Notes From The Culture Wasteland

PRESIDENT ACCIDENTALLY SHOOTS AT FRIEND. MISSES, BUT RUINS HER DRESS!!

This headline just in from MSM international.

Beltway reporters are apoplectic over breaking news that the President was involved on an apparent shooting accident some weeks ago, and has not bothered yet to let them know. As is now emerging, President Clinton fired a deadly weapon in close proximity to a colleague of his, missing the intended target, but completely ruining her evening attire.

Reporters are asking difficult questions of his press secretary, Micheal McCurry. Why did the President wait for so long to reveal this shooting accident? Did he not realize there were national implications in an incident which could have seriously injured someone? Why was it only revealed recently by well-known D.C. Wang's Dry Cleaning Service that they had recovered spent ammunition, apparently owned by the President himself? 

Even the ACLU is interested in this case, after it was discovered that there were several "oh God" references made by the President in the course of his accidental discharge. They want to know whether these utterances were made on public or private time.

Congressional Democrats are defending the president, saying that President Clinton's private hunting habits are none of the public's concern. The stress of his schedule and of his relationship with his wife make such wild-game expeditions necessary. He seems to always return from these refreshed, energetic and full of humor. The fact that his firearm accidentally went off in the direction of a hunting companion should in no way reflect on his capabilities.

More as this important story unfolds.

What Sam Alito Represents--A Tipping Point

Quite a lot, actually. The New York Times somewhat sorrowfully reports a few days ago that "Glum Democrats Can't See Halting Bush On Courts". It's about as depressing a picture of Democratics facing reality as can be seen. What it offers is one after another prominent Democrat taking stock of the remaking of the courts by George Bush, with a repitition of their party assessment: Dems are just out of power with the executive and legislative branches both Republican, which makes it awfully hard to control the branch which has been the mainstay of liberalism in America for the last 40 years--the ultimate judiciary, the Supreme Court.

What they don't bother to state for whatever reason is why Democratic political fortunes have fallen on such hard times, and whether they as mainstays of their party had anything to do with it. And of course they have. They are but the offspring of the generation of liberal moralists before them, many of which actually had something valuable to say, once upon a distant time. Many of their forebears stood for meaningful qualities. However, this generation of liberals lost their way in the fog of moral self-righteousness which followed in the wake of unqualified successes in the crucible of the 1960's. And don't be mistaken. Today's liberals, perhaps in the throes of self-preservation, are in a delusional state about the irrelevance (or worse, harmfulness) of their ideas. This Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein explaining why she will vote against Sam Alito's confirmation: "There comes a time when you just have to stand up, particularly when you know the majority of people think as you do." This is as sure a recipe for continued failure as there is. Good for conservatives, though bad for a lot of people who look to people like her or Teddy Kennedy for leadership.

But what Sam Alito represents more than anything is what liberals have come to be fond of calling "a tipping point". He represents a great swinging back of the pendulum of the judiciary which long ago swung in entirely the opposite direction. He represents the antithesis of what would have happened to the judiciary should an Al Gore or a John Kerry been elected president. We at TCW shudder at the thought of who either of these men would have nominated for Supreme Court vacancies. The headlong rush to race, class, and sexual conciousness which has enveloped the left for a generation could have proceeded unimpeded.

With Sam Alito, we are optimistic the Court may tip back to the serious business of actually deciding cases based upon Constitutional law as opposed to merely aiming for "desired" outcomes. And that represents a very important good thing for everyone up and down the social, class, sexual and economic scale. Equality under the law, being what we are founded upon, is a valuable quality. For when that equality devolves into the uncertainty of our highest Court deciding upon "penumbras and emanations", everyone loses. And the case could be effectively made that those for whom preferred outcomes have been judicially designed are the worst losers of all.

May the judicial sanity which a Judge Alito represents have a tipping effect to other, less apparent reaches of our court system.

Another Day, Another Bad Idea

In our local treasure trove of liberal thought*, the latest tactic for forced removal of American forces in Iraq is laid bare. It is that we should simply allow the Iraqis to vote on whether or not coalition forces stay in their country. This tactic gained traction in larger sites such as the New York Times as far back as a year ago, even well before recent successful Iraqi democratic votes were held. (One wonders what the effect of coalition withdrawal would have been on these votes.) It was touted a month ago in an NPR story.

So it should be no surprise that it has filtered down to writers such as Mr. Wohlgemuth in our local MSM outlet.** Why has the critical mass developed on the left for an Iraqi vote for withdrawal of US forces, which incidentally lest we forget, are the same forces responsible for the ability of Iraqis to vote in their current free manner? Here are two reasons:

1. The left has recently been emboldened by the ability of populist tyrants in a couple of places--Venezuala and Iran notably--to "democratically" stick a thumb in the eye of American interests. Chavez and Ahmadinejad were democratically elected, were they not? And their interests lie in direct contrast to America's, do they not? Ergo, democracy doesn't always run parallel to American interests like the Amerocentric fascists believe. This line of thinking clearly excites our current crop of leftists.
2. On the contrary, those who oppose American presence in Iraq know that their sentiment carries no weight with the current administration. Therefore, they believe that the only way for Americans to be "redeployed" as Congressman John Murtha calls it, is for Iraqis to do the insisting.

* They never fail to disappoint, do they?

** Except when one is forced to take them seriously.

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Mr. Wohlgemuth's idea, an adaptation of a popular one circulating in the fever swamps of the left, is a bad one for several reasons:

• A lot of the very Iraqis to whom this gentleman and others would give power to vote coalition forces out are intimately involved with the destabilization of the very freedom which is becoming instituted there. Allowing a Sunni-Baathist voting privileges as to whether freedom forces should stay or not is a ridiculous proposition on its face. One can be sure that terrorists of that stripe would be very successful in strong-arming (or worse) their fellow countrymen to vote in the manner most opportunistic for their malignant paradigm--that is for a withdrawal of the forces which are constraining them at present. 
• Abandoning Iraq at this particular point in time is unthinkable. Iraq is in the middle of a huge and delicate transition which may very well decide the fate of the entire Middle East for generations to come. Throwing them to the above-mentioned wolves would be short-sighted for us and inhumane for them. Furthermore, the entire project of Middle East stabilization which the left goes on and on about (when it suits their agenda) would go down the tubes.
• From time to time there is polling data which indicates a similar phenomenon about Russia. That people there say they prefer the "stability" of the old dictatorship to the uncertainties of modern freedom. In fact, Vladimir Putin is putting a lot of this sentiment to work as he reconsolidates power and slowly puts his people into the old stranglehold. 

Writers like Mr. Wohlgemuth have tripped on the recent left-of-center discovery that populist sentiment can be used to poke a thumb in the eye of civilizations like the United States. (Witness Venezuela or Iran and the travesties which have been visited upon their people and potentially their neighbors.) These on the left now merely seek to put this plan of action into effect in Iraq.

What they fail to understand, of course, is that there really are some cultures and civilizations worth fighting for. That's why it is crucial that we not cave to the designs of bad ideas, no matter how attractively clothed they are in populist sentiment.

George Bush Spied. No One Died. Hooray!

Quite a bit of ire has been exerted over the Bush/NSA affair, in which he apparently directed the NSA to "spy" on conversations between suspected foreign terrorists and contacts in America. True to form, nearly all the criticism of this activity has come from his domestic liberal opponents. Many of them are convinced he broke the FISA statute of 1978. It is described thusly on the FISA web site:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prescribes procedures for requesting judicial authorization for electronic surveillance and physical search of persons engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States on behalf of a foreign power.

In fact, many are so convinced that Bush is in such flagrant violation of the law that impeachment is in order. Typical of the criticism coming from the left is this editorial from TCW's honorary paper of record*, in which columnist Arch Montgomery takes Bush to task for being too energetic in our nation's defense. Here is his summation in which his conclusion is clear--that George Bush was wrong to order the NSA to eavesdrop on those international conversations:

Expediency and hubris are the two real reasons for the recent wiretap acts. It is easier to do what you want when you want to do it, and it is arrogance to believe that laws on the books do not apply to you.

