Here is a conversation on this topic between my brother Jeff, me, and my cousin Andy:

Jeff: So who’s your candidate that has a chance of winning the nomination and the presidency? The pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-gun control, adulterous New Yorker? The Massachusetts Mormon that evangelical Christians say they can’t vote for because he belongs to a demonic sect? The miracle doctor/Senator who can diagnose comatose patients with only a brief review of a videotape? The son of the football coach who spent his high school days in LA ostentatiously waving the Confederate flag and displayed a Confederate flag and a hangman’s noose in his office until he decided to get serious about politics? The Kansas born-again who believes legalized abortion is equivalent to the Holocaust? The ex-Speaker of the House who became so unpopular that Democrats cried when he left the House and they couldn’t demonize Republican candidates anymore by showing them in pictures next to him? Or Condi?

Nick: My personal favorite is the pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-gun control, adulterous New Yorker, but I also kind of like the Massachusetts Mormon that evangelical Christians say they can’t vote for because he belongs to a demonic sect. I love listening to the ex-Speaker of the House who became so unpopular that Democrats cried when he left the House and they couldn’t demonize Republican candidates anymore by showing them in pictures next to him, but I don’t want him to be President. And of course I love Condi, but I don’t think she’s running.

Andy: Since I have been deluged with requests for my presidential picks, here they are, more or less but not necessarily in order of preference…

1. The gay-loving, fetus-hating, Second-Amendment-bashing, first-wife-abusing adulterous New Yorker.

2. The demonic Massachusetts Mormon, despite rumors that he favors a constitutional amendment allowing marriage between a man and many, many women. A fine idea, but not worth cluttering up our sacred document.

3. The terrible-tempered sanctimonious former heroic war prisoner, so generally beloved by the MSM till he started making nice to Jerry Falwell but whom I’ve never much liked myself.

4. Our charming Secretary of State, despite suspicions that she’s a lightweight, which may, to be fair, stem from lingering chauvinism on my part, or ingrained prejudice against persons of color.

5. The Confederate-flag-waving, hangman-emulating scion of football legend, if he gets past the turncoat.

6. The cruelly denigrated former Speaker of the House, who increasingly seems to thrive on a diet of hot air.

7. The compassionate humanitarian and long-distance diagnostician who skillfully pilots the Grand Old Party through the shoals of the Senate.

8. The born-again Kansan who understands so well that abortion leads to Auschwitz.

9. The departing Governor of our own Empire State, if he had a prayer.

I would, of course, vote for any of the above over any conceivable Democrat. But in most cases that says more about my prejudices than admiration for their merits.

If you are in charge of the Nation’s defense, you will always tend to overestimate an enemy threat, because the price of overestimating the threat is so much lower than the price of underestimating it. You have to err on the side of exaggerating the threat, because you can’t be sure. You can only approximate. And so it is likely that the hotlist of threats, Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the “insurgents”, are all being exaggerated to some extent by the administration. Otherwise they would not be doing their job. Once the cold war was over, it became clear that we had consistently overestimated the Soviet Union, and yet that all worked out pretty well. Better safe than sorry. If, however, the threats are wildly exaggerated, you wind up with a lot of cures that are worse than the diseases. And then there are the threats that are not talked about by the government, because they aren’t ready to deal with them yet, such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Pakistan.

This, it seems to me, is a way of framing the current national argument about the war. Is the threat real? Or is it wildly exaggerated? All I know is what I read in the papers. And the blogs. I read a lot of both, but of course I know next to nothing about the reality of these threats. I have no direct experience, and hardly any hard data. Just a lot of reporting and analysis from people I don’t know. I have no doubt that the govenment knows a great deal more than I do. But, ignorant as I am, I do believe that it is possible for a normally intelligent person who makes the effort, to get a sense of what is happening, by cross-referencing many disparate sources of information.

