The Real Foreign Policy Debate

Here's a reader's letter to Ross Douthat:

I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist. It was conceived by Acheson/Marshall/Kennan/Harriman et al. and pursued by every administration, Republican or Democrat, from then until 2000. Separate this from domestic political posturing, and apart from minor shading the policy differences of Acheson, Dulles, Rusk, Kissinger, Shultz and Albright are indiscernible. Essentially, it consisted of enlightened self interest pursued through containment of adversaries; operating through international institutions wherever possible; and the fostering of alliance systems. On the whole it was a fairly respectable endeavor although there was dirty dealing from time to time. Occasionally, the bus would come off the road of course, notably over Vietnam, and Jingoism or the military lobby would get the upper hand, but it seldom lasted long.

In 2001 there really was a quantum shift in policy to one of overt interventionism; rejection of traditional international institutions as a problem solving mechanism; disinterest in the views of major allies; open support of the most extreme Israeli positions in the middle east; and the embrace of attempts to export democracy, even if in a somewhat ham handed way. This whole approach was increasingly dominated by domestic political considerations, perhaps that was its original genesis, and it has proved fairly disastrous in almost every respect ...

Now with the election of Democratic administration the inevitable reaction has set in and the Republican internationalist/realists are anxious to get back in their traditional groove alongside the folks who think the same way in the Democratic party ... you and Yglesias are quite wrong, this state of affairs is sustainable for a very long time. Any fault lines that appear are far more likely to be between a Lugar and a Cheney than between a Lugar and a Clinton. There are no fault lines between a Daschle and a Clinton. I use these names, but this is not really a matter of personalities despite the media's obsession with people rather than substance.

Here's Douthat's first paragraph in response:

I think [this] is rather like Robert Kagan's suggestion last year that we are all neocons of some sort or another: It emphasizes important commonalities - in this case, among post-WWII internationalists of various sorts, especially during the Cold War - but elides extremely important differences in order to make its case. Saying "the predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist" is like saying that "the predominant strain of thought in American domestic policy since WW 2 has been liberal/neoliberal/neoconservative." It gets at the important point that policymaking has operated within a more constrained range than many people think, but it obscures the fact that there are very important differences between domestic-policy neoconservatism and domestic-policy liberalism - or between, say, the realist internationalism of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the liberal hawkery of John F. Kennedy. (Just compare this speech to this speech ...) The latter set of differences manifested themselves most notably in our policy toward Indochina - and if your case that the Iraq War represents a unique break with five decades of unbroken foreign-policy consensus requires dismissing the years America spent embroiled in Vietnam as a case where the bus went "off the road" modestly but not for long, you're probably overselling your argument a bit.

Actually, it's not just overselling your argument. It's getting it all wrong. Douthat's right that the left/right consensus has long driven American foreign policy, but he needs to indicate that it's the Democratic Party's radical left base that has made an epochal departure from America's traditional internationalism, not the Bush administration.

Fred Baumann, writing in the Public Interest in 2004, pegged the real issues facing American foreign policy since Vietnam:

THREE decades after the Vietnam War, American politicians are still making foreign policy decisions in its shadow. In fact, on one level, debates such as those over the recent war in Iraq can be viewed as hinging on how one interprets the American experience in Vietnam ....

This particular strand in our politics is directly attributable to what, for lack of a better label, I will call the "Vietnam paradigm." It describes not simply a constellation of isolationist policy directives but, more importantly, a general attitude of political suspicion and moral condemnation of nearly any use of American military might. Such post- Vietnam skittishness has affected America's domestic politics in enormous and largely pernicious ways. Most significantly, it has made popular consent for any large-scale foreign intervention--and thus the credibility of any such threat--perennially fragile. This has led conservatives when in power to fight wars on tiptoe ....

If the Vietnam mentality poses both direct and indirect dangers in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, it poses an even more troubling domestic danger in its tendency toward ever greater rhetorical excess and emotional rancor ....

To be sure, there is a strand of rational criticism of the administration's conduct of the war on terror. It can be found in the serious policy journals and with columnists like Anne Applebaum in the mainstream media. But it does not much characterize the antiwar movement's overall tone and style. That movement encompasses a large range, from distinguished intellectuals like Susan Sontag and veteran foreign policy experts writing popular books, like Chalmers Johnson, down through the mainstream of the New York Times and the Washington Post and respectable Internet "bloggers" like Josh Marshall, descending to popular entertainers like Tim Robbins and Michael Moore, and to ever more abusive fringe journals and blogs, all the way down to LaRouche websites. Still, from high to low, there are some strikingly common themes.

Conspiracy theory, in particular, has found its way into the mainstream. The missing weapons of mass destruction are a case in point. Practically everyone, including President Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, and the French and German intelligence services, was convinced that Iraq had them. Yet "Bush lied; people died" (now available on bumper stickers and T-shirts) immediately became the slogan of the antiwar movement. Similarly, the case that this was an "illegal war" because a second resolution had not been forthcoming from the United Nations is a staple of antiwar argument ... Then there is the much-touted discovery of a group of Zionist "neoconservative" foreign policy advisers of the second and third rank who have allegedly hijacked U.S. foreign policy for sinister reasons. A long-time commonplace for the LaRouche set, this too is now a part of the mainstream political discourse. Finally, there is the vitriolic personal assault on the leaders of the administration, culminating most recently in Whoopi Goldberg's obscene punning on President Bush's surname in front of Senator John Kerry himself. Perhaps the historians who say it was this bad in Jefferson's day are correct, but that doesn't make the current incivility any less remarkable ....

This dynamic became all too obvious in the case of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In view of the indefensible character of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from the point of view of "progressive" sentiment, it became crucial to keep the focus on American overreaching and on "anti-imperialism" as an abstraction. That way, the antiwar side did not quite have to say that it would rather Hussein had stayed around to murder people and the Taliban to keep women from medical care than to have had the United States kick them out.

Thus much of the simplicity and heat of the antiwar position has its root in the difficulties of its own situation. But those difficulties do not lead it to moderation. On the contrary, they encourage psychological projection, demonization, and a constant stoking of righteous indignation. This in turn explains why the liberal mainstream has opened itself up to what had previously been judged the paranoid conspiracy theories of the political fringe. Vulgar polemicists like Michael Moore, or the old University of Chicago types who hated Leo Strauss, are always with us. But U.S. senators don't usually lionize the former or Harper's give space to the fantasies of the latter. When that begins to happen, we come to that mysterious point where quantitative change begins to become qualitative. What drives the change, above all, is the need for self-justification. And here the Bush administration has been a stick in the liberal eye.

