09.23.09
Posted in Afghanistan, War at 2:47 pm by Administrator
There’s something odd about Afghanistan having become such a controversy, with deteriorating conditions in that country and waning support for our effort there over here, isn’t there? It was the “good war,” the “necessary war,” the one FHers – including TCM – always held up as the alternative to that exercise in “imperialism” and caprice: our toppling of the Baathists in Iraq.
General McChrystal’s assessment is stark. A resolute defeat of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban is going to take an effort we have not yet mustered. A large number of troops, a long time and a thorough understanding of the lethality of jihadism will all be necessary ingredients.
They probably won’t be applied to the situation. TCM, SecDef Gates, the H-word Creature and other regime figures are speaking of reevaluating strategy even as the enemy is giving us hell like we haven’t seen in our eight years of this effort. Political considerations are no small part of this. TCM knows that the moonbat-and-sprout-muncher contingent comprises a significant part of his base, one which can seal his doom if it turns on him. This bunch hates war more than it loves preserving even its own hide; such is the magnitude of its perversion.
So the likelihood is that the Afghanistan will become a quagmire and then fairly quickly descend into defeat – which probably means the Taliban officially taking back over, another, deeper round of destabiliation of Pakistan, a fresh array of opportunities for al-Qaeda, and a generally weaker hand for the United States in world affairs. Take a moment to ponder the endgame of that set of circumstances.
The last war the US and its allies won resolutely was World War II, in 1945. The Korean “police action” ended in a 1953 armistice, the terms of which still make for no small portion of our current troubles. The Vietnam war ground on for years when it didn’t have to, and concluded with the humiliating specter of terrified Vietnamese citizens clinging to the blades of US helicopters lifting off from the US embassy rootop in Saigon, even as the North’s tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace. Desert Storm pried Saddam’s fingers off Kuwait, but left him in power, for another decade of making a fool out of the United Nations, appealing to the corruptability of our ostensible allies in Europe, feeding its own citizens into shredding machines and playing cat-and-mouse with the world regarding the state of its WMD program. The Balkans and Somalia were situations that sputtered to humiliating, sloppy conclusions. We stared down the Soviet Union, but socialism of a Marxist variety still breathes down our neck in the personages of the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il, and, internally, the TCM regime.
Hence, we’re still beseiged by threats. That’s what happens when victory is less than decisive.
“Well, just what does decisive victory look like in an age of unprecedented lethality?” is a legitimate question to ask.
We had a considerable capacity for lethality in 1945, the last time we brought enemies completely to their knees. What we did to achieve what we had to achieve was ugly beyond anything humanity had conceived before it witnessed it. In Germany, it involved razing cities, most notably Dresden, home to some of Christendom’s most exquisite and historic architecture. In Japan, the metropolitan flattening was done with a device that had been tested for the first time the previous year in the US desert southwest, a weapon of such apocalyptic magnitude that its very existence has loomed in the background of the entire world’s daily life ever since.
I look at photographs of mushroom clouds – from those Japanese bombings, but mostly from various above-ground tests that have been done over the years – the way I look at other kinds of pictures of horror in process: F4 tornadoes looming over housing subdivisions, airplanes in mid-crash, sinking ferry boats. What such agents of utter destruction introduce into the human experience is about all a human mind, heart and soul can bear, maybe more that they can bear but for the grace of God.
I no sooner write the previous paragraph than I’m aware of the difference between the other phenomena I cite and nuclear explosions. The tornado is an act of nature, purely a matter of physics and statistical odds. The ones involving man-made modes of transportation – airplanes and ferry boats – are almost always accidents, owing nothing to the ill will of those who assume prime responsibility for the safety of all involved.
Then there is the nuclear weapon. Is an act of evil committed any time one is detonated?
I’ve written about this before, most recently in my last newspaper column. My conclusion is that, in unleashing the necessary force to subdue one’s enemy, motive is everything. There are two basic motives for taking conflict to that level: to commit evil, or to stop it. The decisive level of force itself is morally neutral.
I’m not oblivious to the possibility that I’m coming across harsh or extreme to certain types of readers here. I’m writing frankly about a harsh and extreme subject. What I am seeking to get to in doing so is a solid sense of where the good lies. One has to pursue that, or we’re talking about a world founded on nihilism, in which there is no ultimate good. The logical extension of such a worldview is the futility of any effort to foster good. That requires cynicism, and I have sworn off cynicism with utter resolution.
