supporting John Kerry for President include not only Bin Laden, but also Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Kofi Annan. The enemies of America have staked all upon this election. For some reason I call to mind the end of the brilliant BBC television drama To Play the King. In it Francis Urquhart, an ultra-conservative Prime Minister, is confronted by a bleeding-heart liberal King. Urquhart, despite the best efforts of the King, manages to win a difficult election through the use of every means at his disposal. At the conclusion of the film the re-elected Prime Minister goes before the King to demand his abdication from the throne. The King, you see, had staked everything upon the defeat of Urquhart and the Prime Minister, in victory, had a perfect right to demand virtually anything that mortal power could grant and he used that power to maximum effect. That’s what victory in defeat in this kind of all-out war means. I relate the story to make a point: our enemies have staked so much upon this election that, if we win, we will have a small window of opportunity to crush them thereafter. After four years of slander and merciless attack from both traitors at home and enemies of freedom abroad I, for one, do not merely wish to win. I wish to dismember the enemy and grind its bones into dust. I want revenge for their many crimes. If we win this election, the battle will not end there. We will drive on towards the final liberation of the American soul and the rededication of our hearts to those causes for which all good men must be willing to give all. Our enemies understand this. That’s why they’ve thrown all of the accumulated capital of decades of liberal cultural rule into this battle. They know that a defeat for them now, after the great lengths to which they’ve gone to destroy this President, might well mean the end of them. Those who risk everything can lose everything. When we win, we should not be gracious in victory: we should collect the pound of flesh that is owed to us. You see, what we all must understand is this: what the American people will be deciding on Tuesday is not simply the matter of who will be President for the next four years but the more fundamental question of whether or not the Americans of today retain that fundamental strength of character demonstrated by their forefathers in places with names like Khe Sahn, Chosin, Okinawa, Normandy, Midway, Belleau Wood, San Juan Hill, Gettysburg, Antietam, Saratoga and Lexington. Are the American people willing to take risks and sacrifice for victory? Or have they been irreversibly infected, as too many in some once-great nations have been, with the horrible mental diseases of pacifism, liberalism, and defeatism? The European Path: Victory for Kerry will be a sign that the United States is headed down the same dirty and disgusting road of nihilism and perversion that Europe has been speeding down for decades. A vote for Kerry isn’t just a vote for the candidate of the party of treason: it’s a vote for the ultimate destruction and dismemberment of our civilization itself. All reasonable observers who do not flinch from the truth must see that Europe itself is dying. Its population is greying and its few remaining productive workers are crushed beneath the horrible burdens of socialistic welfare programs which reward the useless and punish the useful. The laughter of children is mysteriously absent from much of Europe as though Europeans as a whole decided, a few generations ago, that it was time for their proud races to commit a sad and slow suicide. Today roughly 30% of the young in France are Moslems. In a few years those numbers will be even higher. Think about that. Those who speak out against this human invasion are silenced and even oppressed by the law. Unless things change dramatically, the victory of Charles Martel will be reversed without a shot being fired. A century from now there may still be a country called “France”, but I doubt if it’ll be anything that a Frenchman from a time when the French were still a great people would recognize as his country. It’ll just be gone and replaced with the institutions and customs of other peoples. And, I think, as goes France, so will go most of Europe. The election of John Forbes Kerry would commit the United States of America to that same sick path. The people of Europe, and many of the more feeble-minded among the American public, believe that the divergence of American policy and ideals from those of the rest of the world are a sign that something is wrong with America. Of course the United States probably won’t be overrun by Moslems. If Kerry and his friends have their way, big chunks of the country will probably be overrun by Latin American illegals instead. Small comfort there. Winning the Terror War: Now I’m sure that some liberal might object to my idea. It’s shocking, shocking, after all, to claim that liberals don’t want to win the war as much as conservatives do. It’s appalling that anyone would suggest that people who burn the flag are less patriotic than those who wave it. Etc. Let’s get real. Let’s not be deterred from saying what we all know to be true in our hearts: the party of Michael Moore cannot be trusted to maintain American greatness nor can it be trusted to defend this country. For all his tough talk, John Kerry remains a captive of a party whose base is controlled by people like Howard Dean. Kerry’s only real option on terror will be to revert to Clintonian policies: talk loudly and carry a limp stick. We know this. Each and every one of us understands this viscerally. Anyone who tells you that Kerry can wage the war as well or better than Bush can is either stupid or a liar. This is not a war which can be won by hesitation and diplomacy. The only way to defeat the Islamists is to kill them. Words of friendship from France will be as successful in stopping terror as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was in abolishing war. Only the decisive use of force will win this war. And the window in which it can be won relatively easily is closing quickly. Liberals understand this as well as everyone else does, so they attempt to muddy the waters by attacking the President over the conduct of the war. They rarely, if ever, tell you how they’d wage the war better (and, when they do, there answer is usually something like, “We’ll call in the French Army”), instead they seek to undermine it while pretending to support it. Anyone with a lick of sense knows the truth: there never was a perfectly waged war and there never will be. The only wars where everything goes according to plan are waged on tabletops. Bush made hard decisions: some of them were wrong. Most, however, were right. Certainly the overall course chosen by the President was the correct one. That’s what matters. If John Kerry were President, he’d probably still be warning against “rushing to war”… in Afghanistan. Don’t believe me? Just wait and see. There’s no way that Kerry would have been bold enough to adopt the victorious strategy used by President Bush and I don’t think there’s all that much chance that he’d have thrown a hundred thousand troops into the mountains of Afghanistan either. The liberal claim that Bin Laden wants Bush to win because he’s “been good for al-Qaeda” is simply nonsense. Any fair examination of the record of the past three years suggests that al-Qaeda is much weaker than it was on September 11th, 2001. Remember this fact: two-thirds of the people leading al-Qaeda thirty-seven months ago have been killed or captured. Now the left responds to this by pointing out that new leaders have, in most cases, taken their place. This, of course, is true. But that doesn’t change the salient point: much of their best talent, including the people who actually planned the 9-11 attacks, have been taken out. If two-thirds of the top officials in the US Government were killed or captured during a three year period, how well would the Federal Government be functioning? Sure, the President and Vice President might both be along the third of survivors but if the White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and Join Chiefs of Staff were all dead and replaced by lower-quality subordinates, just how much would their effectiveness be degraded? What’s been almost totally ignored in public discussions about the Global War on Terror is what some have called the “Shadow War.” These are the things which aren’t being talked about on CNN. They’re the secret prisons where high-value targets are being thoroughly interrogated. They’re the foreign nations willing to use various methods which would not meet with the approval of Amnesty International to seek information. They’re the US Special Forces who are engaged in secret missions in dozens of countries against al-Qaeda. They’re the covert assassinations of terrorists and their supporters. This is the real war against al-Qaeda. During the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy attempted to make himself look stronger on defense issues by railing against a non-existent “missile gap” between the US and the USSR. Vice President Nixon fully knew these claims to be lies, but didn’t refute them because doing so would reveal the full extent of US intelligence on Soviet missile capabilities. I suspect that Senator Kerry is pulling the same trick: he knows that President Bush can’t come out and talk about the real happenings in the war against al-Qaeda, so he pounds him on the issues in the belief that the President is responsible enough to take a political hit in order to preserve US security. A Dangerous Man: If we lose this battle on Tuesday, I’ve no doubt it my mind that we’ll lose the war. Senator Kerry lacks the personal strength to carry on with the sort of fight necessary to actually beat the terrorists. The public knows this. Beneath the rhetoric, beneath the ads, they know this: vote for Bush if you’re for victory. Vote for Kerry if you’re for peace at any price. There are two possible conclusions that can be drawn from an examination of the public record of John Forbes Kerry of Massachusetts. Either the man has been wrong on every national security issue of the last three decades or he’s on the other side. If John Kerry had been President in 1990, Saddam Hussein would own Kuwait today. If he’d been President in the 1980’s, much of the world would probably still be under Communist rule. When he did get his way, in the 1970’s, millions of people were consigned to death and slavery under communism. Victory for Kerry means defeat for America. We must remember that in the days ahead. This sick and dangerous man cannot be allowed to become the Commander-in-Chief of our country. We must have an overwhelming faith of God that we, those of us who remain loyal to him in the face of the opposition of the unbelievers and the pretend-believes, will ultimately prevail in this struggle for right and honor in which we now find ourselves engaged. Friday, October 29, 2004
I’m Osama Bin Laden and I Approved This Message
Well, someone watched Fahrenheit 9/11. The most astounding thing about Osama Bin Laden’s latest tape is that it doesn’t come with the standard notice mandated by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. If you do away with the strange syntax (partially caused by translation and partially caused by idiosyncrasies of Osama Bin Laden’s patterns of speech) most of what the terror master’s latest tape says could easily have been lifted from any of the hundreds of soon-to-be-remaindered books with an unflattering picture of George W. Bush on the cover.
