Come again?

MSNBC is reporting on a new Washington Post poll - no surprise there. The results: that "80 percent believe that recent sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely, and more than a third say such a conflict is 'very likely' to occur." In this poll, the American public reveals its doubts about the war in Iraq and its discontent with the current administration's handling of the war, the article says, noting that Bush's approval rating continues to tank (though, oddly, it's 7 points higher than in last week's CBS poll - be sure to check out the photo of Bush at that link for an illustration of objective journalism as it's currently defined).

But waitaminnit... How about this older poll?

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. [...] The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.

So let's see here. Are the American people wise and deliberative, perceiving geopolitical matters with a clarity unmatched by the Bush administration... or ignorant sheep, easily led by same? Or have they just been studying up since 2003? Gosh, I need a program.

UPDATE: With a tip o' the hat to Belmont Club, here's Secretary Rumsfeld speaking about the fears of civil war in the aftermath of the destruction of the Golden Mosque:

From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey. The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated. The behavior of the Iraqi security forces had been mischaracterized in some instances. And I guess that is to say nothing of the apparently inaccurate and harmful reports of U.S. military conduct in connection with a bus filled with passengers in Iraq.

Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side. It isn't as though there simply have been a series of random errors on both sides of issues. On the contrary, the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.

And then I notice today that there's been a public opinion poll reporting that the readers of these exaggerations believe Iraq is in a civil war -- a majority do, which I suppose is little wonder that the reports we've seen have had that effect on the American people.

The above obviously supports my point - that there's an agenda being set, and news is being shaped to fit it. Secretary Rumsfeld strongly implies later in the press conference from which the above is taken, though, that the agenda-setting is not necessarily (is not even probably) on the part of the journalistic media - but rather is a disinformation campaign on the part of al Qaeda itself. I'm chastened to admit that even though I've been posting and commenting on this and similar subjects for a long time now (on this blog, only once recently - here), I neglected to consider that the press might be useful idiots.

Wretchard at Belmont believes, concerning the recent report that Iran's "signature" is on particularly deadly shaped charges being found in Iraq, that the news cycle will go thusly:

The 'Iraq is in a state of civil war' lead will continue to be emphasized but attacks may suddenly shift to American troops after a long period of being concentrated upon sectarian targets to create another theme: a Shi'ite insurgency. This plus a clamor to 'bring the boys home' may create a triple wave designed to entirely collapse public support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. The enemy may have failed to win the Sunni insurgency; been unable to plunge Iraq into civil war; proved incapable of stopping the formation of a new Iraqi army and state. But none of that will matter if the three themes of 'ongoing civil war', a Shi'ite insurgency and the need to engage in headlong retreat are successfully promoted in "the capitals of the Western world".

And this, friends and neighbors, is why I get so frustrated at the continuing efforts on the Left to "gotcha" Bush: it's a bootless distraction from the matter of real import - that there is a segment of one of the largest religious populations in the world that is committed to our destruction. That segment is forced into asymmetric warfare with us at present and for the foreseeable future. But it's not necessary for them to win a war if they can win the peace, to borrow a phrase. How important is it that we, the West, either remain in control of or successfully integrate and inculcate our values into immigrating Muslims in the societies we presently dominate? Ask these people - except that you can't, because they're dead.

Urbanity, metrosex, crunchiness

I just finished a remarkable book: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. It's not a novel, but it appears to be one; its pace is both fast and carefully controlled, with shifting points of view that practically made me growl at the chapter headings when I realized that Larson was going to abandon the narrative he'd been following in the previous chapter to take up a new one. It's the story, or at any rate a story, of the Chicago World's Fair, or more correctly the World Columbian Exposition, in 1893. In brief, at the same time that a luminous group of American architects and artists was racing first to envision and then to bring about the miracle of the White City, a serial killer was setting up shop at the Exposition's outskirts, taking advantage of the combination of an unprecedented inflow of young and naive women into Chicago and the confusion surrounding the movements of tens of thousands of people at the Fair. I read it in two days, largely because it wouldn't let me sleep.

But - as always seems to happen these days - the convergence of my reading this book for my neighborhood book club with other events triggers the "blogging gene," and a post is born. The "other events": the Oscars, online discussions of the "crunchy con" phenomenon (such as it is), and my kids' getting back into Bambi. Here we go:

In Devil, Larson quotes unstintingly from the correspondence of the actors (pointing out more than once that in those days, everyone who could write did so, at length - I consider myself an heir to that time, and anyone attempting a word count on my blog entries would no doubt have to agree) and from publications at the time. What struck me in so many of Larson's quotations was the character of the writers, exposed in their words. Men praised one another freely. They complimented one another's accomplishments, sometimes with full sincerity, but sometimes out of courtesy at the expense of commenting on their own. People expressed soaring emotions at their first experience of the Fair - notably pride that Chicago, up to then considered a provincial hard-knocks cowtown (actually pigtown), had eclipsed Paris in the beauty, grandeur, scope, and attendance at its Exposition. Garrison Keillor's "where the men are all handsome, the women are all strong, and the children are all above average" formulation for life in Lake Wobegon seems real in these excerpted letters: the people may have been flawed, their faults may have rivalled ours, but they wrote like heroes. And writing, I believe, is a mirror image of the soul of the writer, at least when it's been adequately taught and learned.

So. There is the "urbanity" of the title. The writers were unfailingly courteous even when they were at one another's throats - just as civilized people ought to be. Miss Manners, my favorite etiquetteer, enjoys pointing out to people who say that good manners are wimpy that nowhere is it written that you can't be forceful and mannerly at the same time; in fact, classic Western etiquette contains specific forms even for insults and responses to them. (A terrific example, from the apparently now out-of-print Miss Manners's Guide To the Turn of the Millenium: the mother-in-law who gave her principled-vegan daughter-in-law a fur wrap for Christmas at a "senior relative's" home, which the d-in-law had to open in front of the family; the m-in-law asked pointedly, "How do you like it?" Miss Manners calls this now-rare gambit a classic: the expensive gift given as an insult. The d-in-law, according to Miss Manners, responded exactly correctly when, absolutely straight-faced and with flat inflection, she stared her m-in-law in the eyes and said, "You shouldn't have.") Of course, the fact that this book is about a serial killer too only highlights the urbanity of the rest of its characters.

Now, contrast urbanity with metrosexuality. Metrosexualness? Metrosex. Whatever. Practitioners may think of themselves as urbane: after all, they live in big cities, in which "urbanity" is rooted; they take care to observe the correct physical forms such as how to dress, how to dance, what darn fork to use. But the difference between an urbane man and the metrosexual man who internalizes metrosexual appearances as values is clearly illustrated in George Clooney's Oscar acceptance speech. Not the rather understated politics of it - but the part where he compliments his fellow actors. I've looked in vain for a transcript, but here's what I recall: First, he notes that every nominee turned in a terrific performance and it was a great honor even to be included in that group. But instead of stopping there and moving on to the "I thank everybody" portion of the speech, he has to undercut his own compliment by pointing out that it's impossible actually to compare people's performances unless everyone performs exactly the same role - and then wraps it all up by practically muttering, "Try it in a Bat suit," or words to that effect, which doesn't come off as self-deprecating but rather as sour.

Now, I think George Clooney is pretty cute, though I get tired of tilting my head so I can look at his mug straight-on. I loved him in O Brother Where Art Thou?. But he ain't urbane - just metrosexual.

Let me also say here that I have no objection - in fact, the opposite of an objection - to men's observing courteous forms. A man who dresses well, knows how to make conversation, even gets manicures if that's his bag - these are all great with me. It's the man who confuses these outward forms with inward convictions who's earned my dismissal.