What will be necessary to win in Afghanistan is resolve and the supporting material wherewithal of a scale the modern American mostly doesn’t consider. It will take that. I’m not speaking of any specific type of weapon or warfare; I’m no expert in that. It must be sufficient to ensure that the enemy can fight no more, though.
Every one of us, every human being on earth, ought to be horrified of war and never forget its cosmic seriousness. It is perhaps the second worse circumstance we can find ourselves in. The first is living in a world in which evil has prevailed.
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09.03.09
Posted in Environment policy, Law dhimmitude, War at 1:18 pm by Administrator
In case you need further substantiation of green-jobs-advisor Van Jones’s revolutionary Marxist bona fides, listen to what he has to say about minimum goals, maximum goals and “complete revolution.”
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09.02.09
Posted in Culture, Culture war heroes, Ideology, Spiritual implications of our life choices, War at 1:52 pm by Administrator
Every time I think my alarm and disgust at the regime that has been gripping America’s throat since mid-January can’t ratchet up any further, a few new developments come along, I consider them in the context of all that has transpired, and my alarm and disgust take a quantum leap once again.
The house is on fire. America is being destroyed by the minute.
The very latest development in this process is the upcoming TCM direct address to school children across the country. As with so many of these undertakings, it will be easy for his minions in the state-run MSM and hard-left side of the punditry world to throw up a smokescreen, for TCM will indeed encourage the kids to study hard and strive for academic excellence. This will be beside the point. The key element of this is in the set of questions the students will be asked to answer, and the key question among these is “How can I help the president?”
“How can I hep the president?” Help him do what?
The same question is being asked of the nations painters, writers, musicians and “cool people” by the National Endowment for the Arts. The conference call among them, organized by the NEA, Rock the Vote, United We Serve, and the White House Office of Civic Engagement (how’s that for a creepily-titled instument of totalitarianism?), was moderated by NEA’s Director of Communications Yosi Sergant. He led off by excitedly characterizing his project as a “brand new conversation” and that he and his associates were still ferreting out “what that looks like legally.”
“Help the president.”
Sergant wasn’t shy about spelling out the fact that this was what he wanted the nation’s creative types to band together to do. He enumerated the four big areas of TCM’s emphasis that he wanted the artists to “push”: energy, health care, education, and the environment.
There it is on full display: complete vindication of BN against any charges of hyperbole when warning that TCM and the Freedom-Hater party in control of the administration and Congress and the MSM have a totalitarian mission. This is about propaganda art. This is Stalinism.
I’ve done some posts in the past few days and weeks on some of the other recent developments that have made my hair stand on end. It’s time to see them all as of one piece and let that fully sink in:
Van Jones, the Marxist “green jobs” advisor
Mark Lloyd, the Marxist FCC “Chief Diversity Officer”
John Holdren, the “window-of-maximum-life-quality” science advisor
Harold Koh, the trans-nationalist top legal dog at the State Department
Cass “why-we-need-the-second-bill-of-rights” Sunstein, head of the White House Office on Information and Regulatory Affairs
Ezekiel Emmanuel
A few posts ago, I wrote of tweaking my main website and rebranding my professional work as a writer, musician and teacher. There’s much to consider. I have a lot of long-standing associations and friendships. I am keen to act on more opportunities. Will my forthrightness about what I see happening to our culture and country help me? It’s not likely. I can’t be silent, though. I will not sit idly by and watch what had been the United States of America become Cuba writ large.
One frequent BN commenter said back in the winter, just a few weeks into TCM’s term, “You’re going to hammer him from the get-go, aren’t you. Can’t you give the guy a chance?”
A chance to do what? I saw this coming. I saw it coming over a year ago.
I’m afraid, but I’m not cowed. That’s because I’m not alone. There are millions of Americans who love freedom, and we are finding each other. And fighting back. We have to. We want to sleep at night.
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08.20.09
Posted in Energy policy, War at 5:15 pm by Administrator
State organ MSNBC edits video of the gun-toting attendee of the Arizona TCM rally so as to make it impossible to detect his race (African-American) and then uses the footage to launch into a strong implications that armed Caucasian racists are showing up at these events. Mind you, this was during the daytime “hard news” portion of the network’s broadcast hours.
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08.13.09
Posted in Law dhimmitude, War at 1:36 pm by Administrator
It was alarming enough to learn that the FCC has a “diversity officer,” but dig this: He’s calling for private broadcasting organizations to shore up funding for public broadcasting – not just through taxes like we all pay, but directly.