My sense of it is that the threats are real, and they are being moderately exaggerated by the administration. I think the overestimation has to do with our assumptions about the stability and competence and resources of Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, and the Iraqi insurgency. It looks to me like these guys, like the Soviet Union before them, are falling apart faster than we give them credit for. I think the same is true of China, where I do have a smidgen of experience. I doubt very much that the current Chinese regime will be around 20 years from now, or even 10, and I’m not at all sure that China will still be one unified nation. Similarly with Iran and North Korea. None of which means that we should adopt a less aggressive foreign policy. I wish we were more aggressive. But it should give us confidence in our ability to achieve victories on all of these fronts. And it does mean that sometimes the right thing to do is to wait, as we are currently doing with Iran and North Korea and a number of other hotspots.

As voters, we can’t really know the nature and severity of the threats we face. Nor do we get to know what steps our government is taking behind the scenes, the New York Times notwithstanding. When it’s election time, we just have to guess what’s what, and choose among candidates, all of whom are saying lots of things they don’t really mean. Events will eventually resolve the argument about the war. Here is the political landscape as I see it:

If the Democrats win in 2006 and 2008 and regain control of the government, and then there is a terrorist attack in the U.S., anywhere close to the level of 9/11, the Democratic Party is through as a significant force in American politics.

If the Republicans win in 2006 and 2008 and maintain control of the government, and then there is a terrorist attack in the U.S., anywhere close to the level of 9/11, the Democratic Party is still through as a significant force in American politics.

If either party wins in 2006 and 2008 and there are no terrorist attacks in the U.S. during the next six years, the Democrats will be in very good shape.

It’s not about national health care. it’s not about the right to gay marriage. It’s not about the right to an abortion. It’s not about global warming. It is all about the misnamed war on terror. Is there one, or is it a grossly exaggerated ploy that has nothing to do with Iraq? The answer to that question will determine the fate of the Democratic Party. As weasely as the Democrats have been on the war, their position is nevertheless pretty clear. There is no war, really. There is only George W. Bush and the totalitarian Republican Party playing on the fears of the American people. Thank the Lord, or whatever, that the New York Times is exposing the nefarious Republican schemes to subvert the bill of rights. The Republican position is even more clear. We are at war. We are facing serious threats on many fronts. And the Democrats and the mainstream media are undermining the war effort for partisan political reasons. How it all plays out in the real world will determine who wins this argument, and will determine the political future of the two major political parties.

Posted by Jeff

I have a clear policy: I never blame myself; I always blame the geeks.
The most annoying are the ones who come to help you out of some fix that
you have gotten yourself into (I mean, that their previous incompetence
has gotten you into), and they say, “Oh, this is simple. You just hit
function f8, which opens the gizmo control panel, then you double right
click, which brings up the font reservoir corrector, which you have to
calibrate between 147 and 183 pixels, unless of course you’re running
Windows 2000, in which case you calibrate between 187 and 212 pixels,
and then you just reboot the calibrator (but not the whole
computer–that will wipe out all the fix you have done so far). I
really don’t understand why you even called me; this is all explained
clearly in the ‘help’ feature. Don’t you know how to use that?” There
is never a manual; I can never remember the machinations the techie went
through to fix anything; I have never in my life even found the problem
I want fixed through the “help” function, let alone received any help
with respect to it.

I do still have nostalgia for my IBM Selectric, but I was a convert to
word processing when I worked for UPI in 1977-78 and they had a
rudimentary word processor before they were available to the public.
You could move paragraphs around and stuff. I thought that was
miraculous.

My only complaint about word processing now is all the stupid automatic
help that Microsoft keeps building into new versions of Word. These
features constantly interfere with my production of any document where I
want to indent anything or do anything that suggests I might be doing an
outline, etc. I have never, ever been helped by one of these automatic
features. And they are very complicated to turn off. There is no
single switch and no instructions about where to find all the option
menus. I guess spell check is a nice feature, but I never use it
because it ends up getting turned off when I turn off all the other
automatic help features.

