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I knew Vik wouldn't be able to go two whole weeks without blogging. The shakes got to him and he gave in to his jones and made the post below.
Vik! Put the mouse down and step away from the keyboard! Take off those pajamas, put on some clothes and go outside. It's a beautiful world out there. At least it was the last time I checked. Let me just click on the Weather Channel and see...
A BRIEF BREAK FROM MY VACATION FROM BLOGGING.
This vacation I'm taking from blogging is working. As I posted previously, I have a major case of blogger burnout, and thanks to guest blogger Don Bridge, whose posts I am greatly enjoying, I'm recovering nicely. One indication that the recovery is going well is that there are brief moments when the need to blog is returning. I'm going to give myself a break from my vacation long enough to post this.
Last night, I had a conversation with a friend who expressed disbelief when I said that the Koran instructs people to kill non-Muslims wherever you find them. She just flat-out didn't believe it. I said I'd send her some links. Just two months earlier I'd had a similar conversation with another friend. Here are the links I sent to my friend last night:
From the Koran:
[3.151] We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and their abode is the fire, and evil is the abode of the unjust.
[4.89] They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
[5.33] The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement,
[8.12] When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
[8.39] And fight with them until there is no more persecution and religion should be only for Allah; but if they desist, then surely Allah sees what they do.
[9.5] So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
[9.29] Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
[9.111] Surely Allah has bought of the believers their persons and their property for this, that they shall have the garden; they fight in Allah's way, so they slay and are slain; a promise which is binding on Him in the Taurat and the Injeel and the Quran; and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? Rejoice therefore in the pledge which you have made; and that is the mighty achievement.
It's inevitable that such a document would lead to an entirely different culture -- a culture in which women are stoned to death and people are raised to go out and kill women and children. I personally have met Muslims who live a reformed version of Islam that rejects the literal meaning of such verses, and who support freedom and America. However, the Islamofascists are merely carrying out the literal instructions of the Koran.
When will this blatant highjacking of my ideas end?
Once again James Lileks, reigning King of the Bathroom Books, has been using his Klingon Mind Scanner to probe my vague, half formed ideas. He then applies wit and - damn him - clearly written sentences and mostly correctly spelled words and publishes them on his website. And where does that leave me? Unable to sleep because the tin foil hat is so uncomfortable and it doesn't even keep him out of my head, that's where! I had intended to write something about how Mandatory Holidays just don't seem the same as they were in some mythical past, and he beat me to it in today's Bleat.
And this happens all the time! In one of his Diner episodes last summer he brought up how truly awful Mungo Jerry is and I shot beer out my nose. The keyboard still sticks! I am the world's foremost hater of Mungo Jerry. I once had a roommate who loved that group and I had to listen to their album endlessly. All their songs have a sameness usually only found in reggae. I hate them so much I won't even google them and post a link.
And you can't get that Diner from Lileks' site cause the link is broken and he won't fix it. Jeez - it isn't like he writes 14,000 columns per week! It's more like only 13,000. The slacker.
Politics is entertainment.
Despite all the bickering and posturing everything that is going on now would still be going on – the economy, the war in Iraq, you name it, it would still be going on pretty much the same. I get a lot of argument about this view.
“Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq!”
Hooey.
As we’ve all seen lately in the who-knew-what-about- WMDs blamefest, there is no denying that the policy of the Clinton-Gore Administration was regime change in Iraq because of the threat of WMDs. Anyone who has been paying attention longer than last Wednesday knows that. Gore brought the subject up many times during the 2000 campaign. Ignore anything he has said since then. A hypothetical President Gore would have taken us into Iraq probably quicker than President Bush. The only difference would be that Democrats would have embraced the invasion as a humanitarian mission (see Kosovo), and the Republicans would have been against it. That’s the way the game is played. It really is hilarious to watch.
I live in a small town on an island just off the east coast. It has been undergoing a furious explosion of development during the past decade or so. Earlier this month we had a local election that was a battle between two factions. On the one hand you had evil developers. On the other hand were different evil developers. One side portrayed itself as the future of the fun recreational lifestyle. The other was sincere in preserving our historical past (which never existed).
What it was really about was who would get to control where the sewer lines would go next.
It was even more fun to watch than the hysteria over the war.
I have a daughter who is a junior in college. She attends a small private university of about 5,000 students. It is not connected with the state university system. She is a smart cookie, but like many girls her age (actually everyone at every age) she’s always been more interested in pop culture than in news and politics. Since her major is requiring her to take a lot of government and current history courses she’s become more aware of what is going on.
