Tag Archives: Politics

War On Terror Rant

I am annoyed at the current state of thing in this ‘war on terror.’
First off I have never liked the idea of a war on a common noun. You can’t win that kind of war because the common noun will always be around. The wars on poverty and drugs are wonderful examples of that sort of stupidity. I am all for war on a named enemy, say Al Qaeda and it’s allies. You know when you’ve won that war. With they give up or cease to exit.
Besides that point I’m really fed-up with the stupid and pointless political crap that gotten in the way of pursuing our enemies.    The current state of affairs seems to be that on one side of argument you have to be for torture and going all Jack Bauer on their stupid medieval skulls, and the only other option is go full court ACLU with Miranda and layers of lawyers.
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Tomorrow’s Special Election

Tomorrow voters go to the polls to elect a senator to represent Massachusetts in the United States Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy and currently filled by an interim appointed Senator.

This is I think a critical election. The Democrats currently hold 60 seats and by the current pansy-assed rules for filibusters need all 60 to get their legislation through. (Filibusters have not been non-stop dramatic speeches on the floor of the Senate as seen in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington for years and years. They are now gentlemen’s’ agreements to require 60 votes, something very different.)

If the Democrats lose this 60th vote Health Care Reform is almost certainly dead.

Frankly if I was forced to place a bet tonight it would be that the Democrats will lose this election. The wind is at the Republicans’ back and even in this bluest of blue states victory is within their grasp. Unlike the special election in NY which was primary a local election, this is state-wide and with broad and clear national implications. A defeat here is a defeat for the liberal agenda and could possibly herald a voter wave that might crash against the party in power in November. (Though November is a long way off electorially speaking.)  Maybe even with enough anger and luck the Republicans can take control of the House of Representatives again.

If that happened it would not be the end of the world and the Republicans would have a chance to show that perhaps they have learned some lessons. (I harbor doubts on that front but would be delighted to be wrong.)

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Wars of choice are often bad choices.

I did not have a blog in 2003, so there is not internet history of my opinion on invading Iraq as we geared up towards the war in 2003. However I can state I was flatly against the invasion.

My arguments against the war were fairly simple.

1) Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States at that time.

2) Even if Iraq possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction a paranoid dictator such as theirs would never let them go out of his control.

3) We would easily overthrow the government but become bogged down in  a war with a native insurgency.

4) A new war would distract the U.S. from is primary goal, chasing down and destroying Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

My friends who supported the war — or described themselves as war-agnostics – dismissed my concerns. I remember quite clear how the last point seemed ridiculous to them.

Well along with the others, point four seems to be gaining evidence lately. See the following quote from a story about a history of the Afgan war written by the Army itself.

First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall.

Second, military planners were concerned about Afghanistan’s long history of resisting foreign invaders and wanted to avoid the appearance of being occupiers. But the historians argue that this concern was based partly on an “incomplete” understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.

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A Pointless Exercise

So over at Instapundit Glenn Renyolds has posted a picture from the White House Flickr page and asks readers to ‘Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.‘

Here’s the photo:
Glenn Reynolds later followed up with an update to his post…

UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame:

And this enlargement of the photo.

The first thing that struck me about this is that this exercise is one of pure futility and pointlessness. Without the context of the situation you cannot analyze the body language. All you can do is project your on preconceptions into the picture. We don’t know what Biden is saying to Obama and knowing that bit of information is critical to having any understanding of the image.

Biden has a reputation for being a blabber-mouth and never knowing when to stop. Could be all Obama is reacting to is a never ending monolog. Biden could be flubbing or telling a rather dreadful joke. Biden could be suggesting white people and black people are equals. The two men could be discussing basketball. It could be anything going on in that picture.

The next thing I notice was how in very typical style, Glenn Reynolds didn’t post his own analysis of the picture. A very sly movie to keep his own name out of harm’s way. Anyone who wants to consider themselves in league with Instapundit can assume that their analysis matches up with Glenn’s, however Glenn has total deniability from any unseemly analysis because he never posted his own stand. (I do believe that he does indeed have a stand and that it is a calculated decision on his point not to post it.)

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Denialist – the sly ad hominem

One thing I hate in debate is the scoundrel’s technique of the ad hominem. I have no troubles with people who disagree with me. Hell, most of my friends disagree with me on a number of issues. That is fine and dandy, but insults to the person making an argument is simply a tool of bullies.

In the current debates on climate change and if mankind is a major contributing factor in any clime change the charge of denier gets thrown at people who express doubt about man-made global warming.  This is really nothing more than a sly ad hominem attack. The most cultural known use of the term denier in political debates is of course for those who would deny that the Holocaust occurred during WWII. By referring to doubters of AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) as deniers, supporters of AGW are trying to achieve to things.

