Home » Maybe now the Democrats won’t be able to pull a Vietnam redux

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Maybe now the Democrats won’t be able to pull a Vietnam redux — 110 Comments

  1. Obama will come in with Iraq in reasonably good shape. If it comes unglued, it’s on him. He is a bright fellow and will be careful not to let that happen.

  2. I read just yesterday that Mosul is still a hotspot. I’ll wait for Petraeus to say it’s ok to leave.

  3. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

    Of course the Democrats will be able to pull a Vietnam redux, you silly Neocon! That was the only time in my knowledge that we completely ignored a treaty (SEATO) and allowed an ally to be conquered by a hostile foreign power. And they gloated over it, even though they knew, going in (via “The Pentagon Papers”), that the military thought it would take a million men and seven to ten years. Military men! Piffle. What did they know compared to the Best and the Brightest?

    Joke:
    Q: Why does a Democrat desert his allies?
    A: Because he can.

    Poland, Israel, Japan, Taiwan – pick a card, any card, and watch the fun. Finland?

    One consolation: poor, beleaguered, honorable (albeit stubborn) G.W. Bush won’t care. He has that big stash of O’s that were stolen from all the White House typewriters.

  4. They (the democras) failed to blow it in Iraq, but they will redouble their efforts in Afghanistan, bet on it.
    I live in Anchorage and I just returned from the Port and guess what? On the corner near the federal courthouse (where else?) were two dozen protestors waving signs, “Honk for peace,” “Peace Now” and “Stop the next war.”

    It’s already on.

  5. The departure of Americans from Iraq will be orderly, but that country will have danger spots for years. A fantasty I hold is to visit as a tourist and send my liberal friends and family a post card with me standing in one of Saddam’s palaces, but I’m not holding my breath. Rest assured, the defeatists will continue to insist that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning, although if you ask them what about the thousands of Iraqi deaths during the Clinton administration you’ll get an empty silence. I never believed the propaganda that half a million children died, but there is no denying that Saddam did as much as he could to perpetuate that claim. Fool Madeleine Albright didn’t dispute the lie in a famous interview with Leslie Stahl of CBS, and thus a myth was born.

  6. My fantasy regarding Iraq is this things work out just fine.

    I might like to immigrate there when I retire as I fancy spending my golden years in freedom.

  7. Why do I get the feeling that Republicans have spent the last 60 years trying to compensate for the fact that a Democrat saved the free world during World War II, when they think that role rightfully belonged to them?

  8. You have to admit, though, Neo, that the Democratic victories in 2006 had a lot to do with the current stability in Iraq, because it forced the incompetent Rumsfeld and Franks out, and we got the vastly more comptent Gates and Petraeus instead. It’s true that the Democrats initially resisted Gates and Petraeus, as well, but I suspect Obama is certainly going to retain Petraeus and there’s an outside chance he might even retain Gates.

  9. Obama is not actually that bright. Affirmative action and grade inflation along with powerful friends, have carried him along so far. Cosmo help the world if any crisis ever depends upon Obama’s intellect, savvy, or judgment.

  10. “Obama is not actually that bright. Affirmative action and grade inflation along with powerful friends, have carried him along so far.”

    LOL! Those dumb blacks can’t get anywhere without affirmative action! Right, conservatives???

    More of this, please. I think you guys should try to see how little of the black vote the Republican Party can earn next time! Think of it as a contest against your own high score.

  11. billy: keep going in that direction and you will be banned. I happen to believe that Obama is quite bright in the usual, book-learning, academic sense. But someone saying that Obama is not that bright, and that he has been the beneficiary of affirmative action, is also a perfectly valid opinion, and not at all the globally racist anti-black position you characterize it as.

    You of course know that. So consider this a warning. I am sick and tired of the racist card being played without evidence.

  12. A couple of things. I see signs already that the violence is ramping up in Iraq – just a bit. I think the insurgents are a bit emboldened by the fact that they know they Americans will greatly reduce the forces there in fairly short order. This, unfortunately also has the undesired effect of making the locals more cautious about supplying the coalition with intelligence because they don’t know how soon we will be leaving. I only hope the army and police force there are strong enough to do what needs to be done to keep the peace.

    Billy – I might even share a bit of your disdain if it weren’t for the fact that Obama released NOTHING he absolutely did not have to release. So we never even saw his grades while everyone on the left was poking fun a McCain for graduating fourth from the bottom of his class at the Naval academy. As an adjunct I would just like to say – having a brother who graduated from the Air Force Academy and a niece and nephew currently there – that degrees at the service academies are highly loaded with math and science (you know – advanced calculus, physics, chemistry, etc.). So I can say with some certainty that a guy who graduated fourth from the bottom (say 952 out of 956) from a service academy would probably be on the dean’s list at most institutions of higher education (including the ivy league) and I would put them up against someone who graduated in the top ten percent (say 600 out of 6,000) from those ivied universities with a degree in medieval art history or 18th century French poetry,

  13. “You of course know that. So consider this a warning. I am sick and tired of the racist card being played without evidence.”

    You yourself are looking for ways for the Republican Party to reach out to more people and adopt principles held by previous iterations of the party.

    Maybe addressing the element of your party that believes that Obama could have only achieved what he did thanks to affirmative action? I dunno, just maybe.

    So, instead of getting mad at me, maybe take a look at that, ok?

    Or, here’s a thought: canvass some black people, tell them you’re a Republican and that you think Obama only achieved what he did because of affirmative action, and then ask them their thoughts of the Republican Party.

    Or maybe Buckley has some evidence to offer for his assessment of Obama’s intelligence other than the color of his skin?

  14. Hey Billy:

    An honest-to-God black fellow teacher at my high school today called BHO “Our First Affirmative Action President”. And she was NOT joking…

    I vas dere, Cholly…

  15. Billy:

    Can you point to an essay, paper, opinion or other scholarly work by “The One”? Can you point to anything he’s written (other than books whose authorship is in question) that shows any signs of above-average intelligence? We certainly haven’t seen his grades, nor evidence of his supposed excellence from Harvard Law. Add to this his utter ignorance of economic issues (couldn’t deal with Charlie Gibson’s question w/regard to capital gains, for instance, let alone his insistence on raising taxes in a recession), and I’m pretty convinced the guy is no better equipped to handle the Presidency than you or me.

  16. billy: I repeat, believing Obama to be not all that bright, and the beneficiary of affirmative action, is not evidence of racism. It is a valid opinion, as supported by what dane and stumbley wrote in their comments above, for example.

    As I said, I am tired of people using the race card when it is not warranted.

  17. So, Billy, The One got into Harvard based only on his abilities, yes?

    And you can prove this, yes?

  18. How many books has Obama written? How many of them were ghost-written? Now, how many has Thomas Sowell written? How many of them were ghost-written? (None.) How many words of opinion has Clarence Thomas written? I’ll bet that, year for year of his adult life, Clarence Thomas has written more words, supported more arguments, analyzed more issues, problems, and situations, than Obama has.

    Obama is a great speaker. He’s a great con artist (IMO). But when it comes to real intellect, he’s a flyweight.

  19. @Billy

    Barack was
    1) the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and
    2) the first ever president of the Harvard Law Review who was not #1 in his class.

    If that’s not Affirmative Action, what is?

  20. I hope things will turn out ok in iraq, but i can tell you ways in which it wont, and none of it is long shot.

    lets talk tactics and facts.. forget who said what or that bush lied or any of that… that never mattered. it mattered less once we were in.

    we were suckered in knowingly. i would guess that the idea was to get sucked in, and then turn it around and make it work.

    but while we are so busy arguing from the gut, how about looking at the obvious.

    [and none of this is to disparage the guys out there, they are doing great. this has to do with the bigger picture]

    here is a fall scenario:

    once we were in iraq, they never wanted us to leave. their game was attrition. If they wanted us out, all they had to do was stop, and it would be impossible to stay. it would be impossible to come up with an argument to maintain huge troops in case people who arent there show up.

    so first things first… once we were in, they were going to keep us there. (i will not go into why we turned it around, but we did, and for good reason)

    so now in order to take back iraq, the game will shift. they will back off… put more stuff in afghanistan… make it look like its shifted there.

    obama will find it easy to remove them if there is a few months of nothing happening. so the troops will leave, and a small force in some areas will remain. afg may calm down too so that a choice to remove a lot of troops will happen rather than just shift them all.

    at this point, the kurds will be fluffed. they will cause problems for turkey. there will be talks… the state will quickly factionalize… another state will probably send a few in and do some cross group killings to set them upon each other and have it blamed on sectarian violence.

    way before this, like now, they will play with isreal a lot.. the idea is to make things look real cool comparitively… so if isreal area gets hot, then the other area looks cool.

    think local games played to effect global ends…

    [and realize that we have been out of the game business for a while, and that most of the games for a long while have not been much of ours]

    i can see iraq having riots… that may make the US witdraw what troops it has for safety… maybe even the embassy… iranians trained would have been entering for a while… so things will escalate.. we will talk talk talk talk… the UN will threaten.. but troops will not go back in

    i will have details wrong, but the general flow will be right. so it might not be kurds first… or it may be something else… if its not going to remain standing, it will be through a chain of similar kinds of steps from stable to instable, then switch. they really dont have a way to protect themselves from state agencies that can do things and it really doesnt cost a lot. (like how hard is it for a certain state to train 25 iranians, and send them off at irans expense? the salary for the soldiers your paying anyway?)

    we dont really have a state agency that can counter things when we leave, and they are going to be a ripe target.

    it would mean so much to slam the US the faster its reversed. this then means that there is a HUGE number of entities who believe they would benifit from such an end.

    afg can fall the same way.. all they have to do is fade away for 4 months… end of story in obama land… and going back.. wont happen.

    obama believes what he is is genuine, those that put him up believe he is the fall guy. he fails and doesnt snap to center, and everything falls on his watch, he will turn from the greatest hope to the greatest dope and held up as an example as to why the greatest country fell.

    he has been raised by all around him to be so sure that destructive policies are constructive. either way, whether he knows and is a fellow traveler, or a well groomed useful idiot… he doesnt wise up, the world is going to play him because it was the world that put him up to be played.

    no matter how bad he is or the things he decides, nothing is going to happen to him. no president is punished for their choices other than histories judgment (and if you rewrite the history?).

    so they are all gonna hit the weak guy at once. hammas at isreal,syria making noise, kurds and turkey making noise with incursions, iran being beligerant, russia perhaps taking some more land and definitely putting iskander missles up scary close… kim jong has already gotten serous by cutting off movement between an economic area and the south… (wonder if he built new tunnels. some massive ones went under the dmz years back).

    nicaragua will get a new airfield large enough for russias nuclear bombers.. chavez will have a new set of factories (agreement signed a while ago), that will allow him to make dragunove sniper rifles, the newer ak’s (not 47s), and rpg launchers…

    i can see things also heating up in africa…

    [though next year will be heavy starvation in ethiopia given what has happened there]

    how will he handle it? i dont know… i am not saying north korea will invad… but i will say they will play games…

    there is EVERY reason for all of these to gear up and play games, whether or not a certain countries hand is in it or not. the previous moves have been made, there is not much choice of the outcome of the next few moves if thats the goal.

    if not the goal, then something else will happen…
    if the goal is to have iraq fall, then it will happen because we are not going to protect our interests there, nor will we go back easily for a few years minimum.

    sorry to be a downer on it… but there is so much for them to gain.. that i dont think that they are going to resist… at the very least, the price of things will go up per unit and they make more, so just that alone is enough to favor the destabilization once a strong support is removed.

