How you like them apples, Peggy?

Flipping channels, I landed on John Kerry on Meet the Press this morning. What I total consuming bore that man is. Seriously, who the hell wants to hear about "modalities of American withdrawal" or whatever else he was droning on about. I can't imagine him being President for 4 years.

For those who think President Bush talks like a moron, at least you get some laughter out of it.

I am trying to remember my Ender's Game - weren't Ender's brother and sister swaying public opinion with their writing on the nets? Or was that in the sequel? Either way, doesn't it now sound like blogging?

Of all the critiques of the President's inaugural speech, the one that has bothered me the most has been Peggy Noonan's. First, because she should know better. Second, because the Bush-haters could use it like a cudgel: even Peggy Noonan thinks he's a maniac.

It seemed to me that the reaction among many on the right was, "well, if Peggy Noonan didn't like it...." Finally, a rejection of her pessimism. Larry Kudlow at NRO takes her to task:

When you read that Jordan’s King Abdullah is taking steps to organize new elections in his country, with regional election districts that look a lot like Iraq’s, you realize just how wrong my friend Peggy Noonan is when she writes that President Bush’s inaugural speech “forgot context.”

I have to say that the level of skepiticism on democracy is a bit depressing. If we don't believe in our own system, then how can we possibly defend it? Is democracy a bad word now that W is for it? Is the hatred for the man so high that if he is for something good, it is now bad?

But then, I run into something like this:

Ahmed Abdullah al-Shaya, 18, told Iraqi investigators during an interrogation early this month that he was recruited to drive a car rigged with explosives to Baghdad and blow it up.

He said the objective was "to kill the Americans, policemen, national guards and the American collaborators."

But Shaya said he was injured even before he went on the mission when insurgents detonated a truck bomb he was supposed to leave at a target site.

Here is the world of a billion or so Muslims, all supposedly enraged at the US invasion of Iraq, and the terrorists can't even scare up enough suicide bombers. They have to resort to lies and trickery. (I bet this story is going to help recruiting!)

Amazing, our enemies are apparently down to desparation tactics, and many of us want to give up.

For you folks out there in non-legal world, prepare for the new latest and greatest thing from the world of legal scholars. The requirement that you mixup your usage of pronouns when speaking.

Now whether my irritation at the practice is due to my fatigue and irritation at having to retake another bar, or whether this practice would irritate me on its own is an open question, although I suspect that it is the latter.

I first became aware of this bit of law school tyranny, while dealing with career services. While discussing my career options, I guess I used too many masculine pronouns to describe aviation attorneys. She snapped something to the effect that women could be pilots too. At first I was absolutely incredulous. Here I am trying to get a job, and this woman is tightly focused on my pronoun usage. The other insulting part was the insinuition that I was incapable of thinking of women in the avaition profession.

Not being a person to put up with this type of crap, I brusquely informed her that my pronouns are asexual, that some of the people I most admire in the aviation industry are female, and where does she get off correcting my pronoun usage? I guess from that moment, I paid attention in law school.

And sure enough, throughout lawschool, professors and others seemed to place an inordinate amount of effort into mixing up their pronouns while they are speaking. What is frequently amusing is that you can see people hesitate before a pronoun comes up. Like they are thinking; " I used he the last time, and 5 times before that, so now I must use she at 6 times."

It is especially noticeable in our bar lecturer for the last two days. In fact, he sometimes stutters it. I've noticed this in a few others as well. Even worse sometimes they switch pronouns in the middle of a hypothetical so that he becomes a she, and visa versa. Not good if you are discussing assignments, 3rd party beneficiaries, or delegations. But entirely reasonable if you are trying to mix it up.

So I have a suggestion. How about the women use the female pronoun generically, and the men use the male version. That way, the female version will be used more often which will satisfy all the people who seem to care about this sort of thing, and then it will not force people to think about which pronoun to use freeing up resources for serious matters. Deal? It doesn't really matter because in any event, I will continue to refuse to mix and match my pronouns.

I am just having to prepare for the Arizona Bar. That will be two bars in less then 1 years timespan. The good news is that I retained most of my "bar" knowledge. The bad news is that the process seems to be more painful the second time around.

Below, I ask if we are afraid of democracy. Unfortunately, I think that many of us - too many of us - are.

