Month: March 2005

I Got Yer Specific Evidence RIGHT HERE!

Tuesday I wrote a piece that mentioned Ed Kilgore’s Talking Points Memo column denigrating any relationship between the Bush Doctrine and the current anti-Syrian activism in Lebanon. Here’s what Mr. Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, had to say:

This may surprise some of you, but I rarely if ever get any email from Republicans. But TPM gets email from the whole world, and today I received quite a few from people wanting to know why I wasn’t posting anything about Lebanon. Not having any particular thing to say about the happy contingency of the apparent collapse of the pro-Syrian government there, I didn’t worry about it much, until I got an email referring to this event as part of a “democracy domino.” And then I got it: those insistent correspondents were suggesting that I, as a Democrat, was indifferent to the latest triumph of Bush administration foreign policy.

Now I am aware the State Department made the appropriate noises, as its predecessors would have done, after the Hariri assassination, about Syrian dominance of Lebanon, and I also know the Bush administration has been generally hostile towards the Syrian government, as has been U.S. policy for as long as I can remember. But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush’s fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.

—

Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria’s setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

Well, how about this piece from today’s Los Angeles Dog Trainer Times?

This week, tens of thousands of anti-Syrian demonstrators in Beirut forced the resignation of the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar Karami. Many are already starting to compare the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon to the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

It would be the height of hubris to claim that all these developments are due to U.S. action alone. Pressure has been building up in the Middle East pressure cooker for decades; the long-suffering people of the region do not need any outside prompting to list a long litany of grievances against their dysfunctional governments. But it was the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent democratic elections there that blew the lid off the region.

“It’s strange for me to say it,” says Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who would never be mistaken for a Bush backer, “but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.”

“Now with the new Bush administration,” confirms former Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, “we feel a stronger determination in liberating Lebanon and in promoting democracy in the Middle East.”

That evidence specific enough for you, Mr. Kilgore?

(Buffing My Fingernails,) I’m Not Surprised.

I found this English skills test via Hell in a Handbasket and had to take it. Here are my results:

Actually, I did!

If You Read Anything Today, Read This

(Via Ipse Dixit)

Jon Stewart had Nancy Soderburg, ex-Clinton aide and author of The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might. But Stewart managed to get her to all but admit that the thesis of her book was in error. And he got her to openly admit what most Democrats loudly object to when accused of:

Well, I think, you know, as a Democrat, you don’t want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don’t want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen.

James Taranto’s Best of the Web in today’s Opinion Journal has the full transcript. Read the whole thing. And pay particular attention to this Soderburg quote and its context:

There’s always hope that this might not work.

UPDATE: I’ve expanded on the post Bittersweet Triumph below, as I’ve found some additional commentary on just this topic by Steven Den Beste. Read also this piece by Steven from December, 2003. One of the (many) pertinent quotes:

America was the most important battlefield for the transnationalists. Without political victory in America, they had no hope of success overall. Their only hope was for the “American Street” to lose heart, to become dejected and depressed, to be defeated in spirit. Transnationalists tried to push defeatism and doubt and feelings of failure, but also knew that this was futile unless American actions were met with failure. After the 9/11 attacks didn’t make Americans lose heart, they hoped that each successive major action by America might be the one which might deflate these brash, confident, overbearing unilateralists. Thus they found themselves in the position of hoping that America would face defeat.

Hysteria in a News Piece? Don’t be Ridiculous!

Talk about hyperbole as “just the facts, ma’am” reporting!

The Arizona Red Daily Star has a piece in today’s online edition on Arizona House Bill 2666. Here’s how it opens:

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to let people carry weapons – including guns, grenades, rockets, mines and sawed-off shotguns – into schools, polling places and nuclear plants if they claim they’re only trying to protect themselves.

I kid you not.

Where can I pick up a case of grenades and a few rockets? (And isn’t a sawed-off also a “gun”?)

Now THAT’s stellar reportage!

