This site is moved

This site is moved to:

http://www.harmonicminer.com

Going South

Things are going south down south of here.

The state department travel alert of about two months ago is chilling, especially in "summer vacation" time in Mexico.

Armed robberies and carjackings, apparently unconnected to the narcotics-related violence, have increased in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. Dozens of U.S. citizens were kidnapped and/or murdered in Tijuana in 2007. Public shootouts have occurred during daylight hours near shopping areas. [emphasis mine]

This is really encouraging. Although it may not be so different from Detroit, or Washington DC. Baghdad might actually be safer. Although perhaps I'm misjudging; maybe its just the excitement generated by those "after Cinco De Mayo" sales.

Criminals are armed with a wide array of sophisticated weapons. In some cases, assailants have worn full or partial police or military uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles. [emphasis mine]

Support your local fake police. And, of course, the fake troops.

Obviously, those gun control laws in Mexico are really working well. (Scroll to the 12th paragraph at this link.)

Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials, and journalists. However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region. [emphasis mine] In its effort to combat violence, the government of Mexico has deployed military troops in various parts of the country. U.S. citizens are urged to cooperate with official checkpoints when traveling on Mexican highways. [emphasis mine]

Let me see if I understand this. US citizens are routinely murdered or kidnapped. The bad guys sometimes wear official uniforms. But if someone in an official looking uniform tries to stop you at a "checkpoint" on the road, be sure to cooperate.

I suppose that makes sense, state department style.

Recent Mexican army and police force conflicts with heavily-armed narcotics cartels have escalated to levels equivalent to military small-unit combat and have included use of machine guns and fragmentation grenades. Confrontations have taken place in numerous towns and cities in northern Mexico, including Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California, and Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua. The situation in northern Mexico remains very fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements there cannot be predicted. [emphasis mine]

You mean they don't have a schedule? What in the world is wrong with these citizens? Don't they understand they're supposed to announce public demonstrations of popular will? I'm just stunned that they would be so inconsiderate.

U.S. citizens are urged to be especially alert to safety and security concerns when visiting the border region. [emphasis mine] While Mexican citizens overwhelmingly are the victims of these crimes, this uncertain security situation poses risks for U.S. citizens [emphasis mine] as well. Thousands of U.S. citizens cross the border safely each day, exercising common-sense precautions such as visiting only legitimate business and tourist areas of border towns during daylight hours. It is strongly recommended that travelers avoid areas where prostitution and drug dealing occur.

Uh, not to be disrespectful, but.... we're talking about MEXICO here. Where, exactly, is it that prostitution and drug dealing don't occur? I'm sure there are such places. I'm also sure that no tourist is going to know where these things don't happen, short of never leaving the hotel (although I understand a Mexican concierge will get you nearly anything), even though there will be places where they obviously do, and which wise tourists will avoid.

Criminals have followed and harassed U.S. citizens traveling in their vehicles, particularly in border areas including Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Tijuana. There is no evidence, however, that U.S. citizens are targeted because of their nationality. [emphasis mine]

Obviously, the people who wrote this howler think we're so drowsy by now that we just aren't paying attention. Exactly how many Swedes are driving US licensed automobiles into Mexico?

I have an idea. If you drive into Mexico, just don't look American! Wear a turban. Wear a burka. Wear a skullcap. Wear a spiked Prussian helmet.

Whatever you do, wear armor.

The Left at Christian Univs, part 3: Diversity

If you care to understand the development of diversity as an ideological, political enterprise in higher education, you need to read this book.

Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter W. Wood, was published in 2003, in the same time frame as the Supreme Court's ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger, preceding by just a bit the ruling that outlawed University of Michigan's undergraduate racial quotas for failing to meet the test of being "narrowly tailored."

It is essential reading for anyone, right or left, who wants to understand the development of the diversity initiatives that are so popular in colleges and universities, as well as certain non-profits, government agencies and even some businesses, especially large corporations. It is very scholarly, dense with references (they don't get in the way of the narrative, but they provide sources for further study, or confirmation for doubters), historically grounded, yet highly readable and accessible to general readers. The author is a professor of anthropology, and former Associate Provost of Boston University. He's seen academia from the classroom and the administration building.