  21. Mosul is still presenting problems. When Baghdad and the rest of Anbar province were secured, the jihadi jackal fu**ers scrammed up to Mosul, which has a hostile militant Muslim element to provide safe houses and logistical support. Three years ago the 101st went into Mosul and really did a number on the enemy, but we didn’t get the rat lines from Syria or the logistical support inside the city. We got the fighters, but their base of support remained. The few remaining surviving fighters slunk away down to Baghdad, where they were all gathering to make trouble there.

    Every time pressure is brought to bear upon the enemy, the survivors slink away and go somewhere else to do their crap.

    When the generals and Iraqis say the enemy is degraded to the point where it is manageable by a police force, they will say so.

    We are still going to need those bases in Iraq, because Iran is not going away and you can bet the farm that the Mullahs and the Pasdahran (the Revolutionary Guards) al Qods Force are going to try to destabilize the Iraqi government.

  22. War is never predictable. Those who think it is and that the outcome in Iraq should be all tidied up by now truly do not have an understanding of military affairs or war. The enemy in this case is weaker in almost every sense, but he has one advantage: he survives and he’s stealthy. Determined to be on the path of Allah waging jihad against the kafir and apostate. This enemy gets a lot of logistical support from Iran and from Iran’s satellite, Syria. He has a lot of volunteers from Muslim countries who sign up to be suicide bombers. He gets the shaped charge mines from Iran and his weapons and ammo from the same. He is working among a population that knows fear, deep down psychologically from decades of terror, fearing that knock on the door in the middle of the night from the Mukhabarat or the Fedayeen. So, this enemy knows what buttons to push. Knows exactly the effect of sudden murder has on the people.

    Against this enemy we have incredible men and technology that vigorously, relentlessly hunts this enemy down, from the skies and on the ground. We have drones in the skies watching all the significant highways and byways in the country, to provide better convoy protection. The top secret program called J-Star. It’s hard for the enemy to set mines and set up ambushes, and when he does he is up against our wicked firepower and new armored vehicles.

    We are definitely winning, but the enemy is desperately hanging on. His only strategy for the moment is to survive and stay in the fight just enough to convince us that it’s all futile.

  23. Here’s how to get Obama to stay strong on Iraq –

    President Bush gives a speech, “well, we’re in the eighth inning we’re up four runs, there’s one out and they’ve man on first and I’m leaving the game and Barack Obama is coming in as the relief pitcher.”

    His ego will take it from there.

  24. We will not have won in Iraq until our enemies have conceded that they lost. I’m not sure if we’ve smacked Iran’s hand hard enough, or if Iraq’s Sunni’s are capable yet of depriving AQ the oxygen it needs to survive and reemerge. It takes ten years to win a counterinsurgency; we are in year six. What I fear is a convergence of factors leading to “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”:

    -A Democratic Congress and President who do not support victoryin Iraq

    -An Iraqi government not able to fill the power vacuum our drawdown will leave

    -An Iranian government under huge stress from the collapse in oil prices and hoping to foment unrest to drive oil prices up

    -Al Queda spreading out from its Mosul base using resources deployed from Afghanistan

    -A President and Congress who ignores rising violence in its early stages, when it could be nipped in the bud

    -A Congress (and probably President) unwilling to surge again to defend the Iraqi government from its enemies.

    The first sign will be the Iraq War funding bill Congress passes and President Obama signs. Obama’s final campaign position was a sixteen month withdrawal of comabt troops; if Congress passes anything more precipious than that, it will be a bad sign.

  25. I’d rather go back to billy’s first comment, beginning “Why do I get the feeling…”

    Because you’re not thinking, that’s why. “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition*.” Cite evidence. Mind-reading doesn’t count.

    *What’s that from? I don’t want to keep seeing the same hands, here.

  26. I hope to hell this does not turn into 1974-75 redux. The cost was horrific for that cowardice and expediency. Believe me, I know people who paid the price for it.

    BTW, junior senator Joe Biden sided with the House vote on that issue. Some things never change…

  27. Some things never change, ie. the nature of the black hole that is Afghanistan; As the Iraq War is no Vietnam, Afghanistan is no Iraq, beware…… If one doesn’t stand up, materially, to any enemy, they will not cease to be enemies, a no-brainer of course, except to children and Democrats, apparently. Buying a temporary lull in “hostilities” with deadly enemies, ie. Iran, when you actually have the upper hand, is like procrastinating about continuing with chemotherapy when you have a deadly cancer. If American mideast foreign policy becomes dependent on the notion of Israel trading land for peace, then America is only compromising it’s own security. How has history evolved after Oslo, since Israel withdrew from Lebanon, and from Sinai? Forget the illusion of “peace” negotiations with the muslim world, especially the “palestineans”. They were Hitler’s foremost allies, then Saddam’s, and now Iran’s, they are unfortunately for the innocent among them their own worst enemy and greatest victim. Free America’s future is intrinsically tied to Israel’s; After judenrein comes the destruction of Christianity, and so on, look about as it’s happening everyday. Stop the childish fantasies, pretending that dedicated idealogical and dogmatic enemies are potential peace partners because they smile as they agree to sign off on your compromises. This is no “peace of the brave”, this is a fools game. Don’t betray Columbia! We must enforce the border with Mexico, stop playing favor to illegal immigrants from the Mexican border, it’s not fair to legal immigrants from everywhere else. THe future will prove this a very serious mistake. Respect is what it’s all about, and for the memories of the victims on 9-11; And for Kenyan Christian women and children who burned to death in churches, reminiscent of Kristalnacht, by mobs inspired by Obama’s cousin, Raila Odinga’s political faction not long ago. Obama needs to present his valid birth certificate up front, as a gesture of good faith, or there is a very legitimate question of his good faith. The democrats must be stopped, by any means necessary, from establishing any additional domestic “security agency”.
    ”Life’s tough……it’s even tougher if you’re stupid.”
    — John Wayne

  28. Incidentally, back on topic (sorry, my mind wanders)… “It may be very difficult for them to mess it up now, although they certainly tried hard enough in the past.”

    Don’t underestimate the ability of Iranian and Iraqi islamist dogmatists, both soft and hard, combined with our now far-leftwing executive branch, to blow it…

  29. So I can say with some certainty that a guy who graduated fourth from the bottom (say 952 out of 956) from a service academy would probably be on the dean’s list at most institutions of higher education (including the ivy league)

    You are delusional.

  30. And for Kenyan Christian women and children who burned to death in churches, reminiscent of Kristalnacht, by mobs inspired by Obama’s cousin, Raila Odinga’s political faction not long ago.

    Mobs inspired by someone who claims to be Obama’s cousin but isn’t really’s political party.

    Sheesh. I can remember when Bush’s grandfather supporting the Nazis was too many degrees of separation.

  31. The idea that Barack Obama is “not that intelligent” is itself pretty obviously absurd, though I wouldn’t use the term “racism” for this but more accurately poor judgement. His stirring speech on race relations, for example, he wrote entirely on his own. He was a professor of constitutional law and wrote many law review articles … the whole subject is really quite ludicrous, frankly. If you think it is possible to do what he did and not be “that intelligent” then I do think that reflects on someone’s lack of intellectual rigor, and it is not Obama’s.

  32. Mitsu,

    I agree with your assertion that Obama is not stupid. Clearly he is not and it’s obvious to all but those who refuse to see.

    You go onto say,

    If you think it is possible to do what he did and not be “that intelligent” then I do think that reflects on someone’s lack of intellectual rigor…

    Again, I agree. It explains a lot about the Bush Derangement Syndrome that has been rampant among the democrats and the left for the last eight years.

  33. Apparently Mitsu knows something the rest of us don’t.

    Where are these law review articles Obama wrote? Or did he write them but not publish them?

    I thought I was paying attention, but apparently not.

    (First time poster.)

  34. @ Billy:

    Why do I get the feeling that Republicans have spent the last 60 years trying to compensate for the fact that a Democrat saved the free world during World War II, when they think that role rightfully belonged to them?

    I have not idea why you “get the feeling,” because you have shown no thought process behind the “feeling.”

    Here is a question for you. Why have so many Democrats in the last three-plus decades adopted by and large the 1930s isolationist attitudes of such prominent persons as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK and former Ambassador.)?

    @ Mitsu: Where are all those law review articles you state that Obama has written? Please document.

  35. Rather than leaving the burden on Mitsu to provide links or a bibliography for Obama’s legal writings, I wondered whether the evidence was so overwhelming that any well informed reader would be able to accept Mitsu’s representation without needing to see some evidence.

    A quick search turns up

    http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12705.html

    a six-page summary of Stallman v. Youngquist. From the description, it seems to be an unsigned case comment.

    So there is one piece of commentary to Mitsu’s credit. However, this seems like a slender reed to support Mitsu’s case, and I don’t think that even finding a second unsigned commentary would be enough to support the substance of her argument, though it would at least get her into the plural “articles,” sort of.

  36. blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/02/12/how-good-was-obama-at-running-the-harvard-law-review/

    Obamas vol 104 is the least cited volume of harvards law review. all other volumes have a rate 54% higher than obamas.

    so when he was president of the law review it became the least cited…

    and to your point…
    He was a professor of constitutional law and wrote many law review articles …

    he never wrote any law review articles… though the law students onthe review have the right to publish at least one piece.

    if you can point the way to his articles we would like to read them..

    i will bet you never actually read any… usually leftists spout as if they know something, and then ignore how many times they are wrong on facts.

    nokia is a swedish company..
    no, nokia is finnish… not swedish..

    you remember asserting this and using it as an example to make a point?

    you keep getting everyting wrong, but you keep wanting us to take your side… but you have yet to have the little light come on that you didnt reach your side by cogent integrated and whole reason.

    which is why when we show you make an error. you just drop it, then move to something else, then drop it and move to something sle, then drop it then move to soemthing else.

    i get progressive tax isnt for communism, but i can quote marx from 1848 in that that is exactly what he said it was and was part of creating a dictatorship.

    (of course you can spout marx, but have never actually read all the stuff surrounding it all. read hayek? mises? Mill? and others? nope, i can tell, because its hard to read them and not realize things)

    mill even wrote about you
    Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

    we basically know the other half of the truth you never learned. the side or inconvenient part that they left out so that you would be guided to the conclusions that come from such a censored set of lessons.

    basically you have been disagreeing with this:
    The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

    that is the limited freedom… not the freedom as granted by the state which needs to control you to guarantee outcome… and not the primitive freedom of a thugocracy or feudal state… but the freedom of those with self control and responsibility for their own outcomes not hindered by the state.

    I guess you also disagree with this

    The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

    in socialism the individual is subsumed to the collective, they are no longer sovereign. you just havent tasted the implications of the movement.

    but you drop it, then move on. drop it then move on. none of it adding up…

    he is not the sharpest crayon in the box because the peopel who are putting him up dont want a sharp crayon in the box. they will not gain advantage by such. with winks and nods his whole life reminds me of the stories of the old grooming of those who would take up power.

    meanwhile… as i said, it will heat up a lot around isreal to make iraq and afg look cool.

    egypt has amassed troops on isreali border (remember syria did that too). hamass is shooting long range russian grad rockets… (as i said, the one destabilizing will be the ones who only have raw materials to sell).. russia has also armed lebanon (tanks and artillery if they recognize the states that they took. once they get a real set of states to recognize them as separate, its legal to sell them any weapons they want. thats how it works)

    russia has also made a deal to provide weapons to cyprus, rebuild a key airstrip in nicaragua, and a bunch of other goodies.

    ya dont want to know what kim jong is doing.

    so we will see if they all endorsed a genius for president because they all wanted to fail in their goals… or did all these around the world endorse someone who has had it easier and beleives they are more capable than they are (even if smart has only ideology to lean back on which makes him entirely predictable as he has no other play book).

    those here who are using facts to assess things mitsu, are not getting to the same ends you are, because you are conviently leaving out facts (perhaps you dont know, but your also not looking them up), and you have just plain wrong facts…

    here is how it works… only broken machinery would reach a wrong decision from right information. flip that over and only a valid working machine would reach a wrong decision from wrong informaiton…

    if their premise cant be argued in the open and without games like political terrorism, they dont have the meritocratic position, they have th elosing position and have nothing without it other than to accept the other position which they oppose for there is no room for them in that. so they are going to force a dictatorship to get their way.

    only those who dont believe their own words say something else.

    we know our history going back as one long unbroken and without holes… thats why we end up on different squars, and why the young tend to socialism while the old realize things.

    takes time to learn… youth and enthusiasm is always beaten by age and treachery.