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08.05.09
Posted in Islam, War at 9:22 pm by Administrator
Hot Air has a great post on how the new ad by the Freedom-Hater party apparatus makes the anti-socialism citizens confronting Congressmen on recess out to be bug-eyed zombies. All that’s missing is cheesy late-50s trailer music.
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08.04.09
Posted in War at 9:13 pm by Administrator
In Castroite Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua they call them Revolutionary Block Committees, those spy-on-your-neighbor organizations designed to root out anti-proletarian casual talk.
Our regime is putting together its own cyber-version of this useful tool of the state / party.
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06.10.09
Posted in Culture war heroes, Education, Food, Ideology, Law dhimmitude, Pakistan, U.S. Constitution, War at 4:08 pm by Administrator
They want to regulate pay in private businesses.
They want to tell you how fuel-efficient your car must be.
They want to require you to have health insurance.
They want judges who “empathize” with certain demographic groups.
They want more “diversity” in the local programming of radio enterprises.
Now, they want to tell you what to eat and make sure you exercise.
Read the whole thing if you’re in need of a good hurl. It’s full of the stock phrases, bureacratic doo-doo and touchy-feely “guidance” (a euphemism for the feigned pity / actual contempt that is a hallmark of the left) that is taking over American life: nutritional counseling (because we pathetic rubes have no business choosing foods we like and, in any event, since we can’t hit our own asses with a yardstick, don’t know how to fashion a healthy diet), bike paths (you can kiss the day of local municipalities deciding whether they want stuff like that good-bye), and grocery stores in “underserved areas” (which are those places where people can’t get it together enough to hop in a car or on a bus to get to a store, much less start a store to serve the damn area).
Taxes on alcohol and sugar.
I’ll tell you this. Any goose-stepper who comes between me and my hot wings dripping with ranch dressing and my Woodford Reserve manhattan is asking for the barrel of an AK-47 up his nose.
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04.15.09
Posted in National Security, War at 4:30 pm by Administrator
Lee Cary at The American Thinker on the conjecture and speculation at the heart of the DHS report on “right-wing extremism.”
Hey, DHS folks: Perhaps you need reminding on this Tax Day that I’m your employer. So here’s the memo: stick to gathering hard intelligence on jihadists and Communists, strictly enforcing our immigration laws, and breaking up sleeper cells. This other hoo-ha ain’t in your job description.
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03.31.09
Posted in Ideology, War at 4:09 pm by Administrator
. . . I’ll get very ugly. Keep this acronym in mind: OFA.
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11.20.08
Posted in Banking, Culture, Culture war heroes, Free-market Economics, Pakistan, War, human sexuality at 5:06 pm by Administrator
eharmonycom settles a lawsuit by agreeing to post homosexual profiles.
So much for free markets, respect for individuals’ moral codes, the definition of family that served humankind quite well for 10.000 years and still serves all other species well, and sanity generally.
You have to ask yourself why the person bringing the lawsuit didn’t take the entrepreneurial route and set up a matchmaking site for those who see things his way.
Freedom is dying before our eyes without so much as a whimper.
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10.29.08
Posted in Culture war heroes, Education, Michelle Obama, War at 4:06 pm by Administrator
. . . for strongly condemning what’s been going on in Toledo, which is a foretaste of the Stasi-like means of dealing with those who dare to exercise their constitutional freedoms that we can expect once the FHers institute one-party rule.
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10.05.08
Posted in Human nature, Ideology, Pakistan, Politics, War, transportation at 10:00 pm by Administrator
The only real problem for me, and all my homies here at BN, being that our freedom, and this Western civilization that has made our lives so liveable, goes down the tubes if you don’t get a clue, and pronto.
This s— of not letting your campaign bring up Rev. Wright is not just suicidal but genocidal.
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09.20.08
Posted in Culture war heroes, Free-market Economics, Politics, War at 4:43 pm by Administrator
The first thing that stood out for me in Joe Biden’s comments about upper-income Americans getting a tax hike was, like it was for most people, his characterization of it being “patriotic.” As disingenuous Marxist double-speak goes, it wasn’t any too artful. One needn’t be a genius to see through it.
Since I first heard about it, though, another word from his remarks has been foddr for much of my pondering: “take.” He said “We’re going to take that money and put it in the pockets of the middle class.”
“Take.” If ever a word hammered home with zero uncertainty the coercive power of the state, that’s the one.
Rule of law is perhaps the aspect of our American experiment in liberty that requires the most intellectual refinement to discern clearly. Yes, we are ruled by laws, not the whims of individuals in particular positions, but by definition law is a construct backed by a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That’s why the West’s greatest thinkers on the subject have said that we mut be supremely careful what we etch into law regarding the dos and don’ts of human conduct. We must not take short-cuts in our consideration of what is just and proper and what maximizes liberty, dignity and individual sovereignty.
