From President Bush's press conference on Tuesday: Question: "Are you still a conservative?"
The president: "Am I what?"
Any port in a storm, especially after the storm has passed. I said the other day that the minute Hurricane Katrina hit, the media started scampering around like Munchkins singing "Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead." They always do, and it always fails. In terms of destroying Bush and the Republicans, Katrina was a total bust. Insofar as it has any political impact, it's likely to make Louisiana less Democrat. That's it.
So the problem remains: how to slay Bush. And, if this last week is anything to go by, it looks like Democrats are going to be denied that pleasure, and it will fall instead to conservatives to reduce the Bush presidency to rubble. Conservatives are mad at Bush, and the theory goes that next November they'll stay home and the GOP will lose Senate and House seats. Of course, conservatives have been mad about a lot of Bush policies for a long time -- education, immigration -- but, in fairness to him, he campaigned as a massive federalizer of the school system and as a big nancy boy pushover for illegal Mexicans. So we can't complain we were misled.
On the other hand, he also said that, when it comes to Supreme Court justices, he'd appoint jurists in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia: "conservative" judges or, at any rate, strict constructionists, who don't claim, as so many judges do, to be able to detect constitutional rights to abortion and sodomy in an 18th century parchment. Instead, the president nominated a lady called Harriet Miers.
Harriet who? Well, she served as his "staff secretary" -- or, as her bio puts it, "the ultimate gatekeeper for what crosses the desk of the nation's commander in chief." Legally speaking, that makes her sound more Della Street than Perry Mason. But don't worry, she is, in fact, a lawyer: Indeed, for some years, back in Texas, she was Bush's personal lawyer. But she's not a judge, not a constitutional lawyer, not a legal scholar, not someone with any judicial philosophy or someone who's shown any interest in acquiring one. What she is is a pal of the president.
Conservative commentators have been withering about the inner-circle cronyism of the Miers pick. Where do I stand? To be honest, I haven't a clue. A vacancy comes up on the Supreme Court, and for a month or so every columnist is expected to be an expert on the jurisprudence of a couple of dozen legal types he'd never previously heard of. For what it's worth, my sense is that Harriet Miers will be, case by case, a more reliable vote against leftist judicial activism than her mercurial predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor. Why do I say this? Well, she's a strong supporter of the right to bear arms. The great Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel says you have to go back to Louis Brandeis 90 years ago to find a Supreme Court justice whose pre-nomination writings extol gun rights as fulsomely as Miers. According to an old boyfriend, Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, she packs heat -- a Smith & Wesson .45 -- which I can say with certainty the other lady justice, the far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never has. She also's personally very opposed to abortion.
In other words, what seems to be emerging is a woman Bush responds to as a fellow cultural conservative and evangelical conservative (she's a born-again Christian), rather than as a judicial conservative -- a label Judge Bork dislikes, preferring quite correctly that we distinguish judges not as conservative or liberal but as either originalists or judicial activists. I find it hard to discuss Miers seriously in those terms, but on balance she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons. She's thus another representative of Bush and Karl Rove's belief in incrementalism: that the Republican majority can be made a permanent feature of the landscape if you build it one small brick at a time. Miers is, at best, such a brick, at a time when conservatives were hoping Bush would drop a huge granite block on the court. But, given that she started out as a Democrat and has been on the receiving end of the partisan attacks on the administration for five years, she seems less likely than any detached effete legal scholar to be prone to the remorseless drift to the left that happens to Republican Supreme Court nominees.
True, that's little more than a hunch on my part. In the meantime, what's left is the base's distress and the perception of weakness on the president's part. The first is real and may cause problems in 2006, though I can't see it costing the GOP its congressional majorities. As for Bush personally, he was the better of the alternatives in both 2000 and 2004, but come on, the "compassionate conservative" thing was, in its implications, far more insulting to the base than the steel tariffs or the proposed illegal immigrant amnesty or the judicial nominees. Bush, it seems ever more obvious, is the Third Wayer Clinton only pretended to be.
