Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I thought of Saving Private Ryan today. I thought twice about posting a video, for as powerful as that movie is, I wasn't sure if the cinematic version of history would be solemn enough on today's 65th commemoration of the Normandy invasion.
Our WWII veterans are almost entirely gone. My father, an 8th AF B-17 pilot, passed away on February 11th of this year at the age of 88. Where did we find such men? Ordinary, common men from every part of our nation, from the farmlands of Iowa to the cities of New York and Los Angeles? They all answered the call, willingly, courageously, unselfishly. They set their lives aside in order to do their part. Some made it back; some didn't. Some came back in pieces.
Who will sacrifice for our nation's future? Where will we find our future warriors?
I fear: I do not see so many.
I still say: God bless America. The last, best hope for the entire planet.
Check out this great piece on the 320th Antiaircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, a blacks-only unit at Omaha and Utah during the D-Day landings, "Forgotten Battalion’s Last Returns to Beachhead":
William G. Dabney could hardly have expected to be spending that ferocious June day in 1944 hunkered on Omaha Beach, struggling to keep aloft one of the tethered silver balloons intended to confound German pilots trying to bomb or strafe exposed Allied invaders in Normandy.
As a member of the only all-black unit in the D-Day landings on Omaha and Utah, the two beachheads assigned to American forces, Corporal Dabney was a rarity in a European war that in its early days was fought almost entirely by whites.
The contributions of his unit, the 320th Antiaircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, have been largely forgotten over the years. But on Saturday, Mr. Dabney, now 84, will join President Obama near Omaha Beach to mark the 65th anniversary of the invasion. On Friday, he received the Legion of Honor from the French government. Officials of the White House Commission on Remembrance, which organizes services at American war memorials, say he is the only survivor of the 320th they have been able to track down.
At 17, Mr. Dabney, of Roanoke, Va., had chafed to join older friends already at war, and had to persuade his grandmother to let him enlist. Most black soldiers were being given support roles in the United States, but like many young men, Mr. Dabney craved action at the front. He volunteered for “special service,” which he thought would have him loading artillery weapons.
“I didn’t know that it involved flying balloons,” he said in a telephone interview from Roanoke.
He was sent to Tennessee to train with the 320th, a unit intended mainly to deploy blimplike balloons for coastal defense. But he soon found himself bound for England and a role in the invasion of France.
In retrospect, Corporal Dabney and his contemporaries can be seen as pioneers. As late as the mid-1930s, the Army had been less than 2 percent black. The Coast Guard used blacks only as stewards, the Navy mainly for kitchen help. The Marines and the Army Air Forces barred blacks outright. The discriminatory treatment was defended by an Army War College report in 1925 concluding that blacks lacked intellect and courage.
“Blacks wanted to participate” in World War II, “but the position of the military was that wartime is not a time for social experimentation,” said William A. De Shields, a retired Army colonel and founder of the Black Military History Institute of America.
“I am not a Greater Israel guy and I have no objection to dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal, but getting so hung up on freezing settlement growth is not wise because it is not the most important issue out there,” argued Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University.
The far bigger concern, he said, is that the Palestinians are unable to make similar concessions because of their political divisions and weakness.
Israelis have turned rightward and most analyses suggest that the reason is a growing fear of regional threats, notably Iranian-backed parties like Hezbollah and Hamas, on Israel’s borders.
Sarah Honig, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, a conservative paper, put it this way a week ago in a column: “Settlements aren’t the problem and removing them isn’t the solution. Israel foolishly dismantled 21 Gaza Strip settlements in 2005. Did peace blossom all over as a result? Precisely the reverse occurred. The razing of Israeli communities was regarded as terror’s triumph, expediting the Hamas takeover.”
The settlements are a complex issue that resonates in surprising ways here. Zionism began 125 years ago through the Jewish purchase of land in Palestine and the building of settlements on what the Jews saw as their ancient homeland. When Israel won additional territory in the 1967 war, a conflict it felt was imposed on it, many here viewed it as the miraculous continuation of Jewish national rebirth in the biblical heartland. Religious Jews began settling there, but others were attracted by low prices, open space and a pioneering ethos.
We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It's a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government. In such a world, it's all too rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity.
The Second World War did that. No man who shed blood or lost a brother would say that war is good. But all know that this war was essential. For what we faced in Nazi totalitarianism was not just a battle of competing interests. It was a competing vision of humanity. Nazi ideology sought to subjugate and humiliate and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale, fueled by a hatred of those who were deemed different and therefore inferior. It was evil.