Our Founding Fathers knew expediency when they saw it, and they refused to accept it. They lived under the arrogance of a King and an aristocratic elite, and they rebelled.

We take issue with several particulars from his column, but more importantly, his sentiment points in the wrong direction as is typical for much of the left on this and other arguments. Earlier in the column, he notes two arguments for presidential authority to conduct the wiretapping--Article II of the Constitution which confers executive privilege to defend the United States; and a Congressional Resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001 which authorized the president to to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

However, as Mr. Montgomery states, these two arguments "must be understood in the context of the existent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." Here he attempts to mislead us as he reverses the order of importance. For it is the FISA law (and even a Congressional Resolution for that matter) which must be understood in the context of the Constitution, not the other way around. FISA cannot abridge Constitutionally vested executive power.

Rich Lowry from National Review Online puts it best.

Every administration, liberal or conservative, has claimed this warrantless surveillance power, and no court has ever denied it. The FISA court of review explained, citing the 14th Circuit's 1980 decision in a case involving the surveillance of a Vietnamese spy named David Truong, "The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." The court added, "We take it for granted that the President does have that authority."

The court in the Truong case noted that the executive "not only has superior expertise in the area of foreign intelligence, it is also constitutionally designated as the pre-eminent authority in foreign affairs." And the Constitution's framers knew what they were about, according to the Truong court: "Attempts to counter foreign threats to the national security require the utmost stealth, speed and secrecy. A warrant requirement would add a procedural hurdle that would reduce the flexibility of executive foreign-intelligence initiatives."

OK. But the question which always intrigues us here at TCW is why would our liberal contingent even want to make the argument against intelligence gathering in the war on terror?  After all, aren't they the same group which bemoaned our national inability to prevent 9/11 in the first place? They had strong words for Bush's "inept handling of intelligence gathering" in the run-up to that disaster. Now they criticize him for doing exactly what they criticized him for not doing prior to 9/11.

Here is our two part conlusion, and why they lack credence. One, they either really are rooting for the bad guys in this conflict, which of course would be the worst scenario and we sincerely hope is not the case. Or two (and hopefully), they are merely feckless political opportunists who employ this kind of flip/flop complaining tactic on a too-frequent basis. After all, remember them doing it with energy, complaining about high gas prices but refusing to allow exploration to find more sources? Remember them pulling it repeatedly with our soldiers in Iraq, claiming to back them, but as John Kerry recently did, calling them the terrorizers of women and children? Hopefully it's just cheap exploitation of both sides of issues for political gain. As bad as this scenario is, we hope this is the true one.
 

  * whose political sentiments we long ago stopped lending credence to.

Our White Elephant--What To Do With It

That would be our downtown Asheville Civic Center. It is in trouble. It has been for years. Virtually from the moment it opened and Bob Hope in its debut act quipped, "Congratulations, you've built yourselves a nice garage," it has been under seige. It is a drain on the city's economy, a drain that the city can little afford given its pressing needs for basics like improved police protection, a crumbling water infrastructure and a social budget that intends to end homelessness, among other utopian  goals. Let's also not forget the Regional Water Agreement which the City Council worked so hard to successfully abolish, cutting themselves out of about $2 million per year in County revenue. Whoops! And now the expensive legal fight begins over the state law which forbids them charging higher water rates to recoup costs.

(By the way, how can a city be in such chronic financial calamity as ours is, in the midst of a national economy that is booming?.....Another day.)

Anyway, an interesting report was issued last week from the John Locke Foundation which proposed a rather obvious solution---simply selling the thing to the private sector. Here is the body of the release:

Study: Asheville Should Sell Civic Center

Sale would convert losses into gains and preserve the complex for the region

Contact: Dr. Michael Sanera
919-828-3876
msanera@johnlocke.org

December 22, 2005

RALEIGH – The Asheville Civic Center is deteriorating and has lost nearly $1 million a year since 2000, prompting the city to convene a task force to find a solution. According to two John Locke Foundation analysts, the task force should focus on the most obvious solution: selling the Asheville Civic Center to the private sector.

The report, “Solving Asheville’s Civic Center Dilemma: Making Lemonade Out of a Lemon,” was written by Dr. Michael Sanera, JLF’s research director and local-government analyst, and research intern Travis Fisher. Sanera and Fisher gave several reasons why selling the Civic Center would make sense for Asheville and how the sale would turn a budgetary drain into a budgetary gain.

The center’s revenue consistently fails to cover its cost, the authors write. It has had $5.7 million in operating losses since 2000.

“The continuing loss of nearly $1 million per year is impossible to defend given the other vital needs of the city,” Sanera said, “especially the dire need for better police protection.”

Selling the Asheville Civic Center would be an immediate financial gain for the city, Sanera and Fisher found, but it would also save money in the long run. The city would no longer have to cover its operational losses, it would get property tax revenue from the new owner, and also the city’s taxpayers would not be on the hook for renovation costs for the deteriorating facilities.

A Heery International study estimated renovation and modernization costs of the Civic Center complex to be from $73 million to $115 million and suggested those expenses be made up in new and expanded taxes. Since Asheville residents have paid about $82 per person to cover the Civic Center’s costs, regardless of whether they ever attend a function, and many attendees are nonresidents who aren’t taxed to support the center.

“The city should not contemplate new taxes to support the private entertainment of only a portion of city residents, especially when a viable alternative is readily available,” Sanera said. “Selling the Civic Center is the closest thing Asheville can get to ‘having your cake and eating it, too.’”

Dr. Michael Sanera and Travis Fisher’s Policy Report, “Solving Asheville’s Civic Center Dilemma,” is available on the John Locke Foundation website. For more information, contact Sanera at 919-828-3876 or msanera@johnlocke.org.

 

Sounds like a pretty reasonable idea to us. But we can imagine the lack of interest from perhaps the most liberal City Council ever elected in Asheville history. Liberal politicians, as we know, are not predisposed to "privatization", as it works against their natural proclivity to build the state rather than disassemble it. Our bet is they would much rather increase taxes and waste money on an expensive renovation and then continue to lose money on its operation, than to see a private entity run it at a profit.

The only way the City would acquiesce to selling it would be an overwhelming display of public pressure. That of course hasn't happened as of yet, and won't be helped along by the local MSM outlet, being the willing big-government accomplice it is.

Therefore, it will have to come directly from the people. And given the city's financial woes, perhaps the people will start to take notice, especially when they receive a shock when their updated tax bills arrive next year.

 

Back From A Respite--And More For The Pastor!

One of the great things about paying one's own way and having no advertisement on one's blog is there are none to be beholden to but one's own schedule. So an entire two weeks has now slipped by without a single post, and over a hundred e-mails have now piled up in the inbox--and it has felt wonderful.

Not that the past two weeks has not been put to good use. About 15 family guests were in for an extended Christmas stay. (Thank goodness the dishwasher and disposal had been replaced before they arrived.) Three very high-calorie meals a day were cooked; conversation and the phenomenal holiday weather were both exquisitely enjoyed. I read quite a bit, watched minimal TV, attended to a court date in which our neighborhood is suing the city not to be annexed (more on that later), and not least of all meditated about the state of our nation and about the state of our body politic as the year draws to a close.

The chance to rest, recharge and place into context was invaluable.

The end of this year also provided an opportunity for a private exchange with someone who has been mentioned in this blog before, Steve Runholt--pastor of the Presbyterian Church and chapel at Warren Wilson College and the college chaplain. By way of history, here is a link to a prior posting in which an editorial of pastor Runholt's in the Asheville Citizen-Times* was criticized as being at odds with the interests of the people his theology happens to champion, namely the poor and dispossessed. And here is commentary about an e-mail exchange with him following his initial reply to our initial criticism.