  37. The idea that Barack Obama is “not that intelligent” is itself pretty obviously absurd, though I wouldn’t use the term “racism” for this but more accurately poor judgement.

    No one is saying that he’s stupid, but that there’s no reason to believe he’s a towering intellect, either. He was apparently a so-so student at Occidental and Columbia (evidence: he has refused to release his transcripts. If he blew the doors off at those places, you can bet your ass he’d have had his acolytes putting copies under windshield wipers in parking lots.)

    As for Harvard, I can assure you from experience that affirmative action is alive and well. Obama almost certainly was chosen to head the law review the same way he was elected President. Evidence: he’s the only head of the Harvard Law Review never to write an article for it.

    His stirring speech on race relations, for example, he wrote entirely on his own.

    Good God! Do you seriously believe that? Obama’s flying around the country, giving speeches and interviews pretty much every waking hour, and he dashes off a speech in his spare time? When did he write, sitting on the john? That must have been the only unaccounted for time he’s had in the last two years.

    He was a professor of constitutional law

    Correction: he was an adjunct professor of constitutional law. BIG difference. An adjunct professor is basically a Kentucky colonel; it’s a honorary title given to someone in the field who may or may not drop in to give the odd lecture. The title is conferred to provide some measure of status in the academic hierarchy. (Otherwise people don’t know where you fit in on the totem pole.) It’s very much like the military giving officer rank to physicians and lawyers; that doesn’t mean they lead troops in battle.

    and wrote many law review articles

    You’re the only person I’ve ever heard maintain this, so I very much doubt that it’s true. Please substantiate this assertion, or withdraw it.

  38. I cannot prove this. It is only my conjecture, based on my understanding of how sometimes the political world operates. When I look at who Oobonga’s advisers are and what think-tanks they are associated with and who ultimately finances those going conerns, I can only conclude that Oobonga is a puppet. When I look at how the Daley machine promoted both Barack Obama and how his wife Michelle Robinson made their way in Chicago, they were set up by powerful LEFTIST interests. Their careers were advanced by people WHO WANTED SOMETHING FROM THEM.

    So, you trade personal ambition for financing and talent on loan. That’s a marriage that means something, which is incredibly not noticed by both his supporters and by many in the opposition.

    But, watch how this kabuki dance is choreographed in the months and years ahead.

    Possibly making Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is the classic move of “keeping your friends close AND YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER.”

  39. Fred, the same thought had crossed my mind. Ayers/Dohrn/Obama at Columbia, living three blocks apart, all worked in the anti-apartheid movement at Columbia, but didn’t know each other. Ayers/Dohrn move back to Chicago, where Dad is a wheel. By chance, Obama follows. Michelle works at Dohrn’s law firm, as luck would have it. Ayers/Dohrn and the Obamas live near each other in Chicago. Ayers/Dohrn babysit for the Obamas, and host Obama’s political coming out party.

    “Just a guy in the neighborhood?” Sounds more like a stalking to me, if it weren’t voluntary and consensual.

    Alternatively, try this on for size. Ayers meets Obama at Columbia, realizes he’s a plausible and articulate fellow with potential to advance the cause. He tips off hard left elements, who concur in Ayers’s judgment, and run interference for Obama thereafter. Obama moves to Chicago where Ayers’s connections to the Chicago machine provide a hothouse where Obama can punch tickets without engaging in any controversial decisions that could hurt him later.

    I think the latter scenario makes a lot more sense, and requires only the postulate that Ayers recognized Obama’s potential while they were both at Columbia. It passes (ahem) Occam’s Razor.

  40. @ Occam’s Beard:
    I had been thinking the same for months. It seems too coincidental that out of the blue, Ayers would choose Obama to chair the Annenberg Challenge board. (Just One Minute blog has been covering the AC for 6 months.). Michelle’s working @ the same law firm as Dohrn is what ties it together for me. It would not surprise me to find out that Ayers/Dohrn introduced M and O to each other.

    It is no accident, as Pradva would have said, that Obama fudged his connection- an ENGLISH teacher in the neighborhood, as opposed to what Ayers recently said.

  41. THE dilemma is that even if you are prescient enough to observe oncoming evils, you are prevented from acting precisely because other people, being normal, lack your prescience. They therefore see you, rather than the evil person, as the deluded or warmongering malevolent soul. When Churchill warned about Hitler in the 1930s, many people became more upset with Churchill than with Hitler. The anomaly is that the prophet has therefore to wait for the evil to manifest itself and thereby to make everyone else see things the prophet’s way. But by then the chance to do anything may be gone.

    http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=615

  42. “Why do I get the feeling that Republicans have spent the last 60 years trying to compensate for the fact that a Democrat saved the free world during World War II, when they think that role rightfully belonged to them?”

    Why do I get the feeling the Dems keep bringing up FDR because he was their last successful Commander-in-Chief?

    63 years and counting….

    And the most recent ones aren’t even on our side.

  43. Kilo Says:

    “Mobs inspired by someone who claims to be Obama’s cousin but isn’t really’s political party.

    Sheesh. I can remember when Bush’s grandfather supporting the Nazis was too many degrees of separation.”

    Obama endorsed and campaigned for him in Kenya, and it’s Odinga’s claim, where at the very least they are fellow tribesmen, in a culture where that comes close, even equivalent, to qualifying as “family”. What are you people are going to do when Bush is so far gone from the scene that introjecting him into otherwise unrelated debate makes you a laughing stock instead of simply a boring parrot for the left. I’m surprised you people are not still introjecting unrelated snide references to Halliburton… Incidentally, I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000 because I don’t trust family dynasties, and because of Bush’s grandfather… Fortunately, Bush prevailed. Though you’re a bit annoying Kilo, I’m glad people like you make an appearance on this blog, it serves to remind me why it’s important to not be an Independent. So, go do some jumping jacks Kilo, you need to be getting ready for your “community service”. Don’t forget to take a copy of Rules For Radicals to study when you report for duty, you may otherwise become suspect, it could go on your public record, and unlike Obama, you may not be able to hide from it.

  44. Re Obama’s intelligence: He’s slick but not deep. Speaks well, but his ideas are either shopworn or contrary to good sense, or both.

    And he’s embargoed his college transcripts. All of them.

    What is he hiding?

    I think, like Occam, that he was picked for stardom by the hard Left, which he was already a junior member of, and that they shrewdly counted on his race as a tarn cloak against the critical eyes. It’s worked brilliantly.

    As an ex-Democrat, I’m continually frustrated by the ease with which the Left eats the Patriots’ lunch in the battle for hearts and minds. They’re wicked good at it; not least because they have no scruples and no shame. I speak here of the power brokers and true believers: the majority of the loyal Democrats have been reduced to Useful Idiot status.

  45. Two points. First, the $64,000 question: who will be using whom here on out?

    Did Obama merely use the hard left for his aggrandizement, but now will burn them, or will they continue using him to advance their agenda, and will now run him?

    The second is that if this perspective is correct, then the hard left view Chicago as part of their farm system, which in turn means that we need to clean it out. So an early bellwether re Obama’s intentions will be whether he keeps the current US Attorney (whose name escapes me now) on to continue investigation l’affair Rezko and ties to the Chicago machine (as the Chicago Tribune has called on Obama to do, or replaces him to provide overwatch for corruption and subversion.

  46. @Occam’s Beard 6.23

    It is not clear that there is any leverage with the wider electorate in going after the Chicago machine. Nor is there much leverage to use against the Chicago machine at this point. It’s a question of economy of effort.

  47. Tim, thanks. Senior moment and all that.

    Oblio, you’re absolutely right. Depressing, but right. It was a pipe dream on my part, I’m afraid.

  48. Just a couple of thoughts:

    1) Never – ever – underestimate the ability of the Democrat party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

    Remember, we had withdrawn combat troops from South Vietnam years before the North Vietnamese invasion and the the subsequent betrayel of our South Vietnamese allies by the Democrat controlled US Congress.

    I would never put it past Obama and the democrats controlling congress now to do the same thing to Iraq when (not if) Iran makes their big move into the power vacuum a US withdrawel is going to create.

    They don’t really have the money to implement the majority of their social programs – so they gotta have some sort of red meat to toss their supporters and *get the troops out now* movements are screaming for their pound of flesh.

    The Chosen One may see this as an opportunity to placate His disciples while at the same time finding money to cut from defense to spend elsewhere – such as on the aforementioned social programs.

    Remember, the withdrawel of US influence in Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat and the subsequent power vacuum that was created is what allowed the Taliban to gain the influence they ended up with – and the safe haven Al Quaeda used to attack the US from on 9-11.

    2) Regarding The Messiah’s veneration as an intelligent individual (Dare I say an intelligent *man*? Is The One above such mundane designations? Anyway….moving on…), I don’t see it as a racist statement to question his credentials.

    After all, the press did a pi$$ poor job of vetting their Beloved Leader during the election cycle, and all sorts of things will end up coming to light over the next few months and years that The One may have a difficult time explaining away – if the press were to actually deign question Him about such trivial matters. We really don’t know this Annointed One nor anything about him.

    So, questioning his past *accomplishments* – while late in the game – should still be a valid avenue of investigation for anyone who wishes to know about this Great Leader we have now been saddled with.

    As for my own estimation of His *intelligence*, everything I’ve seen so far indicates that He is good at delivering a line during a speech – but He is not exactly an original thinker and a lot of what He is repeating is what He has been told by others.

    Education – even extensive education and impressive sounding titles – really don’t give an accurate indication of true intelligence. It only means someone managed to memorize a lot of material.

    It’s how they use that material that has been absorbed through the education process and whether they can come up with original and unique thoughts or ideas, or apply what they have learned in a constructive manner, that matters when one is considering whether a specific individual is “intelligent”.

    To put it more bluntly, I’ve met an awful lot of “intelligent idiots”.

    These are the kinds of people that could go on for ages repeating what they have been told about some high brow concept – but had nary an original thought in their noggin.

  49. Why does Mitsu find it necessary to lie in order to bolster Obama’s cred? Why do most of the Obama cult members feel compelled to do the same?

    I submit that they have no choice in the matter. Once one joins the cult, they are overcome by a strange and powerful compulsion to do whatever is necessary to prop up The One, the only Dear Leader.

    It comes with the territory of being a cultist.

  50. Sorry, you’re right, Obama only wrote one law review article, but in the course of graduating from undergrad and graduate school, and becoming a professor, you inevitably write many papers, theses, etc. Obama wrote his own books (yes, he really did), he writes many of his speeches, including the one I referenced on race relations (one of the most impressive speeches I have ever read), etc.

    I don’t believe Obama is one of the top scholars in the world, by any means. It’s quite evident he’s very intelligent, however — many of his former professors have said he was either the brightest or one of the brightest in their classes. Even being an average student at Columbia or Harvard Law School means you’re one of the brightest students in the country. I should note that I’m not particularly expecting Obama to be some sort of incredible savior of America — I expect him to be competent, to learn quickly, to study situations and act deliberately, and to be thoughtful in his decision-making — and that’s about the most one can hope for or expect in any leader, in my view, and a damn sight more than we’ve had in recent times.