The nations that joined together to defeat Hitler's Reich were not perfect. They had made their share of mistakes, had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to, whatever our differences, we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped. Citizens of all faiths and of no faith came to believe that we could not remain as bystanders to the savage perpetration of death and destruction. And so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free.
EagleWingz08, a commenter at Gateway Pundit, is underwhelmed:
Given the tenor of the speech, and how Obama claims that it was a miracle it succeeded, one must posit the belief, as with Obama's take on the surge for the past four years, that if he were in the Oval Office when the plans for D-Day were being hashed out, he would have rejected them as too improbable and impossible to succeed. How we would have retaken Europe under a President Obama is a mystery that gets me sick even to consider.
The Fox Nation is for those committed to the core principles of tolerance, open debate, civil discourse - and fair and balanced coverage of the news. It is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought, expression, and worship.
Today's report at the New York Times,"New Scrutiny of Judge’s Most Controversial Case," is a frankly devastating portrait of Sonia Sotomayor's deeply flawed jurisprudence (and in light of this story, it's almost inaccurate to utter "Sotomayor" and "jurisprudence" in the same sentence):
Near the end of a long and heated appeals court argument over whether New Haven was entitled to throw out a promotional exam because black firefighters had performed poorly on it, a lawyer for white firefighters challenging that decision made a point that bothered Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
“Firefighters die every week in this country,” the lawyer, Karen Lee Torre said. Using the test, she said, could save lives.
“Counsel,” Judge Sotomayor responded, “we’re not suggesting that unqualified people be hired. The city’s not suggesting that. All right?”
The exchange was unusually charged. Almost everything about the case of Ricci v. DeStefano — from the number and length of the briefs to the size of the appellate record to the exceptionally long oral argument — suggested that it would produce an important appeals court decision about how the government may use race in decisions concerning hiring and promotion.
But in the end the decision from Judge Sotomayor and two other judges was an unsigned summary order that contained a single paragraph of reasoning that simply affirmed a lower court’s decision dismissing the race discrimination claim brought by Frank Ricci and 17 other white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, who had done well on the test.
The Ricci case, bristling with important issues, has emerged as the most controversial and puzzling of the thousands of rulings in which Judge Sotomayor participated, and it is likely to attract more questions at her Supreme Court confirmations hearings than any other.
Read the full article here. Memeorandum links to addtional opinions, here. Robert Stacy McCain offers a long discursion on the hypocrisy of leftist identity politics, here.
I'm simply struck by the sheer underqualification of Sonia Sotomayor. This woman is an ideological quota queen par excellence. That fact explains why she's so popular, and defended so vociferously, by the racial victimologists on the radical left. Indeed, radicals have now turned support for Sotomayor's nomination into a loyalty test of hardline leftist nihilism. See Dave Neiwert, "We Stand With Sonia Sotomayor," and "Stand with Judge Sotomayor Against the Right-Wing Attacks."
Before the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, before the attacks on 9/11, there existed operationally decentralized but ideologically coherent gangs of pro-life, pro-gun, anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant crazies who represented the clearest and most present danger to the nation. Their crowning achievement: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 and wounded hundreds more.
Drawn from the ranks of fundamentalist Christians, neo-Nazis, survivalists, Ku Klux Klansmen, and radical pro-lifers, these nativist cadres have proven to be far more resilient than any of the putrid spawn of the so-called New Left, such as the Weather Underground.
Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder — an opponent of all but local government, a sometime tax resister who was once found by police with bomb-making materials in his car — appears to be a member of similar factions, including the "sovereign citizen" movement.
Like the New Left, the New Right advocates "power to the people" —its "people" being largely white, male, and Christian.
The mainstream political figure who most eloquently articulated the philosophy of the contemporary right was Senator Barry Goldwater. In his 1964 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Goldwater preached, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Roeder would no doubt agree.
Ever since Goldwater, Republicans have successfully played footsie with the most repulsive elements on the right. It was part of President Richard Nixon's malevolent genius that he was able to defang the 1968 candidacy of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, capturing enough angry, racist votes to win the White House.
Ronald Reagan proved just as slick, kicking off his 1980 campaign at an all-white Southern church and pledging himself to "state rights," which is rightspeak for keeping the black man in his place. It was during the Reagan era that the many and varied apostles of hate and other assorted political misfits found common cause.
Shorter Boston Phoenix: "Conservatives are Nazis."
Just keep the left's hypocrisy in mind when you read bullshit editorials like this. All mainstream conservatives denounced the Tiller murder in unequival terms. We've yet to see an equal response to the death of American troops at home.
Subsidizing the continuating of the privatized welfare state is just about the worst thing we can do, on health care, or things like pensions, etc.