This end of year, private exchange is mentioned only because there was something about it which continues to exemplify the profound differences between the right and left in our society, and the harmful consequences to public policy that can be caused by well-intentioned but naive and economically uninformed people. The fact that many of these people happen to carry the imprimatur of the church is also troubling.

In it, pastor Runholt approached us with concerns he had over the criticism sent his way in this blog and then with the publishing of his letters with rebuttals, curiously despite the fact he was e-mailed up front about our intention to take him to issue. (We will honor his request not to publish his most recent communication because he asked that be the case. We will however draw upon the content of that communication to illustrate the broader point--that the left, and incredibly some in the pastorate, seemingly have lost touch with basic humanitarian concepts nowadays out of a fit of pique with our current president.)

Pastor Runholt quickly fell to the one of the tactics that the left resorts to when told they are wrong. He cried foul over the publishing of his exact words. He said we were unethical for publicly criticizing him, based on his exact words. He claimed that we had embarrassed and lampooned him, based on our criticism of his exact words. Now perhaps there exists some ecclesiastical power of immunity to criticism conferred on his post that we are not aware of. But given there is not, we told him that TCW feels a much greater ethical obligation to expose thinking that is at odds with humanitarian constructs than to protect the ego of an angry leftist who happens to be a pastor.

In addition to Rev. Runholt's initial editorial in which he claimed his town of Weaverville was being overrun by "developers and financiers" eager to "develop every square inch of green space in Buncombe County"-- and for which he was roundly criticized in this blog as espousing a "misanthropic" social ideology--what other tidbits did he offer in his subsequent conversation? Here is a list of things he reviled against:

• Wal-Mart and the big box stores. They oppress the working poor while enriching shareholders.
• Wealthy developers and the rich people they cater to. They are streaming into this area in much too great a number, running roughshod over the sensibilities of people like him.
• Of course, George Bush and the unjustified war of imperialism in Iraq. Iraq, after all, never did anything to us.
• People like me, who bother publicly to argue with people like him.

* Our honorary paper of record at TCW. Honorary, because we no longer spend $182.00 per year for the displeasure of reading unsupported leftism on a daily basis.

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We sent the Reverend an extensive response to his concerns, including our amazement at how a religious man could advocate a policy which would have allowed a dictator to remain free to continue to torture and slaughter the people under his subjugation. He didn't bother to respond, except to point out that he was still so angry at us for posting his initial correspondence....that he wasn't going to talk.

What's the moral of this story? What can we as conservatives glean from the behavior of men like this gentleman, which is certainly emblematic of a great many things the left advocates--excepting that he provides his with a religious twist? As we have encountered literally too many times to count over the last few years, the left is comfortable only when given the pulpit to demagogue. And they cry foul when confronted, because their ideology, as we pointed out to the Reverend, does not function well in the real world. Nor is it even advantageous to the very people they claim to support.

We don't expect folks like Mr. Runholt to change, as we have seen how much of their earthly utopia is built on oblivion to facts on the ground. And many folks like him are certainly so heavily invested in maintaining a hold on whatever piece of it they can, they are not going to let themselves fall prey to facts which contradict their worldview.

Our hope is that 2006 may see a rapprochement of sorts. But it's going to take a tectonic shift from people like Rev. Runholt. The moral emperors of the left are not wearing the economic, social and ultimately the humanitarian clothes they believe they are. Let's not hesitate to tell them, for the sake of all.

The Grinch Who's Stealing The Future

We admit to not reading our erstwhile and honorary newspaper of record much anymore. We realized some time ago it represented an enthusiastic forum mostly for social utopians and people filled with class envy--neither of which is our cup of tea. Don't get us wrong. We wouldn't mind a society which was closer to utopia, nor would we mind a more class-free society. It's just that we learned from our leftist days that the way modern progressives propose achieving these goals doesn't work, and frequently further harms the people they intend to help. Since that realization occurred, we reformed our thinking towards optimistic realism, which of course is the antithesis of modern liberalism.

From time to time, however, we do open the pages to confirm why we quit paying much attention to this venue. And it never fails but to affirm our life-changing thesis. Such is the case of the editorial linked above, appropriately written by one of our local university professors. As we are approaching another political season in which the Asheville Citizen-Times will do its utmost to paint our 11th District Congressman, Charles Taylor in the worst possible light, professor Herzog carries the water in admirable fashion. He sounds all the appropriate notes of current moral preening, using as an illustration the plight of Western North Carolina's poorest children--and the Christmas they will not have this year.

How has Mr. Taylor acted to drive more WNC children into the lap of poverty, professor Herzog asks:

According to the Washington Post, here is what Congressman Taylor voted to do for poor kids in North Carolina:

* Deadbeat dads. Though he represents a district in which 22 percent of children are living in single family homes, Taylor voted to cut $4.9 billion from child support enforcement programs.

* Medical care for poor kids. Though 240,000 North Carolina children have no health insurance coverage, Taylor voted to cut $11.4 billon from Medicaid and from the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

* Child nutrition. While 21 percent of North Carolina families with children are at risk for hunger, he voted to cut $796 million from the food stamp program.

* Student loans. Taylor voted to cut $14.3 billion from college student loan programs, adding an average of $5,700 to the total debt burden of the typical student who is forced to borrow money to attend college.

Note that Congressman Taylor’s vote made a difference. The bill barely passed — 217 for to 215 against.

...Taylor’s recent votes in Congress dramatically demonstrate that his concern does not extend to the most vulnerable citizens in the 11th district — impoverished children. To a lot of Western North Carolina kids, our man in Washington is looking more and more like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Now here's the reality as reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, a publication that rarely gets its numbers wrong:

• "Entitlements"--that is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, food stamps, farm subsidies and other programs that increase automatically each year--now cost $1.3 trillion dollars each year. With automatic increases, they will cost $2.5 trillion in 10 years.
• If these costs were to be paid for with taxes, personal income tax would have to double, or payroll tax would have to rise to 25% from the present 15%.
• Over the next 5 years, the federal budget is expected to exceed $13.855 trillion. The Republican House "deficit reduction" plan proposed cutting about $59 billion (or as the WSJ put it, the "rounding error, or the $0.055 trillion" of the budget). That would still leave the total budget at a mind-boggling $13.8 trillion.
• In the past 5 years federal spending on anti-poverty programs has increased by 41%. Medicaid, which provides health care for the poor children Professor Herzog claims to champion, is scheduled to grow by 7.9% a year. Under the GOP plan, it would "only" grow by 7.5%--still more than double the rate of inflation.

Let's be blunt. Here is the way liberals like Professor Herzog calculate "cuts" in entitlement  programs. They take current levels of spending and apply extrapolation to extend them ad infinitum. Any reduction in these numbers--say a reduction from a 7.9% increase to 7.5%--constitutes a moral travesty. Never mind that in absolute dollars and with respect to inflation, spending goes up, up, up.

On the other hand, folks on the left like our professor have taken a recent shine to preaching the evils of deficit spending. We couldn't agree more. But we keep waiting for any sign they may be serious enough to actually propose a "cut" in a program. Or heck, even reduce the "rate of increase" of a program. So far, their idea of saving money has never come at the expense of stopping the hemorrhage of money out of the treasury.

The professor says Charles Taylor and his ilk are the Grinches stealing the Christmases of the poor. He is wrong of course. There may indeed be a Grinch stealing their Christmases, and their futures right along, but we've had a better idea for quite some time where that's coming from.

 

Thoughts About Two Peace Activists

A few days ago marked the 25th anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon. He was described on NPR Thursday as "a singer and peace activist".

Coincidentally, a murderer of four innocent people and founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles, now on death row and due to be executed on Dec. 13, Tookie Williams, was being described as a "peace activist" by the Associated Press.