Better reviews than I would be likely to write can be found here and here.

Why it matters

As I discussed in The Left at Christian Universities, part 2, a trend for Christian universities and colleges seems to be to move left by adopting essentially secular enterprises. Diversity, as understood for the last 30 years or so, is one of these, regardless of how we adorn it. In an upcoming post, I'll very briefly review some that history. However, for the full story, from 19th century antecedents to 1970s court cases to 1990s academic dogma, this book is a goldmine.

lgf: 9/11 Truth Blogs, Marxists, and Terrorist Sympathizers Allowed to Remain at Official Obama Site

lgf: 9/11 Truth Blogs, Marxists, and Terrorist Sympathizers Allowed to Remain at Official Obama Site: "The Obama campaign has been doing a lot of cleaning up and sanitizing at my.barackobama.com."

More at the link. This is a rookie mistake by Obama camp. But not one the main stream media are likely to hold them accountable for.

And in the meantime, it's all we need to know about Obama's fellow travelers, since these posts, now being removed are from authorized posters, not anonymous commenters.

The Left at Christian Universities part 2

In The Left at Christian Universities part 1, I briefly introduced the observation that many Christian colleges and Universities seem to be moving gradually left. This seems especially true of those that:

1) experienced recent, fairly rapid growth
2) are trying to move up in rankings/ratings, such as in the US NEWS and WORLD REPORT
3) changed from a college to a university in the last 25 years or so (often a sign of the outworking of growth and ambition to be well-thought-of, and the reflection of that in marketing initiatives).

I suppose the first question is:

Why does it matter?

It matters because of what we've learned about the typical developmental trajectory of church-related colleges over the last 100-150 years.

Simply, colleges founded by churches rarely (if ever) become secular by moving to the right. (Perhaps you know of one that I don't. If so, do you know of two? Three? There are a lot of examples the other way.) These institutions become secular by moving to the left (the Christian left) and then it seems to take a generation or so to gradually shed the Christian identity in all but name. One may conjecture about the reasons for this, and about just how the mechanisms work.

It seems critical that we examine the historical sources of the ideas that are represented in and by the Christian left and right. If an idea or perspective can be shown on historical grounds to have arisen from sources which are anti-Christian (something more than merely non-Christian), we are correct to look with great suspicion on its current manifestations, regardless of how much God-talk we surround it with. For example, rules of logic developed from the writings of Greek philosophers are merely non-Christian, not anti-Christian. On the other hand, we should be deeply suspicious of a teaching about the value of human persons that flows in a logical way from the assumption that we are mere meat machines, an anti-Christian perspective that cannot possible lead to sound moral judgments.

This is not a violation of the “all truth is God’s truth” principle. We are not talking about denying the validity of science, or the rules of logic, or the fundamental principles of economics (if we can agree on what they are), i.e., theologically neutral propositions flowing from “the general revelation”. We are talking about the danger in trying to harmonize the perspectives of people who were specifically anti-Christian with Biblical teaching; drawing their viewpoints, flowing from anti-Christian stands, into the church’s teaching, perhaps because these viewpoints sound caring, or objectively rational, or appeal to us emotionally in some way; and then wrapping the entire affair in judiciously selected Bible verses so we can assure ourselves of our continued piety, while experience a chilly frisson of self-congratulation at our open-mindedness.

How concerned should a Christian be when he finds himself agreeing on policy matters and social issues with well-known atheists? The answer, of course, is it depends. It depends on whether or not the particular matter of agreement flows from a commonly held perspective or understanding that is itself more or less theologically neutral. On the other hand, it should evoke great concern when a specific anti-Christian perspective, flowing in a consistent way from an anti-Christian worldview, becomes something we adopt as our own, having decorated it with hermeneutic distortion of Biblical texts.

