Is This Thing On?

European Elites

2009-12-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

So, I tear Jimmy Carter a bit down to size, and what happens? The next day, or maybe it was two days later, he apologizes to the Jewish community? Coincidence? I think not.

So today, I came across another article in The Guardian. You'd think I would learn my lesson, that I would stay away from this particular newspaper. Well,every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in, to quote Michael Corleone. The fact is, The Guardian is sort of hard to avoid. If one reads widely, from all corners of the world, as I do, then this paper will be front and center. I suppose it is considered an elite newspaper, and some of its commentators, such as Timothy Garton Ash, are widely quoted and interviewed. Ash, I can deal with. I have read a few of his books and he is a stand up dude. But that does not speak for the paper's readership.

The article that I read today was written by an Israeli who was defending, in a relatively wishy-washy fashion, the invasion of Gaza a year ago. He explained that Israeli children in the Western Negev learn words having to do with rocket attacks before they know how to say "mother' and "father". This generation will grow up to be traumatized and will flinch at the knock of a door or the backfiring of a car, the author writes. That struck me as pretty powerful stuff. He uses this powerful imagery to gently put forward a defense of Operation Cast Lead. That is, after all, how one must write about Israel to be published in the elite European journals. Israel is to be bashed, but if it must be defended, it can't be done in too strong of a manner. It would come across as unenlightened, un-European. In any event, the article didn't impress The Guardian crowd.

To impress the readership of The Guardian crowd, all one must do is bash Bush and Israel. The quality of the prose, the message behind the article, all of that is secondary. One must immediately make clear that he or she is against these particular things, and only then will they be given the benefit of the doubt.

To wit: one of the readers said that the stories of traumatized children in the western Negev were a manipulative attempt to try to swindle the reader into feeling compassion for Israeli children. In other words, the reader should not feel such compassion. I mean, after all the children are Israelis, not humans. Natural emotion is less important than the identity of the child. The traumatization of a Palestinian child: worst war crime ever. That of an Israeli child: whatever, his or her parents are irredentist Nazis, their traumatization is richly deserved. This very same reader made it quite clear that the reason that these children were being traumatized was not because of rockets having been fired from Gaza into Sderot and other towns. rather, it is because of the power-hungry Israeli state. Ahh, I see. Palestinians do not have responsibility for their actions. Any and all problems can be blamed on the Israelis. Very typical of the liberal line regarding just about anything, isn't it? Israel has a powerful military, yes, but this is not because it harbors some imperialist lust for territory or for war. Rather, war has been foisted upon the Israelis again and again, and military effectiveness is necessary for the country to be secure. Any country with only 7 million people, surrounded by hundreds of millions who hate it with an energy that is almost impossible to put into words, would be beyond idiotic to attempt to become an imperialist nation. Any fascistic foreign policy would be suicidal. If the Israelis were Nazis, they would have used their nuclear weapons a long time ago in an offensive fashion. Instead, they have not. The Arabs, as much as they use poisonous invective to describe the Jewish state, understand this. It is why they are not scared to fire rockets into Sderot. It is why they fear the Iranian nuke more than the Israeli one. In sum, it is because the Arabs, deep down, understand that Israel is a civilized, moral nation that is not going to use its nukes lightly. If they did not think like this, they would not fire rockets with impunity into Israel. If Israel was the Nazi in Arab imagination, the death toll in Gaza a year ago would have been much, much higher. So, in sum, this reader is irrational, and motivated by an intense hatred for Israel and/or the Jewish people. Europe is historically anti-Semitic. The Holocaust did not occur in Arabia or Egypt. It happened in Europe. It has not gone away over night. The grim film reels of British soldiers using bulldozers to bury the dead of Belsen did not entirely erase these sentiments. Let's put it this way: if Israel were a Muslim nation surrounded by much larger, Jewish states who hated it, the Europeans would support Israel with as much fervor as they bash it today in reality. Non-Muslims are being slaughtered in Darfur by Muslims, and no one really cares. I mean, they say they do, they wear t-shirts, etc. But they do not speak of the Bashir regime with a vitriol even approaching that reserved for the Jewish state. In other words, it is a fixation on the Jude. Prove me wrong.

Another reader explained his frustration with the fact that the author used the word "terrorist" to define those who would fire rockets into civilian areas. The reader went on to say that the real terrorists are the soldiers of the IDF. Par for the course among the European elites who read The Guardian, I am sure. Israel is not a perfect state, nor is any state that exists. But to justify the purposeful traumatization, injury, and murder of civilians is to reveal yourself to be a cold-hearted bastard. I suppose if the children were Arabs, it would be reason to weep. If the children were blacks, it would be racism. Let the little Israeli fucks get what they deserve. That is the unspoken theme that permeates much of the The Guardian's readers' commentaries. They seem quite pitiless when it comes to Israeli lives, but are suddenly human rights softies when it comes to the lives of the Palestinians. A reader (might have been the same one) said that the author was a bastard for explaining that the Israeli operation in Gaza was legitimate even if some civilians were killed. In other words, from the perspective of The Guardian's readers, firing rockets on Israeli towns with the purposeful intent of murdering civilians is not that big of a deal but for Israel to respond with force, with unintentional but sadly unavoidable deaths of civilians, is beyond the pale. Moral retardation at its finest.

I suggest to read Robert Kagan. A political scientist now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC (across the street from Johns Hopkins SAIS, where I attend graduate school), he makes a forceful argument that Europe is living in a Kantian world and we in the United States are living in a Hobbesian world. In other words, the Europeans are living in a paradise. They work thirty hours a week. They get several weeks vacation per year. They could have sex with their boss's daughter on his desk, while he watches, in the middle of the workday, and not be fired. It's a delight. But the only reason that they can live this postmodern fantasy is because of the United States. The Europeans are spoiled teens; the United States is the daddy. Europeans can live in their paradise because they don't have to put any money toward a decent military. They can ride on the coattails of the United States. They know that the US will come to their aid. So they can afford to live in their bubble. That is why they cried so much about Iraq. They had gotten used to their little bubble and were afraid that the United States' actions would cause that bubble to be pricked. It wasn't because they are somehow morally or culturally superior to the American cowboys. Rather, Europe does not want its party to be spoiled.

It is from this cozy bubble that Europe views the world. Europeans are afraid that any tough talk about Islam will prick it. You must understand, Europeans are hypocritical. They accuse the US of racism and applauded the election of Barack Obama because it proved that perhaps the US wasn't as regressive as they thought. It was a giant leap forward for the Neanderthal United States. Okay, Europeans: name me one black European prime minister. That's right: there haven't been any. So, Europe loves to lecture us on issues that it has not dealt with itself. Look at the North African Muslim immigrants in Paris, who are treated like secondhand filth by the French. But none of this really matters: let the good times roll. Europe needs this bubble. Europe is defined by this bubble. It is this, tinged with anti-Semitism, that explains the virulent hatred for Israel seen in Europe. Europeans are unable to understand that, back in the real world, having a strong military and fighting wars is sometimes necessary. Europeans don't generally fight one another, and one can walk through the streets of Amsterdam, pick out a prostitute, and smoke marijuana with her after the deed is done, all of which is perfectly legal. Because of this fantasy world, Europe is seen as the vanguard of light by many in the United States. Take a walk through SAIS: the students are reading The Economist, The Financial Times, and the BBC on their laptops. It is the hip, "intellectual" thing to do. Europeans, after all, have renounced war and live in peace. They are so beyond us. Their opinions on the way the world works is the be all and end all of opinions. This partially explains the anti-Israel invective of much of academia. However, as explained, the European Eden would not exist without John Wayne (the US) to protect it.

Hello Everyone

2009-12-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

It's been a long semester, no time for blogging. Whatever. Let's get down to brass tacks.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are two distinct things but are never seen as such, attracts a lot of bloviating. Polemical nonsense is thrust back and forth, people get passionate and lose their shirts, and also lose their brains somewhere in the process.

Enter Jimmy Carter. Of all the idiotic commentary so common on the "peace process" (not really an actual thing), I think Carter's probably takes the cake. The man is, quite frankly, a joke. He was probably the most inept president in the history of the United States and is by far the worst ex-president. This is a man who morally equates Israel with Hamas, a man who meets the Hamas leadership while considering himself a holier-than-thou, above the fray mediator who will bring peace to the region. He wrote a book entitled "Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid". So subtle, so intellectual. Of course, it is always a sign of a marked intellect to bash those knuckle dragging Jews in the Middle East who don't know their place as the quiet accountant down the street. This man has truly nothing to show for himself. NOTHING. His main crowning achievement is probably the Camp David Accords in 1979. But that really wasn't his achievement. President Anwar Al-Sadat traveled to Jerusalem on his own initiative in November 1977 and addressed the Knesset, which in the eyes of the Arab world was less morally acceptable than, say, the Babi Yar massacre. Sadat was a political creature and knew that he needed war with Israel in 1973 to gain legitimacy from the Arab world, but by 1977 he had come to the realization that Israel could not be militarily defeated by the Arabs. If you can't beat them, join them. And for that, he was assassinated in 1981. But, anyway, without the initiative of Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, there would have been no Camp David Accords, and no Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty to follow. Jimmy Carter didn't approach the two men and come up with some wise-as-Solomon plan. Mr. Carter: get over yourself.

The reason for my annoyance is an article that the man wrote for The Guardian, itself a bastion of good-old fashioned Israel-bashing. You know, it's what the cool kids do. I don't know why I read the article. I saw the title, which was innocuous enough, but then I saw the author, and my blood immediately began to boil. It began to boil because I knew what I would shortly read was going to be both morally and intellectually retarded, but hailed as some brilliant reasoning by the bulk of The Guardian's readership. Actually, I don't care about their readership. They are too far gone. I care because Jimmy Carter, and his ilk, are shoving this Israel-bashing down the throats of my generation, and have made it totally cool to refer to Israel as an apartheid state. In fact, it's positive uncool to not do so. I was reading an article in The Economist yesterday about Mike Huckabee, and it was a pretty positive review, shockingly enough. What was not shocking was that at the end of the article, under a subtitle: "His Less Cuddly Side" or something to that effect, was that he is a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. There was nothing about him saying anything anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, or anything like that: merely supporting the state of Israel is a debit on the ledger. The Economist is more or less the barometer of elite opinion. This was said in a very casual, matter-of-fact way. Because it is matter of fact. Saying that simple support of Israel is somehow a negative thing is a matter of fact thing. The patients are running the asylum. The blindly anti-war hippies of the 1960s, who don't let circumstances or reality prick their bubble of idiocy, are now the academic elites who channel intellectual thought. In the eyes of a liberal Democrat, the support of Israel is now alongside tax cuts and no abortion on their checklist of bad things.

On to the article. I am not even so sure that this pablum deserves to be described as such, but there you go. In essence, if one were supremely uneducated about the whole "peace process" shindig then the article would make total sense. And it would make one loathe Israel. Because it provides no context, as is usually the case with blind Israel-bashing. Anyway, let's plug our noses and plunge in, shall we?

He starts off with a mindless sentence, harmless, but vacuous, blindingly obvious, and meaningless. "It is generally recognised that the Middle East peace process is in the doldrums, almost moribund," the man says. This sentence would have been true in any time, at any place, in any dimension, from 2000 to the present day. And even from 1993-2000, it was basically a mirage for desperately hopeful people to cling to. You are so wise.

The first clause of the very next sentence is a delight: "Israeli settlement expansion within Palestine continues". Oh, really? It does? Mr. Carter, might you please point out to me the territorial borders of Palestine on the map? Oh, that's right you can't. Because no such sovereign entity has ever existed. However, your average citizen, and even your average graduate student, doesn't really know this. Israel is not building within Palestine because there is no Palestine. Israel has stopped construction in the West Bank for the next ten months, so clearly Jimmy Carter is referring to East Jerusalem here. That is, the eastern part of the city of Jerusalem, which is the capital city of Israel. If Israel cannot build apartments within its own capital city, then it means that Israel is, essentially, an illegitimate state. Which I am sure is what Jimmy Carter is really saying. Within leftist circles, such a thought is really not that outrageous. These are the types who would toast Robert Mugabe, hold hands with Hugo Chavez, and break bread with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Morally retarded? Well, let me tell this to you straight: this is morally retarded on its face and anyone in disagreement with this assertion is morally retarded themselves. To refer to East Jerusalem as "within Palestine" is to show yourself to be, frankly, an idiot.

Well, maybe Carter has been living under a rock for the past few weeks, and hasn't heard about the settlement freeze. Maybe he still thinks there is construction in the West Bank. Even still, the West Bank is not part of Palestine because Palestine only exists in the hypothetical. The West Bank is called "the occupied territories" and the underlying assumptiion is that Israel snatched it from the Palestinians. Actually, the land never really belong to anyone, which makes things a bit more awkward than the Israel bashers would have you believe. The West Bank is kind of a gray area. You know, those gray areas so beloved by the left. Except then when it's something that really excites the left, like Israeli oppression of Palestinians or global warming, suddenly those gray areas become solid black and white. Anyway, the West Bank, as of the end of the British Mandate in May 1948, was terra nullius, meaning no man's land. It was annexed by Jordan after the 1948 war, along with East Jerusalem, but everyone recognized this as an illegal annexation with the exception of Britain and Pakistan. In other words, the West Bank was not part of Jordan. Taking that further, it means that Israel did not take that land from Jordan in 1967 because it never actually belonged to Jordan. It never belonged to anyone. So, from the standpoint of international law (when the waters are not muddied by obfuscating Israel-haters), there is nothing illegal with Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It is all good and well that there is hope that the West Bank will be in a Palestinian state. But that state doesn't exist yet. Don't put the cart before the horse, Mr. Carter. Even if, in your senile state, you were referring to the West Bank, you cannot criticize Israel for occupying a country that does not exist, and may never will.

A bit later, Carter moves from the Israeli-Palestinian issue to the Arab-Israeli issue. Here is what he says: "Even though Syria and Israel under the Olmert government had almost reached an agreement with Turkey's help, the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejects Turkey as a mediator on the Golan Heights. No apparent alternative is in the offing." There is no context provided here, and that is intentional. Without context, it makes Netanyahu appear to be the stonewalling, hard-line, racist jerk that he is made out to be in the liberal press. In fact, there is a reason: Syria called off the talks due to the war in Gaza a year ago. And Turkey subsequently blasted Israel's war operation and accused it of war crimes. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan went bananas on Shimon Peres at Davos. Clearly, in Israel's eyes, Turkey is a biased party. So Netanyahu is understandably uneasy about having Turkey mediate, which should make sense to anyone or -thing with more intelligence than a protist. But, with the context intentionally unprovided, it makes Netanyahu into the peace-stalling demon that he is in the left's masturbatory fantasies. It is not within Syria's interest to have peace with Israel because the Assad regime depends on its confrontation with Israel for purposes of legitimacy. The Assad regime is run by a clique of Alawites, a minority in Syria considered by Sunnis and many Shiites to be heterodox. The only way they can gain legitimacy is by being the most confrontational state in the region, because the Arab street loves it. In other words, this is the icing on Carter's cake of idiocy.

That was literally three sentences of the article. It continues with more nonsense about the supposedly draconian Israeli blockade of Gaza and how Israel should negotiate with Hamas because there has been a whole year without terrorism. WOW. A whole year. They are still a slimy group with blood on their hands, they are not a state, they are a terrorist organization, and there is no negotiating with them because their position is that Israel is a cancer that must be cease to exist. There is no negotiating with such an extreme position. I could go on all day and eviscerate this "article" line by line, but I don't feel like writing a PhD dissertation or breaking my keyboard because I am typing this in a fit of anger.

Mr. Carter: Get off your high horse and go back to your peanut farm.

It's Been Forever

2009-08-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

Alright, I haven't blogged in a while. This is because, among other things, I feel as though I really have nothing to say that I have not already said, and because I have been super busy. It is slowly being revealed that the emperor has no clothes, as I have been saying again and again was the case. For the sycophants, it's been a slow, tantalizing striptease, but it's getting there.

In fact, I am not sure how much I even feel like discussing politics or international affairs at the moment. The only difference in the former is that there has been more and more skepticism of Obama and his policies, and the Republicans are a bit more popular than they were a few months ago. The healthcare bill may either prove to be a Pyrrhic victory or a defeat for the President. This is a very important issue, but I do not care to really discuss it because it is out of my area of interest and because it is being done to death by every pundit out there, liberal, conservative, and anywhere in between. Basically, color me skeptical. On the international front, Iraq has seen more and more violence, more troops are apparently needed in Afghanistan, Israel is still threatened by the Iranians and are still being lectured to cease construction of settlements, there are the rumblings of another war in the Caucasus, Latin America is still a mess, Putin is still consolidating power, another terrorist was released to the cheering throngs of a Middle Eastern nation - none of these things are really new. There truly is a large amount of stasis in world affairs, with momentous events that occasionally shake things up - the fall of the Soviet Union, of course, being an illustrative example.

I want to discuss something slightly different today. This morning I watched a very powerful film that, until recently, had flown completely under my radar - a film so powerful, in fact, that it moved me to get off my ass and blog for the first time in months. It is a Hungarian film called Fateless. It features one of the best performances I have ever seen by a child in a film - the actor's name is Marcell Nagy, and he was but 14 years of age when this movie was made (in 2005). The movie, based on a true story, is a sort of monstrous coming-of-age tale of a boy named Gyurka who finds himself thrust from the maws of Auschwitz-Birkenau into the clutches of Buchenwald. We see everything through his eyes. We see as he transforms from an ordinary boy whose major interest is a girl named Annamaria, to a skeletal figure who thinks day and night of only food, to a young man who has returned to find that both he and his native Budapest have drastically changed. Indeed, when he meets family friends after his experience in the camps, who have not experienced the camps for themselves, he almost pines for Buchenwald. It was a dreadful world, a world of death, of starvation, of maggots crawling in open wounds, and of lice, but it was a world in which he came to become comfortable. This is, to put it mildly, profoundly disturbing. Scenes from the movie continue to run through my mind: a man who takes Gyurka under his wing at Buchenwald, instructing him to always keep clean, with snow if need be, and to always have extra bread on his person; a Christian man approaches Gyurka on a trolley in Budapest after his liberation, and asks Gyurka what he is feeling now that he is home after his experiences, to which Gyurka simply responds: "Hatred"; maggots crawling in an infection in Gyurka's knee.

I understand that the Holocaust has been done before on film; some argue that it has been overdone. There were a smattering of films until the early 1990s including, of course, the Holocaust miniseries and Sophie's Choice (both with the incomparable Meryl Streep; her performance in the latter may the best performance I have ever seen); and in 1993, there was Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's magnum opus and truly one of the best films of all time, after which there have been several. But the viewer should not feel that he is "done" with the topic: "I saw Schindler's List - great film, but I don't ever need to see anything about the Holocaust again. I get it." Actually, you don't get it. I don't care how many films you have seen or how many books you have read. You will never get it. No one will ever get it. It is not about "getting it"; it is about witnessing the experiences of individuals in this terrible age of history, and they were not all the same. Sure, many are similar: after the chaotic policies of 1939-1941, the Nazis standardized the extermination process. But no two stories are the same. Six million is not just a number. Each one was a human being with a story of his or her own. Yes, it is often hard to read or to watch these things. It is very difficult because it is so painful. It is certainly not "entertainment". I have read a ridiculous amount of books on the Holocaust, as anyone in my family can attest, but that doesn't mean I'm "used" to it. It sears. But the people who were killed have no voice beyond, perhaps, diaries and those who survived will not be with us for very much longer. I think it is important, particularly for Jews, to, in a sense, internalize the Holocaust in a way that is almost subconscious. It should be more than just mindlessly repeating "never again" or "never forget". It should teach us how to treat others and how we should allow others to treat us. I am not saying that everyone, or anyone, should spend one's summer afternoons reading about Treblinka as one sips one's lemonade. I just believe that it should have its place in every Jew's consciousness; this is not ancient history.

Of course, it is the exact opposite of this argument that is used against Israel, even by liberal Jews. "You think too much about the Holocaust," they say. "It dominates your society, it permeates your every thought and action, it impels you to use force against the Palestinians and to rattle your sabers at the Iranians." Tom Friedman, the New York Times journalist whose writings I enjoy (even if I sometimes disagree), certainly subcribes to this view (in a more thoughtful and studied manner). In his excellent book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Friedman takes Israel to task for the "Holocaustization" of its society and its politics, a process which he posits to have begun at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s, when Israeli society was faced with the Holocaust front and center, when before there had only been vague whispers, and to have survived it was to feel ashamed. He compares Israel to acting like a traumatized child who has been beaten, and now suffers from a severe Napoleon complex, and must always lash out at the slightest provocation. I cannot say whether or not there has been such a "Holocaustization", as I have not lived in Israel, but I think that it is understandable. The State of Israel was built largely by people whose entire families had been slaughtered. They tried to hide it, feeling ashamed in front of the native Israeli sabras, some of whom were contemptuous of European Jews, feeling that they had gone to their deaths passively. The Eichmann trial opened a wound or, more precisely, emblazoned a scar on the face of Israel, a scar that was no mark of Cain for the survivors, but a permanent, painful reminder that the Jewish nation can never slacken in its defense in the face of genocidal adversity. Surely, this should not escalate into warmongering or trying to act in an overly aggressive manner. Friedman, however, argues that it was precisely this train of thought that propelled Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to invade Lebanon in 1982. I am not really going to touch this, but there you have it. But at least Friedman cares about Israel, and he speaks of this development in an anguished tone; he does not use it to beat Israel over the head as an out of control, fascist, apartheid state. This, as we all know, has been done to death by others, saying that just because a Holocaust happened to the Jews does not mean that the Jews should inflict one on the Palestinians. This false equivalence is repugnant.

I believe in a middle way. Israel should not invade other countries for the slightest reasons, and Jews around the world should not get in fistfights over the slightest insults. This would be insane. But neither should they forget and treat the Holocaust as something that happened in ancient times. People who are alive today witnessed it. It is very close in time. Sixty-five years is but a blink in the history of the world. I am not aiming to bore you or to lecture; I'm just giving my point of view. And, believe me, I do not consciously think this while I read books or view films on the Holocaust. I suppose it has always been a bit of a subconscious thing that it is coming, today, to the surface, because of this extraordinary film.

Anyway, if you haven't suffered Holocaust movie fatigue, and if you are willing (I understand not everyone wants to subject themselves to this), and if you have not completely tuned out my long-windedness, I suggest that you watch Fateless. The preceding was not the most cheerful thing I have written on this blog, but I was moved to write, and write I did.

It Gives Me No Pleasure To Do This

2009-06-30T07:35:00.001-07:00

But because I eschew pleasure (I wear a shirt made of hair under my regular clothes and scourge myself each Friday), I'm gonna do it anyway.

I have been fairly silent concerning the Iranian situation but, I assure you, it is not because I do not have any feelings or opinions about it. Quite the contrary. The devilish triumvirate of my job, schoolwork, and my commute has combined to, at times, sap me of my will to write. This unholy trinity has become, in essence, my Axis of Evil.

Enough quibbling. The situation in Iran is both inspiring and heart-breaking, and it should really bring home how much we take things for granted in this country. Halfway around the globe, people are marching in the streets for basic rights, and have been beaten, kicked, and shot. Many white people in the 1960s had the wool removed from their eyes when they saw horrible footage of civil rights activists being attacked by police dogs and blasted with fire hoses. The footage that we have seen from Iran, much of it via cell phone cameras, should have a similar effect on us today. Too many of us have tried to convince ourselves that the regime in Iran is really nothing to worry about. Stories of stoned women, hanged homosexuals, and the suppression of basic rights should make their impact, but sadly have not. This latest news, however, is much harder to ignore. Indeed, it has been compared with the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Our President, however, has been hesitant to show his support for the protesters, maybe dipping his toe in the waters a few times, never sounding convincingly tough.

Yes, we understand. You do not want to be seen "meddling" in the internal affairs of the Iranian people. Iranians are still bitter over the CIA-led coup of 1953 which overthrew Mohammed Mossadeq and installed the shah. Also, democracy promotion has received a black eye because it is associated with George W. Bush. Anything associated with this man must be wrong. He owned a baseball team - therefore, it is not a coincidence that baseball is the most popular sport played in Hell, with the best team (the Beelzebubs) playing its home games in Pandemonium, Hell's capital city. I understand that there is a theory of international relations called realism, and its most famous practitioner was Dr. Henry Kissinger. But the left hates Kissinger. Indeed, he has been accused of war crimes and many would like to see him sit in the dock, a la Goering. Yet they praise Obama for having the wisdom to pursue that Kissingerian theory, that cold and practical methodology, that unfeeling practice...Realpolitik. Now, I don't think Obama is really following a practice of realism. Rather, I think he's being stubborn. But that is what his admirers would have us believe: that he is surveying the field from the Olympian mount, keeping his cool, thinking realistically, thinking only of the national interest and ignoring any moral nonsense, you know: channeling Kissinger. Again, I want to remind you that these are the same people who will put Kissinger and Hitler in the same sentence. If you can wrap your mind around this, I commend you. Because it makes this look easy.

