joyfulchristian

He does have a point

... although he did say that this post wasn't about why consevatives shouldn't vote Bush. (That's exactly what it's about.) Spoons explains why the NEA thing bugs him so bad:

The thing that bugs me about this, though, is what it says about how Bush sees his base. He knows that conservatives will be incensed by this. He knows that we don't think the government should be involved in funding art, not least when it's things like "Piss Christ." He knows we'll be livid.

And he doesn't care.

Bush has made the political calculation, as he has throughout his entire presidency, that he doesn't have to worry about conservatives, and can safely pursue any policy that stands a chance of attracting moderate and liberal voters. He calculates (probably correctly), that conservatives will overwhelmingly support him, no matter what, because "where are they gonna go?"

Of course, this is why I'm so vexed by conservatives who advance similar arguments to justify their continued support for Bush. If these conservatives mean what they say; namely, that they must vote for Bush because of the War on (Some) Terror, then doesn't that validate the Bush's entire strategy in running to the left? And if Bush must be supported no matter what, then what is to prevent him, and the Republicans who'll seek to follow in his footsteps, from governing further and further to the left as time goes on?

This is very valid criticsim. It's something that worries me to, but I'm not sure I know what the solution is. Although, I'm beginning to formulate a theory. I trust Bush to defend our country, but his domestic agenda is horrible. I don't trust any of the leading Democrats with defense and they're domestic agendas are all worse.

However, traditionally divided government actually seems to work pretty well. (i.e., not at all) I'm starting to think that what we really need is a Republican President, a Republican Senate (so judges will actually, you know, get confirmed before they die), and a Democratic House. Basically, I'm rooting for gridlock. Granted, gridlock isn't a perfect solution and it's sometimes a really big disaster (It's almost always uglier than just about anything.), but it's the best solution I've got.

There is, however, a problem with that. If I vote based on the above preferences, that will require voting against a candidate I actually like. Voting against my Republican Congressman who I think is doing a decent job because Bush is so horrible on domestic policy is bad enough. Doing it while voting for Bush is just too weird.

I'm funny that way

I absolutely love the Internet Movie Database. This is largely because I enjoy watching a TV or movie (especially old ones) and thinking, "Hay wait a minute! Didn't he play ....?" For instance, I realized today, while watching Babylon 5: The Gathering, that Ed Wasser's first role in that series wasn't as Mr. Morden. He was originally an officer on the observation dome.

Go figure.

Let me just make an observation

I am so sick of hearing about "special interests" and it really doesn't matter to me if people are complaining about Republicans or Democrats. There is no such thing as a "special interest." There are just interests. When people talk about "special interests" they almost always mean "interest groups that lobby for things I either dislike or don't partiuclarly care about."

To the homeschoolers, the NEA is a special interest. (And vice versa.) To the NRA the ACLU is a special interest. To Planned Parenthood pro-life groups are special interests groups.

I have never yet heard someone lambast a group they support as a "special interest" group. It's kind of like the difference between pork and bacon. ¹

There's nothing wrong with interst groups lobbying politicians. There's nothing wrong with them giving money to a candidate's campaign. There's not even anything with said politician getting a warm fuzzy feeling about people who help their campaign. That's just politics folks and there's nothing whatever wrong with it.

What is wrong is when a politician benefits personally for making certain votes, but that's not nearly as common as people seem to think. At least not in our system. Anymore.

¹When your Congressman gets a Federal grant to support the suasage festival, he's "bringin' home the bacon." When somebody else's congressman gets a Federal grant for a mosquito museum that's just worthless pork.

Dems in Oklahoma

Real Clear Politics shows Clark leading Kerry by less than 3 points. That doesn't seem to terribly off, but I've got to say If Kerry's got that kind of support around here, they don't appear to be very enthusiastic about it. I've still seen no signs (literally or figuratively) of much support for Kerry. If he's going to get a big chunk here, it's got to be the "None of the above" vote.

RCP is showing Dean at about 8%. I still think this is too low. He's got so much pubic support that I find it hard to believe he's doing that badly. Although, as I've said before, Dean's performances in Iowa and New Hampshire fell well below expectations based on the noise his people were making, so maybe this is just more of the same.

RCP's got Edwards at nearly 16%. I really don't know how accurate this is, but if he's doing that well it's probably "None of the Above" in action here too as I've seen practically no signs that people are really worked up about him. (Although I did actually see an Edwards campaign sign today. Unfortuntately I was driving at the time. It was quite a shock. Fortunately traffic was light.)

On a personal note, I find that the more Edward's commericals I see, the less I like the guy. That's bad for Edwards because as far as I can tell the only things he's got going for him are marketability and a lack of a track record for people to attack. I'm not sure what it is about his ads that bugs me. I guess he just seems so condescending. ¹

I suppose all the Kucinich signgs, and there are far too many for my comfort, do serve some purpose. It's always useful to know who the local wingnuts are. It's kind of like they're fulfilling Bill Engvall's dreams.

Oh, I guess I should mention Sharpton. I guess I just did.

¹ Some day I'll have to do a post about why back "in the old days" it wasn't always considered a bad thing to be condescending.

A good point

Josh Claybourn wants us to remember something:

The problem with big government conservatives such as Roger Kimball is that they're blind to the fact (yes, I feel comfortable calling it a fact) that one day a liberal will sit in the White House. And you can bet that liberal will not be appointing a conservative to the post of chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Yes, this is a problem. Occasionally conservatives fool themselves into believing that it's OK to spend lots of moeny on some agency because "our guy will make sure the money isn't wasted." As Josh points out though, even if that is actually true (a doubtful proposition) the fact remains that eventually "our guy" will become "their guy", but the money will still be in the budget and it's next to impossible to get it out again.

That's better

At least a little bit.

President Bush will propose a $2.3 trillion budget on Monday that backs away from some of the major spending and tax initiatives he supported in prior years, administration officials say.

Constrained by big budget deficits and political realities, the officials said they would retreat on some of their own ideas and oppose others favored by Republicans in Congress.

Mr. Bush will try instead to lock in some of his prior victories, by pressing Congress for a permanent extension of most of the tax cuts adopted in the last three years that were set to expire over the next seven years. He says the tax cuts foster economic growth, which helps create jobs. But many Democrats say the tax cuts are fiscally reckless and widen the gap between rich and poor.

What about specifics?

Administration officials said Mr. Bush would not insist on his earlier proposal to overhaul Medicaid, would not push for a big expansion of retirement savings accounts and would not back tax incentives for energy production that he supported last year.

In addition, they said, Mr. Bush will oppose extending a temporary tax break that greatly accelerates the rate at which businesses can depreciate new equipment. The tax provision was enacted in 2002 to stimulate the economy and manufacturers want to retain it. At the same time, the White House is gearing up to oppose Republican plans in Congress for highway spending that far exceed what Mr. Bush wants.

