Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
9 December 2006, a Saturday
Interesting comment from a New York Times movie reviewer of Mel Gibson's new movie:
Most disturbing, perhaps, is the sight of hundreds of corpses haphazardly layered in an open pit: a provocative and ill-advised excursion into Holocaust imagery on this director’s part.
So why should Mel Gibson, in particular, be denied the right to make any allusion to the Holocaust? Is the reviewer really acknowledging that the Jews actually have that much influence over the film-making industry or the American audience? Or is he simply striving too hard to find something negative to write about Gibson? You said something bad about the Jews, therefore you cannot even use a cinematic theme that might remind them? Well, listen to me, will you...it's what I deserve for reading even their movie reviews.
Oh, well, at least they are consistently negative:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 — Gov. Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican who has built a presidential campaign on a broad appeal for conservative support, is drawing sharply increased criticism from conservative activists for his advocacy of gay rights in a 1994 letter.
Mr. Romney’s standing among conservatives is being hurt by a letter he sent to the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts saying that he would be a stronger advocate for gay rights than Senator Edward M. Kennedy, his opponent in a Senate race, in a position that stands in contrast to his current role as a champion of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
There is no doubt in the NYT editorial mind that gay marriage is a "right", therefore it is impossible to be against same-sex marriage and still support gay rights.
The circulation of the letter by gay rights groups in recent weeks has set off a storm of outrage among social conservatives, and by Friday was looming as a serious complication to Mr. Romney’s hopes.
Does that sound even slightly logical to you? Wouldn't hurting Romney be diametrically opposed to the interests of any gay-rights group, in that case?
I always like reading NYT knock-'em-sock-'em articles to the end, because almost at the very last they admit:
Viewed from some angles, Mr. Romney’s positions on gay rights seem consistent.
In other words, why did we run this item about a 1994 letter in the first place?
China is discussing what it means to be a world power and has largely stopped denying that it intends to become one.
Does this mean now we can run stories worrying about the Chinese Empire? I mean, the dangers that will befall them if they attempt it...that will allow some books to be reprinted only changing the name. And speaking of names...
In response to attacks on Michael Richards' use of the n-word during a performance at the Laugh Factory, the black owner of another club has welcomed comics who use the term.
''Someone had to stand up for comics and freedom of speech has to rule the day,'' said Enss Mitchell, owner of Comedy Union. ''No matter if you agree or disagree with what someone says, you have to allow them the opportunity to say it.''
Mitchell said he wasn't encouraging anyone to use the word but wanted to create an atmosphere in which performers feel comfortable talking about anything they want.
''This was not billed as 'N-Word Night.' Some comics used it, some didn't. I just wanted to make the point that it's a slippery slope when anyone wants to start banning a word,'' he said.
Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada barred the word from his stage after Richards' Nov. 17 outburst in which he targeted four black patrons with a tirade of racial slurs. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and other black community leaders later called for a complete end to the use of the word.
Hymie, now, the Reverend says, that's different. Unless, of course, Mel Gibson says it. Or even makes a movie about Mayan civilization that makes us even think about the Holocaust. Which that great leader in Iran says didn't really happen, and if it did then the Europeans were to blame and should take their Jews back. Where they belong.
The fact that there were Jews in the Middle East before Mohammad was even born seems not to be of interest.
This is fun. Two adjacent items in the NYTimes:
Democrats Plan Oil Royalties Inquiry
Iraqis Near Deal on Distribution of Oil Revenues by Population
Iraq, you may recall, is the uncivilized country incapable of becoming a democratic republic because, well, they just cannot be civilized like us Western folks. Have we ever told you about the corruption that goes on over there? Why, it's just shameful.
Iraq Talks Focus on Viable New Strategy
Options considered include, securing Baghdad with surge of troops, utilizing military to hunt al-Qaeda, and strengthening support of majority Shiites.
Options? Has everybody forgotten that the Big Baker said if his whole package is not accepted in its entirety that it won't work? At least he's half right... Here's a Washington Post item:
Report speculates inappropriate behavior with House pages ignored for political expedience.