And I hate the automatic scoring screens at bowling alleys that all work
differently in every new bowling alley and are hard to figure out and
are always deleting a bowler or attributing a ball to the wrong bowler
or wiping out your first game scores when you start your second game,
etc., etc. I LIKED keeping score manually; now they don’t even let you
do that. And what is with those stupid bumpers that they put up in the
gutters so that little kids never have to confront failure (or
meaningful feedback since the bumpers make terrible shots into wonderful
shots on a more or less random basis). The last time I went bowling,
there was new gizmo that looked kind of like a portable ball return. It
was a metal frame that little kids can just but the ball on the top of
and push it down the slide. So all they have to do is aim the apparatus
instead of learning how to swing their arms and throw the ball
themselves. No child is ever going to learn how to bowl for real ever
again, and none will ever understand how the scoring system works
either.

And what’s with Americans and golf equipment? Every season the golf
manufacturers invent balls that go farther and clubs (at $400 a pop)
that hit the ball farther and are so forgiving that it is less and less
possible to make a mistake. In the end, what’s the point? And if you
don’t at least sort of keep up, you end up on the golf course with some
moron who barely knows the rules of golf (forget the etiquette
altogether) but can muscle drives 300 yards and make you feel like a
90-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face. We seem to have
decided that the development of actual skill is a really annoying
requirement for playing serious games.

I watched a bunch of the College Baseball World Series this year (Oregon
State won the national championship, which was a very big deal around
here). I wanted to throw up every time I heard the “ping” sound of the
aluminum bats. No one knows who has real hitting power anymore until
they hit professional baseball because anyone can hit a homerun with an
aluminum bat. The things are even dangerous; they are getting more and
more injuries in Little League and American Legion of pitchers and third
basemen who are getting nailed with ferocious line drives off these
stupid aluminum bats! How much do bats cost, for Christ’s sake? It’s
really hard for little kids to break a bat, and there’s something so
satisfying about the feel of a wooden bat and the feel of a ball well
hit by one. I suppose next they will put magnets in the balls and in
the mitts so that kids won’t make so many errors in the field. Or they
will put big nets in front of all the beginning baseball players so that
they don’t have to actually catch the ball when it is hit to them but
only take it out of the net in front of them and throw it into the net
in front of the first baseman. Hey, this is really a good idea! I bet
I could get rich with this! Anybody know how to patent stuff?

A majority (70%) of Americans support the top secret Treasury Department program tracking financial transactions in search of terrorist funding, that was revealed, and thus sabotaged, by the New York Times. So, when CNN produced a “discussion” of this issue, they invited three defenders of the NYT and one, lone critic, Hugh Hewitt. Of course the moderator of the discussion was also obviously leaning in a particular direction, guess which one. So Hugh gets 20% of the air time and the NYT apologists get the other 80%. And, of course, while Hewitt is speaking, he is constantly interrupted and shouted at by the other three participants, so he doesn’t even get his 20%. This is not journalism. This is propaganda, pure and simple. But maybe I’m biased. You be the judge. Here is the link to the video.

This highly educational talk by Bernard Lewis, the grand old man of Western knowledge and understanding of Islam, and the author of the term “clash of civilizations”, has the answer to the question, “why do they hate us?”. (hat tip: Dr. Sanity) The war between Christendom and Islam has been going on, more or less continuously, for centuries. But 82 years ago, Christendom achieved a final victory. The last caliph was deposed in Istanbul in 1924, and the caliphate was divided up among the victorious Western allies. The mass of people in “Christendom”, including myself, are ignorant of and blase about this history, but, in the Muslim world, even illiterate people are very much aware of it. When the President called this “the long war”, he wasn’t kidding.