Hmm, it seems to me that he's giving up more tax cuts than spending increases. Although I must say that I can't really complain about losing the depreciation benefit the article speaks of. This is what the code calls a "special allowance" and what practitioners usually call "bonus depreciation." During 2004 this will allow businesses to deduct in excess of 50% of the cost of new equipment, and some buildings, in the first years. This is a sweet deal and I've got one client who's going to pay close to $200,000 less in taxes than he otherwise would have. This is obviously good for business, but it's hard to justify on an ongoing basis. Our tax system is supposed to measure income and the "special allowance" has about as much to do with the company's actual income as does the color of the CEO's car.

This is a small favor to be sure, but it's the first sign of fiscal restraint Bush has shown in a long time. It's a start. (I hope.)

Okay. Yeah. Uh-huh.

More from that paradise to the south:

Fidel Castro accused U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday of plotting with Miami exiles to kill him as part of his administration's hardening policies against the communist-run island.

''We know that Mr. Bush has committed himself to the mafia ... to assassinate me,'' the Cuban president said, using the term commonly employed here to describe anti-Castro Cuban Americans.

Castro's comments came at the end of a 5 ½ hour speech that began Thursday night and continued into early Friday at the closing of a conference bringing together activists across the region who oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The Cuban leader didn't back up his accusations with specific details.

Of course he didn't back up the accusation with specifics. There's about as much chance of Bush ordering Castro's death as there is of me being elected President. Maybe less. (I am, after all, a natural-born citizen.)

This brings me back to an old theme of mine. We've now started down the path of removing tyrants on general principle. Where do we draw the line? Do we only remove those tyrants that we think cause a danger to ourselves? Or do we just do that first before we start going after them all?

We've now gone half-way across the world to overthrow a tyrant and free his people. Meanwhile, there's been one on our doorstep for 40 years and we've never given more than token efforts toward getting rid of him. How, exactly, do we justify our inaction?

Yeah, I know

There hasn't been much in the way of free ice cream today. I just had to take a break from blogging for a day or so. You know you're too into this stuff when it starts giving you bad dreams. Two days ago I dreamed Mickey Kaus was reaming out Wes Clark. Last night I dreamed I was arguing with Kucinich supporters.

I may take tommorrow off as well. That's just going to depend on how stressed out I am.

Update: Spelling fixed.

The other side of my anger at Bush

I've said repeatedly that at this point I only plan to vote for Bush because of the national security issues. I suggested yesterday that the Democrats could try to convince people that terrorism is no longer a threat to capitalize on that anger. The other side of that is that Bush really needs to be playing up the national security angle. Bryan Preston has an idea about how to do that.

Here we go again

Spoons has another post arguing that the best course of action for conservatives is to vote Bush out. This time he uses the perspective of a true liberal fed up with Clinton in '96 for analogy.

His argument is very convincing except for that bit about how people are trying to kill us. If you want to convince me, as a conservative, that my movement is better off with a Democrat this year, you're going to have to explain why you believe there will still be an America to care what happens in 2008. With some of the guys the Dems are running I'm not at all confident we'd last that long.

A strategy for the Democrats that might actually work

I just saw this post by David Bernstein. In it he points out all the policies Bush has come up with that sound like they're right out of the Democrats' playbook and then asks:

Remind me again of why liberals are so hostile to George Bush? Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals, judging by their ex ante policy preferences.

He goes on to try to explain the Democratic hatred of Bush, but that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the fact that more and more conservatives (and libertarians) are starting to talk like this. It's becoming harder and harder to see what practical differences there might be between Bush and a Democratic candidate. After all, if a Republican President is going to act like a Democrat, wouldn't we be better off if it actually was a Democrat? After all, at least then we could blame it on their guy rather than our guy when it all falls apart. "So why is it we should want Bush to win?" we ask.

And then we remember: The war. We remember that there are lots of people out there who want to kill us and Bush has been pretty good at hunting those people down and eliminating them. The Democrats, on the other hand, don't really seem to know which way is up on this issue. (Except for Zell Miller who is retiring from the Senate and Joe Lieberman who doesn't have a chance of winning the nomination.)

I suspect that a lot of us feel like Porphyrogenitus in this post at VodkaPundit:

If it weren't for the fact that there's a war on and all, and the Dems are utterly clueless about it, I'd be with adkj.

As it is, he can jerk my chain on things like this. But I won't forget. (Ed: adkj had just said he could no longer vote for Bush.)

That's the problem so many conservatives now have and it's driving us up the wall. Bush could absolutely abandon the conservative agenda completely (I know some of you think he already has.). He could quadruple the federal budget. He could promise every child a pony and every parent a million dollar house. He could do all that and we know that come November we'll still pull that lever for Bush.

We don't have any choice because any of the Democrats who appear to have a chance at winning are sure to screw up the war on terror.

Which brings me to how the Democrats could (if they only had a brain) use this against Bush. They've been ranting and raving about not finding Osama, not finding Saddam (woops), and how we're not any safer than we were before 9/11. The problem with all this hollering is it's not believable. People know Bush overthrew the Taliban. They know he's got al Qaeda on the run. They know that we're safer with Saddam in a cell instead of a palace. The only people buying this propoganda were the ones who were already on their side.

Instead, the Democrats should be applying some rhetorical judo. Given the anger against Bush from conservatives, it might be possible for them to use Bush's successes against him. What they need to do is not convince people that Bush hasn't been effective at fighting the terrorists. They need to convince them that he's been extremely effective at fighting the terrorists. So effefective, in fact, that terrorism simply isn't a direct threat any more.

I know this sounds far-fetched, but think about. There isn't much actual evidence of the terrorist threat that is observable by the average citizen. Except when things are actually blowing up the only way we know how big a threat we face is that we're told by those with access to the intelligence that things are still pretty dangerous out there.

If the Democrats were willing to abandon the "Bush Lied! People Died!" theme they could probably convince (some) people that the administration is over estimating the terrorist threat. "It's not that he's lying," they could say, "he's just over zealous in his evaluation of intelligence. Remember how sure he was about Saddam's WMDs? That threat wasn't as bad as he thought it was. Now's more of the same thing. Things just aren't as dangerous as the President thinks they are any more. We've won."

That's the message people want to hear. They want to hear that we're safe again, that they don't have to worry any more, that they can go back to their safe little world.

If you can convince enough people that we've actually won the war the idea will take on a life of it's own. If enough conservatives started believing this, they're primary motivation to support Bush would disappear. They probably still wouldn't vote for the Democratic nominee, but they might stay home.

Of course it might be harder to convince people that we've won than I think and the whole strategy would explode the next time terrorists hit an American target (outside of Iraq or Afghanistan), but those are the kind of calculations politicans make in elections all the time. The point is that if the Democrats could find a way to take national security off the table then Bush's support from conservatives would take a big hit. Convincing people we've already won seems to be the easiest way to accomplish that.

I should note, however, that since I believe that terrorists still pose a huge threat I would personally find any attempt to convince people otherwise to be an unspeakably horrendous act as it could get an awful lot of people killed over the long run. I don't endorse the idea; I just think it would work better than what they're trying now.

That's odd

Via Mark Byron I found this story about the Franken incident.

