Saturday the 25th of November

Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins

Ah, the fruits of the political hypocrisy tree are bearing some fruit now that the elections are over, the NYT reports:

When President Bush went on national television one Saturday morning last December to acknowledge the existence of a secret wiretapping program outside the courts, the fallout was fierce and immediate.

Mr. Bush’s opponents accused him of breaking the law, with a few even calling for his impeachment. His backers demanded that he be given express legal authority to do what he had done. Law professors talked, civil rights groups sued and a federal judge in Detroit declared the wiretapping program unconstitutional.

Ah, yes, those were the glory days of attack. Now come the hard days of actually governing:

You see, he didn’t continue but might have, when we were screaming about Bush breaking the law we didn’t even really know what the law was, for sure, or how he was misusing a program when we didn’t even know how it worked. Now we want an investigation…and guess what, if it takes two years to complete, and President Hillary is in office by that time, we’ll find, to our surprise, of course, there wasn’t any abuse of presidential wartime powers contained within the Constitution, after all!

But we fooled enough voters, didn’t we? Ross Thomas, one of my favorite authors, wrote a book titled The Fools In Town Are On Our Side, and I can’t help but remember it. Another friend chortles at me every time he sees some charge leveled against Bush that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, cheerfully certain that he has never been fooled when he is swimming in chummed waters.

Then I remember a favorite Playboy cartoon (Harold Ford showed it to me, you understand) from decades past. It showed a ventriloquist’s Mortimer Snerd look-alike looking scornfully at a call-girl and declaring “Danny the Dummy has never paid for it in his life!”

Yes, they have an American-style democracy there, all right. Meanwhile, have you heard the shocking news? There’s corruption in the Iraqi government!

The fools in town will be properly surprised and disgusted, of course. Horrified at the news, even.

In a friendship stretching over 30 years and many plane trips to Washington from their neighboring California districts, Representatives Nancy Pelosi and George Miller have become so close that, as colleagues say, they finish each others’ sentences.

He is liberal, and that pragmatism is always difficult to achieve when you’re passionate about something,” said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California and a leader of the party’s more moderate wing in the House.

But, Ms. Tauscher said, Mr. Miller understands what she calls the “very difficult kabuki dance” facing Democrats.

If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander V. Litvinenko, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said yesterday.

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste. … But to be fatal it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it.

…it’s such an obscure thing. It’s not easy to get…

Named by its discoverer, Marie Curie, after her native Poland, it occurs in trace amounts in uranium ore and has been found in minute quantities in plants like tobacco, as well as in humans who had eaten caribou that ate lichens growing near a uranium mine.

Presumably they were all found dead around the mine? As are the tobacco smokers? I mean, we’re talking about a particle smaller than a dust mote, remember, being fatal. Really?

Dear Dr Sella: The Iraqi terrorists are not constructing their Rocket-Propelled Grenades, nor are they obtaining them from amateurs.

Robert C. Whitcomb Jr., a health physicist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said polonium had industrial uses and could be produced in commercial or institutional reactors. … Polonium is so radioactive that it gives off heat, and tiny amounts have been implanted in satellites to make heat and electricity. It was also used in the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod moon rovers.

We’re worried about a lot more-serious radioactive materials having been stolen from former Soviet Union than simply small traces of Polonium. Something is fishy about this entire story, seems to me.

Like Nancy might have said, we only had to fool enough of you part of the time.

What do you think? Will Democrats suddenly discover that the surveillance programs designed to listen to their communications and track their funds had some value, after all?

One common strain of criticism surfaced in the Nov. 4 op-ed by Princeton professor Uwe E. Reinhardt, who asserted that "it is well known that to fill the ranks of enlisted soldiers, sailors and Marines, the Pentagon draws heavily on the bottom half of the nation's income distribution, favoring in its hunt for recruits schools in low-income neighborhoods."

The laughable part is not because he’s so wrong (assuming his error is unintentional) but the fact that other Liberals have loudly bemoaned the fact that rising military enlistment standards have been unfairly depriving some of those underprivileged people access to what was traditionally the only form of escape from their environments! And that was certainly true, too.

Liberal logic: complain that they’re being unfairly sought out while at the same time complain they are being deprived of an opportunity. You can’t win with those guys.

The truth is that you will find me in some agreement with Charley Rangel…the disadvantaged who are stuck in those neighborhoods DO need to find a way out of them and the schools are not providing it. For years the military did that, when I was a young Marine we had some young kids, particularly from de Souf, who barely knew enough to get out of their own way, but by the time they got out of the Marine Corps they proudly wore chevrons that demonstrated that they had learned quite a lot of real-world skills. In my case, I began with learning how to wash, iron and sew my own laundry, take sufficient care of my gear that I could pass inspection, start down the road towards, first, self-sufficiency, and thereafter the ability, perhaps, to teach others how to manage.