I’d been curious to see if she was being filled with a lot of liberal bad ideas at school. It turns out that most of her teachers are very balanced in their views, although she has had a couple of real flaming libs. She calls or emails me a lot about what she is being taught and to my surprise she is curiously resistant to indoctrination. I seem to have raised a skeptic, unless she is just telling me what I want to hear. Those with children know this tactic very well. Why it surprises me that my child is a skeptic is a mystery, I mean, she is my daughter, after all.
Back in the news (but just barely) is left-over Vietnam-era fossil Daniel Ellsberg. He was among a dozen or so antiwar protestors arrested in Crawford TX on Wednesday (note to Cindy Sheehan: Forgive your son).
Ellsberg maunders through the usual B.S. about having “seen through” the Vietnam War. These people can’t speak two sentences without bringing up the good old days of Vietnam War protests. And ya know what? They’re full of it.
It is a tenet of the revisionist history crowd that no one remembers anything beyond last Wednesday. Unfortunately they’re usually right. These people are of course in full flower with the “Bush lied about WMDs” mantra.
Well let me tell you a big secret about the Vietnam era antiwar protests.
It was mostly about the draft.
You children have heard of the draft, haven’t you?
As mentioned in the previous post I grew up in Washington DC. I was a teenager during the late 1960s – early 70s. Yes, I’m that old. I attended a few of the big demonstrations because it was the trendy thing to do. To the vast majority of us hippies the slogan “Make Love, Not War” really meant: “Please don’t draft us because the birth control pill is here and all the girls are willing – pass the spliff.”
The number one issue during the Vietnam War was the draft. Turning 18 was an event that we teen boys feared. Statistics say that some 70,000 young men fled to Canada. Burning your draft card was an act of protest. I never burned mine. Most of us didn’t because the draft card was your ID – the drinking age in most places then was still 18. No draft card – no booze.
The draft lottery was enacted in 1969. My turn came in 1971 for the ‘72 draft. My birth date October 9 drew the high number of 254, which virtually exempted me from the draft. Note: my best friend from high school’s birth date was October 6. He drew #6. But that’s another story.
My memories of that period are conflicted. I didn’t dodge the draft and if my number had come up I probably would have gone. There is no point (and little truth) in looking back from age and wisdom (such as it is) and claiming to know the feelings of one’s callow youth. But I probably would have gone because of family tradition. My father served in WWII and got the Purple Heart when his ship was kamikazied. His father served during WWI. My grandfather’s grandfather was a Union soldier in the Civil War, and his grandfather was in the Pennsylvania militia in the early days of the American Revolution. Yep, I’ve got the documentation.
But I digress…
My point (assuming that I have one) is that a long bitter battle was fought to abolish the draft. Everyone now serving in the military is a volunteer. All the hysterical comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam fall to this one hugely ignored point. No amount of screaming “Chickenhawk” by those who just woke up last Wednesday can stand to the fact that the slave army was abolished in 1973.
PS – my son is a former Marine.
Thanks Vik. Old friends indeed!
Vik and I lost touch with each other years ago until I stumbled across The Big Picture a few months ago. Ain’t the internet swell?
Not surprisingly Vik and I hold similar political opinions, although I suspect I am more libertarian (that’s small “L” libertarian – please ignore the wing nuts of the Libertarian Party).
About burnout…
I have been a news and politics junkie since I was a teenager. I grew up in Washington DC and my father was a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal and another Dow Jones publication, so I’ve soaked in news and politics all my life.
Regularly, during periods of political hysteria, I would find my father sitting at the kitchen table late at night, quite drunk.
“It’s all bullsh*t,” he would mumble. “It’s all the same – over and over. The same mistakes. The same stupidity. The same bullsh*t. I can’t take it any more.”
And then he would pour himself another.
Nowadays the news/politics cycle – and the hysteria that goes with it – moves at the speed of the internet and the 24 hour news channels. Needless to say, the bullsh*t level peaks and ebbs just as fast. As I troll the news I periodically get a sense of massive system-wide burnout – an exhaustion induced by the same old stupidity, the same old mistakes, over and over. We are about to embark on the year 2006, which promises to be a brutal year in politics.
Today is Thanksgiving – the beginning of our annual cycle of Mandatory Holidays (more on this later). We all need a breather before the hysteria begins anew.
So have a nice break, Vik.
I have a major case of blogger burnout, and will be taking two weeks off from blogging.