— Liberal activist and comedian Al Franken helped eject a boisterous heckler from a crowded Howard Dean rally at the Palace Theatre Monday, the theater’s manager said yesterday.

The heckler began yelling from the rear of the theater while the Democratic Presidential hopeful was taking questions from the audience, theater manager Peter Ramsey said.

Two members of Dean’s security team immediately moved in on the man, who shoved and elbowed them, Ramsey said.

“He was screaming. He was out of control,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey said he went over to help calm the situation and also got elbowed and pushed.

“All of a sudden, I looked to my right, and Al Franken was grabbing onto this man’s back,” Ramsey said.

“He (Franken) gave him a hefty Patriots block. He should be a Patriot,” Ramsey said.

Keep reading. The story as Ramsey tells it is truly bizarre. It is also nothing at all liked the NY Post report I linked to yesterday. As Ramsey tells the story, Franken actually comes out sounding pretty good. (Although his freedom of speech remarks are still totally off base.)

Curiously, in this version Franken apparently helped trying to restrain this protestor after the guy elbowed him in the face and knocked off his glasses while fighting with security guards. That makes it sound like it had very little to do with protecting free speech (as Franken claimed) and everything to do with helping to contain a public menace.

Even in this version, it doesn't appear that the protestor was doing anything wrong until the security guards came for him. However, this event was in a private theater (another fact that the Post left out) which means that Dean's guards had every right to kick him out even if his only offense was yelling at Dean.

I suppose it's entirely possilbe that tommorrow we'll get another version of events that would cast Franken in a bad light again, but there's quite a bit of detail in this version that just doesn't sound like you'd think to throw in if you were just making it up.

I find it very odd that this story by Ramsey makes Franken sound like a hero while the way Franken told it to the Post made him sound like a raving lunatic. What happened? Maybe Franken was trying to make himself sound tough and cool and it just came out wrong. Maybe the Post left out some of Franken's version. I really don't know how to account for the discrepancy.

Meanwhile, it appears I (and plenty of others) owe Franken an apology for accusing him of assault and battery. I stand by every thing I said. If the facts were as the Post reported them (which was all the data I had) then Franken's actions would be indefensible. However, based on new evidence it appears that the Post report left much to be desired. If all Franken did was help security guards retain a protestor who'd gotten violent, then he did exactly the right thing and is to be commended.

Although if he gets in a scrape like this again he should probably let someone else tell the story.

Update: I note that the Kansas City Star's report sounds a lot like the Post report.

There are some details that were in the Post's report that I missed. I didn't miss them in the Star. They make things harder to understand still. Both the Post and the Star say that Franken put the guy in a bear hug from behind and slammed him to the ground. Franken himself said, ""I got down low and took his legs out." I'm having trouble seeing how those two descriptions in the same story can possible jive. Taking a guys legs out usually means hitting them in the legs in such a way that they fall, not picking them up and slamming them to the ground. And none of that explains why neither the Post nor the Star mention the two security guards of the fact that the guy had already hit the theater manager.

Meanwhile, this CNN report sounds a lot closer to the theater manager's version. It also describes a similar event at a Lieberman rally (sans Franken) as well as LaRouche heckler's at a John Kerry event. (Which is really odd when you consider that the LaRouche guys at the Dean event reportedly said that only LaRouche and Kerry were "telling the truth."

I'm beginning to wonder not just what happened, but if any one knows what happened. Then again, it may not much matter what really happened. The story now appears to have a life of it's own as satirsts have begun to unload.

On a final note, maybe, I have a semi-unrelated thought. Franken claims he's not a Dean supporter, so what exactly was he doing there? Did he show up to not support Dean. How many celibrities show up at the political rallies of people they're not supporting? Wouldn't his mere presence there be taken as an endorsement?

And why are LaRouchies so crazy? Is it genetic, or something in the water?

Another update: OK, so I wasn't done. GOPUSA has this quote from Tim Russert:

Interestingly, one of the witnesses of the brutality shown by Franken was NBC's "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert.

"One of the Lyndon LaRouche guys got up and started screaming and yelling," Russert stated on the Don Imus radio show on Tuesday. "The press guy for Dean tried to grab onto him and remove him, and he couldn't do it."

Russert said he was thoroughly surprised by what he saw next.

"All of a sudden, Al Franken jumped out of the media gallery, ran down and grabbed this guy on the leg and started wrestling him to the ground," Russert recalled. "It was unbelievable. He was really into it."

They also report that the police were called, but declined to arrest Franken.

Russert makes no mention of security guards or the attack on the theater manager, instead he mentions "the press guy for Dean" trying to restrain the guy. The stories I mentioned before don't mention the police being called.

Granted, this last report is from a source with axe to grind, but that doesn't mean they're not telling the truth. (And I seriously doubt they'd make up the Russert quotes as that's just to easy to check. Please, no wheels within wheels arguments here. If I'm wrong, prove it to me.)

This version does explain why Franken was there. It says he was in the media gallery. Although that would imply he was there to report on the rally and I wasn't aware that he'd been hired as a reporter. (Commentator yes, but reporter?)

Arghhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Drudge has a banner right now reading:

BUSH TO SEEK BIG BUDGET INCREASE FOR NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS... Laura Bush plans to announce the request -- for the largest increase in two decades -- on Thursday... Developing...

At present there are no details. With Drudge that sometimes means that he's puffed things up some. Still, I suspect there's some truth here.

Voting for Bush becomes a more bitter pill every day.

Maybe I heard him wrong

I wasn't paying all that much attention to a John Kerry ad that just ran. Still, I'm pretty sure that he said the reason he was running for President was to "roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy."

I don't know about you, but I don't think I want any one in the Oval Office who only wants to be there so he can raise someone's taxes.

For the record

CNN has posted David Kay's opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. There are some things in here that I want to point out.

First off, Kay states in very definite terms, "Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here. " Let's be clear here. He did not say that lies were told. He did say that mistakes were made.

Since Senator Kennedy has been droning on and on about how the Bush administration invented the threat for political reasons, I think it's necessary to point out this passage:

Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.

I don't know for what reason, but Kay singles Kennedy out and makes sure that every one knows that Kennedy had the best information available before we went to war and that information was that Saddam appeared to have WMDs. Not that I expect this to shut up the old blowhard, but maybe someone somewhere will hear what Kay said here and decide he's just grandstanding.

It wasn't just us either:

I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.

The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.

It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.

I know this point has been made before, but the Germans and the French both believed Saddam had WMDs. They never questioned this assessment. They just insisted it didn't matter.

This next part is very telling I believe:

We're also in a period in which we've had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn't discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location. (Emphasis mine.)

The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to that.

Look, these are dangerous times and it's vitally important that we be able to accurately determine which countries are the greatest threats to us. We appear to have an ongoing problem of our intelligence services telling us that countries don't have weapons they actually have and that they do have weapons they don't have. (Which isn't to say I don't believe we should have gone into Iraq. I'm just saying that if we'd had accurate information we might have evaluated the threats various nations posed in a different order.)

Coming up next is one of the most important things Kay has said:

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.

Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities -- one last chance to come clean about what it had.