That is why Obama's supposed realism is almost laughable to me. The man is obviously being stubborn: he is determined to converse with an Ahmadinejad government, for its own sake, and this whole mess is proving to be an obstacle. To call Obama a Kissingerian realist is ludicrous. I can see how a realist might look at the situation in Iran, and I suppose that I have some sympathy for it. He would think that all of these demonstrations were serving to distract foreign policymakers from focusing on what really matters - namely, the centrifuges are still spinning, and Iran is getting ever closer to becoming a nuclear power. Because stopping this must be priority #1, you must overlook the demonstrations and protests because they are getting in the way of what is really important. I don't think Obama thinks this way. He wants to engage in dialogue to show that he is different from all the Presidents who came before him and, specifically, his imperialist predecessor. His way of doing this is flashing a smile, shaking Ahmadinejad's hand, convening some summit, etc. To Obama, the demonstrations are not a distraction from stopping Iran's nuclear quest - they are, however, affecting his ability to get the show on the road. And a show it will be. A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A splendid performance of King Lear that makes one marvel but in the end has no bearing on anything in the real world.

I really do not blame anyone for wanting to speak with Iran, provided that these talks are grounded in reality and are designed to accomplish something. But I am ever more persuaded that this administration is more concerned with style than substance. To them, the presidency is but the continuation of their brilliantly run, but superficial, campaign. Shock the masses with your wondrous rhetoric, speak of the wonders to come, and Thy will be done. But it has not worked so well with the world's rogues. North Korea is threatening nuclear war and has declared that it will not recognize the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War. Ahmadinejad has declared that he will not be stopped from achieving nuclear power and that the "file is closed" - i.e., there will be no ifs, ands, or buts. None of this seems to prick the bubble that is the Obama White House.

It is my humble opinion that when people are being brutalized by their governments, the United States should, at the very least, let it be known that it stands by the oppressed. I do not mean going in there with guns blazing - in this case, it would be insane. But such a small thing as expressing solidarity can make all the difference. Many of the signs Iranian demonstrators were holding were in English. Why do you think this is? Demonstrators were weeping over their injured and dead companions, asking why Obama was not doing anything to help them. The fact that Obama dilly-daddled for several days before issuing a mildly forceful statement speaks volumes. Those who were imprisoned in the gulags were given extraordinary hope by Reagan's expression of solidarity with them. Reagan did not blast his way into the Soviet Union and liberate the camps by force, but by speaking up for the wronged prisoners, he exposed their misery and fixed a great spotlight upon what had previously been a dark, all-too-ignored corner of the world. This action made it much more difficult for the Soviets to continue their evil deeds. The power of words cannot be underestimated. Obama, who is a great speaker and came to his office predominantly due to his forceful public speaking, should understand this. He is blinded by a naive faith in the power of dialogue and by his overriding desire to be the anti-Bush, in every way, or at least be seen as such. Dialogue, as I have said many times, is a great tool and, as Churchill said, "It is much better to jaw-jaw than to war-war". But dialogue for its own stake is ineffective, stupid, and dangerous, especially in this case, because the dialogue could serve as the perfect tool for Iran to forestall any attempts to prevent the progress of its nuclear program.

In Honduras, President Zelaya attempted to unilaterally change the constitution, through a national referendum, which Honduran law forbids. The Supreme Court ruled the referendum unconstitutional, and Honduras' top military commander informed Zelaya that he would have to comply, for which the commander was sacked. Zelaya led a mob to the military installation in which the ballots for the referendum were kept, and distributed them against the Court's orders. For acting in such a brazenly unconstitutional manner, and being so contemptuous of the rule of law and the ruling of the Supreme Court, he was arrested by the military. Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned this action and demanded that Zelaya be reinstated. Obama expressed his regret that the era of military coups was not over in Latin America. A military coup is when some military officers forcibly remove a head of state in order to run the state themselves. The Free Officers of Egypt and Augusto Pinochet of Chile come to mind. These Honduran military men were acting with the blessing of the Supreme Court because Zelaya was acting as though he were above the law. If this is a military coup then I'm Rich Little. (Please see this Wall Street Journal article for the scoop).

In sum, Obama basically had to be forced to say something expressing solidarity with those protesting for their freedom in Iran, not wanting to offend Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and their cronies. Yet he did not hesitate in the slightest to defend a head of state who thinks it okay to overstep the bounds of his nation's laws in order to unilaterally change the constitution for his own sake. Is this realism? No. It is seriously warped thinking. In both cases, Obama's thinking is, in my opinion, dead wrong.

I fear for the future.

"Okay, Here's the Deal...

2009-06-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

just stop all this settlement business and everything will be wonderful. Everything. Hamas will make Gaza City another Tel Aviv, bringing revenue to a Palestinian state. Hezbollah members will form an actors' union and travel the region performing plays. Mahmoud Abbas will visit Auschwitz, cry inconsolably, and convert to Judaism immediately. You just have to do it. You got it? I don't understand what you're being so hard-headed about. Isn't it obvious? Look, guys. You were victimized by a fascist regime in the past. You know, the Nazis. And, you know, you guys are kind of Nazis yourselves. The blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza? Don't you understand that it's the same difference as the Warsaw Ghetto? Khaled Mashaal is a latter day Mordecai Anielewicz. Eyal Eisenberg is Jurgen Stroop. Don't you see the parallels? 'The Muslim quarter of Gaza is no more.' I bet you fascists would have loved to hear Eisenberg say that, which is what Stroop said about Warsaw after he demolished the ghetto and sent its inhabitants to Treblinka. How do I know these things? Good question. I don't: I'm a naive dunderhead but a sentient being of intellect is typing these words into my hypothetical brain so that semi-coherent words can come out of my hypothetical mouth in this hypothetical monologue, but despite its completely hypothetical nature it could really happen because people like my hypothetical self exist in the actual non-hypothetical world.

"Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. Barack Obama knows what he's doing. He went to Harvard. Don't you understand what that means? It means that everything he says is true. It means that he is better than you and I. It means that his intellect straddles not just this universe, but the universes parallel to it. It means that he is God, like Evan Thomas of Newsweek said. Actually, God is only the creator of this universe - one of a cohort of lieutenant Gods who run the distinct parallel universes, all of whom receive orders from and answer directly to Barack Obama. Sorry, I got off-track again. You have to freeze the settlements. They are basically causing all the bad stuff in the region. The Muslims hate you guys. If you just showed them some love, and stopped being so imperialist and colonialists, you wouldn't have to face the violence. You'd get love. Love, man. It's all you need. All of this war has gotten you nowhere. The whole world hates you. Zionism is an evil, alien ideology that is being foisted upon the Arabs. It's racist. Mind you, I have no idea what the word means, I am ignorant of its history, but it's true - it's racist. And wrong. And evil. It thinks Jews are superior and have the right to push the Arabs around. Theodor Herzl is no different than Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in my opinion. Both horrible human beings who influenced even more horrible beings who have made attempts at genocide.

"You Jews - uh, I mean Zionists - have ruined everything. Palestine was a flourishing land flowing with milk and honey, with Arabs living there peacefully and independently. And then you had to come. And bring your wars, and the memory of the Holocaust. Yeah, the Holocaust was horrible, but it doesn't mean you can start one against the Palestinians. And it's what you're doing. The settlements are like that organization that Heinrich Himmler created (the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS) to remove Polish farmers from their land and replace them with German settlers. The Holocaust has given you the wrong lesson. It should have taught you tolerance - instead, there is a new Holocaust. And now there is a new man in the White House. A man of unparalleled wisdom and humanity, not even a man really (as I said before) who will tell you the way that things should be.

"Forget about Ahmadinejad in Iran. You think he's dangerous, but he isn't. He's just expressing his frustration with Western imperialism and the 1953 overthrow of Muhammad Mossadeq, who was a secularist who would totally disagree with everything Ahmadinejad holds dear. The Syrians are no worry either. Hamas and Hezbollah - they are just down and out people who just want to live. They want to be free from your yoke. Let them free, man. What harm would it do? I mean, it's not like they'd fire rockets at you or anything. Nothing like that has ever happened ever. What proof do you have that it would happen? You guys are so uptight and ideological. Live and let live. The Palestinians have been forced into violence by your genocidal actions. I mean, is there a difference between Bull Connor and the Israelis who bulldoze homes of suicide-bombers? That's messed up. I mean, that's like if Bull Connor bulldozed a black home. They just want liberty and equality, like the blacks did. And they follow the teachings of Martin Luther King. Well, they would, but the Zionists make them have to resort to things like suicide bombing. Who can blame them? I mean, they're desperate. They have to resist. That's why they're like Anielewicz. He used Molotov cocktails to kill Nazis in order to prevent deportations of Jews to Treblinka. What's the difference? There isn't one. You guys have serious morality problems.

"We speak gently to the Muslims because they are people of a peaceful religion. Israelis are warlike, and so is Judaism. Have you ever read the Old Testament? I mean, I haven't, I don't have anything to learn from religion or from any so-called God who is not named Barack Obama or from any piece of literature before the advent of Beatnik poetry. But I've heard things. Moses and Joshua? Hardcore murderers. Ruthless. Muhammad, on the other hand, was of a gentle nature. He loved cats. A cat fell asleep on his robe and rather than wake up the cute little kitty, Muhammad ripped off the sleeve. A lover of cats. A lover of all things. It is to the Israelis that we need to dictate, because all they know is war and warmongering. Just give it up. We're so sick of you. Just return back to the 1967 borders and everything will be dandy. You won't need the Golan Heights for defense - rather, you can use them as a stage from which to sing songs expressing the joy and peace you will feel coursing through your veins because you have made peace with the Syrians, who desire nothing more than peace and certainly did not ever encourage raids against Israeli civilians or use artillery to make attacks upon the Galilee from those very heights. East Jerusalem should belong to the Palestinians because Muhammad did something there once. That definitely supersedes any meaning it might have for Jews. I mean, they left there 2,000 years ago. And also - were they ever really there? Arafat believed that there was no Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, and I have my doubts too. After all, the man did not tell a lie, and was a true revolutionary who cared about his people more than anything. He certainly never was corrupt in any form. Sorta like a Middle Eastern Che. A good dude. A dude I'd have a beer with. Gaza - you guys gave that back and it turned out splendidly. So why not give up more? I swear, some people never learn from history.

"Freezing the settlements is part and parcel of this. The violence in the Middle East and its fringes rages because of their continued construction. You can blame it for the chaos in Gaza, the hatred of Hezbollah, the calls for Israel's destruction by Ahmadinejad, the first Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq war, the Yemen civil war, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the violence in Pakistan, and every other bad thing that has happened. The Arabs just want peace, and you hard-headed Israelis won't give it to them. All you want is war. You love war. It's not like you're surrounded by enemies who want to see your destruction. It's not like you're a small country or anything. You stand tall and cast your ghoulish shadow over the whole region. You guys are Dementors - you suck the life out of everything you touch. Freeze the settlements and we will see wonders. You have to do it to show that you are true peacemakers. Obama proclaimed that from the Mount - I mean, at Cairo University, so you know it's true. The solution is SO SIMPLE. And you blind idiots don't see it. If you don't do it, we will make you. Because we are determined to make you see the light. Your apartheid regime must heed our call.

"So you get it? It's essential that you do this. It is absolutely...wait, what's happening? I feel like I'm...I don't know, it's weird...I think, I dunno, I think the sentient being pouring words and semi-coherent but totally idiotic thoughts into my hypothetical brain...he's pulling the plug...I...Bush...imperialism...McCarthyism...o-o-oil!"

(collapses into previous wholly brain-dead state)

Not Too Bad

2009-06-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

So, earlier today the President gave his long-awaited speech at Cairo University. Really nothing to write home about because nothing new was really breached. But at the same time, I did agree with much of the language that he used, especially toward the Arab world. Some points on the speech:

1) He expressed America's "well known" and "unbreakable" relationship with the Jewish State. Nothing against Obama here, but this is basically a meaningless cliche at this point.

2) I appreciated Obama's evocation of the Holocaust and his condemnation of its denial, which he called "baseless, ignorant, and hateful". Indeed. He also called threats to eliminate the Jewish State, such as those from Mahmoud Ahmadinjead of Iran, "vile". All of this is obvious, but it is nice to hear. And I like that he made this clear to this deeply anti-Semitic part of the world.

3) I did not like the transition that he made from discussing the Holocaust to discussing the plight of the Palestinians. I'm sure it was unintentional, but it read as if he were trying to draw a parallel. There is no parallel. The difference between the refugee situation, dreadful as it is, and the Holocaust is the difference between a summer breeze and a Category 5 hurricane. There are a few things that have happened since the Holocaust that are comparable in some way: the Gulag, the laogai, North Korean prison camps, Srebrenica, and the genocides in Africa. The Palestinian refugee debacle should not count among them. It is not the intentional decimation of a people. The Israelis don't stay up at night thinking of new, ingenious ways to torture and to kill. If the Palestinians were genuinely interested in peace, Israel would take the first steps toward a Palestinian state tomorrow. But they're not - at least not those in a position of authority. This is why Netanyahu is not an insane, unthinking right-winger - blindly establishing a Palestinian state before Palestinian society fixes itself would be a dangerous mistake. In sum, the world's foreign policy establishment needs to start seeing things the way they are, not the way they wish them to be.

4) To continue with the Palestinians, Obama made the typical statement of Palestinian "humilations" because of the "occupation." It needs to constantly be re-explained that the Six Day War was defensive; Levi Eshkol did not wake up one morning and decide to conquer the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Eshkol, rather, was shitting his pants at the prospect of war with the collective Arab nations. In his address to the Israeli people informing them about the impending war, he was obviously nervous and stuttered his way through. If Israel did not have to fight that war, they wouldn't have. Also, surely there are situations where Palestinians are "humiliated". I too would be humiliated if I had to be strip-searched to go to work. However, during the Second Intifada, the Palestinians unleashed an inferno of suicide bombings and other terror attacks. What would Obama have Israel do? It is an unpleasant fact that Israel must search for terrorists among many decent Palestinians. But if the Palestinians shaped up, there would be no need and voila, no more humiliation.

I also take umbrage at Obama's comparison of the Palestinian's situation to the experience of America's blacks. Condoleezza Rice made such a comparison when she was Secretary of State. It is a ridiculous comparison. Palestinians have never been enslaved nor have they been subject to any Jim Crow laws. There are Arabs in the Knesset (who are usually more loyal to the Palestinians than Israel). The same with his comparisons to nonviolent resistance in Eastern Europe under communism and in Indonesia under Suharto. Not comparable. I did like Obama's stress on nonviolence but that does not make his comparisons correct.

5) I liked how Obama called out the Palestinian Authority, which he says need to "develop its capacity to govern", as well as Hamas who, he said, "must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist." Right on. But then he goes on to play the moral equivalence card, saying that Israel likewise needs to recognize "Palestine's" right to exist, and unequivocally condemned the construction of Israeli settlements. Yes, as if those settlers are alone responsible for Palestinian extremism and the insane anti-Semitism in the region. It's just the latest excuse. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, it was because of a large influx of Jews. Then it became Deir Yassin. Then the "occupation". Then the "apartheid wall". Then the Gaza "ghetto". And a billion things in between, sometimes anachronistic and other times simply made up. The hottest issue of the past few years has been the settlers (read: Evil People). Stopping the settlements will not stop the Iranians from wanting a bomb.

6) Speaking of Iran, Obama basically skimmed over the prospects of a potential Iranian nuke, saying they had the right to peaceful nuclear energy. This topic was also mired in moral equivalence, saying that we can't dictate who can and who cannot have nuclear weapons. I guess it sounds fair but is he really saying that nukes in the hands of Switzerland is somehow the same as nukes in the mullah's hands? I doubt he believes that, and if he does, he's just fooling himself. He also used that as a starting point to talk about his idea of the U.S. reducing its arsenal - which is basically the biggest deterrent we have. The United States is not ruled by an evil madman like North Korea or a fundamentalist, close-minded messianic cult like Iran. Nukes in our hands are not nearly as dangerous. Also, as a side point, if Israel is so evil, why did the Arabs have no problem invading them in 1967 and 1973? Didn't they fear incineration? No, because as much as they excoriate Israel for its satanism, they know deep down that Israel is governed by rational beings who are civilized. If they really thought Israel was so evil, why would they provoke it? Wouldn't they be afraid of getting nuked into oblivion? But at the same time, the prospect of an Iranian nuke terrifies the Arabs. So, that should tell you something. What it tells me is: this whole hatred of Israel is something to distract their societies from the cesspool of backwardness and intolerance in which they're floating. It's all a big, violent Kabuki play (this doesn't go for Hamas and Hezbollah - I am speaking of the governments of Egypt, Jordan, etc.)

7) The following quote from Obama should be hammered into every Arab brain: "[Arabs] need to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past." Amen.

8) Does anyone else find Obama's use of the phrase "let me be clear" overused and annoying?This is nitpicking, but still. It's almost as though he's making a Sermon on the Mount with every speech; just because he is "being clear" it should be as if it is written in stone and obvious to all. Not important; just an observation.

9) Kudos to Obama for standing up for women's rights. They are too often treated little better than dogs in Muslim society.

10) Overall, I found the speech to be pretty good. It was basically devoid of the nonsensical linkage theory which posits that if only the Israelis and Palestinians solved their differences, the whole world would hold hands and we would heard them echo through the hills "Peace throughout the land." It would be nice, but it's naive and untrue. Obama seems to believe in it, but thank God he didn't emphasize it in this speech. I feared he would. He missed a big opportunity to address the moderate Muslims of the world, and tell them that we will stand by them against the forces of fundamentalism, close-mindedness, and terror. Islamists do not only lash out at non-Muslims; in fact, the majority of their violence is directed at Muslims who they believe to be insufficiently religious or who happen to belong to a different branch of Islam (Shia vs. Sunni, for example). This was the one big thing missing from the address, and I had a feeling he would fail to make this point (see Tuesday's post). But again, other than a few things I had issues with, it wasn't a bad speech. It had a lot of ho-hum cliches in it, but what speech doesn't? It didn't live up to the hype, but how could it? It's like the world expected the lion to lie with the lamb once this speech was delivered. Not too bad, Mr. President.

I Am an Idiot

2009-06-03T07:23:00.001-07:00

Obama's speech is Thursday, not today. I don't know what I was thinking.

Guess Who's Back? Back Again?

2009-06-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

The Sheriff's back, tell a friend. He's back and ready to engage in the ongoing struggle to bring some law and order into this chaotic, effed up world we call home. And no doubt one of the most chaotic, effed up places in this chaotic, effed up world is the Middle East. There's no point to quibble about it: this area is more or less a smorgasbord of shit in all its forms: big, small, solid, diarrheatic, even steatorrheatic (look that one up!) It's almost like flipping through that book Everyone Poops. And despite all that, or perhaps because of it, I find it to be the most fascinating corner of the globe. Indeed, in September I will begin the pursuit of a Masters in Middle East Studies (and international economics) at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. In this region, there are so many things going on: Israeli drama with the new President, their neverending clash with the Palestinians and their neighbors, Iran trying to get the bomb, Sunni-Shia tension, upcoming elections in Lebanon and Iran, etc.

Tomorrow, President Barack Obama is going to deliver a speech to the Muslims of the world in Cairo, Egypt. I will be watching (well, more likely reading a transcript) like a hawk. I am hoping that it will be effective, but in reality I am expecting more of the same: a praise of Islam and Arab society to the skies and a simultaneous apology for our myriad policies in the region. Obviously, policy toward this region is a lose-lose. Years ago, we used to prop up dictators in the Middle East (as in Latin America) in an attempt to maintain stability (see: Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza), which pissed everyone off. Under Bush, we tried the opposite - throwing out dreadful regimes in the attempt to spread freedom and democracy, although the main goal was to topple the Taliban and Hussein regimes (that WAS the main goal, democracy and all that jazz was secondary). Secondary or no, it is now derided in the elite foreign policy circles, and now we are back at square one - not stirring the pot, not rocking the boat, bowing to foreign monarchs, in a word, realpolitik. Yes, that dreadful realpolitik, as perfected by Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century and Otto von Bismarck in the 19th. Horrible, dreadful. We used it to prop up Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, the Shah in Iran, anything to keep those communists at bay. And the left screamed about how deplorable it was, and how we should use our power to free people from the clutch of tyranny. And when Bush did that, he received oppobrium and was chastised and scorned and lectured that he should have practiced a realist foreign policy. Exactly which way Bush could have gone and gotten positive reviews, I am not sure.

But anyway, realism is back. Obama promised change, but really all he has done is revert back to the old way of doing things. Conduct foreign policy based on interests, not values or human rights or any of that abstract nonsense. Exactly how Obama is being revolutionary here is beyond me. Sure he is a change from Bush, but that doesn't mean that he's conducting some sort of radical foreign policy change. It appears to me as though he will go back to the Bush I, James Baker III way of taking care of business: namly, blow the Saudis for their oil and pressure the Israelis to stop being so evil. It's not like the Israelis have given up the Sinai Peninsula or the Gaza Strip. Oh, they have? It's not like they have faced an onslaught of rockets for years and years by Hamas and the constant threat of Hezbollah in the north. Oh, they have? It's not like the Iranians have a nutjob president who rants and raves about wiping the "Zionist entity" off the map every other day. Oh, they do? The Bush and Baker, and now Obama, way of foreign policy is nothing more than a fancy way of kicking things under the rug. Shaking hands for the cameras. Giving a smile and a wink. A laugh. Talking for its own sake. Getting nothing accomplished but looking damn good doing it (see: North Korea, Six Party talks on). I admire realpolitik in many ways, and believe that it is extremely useful in many cases (for example, pitting Stalin against Hitler, the Iraqis against the Iranians, etc.). But I am afraid that maintaining the status quo in the Middle East at this juncture would be quite dangerous.

They say that insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In that case, our foreign policy establishment is insane. I'm talking batshit, talking to walls, off-their-rocker, should-be-institutionalized, Jeffrey Dahmer- level insane. We've been looking the other way with the Saudi regime since its beginning in 1932. Every president since FDR has praised them to the high heavens, never given more than lip service to human rights abuses, and some have even engaged in frankly embarassing behavior (Bush holding Prince Abdullah's hand like they were on a date, Obama bowing to the same). No one else gets treated like this. On the other side of the coin, Israel had better stop building those settlements or else. A kind whisper to the Arabs, a harsh word to the Israelis. I sometimes forget that the Israelis are our ally. And, after all this, what have we accomplished? Nothing.

I'm sort of digressing, but the point is that Obama's speech is going to praise the Arabs and Islam to the skies, and at the same time apologize for our transgressions (and probably bring up the false linkage that if only the Israeli-Palestinian issue is solved, everything else in the region will fall into place - this is, to put it charitably, retarded). I think that it is fine to say positive things about Arab culture and Islam, and of course there are many positive and fascinating things about both. But there is a difference between admiration and fawning. One can still come from a position of strength for the former; the latter is a position of submission. It is a dog who is kicked by a master, returns, and is kicked again. It is not respect. And also, it seems really phony. The new years greeting to the Iranians was like watching a bad actor with lame dialogue.

It is a fact that Islamic terrorists have been attacking Americans since the late 1970s and they have only increased in their virulence and in their sheer numbers. I emphasize "Islamic" because I think we have forgotten, and been allowed to forget. After all, there is no such things as terrorism, let alone Islamic terrorism. Only "man-made disasters". Right, Jane Napolitano? Although I suppose if there was another Baruch Goldstein-like attack, the word "terrorism" would be fine (and it would be true, I'm just pointing out the double standard). If it wasn't our support for the Shah, it would be something else. If it wasn't the support of Israel or exploitation for oil and any other such excuse, it would be something else. Believe me. These fundamentalists are not rational actors. Obama needs to address the moderates and tell them that it is their responsibility to face these crazies and make it clear that they, the moderates, are the true face of Islam, and not these murderous thugs. That would be a marvelous speech, and I hope he makes that point. But I'm not so sure he will. And if he does, I fear it will be an obscure, throwaway line sandwiched between a lot of apologizing.

We'll have to wait and see. I hope I am proven wrong and that the speech is one to remember with a strong, positive impact.

On the Day of Our Lord 101

2009-04-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

Yeah...that sounds about right.

Yesterday was the 100th day of the Obama administration - a day that was destined to be a celebration, regardless of the facts. Let's be realistic. Obama could have spent these past three months crocheting a new line of Obama afghan blankets, and these 100 days would still have been regarded as amazing, promising, unprecedented, etc.

The 100-day benchmark is laughably arbitrary. I don't put much stock in it. Obama could have had a marvelous first 100 days and still turn out to be a disaster, or he could have had a dreadful first 100 days and turn out to be a Rushmore level president. It's just a silly demarcation. Yet its importance has been constantly magnified because of the first 100 days of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, in which sweeping banking and monetary reforms (such as the Emergency Banking Act, the suspension of the gold standard and the easing of monetary policy, and the creation of the FDIC), as well as programs for rural development were enacted. During the campaign, Obama was known to be reading Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (which I have read), probably so that he could know the competition, and ultimately surpass it.