Lewis makes the point that Christianity and Islam are unique among the world’s religions. He says:

“These two religions, and as far as I am aware, no others in the world, believe that their truths are not only universal but also exclusive. They believe that they are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves like the Jews or the Hindus, but to bring to the rest of mankind, removing whatever barriers there may be in the way. This, between two religiously defined civilizations, which Christendom was at that time, with the same heritage, the same self-perception, the same aspiration, and living in the same neighborhood inevitably led to conflict, to the real clash of rival civilizations aspiring to the same role, leading to the same hegemony, each seeing it as a divinely ordained mission.“

Nowadays, to most people in the West, this just sounds crazy. Except for a small minority of completely peaceful evangelicals and Mormons, none of us care about converting the entire world to Christianity. But things look very different from the Islamic side of the war. They may not be under attack from fervent Christians anymore, but they are indisputably under a kind of attack from Western post-Christian culture, economics, and politics. For many Muslims, not all, but many, nothing has really changed in their perception of the long war. When Osama Bin Laden says, “For more than 80 years we have been suffering humiliation”, he doesn’t have to spell it out for the Muslim audience. They know exactly what he’s talking about. Here in the West, we didn’t even know we were at war until 9/11, and even now many people don’t believe it.

We think they’re insane, and they think we’re corrupt. I think we’re both right, but personally I’ll take decadence over homicidal insanity any day.

Words are powerful magic. Words that have to do with things that profoundly affect our lives, have even more power. There are images and connotations that pop into our minds unbidden whenever we hear one of these words. Democracy is an almost holy word that brings up images of people fighting for their freedom against odious tyrants, voters, debates, and the freedom to live as you choose in peace. The word capitalism, on the other hand, conjures up pictures of pigs in top hats, homeless people on the street, and union-busting goons. Even if you are a fan of capitalism, as I am, you cannot ban these images from your mind, but must defend against them.

And yet, capitalism is just democracy in the economic sphere, as democracy is capitalism in the political sphere. Does money equal free speech? There have been Supreme Court rulings, and there is an ongoing debate about this question in the political sphere. What is capitalism? Anybody can sell anything at whatever price they want. Anybody can buy anything at whatever price they’re willing to pay if the seller is willing to sell. The same freedom of buyer and seller is true of buying and selling labor and expertise. If you can do or make something that other people will pay for, you will prosper. Otherwise not. This is freedom and democracy. A system that fixes prices by government decree, determines what products will be sold, picks and chooses among industries by providing subsidies or imposing onerous regulations and taxes, decides how much wealth accumulation should be allowed, such a system is totalitarian. Not coincidentally, capitalism has proven to be a system that creates more wealth for more people than any other that’s been tried so far.

There are problems with capitalism of course. If a business becomes large enough and accumulates enough wealth it can easily put its competitors out of business and create a monopoly. Even in this case, however, the consumer can still refuse to buy. And, especially with the advent of the internet, but even before, there are and have been ways to, over time, undermine and bring down a monopoly and transform the market. The other way to create or enhance a monopoly is to use some of the wealth to bribe politicians into passing legislation, disguised as beneficient regulation, but designed to shore up and cement somebody’s monopoly. There are many examples of this, such as the ever-expanding copyright time period that Congress periodically renews so that Disney can keep making money from Mickey Mouse. There are equally egregious examples in the music and movie industries, like the DMCA legislation. But this occurs in the political sphere, the realm of democracy. And the voters can stop it if it gets too out of hand.

The real problem with capitalism, the one that gives it such a bad name, is that there are winners and losers. And although merit plays a significant role in separating the sheep from the goats, luck and accidents of birth also play a large part. This doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t of course. But there are winners and losers in the democratic political sphere too. If you want the public schools to drop Darwin and teach creationism, and the vote goes against you, you’re out of luck. However, you can step into the capitalist economic sphere, and start your own school, which may or may not succeed. Depends on whether or not enough people are willing to pay a price that will make a profit. The two spheres are intertwined. They make each other possible. They are a check and balance on each other.