Your logical frame for discussion of health care benefits is misleading, and incorrect I think. We exempt health care benefits from taxation, a relic of the WWII era labor unrest of wage-price problems, where companies could deal with wage restraints by creating these fringe benefits, as they came to be called. They're still compensation, no matter what way you slice it. There is a cash value to it that is essentially deferred or foregone income. We are not looking at potential taxation of health care benefits as a new tax, but instead the ending of an exemption.
Want to make health care work? Tax whatever companies are paying in health care benefits and watch them clamor for a publicly-funded program real quick.
Cost of Health Care X Rising Cost of Health Care +Taxation of Health Care = Companies Loving Universal, Single Payer Health Care Program.
It turns out the Gordon Brown's party lost 300 local council seats in Labour's worst electoral blowout in thirty years.
But its not just Labour Party corruption in Britain that explains the wipeout. Social Democrat parties in Europe are facing rejection by voters. And this is counterintuitive. Marxist scholars have argued that the current economic crisis makes socialist policies more vital than ever. But perhaps not, actually. Take a look at today's Wall Street Journal, "Across Europe, Left-Leaning Parties See Clout Faltering":
The economic recession should have meant easy votes for Europe's left-wing movements, longtime critics of unchecked capitalism.
Yet as Europe goes to the polls, left-leaning parties across the continent are looking likely to falter. That's true both for those in government, such as in the U.K. and Spain, and in the opposition -- such as France, Germany and Italy.
France's Socialist Party is trying hard to rally voters ahead of Sunday's European parliamentary elections. "Let's unite with all the French who contest free market, unfair policies that aim at deregulating everything," party leader Martine Aubry urged at a pre-election rally.
Yet less than 20% of voters say they plan to cast their ballot for the Socialist Party, according to recent surveys. That would be a weak performance considering France's main opposition party got 29% of the votes in the last European parliamentary elections.
In Germany, the Social Democrats are expected to get only around 26% on Sunday, consistent with their low opinion-poll ratings ahead of Germany's national elections in September. Italy's center-left Partito Democratico is expected to get a similar percentage.
One reason is that as Europe tipped into recession, the right moved left -- appropriating some of the left's long-standing economic policies, including nationalizations and bailouts.
French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, helped recapitalize French banks, earmarked six billion euros for the auto sector and lashed out at "rascal bosses" with huge pay packages.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has planted her conservative camp firmly in the political center. Ms. Merkel has largely given up her former program of market-oriented reforms, and has gradually approved various kinds of state intervention to protect workers during the current recession, from bailing out carmaker Opel to subsidizing payrolls at companies whose export orders have collapsed.
Even before that, right-wing parties across the continent began offering more pragmatic approaches to policy than they had traditionally done. In the past decade, conservative parties introduced competition or privatized some public services in France, Germany and Italy -- but they refrained from dismantling the health-care and public transport services cherished by voters.
In the past, there was a clear fault line between Europe's left-wing and right-wing parties. The left called for more social welfare programs and public spending. The right wanted the state not to interfere in market forces.
The Washington Postreports that dilation-and-extraction fetal-termination procedures (late-term abortions) have come under increased scrutiny following the death of George Tiller. The Wikipedia entry, clinical as it may be, provides a grisly description of the operation: "Forceps are inserted into the uterus through the vagina and used to separate the fetus into pieces, which are removed one at a time." I truly shudder at the thought.
The Washington Post has an article on late-term abortions which basically allows Warren Hern, Leroy Carhart and the National Abortion Federation's Vicky Saporta to make a number of unsubstantiated claims about the women who come to them for post-viability abortions and the only response is a couple of short quotes from Operation Rescue.
Why couldn't the Post find a pro-life doctor who specializes in helping women who want to carry their children with fetal anomalies to term?
The author, Dana, is really irked by all the focus on late-term abortions. So, with reference to the chart above, she provides this analysis:
I have little to say on the murder of Dr. Tiller than hasn’t been covered adequately elsewhere (e.g.). But two persistent points have been getting on my nerves regarding late-term abortion in which Dr. Tiller had specialized. So let’s have some data.
1) The focus on late-term abortion, especially the straw-fetus of frivolous late-term abortion. The typical discussion runs as follows: a very serious person argues that while he’s personally comfortable with first trimester abortion, the thought of a woman wandering in and deciding that she doesn’t want her baby in week 35 of a pregnancy is horrifying. (e.g., makes him want to puke.) And let’s accept for the sake of argument that it is horrifying.* What can the pro-choice advocate say?