Obama has a pretty high approval rating, but that is not uncommon for first term presidents. Hell, even Lord Voldemort (his alias being George W. Bush) had an approval rating in the low 60s. So, there is not much room for analysis there. The American people are generally optimistic people who have great confidence in their leaders; that is, until their leaders squander their trust. The media has already been elevating Obama to Lincoln-esque stature and the man has been president for 100 days. If this is not absurd, I don't know what it is. (Then again, perhaps I too am being absurd for being so hard on him within such a brief period of time - but this is because I have a fearful sense of where this is leading. You may say it is hypocritical of me to criticize in the same time frame I am saying it is unwarranted to praise - yet I have no problem with praising the man, not at all - I do have problems with putting him on Mt. Rushmore already, however).

Since having taken office, Obama has either achieved or championed the following: a bijillion dollar stimulus package that Americans will still be paying off in 2172; a $3.5 trillion dollar budget; universal (i.e. DMV-style) healthcare; Government (formerly General) Motors; "green" jobs and energy whose costs would be devastatingly high; higher taxation on the rich (a vague term that keeps becoming broader and broader), but whatever, the pigs deserve it; a plan that essentially makes responsible home-owners pay off the mortgages of those who have made mistakes; the chastising and emasculating of our national security and intelligence apparatus; the open consideration of Stalin-esque show trials of former public servants; pitiful, embarrassingly obsequious statements to the Islamic Republic of Iran; a laughably impotent response to the North Korean missile launch (indeed, the very same day he called for the abolition of all nuclear weaponry, with the U.S. leading the way - it would be nice but men such as Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don't listen to such fluff); flip-flopping on nearly every campaign promise except the closing of Gitmo (recognizing the Armenian Genocide, not appointing lobbyists, etc.); apologizing to the countries that we saved in two world wars, and protected during the Cold War; torrid make-out sessions with Hugo Chavez, with Raul Castro awaiting his turn with lustful eyes...you get the picture. I, for one, am not especially enthralled with his first 100 days. At the same time, I can't say I didn't expect it - read older posts and you'll see that very clearly.

But none of this matters. It is more about the man than the policies. Most blacks, as a whole, agree more with Republican social policies, yet nearly all voted for this man, simply because of his race. And, honestly, I believe that this is reason for much of the praise. Obama's election makes us feel good because it is a bookend to our past - and I will cede that point. But just because his presidency is symbolically satisfying does not mean that print media has to become hagiography. Yet it largely has. Individuals who have some issue with the fiscal policies of the Obama administration (and are none too pleased with Republicans either) engaged in lawful and constitutional dissent at "tea parties" - and were sneered at and called racists and extremists for so doing. The media assails conservatives before the latter can even open their mouths to defend themselves, pre-emptively accusing them of racism, bitterness, and intransigence. Yet when Bush was in office, dissent was the noblest of pursuits, and the media did not assail any protestors. Rather, they were very respectful and, I suspect, sympathetic.

I don't think that it is possible that Obama can ever be considered a failure. If seven and a half years from now, the misery index is 50%, we have been invaded by jihadists from across the Mexican border, and have suffered a biological attack, Obama will still be lauded in the history books. Again, because of the symbolism of the man, of what he represents, not of his actual deeds. This infuriates me. Every speech that he gives (and he has already more or less worn out his welcome with me, what has he given, 80 speeches?) is praised as poetic verse, full of profound moral clout, indicative of a sophisticated, mature intellect that is nearly incomprehensible to us peons. Obama has read the CIA memos proving that their "torture" methods worked in extracting information from terrorists that saved thousands of lives. Yet Obama says that those extreme methods were unnecessary - this information could have been attained otherwise. How does he know this (other than being the omniscient, omnipotent One God that He is)? It is clear that he will stick with his preconceived notions despite all evidence that undermines them. That is not pragmatism. When conducting my honors thesis, I did not have a conclusion before I conducted my research. I found a topic in which I was interested (Allied formulation of post-war German policy, with a focus on Roosevelt's contributions), and pored through thousands of pages in books and in archives, spending hours in front of microfilm projectors and thumbing through old, crumbling documents. Only then did I determine a conclusion. I did not come up with a conclusion and then look only for what supported it, blindfully ignoring everything else. This has, however, been common of late in academia -leftist conclusions come before the analysis of any data, but they are "conclusions" nonetheless. This is what Obama has done - the opposite of what I did, and what responsible historians do. It is a shame.

The media has been beating us with the pragmatist stick. As opposed to the wild capitalist cowboy George W. Bush, Obama is careful, thoughtful, pragmatic, intellectually open, mentally virile, sophisticated, sober, etc. Yet I have never seen much proof of this. Yes, the man speaks well, eloquently even, but is this the mark of intellect or merely that of a great orator? According to a Wall Street Journal article I read this morning, when on the Harvard Law Review, he listened to debates but did not engage in them. When he did speak, both sides thought that he was with them. He pulled the same trick on the electorate during this past election - he tried to be all things to all people by the use of rhetorical illusions. He was anything that you wanted him to be. Marxist, liberal, moderate, even conservative - he could be any one of these to any one person. Is this the mark of the pragmatist or of a political magician? I think that leadership requires taking stances, not speaking in vague terms and hedging every sentence uttered. Just because a man speaks well and is photographed with his hand on his chin, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, does not make him a pragmatic, intellectual wonder.

And why is it that the pragmatic position seems to always be the liberal position? If conservatives disagree with a liberal contention, they are being intransigent and they are foot-dragging. They are extremists and out of the mainstream, and they are the party of "no" and of the past. It is they who are always expected to compromise in order to be pragmatic. This country is farther left than it has ever been, yet we are told that the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it's nearing the edge. George Bush paved the road that led to the effective nationalization of AIG and, coming shortly, GM. For their presidential candidate, Republicans nominated a man who is barely right-of-center. The "middle", for this President, this Congress, and the media, is somewhere squarely on the left side of the spectrum. I don't recall the media calling the Democrats intransigent, or calling for them to come to the middle, or to be "pragmatic", when Bush was in office. The "reasonable" side in a dispute is always the liberal one, the extreme, dumb one always the conservative. This is why the media has largely become, in my opinion, quite dangerous. It has largely obfuscated the fact that Bush tried fairly hard to compromise and to work with Democratic members of Congress - look at the No Child Left Behind Act. What has Obama done that has been similarly bipartisan, other than talk a good game? This is not true bipartisanship. Obama may seem to consider all viewpoints, but in the end it's his way or the highway. And if you don't like it, you're a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal with extremist views. His idea of bipartisanship is "Sure, I will listen to your views, but in the end you had better agree with me." Again, it's coming to foregone conclusion without debate. Any and all deliberation with Republican legislators has been of a shallow nature - invites to the Super Bowl, dinners, etc. Token gestures. I know that Republicans lost, but Obama has spoken of the need to heal fractures in the American polity - he should not answer their disagreements with a "We won".

In this society, appearing intellectual is proof of intellectualism. Being pragmatic and moderate means for the conservative to always compromise on his principles, but never the liberal. The center of the road is somewhere between the viewpoints of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer - everything to the right of this is irrational nonsense to be ignored.

Bipartisan and open-minded, indeed.

What a Joke

2009-04-22T14:05:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, the Obama worship is getting out of control. I have never seen anything like it in my life. It started off innocently enough, with everyone wildly raving about his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. From there, it has reached levels of plain absurdity. Ever since Watergate, every journalist has made it his or her duty to find out the nitty gritty about elected officials: corruption, scandals, etc. With this guy, no one seems to really care. I have never seen, or expected to see, or wanted to see, a picture of the President of the United States, while in office, with his shirt off (I add "while in office" because I have seen a picture of JFK shirtless during World War II). If there are such pictures, they certainly were not displayed on the front cover of a magazine. The latest issue of The Washingtonian, on the other hand, has got such a picture on its cover. It is hard to remember that Barack Obama is President of the United States, as opposed to the latest movie star. This is our nation's American Idol culture gone wild. This past election was a joke: Obama had it won from the very beginning. The media spun themselves dizzy making Hillary and Bill Clinton look like racists. And, my oh my, look at that Obama. Cool, suave, telegenic, great speaker - wow, he sure does seems presidential. More than the Dragon Lady and wishy-washy curmudgeonly McCain, anyway. And that tongue of gold! And he's black, so he is the very embodiment of this nation's coming to terms with its past! He is the very embodiment of Martin Luther King's dream! What's not to like?

Look, I haven't seen many world leaders who have tried to pull off this whole shirtless act. I know of pictures of Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, and that's really about it. Not that I have done an extensive search mind you. I don't feel especially comfortable floating around the Internet looking for pics of shirtless world leaders. But Mussolini was a socialist cum fascist, and Putin is a quasi-fascist himself. Mussolini was all about being the baddest guy on the block, and Putin sees himself in the same light. Barack Obama is supposedly about discarding the whole "macho" image of the Bush Administration and returning to quiet diplomacy, speaking softly and carrying a small stick. Obama probably didn't strut topless with the intention of appearing on the magazine, but the media salivated all over the image. The members of the media have engaged in a shoving match to be first in line to drop to his or her knees in front of our 44th President. I know that he's popular, urbane, and that he is following the presidency of Lord Voldemort. But you're not in 9th grade, and he's not Zac Efron. Get a hold of yourself.

Let me put it this way: at this point in time, Obama could eat magic mushrooms and prance merrily down the National Mall while wearing a Hello Kitty dress and licking an oversized lollipop, and the entire media would tell us that this was leadership distilled to its very essence.

I was ready to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and indeed, it is still very early in his presidency, that is certain. But there have been instances that have unnerved me. Here are some (and these only relate to foreign policy/national security concerns; economic policy is a whole other ball game):

1) Gave a speech in Prague speaking in a naive fashion about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, beginning with the U.S. If we get rid of the nukes, it will give us moral authority and everyone will follow suit. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Kim Jong Il launched a missile, as if to say, "Welcome to the real world, Mr. Obama." Obama also apologized for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were horrific incidents, to be sure, no one disputes that. It was a dreadful thing. But it saved millions of lives - remember, the Japanese Empire consisted of some BAMFs who would have fought to the very, bitter end. An Allied invasion of Tokyo would have led to mind-boggling casualties, which would have dwarfed the number of those lost in the atomic bomb. During the Cold War, if we did not have nukes, what do you think would have stopped the Soviets from invading Central Europe? And do you really think that if we were to get rid of our nukes, Ahmadinejad would wake up one morning as if from a daze and call for an immediate halt to his nuclear program? There is a difference between being liked and respected. Obama is liked, to an insane degree. The leaders at G-20 and the recent summit in Trinidad and Tobago did everything short of tackle each other to get photographed with him. But that is not the same as respect. Read some Machiavelli.

2) Apologized for anything and everything under the sun when he visited Strasbourg, France. I am not sure why we have to apologize to Europe. The lines of crosses and Stars of David lining the cemeteries of Normandy pay testament to the sacrifices we have made for that continent. So we have to apologize to them because we decided it was in our interest to invade Iraq? We have to crawl over there and beg for forgiveness? I still don't understand why Europeans deem themselves so culturally superior to us. Europe gave birth to the most disastrous ideologies in modern history, ideologies that made the 20th century by far the bloodiest in the history of humanity. Communism, fascism, and Nazism all have a common womb in Europe. Europeans are now largely pacifist because the Second World War left a searing legacy, as it should have. But they don't have the right to dictate our foreign policy. I do not understand why Bush was supposed to go to the Europeans first. Get over yourselves. Our national security is our problem. As much as the Left would like to believe it, the invasion of Iraq was not analogous to Hitler's blitzkrieg of Poland. You can make an intelligent argument that the war was/is a mistake, but all this Bush=Worst Person Ever stuff is inaccurate, unfair, and quite frankly, tired.

3) Obama has made sure to invite King Abdullah of Jordan to the White House but rebuffed Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Prime Minister of Israel. Good to see that he has his priorities straight.

4) I know that much of it had to do with cameras being around and trying to be polite, but Obama and Chavez looked like they wanted to pull a Larry Craig in the bathroom with one another. I understand having to shake Chavez's hand, but do you have to grin at him with such warmth as though he were a dear friend? Chavez is a destabilizing force if ever there was one, a menace to both his country and his region, an idiot who fancies himself a latter day Mussolini (his poses aren't nearly as epic, however) and he may very well be the most disrespectful person in world politics. Indeed, he called Obama an "ignoramus" about a month ago, in addition to referring to Bush as the devil many times. Just shake the man's hand briefly, and be done with it. Instead, Obama gave him dap like he was his homie from the block. Come on.

5) The latest release of a memo explaining "torture" techniques used against Islamist terrorists is a shame. And, the thing of it is, this was not torture. The memo clearly shows that our civil servants had a struggle. On the one hand, they were dealing with murderous terrorists who had all the intentions in the world of striking our country again, and may have already set a plan in motion to do so. On the other, they were moral human beings who had qualms with treating people harshly. Our soldiers go through waterboarding in survival training. If we can put them through it, then I have no problem doing it to such thugs as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Oh, and putting a caterpillar in a man's cell is not torture. This is such a joke. I can practically hear our enemies laughing us. When are the liberals going to get it: if we make "nice", it won't get rid of terrorism. It is my understanding that it is against protocol to slap these men, to yell at them, to curse at them, and to insult them. How about this? Play the card game "war" with a terrorist, and if he wins, then no more interrogations and he can go free. If you win, then he kindly has to tell you everything that he knows. Well, if he happens to feel like it. Will that please the ACLU? It is unfortunate, but it will take another attack to wake these people up. And even then, such an attack will be blamed on the evil policies of George W. Bush. I JUST DON'T GET IT. Back in World War II, if a Nazi saboteur was found out of uniform, he was put up against a wall and shot. No trial, no bitching, no moaning. Nowadays, if you put a caterpillar in a terrorist's cell, suddenly you're Torquemada. Meanwhile, the same people who wanted to string up the likes of Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow are willing to turn the other way with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad et al. I doubt any of them would have cared if a centipede or something had been let loose in Fastow's cell (and I wouldn't have either). But in Abu Zubaydah's cell? Oh the humanity!!

And on top of this, Obama said that he is open to the idea of prosecuting lawyers who had advised the CIA to use these "torture" techniques. How about this, Mr. President - stop fighting fantasy and start fighting reality. His Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's statements about the "torture" says it all. He made a statement to the effect that it is easy for us to judge the interrogators on a sunny day in April 2009 but those were dark days when we had to deal with a terrorist threat. Uhhhh.....As far as I know, we still have such a terrorist threat. The liberals can't make it go away by pretending it doesn't exist and going instead after Bush's gang of Goerings and Hesses. You see, this is what is unfortunate in the world of intelligence and national security: When you mess up, you get a 9/11 and you get hammered by the press and the public; when you succeed, everyone forgets about the threat and thinks that it was hyped for political expediency.

This administration has got to be kidding me.

Some Observations

2009-04-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

No pithy title, sorry.

1) I don't have much to say about the whole Somali pirate situation. Thank God that it turned out the way that it did, and I hope that other such situations are resolved with similar outcomes. Frankly, these pirates need to get smacked around a little bit. The Navy SEALS kicked some ass, and Obama deserves some credit for the positive outcome.

2) From an article I read today: "Ask those on the Left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning Left-Islamist alliance?"

This is a question that needs to be answered. And let me clarify that I don't mean Democrats are allying with Islamists, I mean those with more extreme views. But I also must clarify that these views are becoming ever more mainstream, which is why they can't be discounted. The answer to this question needs to go beyond the standard "Americans are white and rich", "Americans who work for a profit are little Eichmanns" and "Oh, these Muslims are poor and oppressed, they just need some understanding" - it's non-analytical pablum. There are poor and oppressed people all over the world who do not resort to terrorism. I haven't seen too many Tibetans strap bombs to themselves and then run into a Chinese Communist Party building. Don't these people realize that if they lived under the rule of these Islamists, they would be denied everything that they supposedly value so dearly, and perhaps their very lives? I'm not sure they do. Apparently, Islamic terrorism is either: a) a product of the Bush Administration's fascist, imperialist, racist (you name it) policies or b) not really a big deal, but the Bush Administration made it seem as such to strip us of our civil liberties and establish Buchenwalds throughout the land. These views seem mutually exclusive to me, but they tend to come out of the same mouth. That and, don't forget, blame those Israelis and/or Jews! What evil are they NOT responsible for? The Left is, outside of radical Islam, the bastion of anti-Semitism today. Sure, there are some right-wing kooks too, but they are, to put it mildly, non-influential jokes.

3) Apparently, the economy being in the tank is only going to rile the right wing. That's right: the Department of Homeland Security has issued a report warning of possible violence coming from right-wing elements and disgruntled veterans returning from the theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mind you, there are few hard facts in the report, only a lot of supposing. No specific extreme rightwing entities are listed. Of course, they throw out the name "Timothy McVeigh" as though that psycho is representative of the average U.S. veteran.

You can bet that the result here is going to be a blurring of the line between "conservative" and "rightwing extremist". I have no problem with the report per se except that I know the media is going to run wild with this (as opposed to an obscure DHS report on leftwing extremists attempting cyber warfare, which specifically named left-wing organizations). Its amorphous nature will probably lead to more surveillance of conservative groups in general. If it had named names (say, Ku Klux Klan or skinhead groups), that would be one thing. Just watch those groups (we should be watching them anyway, by the way, so if rightwing extremists = violent racists, then this report shouldn't be needed - it should be obvious that one watches such people). This report is too vague.

Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of being equated with such loathsome people (I use the word "people" lightly). Conservatives are constantly equated with neo-Nazis and abortion-clinic bombers as if they were representative of conservatives as a whole. Again: if John McCain had had even the SLIGHTEST of ties with some abortion-clinic bomber, his campaign would have been shot (it was shot anyway, but still, bear with me). I guess the Weathermen weren't radicals, and never blew up anything. Why is the left always given more slack than the right? Yesterday, I saw an organizer of a "Tea Party" grilled on CNN by Rick Sanchez, who tried his best to make all conservatives look like ranting racists. I have trouble imagining Sanchez or his ilk grilling left-wing anti-Bush demonstrators in the same fashion.

There is nothing racist about conservatism. In this DHS report, they make the point that the election of a black president makes right-wing extremist activity very likely. There are undoubtedly a good amount of people who dislike Obama merely because of his race, but they should not automatically be assumed to be conservative. Conservatism believes in self-reliance and individualism, and not favoring any one class or race over another. I think that modern liberalism is racist, if anything. It attempts to peg all individuals of one race in the same hole, as if these individuals lack the capacity to think independently. If a black votes Republican, he or she is a traitor to the race. In other words, they are expected to vote in a bloc, and if someone falls out of line, he or she is an "Oreo" (black on the outside and white in the middle). Thinking of all people within a race as indistinguishable from one another in the values they hold dear and in their thinking processes is racist.

I am tired of having to explain why I am a conservative to peers, after seeing a look of shock and disbelief on their face, as though I admitted that I had a thing for little kids. I'm tired of having to constantly be on guard, of constantly having to debate, of constantly having to defend my positions as though I were defending the honor of Jeffrey Dahmer. I am sick of liberals going on and on about freedom of speech and the nobility of dissent, yet if I have a different viewpoint, I am automatically shouted down or looked at funny. I have a different outlook than you - get over it. We're human beings who individually and independently come to different conclusions, regardless of the subject. We're not pre-programmed robots. If you don't like it, create a time machine and travel back to 1930s Russia. I'm sure you would feel right at home.

Both sides like to use the strawman, sure, but now I see it much more on the left. Sometimes I get a sense that when they argue, it's akin to Norman Bates arguing with "Mother" in Psycho. That is, he is arguing with someone who doesn't exist, but has convinced himself that she does. Just like Obama, who attributes views to his opponents which they do not even hold, just so that he is able to smash them in debate. The DHS under Napolitano is similar: they're building up right-wing extremists, who are few and far in between, but on the other hand they won't use the term "War on Terror" and refer to terrorist acts as "man-caused disasters." In other words, let's slay dragons that don't exist and pretend that the ones that DO need slaying don't exist. This is brilliant in its sheer idiocy.

Let me be clear (a phrase the President says so often himself): If such a document had been drafted under Bush's administration, about left-wing extremists, there would have been cries of McCarthyism, fascism, etc. We see no such cries now.

Netanyahu: The Anti-Obama

2009-04-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

And, no, this doesn't mean he is the anti-Christ. But it is in the neighborhood.

Before I proceed with a not-terribly sophisticated analysis of Netanyahu and the world's all too predictable reaction to his ascension to the position of Prime Minister, I would like to digress. Next week, on Wednesday and Thursday nights, Jews will get together for their Passover seders, at which the Exodus from Egypt is recounted. We thank God for passing over Israelite houses, while He slew the first-born of Egypt, in the culmination of the plagues. And we thank Him for freeing the Israelites from the bondage under which they had toiled for centuries and, then, His giving of the Law at Mount Sinai and passage to the Promised Land. During these seders, Jews sing a song called "Dayenu" which means "it would have sufficed". The song recounts miracles for which the Jew thanks God, and that those miracles would have been enough without subsequent miracles (for example, it would have been enough to bring us to Mount Sinai without giving us the Torah).

It appears to me that Islamic fundamentalists live by a creed that is directly opposite that of "Dayenu". It appears that nothing is enough. The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in the 7th century and proceeded to build the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism to which all prayers are directed. It must be stressed that life for Jews under Islamic rule was much better than the Romans and Byzantines before them, and much, much better than life under Crusader rule beginning with Jerusalem's fall to them in 1099 (the Muslims reconquered the city in 1187). But building their holy sites directly upon the holiest site of Jews was not enough. Islam was spread by the sword and reached deep into Europe, before eventually being stopped by Karl Martel at Poitiers in 732. Muslims ruled much of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, and they still pine over their lost "Al-Andalus" (this was an excuse for the bombing of Madrid on March 11, 2004). They overtook Constantinople in 1453 and attempted to seize Vienna in 1529 under the banner of the Ottomans. Their religion spread to the Indian subcontinent as well as southeast Asian islands such as Indonesia.

None of this was enough obviously, because the Islamic fundamentalists today still thirst for more. Indeed, they will not be satisified until every human being is under Sharia law. Much of this is quite obvious, but I think it bears repeating because unfortunately our enemy today is very well-protected by the facts that a) they are spread far and wide, and are numerous; and b) our post-modern, politically correct moral equivalence prevents us from acting forcefully. Unfortunately, this is no conspiracy theory. George W. Bush did not make this up to seize oil and power. It is easy to succumb to such nonsense because it allows us to stick our heads in the sand and focus our attention on a non-existing danger. There is not much danger that goes into attacking a democratically-elected President, no matter what people have convinced themselves. It is much more dangerous to attack the true menace, which is why very few do, and when they are, they are attacked; if not by Islamic extremists, then by those politically correct souls who believe there is no worse crime than to criticize Islam, whether within civilized discourse or silly media, such as cartoons.

Israel is a country the size of New Jersey, surrounded by 20-plus Arab nations. There are a total of 57 Muslim nations, expanding over much of the globe. Yet it is too much for them to accept one Jewish state in their midst. One. And it was bought and built up by the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries after it had been neglected for centuries under Ottoman rule. It was a province of the Ottoman empire. It was no country. Indeed, much of the Middle East consists of very recent countries, drawn up by European diplomats after the two world wars. Before this, identity among Arabs was tribal or otherwise very local. Nationalism did not come into the fore until the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, which inspired rulers such as Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Iraq, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini in Palestine, and, later, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Hafez Al-Assad in Syria.

Anyway, on to Netanyahu.

Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most reviled leaders in the world today, and this is including Kim Jong Il, Muammar Gaddhafi, Omar al-Bashir, Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro (feted by many), Hugo Chavez (similarly feted), and Alexander Lukashenko (who?)...you get the picture. Why does he cause such revulsion? I supose it is because he was seen as intransigent in his first term (1996-1999), although I think most of this is caricature. He came after the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin. This was during the "holiday from history" when everyone had their hopes that peace could have a chance (collapse of the Soviet Union, the Dayton Accords, the Good Friday agreement a few years later, yada yada). Israelis believed that Oslo was their chance to finally have peace with the Palestinians, and Rabin's assassination understandably hit them very hard. In the period just before the election, Netanyahu had led rallies that virulently criticized Rabin and his policies. Therefore, he was held indirectly responsible for the assassination by many.