People, most people anyway, don’t want there to be losers. We want all winners, partly out of altruism, mostly for fear of being one of the losers. George W. Bush believes that all people yearn to be free. I believe that too. But I also believe that within every human heart there is a burning desire for security. Human society has experimented with a myriad different political and economic systems to find the philosopher’s stone of unlimited freedom and unlimited security. Not gonna happen of course. To some extent, freedom can be traded for security, and vice-versa. But it is also true that freedom requires a certain amount of security, a structure of enforced law. And the grand experiment of communism has shown that minimizing freedom and maximizing security creates a situation where there is very little of either. China is trying another idea, totalitarianism in the political sphere, and democracy in the economic sphere. I suppose the jury is still out, but I can’t see it. There really aren’t two different spheres. There is only one. Economics and politics are just two different ways of thinking about it. You can’t censor the internet, and give the banking and legal systems as rewards to party apparatchiks, and expect to prosper in the long run.

The utopias have been largely discredited. The argument now is really where to draw the line. Should schools pass out condoms? Should excess profits be taxed? Homosexual marriage? Regulate the internet? Conservatives and liberals fall on both sides of the freedom versus security argument, depending on the particular issue. The fringes, libertarian freedom purists, and communist security fanatics, dream of all one and none of the other. How to draw the line? For example, we can’t have both universal health insurance and all the benefits of a free market. In fact, those countries that do have universal health insurance, depend on the relatively free market in the U.S. to produce virtually all of the advances in medicine and medical technology. And uninsured Americans pay the price of insecurity. The NSA performs warrantless wiretaps of suspicious international telephone calls trying to catch terrorists with disposable cell phones. Is this too high a price to pay in loss of personal liberty, in order to afford some unknowable protection against attack? I don’t think so, but others disagree.

And then we vote, in the booth, with our pocketbooks, and with our feet.

Just finished Volume two of Grant’s Memoirs, which conclude with the end of the U.S. Civil War. Here are some interesting quotes, from a man of restrained rhetoric who did his best, as a military man, to stay out of politics:

“In the North the press was free up to the point of open treason.”

“The convention which had met and made its nomination of the Democratic candidate for the presidency had declared the war a failure. Treason was talked as boldly in Chicago at that convention as ever been in Charleston.”

“…the gibes of many Northern papers that came to them [the troops besieging Vicksburg] saying all their suffering was in vain, that Vickburg would never be taken.”

“The copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes, and belittled those of the Union army. It was, with a large following, an auxiliary to the Confederate army.”

Grant had to continually take gambles he would rather not have, and which were advised against by his generals, because he was in a race against time. Even though he knew the North was winning the war, the constant drumbeat of negativity from the Northern press meant that if the war were not concluded soon and decisively, the North would fold and there would be no union.

Not to draw any unwarranted parallels, or suggest that Grant was questioning the patriotism of the MSM or the Democrats, but here are a few facts about the war in Iraq that you will not find in the New York Times or on CBS, gleaned from an excellent article by Richard Nadler:

————–
There has been a 60 percent decline of infant mortality in post-Saddam Iraq.

The daily toll under the occupation falls in the range of 25 to 28 per day. But under Saddam’s rule, the death toll averaged three times that. A violent day under the coalition would be just a routine day under Saddam.

Coalition casualties declined by 27 percent in 2005. They have declined by 62 percent in 2006, measured against the comparable period of 2005.

There were 146 strikes against the oil infrastructure in 2004, compared to 101 in 2005.

The insurgent strategy of targeting Iraqi police and army units peaked in July of 2005. Since then, casualties among those units have declined by 33 percent.

From March of 2005 to September of 2005, the number of civilian tips informing on insurgents increased from 483 to 4,700, as numerous Sunni tribes declared outright war on al Qaeda.

From the most extensive and scientific polls of Iraq opinion, performed by Arabic speakers for Oxford Research International near the beginning of 2004, then at the end of 2005. These polls covered all of Iraq’s major regions and demographic groups:

By 71 percent to 9 percent, Iraqis believe that their own security forces — Iraqi security forces — are winning the fight against terror.

