Archive for July, 2006

World War 3?

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

GINGRICH: We’re in the early stages of what I would describe as the third World War and, frankly, our bureaucracy’s not responding fast enough and we don’t have the right attitude. And this is the 58th year of the war to destroy Israel and, frankly, the Israelis have every right to insist that every single missile leave south Lebanon, and the United States ought to be helping the Lebanese government have the strength to eliminate Hezbollah as a military force — not as a political force in the parliament — but as a military force in south Lebanon.

RUSSERT: This is World War III?

GINGRICH: I believe if you take all the countries I just listed that you’ve been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you have to say to yourself: this is, in fact, World War III.

……………

“I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.” — Albert Einstein

……………….

But Newt Gingrich gave himself away as a political tactician. “Gingrich said he is “very worried” about Republicans facing fall elections and says the party must have the “nerve” to nationalize the elections and make the 2006 campaigns about a liberal Democratic agenda rather than about President Bush’s record.”

James Woolsey already called the Cold War “World War III” and the — um — “Global War on Terrorism” “World War IV”. In this sense, Einstein was wrong. War War III turned out to be fought with proxies and covert operations, the one moment where nuclear weapons were pointed at each other on the tip of Cuba coming to bluster. To anyone who sneers at the idea of the Cold War being “World War III”, because — you know — where is the wanton bloodshed? — tell that to anyone who felt the might of the Soviet or American military, or fell under right-wing dictators or Communist puppets… Death Squads here, there, everywhere.

But nay. I’ll go ahead and have the definition of “World War” as being, you know, something completely like World War I and World War II — the War to End All Wars — as Wilson called the former because, you know, it’s the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy and, you know, Democracies don’t fight each other… World War Two being the “Great Patriotic War” by the Soviet Union because, well, the Russians mid-stream opted out of the first one to tend toward their own Revolution…

World War 3 is this, or this shall be World War 3, you say? Notwithstanding the sort of insularity therein (it’s only a World War if America involves itself — and the Cold War as World War 3 is decidedly America-centric), Look deep in your heart. Is that really you want? A replay of World War 1? A replay of World War 2? Of that sort of “World War”, with all the implications? (World War 1, incidentally, ended with an entire world unsure of what the heck they just spilt an entire generation’s worth of blood over.)

“Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. In an interview in Bellevue this morning Gingrich said Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.

As though Bush hasn’t been speaking “in stark terms” throughout his presidency.

Really? Are you sure?

Another Message from paultony

Monday, July 17th, 2006

I belive that Lyndon Laroache is capable of murder.Please let me explain this. I was with Lyndon Laroache for over thirty years. I watch him change, He started out being for labor and trying to start a labor party, then came the eightys he want to restore the new deal programs of FDR and the manhattan project I supported him in this. He tried to have Kissnger throw in prison. Lyndon Laroache claims that Kissinger tried to kill him and that Kissinger had to stop at any cost. Then the 1990’s came He wanted to end George HW Bush. He started what he called the Lets get Bush, and expose Bush. He started renew attacts and started the youth movement. He came up with Euro land bridge, The new Brittany Wooods confernce. My job was to sell this to the public, wish I did. When Clinton became president Laroache wented to have Gore ousted and replace him with him. I had to tried to oust Gore, at any cost.

Laroache thought he would be closing to becoming president. Then came the year 2000 He thought he could take over the democrated party. When he run for president he changed, he moved against labor, he was no longer wanted to help the working poor. He later endorsed Kerry. I soon left.

People can leave Laroache it is very hard to do so. Here are some tips to help you.

1 Don’t go to any meeting or briefings
2 Don’t hang out were you used to go.
3 monitor your phone calls and don’t aruge with them over politics. Hang up.
4 Have people drive you around
5 Stay with friends or family they will come.
6 Don’t let their name calling get to you.
7 Don’t send them money or give them your bank account. This was my mistake.
8 Don’t feel guity for leaving, Lyndon Laroache is not saving the world.

I want to help as many people as I can leave. When I left I got called many names. I found a dead rabbit in my yard, and other things. Lyndon Laroache never save the world. Once the money runs out, he won’t use you. I was told I was selling his ideas. I was told to read only what he wrote, they told me that I should not go to college, because he had the true meaning of life, and I should give him the money instead. I took I was saving the world. I had to called people and collect money from them, forget about their health, instead do what was best for huminity, that was raising money for Laroache.

On Pigs and Tasty items

Sunday, July 16th, 2006

PRESIDENT BUSH: Chancellor, thank you very much. Thanks for the invitation. This is a beautiful part of the world, and Laura and I are so honored to come to your constituency and meet some of the friendly people who live here. I remember you coming to the Oval Office, and you said, if you are coming to Germany, this is the part of Germany I want you to see. And now I can see why you suggested it. I’m looking forward to the feast you’re going to have tonight. I understand I may have the honor of slicing the pig.