Realist conservatives with their tough-minded rhetoric are easy for liberal idealists to live with. Tough-mindedness is openly selfish and can be deplored without posing much of a moral challenge. But a frankly idealistic conservatism that doesn't just speak democratization but actually tries to undertake it has to be unmasked, since it poses a moral threat to the good conscience of its opponents. Unmasking measures--that is, vilification and attack on motives--have a double function. They discredit the other side publicly; more importantly they reassure the idealists about their own goodness.

It isn't that the antiwar side would hate to see a democratic Middle East any more than it hated to see the gulag abolished. Rather, the success of the war on terror would mean the triumph of an unreflective, brassy, self-justifying, and morally repulsive patriotism, which could, horribly, sit in judgment of its betters. Of course, Katha Pollitt understood why her daughter wanted, with all of New York, to fly that flag after September 11. But she also thought she understood what her daughter was too naive to grasp, namely that flying that flag would inevitably lead to horrors like Abu Ghraib. Again, for Susan Sontag, it was the most natural thing to conclude in the New York Times Magazine that Abu Ghraib really did represent what the United States has become. For if that were not the case, the utopian idealism of those like Sontag would have to confront the fact that it had defended much that was worse.

Read Baumann's entire piece at the link (it's the best explanation of antiwar sentiment and BushCo demonization you'll find).

Douthat's reader buys into the post-Vietnam mindset by declaring that the traditional liberal internationalist consensus was destroyed in 2001 (recall, apparently, U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam just went "off the road" temporarily). It wasn't. What we saw in the Bush administration was a willingness to put power to prinicples, the same moral principles that drove the liberal utopianism of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policies.

The issue for the country now - our real foreign policy debate - is to resist the abandonment of America's renewed paradigm of power and purpose in international affairs. To that effect, the coming Barack Obama administration is making attempts at international reassurance (the nuclear guarantee to Israel, for example). Desite all of our current economic problems, the U.S. will remain primus inter pares in world politics. American leadership in the Middle East, and increasingly South Asia, will remain central to the agenda of global peace and prosperity for decades to come.

Jesse Jackson Jr. for Senate, Blagojevich Style

Jesse Jackson, Jr., is "Senate candidate number 5," from the federal government's investigation into the Rod Blagojevich pay-for-play scandal (the "Jackson 5").

Well it turns out that a number of Illinois money men talked of a Jackson-backed fundraiser for Blagojevich's (gubernatorial?) campaign. Reading this, things don't sound so good for Representative Jackson:

As Gov. Rod Blagojevich was trying to pick Illinois' next U.S. senator, businessmen with ties to both the governor and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed raising at least $1 million for Blagojevich's campaign as a way to encourage him to pick Jackson for the job, the Tribune has learned.

Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich supporter who also has fundraising and business ties to the Jackson family, according to several attendees and public records.

Two businessmen who attended the meeting and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson's bid for the Senate.

Among the attendees was a Blagojevich fundraiser already under scrutiny by federal investigators, Joliet pharmacist Harish Bhatt.

That meeting led to a Blagojevich fundraiser Saturday in Elmhurst, co-sponsored by Nayak and attended by Jesse Jackson Jr.'s brother, Jonathan, as well as Blagojevich, according to several people who were there. Nayak and Jonathan Jackson go back years and the two even went into business together years ago as part of a land purchase on the South Side.

Blagojevich and the congressman met to discuss the Senate seat on Monday, one day before federal prosecutors arrested Blagojevich and charged him with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. As part of the charges, prosecutors alleged that Blagojevich was considering awarding the seat to a politician identified as "Senate Candidate 5" because emissaries for that candidate were promising to raise as much as $1.5 million for Blagojevich's campaign fund.

U.S. Extended Deterrence to Israel

According to Fox News and Haaretz, the coming Barack Obama administration may offer Israel a nuclear guarantee vis-à-vis Iran. The proposal amounts to the offer of "extended deterrence" to Tel Aviv, and a key problem with such guarantees is the credibility of commitment: Would the U.S. go to war over an Iranian first-strike nuclear attack on Israel? If so, the outbreak of hostilities in a localized Middle East conflict would turn into a global one. Other nuclear powers, such as Russia and China, would move to full battle readiness, particularly Moscow which may see its vital national interests threatened by the real-time extension of U.S. strategic power in his geopolitical backyard.

Richard Fernandez offers an interesting analysis as to rational motivations behind a potential U.S.-Israel nuclear allliance:

From a certain point of view the only thing worse than an Iran with nuclear weapons is the prospect of an Israeli retaliation to an attack, which however justified, could only create eternal enmity with its neighbors. But if the retaliation could be left to America, that might have the virtue of preventing Israel from retaliating, thereby preventing other regional nuclear powers (who presumably emerge in response to a nuclear Iran) from explaining to their outraged populations why they ought not punish the Jews for using atomic bombs. Maybe there is the belief that an American retaliation to an Iranian strike would be more politically acceptable than an Israeli one. With an American deterrent in play Israel could be cut out of the deterrent process — and this would be desirable from a political point of view.

But does it make strategic sense? The downside to this reported proposal is that America undertakes to automatically involve itself in a regional nuclear exchange between atomic powers; thereby creating the risk of going straight from a regional nuclear war to a global one. If an attack on Israel is automatically followed by retaliation from America, what role do Israeli nukes play? From a certain point of view the proposal may actually increase the risk of nuclear war in the Middle East. A combination of tacitly accepting an nuclear-armed Iran and reposing deterrence in Washington could make the Ayatollahs more willing to run the risk. What are the odds that the West can bring itself to enter into a nuclear exchange with Iran if it could not muster the will to prevent Teheran’s acquisition of those weapons in the first place? The Ayatollahs may interpret this proposal as meaning that the West will be a party to any Israeli decision to retaliate for an nuclear attack on its soil, undertaking to attack in lieu or veto the retaliation. It adds one more step in the process of pulling the retaliatory trigger. That can only reduce the certainty of retribution in Teheran’s eyes.

It is far from clear that this proposed policy — acquiescing to a nuclear Iran while reducing the certainty of retaliation — helps anybody. It may hurt everybody.

That's a fascinating discussion.

To some extent, the issue seems kind of moot. At the height of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the U.S. moved to DEFCON 3 (near-crisis stage of military-strategic readiness) in anticipation of a possible Soviet deployment of troops to Egypt to assist Cairo. I doubt the U.S. government, with a presidential administration of either party, would refuse to come to Israel's assistance in the event of an impending or actual nuclear exchange. For the Obama administration, perhaps this all about clarifying the new administration's credibility of commitment, as well as establishing a reputation for firmness in the face of Tehran's international revisionism.

In any case, while we're on the topic, the Wikipedia page for ICBM's has some interesting related information, for example:

To comply with the START II most U.S. multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, have been eliminated and replaced with single warhead missiles. However, since the abandonment of the START II treaty, the U.S. is said to be considering retaining 800 warheads on 450 missiles.

