I was reading a grim account of the life sentence given to the savage murderer of a lovely Arkansas news anchor, and came upon this quote:

“It’s not until he’s carried out of Tucker Max in a pine box will he really meet his true judgment,” Cannady added, referring to Arkansas’ Tucker Maximum Security Prison.

Tucker Max is also the name of a college friend of mine who was arrogant as hell, went to law school, didn’t fit in with corporate firms, and had the last laugh by writing stories about drinking, chasing girls, and general decadence.  He recently wrote a book entitled Assholes Finish First.

Obama doesn’t want to celebrate the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s beneficient self-destruction in 1989 for several obvious reasons:

  • One, during the Cold War he was more concerned about the evils of helping the Contras and the El Salvadorans than with the much greater evils inflicted against Europeans by the Soviets and their lackeys.
  • Two, his fundamental perception of the world is narrow, parochial, self-obsessed and black-obsessed, and thus has little use for highlighting the Cold War and the West’s triumph.
  • Three, he will be a bit player rather than the main attraction.  Unacceptable.
  • Four, his present-day inability to lead Europeans, treat them as important to us and our destiny, will show that the promise of greater respect and influence around the world post-Bush under Obama is a chimera.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is a very meaningful event for me.  In 1989 I was in high school and studying German.  I was fairly in tune with current affairs.  I strongly supported the United States and its principles of freedom over communism.  I admired our military strength.  I rejected the false equivalence of the two sides so often spouted by half-witted social studies teachers and news broadcasters.

On the day the wall fell, we took the day off of class to discuss the meaning of events.  It was an exciting time and a tangible symbol of the victory of the freedom-loving West over the backwards, inefficient, and often murderous regimes of the Warsaw Pact.  Ronald Reagan fought this fight, along with Maggie Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and thousands of American servicemen who fought communism in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and as a deterrent force in Western Europe.  Reagan led the charge when dominant “sophisticated” opinion was that rapprochement and accommodation to the Soviet system were inevitable and desirable.

Obama and his team were on the wrong end of this fight.  Outside of a few hawkish Southern Democrats, the mainstream Democratic Party proffered a policy of military weakness and moral confusion.  John Kerry, Mondale, and Dukakis with their opposition to MX Missiles, arming the Contras, and standing up to the Soviets make this plain.

Obama wrote his college thesis on nuclear disarmament; other papers of his suggest he went for the totally naive liberal idea of unilateral disarmament–the so-called “nuclear freeze.”  Thank God we didn’t freeze our arms, nor did we freeze our moral resolve.  We won.  They lost.  And as a consequence civilization and the Christian religion have been restored in Eastern Europe and Russia.  Thanks for nothing Obama.

The picture that emerges of Major Nidal Hasan is of an obnoxious, provocative, and disloyal gadfly.  He showed little respect for the uniform, his peers, or the rights and wrongs of the war on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.  His deranged criticisms were absorbed by the politically correct and risk-adverse culture of today’s military.  Consider this nonsense from the Army Chief of Staff, General Casey:  “Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Worse?  Worse than 15 dead and 28 wounded?  Worse than an institution whose deracinated soldiers were well trained to know that raising an objection to someone like Hasan could be “racist” and thus the end of one’s career?

People outside the military don’t realize quite how much the h.r. nonsense we’re all accustomed to in academic and civilian life has become the lingua franca of the military since the Clinton’s administration, the Tailhook scandal, and the unnatural integration of women into combat-like roles.

We are fighting a war against radical Muslims, but no one is allowed to notice this inconvenient fact, even inside the military.  Today’s p.c. soldiers are supposed to train indifferent Iraqis and Afghanis, police these crummy countries’ sectarian elections, brook their proteges’ constant whining about civilian casualties (even though their own internecine struggles are positively Satanic in comparison), and ignore the fifth columnists in their midst like Sgt. John Muhammad (DC Sniper), Sgt. Akbar (who fragged his fellow soldiers), and now Major Nidal Hasan.