But the good news is our enemies are afraid of democracy. I suspect they have good reason to be. Austin Bay notes that Zarqawi recently made a tape where he declared himself against democracy. This is regarded as good news, that he is showing his true colors, and now people may understand that, as the President put it, "they hate us for our freedom."

The problem with this, though, is that Zarqawi has been openly anti-democratic from the start, and it was clear in the Zarqawi memo released early last year:

1) if we fight them, that will be difficult because there will be a schism between us and the people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy, we will have no pretext.

That Zarqawi is anti-democratic is not news, and will not sway anyone. This is not an "in your face moment" for Michael Moore and his "Minutemen" comment. We did just have a close election where we came close to electing a guy who once said:

...you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name (sic) it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship.

This would all sort of be academic, so long as Kerry and Pelosi and Moore and the rest of those losers were with Zarqawi on the anti-democracy team, but even Peggy damn Noonan came out on the skeptical of democracy side. That is worrisome. And discouraging.

Captain Ed links to a NYT article that goes a little deeper than the usual MSM reporting on Iraqi Shi'ites. The key point is this:

The decision appears to formalize the growing dominance of secular leaders among the Shiite political leadership, and it also reflects an inclination by the country's powerful religious hierarchy to stay out of the day-to-day governing of the country. Among the Shiite coalition's 228 candidates for the national assembly, fewer than a half dozen are clerics, according to the group's leaders.

I wrote before that the reporting on the election will be wrong: "this will be reported as a huge defeat for the US, and Sistani's Shi'ites will be compared to Iran's." Maybe they'll get it right, or they are trying to get it more right so as not to lose any more credibility. I even heard a story about this on NPR this morning - this is the synopsis they provide:

Basra, in southern Iraq, is a predominately Shiite Muslim city. Many residents say they'll vote in Iraq's Jan. 30 election. The most revered Shiite cleric has declared voting a religious duty, but some Shia say they'll vote for secular candidates.

They report that as a "but" - as if they are surprised, as if we should all be surprised - that the Shi'ites of Basra are thinking of secular candidates. But we shouldn't be surprised at all by this outcome, and we wouldn't be if there were fact-based rather than agenda-based reporting going on.

Still, regardless of whether the MSM is getting right with Allah on this topic, you can rest assured that no matter the outcome, the elections in Iraq will be portrayed as a setback in some way for the United States, for the President, and for democracy.

I heard on Fox News this morning Ellen Ratner say that she was at the inaugural and was quaking in fear while listening to the President's speech. Now, I know, she's playing the person who says outrageous things for TV role, but it isn't isolated. I see the sentiment around. Some on the right say it made them feel uneasy. This notion that the United States stands for freedom and liberty, and that we hope it for everyone, and we'll sand by people seeking freedom.

Somehow, this is called radical. Whatever happened to Truth, Justice, and the American Way? Does anyone remember why we opposed the Soviet Union? Not just because they were a threat to us, but because they were bad people who did bad things to people. Remember this presidential bit I pointed out a while back?

One of those constructive forces is enhancement of individual human freedoms through the strengthening of democracy, and the fight against deprivation, torture, terrorism and the persecution of people throughout the world. The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language.

Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity, and who suffer for the sake of justice -- they are the patriots of this cause.

I believe with all my heart that America must always stand for these basic human rights -- at home and abroad. That is both our history and our destiny.

In case you are wondering, that was President Carter, 24 years ago. Now, obviously, his reality has not lived up to his rhetoric. But even if it is only lip service, at least it is lip service to the right thing.

Or let's take the words of his successor, President Reagan:

believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength . . . But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary . . . "

Yes, change your world. One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, "We have it within our power to begin the world over again." We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself.

Obviously he was not just paying lip service.

And today I hear that the United States stands for freedom is radical, revolutionary - frightening. They said some of the same things back then, too. Reagan was a warmonger, he was going to get us all blown up? But who would have imagined in 1983 that we would defeat the Evil Empire?

Reagan did, for one.

Now, who believes we can defeat the Islamofascist threat?

And it is freaking cold. Weather.com says 15 - that seems about right. Have to bug out tomorrow am before the storm hits. Usually the train is unaffected.