And on to Bambi. It's a movie that - as we choir hounds might say - rather loves the sound of its own voice a bit much; there's so much footage of pretty scenery and innovative animation (the forest fire against the night sky, for instance) that story elements seem almost to intrude on the movie's real reason for being: to elicit "Awwww"s at the cute moments and "Oooooh"s of wonder at the better-than-photography beauty of the forest world. One easy-to-overlook element is that Bambi's parents are a model of what parents used to be expected to be. I'm not speaking just of the heroism of the mother as she lags behind Bambi to draw the hunter's fire, shouting to him to run faster, and not to look back; I'm not speaking just of the determination of the father as he prods and chides Bambi back to his feet to outrun the fire after he's been exhausted by dogs and grazed by a bullet. I'm speaking too of the mother's patient insistence that Bambi "try again" when he falls as a fawn, and the father's, what, four lines in the whole movie. It seems almost axiomatic in the context of the time that the father-figure would be "strong and silent," the mother-figure devoted but not indulgent. One of the great things Disney has done for American society, in my view, is to preserve these images of parenthood: Disney parents, at least in their feature films, are heroic in a manner that other cultural images of parenthood don't support. They're often a bit more hapless now than they were in the Bambi days, but there's a core of Bambi's father's determination and Bambi's mother's self-sacrifice in them still.

Rod Dreher points to a "new" subgroup among conservatives, the "crunchy cons." He compares this group to David Brooks's "Bobos":

Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian ("Bobo") behavior. "Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred," he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. "We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action."

He speaks of "authenticity" as a value after which crunchy cons strive: a sense that they have contributed meaningfully to their own lives. He gives the example of homemade apple butter; he talks about the organic food co-op to which he belongs; he says, "All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer."

I'm terrribly uncomfortable with his conclusions. I am the kind of person who keeps a pantry stocked with ingredients rather than mixes; I am the kind of person who prefers an old house in an old neighborhood, where even if the houses when new were all on the same plan, time has allowed subsequent owners to leave a unique stamp, to new developments; I am the kind of person who makes apple butter. (Actually not apple butter but jams of various kinds; I don't like apple butter.) But a few years ago I stopped hating Sam's Club and starting actually enjoying it, smiling at my fellow shoppers who, like me, didn't see shopping in a warehouse as either a Sacrament or a soul-sucking ordeal - just a shopping trip - and the sense of superiority in Dreher's and Brooks's prose bothers me to no end. One of Dreher's crunchy friends said,

"Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — 'authentic.' I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You're looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty."

It is stuck-up. Look at the words she chose: "real"; "worthy"; "Purina People Chow." In what way can we interpret this sentiment as other than "My choices are better than those of people who shop at Wal-Mart"? Now, when I'm shopping for the trappings of our life, they're required to be both pleasing and functional to the greatest degree possible, because, why not? When it's reasonable to combine beauty and practicality, who would choose the ugly-but-functional thing, or the beautiful-but-useless thing? (All right. I know there are people who would choose each of these, for principled reasons I don't share. I'm trying to show, here, why I mostly fit the profile of the crunchy conservative but hate the implications of it.) The key for me, though, is reasonableness. My household goes through almost a gallon of milk a day; I'm darned if I'm going to buy it from an Amish farmer in Lancaster County fresh from the cow. I buy three gallons at a time, twice a week, at Sam's Club - not because we can't afford or perceive "better" but because "better" isn't sufficiently "better" for me to expend the effort on it. I'm not less authentic because of that choice; I'm just practical about something that doesn't require more than practicality. Similarly, I haven't bought Bisquick in years - maybe ever; it was a fixture in my husband's house growing up, so he may have bought it for us at some point. But I don't see buying Bisquick as a character flaw, just as a choice a consumer makes on the basis of different priorities than mine.

How does this point of view square with my flat-out judgmentalism concerning the difference between urbanity and metrosex? A reference to My Fair Lady sums it up pretty well: Col. Pickering treats a flower-seller like a duchess; Mr. Higgins treats a duchess like a flower-seller. Col. Pickering is a courteous man; Mr. Higgins is a boor in metrosexual clothing. Both men may prefer vintage port and fine pipe tobacco; their choices in that regard are unimportant compared with their character.

They're not just cartoons

Via Instapundit, David Warren at Real Clear Politics vindicates me in the latest dinner-table debate:

The cartoons themselves were a red herring from the start -- a fake issue, trumped up by fanatical Muslims seeking grievances to abet a confrontation, and thereby extract concessions from the West. It is a fire, still being stoked around the world by radical “Islamists”...

The husband and I go round and round on this subject, he mostly saying, "They're just cartoons" and I mostly objecting, "No, they're a shot across our bow - if we're not willing to stand up for a value as fundamental to our society as free speech, what are we willing to stand up for?" I take no joy from Warren's confirmation; I don't want the kind of conflict that appears to me to be looming. (And, let me be more clear: the husband doesn't trivialize the issue - he just sees a different starting point from mine, at the violent responses to the cartoons rather than at the initial and apparently carefully fostered outrage and the furious backpedaling efforts of some - too many - in the West.) But it is what it is. There's a strain of Islam that does want this conflict. Whether it's a sign of a Final Battle like Armageddon and thus a desired outcome among certain of the devout, like the red heifer breeding project among some fundamentalist Christians¹, or a more secular spoiling-for-a-fight thing whereby some Islamists recognize a widening crack in the West's armor that they're eager to exploit, I don't know. The difference in motivation does matter; religious fanatics are generally thought to be harder to convince to lay down their arms than mere power-seekers. But either way, this time looks more and more like the world between the wars.

Bloggers are enjoined not to throw around the N-word - no, not that one (well, yes, that one too, but on the grounds of civility rather than stifling debate); "Nazi" is the word that triggers Godwin's Law. But because that group was so successful at rising from the "nothing" of an unhappy populace to within a few bad decisions of European domination, it's worth a look, because so many of the elements are similar: the very real disparity between the downtrodden group and the world they can see outside their reach; the perception, perhaps justified, perhaps not so much, that their downtroddenness comes as a result of that outside world's deliberate actions; the handy scapegoat; the emphasis on ideological (in this case) purity; the conviction that any who don't conform to that standard of purity are inferior, but are not just to be ignored - rather destroyed; a tendency here in that outside world to feel a bit (or a lot) guilty about that same disparity and to attempt to assuage our own guilt by (another word that comes dangerously close to invoking Godwin) appeasement; an arms race; the actual - not virtual - stifling of dissent; a continual racheting-up of protest from marches to flag-burnings to kidnappings to - what? Kristallnacht? Or have we been there already?

If I were a relatively powerless fringe group who desperately wanted power, I could do worse than to look to that group for strategy and tactics. I could draw the simple lesson "Don't go mad" from the leader of that group and reasonably believe that I could sidestep their defeat. Most importantly, I could push my case as far as possible as quickly as possible, so that the sweet convention that that group May Not Be Named could effectively do my debate-stifling for me for a while - and when the West awakens, they may be surprised at how much I've accomplished during their nap.

I'm simultaneously gratified and saddened to learn that Mark Steyn agrees.

¹It's possible to read Revelations in such a way that certains Signs and Portents^TM point to an imminent Armageddon. (In my own faith tradition, we tend to go by the "You know not the day nor the hour" verse instead.) One of these signs is the birth of a red heifer in Israel. There's at least one fundamentalist Christian group out there that's trying to take the timing into its own hands by undertaking a project to breed that red heifer predictably from parents who will then be transported to Israel. In my opinion, this project is misguided in so many ways I don't know where to start - but conceptualizing God as a kind of garbage-in-garbage-out Black Box will do as well as any other starting point. But please note that because (a) I'm not in or of the group, and (b) I first heard about them on the pretty much hostile-by-definition NPR some years ago, I may be wrong about both their motives and their methods.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Austin Bay is looking at captured al Qaeda documents; he's been doing so for, oh, a couple of weeks. I haven't posted on them so far because they frankly weren't very enlightening to me; they revealed a committed, ideology-based, well-organized, but misled cadre - nothing we didn't already know. The translated documents can be found here, on the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point website.

However, the post to which I linked in the first paragraph is interesting, because it points up two new, or newish, bits of information: first, that al Qaeda's private thoughts about Saudi Arabia are considerably different from its public pronouncements - more in a moment; and second, that al Qaeda considers (or did at the time this document was written, at any rate) the oil spot strategy, starting in Saudi Arabia, its best bet for global jihad. The second point is interesting mostly because of the irony: the oil spot strategy is what Krepinevich was talking about last year as our best chance of success (with a good bit of rueful head-shaking about how the Bush administration just didn't see it and was therefore failing miserably - a piece of typical realpolitik shortsightedness that failed to take into account that Iraq is the oil spot). So it's perhaps not surprising that al Qaeda, that bunch of ultra-realpolitniks in spite of their driving ideology, should adopt the same strategy.