Netanyahu's first term as Prime Minister was nothing to write home about, it is true. But is mediocrity cause for the hatred he has garnered? And I don't mean among the Israeli electorate: I mean all around the world. He is widely seen as an intransigent, stubborn, anti-Palestinian who ruined the peace process. In fact, he negotiated with Arafat at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland in 1998 and signed off on the Hebron Protocol the year before, leading to troop redeployments from Hebron, one of the four holiest cities in Judaism (the others being Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias). It is not as though Netanyahu told Arafat to piss off. Nonetheless, he was loathed for his perceived intransigence by the Israeli left and, simultaneously, loathed on the Israeli right for his negotiations with Arafat. So...basically he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, between reality and perception. His perceived animosity toward negotiation still stigmatizes him to this day. He is seen by many to be the cause for the death of the peace process, when that dubious honor should clearly go to the late Yasser Arafat.

As the world did then, so they do now: they're all in a hissy fit about the peace process and how Netanyahu's election will derail the whole thing. I have read basically the same op-ed about 15 times from 15 different journalists in at least 5 different countries about how bad Netanyahu is for the "process". Netanyahu is very uncomfortable with the idea of a Palestinian state and has said that the peace process cannot continue until the Palestinian economy is developed. I think that this isn't hard-headedness; in fact, I think that it is pretty sober thinking provided the history of the peace process. He understands that final status issues such as Jerusalem and refugees are too complicated to be crammed down either side's throat, which Bush and Rice tried to do at the Annapolis conference, with the intention of forcing an agreement by the end of 2008 (yeah, right). Netanyahu does not worship at the altar of the peace process. The probability that any final status will be agreed upon to the satisfaction of both sides, in the short or long term, is pretty close to zero. I believe that it is better to see things as they are, rather than as you would hope them to be. There is, unfortunately, no final peace around the corner, nor has there ever been, despite the hype over Oslo and the Rabin-Arafat handshake. It is more practical to start with the smaller, more parochial things, such as the economic development of the West Bank (Gaza under Hamas, you can just forget about) and of the economic relations between the two peoples. This is much more feasible in the short term; the grand issues, such as Jerusalem and refugees, will not come so easily (if at all), even in the long term. Dealing with Arafat aged Bill Clinton 20 years. Everyone wants to be the guy who brought peace to the Middle East, and think that if they put the whole thing in a pressure cooker, it might get done faster. Rather, it will more likely blow up. And, possibly, quite literally.

This is fanciful, naive, and dangerous thinking. The State Department has pledged to pressure Israel, and it seems that President Obama will have no problem pressuring Netanyahu. But pressure doesn't mean it will make it happen. This is not a middle school fight. It is serious and it runs deep. For all you on the Left, let me make an analogy to clear things up for you: many Soviet apologists believe that the Soviet Union failed because Lenin artificially created a communist state. The conditions were not right in Russia: it was a predominantly rural nation and laughably un-modern. Marxist theory postulates that a socialist revolution, leading to an eventual communist state, can only succeed in a modern, industrialized nation with a developed working class. Lenin understood this, but went for it anyway. And while the Soviet Union did eventually modernize (thanks to the work of millions of Gulag slave laborers), socialism's artificial, forced-upon nature in Russia was an original sin that could never be corrected (from this point of view). I don't quite agree. In the same vein, I am also not sure if true peace in the region will ever be achieved. But if you see the Israeli-Palestinian situation through those lenses, you will see that forced social engineering experiments just do not work, inside or outside of communist states. And this is true.

Reality is not always pretty. It is nice to think of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and it is especially nice to think of yourself as the person who made that happen. But that is wishful thinking. If this conflict is solved, it will have to start with training wheels. During the 1990s, it was put on an adult bicycle right off, and we all saw it wobble pathetically, never in control, before it smashed its face into the hard gravel of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

This is an issue, unlike the Iranian nuclear situation, that requires prudence, patience, and realistic, rather than idealistic, thinking.

History Lesson

2009-03-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

I know most of you out there probably fell asleep during your history classes, and you wouldn't be wrong. Most of the textbooks and assigned books out there are less exciting than watching paint dry. Even I, a true history buff, have been bored to tears by much of the material out there. It all has to do with the prose. Most academicians have trouble writing with any sense of flow. This, in my opinion, has much to do with the contempt for the reading of history by many, and especially in my generation. At the very word "history", one's eyes gloss over. It is part and parcel of my generation's contempt for much that is worthy because it is "old": films, music, and events alike. The height of art today is talking about "makin' love in the club" or "makin' it rain on 'em" (the Urban Dictionary's definition for the latter is: "When you're in da club with a [stack], and you throw the money up in the air at the strippers"). I think these songs are fun, and I enjoy bobbing my head to them in the car, but this is not art. I weep for the future. But I digress.

There are many current events that demand attention on my part, not least the latest AIG bonus debacle, but I will zero in on one of them. I have written of it before, but I think that it is a topic that is worthy of many words. It is the anti-Israel hysteria that is sweeping through the world. It is scary because it does not only affect the Jewish State, but all Jews. Witness the recent synagogue vandalism in Venezuela, with its eerie similarity to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 which, throughout Germany, witnessed the burning of synagogues, the vandalism of Jewish shops, the burglary of Jewish homes, and the mass arrests of tens of thousands of Jews and their subsequent internment in concentration camps. If Joseph Goebbels were alive today, he would be beaming with delight. In a certain way he is alive - anti-Semitic literature, such as the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is among the most popular reading in the Arab world. And his "Big Lie" technique is utilized freely: the distortion of Israeli, Jewish, and Zionist history has turned nonsense into uncontested fact.

This nonsense includes that the Arabs were kicked off their land by Zionist settlers. Rather, throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, Jews purchased land from Arab absentee landlords. Much of this land was arid, and Palestine was nothing but a backwater region of the Ottoman Empire. Irrigation and farming techniques practiced by these Jewish immigrants attracted Arab workers from near and far: from what would become Israel, from Syria, what is today Jordan, etc (often illegally, and who can blame them?). It created an economic opportunity for these Arabs, and it created relative economic prosperity for what had been a neglected, run-down area.

Even before the State of Israel was declared in May 1948, there was the hatred and killing of Jews: in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Haifa, to mention a few. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was friends with Adolf Eichmann and toured Auschwitz incognito, according to Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny in his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, also created a Muslim SS Division to fight for the Third Reich and he desired a "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem" in Palestine as well.

As soon as UN Resolution 181 was delivered, calling for the partition of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea between the Arabs and Jews, Arabs vented their fury by immediately attacking their Jewish neighbors. Arab countries immediately invaded, leading to a chaotic situation in which Arabs were forced off their land. The vast majority left because of the Arab armies, who encouraged them to leave their homes for now but return once they had declared victory over the Zionists (which never happened). Their departure was also caused by local Arab leaders and, less frequently, by the Haganah. In the case of Haifa, the Jews begged the Arabs to stay, despite calls for Arab leaders to vacate the city. The Arab nations' culpability was admitted by the Syrian Prime Minister at the time, Khaled al-Azm: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave." There were incidents in which the Haganah removed the Arabs from their land - of this there is no doubt. But it is not the whole story - indeed, it is only a small part of it. Arab propaganda sowed the belief that the Jews were murderous and rapacious, and that they would destroy Arab villages and massacre their occupants. This was hardly true, but hundreds of thousands of Arabs thought it might be, and thus left their homes. Yet the entire refugee problem has been laid at the feet of Israel.

Palestinian refugees have been treated like discarded filth by their Arab neighbors. The vast majority of Arab residents of the Gaza Strip were denied citizenship and employment by Egypt, who occupied this territory until 1967 (the Palestinians were treated as second-class citizens by the Egyptians and Jordanians in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank for nearly 20 years, but occupation would only become an issue from 1967 onward). Instead, Israel's neighbors felt that keeping the refugees impoverished and embittered would serve as useful political leverage against Israel. This is disgusting in its cynicism. To quote Robert Galloway, the former head of the UNRWA (hardly pro-Israel), “The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the UN, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die.” Refugees who fled to Syria reported: "We arrived at the Syrian borders. The Syrian authorities expelled us to Jordan because we entered Syria illegally. Refugees had to beg for food and water. Some nearly starved." Syria was offered handsome compensation by the U.S. in 1952 to resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees within its borders: they refused, preferring to encourage the fedayeen raids on Israeli towns.

It was not until there existed the specter of a Jewish state that the Arabs living in Palestine became "Palestinians". Their national identity is a reaction to the establishment of the State of Israel. Historically, there has never been a people known as "Palestinians" and to the extent there were, Jews living in British-mandated Palestine were referred to as Palestinians as well. The Arabs living in Palestine did not think of themselves as "Palestinians", but rather as part of a greater Arab world or as a part of Syria. This is why Syrian Prime Minister Hafez Al-Assad scoffed at Arafat and the notion of Palestinian exclusivism and nationalism. No less of an authority than Zuhair Muhsin, who was a member of the PLO Executive Council, made it clear that, "There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity....yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."

The entire history of the Palestinians that is peddled by the Arabs, the UN, the Left, and Israel haters (but I repeat myself), is an alteration of the facts. But the Big Lie has served its purpose well, because it has isolated Israel within the realm of international relations. Israel is constantly on the defensive, and it is expected to meet standards of morality that no nation in the history of humanity has had to meet. They have been called Nazis, a particularly hurtful epithet for Jews, and accused of apartheid and genocide. They have been accused of everything under the sun. They supposedly control the United States (this is an update of the old anti-Semitic smear that Jews ran the world and international finance in particular). Yet this is a nation the size of New Jersey, surrounded by hostile enemies. For a nation under these circumstances to pursue fascistic expansionism would be idiotic, and for one to assert such is to divorce onself from reality. The sacrifices it has been expected to make on the altar of peace have been expansive and, furthermore, ridiculous. Very little sacrifice has been expected of the Palestinians or the Arab nations that border Israel.

The Oslo peace process of the 1990s is a case in point. The recital of the names of peace conferences and documents is long but barely relevant, because the peace process officially died in the flames of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (and was more or less in hospice care for its entire existence). But it is important because it highlights the fact that all of the meetings had absolutely no effect on Palestinian intransigence. They are: the Madrid Conference of 1991 (which kicked things off); the Oslo Accords, also known as the Declaration of Principles, of 1993; the Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994; Oslo II of 1995; the Hebron Protocol of January 1997; the Wye River Memorandum of October 1998; the Sharm el-Sheikh conference of September 4, 1999 (the exact date of my Bar Mitzvah, which is why I specified it); and, the finale of the peace process, Camp David of 2000. At Camp David, which witnessed an awkward instance in which Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat kept insisting that the other proceed first through a door, Arafat stormed out. This despite the Palestinians being offered: all of the Gaza Strip, 95% of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as its capital (including the Old City). Israelis were actually stunned at the generosity of Barak's concessions. Arafat rejected them with no counterproposal, like a five-year old child who indignantly pouts "No" to everything he is offered by his mother.

Arafat did this because he realized that to sign off on these proposals would be an acceptance that Israel was giving him basically everything he wanted (except the Palestinian "right of return", which no Israeli government can consider as it would erase the Jewish state of its Jewishness). He did not want this, because it would take away excuses for violence. So instead, he went home and drew up the Al-Aqsa Intifada which erupted two months after Camp David. Some will argue that it was the provocation of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount that caused the violence - but the facts are that the intifada was planned before Sharon's visit (this has been admitted by Palestinian leaders, such as Marwan Barghouti). The Intifada featured unprecedented levels of violence. It seemed as though peace was just on the horizon, but it was only a mirage. True peace intimidates the Palestinian leadership (though not most of the Palestinian people), because responsibility comes with that peace. This they do not want. They would not be able to maintain their power without an Israel to hate and at which to direct violence.

Yet none of these historical examples seem to give those in power any pause for consideration. The peace process is touted, but has become an end in and of itself rather than a "process" that would lead to a "peace" as it names implies. Everyone wants to be Bill Clinton, standing by as the two sides shake hands, even when it is only appearances and has no depth or substance to it. When realistic people say that the peace process needs to be put onto the back burner for a while, they are castigated as "anti-Arab" and "instransigents". Rather, they are students of history. The history is obvious. Until there is a Palestinian leader who cares more for economic development than the destruction of Israel, there will be no peace, and to forcibly demand the two sides to come together before that time would only be a waste of breath. Nothing substantive could possibly come of such talks.

Israel must assert itself in the face of its many foes. The fact that they are blamed for not conceding enough when they have offered to concede nearly everything proves the bias. The falsified and distorted history of the conflict has become the conventional truth and the framework through which the conflict is seen. Diplomacy is a good thing, but only when it has the chance to succeed, not for appearance's sake. The Jews cannot win - throughout history they were the killers of Christ, usurers, kidnappers and eaters of Christian and/or Muslim children, diabolical, shadowy, hook-nosed sub-humans who had their hands on the strings of finance and power, Shylocks, Fagins, cowards. But now that the Jews have asserted themselves with their own nation, the ideology of Zionism is fascistic and racist, their self-defense is aggressive war, their state is one of imperialism, apartheid, and warmongering. So the Jews have made the progession from cowardly, hunch-backed creatures to tough, imperialist fascists within a remarkably short period of time. And the world, inundated by the media which parrots the anti-Israel swindle, accepts this new view of the aggressive Jew who delights in the pain of Palestinian women and children. There is nothing short of committing seppuku that Israel could do to appease its enemies. And it appears that much of the world couldn't care less if that were the case.

What's Going On?

2009-03-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, so let's review the current state of the union and the world at large:

1) President Obama effectively spits in the face of our most traditional ally, Great Britain. Yes, in the 18th century and much of the 19th century, we didn't get along, but we have had a special relationship since the 20th century. World War I and World War II cemented it. However, Obama returns a bust of Winston Churchill that Tony Blair had given Bush, and then insults Gordon Brown when the Prime Minister visits him at the White House. Brown's gift was quite thoughtful and interesting - a pen carved from the wood of a 19th century anti-slave trade ship. Obama gave Mr. Brown 25 DVDs in return. Will these even run on UK DVD players? Also, no press conference or state dinner for Brown. In international relations, this is a bitch slap. Brown sure does need a bitch slap, for a lot of reasons, but Obama has got to understand that he is not the proper person to administer it. It should come from the British parliament and/or electorate. This was tasteless. The excuse? He's tired. If Bush had committed such a diplomatic faux pas, and came up with that lame excuse, the media would be guffawing at his imbecility. Not for Obama. They're still salivating over his glistening pecs.

2) President Obama sends a note to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, in which he offered to stand down on missile defense systems in POland and the Czech Republic if Russia would help to pressure Iran on its nuclear program. Interesting idea, Iran does need to be pressured. But President Obama must understand that these nations' souls had been crushed for nearly 50 years: first under the swastika and then under the hammer and sickle. The Soviet Union owned their lives for just about a half century. Unlike us, who have taken our freedoms for granted, the people of these nations breathe every free breath with gusto. Russia has been increasingly aggressive of late (see: Rape of Georgia). So this offer, while perhaps made with the best of intentions, was a slap to the face of two more allies. Oh, and it didn't work. Medvedev said the two issues were not linked, and essentially faceplanted Obama. This has to be embarrassing for the White House.

3) Tibet just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Lhasa Uprising against China. China is in the midst of a potentially tumultuous year, because there are a lot of anniversaries in addition to the Tibetan milestone: the 10th anniversary of the Falun Gong protest at the Zhongnanhai (the HQ of the Chinese Community Party) which led to a brutal crackdown, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, which I'm sure a lot of dissidents don't really appreciate. More power to these dissidents and the Tibetans. I feel bad for them because, in between rallies for the Palestinians and those poor babies held up in Guantanamo Bay, no one has the time to care about them. Even if they did have the time, I doubt they would care anyway.

4) There is a huge financial and economic crisis occurring, as you all know. President Obama keeps saying it's the worst crisis since the Great Depression. I'm no economics expert, perhaps it is. But we will not get out of this crisis by nationalizing healthcare, education, and installing a cap and trade system to incentivize cuts in carbon emissions. This is like if my house was on fire and I set to work on my car's engine.
a) The horror stories I hear from the United Kingdom are enough to give me pause about nationalizing healthcare. Do you want your life, and that of a loved one, in the hands of a bureaucrat who doesn't even know you? A person who has no interest in whether you live or die? Do you want your elderly relative to be told that chemotherapy is out of the question because he/she is too old, is going to die anyway, and therefore the cost of the treatment is too high to warrant it? This is scary stuff.
b) Nationalizing education is iffy. No Child Left Behind was stupid, and I am 99.999% sure that throwing more federal money at these schools will accomplish nothing. Leave it to the municipalities and/or the states.
c) Cap-and-trade may or may not have its merits, but now is not the time for it. Let's fix the financial mess first. One thing at a time, Mr. Obama.
A shit ton of money is being thrown at issues that aren't related to the central financial crisis. The debt that my generation will have to shoulder is ridiculous, and getting more so. Between the stimulus package, perhaps another one (Pelosi seems open to this idea), nationalizing healthcare, and skyrocketing energy costs, the federal government is spending a lot of money. A fricking lot. And it has to come from somewhere: there is no such thing as a free lunch. It comes, ladies and gentlemen, from you and me...and our children...and grandchildren...and great-grandchildren, etc.

5) Iran has, according to Israeli intelligence, crossed the nuclear threshold. What do we do? More sanctions, I assume, and dialogue. This isn't wrong, but I fear that Iran will use this time to proceed with the enrichment that weaponizes uranium. Benjamin Netanyahu may want to act, but it will be tough for Israel to attack Iran without cooperation from the White House. The quickest way from Israel to Iran is over Iraq, and we control Iraqi airspace. This makes things awkward, and very difficult logistically, for Israel. Sanctions have been, and will in all likelihood continue to be, ineffective, but acting militarily is a very unattractive option right now, and for good reason. Scary times, people.

6) Approximately $2.8 billion is going toward helping the Palestinians rebuild Gaza after the IDF's Operation Cast Lead. $900 million is coming from us. I can guarantee that the vast majority, if not all, of this money will wind up in the hands of Hamas. The PA is weak even in its West Bank "stronghold", but especially so in Gaza, and the pro-Hamas United Nations Relief and Works Agency will help in the rebuilding, so you can rest assured that Hamas will get its hands on that money. So once again, our tax dollars will go toward the facilitation of terror. Don't you love it?

7) Last week was "Israel Apartheid Week" at scores of college campuses both here in the U.S. and in other countries. This comparison with South Africa has got to stop. There is absolutely no parallel. Arabs hold office in Israel, and public establishments are not segregated. Perhaps de facto they are, but not de jure. In Apartheid South Africa, this wasn't an uncommon sight. Israel's West Bank Barrier is for defensive purposes, not racist ones. And it works. Pro-Israeli students have been beaten up at these "apartheid" events, but disciplinary action seems to have only been taken against the beaten. "Apartheid" has lost its original meaning, as has "liberalism", "fascism", "Zionism", and "feminism". In this post-modern, politically correct world in which we live, people try so hard to see things from the "unorthodox" point of view that their viewpoint has become irrevocably upside down. The understanding we have sought has become outright sympathy, and a detestation and contempt for ourselves, and for those most like us (the Brits, Israelis, other democratic nations). In this bizarro world view, the Castros and Mugabes of the world are the good guys.

8) The education system in this country would be a joke if it wasn't so scary. From K-12 through grad school, students are groomed with a morally equivalent outlook. And sometimes, it is not equivalent so much as rooting for the other side. Examples: Gorbachev = a Herculean hero, Reagan = an evil dope. Alger Hiss = upright citizen, Richard Nixon = the most evil man in the history of humans until he was supplanted by He Who Shall Not Be Named, George Voldemort Bush. It is scary because idiotic, naive college students never grow out of their idiotic, naive stage. They rage against McCarthyism, yet seem accepting of the former Soviet Union, insisting it wasn't so bad. Well, I suggest for these people to read about the Holodomor, the Great Purge, or Kolyma. Not as bad as Guantanamo (what is?) but still. Horrific. Che Guevara, who had people murdered for their insufficient revolutionary fervor, is regarded as a Christ-like figure for dying for his glorious cause. And the groupthink of such people is astounding - if one were to espouse any view other than theirs, one would be a troglodyte, fascist, etc. If you don't agree with them you are narrow-minded, they say - the irony of this statement truly cannot be overstated, yet this glaring hypocrisy is not noticed by these so-called intellectuals. Many State Department officials today are naive college students who have traded their Che Guevara shirts for shirts and ties and their Birkenstocks for dress shoes. But their essence has not changed. The naivete of some of our officials, not excluding our president, is crazy. If only we talk and listen, everything will be right with the world. Talking is good, definitely more desirable than war, but to put all of your faith in it is insane. But this is what they teach nowadays. The quality of education since the period just before the Vietnam War is more in free fall than the Dow Jones Industrial Average (excluding yesterday's surge).

9) There was a demonstration by British Muslims against British troops returning home from Iraq. They held signs calling them "baby killers" and one, when interviewed, said that the Brits are 21st century Nazis. If anyone is 21st century Nazis, it's these Muslim extremists. If they hate Western civilization so much, why don't they go back to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or wherever it is they come from? If they want to live under Sharia law, why don't they go where it is in force? Islamism is spreading like a cancer. No one has the balls to stop it, or even tell it like it is, and those that do (like Geert Wilders) are called "Islamophobes", shunned, and given death threats by people like these demonstrators. But bash those dirty Jews all you want! You sure wouldn't be banned from England, but say something against Muslims - not invited. Who is in charge, anyway? (And, by the way, this story reminds me of those who called our soldiers returning from Vietnam "baby killers" and "fascists" - scumbags).

10) When liberals speak their mind when conservatives are in power, dissent is patriotic. When conservatives speak their mind when liberals are in power, dissent is treason. People are all over Rush Limbaugh for being unpatriotic because he said he wants Obama's policies to fail. It has been spun so that Limbaugh supposedly said he wants Obama personally to fail, but he said his policies. And even if he did say he wants Obama to fail, so what? Doesn't he have a right to speak his mind? I thought liberals were all about free speech. It's patriotic! Oh, wait, that's right - they want free speech only for themselves. Apparently, wanting Bush to fail was fine: In a 2006 poll, over half of Democrats said they wanted Bush to fail. None of these media outlets said boo. Yet they are on Limbaugh as if they were hyenas and he the carcass of an antelope. No liberal media bias my ass.

Lots of People Talk and Few of them Know...

2009-02-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

...the soul of a woman was created below.

This eternal truth sung by Led Zeppelin aside (I kid, I kid!), it is true that lots of people talk and few of them know about ANYTHING. Like college students, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and Birkenstocks, sipping grande machiatos with soy milk at the local Starbucks, decrying the evils of capitalism while enjoying its fruits and praising freedom- and life-squashing thugs. Like those in the field of diplomacy and international relations, who talk and talk for its own sake, even when its ineffectiveness becomes painfully obvious to anyone who isn't like The Who's Tommy ("that deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball"). Like Hollywood celebrities. Need I say more?

I want to digress slightly here to discuss an issue that has had a personal impact. The Montreal Protocol made it its mission to phase out the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), whose said emission is said to harm the ozone layer. Maybe it does. But, there is no maybe about thousands and thousands of people who have been afflicted with asthma, including myself. The inhaler that I have always used on an as-needed basis has as of January 1st of this year been phased out in order to make way for a new inhaler, one which replaces CFCs for hydrofluoroalkaline (HFA). So, what's the big deal? Here's the big deal. I don't like the government controlling what medicines I can or cannot get my hands on. Some preliminary surveys have suggested that the new inhalers are not as effective. But anything for Mother Nature, right? If CFCs do aid in the depletion of the ozone layer, then perhaps they should be limited - but how much can a small inhaler add to the problem? I am sick and tired of the government being all up in it. This is why I'm okay with legalizing medicinal marijuana (or even just marijuana in general). If you need it, you need it.

Do you think that the government, or a clinically incompetent intergovernmental organization like the United Nations, really cares about the individual human being? Shit, according to Malthusian economics, our overpopulation is going to deplete the world of all its food and natural resources anyway. I'm not a chronic asthmatic, but suppose someone was, and the new inhaler just was not cutting it, and he or she ended up dying? Small price to pay for the sake of the environment, right? Get rid of the useless feeders - without them there would be less of a human carbon footprint, less CFC emissions, less people to deplete natural resources, etc. The UN couldn't have cared less about the holocaust in Rwanda, or the holocaust occurring now in the Sudan. You think they would care if a few sickly asthmatics couldn't get the medicine they really needed (and for a higher price!)? I doubt it.

This whole environmental thing is getting out of control. I read an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday about the epic efforts being put into the reduction of sheep-belching, a source of methane, a greenhouse gas. Scientists have been manipulating the sheep's diet, in order to change the nature of their digestive tracts. We have people dying of cancer every day, young and old, and this is what scientists are studying? Seriously, I don't know what to say other than "WTF?!" Pretty soon they'll be regulating breathing; after all, we exhale carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.

Now, on to diplomacy, and our Iranian and North Korean friends. I will say unequivocally that the six party talks, involving the United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea, are laughable. We've had the same policy for nearly two decades now, all in an attempt to halt North Korea's aggressive tendencies. Since then, North Korea has acquired the bomb, and apparently is on the threshold of testing the Taepodong-II, a missile which could deliver a nuclear warhead thousands of miles away, far enough for it to hit the western coast of the United States. Some effective diplomacy, huh?