Back up and running, it seems, and now the front page is blank - or will be until I finish this post. I had some issues a while back with a corrupted comments database and then some other things happened with a huge comment spam attack and the end result was that I could not do a site rebuild - and most of the comments were unaccessible.

So I finally got around to converting off of the file system to a database backend, and that cleared things up. But it took some doing.

And it has hosed my post numbering up, so that a lot of links aren't going to work anymore. Oh well. At least it isn't all gone.

A recent Drudge headline about the Iraq Survey Group winding up. Let's read the first sentence of the article:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein.

Can anyone identify a key phrase in this sentence?

I briefly caught Rush saying something to the effect that LTG Casey (Commander of forces in Iraq) said that he had been given authority by the President to strike Syria, and then something about how you never know with that website anyway. I figured it must have been DEBKA, and sure enough it was.

So, you don't ever know with DEBKA. But this is the AP:

U.S. mulls strikes on Syria

Bush administration hard-liners have been considering launching selected military strikes at insurgent training camps in Syria and border-crossing points used by Islamist guerrillas to enter Iraq in an effort to bolster security for the upcoming elections, according to former and current administration officials.

Aside from the gratuitous "hard-liners" bit, a pretty good article, because if you read the whole thing, it isn't like its the Rumsfeld Strangler out there going, "Rarr! Kill Syria!" The evidence of Syria's perfidy is now too obvious to ignore.

Patrick Ruffini is on it, too, with an excerpt from a speech by the Great Communicator,and a link to a WSJ article that also presents some cautions.

In Albania. The Washington Post reports that Albania discovered a cache of weapons left over from the days of their murderous dictator Enver Hoxha. The concern is that these were forgotten and essentially unguarded since the fall of Communism there, and what that could mean - there may be other caches in other countries, similarly undiscovered or hidden. The biggest news on this is that supplier for these weapons was not the Soviet Union, but China. From the article:

"It was the height of the Cold War," said Alba, shrugging. "Communist countries helped each other. And they didn't always leave documents to show what they did."

An inspection regime would not have done much in this circumstance.

Also, I am not sure how much of this story is true - whether this was indeed a rediscovery of a decades old secret, or whether it was the result of the Proliferation Security Initiative. Of course, we've had chemical weapons from WWI dug up in the United States - even right in our nation's capital. Either way, it is good that these weapons have been identified and are being destroyed.

Lost in the hubbub of the CBS report is the fact that Paul Volcker released his first installment of the UN investigation report on Sunday. This report doesn't delve into the whole of Oil-for-food, but focuses on the people who were supposed to audit oil-for-food, and concludes, essentially, that they didn't do a good job. Well, duh, as they say.

On John Batchelor last night, he discussed with Claudia Rosett (the reporter who has really been bird-dogging this story) this report, as well as noting that the problems with oil-for-food occurred on the watch of UN Ambassadors Albright, Richardson, and during the worst of the abuses, Holbrooke. Perhaps that is why Holbrooke is so interested in saving Kofi Annan.

I heard Evan Thomas of Newsweek on Imus this morning, and he was saying that he was more optimistic than most journalists about the upcoming elections in Iraq. He'd pretty much have to be, since the conventional wisdom is doom and gloom. But it doesn't need to be. Democracy is pretty strong, even in times of strife.

David Brooks writes about voting in El Salvador in the 1980s. And it is very relevant to Iraq.

I have compared our mission in the Muslim world to what was accomplished in Latin America during the 80s before - in fact using some of these same words, but it bears repeating. During the 80s, the enlightened (including Senator John Kerry) pooh-poohed democracy as a solution to the problems there. In fact, they really didn't see that there were problems there. Why, didn't Castro have every right to extend his reach in the Western Hemisphere as we did? Never mind that the Soviets were behind it, because they love their children too, and in the 80s, Bianca Jagger was still hot.

Yeah, I know, that bit was all over Nicaragua, not El Salvador, but it was an extension of the same policy. The United States abandoned realpolitik in that region, and began promoting democracy, plain and simple. The nasty and brutish anti-Communist dictators got the old heave-ho from the United States, perhaps as a direct lesson from our support of the wrong guys in El Salvador (anyone else remember when El Salvador was going to be our next Vietnam?). The bottom line is that FDR's "SOB but our SOB" philosophy in Latin America died, because we killed it. Our takedown of Noriega was just about the last nail in the coffin.