More important is the disconnect between al Qaeda's public and private expressions about Saudi Arabia. From the synopsis of the al Qaeda document given by Austin Bay, at the same Austin Bay link as above:

The fight against the Americans (Jews and Crusaders) is characterized as a series of battles; the struggle with Saudi Arabia is a war. An oil spot strategy must be pursued against Saudi Arabia, with the goal of expanding the circle of jihad through successful operations that break down the fear barrier which keeps Mujahideen from fully engaging the Saudi state.

Note that this is a translation of al Qaeda's words, not Austin's. Contrast this statement with bin Laden's from 1996:

"The ordinary Saudi knows that his country is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services…Our country has become a colony of America…Saudis know their real enemy is America" (UPI Intelligence Watch, March 21, 2005).

...as it appeared here. Now, bin Laden, as a Saudi himself, obviously draws a distinction between his kind of Saudi and the House of Saud and its sympathizers - but examine this disparity in message through the prism of the recent attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra: al Qaeda in Iraq is part of the so-called "insurgency." Their goal in Iraq, however, is larger than an actual insurgency's goals, which would be to bring about the end of an American presence and to take on political power in Iraq. These insurgency goals are indeed what the Ba'athist insurgents in Iraq want, for obvious reasons: they were in the catbird seat under Saddam and want that seat back. The way for this now significantly minor (rather a non-sequitur of phrasing, but the synapses aren't clicking all that efficiently this evening) minority to achieve those goals is to foment a civil war and to be the last ones standing. That's the only way they can reclaim power, now that the Shi'ite majority has discovered its power and the Kurds have been able to enjoy theirs.

So why was the Golden Mosque bombed? It doesn't advance the aims of al Qaeda, which (according to this source, center on driving Americans out of all Muslim lands, particularly Saudi Arabia, and displacing Western-style democracies throughout the Middle East (with destroying Israel and reestablishing the caliphate in there for good measure). The way to drive Americans out of Iraq, much less the Islamic world, is not to create a need for more and longer-lasting American military presence with two years to go in Bush's term; the way to bring down the fledgling Iraqi democracy, much less to quell democratic movements elsewhere in the Middle East, is not to give a government only just vigorously drying behind its ears a chance to appear statesmanlike and to exert control while still well supported by the United States (better in both cases to wait until more American troops had been withdrawn, and Americans were accustomed to an ongoing orderly disengagement). al-Zarqawi is on record as wanting to see a bloody war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and indeed al Qaeda under his leadership claims responsibility for the Golden Mosque bombing. But was it strategically supported? Or was he acting outside his role as leader of al Qaeda in Iraq? Or, was he taking an opportunity to claim credit for a devastating attack carried out by Sunni, perhaps Ba'athist, insurgents? Is bin Laden even now slapping his forehead and saying, "Why again did I let that numbskull pledge fealty to me"?

Heck, I don't know. What strikes me, though, is that there's less consensus in al Qaeda than they need in order to accomplish their goals. In Iraq they've miscalculated again and again, galvanizing the population against them so that every month brings more informants and fewer safe havens. In Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is actually a main stream of Islam rather than a narrow tributary, will al Qaeda be similarly fragmented in its approach? The attempted-but-failed attack by al Qaeda on a Saudi oil facility last week suggests that it may be so: if al Qaeda were to succeed in toppling the House of Saud by destroying the Saudi economy, the job of rebuilding what they had destroyed without help from the West could (it seems to me would) be more than they could handle.

Not that I want to give advice to the enemy. But as even Juan Cole says, "By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he [bin Laden] denied himself any real impact." I can't resist the urge at this moment to point out that making Howard Dean chairman of the DNC was a similarly head-scratching move - but as I've tried to point out repeatedly in the past few weeks, that's neither here nor there; the Democratic Party either will or won't carry on in its current often inexplicable vein and neither outcome threatens real national unity, nor is the divide between Left and Right in this country so great that it can't be bridged when necessary - whereas bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda are in a struggle for their own lives and, if they can survive, for any slightest whiff of political power. You'd think they would decide on a message that would further their struggle, rather than one that only chips away at (if not outright decimates) any coalition-building they've managed so far.

Compare and contrast

I think I'm like a fine wine.















(Thom, I swiped the picture from your site because I don't have a scanner for my own yearbook. Do you want a link back?)

"Think of how we feel..."

I've been looking all over for a transcript of a little "think-piece" by NPR's Daniel Schorr that my husband heard yesterday. (A brave man, he - my husband, not Schorr - also listens to Air America at times.) Apparently, it went something like this (please note that there isn't a real quote in this whole post; I'm setting apart the paraphrase so it's clear that it isn't me, that's all):

Some people have been saying that the news media have acted like spoiled children over Cheney's hunting accident and the delay in notifying them. Think of how we feel: most Vice Presidents throughout our history have clamored for press coverage and complained when they didn't receive enough. After all, most have been poised to run for President as a successor to the incumbent. Dick Cheney is a notable exception, Not only is he completely uninterested in running for President, but he's also the most powerful and the most secretive Vice President ever. I guarantee that there isn't a Vice Presidential desk at any major news outlet, five years into this administration, because as [someone or other] quipped, "That desk would be like the Maytag repairman!"

"Stop the tape!" as my sole source of hard news, Rush Limbaugh, says (heavy-handed irony alert). Apparently, according to Schorr, the response of the intrepid members of the Fourth Estate to a secretive and powerful (and distrusted - by them at any rate - and not well-liked) high elected official is to shrug and wander off, dejected, rather than to follow him around, keep on calling his staffers, and basically be journalists rather than stenographers.

The upshot of the piece, and again I apologize for not having an actual transcript and going from my husband's notoriously imperfect memory, appears to be that we should understand and feel sorry for the White House press corps, because they abdicated what they so often claim as their right on behalf of the American people but I think would be more accurately termed their job to dig out true stories and report them. Let me repeat: faced with an unusually powerful and secretive vice president - recall that Teddy Roosevelt was originally stuck in the Veep seat by his own party to sideline him, since the position was considered about as powerful as that of a queen who's already produced the heir and the spare - the press corps packed up their Vice Presidential desks and resigned themselves to Four More Years! of doing little besides attending the Monday morning press briefings and the occasional cocktail party.

Oh, I understand, all right. Nice work if you can get it.

Born (or happy) in the USA

Try this on for size:

Why is this newspaper published in the language of a tiny island on the other side of the earth? Why does Australia have an English Queen, English common law, English institutions? Because England was the first nation to conquer infant mortality.

By 1820 medical progress had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. Britain had the manpower to take, hold, settle and administer huge chunks of real estate around the planet. Had, say, China or Russia been first to overcome childhood mortality, the modern world would be very different.

What country today has half of its population under the age of 15? Italy has 14 per cent, the UK 18 per cent, Australia 20 per cent - and Saudi Arabia has 39 per cent, Pakistan 40 per cent and Yemen 47 per cent. Little Yemen, like little Britain 200 years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world - one way or another.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Mark Steyn, Columnist to the World^TM, is writing for an Australian audience, but let's consider the American numbers:

According to the Census Bureau, there were 60,253,375 kids under 15 in the United States in 2000, with a total population of 281,421,906. That's just under 21.5%. Better... but still too low.

This organization, ironically an arm of the Sierra Club with a "vision for environmentalism [that][...] includes educating women worldwide to achieve lower birth rates, lowering consumption levels in industrialized and developing nations, and protecting national parks and the world's remaining wild spaces from exploitation and development [as well as][...] support[ing] the fight to unseat President George Bush from office along with all other politicians hostile to preserving the environment[,]" cites this information:

[In 2000,] the average number of children born to women over a lifetime is at 2.03 - slightly below replacement level.

There's the datum - 2.1 is replacement level, FYI. It took me four or five "click-throughs" to determine that the above was being presented as a (relatively - apparently the number represents an uptick from prior years, which is negative in their paradigm) positive datum. Finally, I found, on another page of their site:

[The Sierra Club's policy of an "integrated and international approach to the global need for slowing population growth"] implicitly assumes that if global population can be stabilized, the influx of people into the U.S. will decline and U.S. population can be stabilized. Unfortunately, this grossly oversimplifies complex social and demographic forces.