In the portions of the transcripts released so far Bin Laden manages to touch upon: -The “Bush lied” or “Bush misleads” theme (“Bush is still practicing distortion and misleading on you”). -The links between the Bush family and various Arab nations (“Both parties are arrogant and stubborn and the greediness and taking money without right and that similarity appeared during the visits of Bush to the region while people from our side were impressed by the US and hoped that these visits would influence our countries. Here he is being influenced by these regimes, Royal and military.”). -The USA PATRIOT Act (“So he transferred the oppression of freedom and tyranny to his son and they call it the Patriot Law to fight terrorism.”). -The 2000 Florida Recount (“He didn't forget to transfer his experience from the rulers of our region to Florida to falsify elections to benefit from it in critical times.”). -“My Pet Goat” (“the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important than paying attention to airplanes butting the towers.”). Seriously, this guy could be cutting thirty second spots for MoveOn.org. Before I move on, I’ll note one other thing: there’s not one bit of rhetoric in there that you couldn’t have absorbed from a viewing of Fahrenheit 9/11. To the best of my recollection, everything in there from the Bush-Saudi links to the “My Pet Goat” bit was in that movie. We’ll be coming back to this. The Democrats have now been reduced this arguing that this is a reverse-psychological trick: that he’s trying to make it sound like he wants people to vote for Kerry so that they’ll vote for Bush. Of course, these arguments soon drift off into never-never land: for example, I’d argue that it’s more likely to be a reverse-reverse psychological trick, designed to make you think that he wants Bush (by pretending to argue in favor of Kerry) so that people will support Kerry. To this, I’m sure, some Democrat will respond by arguing that it might be a reverse-reverse-reverse psychological trick, designed to make you think that he wants Kerry when he really wants Bush when he really wants you to see through his trick and think he wants Kerry when he really… And, by that point, the average voter has fallen into a coma. I’m a big believer in Ockham’s razor. What makes more sense: that Osama Bin Laden decided to play a complex and difficult-to-assess psychological trick upon the American people or that he, a man who belongs to a group who has demonstrably failed to understand the minds of the American people in the past, decided that their words might frighten enough people to put their candidate over the edge? I know which theory I’d bet my money on. In fact, the very words of the speech offer up some potential insight into the logic behind it. Bin Laden (or his speechwriters) are obviously consuming political “intelligence” (if that’s the right word) from the United States. We know that Fahrenheit 9/11 has been exceedingly popular overseas. We also know that its popularity in the United States is well-known there as well. It is at all implausible that someone with a DVD copy of the film showed it to Osama? I don’t think it is. The really concerning thing is just how this demonstrates how sick the American political scene has become. A man whose words are cheerfully lifted and easily used in enemy propaganda is given awards and allowed to sit alongside a former President of the United States at the convention of one of our nation’s great political parties. This should sink John Kerry. Though I’m not sure if it will. There’s already been so much which should have sunk him and hasn’t. He’s going to lose: but not by more than a few million votes. That, in and of itself, is enough to scare me. A man with John Kerry’s “record” should be, at best, in jail and certainly not a serious candidate for the office of President of the United States. When the British captured Lord Haw-Haw they hanged him. We’ll probably give Michael Moore another Academy Award come the spring. The moral relativism of the left has now assumed all-encompassing proportions. The situation is not good. The left is now working, quite literally, hand-in-hand with the enemies of our Republic to take down this President. If the enemies of the United States can be conscripted into an election campaign, they’ll do it. If they can write material which can be gleefully consumed and used by our enemies: they’ll do it. This is probably the second most important election in the history of the United States (the only election of comparable importance I can think of is that of 1864). The choice now is narrowed down to one between victory and surrender, honor and dishonor. The Americans of 1864 were offered, as we are now, a choice between the promise of an easy peace and a hard but just war. They made the right decision. We owe it to ten generations who fought, sacrificed, and died for their country to make the same. The candidate of Osama Bin Laden cannot be elected President. We cannot fail. Were we to ever do so the Earth would shudder with the screams and howls of a million American boys who fell in battle crying out in mourning, from beneath their white stars and crosses, for the fate of the country for which they gave so much and of which they asked so little. Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Those "Missing" Weapons
Two things:
First, apparently the numbers are wrong. The IAEA found three tons in January 2003, but the Iraqis reported 141 tons (just this month) because that was what was on a 2002 declaration. And then, of course, we've got Bill Gertz's story. Basically, the impression I get is that, in the run-up to the war, the Russians decided to take back things they'd given to Saddam that they shouldn't have. A Test of Character
This election is a fundamental test of character for the nation, for the world, and for individuals. More than that: it is a test with just one question and one correct answer. Those who care for human freedom, those who care for the future of the West, and those who care for the survival of the United States of America are supporting George Walker Bush for re-election to the office of President of the United States. Those who don’t aren’t.
Next Tuesday is the date of the most critical battle in the War on Terrorism since September 11th itself. If Kerry wins this election, the terrorists will probably ultimately win. That may be harsh. That may be questioning the “patriotism” of those opposed to the Commander-in-Chief, but it also has the unique advantages of being true. If Bush doesn’t win: we’ll lose and millions will eventually die. We may even ultimately lose our civilization. That’s how high the stakes are in this election. The future is on the ballot on Tuesday. There’s no excuse for not being a Bush supporter this year. Those who oppose him fall into four general groups: The Stupid: If the debates around the mechanics of voting this year prove anything they should prove that, upon the whole, Democrats are dumber than Republicans. After all, why else would the Democrats fight like hell to ensure that voters who don’t show up in the right place on Election Day can still vote? Why would Democrats be so certain that “undervotes” and “overvotes” would largely go to them? The answers should be obvious to everyone, seeing as they’re apparently obvious to the people running the Democrat Party: Democrats are likely to be disproportionately represented among those too stupid to show up at the correct polling place or fill out their ballots correctly. These people tend to vote for Democrats because they believe themselves to be (and generally are) incapable of tying their shoes or bathing without a government program to tell them how to do so. Fortunately for us, these people are mostly to lazy to actually bother to vote. Most of the time when they do vote it’s because some Democrat with a big wad of walking-around money has roused them from the viewing of the Jerry Springer Show long enough to give them a $5 bill, a cigarette, and a ride to the polls. The Ignorant: This is probably the largest category of Democrats. Among this group would be people whose sole source of news is one of the big networks and those who went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and came out without realizing that the film contains more lies than words. These are the people who believe any nonsense that’s thrown at them, even when that nonsense contradicts the other nonsense that they’ve been told. They tend to believe that an ability to recite from memory nonsensical conspiracy theories proves that they’ve got an IQ which can be measured at higher than room temperature. For example they’ll explain to you, with a straight face, that the Iraq war is a result of sinister intrigue involving a “Neocon” (Jew) Cabal, the Saudi Royal Family, and Texas Oilmen. Because, as we all know, those are groups with strong common ties and affection. The Foolish: There are some people who know better who are voting Democratic this year for petty or silly reasons. Most notable among this category is blogger Andrew Sullivan who, despite what he’ll tell you, is obviously voting for Kerry for the sole reason that he hopes that Kerry will allow the perversion of marriage. Andrew, it seems, doesn’t really quite get what our enemies do to his kind when they get the chance. Of course, I suppose, Andrew is well aware that as a result of his… past indiscretions… he probably won’t live long enough for that to matter to him personally in any case. Traitors: This last group, also known as “Democratic activists” consists of all of the supporters of Kerry who don’t have their own idiocy, ignorance, or moral blindness as an excuse to explain away their otherwise inexcusable lapse in judgement. Like Kerry, most of these people would have been traitors in the Vietnam-era as well, opposing US victory then as they do now. It’s just not safe to vote for Democrats anymore. There used to be patriotic Democrats: good men like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Harry Truman: but they’re mostly all dead or Republicans these days. The rest, out of a desire to remain loyal to the old party, have mostly drifted into category two or three. Anyone who has been paying attention should have a fairly good idea as to exactly how a President Kerry would run the War on Terrorism. He’ll work to get US forces out of Iraq as quickly as possible and, beyond that, he’ll confine the war to limited operations of the sort that we saw in the Clinton era. He’s going to attempt to hide behind homeland security appropriations: he’ll dump tens (or even hundreds) of billions of dollars into these efforts to give himself political cover and then he’ll withdraw from active engagement with the enemy. I think that Kerry’s view of terrorism is what he said a few weeks ago: if it is mostly ignored, it will be mostly a “nuisance” which means, in essence, that he’s willing to accept fifty or a hundred dead Americans every year as simply the “price of doing business” overseas. Some have said that it would be preferable to risk the loss of a US city to terrorism than to involve the United States in years of global war. Deep down, I think, Kerry probably agrees with that as well. However, there’s an essential problem with this view: the War on Terrorism is a global conflict in which time is not on our side. We have a limited window in which to win this war easily because the demographics are running against us. In another twenty years we of the West are going to have to deal with an increasingly Islamic Europe and even a Canada where Moslems may constitute more than 10% of the population, making them the nation’s most powerful minority. Today in France roughly 30% of those under twenty-five are Moslems. Think about that for a second. The Islamic birthrate is much higher than that among the native French, so that number is bound to continue to grow. In a few decades, France might be a Moslem-majority country. Think about that for a second. Even in the best case scenario in thirty years a third of Frenchmen will be Moslems. From the opening steps of the Cold War to the end of the Soviet Union roughly forty-five years passed. The demographics and economics of the Cold War were on our side: we could wait the thing out and let Russian Communism decay from within. The same is not true here: if we wait, we’ll lose. If present trends are allowed to continue without being abated, what will our world look like in forty-five years? Imagine for a moment if you will, what the world of 2049 might look like if we were to now abandon out efforts to slay the Islamist beast. The only Western nations which might still look like the West by then would be Australia and the United States. And even those nations will, in all probability, have been grotesquely transformed. Australia will, given time, take on an increasingly Asian character. The United States, without action taken to stem the tide of illegals, will be an increasingly balkanized nation. Islam will be on the ascent all across the world, with stern mullahs ruling from Tehran to Paris. In the east, the rising economic (and perhaps by then military) superpowers of China and India will contend for dominance in Asia. Even in the Americas, a rising Brazil will challenge the local economic supremacy of the United States. In simple terms: if we don’t win soon, we’re going to lose this thing. It may be even worse than that. The rise of Islamism will not occur without resistance in large parts of the world. What happens when the Moslem majority in France tries (as it inevitably will) to impose Islamic law upon that country? What will courageous Frenchmen (yes, a few still exist) do then? By that point their options will have been essentially reduced to surrender, flight, or genocide. Demography is destiny. If the present situation is allowed to go on, the Moslems will win. This is simply a fixed fact. If we fail to resist, if we fail to follow through on the revolutionary changes which the President is seeking to make, then we will be faced with a choice between defeat and rolling the dice on a decidedly unpleasant all-out apocalyptic war. There’s only one way to defuse the demographic time bomb which threatens us: we have to transform the Moslem world. We dive into the heart of the Middle East and transform the societies there and several things will happen. First, as living standards go up, birth rates will decline. Second, as liberty increases, Middle Easterners will suddenly find themselves arguing about environmental regulation instead of better ways to blow up infidels. Third, as the Moslem world transforms, it will stop exporting its people to the West and may even take back some of what they’ve already sent. Either way, as the flow stops, those already in the West will probably assimilate. This is a difficult plan, but it’s also the best one we’ve got and we all have to get onboard. If we fail in transforming that region of the world, the options we’re going to need to save our civilization in fifty years won’t revolve around liberty: they’ll revolve around atom bombs. We must resist the temptations of evil and remain dedicated to the cause. George Bush’s cause this year is the cause of all decent men and women who may be found anywhere in the world. All who are moral, all who know, will join with me in supporting this President and seeing his mission through to its completion. Welcome to Hell, Mr. Arafat
I doubt if it will be long now before Yassir Arafat dies. Perhaps he will already be gone by the time you read this. If not hopefully it will come tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. In any case, that joyous day is coming soon.