The Christian left seems more likely to ally itself with initiatives and perspectives whose origin is outside the church. These include abortion “rights” (flowing from Margaret Sanger’s eugenics views, among other places), certain views of science’s role in life and faith (especially sympathy with the neo-Darwinian synthesis), diversity, multiculturalism, sympathy with socialistic approaches to social problems, anti-military perspectives (natural for Christians from the Anabaptist tradition, but not so much for others), modern environmentalism as a near religion in its own right, suspicion of the profit motive, class warfare, preoccupation with “social justice” (not the simple Biblical concern for the local poor), “borderless nations”, disdain for the USA (expressing itself in inappropriate moral equivalence arguments relating the USA, and sometimes our allies, to other nations), encouragement for gay marriage (more than civil unions with associated “couple” oriented privileges, which seems acceptable to many on the right), etc. The list could be longer, but the flavor is here.

This is not to say that all of the Christian left agrees with all of these things. And it seems possible for perhaps one of these perspectives to find root in an otherwise Christian right perspective, though it is uncommon. However, where half or more of these perspectives are present in an institution or person, it seems reasonable to affirm identification with the Christian left.

With one exception, what all of these have in common is their origins not merely in non-Christian thought, but frequently in explicitly anti-Christian thought. The exception is the specifically pacifistic Anabaptist tradition, which can encourage a thorough-going withdrawal from all civil participation that has any aspect of violence implied in its function, though this is not always completely practiced by current descendants of the Anabaptist tradition. A simple test for the “theological authenticity” of a pacifist is how willing they are for the political state to tax and redistribute to cure social problems. The threatened violence behind the power to tax is anathema to many true Anabaptists, but not to many members of the Christian left, whose concern is not primarily refraining from doing evil with violence, but with effecting specific “cures” for society’s ills, which they are only too happy to do with taxes paid by other people.

The trajectory

Christian institutions of higher education have a way of starting as small bible colleges that will fail in a decade or two if they don’t mind their onions and focus on their main mission. Then they get a little bigger, and start trying to do other things… which is fine, as long as they keep their eye on the ball. But at some point, they find that they really want to be thought well of in the eyes of the world (the marketing/message/branding thing… must get that USNEWS and World Report rating) and begin trying to arrange adequate resources and public image such that even if they failed to carry out their primary mission for 20-30 years (or CHANGED the mission, gradually and subtly), they’d still survive, and maybe even thrive. Here is how you know you’re there: when the university creates a separate PROGRAM dedicated to carrying out its current understanding of the original mission, and then advertises that it’s doing this. (Imagine Ford engaging in an advertising program to tell the world that it was now trying to make good cars....) On the surface, this looks good… but it’s in fact an acknowledgment of serious “mission creep”… and unfortunately, the fix, mandated to create objectively observable and measurable results (of something that was never meant to be so measured... "Exactly how attractive is the curve on that fender?"), is often just another kind of “mission creep”.

Upcoming posts

I’ll try to pursue each of the “Christian left” perspectives above, and review the historical roots of each. Keep in mind that I’m not an historian, I’m just a musician who reads a lot. I've been in Christian academia for a long time, and have had the privilege of talking, in depth, with fine educators of both the Christian left and Christian right perspective, though of course I identify more with the latter. I expect the theologians, philosophers, biologists, physicists, historians and social scientists to point out all the ways I've misused their disciplines. So be it. Some of them are "hoist on their own petard", in that they have talked about interdisciplinary, integrative work so much that I have taken them seriously and am trying to do it.

The principles I’ll try to follow are simple. I’ll trace the antecedents of particular ideas that I have identified as being distinctively part of the Christian left. I'll be trying to make the case that most of them are secular, that is, flowing not out of the gradual development of the historical Christian traditions, but rather appearing discontinuously from secular, frequently explicitly anti-Christian sources.

I’ll discuss the Biblical references that are made by the Christian left to support these perspectives, but I will do so in the context of the Bible overall, what is known historically about the context of the times (and sometimes what is different about the times in which we live), the teachings/behavior of the early church fathers, and the continuing tradition.

I’m not sure how long this will take.... I’ve done a lot of the reading I need to do, but there is, of course, no end to it. So hang with me as we go. Suggest a book if you wish.

The first one will be on the topic of diversity and multi-culturalism. Look for it soon, I hope.