MIRVed land-based ICBMs are considered destabilizing because they tend to put a premium on striking first. If we assume that each side has 100 missiles, with 5 warheads each, and further that each side has a 95 percent chance of neutralizing the opponent's missiles in their silos by firing 2 warheads at each silo, then the side that strikes first can reduce the enemy ICBM force from 100 missiles to about 5 by firing 40 missiles at the enemy silos and using the remaining 60 for other targets. This first-strike strategy increases the chance of a nuclear war, so the MIRV weapon system was banned under the START II agreement.

See also, Abe Greenwald's discussion, "Obama’s Nuclear Pledge to Israel."

Gay Pestilence Should Be Destroyed?

I've probably written two dozens essays on same-sex marriage since the November 4th election. As readers know, the key issue in the debate over gay marriage is the preservation of traditional values, with marriage defined as the intitutionalized union of one man and one woman for the central purpose of procreation and regeneration of society (even couples who do not and cannot have children are still united in an institution that has its social construction in the biological union of man and woman - bearing children is not something same-sex couples can do).

Particularly bothersome, as we have seen, has been the anti-democratic backlash against the initiative by radical gay activists, which has incuding blacklists and intimidation so vile that even mainstream supporters of same-sex marriage rights have recoiled in disgust.

Gay rights activists have attacked supporters of Proposition 8 as "bigots," "Christianists," and "haters."

In my writing on this I have seen conservatives make principled arguments based on superior facts and logic. Indeed, those on the No on H8 side can't seem to make up their minds: Is gay marraige a civil institution? Or, is it a religious institution after all? Since there's no firmly established case for gay marriage other than the spurious claim to "equal rights" for homosexual behavior, gays have had to threaten and browbeat conservatives who have exercized their basic rights to influence policy through the electoral process. As I've noted, in "The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage," the hegemonic anti-democratic element is likely to create a backlash to the gay agenda, and could even cause a decline of popular support for existing and legitimate protections, such as same-sex adoptions.

That said, it's disturbing to find some bloggers on the right who not only confirm the left's stereotypes of right-wing knuckledragging bigots, but that these same extremist faux conservatives give the movement to protect traditional institutions a bad name.

BushwacKKK at American and Proud provides a good example, with his post on the "call in gay" sickout, "Faggots Called in Sick, Straight Only Work Day Went Well":

So now maybe we should call in straight? Across the nation, every heterosexual person in America call in sick, then all the faggots can run around shaking their hands and prancing on their tip toes screaming “Oh my Gosh”…

Personally, if I was a business owner, (other than a damn starbucks or showtune radio station) I’d fire the pipe smokers tomorrow morning. This would be called “Fire a GAY DAY” or better yet “Pink slips for the PINK FLIPS” Either way, there would be some more unemployed faggots that can protest all over the state, all day everyday.

The only thing this accomplished was to show those of us that voted FOR PROP 8 that we did the right thing.. Bunch of fucking queers, They should be banished to a damn Island somewhere and used for target practice ...

BushwacKKK is a member of Basti's Butchers blog-ring of hate, and he's best buddies with Texas Fred and his racist Anti-Wetback Coalition. These scumbags are beneath dirt, and apparently they glorify in their bigotry and hatred. Jenn at Screw Liberals sponsors the hate, seen here for example:

Dear Faggots: The world DID NOT end because you stayed home baking brownies and puffing peckers, it didn't even slow down...

Stay home more often, maybe you'll ALL aquire AIDS sooner, thus ridding the rest of us of your perversion!

Yes libtards, I am a REDNECK, not a homophobe, phobe indicates phobia, fear of, and I am not afraid of queers, I just believe them to be a pestilence that should be destoryed [sic]... Sicks bastards!

These views are fascist, not conservative, and BushwacKKK's ring of hate makes the job of conserving traditional values all the more difficult for the rest of us who fight the good fight, with honor and respect.

Blagojevich and Obama: No Contact?

Captain Ed raises some interesting questions:

Barack Obama has gone out of his way to make his incoming administration Clintonesque. Not only has he built 63% of his transition team from Clinton administration officials, he even picked Hillary Clinton for a Cabinet post. Now Obama appears to have restored another Clinton tradition — in word parsing. Ace has this picture from the December 2nd meeting with the National Governors Association ....

That image belies Obama’s statement from Tuesday, following the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich:

“I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.”

Is this anything like parsing the meaning of the word “is”? Obviously, Obama made contact with Blagojevich a week before the statement at the December 2nd NGA conference. Did they discuss the Senate succession? Probably not, but it’s not necessarily out of the question, either.

Barack Obama had better learn precision in the future

More post-election Blago/Obama photos at the link.

Recall my post from last night, "Browner Proves It: The Second Clinton Administration!" That essay concluded by noting that Obama's administrative appointments suggest we won't have "a 'team of rivals' but a team of cronies from the previous Democratic era of Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and the last presidential impeachment."

It looks like Obama's "parsing" is providing some confirmation of the point.

Newsweek to Cut Staff, Reporting in Magazine Makeover

Newsweek is facing dire straits as the magazine's revenue base shrinks in a changing media market, the Wall Street Journal reports. To adapt, the publishers will reduce circulation and cull the magazine's hard news reporting, in a sense shifting the publication to a journal of opinion:

As it continues its shift away from news gathering toward a more provocative, idea-driven editorial approach, Newsweek is also considering other dramatic changes, including significantly reducing its rate base - the number of weekly copies it promises advertisers it will deliver ...

Recently, Newsweek has emphasized commentary on hot-button issues, such as gay marriage, by big-name journalists like editor Jon Meacham and international editor Fareed Zakaria, as well as contributions from political operatives and academics like Michael Beschloss and Sean Wilentz.

Newsweek is seeking in part to mirror publications like the Economist, which has thrived in a tough market by focusing less on costly news gathering than on driving discussion of the day's issues.

If this week's cover story is any indcation, the shift to opinion over rigorous reporting will likely mean more nails in the magazine's coffin. The article, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage," was a poster-essay in journalistic malpractice on a number of levels. Factually innacurate and morally repulsive, some religious conservatives responded by pledging to cancel their subscriptions.

Interestingly, apparently in tandem with the case for gay marriage, Newsweek's editors have positioned the magazine as a bulwark against religious fundamentalism:

We saw it coming. This week's cover story, written by Lisa Miller, our religion editor, lays out the religious case for gay marriage. As Jon Meacham says in his weekly Editor's Letter, "The reaction to this cover is not difficult to predict. Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their "agenda,"a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come."

At times, Jon Meacham has himself written some of the best journalism around, but he's jumped the shark now. He says this at his editors' note:

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between — this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism.

He then backs up this assertion with the same kind of falsehoods that mar the magazine's cover story.