I’m reminded of an old joke. Arafat is talking is a psychic and he asks her, “What day will I die?” She responds by saying, “You will die on a Jewish Holiday.” “ Which one?” a nervous Arafat asks. “It doesn’t matter,” replies the psychic, “Whenever you die, it’ll be a Jewish Holiday.” Even if it isn’t in the next few days, we know that Holiday is coming sooner rather than later. If I’d had my way, it would have come much sooner, but it’s coming nonetheless. Arafat and those who’ve supported him and his cause will all be consigned to the fiery depths of hell. Of course the real fun will start after the son of a bitch is dead: then the various factions among the Palestinians will fall in against eachother and they’ll be busy killing eachother for a bit. That wall of Israel’s is going to come in handy. As the post-Arafat Palestinian territories descend into chaos various people will call for an intervention of humanitarian grounds. The President would be wise to reject any such calls: we should let every side lose. The more of eachother they kill, the fewer for us to worry about at some later date. Twisted as they are by Islamist propaganda, I’m quite sure that the Palestinians will take to butchering eachother with as much enthusiasm as they used to kill Israeli children. So far as I’m concerned, they’re more than welcome to do so. If I were the Israelis, I would respond to a post-Arafat civil war among the Palestinians by sporadically covertly assassinating leaders on both sides while using all of my intelligence assets to constantly convince each faction that all of the others were collaborating with me. In any case, I’m counting the minutes. Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Why Not More Executions?
In 2003 there were sixty-five people executed in the United States. In response to this fact, I have one brief question: why? Not “why did they have to die” but rather “why so few”? It strains credulity to suggest that only somewhere under a hundred people a year, out of the three hundred million in the United States, commit crimes for which they deserve to die. So, to death penalty supporters, I pose the following question: what’s stopping us from giving people exactly what so many richly deserve?
To begin with we need to ask the core question: how many people might, in an ideal world, be eligible for execution? To do this we need to look at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics. In 2002 there were 16,204 cases of murder and manslaughter reported in the United States. For these murders there were 14,158 arrests. One would think, leaving aside individuals who were released and acquitted, that at least 10% (or 1400) of the people arrested could easily be punished with death. I’d peg the number much higher than that, at around 10,000, even leaving out the twenty-eight murderers who were aged twelve or under. I don’t see any real reason why anyone convicted of first-degree murder ought to be allowed to live. Now, we need to make ourselves certain of guilt so some individuals are going to have to be excluded from execution. So let’s figure that we’d have solid enough evidence on half of the 10,000 or five thousand to warrant their execution. Is that really enough? Frankly, I think it’s time that we consider expanding the death penalty to second-offender rapists and pedophiles. Think about it for a second: First; no one is going to get falsely convicted of rape or pedophilia twice. Second; repeat offenders in these areas are almost never cured and, really, what worth are they to society even if some Doctor proclaims them so? I can think of at least one other class of people worthy of execution: members of al-Qaeda. Congress should pass a law making mere membership in the terror group a capital offense. Sunday, October 24, 2004
Oh, Good God
This is just, well, utterly depressing.
Apparently Satanism is now a recognized religion in the Royal Navy. Combine it with this story (the Halloween celebrations cancelled because they might be offensive to Witches) and you begin to wonder if bringing back the Inquisition might not be such a bad side. The Mainstream Media Opens Fire
With just eight days to go before the Election, those of us dedicated to the triumph of the cause of liberty (and, I suppose, those who support Kerry as well) can expect to suffer through at least that many days of nervous twitches and churning stomach acid. These are difficult times: the final hours before a vital moment in history. The final minutes before we who love America discover if, “history still has a place for a nation so strangely composed of great ideals and uneasy compromise as she” are ticking by.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the mainstream media is opening fire on the President. We must be stalwart in these hard days and we must win. Some on the left are already hyping a front-page story in Monday’s New York Times about three hundred and eighty tons of high-quality explosive that have gone missing from a site in Iraq. They should carefully read the entire two thousand word story before they get too excited. From what I’ve read, this is very old news repackaged to make it sound menacing and hurt the President. To sum it up: during the Saddam years there were an estimated three hundred and seventy-seven tons of high quality explosives suitable for use in triggering a nuclear weapon stored at a facility named Al Qaqaa. At some point during the last nineteen months those explosives have gone missing (or, rather, are “unaccounted for”). Presumably, some quantity of explosive found its way into the hands of the Iraqi insurgents. Near the top of the story (the part people will actually read) is an account of all of the damage that high explosives can do (NYT Headline: “Explosives Can Kill, Experts Say”) as well as a number of references to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was theoretically guarding these materials. Now, the story fails to answer one core question: when did these explosives go missing? It is simply never mentioned anywhere in the body of the story. American forces, one official is quoted as saying, went through the facility sometime towards the beginning of the war, saw no materials carrying the IAEA seal, and moved on. Buried deep within the story is the most likely explanation for what happened to the stockpile: it was standard Iraqi practice to, prior to bombing, move explosives out into the open and camouflage it. In all probability, it was long gone before any American soldiers ever got near the place. Presumably, this story is designed to feed on the liberal argument that too few troops were sent to Iraq and that, as a result, US casualties have been higher than they otherwise needed to be. John Kerry tried to push this line during the debates. This ignores two critical points: First: in all probability most of what was at Al Qaqaa and these other places was looted before the arrival of US troops. Post-war intelligence confirms what many of us have long believed: that Saddam had, by March of 2003, abandoned all hope of defeating the United States in a conventional war and, therefore, had staked his hopes on the victory of a guerrilla force which, in collaboration with seditionists in America, would undermine the morale of the American people and force a US withdrawal. Second: more US troops, unless the numbers were truly substantial, would probably have not made a difference, except for resulting in more US dead. In the sort of operation such as the one ongoing in Iraq, a point is reached where more troops simply mean more targets. Iraq was (and is) a nation literally floating on a sea of explosives. To secure all of those sites (and to do so without sustaining heavy losses) would have required, literally, more than a million men. This, of course, is the point of these attacks. Liberals are now for defending America, so long as we’re able to do it with more troops than are physically available. Anyone even a vague knowledge of history fully knows that these things happen: munitions linger long after wars end. To this very day, people still occasionally find bombs from the Second World War lying about. This is really a non-story. “Explosives go missing in war zone.” In other news: “Drug paraphernalia found in crack house.” The only way to spin this against the President is to argue (as Democrats have lately taken to doing) that it is possible to conduct a war perfectly. Friday, October 22, 2004
The Arrival of the Bush Landslide
You can feel it in the polls and you can see it in the eyes of Democrats: barring a catastrophe, George W. Bush has won this election. It may even be that, contrary to most expectations, his margin of victory will be large enough to prevent the Democrats from even attempting to steal the election. As Hugh Hewitt likes to remind us, “if it’s not close, they can’t cheat.” Well, it looks to me like it won’t be close.