I read an article yesterday by John Bolton, the former SS und Polizeifuhrer of the Lublin District. My mistake, that was Odilo Globocnik. John Bolton was actually the Bush Administration's Ambassador to the UN but, really, is there a difference? In this article, he explains very clearly that the art of diplomacy is a tactic, a means to an end, not the end itself. This seems to have been lost. He explains that Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State under Harry Truman, did not want to negotiate with the Soviets unless from a position of strength. The Obama Administration's State Department would negotiate with anyone from their knees. For them, and for practitioners of political correctness everywhere, diplomacy exists for diplomacy's sake. They don't seem to understand, with rich irony, that the point of diplomacy is to create real change you can believe in. For example, Nixon's visit to China. Diplomacy should not mean endless, meaningless talks that accomplish nothing other than create the illusion that something is being accomplished. At some point, it just needs to stop. This does not necessarily mean military action - it means that sometimes there is just no point in talking. Like right now between the Israelis and Palestinians. Do you really think that if they sat down and talked about the final status of Jerusalem, they would come to a resolution? This is a non-negotiable issue, for both sides. Clinging stubbornly to diplomacy as though it were a teddy bear in the hands of a young child is foolish, and dangerous (see: Chamberlain, Neville).

U.S.-Iranian relations are anything but steady. Iran says it will engage with us in a healthy manner, but only if we, more or less, grovel before them and come to the understanding that Israel is the mistaken result of a drunken, one-night-stand that needs to be aborted. We obviously cannot accept this. The relationship between the United States and both Iran and North Korea can be explained with the following crude analogy. It's like a guy who's dating an exceptionally hard-to-get woman, who just won't put out, even after months and months of fancy dinners, jewelry, and the whispering of sweet nothings by candlelight. Sure, occasionally she'll let the guy get to first or second base, but she won't wave the runner around any further. The guy, if not a drunken frat boy douchebag, will respond with more romances, hoping and even fooling himself that eventually this will melt the woman's resolve. Yet the woman just does not respond. No matter what the guy does, he can't get that runner home, and after months of romance and seduction, the man has got nothing to show for it: except for maybe a painful side effect of vasocongestion. So the guy is left with unrequited desire and pain, and as for the woman - I don't know because I don't understand women and never will. But this is similar to us and the Iranians - we don't really know what they think, or what their motive is. All we know is that their non-response to our overtures hurt - and, more seriously, they hurt because they give the Iranians time to build their nuclear bomb.

This is where this silly analogy falls apart - if the woman doesn't want it, then the guy just has to deal with it (if he is a man worthy of the name). On the other hand, if Iran won't accept our offers, and continues to build its nuclear weaponry, then ultimately it may be needed for us, Israel, or both to take military action. It would be unthinkable and unacceptable for Israel to live under the threat of a nuclear holocaust from a regime whose so-called moderates even want to wipe it off the face of the earth.

And, one final point: I don't know much about economics, but I think that any first-year economics student should be able to understand that "trickle-up" economics is plain silliness. Yet this is what is being proposed in the Obama budget that came out yesterday. "Trickle-down" has received a bad rap, but all it means is that if you cut the taxes of the wealthier classes of society (which include small business owners, who employ the vast majority of workers in this country), it will allow them to expand their businesses and open their arms to new employees. If you raise their taxes inordinately, they will have less incentive to do so, but will rather scrimp on expansionary plans and will give them cause to, if anything, lay off people. I'm not really sure what "trickle-up" economics would accomplish. I understand that it would give the lower classes a bit more disposable income, which on the face of it seems like a great idea - but the undeniable, unfortunate fact is that this wouldn't really have anything but a temporary impact. Conservatives believe that you don't give a man a fish, you teach a man to fish so that he can eat for the rest of his life without dependence on anyone. It is the wealthier classes who employ people and it is employment which allows people to take care of themselves and their families. If employers have their hands tied, it is harder for them to hire workers or even keep current workers. If more disposable income is given to lower classes, but bosses cannot hire them, what is the good of the disposable income? It would be a temporary relief at best. These people work hard, are willing to work, and are worthy of the highest respect - but where will they employ their labors if business owners cannot hire them?

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold/And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

A Little Churchill, Anyone?

2009-02-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

Alright, look, full disclosure: Winston Churchill is my hero. I admire the hell out of the man. He personifies the grit of the British people as they withstood the Blitz, in which German planes bombed residential areas of Britain and killed over 40,000 civilians. Sure, he was flawed, and some of his imperialist views are cringeworthy, especially to our modern sensibilities. Nonetheless, the very fact that I am able to write this sentence in English is a testament to this man's fortitude. Not only was he courageous, and unrelenting in his stance against Hitler's Germany, but he had the foresight to realize that Hitler was a dangerous man who needed to be taken care of immediately. However, the British government under Neville Chamberlain infamously engaged in appeasement of the dictator.

We must place this in its proper historical context. In 1938, the year in which the Munich Conference took place, "appeasement" was not yet a bad word. In the First World War of 1914-1918, Britain had left millions of dead and wounded men on the battlefields of Ypres, Arras, and the Somme. Indeed, Britain suffered 60,000 casualties in the first hour of the Battle of the Somme alone. So it is, to me, very understandable that the British were wary of yet another war. What responsible nation would not be? The United States has been hesitant to fight a war since Vietnam. Vietnam was undoubtedly a bloody, terrible war - but during the First World War, the British, in a few months, suffered as many casualties as the U.S. military did in 11 years. It is very hard for the mind to understand these numbers, to engage in the macabre calculus. So, yes, in hindsight it is very easy to call Chamberlain names. And, yes, history has proved him wrong. But he truly thought that he had achieved peace for his time. The subsequent Chamberlains, who have had the benefit of learning from the original's mistakes, are really the ones who are in need of castigation. The original Chamberlain was wrong, yes, but given the context, it is hard for me to pass harsh judgment on him. And Chamberlain was an honorable man - once he realized his devastatingly wrong analysis of Hitler, and he saw the man for what he truly was, he backed Churchill and the war effort 100%.

Winston Churchill was uniquely prescient. At the time, he was labeled a warmonger. But he spoke with a clarity that has reverberated to the present time. He had the foresight to see that Chamberlain was wrong. And although I just said that I have some trouble cursing Chamberlain because of the times in which he lived, I can't help but love the Churchillian quip that "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last."

The times in which we live have a similar "gathering storm". Well, perhaps it is not so much gathering as having had already begun, but nonetheless, if we do not have the leadership of a Churchill, the storm will wreak havoc upon us all. There is today, as there was then, a powerful temptation to stick one's head in the sand and hope for the best. But we do not have their excuse - we have a Chamberlain to study, and from whom to learn. Neville Chamberlain and those who thought likewise at that time had no such model.

Look around at what is happening in the world. As I wrote about in my last post, Churchill's Britain is gradually giving into the Islamist menace. Indeed, British society has surrendered to such an extent that merely to mention the word "Israel" is to look for a fight in most quarters. Iran has made it its quest to achieve nuclear weaponry - why would a nation blessed with some of the most vast energy resources in the world need nuclear energy for civilian purposes? Russia is increasingly belligerent. Putin is becoming more arrogant, influencing Kyrgyzstan to close a U.S. military base. North Korea is testing missiles that can send nuclear warheads to the west coast of the United States. Our ally Israel is surrounded by enemies - Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the south, Syria to the northeast, Fatah (though weak) in the West Bank, all of whom desire its destruction.

I would here like to quote the great man himself, for what he has to say of Britain in his time is true of that country, and ours, in this time as well. This is from "The Gathering Storm", the first volume of his six-volume The Second World War, which garnered him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Churchill writes:

"We must regard as deeply blameworthy before history the conduct [of the British parties] both in and out of office, during this fatal period. Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes ["Change We Can Believe In"], refusal to accept unpleasant facts [what War on Terror?], desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State [the shutting down of Guantanamo to fulfill a campaign promise], genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation [Islamists are just "misunderstood"],...the utter devotion of Liberals to sentiment apart from reality [Obamamania]...all of these constitute a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries..."

I pray to God that this last part does not come true in our time, but I fear that it might. President Obama is a mere repository for our desires, from what I can see. A Rorschach test. You can get any number of meanings from his ambiguous wording. I just don't know who this man is. As far as I can tell, he hasn't done much other than win elections and give good speeches. I never feel as though he is being straight with me. He talks in circles, which makes me believe that he is either talking just to talk, or he isn't sure what he is talking about. I understand that he is a liberal, and that I will have some issues with his domestic policies, like this new stimulus package. But so was FDR, and Churchill himself flirted with some socialist ideas as a young man. This did not prevent these men from understanding the dangers that existed, and doing what they had to do to take them on. Like Nazism, Islamism is nefarious and it is very real. It is no "misunderstanding." No speech in Jakarta or Damascus will change these extremist minds. Not all hearts melt at Obama's mellifluous rhetoric. If he gave a speech in Berlin in 1940, do you think it would have changed the minds of Hitler and his ilk? Then why should it change the minds of Hamas and their ilk? Desperately wanting Hamas to recognize and make peace with Israel, and ignoring all signs to the contrary, will not make it happen. Again, we must not transpose our values onto to these extremists. This is not analysis or understanding. Rather, it is wrongheaded and dangerous. Just speaking to them in hushed tones will not lull them. These are not toddlers to whom we must read a bedtime story and give warm milk to make them go to sleep. They are hardened men and women who are adherents to a philosophy that endangers us all.

Wake up, everybody.

The Decline of the West?

2009-02-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

A bit ominous, perhaps, but there have been some startling developments that make it seem that the West is in a weakened state. This weakness, and I have brought this up before, is due to the nefarious influence of multicultural indoctrination. And, yes, I say indoctrination. I don't know if my public school education is typical, but multiculturalism and tolerance, etc. got rammed down my throat. In high school, after 9/11, I detoxed and threw it all up. The West needs to do the same. Anyway, to cite an example, we sang a song in music class with the lyrics, "The world is a rainbow, with many kinds of people, so let's live together in perfect harmony. Now, you be you, and I'll be me, that's the way it was meant to be. The world is a mixing cup, look what happens when you stir it up (these may not be 100% accurate, but you get the deal)." Well-meaning? Yes. Gay? Extremely. Harmless? By itself, yes, but when put together with the English departments and social studies departments of the public education system, the piece of the puzzle begin to reveal a disturbing pattern.

You could consider this harmless if we did indeed live in a world, where we could build the world a home, furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves, etc. But in the face of jihadism, it's a dangerous mindset. Don't get it confused - Islamism is more dangerous than Soviet and global Communism ever was. Sure, the latter killed tens of millions of people. But, when it comes down to it, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and their ilk were rational actors. We could sit down with them and perhaps get something done. We might not, but there was a much better chance than if we sat down with Hassan Nasrallah or Ayman al-Zawahiri. Indeed, even sitting down with a Heinrich Himmler or an Adolf Eichmann would garner better results. As evil as the Nazis were, they were a product of Western civilization and therefore there was a foundation of understanding. There is no equivalent with the Islamists. Even my liberal, Edward Said-loving Middle Eastern history professor agreed with this. (By the way, is there a more overrated scholar than Edward Said? The Middle Eastern Studies departments of the country and the world are just in love with him. I read his much-touted "Orientalism" - it was hypocritical, repetitious, and arrogant. In sum, his thesis is: you can't judge Islam because it is too complex for you to understand and sum up with one word. However, I can judge the West as much as I damn well please. Well, he was no fan of Israel or American foreign policy - I suppose that is enough to crown him).

Part and parcel of this multicultural crap is a complete decimation of the history departments of our schools. Yes, I know sociology and English classes nowadays are more like Marx and Engels Lovefest 101. But, as a history major in college, I have more of a personal knowledge of this particular subject. And yes, Marx and Engels got a lot of lovin'. I read the Communist Manifesto for like 8 different classes, and when it wasn't straight from the source, it was from some communist scholar - Eric Hobsbawm, some Marxist African guy whose name I can't remember, etc. I understand the need to study this subject. Marxism has surely had a profound impact upon world history. But JESUS CHRIST THERE WERE OTHER POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS WHO EXISTED OTHER THAN MARX AND ENGELS, including scholars whose theories actually work in the real world - i.e., Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek. It semed to me that the entire point of many of these classes was white guilt - one class focused almost exclusively on the transatlantic slave trade, although in its course description, this wasn't even mentioned. My Latin American history class was almost all about the evil deeds of the Spanish overlords (which was real) and of the U.S. government (I don't know if I'd call it evil, but much of our Latin American policy was sketchy at best). But the teacher extolled Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, who are buffoons in my opinion, and that's where I draw the line.

To graduate as a history major, I had to take more courses on Third World history - African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American - than American, European, or classical. These last three are, whether you like it or not, the very foundation of our civilization. The former is quite interesting, and should be studied, but to be able to get a college degree in history with a bare bones knowledge of American, European, and classical history is a crime. And the one course that I did take on American history was awful - it was all about Puritan society in 17th century New England and the Native Americans (i.e. the real story of Pocahontas). I had to write an essay comparing and contrasting the real life Pocahontas and John Smith with their Disney counterparts. We spent weeks studying the quotidian lifestyles of Puritan goodwives. In the scope of things, is this really that important? Specific history is important, but it has become so focused, and so tight, that it's become largely irrelevant. Third World courses taught through the lens of Marxist and/or feminist theory were legion, yet I found it exceedingly difficult to enroll in a course on, say, the American and French Revolutions. Sure, they were there, but they were not nearly as numerous as Marxo-Feminist African Movements in the 20th Century and courses of that sort.

It is this mindset - that we must glorify the Third World and demonize Western civilization - that has led to Europe's metastasizing cancer - Islamism. A few years ago, a woman was forced to remove a Kleenex box from her work desk because it portrayed Winnie the Pooh and his friends - which included Piglet. Pigs are considered filthy in Islam, and a Muslim co-worker was offended by the sight of the cartoon pig. Britain has made Sharia law superior to its own. Can you imagine the uproar if they made the Church of England superior to the British state? Massive outrage, you can bet. But, Sharia law? Okay. It's very sad that we hold Muslims to a much lower standard than we do ourselves. If Christians or Jews, or Hindus for that matter, were to firebomb embassies over cartoons, you could rest assured that it would cause a firestorm (no pun intended). Muslims do it - yawn. Usually, double standards such as these are what Adolf W. Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And it's true. If you think blacks and Hispanics can't make it without your helping hand, it means you expect less of them, which means you believe them to be inferior. It is no different with the Muslims. If they bombed a pizzeria in Tel Aviv, it wouldn't really register on anyone's radar - if Israel responded by bulldozing the perpetrator's home, all of a sudden the Israelis are Jurgen Stroop's soldiers destroying the Warsaw Ghetto. Making excuse after excuse for a people is not being tolerant - it's treating them as though they were children, not fully emotionally or mentally developed. The Muslims who have committed these acts, and who condone them, are not children. They should not be treated as such.

A few days ago, a British court ruled that the Dutchman Geert Wilders would not be allowed in the country. His crime? A 10-minute short film juxtaposing verses from the Quran with scenes of Muslim violence. If a Muslim had made a similar film, but was critical of Christians, I suppose that some might take offense but I highly doubt any embassies would be bombed. The filmmaker's life would not be in danger. And he would not be barred from Britain or any other Western country. In fact, he would probably have balls in his honor. The West only seems to limit freedom of speech when it is directed against Muslims - there is no parallel limitation on Muslims for speaking against Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion (or lack of it). In fact, they have ingeniously used their host nations' freedom of speech laws to destroy them from within. Any crazy loon of an imam in Britain can say whatever he wants against Britain, the U.S., the West, Christianity, and Judaism, and he will be assured the full extent of the law, and if anyone responds they are "Islamo-phobic." If a rabbi or a minister railed against Islam or Muslims in a similar fashion, they would be defrocked, publicly talked down to by some British politician, and, most seriously, hunted to the ends of the earth. Salman Rushdie has been living under a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini for writing something about Muhammad in a novel twenty years ago. This is the height of absurdity, yet it has become so normal that it is nearly blase. That the West turns its face from this is pathetic and, furthermore, disturbing.

The West in general, and Britain in particular, needs to wake up, get off our collective asses, and defend our civilization. The Muslims are obviously proud of theirs. Are we not proud of ours? When Western civilization is called every name under the sun, what is done? We nod our heads in agreement. Yet it is Western civilization that has produced the rule of law, democracy, and the greatest wealth and prosperity this world has ever known. Yet we elect a man whose very mission seems to be to grovel before our enemies in the hope that such groveling will be our salvation. It may seem tactful and diplomatic and well-wishing to us. To them, it is weakness. They don't play by the same rules. We whine about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but we scarcely mention the beheading of Daniel Pearl, as though the latter is no big deal, or certainly less of one. We are playing different games. They are playing football and we are playing croquet. In order to win a game, you must play it. You do not win a football game by convincing yourself that you're in fact playing croquet.

I will finish this as I finished another post: Winston Churchill must be spinning in his grave.

Question

2009-01-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

Why is it that if anyone goes against Obama, it is deemed wrong, hard-headed, and even treasonous, yet "Dissent is patriotism" was the mantra of the left when George W. Bush was President? As a follow up to this, why does Rush Limbaugh, a private citizen, get so much vitriol for saying that he hopes Obama's policies fail, when people who actively rooted against success in Iraq were engaged in dissent?

Yeah, there's no such thing as double-standards.

They Just Don't Get It

2009-01-23T09:38:00.001-08:00

Am I the only one out there who is just sick and tired of everyone clamoring for a return to the "peace process"? And gets agitated when only one side (Israel) is pressured to do anything substantive, and the other side is given excuse after excuse? And who just wants all these tired peace plans drawn up by American and European leaders to just stop? I guess I must be, because all of the aforementioned is incessant.

Two days after Obama is elected, he calls a press conference at Foggy Bottom to introduce Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, and her envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. I watched it yesterday while in the gym, and a few parts of it just made me shake my head and give out an exasperated sigh.

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, they just don't get it. They think that a few photo ops and a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and Israeli and Palestinian leaders shaking hands will fix everything. This is so superficial that it's hard for me to grasp that these educated officials cannot see it. But then again, academia is in the firm grip of the naive left, so they may think that a few smiles and a few hand shakes (and -jobs), might get the job done. No. They won't. This issue is deep - it does not only involve two ethnic peoples, but it involves two of the world's religions, Judaism and Islam, and the site of those two religions' holy places. This is not Northern Ireland, you idiots. Yeah, the Catholics and the Protestants hated each other, the Provisional Irish Republican Army had a penchant for explosives and killing people, both sides were implacable - so on the surface it might seem to have many similarities with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that is too simplistic. Belfast is no holy site - no Protestant Northern Irish directed their prayers to it. Catholics and Protestants did not have issues as the Jews and Arabs do concerning holy sites such as the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs. Religion in the Holy Land is not just a guiding force, but is geographic and tangible. Northern Ireland - not so much. The Northern Irish Protestants would probably piss on the Pope if they could get close enough, but religion was not as entangled because Northern Ireland is not the center of Christianity. The Northern Irish were separated by politics and religion, but the latter's origin is not in Ireland. The Middle Eastern issue is so much more complicated because of its site as these religions' centers (well, more periphery for Islam, but you get what I mean, Jerusalem is their third holiest city). The Troubles and the two Intifadas are therefore not analogous. Superficially similar, true, but that is where these comparisons should end. Neither can one compare the Provisional IRA with Hamas. Despite the Provos' devastating acts of terror, Hamas is on a whole other level of wantoness and bloodthirstiness. I hope I have explained this clearly enough.

That is why it is naive and foolish to believe that George Mitchell can succeed in the Middle East because he succeeded in Northern Ireland. The Troubles had much to do with political issues such as whether or not Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom or would join Ireland. Broadly speaking, the Protestants wanted the former and Catholics the latter. They were not fighting over Bethlehem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or Golgotha, or anything centrally and tangibly tied to their respective religions. Religion was important in the Troubles but the political issues were predominant. Political issues can usually be resolved, even if they are exceedingly complex, which Northern Ireland most assuredly was. The PLO has tried its best to drive the Jews into the sea - despite its intense hatred for Unionists and the British, the Provisional IRA was hardly genocidal. And as for Hamas, they are no Palestinian nationalist group, but instead are motivated by their extreme Islamist beliefs. Neither Sinn Fein nor the Provisional IRA is comparable. George Mitchell's experience, while impressive, does not mean he will be a magic maker in the Middle East. In fact, the parallel thinking is dangerous.

Quite frankly, I think it is annoying that we treat Israel as if it is our dog: "Attack, boy". "Stay, boy". Israel is a sovereign nation and if it feels that military force is its best option, it should be respected, rather than talked down to as if it were a naughty boy or a bad dog. We should not keep forcing this useless, meaningless, wholly on-the-surface "peace process" down their throats when all it has accomplished are intifadas, suicide bombings, rocket launchings, and war. When are European and American politicians going to realize that stubbornly clinging to the illusion of an imminent peace is counterproductive? You cannot have peace between two parties when one does not even recognize the other and is pledged to its utter destruction. It doesn't work. The two parties only talk past one another. To Jews, Jerusalem is the holiest of cities and the Temple Mount is the holiest site of Judaism. Yet the Palestinians want East Jerusalem, which includes Old Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, as the capital of their state. If the issue were purely political, that would be one thing - Israel successfully implemented peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, two erstwhile mortal enemies, in 1979 and 1994 respectively. But the Israeli-Palestinian matter is a lot more complex than that. A lot more. And no amount of nice-sounding speeches and mellifluent voices will make it otherwise.

The European and Washington establishments apparently think it will. "Come together and make nice," they say, as though it were a mere matter of quarreling children in a sandbox. They expect all the history, religion, and bad blood that characterizes this conflict to be put aside in the blink of an eye. It just won't happen. The State Department is doing nothing but looking like it is doing something. They want to "engage" the Middle East peace process, and want the two parties to "set aside their differences." Nice sounding, but hoplessly naive. And this is not the only administration that has felt that way - all others have talked along the same lines. The only way to move beyond this conflict is when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate the Jews. And to stop teaching their children hate straight out of the womb. And to eradicate the extremism of groups such as Hamas, with whom negotiation is a futile exercise and, furthermore, unacceptable. Just making it look as though peace is really working does not make it so.

So, therefore I must say to the naive State Department and its new Middle East envoy - good luck. You're going to need it.

Out with the Old and In with the New

2009-01-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

So, Barack Obama is officially the 44th President of the United States. Congrats. I wish him well. As I have written previously, I have my doubts. I think that he was elected president merely because of fine-sounding rhetoric, none of which is meaningful when one thinks about it for more than two seconds. His speeches are lofty and inspiring when one hears them, but as soon as they are finished, one is hard pressed to remember what the hell he just said. Plus, he was the anti-Bush - articulate, liberal, and black.

I don't want to rain on his parade - he rightfully deserves to celebrate his victory. But some things just have to be said. Reports of his inaugration being a "sacred event" are absurd. The biblical comparison are obnoxious. He's Moses leading us to the Promised Land - no, wait, Moses never crossed the Jordan so he's more like Joshua. No, wait, he's ushering in a new age - he's John the Baptist. No, wait, he's the one we've been waiting for - he's Jesus. He has also been compared to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt (before he even took office). A bit of a stretch, maybe? I mean, let him get through his first 100 days first. And now his first priorities are to undo programs that those two presidents would have sanctioned. More of that in a bit.

There is something that has been bothering me (among many). Everything that conservatives believe in is deemed "extreme" or "partisan" or "the politics of hatred" or some other such nonsense. The liberal positions are always deemed the more mature (from a supposedly unbiased press). There is a call for bipartisanship and compromise and unity, and putting aside bitter divisions, but the ones who are always expected to sacrifice their principles for the greater good are always the conservatives. Obama pledges to bring in a new way of doing politics, but he has recycled of bunch of people from the Clinton years. They are always deemed "centrist", "moderate", "capable", whereas Republican appointees at first blush are always deemed either incompetent or downright evil. The bar they face is much higher than their liberal counterparts. If you don't realize this, you're blind. If you do, and have no problem with it, then you're unfair and bigoted.

A few words on Bush: I understand that he is the monster in much of the world's opinion. Why he has gotten such an opinion is beyond my understanding. I understand that the Iraq War is controversial, but still. Honestly, how much did your life really change for the worse under his administration? The vast majority of Americans still went about their daily lives, raised their kids, went on family vacations, etc. All of us still retained the freedoms of speech and religion - anyone who claimed that this was not so, and then published a book on just how much Bush has repressed speech, and then had that book front in center in a Barnes and Noble, disproved himself by being published and sold right here in this country. You think that the bevy of anti-Bush books that have flooded book stores in the past eight years would have been sold if Bush was the tyrant he was said to be? He was no tyrant. I think that people sort of wanted him to be Hitler so that they could make themselves feel more courageous for "daring" to speak out against him. How was this brave when everyone did it? If Bush was really Hitler, or even a lesser fascist, these people wouldn't have been talking for long - they would've wound up dead in some ditch. So enough.

