Archive for June, 2014
25 Jun 2014

Wish You Were Here

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25 Jun 2014

“Six Years of Continual Foreign Policy Failure”

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ObamaTothe-rescue

Walter Russell Mead delivers, what Andrew Sullivan calls, “a majestically sweeping indictment of everything [P]resident Obama has achieved in foreign policy over the last six years.”

One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy. Most administrations have one failure in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking; this administration has two, both distinctly more ignominious and damaging than average. The opening to the Middle East, once heralded by this administration as transformative, has long vanished; no one even talks about the President’s speeches in Cairo and Istanbul anymore, unless regional cynics are looking for punch lines for bitter jokes. The support for the “transition to democracy” in Egypt ended on as humiliating a note as the “red line” kerfuffle in Syria. The spectacular example of advancing human rights by leading from behind in Libya led to an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.

Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise—though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, as they talk about George W. Bush at every chance they get.

Now, from the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is a strategic defeat of the first magnitude for the United States and its allies (as well as countries like Russia and even China). It is a perfect storm of bad policy intersecting with troubled times to create the gravest threat to U.S. and world stability since the end of the Cold War.

The mainstream press and the professional chatterboxes of the news shows need to set aside their squeamishness at poring over the details of a major strategic failure by a liberal Democrat. The rise of ISIS/ISIL is a disaster that must be examined and understood. How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?

Read the whole thing.

24 Jun 2014

Tweet of the Day

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Tweet55

24 Jun 2014

By Federal Law: Everyone Must Live Here

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pacific-heights
San Francisco: nice view, kind of pricey though.

Kevin D. Williamson considers the implications of applying the principles behind Obamacare more widely.

I have heard it argued that the San Francisco Bay Area is not only the nation’s but the world’s most desirable metropolis. I don’t buy that for a minute, but it’s not entirely implausible. There’s great natural beauty, and many of the world’s most creative people and institutions choose to make the area their home. It’s pricey by American standards but still a bargain by global standards. Like New York City in its golden age, it is a glorious collision between culture and money.

Let’s assume that the Bay Area partisans are correct in their high estimation of the metropolis. What might we do with that information? Why not pass a law requiring everybody in the United States to live there? As with the Affordable Care Act’s approach to health insurance, we wouldn’t be forcing an inferior product on people; we’d be forcing them to drop their second-rate cities for something better. Sorry, Cleveland — you can’t keep your crappy city, so deal with it. There would be some great economies of scale at work, and there are well-known economic benefits associated with population density, which we’d have in spades with a population of 300 million. (Though if we define the Bay Area broadly, we’d still have a lower population density than Manhattan, on average.) We could drop altogether thousands and thousands of redundancies — of school districts, police departments, fire departments, planning and zoning codes, tax laws, city councils. The rest of the country could be turned into farmland or left to revert to wilderness. Think of the efficiency we could achieve.

Once we’ve decided where everybody should live, we can move on to the question of what they should eat.

Read the whole thing.

24 Jun 2014

Atticus Aims a Krag

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GregoryPeckKrag

Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) takes aim at a rabid dog menacing the residents of 1930s Maycomb, Alabama in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962) with a neighbor’s Krag carbine.

I have one of these. Don’t you love that box magazine?

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Full video of scene here.

24 Jun 2014

The Anchoress Spanks Chelsea Clinton

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ChelseaClintonApt
Combined living-dining room of Chelsea Clinton’s block-long, Gramercy Park apartment.

Chelsea Clinton, who got paid $26,000 a minute by NBC, recently informed America that she doesn’t really care about money.

“It is frustrating, because who wants to grow up and follow their parents?” admits Chelsea. “I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success I wanted in my life. I’ve talked about this to my friends who are doctors and whose parents are doctors, or who are lawyers and their parents are lawyers. It’s a funny thing to realise I feel called to this work both as a daughter and also as someone who believes I have contributions to make.”

—————-

Which posturing not surprisingly provoked Elizabeth Scalia (“The Anchoress”) to put the spoiled young woman firmly in her place.

Dear Chelsea;

Stop. Just…stop it.

Do not follow in your parent’s footsteps and try to convince the world that money means nothing to you. Money never means “nothing” to the people who cannot stop talking about it, and between your poor “not truly well off” mother, and your dad who is forever telling us that he’s happy to be a rich guy paying rich guy taxes, and now this…just stop it.

You tried really hard to care about money? And naturally you couldn’t because no good or noble person actually does that? Naturally, only greedy, vulgar people would care about money. I wonder who they might be? And do they know how offensive they are?

Come to think of it, I might know some of them, and I can hear them grumbling a bit at the moment, can you? Listen…cock your ear over here, away from Nobu, and listen to that single mom:

“She’d bloody well care about money if every time the gas and food prices go up it’s another supper of macaroni and cheese for us!”

Maybe, from your $10 million dollar pad in Gramercy Park you can hear the young couple weighed down with college debt: “She’d freaking care about money if she was living in her mom’s basement while trying to find a real job and carrying $45,000 in college loans.”