We thought it odd the strange confluence of these two noteworthies--one undeservedly robbed of life by a bullet, and another who deserves to die for his cold-blooded behavior--both being described by the MSM as "peace activists".

First, Mr. Lennon. He, and the millions of his followers up to the present day who call themselves "peace activists" as well--all those imaginers of no countries, no possessions, no heaven or hell--are they any more equipped than John was to actually do anything about peace? Most of them undoubtedly would be first in line to support the clemency of very un-peaceful killers like Mr. Williams, the kind of people who prey on the unarmed, the naive and the helpless.

Nevertheless, John didn't deserve to die the way he did, in cold blood. But his successors could do so much more for actual peace if they would undertake to understand the nature of those who mock their notion of "giving peace a chance".

Now Tookie Williams. Word is, he has rehabilitated himself in his years in solitary confinement. He has even taken to writing children's books, urging them not to take up the life he did. Accordingly, he has been made an icon of the Bianca Jagger/Mike Farrell/ Hollywood/anti-capital punishment set. He has even been nominated for Nobel Peace Prizes (which says it all about the Nobel). On Wednesday, hundreds of demonstrations were carried out around the world in his name for "World Cities Against The Death Penalty Day".

We are glad that he apparently feels differently now than he did when he committed those murders and then went around L.A. bragging about them. And we do not wish to diminish the impact that those children's books may have on preventing wasted lives. But he still deserves to die for his crimes. Like it or not, the death penalty represents a social and legal bond we have with one another. When we feel comfortable that the system has worked in a just manner (as it did in Mr. William's case), the outcome ought to be predictable. Otherwise, society's legal contract is abrogated, and its foundation suffers. Future Tookie Williamses feel more empowered at the expense of future John Lennons.

Lastly, what damage has been done to the term "peace activist", and to our language in general, by the MSM carelessly bandying it about as it has? Here's what: it endangers the term. It denigrates the term. It begins to render the term meaningless, much the same as words like "liberal" and now "progressive" have been ruined by those who pick nice-sounding linguistics, and then in Orwellian style, misapply them.

Meanwhile the real peace activists of the world toil on, unappreciated and obscure--just as the Bianca Jaggers prefer they be.

Three Unwise Men Bearing Gifts From Left Field

Just when conservatism seems to be suffering from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), along come three unwise men to remind us that no matter how badly we feel sometime, it could be a lot worse. They have given mightily of their talents to uplift the spirits of conservatives in this bleak midwinter. They have rekindled the flame within our hearts, which had been reduced to a flicker.

1. First, Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General (of the United States!) under Lyndon Johnson. After losing his mind some time ago, and having been affiliated with such cesspools of far-leftism as  International Answer (Act Now To Stop War And End Racism), and founder of the International Action Center (both worth a long look), he is now on Saddam Hussein's defense team. Thank you, Ramsey.
2. Next, Howard Dean. Yes, he's an old standby. But he manages to present fresh new gifts on such a regular basis so as to be truly the kind of regular friend that the beleaguered conservative needs the most. As reported by CNN, Dean recently said the war in Iraq was unwinnable: "Dean, the Democratic National Chairman, on Monday told a San Antonio, Texas, radio station that the United States appears to be making the same mistakes it made during the Vietnam War, and the idea that the war in Iraq can be won is "just plain wrong." Thanks Chairman Dean for "speaking your truth", as you guys on the left call it. Good to know exactly how you feel.
3. Finally, the inestimable John Kerry. Sunday, on CBS's Face The Nation with Bob Schieffer, (former presidential candidate!) Kerry made this whopper:
   

   And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going     into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children,     you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs,     religious customs. Whether you like it or not--
   
   Schieffer: Yeah.
   Kerry: --Iraqis should be doing that."  

Does this remind anyone of stories we the distinguished veteran relate of "...war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...stories that at times they had           personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from           portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off   limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in           fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun,         poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South     Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war..."

Thanks, John, Howard, Ramsey.

Happy Holidays to you too.

TCW

MSM Enraged About Positive News Coming Out Of Iraq

Lest you thought there was nothing the Mainstream Media thought was worth fighting for in Iraq, just check out the outrage triggered over the "planting" of good news stories about the war.

The New York Times devoted extensive coverage to the issue with "Military Admits Planting News In Iraq" in their Dec. 3 edition.

The military acknowledged Friday in a briefing for a ranking Senate Republican that news articles written by American troops had been placed as paid advertisements in the Iraqi news media and not always properly identified.

Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters after receiving a 25-minute briefing from officials at the Pentagon that senior commanders in Iraq were trying to get to the bottom of a program that apparently also paid monthly stipends to friendly Iraqi journalists.

Mr. Warner said there had been no indications yet that the paid propaganda had been false. But he said that disclosures that an American company, under contract to the Pentagon, was making secret payments to plant articles with positive messages about the United States military mission could undermine the Bush administration's goals in Iraq and jeopardize Iraq's developing democratic institutions. "I remain gravely concerned about the situation," he said.

Later on in the same article:

On Friday, the Lincoln Group defended its practices, saying it had been trying to counter insurgent propaganda with accounts of heroism by allied forces. "Lincoln Group has consistently worked with the Iraqi media to promote truthful reporting across Iraq," Laurie Adler, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement.

But Congressional Democrats said the Lincoln Group activities were the latest example of questionable public relations policies by the administration. In an earlier case, payments were made to columnists, among them Armstrong Williams, who received $240,000, undisclosed at the time, for promoting No Child Left Behind, the administration's education initiative. In January, President Bush publicly abandoned this practice.

"From Armstrong Williams to fake TV news, we know this White House has tried multiple times to buy the news at home," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said in a release on Friday. "Now, we need to find out if they've exported this practice to the Middle East."

Also on Friday, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called on the acting Pentagon inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, to investigate the Lincoln Group's activities to see if they amounted to an illegal covert operation. "The Pentagon's devious scheme to place favorable propaganda in Iraqi newspapers speaks volumes about the president's credibility gap," Mr. Kennedy said. "If Americans were truly welcomed in Iraq as liberators, we wouldn't have to doctor the news for the Iraqi people."

Now as it happens, our Middle Eastern staff of The Culture Wasteland maintains contact with a source high within the MSM heirarchy. We found Niles Fonda embedded deep within the Green Zone, tucked safely away in a Baghdad bar, where most of his war reporting originates.

TCW: Niles, we appreciate your taking time out from your important work to talk to us. Briefly, why the uproar over stories "planted" by interests friendly to the American war effort?

NF: Well, it should be obvious. We own the news here. And we don't appreciate riff-raff attempting to subjugate our serious business of shaping the way this ill-begotten war is going. It amounts to propaganda.

TCW: What do you say to critics who claim that the Islamists engage in propaganda all the time via Al-Jazeera, and that we must fight the war of public opinion the same as they do?

NF: It is beneath us and antithetical to our purist point of view. Besides, we do not engage in moral finger-pointing at enemies of America. That would be taking sides.

TCW: Are you saying that no story should be allowed which has not passed through your journalistic seive, promoting Western values over the typical Middle Eastern ones of suppression of human rights?

NF: Exactly. "Planting" stories--especially ones portraying America in a positive light--is not an option. We are not into the business of promoting one set of values over another here. Our job is to uncover bad news. And wouldn't you know it, most of it happens to originate with American imperialism. Good news coming out of Iraq can wait as far as we are concerned. Until at least the next president.

TCW: Would you rather see no freedom of the press of the kind that was in place in Saddam's regime, than to endure a few positive pro-Western stories? It always strikes us as odd that the MSM seems so reluctant to criticize the total lack of press freedom evident in countries governed by dictators--like an Iraq or a Cuba or a Venezuala--than to embrace the freedoms that might be possible should certain dictators be deposed.