Today's current world population harbors millions - if not billions - of people who are eager to enter the U.S. This degree of immigration would devastate our remaining open spaces and ecosystems and place an unacceptable burden on our infrastructure.
[...]
Thus, while we support the Sierra Club's current global policies designed to stabilize world population, we urge the Sierra Club to return to the roots of the environmental movement that encompass U.S. population - to preserve and protect our own environment for the benefit of future generations.
[...]
Unfortunately, the Sierra Club has abandoned its previous position for sustainable levels of immigration in favor of a less politically controversial policy that still threatens the environment. Therefore, SUSPS calls for the Sierra Club to readopt its policy in favor of sustainable levels of immigration. SUSPS does not call for an end to immigration to the U.S. That would deny Americans the benefit of many talented immigrants who wish to contribute to our society. Instead, SUSPS calls for a return to sustainable levels of immigration.

The underlying and unspoken principle is that if everywhere on Earth becomes as sought-after a place to live as the United States, we won't have to worry about so many people coming here - and the point is well taken - but note the methodology: the SUSPS wants to level the playing field by emphasizing "open space and ecosystems" over human opportunity, as if it's our national park system that causes immigrants to flood our borders. It's a NIMBY argument that, if implemented, would only accomplish "keeping a brutha down" by not allowing entry to people who want to come here to try for their version of the vaunted American Dream, not creating an open-space utopia in which all humanity can frolic together in low-density harmony. Side note: all right, who are the racists? "Many talented immigrants" indeed. I encourage readers to visit the source document; I've selectively quoted here, and some of what I left out is even more inflammatory than what I've included.

Let's return to Mark Steyn for a moment. His piece in The Australian, cited above, is a salute to Danna Vale, a backbencher in the Australian Parliament who asked whether abortion is in Australia's interests when the demographics are what they are, or, "Can a society become more Muslim in its demographic character without also becoming more Muslim in its political and civil character?" (The quote is Mark Steyn's; I don't know to what extent he was paraphrasing Ms. Vale.)

I would posit that the goal, for us in the United States, is to ensure not so much "every child a wanted child" (which seems to me to be at least as much of a problem of parents as of their apparently unwanted children) but "every American an American who is happy to be here." I, unlike SUSPS, am not advocating a return to prior, "sustainable" levels of immigration. I do want immigration to take place in orderly and legal fashion, but as the descendant of fairly recent immigrants myself and as the mother of children half of whose ancestry consists of very early European immigrants to this land, I'm all for immigration. And I have no argument with immigration of Muslims, either, or Buddhists or Hindus or animists or any other -ist you'd care to name, except those -ists who are not happy to be here and want either to eliminate "here" altogether or so change the character of "here" that I can no longer be happy to be here.

Tortured construction... but what it comes down to is this: the Bush Doctrine is the SUSPS Doctrine turned on its head: both acknowledge that the United States is THE Premier Destination for many in the Third World. (The Bush Doctrine also acknowledges that some people respond to the disparity not by wanting to come here but by wanting to punish us for living at the tail of the curve, or by claiming that what we are and what we represent are anathema rather than the most tolerant, stable, prosperous culture the world has ever spawned.) But SUSPS wants to shut the doors now that "we" are all inside, while Bush wants to make "outside" more like "inside," so that people can choose from a less skewed set of options (or, alternatively, be considerably less envious of "inside" and dissatisfied with "outside").

I don't have a good wrap-up and I have to get my daughter to a playdate; blogging is heck, some days.

Update: I just read another Steyn piece here. As Inigo says, "Let me explain. No - it's too complicated. Let me sum up:"

Mark Steyn has been nattering on about demographics for a good few years now - he says since 9/11 caused him to take sudden note of a demographic group that hadn't seemed especially noteworthy before. It was not, he said, the people flying the planes who disturbed him; it was the people dancing in the streets afterward. He started digging into the numbers for the West versus the Muslim world and concluded, as he puts it, that:

"The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

That's a mighty short quote to set apart that way, but it's a mighty important one. In this OpinionJournal piece, Steyn is wordier than I've ever seen him, making and remaking the point that Europe-as-we-know-it is on the brink of death - he says, "Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone."

Is this tragedy, or just life? Well. If the people poised to take over those grand buildings were like-minded to the Europeans they'll replace, it'd just be life, and Europe would live on as the great dream it's been since the Enlightenment. But what Steyn sees in the near future is A Handmaid's Tale wrought by Muslim, not Christian, hands. He notes:

We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .
[...]
Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.

What we are, what we stand for, is important. For the moment I'm going to put aside cultural relativism utterly and say, it's better than Wahhabism, Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism, or pick your term - the form of Islam that strives for cultural purity and rejects Western liberalism - in its classical sense - as decadent and even more basically wrong, and that embraces jihad as its means to these ends. We ought to - we must - demand that our liberal values prevail, as long as we consider them valuable. We ought to - we must - resist this post-modern urge to be the ones who set our own Alexandrian library alight in the name of multiculturalism: if bringers of a new Dark Age want to break through our ranks, let them try, but while we can defend what we are, let us do so.

I've quoted extensively, I know, and I've carried on at great lengths even for me, but I've also found my summing-up:

One-way assimilation or death.

Sixteen candles

Today marks the sixteenth anniversary of my first date with my husband. He made me spaghetti. Out of a package, it's true, but it was good, it was surprising, it was served on actual china in a dining room free of his four roommates, and it was prescient. For sixteen years, he's been good, surprising, considerate, and mindful of my sensibilities. He's given me - no lie - the best years of his life so far, three terrific kids, a huge amount of patience, and the honor of his trust. I've tried to give him the same - not as successfully, I'm sure, since I'm patience-challenged, but the intent has always been there.

Husband, it's been a good sixteen years. I hope you're up for another round.

Why can't we be friends?

It's about the Danish cartoons again.

Based on the comments I received for this post, I'm going to have to assume that among the handful of readers I enjoy there's a sadly high proportion who may not know what's going on in the world. No offense intended to those who do; please, keep up the good work. The great advantage we have over our philosophical parents and grandparents is that we can inform ourselves so much more completely than they could. But for those who aren't "up" on the story, here we go:

The original cartoons were published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. You can see them here - and I'm linking to Michelle Malkin's site both because she, unlike the New York Times and unfortunately so many others, had the cojones to show the images, and because I know she's a tremendously polarizing figure, as they say. In other words, for fun.

The paper invited Danish caricaturists to draw Mohammed to make the point that non-Muslim Danes felt "chilled" by the disproportionate and often violent responses of European Muslims to perceived cultural or religious slights. There is a proscription against portrayals of Mohammed in some Muslims traditions (but not all - see for instance Omar's comments here on IraqTheModel); this proscription was the pretext for - eventual - widespread demonstrations, riots, arson, and deaths. However, it's come out that the means of distribution of these cartoon images wasn't what we might expect - a genuine grass-roots Internet-fueled viral-meme campaign wherein Danish Muslims told their coreligionists elsewhere, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on... (If you're too young to remember the reference, it's a shampoo commercial.) Instead, sometime in December 2005 or so, a group of Danish imams created a pressbook including these cartoons and others, including three particularly egregious images of diverse origins (one of them was a bad photocopy of a French contestant in a pig-squealing contest, who, in a burst of high spirits, donned a pig nose - this image was passed off as an insulting caricature of Mohammed). The imams toured the Middle East with this dossier, but (in spite of the cartoons' appearance in an Egyptian newspaper as early as October 2005, which appearance resulted in verbal denouncements but no violence) failed to stir up a lot of publicity until January 2006...

...when, suddenly, they were the spark to the tinder and the fundamentalist fraction of the Muslim world took to the streets. Most American newspapers and as far as I know all British newspapers to date have refused to publish the images; the BBC showed them briefly; some European newspapers I wouldn't have expected to show spines have shown spines and republished. The competing values to be balanced at those journalistic organs that have not republished the images are, as Andrew Sullivan says not "risible"; they're justifiably concerned about their staffs' safety. But the mass walkout of the editorial staff of the New York Press when the paper's owner refused to allow the republishing of the cartoons is a sign that not all journalists - indeed, I hope not even most journalists - would find that their own safety overbalances the scales against informing their reading or viewing public about this issue.