William Jefferson Clinton laughed and laughed. The closest those two ever got was the internet and instant-messaging on a keyboard. Why, I made some actual telephone calls you wouldn't believe...but, anyhow, since this is "only about sex" then why does it matter?
Speaking of the Jeffersons...
Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) was given up for dead politically after the FBI found $90,000 in alleged bribe money in his freezer, and he barely survived a Nov. 7 primary election, garnering 30 percent of the vote in a crowded field of 12 challengers.
Nancy Pelosi says we are going to ignore his inappropriate behavior out of political expedience, because, after all, it's only about...money.
Jefferson has scooped up high-profile endorsements from New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and state Sen. Derrick Shepherd,
Misbehaving Republicans get voted out of office. Misbehaving Democrats get reelected. In Texas, one formerly-prominent Republican is considering changing his registration in order to get his seat back.
Ray Nagin says y'all better change more than your registration if you want to get my vote.
Ah...the Washington Post reviewer doubles the stakes, he claims that Hollywood trashed the "noble" Mayan civilization. I guess he thinks the human sacrifice part was another kind of Holocaust misunderstanding.
I swear, the Syrian guys have some great comedy-writers doing their scripts! How about this one in the Washington Times:
Jordan and Syria are threatening to close their borders with Iraq to stem the flow of desperate Iraqi refugees into their countries, a top U.N. official said yesterday.
Syria, you may recall, was last heard from claiming they couldn't keep al Qaeda and other terrorists from crossing their border INTO Iraq because, well, it was so long and so difficult to police. They sure would have stopped any terrorists from entering Iraq if they could have managed, though, it was official government policy...
I liked this item, too:
People wanting to settle in Britain must conform to its tolerant values or stay away, Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday.
We will not tolerate intolerance, he said. Actually, he's just trying to sound Australian. But I think he has a point, those people can no longer claim membership in the Empire, after all, maybe everybody everywhere should all be sent back to wherever it was they were born. Of course, that would leave me in downtown Los Angeles...
Great line by columnist Paul Greenberg:
"...when the Kissingers and Bakers turn up at the bedside of a patient in crisis, they come not so much as doctors but pallbearers."
Perfect. Well, he had another one in his column, now that I think of it:
There was one remarkable moment during those agonizing Senate hearings about what policy to pursue in Iraq. It came when Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, who has reason to know all too much about the Vietnam War, pointed out that Iraq is not Vietnam:
However, I have friends who never served a second in any military service anywhere but know better, just the same.
Victor Davis Hanson draws a different parallel:
On December 7, 1941 -- 65 years ago this week -- pilots
from a Japanese carrier force bombed Pearl Harbor. They killed 2,403
Americans, most of them service personnel, while destroying much of the
U.S. fleet and air forces stationed in Hawaii.
...
Sixty years after Pearl Harbor came another surprise attack on U.S.
soil, one that was, in some ways, even worse than the "Day of Infamy."
Nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11, 2001 attacks -- the vast
majority of them civilians. Al Qaeda's target was not an American military
base far distant from the mainland. Rather, they suicide-bombed U.S.
financial and military centers.
It would be nice to be able to interview Osama. In custody, where he might be more likely to speak truthfully rather than simply spewing rhetoric to motivate his troops.
What was his biggest disappointment about 9/11? That the plane failed to hit the White House? That the hit on the Pentagon was really as botched up as a Kerry joke, doing only a small fraction of the damage it might have done? Or that his serious target, the US financial center, had been harder-hit by the Clinton recession?
Osama, an educated and wealthy man from an influential and powerful family, knew that he wasn't going to destroy our military capacity by hitting the Pentagon or wipe out our political leadership by hitting the White House, even if Congress had been in session, a la Tom Clancy, but I rather think he expected the complete collapse of the World Trade Center and the nearby buildings in the financial district would bring America to its financial knees.
After all, the real prize for which Osama lusted, one within his reach, was Saudi Arabia. The only thing preventing him from taking over from the House of Saud was the American support propping it up, so if only he could preoccupy the Americans so badly that they could not even conduct their daily affairs back at home, which cratering the financial system would effectively do, he'd be on his way.