I have no problem with people having policy isues with Bush. Who doesn't? I have a problem, though, with people calling him a fascist (that word means nothing at this point, it is so overly used and abused) and other such terms. It is funny that the same people who extol Castro are those who most loudly denounce Bush. Well, which one has put people in prison camps for their personal and political beliefs? The great thing about Orwell was that he was a believer in socialism, but he was intellectually honest enough to see its failings and the evil actions of socialist and Communist leaders. I have a ton of respect for that. Unfortunately, that intellectual honesty is pretty rare.

Two of the men routinely considered to be among the best, if not the best, presidents of the United States are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I don't dispute this - in fact, I agree. But I want to point out that these men were responsible for actions that were much more morally dubious than anything Bushitler or Heydricheney have accomplished (that second name fuses together Cheney and Heydrich, the latter being second-in-command of the SS and architect of the Holocaust). Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Antiwar journalists were thrown in jail. He sanctioned Sherman's March on the Sea which devastated the South. Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, which killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians. He sent 100,000 plus Japanese-American citizens to internment camps. These two men ordered some morally questionable things, but they were trying their hardest to win devastating wars. Yet they do not get very much flak for these actions - in fact, they are routinely ignored. Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fall well short of Lincoln and FDR's actions. Next time you see some talking head on CNN verbally fellating FDR while bludgeoning Bush's civil liberties record, think about that.

I have no doubt that if FDR had to torture a few Nazis to guarantee the safety of thousands, if not millions, of Americans, he would have done it. And he would have been celebrated throughout the land for it. But we waterboarded three terrorists who already had killed thousands of Americans, and planned to kill many more, and everyone is claiming that Bush is some sort of Torquemada. Can you say "hyperbole"? I couldn't care less what happened to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, as long as the information they gleaned from his interrogations bore fruit. If a dirty nuclear bomb was placed in your city, and torturing a KSM-like terrorist was perhaps the best option to stop it from detonating, would you sanction it? If you wouldn't, then you're insane. Why the hubbub about how we treat these murderers and would-be murderers? Why does their discomfort keep you up at night? You think they would care about you, even if you were totally innocent?

Fun fact: Rendition, the program for kidnapping and sending off terror suspects to other countries for interrogation purposes, was installed under Clinton. This was not born of the demonic minds of the Bush administration. Remember that when you're told the tale of our Fall from Grace because of Bush.

The most common retort to "What's the big deal about the harsh interrogation of terrorists?" is that we are better than that. The world looks to us as a moral beacon, and we must be morally superior to our enemy. Well, we certainly climbed into the ditch with them in WWII, as I mentioned a bit of above. Moral relativists are among the most vociferous of those clamoring for the cessation of harsh interrogation. They claim that Western civilization and culture is not superior to any other, and in fact might be worse. But with the same breath, they explain that we must not torture because our (Western) civilization is better than that, and we have certain morals to uphold. Well, which one is it? You can't have both. You can't claim that our culture is no better than any others and then at the same time say that we cannot torture because our culture is morally better.

Some food for thought.

Sigh

2009-01-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

What else can one do when one surveys the ridiculousness concerning Israel's actions in Gaza? There have been hateful demonstrations throughout European cities and American college campuses (the heartland of the left), bitching and whining and screaming about the need to "Free, Free Palestine", "Stop the Genocide", etc. Of course, the UN reared its ugly head and pushed through Resolution 1860 which calls for immediate cesafire in a language that paints the actions of Hamas and Israel on an equal moral plane (speaking of plane, what a miracle that no one was killed in the crash landing in the Hudson River yesterday!) I cannot really put into words the rank hypocrisy of the United Nations. This organization has got to be one of the most morally bankrupt entities in the world today. I read today that 68% of the UN Security Council's resolutions having to do with human rights are against Israel. NONE are against the Bashir regime in Sudan, and none are against Russia or China. I don't really know who makes up the other 32% but even if it were one country (say, North Korea or Zimbabwe), that means that the UN believes that Israel is more than twice deserving of international condemnation.

I am sick and tired of these constant calls for a "return to the peace process". What peace process? Oh...do you mean the Oslo Accords? Those worked out splendidly. Or when Ehud Barak took off his pants and bent over in front of Yasser Arafat in 2000, only for Arafat to unleash the Second Intifada? Oh, that's right. The Second Initifada was an act of civil disobedience - you know, like the civil rights marches of the 1960s and the students' rally in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The peace process doesn't exist, except in the mind of the naive. Sure, Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House Lawn. Olmert and Abbas are supposedly on decent personal terms. But it's all on the surface, a facade.

Okay, what is the main gripe of the Palestinians and their supporters? Well, that their "struggle" (read, terrorist activities, like suicide bombings and rocket launchings) are legitimate because of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Yo: the PLO was formed in 1964 with the explicit purpose of destroying Israel. For sentient human beings who can understand basic chronology, Arafat and his ilk were conducting terrorism against Israel before their fundamental excuse for such violence existed. Israel did not occupy either of these two territories until the Six Day War of 1967. The Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem are just tactics, not the end game. The end game is only the destruction of Israel. From the 1949 armistice agreements with the various Arab nations following the 1948 War of Independence through June 1967, Gaza was administered by Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Jordan. There were no "Free, Free Palestine" chants then, no clamors for Palestinian independence, either from the Palestinians themselves or from the European intelligentsia. The calls for self-autonomy for the Palestinians and the end of occupation only began in 1967 - there was none when they were governed (as second-class citizens) by the Egyptians and Jordanians. Occupation only became an issue, and a crime in the eyes of the world, when it was Israel who did it (in a defensive war, I might add). The current excuses for Palestinian excesses are ex post facto because such excesses existed before June 1967. They called for the Jews to be pushed into the sea well before then.

This is not even to mention Arab terrorism before the PLO: the massacres in Jerusalem in 1920, in Hebron and Safed in 1929, the Arab revolt of 1936-1939, Arab violence against Jewish civilians in the aftermath of the UN partition resolution in November 1947, fedayeen raids (particularly from 1951 until the Sinai Campaign in 1956), etc. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a friend of Hitler, founder of the Muslim SS Division that served in the Balkans, and a man who called for the "Final Solution" of the Jews in Palestine (all before the establishment of the State of Israel), exhorted his Muslims to kill all the Jews. This was before the State of Israel, before the so-called massacres at Deir Yassin, Khan Yunis, and Kfar Kassem, before the "occupied territories", before Sabra and Shatilla, before the "disproportionate" Israeli responses to the two intifadas, before the Jenin "massacre" during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, or any other excuse the Palestinians or their apologists want to make. Suffice to say, they have been at the Jews' throats since way before these things even happened.

There is a pattern that should be very obvious to anyone aware of international affairs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. It is: Palestinian terrorism --> Israeli patience and calls for Israel to continue to keep its cool --> further terrorism by emboldened Palestinians --> Israel acts to defend its civilians, iin this most recent cases, the besieged people of the Western Negev --> cries of disproportionate response and calls for restraint, and "expert" analyses that the Israeli response will achieve nothing but set back the peace process. There is little, if any, flack for the initial terrorist attacks that led to an Israeli response. It's as though Israel woke up one morning in a pissed off mood and decided to wreak havoc just for the hell of it. And if Hamas or whoever is called out, it is with the understanding that they are "oppressed" and under "collective punishment", etc. In other words, their attacks on Israeli civilians are excusable while ANY Israeli response is not.

The battle for Jenin in 2002 was immediately labeled a massacre by the Palestinians and their apologists. All the evidence points to the conclusion that this did not happen, but this does not prevent anti-Israeli groups from using it to bolster their cause nor does it prevent these groups' useful idiots from believing them. The fact is that Israel sent ground troops into Jenin specifically to prevent civilian casualties, which would have been more widespread had they just pursued a policy of bombardment via airplanes or artillery pieces. That is, Israel risked the lives of its young citizens to ensure that as few Palestinian civilians were killed as possible. And what does Israel get in return? Screams of massacre, genocide, etc. Arafat called it Jeningrad, implying that it was somehow akin to the Siege of Leningrad (which led to the starvation of millions) and the Battle of Stalingrad (the bloodiest battle in history). One would expect Arafat to utter such nonsense, but it is ridiculous that so many in the media, academia, and European governments ate it up with a spoon.

To any supporter of Israel, all of this is very frustrating. Sure, Israel has committed some wrongs (read about Kfar Kassem, which was an unfortunate example of undisciplined, trigger happy (but not evil) soldiers). But they also acknowledge these wrongs - those responsible for Arab deaths in Kfar Kassem were investigated and sent to prison. There were investigations into the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. They are willing to engage in the most excruciating of self-examinations. The Palestinians on the other hand, praise Samir Kuntar, a cold-blooded murderer, and Hamas. Shouldn't that speak for itself?

Operation Cast Lead

2009-01-08T08:14:00.001-08:00

This post is a bit overdue, because the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began nearly a fortnight ago. As usual, Israel has received a ridiculous amount of criticism for actions that are perfectly acceptable under international law - that is, unless initiated by the Jewish state. The criticisms are so obnoxious and predictable, they come from the same quarters and say the same shit. To put it succinctly: every single time Israel acts to defend itself, it is acting immorally and disproportionately. Sure, it is understandable that the Israelis should defend themselves from the incessant rain of rockets cascading upon them from Gaza, but they should do so in a more restrained manner so as to limit civilian casualties.

What they neglect to mention is that Hamas is a pussy organization that hides among civilians. They boast about their toughness and about Israel's supposed weakness, but when Israel comes calling, the first place these cowards head is into the most densely populated area they can find. In fact, they launch their rockets from those very locations, knowing that any Israeli response will kill and injure civilians. So, Hamas fires rockets at the civilians of the western Negev, and do so from highly populated areas (the Gaza Strip itself is one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the earth). This is a war crime in two ways: firing upon civilians and using other civilians as human shields. Yet for some reason the world seems blind to this.

Well, it isn't so much "for some reason". I know the reason. It is unadulterated anti-Semitism, cloaked in so-called "anti-Zionism". As the British historian Paul Johnson, a great philo-Semite and author of A History of the Jews (a magisterial work) writes, "Scratch an anti-Zionist and you will find an anti-Semite." It is just a very convenient disguise. Yet, sometimes it is exposed, such as the recent demonstration in Fort Lauderdale, at which pro-Palestinian demonstrators urged Jews "to get back to the oven" and screamed about nuking Israel. This story has received relatively scant attention from the media, but I can guarantee that if there were pro-Israeli demonstrators screaming about nuking Gaza or the West Bank, it would be all over the news. This was not just a demonstration against supposed Israeli belligerence, but rather a castigation of all Jews. What do the military activities of the IDF have to do with Torah scrolls and synagogues in Belgium, which have been desecrated in recent days in response to the military op in Gaza? Nothing, except that the IDF is composed of mostly Jewish soldiers. So, because Jewish soldiers in the Middle East are engaged in military action, it suddenly becomes legitimate to attack European Jews whose only link to said Jewish soldiers is their Jewishness. Even if one found the attacks in Gaza to be immoral, which I most assuredly do not (they are long overdue), the rationale of the violent acts in Europe is nonsensical. Yet, most sadly and frighteningly, it is par for the course for Muslims around the world.

No other nation on earth is expected to adhere to the ridiculous standard of perfection that Israel is, not even the United States although we come close. More insults are hurled Israel's way when they act in a perfectly legitimate, defensive manner, than when Hamas engages in suicide bombings and rocket launchings. I did not see any marches or demonstrations on behalf of the besieged Israelis of Sderot and surrounding environs. Because no one fucking cares. No one cares except maybe some Jews and their conservative Christian friends. And the latter are not even recognized by the former but are rather shunned. LOOK: all of the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that matters comes from two groups: Islamist murderers and their idiot liberal apologists. That is it! Neo-Nazism is a fucking joke: there are like 9 adherents to that ideology and they are largely marginalized.

China took over Tibet 50 years ago and no one cares. Millions of Sudanese are being slaughtered and no one really cares. Sure, they say they do but when is the last time you saw worldwide protestations against the Khartoum regime? Russia asserts its dominance by raping Georgia and everyone is prepared to make the whole situation Georgia's fault. Russia went into Chechnya in 1999 in such a destructive frenzy that I am not sure there are any cockroaches left in Grozny. But the Russian government has the audacity to criticize the legitimate Israeli response, calling it disproportionate. And the world hardly seems to recognize this arch-hypocrisy. There have been more UN resolutions against so-called Israeli belligerence than against any other country in the world, including China, North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and a host of other nations with unsavory regimes. The United Nations has an entire department dedicated to the Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which is either the most ineffective department in the history of humans or superb in its actual intent to keep the Palestinians in squalor to deepen and perpetuate anti-Israeli feelings both in the region and worldwide. I vote for the latter. The United Nations: a good idea poorly executed. It's a waste of time. It is so corrupt and useless that I don't understand why anyone should care what it has to say anymore.

Israel needs to shrug its shoulders and say a big "Fuck you" to a hostile world. Otherwise Operation Cast Lead will have been a huge waste of time and human life. Israel cannot afford another 2006 Lebanon-like failure, otherwise it will deter no one. The whole world already hates the Jewish state: there is no difference whether they act or do not. So they must continue their offensive until Hamas is sufficiently weakened. If they accept an ineffective cease-fire, as they always do in their hopeless attempt to assuage world opinion, the Israelis will be only weakening themselves and strengthening Hamas, which will make it seem that terror is the way to go for the Palestinians, rather than moderation. This is not to say that Fatah is moderate - only in this fucked up part of the world can such an organization be considered such.

There is only so much that a country should be expected to take. That Israel restrained itself for this long is pretty impressive (albeit mistaken). Yet no sooner do the Israelis act than all the talking heads begin their blathering anew about how such violence sets back the peace process. A "peace process" with one party desiring to destroy the other is not worth the paper it is written on. Israel needs to destroy Hamas before any meaningful peace can be established, if it can (and I have my doubts). Arafat seemed moderate to much of the world because they fell for his duplicity (telling the Western world one thing, the Arab world his true intentions). The Second Intifada was pre-planned and no matter what Barak had offered at Camp David in 2000, there would never have been an agreement. The Palestinian leadership gets off on its constituents' misery. The more miserable the Palestinians, the better the excuse to demonize Israel. If there was ever an effective peace, the Palestinian leadership would have to act responsibly, as any leaders of a sovereign state must. Israeli occupation and "genocide" and "apartheid" would no longer be an excuse. This responsibility is not welcomed in these quarters - it is easier to blame the Jews. And so long as it is the Jews you are blaming, you will find sympathy around the world.

Israel is damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't, they place their civilians in unacceptable danger (as happened to Sderot). If they do, then they are called bloodthirsty warmongers. They really cannot win. Hamas wins either way: if Israel does nothing, Israel is seen as weak and Hamas as strong. If Israel attacks, then Hamas can hide among civilians, knowing that Israeli bombardments will kill some civilians, which will turn the world against Israel.

The entire world, with the exception of a few countries, hates Israel with a demented fury that is reserved for it alone. How much more can it increase this hatred if they continue with Operation Cast Lead? Because the whole world hates Israel anyway, they might as well go for it because their security as a sovereign nation is more important than what a bunch of self-important, ignorant leftists have to say on the matter. As for the Palestinians - they hate Israel for even existing. Unless hatred for Israel has an 11 knob, like Nigel's amplifier in This is Spinal Tap, there is not much higher it can go.

Succumbing to world opinion has accomplished nothing. It accomplished nothing when you retreate d from Gaza and when you half-assed your war against Lebanon. Fuck it. Get 'em.

Long Overdue Post

2008-12-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

I tried to think of a witty, pithy title, but I had nothin'. I'm halfway through grad school apps, took my econ final tonight, so I might be able to blog a bit more. Things are looking up!

I want to stop myself before I get too positive. That isn't why I created this blog. I created it as a cathartic way to get things off my chest and in the process hopefully teach someone a thing or too. I am sure I have failed in this latter respect, but I try. Before I start with anything political or truly significant, I want to point something out, something that never really hit me until recently.

Basically, I am Opposite Guy. I have never intended to be, it is not something that I purposefully created and nurtured. But it is true nonetheless. You're probably like "What the hell are you talking about?" Alright, I live in Fairfield County which is in the New York City metropolitan area. NYC is a little less than an hour away. My sis lives there and I go there a decent amount. I love it. I would love nothing more than to have a penthouse overlooking Central Park. That is, with all honesty, a dream of mine. Yet, with the kind of random exception of the Rangers, I dislike New York sports teams. Most of the people in my town and county, my friends, and my family, are all NY sports fans. I am not. Why? I don't really know, but if someone didn't know me they might think that I picked my sports teams specifically to piss off my family, friends, and region. This couldn't be further from the truth, but seriously: I like the Boston Red Sox and the Dallas Cowboys. I have decals of the teams on my car. How my car has not been keyed or egged yet is beyond my comprehension.

But believe me: I didn't pick the teams because I am some contrarian who is just being contrary for its own sake. I hate people like that. By "not conforming" they are actually conforming to an idea of nonconformity. I have always loved Dallas - I was basically obsessed with Troy Aikman as a kid. As for Boston - I started rooting for them primarily in my early teens. I had always liked them, and kind of passively rooted for them because I actively despised the Yankees, but I didn't actively root for them until a bit later. But understand this: I am no bandwagoner. These Red Sox fans who have cropped up all over the place since 2004: lame. Same with Patriots fans. I never knew a Pats fan until they won the Super Bowl in 2001, then all of a sudden everyone in my neighborhood was a die hard Pats fan. Pfft. I had barely even heard of that team with the exception of a few blurbs when they faced the Packers in the Super Bowl in the 90s.

This is also true of my politics. I live in the Northeast. Every state out here is true blue with the exception of New Hampshire which typically goes Republican but did not this year. And yet I'm a conservative in this most liberal of regions. Again, not to be contrary. Believe me, it would be a lot easier to be a conservative if I was surrounded by them. Sort of like how it's really easy to be on MSNBC because everyone at the network and all guests agree with you. It would be nice to not have to debate once in a while.

This was hugely tangential and super random. On to more pertinent issues.

I don't really have much to say concerning the whole Blagojevich scandal. The dude is sleazy as shit, he's up his eyeballs in corruption, he's your typical Chicago politician. But Obama managed to get through Chicago unscathed because he is our Savior. All I have to say about this whole shit show is this: there is no way the media would give a Republican President-elect the same benefit of the doubt they have given Obama about this whole scandal. That would never happen. The media would actually do some investigating. I am sort of interested to see what the media would do if Obama maintains much of the Bush policies contra terrorism. I can't wait to see how the fuckers squirm their way into somehow supporting the Patriot Act because now Obama is in charge. The prospect is delectable.

Bush is killing me. Besides his acrobatic move in dodging a shoe thrown at him, which was pretty impressive, he has done everything wrong lately. This whole push to nationalize Detroit is pretty pathetic. He is obviously just trying to solidify his legacy, somehow, someway, with those that hate him. Ain't gonna happen, Dubya. You have spent a disgusting amount of government money, a liberal trait, and have not done anything terribly conservative. Unless if some leftists want to argue that waging war is somehow some conservative trait. I already discussed that in the latest post. Not true. George W. Bush has disintegrated into a socialist in his last months of office, and it seems as though he is pleading with us. "Can't I do anything right?" No, in the eyes of many, you can't. You could legalize gay marriage, destroy our economy so that we can be more "green", and pull out of Iraq, etc. It doesn't matter. As far as the left is concerned, you should have never been President. You stole the presidency. So, in sum, fuck you. You can guarantee that if Bill Clinton invaded Iraq, which he supported doing, the media would be doing their darndest to support him and the effort. Swinging wildly to the left and being ridiculous won't change anything. So stop, its embarrassing. And stupid. Bailing out Detroit merely postpones the inevitable at taxpayer cost. Washington has nationalized enough.

So, a new movie coming down the chute: a 4 hour epic on the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, starring Benicio del Toro and directed by Steven Soderbergh. Okay, seriously: when is everyone going to stop deifying this man? He was the father of the Cuban prison system, he was a cold-blooded murderer who reveled in that role. Who uttered the following? "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become." Dick Cheney? You woulda thunk, but no. Che Guevara, that romantic, idealistic revolutionary who adorns many a college student's t-shirt and/or dorm room, said those words. And if Bush said them, these same idiots who wear Che shirts would decry it as proof of his fascism. But Che said it. So whatever. He was fighting for socialism, and equality, and the indigenous peoples of Latin America and Africa, and all that good shit. So, yeah, maybe he did kill a few people. So what? They got in the way of his wonderful revolution. And they're making a movie glorifying this guy? Alright, then I'll write a screenplay glorifying Augusto Pinochet and then have that made into a film. No? Well, why not? All sarcasm aside, here's why: It would be stupid because Pinochet was a goddamn murderer...but so was Che, and it's therefore just as stupid. And not only stupid, but wrong.

We should be wearing t-shirts of actual heroes: George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, the unknown rebel of Tiananmen Square, Winston Churchill. But Guevara? Uggh.

Mumbai and Moral Equivalence

2008-12-07T18:46:00.000-08:00

Again, a long hiatus and again, sorry.

First off, I want to talk a bit about the Mumbai massacre. This was an atrocious tragedy. It has received a bunch of attention, as it should. But some of the things I have read have been beyond idiotic. Of course, we were inundated with moral equivalence. Muslims are a persecuted minority in India, Indians are wrongfully occupying Kashmir, and every other excuse under the sun. Has it occurred to anyone else that Muslims are the only ones who get these excuses? When Baruch Goldstein opened fire in a mosque in 1994, killing a bunch of Muslims at prayer, did anyone get on CNN and try to explain away this horrible deed? No. If and when Hindu Indians kill Muslims, it is a wrongful, genocidal deed. When Muslims do likewise to the Hindus, there is a Rolodex of excuses waiting for them.

It's disgusting. If Americans, Israelis, Britons, Indians, or any other nation currently in a fight with Islamists is attacked, it is always some transgression on the former's part that justifies the latter's terrorism. Yet the former never gets the benefit of any such viewpoint. It seems as though there is no limit as to what is acceptable for them to do. Plow a plane into the World Trade Center, stone and/or hang homosexuals, shoot women for painting their toenails in front of stadium crowds, etc, and there will be some Noam Chomsky-like defender of your actions. Happen to be a soldier of the IDF, and shoot some Palestinian terrorist attempting to blow something up, and you are the approximate equivalent of Paul Blobel, the architect of the Babi Yar massacre.

Moral equivalence is probably the most sickening development in Western society that has exploded in popularity since the Vietnam War. We must realize that our culture is really no better than any other culture. If another culture sacrifices children to Moloch, it's cool, it's their culture. It's this sort of thinking that placed the Soviet Union and the United States on the same moral plane during the Cold War. According to this way of thinking, the two were equal actors in the five decades pursuant to World War II, and one was no better than the other. In other words - the USSR, who shoved millions into the maw of the Gulag and robbed peoples of their human rights, is basically the same difference as the United States, which occasionally went overboard in its support of anti-Communist regimes in Latin America and elsewhere. If anything, the former is given the benefit of the doubt more than the latter. In other words, supporting a few unsavory characters in a few Latin American countries is worse than the USSR starving and killing millions of its denizens. In these people's minds, Guantanamo Bay is a worse moral stain than Kolyma and Abu Ghraib is worse than Lubyanka. I understand that the U.S. does not have a lily white past - but who does? And basically the same difference as the Soviet Union as the two culprits in the Cold War? This is insanity.

This is also the kind of thinking that makes Mikhail Gobachev some kind of knight in shining armor and makes Ronald Reagan a Forrest Gump-level idiot. Perestroika and glasnost were not intended to tear down the Communist structure, but rather to strengthen it by making some reforms. Reagan gets no credit in these quarters and if so, it's for the strength of his personality, not his ideology or his policies. Gorbachev and the Soviets get more credit. Not true and, if it were, completely unintentional on their part.

I have started a biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which so far is a magnificent read. The author describes the educations that these men would receive, and the subjects they were expected to know: the classics (the Aeneid, Cicero, Greek and Roman philosophy and history), Greek and Latin, the Bible, etc. These are, indeed, the backbone of Western civilization. Nowadays, with the multicultural left running (and ruining) academia, and moral equivalence all the rage, it is not considered politically correct to teach these things. This is not to say that one cannot take these courses, but they are no longer required in the curriculum. They are, if anything, an elective or an obscure major. At my school, as a history major I was required to take more courses on Third World nations than on Europe and the United States. I do not understand why it is suddenly a faux pas to be knowledgeable and proud of Western heritage. I don't understand why the Aeneid and the Bible were dropped and Marxo-Feminist Thought and Chicano Literature were added. While the latter can be interesting to some, they are not nearly as important as the former in Western civilization. If the PC police got a problem with that, then fuck 'em. Come get me.