It's interesting that the Wall Street Journal compares Newsweek's developing model to the Economist. That magazine, probably the most rigorous newsweekly currently available, stands head-and-shoulders over Newsweek, as its editorial standards are based on a careful rationalism found in the same economic logic from which the publication is named.

Newsweek, in shifting its focus to publishing Bush-bashers like Sean Wilentz and moral relativists like Fareed Zakaria, has essentially sold out to the Democratic zeitgeist of the times, a sort of journalistic Obamania. It's a disastrous short-term tack, as well as a disturbing reflection on the decline of moral clarity and objective reason in contemporary American journalism.

See, also, John at Powerline, who says "Goodbye to Newsweek."

Conservative Republicans Still Love Bush

A new Gallup poll finds that conservative Repubicans remain firmly in support of President George W. Bush:

George W. Bush remains popular among conservative Republicans (72% approve of him) despite his low overall approval rating. Meanwhile, moderate and liberal Republicans are as likely to disapprove as to approve of the job he is doing, and Democrats of all political orientations hold Bush in low regard ....

Those from just about every other partisan and ideological perspective give Bush low marks on public support. Bush is currently standing at 29 percent in job approval:

With such a low approval rating, it is hard to find many population subgroups that are favorable to Bush. A look at the groups giving Bush the 10 highest average approval ratings clearly shows how much one's opinion of the president is driven by political attitudes as opposed to demographic characteristics. Only four groups give Bush ratings in excess of 40% approval, and all are defined by political points of view. But because membership in these four groups overlaps (e.g., Republicans and conservative Republicans), when they are subdivided into mutually exclusive groups (as in the first graph), it really is only Americans who are both Republicans and conservatives who hold Bush in high esteem.

People in this category are likely to see President Bush in terms of moral clarity, as a president who's willing to stand up to our enemies, and one who's not likely to cave to pacifist public opinion.

History will record that this administration stood firm in America's fight against a fanatical ideology hellbent on the destruction of the West. The costs have been high, but Bush's commitment to victory in Iraq and the broader war on terror will place him in the category of great foreign policy presidents as the immediacy and partisanship of the moment fade over time.

Bill Ayers Keeps Weathermen Above Ground

The rehabilitation of William Ayers, the '60s terrorist who wishes he'd done more, reflects one of the most fundamental shifts in American culture toward relativism and the rejection of moral truth. Ayers' essay last weekend at the New York Times, an otherworldy parody of reason, certainly confirmed a turning point in society in which no deed - no matter how diabolical - will forever remain unacceptable, and no unrepentant perpetrator of violence against Americans will remain outside the boundaries of polite, upstanding society.

Charles Lane at the Washington Post discusses Ayers in an article with a long but beautifully apt title, "The Unreal Bill Ayers: Three Decades After the Weather Underground's End, He's Still Justifying Its Means":

In a Dec. 6 New York Times op-ed -- headlined "The Real Bill Ayers" -- Ayers cast himself as the victim of a "profoundly dishonest drama" in which he was branded an "unrepentant terrorist." He cops to "posturing" and "blind sectarianism" -- but insists that he never killed or hurt anyone and never intended to. His Weather Underground committed "symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed against monuments to war and racism" -- not terrorism. Its bombings were surgical strikes "meant to respect human life."

Some people might buy this, but not if they know the actual history -- as opposed to Ayers's selective version. Ayers omits the 1969 "Days of Rage" riot in Chicago, spearheaded by his Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. He kicked it off by helping to blow up a downtown police monument the night of Oct. 6, 1969; the blast showered rubble on a nearby expressway and shattered more than 100 windows.

If a warning to the public preceded this strike, Ayers doesn't mention it in his 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days" -- nor does contemporaneous media coverage. In fact, a bus driver told police that his vehicle stalled near the statue a half-hour before the blast; he would have been a sitting duck 30 minutes later. Days afterward, Ayers and other club-wielding leftists fought and injured police officers and smashed storefronts and cars. A government attorney tried to tackle one of them and wound up paralyzed.

In his Times column, Ayers's chronology focuses on 1970, the year he co-founded the Weather Underground "after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village." But this wasn't some especially radicalizing furnace mishap. On March 6, 1970, three members of a Weatherman cell died when a bomb they were making blew up in their faces. Packed with nails for maximum lethality, it had been intended for a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J.

Only then did the Weatherman faction mutate into the Weather Underground -- and begin issuing pre-detonation warnings. Even so, it was still a matter of luck that there were no casualties.

As Todd Gitlin, a former '60s leftist and a historian of the period, put it: "They planned on being terrorists. Then their bomb blew up and killed several of them and they thought better of it. They were failed terrorists."

Ayers told me this week that he did not know about the nail bomb in advance -- and condemned it afterward. I take him at his word. So why obfuscate in the Times? Editors cut the article, he protested -- before conceding that his original version left it out, too.

His refutation of the "terrorist" charge relies, ironically, on the U.S. government's definition: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." "We did not do that," Ayers insisted.

To some, the U.S. Capitol, a Weather Underground target, might qualify as "non-combatant." But Ayers said it was fair game: The U.S. invasion of Laos and Cambodia made it "a symbol of empire."

Ayers has been singing this tune for years. In a 1976 tract, he called for "revolutionary violence," as long as it was "humane." By then the war was over, and his goal was "to build communist organization toward the stage where armed struggle becomes a mass phenomenon led by a Marxist-Leninist party: a revolutionary stage." His crazy means were dictating even crazier ends.

Hardly the worst crimes of that turbulent era, the Weather Underground's deeds were nevertheless immoral. They put innocents at risk and sowed fear. Ultimately, they achieved nothing except to undermine the peaceful antiwar movement. Bill Ayers should cut the sophistry and admit it.

Also, check out Allahpundit's post on Chris Matthews' recent interview with Ayers.

Unreal...

Browner Proves It: The Second Clinton Administration!

Carol Browner, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency for both terms of the Clinton administration (1993-2001), is expected to be tapped as "energy and environmental czar" for the incoming Barack Obama administration.

Well, that does it. I'm putting my foot down, finally. I've held off on criticizing Obama for his oppressively stale administrative appointments. But, I mean let's be honest, this is a de facto Second Clinton Administration, with a token black chief executive who'll be sitting in the Oval Office. This is not just a disaster for the Democratic Party, but for Barack Obama's personal claim to embody hope and change, not to mention post-partisan transformation.

Recall what we've seen so far: Obama picked the profane Illinois political operative Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff. Emmanuel, prior to being elected to Illinois' 5th conressional district in 2002, was Bill Clinton's campaign finance director in 1992, and later served in the Clinton White House as a personal advisor to the president.