NF: I don't think you are getting it. Purity of the press must not be sacrificed. And you must admit, there is a certain sexy allure to the ideological purity of Saddam, Fidel, or Hugo. These guys really know what they want.

TCW: We see. Well, what do you say to the concerns out there that you and your colleagues have covered the war in a subjectively pessimistic way?

NF: What? We are only trying to tell the truth here. Western oppression is the cause of virtually all the problems in Iraq. We thought that was pretty much accepted fact by now. And we seriously doubt that anything good will ever come of Mr. Bush's war. If anything good does manage to accidentally happen, we'll let you know. That's our job. After all, I and many of my colleagues have Master's degrees in journalism.

TCW: We don't think you answered our question about media suppression in totalitarian states. There are even reports of media manipulation in "free" states. For instance, the French press recently actively underplayed the reports of suburban rioting by Muslims so as "not to encourage right-wing politicians." You seem unbothered by those things, but get all lathered up about a few positive strories about America in the Iraqi press. What gives?

NF: We are fighting our own war for the hearts and minds of people. We see the Middle East as our next great outpost. As modern media hero, Howard Zinn, once said: "The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners." We in the MSM try to live by those words.

TCW: So do you not see people like Hussein as the executioners of history? Did you not ever see those videos of his security forces throwing Iraqi men with their hands tied behind their backs off three-story buildings? Very gruesome stuff.

NF: I would tend to lump Hussein in with the group of other leaders in history who were mostly just misunderstood populists and happened to be successfully painted in a bad light by degenerate forces of Westernism. Our job here in Iraq is make sure those whose rage is misunderstood are fully represented in the pages of informed thought. Now, if you'll excuse me. I think happy hour is beginning.

TCW: Niles, very interesting. Thanks for your time.

 

 

We Bought Bush At 36

Remember way back a month ago, when GWB's approval rating was sinking faster than New Orleans after a hurricane? It stood at 36% in the November Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Corporation Poll. There was serious blood in the water.

But we here at TCW--ever the optimistic contrarians when it comes to what passes for currency on the left--thought differently, and we bought all the stock in him we could at that point. We believed that if he would only start making his case for the Iraq mission his numbers would bounce back. Plus we knew that the domestic economic picture was not nearly as grim as the New York Times and other liberal wags were making it out to be.

Lo and behold, after only a modest effort at countering some of the doom-and-gloom and cut-and-run coming from the left, his numbers are coming back. And we are enjoying our paper profit. The latest Fox/OPD poll has him up to 42%. Rasmussen has him at 46%.

Let's see. A return on equity of 16% in one and 27% in the other. Not a bad month's work.

Speaking Truth To Impotence

On John Kerry's homepage, there are the words liberals love to hear themselves saying nowadays: "Speaking Truth To Power". Mr. Kerry's particular "truth-speaking" in this instance is a peculiar call to succeed (he underlines it--so do we) in Iraq by setting a timetable for troop withdrawal. We say peculiar because he presages this call to succeed (withdraw) with this nice-sounding Kerryism:

All of us believe our troops are doing an extraordinary job.  They believe in the mission and we believe in them.

In classic Kerry fashion, and the fashion that sunk his presidential ambitions, he attempts to straddle the fence between the John Murtha/Nancy Pelosi faction of his party which thinks the whole Iraq mission has failed, and the Joe Lieberman faction of his party (an increasingly small faction) which thinks the Iraq mission is vital, humanitarian, and noble.

We of course know which side he really favors, since there are plenty of public opinion polls now available which show public reticence about Iraq. Let's be plain. He is running for the exits in the most statesmanlike fashion he can, trying desparately to seem like the reasoned leader of defeat. A tricky maneuver we would say-- but who knows, just because he failed miserably to convince America this kind of talk was leaderly in his failed bid for president doesn't mean it would necessarily be unsuccessful now, a year later. Or maybe it does.

At any rate, just a couple of observations about "speaking truth to power". What do liberals mean exactly when they use "truth" in this context up against "power"? What they are trying to connote is the image of say, a Martin Luther King, a Mahatma Gandhi or a Rosa Parks--standing in a dignified, peaceful way up against the overarching tyranny of injustice. Their use of the term "power" naturally is a synonym for arrogant western oppressiveness and otherwise anything George Bush may stand for. Standing up against values which would consume their ability to preen, ie. communism and now radical Islamicism, would never occur to these moral megaphones.

So, get the image? Peace vs. war. Equality vs. discrimination. Diversity vs. intolerance. Citizen of the world vs. xenophobe. The slogan, "truth to power", can just as easily be transmogrified to any number of other "liberal vs. conservative" caricatures. Non-profit vs. capitalism. Toyota Prius vs. Chevy Suburban. Hip vs. stuffy. Cindy Sheehan vs. the Crawford county sheriff's dept. On and on.

And to Messrs. Kerry and others on the left's credit, it's very, very clever. It sounds good. It feels nice and warm. It captivates the young and the not-yet-quite-thought-things-out-set. It's populist. It's an easy term to demagogue morality with. Recent poll numbers all show what a great tool it is, and how gifted liberals and the MSM have been at it--and how regrettably very bad GWB and conservatives have been at it. Who after all is against "truth", especially when poor little unarmed "truth" is up against Halliburton and Wal-Mart and Exxon and Pentagon cruise missiles all rolled into one hated package--modern conservative "power"?

But, at least as regards the war in Iraq, it is nothing more than a call to impotence. It is a call to a values vacuum into which we know exactly what will rush. What does Mr. Kerry support? Surely not "soldiers" and "missions". These only sound like meaningless, scrubbed, sterile emissions from his mouth. Does he even feel what the words mean? Hearing him say these things is reminiscent of Bill Clinton speaking of "sex"--terms that, by the time they had been massaged and manipulated for the maximum political effect, had been stripped of their essence, had lost all meaning, and were just amorphous....words.

We simply cannot afford this nothingness, this values vacuum, this impotence that John Kerry and others on the left call "truth". Our values are more meaningful, more tangible, more moral, even if the Kerrys of the world don't believe it. And they are worth fighting for.

Combat the Kerrys of our country with all you've got. The news from the front is not all bad, in fact not even most of it. And when Iraq  ultimately has been transformed, the left will be the most surprised of all. Their impotence in the face of challenge will have been fully exposed.

 

Be Still My Quaking Tutu

Turns out, we look good in tutus tootoo.

'Tis the season of "The Nutcracker" here in TheCultureWasteland's home town. And what better way to celebrate gender inspecificity, Asheville style, than to watch men playing all the parts. Imparting the justice to this subject only TCW's honorary paper of record** could, staff writer Paul Clark gives us "Dancing is men's work", a sensitive look inside the barre at Men Dancing IV: Real Live Action Figures.

credit: John Fletcher/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Turning gender on its toes, Nelson Reyes, left, dances the sugar plum fairy part of “The Nutcracker” with Giles Collard, co-director of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre.

The piece begins:

What’s the difference between a bunch of guys sitting around watching the game and some guys getting ready to go on stage to dance together?

Not much, Giles Collard said.

“There’s a lot of friendship, warmth and humor” during rehearsals for the upcoming performances at BeBe Theatre, Collard said. “A lot of action. And silliness.” Choreography done by men for male dancers tends to be “more relaxed” than dance in which women are the principals, he said.

Collard is staging the men-only show in part to celebrate the joy male dancers share when they work together.

“And really strong, physical all-out body contact,” he said. “Big jumps, big lifts. Throwing ourselves against the walls. Real male stuff.”

Here's some more shots of the guys over for the Cowboys and Eagles--doing the bonding thing, doing typical male stuff.

Giving new meaning to "the three-point stance":

GO EAGLES!

FIRST AND TEN, DO IT AGAIN!!