The Slicker reckoned that, to be electable, a Democrat had to genuflect rhetorically to some kind of sensible soccer-mom-ish center, and he was right, at least insofar as without him the Dems have been el stinko floppo three elections in a row. But Bush, for good or ill, believes in himself as the real Third Way deal: It's a remarkable achievement to get damned day in and day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you're Tony Blair with a ranch. The president is a religio-cultural conservative who believes in big government and big spending and paternalistic federal intervention in areas where few conservatives have ever previously thought it wise. Not my bag, but, that said, every time I or anybody else have predicted he's blown it, he manages to eke out another victory. Even the sluggishness of the war on terror seems likely to be partially redeemed by the imminent fall of Baby Assad. Given the transformational potential of 9/11 and the fact that the Democratic Party is all out of gas, I think the Bush-Rove incremental strategy is way too limited. But it seems to work, and I'd bet it does again on election day next year.
Recently the refractory city of Fallujah reemerged as a front-page story. Fallujah first leaped to national attention last November when it became the scene of the fiercest urban combat in the past 35 years. During that battle, 100 Marine squads engaged in more than 200 firefights inside small, dark cement rooms against suicidal jihadists. A single such ferocious gunfight between police and gangs anywhere in America would receive overwhelming and immediate press attention. The Marines did that 200 times in one week in Fallujah.
Since then Fallujah has received scant press attention. I was in Fallujah in September, shortly after Pfc. Romano Romero, 19, was killed by a roadside bomb -- the 160th American to die in and around the city since the Iraq war began. The Marines staked out the area and days later shot two Iraqis brazenly placing another explosive device at the same spot. This grueling routine of counterinsurgency did not merit front-page coverage.
U.S. Marines patrol Fallujah in November 2004. (By Anja Niedringhaus -- Associated Press)
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Yet Fallujah has suddenly popped back up as major news. Why? Because allegations have emerged that American soldiers beat prisoners there two years ago. The allegations were about beatings, not about torture or murder. At the time of the alleged incidents, in late 2003 and early 2004, violence in Fallujah was escalating. The 1st Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment had suffered 94 casualties inside the city -- one every other day. They warned the Marines who were rotating in that they would be bloodied, because the insurgents were massing.
The paratroopers were right. Over the next nine months, Fallujah grew into the stronghold of the insurgency and the vipers' nest for jihadists infiltrating from Syria. The fighting escalated in ferocity. Among the Marines, acts of courage became common. 1st Sgt. Brad Kasal, for instance, threw his body over a wounded Marine and shot jihadists two feet away. Cpl. Tim Connors, 20, battled inside two adjoining concrete rooms for four hours before killing five jihadists and recovering the body of a fallen squad member. So it went, day after day.
Hundreds of gripping stories of valor emerged that would have been publicized in World War II. Although there are far more heroes than louts in the ranks, stories of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and now at Fallujah vastly outnumber stories of heroism and sacrifice.
Not to take anything away from The Greatest Generation, but the behavior of our soldiers today will stand scrutiny when compared to the performance of those in any past war. The focus of the press on abuse is not due to any relaxation in military discipline or social mores. Why was valor considered front-page news in 1945 and abuse considered front-page news in 2005?
Posted by: Captain America ||
10/09/2005 15:49 ||
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It is about half an hour to Iftar time. This is the most difficult part of the day. I don't know about others but I tend to get very irritated and easily provoked about this time. So I have these difficult minutes to kill, so I thought I kill them with you.
So here is my nasty thought of the day (So much for Ramadan bringing you tranquility and peace of mind; and may God forgive me for saying this): Here we have the U.S.A. and Great Britain and their smaller friends, an alliance that has defeated Nazi Germany and the mighty Reich, and have had the stomach to obliterate Japanese cities with atomic bombs. Here we have the Americans, the descendants of those who wrested a whole continent by shear obstinacy and fought for every inch of land with blood and sweat. Here we have nations that have waded through rivers of blood and mud and marched through entire continents to become symbols of human perseverance and enterprise. Yes all this history and yet we have some who think that our miserable "Sunni Triangle" poses an insurmountable problem and that one should "cut and run" and "bring home troops immediately" etc. etc.
I salute President Bush who does not care much for this kind of defeatism and treats it with the contempt it deserves.
Salaam
Salaam indeed, Alaa. May we persevere and prevail.
Posted by: DanNY ||
10/09/2005 14:24 ||
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#1
Optimism is to cynicism what light is to darkness.
Posted by: ed ||
10/09/2005 17:42 ||
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#1
I've read his original french book, "La guerre d'après", the following war, and it's a good read on the saudi influence.