We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

Here's the thing that people need to keep in mind. The ceasefire at the end of Gulf I required Iraq to eliminate its entire WMD capacity and to prove that it had done so. Resolution 687 basically ratified that agreement. Let's be perfectly clear here: We agreed not to finish the invasion of Iraq and let Saddam stay in power; he agreed that in return he would prove to us that he'd gotten rid of all his WMDs and the programs and facilities required to make more.

Under that agreement, we had every right to invade Iraq the first time he lied to us. (To say nothing of the first time his people shot at our aircraft, but that's another post entirely.) Saddam spent the next decade lying to us at every turn. Finally the UN issued 1441 which basically said, "This is your last warning. Provide full disclosure of all your WMD activities or else." Despite all the hemming and hawing everyone knew exactly what "or else" meant. It was made perfectly clear to Saddam that if he lied again, all bets were off and we were going to come in and finish the job ourselves.

Saddam's people issued a report. British and American intelligence agencies compiled a laundry list of items in that report that they knew or believed to be lies. As a result, it was determined that Saddam was in violation of 1441 and American, British, Australian, and Polish troops invaded Iraq.

Now that it's all been said and done we find that a lot of the intelligence was wrong. However, despite the fact that he was unable to find a lot of the material that every one was sure was there, the retiring head of the Iraq Survey Group says that it's obvious that Iraq was in violation of 1441 and that Iraqis on the ground say they were ordered to violate the resolution.

What Kay has found (and not found) in Iraq is evidence of serious problems in our intelligence agencies. What he hasn't found is evidence that the WMD issue was puffed up out of proportion to justify a rush to war.

On the issue of intelligence failures Kay is very adamant that we need to find out why these failures have happened. He doesn't offer any theories of his own, but he does refute one:

And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.

As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.

In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."

And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position.

It is very important that we find out what happened and those people that keep insisting the Adminstration pressured the intelligence agencies to get the analysis they wanted are probably just getting in the way of that investigation.

That would explain a few things

Evidence has been found in Iraq indicating that Saddam bribed officials in France and elsewhere to oppose the war. Who were these others?

Al-Mada's list cites a total of 46 individuals, companies and organizations inside and outside Iraq as receiving Saddam's oil bribes, including officials in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Sudan, China, Austria and France, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Communist Party, India's Congress Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Who knows how accurate these records are. I'm not willing to start making accusations yet, but this is certainly something to keep in mind.

I will note that some of these people didn't really need to be bribed. The PLO, for instance, has supported Saddam for years. With some of these groups the payments would seem to be more in the order of thank-yous than bribes.

Update: Crank at the Command Post pointed out something that I should have mentioned, but it slipped past me. (Possibley a case of expectations influencing reality.)

Oddly, the article is entitled Iraqi govt. papers: Saddam bribed Chirac, but the body of the article never mentions Jacques Chirac personally receiving any improper payments, and this article in the Independent (which appears to be the Times’ source) never points the finger directly at Chirac.

That's a good point. A lot of news stories have implied Chirac's complicity, but none of them actually mention any evidence against him.

Need to read

As you may recall, last month an Iraqi claimed that US soldiers had thrown himself and his cousin into a river and that, as a result, his cousin drowned. This column by Wendell Stevenson examines the claims and has quotes from several of the parties involved. You probably ought to read it just so you can have a better idea of the facts. (Although there really aren't a lot of them.) Some of the stuff Stevenson reports would seem to contradict some of the more extreme parts of the story, but there's still a lot of unanswered questions.

I should warn you though that the column is extremely disjointed with lots of background information thrown scattered throughout the piece with very little ryhme or reason.

Personnel is policy

Jonah Goldberg explains why, despite the disappointments, voting for Bush is the only sensible thing to do:

Now, many conservatives have been writing me in recent weeks, in response to my increasingly critical comments about President Bush, to say that maybe conservatives shouldn't vote for him. I think that's silly. On any issue of major importance to conservatives, there isn't a Democrat running who wouldn't be an order of magnitude worse. Indeed, even if, say, Joe Lieberman's Joe-Mentum had caught on, and he won the nomination, he would still be filling his administration from a Democratic bench. The gravitational forces of the party largely determine the course of policy. The Democratic dogma is instinctually to err on the side of government action. Republican dogma, at least for now, is to err on the side of individual initiative and the market.

I guess we sometimes forget that holding the Presidency is about more than holding the Presidency. The President is the one who makes all those appointments and I'd rather they be made by a liberal (relavtively speaking) Republican than a conservative (again, this is relative) Democrat. The odds are greatly in favor ofthat the Republican, no matter his personal political beliefs, will choose people I can live with.

I think that part of the we-need-to-defeat-Bush thinking is based on frustration. "What good," we ask ourselves, "is having Presidential power if it's not being used to advance the conservative agenda?" The answer, of course, is not much. But it's also true that we can't excercise Presidential power on behalf of our agenda if we don't have it.

As infuriating as the Elephants have been lately, they're still better than the Donks would be. I'd a whole lot rather have people who are screwing up in spite of their ideology than because of it. The former may wake up and reverse course; the latter are much more unlilely to change.

My two cents

Mark Byron had this to say about upcoming races:

South Carolina seems to be Edwards territory, while Oklahoma looks Clarky. Missouri, with Gephardt out of the race, might be the biggest price, with a Clark-Dean-Kerry three-way likely there and in New Mexico. Arizona has a Kerry-Clark race with Dean a close third. Deleware might be Dean's big spot for the day.

I've not been following the polls much, but I'll throw my thoughts on Oklahoma. If public demonstrations of support (number of signs, people talking, etc.) can be taken as a proxy for actual support (a big if, I know), then I don't bye the poll numbers Mark points to at RCP.

Based on my admittedly haphazzard observations support in my part of the state seems about even for Clark and Dean. (Although if the sheer size of campaign signs meant anything, Dean would win by a mile. You should see some the Dean signs here. They're practically an air traffic hazzard.) There also seems to be a fair amount of support for Kucinich (proving that Oklahoma has it's fair share of wingnuts). I've seen exactly one Lieberman sign and the only people I hear talking him up are Republicans. I've seen practically no support for Kerry or Edwards.

If I had to guess who would win the state based solely on my personal observations, I'd guess Dean followed closely by Clark. Of course, what Iowa and New Hampshire seem to tell us is that while Dean's supporters are really loud, there aren't as many of them as you might think at first glance. Similarly, Dean and Edwards (especially Edwards) didn't have much in the way of loud supporters in Iowa, yet they did very well come crunch time. Still, I expect Dean to better and Clark to do worse than the polls currently show.

Those are my completely unscientific observations. That's also about as close to a prediction as you'll see me make. Take it for what it is (or is not) worth.

Not a viable option

... but tempting.