Why does this work for the Marine Corps and not the schools? Discipline. My parents always represented discipline to me, so before I learned enough to begin really appreciating my teachers for who they really were, so that I respected them as people, my biggest fear was that they would report any misbehavior to my folks. And the same with the local cops and the sheriff, too, I might add. In a small town this is extremely effective because cops, teachers and parents see each other outside of the school environment…at the gas station, grocery store, post office…and also when children have functioning parents at home. In a bigger city, or when the parents aren’t available, this breaks down.

When you are in the Marine Corps you have a brand new parent who is RIGHT THERE and in your face! He’s also your cop and school teacher, too.

The kids with the parents, the kids from the better backgrounds, the kids with at least some discipline, they escape. To school and to the military. The disadvantaged tend to get left behind with few ways out.

John Kerry was wrong about where you ended up without an education. It’s not in Iraq. It’s in prison.

And since taxpayers foot that bill, why not spend the money elsewhere on some social program that will really work and help some people? One that begins with some kind of boot camp, where the new rules of life get spelled out.

I have crept back just over 190, I’m sad to admit, and I’m getting very little exercise right now. Okay, time to get serious again before this gets out of hand.

Had a difficult morning struggling with the peculiarities of the various Microsoft products…Word, Front Page, Internet Explorer and Outlook. Couldn’t the company transfer employees regularly between those divisions so they would be more likely to see incompatibilities between their own products?

I don’t know for sure, of course, but I always thought that was one of the reasons Standard Oil transferred us (geologists and geophysicists) as much as they did, so we would become familiar with more than just our own local geology and way of doing things and thinking about how oil is trapped and found.

It’s simply stupid to format a document in Word according to all of the rules, then move it to Front Page and have the fonts and formatting all switch in unpredictable ways. Another favorite of mine is how they’ll have the same functions on two similar-looking and titled drop-down windows, but put the buttons in different spots on the menu!

Whether our joint morning of struggle strained or strengthened the familial bond is uncertain, but it made it plain to me that she knows six zillion more things about the programs than I do…or ever will. How in the world do all of these other bloggers do this?

Also, I used to spend too much time reading and writing St Ives, I often thought…but this seems like an even bigger task, seems to me, if I try to do what the others are doing.

But, really, I look at the list of “recommended sites” and I see so many that I wonder how the hell it would be possible to visit all of them even once a week, maybe once a month?

Yes, I know…so far I’ve listed only Patterico, my mentor even if he doesn’t yet know anything about it, but there will be more.

My normal day starts with the MSM…New York Times, Washington Post, sneaking in the Washington Times as quasi-MSM. I go to OpinionJournal, American Spectator, National Review, kausfiles, and the Weekly Standard, ending up at RealClearPolitics. Of course, each of those sites links me to others, so that’s a lot of reading.

Then when I feel the need to similarly pontificate…well, there goes the yardwork, at least.

Toss in three dogs who need at least a little attention (don’t ask me how we got three dogs or that will bury the evening) plus a 3-year-old son (an even LONGER story), a wife (some people laugh because we converse via email and intercom more than we do face-to-face), two elderly cars, life’s daily chores like buying groceries and doing the banking and paying the bills… Too, I like to read books (you remember those, right?) and I’d still like to write at least the one I’ve been working on for such a long time…

How do these guys DO it? I mean, Patterico is a prosecutor, he has a job, and at least I’m retired, a curious term to apply to someone who spent most of their life self-employed…

Sure makes me feel inadequate. (No, I don’t mean the definition that reads “all the way in”. Over my head might do it, though.)

But I get so much fun out of reading the papers and blogs! I doubt if Robert Novak ever intended to make me laugh the way I did at this line of his:

House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, on the heels of being rejected in her choice of majority leader, is being urged by prominent Democrats to avoid further embarrassment and not name Rep. Alcee Hastings as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Pelosi has made clear that she does not want to pick Rep. Jane Harman, the committee's ranking Democrat but an adversary of Pelosi in California politics. As speaker, Pelosi has complete power to name a chairman. But her advisers tell her that Republicans will have a field day if she selects Hastings, who was impeached by Congress as a federal judge on bribery charges. The committee's third-ranking Democrat, the low-profile Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, would be a compromise.

A footnote: Senior CIA officials consider Harman a prima donna and say they dread the thought of dealing with her as chairman. They would much prefer Hastings, finding him consistently cooperative.

Ah, how I love Liberals, even if I don’t understand how Rami G. Khouri can survive in Lebanon long enough to write for the Daily Star. The author spent 7 weeks in the US and was asked (and answered) a number of crucial questions for us!