Perhaps on your way to the Hamptons this summer you can lean out — but not if you’re taking a chopper, of course — and hear the family that will be stay-cationing it for the fourth year in a row, because the “recovery summer” hasn’t reached them yet. You should be able to hear them, because the grumbling is getting pretty loud in those neighborhoods.

When you mewl in blissful ignorance about trying “really hard to care about money” all you do is emphasize that money worries are a non-issue for you. You insult every man and woman who are forced to “care about money” as they struggle to pay their bills and sacrifice so their kids can join a baseball league or take a dance class (like you did); you diss everyone who is forced to “care about money” because they haven’t had a raise in a couple of years, though costs keep rising — or because they are retired and aren’t seeing the interest income they’d planned on, and so the house is falling into disrepair, and they can’t sell it because young couples weighed down with student loans aren’t buying those fixer-uppers the way they used to.

Just stop it.

No one minds your being rich, but have a little class about it. Don’t sit in your ivory tower — justifiably excited to be expecting the best-connected-baby in the world, with access to the finest doctors and no worries about what sort of school environment or teachers your child will have to endure — and suggest that none of it matters, as though you’d be just as happy living in a garage apartment next to 7-11 and with no immediate plans to board a private jet.

You think it makes you sound humble, but it really makes you sound ungrateful. You think it makes you seem down-to-earth, but it only emphasizes the rarity of your air. …

[W]ith all due respect, lady, gain some self-awareness; understand what has been handed to you through very little effort of your own. Before you talk about how much you can’t bring yourself to care about money, why don’t you…check your extraordinary .0000001% of the .0001% privilege.

24 Jun 2014

French Army Knife

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FrenchArmyKnife1

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

23 Jun 2014

“A Tale of Two Scandals”

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ObamaNixon2

Peggy Noonan recently marveled at the partisan-induced somnolence of the establishment media at the revelation of the IRS destroyed hard-drives.

[T]he Obama administration is experiencing what appears to be its own Eighteen-and-a-Half Minute moment. In a truly stunning development in the Internal Revenue Service scandal, the agency last week informed Congress that more than two years’ of Lois Lerner’s email communications with those outside that agency—from 2009 to 2011, meaning the key years at the heart of the targeting-of-conservatives scandal—have gone missing. Quite strangely. The IRS says it cannot locate them. The reason is that Lerner’s computer crashed. …

And what is amazing—not surprising, but amazing—is that if my experience of normal human conversation the past few days is any guide, very few people are talking about it and almost no one cares.

The IRS scandal as a news story carries a stigma, and the stigma is in part due to the fact that when it broke, when Lois Lerner last year made her admission, with a planted question at an American Bar Association gathering, that the IRS had made some mistakes with conservative groups, and disingenuously suggested the blame lay with incompetents in a field office far from the Beltway, conservatives and partisans jumped. The mainstream press was inclined to believe Lerner, or believe at least that a series of mistakes had produced a small if embarrassing so-called scandal. Some conservatives, activists and partisans, not all of them sincere and not all of them serious, viewed the story primarily as another cudgel to use against the president and his party. Some no doubt viewed it as a fundraising opportunity.

The press viewed it not as a story but as a partisan political drama. And in partisan political dramas they are very rarely on the Republican side.

I haven’t ever met a reporter or producer who wasn’t a conservative who didn’t believe the IRS scandal was the result of the bureaucratic confusion and incompetence of some office workers in Cincinnati who made a mistake.

But the IRS scandal is a scandal, and if you can’t see the relation between a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal and what happened 41 years ago with a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal, something is wrong not with the story but with your news judgment. …

It would be very good to see the mainstream press call for a special prosecutor, fully armed with the powers to get to the bottom of the case. …

The mischief of the Nixon administration was specific to it, to its personnel. When Chuck Colson left, he left. All the figures in that drama failed to permanently disfigure the edifice of government. They got caught, and their particular brand of mischief ended.

But the IRS scandal is different, because if it isn’t stopped—if it isn’t fully uncovered, exposed, and its instigators held accountable—it will suggest an acceptance of the politicization of the IRS, and an expected and assumed partisanship within its future actions. That will be terrible not only for citizens but for the government itself.

23 Jun 2014

“A Man Under Authority”

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Peiper1OldPeiper
Left: Standartenführer Joachim Peiper commanding 1st SS Panzer Regiment during WWII; Right: Peiper, aged 61, shortly before his murder in 1976.

For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

–Matthew 8:9.

Reid Mitchell is a resident of New Orleans and author of a book on the history of Mardi Gras. He is best known as a Civil War historian. Mitchell taught American Studies at the University of Hong Kong as a Visiting Fulbright Professor during the 2005 academic year.

His only novel, A Man Under Authority, now out-of-print, was published in paperback by a small press publisher in 1997.

The man under authority is an aged, never specifically identified by name or nationality, Colonel (clearly directly modeled on Joachim Peiper), living in poverty in retirement in a former enemy country, eking out a modest living with translations.