We have lost pride in ourselves, and I believe that the start of this was the Vietnam War. I am not going to debate it, because a) it is still a sore issue and b) I am still debating myself as to what I really think about it. I believe that it was for a decent cause and I do not believe any such bullshit that it was for imperialist reasons. What would be the point? But, at the same time, to send vast numbers of men to die for a country not in our backyard was over the top (an understatement). I just finished Philip Caputo's memoirs of his time as a Marine Lieutenant in 'Nam, A Rumor of War. One of the best books I have read. If you haven't read it, drop what you are doing now, go to your nearest library or bookstore, and get it. You will not be disappointed.

Anyway, our loss of self-respect and confidence stems from Vietnam. Because many believe that we did not act morally in that war, it suddenly stained our entire history. The multicultural left came to view the United States as the aggressor, as the bad guy, hence their whitewashing of Soviet communism and their demonization of Reagan. To this day, to wear a Che Guevara t-shirt or to display the hammer and the sickle, or a portrait of Chairman Mao, is considered cool. There is nothing cool about it. Che Guevara was a cold-blooded murderer who killed thousands and was the father of the Cuban prison camps. I see so many ignorant college kids with his t-shirt that it makes me physically nauseous. The hammer and sickle represented a murderous systems which killed tens of millions. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward killed millions.

Yet to display a swastika would bring immediate social isolation and contempt AS IT RIGHTFULLY SHOULD. Nazism was extraordinarily evil, but at the same time so was Soviet Communism. The former is rightfully hated while the latter is given an excuse. "Well, Lenin deviated from Marxist doctrine. If only they followed Marx to the letter, it would have worked," etc. It is as though Lenin and Stalin were fools who just "didn't get it" rather than murderers of millions. (And even many of those who will admit the Soviet state's evil, Lenin, a bloodthirsty bastard, is often given a complete pass and Stalin somehow is a corrupter of the system who fucked it all up, and real communism is actually a delight). I suppose the difference is that while Nazism was bluntly evil in both word and deed, communism sounded pretty acceptable in theory. Therefore, they are given much more slack than their Nazi cousins.

Communism killed, and still kills, way more people than fascism in all of its forms. But for many, somehow the ends justify the means. "Stalin killed a lot of people, yeah, but it was necessary to consolidate the revolution. It was necessary to achieve a stateless society. Plus, he modernized the Soviet state." Well, let's put it this way: no the ends did not justify the means. Maybe he built some canals, roads, and dug up ores but he did so through the enslavement and deaths of tens of millions. His state was an economic basket case because no one had any motive to make anything of high quality. Everything was about just attaining a quota. In the 1970s something like 3% of the country's farms were private but they produced like 40% of its agricultural goods.

Many of us did not have the moral certitude to say that we were in the right during the Cold War. Sometimes we were overly aggressive but never were we even in the same league as the Soviet Union in terms of sheer wrongness. That has extended into today, with many making George W. Bush worse than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Muslim fundamentalists are coddled everywhere. Israelis, as mentioned briefly above, are demonized in the most hateful of language. There are Sharia courts in Great Britain. Asshole terrorists who shot up hundreds of people are given a "Well, you see...." justification. Enough. Grow some balls to stand up for yourself, and for your culture and civilization. We were better than the Soviet Union then, and we are better than the terrorists now. Yet we are tentative to say so. Winston Churchill must be spinning in his grave.

Hi Kids!

2008-11-20T18:50:00.000-08:00

Do you like violence? (Yeah! Yeah!)... Anyway, it is time for me to end this ridiculous 2 week plus hiatus. I bet all of you thought I had quit or something. Uh uh. There is no quit in this guy. I've been a busy little bee. Don't look for any rants about the election - it's over and done with, and I've moved on. I will discuss politics here, but I won't be whining about the election. I'm over it. I was pissed that night, I did not rejoice in Obama's victory as I was told to do by the media, I expressed that in my last blog post, and that's all there is to it. Although I have my concerns, and have no great like for the man, I will try my best to get behind him. After all, if he messes up, we're all fucked. All. I refuse to become like the Bush Derangement Syndrome folks who could not get over their hatred for Bush and would oppose him no matter what he did. He has swung sharply to the left over the past year or so and the public still hates him.

I will get to Bush in another post. All I will say for now is this: he is hardly the conservative demon he is made out to be. Even if he were a demon, he wouldn't be a conservative one. He would be a sort of hard to categorize, but undoubtedly evil, Mammon-Moloch hybrid. Big government, bailouts, No Child Left Behind, immigration amnesty? Not conservative. At all. The word conservative does not mean evil. It is a governing philosophy. Bush has been painted as some right-wing uberconservative when that isn't even remotely the case. He is hated for being a "warmonger" which is bullshit, but even if he were, that is no conservative trait. We were led into both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam by Democrats - Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Under conservatives - the end of 'Nam, Grenada, Gulf War, and Iraq War (Oh what am I saying? This is the bloodiest war in history, George Bush and Dick Cheney are the equivalent of Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann, if not worse, Halliburton is an evil Nazi corporation that manufactured and dispensed Zyklon-B during World War II, etc.) What I am trying to say here is that war is not necessarily brought upon by any rational governing philosophy, liberal or conservative. It is brought upon by circumstances. The political movements in the U.S. are largely rational. We don't see fascism or communism here. Now those two movements begat some violence, and by necessity. Fascism needs to conquer to sustain itself and in order to achieve communism one must forcefully and violently remove people from their homes. And send them to Kolyma if they cry about it.

Random tidbits:

The "Big Three", a phrase that until recently I thought referred to Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, need to get off their knees, get back to Detroit in their jets, and accept bankruptcy. If the government continues to subsidize and bail out everything, there will be no end to it. And that isn't good for anyone. Not good for business, not good for the economy. If you're a company, and you suck, why should taxpayer money be given to you? Bankruptcy would provide Chrysler, GM, and Ford with the opportunity to revamp their companies and hopefully become more competitive. Throwing money at things doesn't make them work: look at the public school system in this country. Either change or die. Why prolong their agony? Why prop up a corpse? If your business model sucks, do something about it.

Hillary Clinton: the next Secretary of State? Eh. Not pissed, not delighted. Just eh. Seriously: who is this woman? Last year she was the bane of every conservative's existence. She was forced to move rightward in her campaign against Obama and she somehow managed to pull it off and not look idiotic. Now several conservatives seem pretty content with the fact that she may be the next Secretary of State. The transformation is truly remarkable. I admit to thinking up to earlier this year that if Hillary Clinton were elected, I would be devastated. But during her run against Obama, I was rooting for her because compared to him, she was one tough cookie. I don't really think she has the proper credentials for SecState, but if the alternative is either John "Reporting for Duty" Kerry or Bill Richardson, she's got my approval. Hillary has not been my favorite woman in the past. In 1999 she was present for a speech made by the late Yasser Arafat's wife, in which she (Arafat's wife) claimed that Israel poisons Palestinian wells (an atrocious falsehood). Hillary seemed to eat it all up and afterwards gave her a big hug. She supported the war in Iraq until it became politically harmful to do so and then flip flopped like every Dem except Lieberman. But she is fairly hawkish compared with her competition. Kerry and Richardson would be jokes. Can you imagine John Kerry squaring off against Vladimir Putin or one of his top dogs? Think about it. And then weep. Or clap, if you're Russian.

Speaking of Putin: this guy has got to be the most balls out and absurdly macho world leader since Benito Mussolini. Mussolini would wrestle lion cubs (or was it bear cubs? Whatever). He would rip his shirt off and harvest wheat alongside Italian peasants. Or at least he would for the cameras. Putin has, in the past few months, assembled a judo video of himself kicking the shit out of guys, tranquilized a tiger and subsequently pet it like a kitten, and received a tiger cub for his birthday. And this is not to mention his shirtless fishing, which supposedly made him some sort of sex symbol. Ridiculous. I guess he's pretty awesome - or at least he would be if he wasn't such a dick. I read recently that he wanted to string up Georgian President Mikhail Sakaashvili "by the balls." Direct quote. In sum, I would not mess around with this dude. There aren't any specific implications I wanted to make in this paragraph, I just wanted to randomly talk about this guy. I sincerely feel like I haven't seen anything like it. Not outside of a history book, anyway.

I said I wouldn't speak about the election, but to be fair I have to ask one question: Why, two plus weeks after the election, does Sarah Palin, the vice presidential candidate for the losing ticket, continue to get hammered by the media? Is the left that pathetic that, even with victory, it must continue to belittle and besmirch this woman? It is truly sickening. The only reason I can think of is that the left is afraid that somewhere down the road, she is going to be a problem. They are trying to nip that in the bud. Or at least that is my not-really-thought-out theory. Look, people, you got what you want, the embodiment of all your hopes and dreams was elected, fair and square (well, there was voter intimidation but the gap between his votes and McCain 's render this irrelevant). GET OVER IT. Move on. Every time I turn on Olbermann, he's STILL talking about Palin. He's obsessed with her. They all are. And I don't really understand why. If she had been on the victorious ticket, it would be much more sensible.

It's 1:15 in the morning and I got to get up for work. More posts to come.

For the First Time Ever...

2008-11-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

...I am disgusted with my country, to paraphrase Michelle Obama. I want to throw up. It appears that if one can merely speak well without saying anything, then one can become President of the U.S. Obama makes Clinton appear to be a political amateur. Congratulations for pulling the wool over the eyes of the electorate...Canada even has more sense than us, Harper is still in office. I am actually so annoyed right now that I have nothing more to say. We've elected a socialistic empty suit who has literally brought nothing to the table. This is a man who physically makes me gag every time I see him on television or any time he opens up his mouth so that I can hear silver tongue wag. Ayers and Farrakhan and Ahmadinejad and Hamas and Putin are delighted, all for different reasons. What a fucking joke.

2008-10-28T18:23:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the dearth of posts, I've been absurdly busy. Same old, same old, I'm always complaining about something I know. But I got the GREs out of the way this weekend, I sorta rocked 'em, and that's one thing off my plate.

I'm not really sure what I want to talk about in this post. I really have nothing left. It may be a case of verbal premature ejaculation or it could just be my sheer exhaustion and frustration with the world around me. But I'll try to say something, because this juggernaut named Obama will not be stopped. Not that I'll stop him, but still.

Barack Obama is becoming a celebrity and a standard for not much of a reason. I understand that he is the first major candidate to be black and could very well become the first black president of the United States. That is a great historical development. I want you to be honest with me though: do you think people would be all about Obama in the manner they are if he was just some white dude from Illinois telling all of us to change? Pfft. Yeah, okay. T-shirts depicting this empty suit alongside Martin Luther King, Jr? Are you really comparing the two? What has the former done to AT ALL compare with the latter? Oh, he's black. It has nothing to do with actual accomplishments or anything. King spoke with soaring rhetoric but backed it up with deeds. Barack Obama just talks big but really hasn't done anything memorable, OTHER THAN GIVE SPEECHES. I overhead some girl in my class last night saying how she wants to go to Columbia because that is where Obama went as an undergraduate. "That is a smart man." Maybe he is, but is he really the reason you want to go to a school? Would you want to go to Stanford because R. James Woolsey went there? And is Obama that smart? I'm not sure that he is: he thinks that the Berlin Wall fell because the "world stood as one." What world was that, Obama?.....Oh, it doesn't matter, you don't have to answer to anybody.

Let's put it this way: we are a week from electing the most left-wing candidate in the history of this country. For some of you, that is undoubtedly a good thing. For me, it's pretty horrible and scary. We're not talking Bill Clinton here. (Although, compared with Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton was (and is) a political amateur). Obama has managed to pull the wool over so many people's eyes, and these people have become so narrow-minded and brainwashed that it is more or less futile to attempt to sway them. Name me one reason that Obama should impress me. He went to Columbia? A lot of people do. He went to Harvard Law? Impressive, but so did everyone in the United States government. He was a useless professor at the University of Chicago Law School who left nary a trail of any academic scholarship? I'm amazed. He was a left-wing state senator representing a left-wing district for the Illinois State Senate? Holy Mother of God, what more can you tell me? He opposed the Iraq War when it was "unpopular" to do so in a left-leaning, anti-war district? Wow, such political courage. He gave a speech at the 2004 DNC in Boston that was well-worded and sort of nice-sounding? OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD MY BRAIN HAS EXPLODED AND I NEED NEW UNDERPANTS OH MY GOD.

Here is a man who believes that it is a shame that the Supreme Court has not made it a priority to spread your wealth around. A) Not their responsibility, dipshit. They're a judiciary. B) Spreading wealth around - not good for anybody. I know that we need taxation to pay for indispensable goods and services provided for the government at the local, state, and federal level. But in the end, I work for myself and in the future (God willing) for my family, not for some federal bureaucrat in some cubicle in Washington so that he can give that hard-earned money to some dude who this bureaucrat feels should get it. It is hard to see how this is not socialistic, although I know this is a term that is thrown around waaaaaay too often. But, honestly, I don't like the idea. We are already taxed too much. Way too much. But let's become like Europe! With like 70% income tax. Not like their economies have been stagnant since forever or anything.

Bush is getting a ton of shit for what is happening with the economy right now. Bush has gotten and will continue to get shit for anything wrong in the world until he is six feet under. This financial crisis and all the ramifications stemming from it are not the fault of the Bush tax cuts though. Obama himself said that more taxes make no sense when in an economic rut, implicitly saying that higher taxes hinder growth. So what gives then, man? The top economic bracket already pays like 70% of taxes in this country and most people on the lower end of the scale don't pay anything. I understand wanting to help out the poor, but punishing people for their success is ridiculous and counterproductive. Why should anyone bust their ass to create and run a successful business, only for it to be taxed to holy hell? What planet am I on?

Oh, right. The one Obama is going to magically heal. I nearly forgot.

A Little Somethin' Regarding McCain

2008-10-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

A few years ago (and even more recently than that) John McCain was the recipient of so much praise and admiration from the media you would've thought that he was a superhero or a resurrected Founding Father. He was adored, even by the New York Times, which nowadays won't publish an opinion piece that he had penned. Seems like a long time ago, but it wasn't.

So, what has changed? Has McCain marched radically to the right and become a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? Based upon the latest stuff out there, you wouldn't be wrong to think so. But he really hasn't. In fact, he has stayed his usual self: a moderate, right-of-center Republican who does not march lockstep with his party on every issue. He disagreed with basically everyone on the surge, which has turned out well. He sponsored the McCain-Feingold bill to reform campaign finance, has called for amnesty of illegal immigrants, and now points his fingers at Wall Street, which is always an easy target. Suffice to say, I don't delight in these latter three. But they show you something: If John McCain is a right-wing ideologue, then I am Simon Bar Kochba.

His call for more regulation in the financial sector is contradicting his message for less government (which annoys me), and it's also dumb beyond words because it was over-regulation, not deregulation, which is largely why we got into this financial mess. Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd pushed lenders to offer loans to uncreditworthy borrowers, because it's the government's duty to make sure everyone fulfills the American Dream (sarcasm), and what happened is that the industry was overfed and ultimately shat all over itself and everyone else. I don't know when the next laundry cycle will come around to get this stain completely out, but it might be awhile because the government is slow and lazy when it comes to actually doing the laundry (like me), although it talks about doing it. They demand that you let them borrow your pants, they defecate in said pants, and then give them back to you claiming that they didn't do it - their brother did, their cousin did, their stepfather's niece's best friend's collie did. But if you take a stool sample, it will show you that the government is the culprit. The government pooped your pants.

Before I get out of control here with the poop stuff, I must say with a measure of level-headedness that there were most assuredly instances of greed and wrong-doing outside of the government. But the government's steering of Fannie and Freddie, and the pressure it put on lenders to be "fair" (playing the race card, no doubt), was wobbly and misguided.

Anyway, back to McCain. When I watched the debates, it seemed as though Obama and McCain were trying to "out-socialist" one another. "Well, I'll put this much money into it." "Well, I'll put this much money into it, so take that." Throwing money at things doesn't make them work. Ingenuity does. Entrepreneurial and analytical thinking, along with mechanical, technical, and a million other skills, make things work.

McCain has it wrong here. I don't see too much of a difference between him and Obama on this issue, and I think McCain likes his role as the maverick (a word that has begun to annoy me due to its overuse). He couldn't deny the temptation for demagoguery. How about: throwing the facts out there about how Congress and the federal government was largely at fault here, instead of trying to out-Huey Long Obama? The American people hate Congress (last I saw, it had a 9% approval rating, making George W. Bush look like motherhood and apple pie), they think it's terrible, but somehow they think more government is going to make everything dandy. That doesn't make sense, and it won't. Government is no panacea. What does a guy sitting in a cubicle in Washington, D.C. give a shit about you and what you need? The profit motive, folks, as much as we hate to think it, is very powerful. More powerful than just "goodness". Because when it comes down to it, most people aren't saints. But, if given a chance to earn something for themselves, they might care a bit more. And it works. A person who is sick gets his medicine and the dispenser of that medicine gets his money. I know it sounds bad, and I really wish it were otherwise, but unfortunately it's the world in which we live. We are humans, after all.

A lot of that was tangential to the point at hand. Basically, to sum it up, McCain is not a radical right-winger. In fact, it is hard to really see much of a pattern to his politics at all. I'm not in love with the guy trust me - I'm more voting against Obama than for McCain. But the crap being thrown out there at him is largely unfair. So I'm gonna get his back.

The new theme that the media is harping on is that McCain is a big ole meanie. Obama is the skinny twit at school being picked on by the big bully. And Obama's black too, so that makes him a big racist bully. The only ones making an issue of race out of this campaign are Obama and his minions. He preemptively accused McCain and the Republicans of racism and, since any criticism leveled at Obama is racist, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one has made fun of his name or attacked his ethnic background, except for maybe a few extremist jerks. The McCain campaign has certainly done no such thing. How is asking about Obama's ties to a WHITE terrorist racist? I guess because Obama is black? Look, if McCain or anyone on his team attacked Obama for his race or anything like that, I would be appalled and decidely turned off. I would never write a post doing anything but bashing him. But this hasn't happened. This country is increasingly knee jerk and hyperbolic. Bush = Hitler. Guantanamo = Auschwitz. Questioning Obama about anything = Jim Crow-level racism.

McCain's reputation is being sullied for no legitimate reason. Agree or disagree with him, he is a man of honor, and these lies are despicable. This is the same man that the media deified when he defied Bush (those words look weird in the same sentence and are oddly similar in spelling). It's the same guy who ran against Bush for the 2000 Republican nomination and gained so much kudos for his honor and integrity. But now that he is atop that ticket, he no longer has that integrity? Why? Just because he questions (and even attacks) Obama over policy differences, that does not mean he is a schoolyard bully. If it does, then so is Obama. And so is every candidate who has ever run for any position anywhere ever. Stop your crying and finger-pointing hysterics. Get over it. McCain did not run for the presidency to lie down and lose with grace. I know that is what is expected of him. I know that he is an obstacle barring the door to Paradise. A nuisance. It is Obama's time, etc. This is a presidential election in a democracy, so McCain, unfortunately, has the right to fight back.

I Apologize for the Hiatus

2008-10-21T08:08:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I've been really busy. Between my GRE this Saturday, a billion schools to apply to (which require 2 essays each), a full-time job that takes forever both to get to and to come from, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and spending time with my lovely lady, sometimes I feel too lazy to blog it up. However, I know how much my readers anticipate the venom that I spew forth, and how much they've missed it. I know this because I got a complaint that I was posting too few and far in between.

I'm going to try to make this a short post. I tend to get overexcited and try to get all of my thoughts down at once. First, I want to lightly cover baseball. Rays, good job. I heartily congratulate you. Sox: you didn't win the pennant but you made it a bruising fight, commencing with an incredible comeback starting in the 7th inning of Game 5. I have to applaud that, despite my disappointment at the final outcome. That a team could go from AAA-caliber to winning the pennant of their league is to be applauded. It's actually pretty miraculous. No one ever thought that the Rays would be anything more than a doormat for Boston and New York to piss on.

As for the election - I don't even know what's the point of talking about it, although talk about it I damn well will. It's pretty scary how easily and quickly Americans have fallen in love with Barack Obama. He's got a silver tongue and he's even kinda funny, as we saw at the Alfred E. Smith dinner at the Waldorf in NYC. But the lack of curiosity about the man continues to appall me: no medical records needed, nothing about his past important, nothing about his associations are important. What is important? Oh, that he's the one we've been waiting for. Why is he? Because he's going to "change" things. Change what? "......" I can't hear you. "...Fuck Bush, man. He's an asshole." Thanks for your scholarly exegesis.

Look, this is hyperbole. There are many thoughtful supporters of Obama, including many family members of mine. However, this country is a center-right country. Obama is hard left. Not sorta left, or left. Hard left. I understand that people are frustrated with Bush and his cronies because they're responsible for (fill in anything horrible that has happened in the past eight years anywhere in the world that comes to mind here). Dick Cheney invented a time machine, went back in time, shot Lazar Kaganovich in the face "accidentally", took over his post, and increased the efficiency of the Holodomor. I know all of this. BUT -if the people of this country were made more aware of Obama's actual philosophy, positions, and past, maybe they would see beyond his silver tongue. The fact that he has been portrayed as some sort of messianic figure is a joke, except that it isn't as funny as it should be, because so many people are buying into it, whether realizing it or not. They call him "transformational", they say he will heal the partisan divide, make the rising waters slow, etc. They have absolutely no evidence to support any of this. Indeed, it is based on what people want to think. They want to believe that Obama is a post-partisan and -racial candidate who will make everything hunky dorey by simply sitting down with someone and soothing him/her with his mellifluous voice. In fact, they actually do believe this; they have made themselves believe it.

If you were to watch only MSNBC and the "analysts" on CNN (read: liberal commentators), you would think that John McCain was a hybrid of John Wayne Gacy and William Calley. Because I'm into serious sadomasochism like my boy Dice-K (see first post), sometimes I watch MSNBC just to see what Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann say. I don't know about Maddow but I know Olbermann pretends to have a veneer of neutrality, which is a joke. I know Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are blowhards too, but guess what - they know they are conservative and they make it clear. The thing that makes Olbermann and Maddow laughable is that not only are they so in the tank for Obama that their brains are dead from want of oxygen, but I have never seen a conservative or Republican on their show to contest them. Sean Hannity has liberals on his show to debate all the time. Everytime Olbermann and Maddow has a guest, it is ALWAYS a fellow liberal. They share snide remarks about Republicans and how "stupid" they are, hate on McCain and Palin and Joe the Plumber. Which means they never have to defend the bullshit that continuously pours from their mouths. They never have to debate, or to look at it from the other side. It's easy to share smirks with those who support you. This is the problem with the media - they all think alike so they don't really think to think otherwise. In other words, it's a big circle jerk.

But this charade of the media continues. Joe the Plumber has been given a public colonoscopy. I don't care whether he owes taxes, that his first name is Samuel, etc. I don't. I care about who is running for office. He's just a dude in Ohio who asked a candidate for president a legit question. The main news-getter should be Obama's socialist response to Joe's query. The media, though, has reacted in predictable fashion and has turned on a private citizen who did nothing but ask the guy a question. If an "average Joe" had asked McCain a hard question which required an extemperaneous response which he had flubbed, the media would be festooning praise on the guy. Inviting him on "The View," etc. But we all know that you can't question Obama. I'm not talking bash, or be racist about. I'm talking, you can't question him. Joe (or Samuel, or whatever), learned this quickly. Don't you know better than to question the Lord thy God, you fucking peon?

We all know McCain's deal, Palin's deal, and we all know whether or not Joe the Plumber has ever been late to a doctor's appointment. But we know very little about Obama. Yeah, we know a few things, but when you get down to it, you don't know much. You know what you want to know and you see what you want to see. Any sort of criticism of Obama is castigated as racism, no matter how it's posited. I have covered this on another post, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Anything mentioning Franklin Raines: racist. Mention Paris Hilton: playing into the racist stereotype of lustful blacks chasing blondes. In other words, "Shut your mouth, McCain and let Obama win this election. You're not being a good enough loser. Don't you know you're supposed to lose?"

A New York Times reporter has sent messages to associates of McCain's daughter, via Facebook, to get the inside scoop (on what, I don't know). If the media showed half of this dedication in trying to find out things about Obama, then maybe the poll numbers would look different (or maybe if they stopped polling a majority of Democrats). I want every one of you reading this to google "Obama and Odinga". Because Ayers isn't enough to sway people. Neither is Wright. But you all know that if McCain had these sort of associations, the media would be in our face with a new revelation every day. You know it, I know it. We all know it. If you don't know it, then you really do know it and you're lying to yourself.