Obama's site gives Communists a voice

Commies and Socialists for Obama, STRAIGHT OFF HIS WEBSITE!: "Marxists/Communists/Socialists for the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. By no means is he a true Marxist, but under Karl Marx's writings we are to support the party with the best interests of the mobilization of the proletariat. Though the Democratic Socialists of America or the Communist Patty of America may have more Socialististic values, it is pointless to vote for these candidates due to the fact that there is virutally no chance they will be elected on a National level. The members of this group are not Leninists, Stalinists, etc. and do not support or condone the actions of North Korea, China, Cuba or any other self-procalimed 'Marxist States.' They do not in anyway represent the Marxist philosophy nor do they represent Socialism/ Communsim. We support Barack Obama because he knows what is best for the people!"

You can't make this stuff up. Some things are beyond parody. And, in another link from the same page:

Capitalism presents an interesting dilemma for the white, upper middle class male, a demographic that, unjustly, has been and continues to enjoy the ripest fruits of capitalism. On the one hand, a person like me (or anyone else who lives in the economically secure class of citizens of a capitalist nation, especially America) can sit back and enjoy and take advantage of the limitless opportunities afforded them. Thousands of universities, both domestic and international are within their grasp. After that, countless occupations with career paths that could lead them to even greater heights on the social ladder await.

But on the other hand, this education afforded them (hopefully) enlightens them to see the reality of the perverse economic system that got him or her to the position he now occupies. He sees a system that takes from those who have less and gives to those who have more. He sees a system that rewards unscrupulous rule-bending and breaking, a system that attacks the family, moral values, the environment, and even exploits every experience in life itself for money and profit. And while often isolated and removed from poverty and the uncertainty and paralyzing fear that accompanies it, the enlightened and idealistic youth knows it’s out there and wants that wrong righted. And so naturally, the youth attacks and turns against the system that caused the suffering to begin with.

It goes on to say, "Redistribution is not enough." I'll say: you have to have something to redistribute.

Change you can believe in.

hat tip: Little Green Footballs via Powerline

UPDATE: they will probably take the referenced pages down, just like they removed anti-Semitic materials that they had posted earlier (not just in comments, actually posted by Obama's own people). The picture at the top was made as a screen capture from Obama's site.

UPDATE: as predicted, the Obama campaign has removed the communist/socialist/marxist cheerleading page. Again, just to refocus: this was not something simply left as a comment by an anonymous net-lurker, it was an official post of the Obama campaign by an approved, authorized poster on the Obama website.

Invisible Link

Today I sat in church with my 10 yr old daughter. Her mom is usually playing the piano, and so my daughter often sits between her grandmother and me. That way, we can both hear her sing. I don’t think the small vocalist knows that we sometimes just listen to her. She probably just thinks we’re tired by the second verse, if she thinks about it at all. Sometimes grandma and I make eye contact. We both know what we’re doing. We don’t talk about it.

Now, not to knock the sermon today; it was great, on Psalm 42. But attention can drift. I expect somebody dozed off during the Gettysburg address, or while Paul was waxing eloquent about unknown Gods. Especially while Paul was going on about unidentified deities. So my mind can wander now and then.

But partway through, I noticed an odd looking purple pen in my daughter’s hand. I don’t know where she got it.

She took my arm, and prepared to write something on it. I thought, oh great, now I’m going to have ink on my arm... But Dads will do anything for love of a child, pretty much, so I let her write. She seemed to write a short word, but apparently the pen wasn’t working... No ink, I supposed, or it was dried up or something.

I shrugged to her, and returned my attention to the sermon. She was doing something beside me, but I wasn’t paying lots of attention... Kids get squirmy in church sometimes, and she wasn’t making noise. Then she tapped my arm, until I looked down. She had turned on a small light on the end of the funny looking pen, and was shining it on my arm, the miracle of “black light”. In kid-scrawl letters, my forearm said, all in lowercase, “dad”.

Well.

I know this is probably silly, but the moment took on a luminescent meaning for me. There we were, father and daughter, bonded in many different ways, each partly defining ourselves in terms of the other. She was naming me for what I was to her, and applying the label... But only she could read it. And she wanted me to see the label, too. It was our secretly acknowledged non-secret.

Being metaphorically minded, I could not help but reflect on the invisible bonds in our lives. These chains bind us as surely as titanium steel twisted cable, as unexpectedly powerful as light-weight carbon fiber-reinforced Kevlar. We can stretch our bindings. But they’re still there, drawing us together.