Neither Bush, nor Obama, nor most of the leadership at Ft. Hood takes note of the fact we have a self-professed Islamic enemy.  And that some of these enemies were born here, wear our army’s uniform, and have conflicted views about the country the rest of us love.  Instead, these manifest facts are dutifully suppressed by the ideology of diversity.

I think the media’s and other elites’ refusal to look at the content of Islamic beliefs, the relative lack of patriotism of the American Muslim community, and the way this community and the broader American community talk past each other is a problem. Non-Muslim Americans wrongly assume Muslims want to be treated fairly as equals.  Some do and would be content with that.  But Muslims on the whole see themselves as an elect, a superior community that needs to be treated deferentially.  This is the meaning of the Danish cartoon riots, the pushy suppression of dissent under the rubric of “hate speech,” and the double standards on accidental civilian deaths by western forces on the one hand (unintentional but worse in their eyes because committed by infidels) and the nearly daily and far more deadly bombings and killings of Muslims by other Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Their idea of “due respect” is anathema to a democratic society built on tolerance and Christian ideas of freedom and conscience, whether in Europe or the United States.

Channeling Aleander Kojeve, Francis Fukuyama in the End of History noted that the animating principle of democratic societies is the abandonment of the earlier “warrior aristocracy” ethic, whereby one group in the community demanded recognition as superior because of its physical courage, in favor of the more limited respect between each stratum of society merely as an equal to the others.  This practical equality of self-perception and social demand by different cohorts in our own society has a lot to do with our vital and relatively strong traditions of self government and peaceful social life.

Fukuyama to his credit more recently noted that, “Democracy’s only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism. . . . Some disenfranchised Muslims thrill to the rantings of Osama bin Laden or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the appeal of this kind of medieval Islamism is strictly limited.”

This is all to say that the Nidal Hasans of the world are not an existential threat, particularly to the United States.  At the same time, they–and by “they” I mean Muslims in America in general–should not be considered presumptively loyal.  They should prove themselves.  Every other immigrant group has done so, usually in the uniform and with the sacrifice of blood.  But unlike the Japanese and immigrant Italian and German Americans in World War II, Muslims have largely been MIA from the War on Terror and have shown a lack of moral clarity regarding the same.

Is it too much to ask a little expression of anger that anyone anywhere thinks like this bastard, Hasan?  Can we not say, roughly, “Love it or leave it.”  If they insult us, show discomfort with the uniform, express sympathy for Islamic terrorists, or otherwise threaten the military and its need for uniformity, Muslims and anyone else who thinks like this should be shown the door.  In other words, while we should not abuse loyal and peaceful citizens, we should be profiling.  We should be demanding displays of loyalty.  And we should be kicking out bad guys like this from the military and from the country before they do us any harm.  Diversity is hardly important and its loss is not a greater tragedy than the loss of life from some of our best Americans at the hands of someone who was only here because of a misguided and reversible immigration policy.

We’re soon going to have the shooting in Fort Hood reduced to a question of individual psychology.  We’re supposed to conclude that it was the meaningless act of a madman.  Thus understood, it’s random, a senseless tragedy, and a story of a good soldier gone bad.  In fact, this treacherous assault on our servicemen by a traitor in their midst is anything but senseless.  It is perfectly understandable.  It’s non-random.  It’s an act of “meaningful” violence.  And the key to deciphering that meaning is in the name of the shooter:  Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

I’ve written about this deficit of analogical reasoning by the media and our politicians regarding Muslim-on-American violence before.  When the patterns involved are permitted to be observed and recognized, this act of treachery should not be the least bit surprising.   It’s natural and regularly occurring and logical considering the utter incompatibility of the soldier’s religious faith and the necessary loyalty of a soldier to a country that will not implement that faith’s aggressive political program.

I thought Dick Morris and Charles Hurt had interesting things to say on last night’s election results.  Gay marriage lost in Maine, which suggests the momentum of this judge-and-elite-driven social change may be losing steam. Republicans won the governorship of Virginia, which is an Obama swing state and the home of a long stretch of DC suburbs, by a whopping 18%. The economy and a lack of confidence in Obama’s leadership I presume were important factors.