Then, of course, we have Senator Hillary Clinton who has accepted her nomination to be secretary of state in the new administration. The Clinton pick raises more questions than anything we've seen so far. Tapping Clinton, above all, is a sign of Obama's dire weaknesses. Did Obama need to shore up his credibility with the PUMAs? Probably not, as he won a decisive 52.5 percent majority on November 4th (apparently showing that the pre-convention fears of party disunity were overblown). No, Obama selected Clinton to neutralize his own woeful inexperience, and not just in foreign policy, which Hillary had targeted so effectively during the primaries (don't forget the "3 am phone call"). After running perhaps the most successful presidential campaign in history, Obama put on the retroburners. Frozen by the fact that he's going to have to actually govern, he tossed his utopian calls for transformation and hewed to the tried and true of old-news party hacks. We'll have not just have Hillary, but Bill Clinton too, as an in-house deputy secretary of state, with tremendous influence on his wife (and not to mention his estimable connections, which at any other time in history would raise vigorous questions of conflict of interest).

Then you've got New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, the most qualified failed presidential candidate in American history. Richardson was Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of energy. Having been snubbed for state, Richardson will preside over private-sector ribbon-cutting at one of the smallest cabinet departments in Washington. What a letdown, but it's a perfect signature for Obama's already-failing style of bureaucratic leadership.

Of special note is attorney general-nominee Eric Holder. As assitant attorney general in the second Clinton administration, Holder endorsed Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which soon became a culminating symbol of the moral vacuum of the Clinton presidency.

With the appointment of Carol Browner as a top staffer on Obama's energy and environmental policy, we'll see another top Clinton administration official coming back to D.C. for a second turn on the Democratic-insider merry-go-round (revolving door?). An undistinguished bureaucrat, Browner apparently stepped on toes during her tenure as the administration's enforcer on bone-crushing anti-business environmental mandates. This time around she'll have the added capital of global warming hysteria to really dampen entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

More announcements are on the way (including the possible appointment of Anthony Lake, a former national security advisor to Bill Clinton, as CIA director - no "change" there, again!).

Note that Obama's selection of physicist Steven Chu as secretary of energy should have been the model. This man has no inside Washington experience, and he boasts impeccable credentials as a winner of the Nobel Prize. Chu is a big thinker on the cutting-edge of alternative fuels and is thus exactly the kind of pick that Obama should be making across-the-board.

The progressive left has been deeply disappointed with Obama's appointments so far (not enough "genuine" Democratic leftists). But it's the American public who should really be disappointed, now that they're disabused of the campaign's lofty - even ethereal - promises of national healing, unity, and restoration of American values abroad. The fact is American government will largely return to the status quo ante, circa 1999. The difference is the country's got pent-up and deep-seated problems, and the man in driver's seat (or the figurehead, depending on how incompetent Barack Hussein ends up being) will have not a "team of rivals" but a team of cronies from the previous Democratic era of Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and the last presidential impeachment.

I can't see how this constitutes the kind of "change" Americans hoped for when they pulled their levers last month. But this year's been a black-magic tour of corruption and radicalism on the Democratic side, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, and now to Rod Blogojevich.

I'll be relieved, though, if Obama breaks with Bill Clinton's record and loses in 2012, ending up as a failed one-term president with his first-term agenda of big-government liberalism repudiated at the polls next time around.

Gay Marriage Disinformation and Intimidation

There's a little debate online this afternoon over Mike Huckabee's appearance on Jon Stewart's show. Apparenlty, Stewart's a big liberal PC master, and he peppered Huck with the standard leftists questions and false equivalencies.

Think Progress has the video, but note this transcripted portion and the response:

Huckabee tried to insist that “60 percent of the American population” opposes gay marriage. Stewart interrupted him, calling it a “travesty” that gay Americans have to plead for their civil rights:

HUCKABEE: If the American people are not convinced that we should overturn the definition of marriage, then I would say that those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us. And as I said, 60 percent of the American population has made the decision–

STEWART: You know, you talk about the pro-life movement [abortion] being one of the great shames of our nation. I think if you want number two, I think it’s that: It’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights as someone else.

Watch the whole interview ....

It is true that 30 states have banned gay marriage. However, Huckabee — like other conservatives who make similar claims — is wrong to suggest that American public opinion is on his side. A recent poll found that a full 75 percent of Americans favor either gay marriage or civil unions, with nearly 50 percent favoring gay marriage itself. More importantly, the next generation is much more open to gay rights: According to CNN exit polls, an overwhelming majority — 67 percent — of 18-29 year-olds voted against stripping gay couples of their right to marry in California.

Note that Think Progress, to make its case, cites a bogus poll plus the views of young people, who are more liberal on the issue but don't vote in near the proportion to older and more conservative voters.

Just this week Newsweek published the results of its poll on gay marriage, and just 31 percent of those surveyed said they backed full-blown same-sex marriage rights. Huckabee's not only correct, but he's citing conservative estimates on support for traditional family structures.

But that doesn't matter to the radical leftists, who have launched a campaign of intimidation to overturn a decisive majority around the country in favor of retaining traditional heterosexual unions. As the New York Times reports today, in "Gay Marriage Ban Inspires New Wave of Activists," homosexual activists are launching anti-democratic campaigns seeking to browbeat and intimidate people over their agenda:

The ban [Prop 8], which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned a decision by the California Supreme Court in May legalizing same-sex marriage. The same court is currently considering a challenge to Proposition 8.

But many activists seem unwilling to wait for a legal solution and have planned a series of events to keep the issue in the public eye, including a nationwide candlelight vigil later this month, a Million Gay March in Washington next spring and continued protests at county clerks’ offices throughout California.

“We’re doing an end run around the mainstream organizations that run our causes,” said David Craig, a movie producer who is an organizer of Wednesday’s “call in gay” protest. “And the Internet has given us the tool to create these events.”

Recall that gay radicals frequently invoke the black civil rights movement in hopes of finding moral authority for their position. But blacks were disinfranchised prior to 1964 and 1965. They really were on the back of the bus.

Today, gay Americans enjoy full equal protection under the law (and recall that gay marriage is not considered as under the civil rights umbrella according to the federal Defense of Marriage Act). What they don't have - and they'll berate, lie, stomp, and whine until they get their way - is the right to impose their will on a majority of voters who have legitimately and peacefully sought to protect their interests through the ballot box.

New Down Syndrome Tests May Increase Abortions

A couple of years back I had a young woman with Down syndrome in my American government class.

She was the sweetest young woman you'd ever want to meet. Her condition was mild, and she had a wonderful way about herself and her abilities. She would often stay after class and ask me to look over her lecture notes to see if she got everything down. She wrote a perfectly fine news analysis notebook - the term-paper assignmnent for the course - and she wound up doing better in the class than a number of the coolsters and hip-hoppers who would drag their tails to class every day 20 minutes past the hour.

I never really thought much of it. My young student was more conscientious and polite than most young people I meet. It was my pleasure to have her in the class.