From what I've been able to learn, his plan failed because apparently there is so much redundancy built into the system that there were duplicate copies of virtually everything.
So the financial system suffered from heartburn, not heart attack, and instead of running Saudi Arabia Osama found himself running for the hills. Probably in great surprise.
Are we in over our heads fighting in both Afghanistan
and Iraq? Hardly. Within days after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. found itself in
a three-front war against Germany, Italy and Japan -- an Axis that had won
a series of recent battles against the British, Chinese and Russians.
But there are significant differences between the "global war on
terror" and World War II that explain why victory is taking so much longer
this time.
The most obvious is that, against Japan and Germany, we faced easily
identifiable nation-states with conventional militaries. Today's
terrorists blend in with civilians, and it's hard to tie them to their
patron governments or enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan,
who all deny any culpability. ... The limitations on our war-making are
just as often self-imposed. Yes, we defeated the Axis powers in less than
four years, but at a ghastly cost. To defeat both Japan and Germany, we
averaged more than 8,000 Americans lost every month of the war -- compared
to around 50 per month since September 11.
This is the other thing which is politically incorrect to mention, as soon as you do someone will point out that every life is precious (even those people who have no idea how many police and fire fighters get killed every month, or even gave it much thought) and what if it was YOUR son, etc, and of course they'd have a point...
...but they would also have to overlook a bigger point, and that is how incredibly much the US forces have accomplished in Afghanistan and Iraq with such an incredibly small number of casualties, as wars go.
Iran and Iraq had just finished killing off more than a million people on each side of their war, they have to look at us in complete amazement.
Americans like to complain. Especially when things aren't done fast enough, cheaply enough, and perfectly. The first time, too.
If Rip van Winkle Jr had just now awakened, having fallen asleep around 1950 or so, and was told that Osama was in hiding, Afghanistan and Iraq had written constitutions and democratically-elected governments, Saddam was sentenced to death after a trial by his own government, despite a continuing insurgency taking American lives right to this very moment...what do you think his answer might have been if you had asked him to remember WWII and make a guess at how many American casualties there had been?
Remember, I'm setting you up just a little bit, here...because we had some American Armchair Generals make their estimates before we even went across the Iraqi border.
And yes, I hear those guys screaming that Osama attacked us and now I'm talking about Iraq, as if they were completely unrelated...much like the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor but we included Hitler, anyhow. I suppose in their eyes we should have left Hitler alone, too.
...in those days, peace and reconstruction followed rather than preceded victory. In tough-minded fashion, we offered ample aid to, and imposed democracy on, war-torn nations only after the enemy was utterly defeated and humiliated. Today, to avoid such carnage, we try to help and reform countries before our enemies have been vanquished -- putting the cart of aid before the horse of victory.
Another thing that would undoubtedly astonish Rip Jr.
So paradoxes follow:
c A stronger, far more affluent United States believes it can use less
of its power against the terrorists than a much poorer America did against
the formidable Japanese and Germans.
c World War II, which saw more than 400,000 Americans killed, was not
nearly as controversial or frustrating as one that has so far taken less
than one-hundredth of that terrible toll.
c And after Pearl Harbor, Americans believed they had no margin of
error in an elemental war for survival. Today, we are apparently convinced
we can lose ground, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, and still not lose
either the war or our civilization.
Of course, by 1945, Americans no longer feared another Pearl Harbor.
Yet, we, in a far stronger and larger United States, are still not sure we
won't see another September 11.
Unhappily, I have to say that I'm almost certain that we will. And especially if we do, in fact, retreat from Iraq with our enemies believing that we lost even though we claim in our Senate that we did not. All we have to do, they say, is spend enough money on Homeland Defense without Halliburton misappropriating any of it. You know the drill, secure our ports. Secure our borders? Well, okay, maybe those, too...
In football they call that kind of behavior a "prevent defense". It doesn't always work, because sometimes the opposing team is successful throwing the "long bomb". After all, the only thing they need is a bomb and someone willing to throw it.