There’s also this obligatory quotation from the sheeple:

“I don’t see any benefits to allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon,” said Kendal Morgan, whose son attends University High School.

“You have a lot of characters running around out there that shouldn’t be carrying weapons,” he said.

Carol Mack, whose daughter attends Cienega High School, said that while she is an advocate for gun ownership, she doesn’t think concealed weapons belong on high school or university campuses. “If you’re afraid to go to a college campus without a weapon, I think we need more security,” she said.

Yes, these people believe that the State is wholly responsible for their protection. Mr. Morgan, are you unfamiliar with last week’s Tyler Texas incident? Ms. Mack, aren’t you forgetting Columbine?

How do people go through life denying reality?

Guns for Me, But Not for Thee.

Reader “tarponbill” sent me a link to this Illinois State Journal-Register news story.

Anti-gun activist arrested after firearm found at home

A Springfield woman who began lobbying against gun violence after her son was shot to death in 2002 was arrested last week when police allegedly found an illegal gun and drugs in her home.

Color me shocked. [/sarcasm]

Annette “Flirty” Stevens, however, said Monday she’s innocent, and the arrest is an attempt by police to get her to give up information about unsolved crime in the city.

The handgun, which had a scratched-off serial number, and drugs allegedly were discovered Friday morning inside Stevens’ home in the 2500 block of South 15th Street. Authorities said they obtained a search warrant for the residence as part of an ongoing investigation of a recent series of drive-by shootings. No one has been hurt in the gunplay.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted in the search.

No reports of stomped kittens, though.

Although police declined to get into specifics, Stevens has a “close connection” with one of two feuding groups involved in the shootings, Lt. Rickey Davis said Monday.

Stevens, 47, who is free on bond, admitted she does know some of the people allegedly involved in the drive-by shootings. But she said she only knows them because her interest in stopping gun violence – sparked by the shooting death of her son Jericko Clark, 20, on July 13, 2002 – has her in the neighborhoods talking to the youths.

She said the police wrongly believe she is the ringleader of the shootings, and they think she has information to solve those cases, as well as others, including the December murder of Andre Ayers, 22, who was shot as a procession of cars wound through the city’s east side.

Well, the presence of drugs and a gun with the serial number removed would seem to lend some credence to the idea that perhaps old “Flirty” knows more than she’s saying.

“This is a blatant attempt to try and undermine me,” she said Monday night. “… They can’t solve these crimes, and I’m familiar with these individuals, so they’re going after me because I socialize with all of them.”

Davis said detectives working on the drive-by cases – which already have resulted in four arrests – began taking a closer look at Stevens after her name came up in interviews with witnesses and informants.

“Basically, she has a close connection with individuals that have been involved in one side of these two groups that are feuding,” Davis said, declining to elaborate.

After finding the handgun and drugs, police arrested Stevens at her job.

Stevens said she believes the search warrant was obtained illegally. She said no drugs were found in her home. And as for the gun, she admits to having it in the house. But she said it belonged to her son. She didn’t find it until six or seven months after he died. Not knowing what to do with it, she wrapped it up, put it in a drawer and forgot about it.

What, the Million Mommies didn’t run a “gun buyback?”

Contacted later, Davis said he had no comment on Stevens’ statements.

Since her son’s death, Stevens has become involved in the anti-gun-violence movement. She helped establish and is president of a Springfield chapter of the Million Mom March, an organization that aims to prevent gun violence.

Last fall, she appeared with other anti-gun advocates at a Statehouse news conference to urge federal officials to renew a ban against semiautomatic assault weapons.

Jonathan Lackland, Midwest regional director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the march’s partner organization, said he was shocked to hear about Stevens’ arrest.

He wished to withhold comment on the case until he learned more about it, but he did say he knew Stevens was dedicated to the cause.

“I know Miss Stevens, and I know her character,” Lackland said. “I know after the death of her son, it really prompted her to jump full force into activism in terms of gun-violence prevention.

Perhaps then she might have started a little earlier and kept her son from having a pistol with the serial number scratched off? She didn’t keep HIM from getting a gun, but she wants to keep everybody ELSE from having one?