Thus, I was very disturbed to read this story on the new screening tests available for expecting mothers, tests that have pro-life adocates worried that even more Downs syndrome babies will be terminated:

Beth Allard was recovering from labor, waiting for a hospital photographer to capture her newborn son's first day in the world, when a pediatrician walked into her room and told Allard her life was ruined. Allard might have expected as much from a doctor, given what she'd already heard from others in the previous few months: little Ben, who had tested positive in utero for Down syndrome, would be mute and illiterate, they said; he would spend his life hanging off her, drooling. The pediatrician was harsher: "You should consider putting him up for adoption," she said. "You're going to end up divorced. Don't even bother having any other children. Didn't you have the option to terminate?" Finally, the pediatrician left, and Allard resumed her wait for the photographer. He never came.

Ben Allard is now 9, and it's hard to understand why doctors were convinced he would be such a burden. He's a friendly, witty kid who's happily enrolled in third grade at a regular school. He does, says Beth, "all the things they told us he wouldn't be doing, and more." She shudders when she thinks about how wrong the doctors turned out to be: she almost took their advice and ended her pregnancy.

Read the whole thing, here.

I have to confess I get a little emotional reading stories like this, which seem to be way too frequent amid this growing culture of death that's taken over today's Democratic left. The article cites a 2000 survey of pediatricians that found 1-of-4 doctors encouraging their patients to abort their pregnancies. This reminds me of Michael Barone's comments on why the media attacked Governor Sarah Palin so viciously: "The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby ... They wanted her to kill that child ... "

One of my very best blogging buddies sent this website along, theupsideofdowns.org. Please take a moment to think more about families with this kind of love. I do not know the difficulties parents face raising a child with Downs syndrome. I do know that they should not be coerced into killing their babies.

The Democrats' "Phony Scandal"

It's the nature of partisan politics to defend your side when a scandal emerges, but frankly, the Chicago pay-for-play allegations are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg for a presidential administration rooted in the corrupt Chicago patronage-machine cesspool.

Here's Digby blowing it off as a right-wing witchhunt:

I don't know if this environment is conducive to phony scandal. There's just so much going on. But if it is, this is one of the ways they do it. Guilt by association, drip-drip-drip of vague allegations and ongoing "questions." The key to really hammering it home, of course, would be for the Republicans to win back a majority in the congress in 2010, which I think is unlikely. The Republicans were growing in strength during that earlier era and are now in retreat, at least temporarily.

But keep this in the back of your mind. If there is room for scandal and the wingnuts can get traction, this is one of their tried and true methods of getting it "out there."

Of course, resort to comic relief is a sure sign that the scandal is damaging to Democratic power prospects next year. Check out this from Josh Marshall's reader:

I think you guys should do a Most Corrupt State smackdown. Maybe get CREW, POGO, ProPublica, and whoever else wants to help to cooperate. I think it's pretty clear that the only three serious contenders are Illinois, Louisiana, and Alaska. My money would be on the young upstart, Alaska, over the grizzled corruption veterans of Illinois and Louisiana, but who knows. Statistics should play a part in the contest, but style points are important, too. Cash in the freezer is pretty impressive, as is trying to shake down the President-Elect.

Now, back to reality: It turns out that Andy Stern, the new-age Big Labor roughneck, may have acted as a go-between for Blogojevich and the Obama tranistion team:

Among the revelations contained in the complaint brought against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich yesterday was the description of an official with the Service Employees International Union acting as an apparent intermediary between the governor and Barack Obama's camp in discussions over Obama's Senate seat.

The alleged role of the SEIU official was surprising, given that the union had not figured publicly in the investigation into Blagojevich (D). But on another level, the SEIU's apparent involvement is an indication of the extent to which it has, under the leadership of its ambitious and controversial president, Andrew L. Stern, become an omnipresent force in Democratic politics.

With organized labor holding such high expectations for the Obama administration -- notably, hopes for legislation fiercely opposed by business leaders that would make it easier to form unions -- officials of other unions were hoping yesterday that the SEIU's apparent involvement in the Illinois scandal would not undermine their cause in Washington.

The U.S. attorney's complaint states that Blagojevich mused aloud with his advisers about the possibility that he could seek a high-paying job with Change to Win, the coalition of seven unions -- dominated by SEIU -- that broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Blagojevich and his chief of staff wondered aloud about a "three-way deal" in which he would appoint Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman believed to be the woman identified in the complaint as "Candidate 1," to Obama's Senate seat; Blagojevich in return would become Change to Win's executive director; and Obama would reward Change to Win with pro-labor policies.

The complaint also states that on Nov. 12, Blagojevich spoke by phone with an "SEIU official" who was in Washington and with whom Blagojevich had met a week before on the understanding that the official was an emissary to discuss Jarrett's interest in the Senate seat. In the conversation, the SEIU official is alleged to have said that Obama now wanted Blagojevich to consider candidates other than Jarrett.

It's no surprise that big union bosses are in the middle of all of this. We're seeing a culture of corruption with no equal in American politics:

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the "we're cleaner than thou" rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, Charlie "Sweetheart Deals" Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame "Text Me" Kilpatrick. It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania's state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

The Democrats have met the culture of corruption, and it looks like it ain't just elephants among the jackasses soiling public office.

But the Dreams I've Seen Lately...

I'll again be away from the computer for some time (dinner and kids' homework-time tonight), so please enjoy The Eagles, with Randy Meisner, and "Take it to the Limit":

I'll be back online later.

In the meanwhile, here's Randy Meisner's Wikipedia entry, or click some of the tags below for more of my music favorites.

Remembering John Lennon (But Not Pearl Harbor)

December 7th is one of those days, like September 11th, that draws forth the deepest sentiments of history and American patriotism.

Not for everyone, it turns out.

I noticed that Jeralyn at Talk Left has made a tradition of remembering December 8th every year, the day John Lennon was killed:

28 years ago tonight, in the middle of Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell announced there had been an "unspeakable tragedy in New York City." John Lennon had been shot. (Video here.)

This is my sixth annual blog post about that night, and how for me, it's a day of both sadness and celebration ...

As readers know, I've always loved the Beatles, but I have to separate their music from Lennon's brainless idealism (although George Harrison's Concert for Bangledesh was too hip, I must admit).

Still, I probably wouldn't complain about Jeralyn, since she was a big Hillary backer in the Democratic primaries and she seemed - throughout the election - generally less deranged than most of the whack "progressives" we see across the leftosphere. But she makes no reference to Pearl Harbor in her Sunday posting (scroll down and you'll see). Rather, there's repeated posts on "Blackwater guards" and "911 detainees," that is, all the indicators of the "fascist" reign of the evil "BushCo" regime.