Asked to compare their current lives with their lives under Saddam, Iraqis reported an improvement in availability of necessities, and an improvement in overall economic wellbeing. They reported superior access to clean water, health care, and education. Iraqi respondents believed that their local governments had improved. Asked what form of government they hoped to live under going forward, democracy won handily: four-to-one over the rule of one-man, and ten-to-one over totalitarianism.

a plurality of Iraqis feel safer now than under Saddam, and a majority feel safer from ordinary crime. Moreover, better than 60 percent feel personally safe in their neighborhoods.
————

And yet, the view of how the war is going is wildly more pessimistic among the U.S. populace and punditry, than it is among the Iraqis, or the American military, or in the captured dispatches of Al Qaeda. Why is that, I wonder?

It has been somewhat of a mystery to me why we have heard so little from moderate Islamic voices over the past few years. When the public face that Islam presents to the world is one of psychotic killers beheading innocents and stoning women to death, I would expect there to be an outcry from sincere, sane Muslims, repudiating this desecration of their faith. And yet there has been only a faint whisper from the moderates. In fact there has been more than a faint whisper of yes-but excuses for the continuing, global atrocities committed in the name of Allah. Why is this? I have wondered. Is it because there aren’t really very many moderates? Do most Muslims actually support Al Qeada to some degree? Or is it just fear and intimidation? Are the majority of Muslims peace-loving people who are simply afraid to speak up?

The cartoon jihad has made it all much more clear. Publishing the cartoons in the first place was rather gauche. I wouldn’t have done it, had I been a Danish newspaper editor. But now, thanks to the carefully orchestrated demonstrations and embassy burnings, it is the biggest story of the day. And the New York Times, and all the other major papers in the country, and all of the major TV news shows, have chosen not to show the cartoons, which makes the biggest story of the day impossible to understand. There were no such qualms about pictures from Abu Ghraib, which ran in all available MSM outlets for months. Obviously this is not indicative of sympathy for Osama Bin Laden, or excessive delicacy concerning the tender feelings of Muslims, on the part of the NYT editorial board. It is fear, plain and simple. Any reporter, editor, or publisher risks assassination and bombing of their offices if they give offense to the Islamists. So they don’t.

Now I no longer wonder why there is so much loud silence coming from the majority of moderate Muslims. If the New York Times is afraid, how can I blame some reasonable Muslim guy living in Egypt or Pakistan for keeping his mouth shut? Who would have thought it would be so easy to frighten that Western exemplar of free speech, the New York Times? Terror works.

Posted by Andy

It’s not that the Democrats don’t like Judge Alito. They like him a lot. As Senator Schumer so accurately observed, they went into the hearings with completely open minds, no idea how they would end up voting. But now they are “troubled.” Judge Alito’s views are “disturbing,” and they find that they have many, many “concerns.” The New York Times is troubled too. Judge Alito subscribes to “troubling views” about executive powers. He has said “some truly disturbing things about his view of the law.” His “extraodinary praise of Judge Bork” is “unsettling,” given Judge Bork’s “radical legal views.” His membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton “is also deeply troubling.” His dissent from a ruling “by two Reagan-appointed judges” in a mine safety case “is especially troubling.” And his over-all testimony “should trouble moderate Republicans as well.”

The health of the body politic is not well served when its great newspaper of record and almost half the Senate, not counting frightened moderate Republicans, are effectively disabled by seriously troubled minds. Looking ahead to Judge Alito’s confirmation, which seems quite possible, a bunch of us political care-givers are organizing a volunteer corps of trouble counselors, with the aim of providing at least some measure of closure (not cloture). Contributions may be sent to savethementalhealthof thesenateandthenewyorktimes.org. In the words of the old African-American song, which Judge Alito has not yet succeeded in suppressing, Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be always. Sun’s gonna shine in my back door some day….

Thanks to Powerline for this quote from Winston Churchill:

“You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”