Month: October 2006

World Problems Reprised

I posted this a while back:

Problem 1: Us-vs-Them-ism. Call it tribalism, nationalism, racism, whatever. Any time you divide the world into Us and Them, you’re asking for trouble. Unfortunately, that’s how we evolved to view the world.

Problem 2: The Expert Syndrome. Any time you find someone who’s absolutely convinced you should live your life some other way than what you’re doing right now, you’ve got conflict. Religious zealotry, health-nuts, safety nazis, the list goes on and on. “I know better than you, and you should be forced to do things my way.” Both halves of that statement are also how everyone evolved to view the world. The first half (I know better than you) isn’t that harmful in and of itself, it’s the second half (you should be forced to do things my way) where things fall apart rapidly.

There. I’ve pretty much identified the basic problems with the world today. Somebody needs to go out and fix them. Actually, everybody needs to go out and fix them.

Problem #1 is rampant in the world today. See this story[*1] about a South Dakota State basketball player who’s half-white, half-“native american”:

Observing the struggle was (basketball player Casey McKenzie’s) father, Tom, who came to Pine Ridgeas a graduate student in 1970 and married Belva Hollow Horn, a memberof the Oglala Sioux Tribe. They separated in 1993, when Mackenzie was 7years old and his siblings, Meghan and Sean, were 10 and 13.

Thatleft Tom to raise three children as a single parent while he works asgeneral manager at KILI-FM, a public radio station founded by theAmerican Indian Movement.

In 1992, a group of activists campedoutside the station for seven months to protest Casey’s role as anon-Native American in charge.

“White people have no monopoly onracism,” says Casey, who has covered Pine Ridge-area athletics for morethan 20 years. “Have I felt racism because I’m a white person living inan Indian community? Of course. But I’ve lived in this community for 36years, and we’re making it work.”

Fear of the different.  Everyone, regardless of skin color or culture, feels it.

More on the Democrat Alternative

Or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

First, Michael Barone, writing at RealClearPolitics[*1] :

Their pit bull attacks on Bush, their constant references to the AbuGhraib abuses as if they were typical, their opposition to letting theNSA listen to conversations from al-Qaida suspects to persons in theUnited States and to letting interrogators of unlawful combatants usetechniques that have helped us foil those plotting violence against us– these amount to a strategy of rule or ruin. You must let us rulethis country, or we won’t regard it as “our” country anymore. So muchfor the first person plural.

Next, writing in the Washington Post[*2] , Sebastian Mallaby:

I’m not saying that Republicans are at all better, and of courseelections breed some policy timidity. But the infuriating thing aboutthe Democrats is that, just a decade ago, they knew how to empathizewith voters’ economic insecurities without collapsing intoirresponsibility; they combined attractively progressive socialpolicies with sensible pro-market fiscal responsibility. Now many inthe party have lost interest in this necessary balance. If theDemocrats win a measure of power next month, it’s hard to see what theywill do with it.

Hat tip:  Instapundit[*3] .

We’re all quite well aware (painfully, tediously aware, reminded day after day, hour after hour) of what Democrats are against.  What are you for, other than raw political power?

‘Cicero’ despairs

Cicero, at Winds of Change[*1] , writes of his dissatisfaction at both of the major political parties:

My option as a voter appears to be a false choice. Either I can voteRepublican, lest we ignore the war on terror, or I can vote Democrat,lest we lose the planet to the sun. Our political culture is coarse andcramped with soundbites that have overshadowed eloquent debate. Thereare no Daniel Websters anymore, riveting packed galleries in the Senatechamber with soaring rhetoric expounding on the great issues of theage. No Lincoln-Douglas debates. After Martin Luther King wasassassinated, Robert Kennedy stood on the back of a truck inIndianapolis quoting Aeschylus on the meaning of grief to angry blackAmericans. No more.

There are few genuine debates taking place in congress. There islittle eloquence. There is mostly position-taking and attack. We findmostly ‘where’s the beef’ and ‘gotchya’ politics. We’ve come nowhereafter five years of war. If anything, we’ve devolved.

We do appear doomed to at best two more years of tiresome gotcha politics. At worst, should the Democrats regain control of even one of the houses of Congress this November, we’re looking at a non-stop parade of McCarthy-style witchhunts of the Bush Administraton.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world will not stop plotting, scheming, seething, fighting, killing, dying. “Are we safer today than we were on 9/11” is a question based on a false premise. How safe were we on 9/10? How safe were we on 9/12? They were coming for us on 9/10. They’re still coming.

We’ve lept onto the back of the tiger. We have no choice now but to ride it, because if we get off, the tiger will turn around and bite.

The REAL story of the NIE

That’s “National Intelligence Estimate.”  You know, the one that says whatever the reader wants to read into it?

That’s the problem, as Herbert Meyer points out at the American Thinker:

Some sentences in the Key Judgments contradict themselves, and some are trite (“We judge that groups of all stripes will continue to use the Internet . . . “).  Others are classic examples of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” syndrome.  And still others are simply unintelligible — they are neither right nor wrong, but written in a way to make them subject to whatever interpretation the reader wishes to make.

No issue is more important to our country’s security than the future of terrorism, and nothing could be more helpful to the President than a clear and accurate projection of what that future is likely to be.  That is what this NIE should have provided, but doesn’t.

Now you see the “secret” that the Key Judgments of this NIE inadvertently reveal — and it isn’t about Iraq or about the future of terrorism.  It’s about our own intelligence service, and what this NIE has revealed is that our radar is busted.  That’s frightening, and what’s even more frightening is the realization that if we know it, so too do our enemies.

The National Intelligence Estimate is supposed to be the best available advice to the President regarding the issue being studied.  If all the intelligence community can do is “on the one hand–on the other hand” non-advice, it’s worse than useless.  It’s a waste of time and money.

Those who complain the loudest about this President’s foreign policies should be demanding better, more definitive reports from the intelligence community, instead of using that very same milquetoast “advice” as some kind of Holy Grail of received wisdom from on high.

The advice our President is receiving from the intelligence community is garbage.  And, as we all know, garbage in, garbage out.

Steyn on Gitmo

Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times[*1] :

“Even they cannot dismiss the practices at Guantanamo as the actions ofa few bad people,” (Vermont Senator Pat Leahy) continued. “Before they just did it quietly, andagainst the law, on their own say-so, but now they are obtaininglicense to engage in additional harsh techniques that the rest of theworld will see as abusive, as cruel, as degrading and even as torture.”
. . .
it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terroristdetention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horrorand brutality. If I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it wouldbe the brand-new Qurans in each unoccupied cell.

A Quran in every cell.  Abusive, cruel, degrading, indeed.