In sum, if the media showed even a modicum of the gusto with uncovering stuff about Obama as they do with McCain, then people would be able to make an informed decision. But because they don't, all we hear are the positives of one and the negatives of the other. Which means that, if one does not do his or her own research, one will vote for the man the media touts as the better of the two. This is what's happening. Most people aren't curious enough to do their own reading beyond the paper or the evening news, they just take everything they're told at face value. If Obama wins, this is why. Not because he is some miraculous Lightworker.

Soon to come (and I mean immediately): a post on McCain and how, now that he is the Republican nominee, he is such a mean jerk.

Some Thoughts (Not About Baseball)

2008-10-15T06:40:00.000-07:00

I can't bring myself to talk about baseball. The past few games of this ALCS have been painful. Game 2 stayed close, though for some reason I never felt that the Sox really had a chance. Games 3 and 4 can be summed up in a simple analogy: Rays:Red Sox::German Wehrmacht:Belgian Army. I think that's about right.

On to some more pertinent matters, like the future of our country. This election race is slipping out of McCain's hands, if he ever had it in his hands to begin with. He has forfeited any sort of political capital that he might have gained in the short run due to the Palin bounce. Palin, in some circles, is more anathema than George W. Bush, which is saying something. Oliver Stone (I know he's a joke politically) said that "George Bush is an intellectual compared to Sarah Palin" and said that she wouldn't understand the dialogue of his new feature film "W". This, in liberal speak, is calling her a protist. It's pretty unfair, too - we have been publicly exposed to this woman for like eight weeks, and people are frothing at the mouth about her in a ridiculous manner. There is an absurd double standard that she is being held to.

Joe Biden, Foreign Policy Savant, Knower of All Things Foreign, Wisest of the Wise:

"President Bush insisted on elections in the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, 'Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them.'" President Bush insisted on elections in the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, 'Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them.'"

....What are you talking about? Hamas has power in Gaza, not the West Bank. I am not Lord of Foreign Policy, but even I know this. If Sarah Palin had made this error, the media would have pounced. With Joe: maybe a shrug and a "That's our Joe!" Ridiculous.

Another Biden error in the same debate, regarding foreign policy, his supposed forte:

"When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”

.........................................................................

I am literally speechless at this. Hezbollah out of Lebanon? What universe is this guy living in? Even if he meant that we had kicked Syria out of Lebanon, he would be wrong: we didn't. Soooo....not sure what Biden is talking about. If Sarah Palin had made this mistake, she would be derided as an out of her league dumb redneck hick c*nt (yes, there is a t-shirt calling her this despicable term - what she did to deserve such hatred I don't know, but if she were a Demmie all the lefties would be shouting "Sexism!" But she's not, so whatever).

Biden:Gaffes::Box Factory:Boxes. There are many delightful ones to choose from. But perhaps my favorite, which no one cares about because he is the Seer of Seers and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., the Scrapper from Scranton:

In an interview with Katie Couric:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

I'm sure my readers are intelligent enough to see where the mistakes are in that statement. Hint: There are two of them. If Sarah Palin uttered this absurdity, she would be a Mongoloid retard backwoods inbred uneducated idiot. But Joe Biden said it. "Sooo....let's pretend it didn't happen or, if we do acknowledge it, let's do so with humor as opposed to the unmitigated hatred with which we would tar Sarah Palin if she had made the same remark. Joe Biden is a God." This is over stating it though: if Obama is Jesus, and I'm pretty sure that he is, than Biden is more anagolous to, I don't know, Peter.

This is an inexplicable double standard. Sure, Palin is an upstart and she rightfully deserves a lot of scrutiny. But Biden is sort of just given a pass just because he's been in the Senate since like 1842. If anything, his words should be criticized more because as someone with routine access to intelligence reports and meetings with foreign policymakers and analysts, he should know that Israel did not kick out Hezbollah, never mind us, and that Hamas won an election in Gaza, not the West Bank. And, as a man who has been an American leader for forever, he should know that FDR wasn't President in 1929 and that he certainly did not appear on television, which was not yet publicly available. Not to say that this should cost the Obama-Biden team the election, but the free pass from the media is unacceptable. Unacceptable.

I heard about a segment on the Howard Stern program in which Stern sent out a correspondent to Harlem. He asked passers-by what they thought of Obama, and then intentionally misrepresented McCain's positions as Obama's. Questions were asked such as, "Do you support Obama's pick for Sarah Palin as V.P.?" The passers-by were basically like, "Why, of course." Here's another delicious treat: "Do you support Obama more because he's pro-life, or because he says our troops should stay in Iraq and finish the war." Knowledgeable voter: "Um...I guess, both." This is what I hinted at last post, people. Obama is going to win this election (I am sure of this) because he is a minority, he is telegenic, and a good public speaker. People don't necessarily know his actual policies. The benefit of the doubt he receives from both the media and the public at large is ridiculous.

The race card thing makes me want to explode. You cannot say a negative thing about this man without some asshole pointing at you and whining "Racist! Racist!" Any attack that McCain makes is racist. Racist, racist, racist. Shut up with that. These are scare tactics. Everyone treats Obama with kid gloves, and I can come to no conclusion other than it is because he is black. McCain is being an absolute pussy. The media should spend wisely and invest their money in some knee pads. Otherwise, if Obama gets elected and is president for four or (God have mercy) eight years, their knees will be awfully sore. Other than talk radio and a few dudes on Fox News, who has really laid into Obama? Even O'Reilly, a blowhard who I can't really stand, threw him softballs. Why? Because everyone is afraid of being castigated as a racist. There are eggshells all around. I get so sick of being indirectly accused of being a racist (I say this because conservatives are painted as racists by much of the ignorant public).

Obama, to paraphrase the Beatles, is a real nothing man, sitting in a nothing land. He is a nonentity whose entire persona has been created by his campaign and the media (the same difference). Think about it: we don't really know anything about him, except that he was a "community organizer". The media's lack of curiosity is shameful. We have learned more about Sarah Palin in like eight weeks than we have about Obama over the past few years that he has been campaigning for president.

Make sure that you've really thought everything through before pulling the lever for this guy. McCain is NOT a right wing ideologue like the media is making him out to be. He is a centrist, which is why he used to relish in attacking Bush and the media loved him. He is, in my opinion, not conservative enough. The media is painting him as an out of control, angry right-winger (racist to boot!), which is ridiculous. McCain is pretty independent. Obama rolls with dudes who hate this country and, for you Jews out there, who hate Israel too. If it was one guy, or maybe two, then I give him the benefit of the doubt. Beyond that, it becomes a pattern. It is a pattern. I am not saying that Obama hates the U.S. and Israel, but he is in deep with crowds who do. What does this tell you? I understand: Bush fatigue, yada, yada. But McCain is not Bush. No one is Bush but Bush.

I could be wrong. There is a strong possibility that in his first day in office, Obama will take a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish and feed the multitudes in the Third World. Blind children in Somalia will be able to see. Lepers in Bangladesh will be cured. A man will be exorcised of his demons, who are legion - (we, the United States, are the man - the Republicans are the demons). He'll walk across the Tidal Basin. He will ascend Capitol Hill, where he will be transfigured into a radiant, superior being. All of these amazing things could happen, and more.

But then again, I could be right. This man has a shady past, hangs with shady dudes until it's politically expedient to throw them under the bus, and is, get this, no more experienced to be president than Sarah Palin. Tell me: what has this man done other than talk about what he's going to (miraculously) do? Why is he any more qualified? He isn't - but he is more eloquent and a minority to boot. These are his qualifications - nothing more.

A Thorough, Incisive Analysis on Yesterday's ALCS Game 3

2008-10-14T06:44:00.001-07:00

....Bah

The Game Last Night

2008-10-12T13:09:00.000-07:00

I doubt that many of you got through my election thoughts. I just kept writing and writing, and without realizing it, I exceeded 3000 words. Sorry about that. I won't bore this time. I just want to talk a bit about the game last night, and by "the game" I'm referring, of course, to the second game of the ALCS.

As I predicteed yesterday, Beckett indeed was not his "ridiculously ridiculous" self. In fact, if anything, he was ridiculously terrible. I kept thinking that eventually he would get his shit together, and he just never did. It was pretty frustrating to watch, but I guess you can't get too cocky about your guys always going out there and excelling, kickin' ass and taking names. That would make you a Yankees fan. Or, to be fair, an obnoxious brand of Red Sox fan that was spawned in 2004, a group that sort of disgusts me. Every single one of Boston's teams, with the exception of the Bruins, at least made it to their league championship last season. That, my friends, is absurd. This has, in turn, bred a bunch of cocky assholes in Boston (even cockier than before, which is saying a lot). But again, I digress.

Like I said, I kept expecting Joshy to turn it around but he just didn't. The offense was awesome last night, though, which bodes well. Pedroia hit two jacks, Youk had 1, and Bay had yet another (who is this guy?). I had to wonder how this was not enough offense. It just seemed that no matter what the Sox did, the Rays just turned around and either matched it or exceeded it in the bottom half of the inning. The Rays have been consistently underestimated all year and I will admit that until 3/4 of the way through the season, I felt the same way. I knew they were good, but I just could not accept that they were winning the AL East, and quite handily. Chalk this up to the fact that they have been more or less a AAA team until now. Kudos, I guess. But still, Beckett? Even coming off an injury, Red Sox fans have gotten into a habit (perhaps a bad one) of expecting him to go out there and allow at most 2 runs. He has been so amazing in the post seasons of the past that is it hard for you NOT to expect that. But his last two starts have him looking completely out of it. Not sure of it's the injury, rust, a bit of both, or just not getting it together. I still love the guy though.

DP looks like he is turning it on. Youkilis is hitting like the reincarnation of Ted Williams, although he looks like Sasquatch's cousin. I love Jason Bay. When Manny was released, I figured that there were two sides of the coin. One was that he was acting like an asshole, so maybe it would be good for the team to have that off their minds. He and Youk, it should be remembered, got in a fight in the dugout last June. Manny attacked the traveling secretary. There was certainly tension. The other was: Holy shit, we are losing Manny, who is a future Hall of Famer. But Bay has really been playing well in his stead, and Manny's absence hasn't really been too palpable in the postseason. Bay is hitting out of his mind. Big Sloppy is popping up everything, but I feel like he is just missing. I am calling this right now: he's hitting a home run in Game 3. I know this. I consulted an augur last night, after throwing my cat out of the window in frustration at the outcome of the game and scaring the crap out of my sleeping girlfriend. The augur guaranteed it. And the augur knows all (what the hell am I talking about?). Maybe I was dreaming, although I think not.

Anyway, last night was an excellent game. It was intense and competitive throughout. It was a billion hours of exciting baseball. I had several myocardial infarctions. All of these extra inning games are taking years off my life. But, then again, this is playoff baseball. I live for this. But, you can't win 'em all.

As a final note, I think it is beyond idiotic that Major League Baseball decided to have tomorrow's game start at 4 pm. This sucks. I get out of work at 5:30 and I can't get home till at least an hour later. That means that, conservatively speaking, I might get to see 2 innings of baseball. Most people also have jobs. It starts at 1 pm on the West Coast. It is an important playoff game. Who thought this up?

P.S. I have a crush on Jon Lester. I get giddy when I see him on the mound. I have five posters of him in my room and I asked the augur if there is a future for us together. And tomorrow afternoon, he's gonna win. I know it. I just might not see it. And that is just not right.

Some Thoughts on the Election

2008-10-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Now, as some of you may be aware, the Presidential election is on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of this November, namely Nov. 4. The progression of the campaigns has made me increasingly worried, but most of all, frustrated. Barack Obama - the messenger of hope, the "one we've been waiting for", fairly new on the political scene, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ returned to earth etc. against John McCain - a scarred war veteran, a Senator for the last quarter century, a "maverick" who is barely right of center yet framed by the media to be some right wing ideologue now that he is no longer that convenient thorn in Bush's side that made him their favorite Republican. These are the two choices and quite frankly I am not too excited about either. The former is an empty suit who is the classic Sophist - all rhetoric, no substance. The latter, while honorable for his independence and his tendency to speak his mind on issues rather than succumb to groupthink, is sometimes uncomfortably populist

First, I want to come clean here - I'm a registered Republican. Now, before you call me a rich-loving, poor-hating, racist, misogynist, gay-bashing, warmongering, imperialist Hitler-loving Nazi Fascist, let me get some things out. I am a Republican because I believe that it is one's responsibility to be responsible for one's self (with certain limitations). I don't believe that the government should have the final say on everything and basically be the overlord of everything that happens in this country. While there is certainly some greed in the private sector, I don't believe that faceless bureaucrats within the federal governments are any less susceptible to that greed. They are not angels. Human nature is greedy. That is how it always has been, and always will be. Legislation that calls for more regulatory oversight won't change that. The regulators could be, and most likely are, just as greedy, because they're human too. I do not believe that just because a person is motivated by profit, that person, ipso facto, is incapable of acting with decency and humanity. I just believe in Adam Smith's philosophy of the invisible hand, and here I will quote perhaps the most famous passage from his 1776 Wealth of Nations:

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

All of that dense 18th century language is only saying that by pursuing one's own self-interest, one usually ends up fulfilling the public interest much better than if one intends to fulfill the public interest.

Also, I believe in a muscular foreign policy. The Bush Administration has gotten a ton of criticism, and rightfully so, for its blunders in Iraq and now, ever more apparently, in post-Taliban Afghanistan. However, I think that the intentions of invading Iraq were correct. I'm not going to get into a big thing here, if anything maybe I will cover it in a later blog, as to why this is so. However, I want to state very clearly that the conflict has been overly simplified, the notion that we "took our eyes off the ball" in Afghanistan is misguided, and that strategically speaking, invading the heart of the Middle East was a pretty good idea.

Believe it or not, I am no fascistic thug. Maybe I have some neoconservative leanings (this term has been misused and abused to the point that its original meaning has been largely obfuscated). I tend to be relatively liberal when it comes to domestic social issues (gay rights, marijuana, etc), but on foreign policy I tend to be a bit more hawkish. That is, more or less, the definition of a neoconservative, although obviously truncated for brevity's sake. It must be emphasized though, that Obama's idea that the war began in Afghanistan and therefore must end there, is stupid. That isn't where the war began. Sure, that is where our troops first invaded, but this war began in the heart of the ARAB Middle East, the home of Wahabbism, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic fundamentalist thought in general. That is where it must end, if it does end. Obama's notion is akin to saying, "The Second World War in Europe began in Poland, therefore it must end in Poland". Ridiculous and historically impossible. Even if Osama bin Laden were killed tomorrow, do you think that suddenly all Islamic fundamentalist thought would cease to exist? He is one man. An influential, dangerous, murderous, asshole-ish man, but still, just one man. The ideas do not die with him. There needed to be a much wider war against Islamists than just in Afghanistan. The root of it is in the Arab world, not Afghanistan. These are very complex issues, but I'm just throwing out the basics. I'm not writing a thesis or a Foreign Affairs essay

Now, on to the candidates. For this post, I will deal with the Democrat, Barack Obama. On the surface there is much to be admired in the man. If elected, he would become the first black President of the United States. This would be a huge leap forward for a country that once held blacks as slaves and segregated entire communities. He is eloquent, and seemingly thoughtful and intelligent on some important issues. He is young, and seems to brim with optimism. Indeed, this makes him, to some, a much more attractive candidate than John McCain, who can appear cantankerous and stiff in comparison. But, come on people, let's get beyond the superficial and let's dig here. Beyond the rhetoric, who is this guy? This is a man who, beyond degrees from Columbia and Harvard Law, does not have much to say for himself. Sure, he was in the State Senate of Illinois and the U.S. Senate. Sure, he speaks about bringing Republicans and Democrats together to sing Kumbaya from Capitol Hill, and he does so in an often beautiful way. But, to simply take him for his word and believe in him because of an admittedly brilliant speech he made at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and subsequent speeches, is stupid. Listen, he will never bring Republicans and Democrats together on every major issue. No one ever will. Why? Because they are sentient human beings with the ability to process information and, ultimately, decipher, understand, and act upon that information in different ways. They will not always agree to compromise on every issue, because sometimes there is a fundamental reason as to why they differ. And this is healthy for democracy. If there was always the ability for everyone to just agree and get along, then democracy is for naught. The whole purpose of democracy is to discuss issues and argue over them, often vigorously and angrily. If everyone always agreed, the point of a legislature would be slim to none and a fascist state would more or less exist.

I have gone off on a tangent, but this is my blog, so deal with it. I have a lot to say here, and because this is not a school assignment, I might be all over the place. I can't possible cover everything wrong with Barack Obama because I am not Edward Gibbon, I don't have time to write a six volume tome, and I don't care enough. People are going to vote for him regardless. There are several reasons, but I will list five:

1) Everyone, save a small minority, despises George W. Bush and, by extension, the Republican Party. Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, etc. have people angry and just tired of this administration. Some of it is justified, some not.
2) Barack Obama is black.
3) People don't inform themselves on the issues and say, "Hey, here's a handsome, relatively young man who speaks eloquently about the evils of Republicans and the plights of the little guy. I'm for him!"
4) Many Democrats (and Republicans too) will pull the lever for damn near anyone provided that there is a D (or an R) in front of his or her name without really thinking about it.
5) John McCain is running the most inept and retarded campaign ever.

I'm not going to get into the wars or the financial crisis right now. They are too big of concepts to effectively dissect in a blog, although I will go against this very grain of thought in future posts. Suffice to say, no one is more culpable in the financial crisis than the Democratic Party and, specifically, Barney Frank and Connecticut's own Christopher Dodd. They are obfuscating the truth by trying to lay the blame on the typical bad guys: Wall Street executives and their slithery, oily, evil, cunning, warmongering, Slytherin House-inhabiting Republicans. This is not to say that Wall Street execs are not to blame. Quite the contrary. Richard Fuld seems like a dick. So do these AIG people going out and getting manis and pedis. They have much to do with it. But for Frank and Dodd to deny all culpability and just point the fingers is nauseating. Yet, people will eat up this word vomit. With delight.

As you may or may not know, and you may not, Barack Obama is (half) black. Because of our country's history for slave owning and Jim Crow laws (which is a fault that must be acknowledged), the fact that Obama is black and on the cusp of becoming President is a huge deal. But, to some people, it's the only factor in their vote. Blacks are going to vote for him because he's black. The hip hop community will vote for him because he is black. Teen suburbanites will vote for him because they think they're black. Older Americans who want to prove to themselves that they are not prejudiced will vote for him because he is black. And...that's wrong and stupid on so many levels that no Earth language can truly do it justice. Also, any time anyone ever criticizes anything that Obama ever does, they are racists. This is an awesome card that he can play. And he does. He constantly brings up that Republicans will tell everyone how "different" he is, and how he looks nothing like the people on our currency. No Republican that I know of has said this. HE IS THE ONLY ONE SAYING THIS, and to make us feel sorry for him. And if he loses, blacks across the country are going to riot, blame racism, etc. I am not a racist. I am, in fact, part black. Race, to me, is a non-issue. I am a person who reads and ultimately comes up with his own decisions. Sometimes they differ from other people's. Because I am a human being, not a pre-programmed robot. I hate college student liberals more than anything - they profess to be so free-minded, man, and so liberal and thoughtful, dude, but if anyone thinks differently than they do, they try their damndest to shut him or her the fuck up, and immediately. This is called hypocrisy. I could write a Gibbon-esque tome on this. It is widespread, metastasizing, and actually sort of dangerous. But whatever. On to the next point.

People don't go about trying to learn stuff on their own. They see what the celebrities like Brad Pitt and Barbara Streisand have to say, what Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and Tom Brokaw et al. have to say, etc. Many do not do their own research. If people were to do a fair to heavy amount of research on the candidates, compare and contrast them, and ultimately decide to vote for Obama, then fine. This is a free country and I don't begrudge them their opinon. But many don't. "Hey guys, that Obama can speak. Not like that retarded ape Bush. Obama's got my vote". Believe me, people, I know many an Obama supporter whose thought processes run along these general lines. Maybe he is eloquent, maybe the Europeans want to deify him while hypocritically treating their own black minorities like shit. BUT THIS DOES NOT SUBSTITUTE FOR HIS LACK OF SUBSTANCE. His speeches are vague nonsense, meaningless, drivel. Give me one solid, factually-grounded reason that this guy should be President other than that we need "change" (whatever that means). Or that he is not an evil Republican. Or that he is black, or any other such nonsense. If you can, then okay. If not, then you're an idiot who is voting based on nothing. Unfortunately, I know too many people, mostly my age, who are in the latter camp. If more people knew about his connections with not only Jeremiah Wright, but with Bill Ayers, ACORN, Tony Rezko, Michael Pfleger (sp?), the Saul Alinsky-influenced leftist community organizers, his apparent membership in a socialist party in Chicago, his disturbing connections with Raila Odinga (look him up) etc., he would not be as popular. But many don't know. Many don't care to know. Many do know, but shrug it off. "He is not George Bush. He is not a Republican. He is black. So fuck McCain and those old white jerks."

This sort of applies to the fourth point I made as well. I am sometimes convinced that if Benito Mussolini were resurrected, and had in some hypothetical universe been born in the Midwest instead of Predappio, Italy, and ran as a Democrat, he would get votes over John McCain. "Because, goshdarn it, McCain is a Republican. He's not like you or me. He was awesome when he was against Bush but now that he seems to have some conservative principles (gasp) and is the Republican candidate, he is evil. Mussolini will make the trains run on time! Not like they did under Bush. They were always late! Always!...I'm voting for the Muss." This is hyperbole, obviously, but truly, for people who claim to be free thinkers, not like those narrow-minded gay-bashing Republicans, Democrats are often frighteningly narrow-minded. I guess the same can be said for Republicans. But I live in an area where everyone and their mother is a Democrat, so I can't really speak for that from personal experience. But it's a mind-boggling groupthink mentality. If you are friends with liberals, and you are outed as a conservative, you might be looked at as though you crucify puppies for recreation on the weekends. This is stupid, from either side. People have the right to think differently. This isn't Stalin-era Russia.

And, as for the fifth point: Is John McCain trying to lose this campaign? Look, I don't love the guy. But, because Obama is downright frightening to me, he has my support. And...WTF is he doing? He doesn't bring up Wright, Rezko, Ayers, etc. He has a bouillabaisse of things to choose from to harm Obama's popularity and he just doesn't. This isn't character defamation. Obama had a more-than-casual relationship with an unrepentant domestic terrorist and with some other sketch-ass dudes. This requires some investigation if this man is running for the most powerful position on earth. If McCain had had connections with Eric Rudolph or another like-minded individual, no matter how coincidental, the media would be all up in it. But they're not. And this speaks volumes. McCain is hardly helping because he refuses to bring it up. If I were him, I would bring it up in every single response in the debate, no matter how off topic, irrelevant, or dick it would be.

Moderator: So, Senator McCain, how will this financial crisis affect your governance if you become the next President?
McCain: Well, my friend, it will have a profound effect. People feel as though they are being taken advantage of, and they are correct. My administration will take the proper steps to rectify this horrible situation. My opponent, who is friends with an unrepentant Weatherman terrorist, will raise taxes. Any economist will tell you that you don't raise taxes in a crisis. According to a Wall Street Journal survey among top economists...

Stop being a lame ass and do it. You will be called unfair and rude and evil and racist no matter what you do because the media is in the tank for Obama anyway, so what's to lose? I fear that at this point, it's too late anyway, and if he brings up Obama's shady past associations he will look desperate and mean-spirited. I don't, however, think there is an alternative.

I can go on and on, but I have the GREs two weeks from today and I have to study some geometry. That stuff owns me. I have the verbal down (although the analogies are absurdly difficult), the algebra, trigonometry. But if you asked me about the area of a triangle inside a circle inscribed in a square that has sides measuring 3 units, I would not even know where to begin. It kicked my ass in high school too. So I have to get on that. Have a good day, y'all. More posts to come!

ALCS

2008-10-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

So, the first game of the American League Championship Series went pretty well last night, albeit in a boring fashion. Daisuke must get some serious sadomasochistic delight out of filling up the bases with walks and then getting out of the inning, something at which he excels. This really only happened in the first inning yesterday, and I was thankful that he got out of it unscathed, but Christ man, serving up three walks in the first inning of a game is just asking for it.

I'm looking forward to tonight, should be interesting. I hope that Beckett plays up to his potential. He had a really rough outing last start, but he's coming off an injury and these things happen. I expect that he won't be his ridiculously ridiculous playoff self tonight, but that is just cuz I'm a glass half-empty kinda guy. I still think (hope?) the Sox will win tonight, and if it's 2-0 going back to Fenway, this thing is a wrap. But even if they lose, splitting the first two in Tampa is pretty good. I gotta give it up to the Rays, it's good to see that maybe they have exorcised their Devils (lame joke, I know) and that they've broken out of their existence-long basement- dwelling status. I have a soft spot for underdogs of any type: this is, I think, what initially drew me to the Red Sox, before they became the favorites themselves. This is why I sometimes root for the bad guys in movies, because you just KNOW that when all is said and done, they're gonna lose. I love the underdog. That said, I hope the Rays get fucking face planted.