I think this just confirms what I already suspected. While Obama excited many people, much of his support was thin, driven more by personality, the projection of hopes of improved race relations, and concern for McCain’s erratic character and politics. Further, Obama has deviated from what he promised to be: a pragmatic and moderate “uniter.”

This series of interrelated outcomes should not be terribly surprising. The media did a lot to conceal Obama’s past, including playing along with his “et tu Brute” take on his long-time minister. The media basically suppressed the Bill Ayers’ controversy. And the media hardly noticed that Obama and his staff all cut their teeth in the nihilistic world of Chicago politics, where the name of the game was ethnic spoils and power more than idealism. To the extent there was idealism in this town, it was the socialist idealism so common in Hyde Park. People outside of the University of Chicago don’t realize that it’s as liberal and conventional a university town as any other and that the conservatives and Milton Friedman types all knew each other and could fit inside the Home Room of the International House, where we occasionally met. Everyone else was your basic extreme “progressive” and books about transgenderism and “Bombing the Suburbs” and support for gun control and other un-American ideas were common fare in the ‘hood.

Obama is an extreme liberal whose agenda is increasingly unpopular and who has implemented plans–such as the stimulus–that are not working. The recent elections and next years’ congressional elections are, in effect, referenda on Obamanism and its results. The best case scenario would be his and his liberalism’s thorough discreditment, though the incoherence and unwillingess to make tough choices by the American electorate will likely give it a new lease on life regardless of what happens in 2010 or 2012.  Austerity doesn’t sell for very long.  If Republicans are fighting for immigration amnesty, democratizing Iraq, overly generous Medicare, and other unsustainable subsidies, it hardly bodes well for the leave-me-alone coalition.

Democracies are inherently unstable and inimical to liberty in the long run, as William Lecky observed so well over 100 years ago.

I’m in a bit of a blog rut. The same news basically keeps repeating itself: Obama’s abominable healthcare bill, our massive debt, our ailing economy, our lack-of-strategy or will or purpose in Afghanistan, and the general and increasing weakness of the country under Obama. What else is there to say about the latest behemoth healthcare bill. It’s an atrocity, and let’s hope it fails, but I have no particular ability to handicap its likelihood of passage or not.

As for the economy, the situation is bad and Obama is making it worse by running up huge deficits. Friends from extremely normal backgrounds–i.e., they weren’t reading Paladin Press books in college like I was–are talking about stockpiling guns, survival retreats, and general doom and gloom. These are guys that walk lon Wall Street and the Chicago commodities exchange, not habitual survivalist oriented nut jobs like yours truly.

Times have been worse of course. And God has his own mysterious unfolding plan in store for us individually and collectively. But I hate to write about the same things in the same way over and over again. I’m not quitting the blog. It’s still fun and helps me collect and clarify my thoughts. Something interesting and new should be on the horizon before long. But for now I feel great weariness.

I wrote this in March and it’s more true than ever:

Bailouts are bad for many reasons. But the two worst are that they cost a ton of money, and, second, they get government in bed with business. As a result, we’re becoming increasingly numb as a people to the idea that a $1T here and a $1T there is no big deal, just as we’re getting used to the idea of the government has any business directing how private companies should spend their money. The bailout is an anti-capitalist virus that attacks our public finances and our commitment to corporate independence. We must let these companies fail or we’ll destroy free market capitalism. That is the real systemic risk.

Ace hits the nail on the head in a recent entry. You would have thought abortion was a minor issue in the health care debate. You might not have even realized the House plan and ever-morphing Obama non-plan covered abortion. But it turns out it may split the Democratic coalition and this news has been a long time coming, but the media wanted it to be kept under wraps:

The media is never interested in covering wedge issues that effect Democrats. A wedge issue is any issue that divides the party. They’re always damaging in terms of getting elected or getting legislation passed, because, if there is a resolution on the issue, it is clear one wing has won and another wing has lost, and that causes all the internecine fighting we see all the time on the Republican side of the aisle.

A party’s best strategy — as far as simply acquiring and maintaining political power — is to obscure these wedge issues, ignore them, finesse them, leave them unresolved, to keep it unclear as possible who has won and who has lost.