As a father, I have tremendous freedom of action, befitting the responsibility that is mine. There are a thousand ways to be a good father, and about a million ways to be a bad one. It may be odd to say, and it is not usually expressed this way, but I am also her servant, working for her and for the One who put her in my charge, for a little while. Perhaps it is good for servants to wear invisible identification.

Her yoke is easy.

Slow learners

Michael Ledeen speaks about the fact that we know an enormous amount now about the rise of totalitarian states in the 20th century, and about why the rest of the world failed for so long to do anything effective about them, and eventually accepted that the only way to deal with them was war. It is now widely understood, despite the occasional revisionist, that negotiations could never have produced any good result with Hitler, Mussolini, imperial Japan, or Stalin. He discusses how badly we misjudged them, how little we believed their publicly stated intentions, and how poorly we were served by our "reasonable" approach to them, and how many lives were lost to remedy that error.

By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.

Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes – from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis – who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of "politics," intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.

Clearly, the explanations we gave for our failure to act in the last century were wrong. The rise of messianic mass movements is not new, and there is very little we do not know about them. Nor is there any excuse for us to be surprised at the success of evil leaders, even in countries with long histories and great cultural and political accomplishments. We know all about that. So we need to ask the old questions again. Why are we failing to see the mounting power of evil enemies? Why do we treat them as if they were normal political phenomena, as Western leaders do when they embrace negotiations as the best course of action?

No doubt there are many reasons. One is the deep-seated belief that all people are basically the same, and all are basically good. Most human history, above all the history of the last century, points in the opposite direction. But it is unpleasant to accept the fact that many people are evil, and entire cultures, even the finest, can fall prey to evil leaders and march in lockstep to their commands. Much of contemporary Western culture is deeply committed to a belief in the goodness of all mankind; we are reluctant to abandon that reassuring article of faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we prefer to pursue the path of reasonableness, even with enemies whose thoroughly unreasonable fanaticism is manifest.

This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means – short of a policy of national suicide – acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war. It means that, temporarily at least, we have to make sacrifices on many fronts: in the comforts of our lives, indeed in lives lost, in the domestic focus of our passions – careers derailed and personal freedoms subjected to unpleasant and even dangerous restrictions – and the diversion of wealth from self-satisfaction to the instruments of power. All of this is painful; even the contemplation of it hurts.

Then there is anti-Semitism. Old Jew-hating texts like "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," now in Farsi and Arabic, are proliferating throughout the Middle East. Calls for the destruction of the Jews appear regularly on Iranian, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian television and are heard in European and American mosques. There is little if any condemnation from the West, and virtually no action against it, suggesting, at a minimum, a familiar Western indifference to the fate of the Jews.

Finally, there is the nature of our political system. None of the democracies adequately prepared for war before it was unleashed on them in the 1940s. None was prepared for the terror assault of the 21st century. The nature of Western politics makes it very difficult for national leaders – even those rare men and women who see what is happening and want to act – to take timely, prudent measures before war is upon them. Leaders like Winston Churchill are relegated to the opposition until the battle is unavoidable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight desperately to win Congressional approval for a national military draft a few months before Pearl Harbor.

Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.

Read the whole thing.

Israel plays chicken

The Jerusalem Post carries an article describing the experience at a single checkpoint, even as Israel is removing checkpoints to ease the lives of Palestinians who need to move from the West Bank into and out of Israel. These are the checkpoints put up to stop terrorists, after repeated bombings and shootings by Palestinians crossing into Israel from the West Bank.

An 18-year-old Palestinian was arrested Sunday afternoon at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus after military police on duty discovered he was carrying six pipe bombs, an ammunition cartridge and bullets, and a bag of what appeared to be gunpowder.

Cpl. Ron Bezalel of the military police's Taoz Battalion told Army Radio that the youth had sent his bag through the checkpoint's X-ray scanner. When the explosives were discovered, the troops on duty immediately implemented the protocol for stopping a terror suspect.

'It's routine to find bombs at this checkpoint... every day, we find knives and other weapons,' Bezalel said.