Spoons, responding to David Frum's pessimism about the Republican Party in 2008, has this to say:

The only sure way to avoid losing the soul of the Republican party is to not re-elect George Bush! If Bush is re-elected and follows the same compassionateliberal Republican policies he's advanced so far, then it will be utterly impossible to elect a conservative in '08 -- or, for that matter, in '12. If Bush loses now, however, the GOP will spend the next 4 years opposing the liberal John Kerry (or whomever). That can't help but have a salutory effect on the party that used to stand for low taxes and low spending, color-blindness with respect to race, no federal gun-control, free trade, decreased federal regulations, freedom of political speech, etc.

Conservatives have no choice: vote Bush out!

Unfortunately, there's one little problem with this idea. Do we really want Dean, Kerry, or (can you imagine anything worse) Wesley Clark in charge of protecting us from al Qaeda? I suppose Edwards wouldn't be too bad but there's really not any Democratic candidate I'd trust with national defense right now besides Joe Lieberman.

Given the choice between my party losing its way or the people of my country losing their lives, I'll take the latter every time.

Which is not to say that I want to vote for Bush, just that I don't think I've got a choice.

Hmm

Drudge had a flash up that Lieberman was getting ready to "suspend" his campaign. I'm watching him speak right now and he sure doesn't sound like he's giving up. In fact, he announced he was coming to my state to campaign tommorrow. Personally, I hope he doesn't throw it in. I know he doesn't have a chance, but the thought of the Democrats most reasonable candidate bowing out this early is depressing.

David Adnesnik has some other Lieberman thoughts:

But given that Lieberman was expected to get 5-6%, doesn't 9% look relatively good? Double digits would look especially nice, suggested that Lieberman is running neck-and-neck with Clark even though the Senator is a supposed also-ran.

With 9-10%, it almost pays for Lieberman to fight it ought until the convention, since those kind of numbers might allow him to play kingmaker.

That's very true. Things are still very much up in the air. A single candidate who can control around 10% of the delegates may be able to name his price come convention time.

Yeah, that will work

The EU wants to find a way to make their economy more like America's. What's their solution? More taxes and regulation.

I fear they'll never learn. (Of course they're not alone.)

What's wrong for the goose ...

Joe Carter is criticizing Grover Norquist for his poor choice of words (to say the least). I understand, I think, what Norquist was trying to say when he compared estate taxes to the Holocaust. He should know that nothing can justify comparing estate taxes to the slaughter of millions of people though.

Paying tribute

It's important to remember that despite the Canadian government's wrong-headedness over Iraq, Canadian soldiers are still fighting. and dying, in Afghanistan.

A SUICIDE bomber threw himself on to a Canadian Army jeep in central Kabul yesterday, killing two people - including a Canadian peacekeeper - and injuring 11 others.

Three Canadians were among those injured by the blast, in which the bomber also died.

"One Canadian soldier has been killed and three others wounded," said Colonel Joerg Langer, a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in the Afghan capital.

Never forget that many countries have lost soldiers in this war. Unfortunately, the tally isn't done yet.

Vote for Joe

Donald Sensing writes that since Tennesse has an open primary, he intends to vote in the Democratic primary and cast his vote for Lieberman. I've got to admit that I've considered that as well, but it's not that easy to swap out in Oklahoma. However, I'm not at all certain that I'll vote for Bush in the primary. That line for President will likely be blank on my ballot.

You know

You could make a pretty fair foreign policy by simply observing what Jacques Chirac does and then doing the opposite. Here's his latest:

The arms embargo on China makes no more sense today, French President Jacques Chirac said here Tuesday at a joint news conference with his visiting Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

He said France hopes the restriction would be scrapped "in the coming months."

Good plan!

You know, just because the communists in China have been behaving themselves (relatively speaking) doesn't mean we ought to sell them weapons.

Jacques Chirac, he never met a tyranny he didn't like.

Question

Here's something I don't understand.

1. The major payroll taxes, social security and medicare, are our gifts from the Democratic Party.

2. The Democrats are always wanting to expand Medicare services. (Even more than Bush just did. Arghh!)

3. Yet I'm always hearing Democrats complain about the horrible injustice involved in poor people paying payroll taxes.

Something here just doesn't compute.

Condescending

That's pretty much how Rich Lowry sums up John Edwards. I've got to admit that I haven't seen that side of Edwards. On the other hand, I really haven't seen much of Edwards at all. That might explain why he seems better than the rest of the Democratic field.

Sheesh

Andrew Cline examines Kucinich supporters. Here's one on national security:

But how will the Iraqi people get back on their feet? "Just like every other country. Do you look at North Korea and China and ask how they do it?"

Hallowell said the United States should stop spending money on defending the country from terrorists.

"I'm not afraid of terrorists! Spending money on homeland security, what a joke! I don't need that. I have three children, I'm struggling hard."

On the bright side, they're still not as nutty as Lyndon LaRouche supporters:

In case you think these people sound a little, well, nuts, consider that not far off were the Lyndon LaRouche supporters. One of them handed me a booklet with a picture of Dick Cheney on the cover. "You know who that is on the cover?" asked her friend, poking her head out of the back window of a rented black GMC Yukon. "It's Lucifer." She wasn't kidding.

Good grief.

It means no such thing

Oh, this is rich:

Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.

His description later in the story makes it sound more like a spear than a body slam, but why quibble? The real story here is Franken's explanation.

Franken said he's not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely. "I would have done it if he was a Dean supporter at a Kerry rally," he said.

"I'm neutral in this race but I'm for freedom of speech, which means people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down."

Wrong! Freedom of speech does not mean that, "people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down." It means that people have the right to assemble and speak without the government locking them up, beating them up, or otherwise punishing them for having unpopular opinions.

The guy Franken attacked wasn't violating anyone else's freedom of speech; he was excercising his. BTW, if trying to shout someone down violates someone's free speech rights, tackling a guy for speaking his mind would have to be about as flagrant a violation of free speech as it's possible to have.

Further, while it's not in the constitution, our country has made it pretty clear that people have the right to speak their mind without being tackled or otherwise brutalized. That's why we have assault and battery laws. I hope there's a prosecutor in New Hampshire that remembers why those laws are on the books.

Update: Tom Perrault had this to say:

Here's the interesting part, however: Al said he put a stop to the shouting protest because he's "for freedom of speech." Yes, that's right.

You see, as a supporter of free speech, you must strike down any non-Democrat (reportedly, the heckler was a Lyndon Larouche supporter) who dares to interrupt someone else. It is, of course, a different story, when someone chooses to heckle, interrupt, drown out or muzzle a Republican -- that's totally acceptable.

But of course!

Another Update: Susanna adds:

My question is, how would he have responded if it had been Rush Limbaugh tackling a Kerry OR Dean supporter at a George Bush rally? Somehow I'm not thinking he would have run up the flag and started singing America the Beautiful in tearful appreciation for Rush's protection of freedom of speech.

No indeed.

What are Repubicans looking for in a Democrat?

Peggy Noonan nails it:

Let me assert something that I cannot prove with a poll but that is based on serious conversations the past few months with Republicans and also normal people: 9/11 changed everything. Yes, I know you know that. But it has even changed how people who usually vote Republican think about Democratic candidates for president. Our No. 1 question used to be: Can we beat this guy easily? But now we feel the age of terrorism so profoundly challenges our country, and is so suggestive of future trauma and national pain, that our No. 1 question has become: Is he . . . normal? Just normal. Is he stable and adult and experienced?