The first is subliminally place doubters in the same emotional space to most people as deniers of the Holocaust. The second thing they are trying to do is establish AGW as a fact as firmly rooted in reality as the Holocaust itself.

The Holocaust is a fact. It is not a theory, it is not a hoax, it was the systematic murder of Jews, gays, Gypsies, and others by the NAZIs.

AGW is a hypothesis, it is not a fact. It’s not even a theory. In science a theory is a hypothesis that has withstood rigorous testing over an extended period of time. The Atomic Theory of matter is a theory, the Germ Theory of Disease is a theory, General Relativity is a theory. All of these started their scientific lives as a hypothesis and became theory as they proved themselves to be the best current description of how the world works.

The world is warming. I think there is enough evidence to support that statement. After all the Hudson River used to freeze solid enough that you could drag cannons across it and they used to hold winter fairs on the frozen Thames in England. Clearly we don’t get that cold anymore. That does not mean that AGW is true.

Mind you I am not saying that AGW is not true in the post. It might be the best hypothesis for describing the current climate and the apparent changes we are seeing, but it is not the only one. The Earth has been much cooler in the past and it has been much warmer in the past without any help from mankind at all. There are good and reasonable people – scientists and lay-people alike – who have serious questions about AGW. These people might be right, they might be wrong.

What is wrong is to call these people deniers as though they were apologist for Hitler, or flat earthers pretending we never went to the moon. Calling them names is nothing but an attack on the person. (I will grant you that not all people who questions AGW do so from a serious doubt of the science. There are many venal and frankly manipulative people who takes their positions purely out of the politics of the situation, but that applies to both sides.)

Show me facts. Show me testable experiments and simulations.

Do not call me a denier simply because I think the GCR hypothesis might explain thing as well as the AGW hypothesis.

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Is The US Doomed?

Way back in the 1980’s I first conceived of my fictional character, Seth Jackson, and the universe he inhabits. Seth is an American who has risen through the ranks of the European Star Forces to command a starship. In this universe, Nationalism has not faded away as is so often the case in science-fiction and the Unites States is no longer a dominate power-player.

Part of the themes I wanted to play with back then were the ideas that America without money and without dominance would find itself nearly friendless and alone on the international stage and that Americans would be scorned in general. To get to that situation I had to work out how America might fall by the wayside and become a second rate power.

I looked at two forces that concerned me for the future of my country.

First – the growing sense of political correctness in our culture along with its twin evil, collective rights, and second the out of control spending by a government that didn’t seem to understand that every bill must eventually be paid off. Extrapolating those trends outwards and without and restriction in their growth gave me the future I needed foe the stories I wanted to write. This was not me trying to play prophet, but merely playing with ideas.

Politically in the 1980 I did fear is the liberal faction of our political culture retained control for too long in our government. I didn’t see that faction as putting the breaks on either of those two trends. I myself am much more of a libertarian-conservative. Leave people alone unless that are actively violating the rights of others. I had hopes that the conservative movement in the Unites States, which called for sensible fiscal spending might someday exact that sort of control.

In 1994 the conservatives took power in the legislature, while the liberals retained the executive. For a brief period we seemed to have found a return to intelligent fiscal planning.

By 2000 the conservative took all the executive and were firmly in control of the purse and the spending. They quickly exposed themselves as hypocrites and liars in matters of spending. Our debt ballooned and no spending bill was ever vetoed while the conservative controlled both the legislature and the executive.

Now it is the of 2009 and the liberals have returned to power across the government and spending is on the rise. The Conservatives — who until recently informed us that deficit spending doesn’t matter — are now making noises about being concerned about our spending. Sadly it is the exact same politicians who spent madly when they held the checkbook, so they are no better than a prostitute lecturing us on chastity.

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Asinine Political Writing

From One Jonah Goldberg

Let me say up front, I don’t think President Obama is to blame for the Fort Hood shootings, and I don’t think it’s fair to say otherwise.

But (you knew there had to be a “but”) that doesn’t mean Obama won’t pay a political price for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.

At first blush, it seems distasteful to take a political yardstick to the pain suffered at Fort Hood. But if we are to consider this incident part of the bloody tapestry of the larger war on terror, there’s no way to separate it from politics. After all, the war on terror has been driving politics in America for the better part of a decade now.

And that might offer insight into why so many are eager to make the massacre a story about the psychological breakdown of a man who just happened to be a Muslim. . . .

For instance, it seems likely that Obama has already suffered a rhetorical defeat. Whatever his faults, President Bush got to say one thing that the American people always appreciated: After 9/11, he kept us safe from a terrorist attack on the homeland. If Hasan acted as a jihadist terrorist and not a disgruntled psychiatrist, Obama can’t even make the same claim about his first year in office.

There is so much that is wrong with what was written by Mr. Goldberg in the above excerpt.  To bring up an opponent’s possible political cost from such a horrendous crime is the kind of tack left to propagandist and not any form of serious thinker or writer.