The interview is a good read too.
Laurent Murawiec is one of the two only french neocons (the other being Guy Millière, the translater of Reagan's memories), and his book could interest RBers.
He's made an excellent synthesis on arabo-islamic terrorism for the Hudson institute (IIRC?, I can't remember right now for which think tank he's working after having been ousted from the Rand for his anti-saudi views), you should perhaps check his material available online, he's pretty clear-cut and thoughts-provoking about what should be done about WOT. In french he's collaborating with the Mena press, and various free-market websites.
Note that besides coming up with interesting notions, such as the 1973 oil embargo being a razzia, or the "islamintern" build-up by the saudis, his prescription for solving this whole mess is radical, it is to cut the hydra's head and "de-saudize Saudi Arabia", including getting oil out of the royal hands : this should be very familiar to thoses who advocate here the seizure of a certain landstrip...
Too bad this will NEVER be applied, except perhaps and unfortunately in case of major attack on US soil.
#2
Outstanding interview, A5089! This is precisely what I come to Rantburg for. When people finally understand that our nation's politicians are bought and sold by the House of Saud, there will be a glimmer of a chance for things to improve. Until then, the Saudis are a perfect mirror to reflect conservative and liberal self-hatred alike.
Via Normblog, this is a site advocating democracy and rationality in Zimbobland. This is an excerpt from the October 7 entry.
...For over three years I learnt, the people of that dirt-poor region had been receiving a life-saving monthly food handout from Save the Children UK. Everyone over the age of 55 (and including those below that age who were known to be without food) could then rely upon a generous allocation of mealie-meal, cooking oil and beans. But this was no more, because ever since the ill-fated Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Bill had first been mooted in 2004 the Mugabe regime had banned humanitarian organizations like Save the Children from continuing with their general feeding programmes. Save the Children UK was given permission to continue its developmental work, such as digging wells to provide drinking water, but was ordered to discontinue the feeding. The reason cited by local ZANU PF officials was that these NGOs were engaging in a subversive political programme in support of the opposition MDC - which according to my well-informed Gogo, was absolute nonsense.
The obvious next question was, how the people are surviving. The simple answer, it emerged, is that many are not. Many are succumbing to early deaths as a result of a major food deficiency. Statistics are difficult to come by in the very nature of the situation - a remote location with only rudimentary heath care facilities, and extreme sensitivity on the part of ZANU PF to anything resembling a proper health care study. But said Gogo, people are dying of malnutrition now. A visitor to the area could not help but notice how thin most people are. Anyone in the community believed to possess a significant amount of food, will have a trail of people to the door, virtually begging for help.
My final question to Gogo was how she personally was managing to survive. She paused and a look of quiet resignation crossed her wizened features.
"Aha," she said, "I used to keep chickens, but now there is an outbreak of Newcastle disease - right across Binga, Lupane, Hwange. Many, many chickens have died. Now I have nothing left to sell. The goats have a disease too. Even the goats are beginning to die."
#1
When Africa's woes are laid squarely and solely at the feet of its hyper-corrupt "leaders", only then will there be the remotest possibility of obtaining a solution. Until then, nearly the entire (sub-Saharan) continent serves as a monolithic object lesson in parasitic vampirism.
#2
Marches against genocide in Zimbabwe to commence in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Hello? Is this thing on? Isn't there ANY outrage over this on the left?
No?
Huh.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
10/09/2005 17:18 Comments ||
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#3
The Zimbabwe marches are scheduled for right after those against the genocide in Darfur, replete with scathing condemnation of Kofi Annan's ornamental role in stopping even one millisecond of any such thing. Holding one's breath for the start of either event is strongly contraindicated.
Ok, this is more a promo than anything else, so there's just the link, but this might interest some RBers. Kill it if inappropriate. This is a Joseph Farah column about a DVD documentary targeting Michael Moore's view on firearms and self defense ("guns are baaad and are used by scared redneck whiteys to kill black people, except when they are totted by my bodyguards to protect my famous and very rich ass, in which case they're fine").
Since it won't get a Palmes d'or at Cannes, it at least deserves some coverage.
On the subject of armed citizens self-defense, see this excellent ressource : http://www.johnrlott.com/, and this selection of articles, a bit repetitive but interesting http://www.tsra.com/LottPage.htm
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