The military said the Palestinian was most likely on his way to perpetrate an attack in an Israeli city. He was arrested and transferred to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for interrogation.

Three weeks ago, another Palestinian carrying five pipe bombs, which he had attached and strapped to his chest in the manner of an explosives belt, was stopped at Hawara.

Earlier Sunday, the IDF announced that Israel had removed 10 roadblocks in southern Hebron."

It's worth reading the entire article. The short story is simple. Even as Israel is trying to strengthen Abbas with Palestinians, by making him appear partly responsible for Israel's liberalization in the matter of checkpoints, Israelis know that the attempts to sneak terrorists into civilians areas will not stop. In essence, Israel is playing a game of chicken: will Hamas kill too many Israelis to make a more moderate approach possible?

They are literally betting the lives of Israelis that Abbas might be able to rein in Hamas' worst activities, by trying to help Abbas with his own people.

I think it's a forlorn hope. So do many Israelis.

Almagor, an organization representing terror victims and their families, responded to Sunday's announcement in the form of an open letter to Barak written by Nahman Zoldan, the father of Ido Zoldan who was killed several months ago by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank.

"As someone who has lost a son near a road at the hands of Palestinian Authority members, I call on you to reconsider the decision and not to take at face value the Palestinian Authority's promise that it will take care of our security for us.

"I issue this especially ahead of the coming holiday, when tens of thousands of Israelis use these roads on their way to Eilat, not knowing that these roads are now totally exposed to Palestinian movement," Zoldan wrote in a statement issued by Almagor to the media.

Talks between Hamas and Fatah are producing essentially zero results. Why should they? Hamas has all the support it needs from bad actors outside Israel in terms of weapons (can anyone spell Iran? Syria? Al Qaeda?), and from sources that belie the Shia/Sunni divide that some in the West claim is strong enough to keep them from cooperating. Hamas protects its "brand" with Palestinians by acting as a humanitarian organization, and tries to prick western conscience with the needs of its people, while doing everything possible to make it unlikely that western aid will be given or deliverable. Hamas, despite being officially declared a terrorist organization by the UN, still has enormous sympathetic resonance with too many in the western media. They gain nothing by actually compromising on anything, now, and these pretend negotiations with Fatah are window-dressing. So they wait and see, knowing the short memory of the west, and the media in general, and knowing that surrogates in the west that pretend to be "moderate" are providing them public relations cover whenever possible, which is pretty often with a cooperative world media.

Look for upcoming elections in Israel to give a more definitive answer on how the Israeli people feel about removing the checkpoints. The main question is straightforward: will the first Israeli deaths from lifting the checkpoints come before or after the elections? As is so often the case, the election may turn more on emotional response to recent events than to sober historical judgment.

Events will trump policy in the end

I commented here about short memory of the public, and the power of events to overwhelm policy and message.

This article argues that the "right" must craft a new message, a new set of outcomes, etc.

"While the factions of the GOP don't all have to agree on each bit of policy, there has to be more than a process we tend to agree upon - we need an outcome that a Republican government is working toward. When we were in power, when we had the reins, we failed to achieve outcomes that Americans wanted, and thus, as Winston's column notes, we were 'fired'. Luckily, we still have a chance to prove why we should be hired again."

It's worth reading the whole thing, but:

I don't think the woes of the right are about policy and politicians, at least not mainly. They are about events.

Republicans DID achieve outcomes during the Bush administration that Americans would have said they wanted in 2002. Americans would have said they wanted to prevent more terrorist attacks on US soil, they would have wanted a strongly growing economy to rebound from the effects of 9/11, etc. Americans got both of these things. A crafting of message that included both of those things in 2001 would have been perceived as a great success, for a few years, until it was overtaken by events that diverted the attention of the public.

But it was, after all, events that toppled the Republicans more than simple policy disagreements and message communication failure. Hard times in Iraq, high gas prices, specific scandals, economic woes, Katrina, etc. Yes, better policy in fighting the Iraq war might have reduced some the negative events. I don't know what the Republicans could have done about high gasoline prices, short of persuading enough of congress to vote for drilling and refinery construction. It's hard to survive personal scandals on the Right, simply because people expect more from the Right. And perhaps better managing of the message regarding the economy and Katrina would have helped... and it would have helped to send in about 100 helicopters dropping water and food in the first 12 hours, too. Still... no future oriented policy planner could have foreseen the fact of Katrina, and the success with which it would be manipulated to impugn Bush, and by extension, Republicans.