And finally, one who went a little heavy on the suds:

   

** $182.00 a year for this? Mmmm...don't think so.

 

The Fecklessness Of Liberal War Policy

The heat has been turned up several notches domestically in the criticism of Iraq war policy lately by Democrats, all with the underlying theme that (a) we were misled into war based upon manipulated intelligence information, (b) we are losing and (c) we need to get out sooner rather than later.

The irony that insurgent/terrorist attacks upon the Iraqi civilian population is drastically increasing coincidentally with these fresh attacks by American liberals hopefully is not lost on anyone.

Here are two must-reads by thinkers in the media. The first from retired Army officer Ralph Peters in the New York Post.

HOW TO LOSE A WAR

By RALPH PETERS

QUIT. It's that simple. There are plenty of more complex ways to lose a war, but none as reliable as just giving up.

Increasingly, quitting looks like the new American Way of War. No matter how great your team, you can't win the game if you walk off the field at half-time. That's precisely what the Democratic Party wants America to do in Iraq. Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions: The Dems are looking to throw the game just to embarrass the Bush administration.

Forget about the consequences. Disregard the immediate encouragement to the terrorists and insurgents to keep killing every American soldier they can. Ignore what would happen in Iraq — and the region — if we bail out. And don't mention how a U.S. surrender would turn al Qaeda into an Islamic superpower, the champ who knocked out Uncle Sam in the third round.

Forget about our dead soldiers, whose sacrifice is nothing but a political club for Democrats to wave in front of the media. After all, one way to create the kind of disaffection in the ranks that the Dems' leaders yearn to see is to tell our troops on the battlefield that they're risking their lives for nothing, we're throwing the game.

Forget that our combat veterans are re-enlisting at remarkable rates — knowing they'll have to leave their families and go back to war again. Ignore the progress on the ground, the squeezing of the insurgency's last strongholds into the badlands on the Syrian border. Blow off the successive Iraqi elections and the astonishing cooperation we've seen between age-old enemies as they struggle to form a decent government.

Just set a time-table for our troops to come home and show the world that America is an unreliable ally with no stomach for a fight, no matter the stakes involved. Tell the world that deserting the South Vietnamese and fleeing from Somalia weren't anomalies — that's what Americans do.

While we're at it, let's just print up recruiting posters for the terrorists, informing the youth of the Middle East that Americans are cowards who can be attacked with impunity.

Whatever you do, don't talk about any possible consequences. Focus on the moment — and the next round of U.S. elections. Just make political points. After all, those dead American soldiers and Marines don't matter — they didn't go to Ivy League schools. (Besides, most would've voted Republican had they lived.)

America's security? Hah! As long as the upcoming elections show Democratic gains, let the terrorist threat explode. So what if hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners might die in a regional war? So what if violent fundamentalism gets a shot of steroids? So what if we make Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the most successful Arab of the past 500 years?

For God's sake, don't talk about democracy in the Middle East. After all, democracy wasn't much fun for the Dems in 2000 or 2004. Why support it overseas, when it's been so disappointing at home?

Human rights? Oh, dear. Human rights are for rich white people who live in Malibu. Unless you can use the issue to whack Republicans. Otherwise, brown, black or yellow people can die by the millions. Dean, Reid & Pelosi, LLC, won't say, "Boo!"

You've got to understand, my fellow citizens: None of this matters. And you don't matter, either. All that matters is scoring political points. Let the world burn. Let the massacres run on. Let the terrorists acquire WMD. Just give the Bush administration a big black eye and we'll call that a win.

 

 

The irresponsibility of the Democrats on Capitol Hill is breathtaking. (How can an honorable man such as Joe Lieberman stay in that party?) Not one of the critics of our efforts in Iraq — not one — has described his or her vision for Iraq and the Middle East in the wake of a troop withdrawal. Not one has offered any analysis of what the terrorists would gain and what they might do. Not one has shown respect for our war dead by arguing that we must put aside our partisan differences and win.

There's plenty I don't like about the Bush administration. Its domestic policies disgust me, and the Bushies got plenty wrong in Iraq. But at least they'll fight. The Dems are ready to betray our troops, our allies and our country's future security for a few House seats.

Surrender is never a winning strategy.

Yes, we've been told lies about Iraq — by Dems and their media groupies. About conditions on the ground. About our troops. About what's at stake. About the consequences of running away from the great struggle of our time. About the continuing threat from terrorism. And about the consequences for you and your family.

What do the Democrats fear? An American success in Iraq. They need us to fail, and they're going to make us fail, no matter the cost. They need to declare defeat before the 2006 mid-term elections and ensure a real debacle before 2008 — a bloody mess they'll blame on Bush, even though they made it themselves.

We won't even talk about the effect quitting while we're winning in Iraq might have on the go-to-war calculations of other powers that might want to challenge us in the future. Let's just be good Democrats and prove that Osama bin Laden was right all along: Americans have no stomach for a fight.

As for the 2,000-plus dead American troops about whom the lefties are so awfully concerned? As soon as we abandon Iraq, they'll forget about our casualties quicker than an amnesiac forgets how much small-change he had in his pocket.

If we run away from our enemies overseas, our enemies will make their way to us. Quit Iraq, and far more than 2,000 Americans are going to die.

And they won't all be conservatives.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer.

The big question is why. What moves a group of people to become so affected by herd instinct that an idea like this, on which bad outcomes can easily be predicted, becomes acceptable, even desirable?

Here is an excellent analysis of the herding instinct which produces so much misery, from a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal. This particular analysis has to do with the latest demagoguery of oil companies at the hands of populist Senators, but the lessons of herd mentality are similarly instructive for the bandwagoning of the Iraq issue.

 

The Rational Herd
November 23, 2005; Holman Jenkins

A handy idea for making sense of the modern world is the idea of an "availability cascade." It employs economics to explain how people come to hold faddish beliefs, even when those beliefs are at odds with other beliefs they hold or information they possess.

You can see this dynamic in Washington's lowbrow burlesque over gasoline prices. The idea is also known as rational herding. Senators in the recent grilling of energy CEOs couldn't have made it plainer that they were flinging charges of manipulation not because they believed them but because they believed their constituents believe them. Senators also let it be known they were perfectly prepared to enact unwise policies rather than argue with constituent misperceptions.

Said Republican Pete Domenici: "Polls show that our people have a growing suspicion that the oil companies are taking unfair advantage of the current market conditions to line their coffers with excess profits . . . My constituents think that somebody rigs these prices, that in the process somebody is getting ripped off."

Said Democrat Byron Dorgan, explaining why he was forced to introduce a bill confiscating the "windfall" profits of oil companies: "A consumer says to us, 'You know, Mr. and Mrs. Politician, what I see are big economic interests getting rich here.'"

This hand-washing is the essence of childishness but the political class is far from the helpless sock puppet of an ignorant or misinformed public. The same voters, in any poll, would happily affirm that the world is running out of oil, that the supply is controlled by unreliable foreigners. Yet let gasoline rise to $3.00 a gallon, and suddenly they believe that only the ruthless profiteering of oil companies stands between them and cheap and abundant gasoline.

The public doesn't adopt beliefs directly at odds with its other beliefs without help. In the latest instance, help came from state attorneys general who, at the first sign of a spiking gas prices, ran to the nearest TV cameras and proclaimed crackdowns on price gouging. It came from the media and politicians declaiming against Exxon's quarterly profit of $10 billion as aberrant and suspicious -- never mind that at 10% of sales, Exxon's profit margin was hardly out of line with those of other industries.

'Availability cascade" is a term coined by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran in an important 1999 Stanford Law Review article. Their work follows distinguished prior work on informational cascades (when people knowing little about an issue take their cue from others) and reputational cascades (involving the rational incentive to go along with the crowd). All owe a debt to the Nobel Prize-winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who coined the term "availability bias" for people's willingness to judge the odds of a given event occurring based on how readily an example comes to mind.