I guess the football analogy wasn't so good...I should have used horseshoes. Because close counts.
Computers...can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. First spell-checker went away, now my links aren't underlined or colored, although they are there. Maybe my computer is punishing me because the other day I checked to see if it was Vista-compatible?
Not that I intend to play THAT game! No, whenever I come up with a new computer, and no telling when that might happen, it will probably already be installed and everything compatible, one hopes.
I think Peggy Noonan gets this one wrong. She's writing about the emotion shown by Bush the father, and says at one point:
Surely Mr. Bush knew--surely he was first on James Baker's call list--that the report would not, could not, offer a way out of a national calamity, but only suggestions, hopes, on ways through it. To know his son George had (with the best of intentions!) been wrong in the great decision of his presidency--stop at Afghanistan or move on to Iraq?--and was now suffering a defeat made clear by the report; to love that son, and love your country, to hold these thoughts, to have them collide and come together--this would bring not only tears, but more than tears.
And the younger President Bush, what of his inner world? He has been shorn of much--his place in the winner's circle, old advisers. A man who worked for Richard Nixon reminded me the other night that when Nixon fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman, "he lost his asbestos suit." He lost his primary protectors and loyalists. President Bush is now without a similar layer. Old staffers gone, Rumsfeld gone, Cheney marginalized, Condi and Karen off representing. And the ISG. And the loss of Congress.
And yet the president presents himself each day in his chesty way, with what seems a jarring peppiness. A person who saw him in the White House a few days ago described him as "perky, seemed happy."
Peggy says she just doesn't get it.
Unlike anguished wartime presidents of old, he seems resolutely un-anguished. Think of the shattered Lincoln of the last Mathew Brady photographs, taken just weeks before he was assassinated. ... Or anguished Lyndon B. Johnson sitting in the cabinet room by himself, literally with his head in his hands. History takes a toll.
But George W. Bush seems, in the day to day, the same as he was. It is part of the Bush conundrum--a supernal serenity or a confidence born of cluelessness? You decide. Where you stand on the war will likely determine your answer. But I'll tell you, I wonder about it and do not understand it, either what it is or what it means.
But, really, she actually does get it...it all depends on where you stand on the war, she acknowledges...or, more properly said from my point of view, the portion of the much wider war that is taking place in Iraq.
As a scientist, I subscribed long ago to the principles of William of Occam (which you might have guessed from my discussion about God, earlier), which in a simple sort of way says that, in fact, the simplest solution that works is likely to be the right one. If you have to start adding too many gadgets to your gidget in order to make it work well, the more you have to add in order to "fix" it, the more likely you are to be heading down the wrong road.
Rube Goldberg made an art-form out of it.
I often like to go back to Galileo and his observation that the planets, particularly the earth, orbited around the sun, not vice versa. People had known for millennia that planets were different than stars, but, even stranger than that, some of the planets, but not all of them, followed really curious paths across the night sky.
Curious, but scientifically predictable, just the same. You could create tables which would show exactly how and when the odd-ball planets behaved differently than the others, for instance, which is one of the basic requisites for a scientific "law"...it has to be unfailing in predictive ability.
I had a really great math professor teaching my astronomy class, a brilliant guy with a great sense of humor. I was reading a lot of science-fiction back then (circa 1951) and asked him one time how it might be possible to "warp" space, thinking about a FTL (faster-than-light, for you mundanes) drive before Gene Rodenberry did. Without missing a beat he told me, dead-pan, you wet it and then hang it out in the sun to dry.
Anyhow, in the course of things we discussed Galileo and planetary orbits and he said that mathematically it wasn't possible to show that the earth wasn't the center of the universe, it's just that the calculations required to depict how all of the other celestial bodies behaved became very, VERY complicated. But if the sun was the center of at least our planetary system, things became very simple. I can't be sure now if we even mentioned Occam's Razor, but I suppose it was likely, since that's the general principle involved here.
William of Occam said to look for the simple answer, and to research unknown phenomena by starting out with what you knew and going from there.