Then it occured to me: All of Jeralyn's pro-Hillary centrism was mostly bull. HRC's candidacy was the ulitmate gender quota. Why support the first black when the first white woman should be first in line? That's right: The radical sisters want America to pay down the debt of historical oppression by installing the "First Lady" in the presidency. Forget "hope and change" ... it's all about "identity politics" among leftists, so it makes sense - imagine, a sisterhood of man, and no countries on top of that, especially the hegmonic United States! NO BLOOD FOR OIL!

For those who don't worship the Church of John and Yoko, don't miss Stogie's awesome Pearl Harbor commemoration, "Remembering Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941."

Rod Blagojevich: Preview of Obama Administration Corruption?

Rick Moran has the backround the Illinois Governor's arrest in the state's "pay-for-play" scandal:

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, have been arrested and charged with a multitude of crimes involving everything from a “pay-to-play” scheme for state contracts to his attempt to sell the open Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for “financial considerations” for the governor and his wife.

I know political corruption follows no particular partisan lines, but Illinois remains the last big "party machine" state in American politics, and Barack Obama launched his career in the maelstrom of Chicogo's corrupt ward politics. Gina Cobb touches on the Democratic nature of the scandal, and what to expect in the coming months and years:

It may be schadenfruede time, but more than that, it's "hang your head, America" time. How did we elect this man? How many more Gov. Blagojeviches and Elliot Spitzers have we put into office? How many more politicians and bureaucrats in state and local government are trading their power for money and favors right now? How many corruptocrats many are waiting in the wings to join the Obama administration?

There's some speculation that top Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett was one of the possible candidates willing to pony up for the open Illinois Senate seat, AND some are suggesting that Jarrett's appointment as a "public liaison and senior aide to the president" was made just in time to avoid her being implicated in Governor Blagojevich's investigation.

Did President-Elect Obama know that his Senate seat was up for sale?

Don't doubt it folks. As I've said before, this man is the most secretive candidate we've seen in decades, and his administration's likely corruption will put Richard Nixon's in the shade.

See also, "GOP Ties Obama to Arrested Ill. Governor," and "US Atty: Not Alleging Obama Knew of Ill. Gov. Plan."

"Day Without A Gay" Protests Planned

The "No on H8" gay rights activists are stepping up their campaign of opposition to Proposition 8 with a "call-in gay" day, set for tomorrow:

Since California voters approved Proposition 8 last month and repealed the right of gay couples to marry, initiative opponents have marched, held rallies and blocked intersections.
On Wednesday, they're asked to do something different: nothing at all.

Modeled loosely after the 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations, "Day Without A Gay" is scheduled for Wednesday and billed as "a nationwide strike and economic boycott" at www.jointheimpact.com, an organizational site for supporters of same-sex marriage.

In San Francisco, the day will be marked by a 6 p.m. rally and march in the Mission District. But local organizers say they don't expect all Prop. 8 opponents to "call in gay" and instead spend the day doing volunteer work, as some proponents urge.

Jammie Wearing Fool adds this:

I could make a crude reference to how Wednesday is also commonly known as hump day, but we like to keep things highbrow around here.

Planned Parenthood's Abortion Extremism

From St. Blogustine, here's the video clip of a Planned Parenthood staffer covering-up of the statutory rape of a thirteen year-old girl in favor of aborting her child:

The above video is the latest example of Planned Parenthood's continued illegal activity, this time in Indiana, in which a 13 year old girl reports being impregnated by her 31 year old boyfriend to the Planned Parenthood nurse, who tells her to keep quiet about it or lie about his age. Apparently, killing her child in her womb is more imperative than prosecuting the 31 year old boyfriend for statutory rape and/or child abuse[emphasis added].

Newsweek on Gay Marriage: "At Least Get Scripture Right"

I need to follow up my piece from last night, "The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage," where I argued against Newsweek's cover story this week, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."

It turns out that Mollie Hemmingway takes apart Newsweek's Lisa Miller and her disastrous hack job on the Bible's scriptural foundations for traditional marriage:

This is such hackery that it’s offensive ....

I hold sacred the New Testament model of marriage and find Miller’s comments to be beneath contempt. I also wonder what, if anything, she has read from the New Testament.

When my husband read the opening graph of this train wreck of a hit piece, he wondered if these words of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, indicated indifference to family:

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Would that be the indifference that Miller is referring to? Because it really just doesn’t sound indifferent to me. This quote from Jesus comes in a larger section on, well, earthly attachments. One part notes that only those who have the gift of celibacy are to be celibate. I have no doubt that my elementary school-age nieces know these things. Shouldn’t Lisa Miller?

And while St. Paul does endorse single life enthusiastically, for those who are able (a key point left out of Miller’s little opening paragraph), he writes extensively about marriage. In fact, he’s normally picked on for his clear endorsement of traditional marriage, as in Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

There is nothing lukewarm about this. In fact, there is nothing lukewarm about any of the writings of Paul.

Now, as a member of a contemporary marriage, albeit one that isn’t so foolish as to think marriage is about gender equality or romantic love, I can honestly say that the Bible has been the only guide that has helped my husband and myself. We turn to it constantly to be reminded that the husband is to sacrifice for the wife and the wife is to respect the husband (these things don’t come naturally to either my husband or myself).

And yet Miller discounts our faith by saying that “of course” a contemporary married couple wouldn’t turn to Scripture as a guide for marriage. Just who does she think she is? And why does she have the cover story of Newsweek?

The rest of the piece is about as worthless and mendacious as the opening paragraph. She repeatedly pretends that marriage is not defined in Scripture — although the two examples I gave above manage to define it unambiguously as a heterosexual union. Even her own mentions of the patriarchs prove the point that Biblical marriage is heterosexual in nature.

RELATED: "KipEsquire" has no effective response for my essay on the secular case against gay marriage:

It’s all circular: Since marriage is procreative, anything that is not procreative is not marriage.

Actually, the argument at the post is not circular, but gay advocates are more about visceral emotion than rigorous logic.

Most Influential Wartime Speeches

Here's a great selection from the editors at RealClearWorld, "Most Influential Wartime Speeches":

Sunday came and went almost unnoticed by most Americans. But it was 67 years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941 - also a Sunday - that the United States naval base in Pearl Harbor was attacked by a massive Japanese air strike that plunged the U.S. into the Second World War. It remains the most audacious aerial assault by a seaborne force in history. And the scars and vengeance from that fateful day did much to alter modern world history.

American reaction to the attack was fierce because it was considered a "sneak attack," for the Japanese had failed to deliver a declaration of war on the United States prior to the sinking of the battleships in Pearl Harbor. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt similarly reacted with strong rhetoric, imploring Americans to end decades of isolationism in order to defend their nation and freedom.

FDR used ferocious language - "day of infamy," "treachery," and "dastardly" among the expressions - to drive his point home to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. His speech was also broadcast on radio for all Americans to hear. By then, FDR's stellar oratorical skills were well known by the average U.S. citizen, for he had become a regular presence with his famous weekly fireside chats.