In the meantime, I'm turning this space over to guest poster Don Bridge. Don is a good friend. He's also a former blogger whose work I enjoyed. He tells me that his articles will be very different from what I usually post. I approve whole-heartedly and look forward to reading them. Don, welcome back to the blogosphere, and have a great time posting!
HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Have a great holiday. And check here for Ben Franklin's account of its origin. (via Drudge).
From Victor Davis Hanson:
...the Democrats are now inching toward jettisoning their final reservation and embracing the Howard Dean cut-and-run position. Still, shrewd pros like a Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, or Chuck Schumer are not quite there yet for two other understandable worries. The polls say Americans are tired of the war, but not yet ready to quit and give up on all that has been achieved, leaving brave Iraqi reformers to ninth-century beheaders and suicide-murderers.
...these more astute Democrats are not sure that the Iraqi gambit might not work, especially with the December election coming up, the public trial of Saddam, the growth of the Iraqi security forces, and the changed attitudes in Europe, Jordan, and Lebanon. Many talk a lot about Vietnam circa 1967 but deep down and in silence most have mixed emotions about Saigon 1975.For now Democrats stammer, sputter, and go the Bush shoulda / coulda route — not quite ready to take the McGovern sharp turn, forever waiting on polls and events on the ground in Iraq, always unsure whether peace and democracy will come before the 2,500th American fatality.
Yet as they hedge — on television praising Congressmen Murtha who advocates withdrawal, but making sure they vote overwhelmingly on the record to reject his advice — they should consider some critical questions.
First, are the metrics of this war in the terrorists’ or our favor? Are the Iraqi security forces growing or shrinking? Are elections postponed or on schedule? Are Europe, Jordan, Lebanon, and others more or less sympathetic to a war against Islamic terrorism in Iraq? Are bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Zarqawi more or less popular or secure after we removed Saddam? Is al Qaeda in a strengthened or weakened position? Is the Arab world more or less receptive to democracy in the Gulf, Egypt, Lebanon, and the West Bank? And is the United States more or less vulnerable to a terrorist attack as we go into our fifth year since September 11?
...and earns a comparison to Jane Fonda from Dick Morris.
By traveling to Dubai, just a few hundred miles from the combat zone, to denounce the American in volvement in Iraq as a "big mistake," Bill Clinton has made a big mistake of his own.
Normally, a top leader of the Democratic Party and the spouse of a presidential candidate can and should feel free to say anything he chooses. But a former president of the United States should be more careful before he tells hundreds of thousands of young men and women, many of whom served under him, that they are risking their lives for a mistake.
To do it in the Arab world compounds the error. His denunciation of our war effort so close to the spots where our troops are fighting summons memories of Jane Fonda.
Author Barry Rubin has insights on the current status on movement towards Democracy in the Mid-East:
FrontPage: Tell us about the battle for the soul of the Middle East.
Rubin: Briefly, every Arab country plus Iran and the Palestinians has long been led by dictatorships—Lebanon and Iraq are currently different. These leaders have failed to deliver on their promises but they have not fallen. This situation is at odds with trends in the rest of the world. The regimes have survived through a mix of techniques, including repression and corruption, the use of anti-Americanism and anti-Israel rhetoric, playing ethnic politics, and other methods. The main challengers to them have been radical Islamists who in a sense have the same basic world view. They simply want to substitute Islamism for Arab nationalism. As I put it, this means they are saying that the mistake is not bashing one’s own head against a stone wall but merely not doing it hard and long enough. Now the liberals have emerged as a third, but the weakest, alternative. In every Arab state plus Iran and the Palestinians, the future is going to see a struggle between these three forces that is going to go on for a very long time. We cannot assume the regimes will soon fall or that the liberals will inevitably win. In my opinion this three-way battle is and will be the greatest political drama of our time.
...Rubin: I was never enthusiastic about the war although I recognize the moral importance of freeing the Iraqi people from such a terrible regime. Iraqis are now often advocates of pluralism. An Iraqi intellectual went to Beirut and urged the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union to condemn the repression of the Saddam Hussein regime. One Lebanese politician said to him that he was tired of all this Iraqi whining. Why should they complain when every Arab country has mass graves?
...The clear answer about Iraq is that if Iraq does become stable and works it will become a role model for democracy and moderation in the region. If it doesn’t, it will become a cautionary tale.
...FrontPage: Are you optimistic about the democratization and modernization of the Arab world?
Rubin: Over the next 50 years, yes. Over the next 10 years, no. I think this will be a long-term trend—with an emphasis both on the “long-term” and “trend” parts. But of course the pro-democratic individuals in the Arab world know that they have no choice but to wage the struggle, both out of individual conscience and to save their societies.