Which leads us to her impressionon of Wes Clark:

Which gets me to Wesley Clark. Forgive me, but he seems to be another first class strange-o. He has been called arrogant and opportunistic. That's par for the course in politics, but what worries me about Gen. Clark is that it seems to be true to greater degrees than is usual.

[...]

Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest--the actual meaning of his candidacy--he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate's hunger.

She's pretty much nailded my impression of Clark. Having that man in the White House would be an unmitigated disaster; I've had quite my fill of presidencies that are all about the presidency itself rather than, you know, the nation.

That would explain a few things

Heh.

Well, yeah!

David Frum asks, "Isn’t there too something fatally unready about John Edwards?"

There is. Edwards has very little experience on the national stage and, as Frum points out, hasn't even proven he can get re-elected in the Senate. I think the reason that we're seeing so much swooning about Edwards all of the sudden isn't that he's that good; it's that the rest of the field looks that bad.

On another note, I finally saw Edward's "Two Americas" commercial. I lost a lot of respect for him when I saw that. It was just shameless class warfare. When he got to the line about how the rich pay less in taxes and the poor pay more, I just had to scream.

Paying more on what scale?

I've got a client who earned more than $1 million this year. I challenge anyone to find someone below the poverty level who's paying more in taxes than he is.

You may say, "That's not what he meant." Maybe not, but it's sure what he said and I can't find anyway to twist that statement to make it true.

Some things are just too funny for words

Try to guess in what context Scrappleface used this phrase:

Mr. Kerry, who has served as a Vietnam veteran for more than 30 years

Heh.

Because it fits their preconceived notions

That's my answer to this question my Melanie Philipps:

To remind us all yet again -- the basis of going to war was that Saddam had defied UN instructions to dismantle all his WMD programmes and prove that he had done so. Here is Kay saying there is evidence he was continuing to try to make biological and nuclear weapons. So why are Robin Cook in the UK, Senator John Kerry in the US and Uncle Tom Anti-War Cobbley and all, screaming that Kay has now proved we were taken to war on a lie? Or is the new line that a little bit of ricin and rudimentary nukes don't count?

Well, in Kerry's case it's just shameless politicking, but why nitpick?

Dean simply isn't capable of serious discussion about Iraq

Over the weekend, Dean said this:

"You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone," said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq (news - web sites). "But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

Just the fact that they don't have to look over their shoulder before they say something critical of the government for fear that they will be executed and their family tortured pretty well puts the lie to that statement. But Howard wasn't done:

"Now I would never defend Saddam Hussein," Dean told the "Women for Dean" rally. "He's a horrible person. I'm delighted he's gone. Would there not have been a better way to get rid of him in cooperation with the United Nations (news - web sites)?"

The UN tried to get rid of Saddam for 12 years with no results. Further, the UN showed absolutely no indication that it was going to be any more useful in the future. Keep in mind that we were actually enforcing UN resolutions when we invaded Iraq. The same resolutions that the UN itself couldn't be bothered to act on.

But what does that say about him?

Neal Cavuto puts pundits in perspective:

The bottom line is that pundits are no better than you and me: They make guesses that are more often follow-the-crowd than wow-the-crowd. And they are often wrong, very wrong. But that doesn't stop their punditry. What's amazing to me is why we care about what they say.

I think he's got a good point, although perhaps a tad understated. Some pundits do have true vision and others have a unique knowledge base. Their opinions are not worthless.

Of course, there are quite lots of pundits whose opinions are worth next to nothing. If you took Cavuto's advice in the terms he presents it, you would have to reject his advice too.

What amazes me is not that people listen to pundits; what amazes me is that so many people don't differentiate between those with good track records and those that don't.

Desertion? Know your facts.

That's what Donald Sensing has to say about those saying stupid things about the charges that Bush deserted.

Three observations here. First, Jennings was quite correct to point out that the accusation of George W. Bush's presumed absences is "a reckless charge not supported by the facts."

Second, Clark, a retired four-star general, admits he is entirely unconcerned that an ideologue celebrity has made this most serious, unfounded charge against the commander in chief. In fact, he strongly implies that he is not bothered at all that the charge was made. He admits he is not interested in the facts. He admits he is "delighted" to have the support of the man who made the accusation. I find that just incredible and utterly repugnant.

Third, practically no civilian actually knows what desertion really is, Mark A. Kleiman, for example.

I think he's right about that. For instance, if I hadn't read Sensing's post I wouldn't know that someone can be AWOL for years without being a desrter or that someone can be convicted of desertion even if they never left their base.

Of course none of that matters to those making these charges. We've got a whole lot of people that hate Bush so much that they don't need facts to believe charges against him. This is hardly a new problem. During the Clinton years there were plenty who were just as rabid about Clinton.

This is part of an ever-escalating problem in our political disputes; people are coming to believe that those who oppose them politically are not just wrong, but truly evil. Of course, deep down they recognize that this is ludicrous, so they search for some other reason to hate their opponents. The reason so many people believe these ludicrouse charges is that they need the charges to be true to validate their world view.

(This post originally had a horrid grammatical error in the title.)

I've got to be fair

I just saw Dean's red-faced moment on Nightline. It's actually the 1st time I've seen it and I've got to say that while it was certainly not "presidential" I really don't see what the big fuss is about. He wasn't even that loud and the "yeaah", whatever it was, was not nearly as pronounced as the impression I got from those who saw it live. I understand why people would make fun of it, but not why it's become a campaign issue. There's just no "there" there. Again.

(And I don't even like Dean.)

I tend to agree

Representative Bill Janklow was sentenced to 100 days in jail for manslaughter. Some people aren't happy. I've got to agree. Although I don't think he received a light sentence as a result of favoritsm, I do think the sentence is too light. It's not just Janklow; lots of people who are convicted of manslaughter involving vehicles get pretty light sentences. It seems to be a fairly widespread problem.

Oh goody!

Just what we need, a Klansman in Congress. No, not that one. This one:

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, in federal prison after pleading guilty to mail and tax fraud, is considering a run for Congress when he is released this year, his secretary said Friday.

Roy Armstrong said Duke is considering entering the race for the seat of Republican Rep. David Vitter. In 1999, Duke finished third in the primary for that seat.

Armstrong said Duke could be released to a halfway house in mid-April, a year after he began his prison term.

"He was skeptical that he would be able to raise the money to run an effective campaign in time, but he said he would consider his options," Armstrong said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Let me the first to say, "We don't want you."

Greedy states

Michael Greve explains what the states have done with the tobacco settlement and what's coming next. Personally, I loved this bit:

One might think that the states — having invented phantom expenses, claimed the proceeds as their own, and leveraged them into yet more money — would finally be done. But one would be wrong.

Read the rest.

We're not alone

Via the InstaGuy I found a blog called Iraq Now by a soldier serving in Iraq. You've got to read this post about an Iraqi working at a roadside stand.