The Democratic plans to repeat the Florida recount, only with an outcome favourable to them, will be useless unless they’ve got material to play with. If both Florida and Ohio and within a few thousands votes and they make up the President’s majority in the Electoral College, they’ll have room to unleash the hell they’ve planned for us. If the President wins by eight million votes and eighty Electoral Votes, they won’t have anything like room for that. I think that Bush will win by a comfortable margin in the popular vote: perhaps 52%-46% and that he’ll win with a surprisingly high number of Electoral Votes. Higher than 320 and perhaps as many as three hundred and sixty. The real tip-off isn’t the battleground state polls: it’s the Blue State polls. States where the President is within striking range, even at this late date, include Maine, New Jersey and Hawaii. In places like New York and California, where Gore won by millions of votes, the margins are much narrower than before. All evidence suggests that the President now is in at least as strong a place as he was at this time in 2000: and there’s no DUI to drag down his numbers at the last minute this time. Even better for the President are the various signs that he will perform much better among blacks than he did in 2000. Those calculating polls of likely voters based upon the results of the 2000 Election are assuming that blacks will turn out at the same rate they did then, when the Democratic ran the most demagogic campaign among minorities in recent memory. If 20% of blacks vote for the President (the best number in recent memory) it will not only seal the President’s victory, it may also mark the start of a new era in American politics and signal the end of the one-party stranglehold maintained by the Democrats over African-Americans. The Bush landslide will be more significant than any of the other recent landslide elections because it looks like he’s going to have coattails. From the looks of the numbers, the odds are high that the President will help to pull off Republican Senate victories in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Alaska. The Democrats retain an advantage in only three of those races at the moment: Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Alaska and, frankly, I believe that twenty-plus point Bush wins in all of those states will be more than enough to pull all of those Senate candidates through. That means a 56-44 Senate, almost enough for the President to push through things with a filibuster-proof majority. When we win, we will have to understand two important things. First, we will have to accept that this is but one battle in an unending war for the soul of America, the future of Western Civilization, and the security of the world. But, more importantly than that, we’ll have to accept something else: that the President and his team have done something amazing. This President has been subjected to a campaign of personal attacks unlike any in American history. While other Presidents have faced similar sorts of animosity from their opponents, few have faced the sort of total war that has been launched against President Bush. The President has been subjected to attack not only through standard political means, but through an unprecedented cultural assault. The left has thrown all of the elements of our culture that they’ve captured at this President with astounding force: the newspapers, the movies, television, popular music, and academia have all done their worst to this President. They’ve staked their own future upon this moment. All of the accumulated capital of a generation-long march through the institutions has been bet on this spin of their wheel. If we play our cards right we can make this the left’s invasion of Russia. Overextended and resource-starved, they will be vulnerable to our attacks in the wake of the Bush landslide. The day of the election is not the time for rest: it is the time to begin to prepare the final all-out battle to re-take our culture and our country from the liberal cultural cabal that have seized power in recent years. Wednesday, October 20, 2004
When the Democrats Cheat
It’s fairly clear to me that the question to ask this year isn’t what we’re going to do if the Democrats try to steal the Presidential election, but what we’re going to do when they try to do so. Today’s revelation (in an Associated Press article, no less) that Senator Kerry plans to, claim victory on Election Night and name a National Security team without knowing whether or not he’s actually won is strong confirmation of what many of us have suspected all along: the Democrats are planning, if they lose, to outright steal the election. If they can’t win on their own, then they’re going to use every resource at their disposal to cheat.
In a way, this goes a long way to explaining one important question: why have Democrats spent such vast amounts of money on voter registration efforts? According to one report, Democrat 527 Americans Coming Together has spent $125 million registering 366,000 voters in four battleground states. In other words: they’re spending $341.53 for every voter they’ve managed to register. Seemingly worse for the Democrats, these efforts have generated thousands upon thousands of fraudulent registrations, to the point where, in more than one Ohio county, there are notably more registered voters than people. There are 1,066,222 people eligible to vote in Philadelphia, an amazing feat since, according to the most recent Census, there are 1,025,259 people of voting age in that city. Now, here’s the trick. Let’s say that voter turn-out goes slightly upwards in Philadelphia this time, up to 51% of all people of voting age. This would mean that 522,882 people would vote in the city: fewer than last time by roughly 30,000. Moreover, this would mean that only 49% of eligible voters would have shown up to vote. All of this strikes me as plausible, given the actual number of people in the city. A 3% increase in voter turn-out seems entirely reasonable. But what will the Democrats say? Within hours of the results, if Bush wins Pennsylvania, they’ll be flooding every television screen in the nation with crying blacks telling of how they were horribly intimidated by evil Republican poll workers, police officers, etc. The Democrats will then use the massive difference between the number of people registered to vote and the number of people who actually voted as prima facie evidence of “voter intimidation” and “election manipulation.” The networks and newspapers will draw up graphs of the wide chasm between those eligible to vote and those who did. “Why, in such a close and passionate election, would so many choose not to vote?” the anchors will solemnly ask, the answer obvious in their tone of voice. This is the only way I can think of that the Kerry campaign could plausibly need the five “recount” teams that they plan to have on standby around the country on Election Night: they’re not planning to, if they have to, contest the actual vote totals at all, but rather they plan to contest the elections themselves. This is also, of course, where the matter of electronic voting comes in. I’m sure they’ll have no trouble finding Democrats who will swear out statements claiming that, to give one example, the number of people who entered a polling place in a Democratic area is far lower than the number of votes actually reported. Various partisan election officials will be found to come forward with lurid tales of tampered machines and erased votes. That’s the whole point of election manuals instructing local Democrats to make “pre-emptive” complaints about non-existent “voter intimidation.” It allows them to invalidate results even where the election isn’t particularly close. Even if they fail, they win, since their rabid base will believe pretty much anything at this point. The question now becomes: what can we do about all of this? There’s really one important thing: we need to start spinning early. This is why it’s vitally important to collect as much information about post-election theft attempts now. We also need to be ready with statistics: historical vote counts and the like to show that voter totals are consistent with past numbers. It will also be critical to be prepared to, at an instant, begin looking hard into the backgrounds of anyone who claims to have been a victim of “voter intimidation.” But more than that, we need to understand something else: winning the election will not, in all probability, be the end of the battle. We need to be ready to fight back against Democratic spin and steal attempts at Midnight on November 3rd. More than anything else, this means unity: if, the day after the election, those fair-minded allegedly-Republican pundits who crave Democratic affection successfully call for people to “wait for the facts” or some other such nonsense, we’ll surely lose or, at the very least, end up with a hellacious fight. The only solution is to head in, at the first possible moment, with our voices shouting and our fists flying (hopefully only in a metaphorical sense). We can’t be taken by surprise when the Democrats move: we have to be both materially and mentally prepared for them to act. That last part is almost as important as the former: in a contested election aftermath I’m fairly sure that the friends of the President will provide the money and resources required. Ultimately, any post-election contest will be, at its core, a clash of wills. We have to be stronger than them, more determined than them, and more willing to go the distance than they are. I think that the Democrats are planning on playing a grand game of chicken with the whole of the nation along for the ride. They’re going to disrupt and delay the election results for as long as possible and make as many false claims as possible in the hopes that, eventually, Republicans will be persuaded to pack it in for the ‘good of the nation.” Various “moderate” Republicans and non-partisan commentators will point to the example of Nixon in 1960 and suggest that, for the good of the country, the President will have to concede. After all, we still don’t really know who won the election of 1960. Nixon, contrary to myth, even won the popular vote that year (the Kennedy “win” is manufactured by adding votes for a slate of ‘unpledged’ Democratic electors in Alabama to the Kennedy totals) and, more than likely, lost both Illinois and Texas as a result of fraud. Nixon, it being a more gentlemanly age, conceded rather than put the nation through a trauma without a definable end. Nixon’s example was a good one: Al Gore should have followed it in 2000. However, regardless of the trauma and danger it may cause, we must ensure that Bush is not pushed into following it this year. We cannot let the Democrats steal this election, even if they drag it right through to January 20th. If we have to, we can have the House put through a Bush win, or failing that, we can drag the thing out and make Dennis Hastert the acting President. Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Poll: Bush Doubles Black Support in Four Years
You've got to love the AP. They title this story, on a poll of black voters, "Kerry Has Wide Support Among Blacks". Then, when you read the story, you find out:
That has helped the president narrow the still sizable gap with Kerry among blacks, who preferred the Massachusetts senator over Bush, 69 percent to 18 percent. The group's poll before the 2000 election found Gore with a 74 percent to 9 percent lead over Bush. The poll of 1,642 adults was conducted between Sept. 15 and Oct. 10, four days before the third and final presidential debate, and had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. This is, literally, the best polling news I've heard in four years. If this is correct (and there are more than a few signs it is) then the President is on track to grab as much as 20% of the black vote. Perhaps even 25%. If he does that, the Democrats have no chance. Monday, October 18, 2004
Divorced Kerry, Dated Dean, Married Hillary?
In talking about the post-defeat prospects for the Democratic Party one name has been all-but-ignored which should not be: that of Dr. Howard Brush Dean III. We’ve heard a lot about Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, but almost nothing about Dr. Dean. I’m not really sure why: from my point of view, after a Kerry defeat, Howard Dean becomes the instant front-runner for the Democratic nomination in four years.