  51. He was a professor of constitutional law and wrote many law review articles

    he also never published anything that had ever been reviewed by that “review board” at Harvard. Interesting gig.

  52. I don’t believe Obama is one of the top scholars in the world, by any means. It’s quite evident he’s very intelligent

    Mitsu seems to treat Obama’s intelligence the same way Mitsu treats the government’s ability to regulate. Both are assumed to be barometers and indicators of good decision making ability or solution solving qualities.

    Both aren’t, however.

  53. Btw, when people like beverly talks about “intelligence”, be assured, Mitsu, we ain’t talking about the same kind of intelligence that you are talking about, or that you value as being important.

  54. I’m surprised you people are not still introjecting unrelated snide references to Halliburton…

    Given that Soros now owns a lot of stock in Haliburton and Soros pays the Left’s bills at his own expense… it’d be kinda foolish for Leftists to talk bad about Haliburton, so des neh.

  55. You have to admit, though, Neo, that the Democratic victories in 2006 had a lot to do with the current stability in Iraq, because it forced the incompetent Rumsfeld and Franks out, and we got the vastly more comptent Gates and Petraeus instead. It’s true that the Democrats initially resisted Gates and Petraeus, as well, but I suspect Obama is certainly going to retain Petraeus and there’s an outside chance he might even retain Gates.

    Bush was going to replace Rumsfeld regardless of what the 2006 elections ended up as.

    I suppose the whitewashing of history concerning Iraq has already started, just like blacks i know believe Lincoln was a Democrat, that the Republicans started the KKK to lynch blacks and keep them down, that Vietnam was Nixon’s war.

    It’s sad that good people have to die for such propaganda as you write, Mitsu, but that’s democracy for ya.

  56. I’ve already seen billy’s first comment here and labeled it a piece of fake liberal mass murderer supporting propaganda piece.

    Nothing more to be said on that score.

  57. Their earlier fears that they would be the ones to preside over shameful and terrible scenes of helicopters on the roof, this time in Baghdad, will probably never be realized.

    They were proud that they made Saigon fell. They were jubilous that the corrupt South Vietnamese fell. They felt relief, because now the North Vietnamese and remnants of the Vietcong (not many of them left) would be able to cleanse the blood from the Left’s hands by exterminating the witnesses.

    Be assured, Ted Kennedy and those like him felt no guilt or shame whatsoever.

  58. @Mitsu 12.55 am

    I think the readers here deserve better than that–a perfunctory semi-retraction followed by a restatement of your principal thesis supported by more mushy (and irrelevant!) evidence followed by insults. Your statement boils down to “He must be very intelligent if he went to Columbia and Harvard and some of his professors say nice things about him. And I believe he’ll be better than the guy we have now.” Not a very compelling argument, in my view, and I think anyone who has ever spent time at an elite university would agree.

    Let’s be clear: the issue at this point is not Obama’s intelligence. The issue is whether Mitsu is even pretending to make her argument in good faith and whether Mitsu even claims to be arguing in good faith. Mitsu stated facts that were not true–and were easily known not to be true–because it made a convenient hook for her position. Presumably, if we all got the wrong idea, well tant pis. When called on it, Mitsu starts a jumble of new assertions and tries to change the subject.

    We have seen this behavior before. It is learned and taught and practiced among those who style themselves as “bright.”

    The larger questions are ethical: how much respect for the truth do we owe to people with whom we disagree? How much accountability for errors in fact or logic are we required to take when it is politically inconvenient?

  59. Repentant Left? I never met one. I knew dozens of old Stalinists, and those who were alive when perestroika began and all crimes of Bolsheviks were exposed, they still sought excuses and try to justify the horrors. Only those who radically change their views and became anti-communists were able to repent. In this case, repentance follows conversion, not other way round. That is why I see this ideology not simply wrong, but evil: it makes people utterly amoral.

  60. First of all, “Oblio”, I am not female, I am a man (why you would assume I am a woman, I have no idea). Secondly, I wrote my original post from my cell phone, so I didn’t have time to thoroughly check my assertion, for which I apologize — I made the assumption that he had written more than one law review article, which was incorrect, but more generally I simply should have pointed out that, yes, as anyone who has gone to one of the elite schools (I went to Harvard) knows, simply getting through one of those schools requires one to write a hell of a lot of papers, theses, etc. The implication of the original poster was that Obama had not written anything at all, which is what I was saying is absurd.

    It is very difficult even to get accepted to Harvard Law, “affirmative action” or no affirmative action. Furthermore, Obama wasn’t merely an average student there, but he graduated Magna Cum Laude — and once you get into a school like that, the affirmative action ends, even if it was a factor in your admission — affirmative action helps people get their foot in the door but that’s it. Affirmative action, by the way, merely boosts slightly the chances of a candidate, it doesn’t in any way boost totally unqualified applicants. Studies show that once students get in under affirmative action they do equally well to other students, on average.

  61. Regarding Stalinists — again, this is one of the most bizarre and ridiculous bogeymen of the right that keeps coming up here and elsewhere. As I keep saying, the spectrum of left to right in this country is much more akin to the spectrum of Sweden, France, Canada, Japanl and the US. There’s no Stalinism anywhere on that spectrum. Most countries have higher taxation and better social services than we do, and they’re not Stalinist, they’re not Communists, and no, it is not a slippery slope. The idea that increasing the top marginal tax rate from 36% to 39% is the first step on the road to dictatorship is itself completely unwarranted paranoia.

  62. Every government expansion is a slippery slope – it makes harder to curb its further expansion. Canadians already lost such fundamental freedom as free speach due to so-called Human Rights Commisions. In all continental Europe freedom of speech is also greately reduced by government-mandated politcorrectness, and nationalists and euroskeptics are systematically oppressed, maligned or even beaten by police. Even such theoretically useful institutions as EPA and FDA can be used by bureucrats to expand their power beyond reasonal bounds.

  63. Mitsu,

    http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/16/rangels-other-shoes/

    Looks like 44% now not 39.6%

    You like to make conservatives into extremists instead of listen to us.

    We are simply telling you that the bottom 50% of income earners pay 3% of the taxes now and the top 10% pay 71% of the income taxes now.

    For the bottom 50% that has been a reduction since the year 2000 and for the top 10% that is an increase over the last 8 years.

    I’ve given you the raw numbers. While you fight with hyperbole you fail, you lie and you paint us into extremists.

    You display more about who you are than who we are.

    You point to countries that run high unemployment rates and provide much less national defense. There are disincentives to work and very high rates of BURNT cars. Nice… That’s what we want to emulate??

    And be careful about the Japan analogy – liberals would NEVER want to fully emulate their culture…. A culture of hard work, saving and respect..

    I work here in the belly of the beast in Sac, CA. Plenty of state workers with placards saying, “pay us our worth” while the play solitaire.

    It’s ridiculous. Never have I EVER thought of having such a placard on my desk.

  64. I guess the question for you Mitsu would be:

    What should the bottom 50% of income earners share of income taxes be?
    What should the top 10% of income earners share of income taxes be?

    We’ll go from there if you wish – reveal !

  65. Obama only wrote one law review article, but in the course of graduating from undergrad and graduate school, and becoming a professor, you inevitably write many papers, theses, etc.

    Mitsu, you just don’t get it. Obama’s not a professor. Say it with me: he’s not a professor. He’s an adjunct professor. Not a professor — an adjunct professor. Type “define:adjunct professor” into Google and this is what you get: “a professor appointed for a specific purpose on a part-time basis without remuneration.”

    Many times adjunct professors are wheels from the local community from whom the university hopes/expects to get money or the help of their connections. Oftentimes they don’t even teach; it’s purely an honorific title to warm someone up. If they do teach at all, they might give a lecture or two on some arcane area in which they’re expert and the university lacks expertise. (For example, someone from a pharma company might be appointed an adjunct professor to give an upper division or graduate lecture on structure-based drug design. A friend of mine is an expert on Roman concrete, and has lectured as an adjunct professor on that topic to engineering students. Another friend of mine is an adjunct professor in molecular biology, but has never taught a thing.)

    Adjunct professors need not have published anything, they don’t have tenure, they’re not on a tenure track, they don’t have any standing in the university whatsoever. They’re just appointed potentially to make a guest appearance. It’s like giving a talk before the local Scout troop and being appointed “Assistant Scoutmaster” for the evening. It’s like being given the keys to the city, or appointed honorary Grand Marshal of a parade. Since you’re in the financial services industry, it’s like being the guy who rings the opening bell at NYSE could be called the adjunct chairman of the Big Board.

    Got it? “Adjunct professor” doesn’t mean squat.

    As someone who busted his butt for many years to get tenure, writing papers, grant proposals, and running a research group, I kind of resent being lumped in Kentucky colonels. No offense to them, but they have not seen the elephant.

  66. Obama wrote his own books (yes, he really did), he writes many of his speeches, including the one I referenced on race relations (one of the most impressive speeches I have ever read), etc.

    And Hillary wrote “It Takes a Village.”

    Please.

    A speech alone takes many days of concentrated effort focused solely on writing. That’s why politicians – all of them – have teams of speechwriters.

    Jon Favreau is Obama’s head speechwriter. You don’t think Favreau and his team sit around playing pinochle and collecting paychecks while the Messiah writes his own speeches, do you?

  67. Occam,

    Oh oh, I do I do !!

    I also think that the 5 million dollar Greek temple was built by the Messiah himself !!!

  68. @Mitsu

    I apologize for jumping to conclusions about your gender. Thanks for clarifying, so I won’t make that mistake again.

    Were you referring to Stumbly @ 11/14 6.05 pm as the post that set you off? I wish you would be more precise, so that we could understand what caused you to turn unsupported assumptions into facts to use to make your arguments.

    I note you end (again!) with unsupported assertions about studies that back up your beliefs about affirmative action. Perhaps some do and others do not, but we really shouldn’t be getting into that on this thread. The case is not provable either way in this forum.

    I agree with you that “affirmative action” originally meant help for really talented people to get a foot in the door through extra outreach and an extra look, and it was sold on that basis. Whether that is still what it means is a debate for another day.

    For what it’s worth, I agree with you from my experience that very few people who go to the Ivies are actively stupid, and that most students there work damn hard. Some, however, don’t.

    You often seem to complain that other people are painting with too broad a brush. You should demonstrate a little precision yourself.

    And I don’t see the need for “scare quotes” around Oblio.

  69. >every government expansion is a slippery slope

    It’s perfectly right to worry about government abuse of power, but conservatives seem to worry primarily about tax rates and the like, while being much less concerned about police brutality and misconduct, invasion of privacy/surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, infringement upon free speech / censorship, mixing religion and politics, etc. I’m certainly not suggesting that Europeans don’t have their problems, too, I am merely pointing out that there is no country in Western Europe whose society looks even a tiny bit like the USSR, even those with democratic socialists actually wielding government power.

  70. Mitsu lies every which way as if he knows us !

    He said, “but conservatives seem to worry primarily about tax rates and the like, while being much less concerned about police brutality and misconduct,

    6 government entities in Ohio searched databases for Joe the Plumber.

    While leftists want to have conversations with terrorists abroad without being recorded, I’m all for being recorded and I’ll hand on and ask the terrorist a bunch of questions while being recorded. I have nothing to hide. Do you? 🙂

    Hello fairness doctrine and politically correct speech! Try to schedule a conservative to speak at the college nearest you. See what kind of hate and vitriol happens and that is IF you can get the conservative scheduled in the first place.