[…]

I’m optimistic we can still get something done on the Doha Round. It’s going to take work, but G8 is a good place for us to continue the dialogue, and we will.

And I guess that’s about all — we discussed a lot of things, in other words. And thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to that pig tonight. (Laughter.)

I’ll be glad to answer a couple of questions. Do you want to start her off?

[…]

Q A question addressed to you both. You talked about the Middle East, and what is your assessment of the military action of Israel in Lebanon? The French Foreign Minister already said it is disproportionate. Does that give you cause for Europe or the United States to intervene?

And apart from the pig, Mr. President, what sort of insights have you been able to gain as regards East Germany? — (inaudible) —

[…]

PRESIDENT BUSH: Follow up on?

Q On both of these. Does it concern you that the Beirut airport has been bombed? And do you see a risk of triggering a wider war?

And on Iran, they’ve, so far, refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I thought you were going to ask me about the pig.

Q I’m curious about that, too. (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT BUSH: The pig? I’ll tell you tomorrow after I eat it.

The Iranian issue is — will be taken to the U.N. Security
………………..

You know the problem with Bush’s sense of humour. It’s hard not to think that maybe, just maybe, he is actually preoccupied and what is central in his mind is … that pig. This is not the first time he was in a press conference where he returned again and again to a superflous item like that as light-hearted jab. (Note: once is fine. Twice you’re treading on thin ice. Thrice and more, I have to wonder about someone with the power of the presidency.)

Reagan’s “The Bombing begins in five minutes”, a somewhat dark joke that may indeed terrify the children, at least has the advantage of pertaining to things that occupy the world stage. It’s not a goddamned pig you’re looking forward to eating.

On Sex Offender Registries

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

From the latest issue of Reason, Tim Cavanaugh writes:

On Easter Sunday Stephen A Marsahll, a 20 year old Cape Breton dishwasher visiting Maine, borrowed his father’s truck, rifle, and 2 handguns, shot and killed two men in two different towns, then boarded a bus to Boston, where he was approached by police and shot himself. Marshall’s motive for the murders is still unclear, but his method for selecting victims is not: He found them on Maine’s online registry of sex offenders.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia maintain web sites providing information on convicted sex offenders who have been released from prison. States differ in how much information they provide. Maine’s registry provides users with home addresses, photos, and legal descriptions of the crimes that landed offenders on the registry.

The justification for maintaining such public lists rests on the presumption that sex offenders have higher recidivism rates than other criminals — though Bureau of Justice statistics indicates that rapists are less likely than other violent and nonviolent criminals to be rearrested for the same crime. The psychological theory that pedophilia is a lifetime condition carries more wight with the public, but registries do not distinguish among varieties of sex offenders. As it happens, one of Marshall’s victims, 24 year old William Elliott, was registered for the crime of having sex, at the age of 19, with a girlfriend who was 2 weeks shy of her 16th birthday.

You can decide for yourself whether such a man deserved to be marked for life, let alone murdered. Meanwhile the registries create a conundrum: if the offenders are still menaces to society, why have they been released from prison? And if they are not, why is the state blocking their attempts to return to society?

I have pondered those two questions whenever a new state has set up a sex offender website. The one thing I can say is that you really can’t hold too much sympathy for the individuals on Oregon’s sex offender website: you have to match several criteria before you get listed there — the worst of the worst, so the example posed here: 19 year old who had sex with a 16 year old. As for having been released, that would be another problem, wouldn’t it?

Things Fall Apart

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Hm. The situation in the middle east seems to have taken a rather… horrid turn for the worst. All of a sudden I’m just having flashes of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, only with religious zealots of various types thinking they have the key plan for the apocalypse.

But those flashes are always just a scratch under the surface even in relatively calm times.

Plame reignited

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Unfortunately, I heard a bit of Sean Hannity today. It happened when the Rick Emerson show stopped broadcasting for about ten minutes and the two stations on both sides of the dial bled through. It was a bit disorienting, the oldies station that blew Rick Emerson away a year ago faintly coming through, a spanish station chiming in, sports, and — slightly stronger than these three — Sean Hannity’s insights on Robert Novak’s revelatory new column about his side of the Vallerie Plame Affair. Oh boy oh boy oh boy has the Liberal Media gotten everything wrong about this story, and oh boy oh boy oh boy have the Wilsons been exposed as…

as what precisely, I do not know. I suppose I should be more on top of the arguments, as minituae has developed over the course of time. I’m still stuck on what was the last iteration of these things. With Rove we’re in the realm of technicalities, and I guess there’s nothing too much wrong with that. With Vallerie Wilson, the attack against her always seemed to me to boil down to the fact that her job description does not match that which we have learned about the world of spies from James Bond movies. And as for Joseph Wilson, those words in the State of the Union Speech, “Uranium from Niger”, is meaningless because don’t you know that Clinton said there were weapons of mass destruction?