“She has been a staunch supporter of gun-violence-prevention measures,” Lackland added. “She has lived by (the theme of) ‘I don’t want anyone to go through the pain and misery I have gone through. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.'”

Stevens has not been formally connected to any crime directly related to the drive-by shootings. But Friday’s discoveries could lead to her being charged with defacing the identification marks on a handgun, manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance and having no valid firearm owner’s ID card, police said.

This now makes TWO of the significantly-less-than-a-Million Mommies who’ve gotten into legal trouble over firearms. Back in 2001, Barbara Graham – another mother who lost a son – got 10 years to life for shooting and paralysing a young man who had nothing to do with her son’s death.

I really shouldn’t, but the word “schadenfreude” just rolls trippingly off the tongue at times like this.

Matt at Stop the Bleating! has a little different take on this topic.

I was listening to Hugh Hewitt on the way home tonight. He was talking about the Left’s reaction to the spread of Middle-Eastern democracy, now exhibiting itself in Lebanon. He quoted from a TalkingPointsMemo piece by Ed Kilgore that denigrated any association between the public uprising in Lebanon and the Bush Doctrine. This in the face of today’s New York Times op-ed that – grudgingly – acknowledged:

The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.

But the comment Hugh made that piqued my attention was this, speaking of those on the Left who are in such denial:

I discussed this a bit in On Guillotines and Gibbets. My question is, “What difference does it make?” Because they’re not children. The majority of them are adults who never matured. (There are, as I noted in Guillotines, some who know exactly what they’re doing as they manipulate the strings.) But even so, children can be evil, and willfully. And they can commit acts while looking out for the adults who they know would punish them for their wrongdoing. In this case, however, we have biological adults who refuse to acknowledge reality, because it conflicts with their mental model. Once again, we have a textbook example of cognitive dissonance from the Left. Once again, the Anointed have had their noses shoved into the excrement they’ve been smearing on the walls, and once again they’ve declared that nothing’s changed and everything smells like roses.

But Hugh’s “they’re CHILDREN!” exclamation smacks to me of a dismissal of responsibility. Hugh Hewitt absently absolves the Left, yet two days ago Howard Dean backhandedly called Republicans evil, speaking at a fundraiser in Lawrence, Kansas.

“Moderate Republicans can’t stand these people (conservatives), because they’re intolerant. They don’t think tolerance is a virtue,” Dean said, adding: “I’m not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant.”

And concluding his backyard speech with a litany of Democratic values, he added: “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

How tolerant. Apparently the Left is tolerant of everything but people who disagree with them. Then today in an impassioned Senate speech, Robert Byrd (D-KKK) compared Senate Republicans to Nazis over their threat to invoke the “nuclear nukular option” and change the rules on cloture for judicial nominees:

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions in modern conditions are carried out with, and not without, not against, the power of the State. The correct order of events was first to secure access to that power of the State, and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality. He never abandoned the cloak of legality. He recognized the enormous, psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made his illegality legal. And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do. To Rule 22 of the standing rules of the Senate. I said to someone this morning who was shoveling snow in my area. “What does nuclear option mean to you?” He answered, “Oh, you mean with Iran?” The people generally don’t know what this is about. The nuclear option seeks to alter the rules by sidestepping the rules, thus making the impermissable the rule.

Now, perhaps surprisingly, I’m with the Senator on opposing that rule change. If the work of the Senate grinds to a halt because one side wants to filibuster, fine with me. Let ’em. The less damage work the Senate does, the better. But invoking the Nazis?

Sounds like projection to me. They’re children. We’re Nazis.

But we’re the by-god ADULTS here. And Hugh’s observation certainly explains why I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to spank any liberal that spouts off near me.

Bittersweet Triumph

The inimitable Steven Den Beste has interrupted his hiatus to respond to a question that I must admit I had.