So, having rounded that Mulberry bush, back to the other two Bushes. What if--as I happen to believe--Bush the father was the one in error, the decision not to go to Baghdad and remove Saddam once and for all, back then, was the bigger mistake.? What if the younger, Bush The Clueless, the guy with the degrees from Yale and Harvard, actually figured out the true size of the war that was being declared against us, openly by bin Laden and less-openly by the wilier types? What if he (gasp) read Bernard Lewis back when Bill The Brilliant was trying to figure out what "is" and "humidor" meant?
You see, if I'm right (which means that Bush must be, too) and Occam's Razor is still slicing thinly, this explains a lot of apparently-complicated actions and reactions in rather simple fashion.
For one thing, it would explain why Bush The Elder is the emotional whiny one and Bush The Younger remains serenely confident that he is doing the right thing.
It explains why BTY doesn't feel like he has to defend his "war of choice" because that isn't really what it was. True, he chose the battlefield and the time and manner of engagement, but the war was thrust upon him.
Look for simplicity...think of fractals rather than complicated whole snowflakes.
I'd ask someone in the White House, but they're still stuck in Rote Talking Point Land: The president of course has moments of weariness but is sustained by his knowledge of the ultimate rightness of his course . . .
If he suffers, they might tell us; it would make him seem more normal, which is always a heartening thing to see in a president.
But maybe there is no suffering.
Maybe he outsources suffering. Maybe he leaves it to his father.
Look at all the "maybes" she suffers from which would disappear if it wasn't really Rote Talking Point Land after all.
I like Daniel Henninger's take on the ISG Report:
...GOP Sen. Arthur Vandenberg's 1952 dictum amid the Truman presidency (was) that "politics stops at the water's edge." More than a sentiment, Vandenberg's point was, as he put it, "to unite our official voice at the water's edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us." For the past three years, we have had the opposite--a domestic political war waged relentlessly at the water's edge.
Now comes the ISG report, and based on the Beltway reaction to it, one has to wonder whether the call yesterday for unity and bipartisanship by Messrs. Baker, Hamilton, Panetta and former Sen. Alan Simpson was disingenuous or naive. Washington took their study and went completely over the edge. The morning-after press reporting on the Baker-Hamilton report can only be described as neurotic glee. Over endless columns, reporters ransacked their thesauruses for words to unload pent-up antipathy toward the Bush White House: failed, repudiated, dire, abject failure, deeply pessimistic, disdain, replete with damning details, a rebuke, a remarkable condemnation.
For the Bush opposition and its beliefs, this White House has become the most odious and illegitimate presidency (the disputed 2000 Florida result) of the last century. Opposing it became a moral imperative. We can pinpoint the moment the Vandenberg ethos died. It was when one Democratic senator, Joe Lieberman, tried to bridge the partisan divide. He was culled from the party herd, shunned and left for dead by his oldest friends in the Senate.
I think one of the potentially funniest things that still might happen is for Lieberman to decide he feels more comfortable now as a Republican. And don't think the Big Dems aren't sweating blood over this idea, either.
In short order, the Iraq story will enter 2008's presidential politics. To his credit, John McCain distanced himself from the report, which has turned into an unedifying pig-wallow for one swath of our political culture. The Washington Post yesterday reported that Democratic congressional aides say they'll make sure Mr. Bush still "owns" the Iraq war so he gets tagged if Baker-Hamilton fails.
Baker-Hamilton will fail because it cannot succeed according to its own definition. What Democrats truly fear is that Iraq will succeed under Bush's view and that it really WILL BE his war, a victorious one. But, like they say, victory has a thousand fathers and Kerry will be elbowing people out of the way in order to claim that he did, after all, vote for it...
Ditto Shelby Steele's:
Possibly the most confounding feature of the Iraq war, from the very opening of hostilities to the present day, has been the American government's utter failure to define what victory would be in this war. "Victory" has been a conjure word for the Bush administration, a Churchillian allusion meant to evoke the heroic perseverance shown in the great wars of the past. But no one in the administration has ever said what victory would actually look like. And, lacking this description, even those of us who have supported the war have seen trouble coming for some time. Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.