Kerry v Kerry

No, that's not a divorce case. It's how Rich Lowry sums up one of John Kerry's biggest problems.

John Kerry has surged into first place here, proving his oft-repeated contention that he is a "good closer." Kerry has long said that he is a great fighter. If he completes his miraculous comeback to win the Democratic nomination, he will indeed have the fight of his life on his hands -- against his own legislative record.

Kerry, of course, has struggled with his vote in 2002 to authorize the Iraq War. "We did not empower the president to do regime change," Kerry said of the resolution on "Meet the Press" last summer. Actually, the Kerry-supported resolution specifically cited regime change as a goal, and Kerry also voted to make regime change U.S. policy in 1998. That's two Kerry votes in favor of regime change, but who's counting? The Massachusetts senator has similar trouble with other prior votes, making him the first candidate in U.S. history to run a presidential campaign against himself.

Heh. Yeah, watching Kerry attack his own votes could make for an entertaining summer.

I'm surprising myself

Maybe it's just me, but I'm surprised to find that with Gephardt out of the race and Lieberman trailing far behind, John Edwards is starting to look more appealing. Not that I'd actually vote for him, but the thought of him being President no longer makes me physically ill. Overall, he appearst to be the most palatable of the remaining field.

There's a novel idea

After a quick look at the history of 3rd party candidates, Jane Galt had this to say:

If you ask me (and no one did), the Democrats need to stop searching for gimmicks such as a third party savior, or hoping for demographic salvation (a la Teixera and Judis), and start looking for some new ideas with which to pull the American electorate back towards them. So far, the big ideas on which the Democrats have staked their future this election cycle have been:

1) Maybe the economy will continue to suck!
2) Maybe the American public will decide that the war in Iraq is as rotten as we said it would be, except when we voted for it.
3) George Bush is running a huge budget deficit, which is awful, and that's why I'm going to increase it.

You wouldn't think that you would need to tell the party that takes pride in being progressive to go think of some new ideas. But she's right, part of the reason the Democrat's have been having troulbe closing the sale is because all their products have passed the sell-by date.

Priorities

Despite the fact that his administration spends like a drunken sailor, I think it's extremely unlikely that I would vote for anyone besides in the President come November. I just don't see any other choice. That doesn't stop me from noting the (many) things about the man that drive me up the wall. Robert Tagorda mentions an important one:

It isn't simply his fiscal profligacy. It's his needless attention to peripheral issues alongside his admirable commitment to major goals. He puts forth a bold agenda, calling upon Americans to promote democracy abroad and combat terrorists who seek the diminution of freedom here. Then he tosses several million dollars at a pork project. How deflating.

I understand the reality of appealing to special interests, especially during an election year. But such appeals cheapen the noble cause. As we devote ourselves to helping the Middle East become stable, it's plainly disheartening to see Bush pay lip service to steroid abuse in professional sports.

On the foreign policy front President Bush is a many of big, bold ideas that he's wrapped up in a vision of the future that's extremely optomistic. On the domestic front, he's a man of lots of good ideas, but none of them are big. His domestic agenda isn't part of an overall vision that people can tap into either. It's just there. Well, it's not just there; it has a lot of money to keep it company.

The President needs to formulate a comprehensive domestic agenda that focuses on just 2 or 3 really big ideas that can be integrated with his foreign policy. And he needs to stop spending so dad-gum much money.

Standing up for allies

Bryan Preston gives kudos to our allies in Japan. Then he starts asking important questions:

Many, many on the left grouse that America is now without allies, thanks to Bush administration hamhandedness. Josh Marshall hits that theme every week or so, and the press laps up that sort of talk from the Democrats running for president. The fact that it doesn't square with reality doesn't seem to bother them. They can by willfull omission pretend that we don't have more than 30 countries in our coalition, or that we don't have a major naval alliance working quite multilaterally to cage up Kim Jong-Il, or that Japan is an integral part of it all.

We have allies, strong ones that understand our reasons for war and support us. We have former allies who opposed the war for various reasons, but to the left it's the former allies that should get our attention while our current allies--allies actually risking blood and treasure to stand with us in Iraq--get sneers. Why should we care what France thinks, when it did everything it could to oppose us, and when an even stronger ally thinks we did the right thing? Why should we care what Germany or bankrupt Russia think, when the UK, Japan and Australia, not to mention South Korea and nearly three dozen other states are with us--and they are not stagnant states wallowing in some glorious but mythical past? Why should we put ungrateful European former allies ahead of current and consistent grateful Asian allies?

Beats me. Personally I've always preferred allies who were, you know, actually allied with us. But then again, I think that unilateral means "on your own" so what do I know?

So what?

Aakash Rault makes an argument against the war in Iraq that I frankly don't get. I thought about trying to pull a blockquote that would summarize his point, but since I'm not sure I understand the point, you're just going to need to follow the link and read it for yourself.

Are you back now?

Ok. As far as I can tell Aakash seems to be making three major points here.

1. Lots of liberals supported the war in Iraq for their own purposes that had nothing to do with conservative principles. (I don't think there's any denying this.) Therefore:

2. The war violates conservative principles, ergo:

3. The war must be wrong.

I'm aware that he linked to other posts where he made other arguments, but he seemed to think that this was a line of reasoning that stood on its own, so I'm taking it as it is. If you think this is an unfair summary of his argument you might as well stop reading now, although I'd appreciate a comment telling me where I missed the boat here.

Assuming that this is what he was saying, then my response is, "Huh?"

Let's just start with the first point. As I mentioned above, I think it is beyond question that many liberal hawks supported the war for reasons that any right thinking conservative would consider absurd. What I don't see is how this establishes that the war was anti-conservative. Just because a ton of liberals supported the war for "reasons" that I think are laughable doesn't mean that there aren't good and proper conservative justifications for the war.

But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to list a litany of liberals, in the most derisive language possible, who conservatives probably despise most of the time just to point out that all of them support the war. I fail to see what the point of that was unless it was to try to get conservative readers to feel icky about actually agreeing with these people about something.

This whole line of reasoning just feels like guilt by assocation. Not only is it not particularly compelling, it's also wrong-headed. Just because some one is naive, intellectually lazy, foolhardy doesn't automatically make them wrong. It might be enough to make be do a double take and make sure I'm not missing something, but it doesn't make them wrong. After all, every dog has his day.

But, just for a moment, let's assume he's right. Let's assume that the mere fact that a lot of liberals supported the war means that the war fails, under conservative principles, to have been a proper war to fight. So what?

Conservatism isn't an iron-clad law. It is a default-way of thinking about a given topic. Those who cling to it do so not because they think it's perfect, I hope, but because experience has shown them that the conservative approach offerst the best answer to problems more often than it fails to do so.

And that's all it does. It's not a solution to all our problems; it's just our preferred method of approaching the problem. It's entirely possible for the most Burkean among us to analyze a problem cooly, and rationally and come to the conclusion that you're absolutely certain is the best conservative answer to a problem and yet, at the same time, be equally convinced that said solution is absolutely bonkers. (I don't think the Iraq war falls into this category, but you're mileage may vary.)