The Colonel receives a letter (written, with characteristic American arrogance or linguistic ineptitude, in English) offering him a highly remunerative job as technical advisor to a film crew making a movie about his most famous battle, a battle in which he unsuccessfully led an armored assault force attempting to make a strategic breakthrough behind enemy lines.

Not unappreciative of the irony and implicit humiliation of his position, the elderly Colonel accepts the assignment, hoping to use the money to give a little pleasure to his wife.

Mitchell’s novel depicts the Colonel’s last campaign as another final desperate attempt, this time with self-awareness and the maintenance of personal dignity, rather than the Meuse River and the Allied fuel reserves, as his unreachable goal, with the infirmities of age, modern Philistinism, and his own historical status as the defeated as his adversaries.

Arriving at the production site, the Colonel finds that the film crew are using the same chateau, now a hotel, which had been his own headquarters during the famous operation. But the choice highest tower room in the oldest part of the castle this time belongs to the female director, not to him. His role, this time, will not be that of commander, but that of curiosity, ornamental credential, and bemused spectator. Nonetheless, the Colonel finds himself able to maintain his Stoicism and even, on occasion, to employ his long-disused habit of command.

23 Jun 2014

Now That’s How to Sell Victory Bonds!

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TankCrushingCar
Tank Crushing Car, November 11, 1918, University Avenue, Toronto

Via Ratak Monodosico.

23 Jun 2014

Tiny Little Screech Owl Stares Down Texas Sissy

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Colton Wright of Fort Worth, Texas achieved dubious international renown, even making British and Canadian newspapers, by posting two short videos depicting his own impression of a 1950s housewife terrified of a bat getting caught in her hair. In Wright’s case, all the shrieking and foul language was occasioned by the presence of a handsome and tiny, little red morph screech owl.

Wright shared roughly a minute of his hysteria and pleading with the fearsome predator, but apparently the confrontation between owl and rodent went on for something like 40 minutes. In the end, Wright successfully persuaded the owl to perch on his Swiffer mop, then maneuvered his passenger out an open widow.

Lord! What a fuss over a tiny bird. There was a time when Americans used to wrestle alligators for fun and take on black bears with Bowie knives.

Daily Mail

Toronto Sun

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

22 Jun 2014

No Victory Lap For the Back-Stabbing Left

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dolch2

David French, at National Review, notes that the Dolchßtoss*-ing left-wing commentariat are in no position to blame other people for things going badly in Iraq now.

Rarely have so many people felt so cocky about leaving a genocidal dictator in place. Rarely have so many people felt so sure about the completely unprovable and speculative claim that this hostile genocidal dictator’s next eleven years in power would have been better for America than the decision to depose him. And rarely have these same people been so cocky about working so hard to ensure the failure of the course of action they opposed, then crowed about their success even as they blamed their ideological opponents for the resulting human toll.

This I believe: America made some profound mistakes at the beginning of the war, bad choices that if made differently could have had a material, beneficial effect on the course and conduct of the war. In hindsight, I believe we shouldn’t have disbanded Iraq’s military and its civil service. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have limited our footprint on the ground. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have waited so long to adopt the counterinsurgency tactics of the Surge. The list of mistakes could go on, but war is hard, the enemy always has a vote, and sometimes only cruel experience can teach us the right lessons.

This I know: America has made profound — and far more costly — mistakes at the beginning of virtually every war. The opening months of World War II were a national nightmare, rendered more palatable to the public only through large-scale censorship that sometimes blocked the American people’s knowledge of defeats that cost more lives in one night than America would lose in entire years in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the Korean War, profound diplomatic and intelligence failures led to headlong retreats and mass-scale slaughters of unprepared soldiers. In the Civil War, poor tactics and dreadful leadership almost destroyed the nation less than one century after its founding, as a Union with immense manpower and industrial benefits arguably came within a few improper orders and missed battlefield opportunities from crumbling in the face of the Army of Northern Virginia. The list of horrifying mistakes could go on, but — as I just said — war is hard, the enemy always has a vote, and sometimes only cruel experience can teach us the right lessons.

This I also know, because I was there: In Iraq, we learned from our mistakes, and the Iraq we left — even as early as late September 2008, when I flew home — was a far, far better place than it is today, a far better place than it was under Saddam, and an actual ally of the United States. …

We are all responsible for our words and actions. Even though my influence is minimal (especially compared to my colleagues posting here on NRO and syndicated nationally) I sometimes agonize over individual words in blog posts. And I still think every day about the choices I made in Iraq. But if I’m responsible — as a supporter of the war from the beginning and a veteran of that same conflict — for what I say and do, so are the victory lappers. And I would not trade places with a group that helped manufacture the “war weariness” that gripped an American public that has, apart from a tiny minority, sacrificed nothing for this conflict and would continue to sacrifice nothing even if we maintained the small force in Iraq necessary to secure our gains.

You helped America leave, and in so doing, you helped waste the sacrifice of those few who served.

*German: “back-stab.”

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