To put it simply, Republicans didn't lose the debate on the merits, they lost the public trust for failure to respond to events that were difficult or impossible to predict, and for being the event, sometimes, particularly in overspending, earmarking, scandals, etc., none of which were ever a part of policy as such.

$6.00 gas (or $8.00!), another serious terrorist attack, obvious success in Iraq (so extreme even the MSM can't ignore it), etc., will change things. And if the past is any guide, there will be events no one can foresee now, perhaps in categories we can't anticipate. The politicians who appear to have the strongest responses to these are the ones the public will follow, regardless of previous policy/message management. Witness how the public did follow Bush for a few years, even though his stated previous policy had been to avoid nationbuilding, overuse of the military, etc. He sounded almost isolationist at times, and was singularly non-muscular in his response to the Chinese forcing down one of our military planes and holding the crew. But Bush's new policy on terrorism, popular though it was at the time, did not insulate him from events, and his failure was in not responding to them correctly, not in his initial policy formulations.

The MSM can manage perception of events to a higher degree than we might wish, but they cannot insulate the political left from their effect permanently. The main "skill" strong Republican politicians need is the ability to respond to unexpected events from a principled understanding of their own policies. Policies planned years in advance, along with means of communicating them, are fine... but the lack of these is not what did in the Republican congress, nor what has torpedoed Bush's ratings.

So I resist the notion that Republicans have to craft a new message, new policies, new perspectives, though perhaps we need to demand that the Republicans we elect be more faithful to the old ones. And a better job of communicating, including permanent engagement with an often hostile media, is critical. But it needs to be more about communicating facts and concepts, and less about buzz terms and "crafted messages". We need a LOT more Tony Snows who believe it and sound like it, and a lot fewer Scott McClellans, who apparently didn't believe it, which is why he so often didn't sound like it.

It only takes about a minute to explain to anyone why rent control produces shortages in housing. It's as clear as two plus two equals four. Many issues are like this, but for some reason too many people on the Right feel like they must use the vocabulary of the left to defend themselves. They're afraid to be seen as mean if they turn to the short-term beneficiaries of rent control and say, "Why are you so selfish?"

The Left cannot be outdone in the implementation of smoke and mirrors, but it can be countered with facts and consistently strong perspectives on them, fearlessly communicated by people who believe in them. A "crafted message" by people who don't, and are trying to create something to engage the public superficially, just won't do the job.

hat tip: Powerline

UPDATE: Remember when it looked like Clinton was a goner in 1995, after the Republican takeover of Congress? He was able to resuscitate himself by his response to the Oklahoma City bombing, which allowed him to play to his greatest political strengths. He did not win re-election on policy, or even message, exactly, but by being himself in response to an event that didn't reveal his weaknesses, and emphasized his strengths.

Some changes

I'm still working on the formatting, etc., for the blog. I've made a few
changes. Let me know what you think!

World War II: the Bad War?

Victor Davis Hanson, the well-known historian, has written an article at Real Clear Politics, regarding recent revisionist attempts to criticize how the Allies got into World War II, as well as how they fought it, attempts being made both from the left and the right to create, without quite saying so, some kind of moral equivalency between the Allies and the Axis.

Essentially, the argument is that if the Versailles agreement that ended WWI had been more "fair", and if the Allies had not made unenforceable security guarantees to Poland, and more or less let Hitler have what he wanted, the war could have been avoided. After all, what interest did France or England have in defending Poland? Buchanan makes other, somewhat more subtle arguments, but they boil down to assessing Hitler as negotiable, or implying that the unfair resolution of WWI was the real culprit.

This all reduces down to an enormous exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking, combined with myopic hindsight (not 20/20, since those looking back in this way seem to be missing essential points).

Hanson's take on this:

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 -- or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis' pain and anguish.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never "stabbed in the back" at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II -- and 60 years without war have followed.

Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.

A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.

I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.

Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the "good" war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.