If you find yourself in that situation you are under no obligation whatsoever to choose the conservative option even though you think it's insane. As I said, conservatism gives us the best answer more often than not, but that doesn't obligate you to take the "nots" along with the good.

Conservatism is a tool, not Holy Writ. It should be used as a default position, but it'snot the only position.

The phrase, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact, " has been used so much that it's become a cliche. Cliche or no, it's still true. I love the Constitution and believe it to be one of the most marvelous things ever produced by the mind of man, but if I discovered that 15 million people were going to die in the next 10 days unless I stationed a soldier in every fourth home I'd do it in a heartbeat, Third Amendment or no.

That's not to say that violating the Constitution is a thing to be done lightly, but if I had to choose between violating the Constitution and saving millions of lives, that's an easy call for me.

You may not understand the connection here, but let me explain that while I believe conservatism to be a great ideology (or lack of one, depending on your point of view), I don't hold it as dear as the Constitution. If I'd be willing to sacrifice the Constitution to save millions, I'm even more willing to forgo my conservatism if I believe it gets in the way of doing the right thing.

A few months ago I read somewhere words along the lines of, "We can argue about the shape of Western Civilization after we make sure that it's going to have a future." That's the issue for me. You should only be willing to sacrifice your most cherished beliefs if circumstances require that you do so or perish.

As it happens, I do not find any conflict between my conservative beliefs and the direction the war on terror has taken so far. (Although I do see a few things that worry me.) But if I did, I'd sacrifice my conservatism in a heart beat. I say that because I believe we are in a fight to save our civilzation, our way of life, and our actual lives. Against that kind of threat I'd sacrifice everything but my Christian faith.

Which brings me to a point that I just thought of. Since 9/11 strange bedfellows have become so much the norm that I've almost forgotten what "normal" looked like. You do see lots of liberals, conservatives, and even libertarians uniting together in their belief about what needs to be done to fight the terror masters. Likewise people from all those ideologies have united together to oppose those same actions.

I think what we have here is a difference, not of ideology, but of fact. C.S. Lewis always maintained that morality hasn't changed much over time or across culture. One society may emphasize one part of the common morality more than others, but in general morality doesn't change. I read in one book, (possibly The Abolition of Man but I'm to lazy to go look it up) where people would challenge him by saying, "What about burning witches? We don't burn witches now, but people once did." Lewis's response was, "But that's because we don't believe that there are such things as witches."

His point was that if you really believed that there were people who had sold their sold to the devil to gain supernatural powers which you used to torment innocent people and you further believed that the only way to purify that person's sould was to burn them alive, then burning them at the stake would make perfect since to most people in most of the societies that ever existed. The reason most societies don't burn witches is not because they find witch burning, per se, to be repulsive. We find the burning of witches to be repulsive because we don't believe they were witches. This is a difference, not of morality, but of fact.

In the post 9/11 world I think we also have a difference of fact. Everyone agrees that the terrorist pose a threat. What we don't agree on is what kind of threat they pose and how acceptable the risk is.

I think just about everyone would be willing to sacrifice their ideology if they believed that the failure to do so posed a substantial risk that millions would die, that there country might be taken over by barbaric butchers, or that their entire civilazation might collapse. (Although there are some post-modernists out there who wouldn't flinch at the last one.)

To put it another way, I think most everyone has a breaking point; everyone has their own personal Rubicon that they're willing to cross when they reach the point that the danger they face appears to be great enough that they're willing the abandon their ideology.

The reason why traditional allies are at each other's throats while traditional ideological enemies find themselves allied is not so much that they've changed their ideologies as that they have different breaking points. I think a lot of people believe the threat is so great that they're willing to do pretty much anything to counter it, even if they're ideology would normally tell them not to. (Which isn't to say that everyone who supported the war in Iraq or other arenas sees themselves as going against their ideology. Just that a rather large portion see the risk as so great that they'd support the war even if their ideology said no.)

Likewise, those who opposed the war do so because they either a) don't see the threat as that great, or b) don't see the connection. I'm not, at the moment, concerned with the latter group. Liberalism, conservatism, and (especially) libertarianism all have as part of them pretty good reasons to avoid war. So if you haven't reached your Rubicon, your default position is much more likely to be against the war.

The difference between the two groups isn't ideological so much as it is factual. Either you believe, as a matter of fact, that the risk is so great that it transcends ideology, or you don't. (Yes, under some circumstances your evaluation of the breaking point may, itself, be determined by your ideology.) If you don't, then it's likely that a certain degree of escalation would cause you to change your mind.

The whole reason I went on that whole fact/ideology tangent was just to help make the point that if you feel it's necessary to abandon your ideology on a given subject to do what you believe is the right thing, that's perfectly OK.

So, I ask again, even if the war was anti-conservative, "So what?" That doesn't necessarily make it wrong.

Yeah, I know this was long and rambling, but I had to get it off my chest. It's nearly 1 and I'm tired. If you find any grammatical or spelling mistakes you're just going to have to deal with them. I may or may not edit this tommorrow.

Romans 7:13-23 ESV

Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

This is one of the fundamental struggles that every Christian has to deal with. We know that sins violate God's law. We know, for the most part, what sin is. We do not want to hurt God¹, so we don't want to violate His law. ² However, despite the fact that we know we should not sin, we do it anyway.

Paul describes a condition where he knows what he hates, but he does it anyway. I fully understand this; only God can understand fully how many times I've done something I knew was wrong even though I didn't really want to do it. I'm familiar with the circumstance, but I don't understand why it happens.

However, with some sins I find things seem to be working on a different level. There are some sins which I know are wrong. Furthermore, I know I shouldn't sin, but if I'm really brutally honest with myself I find that the reason I have trouble avoiding that particular sin is that deep down I really want to do it.

In other words, while it is my desire, in broad general terms, to not sin, the particuar sin is something I actually want to do.

I suspect that this is what Paul meant when he said, "Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me." Each of us are, I believe, genetically pre-disposed to certain types of sin. And despite what Howard Dean might say, just because you have the urge to commit the sin, that doesn't make it right. These are the sins that we are drawn to so strongly that, despite the fact that we know it's wrong, it almost feels like we can't help ourselves; sometimes you might even feel like it's not even you who's doing it. Almost as if your body was on cruise control.

These are the really insidious sins. The one's that you could never give up. At least not on your own.

Fortunately, you don't have to do it on your own. That's part of the reason God created the church. It's a support structure that allows Christians to work together to defeat the common enemy of sin and death.

Of course we'll never fully conquer sin. God knew that from the beginning. He doesn't expect us to. That's why he sent his Son.

I think at some point every Christian has cried alone into the night, "Who will rescue me?" Paul's response to that question was, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

¹ I'm forgoing any discussion involving the ways in which God can, or cannot, be hurt. Just stay with me.

² Of course, this at our most noble moments. For far to many of us, far too much of the time, we avoid sin just because we don't want to go to hell. That is to say we are, unfortunately, motivated to avoid sin as much, if not more, by enlightened self-interest than we are by principle.