It’s foolish to think that the Democrats would respond to a defeat this year by universally concluding that they need to move to the ever-elusive “center”. The likelihood that this Democratic Party would do that after the campaign we’ve just been through is essentially nil. The most likely conclusion that average Democrat activists would take from a Kerry defeat, especially one without the massive increase in voter turn-out that they’re expecting is that Kerry, because of his evasiveness on the Iraq issue, failed to excite the “base” of the party. I’ve almost zero doubt in my mind that Howard Dean is planning to run for President in 2008 and that he will start with a very strong base of support. Not only will he retain his activist followers, whose hearts have been with him all along, but he’ll also have the support of other assorted liberal Democrats who never committed to Dean but joined up with Kerry during the whole “electability” craze. I’ve very little doubt that, literally within days of the election, the whole Democratic spin machine will begin to push the message that he Democrats lost because they failed to stay true to liberalism. The question then becomes: is this a potentially winning message? I don’t think so. I doubt if a revived Howard Dean would have any better chance of winning the General Election in 2008 than he would have had in 2004. So: will the Democrats of 2008 vote with their hearts or with their heads? It is, of course, pretty much accepted as a fact that Hillary Clinton will run in 2008. It’s generally been assumed that she’d run as a candidate to the left of her husband, largely with the support of activist Democrats. These are the same Democrats, of course, that Governor Dean would depend upon to win his race and, I think, they’d be more likely to go for Dean than Clinton. So, if Hillary runs for President, she’ll have to look elsewhere for much of her support. In my mind this raises the possibility of a “Nixon in China” scenario for Hillary, a scenario of which we’ve seen a few signs. Senator Clinton, of course, went right after a seat on the Armed Services Committee. And she’s actually been relatively muted in her attacks on the Iraq War. It doesn’t strike me as impossible that Hillary might run on a defense platform not only to the right of Dean (or whoever the liberal standard bearer will be), but to the right of the Republican candidate as well. Think about it from a strategic perspective for a moment: Hillary, if she won the nomination, could, by her name and history alone, expect to receive pretty much lock-step support from most Democrats. The name I’ve left out of this is that of John Edwards. There’s a simple reason for this: unless Kerry wins this election, I think that he’s done for. He hasn’t been at all impressive on the campaign trail and he’s no real prospect of holding any office over the next four years if he isn’t Vice President. He can’t even run for a Senate seat or for Governor of North Carolina because there won’t be an election for either of those offices until 2008. A losing campaign combined with years out of the public eye will finish John Edwards politically. What we must ask next is who has the advantage in a Dean-Clinton contest. A lot, I think, depends on the maneuvering in the year ahead. I fully expect to see the first signs of a Dean campaign as early as November 3rd. Moreover, unlike this year, his campaign will be run by actual professionals, not enthusiastic amateurs. The first task of a Dean campaign will be to spin away the negative memories of the final days of his campaign, most notably the infamous “Dean Scream.” Frankly, I don’t think this is as hard as it sounds, at least among Democrats. In fact, it could be turned into a plus. With careful work from surrogates, months after the election can be spent building a myth of Dean’s martyrdom. The first steps in this process, I think, are already underway. Already more than a few people have suggested that he was the victim of an assault by the “corporate media.” From Dean’s perspective, this is good politics. Dean isn’t someone who was blown up by the media and was crushed when forced to face actual voters, but the wounded Messiah, assailed and brought low by unbelievers. The media, this myth would hold, pushed down a crown of negativity and crucified Dean upon the cross of electability. In truth, I believe that Hillary Clinton is the national Democrat with the best chance of beating Dean and potentially winning the election in 2008. Especially if she runs to the right on national security: a move which would make her truly “electable” in a way that John Kerry never was. The combination of anti-Republicanism and the Clinton name will be more than enough for Hillary to hold the Democratic base. Now, if she moves rightwards on national security, she might cause a few Democrats to bolt, but she’ll more than make up for that by grabbing independent and Republican votes. If the Republicans nominate a conservative, she’ll manage to grab moderate Republicans. If they nominate a moderate, she’ll be able to protect Democratic moderates and, perhaps, even get to the right of the Republican, thus pulling disgruntled Republicans willing to vote on national security. Hillary has another, hidden, advantage: a lot of Republicans really, really, really hate her. Now, isn’t always a bad thing in politics. The level of hatred directed towards President Bush has, if anything, strengthened him by drowning out more serious criticisms, discrediting all attackers, and alienating moderates. If Hillary were to be the Democratic nominee, she’ll have all sorts of foul (though at least partially true) abuse hurled at her by Republicans. That will work to drive moderates in her direction. Would Hillary win? I don’t know, but I can tell you this: we’d be foolish to underestimate her. Friday, October 15, 2004
The Voter Registration Mirage
For months now we’ve been hearing stories of “soaring” voter rolls, especially in battleground states. These statistics give hope to Democrats and nightmares to Republicans. In particular, many Republicans worry that the bizarre increases in numbers (to the point that, in some parts of the country, there are now more registered voters than people) point to plan to perpetuate a massive act of fraud against the American people. Frankly, I’m not so sure.
Let’s begin by asking a simple question: how were all of these new “voters” registered? We know this answer to this: the majority of the registrations came about via the efforts of paid canvassers who, in virtually all cases, are paid for every voter they register. And, more than any other year, there’s enough money being poured into the race to, quite literally, flood battleground states with these paid workers. So let me put forward a notion: the overwhelming majority of the new registrations (most of those over and above registrations of people who would have come to voting age and registered in any case) are of little or no practical value. A large percentage of the people who have been registered to vote in this drive either don’t exist, are already registered to vote, or won’t vote in any case. Consider, for a moment, the tactics being used to actually physically register new voters this year, especially by paid canvassers: Harassment: I view this as the most likely cause of the surge in registration. Simply put, a certain percentage of the population will sign anything in order to get an aggressive individual to go away. This will inevitable lead both to people agreeing to register to vote who have no intention of voting and to people registering to vote multiple times not with the intent of committing fraud, but to get people to leave them alone. Deception: We have multiple and credible reports of canvassers using deceptive techniques to get people to sign registration forms. These techniques have apparently most commonly included misrepresentation of the forms, including the making of false claims that voters have to re-register in order to vote in this election. Fraud: The final, and fairly common, factor is out-and-out fraud. If an individual is being paid a few bucks to register a voter, then you can make a lot more money copying names out of telephone books than you can out on the streets. This has occurred many times in the past and I see little reason to believe that it will not occur again this year. Enticement: In more than a few cases, people who register to vote are being offered a chance to win a prize. I think it goes without saying that offering a Plasma Screen Television might get a few hundred people to register to vote, but it’s not going to get them to vote. And, of course, such contests are likely to attract repeat registrants as well. I don’t deny that we’re going to see voter turn-out tick upwards, but I suspect that it’ll be a very small one. We’ll get turn-out of 52% or 53% instead of 49%, but nothing like the 60% turn-out that some very optimistic Democrats are expecting. The Democrats are chasing a mirage in this election. They’re going after voters who aren’t going to materialize in any meaningful way. Mark my words: they’re feeding off of their own enthusiasm and seclusion from the nation as a whole. This is a re-run of the later stages in Howard Dean’s primary campaign, when it was clear that the good Doctor’s poll numbers were not those that should be expected of a front-runner and we were repeatedly told that “invisible voters” were going to come out of the wood-work and sweep Howard Dean to victory. Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Defining Disloyalty Down
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan popularized the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the sociological process by which a society comes to recognize behavior it formerly viewed as abhorrent as falling within the bounds of normality. The theory holds that a society can only recognize a fixed percentage of behavior as “deviant” and when deviant behavior exceeds that percentage a society must then redefine what it considers to be “deviant.” I put it to you that this same process has occurred politically within the United States.