A typical Liberal answer, I thought, which admits quilt for the non-American side but still assigns the majority of blame elsewhere. I wondered if Khouri believed that “Arabs” constituted a country, as does the term “US”? Are we talking about the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Syrians, or even the non-Arab Iranians when we talk about hypocrisy? Are we talking about media statements, like those of from al-Jazeera and the New York Times, or are we talking about statements made by President Bush and (pick a name)? I think this is not a thoughtful question but a foolish one, and the answer was worse.

Yes, that would certainly work, but if we can’t succeed in demanding accountability from the New York Times, what better luck would have some poor Palestinian, say? Take Iraq, which under Saddam had NO free press or television stations yet today has hundreds, all operating free of government interference…which situation is more likely to produce accountability to their consumers? Similarly, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that quite a LOT of those Arabs would love to seek out people from the American side to meet, but in many of those places I’ve read it could be tantamount to their committing suicide. Not so?

Ah, yes…like the old tale I’ve repeated before, where the simple solution to dealing with the problem of the cat was merely to hang a bell around the cat’s neck. What rule of law, what strong security guarantees, enforced by whom? Try to answer this question in 50,000 words or less without mentioning the name of the United States.

This one is absolutely marvelous, an answer so perfect it cannot even be debated. The US is using intellectual “terror-like tactics” in violently coercing the Iraqis into forming a democracy! I like the idea, but what is the intellectual threat? We’ll turn Saddam loose if they don’t? We’ll turn Iran and Syria loose if they don’t? We’ll let the Sunni and Cheri keep slaughtering each other if they don’t? Or, the biggest terror(-like) tactic of all: we’ll go home if they don’t?

This is almost as good, I have to admit. Only by our withdrawal will they define their own system, because we have forced what they have on them by means of intellectual terror-like-ism.

What is this really saying except that the violence will end when the strongest side kills or otherwise dominates the losing side, when by this means a “legitimate government” according to their own defined “governance system and power-sharing consensus” will have been created. This is the condition that existed in Iraq under Saddam’s Sunni rule, of course. About a million dead Kurds and Shiites might have argued about the violence being stopped…at least in time for them to enjoy the peace.

All this poor liberal is saying is let them go back to their old system of sheiks and warlords and sooner or later a strong-man will emerge who will quell the violence. But he hasn’t the guts to just come right out and say it that way, because this is EXACTLY what US policy had been roundly condemned for doing in the Middle East since oil became important.

And, in fact, aren’t we still doing so? Don’t we support the House of Saud, despite all of their terrorism assistance around the world, in the name of stability of Saudi Arabia? What other reason would we have?

Great idea. Hopefully Hamas will not be tunneling beneath your table as you speak, in order to kidnap you for ransom. Before the coffee is poured, would it be too much to ask Hamas to renounce the portion of its charter that calls for your destruction and annihilation?

I mean, I am forced to shake my head and laugh, but isn’t it kind of scary that this person—as well, apparently, as the students across the country—considered these to be thoughtful questions and answers?

Well, for the first one we have to create a score-card…as they’ve always told you on your way into the ballpark, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. Then the words. A hypocrite is an actor, one who feigns to be what they are not or to believe what they do not…sometimes called a Diplomat. As a result, there is a HUGE difference between a hypocrite and a liar, although Americans have become so careless in their vocabulary that many people no longer recognize distinctions.

A lie is deliberate. The dictionary says it is an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue WITH INTENT TO DECEIVE.

So when George Bush says he believes that a stable democracy in Iraq, one which can defend itself, is within our (theirs with our assistance) ability to create, is he a hypocrite if he worries that it might not happen?

When Ahmadinejad says he intends to wipe Israel off of the map is he a hypocrite because he might be only posturing for his core?

You simply cannot give a “thoughtful” question like that one “thoughtful” answer, the concept is meaningless as stated.

How can we better understand one another when our mass media are distorting the truth (which the author tactfully calls “a poor job”)? Go around them. In WWII we went around the Nazi mass media by means of Radio Free Europe, which was listened to surreptitiously all over Europe. In the US, today, the internet is breaking the hold on our own false or deceptive purveyors.

Eventually the internet and television will do to the Middle East what it did to East Germany just before the Soviet Union collapsed. There turned out to be just too many tv sets the East Germans could not control or destroy, in the end.

Travel is important, of course…but travel is often the first thing to be limited. Calling for more people to travel and make face-to-face visits is kind of a dreamland fantasy, isn’t it? Sure, it would be nice, but…

If Israel acceded to Arab DEMANDS, the question goes, would this be a sign of weakness? Of course it would…any time someone demands that you do something you do not want to do, but you must, you are the weaker party. If you really also want to do the same thing then it isn’t a demand on their part. Even so, it’s another foolish question because there are demands and then there are demands. If the Arabs were to DEMAND that both sides quit sending suicide bombers into the other’s territory, that would be one thing; Ahmadinejad’s DEMANDS that all the Jews return to Europe is another.