The key is to remember that acquiring information is costly and that people look for shortcuts. Imagine a situation in which gifts are being distributed in red and blue boxes. You don't know what the boxes contain but everyone in line is asking for a red box. Therefore, you ask for a red box too, assuming they must know something you don't and because you want to appear "in the know" too.

This is rational herding. Now consider that everyone was thinking just like you, and that the chain began only because a prominent individual was seen picking a red box.

Put aside the reliance on jargon: That even intelligent people are capable of holding passionate views on matters to which they have given little thought or study is hardly a revelation. A plausible explanation indeed is that such people model their beliefs on the apparent beliefs of others whom they presume to be better informed.

Though the authors focused in their original article on environmental scares (and cited the presence of "availability entrepreneurs" who try to advance their agendas by inciting public misperceptions), their reasoning is widely applicable. After all, what was the collective estimate of the world's intelligence agencies about Saddam's WMD but an informational cascade? And, with rather more deliberation, what are Democrats now trying to create but an availability cascade for the belief that the Bush administration "lied" about Saddam's capabilities and intentions?

Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein used their Stanford article to suggest formal mechanisms to slow availability cascades that "spread empirically baseless information" and create "formidable political pressure in support of wasteful or counterproductive regulations." Among their ideas were creating a respected website to retail accurate risk information and greater reliance on formal risk-benefit analysis and peer review in the legislative and regulatory process.

Pierre Lemeiux, an economist at the University of Quebec who has also explored the practical implications of this work, points to cascade theory as reinforcing the classical case for protecting unpopular speech and cultivating the checks and balances of a decentralized state.

The danger of public herding in the media age is obvious but it can be overstated. Informational cascades are inherently fragile -- because they're based on slight information, thus ripe to be reversed when better information becomes available. It's the "reputational cascades" -- in which influential members of the public adopt positions based on fear of unpopularity or career damage -- and the resulting unnatural unanimity among elites that poses the real danger. So the senators rushing to enact punitive attacks on oil companies -- and blaming public opinion for making them do it -- let themselves off the hook too easily.

Again, the question is why. Why do people succumb to faulty thinking in an attempt for gains which, if procured, are less meaningful because they were obtained under dubious pretenses?

This, in a nutshell, is about all the left has at its disposal. Argument based on faulty logic, accentuated by moral preening and faux outrage, doled out with the expectation that it will snow the opposition long enough to obtain the desired results.

It has worked quite well for the last 40 years or so. We anticipate that it is coming to a close.

We Gather Together Against The State's Blessing

A profound Thanksgiving hymn, totally out of synch with today's sensibilities. After all, who dares call anyone "wicked" anymore (with the exception of imperialists and oligarchs like George Bush of course)? And who would be so presumptuous as to think that God is on "our" side in a fight, and that we are "his own"? And "our leader triumphant"? Wow. What kind of crusader mentality does that imply? How totally un-PC.

Last Sunday in church we noticed this old favorite, which everyone remembers from childhood, got passed over for one less familiar and easy to sing, with blander lyrics--but more politically correct. Kind of a shame that we've lost our courage to sing such outrightly partisan songs anymore, lest we brand ourselves as theocratic bigots. We are afraid even to believe, aren't we, in a God which, if not dead, is at least a spiteful, mean thing.

What an indication of how far we've been pushed into the corner by secularist culture.

Now together:

WE GATHER TOGETHER

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be.
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free.

Here's a fun little excercise. Reread it, substituting "State" wherever you see "Lord" or "God". Substitute "capitalists" for "wicked". Presto! Instant modernism, no?

Cut-And-Run Already Producing (Un)Desired Results

Let the record show: One day after Representative John Murtha called on Thursday for all American troops to be withdrawn from Iraq within 6 months, and two days after Bill Clinton told a group of students at American University in Dubai on Wednesday that the United States made a "big mistake" when it invaded Iraq, one of the deadliest days on record occurred there when 82 civilians died as a result of suicide bombers.

No mere coincidence, we would say.

Was it not obvious to Rep. Murtha and the former President that comments such as these would only serve to increase the violence? Does one think that--maybe deep down--they knew by making such comments that things would only get worse quickly, thus seeming to reinforce their presuppositions that it was a mistake and that it is too violent an undertaking?  Does one think that they--again deep down--knew they were somehow feeding into the self-perpetuating cycle of defeat: appeasement begetting violence, begetting more appeasement, until at last the heads of the American infidel enemy are served up on a platter? And does one think that they--perhaps again very deep down--really want it this way? Otherwise, why they hell would they be behaving like they are and saying the things they are saying?

From the Wall Street Journal of 11/18:

"We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."--North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow.

American elites are finally showing they have absolutely no stomach for this struggle between freedom and Islamic fascism as they magnify each and every death as proof it was not worth it. (And isn't it amazing that their lack of will correlates so closely to public polls?) Their spinelessness only promotes a cycle of the same, unfortunately drawing in a few more impressionables each time it is retread on the pages of the MSM. Concurrently, and tragically, their cowardice only makes matters better for al Qaeda, emboldening them to become ever more violent until, at last, we are gone and one more state can be secured for the Caliphate.

TCW's prediction: Expect much more bombing and needless killing now that terrorists think we are internally conflicted about beating them and their ideology of death. And expect even more breathless coverage of it in the MSM.

We wonder how many American military and Iraqi civilian lives the comments of Rep. Murtha and President Clinton prematurely ended.

What's So Great About Liberalism?

"To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters."....Voltaire.

A gentleman named Paul from the blog Brainshrub.com sent a comment in response to one of our previous blogs in which we offered up some criticism of liberalism/progressivism in light of recent Asheville city elections. Seems he was offended by the choice of nomenclature, and went to pains to defend modern liberalism and its current bastardization, "progressivism".

We wanted to be sure you saw it:

Go ahead and call us Liberals, most of us don't mind.  The terms "Progressive" and "Liberal" are interchangeable.  Kind of like the way Republican and Conservative are also interchangeable.

I'm proud to be a Liberal, because Liberal ideals and values are what makes this country great.

Some thoughts on Brainshrub's statement:

Paul,
We here at The Culture Wasteland once called ourselves liberal too. When we were growing up in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, we were proud to lend our support to the liberal policies of racial integration and civil rights. We remember the separate bathrooms and water fountains, whites only restaurants, separate seating in the movie theaters, and so forth. We were bothered by the whole culture of unfairness as much no doubt as you would have been. And as such, we lent our energy and support to liberalism when it was not popular to do so. We are still proud of those particular liberal roots of ours.

However, Paul, in that very same decade--the decade of the 1960s--many of the same people who effected invaluable change on America's racial culture lost their way in another regard. As you may remember, the 1960s were famous for another phenomenon: The United States experienced an upsurge in sympathy for the ideology of hard leftism, or Marxism. Marx, a philosopher whose ideas allowed totalitarians to live the good life atop many, many mass graves, saw personal liberty as nothing more than "bourgeois freedom". But he realized that a frontal attack on personal freedom was a difficult sell. After all, he had been preceeded by the likes of Voltaire, Adam Smith and John Locke--who had all argued powerfully and persuasively for individual liberty (liberalism, as it was called in the good old days, Paul).

So Marx repackaged the ideology of coercion and oppression in a different manner. He decided to attack liberty under the guise of expansion of it. He, in essence, repackaged despotism by defining it as liberty--a brilliant marketing feat which we are still grappling with today.

And the American left in the latter part of the 1960s fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Vietnam provided them the perfect venue to take Marx's canards about the evils of capitalism, private property and religion, and overlay them with the protection of the "rights" of an innocent Communist outpost (N. Vietnam). It really was the perfect scenario for the left, coming off the heady successes of civil rights. American involvement in a far-away war against a tenacious Communist foe, the ascendency of the drug culture, rock and roll (we still remember what a scam it was to see Elvis's hips gyrate--it drove our parents absolutely mad)--it all worked quite well for destroying a paradigm and replacing it with another one.