The best minds on the case have concluded that a major way in which liberty is maximized is letting people keep nearly all the money they earn or otherwise lawfully acquire. To receive money in exchange for one’s time / talent / skills and then use that money as one sees fit is at the core of putting an individual in charge of the making of choices and of the right to define well-being as one so chooses.
And, Joe, who is this “we?” I think we can strip away any grandiose notion of “the American people” and get to the essence of what he’s talking about when we consider this monopoly on power: he means the government.
Biden isn’t the first to use “take” in the context of people and their money this campaign season. Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton spoke of taking oil company “windfall” profits and establishing a government fund for atlernative-energy development.
The first step in a state moving toward totalitarianism, toward massive restructuring of society, is getting the public used to the idea that taking the most important of a person’s belongings – his capital – is legitimate when used to make circumstances more “equal” and “fair.”
I’m all the time coming ups with topics of speeches or debate remarks that McCain, Palin and GOP congressional candidates ought to use. A major examination of the implications of this word “take,” it seems to me would be particularly juicy and beneficial at this time.
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09.18.08
Posted in Culture, Human freedom, Ideology, Politics, Radicalism in high places, War at 5:55 pm by Administrator
I think the appropriate way to regard the tofu-and-sprout-munching, peace-and-social-justice, agnostic, save-the-planet types – the ones who were the first on your street to get an Obama yard sign – is with pity. The deepest kind of pity, the pity that’s just a microinch removed from scorn and contempt, but does qualify as pity. For these people really swallow the lie. They’re awash in Kool-Aid. After all the evidence that their man is not only a fake, a Marxist and a liar but a thug, they still see him as the change-and-hope prophet he appeared to be last winter.
I’m not talking about the hate-crazed vanguard doing the flooding of radio station phone banks or hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account or cynically taking Rush Limbaugh quotes out of context for Spanish-language ads. I’m not talking about the economic charlatans in his camp – most notably his running mate, he of paying-higher-taxes-is-patriotic fame – or the 9/11-was-America’s-chickens-coming-home-to-roost crowd. I mean the nice folks down the block, the ones you see at the farmers market or the wine bar or your kids’ soccer matches. The ones who, gosh darn it, just want things to be fair and peaceful.
About all that can be done in these remaining forty-plus days is to whittle away at their numbers. As it becomes easier to expose the ugliness behind the big grin, the confident stride, the thoughtful tone of voice, those numbers can indeed be wuittled.
But remaining numbers there will be. The enemy in this war has been quite effective at convincing them to sip the Kool-Aid.
Yes, war. And what it is is the domestic front in the overall world war, the one that manifests itself in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, joint Venezuelan-Russian naval exercises, Russian invasion of Georgia, new and more powerful engines for North Korean long-range missiles, bombings in India, Iraq and Yemen. It’s a war in which we face an array of enemies who share a hatred of the goodness that lies at the heart of our greatness. We love freedom, we know it is a gift from almighty God, and we know it is the key to our prosperity and progress. And they hate us for it.
So let the minions of the Marxist From Chicago “get in [your] faces.” You’re prepared. Meanwhile, take every opportunity to compel the nice folks down the street to wake up. Feed them ideas. Lace your conversation with noble principles. A lot of them can be convinced to value their own freedom and prosperity, to see truth and smell falsehood. The rabid types are too far gone, but a lot of the nice folks down the street can be reached.
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09.03.08
Posted in Culture, Hillary Clinton, Natural disasters, Pakistan, Politics, War at 7:22 pm by Administrator
The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.
The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy. It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.
John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas. The division is deeper than it’s ever been.
As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism. It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s. The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward. But the whole thing really goes back even further. There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin. Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century. American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element. One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way. In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations. Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture. Still, relate to it he most definitely did.
In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others. It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal. Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense – these were givens for pretty much everybody.
I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation. I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin. I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches. Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.
So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation. What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change. You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”
The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me. I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics.
No, this is an actual war. My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line. I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.
Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs? She posed a question and then answered it. “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked. And then she said, “Lipstick.”
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10.10.07
Posted in Culture war heroes, War, journalistic dhimmitude at 7:08 pm by Administrator
. . . but the administration of George Washington University wants them to apologize anyway. For what?
This smear-somebody-and-then-demand-an-apology tactic seems to be catching on. Is there any more foul way to engage in public discourse?
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