I admire Mr Steele, but a worse problem is that Bush actually HAS described 'victory'...it is a democratic government capable of standing up and defending itself from enemies.
The problem is that you cannot know you have achieved that kind of victory until after you leave and others attack. It isn't something you can know ahead of time.
Historically victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. We not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, we also--and without a whit of self doubt--imposed our democratic way of life on them. We took our victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement, and felt commanded to morally transform these defeated societies by the terms of our democracy. In this effort we brooked no resistance whatsoever and we achieved great success.
Another problem is that we have allowed so many careless thinkers to attempt to impose the term "empire" upon American aims, and always assuming that it must be a bad word. But Germany and Japan and Italy are not our imperial subjects, and neither is Iraq, nor was Kuwait, nor Panama, nor Grenada...
We defined 'victory' as something that can't be proved until after we leave, and we've let others define 'empire' to mean anything they want it to mean, as long as it means America Bad.
In their careless moments, the liberals even admit their willingness to redefine words:
...today, as Nancy Pelosi recently put it, "You can define victory any way you want." And war, she said, was only "a situation to be resolved."
She probably meant to quote von Clausewitz ("...a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means") but I don't think Grandma Nancy is particularly intellectual.
Why don't we know the meaning of this war and our reasons for fighting it? I think the answer begins in the awkward fact that America is now the world's uncontested superpower. If this fate has its advantages, it also brings an unasked-for degree of dominion in the world. This is essentially a passive dominion that has settled on a rather isolationist nation, yet it makes America into something of a sheriff. Whether the problem is Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Darfur, America gets the call. Thus our youth are often asked to go to war more out of international responsibility than national necessity. This is a hard fate for a free and prosperous citizenry to accept--the loss of sons and daughters to a kind of magnanimity. Today our antiwar movement is essentially an argument with this fate, a rejection of superpower responsibility.
And this fear of responsibility is what makes us ambivalent toward the idea of victory. Because victory is hegemonic, it mimics colonialism. A complete American victory in Iraq would put that nation--at least for a time--entirely under American power and sovereignty. We would in fact "own" the society as a colony. In today's international moral climate this would both undermine the legitimacy of our war effort and make an ongoing demand on our blood and treasure.
My main point why America is not an Imperialistic Power...empires bring treasure home for the benefit of their own citizens, they don't spend it abroad for the benefit of others.
Our problem is that we did achieve victory, we did put Iraq completely under our power for a time, but then we said to them, okay, you're sovereign now...but we'll look out for you until we are sure that you can take care of yourself.
It's like when your 16-year-old gets his first driver's license and figures that gives him equal rights to the "family" car. And while your goal is to grow him into an adult mature and capable enough of handling that family car responsibly, you're still reluctant to simply toss him the keys and sit back with a smile, thinking of all of the drunk and careless drivers with whom he will be sharing the road.
To the extent that the Democrats are right--even, as the old farmers said, a blind hog will find an acorn now and then--it is true that eventually the father has to turn loose. For some kids it is 16, for some 20, and sometimes it depends on the neighborhood.
(I'm suffering right now because my current 3-year-old is my fourth son. One son had a near-fatal auto accident, a collapsed lung. The second one hasn't told me of anything serious in his past but he might not also have told dear old dad everything, either. The third son died in a motorcycle accident. It may be against the odds for me to even see #4 to driving age, but I'm sweating out handing over those keys, just the same.)
And Steele makes this very cogent observation!
Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace. It empowers those who, but for menace, would languish in the world's disregard. The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history. And they are greatly loved for this. If their achievements follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing. Worse than evil is invisibility.
As I have observed before, perhaps too often for some of you, if Western Civilization did not depend on oil (note, I did NOT say American Civilization, and pretty soon China may pull into the lead) then Americans wouldn't give a hoot in a windstorm (I'm being polite) about Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, any of those places, except as someplace to go as tourists and snap pictures.