It now seems certain to me that George W. Bush will, barring unexpected events, win re-election on November 2nd. However, we must consider an alarming thing: even in the best-case scenario, close to fifty million people are going to vote for John Kerry. This is not to say that I believe President Bush is perfect or that he ought to win re-election unanimously, but it is to say that I believe John Kerry, on a personal level, to be so totally unfit for office that, in an ideal world, he would not receive a single vote. In the period after the election we’re going to have to face up to a difficult fact: a man who, by traditional standards, had a history of treasonous behavior (and who never apologized for that behavior) was able to capture the nomination of one of America’s two major political parties and win the votes (at a very minimum) of 40% of the American people. This is a difficult fact: are we to conclude that all of those who supported John Kerry are traitors themselves? Or is there something else at work in the land? Let us consider, for a brief moment, the record of John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. This man launched his political career by traveling to Paris and meeting with representatives of enemies with whom the United States was then engaged in active combat. After returning from those meetings he advocated that the United States unreservedly accept the terms offered by the Vietnamese Communists, trusting that their goodwill would ensure the release of US POW’s. He was instrumental in organizing an event where fake soldiers confessed to imaginary war crimes and then used those fabrications to smear all US servicemen who served in Vietnam as savage rapists and murderers. He threw his medals away. The cover of his book “The New Soldier” parodies the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. Later still, he again traveled to an enemy capital (in this case that of Nicaragua) and returned to call upon the United States to accept the terms offered by its enemies. I lay out this record not as a political case against John Kerry but to argue that, by traditional standards, he has a history of disloyalty. I point it out not to question his credentials, but rather his patriotism. Can you imagine what would have been said of someone who, during the First World War, traveled to meet with representatives of the German government and returned to advocate the acceptance by the United States of the Kaiser’s terms? What would have been said of a Civil War soldier who sought to enhance his own political standing by spreading false stories about Union atrocities? All of the acts committed by Kerry, in any war prior to Vietnam, would have been considered manifest examples of disloyalty towards the United States. I consider this to be self-evident, as to a great many other individuals. To my view, and that of others, this should be an automatic disqualifier, not merely the Presidency, but any office in the land. But others seemingly do not agree. So, what happened? The only reasonable conclusion one can come to is this: as a result of the Vietnam experience what constitutes “disloyalty” in America has been defined downwards. As in other matters, a society can only recognize so much behavior as “disloyal” or “treasonous.” After all, if half of society came to fully regard the other half as treasonous, our options would very rapidly be reduced to a choice between segregation and a genocidal civil war. This is the sick legacy of John Kerry and his comrades in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. They have poisoned the minds of tens of millions of people at created a permanent fifth column within the United States. As a result of this, as we wage the war which will define our age, all patriots are perpetually haunted by the grim and inescapable truth that we are never more than one election away from defeat. “Disloyalty”, as a result of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era, has been defined downwards. Behavior would have certainly drawn the label of “traitor” is now dismissed as mere “dissent.” The sort of treasonous behavior which they engaged in has been lionized and venerated, especially in public schools across the land. Two generations of students since the Vietnam War have been taught that opposing American victory in a war is an act which as at least as patriotic (if not more patriotic) than supporting it. This indoctrination hasn’t stuck in every case, but it’s done so in enough to make a difference. So, what is to be done now? We can’t simply roll back the clock, as much as some of us would like. We can’t simply jump from where we are back to the old, traditional, definitions. As I see it, the only road open to us is to wage a relentless campaign of attrition against all emanations of disloyalty. This means, more than anything else, a campaign to retake the schools and the media. Education and the popular media can be used, as they have been used in the past, to inoculate the public against the menace of treason and treasonable ideas. They must be used in this fashion once again. This will not be easy work, not will it be fun: but I am convinced that it is necessary to do this to, quite literally, save Western Civilization. We must face the fundamental fact that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the frontiers of the West are shrinking, as are our numbers. Europe is gradually dying. In no more than a few decades, probably within my lifetime, Europe will be transformed into a massive Mosque/Retirement home, where increasing Islamic polities strain under the massive burden of a cohort of the elderly so large that I would be less-than-surprised to discover that the European fetish for Euthanasia has purposes beyond the obvious. Canada is rapidly dying a largely similar death and, in all probability, won’t reach the mid-century mark intact. That leaves us with a West which is reduced to Australia and the United States. And, however valiant Australia may be, who knows how effectively her twenty million will be able to stand up to the billions of Asia? Ultimately, we must therefore accept that at mid-century it is highly likely that the only consequential and powerful remaining bastion of the West will be the United States of America. Therefore, the survival of our three thousand year heritage of liberty depends upon her fate. The survival of liberty and that of America are intrinsically linked. If she is defeated or (as is more likely) destroyed from within, nothing less than a new Dark Age will be inaugurated. It is therefore essential that we begin to revise the meaning of “loyalty” upwards in order to demand an ever-increasing degree of fidelity. Those of us who wish to see a strong and victorious America must take this election (assuming we win) not as a final victory, but as a stay of execution. Monday, October 11, 2004
Kerry on the First Gulf War
The American Future blog has a post worth reading on Kerry's position(s) on the First Gulf War.
In his lengthy speech . . . he repeatedly criticized Bush and his “unilateral” rush to war. “We are in this position today because the president of the United States made a series of decisions that have put us in this position.” With economic sanctions tightening their grip on Iraq, “there is no one who suggests that Saddam Hussein is winning anything today,” Kerry said. Kerry’s Nuanced View on the “Nuisance” of Terror
Senator Kerry’s comments for an article in the New York Times Magazine over the weekend have already drawn a fair bit of attention, even sparking a new Bush-Cheney ad. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,” said Kerry, “'As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise.”
The focus to date has been on Kerry’s apparent equating of terrorism with prostitution and illegal gambling. The Bush campaign ad placed it alongside his earlier comments, noting that he considers terrorism not so much a military as a law enforcement problem. However, from what I’ve read so far, the quote contains an even more damning sentiment which has yet to be picked up upon. Let’s read that quote again and consider exactly what Senator Kerry said, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.” We have to “get back to the place we were”? What place is that? He says it’s, “where terrorists are not the focus of our lives” which I take to mean the world before September 11th. But let’s consider the deeper implication of what he’s said and what he means. When he speaks of terrorists once more being a “nuisance”, I take him to be saying that he regards the attacks which came before September 11th (the USS Cole, the attempted bombing of LAX, the Embassy Bombings, the Khobar Towers, the first World Trade Centre bombing, the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut), attacks which killed hundreds of people, to be nothing more than a “nuisance”. All of this demonstrates a fundamental ignorance on the part of Senator Kerry. The only real difference between the first World Trade Centre attack in 1993 and the second in 2001 is that the attackers in 2001 had better organization and planning. Their intent was the same. If the 1993 terrorists had a bigger bomb or a better plan, who knows what would have happened. Does John Kerry really believe that this, a serious attempt to kill thousands of Americans, was merely a “nuisance”? Does he believe the same about the plans of the same cell to attack transportation infrastructure in New York City? Does he believe that, had it gone off, al-Qaeda’s plan to attack LAX to mark the start of a new millennium would have been a tolerance “nuisance”? From all of this we can come to one of two conclusions. The first is that John Kerry, on a personal level, has never really thought about or studied the enemy that we face today. The second is that he has examined it and come to the following set of conclusions: 1) Enhanced large-scale Homeland Security operations can thwart most terrorist attacks. 2) A few dozen Americans killed, on average, each year is a tolerable and inevitable thing which must be reluctantly accepted. 3) Responding to 9-11 level events with a campaign like that in Afghanistan should keep bigger terrorist events to a low level. 4) The effects of large-scale terror (most notably nuclear terror) are so potentially cataclysmic that they aren’t really worth thinking about, planning for, or working against. This would, of course, mirror Kerry’s view on the possibility of nuclear conflict with the USSR during the 1980’s. This is, of course, the way that many people plan. “Minor” wrongs can be safely ignored or minimized, larger wrongs can be responded to, and the worst-case scenario can be ignored because, in the event it comes to pass, everything that’s gone before will be out the window anyways. The latter is how, in day-to-day life, I’ve respond to people’s fears of the worst-case. Someone will say that, “if I lock that in, and you go bust, I won’t be insured beyond the Federal limit,” and I’ll say, “look, if this place goes bust it’ll be because there’s been a nuclear war or general economic collapse, in which case you’ll have bigger things to worry about.” So Kerry’s view, if that’s what it is (as I’ve said elsewhere, the good Senator typically likes to leave people guessing and speculating what he actually means as though he were a Delphic oracle), is logical, at least so far as John Kerry is concerned on a personal level. Kerry’s view sounds like one designed to manage the problem while he gets in the two terms as President that he believes were promised to him at birth. It would leave the final resolution to some later date, some later President. “Please God (or Goddess),” says the Kerry view, “just let me get through today without anything going wrong.” It is a strategy for survival, not a plan for victory. It will not make America safer. You see, it isn’t so much that John Kerry isn’t interested in defending America from the terrorists. He’s very bothered by the threat of terrorism and very interested in seeing it dealt with. It’s just that he has other priorities at the moment. Saturday, October 09, 2004
Kerry and the Sanctions
The reaction of Senator Kerry and other leading Democrats to the Duelfer Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is alarming to say the least. Leaving aside the fact that a majority of them obviously either didn’t read the report or are intentionally distorting it, there’s another alarming issue has been raised: if you read closely between the lines, it becomes very clear that the Democrats, had they been in power during the last few years, would probably have given Saddam Hussein everything that he was seeking.