    You are on the WRONG side of the spectrum to be ACTING like you know what we believe.

    You distort the record about conservatives with every word you write I’ve noticed….

    Try telling us what you believe for once instead of bad mouthing us! I saw that was a pattern of Obama and Bill Clinton’s. They would launch with a laundry list of ridiculous positions that we don’t hold and then slam “conservatives” or Republicans

    I bet you believed that Republicans were cutting the school lunch program and Medicare.

  71. Mitsu lives in a bubble, so you’ll have to excuse him if his empathy capabilities are not up to the task of seeing how others really live or suffer.

  72. Mitsu wrote “His stirring speech on race relations, for example, he wrote entirely on his own.”

    Er, no. Krauthammer had it right when he called it “a brilliant fraud.”

    To the post – yes, neoneocon, I too am happy that we’ve turned things around to the point where Yon can say that “The was is over and we won.” In late 2006 I was mightily worried. I was cautiously hopeful as to whether the surge would work, and am grateful that it has exceeded expectations.

    No thanks to the Democrats, of course. Obama, Biden, and all the others had turned into Civil War-era Copperheads by this point. Shame on them.

  73. >distort the record

    First of all, you support my assertion with your very “if people have nothing to hide, why worry about the government spying on them?” What happened to worrying about the government abusing its power? You’re convinced that every time the government invades your privacy, they’re only doing it for right and good and just reasons? For people who are supposed to think government is frequently corrupt, incompetent, and/or evil at times, that’s a pretty trusting attitude.

    I don’t trust ANY organizations implicitly: not the government, not corporations, not individuals. You need to have various forms of competing power bases, with each power center checking the corruption of the others. So yes, we need the FBI and the CIA and the police. We also need oversight of the FBI and the CIA and the police. We need private enterprise, and we need oversight of private enterprise. Etc.

    I am a pragmatist and a radical centrist. I do not believe that government is either always the solution nor always the problem. I do believe conservative *principles* have some value, but only when balanced against liberal *principles*. I believe most self-described conservatives advocate one-sided policy that is impractical, because it only emphasizes or concerns itself with a subset of factors which are important. Liberals tend to incorporate factors on both the right and the left. Leftists tend to be one-sided in the opposite direction. I call myself a liberal primarily because, in the United States, liberals tend to be more centrist than conservatives, and I am a centrist.

    I mean, all the overblown rhetoric comparing raising the marginal tax rate slightly to Stalinism is a perfect example of the extremist rhetoric on the right, in my view. It doesn’t make any sense at all; there’s no relationship. Sweden isn’t Stalinist. France isn’t Stalinist. The United Kingdom isn’t Stalinist, and they’re all more “left” than anything Barack Obama or the Democrats in the United States advocate. In fact — the Democratic Party would be a conservative party in most European countries.

  74. Unless the new administration mucks this up somehow (and shifts the blame backwards to Pres. Bush, like it managed to shift forward to Pres. Nixon), this may well be George W. Bush’s most lasting legacy.

    In my line of work, I really want there never to be another “helicopters on the roof” scenario, since it could well be either me or someone I know trying to get on that last chopper.

    I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/11/re-maybe-now-democrats-wont-be-able-to.html

  75. @ Mitsu,

    I would be very interested if you could clarify your thinking on several levels.

    First and foremost, your idea of oversight of all organizations creates the classic problem: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who Watches The Watchmen?). Any type of oversight by any entity, individual or collective, usually makes it so that that entity wields disproportionate power relative to the rest of the distribution. If you believe that all organizations require oversight, than inherently the body that oversees must be overseen as well. Separation of powers is different from oversight. How do you propose to oversee all these different sectors without a drastic increase in government power? How can you watch the watchmen?

    I am also interested to how you can characterize yourself as a “radical centrist”. If you are familiar with French Revolutionary history, the terms “left”, “right”, and “center” emerged with the seating arrangements of the National Assembly. The Radicals were seated on the left, their pro-status quo foes on the right. The centrists ranged anywhere from constitutional monarchists to moderate republicans. The moderate republicans were chastised by the right and the constitutional monarchists were alienated from the left. Thus either side seemed to lump all of its opposition together as a single entity rather than representative of a plethora of divergent views. In my humble opinion, your tendency to generalize and dismiss the different conservative viewpoints out there suggests that your centrist credentials do not extend past your rhetoric. But I must ask you, what in the world is a “radical” centrist? How would you define a plain old centrist anyways? Wouldn’t the term “radical” imply that there is less moderation than say a “conventional” centrist?

    I would also be very intrigued if you could tell me of any actual, as opposed to theoretical, rhetoric comparing Barack Obama to Stalin.

    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  76. To assert that wiretapping of telephone conversation with KNOWN terrorists abroad is abuse of power, one must show real examples how this harmed a single innocent individual. Providing national security is the primal obligation of state, so this is completely sound practice. Special services are very special, indeed, so they must be exempt of usual control procedures requiring transparency: they must be secretive to be of any use. This means, you must simply trust them – as you trust your doctor or your broker, because you have no means to do otherwise. That means, you must trust the heads of these agencies, who all aquire their prerogatives from Congress.

  77. Nobody here compared Obama with Stalin – this is bogeyman. And, of course, European style soft socialism is not the same that Stalin’s rule of terror. The problem with soft socialism is that it is not stable or sustainable form of society – it will be either abandoned or devolve into Ingsoc of 1984. And, of course, USA was founded on completely different set of assumptions about human nature and role of a state than any european country. All Old World societies treated their populations as subjects, not as citizens, and still do it – that is how Nanny State idea emerged. And this is completely alien and hostile to basic principles and spirit of US constitution.

  78. >Who Watches the Watchmen

    I am talking about mutual oversight; separation of powers, checks and balances, not an infinite regress of oversight, obviously. You have a government that is checked by the people via elections, which can be corrupted somewhat by money and influence, but that is checked by the press, which to some degree checks each other, but that can be threatened by too much media consolidation, which is checked by the government (making laws against excessive consolidation, antitrust laws, etc.), and so on. This is why I am opposed to efforts to weaken our system of checks and balances: the “unitary executive” doctrine is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a very long time, it undermines this principle.

    >what is a “radical” centrist

    I call myself a “radical” centrist as a kind of joke, to some extent, but it’s not without meaning. I mean to distinguish it from someone who is merely taking on some sort of stand “in the middle” of the right and left or whatever other political views there might be. In my view, there are very important principles at stake (such as the idea of checks and balances, above), and I feel very strongly about them. In practice this leads me to a political philosophy that can be roughly described as “center left”, or “liberal” in the usual spectrum, but it does at times lead me to views that diverge from what happens to be in vogue in the Democratic Party at a given moment in time; as I’ve mentioned before I supported the first Gulf War, I thought the surge was a good idea, I supported and still support Petraeus and Gates, and so forth. I believe in empiricism, not it ideology, in pragmatism, in evidence.

    >Stalinism

    I wasn’t referring to direct criticisms of Obama, but rather to the constant references in comments to things like “in socialism the individual is subsumed to the collective, they are no longer sovereign” when referring to liberal points of view, conflating liberalism (even the very conservative version of liberalism we have in the US) with Soviet-style dictatorship.

    >To assert that wiretapping of telephone conversation
    >with KNOWN terrorists abroad is abuse of power

    You’re not getting it. The point here is that the Administration asserted their right to do this without any judicial oversight whatsoever — they even went so far as to claim the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over it (but I’d love to see them try to defy an order of the Supreme Court — something they have not yet done). Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wiretapping known terrorists. The problem is the assertion of the executive of “unitary” authority. As Reagan said, “trust, but verify.”

  79. Secret programms can not be kept secret if they became a subject of debates between different independent authorities. Unitary chain of command is a necessity in warfare, so Army is exempt from usual check and balance, transparency and other principles of democracy. Under terroristic threat special services make a war, the most crucial part of it, so the same exemption must apply there. When necessary, democracy can and must be curtailed (in emergency situation, for example). I see no real threat in it in overwhelmingly democratic society.

  80. You put forward the same logic that lead to infamous Gorelik firewall preventing CIA and FBI exchange information. You should know the price of this ideological rigidity. Unitary executive principle is a direct lesson extracted from this tragic blunder. Now I understand why you call yourself radical: you put some ideological tenet above common sense and pragmatic necessity. I see any radicalism as a sign of personal immaturity.

  81. When in history Supreme Court had jurisdiction over CIA covert actions? Judical oversight is necessary only over law enforcement bodies. Counter-terroristic operations are not acts of law enforcement, they are acts of war. Do you require also civil judical oversight over field commander developing battle plans?

  82. Sergey,

    People like “Mitsu” really do not “get it” when it comes to the realities of the world. They think that counter terrorism should be governed by cop rules, not the rules that obtain in the shadow world where you literally chase after ruthless, calculating enemies who know how to game the system.

    I well remember the Seventies, when there were the Church Hearings that led to the 1978 FISA. I don’t know how much you know of that period, Sergey, but it was a heady time for the Left in the United States. Things were going their way. Carter had just been elected and the pressure was on to get the records cleared of all the people who the FBI and CIA had been watching during the Vietnam War. There were people who were being watched because they were actively (and some knowingly) involved in Soviet dezinformatzia campaigns. Some of them did things like meet Communist handlers in Havana and Prague, in order to get instructions on how to foment and organize the protests at home. There were people who were also nested in media and academia who were orchestrating a propaganda war against the government and the effort in South Vietnam. After the war a lot of these people had lawyers and they wanted their names cleared. One of them was… John Kerry, who had received a general discharge from the Navy because of UCMJ violations when he was still an officer. Participating in the anti-war movement and also meeting, illegally, with some North Vietnamese Communist officials in Paris. Sen. Kennedy wanted Kerry cleared and his discharge upgraded, because Kerry had had trouble getting into law school and later on being admitted to the bar because of these things.

    The 1978 FISA was intended to prevent the FBI and the CIA from doing surveillance on American citizens in this country and sharing the information with each other. The Left wanted breathing room to be able to maintain its networks with the Soviets and the Soviets wanted to be able to have these people working with them. The ACLU agitated for these reforms, and Sergey, the ACLU is a Communist front organization. Its founder, Roger Baldwin, was a Harvard law professor who was an admitted Communist who supported Lenin and later Stalin.

    The Left had a shit fit when recently the conversations that lawyer Lynne Stewart had with Sheik Abdul Rahman were recorded and she was caught helping the Blind Sheik pass information to the terror networks inside the U.S. She was tried and found guilty. She was given an incredibly light sentence and they are still appealing the verdict. But the bottom line is that the anti-government types and the Communists and Muslims don’t like President Bush’s revisions to the 1978 FISA.

    Within weeks of 9/11 I pretty much figured out, based upon the way the Left was up and grunting, that it was only a matter of time before the Left and the Democratic Party (see David Horowitz’ “Party of Defeat”) would wear down the national resolve to prosecute this war against the jihadists. The climate now is such that one understands that most people have completely forgotten about 9/11. It was just a soap opera drama for them, with all the attention span required to chatter about a soap opera and then people move on.

    And now the nation just wants to get on with the inexorable march towards being more like a Euro-socialist country. Have a good time, people! Let’s get more goodies from the government! Let’s do the Kumbaya with those poor, poor jihadis down there in that awful place, Gitmo!