Beside which, why isn’t the Liberal Media covering Rick Santorum’s press conference alerting everyone that the Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found? The answer to that question might simply be that the media doesn’t want to expose actual elected officials as being complete idiots, which would then embarrass the public that elected these idiots.

Before my brain could explode, Rick Emerson returned to the air, saving me from Sean Hannity, and that was that.

Department of Homeland Security

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

“Did you see the Farm Implement Parade last night?” So asked my 8th grade Speech Therapist.

“Oh gawd no.” I answered, a sour note on my face.

“Oh, it was great!”

The Farm Implement Parade was/is an annual parade held in November, sometime past dusk, of lighted farm equipment in the burgeoning metropolis of Sunnyside, Washington. Evidentally, the evidence being that my parents and others told me thusly (my parents going to the parade where I nor my brother wouldn’t), it was featured by Charles Kuralt in his seris of vignittes on quaint rural American festivals. When he retired (or was it died?), I saw him profiled as having “put towns on the map”, a lie as I don’t know and doubt seriously that anybody knows of any American municipality because Charles Kuwalt did a feature on it.

Flash forward to 2006. The Dempartment of Homeland Security has been exposed as pretty much one giant pork rind. For example, Indiana is listed as having more than 8,500 critical assets — 50 percent more than New York. I always maintain that the terrorists are somewhat of the ultimate urban snobs in terms of American knowledge. They know not from “Flyover Country”, essentially taking cues from where the media capitals of America are. It ultimately made little sense to suspect the Oklahoma City bombings as coming from Islamic terrorists. Attention Red State America: “Islamo-Fascists” do not even know you exist. (It is one of the virtues of living in the sticks.)

But wait! Maybe they actually do know about these quaint American festivals and the bizarre tourist traps you run into while driving through the vast American expanses. I picture Osama Bin Laden, just having picked up from the Discounted Cut-Out section, the coffee-table book of Charles Kuralt’s America. Thus, the skeptics will be proven wrong when the Amish Country Popcorn in Indiana explodes alongside the Sweetwater flea market in Tennessee.

Blast from the Past

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar of the American Enterpise Institute, New York Times, 1-24-1991.

It will be weeks before the guns in the gulf fall silent, but we can see already the political contours of the world following an American victory. Important changes are in the offing on three levels of politics: domestic, Arab and global. Domestically, the most profound consequences may be felt in the Democratic Party, dominated ideologically since the Vietnam War by its dovish wing. If the large majority of American voters continues to view the gulf war as the most just, necessary and successful our country has fought since World War II, the Democrats will pay a heavy price for having opposed it.

However, those who bucked the leadership and supported the President — Stephen Solarz, Les Aspin, Dave McCurdy, Dante Fascell in the House; Joseph Lieberman and Albert Gore in the Senate — will emerge vastly strenghtened. They will win plaudits both for being right and for having risen above partisanship. If they stick together even loosely they will constitute a formidable new force in the party. From their ranks may come the next Democratic candidate, albeit not before Mr. Bush has had his second term.

In the Arab world, the drubbing of Saddam Hussein will be an epiphany that will demolish the appeal of the radical path. The bane of Arab politics has been a millenarianism that has stood in the way of a reckoning with reality — the reality of Israel, the reality of the West. Whether in the form of pan-Arabism, religious fanaticism or secular radical ideologies, this millenariansim has led many Arabs to believe that, with unity or the right leader or theory, the humiliations of colonialism and underdevelopment could be redeemed and the world could be had on Arab terms rather than through compromise.

If — as seems all but certain — the war ends in Saddam Hussein’s utter humiliation, the sobering effect should be enormous. With Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party in tatters, Soviet influence a thing of the past, Islamic extremism losing its luster in Iran and the myth of unity shattered as never before, the Arab world may be ready finally for realism and moderation.

Last but not least, the gulf war marks the dawning of the Pax Americana. True, that term was used immediately after World War II. But it was a misnomer then because the Soviet empire — a real competitor with American power — was born at the same moment. The result was not a “pax” of any kind, but a cold war and a bipolar world. During the past two years, however, Soviet power has imploded and a bipolar world has become unipolar. A global rush toward democracy and free markets has spelled a huge victory for America on the ideological plain. Now, in the gulf war, our ideological supremacy is being matched by a demonstration of America’s refurbished military capability.

Since Vietnam, doubts had abounded, both at home and abroad, about America’s willingness to use force and its ability to do so effectively. It may well have been such doubts that led Saddam Hussein to ignore President Bush’s pleas and threats. It is not likely another ruler will soon hasten to make the same miscalculations. America’s rediscovered prowess will not be used for conquest but to deter others from conquest: to secure the “new world order” that has been a goal of American policy since President Woodrow Wilson. In addition it will strengthen the attraction of America’s political and economic system.

This Pax Americana will rest not on domination but on persuasion and example as well as power. It will consist not of empire but of having won over a large and growing part of the world not only to the joys of jeans and rock and Big Macs but also to our concept of how nations ought to be governed and to behave.