Suppose John Kerry has been President during the period after September 11th. Under irresistible domestic pressure, he’d probably have had to make some moves towards a serious confrontation with Iraq and those moves would have almost certainly consisted of a trip to the UN and a return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. John Kerry keeps talking about how, if the UN inspections had gone on, “we’d have learned what we now know” (that Iraq “had no weapons of mass destruction”). So here’s the question that must be asked: if John Kerry had been President in 2003 and if the inspectors had, let’s say sometime in the summer of that year, come back with a report saying, “we find that Iraq has no stockpiles of prohibited weapons”, what would President Kerry have done then? Think about it. Suppose we’re back in May of 2003 with President Kerry sitting in the Oval Office. Hans Blix is on CNN telling the world that his report concludes that Iraq has fully disarmed. What would the French, the Germans, the Chinese, and the Russians cry for next? Why, of course, they’d want the sanctions lifted, wouldn’t they? And what would President Kerry have to say to the “united will of the world” on such an important matter? And, even if he remained in support of the sanctions, would it really matter at that point? Sanctions in the name of the United States alone tend to do little good, especially against countries which lie upon rivers of oil: we’ve seen that in the case of Iran. Does anyone think that the UN sanctions on Iraq would have, in the atmosphere of 2003, survived a report from the weapons inspectors which cleared Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction? I certainly don’t. In fact, given Senator Kerry’s long-standing penchant for trusting America’s enemies (the Vietnamese Communists, the Soviet Union, the Sandinistas, Iran, North Korea, etc.), I suspect that he’d have taken such a report as an opportunity for “reconciliation” and, even if he didn’t, I can’t imagine the French, Russians, or Chinese even bothering to pretend to abide by the sanctions at such a point. After all, they had much money to make and remarkably little to lose. It’s not like the UN would be able to do anything about it. Neither, for that matter, would John Kerry. Consider this for a second given what we now know. Once sanctions were put in place, they weren’t going to be going back on short of another Iraqi invasion of some other nation in the Middle East. A year and a half would have now passed since the end of sanctions. We know now, thanks to interviews with most of the top officials of the regime, that Saddam planned on resuming his WMD programs once the sanctions were lifted. Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz estimated that, once the sanctions were lifted, Iraq would have a WMD stockpile again within two years. Others estimated that the time would be even shorter then that. Since, according to the Duelfer Report, the rapid reacquisition of WMD was the “guiding theme” of Saddam’s regime, I think it’s fair to estimate that he’d have gotten those weapons sooner rather than later. The Democrats are fond of claiming that, prior to the invasion, the United States had “Saddam in a box.” That may well be true, but if it is so, it was a wet cardboard one. A few wrong steps (the same wrong steps, incidentally, that John Kerry now retroactively indicates that he’d have taken) and we’d have been back in 1990 again, with an unsanctioned Iraq vigorously pursuing WMD’s as well as supporting terrorism. Moreover, the unsanctioned Saddam of 2004 would be much more powerful than the Saddam of a 1990, since he would be universally accepted in the Moslem world (and probably much of the rest of the world as well) as having “beaten” the United States. There was no reasonable alternative to the decision that President Bush made in March of 2003. Until the problem of Iraq was solved, no other problem in the region could be dealt with. How could the United States pressure Saudi Arabia to crack down on al-Qaeda within its own borders when the United States might still need Saudi bases to act against Saddam Hussein? How could the United States deal with Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of terrorism so long as Saddam lay on Iran’s Western border, always ready to make trouble? In truth, the problem of Iraq stalled all forward progress anywhere in the Middle East. So long as the business of 1991 remained unfinished, then nothing else could be done. In some cases this was a result of geography, in others strategy; but in all the result was the same: paralysis. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a shock to the system of a region of the world which desperately needed one. All of this raises a very real question: just what would John Kerry do if elected President of the United States about three weeks from now? Does anyone actually know? Most debates of the actual policies of John Kerry, were he to be elected, remind me of the debates of the old Kremlinologists who used to attempt to analyze who was in and out of favor within the Soviet hierarchy by deciphering tiny hints available in official photographs. “Well,” I’ll say, “if you hold this policy paper of his upside down on a 45 degree angle, it seems to indicate that he’ll…” This, of course, is a product of an environment as information-free as the Kerry campaign. Would Saddam still be in power if John Kerry were President today? “Not necessarily” is the answer that John Kerry gave in the most recent debate. I take that to mean, “probably, but it’s always possible that he could have slipped in the shower and broken his neck.” So, let’s take that as a yes. Now, as to the second question: if UN Weapons inspectors had come back with “what we now know” would UN Sanctions on Iraq have been lifted, especially under a President Kerry? Not necessarily, by which I mean, of course, “Yes, unless Aliens invaded the Earth and forced the French, Chinese, and Russians to cooperate in maintaining the sanctions.” Would an unsanctioned Iraq have rapidly reacquired weapons of mass destruction? Not necessarily. Saddam might have converted to Buddhism and dedicated himself to finding Nirvana instead. One begins to believe that that is how Senator Kerry thinks: not in terms of probabilities, but in terms of possibilities. “Sure, Saddam sought to defy the world for twelve years, but maybe he means in this time!” “Ok, this is Hitler’s eleventh “last demand”, but maybe this time it’s true!” “The North Koreans didn’t bother with the nicety of obeying the last treaty we signed with them, but maybe they’ll abide by the terms of the next one!” “Of course the Iranians are sitting on more oil then they’ll need for the next thousand years, but maybe they really do want nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Let’s give them nuclear fuel to find out!” Perhaps Senator Kerry was right when, after some focus group told him to do so, he started telling everyone not put to sleep by his droning that, after a year of offering the most pessimistic assessment of the state of the nation possible, he was an optimist after all. He’s always optimistic that America can trust its enemies. Perhaps Lenin was only partially wrong about capitalists. Under John Kerry’s wise leadership, the American people won’t sell our enemies the rope with which they hang us: we’ll ship it to them in exchange for their promise not to. Thursday, October 07, 2004
Iraq Wasn’t an Intelligence Failure
As is becoming a habit these days, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) are busy trumpeting the findings of a report that it is quite evident they have not read (see also: 9-11 Commission Report and the Kay Report). In this particular instance, the report that they’re salivating over is the Iraqi Survey Group’s report on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. If the media reports are to be believed, the report is a vindication of the retroactive Democratic position on WMD in Iraq (that they were never there including, apparently, when Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for three days over them in 1998). That is, of course, if the media reports are to be believed.
Let us briefly review what the Duelfer Report actually says, as opposed to what the media says that it says: According to the report, Saddam Hussein personally supervised and micro-managed the report to conceal from, quite literally, everyone in the world the fact that Iraq lacked weapons stockpiles. Even Saddam’s own Generals were unaware of the true state of Iraq’s programs until very shortly before the war began in March of 2003. Saddam Hussein’s real strategy in the years 1991-2003 was to pretend to be exactly cooperative enough to get UN Sanctions on him lifted. Throughout that time, Saddam sought to retain a residual WMD capacity which could have been reactivated very quickly once sanctions were lifted. The UN-created Oil-for-Food program was, without hyperbole, the most hideous example of corruption in the history of the world. Instead of feeding his suffering people, Saddam used his oil to enrich himself and bribe people: including high officials of the United Nations, France, Russia, and China. Despite the sanctions, Iraq continued extensive work on prohibited long-range missiles. Oh, yes, and they concluded that it was the “guiding theme” of Saddam’s regime to start making WMD again as soon as possible. This is the report that the media-Democrat axis is attempting to play up as a damning indictment of the Bush Administration’s thinking and actions? In truth, what this report reveals is that US intelligence, on the matter of Iraq, worked exactly as it was meant to. Intelligence isn’t clairvoyance, it’s merely meant to present the best information available at the time and allow decision-maker to act accordingly. It’s well past time that we concede that what happened in Iraq wasn’t an “intelligence failure” in any meaningful sense of the word. If Saddam was so successful in his deceptions that even his own Generals, on the very eve of war, were unaware that Iraq lacked WMD, how was it even remotely possible for the United States or other Western powers could discover and confirm the same? The matter of Iraq is very similar to the situation we see played out on the streets of our cities on a fairly regular basis. A known criminal is running down a dark alley, pursued by the police. At some point the criminal turns around and reaches into his jacket. The police fire. The criminal dies. Afterwards it is revealed that, for some reason, the criminal was reaching for his cell phone. But no one (at least no one who thinks rationally of the matter) believes that the police did anything wrong. Rather, we all agree, they saw an emerging threat and they acted. They did the right thing. We view what the police did as right because we understand that, in life-or-death situations, the police have no choice to act based upon the worst case scenario. Yes, it’s possible that what the criminal grabbed wasn’t a gun: but the police just couldn’t take that chance. Neither could President Bush. Those who dub both 9-11 and Iraq as examples of “intelligence failures” are working from the bizarre premise that it’s possible to have intelligence that is 100% accurate. In the case of 9-11, they’re angrily demanding to know why our intelligence services and leaders failed to act upon a scenario which, before it actually happened, would have seemed like a fanciful leap of imagination at best. In the case of Iraq, we’re condemning them for looking at the available intelligence and drawing the same conclusions that every other reasonable and fair-minded observer would have drawn. It can’t be both: we can’t expect our leaders to both be prepared to act upon wild conjecture about bizarre enemy plans and to, simultaneously, accept the word of a mass-murdering dictator whose plan of deception worked so well that even his own Generals were surprised to learn the truth. Consider this for a moment: if Saddam Hussein was able to convince the entire world, including his own military leaders, that a massive WMD program existed when, in fact, it did not exist, how highly would you rate his capacity to conceal an actual program if it did exist? There was simply no way of knowing the truth without doing what the United States ultimately did. The case of Libya was a much better example of an intelligence failure. When the Libyans agreed to hand over their nuclear materials, the United States had absolutely no clue that Libya had an advanced nuclear program. None. US intelligence, for various reasons, missed it altogether. That’s the real danger: not that we’ll act too soon, but that we’ll fail to act because we lack confidence in our intelligence. I agree that “abuse” of intelligence has gone on in Washington in recent years, but I disagree as to the perpetrators. The real abusers are not those who have acted in the defense of the United States, but those who have peddled the dangerously flawed notion that it is possible to have intelligence that is perfect in all ways and that, short of that, we must not act. When acting against terrorist threats, we need to look for “fail-safe” options. What that means is this: when examining intelligence about terrorist threats, we need to act in such a way as to ensure that, even if we’re wrong, things will be better as a result. Invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam is a good example of a “fail-safe” option. Even if we weren’t exactly right as to the exact extent of the threat, we’ve made the world better as a result. Leaving Saddam to his own devices would be what I’d call a “fail-deadly” option. If it works, it works: great. If it fails… well, we’ve all already seen the consequences of that. We need to be thankful that during the Iraq crisis we had a leader who learned the core lesson of 9-11: that, because we cannot our intelligence to be perfect, we must act against threats as they gather, not after they materialize. As Donald Rumsfeld once explained it, there are facts that are known, there are facts that are known-unknown and there are facts that are unknown-unknown. What this means is this: there are certain facts, such as the fact that a man named Osama Bin Laden exists (or, at any rate, once existed). There are things that we know in general, but do not know in detail: such as that he’s planning a terrorist attack against the United States. We don’t know where and we don’t know how, but we know that it’s coming. Then there are the unknown-unknowns, facts which no reasonable person could ever have guessed. That’s what the actual attacks which occurred on September 11th were: an unknown-unknown. Now, we obviously cannot guard against those things that we don’t know about: but we can minimize their chance of hurting America. The only way to do this is by acting against threats before they become imminent and by acting on the best information is available. That’s what President Bush did and that’s what he and his successors must do in the dark years to come. In this Global War on Terrorism the margin for error is very small and, if we are to err, it must be on the side of caution for America and for the world. That is how President Bush has acted to date and that is how he will act in the future. Some, I’m sure, will scoff at the notion that President Bush has been “cautious” in recent years. But I will assert that he has. After all, who is more reckless: the man who confronts a madman or the man who trusts him? Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Kerry’s Imaginary History
John Kerry conceives, or at least pretends to conceive, the history of US foreign relations as a sort of idealized, snow-white, past of total honesty and trust. In particular, Kerry has taken to telling one story, which I’m going to reproduce in full only because, if he believes it as he tells it, John Kerry too naïve to be the President of the United States.