  83. Regarding Stalinists – again, this is one of the most bizarre and ridiculous bogeymen of the right that keeps coming up here and elsewhere.

    mitsu, you have NOTHING to back that up with. i linked to marx 1848 paper in which progressive taxes PURPOSE was to create a DICTATORSHIP.

    you keep claiming that the core tenet of the ideology you follow somehow abandoned dictatorship, when dictatorship was the whole purpose of their writings.

    many here are giving you FACTS, and you keep ignoring how wrong you are.

    you ASSUMED that obama wrote a lot for harvard review… when found out you were wrong, you ge spin doctoring, and an excuse as to why injecting wrong facts is ok, because you use a cell phone, and not a computer. i hope your doctor uses a cell phone to check things, and its ok with you he or she has your attitude

    you said that progressive taxes is no marxist. but marx invented it as a means to a dictatorship and i showed yoiu that you didnt read the originating stuff going back to 1850s…

    you claimed that nokea was a great swedish company, when nokia is finnish not swedish.

    now you claiming AGAIN, forgetting the past two weeks of commetnary (conveniently since they show your wrong two ways. with your facts and conclusions drawn from lies). this is what happens when teachers reward resoning to lies as being correct (the children who answer false ideological principals as a solution learn to believe those solutions).

    you parade sweden out as an example… but right now swedes are suffereng record rates of gang rapes, loss of cities, a 40 year stagnated economy, and suffereing from some of the worse brain and money flight in europe.

    your example was created by lies, and like your otehr facts, you dont check them out.

    if you checked the lefts facts you would stop siding with a group whose major thrusts are all lies.

    here is how stupid you act:
    you imply by your reasoning that if the left really wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism), then they would tell us they are createing a dictatorship, and since they dont say so, they must not be doing it.

    thouhg even showing you documents in which they do say this, is not enough!!!!

    your the type that will sit there and say that the whites are so bad for having slavery… how long ago? well right now in west africa they give birth to babies to sell them into slavery. in nigeria they are raised for sex slavery, body parts, and child labor… (and we help it by giving freebies which destroy economy… cant compete with free, so it stays collapsed).

    and of course you want us to live like in sweden… your favored (feminist) model… but the problem is that swedish left law prevents them from reporting the news honestly.

    One in three Swedes was found to want to live in a gated community which prohibited unauthorized people from entering, a new study showed. Most interested in the security provided by such living situations were young singles, of which 41% reported wanting to live in a place surrounded by fences or requiring a door code for entry. The study also reported that less than one fourth of the survey’s thousands of respondents – 23% – wanted to live in areas featuring cultural, ethnic and social diversity. The results come from a report entitled BoTrender 08 (`Living Tends ’08’).

    most want to live in a gated protected community… the swedes!!! the most egalitarian people you raise as an example are now so afraid of the outcome of their and your policies, that they want to wall themselves off from the world the way we did in feudal times when kings’despots/rulers had castles around them to protect the citizenry.

    beuracratic feudalism… same outxcomes…

    you dont think that it leads to totalitarianism?

    how about this…

    would you consider it totalitarian to make laws in which parents are not able to freely choose the name of their child? well, in sweden, you cant name your child what you want, you HAVE to pick it from a list.

    and do you think that library censorship, like the nazis had is also a good leftist thing? of course you do, your like the nazis, but hacve yet to know it yet!!! i bet many in germany thought they were good people too.. this is why they have banned tons of books…

    Health minister Lars Engqvist, a Social Democrat, said that new legislation would end the practise of private patients “buying their way past” hospital waiting lists. Provincial authorities, which are responsible in Sweden for the local healthcare system, will not be allowed in future to hand over the running of a hospital to a profit making company.

    there that will teach them…

    the soviet union was known for its lines… everywhere socialsits run things, there is rationing and lines, and the need to be working high up in state to live well… (for there is no other way to live well. certainly not by inventing or producing anything).

    meanwhile, sweden worked before because it was mostly a white protestant country with that work ethic… (work hard to earn recreation. accept no charity, support yourself. strong family. etc).

    now they dont ahve taht, and now they are falling apart since its THOSE teachings that do good, not the new ones, which are designed to tear things apart. (Read the words of the designers).

    sweden has banned religion… (maybe thats why protestant ethic is dead)…

    there is a big brain drain… which they work very hard trying to cover up… but in reality, who would choose to go there if your a resercher or doctor? the funny thing is that the state figures say there is no drain, but other figures say there is, including economics and quality… in fact here is an example of their idiocy through ideology.

    Contrary to popular belief, Sweden attracts more highly educated people than it loses to the rest of the world, according to a survey published at the end of 2003 by the national agency Statistics Sweden. “There has long existed the myth of a great academic brain drain from Sweden. This is now proved to be untrue, while the opposite situation prevails,” Minister of Education Thomas é–stros says in a press release .

    sounds good… the mice report that despite raiding the cupboard, there is still just as much cheese in teh cabinets.

    but then the next paragraph..

    Swedish worries about an academic brain drain may be due to a few highly publicised cases of top scientists leaving for better salaries and swankier lab conditions, mainly in the United States. But although there may be a brain drain when it comes to quality, in terms of quantity there is no such thing. Between 1987 and 2002 Sweden exported 100,000 people with a basic or higher university degree, but imported 180,000, both foreigners and returning Swedes.

    we are all equal and perform the same says their ideology… so they expensively train their doctors, who then leave for the US where they can make money and be rewarded… (so much for ideologists beleiving and acting on their ideology. hey mitsu!!! ever pay 10,000 extra to taxes? you know you can!!! the state will take the money… if you think they are so much better at spending your money than you, then why arent you over paying your taxes and supporting higher taxes that way voluntarily rather than empowering a gun to steal it?)

    anyway… they lose highly trained doctors, lawyers, and researchers…. and get third world replacements…

    bet you dont read about that… bet you ASSUME the propaganda is correct since you hear and feel it must be.

    the safety of young Scandinavian women is sacrificed in order to keep the glossy image of a multicultural society intact.

    even feminists know that multi culti trumps feminism…

    except:
    Muslim Rape Epidemic in Sweden and Norway – Authorities Look the Other Way
    fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/02/muslim-rape-epidemic-in-sweden-and.html

    basically, the feminsts and the left claim its more reporting… but stats are up all over the palce and follow the new multi culti non assimilation areas.

    Thomas Anderberg, responsible for statistics at the Malmé¶ Police, says there was a doubling of the number of reported rapes by ambush in 2004, following what was already a decade of steadily increasing numbers of sexual crimes. – I think that’s great news, says Anna Gustafsson, head of the Domestic Violence Unit at the Malmé¶ Police.

    great news as she gets more money… and as long as she can paint that its a administrative increase ratehr than a real one, she can avoid them blamig her policies and others of her ilk.

    According to Swedish Radio on Tuesday, statistics from Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention show that the number of reported rapes against children is on the rise. The figures have nearly doubled in the last ten years: 467 rapes against children under the age of 15 were reported in 2004 compared with 258 in 1995. Legal proceedings continue this week in a case involving a 13 year old girl from Motala who was said to have been subjected to a group rape by four men. (Note: These four men were Kurdish Muslims, who raped the girl for hours and even took photos of doing so)

    many get to go free since thats their culture and only western culture (Which has always forbid that kind of behavior) is the eveil one that has to be replaced.

    and here is what the polices have actually created

    The number of rape charges per capita in Malmé¶ is 5 — 6 times that of Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is a larger city, but the percentage of immigrants is much lower. And it’s not just the rape statistics that reveal a scary increase in Malmé¶ or Sweden. Virtually every kind of violent crime is on the rise. Robberies have increased with 50 % in Malmé¶ only during the fall of 2004. Threats against witnesses in Swedish court cases have quadrupled between 2000 and 2003. During the past few decades, massive immigration has changed the face of Sweden’s major cities, as well as challenged the viability of the welfare state. In 1970 Sweden had the fourth highest GDP per capita among developed countries with income about 6% above the OECD average. By 1997 it was at fifteenth place with an average GDP per capita 14% below average. Malmé¶ has a heavy concentration of Muslim immigrants in particular. According to some estimates, it will be a Muslim majority city in no more then 10 years. Crime is rampant in the growing ghettos:

    and this is what you want for the US… why? because you belive that they are honestly reporting things, when socialism demands you lie to the people!!!

    you have to lie since the people are not going to like the policies… and so they always lie… which is why their foudnation abandons morality… that way no one can call them out on lying… how can they?

    The German journalist Udo Ulfkotte told in a recent interview that in Holland, you can now see examples of young, unveiled Moroccan women with a so-called “smiley”. It means that the girl gets one side of her face cut up from mouth to ear, serving as a warning to other Muslim girls who should refuse to wear the veil. In the Muslim suburb of Courneuve, France, 77 per cent of the veiled women carry veils reportedly because of fear of being harassed or molested by Islamic moral patrols.

    and the men do nothing… they are emasculated by feminism… so they actually stand by and watch… (like many YOUNG men in america).

    and notice how in norway, its a womans fault for being raped… hows that for reversing ones position when the people you attack are not your mates and countrymen…

    An incredibly revealing article that tells us all we need to know about the multiculturalist fetish in Europe and some parts of North America, not to mention the need for change within Islam. Apparently, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by “non-Western” immigrants — a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (note: her name is Unni Wikan) as saying that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

    authorities in Sweden and Norway know about, or should know about, a disturbing amount of Muslim immigrant rapes of native Scandinavian women, yet choose not to make this information known to the public. Perhaps it would be just too politically incorrect to reveal the negative effects of decades of naé¯ve immigration policies. Perhaps it would also destroy too many multicultural pipe dreams among the intellectual elites, who have built their current careers and reputations on advocating how culturally and economically enriching this new population mix would be. So in the end, the safety of young Scandinavian women is sacrificed in order to keep the glossy image of a multicultural society intact. It is a chilling demonstration of an Eurabian continent that now appears to care more about not upsetting relations with its immigrant population than about protecting its own citizens.

    now remember, these people are willing to sell you down the river for a pipe dream…

    i hope you learn about sweden as it is now despite the legal news black out thanks to left censoring things that are not good for ideology.

    kind of like what you do mitsu… spout lies as truth, and expect them to change behavior some way… but we are not ignorant, the precondition needed to make it work…

    look around
    choose your own ground
    said pink floyd…

  84. one last thing… communism is the north pole in political speech…

    that is, everything is right of the north pole…

    you think its an east west thing… its a north pole thing…

    hitler then and mao, and everyone on the left actually is then to the right… because the pole can only be occupied by one making everything but that one evil in the idiot followers minds.

  85. Mitsu is schizophrenic, walking around with many minds.

    She thinks that the house watches the senate, and the senate polices the house. She sides with a person who wishes to use the judiciary to replace the functions of the house and senate, but yet thinks about checks and balances. She wants socialism, but doesn’t realize that it violates checks and balances (and the constitution to which she says we must adhere to since it defines the checks and balances that the left ignores).

    You have a government that is checked by the people via elections

    No.. this was not how it ever worked. elections are tie breakers between the people the people supported monetarily. But now since Americans give to a party, not to individuals, we get who the party picks. When we have no property, we will have no voice, the way your pets don’t choose anything about the house budget.

    which can be corrupted somewhat by money and influence, but that is checked by the press

    Not in an ideological world. I just posted that the press is no longer allowed to report things that are ideologically uncomfortable. So under socialism, we have learned the end dictatorship of the proletariat, justifies the news skewing to the left. So the political system you side with, sides with completely false news organs. From Pravda issuing disinformatzia, to Swedish papers not reporting crimes, to American papers refusing to give you details that would help you form opinions.

    This is why I am opposed to efforts to weaken our system of checks and balances

    She/He tells us that she is a CONSERVATIVE… who wishes to CONSERVE the constition, and CONSERVE The checks and balances, and CONSERVE the prior good..

    But then sides with the side that thinks that the constitution is a rag that means nothing, a living document and don’t want to conserve it. Then says that she sides with the side that violates the constituition in many ways… like a progressive tax, which violates the constitution. Or delegation of powers, which violates the constition. And even abortion, which technically also violates the constitution (right to life liberty and the persuit of happiness. Duh). And so forth.