First, that late-term abortions are really, really rare. Here’s a chart from the Guttmacher Institute ....
The full document is here. The chart shows percentage of abortions by week of gestation. Note that the vast majority are in the first trimester, and over half are before 9 weeks. (The answer to “Abortion stops a beating heart” should be “Well, about that…”; the heart isn’t beating before five weeks.)
But let’s look at the late-term abortions. Only 1.1% are after more than 21 weeks. 21 weeks is about two weeks shy of the lower-end of viability. 21 weeks is still in the second trimester. We can safely assume that the number of abortions in the third trimester is even smaller, especially because abortion after 24 weeks is generally not permitted by law except in cases of danger to the health of the mother and the fetus.
Here's the link. If you're up to it, keep reading Dana's (morally bankrupt) justification for baby killing.
The basic point for Dana is that (1) dilation and extraction is "exceedingly" rare, and (2) the procedure, "We can safely assume," is necessitated by "fetal abnormalities," with Down Syndrome mentioned as the primary example.
Well, I doubt Dana's been to The Upside of Downs homepage. Aborting a Downs child is destroying a potential life. And for what? Choice? Convenience?
But more than that, let's "safely assume" that all of these abortions were purported "fetal abnormalities," or were deemed medically necessary to "save" the life of the mother.
Hello? The numbers are still staggering!
A 2008 report cited 1.2 million pregnancies that were aborted in 2005. According to the chart above, 1.1 percent of pregnancies were terminated after 24 weeks. As Dana acknowledges, that would leave a total of roughly 13,000 potential children destroyed in the maw of the pro-choice killing machine.
And the brutal truth is that untold numbers of late-term abortions, many performed by George Tiller himself, are simply "second-thought" terminations. Women have decided past the second trimester that they don't want the baby. What to do? Look up Tiller the Killer, of course.
So, back to Dana's query, "What can the pro-choice advocate say?"
They can't say anything. Choose abortion and you're going to kill a baby, plain and simple. Maybe there's some extreme case for a Solomonic judgment to save the life of the mother. And I don't think anyone, any decent, moral person, would sleep well even contemplating such a choice. The fact is that fetal brain development begins within 14 days of conception. That is, the miracle of life begins immediately. The relative moral importance of the stage of the pregnancy is really a matter of leftist propaganda. See, for example, "Miracle of Life: The Action-Packed Days of Unborn Babies." The ugly fact is that the pro-choice movement is an extremist death cult. The "rights" of women trump moral considerations on the beauty of life. Leftists just want to have their "Happy Abortion Stories." (Or, "they want to kill that baby.")
What's most sickening, ultimately, is how the left has exploited the killing of George Tiller. Perhaps in this man's death, radical leftists can revive a movement that has continued to lose public support in recent years.
So, what's happening on the radical left? How are the postmodernists framing President Hussein Obama's speech to the Muslim world. Well, a good start can be found in Rachel Maddow's positively orgasmic response to the president's speech:
So, let's take a look around the leftosphere and the liberal media for some of the postmodern commentary.
With the Bush Administration, everything always was about them. I dimly remember a news story (if you can find this and link to it, I’d be grateful) in which Condi Rice was in the Mideast, meeting with representatives of several Mideastern countries. She dictated to them what the United States expected from them, adding something to the effect of “this is what we want for you.” Someone spoke up and countered, “What about what we want for ourselves?”
Well, there you have it: The U.S. can't be expected to have its own preconditions for peace in the Middle East. And of course, it's "the Bush administration" who's the bad guy!
Bush took dishonesty in the Middle East to hallucinatory extremes, we had not been honest brokers, or willing to speak the truth, for some time before he came on the scene.
For the past 8 years, our bad attitude made us really unpopular. Unappeasable, we became like the schoolyard bully -- you give him your lunch money and he still beat you up. President Obama is out to change this reputation.
But let's check around further:
* Carl at The Reaction is blinded by "Obama's Defining Moment": "Wow. I mean, wow. He invokes among the most holy of passages written in the Koran and challenges the Muslim world to live up to it."
It’s crowded out there in the political blogosphere -- and there are as many ways to judge influence as there bloggers who stand ready to judge politicians.
But here’s an interesting tool I recently came across: From Wikio.com, it’s a ranking of political blogs -- emanating from everywhere from living rooms, mainstream media organizations, and the White House.
The rankings are compiled based on links from other blogs -- with extra weight given to blogs that rank higher via Wikio’s formulas, and based on how recently an item is published. Blog rolls aren’t taken into account, so only fresh postings impact the rankings. Wikio: About Us
One of the intriguing aspects of this list is that it puts everyone in the same pot. The list has mainstream media blogs -- from ABC News, CNN, The New York Times, and others -- alongside well-known partisan bloggers -- Michelle Malkin, FireDogLake -- and even government-run bloggers, like WhiteHouse.gov’s.