Almost on a direct continuum from the civil rights victories of the early 1960s--again a good thing--liberals had gone straight for the jugular of the foundations of Western society. Some of this was undoubtedly under the naive assumption that any system which had supported the evils of Jim Crow could only be rotten in all other regards as well. Therefore, the whole of its characteristics--its capitalism, its religion, its morality, its antipathy to Communism--they had to be linked to the immoral depredation of the black people--and therefore had to be discarded. But some of it was conscious anti-Americanism, and still is today.

Paul, today's liberals (or progressives or whatever you wish to call yourselves) are nothing more than the unfortunate culmination a generation later of this anti-capitalistic, anti-western, anti-religious (specifically Judeo-Christianity) ideology. We, here at The Culture Wasteland cannot think of a single valuable contribution modern liberal thought has produced over the last 30 years, with perhaps a tempered exception made for environmental concern. However even on that issue, liberals have over-done and over-demagogued. Meanwhile, it has worsened the plights of the very poor and disenfranchised it helped set free back in the 1960s. It has denigrated their religion. It has denigrated the equality that was supposedly at the center of their freedom. It has denigrated their country. It has produced horrible social consequences in the name of accomodation. It has effected a post-modern, de facto slavery of the people that benefitted from its most shining moment. For shame.

As Voltaire warned, to chain the multitude you must seem to wear its fetters. What better exemplifies that saying than modern liberal ideology? Who better to keep the multitude in chains than for instance a Ted Kennedy; or a Howard Dean; or a Bill Clinton; or a Kofi Annan; or a Barbara Boxer; or a Jessie Jackson--all ostensibly at one with the masses, all seeming to wear the same fetters--but who of course lead their own lives of privilege at the expense of the proletariat. Just as Karl Marx and his spawn did.

Paul, you as a modern liberal are obviously no longer capable of making the distinctions between what is better or worse for you or your citizen brothers and sisters. A full generation of moral and ethical relativity, a full generation of religious vacuum, a full generation of antipathy to capitalism, a full generation of "citizen of the world" status has neutered your ability to make these kinds of distinctions. Karl Marx, in his special place in hell, couldn't be prouder of what you and your compatriots have degenerated into.

We, here at TCW got out relatively unscathed after the good work of liberalism was all accomplished, and before liberalism was ruined by the cultural morass of the '60s. You can do it too, Paul.

Best, dude.

The Culture Wasteland

Jimmy Massey Lied. No One Died.

.....And Other Forms Of Intellectual And Anti-American Terrorism...

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By now, you are no doubt familiar with the duplicitousness of former U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey. Jimmy, a native of our own mountains, served for a period of time in Iraq, then came home after suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was then discharged, and proceeded to relate horrible tales of gratuitous American killing of Iraqi civilians. He became one of the heroes of the anti-war movement, as he seemed to symbolize everything that could go wrong with the war effort: a kindly, enlisted American goes to Iraq to help make a difference, whereupon he finds himself caught up in a rampage of barbarism from which he succumbs to mental anguish and has to evacuate. He proceeds to rend his cloak of self-guilt as he shouts his complicity in the deaths of many innocent Iraqis, ironically the same people he was there supposedly to save. There can be only one conclusion. The war is immoral. America is immoral for having started it. He was sent there immorally. He has been forced into beastial behavior by his neo-con leaders, deluded by their imperial desires. As he put it in a speech at Syracuse University,

"The reason the Marines teach you discipline . . . is so that you can confront the enemy and kill him. . . . Or so you can put a bullet into a 6-year-old, which is what I did. "

Only problem...it was all a lie. And once again (how many times has it happened now?) the MSM has been caught acting in collusion with a liar whose only agenda it seems is the defeat of the forces of democracy and freedom in a strife-ridden, totalitarian part of the world.

Here is the original story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch online edition that documents the inconsistencies and the frauds in Jimmy Massey's original stories. And here is the follow-up story from the same source which asks the difficult question, "Why Did The Press Swallow Jimmy Massey's Stories?"

Indeed. Jimmy received extensive attention from media outlets all over the world, including our local MSM Outlet, in which one of its local columnists recounted very sympathetically an interview with Jimmy (link expired, but part of the interview can be found on the columnist in question, Bruce Mulkey's blog site). What sort of blind spot lead to Mr. Mulkey and other journalists and activists to invest so much trust in a man whose word they never doubted, despite his outrageous claims? 

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We have a friend, we'll call him John, with whom we used to discuss a wide-ranging variety of subjects, sometimes until late into the night under the glow of the street light outside. We have always had our political differences, but these never overshadowed our ability to communicate. However, particularly since the last election, John has developed such a visceral dislike for the man, Bush, that he cannot be bothered anymore to argue politics in a rational manner. He now merely heckles. He has been reduced to it--to heckling, clever innuendo and the like--to express his intensity of disregard for the object of his derision, so much so that he has begun to resemble an odd amalgamation of Bill Maher and Michael Moore. On some days, we would even go so far as to call them better days, he sounds more like a Harry Reid, repeating the leftist subjectivisms "Bush lied" or "Bush is an idiot". Which is all too bad, because were he given to serious discussion like in the good old days, he could better get his sympathies across, we think.

Why does the normal activity of  discussion (the actual giving and taking of reasoned argument) seem to have no attraction for him, much as the normal activity of truth-checking seems to have escaped the virulent anti-war element that the Jimmy Massey's of the world circulate in?

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When we say "intellectual terrorism", what exactly do we mean? Terrorism is, by definition, an activity which is conducted outside normal rules of conduct. Its aim is to extract the maximum advantage using whatever means necessary, with no thought whatsoever to adhering to normalcy (which may only confer some advantage upon the enemy, who cannot be respected under any circumstance).

Much as we now conceive terrorism in the classical sense of the word--human bombs, gratuitous beheadings, with no regard for the constraints of historic behavior patterns, even in war--intellectual terrorism is now being practiced by the left. Ideology has come to trump truth. Ideology has come to trump argument. Ideology has come to trump compromise, no matter what the costs of censure from the adherents of classical rules of order. (Indeed, the classical rules of order have long been ignored by this element--and proudly so). And personal revulsion has completely obviated the ability to debate.

Why has ideology become all-consuming, to the point of fabrication or substanceless heckling? Simple. Because the arguments of the left are flaccid, morally and intellectually. There has been a powerlessness effected by two great shifts of American liberalism. The first occured in the decade of the 1960s, the decade of the "coming out" by the left of the subversion of morality. The second occured in the decade of the 1980s, the decade when conservative intellectualism began its ascent, and liberal intellectualism began its decline. Into this powerless vacuum has rushed a turpitude of unimaginable proportions, and a desperation from which the logical outcomes are: the fabrication of stories by the Jimmy Masseys and his acolytes of the world in an effort to rewrite history, and the sad fecklessness of heckling comedians.

Everything Important, I Learned In Kindergarten

If there can be found any humor in the last Asheville election, this has to be it. A slate of candidates about as left-wing as it comes was voted into the mayorship and City Council posts of our fair city. And not only did the adult voters go for them, they were also roundly supported by the children voters of Asheville. Kids Voting Buncombe County --another one of those ubiquitous non-profits feeding off the public trough--runs a program which theorizes that when kids can be taught to vote liberal as children, they will grow up and vote liberal as adults.

It seems to be working well in Asheville. As reported in the TCW's honorary paper of record***, Asheville children voted in almost an identical manner as their adult counterparts. With only one exception from the adult results, the children voted a slightly more leftist ticket. Bryan Freeborn replaced Carl Mumpower as the children's choice, which would have represented a clean sweep for the socialist brigade.

What this shows of the children is about what we would expect: the childlike desire for being taken care of by an elected official (an adult), combined with the (only slightly more advanced) instinct of government by "it takes a village". Both, appropriately are alive and well in the minds of Asheville's children.

And as far as the adults go