And the results have been good, if imperfect. Today virtually all of Latin America is democratic, and it is a substantially more peaceful place than it was. Sure it has its problems, but it is, in addition to being more peaceful, a better place than it was economically. And the most important point, it rates just about a zero for being a national security problem for the United States. The result is of course partly attributable to the demise of the Soviet Union - but that, too, provides another case in point. We sought not only the defeat of the Soviet Union, but as it came down and apart, we promoted democracy in all of its component parts, with some success, the largest of course being Russia. Imperfect for sure, and at least one full-fledged civil war in the 15 years since the Wall came down, but a better place, and again, no longer the national security issue it was before it was a democracy. Not zero yet, but nominally our ally. That's a good thing.

So what does all that have to with the Muslim world? Well, it is the last major bulwark of fascism against democracy. Even China moves hesitatingly that way. And if you look at what Pentagon thinker Thomas P. M. Barnett calls the "New Map," the countries that reject globalism overlap significantly with the map of the Muslim world. This is our largest national security threat. And it should escape noone that the old East v. West rivalry was not merely two equal but opposite poliical philosophies in conflict. One was clearly better. I think that our National Security Strategy captures this well with its opening sentence: "The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

In order to win the GWOT, we - meaning the world - will have to have sustainable models of nations in the Muslim world. We have seen the results of the non-sustainable ones in place now, and it isn't acceptable, and will be even less acceptable in the future as demographics get to work over the next half century. If Muslim nations cannot do democracy, then we'll certainly have our hands full as Western Europe becomes Muslim. Will Turkey be forced to kick The Netherlands out of the EU because it isn't progressive enough?

So, then, Iraq. The elections are coming. They will be held the 30th. And there will no doubt be violence, before during, and after. There were attempts to disrupt the elections in Afghanistan, and we foiled them. But it won't matter, much, I think, whether there is violence or not on election day - there will be a vote, and a result.

And a place with no history of democracy will show that it can do it. Much like Afghanistan. Civil war is not inevitable (though some would argue that there is already a civil war, so the point would be moot). Will the Sunnis fail to vote because they are afraid of their own kinsmen? Or will they be more afraid of having no say in the coming Iraqi government? A government solely made up of Kurds and Shi'ites will have a serious grudge with the Sunni. And they won't care much about the editorial page of the New York Times.

I don't think it can be argued anymore that what we call the "security situation" is better now than it was last summer. The AIF (anti-Iraqi forces, I like it better than "insurgents") are certainly more organized than they were. But the underlying institutions of Iraqi society - what will be the backbone of the new government - have been getting better. And only because we are there to do it, and to keep the security situation less bad than it is.

People say "we can't put an American style democracy there," and that's true enough, but it is not what we seek. Slates of candidates are being offered by various parties (well over 100) and the voting is not anything like what we do here. Likely Sistani's slate will do very well, and Allawi will not be the new President of Iraq. This will be reported as a huge defeat for the US, and Sistani's Shi'ites will be compared to Iran's. Don't believe either.

The new Iraqi government (which will not be the "permanent" government, these guys will be drawing up the new Constitution and establishing the permanent government) will not throw the US out. And they won't become a mullahcracy. But it will be a new democracy in the Muslim world, and it will mean that bin Laden's dreams of a caliphate are being rolled back. I hope that there will be some good results from the election just held in "Palestine," where Abbas, not a great guy, but probably the best we can hope for, won an election, conducted under the law as required - something Arafat had refused to do. We shall see.

Of course, some will ask, sure, democracy should come to the Muslim workd, but why must American men and women die in order to make this all happen? To be blunt, because no one else will, and no one else can. The UN will not do a single thing to roll back tyranny anywhere in the world, even if that tyranny is the breeding ground for the terrorists who threaten us. The UN loved Arafat, and so did our erstwhile allies in Europe. Not coincidentally, they also loved Saddam (what a lovely mutual admiration society). We cannot come home and be fortress America - they brought the war here, remember.

And by doing so, they started a fight that we must finish. And we will do the heavy lifting, and the non-heavy lifters will criticize the way we lift. Which is fine. They didn't appreciate what we did in Latin America, or with the Soviet Union. Unilateral cowboys and all that stuff. But just as we enjoy the fruits of those labors (is the imperfection of Russian democracy an argument against the trillions we spent on the Cold War?) today, in the future, we and our children will benefit from what we do today.