If this was an example of Islamic terrorism  since 9-11, then you can’t really say that Bush 43 kept us safe and prevented all attacks on US soil after 9-11 either. John A, Muhammad, the DC sniper from 2002, was convicted and recently put to death for acts of terrorism within the united States.

All seven justices agreed that Mr. Muhammad’s conviction under a previously untested terrorism law was appropriate. The law dispenses with the triggerman requirement in cases where the killing was “pursuant to the direction or order” of someone engaged in an act of terrorism. (NY Times April 23 2005)


What takes this sentiment of Mr. Goldberg’s into lunacy is that reflect on the Obama administration. As though Major Hasan would not have snapped in the same way had John McCain and the Goddess been elected in 2008. (There is no ideology save Conservatism and Palin is it profit. Blessed is her flirt and may peace be upon her.) In all likelihood this would have happened exactly the same way and then of course there would be silence from Mr. Goldberg about how this reflected poorly on the president.

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The recent off-cycle elections

First point to make: everyone spins there losses as not being pertinent to the situation and everyone conversely spins their victories as great and meaningful. So a lot of the spin going on from on high and punditry in general is meaningless. Were the results of any particular result reversed, the sides would smoothly flip to saying the exact opposite.

Not too long ago prominent Republicans were telling us that “deficits do not matter.” Now they are a matter of life and death and when power switches hands again in Washington — and it will boys and girls it’s only a matter of when — then they will once again feel that deficits do not matter.

All that said I think the NY-23 district was an interesting race. The forces of Conservative Populism (A term I picked up from Nate Silver) chased the Republican candidate from the field and delivered the district to the democrats. So far the CP movement has delivered two seats to the Democratic party. (Sen. Arlen Specter and now NY-23) There are those who think this is a good thing. That the Republican Party needs to be more Conservative and there is an argument for that. It’s hard to win if you are trying to be the opposition-lite. However, in our two party, winner take all system, to win you need your base and you need the middles. Whoever does that wins. Making your base more extreme at the cost of the middle doesn’t strike me as a winning strategy. (This would matter less if we had proportional representation, then we’d have more parties and the parties could be more ideologically defined. That’s not our system so a drive for purity yields losses.)

I will not extrapolate these results into predictions for 2010 and hell no for 2012., There’s way too much time and way too many events between here and there.

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Follow-up on Sarah Palin

When Sarah Palin announced on the 4th of July that she was quitting as Governor of Alaska I had some conjectures as to why she did it.

Here’s one of them:

3) She’s gotten a better offer. Some sort of TV show or other major media spotlight that pays better and flatters her ego better. This is credible if that’s what she really wants. To be the conservative Oprah would be a gig she is well suited for — but then again I don;t a high opinion of Oprah as a thinker either. If this is the case we’ll hear about it soon, otherwise why quite now?

Now we’re near the release of her book, Going Rogue. (I assume it’s not a not to play thieves book for D&D Gamers.) This book is reported going to be released with 1.5 millions copies on the first printing.

This along with nice speaking fees for closed to the press speeches I think nicely demonstrates that Sarah Palin quite for the money.

The surprising thing is that she is still respected by many as a future leader of the Republican Party. A quitter.

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Birthers and Truthers

In case you were unaware there are fantastic sets of conspiracy believers running about in American politics right now. (Okay there are a lot more than two, but I’m only going talk about these two at the moment.)

Truthers – who believe that the US Government, and usually G.W. Bush specifically, was behind the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001. That the whole idea that it was perpetrated bye arab terrorists is a lie created to justify war.

and

Birthers – people who think that Barrack Obama was born in Nigeria and not in the United States and therefore is ineligible to be president of the United States.

On the web I caught a bit of a argument between some on the right and some on the left as to whose conspiracy nuts were nuttier. Frankly this sort of argument is meaningless. It has all the validity of arguing who would win in a fight between the USS Enterprise and The Battlestar Galatica.

However I did find it amusing to see that the two sets on conspiracies meshed with the political philosophies of their believers.

People on the Left tend to think that government is an efficient capable  entity, able to solve all manner of problems with speed and practicality. (And there are many things that government should do and some that government does better than the private sector.) The Truthers, generally on the left, believe that the government is capable of such a grand conspiracy . It would be an amazing military operation to pull off such an attack and not leave clear fingers prints.

People on the right tend to think that private businesses and individuals are more capable and better problem solvers than government. It’s natural that their conspiracy – and Birthers tend to be on the right — would emphasize the power and forethought of the individual. That Obama’s parents certain that there baby would be president someday would take such diverse steps as faking a birth certificate and planting birth notices in local papers to cover baby Barrak’s true birth is simply amazing work that could only be performed by gifted individuals and never by a committee of paper-pushers.

What you believe also reveals more about yourself and your worldview than you expect it to.

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