Two Quotes
"We're kicking ass."
-President Bush on Iraq, speaking to Australian Deputy PM Mark Vaile
"Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall."
-Proverbs 16:18
Fred Thompson In Da House
Finally, this absurdly long mating dance is over and Fred Thompson is officially running for president. I'm still dubious he is the Great Right Hope that some people want, but at least we will get to find out now.
For Fredheads, the hard part begins now. He will no longer get away with platitudes and vague generalities. He will be asked hard questions about important policy issues from people who don't necessarily like him. He will have to be specific. Is he up to the job? I think we'll know pretty soon - probably within a month. Thompson is under the microscope, effective now. If he doesn't meet some very high expectations, his support could evaporate quickly.
From what we know so far, Thompson strikes me as a lot like George W. Bush, and I don't mean that as a compliment. The same can be said of all the GOP candidates, actually, with the exception of Ron Paul. He's the only one who has been willing to break with the president in any significant way. Nonetheless, I'm going to reserve judgment for a little while and give Thompson a chance to speak.
Here are my prior posts about Fred Thompson, in which I raise some important questions. I hope we get answers soon.
Finally, take a look at this campaign commercial that aired last night. Does the way he moves his head strike anyone else as kind of weird? I've seen Thompson in many interviews and not noticed him talk this way before. It almost looks like they speeded up the tape to make him appear more dynamic. I hate to nitpick about trivial things but he is an actor, after all. This doesn't seem like a very good performance for his big debut.
Wrong Twin Aborted
When prenatal tests revealed that one of her unborn twins had Down's Syndrome, a woman in Italy decided to abort the "defective" child and keep the healthy one. Doctors proceeded to abort the wrong child, apparently because the unwitting masses of fetal tissue changed position between the time of the ultrasound and the abortion procedure.
Now, some people would have interpreted this horrible event as a sign from above and amended their life. This mother did not; upon being informed of the mistake, she returned to the hospital and had the remaining child aborted, too. She now says her life has been ruined, and I'm sure it is. So were two other lives. We can trust they are now in a better place - no thanks to their earthly parents.
While all abortion is unacceptable, abortions undertaken for the specific purpose of killing children who are somehow disabled is particularly disgusting. People with Down's Syndrome are still people. If we permit people to be killed before birth because they are inconvenient and imperfect, by what logic do we forbid them from being killed after birth?
You may recall a similar case last March, also in Italy, where an infant thought to be deformed was aborted, only to be born alive and without the defect that inspired the abortion in the first place. The child died after six days.
Such efforts at population purity are nothing less than eugenics. This same mentality allowed the Nazis to define entire categories of people as non-human and systematically exterminate them. It's all a big word game. "We value all human life," they will say, without being too specific about how they define "human." For example, will these organisms be human? How will we know?
Think it can't happen here? Wrong; it already does. Watch this video. It is the only time I've ever seen Bill O'Reilly rendered speechless.
Hat tip: Leticia
When Every Day is Labor Day
As you enjoy your day off, think about this story from Cardinal Sean of Boston.
For 20 years I worked as a priest with immigrants in Washington. There were many Portuguese who had left the old colonies after the revolution and were seeking a new life in America. Most were Hispanic refugees from Central America where civil wars were raging.
One day a man came to my office. He handed me a letter from his wife and sat down and wept. The wife scolded him for leaving her and their eight children to starve in the war torn El Salvador. She said she had waited over eight months and still he had not written or sent money.
The man told me he had left his farm in El Salvador and come illegally to Washington because it was impossible to farm with the war. He lived in a single room with six other men and worked in two restaurants, washing dishes. He told me that he walked to work, so as not to spend money on the bus and that he did not buy food, but rather ate the leftover food on the dirty dishes that he washed. Each week he sent all the money he earned to his wife, but she had not received his letters. I asked if he sent checks or cash. He told me he sent cash and each Friday mailed the letters and money, putting them in the blue mailbox on the corner.
I looked out the widow and saw his blue mailbox. It was a fancy trash bin.
Too often we who want to stop illegal immigration forget that the people entering our country are still people. They have lives and families and emotions and worries. Does that mean we open the borders and let everybody in? No, of course not. Yet there ought to be a way to allow men like this - who want nothing more than to provide for their families and willingly make enormous sacrifices to do so - to work in the U.S. while still keeping out the criminals, terrorists, gangsters, and others who might be a threat. The fact that the situation goes on unresolved is a political outrage and a human tragedy.
Happy Labor Day.
Let's Declare War on Futility
The month of September will be pivotal to the future of U.S. operations in Iraq, with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker scheduled to report on the success (or lack thereof) of the troop-surge plan. Both sides are already hard at work to spin things in their direction.
We can safely assume, no matter what the reports say, that the president will not give an inch in the direction of withdrawing troops. We can also safely assume that the Congressional opponents of the war will continue to call for withdrawal, notwithstanding the contents of the Petraeus and Crocker reports. At this point it appears that the Democrats do not have the means to force their will on this issue. This suggest that, after much sound and fury, not much will change.
The mantra of pro-war forces is that they just need "more time." More time is probably what they will get, but is it really time going to help? Maybe, maybe not. It could actually hurt. Consider this:
I find this argument compelling because the U.S. government has a long history, in its grand plans, of creating outcomes that are the opposite of what was intended. LBJ declared war on poverty. Did we get less poverty? No, we have more of it. Nixon declared war on drugs. Is there less drug abuse now? No, there is more of it. Other examples abound.
When the United States struck Afghanistan in 2001, "there were probably 3,000 core Al Qaeda operatives," says Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School. "We killed or captured about 1,000; about 1,000 more ended up in distant parts of the world. And about 1,000 ended up in Waziristan. But the great terror university in Afghanistan is gone; they've relied on the Web since. They haven't had the hands-on instruction and the bonding of the camps. That's resulted in low-skill levels. Their tradecraft is really much poorer.".The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on, the more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're getting re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came through the [Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've logged on [to Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those who have come through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of skill is going to be greater than the skill of the original generation." SOURCE
So it is not a stretch to think that George W. Bush's war on terror may produce more terrorism rather than less. It is hard to see how it serves U.S. interests to provide live-fair training and recruiting incentives for our enemies. Given that the poverty and drug wars are still with us, there seems to be little chance this one will end soon, either.
Hat tip: Born at the Crest
UPDATE 9/3/07: I edited the text above to say that the War on Drugs was launched by Nixon, not Reagan. Also, here is a nice article by Paul Farrell of MarketWatch.com about the connection between drugs, terrorism, and borders.
Balls of Blasphemy
Another example of why U.S. troops should not be in the business of nation-building: the gift by U.S. troops of soccer balls to Afghan children. These particular balls were colorfully decorated with the flags of various nations.
Soccer balls are intended to be kicked. While people in certain parts of the world may relish the thought of kicking an object that displays the American flag, that was not a problem in this case. The issue was the Saudi flag that was included on these balls. The Saudi flag contains Arabic words from the Koran, including the name of Allah. Muslims regard these words as sacred and treat them with great respect. They do not kick them around.
At least some branches of the U.S. military are aware of this fact, since those who guard Islamic prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere are not permitted to touch the prisoner's Korans unless they are themselves Muslim. You would expect that whoever is in charge of winning Muslim hearts and minds in Afghanistan would have at least a passing knowledge of local customs and taboos. Apparently not. So they managed to insult the people's sensibilities in three different ways:
- Printing sacred words on decidedly non-sacred objects such as soccer balls
- Dropping these objects from helicopters to land on the unclean ground below
- Enticing Muslim children to kick the balls with their unclean feet
Hat tip: Islam & Christianity