In the first Presidential debate, Kerry said: (W)e can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me." The point of the story Kerry wishes to tell is this: relations between the United States and other nations were once so good, so filled with a sort of total trust, that even a hardened leader like Charles de Gaulle was willing to simply accept the word of the President at face value. Further, he implies, that if he’s elected President we will return to those golden days. This is not only nonsense, but it’s very dangerous nonsense. It seems more logical to me to assume not that de Gaulle simply accepted what was told to him by the United States because: a) He already knew, from his own sources, what was told to him. b) It suited his interests to accept what he was told uncritically. c) Both. Anyone who knows anything about de Gaulle should fully understand this. The man was many things, but a starry-eyed idealist he was not. Neither was he particularly dedicated to the maintenance of good relations between France and the United States, as demonstrated by his decision three years later to withdraw France from the NATO military command and to order US troops off French soil, causing Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bitterly ask, “does that include the dead Americans in military cemeteries as well?” In addition, even though other leaders were willing to accept America’s information about the Soviet Missiles, other leaders of the Western Alliance were hardly so accommodating. At the height of the Crisis, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker deliberately dragged his feet in putting the Canadian military on heightened alert. Had his Defense Minister not secretly defied his orders, a critical gap could have been opened in North American defenses as a result of the truculence of one of America’s so-called allies (remember: this was in the days when the Canadian military was still a functional force). Kerry asks, “How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way?” I would point out to Senator Kerry that they didn’t respond to America that way then. I’m often at a loss as to whether or not John Kerry actually believes most of the stuff he says. The foreign policies advocated by his campaign seem to have increasing wandered off into some strange world wherein Senator Kerry is a great sorcerer who, if allowed to add to his magic powers those of the Presidency, will use mystic energies to conjure up unthinkably superlative feats of excellence. I laugh whenever Senator Kerry attempts to push his new line about President Bush “not being in touch with reality” in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeing as it seems reasonably self-evident that Kerry is simply not in touch with reality anywhere. Even his most hardened supporters are unable to defend the fact that the Kerry-Edwards foreign policy has been created by fiat by focus groups and pollsters. Even his own supporters can’t defend it, aside from spinning off into other topics, because anyone with any sense at all, regardless of their views on the actions of the Bush Administration, knows that the proposals being advanced by Senator Kerry fail the global test which, at its core, requires the policies of any nation to be grounded in reality. In my view, Kerry has about as much credibility in saying that foreign troops and dollars are going to somehow magically come to the rescue of his foreign policy in Iraq as he would have were he to declare that his policy for Iran was premised upon receiving the assistance of the Klingon battle fleet for strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. Kerry’s looking for inspiration in a past that never existed. If he is not simply lying for political gain, then he’s going to be in for one hell of a surprise if he ever gets into the Oval Office. Sunday, October 03, 2004
Kerry’s Iraqi Fantasies
I find it deliciously ironic that a new Kerry campaign theme claims that President Bush is not “in touch with reality” in Iraq when, quite evidently, the Kerry plan for Iraq is itself is completely out of touch with the military, diplomatic, and logical realities of the world in which we live.
Senator Kerry’s plan is premised upon the bizarre idea that, simply by holding a summit and ‘inviting the world in’ all problems can be solved. In last Thursday’s debate, Kerry callously dismissed those nation with “only” a few thousand or a few hundred troops in Iraq, suggesting that, if he were to become President, he could find many more. In fact, it isn’t really worth discussing the rest of the Kerry proposals in this area because everything that he says with regard to Iraq is set upon a fundamental assumption that a Kerry Administration would be capable of securing a much greater degree of foreign assistance. Absent that assumption, the rest of his plans are meaningless. The Kerry fantasy for Iraq is based upon a combination of faded (and mostly incorrect) memories of the First Gulf War and wishful thinking about the military capabilities of much of the rest of the world today. So, what are the prospects for getting more than a hundred thousand foreign troops deployed to Iraq? The answer, to be brief, is “poor.” Senator Kerry’s blithe dismissal of those nations whose contributions in Iraq number “only” in the hundreds or the thousands suggests that he’s looking for foreign contributions of massive, divisional-level forces. But where are these going to come from? Senator Kerry would do well to remember that the great United States only has ten active-duty Divisions in its whole Army. The average European nation just doesn’t have entire Divisions sitting around with the levels of logistical support available to deploy them to the Middle East. Kerry’s recently been running around comparing the present-day coalition in Iraq unfavourably to the one assembled and used in 1991. Our present coalition, with troops from nations as diverse as Britain, Australia, Poland, Italy, Ukraine, Japan, and South Korea isn’t a “real Coalition”, unlike the one that Senator Kerry is going to put together at his summit. Of course, according to CNN, the US suffered two hundred and ninety three out of three hundred and fifty-eight dead in the first Gulf War or, in other words 82% of all deaths among Allied nations, versus 88% in this war. And the non-US death percentage in that war, I might add, was increased by thirty-nine deaths among Coalition troops from Arab nations which were poorly equipped, trained, and led and, therefore, sustained a high casualty rate. If you exclude those from the numbers, US dead as a percentage of all Allied losses in that war add up to 92%. In order to replace the present US forces in Iraq, Senator Kerry would need something like 120,000 foreign troops (and that, of course, is only if the troops he’s getting come from other First World militaries). It’s worth remembering that the total of non-American forces contributed to the First Gulf War was roughly 160,000 and that, of those forces, a majority consisted of Arab forces whose contributions to victory were minimal. To put it another way, the entire strength of the German Army today is about 230,000. The strength of the French Army is even lower, at less than 150,000. However, the French numbers are, in fact, worse than that in reality because French conscripts may not be deployed overseas in peacetime. In other words, even if they wanted to, neither France nor Germany is in position to deploy a substantial force anywhere. The relatively small force (around 20,000) dispatched by France in the Gulf War could probably not be matched by the much smaller French Army that exists today. So, where else is Senator Kerry going to get these troops he wants from? The other major nations of Europe either already have troops in Iraq or are capable only of dispatching units which aren’t nearly large enough for the gentleman from Massachusetts. Canada can barely keep a few hundred troops in Afghanistan. So where are these foreign troops upon which the Kerry fantasy relies going to come from? Kerry has suggested that Arab nations ought to send troops. Frankly, I can’t think of a worse idea. Leaving aside the fact that the average Arab Army these days would probably be defeated in battle by a Confederate Regiment teleported off the fields of Manassas to the present day, there’s the obvious matter of which Arab nation would be sending those troops. Jordan doesn’t have an Army large enough to make a meaningful contribution. Kuwaitis and Saudis deployed into Iraq (even if either nation were capable of making a meaningful contribution) would be a bad idea for more reasons than I can name here. Who else is there? Syria? That’d be a laugh, of sorts. Seriously, does anyone think that inviting troops from Arab dictatorships who have a vested interest in seeing the Middle East remain undemocratic into a fledgling Arab democracy is really a good idea? Whatever useable forces Russia possesses are going to be needed in Russia in the years ahead, so they’re out too. Beyond that we get into even more far-fetched scenarios. Does John Kerry plan to seek the deployment of Chinese forces into Iraq? Does he want an Indian Army Corps dispatched to Baghdad? Could it be that he plans on cashing in the points he earned with the Vietnamese Communists and asking them to deploy major forces into Iraq? I don’t know and neither, in all probability, does John Kerry. Saturday, October 02, 2004
Something Odd About the latest Kerry Ad
I'll leave aside the bizarre idea of taking out ads to insist that you won a debate, but I noticed something else odd in the latest ad coming out of the Kerry Campaign.
Look closely at that headline and quote. It says "Skewed Intelligence on Iraq Colored the March to War". It cites the source of that as the Sunday edition of The New York Times (October 3, 2004). Well, here's the interesting thing: a search of the Times' web site shows that the phrase has never appeared there. A search for the shorter phrase "Skewed Intelligence" again yields no hits. A seach for simply the word "skewed" shows that it last showed up in the Times on September 29th. Now, my assumption is that the headline shown in the Kerry commercial refers to this story in the Sunday edition of the Times, entitled "How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence." But note, the headline on the Kerry commercial is in quotation marks, representing it as an exact quote from the times. This leaves us, in my view, with three options: 1) The Kerry campaign's ad people paraphrased (or guessed at) the title of a forthcoming story and stuck it in the ad. 2) Someone from the Times told the Kerry campaign a proposed title ahead of time and it was later changed. 3) For some other reason the title of the article referenced and the actual article do not match. 4) I'm an idiot who is missing something obvious. I don't know which is the answer at the moment. But I'd sure like your help. |