Remember those heady moments when we thought we had discovered "cold fusion" and cheap, unlimited power from a glass of water?
Believe me, if we did then Chavez and Ahmadinejad would dry up and blow away.
Every time we talk about becoming energy independent we give them the cold shivers.
For every reason, from the humanitarian to the geopolitical to the military, Iraq is a war that America must win in the hegemonic, even colonial, sense. It is a test of our civilization's commitment to the good against the alluring notion of menace-as-power that has gripped so much of the Muslim world. Today America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because we are a powerful bully but because we don't fully accept who we are. We rush to war as a superpower protecting the world from menace, then leave the battle before winning as a show of what, humility? We confuse our enemies, discouraging them one minute and encouraging them the next.
Could it be that our enemies are really paper tigers made formidable by our unceasing ambivalence? And could it be that the greater good is in both the idea and the reality of American victory?
I'm not at all sure where we got this idea of "Empires=bad" any more than we did "global warming=bad". What, too many Star Wars films? There are tens of millions of people living in the central US who are delighted to be farming there instead of submerged beneath a mile of ice.
Steele and I agree on one thing: because of our ambivalence, we really haven't fought this war all-out the way we have others in the past. Even if we decided to finally define 'victory' satisfactorily we'd have to make up our minds to do it.
Observed by Laurence Henry in The American Spectator:
James Q. Wilson wrote a wonderful lead in a column in an early November issue of City Journal, reprinted on Opinionjournal.com November 6: "The Press at War: Whatever Happened to Patriotic Reporters?" I share it with you in its entirety for its wonderfully bitter truth.
”We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now."
My question, a real one, is why? Why do these Americans want us to lose? I don't buy this idea that they're worried about the lives of American servicemen lost in Iraq, the peaceniks abort more babies than that in a single month. They let more kids die of crack in Harlem without giving it a second thought.
The NRO editors tell me something I didn't know before:
Rep. Steny Hoyer, who will be majority whip in the next Congress, announced that members of the House will henceforth be expected to work five days a week on Capitol Hill. This news met with grumbling from Republicans accustomed to a two-day work week. In 2006, the House kept to a schedule that went from late Tuesday afternoon to early Thursday afternoon, meeting for only 103 days — seven fewer than the infamous “Do Nothing” Congress of 1948. After winning the majority in 1994, the GOP operated on the theory that members who spend less time in Washington and keep their families back home are less likely to be seduced by the power and perks of political life. But plenty of Republicans — far too many — got seduced anyway. One reason people run for office is, presumably, their willingness to place the public good above their personal interests. Is a five-day work week really too great a sacrifice? Before complaining about their onerous duties, members of Congress should pause and consider the troops serving their third tour in Iraq.
It's enough to make me vote Democrat. The Republicans who are lucky enough to still be working in Congress should be delighted to comply, I would think.
I thought this odd. Peter Suderman at NRO reviews Gibson's latest film thusly:
Even before he drank and cursed his way into his unfortunate current public perception, Gibson spent a long time courting the role of unhinged, retributive loner. As an actor, he first gained notice in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max series playing a vigilante ex-cop whose family had been murdered. He became a star in Lethal Weapon with a turn as another cop, this one a half-crazed, suicidal alcoholic who had lost his wife. In his directorial debut, The Man Without a Face, he cast himself as a disfigured, melancholy recluse of ill-repute. Armchair psychoanalysts cannot know Gibson the man, but his artistic legacy is replete with mania, personal loss, and acute physical suffering, as well as an intense, unrequited longing for family and community.
Carol swears she heard the Paul Harvey show in which he described the brutal beating Gibson suffered as a young man, one which led him to select this story for his directorial debut, but an internet search says it's mostly an urban legend...although apparently he did lose a particularly disfiguring bar fight shortly before his "Mad Max" audition that helped get him the role...they didn't want a pretty boy actor, apparently.
Still, I think Suderman's review, after the several biographies I read of Gibson's life, is a bit superficial. And condescending. For instance, courting the role of the unhinged, retributive loner...that could also be said of his role in Hamlet, couldn't it?