    I state that she doestn know what she stands for, and knows even less whoat to support to get there.

    I call myself a “radical” centrist as a kind of joke, to some extent, but it’s not without meaning. I mean to distinguish it from someone who is merely taking on some sort of stand “in the middle” of the right and left or whatever other political views there might be.

    She lives in a bubble in her mind… in which she changes the meaning of words as she pleases… fails to tell us in her conversations… and uses this personal reality to argue from.

    She has what I said they have. personal forms in which the bad part of what they side with doesn’t exist. Ujnlike the real thing they are supporting.

    Ocne the state starts to give out money, how do they make sure they are not cheated? The state spies on the people.

    Ergo that until socialism became a state reality, organizations like the CIA only existed for war and were disbanded. The US OSI was disbanded at the end of WWII, but since socialism is a constant state of war (mitsu isnt aware of), they created the CIA to oppose the permanent KGB… (which used to be the NKVD)

    In other words. She has no idea, as is evident from her writings, of how things work. she things the fbi checks on the CIA… and then what does the NSA do? play?

    She has no idea that each of these have their domains of action, and that he lack of understanding and knownign from the movies is all she has. She knows the cia through things like the bourne supremecy.

    That the more socialist the state becomes (US included), the more the state has to spy on its own people. she has no idea that this does not stem from despots desires, like bush. Its stems from the state having a mandate to dispense money, and so need to know intimate details of who they give to so that political enemies cant use a misallocation against them. so in England, the terrorist laws were used to empower locals to spy on people to insure that their dustbins were put out properly. Yes, their dustbins. Another set used the laws to spy on families to insure they lived in the area in which they registered children for school. and tons of other things. ALL FROM LABOR.

    The biggest problem is that mitsu thinks that she sits in the middle of the spectrum. but the middle between russia and germany, is not the middle any more than 25 is the middle between 0 and 100…

    That her side is purist russia, and the other side is germany.. (while the farther right and small state of free market is even farther right as the ills of germany came from the adoption of left principals!).

    That when her side spies its ok… (like joe the plumber)… cause they are pure..

    and when the other socialuist side does the same thing (spy on a citizen), they are evil.

    BOTH are doing it for the same reason, political power…
    BOTH are following the same political doctrine. Socialism.

    The ones screaming not to spy are not genuine… they are made up of the right, who say that the stae has no right into our personal lives… (that means nothing to say about abortion, education, what we eat, what we party with, what we like to do in our spare time, who we support etc). and the left, who says that our sphying is ok… and the fascist centrists (third way is centrist), claiming its ok for their side to spy.

    The only ones that are being honest are the right, which tilts the argument and defines the battle areas… to which the other two lie,.

    In case you didn’t know mitsu… the centrist position in this spectrum, is FASCISM..

    That you disapprove of full socialism planned economy… (communism)

    And you disapprove of full free market economy with no planning (capitalism)

    But you approve of a mix of socialism and capitalism is clear..

    What is not clear is that you don’t understand that this was the german solution
    The third way of the democrats

    Your describing your favorite states, but have not realized that your favorites are FASCISTS…

  86. fred that was great!

    (as was sergeys stuff too)

    basically… ask mitsu or the others what is stalinist… and they will not be able to tell you… they assume that the murders are what makes stalinism, hitlerism, maoism, etc… they are wrong… completely… in the way that a child who uses word roots to understand all meanings will be wrong

  87. >she

    How many times do I have to say it? I AM MALE. NOT A WOMAN.

    Anyway, you guys say I’m making baseless accusations against the right, and then you go ahead and pretty much confirm, at great length, precisely the things I was accusing you of (and doing so in remarkable form). The ACLU is a Communist front organization, progressive taxation is a step on the way towards dictatorship, liberalism is Stalinism, etc., etc. It’s all utterly laughable, and it’s precisely the reason the right is losing credibility here. The left, of course, has it’s own slate of ludicrous beliefs, which is precisely why the left has totally lost credibility as well.

    At least we can all agree that fascism is bad.

    The long posts you’ve written above in favor of the “unitary executive” are precisely the thing I’m saying is totally inconsistent about the ntellectual positions of many of you. It makes no sense to rail against the dangers of government power and then turn around and say, well, but sometimes the government ought to have unfettered power, without oversight of any kind.

    The idea of the “unitary executive” is a fundamental violation of the principles in the Constitution. Have any of you actually bothered to read the Federalist Papers? Before Bush, we managed to carry out numerous covert actions without having to attempt to tear up one of the most important principles of American governance. Checks and balances are the main reason our country is free, it’s a fundamental aspect protecting freedom.

    NO single organ of government, corporation, or agency can be trusted to act honorably without being checked by something else. Those of you who disagree with that are the ones who unwittingly favor a governmental architecture that truly is on the slippery slope to fascism. You think democracies can’t turn into fascist states when power is concentrated? Read the history of Rome.

  88. Anybody that cries about Bush trampling the Constitution is a troll and should not be taken seriously. With all the abuses in power in our history, from Waco to the Internment Camps of WWII to Renditions, outrage about wiretaps of foreign calls (with legislated restrictions) is pretty thin stuff. People that can’t think for themselves – the new useful idiots that jump to the tune the MSM plays for them – are a waste of time.

  89. >she

    Mitsu, if you won’t say that you are accountable for what you have written, why should they believe anything you say?

    When you call yourself a moderate, it is not completely believable. Though to give you credit, when you say (however fleetingly) that some Left wing views are ludicrous, we can entertain hopes that you won’t end up as a high quality Harvard troll.

    I’ll cheerfully call myself a liberal, and thank Sergey for his extremely accurate review of revolutionary ethics!

  90. Most of my friends on the Left reflexively take the opposite site of any foreign policy engagement the United States gets involved in, no matter what it is, because they believe US policy is nearly always driven by some sort of nefarious capitalist conspiracy. They believed that the Afghan war would turn into a humanitarian catastrophe, and was done primarily because of an oil pipeline. They thought we shouldn’t intervene in the former Yugoslavia, and portrayed the Kosovars as mostly ruled by drug dealers and mafioso. Etc., etc. I really like my leftist friends, and I engage in good-spirited debate with them, but their views are generally speaking out of touch with reality on many fronts. Their chief motive is opposition to US policy on every level, they’re opposed to capitalism, etc., etc. Very few of them, however, actually believe in Stalinism — in fact I can’t think of any, quite frankly. That’s what’s so funny about the postings in this forum — right-wingers railing on against some sort of dark conspiracy of Stalinist when in fact, in the United States, there really aren’t any of those, even in the far left.

    The typical far leftists in the US tend much more towards a sort of anarchistic views of one type or another. They share much more in common with libertarians than with liberals, frankly.

    When you say, Oblio, you find it hard to believe I am a moderate, is it because you don’t believe I actually hold the political views I am espousing here, or that you don’t believe the views I express are moderate? If it’s the former, I hardly think I can help you. If it’s the latter, then you certainly live a sheltered life, clearly oblivious to the real world of politics surrounding you.

    Getting back to wiretapping: again, the danger is not the wiretapping it is the doctrine of the unitary executive. For those of you clearly unschooled in constitutional law, this is NOT an idea that has ever had any currency; no President has ever before claimed such authority. Every President since Marbury v. Madison has recognized the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the constitutionality of a law or an action by the executive branch. Bush Jr. is the first to ever claim that some of his actions are unreviewable by any Federal court, even the Supreme Court.

    This is a direct affront to the Constitution and to our Constitutional legal framework. I am not particularly concerned with it at this point because it is a doctrine that will likely enter the dustbin of history, but it was certainly a dangerous idea. I am simply saying that true, intellectually consistent conservatives, ought to be concerned about this as much as they are about marginal tax rates.

    The point I am making here is that many of you here are simply intellectually inconsistent. Though I disagree with the Cato Institute on many levels, at least they are truly consistent conservatives:

    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6330

    “Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

    * a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech–and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
    * a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
    * a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror– in other words, perhaps forever; and
    * a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

    President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers. “

  91. @ Mitsu,

    Your conception of the unitary executive and George Bush’s view of the executive branch seems to be easily containable by the separation of powers. As we can see, Bush has not created a police state or become the “Fuhrer” of America. Even if he had these anti-Democratic desires, he would be stopped by many different special interest groups and by the legislative and judicial branch. The fact that we still live in a democratically elected state in which most laws beyond the constitution are not set in stone should convince you that the idea of the unitary executive, if Bush was a megalomaniac, failed. The fact that the United States people voted in Democrats in 2006 to curb Republican power in the executive branch and legislative branch should convince you that the unitary executive still takes a backseat to the will of the people. The George Bush you describe is not the one we’ve lived for 7 years.

    Concerning wiretapping, a bipartisan congress voted in the Patriot Act, under which wiretapping occurred. It’s hard to say that Bush “gave the word” to wiretap when it was a broad policy that has YET to be reviewed by the Supreme Court for constitutionality. Having armchair commentators on the Constitution assert its unconstitutionality does nothing to convince me. When the finest legal minds of the United States, represented in the Supreme Court, decide its unconstitutionality, I will rise up against it. But not until then.

    As for your comment on the federal government with the “power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave”, I would have to ask what America you’ve been living in. The Federal government has traditionally and will continue to hold a monopoly on primary education, marriage licenses, and death certificates. So that accounts for the stages of life that have always (alas!) been under government supervision. On the macro level, Americans have rights that are contingent on responsibilities. You lose the right to vote if you are a felon. You go to jail or get audited if you don’t pay taxes. Isn’t the government supervising your life regardless? The vagueness of this phrase “virtually every aspect of American life” must be explained further if you want to be considered seriously, despite your alleged Harvard credentials.

    As your conversation with Oblio, you really should avoid your judgmental behavior toward him. Once again it puts your “moderate” credentials at risk. Your assertion of what is “moderate” and what is not is once again very debatable. You cannot simply assert that your definition is true. You have defined what moderate is and he has questioned that definition, but simply giving a statement equivalent to “everybody knows its true” shows that you have no conception of whether or not it is moderate. Mitsu, you cannot explain “moderate” yourself without the views of others, in this case the Europeans and some unnamed majority of gnostics. The fact that you sympathize with European governments that are admittedly more left-wing than our current one should make you question your “centrist” credentials even further.

    There is even a further argument that there is no coherent or consistent “center” just different shades of right/left and people that don’t really care too deeply about politics. What is a moderate in today’s political landscape? By your definition a self-proclaimed moderate in America would mean that he or she would have to be farther on the right. Do you see how this would not make sense if that person has no real ideology?

    I put it forward to you sir that you most definitely are not pragmatist that you claim to be and that you have a specific ideology that motivates your comments and definitions of certain terms. I further assert that by your associations and your sympathies that you are a man of the left, albeit more “center”-left. You have as much admitted this after several creative “revisions” of your original political statement.

    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  92. >containable by the separation of powers

    Of course, I agree that our constitutional system is deeply ingrained enough that Bush’s attempt to challenge it with the “unitary executive” idea was bound to fail. My point in raising the issue was not that I was particularly worried that his view was about to prevail, but simply that I oppose his view, and I believe that my opposition is consistent with the truly conservative small government views as expressed by the Cato Institute quote I posted above.

    >”power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave”

    I never said this — you must be confusing me with a different poster.