And at last we've reached the point where my title comes in: if there's one issue on which the American Right and the American Left ought to be united, it's press freedom. We do share this value. We also share the frustration of not always having it work in our favor - which we all recognize is par for the course when freedom of expression is at issue. We rail against some instances of free expression, we sometimes demonstrate to protest them, we write angry letters, make placards, march, lobby, and get all ticked off - but can we not agree that that fraction of the Muslim world that flew right the heck off the handle here was wrong to do so, by the standards of modern civilization?

Because if we can't find common ground here, perhaps there's no common ground anywhere for us. I fully support the right of Muslims who feel so inclined to demonstrate peacefully, to record their disgust and send it to the editor, to march for more "sensitivity" on the parts of newspaper editors. But. But. My support stops when the match is lit. We must not allow freedom of speech and the press to be chilled by the threat of violence.

In the United States, where by and large violence does not accompany angry protests against disrespect of one religion or another, it is possible, appropriate, and often wise for the media to be "sensitive" to their viewers; take for instance the Will & Grace episode that was slated to appear on Good Friday this spring, in which Britney Spears was to play a Christian TV chef making "cruci-fixin's," for some reason. (Pause: whew. That was a stretch.) The episode, I understand, has been pulled because it's singularly insensitive to Christians on the most solemn day of the Christian calendar. It would have been perfectly legal to air the episode - but I'm guessing the show's sponsors decided they didn't want to lose quite that much business. However, the self-censorship, if you will (and no doubt some will), of that episode can be assumed to spring from a different motive from the self-imposed media blackout on the Danish cartoons, where it's occurred, because fundamentalist (and other) Christians who would doubtless be offended by Will & Grace's tasteless joke at their expense were not about to saw any heads off over it, and everyone on both sides of the table knows it; we have no such assurance concerning the Islamist/Wahhabist/fundamentalist Muslim groups fomenting violent riots. To be silent on the issue of the cartoons is tacitly to admit that free speech is a value for us only so long as our own ox isn't gored. Or our own editor isn't kidnapped. It's not a decision to make lightly - but it is a decision to make, not to softsoap and avoid and couch in terms of "nuance."

So, I salute you people of the Left who are not sitting squarely on "sensitivity" but rather standing up for this proud, secular, foundational principle that we share - freedom of the press, without which there is no America. I hope that you realize, believe, and perhaps even are willing to acknowledge right out in public that we do indeed share it.

Ball's in your court.

Sheesh, Ann

OK, I admit it: I often find Ann Coulter funny. But not today:

With Ann Coulter you should only expect a bad stand-up comedian with a conservative schtick. That's what CPAC attendees got today. My expectations were low, yet she proceded [sic] to go below them. She referred to Muslims as "ragheads."

Sigh. Thanks, Ann. Any other thoughts? Keep them to yourself, will you? Stop doing us "favors." And as is so often the case, thanks, Instapundit, for the point to the site.

Update: Of all the things I've written about since starting this blog, I never dreamed for a minute that I'd get my longest comment thread out of an eye roll at Ann Coulter.

So. Addressing some of you in the comments, beginning with my buddies and high school classmates from long ago, the Kirby brothers: Thom, I've got to get over to your blog to indulge in some cussing! And Gary, yes, I know some might read this post as ammunition; I chose to write it anyway. You're correct, I think, that the Left won't self-police and won't acknowledge self-policing efforts on the Right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we know is right. In my ever-so-humble opinion, of course.

On to the rest of yez. I am indeed a fiscal conservative and I'm not at all pleased with Federal spending at the moment. However, I don't make the mistake of attributing the "Clinton surplus" to Clinton when he was the beneficiary of the so-called "peace dividend" (which, recall, led to comments like Rumsfeld's infamous but absolutely true "You have to go to war with the army you have," along with outrage from the Left that we ought to have delayed going to war while we built up our military, while our enemies would presumably have been leaning on their guns and trimming their nails, maybe having a smoke) and the dot.com bubble. And I likewise find it utterly clear that in order to have a Federal budget, you have to have a Federal government, which implies a nation, so national defense takes precedence over a balanced budget for me. A more descriptive and accurate statement about my fiscal policy, such as it is, is that I favor fewer and smaller government programs but recognize the fact of certain "natural monopolies," such as an army, without which a nation cannot function well, or at all.

I was and am a classical liberal: a devotee of and believer in the individual, his rights, his responsibilities. The term "liberal" has been long hijacked by some on the Left who act and talk as if they believe it means "dedicated to the premise that 'social' justice, as opposed to justice, ought to be the preeminent goal of society." I favor tolerance (but not preference nor a "right" not to be offended); equality of opportunity (but not efforts to create an impossible level playing field); equality under the law; freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly; I believe in freedom from unreasonable search and seizure - but also that the word "unreasonable" means something different from "any"; I believe in the right to keep and bear arms and in the responsibility of those who choose to do so to train and protect themselves and those in their household to avoid tragic accidents (and I point out that a pool is much more dangerous, statistically, than a gun); I believe that the Constitution is a "living" document in the sense that its words and ideas should and do continue to direct and inspire Americans, and speak hope and defiance to oppressed people around the world, but not that it's a "living" document in the sense that contextual reinterpretation ought to trump original intent. And finally (for purposes of this discussion), I'm absolutely thrilled that I didn't have to fight my way across the world, learn English laboriously as an adult, and undertake to become a citizen by dint of effort and commitment in order to enjoy the rights, liberties, opportunities, and responsibilities that devolve on American citizens generally. In short, I believe that being born American is the single luckiest thing ever to happen to Americans (beyond being born in the first place).

Does that clear anything up? I'm not a Democrat and have never been a Democrat (all right, I admit I was campaign manager for the "Democratic" candidate in my high school's mock election in 1984 - thanks a lot, Kirbys, for showing up and making me refer to those bygone days so much here) - but there are a whole lot of Democrats out there who, by their words and behavior, can't honestly be called "liberal" in this sense. "You keep saying tha' word; I do no' think it means what you think it means." Ditto "progressive," but I have no particular affinity for the term (I'm not convinced that progress for progress's sake is necessarily good), so I won't muddy the waters by amending my description of myself to include it.

When do I find Ann Coulter funny? When she says something like this:

The Democratic Party has decided to express indignation at the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al Qaeda is not allowed to have a private conversation with Osama bin Laden. If they run on that in 2008, it could be the first time in history a Republican president takes even the District of Columbia.

or this:

Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party, may have had some unpalatable goals, but at least they were big ideas. Wipe out the Indians, kill off the national bank and institute a spoils system. Love him or hate him, he never said, "I'll be announcing my platform sometime early next year." The Whigs were formed in opposition to everything Jackson stood for.

The Republican Party emerged from the Whigs when the Whigs waffled on slavery. (They were "pro-choice" on slavery.) The Republican Party was founded expressly as the anti-slavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today.

Having won that one, today's Republican Party stands for life, limited government and national defense. And today's Democratic Party stands for ... the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't especially like. We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies party. They're the Hook-Up party.

I do not find her funny when she refers to Muslims as "ragheads." At moments like those, I find it appalling and inexplicable that she could say such a thing while apparently sharing a number of other principles and beliefs with me, which is pretty much the point of this post. Lindata, by "eliminationist" language do you mean "racist" or something similar? Coulter certainly uses insulting language about liberals frequently, but not generally in this vein; otherwise I wouldn't read her at all. Insult comics have a long and - well, not glorious, but at least storied tradition; racist comics went out with the Polish joke. Ann Coulter again crossed a line that she's crossed on a few occasions in the past (I hated her comments culminating in "now more than ever" about converting all Muslims to Christianity, for instance, while, as a Christian myself, acknowledging that Christianity appears to me to have a much better claim to the term "religion of peace" than Islam, based on both the teachings and the recent behavior of adherents of each), but as an entertainer, not as a spokesman for me.

So. Thanks for the spurious congratulations on "discovering" my "limits." Let me offer my congratulations on your exposure, willy-nilly, to the fact that the Right, while no more monolithic than the Left, is perhaps something different from what you thought it was.

Moderates speak

A group of moderate Muslims has started a website: We Are Sorry. Unfortunately they don't identify themselves, but what they do say is that not only the violence of the radicals (which has included several embassy-burnings and at least one kidnapping) but also the across-the-board boycott of all Danish products was inappropriate in response to the depictions of Mohammed last September. As it happens, I of course agree about the violence, but if the world's Muslims decide not to buy Danish for any reason or none, that's their own business.