Bill Clinton: 'the United States made a "big mistake'' when it invaded Iraq.'
...and yet...
Bill Clinton: "Saddam is gone. It's a good thing..."
And those two quotes are from one single appearance by Bill Clinton.
...and now...
Hillary Clinton: '...an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be "a big mistake."'
Thank you, Bill and Hillary, for simultaneously taking every possible opposing view of this same subject. Way to go in demonstrating leadership ability!
Since Zarqawi ordered the attack on a Muslim wedding in Jordan two weeks ago, officials say there has been a surge in the number of tips about his whereabouts.
According to Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and ABC News consultant, "More and more Arabs and Muslims are becoming vocal in their condemnation of Zarqawi's tactics."
Even Zarqawi's attempt last week to apologize or explain the attack on the wedding as a mistake did not seem to help.
"This may have been the straw that breaks the camel's back with regard to attacks on fellow members of Islam," says Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism official and now an ABC News consultant.
In fact, Zarqawi's own tribe disavowed him in an advertisement placed over the weekend in Jordanian newspapers in an apparent attempt to minimize the risk of becoming targets of revenge.
(First entries posted on 11-10-07).
Updated 1-19-06: al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert killed in Pakistan
12-10-05: Iraqis Hand Over 'The Butcher,' High-Ranking Al Qaeda Member
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi citizens turned over a high-ranking Al Qaeda member known as "the Butcher" to U.S. forces in Ramadi Friday a military statement said.
12-08-05: 22 Militants Killed in Two Afghan Clashes
KABUL, Afghanistan — Twenty-two suspected militants were killed in two clashes with Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces this week, including 13 in an attack on a cell that was believed responsible for several bombings in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.
12-03-05: Al-Qaeda number three 'killed by CIA spy plane' in Pakistan
Al-Qaeda's third-ranking leader has been killed by a missile fired by an American drone in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, NBC television news reported yesterday.
Egyptian-born Abu Hamza Rabia, who is said to head al-Qaeda's international operations, was among five people killed in a blast at a house where they were hiding in North Waziristan on Thursday. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan confirmed Rabia's death yesterday.
11-21-05: Al-Qaida Operative Nabbed Near Mexican Border:
An al-Qaida operative who was on the FBI's terrorist watch list was recently captured near the Mexican border, housed in a Texas jail and turned over to federal agents, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, said on Friday.
"A confirmed al-Qaida terrorist, an Iraqi national, was held in the Brewster County jail," Rep. Culberson told ABC Radio host Sean Hannity. "He was captured in Mexico. This was within the last six weeks. He was turned over to the FBI."
..."In fact, one was the sheriff who incarcerated him in the Brewster County jail [and who] confirmed this as well," he explained. The same sheriff also confirmed "that this guy is on the FBI's al-Qaida list," he added.
The al-Qaida operative "had been in Mexico, living just about 60 miles east of El Paso," Rep. Culberson said. "He was captured in a little town called El Porvenir, right across from Fort Hancock."
Rep. Culberson said the detainee had been living in Mexico for up to a year, where the terrorist "was taking careful notes on the movement of people, police officers, wildlife, etc."
The Iraqi national "had apparently aggravated a neighbor in Mexico, who turned him in to Mexican authorities," he explained. Mexican officials then turned him over to the U.S. officials, who temporarily housed him in the Brewster County jail.
11-10-07: Given the frequency of reports of terrorists captured and otherwise put out of commision, it would be useful to keep a record of such events. I'll start with recent reports from Voice of America.
11/10/05 -- Top Asian Terrorist Leader Dead in Indonesia
One of Southeast Asia's most wanted terrorists has been confirmed dead after blowing himself up to avoid capture by Indonesia police.
Indonesian presidential spokesman Andi Mallerangeng says fingerprints Thursday confirmed that terrorist mastermind and explosives expert Azahari bin Husin is dead. He called it another blow against terrorism.
...Authorities say that Azahari bin Husin and two militants apparently blew themselves up Wednesday rather than surrender to an elite Indonesia police unit that had surrounded their hideout in Malang in east Java.
That's what I'm talking about.
11/08/05 -- Australia Claims Terror Raids Foiled 'Catastrophic' Attack
Police in Australia have arrested at least 17 people including a radical Muslim cleric, in a series of counterterrorism raids in both Sydney and Melbourne. The police say stockpiles of explosives and chemicals were found and the operation prevented a large-scale attack.
I'll update this list as reports come in. Please email me or post a comment if you see a report I've missed.