    >there is no coherent or consistent “center” just
    >different shades of right/left

    I’m not calling myself a centrist because I think my views are smack dab in the middle of the political “spectrum”. I call myself a centrist because I believe that there are principles captured by conservative ideology and principles captured by liberal ideology which both have merit, and both should be considered when thinking about the optimal policy. In terms of the political spectrum this view, a view I call “centrist” or “pragmatic” is most closely mirrored by the Democratic party’s views, and would be called “liberal” in the United States. In Europe or Canada I would be considered a centrist, however, or even perhaps center-right, as I am more of an advocate of the free market than most Europeans. Where you happen to place me on the spectrum of any given country, I do believe the term “pragmatist” is a reasonably descriptive term.

    As I’ve said many times before, I have disagreed with the Democratic Party on many occasions, and with Barack Obama as well. I do, however, find his general attitude towards bipartisanship to somewhat resemble my own, so I am a strong, though hardly uncritical, supporter.

  93. Oh, I see now, you were quoting from my quote of the Cato Institute’s critique of the Bush Administration; I didn’t recognize it at first. Those weren’t my words, they were the words of the Cato Institute (a conservative organization, if you aren’t aware of them).

  94. Ozymandias handles the issue of “what is a moderate?” pretty well. Mitsu further identifies himself as what Europeans I know would call a Social Democrat. I have no doubts that he might feel like a moderate among people he knows, and that he has more appreciation for US constitutional principles that his friends and acquaintances on the farther Left.

    There are a number of reasons to be doubtful about Mitsu’s claims of moderation based on his behavior in this thread, but four will suffice in the interests of brevity.

    First, there are rhetorical and positional advantages to be gained by claiming to be a moderate, which boil down to being able to claim that your opponents are extremists. (I recall that Uncle Joe Stalin was a master of this tactic in the late 20″s and early 30’s!) Since there are advantages to being perceived as a moderate, claims of moderation should not be considered to be self-authenticating.

    Second, when I look at Mitsu’s rhetoric, it it characterized by irresponsibility and an unwillingness to take accountability and give credit. It is these characteristics that give moderation its moral authority. He doesn’t have them.

    Third, Mitsu’s guns only aim at the right. He must be aware of the principle “No enemies on the Left.” A true moderate would have a lot more principled criticism to make of all hyper-partisans. As it is, he needs to show evidence of good faith in his claims.

    Fourth, to call the Cato Institute a “conservative” institution reveals a failure of discrimination that is common on the Left. I understand Cato to be Libertarian and anti-collectivist. They are only Conservative in the in sense that they are against the Left and against big government. That is to say, they are only “Conservative” if your definitions are inherently Leftist.

    Mitsu, you may take it as given that I don’t lead and have not lived a sheltered life.

  95. Oblio, you obviously haven’t even been reading my most recent posts: I’ve already listed out many cases where I’ve disagreed with the far left as well as the positions of most Democrats. Obviously I am going to criticize the right, here, because most of you are posting from the right. When I have conversations with the far left, I criticize them just as thoroughly (but in a cordial manner, as I attempt to do here, as well).

    Again I have to ask: I’ve actually laid out my political positions pretty clearly here. You seem to be having a hard time deciding whether my positions are moderate from their actual content, and have taken to questioning my “motive” for “claiming” to be a moderate. It seems to me quite odd that you don’t actually seem to be able to use the political positions I take as evidence, or not, of my politics.

    Finally, I’ve already said that the term “moderate” is not exactly accurate in describing my views, because it implies “somewhere in between right and left”. That’s why I chose the slightly tongue in cheek “radical centrist”. For example, I strongly favor gay rights. But, I was in favor of welfare reform (particularly welfare-to-work). I am a strong supporter of free speech rights. But, I was in favor of the first Gulf War (because I agreed with Bush Sr. that naked aggression of that sort must be resisted, to set a precedent for the post-Cold War era). I believe the current Iraq war is a strategic disaster. But, I was in favor of the surge (I posted about that on Belgravia Dispatch at the very beginning). I believe in some regulation. But, I am a vehement opponent of Soviet-style central planning. I believe Marx’s analysis of the economy is fundamentally flawed, because he makes oversimplifying assumptions about stored capital. But, I believe some state assistance in health care is a good idea. But — I think it makes more sense to have competition in health insurance, rather than a single-payer system. I believe that war is sometimes necessary. But, I believe it should be engaged in only as a last resort.

    I could go on. Rather than making vague speculations about my “motive” in “claiming” I am a moderate, you can call my politics whatever you like, but you can also judge for yourself what my political views are from my actual views.

  96. Cato is not simply libertarian, it is anarcho-capitalist. That is, their attitude to federal government are somewhere between Ron Paul and Timothy Mac-Weight. It is a bad case of BDS, and cite it as representative of conservative opinion is very strange, indeed.

  97. Oblio, you obviously haven’t even been reading my most recent posts: I’ve already listed out many cases where I’ve disagreed with the far left as well as the positions of most Democrats. Obviously I am going to criticize the right, here, because most of you are posting from the right. When I have conversations with the far left, I criticize them just as thoroughly (but in a cordial manner, as I attempt to do here, as well).

    I don’t believe your criticisms of either side will explain away the problems in your own arguments, Mitsu. I do not think folks here particularly care that you criticize some things from the Left. After all, McCain does the same thing but that doesn’t make his judgment and arguments on McCain-Feingold valid, now does it.

    As for Mitsu’s guns only aiming at the right, I believe that is false. If you want an example of that, look at Ozzie from Bookworm Room. Mitsu has problems, although those problems are not easily categorized as normal Leftist ones.

    I’ve mentioned what I thought those problems were but I won’t go into irrelevant details at the moment: for now, let it be sufficient to say that Mitsu has seemingly right philosophical goals and objectives, like John Spragge, but those beliefs eventually fail in the detail segment.

    The economic issue of regulation vs de-regulation is one example.

    As I’ve said many times before, I have disagreed with the Democratic Party on many occasions, and with Barack Obama as well. I do, however, find his general attitude towards bipartisanship to somewhat resemble my own, so I am a strong, though hardly uncritical, supporter.

    You have the lofty goals of Mitsu, which seemingly are the same things classical liberals here believe in. Delve into the details a bit and you find out something else completely.

  98. NO single organ of government, corporation, or agency can be trusted to act honorably without being checked by something else. Those of you who disagree with that are the ones who unwittingly favor a governmental architecture that truly is on the slippery slope to fascism.

    This must be why Mitsu here touted regulation as the salvation to the problems de-regulation has wrecked in this economy of ours. It is okay if there are many organs, like Mitsu’s pet government regulations, but it is not okay for the Executive branch to satisfy the balance of powers created when the three branches were created. Oh no, then it is too much: then it is out of balance.

    This is a matter of judgment and Mitsu doesn’t have it. Notice that the ability to judge well isn’t related to intelligence, accent, or level of education (or level of income).

  99. >It is okay if there are many organs, like Mitsu’s pet
    >government regulations, but it is not okay for the Executive
    >branch to satisfy the balance of powers created when the
    >three branches were created. Oh no, then it is too much:
    >then it is out of balance.

    I’m not sure what you mean by this; my position is completely consistent. I believe in *some* regulation, but obviously it must be relatively moderate in scope, and certainly it must be checked for abuse by the courts, Congress, the press, the public. When it comes to national security, obviously one must be much more careful with secrets, which is why only select members of Congress are informed, why you use a secret national security court to review things, etc. The whole point is, exactly: you balance the competing forces.

    As for Cato, yes, of course, they are libertarian, but that does make them champions of many conservative causes (but not all, naturally). However they’re obviously not the only principled conservatives critical of Bush’s “unitary executive” theory: for example, Jack Goldsmith, a conservative who worked in the Bush Administration:

    http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/19/entertainment/et-rutten19

    Goldsmith concludes that Bush’s “accomplishments will likely always be dimmed by our knowledge of his administration’s strange and unattractive views of presidential power. The American people know better today than during the Civil War and World War II that Lincoln and Roosevelt, in [Arthur] Schlesinger’s words, regarded ‘executive aggrandizement as but a means to a great end, the survival of liberty and law, of government by, for, and of the people,’ and that ‘they used emergency power, on the whole, with discrimination and restraint… .’ We are unlikely to come to think of President Bush in this way, for he has not embraced Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s tenets of democratic leadership in crisis.”

  100. @ Mitsu

    As for your discussion of “secret” government powers concerning national security, I would ask that you tell me why you believe in that and not the principle of the unitary executive, which both operate on relatively the same idea: opaqueness in certain government operations.

    I would also ask for your condemnation of the New York Times and other media outlets that routinely reveal national security secrets and counter-terrorism plans to the rest of the world.

    As for the “regulation” argument, I would ask for your condemnation of the excesses of the 5th estate (the press) which would merit regulation by your argument. Would this or would this not stifle the 1st Amendment? Should all of these systems of checks and balances be under scrutiny?

    You are using that word “moderate” again, which you cannot define as of yet on its own. You must realize that your views of what is moderate or not have no place here as they cannot be verified, checked, or agreed upon. You should not use it.

    I appreciate that you, compared to some of your friends, are less beholden to the Left, but that does not make you a “moderate”. In my opinion, your views are not compatible with most of those of the Democratic party and its constituency, which would lead me to believe that these are not really your views, since you are most definitely a Democrat. What do you really believe and why should I take it at face value? How can you be against the War in Iraq but for the surge? I was the under the impression that most “liberals” could not support the surge because they saw it as doomed to fail. How do you support a tactic and not the war it is used in?

    Goldsmith’s analysis is flawed because, in the case of Teddy Roosevelt whom he heaps great praise on, there was no reason for the executive aggrandizement. Roosevelt, admirable and charismatic as he was, created an activist government that never went away, unlike Lincoln’s government which was swiftly swallowed up by the turmoil of Reconstruction. I don’t see how you can’t see that perhaps the conservatives that support Bush think that his (failed) attempts to expand presidential power that he did it for a good reason? That perhaps he was trying to fight the War on Terror? That perhaps he thought that the President would need more power to properly pursue nation-building? It seems disingenuous that you would suggest that Bush expanded presidential power for himself, as whomsoever inherited the position would gain all of the privileges of the presidency! What if Bush’s successor was a Democrat? Wouldn’t that undermine all of Bush’s rulings and possibly leave the country in a worse spot overall?

    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  101. One quibble before I retire from this thread. I did not speculate about Mitsu’s motives; I explained why statements of “moderation” are not self-authenticating.

    I will accept correction from Ymar and Mitsu, and await the spectacle of Mitsu firing away at the Left in the future.

    I applaud Mitsu for enumerating positions he supports or has supported in the past. It takes some courage to be FOR something.

    On that note of happy accommodation, I am off to pastures new.

  102. On President-elect Obama, two comments:

    1) The more you run him down, the worse getting beat by him looks on you.
    2) If you want to call him the “affirmative action” president, remember that for every president up to Woodrow Wilson, formal sanctions kept African Americans and women away from the opportunities that could lead to the Presidency. Feel free to call President Obama the “affirmative action” president, but keep in mind that this description also applies to every president from (at least) Wilson right back to Washington.

    On Iraq:
    You leave out the actual political reality: the status of forces agreement, which even some conservatives have noticed does not favour your original intentions. In brief:

    1) The current agreement gives you six months from President Obama’s inauguration to cease combat operations in all major Iraqi cities.

    2) The agreement gives you until the end of 2011 to withdraw all troops.

    3) The agreement forbids you to employ any of your current basic rights to conduct operations outside of Iraq (meaning no strikes from Iraq on Iran or Syria.

    4) Iraq will have criminal jurisdiction over all non-military, non-diplomatic personnel (i.e. contractors).

    Now that a prominent conservative has admitted it, perhaps you will accept that the democratically elected government of Iraq has politely but very firmly shown you the door. If you want to evaluate the performance of the Democrats in office, you have to accept that they have virtually no political warrant to conduct operations in Iraq.

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