Let me say that the reaction from some in the blogosphere, to initiate a "contest" to produce the most offensive image of Mohammed, is also inappropriate, but as a matter of free speech, permissible - if just barely, since it skates mighty close to the edge of incitement.

It remains to be seen whether the attempts of either side to elicit a hotter, larger, and more immediate conflict than we're already experiencing will succeed. I'm enough of a peacenik to hope that the conflict can be contained and limited, but not enough of one to believe that it can be solved by all parties' "just sitting down [why is sitting down always a part of these formulations?] and talking"; it's a part of Islam we're at war against, the faction that rejects the "internal struggle" interpretation of jihad in favor or the "infidels must convert or die" version, and the rest of Islam is going to have to choose a side eventually. The question is, will they choose on principle, or wait until the outcome is clear? If they choose now to side with the modern world, or if they wait until we win, the result is the same though our level of trust would be significantly lessened in the former case. If they choose now to side with the radical element, I believe we'll still win, but at greater cost to both sides as we're forced to recall and replay our own bloody history from times when our existence was similarly under assault.

This is a crummy post. I'm far more involved in reading about what's happening than in opining on it at present, but lest this page grow cold and dark, I'll keep trying to put something up regularly.

And back to business

I have next to nothing to say about the State of the Union Address that hasn't been said in timelier and more complete fashion, more assiduously, and more hilariously (but you might have to backtrack a bit to the Protein Wisdom Conceptual Series to get some of it) by others. (OK, OK, I have to give you a little of Jeff's: "Alito, wearing robe, enters the hall. Instinctively, Amanda Marcotte clenches her vaginal muscles to protect her uterus.") I shared in the disbelief when the Democrat side of the hall rose to congratulate themselves on not only blocking Bush's effort to reform Social Security but not coming up with any alternatives for it, as well as when they stayed resolutely seated at various moments when Bush posited an America on the side of freedom, democracy, and self-determination. Mmm-hmmm.

Some other notes:

• Buy Danish! In case you've missed the story, protests have been occurring at various places in the Middle East and elsewhere because a Danish newspaper printed twelve caricatures of Mohammed, who is traditionally not pictured (though the tradition is not always observed - thanks to Michelle Malkin, who also reproduces the cartoons, for the link to the Mohammed Image Archive). Europe appears to be taking an unprecedented-in-recent-times stand with the Danes, so bravo to them. Me, I'm going to buy some Havarti today. Maybe some ham. And I hope I still have the email address of my Danish friend from college, so I can ask her how to make - ahem, phonetic-ish spelling to follow - röt gröt mit flutheh, a red-berry pudding with cream that she served at her wedding dinner. Oooh, oooh, I know: I'll do Smørgåsbord for our Super Bowl party!
  
• Read this for an eyewitness account of the situation on the ground in Iraq and with our troops. Note particularly:
  

  Our occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War is a closer example of what we face in Iraq; we fought an extensive insurgency there for years, then remained in the country for nearly a century, with very positive eventual results.

  
  and:
  

  [...]in the latest scientific poll of the Iraqi public, released December 12 by Oxford Research International[:] Asked how things are going for them personally, 71 percent of Iraqis now say life is “good,” compared to 29 percent who say “bad.” A majority insist that despite the war, life is already better for them than it was under Saddam Hussein. By 5:1 they expect their lives will be even better one year from now. Seven out of ten Iraqis think their country as a whole will be a better place in one year.

  
  
• This lengthy piece (thanks to the inimitable Instapundit for the link) discusses reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The part Glenn Reynolds highlights is the discussion of electrical supply: under Saddam Hussein, rolling blackouts in the north (Kurdish area) and south (Shi'ite area) were routine, in order to keep Baghdad powered 24/7. Now, rolling blackouts still occur, and little or none of the country has adequate electricity, but the total amount of power generated and supplied exceeds the total under Saddam - it's just more equitably distributed.
  
• As if it needs to be said, Cindy Sheehan has demonstrated again that she's moved from grieving mother to shameless grandstander. I'm sorry for her loss; I can't imagine the pain of losing a son (quick sign of the cross and knock on wood, covering all bases). But, just as it was inappropriate for Dave Delp to wear a rude anti-Clinton t-shirt to the Senate gallery during Clinton's impeachment hearings, and just as Rep. Young's wife acted inappropriately by wearing a "Support the Troops!" t-shirt (she was also escorted out), while Cindy Sheehan has the same freedom of speech as any American, she has no intrinsic right to a national audience, particularly when the forum is held for another (and Constitutionally-required) purpose. Apparently the Capitol police have apologized for their actions in removing both women; they were following what amounts to an etiquette rule of very long standing at the Capitol, but they've now knuckled under to "free speech" advocates who apparently have no sense of decorum. [Query to self: if Sheehan or Young had worn a tasteful suit with the same message embroidered on the jacket, would that have been acceptable? Hmm... nope, not as far as I can see. The rule both women broke is reasonable, and equitably applied, it seems. Why the backpedaling?]
  

I'd say that's enough to go on with.

Important omission to be corrected: Please note that I do not advocate dissing any religion's peaceful tenets! There's no virtue in mocking Islam or Muslims, any more than there is in mocking Judaism or Christianity or their adherents. But these drawings were typical editorial cartoons, far less disrespectful of Islam and Muslims than pretty much any European picturing of Israeli Jews and their allies (that'd be us, folks). Where they blended the image of Mohammed with the actions of fundamentalist Muslims (or Islamists, as I'm following the lead of many in calling them), the blending was factually accurate. My objection to the reaction of Islamists is that they appear to believe that we "infidels" are as bound by Islam as they are themselves, and they're willing to back up their belief with blood.

Unfortunately for them, if the sacrilege of picturing Mohammed is a life-and-death value for them, a free press has long been rather a life-and-death value for us. We now have the clash of civilizations out in the open: first, Palestinians overwhelmingly elect Hamas to lead their would-be nation, and then Islamists burn Danish flags and threaten Danish lives over some line drawings. It's been quite a week, hasn't it?

I'm whistling in the dark; this is terribly serious.

Will there be a pre-buttal?

Remember last year?

Whenever I hear that odd term, I think of my sister's puzzlement in early high school when she first heard the term "button-front jeans." Because she hadn't actually seen the jeans (our parents were strong proponents of unbranded clothes - my first and only "designer" jeans in high school, bought with my own scarce money, were Guess jeans reminiscent of that Brooke Shields ad that anyone who came of age in the mid-'80s will no doubt remember. She of course looked better in them), and hadn't actually seen the term in writing, she heard "butt-in-front jeans." She couldn't for the life of her figure out how they'd accomplish that aim. (I think I would've been equally puzzled except that I was paying much less attention.)

So. Butt-in-front - pre-buttal - you connect the dots.

The kids will get to stay up late tonight, because (a) I'm not missing the speech, (b) we have no blank videotapes in the house even if I were inclined to tape it, (c) we don't have TiVo or its ilk, and (d) there's no way the little one will go to sleep in time for me to hear it; he's tough.

A moment of clarity

I just had a heck of a thought.

What if... stay with me, here... what if there's an overarching sense to all the silliness from the Democratic Party? Let's review:

• Leaders of the party repeatedly declare the war in Iraq a "quagmire" and unwinnable in the face of clear evidence - such as Osama bin Laden's call for a truce and the coalition government that's forming in Iraq - that it's eminently winnable if we keep our concentration;
  
• ordinary Democrat folks and some elected Democrats stay on message with "Bush Lied!" in the face of non-partisan evidence that he just, well, didn't;
  
• the Left blogosphere's rhetoric, ranging from tediously repetitive claims that Bush is simultaneously dumb as a rock and sly enough to fool the entire body of the American public all the way up to calls for impeachment and even assassination, and Party leaders fail to denounce that rhetoric, instead even appearing as commenters and diarists on the blogs of some of the big offenders;
  
• Kerry continues to make solemn pronouncements and take quixotic actions regularly, in spite of even Left-side commentators' head-scratching about his unbelievable "tone-deafness";
  
• Gore continues to seek relevance in all the wrong places;
  
• Cindy Sheehan may be running for the Senate against Dianne Feinstein;
  
• Kennedy continues to see (or at least acknowledge) no irony in his moralistic scoldings of Alito;
  
• public and private spokespeople for the party have staked out the side of the NSA program "controversy" that aligns them with the interests of terrorists, so that when they protest that they're for the program but against the method, they're vulnerable to widespread interpretations that they've again put a perceived privacy right of criminals ahead of a significantly more defensible right of law-abiding citizens to expect their government to take all prudent actions to protect them from physical danger;
  
• and at every turn we're warned not to question their patriotism.
  