They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring -- or faulting -- the intelligence and resolve that won it.

Read the whole thing.

History has still not ended

There's a lot of discussion here and there and other places about the future of the Republican party, and "conservatism" (not the same thing, of course). Some speak of the millennials as less interested in political parties, less ideological, etc. We hear that Reagan conservatism isn't going to sell anymore, and that it isn't just a matter of not having a great communicator anymore, but rather that the public just doesn't see things like it did.

Almost universally, the analysis seems to involve the assumption of stability in events, in anticipation of only small changes from current circumstances, and it assumes the ability of politicians and the media to manage message to the general public. This gives extraordinary power to the message deliverers, of course, and the better message deliverers are expected to win most of the time. In sum, this approach assumes that politics is about politicians.

But it isn't, in the end. It's about events, most of which are beyond the immediate control of any given crop of politicians.

People's memories are short. "We will never forget" has morphed into "maybe we weren't in so much danger after all". A decade ago, the left blocked drilling in Anwar and other places, because the oil wouldn't come on line for a decade, and, "It won't help us right now." But the decade has passed, and I just filled my tank with regular gas at $4.35 per gallon, self-serve. If they'd drilled then it would have helped now. Most people don't know that the two hottest years in the last century are 1934 and 1998 (1934 was the hottest, with a cooling period in between, and no one can claim the 1930s warming was due to CO2 emissions), and most people don't know that we appear not to be warming up since 1998, but cooling, if anything.

But there are likely to be developments that totally change the dynamic of things, and to quote our second president, "Facts are stubborn things."

When there is a major attack on US soil (inevitable, according to many serious observers), or possibly even on one of our allies, peoples' attention will be re-focused. If there is any obvious link between the left's less forceful approach to terrorists and their enablers (likely), there will be a re-energized right. Let's be clear: if Islamicist extremists do the deed, and if the left has curtailed programs that might have detected or stopped the attack, or removed pressure that would have diverted the attackers' attentions, or (shudder) if there is a nuclear attack carried out by anyone who got the materials to do it from an Islamic nation, the blowback will be enormous, and a very large price will be paid by the party that is identified in the public mind as having been asleep at the switch. Fool me once....

Does anyone think that Congress will be able to resist public demand for drilling when gasoline is $6.00 per gallon? If so, how about $8.00? $10.00? At some point, the dynamic changes. Sure, the left will try to pin the blame on the evil oil companies, and that miserable resource hog, the American driver. And that works for awhile, when people aren't paying that much attention. But at some point, instead of just wondering why prices are so high in a vague sort of way, people are going to DEMAND to know. There will be debate, and the old answers will be trotted out, but inevitably someone is going to get peoples' attention with the simple idea that as demand goes up and supply doesn't, the prices will rise. Few people want to drive less.

So, I think drilling is going to happen. It's just a matter of time, and public desperation. And the party that had a history of blocking it, and fights it to the end, is going to suffer, for awhile.

By the end of an Obama administration (two terms to 2016!), if we have not had a year hotter than 1998, it will be impossible to claim global warming is even real (with a straight face, anyway), let alone caused anthropogenically. (The activists have begun to suspect this... that's why they've changed the scare-phrase to "climate change", which works no matter what happens, since the climate always changes.) If the left has forced a very costly scheme to control carbon emissions in the meantime, and the economy has suffered because of it, gas prices are higher, etc., then the campaign slogan for the conservative candidate in 2016 could be, "WHAT global warming?"

None of this will stop Obama from getting elected this year, unless the terrorists are stupid enough to mount an attack on US soil before the election, or gas goes up to $6.00 per gallon immediately. I expect neither to happen immediately.

Unfortunately, I expect both during Obama's presidency, though this is one time I'd love to be wrong.

The only (very cold) comfort will be that the winds of politics will probably change direction again... for awhile, at least. It will be too late to immediately undo Obama's disastrous effect on the courts, the economy, and our national security... but it may bring an opportunity to staunch the bleeding, at least. Until, of course, the stupid Republicans who come to power in the reaction get complacent, fat and greedy, like the last crop that just lost Congress in 2006.

Pray for McCain to win, but the nation will weather an Obama administration, painfully.