President Obama on Friday toured a former Nazi concentration camp that his great-uncle helped liberate, accompanied by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, perhaps the camp's most famous prisoner.
U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buchenwald concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel and International Buchenwald Committee President Bertrand Herz walk through the former Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Obama is visiting the site after his stop in Cairo, where in his speech to the Muslim world he made an appeal against Holocaust denial.
Worried by their prospects in the House, Democrats postponed final action on a nearly $100 billion wartime spending bill until next week so as to buy more time for talks among lawmakers and the return of President Barack Obama from overseas.
The administration remains confident it can navigate between the conflicting pressures from the right and left. But for this confident young White House, which so prides itself on juggling many balls at once, the delay is a humbling reminder of just how complex the low-profile appropriations process can be.
Obama himself faces growing criticism for piling on new requests and not doing more to support his demands. Privately, officials now concede that the budget calendar put them at a disadvantage, forcing the new administration to submit its funding requests in April, even before its policies could be fully formed.
This was most embarrassingly true in the case of Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo detention center. But in a single stroke, the same appropriations bill affects wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new alliance with Pakistan, the threat of pandemic flu, and complex civil liberties issues, such as whether the public should have access to damaging photos of post-Sept. 11 detainees held by the U.S. military.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama left some fuzzy edges to his biography. He affirmed strong support for Israel but implied a strong empathy for Palestinians. His personal story played up his introduction to the black church, leaving his father's Islamic roots in the shadows.
It was a narrative designed to ease any voter concern about Obama's background and counter false Internet rumors that he was a Muslim.
But now, with Thursday's speech in Cairo, Obama is laying bare more of his sympathies and inclinations in the volatile area of Middle East politics.
Obama spoke, for example, of Palestinian "resistance" -- a word that can cast Israel as an illegitimate occupier. He drew parallels between Palestinians and the struggles of black Americans in slavery and of black South Africans during apartheid. Both references made some allies of Israel uneasy.
Moreover, in his defense of Israel's legitimacy, Obama cited the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism, but not the belief of some Jews that their claim to the land is rooted in the Bible and reaches back thousands of years.
A close examination of the speech underscored how Obama, four months into his presidency and five years after stepping onto the national stage, is still introducing himself - and what he stands for - to Americans and the world.
Actually, the Times is being way too objective here.
From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel ....
The only silver lining for Israelis from the president’s speech in Cairo and his general positions on the Middle East is that Obama has overplayed his hand. Far from bending to his will, a large majority of Israelis perceives Obama as a hostile force and has rallied in support of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against the administration. This public support gives Netanyahu the maneuver room he needs to take the actions that Israel needs to take to defend against the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran and to assert its national rights and to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists and other Arab and non-Arab anti-Semites who wish it ill.
Read Glick's entire piece, here. More analysis at Memeorandum.
The Weather Underground, a leftist terrorist group from the 1970s, played a bit role in last fall’s presidential election through the association of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers with his fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama. That kind of connection would have come as no surprise in Germany, where the Weather Underground’s far more deadly counterpart, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, continues to cast a shadow over the country’s politics.
In 1985, German journalist Stefan Aust published the definitive book on the RAF, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. His book has since been turned into a successful feature film of the same name, which was nominated last year for a foreign-language Oscar and is slated for U.S. release this summer. Aust, a former editor of Der Spiegel, has now reissued his earlier work, changing the title to Baader-Meinhof and updating it with information that has come to light since the end of the RAF’s reign of terror in West Germany 30 years ago. The new edition deserves attention, and not just because Anthea Bell’s deft translation preserves the dynamic, detail-rich prose that made Aust’s original read like a real-life thriller. Dense with insights into the psychology of terrorism, this history of West Germany’s struggle against RAF radicals also serves as a cautionary tale for the West in its war against the modern threat of jihadist terror.
I spent this rainy afternoon at Princeton’s Mudd archives ... reading Sonia Sotomayor’s 1976 senior thesis, La Historia CÃclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz MarÃn on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930-1975.
Since I was born and raised in Puerto Rico and I am very familiar with the island’s politics in the 1970s, I thought it would be interesting to read what she had to say.
This unusual post comes courtesy of the Google ads at Three Beers Later.
Who knew that the rage in dating services is now young hotties seeking "established men" as "successful and generous benefactors to fulfill their lifestlyle needs"?
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