Maybe they have a double-secret agenda: to make the anti-war, anti-Bush case so completely batty and unacceptable to everyone with a shred of perspective or proportion that they ensure that the American will is bound to remain strong enough to finish the job in the Middle East. Maybe 9/11 was as crystalline a moment for them as it was for the rest of us, and they've just chosen a strangely Machiavellian course to address its imperatives. So we shouldn't question their patriotism after all - just play along, keep on acting puzzled and triumphalist and only give them the wink when we're sure no Islamist is looking.

Or maybe it's just the nachos. Baked chips, fat-free refried black beans, but of course real pepper jack cheese, a dollop of sour cream, and the Safeway Chipotle Salsa... mmmmmmm....

This parenting moment brought to you by the kid down the street

Last night my four-year-old daughter apparently used "the S word," according to the eight-year-old. As the oldest was shouting the accusation from the other room to me, the four-year-old was already in motion, racing for the kitchen where I was cooking dinner to forestall what she assumed would be the storm to follow.

"I'm sorry, Mommy," she began, then, her little face crumbling, "I'm sorry, MOMMY!!" and I was bending down to tell her, "It's OK, honey, everyone sometimes makes a mistake and says something they don't mean to, but remember that that kind of language isn't OK in this house," or words to that effect. I got as far as "It's -" and she was gone, stumbling up the stairs to her room in hysterical tears. We heard her slam the door and fully lose her grip, screaming with sobs.

Truth is, I was briefly amused and surprised that she knew "the S word." We don't talk like that. It's not that we don't know the words ourselves; we're just scrupulous about not using them in the kids' hearing (and frankly I no longer find the need to illustrate my points in exactly this way nearly as much as I did when I was younger). Then I figured it out: a neighbor kid has spent some part of the last three days over here, and though he's a friend of the oldest, the girl loooooves him and hangs around like a groupie whenever he's in the house. This kid is nice, polite, doesn't boot her out of the room or anything (in contrast to her brother) - but evidently he does run off at the mouth. He has an older brother with whom, according to my oldest, he engages in blue-language fights regularly, so there you go.

Poor little girl. I went up to her room and spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince her that I wasn't mad, that I understood how things can just slip out; for the first ten minutes I was talking over her still-hysterical weeping. Eventually I got out of her the reason for her upset: she was angry and embarrassed at herself. It made me want to drop everything for the whole rest of the night and cuddle her, which, sadly, was not a realistic option. But at least I did get her calmed down, changed her into a pretty dress (I had to wonder at that request: yes, she was all sweaty and wanted to change clothes, but why a dress? Could she actually have "felt dirty" from using a bad word? Hmmm...), and held her hand down the stairs to eat her dinner. She commented on the whole scene later in the evening: "Mommy, remember when I was so upset because I used the S word?"

Oh, that she - that all of them - would remain self-policing. I know it won't happen, but what a wonderful world it would be if they did.

Don't make eye contact!

Whoa.

Thanks again, Protein Wisdom via Michelle Malkin, for reminding me to check the transcript. Last night on Fox News - I think it was Brit Hume's part of the evening, as I was laboring mightily on my Total Gym Pro Plus 2000 Xtreme or whatever the thing's called with my toddler cracking up laughing as he climbed on my chest - I heard one tiny snippet of Senate-speak. The tagline was something like, "From some senators we heard sound..." [cut to soundbyte of Kerry holding forth in sonorous tones, looking nice and tan from Davos - cheap shot, but what the heck - about how Alito's nomination was the result of a revolt on the Right to which the White House responded by predictably caving and putting up an ideological conservative. Imagine!] "...and fury..." [cut to Kennedy looking ready to pop a vein in his forehead, actually pounding on the podium as he declared, "He failed to demonstrate before this Judiciary Committee that he was committed to the continued march for progress!!?!" - thanks again to Michelle Malkin, as I've reproduced her quote rather than relying on my memory].

In the moment, I thought, "My, that's not exactly a passion-inspiring soundbyte there; how'd he get so het up?" There was a serious disconnect between the words and the body language.

So - the link again is here - Michelle Malkin filled in the blanks for me. Go read the transcript on her blog. It includes such nuggets as:

[...][T]hey [the Supreme Court] are the ones who changed this country inevitably with what we call the march to progress. The march towards knocking down the walls of discrimination that permitted us to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and public accomodations so people who's skin was not white who could go into restaurants and hotels. Public accomodations[sic]. The '65 act for voting. Voting rights. The '68 act. The public accomodations[sic]. The 1973 act that said that women are going to treated equally. The Americans with Disabilities Act that said that the disabled are going to be part of the American family.

All of that is part of the march for progress.

And my friends, the one organization, the one institution that protects it is THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!

She adds at the end of that paragraph, "(Screaming at the top of his lungs.)"

You know when you're, say, serving dinner at your house to a group of people you don't know all that well, you're thinking, "OK, this is fine, everyone's getting along well," and you ask, "So, Bev, what do you do for a living?" and it turns out that she sells mail-order herbal supplements to cleanse your body of all the toxins that accumulate in your fat cells from the hormones in meat and milk and the pesticide residues on vegetables? And she goes on at some length about how everyone who actually cares about their health should only eat organic foods, and especially eschew engineered foods because who knows what you're taking in when you eat, say, a genetically altered tomato? And, remember, you made this dinner, and if there was something organic in it, it was in the chemistry sense of "carbon-based" rather than the new-age sense of "grown through the gentle ministrations of Mother Gaia and nothing else, except maybe some manure from free-range cattle"?

Awkward pause... and someone makes a valiant but doomed effort to segue out of the danger zone, and eventually someone else drops all pretense and just flatly changes the subject.

That's the sense of it. Kennedy, a senior Senator, the (gulp) eminence grise of the Democratic Party, going completely wild in defense of a competing branch of government - more: giving them sole credit for every advancement he perceives in American life - right in the middle of a bunch of other Senators. Add to that the implicit - no, explicit assumption that the "march for progress" is the goal of American governance. And, of course, the implicit (this time it actually is implicit) acknowledgment that the courts are the last refuge of the Democratic Party, or at any rate his ideological companions.

I just can't figure out whether Jeff Goldstein is trying to create a segue out of thin air or baldly changing the subject. All I know is that my eyes are unwaveringly on my plate.

The dilettante blogger's haiku

Winter: Jeff Goldstein
cites my comment on his blog.
I fear reprisals.

Yet another reason (if you needed one)

...to avoid a "timeline for withdrawal" from Iraq, even a milestone-based one. The usual line, which is indubitably true, is that a timeline gives al Qaeda and its cohort a target to out-wait. But even points along a timeline are dangerous:

What is the engine of our involvement in Iraq? A combination of the will of the American people and the will of the American president. I have confidence in President Bush to stay this course until circumstances make it apparent that we, and the Iraqi people, have won. (As Orson Scott Card says in Ender's Game, since when does the victor need to be told he's won?) In the will of the American people, I have less confidence - not because the American people have poor judgment, but because they're an aggregate, not an individual. So it's possible to affect their - our - sense of the worthiness of the cause by several means, including - here's the rub - missing milestones.

So far, Iraq has done a brilliant job of meeting the milestones set for it internally and externally. But let's say we set a series of milestones tied to troop withdrawals. How many milestones would al Qaeda have to disrupt before the American people's aggregate sense of our effectiveness in Iraq would be damaged beyond salvage? Better by far to keep Coalition troop levels fluid, able to respond to events, and keep our eyes on the prize: a stable, democratic, allied-with-us Iraq, as I said in my previous post.