Oratorical flourishes were often needed to galvanize a nation in times of despair or war. Throughout the turbulent 20th century, major speeches were often given by heads of states engaged in conflicts. With the advent of radio, and later television, some of these speeches were immortalized and filed away for history's posterity.

Into the 21st Century, with grave new threats and challenges, major wartime speeches certainly will return to our radios, television sets and now computers and smart phones. This one took place on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001:

Read the whole thing, here.

Especially powerful is Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons, on June 18, 1940:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Crisis in the Black Family

Kay Hymowitz comments on the enduring crisis of the black family in the United States:

In the nearly half-century in which we have gone from George Wallace to Barack Obama, America has another, less hopeful story to tell about racial progress, one that may be even harder to reverse.

In 1965, a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers. As Moynihan wrote in a now-famous report for the Johnson administration, especially troubling was that the growth in illegitimacy, as it was universally called then, coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying - and fathering - less ....

Since 1965, through economic recessions and booms, the black family has unraveled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980, black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 percent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighborhoods, the number was closer to 66 percent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of American women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who did bear children were unmarried. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. In parts of Newark and Philadelphia, for example, it is common to find children who are not only growing up without their fathers but don't know anyone who is living with his or her biological father.

And what has this meant for racial progress? Fifty years after Jim Crow, black U.S. households have the lowest median income of any racial or ethnic group. Close to a third of black children are poor, and their chances of moving out of poverty are considerably lower than those of their white peers. The fractured black family is not the sole explanation for these gaps, but it is central. While half of all black children born to single mothers are poor, that is the case for only 12 percent of those born to married parents. At least three simulation studies "marrying off" single mothers to either the fathers of their children or to potential husbands of similar demographic characteristics concluded that child poverty would be dramatically lower had marriage rates remained what they were in 1970.

Black married couples make a median household income of $62,000, which is more than 80 percent of what white households earn and represents a gain of 13 percentage points since the 1960s. Yet overall, black household median income is only 62 percent that of white households, a mere six-point increase over the same period.

Merely walking down the aisle can't explain these differences. Rather, the institution of marriage appears to promote ideals of stability, order and fidelity that benefit children and adults alike. Those who pin their hopes for black progress on education tend to forget this. Numerous studies, when controlled for income and race, show that, on average, children growing up with single mothers are less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. And Moynihan's discovery of a negligible relationship between "economic conditions and social conditions" suggests that even increases in black male employment are not a certain cure.

Through the power of his own example, Obama presents a chance to revive what Lyndon Johnson called "the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights." Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," conveys the economic, emotional and existential toll of growing up fatherless, and he has spoken movingly of his determination to ensure for his own children a different life. Yet tackling this issue won't be easy. When Obama gave a Father's Day speech lamenting "fathers . . . missing from too many lives and too many homes," Jesse Jackson was so incensed that he said he wanted to castrate Obama. Still, painful as the subject is, the alternative is far worse: racial inequality as far as the eye can see.

The importance of family stability has been a key theme of Barack Obama's speeches on the politics of responsibility. But the coming Obama administration cannot resort to stale spending initiatives - reminiscent of the War on Poverty - to kick start a black urban poverty agenda.

New ideas are needed. But when the proportion of single-parent black households declines, the country will see improvements in virtually all the other categories of socieoeconomic well-being.

Oh Yeah, All Right, Take it Easy Baby...

I'm going to be away from the computer for a while, so please enjoy Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "American Girl":



I remember watching the band at the Super Bowl halftime show this year. It was awesome to see these guys playing with such verve, and the enthusiasm of the crowd rushing the stage reminded me of some of the stadium concerts I attended years ago (YouTube here).

I called my son down from his room to watch the performance, but he wasn't interested. It reminded me of Jack Black in School of Rock, "What do they teach you kids around here ... !"Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a great American band.

Progressives Still Grumbling at Obama Cabinet Picks

In response to today's piece at the Politico, and hard-leftists like Chris Bower (cited therein), Megan McArdle offers an incisive analysis of the problems with today's progressives: "Some Progressives Apparently Shocked to Discover That They Elected a Politician, Not (Awesomely Wise Secular Teacher!) Jesus. Clip at Eleven":

For a movement that grew out of the anti-corruption campaigns of the late nineteenth century, and was nurtured in the hothouse built by domestic Communism and Socialism, modern progressivism seems curiously unwilling to think about, much less cope with, institutionalist models of politics. Enacting legislation is not a matter of getting a president and a filibuster-proof majority, unless you happen to have a congress filled with career-suicide bombers. It is a matter of getting a filibuster-proof majority and a bill that either no one cares about, or is supported by close to a majority of voters. (Actually, it's much more complicated than that. But as a general rule, this simple model is much more effective than believing that shortly before electing Barack Obama, America collectively read Gunnar Myrdal and shifted about 20 points to the left.)

Here's more McArdle on the letdown on the left:

This sort of ridiculous posturing pervades every post campaign let down. Oh, yes, Barack Obama couldn't have been elected without progressives. He also couldn't have been elected without lower-middle class Moms who like to drive to Wal-Mart in their SUVs to buy enormous flat-screen televisions for the family room. Guess which group is larger?

I would add that progressives themselves have identified their activists as the heirs to the radical leftsts of the 1960s and 1970s.

And while there are more Wal-Mart SUV moms in the coalition that elected Barack Obama, the media elite are firmly on the side of today's hardline secular radicals and their campaign to strip the public sphere of traditional moral values and objective truth. That, and the possibility of Obama's "secret theory of progressivism," means that all of these developments are in fact more complicated than McArdle allows.

Report from Afghanistan

Michael Yon has the first in a new series of reports from Afghanistan, where he says, the war "is just beginning":

While Americans sleep tight in their beds, this time of year U.S. soldiers sit shivering through the frigid, crystal clear nights at remote outposts in places most of us have never heard of and will never see. Often they head out into the enveloping darkness, to hunt down and destroy terrorists, who continue to kill innocent Afghans, Americans, Aussies, Balinese, Brits, Indians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Spanish … in short, anyone who opposes their violent tyranny. Their greatest weapons are ignorance and terror. Witness the latest unprovoked attack on our friends in India.

These enemies have no wish to reconcile with their fellow countrymen, or compromise in any way that would diminish their control of the lives of the ordinary Afghans who don’t share their feral vision of life. They throw acid in the faces of little girls whose only crime is that they go to school. So we must continue to send our toughest men to confront them eye to eye, while performing the difficult balancing act of not alienating those who intend us no harm. This is particularly difficult in Afghanistan, a proud nation with a deep tradition of antipathy toward outsiders — even those who are here to help, though I am finding many Afghans clearly do not want us to leave.

We will get the clearest, sober, and realistic reports from independent journalists on the ground in Afghanistan.

Read the rest of the report, here.