Terry writes:

I hope you are well and enjoying your “retirement” from blogging. I find myself reading Wretchard, Donald Sensing, and the Powerline guys and wondering how you see the amazing events unfolding across the middle east. I must say you hit it pretty square on the head in some of your old posts.

Steven (unsurprisingly) nails the dismount. Go read.

UPDATE 3/3: Steven leaves comments at Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit post on the falling dominoes in the Middle East, What Lies at the Bottom of This Slippery Slope?. As always, Steven’s insight is laser-sharp, and I am glad to read his words again.

Steven says:

This is the payoff. This was always the most important reason for the invasion of Iraq. I am a bit surprised by how fast it’s beginning to happen, but I never doubted that any of this would eventually take place. It was always the goal of what we did.

But it is not really the Iraqi election that set this off. It was, in fact, the US election that did it. The entire region held its breath because it needed an answer to this question: Will the Americans see this through? When Bush won, the answer was “yes”. Now they know that there will be four more years of American pressure, and they know that 4 years is a long time and a lot can be accomplished in that time.

If Kerry had won in November, turnout in the Iraqi election would have been low and none of the rest of this would have happened. A Kerry victory would have been treated in the region as an indication that the Americans had given up.

Steven made a damned fine argument for this position in his Strategic Overview of the cause of the war from July of 2003, but I’ve got to disagree – just a bit – with one point. I think if John Kerry had been elected President, the Iraqi election would have been postponed – indefinitely – as “too dangerous.” It would have been one of Kerry’s first actions, and it would have been the final indicator that America had given up.

Then there’s this response to a question of just why Bush’s foreign policy is so adamantly opposed by the Left:

(T)heir problem with it isn’t what is happening, but rather who is doing it and how they’re doing it.

Liberating the world is fine. But it’s supposed to be done by transnational governance through peaceful diplomacy. It isn’t supposed to be done through military might as an expression of nationalist power.

And the reason they’re becoming increasingly incoherent with their anger is that their world-view doesn’t even admit the possibility that these things can be done through military might and increasing nationalism.

Nationalism is the big enemy, from their point of view. That’s more important than little things like spreading democracy and ending repression. And when the Americans kiss off the UN, the ICC, the Kyoto accords, “international law” and all the other nascent manifestations of world governance the lefties have placed their hopes in, and then the Americans proceed to accomplish more in three years than those nascent organizations have in the previous thirty, it leads to big-time cognitive dissonance.

Because it forces them to confront the possibility that nationalism may not in fact be inherently and unredeemably evil. Nationalism may well be the savior of the race, the historical force which leads to a better tomorrow.

The lefties hate Bush because Bush is unapologetically nationalist, unapologetically American. Clinton and Kerry were at least willing to apologize for their nation; Bush won’t. Bush thinks America is a force for good — and to lefties who are invested in the idea of world governance, that is the worst threat imaginable. Because they cannot establish a world government unless they somehow convince the majority of Americans that the United States as a nation and the US Constitution as a political experiment are utter failures which must be abandoned and replaced by something better — i.e. by world governance and the emerging socialist utopia predicted by the sainted Marx.

And this follow-on:

I mean where is the evidence that “transnational governance through peaceful diplomacy” has EVER worked?

Joshua, for the lefties that isn’t an important question. Transnational governance is such an elegant concept that it must be the correct answer. Old fashioned ideas like “evidence” and “experience” don’t affect that calculation.

That’s why a century of failure hasn’t disenchanted them with the idea of socialism. True, every time it’s ever been tried it’s always failed, but that was because those doing it were stupid and corrupt. Socialism is fundamentally elegant idea; it simply has to be right.

…even if it isn’t.

Amen.

And this commentary fits perfectly into Jon Stewart’s outing of Nancy Soderburg that I posted on this morning.

Gullyborg Gets an Instalanche.

Resistance is Futile‘s Carnival of Cordite has received an Instalanche. Congratulations. (See Jed? You should have named yours a “carnival” too!)

(An Instalanche is an awesome thing. I don’t think Glenn really understands the power he weilds.)