Democrats' Quilting Bee and Debating Society meets here

Many moons ago, I was a high school debater. My partner and I were the #2 team among Department of Defense Dependent Schools competitors in the U.K., which, with $4, will get you a pretty decent latte. I note here, for real debaters out there, that the DoDDS system, convinced (and correctly so, at the time) that we dependents overseas would not be able to research our questions at all adequately at base or post libraries, created packets of "fact cards" for us. All we had to do was to sort and organize them, and become sufficiently familiar with them that we could whip 'em out during a debate to good effect. So DoDDS debate teams started with exactly the same bodies of fact, and a team won by dint of its rhetorical fancy footwork.

But when the spokespeople of one of the United States's dominant political parties embrace high school debate as a tactic, well, forgive me if I tend to roll my eyes. For instance:

So, when the extremist nutcases in our country start comparing patriotic Democrats and Progressives with Osama bin Laden, welcome the opportunity to point out that the present incarnation of the GOP is controlled by the religious right, the Theocons, who bear disturbing parallels to the most wanted man in the world. And you don’t have to be able to whip out a bunch of quotes, all you need to remember is a simple soundbite and they will open the door for you.

The religious right is Osama bin Laden light.

That’s how easy it is to turn the tables.

H/T to Jeff Goldstein at ProteinWisdom, a terrific and often terrifically funny blog I've spent a lot of time on lately. (Not necessary work-safe, and definitely not kid-safe! Jeff's observations are clear and frequently hilarious, but couched in sometimes-inappropriate language for these audiences. However, civil discourse is the general rule. This is no Kos or DU.) The above is from a Kossack who goes by the moniker DarkSyde (whatever). His comments refer to what he perceives as similarities between Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist Islam and the beliefs of fundamentalist American Christians... without the barest acknowledgement of the completely different approaches each takes to the cultural norms of which they disapprove. Hint: one supports stoning and beheading of violators of religious law. The other, in its worst socially acceptable incarnation, supports aggressive, sometimes irritating, but ultimately non-physical conversion attempts. (If this DarkSyde's intent is to convince the great American center that all fundamentalist Christians are on the same page as the monsters who drag people to death behind pickup trucks or leave them wired to fences to die in the cold, good luck to him.)

Point being, DarkSyde, who is a "diarist" on DailyKos (which means he actually gets a "column" rather than just the opportunity to comment), appears to believe that the important thing here is winning the debate, rather than determining what is in the nation's best interest and going about creating a plan to achieve that goal.

Back in high school debate, it was a truism that the negative side was the easy side. If you won the coin toss, you chose to be the "con" side, because all you had to do was to poke enough little holes, or a sufficiently large single hole, in the "pro" side's arguments to weaken it; you didn't have to present an alternative. It was absolutely the opposite of the Perry Mason courtroom, in which Perry not only always got his client off but did so by revealing the real killer; instead, the debate was decided more like a real criminal trial, with a "reasonable doubt" standard. If the cons could elicit the equivalent of a reasonable doubt, they won. The pros, on the other hand, had to present their argument and then defend it vigorously, hoping that they could poke sufficient holes in the con-side's hole-poking attempts that their reasonable doubts would be revealed to be unreasonable.

But high school debate ain't what we're doing here. Does it matter whether the NSA program, summed up as "eavesdropping on the conversations of known al Qaeda members with others, some of whom may be US citizens," is legal or not? Of course it does - but if it's not legal, isn't the important question how to make it legal rather than how long the high-fiving should go on? What is the goal here? Is it important that the Shi'ites, many of whom are followers of a conservative brand of Islam, won a majority in Iraq's recent elections? Of course it is - but is it not at least as important that they didn't win enough seats to control to ["the" - sheesh!] Iraqi government and must form a coalition government? Should we consider whether military commanders in Iraq ought to have asked for more troops on the ground in the days immediately following Iraqi liberation? Naturally we should - but as an exercise to feed into the next conflict, rather than a "gotcha" moment with no follow-up.

I hope to get my hands on L. Paul Bremer's new book, My Year In Iraq, soon. I've heard parts of two interviews with him lately, and not only does he utterly destroy arguments from "the other side" about whether, for instance, the Iraqi Army "should have been" dissolved and more Coalition troops "should have been" used in the early occupation period, but he stays brilliantly focused on the goal of bringing about a stable, peaceful, allied-with-us Iraq as a means to greater American national security and, not incidentally, a better world. He ain't doing high school debate either.

Update: Well, color me surprised. Apparently Blogger doesn't support trackbacks, and besides linking to sites I read (and emailing the authors, which I usually don't do because of the pretension factor), I don't actually know how to indicate to their authors that I've been reading them. Yet who shows up in the comments but DarkSyde him/herself and... Jeff Goldstein! Wow. I'm honored, Mr. Goldstein. Mr./Ms. Syde, well, thanks for the appearance - can't say as how I'm honored.

Mr./Ms. Syde, you continue to confuse a general similarity (ask yourself what orthodox Jews believe about women clergy, for instance - I bet it's "eerily similar" to what Osama bin Laden believes) with equivalence, and believe that by doing so you "win." My point is that with methodology as flawed as yours, your conclusion is invalid.

But even if we elide your method, your conclusion is still specious. You say, in the Comments, "In toto, both ["the extreme religious right" - as opposed to ordinary American Christians or even most fundamentalist Christians, as Mr. Goldstein points out - and Osama bin Laden] wish to force feed their specific version of religion, with all the associated Fatwas acting as a veto on the behavior of others, regardless if others share that view, with the full power of the state and law behind them." You make this assumption, fail to back it up, and ignore the really indisputable fact that while Osama bin Laden has (or perhaps "had" is a better word, these days, thank you Mr. Bush) real power and influence over policy in the real world, the "extreme religious right" has precisely zero power and influence. By "extreme religious right," I must conclude you're talking about an apparently invisibly tiny group of fundamentalist Christians who would actually seek and support the setup of an American theocracy, rather than the larger group of fundamentalist Christians who are content to work through the electoral process; otherwise your equation of this group with Osama bin Laden makes no sense. Anticipating your counter that an American government that includes any number, however small, of fundamentalist Christians is in fact a "theocracy," let me point out the important difference between a theocracy, or government based on religious offices and run by religious leaders - such as, for instance, Rev. Jackson or the Archbishop of Boston - and a government in which some leaders are devout in their religions, and share their devotion (or maybe just their cultural aims) with enough voters that some of their policy goals are able to be voted into law. Since you come from the "nuanced" side of the aisle, I'm sure you have no trouble understanding that difference.

Federalism: not for the faint of heart

The Supreme Court has spoken - and it's with a heavy heart that I admit I agree with their ruling, and can't imagine why Scalia and Thomas dissented. I can imagine why they might have disagreed with the Oregon law, as I do, but not why they dissented from the majority opinion that the Federal government does not have jurisdiction over this area of American life. (Roberts, I don't know well enough yet.)

I hate that law. My father, I understand, loves it, for reasons he and I don't discuss. I consider it one of the depths of depravity to involve healers in suicide. I don't doubt that doctors faced with their patients' pain and desire for release may feel an impulse to help them achieve that release - good doctors, at any rate, ought to empathize with their patients this way, just as family members sometimes pray for the speedy (or "happy," in the old Catholic formula) death of a loved one in agony. But to take the next step by bringing about that death - that's a line I believe we ought not to invite doctors to cross. (I also fear that today's allowing doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs for terminal patients could too easily evolve into tomorrow's mandating that they do so, a la the Plan B pharmacist debates. And can anyone doubt that there will be pharmacists who, still committed to their own principles, will refuse to fill these prescriptions? But these concerns of mine are for later days.)

However. This ruling is closely analogous to Roe v. Wade, this time decided in a strict-constructionist fashion. The repeal of Roe no longer looks like such an impossibility. I reluctantly see this ruling as a victory for Life, because if Roe is overturned and the legality of abortion returns to State legislatures, there is a chance that some, perhaps many States will outlaw late-term abortions, that some will enact limits on second-trimester abortions, that one or two may ban abortion altogether (probably with the usual medical exception), and a certainty that each of the fifty States will have the freedom to explore a range of policy options. Jane Galt addresses this point this week.

Now, it becomes incumbent on me to try to prevent Pennsylvania from passing a law similar to Oregon's. That, friends and neighbors, is federalism, and it's not for the faint of heart.