And then, only later, once they’ve accomplished their short-term goals, do they deal with the political fall-out.

It is against a party’s interests to see these splits come to the forefront before they’ve achieved their short-term goals.

Clarity, in other words, hurts in politics. Witness Obama’s gauzy, empty campaign of change and hope without many people knowing what that meant. Liberals, leftists, independents and even some Republicans each read those empty words in a different way, each believing Obama would govern as they preferred.

Three of those groups were wrong. Had Obama been clear about his intentions and politics, three of those groups would have known they would be in the Out Group in any Obama presidency, and would have voted differently.

But because the media gave Obama a free pass on remaining utterly obscure, he prevailed.

The government is fiddling with executive compensation, which is bad, but perhaps understandable and defensible considering the various institutions involved were saved from death by the TARP funds. But on what principled basis are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi excluded from the restrictions? And why would concern for excessive risk-taking demand lower base salaries as opposed to reduced or delayed bonuses. This is the biggest problem with government involvement in the economy of all kinds: it reduces our sense of what spheres should be beyond government control, it is driven by ignorant populism rather than concern for “systemic risk,” and it allows the government to pick winners and losers on the basis of factors like influence, favoritism, and political savvy.

This would be bad enough, but the Obama administration bullying its media critics, recently trying (unsucesfully) to exclude Fox News from a press conference and generally to delegitimize Obama’s most prominent critic. And, in recent months, Obama has notably singled out insurance companies, the Chamber of Commerce, and a lone Cambridge police officer for public ridicule, showing little sense of magnanimity of responsibility that should come with an office of such power.

I am not terribly annoyed that Obama would give military policy a deliberate review. War is serious stuff, and too often bad ideas carried forward through inertia. It’s appropriate he changes policy in certain particulars. In fact, my own preference is for something like Biden’s plan or even more radically off-shoring the whole thing, treating Afghanistan not so differently from Pakistan with the occasional Predator or SF raid and a threat of massive conventional retaliation without mercy for whatever government inhabits the rubble that might harbo terrorists. Nation-building is for the birds, and if the “success” we’ve had in Iraq is the end-game, I’d say it’s not worth the trouble.

But Obama is revisiting his policy on the basis of an entirely predictable statement by his hand-picked commander that more resources were needed to fight the traditional counterinsurgency Obama chose to fight. Was Obama not paying attention in super-recent-history class regarding the Iraq Surge, which has become the U.S. military’ model for such operations? He’s obviously backing away because he lacks the guts to follow through on this or much of anything that might require him to act like the leader of a nation at war.

The stuff about the “Real War is in Afghanistan” we heard from so many for the last six years turns out to be a thinly held debater’s point; and this was fairly obvious, because Obama and the Left in general lack the visceral faith in their country and hatred of the enemy needed to win any war. And this demerit applies even if this strategy were a good one, which in fact it is not. It was also obviously not a good strategy earlier this year and during the campaign when it was embraced by the Democratic Party. It was the Iraq “surge” strategy translated into Pashto.

The reason I’m extremely pissed off the more I think about this is that our troops are not in the locker room suited up for the big game. They’re in the field, executing Obama’s strategy as we speak. Some young American will die there this week and the next and the next in order to “build up Afghanistan” and its army and its government. I don’t mean to be maudlin. These are professional soldiers and volunteers. If it’s worth it to defend the country, then their sacrifices are a cause for honor and remembrance, not weak-kneed irresolution. They’re certainly mostly killing bad people that deserve little sympathy. The question is whether a defensive strategy off-shored and focused on surgical strikes is superior. In either case, it is utterly unconscionable to commit to a war, announce a new strategy with much fanfare, and then deny the troops the resources to win only two or three months thereafter.

Obama is dithering as if the world were on hold while he takes his time. This is not a faculty meeting. The issue can’t be tabled. It’s a real war, with real blood and death, and Obama’s increasing the mission requirements while cutting troops and the Pentagon budget. A foreign conqueror could do little worse.

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