First there was Ralph Nader, debating John Kerry and George Bush dolls. Then I read somewhere (I really need to write this stuff down when I see it) that Keith Olbermann took an Ann Coulter doll and smashed it up on his show. And then a bunch of Democrats get together and have fun posing Ann Coulter dolls in various uncomplimentary ways. Which isn't just over at the awful Wonkette, but in the Washington Post, which reports:

John McLaughlin, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Mark Russell, Bill Press, John Fox Sullivan,Helen Thomas and other media and political types -- took inordinate delight putting the Barbie-like Coulters in naughty poses with "W" and Clinton dolls -- rather than listen to the doll's sound bites. Turns out Coulter (the doll) can change positions. Who knew?

This is said to be a bi-partisan party, but McLaughlin is the only conservative listed.

At any rate, explain to me again about how the Left is the "reality-based community" again?

From wretchard at the Belmont Club.

The biggest question to me is why don't we get this kind of analysis from the "real" media?

This is a very good article on the issue of torture. Not on whether it is right, but what is actually happening.

Barbara Boxer decided to go full kook and object to the Ohio slate of electors. Well that was worthwhile, wasn't it?

Surprisingly enough, she was all alone in the Senate, though the House saw many Congressional Black Caucus members voting to reject. Evidently, Rep. Maxine Waters thought to thank Michael Moore, and Rep. Conyers called him a truth teller.

Hello! Did you guys miss that bin Laden was using Moore talking points right before the election? Not a winning position.

And on the theme of blogs being better, Powerline posts a review of the much lambasted Columbia Journalism Review article that defends Dan Rather on the forged documents.

They quote a paragraph that when I read it, just made my jaw drop:

It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign.

Emphasis mine. And that is supposed to be a defense of Burkett. But in reality, it is what the blogs have been saying - that the Democratic party, and their pals in the house organ media, are so caught up in the tinfoil hattery, that they couldn't spot the obvious forgeries.

posted by blaster at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)

Not patting myself on the back, here, I am not doing any groundbreaking. But I read at Michelle Malkin's blog (and she links to others) something I haven't seen in any other news sources - that the suicide bomber in Mosul, recently identified as a Saudi medical student, is named Ahmed Said Ahmed al-Ghamdi - and that "three of the 9/11 hijackers also carried the surname 'Al Ghamdi.'"

That would be news, wouldn't it?

I've been stingy on this, I guess, since everybody else has it covered better. But an interesting angle. Driving home from Christmas vacation, the local talk radio show was hosted by Geoff Metcalf, and he made an interesting point on the UN and the United States (currently he has a written article about it on the front page of his site). First, he talked about the Proliferation Security Initiative, which is a program that countries, led by the United States, participate in to counter WMD proliferation. It is how we got Khadafy to capitulate, and it is how we caught those North Korean Scuds packed under concrete that were going to Yemen. It is a successful program, it supports US securit needs, and it has nothing to do with the United Nations.

Now, with the campaign for relief in South Asia, the US has formed a "core group" of donors. And countries want to be part of that effort. (Start at that Belmont Club post and scroll down.) Metcalf had the story, then, of the accusation that the "core group" was being decried as an attempt to undermine the UN, and his response was that he hoped that it was.

As wretchard notes, the UN realizes it is losing "legitimacy" as it is shown to be impotent. We aren't doing that on purpose, it is just the way it is. As Metcalf puts it:

Continue to ‘undermine’ UN inefficiency by doing their job better and more effectively.

Metcalf also suggests - as the blogosphere has recommended - replacing the UN with an organization devoted to democracy. If you think about it, in each of these cases, the United States - and President Bush - has assembled a "coalition of the willing" to get things done.

It is starting to sink in. The UN is in trouble. But Ace shows us the real danger, quoting from a column by former Law & Order prosecutor (not Sherlock Holmes nemesis) Michael Moriarty - "leader of the pack - soon-to-be United Nations Secretary General William Jefferson Clinton."

No wonder the Bush administration is "not going to draw the sword against Kofi."

It's 2005!

Also, December 29 was my blogiversiary - 2 years!