Is the US using terror-like tactics in the Middle East by violently coercing the Iraqis to form a democracy? Quite aside from the apparent change of tenses in this thoughtful question, the democracy in Iraq is a done deal, it’s already been achieved. They have held three elections/referendums and adopted a written constitution, something many democracies (like Great Britain and the European Union, say) have not yet accomplished. They have a constitutionally elected government providing proportional representation.

You may not like the Shiites being the majority party any more than the Republicans like the Democrats being in power, but them’s the breaks. The Iraqi people, threatened by physical violence from the insurgents if they voted but only, ah, let’s see, oh yes, intellectual terror-LIKE tactics by the Americans, nonetheless voted in numbers that few if any western democracies can approach these days.

They have their democracy. Actually, they have the same thing that we had back when Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government the new United States had:

How can Israel talk to “terrorists” like Hamas? Why the scare quotes, are we to believe that Hamas is not really a terrorist organization?

But if they weren’t, then the question would become simply: How can Israel talk to Hamas?

Again, the cup of coffee idea is a fine one, but it would seem to me that you could hardly be surprised if the Israelis wanted to check for the presence of Polonium first. I mean, Hamas has been virtually begged to change its charter calling for the destruction of Israel, yet have refused. Apologists who argue it is only rhetoric, therefore meaningless, have what grounds to argue for its retention, exactly? To fool someone?

I’ve long argued that what is taking place in Iraq is not properly referred to as a civil war. My own inadequacies have prevented me from convincing some people who wish fervently to believe otherwise if for no other reason than to comfort their own minds, but finally I have an exceptional article by John Keegan in Prospect Magazine which says what I might have said if I only could.

It is long and impossible to excerpt meaningfully, so please go read it all and do not be put off by the small section I want to quote here as a teaser:

Could Iraq be the first civil war ever without battles, generals, explicit war aims, the use of partisan public rhetoric by civilian leaders, mass public participation and targets of a predominantly military nature? Even if Iraq today possessed these characteristics, it would still lack something even more important: the struggle for authority. In Iraq, the state actors are fighting for authority. But the others are not, which is probably why we do not hear from them. The Shia militias are the armed wings of the two biggest parties in parliament, and their people own the top ministries. Neither Badr nor the al-Sadr movement is big enough or strong enough to own the state itself. They balance each other while the Sunnis, whose violent actors are far smaller, provide the final guarantee against a full grab for power by either. It is no coincidence that the only player, apart from the state, that acknowledges war aims is the only player whose war aims constitute the traditional aspiration of exclusive control: the religious element of the Sunni insurgency. The aspiration to a new Baghdad caliphate frees the Wahhabis and Salafists from the pragmatic calculations of al-Sadr or the Baathists, and lets them dream of control, and talk about it on their websites.

Objectively, it must be concluded that the disorders in Iraq do not constitute a civil war but are nearer to a politico-military struggle for power. Such struggles in Muslim countries defy resolution because Islam is irreconcilably divided over the issue of the succession to Muhammad. It might be said that Islam is in a permanent state of civil war (at least where there is a significant minority of the opposing sect) and that authority in Muslim lands can be sustained only by repression if the state takes on a religious cast, since neither Shia nor Sunni communities can concede legitimacy to their opponents.

The ONLY hope, if I may be so bold yet one more time, is that the Sunni and Shia manage to accomplish what Catholics and Protestants managed to do with the creation of America. Today they are able to have a great and profound philosophical difference, one which used to cause wars, yet still live together peacefully.

(Rep Barney) Frank has proposed in a series of meetings with business groups a "grand bargain" with corporate America: Democrats would agree to reduce regulations and support free-trade deals in exchange for businesses agreeing to greater wage increases and job benefits for workers. . . .

Frank proposes that if businesses support a minimum wage increase and provide protection for workers adversely affected by trade treaties, Democrats would be more willing to ease regulations and approve free-trade deals. Frank also would support changes to immigration rules favored by businesses, and noted that allowing more immigrants would put needed funds into the Social Security system.

Frank casts his proposal as a way for capitalists to quell some of the populist fervor that was expressed in last week's election, when many Democrats vowed to crack down on companies moving jobs overseas.

James Taranto commented: In the private sector, this is known as a "protection racket."

"A Palestinian who fought a legal battle to attend an Israeli university says the six months she has been given to study for her PhD is simply not enough," the BBC reports: Sawsan Salameh won a scholarship to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem but was banned by the army from attending.

Salameh was admitted to university but fell foul of Israeli army regulations banning Palestinian students from the West Bank from entering Israel . . ., where the university is located.

Why doesn't she go to one of the many excellent universities in the Palestinian territories--or, for that matter, in Egypt, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia?

Isn’t it interesting…and also sad…that the Arab world was once considered intellectually superior to Europe?