Month: December 2006

Quote for the Day

"If Republicans can’t win New Hampshire and the Mountain West, they can’t win a national majority. And they can’t win those states without libertarian votes. They’re going to need to stop scaring libertarian, centrist, and independent voters with their social-conservative obsessions and become once again the party of fiscal responsibility. In a Newsweek poll just before the election, 47 percent of respondents said they trusted the Democrats more on "federal spending and the deficit," compared to just 31 percent who trusted the Republicans. That’s not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party," – David Boaz and David Kirby, TCS.

“Manning Up”

A reader writes:

Background on my attitude: I thought the war was unsupported from the outset. It was a mistake and one we have just piled on mistakes to make worse. We should never have gone in, if we did, we needed double the troops, a better plan for the postwar period, one that was flexible so that if X happens, we can adjust to point Y. In short, this is a cluster-f**k. It could be worse, but that’s like Bill Parcells saying Sunday night "Hey, we could have missed that field goal". Clear enough about my attitude towards Iraq? Good.

However, I’m a firm believer in the Colin Powell thought process: we broke it and everything that’s happened since, including things outside our control, is our responsibility (not nessesarily our fault). If we leave now, we create a humanitarian crisis of such epic proportion that if it were any other country, we would be begging our leaders to intervene. I believe in being responsible for your actions, right or wrong. With that in mind, I think it is our responsibility to throw everything we have at this to fix it. If it means doubling the Army by starting the draft again, let’s do it. If it means paying every Iraqi $1000 to stop fighting, lets raise those taxes and start sending checks. If it means we have to fly the Iranian flag on the Fourth of July, we do it. Whatever it takes to fix the problem, we do, even if it causes much more pain than we’ve felt so far. Like a parent for their child, we protect them with our lives and if it takes the end of America to make Iraq whole, we owe it to them to go to that extreme. 

I see any options short of solving the problem with the fewest Iraqi deaths to be passive-aggressive.

Dominion

Pigs

A reader writes:

It was so fun to see you mention Matthew Scully’s book on animal welfare today! I discovered "Dominion" and your blog at roughly the same time two years ago, and together they’ve played a big role in my re-examination of my own convictions.

Like your blog does when it’s at its best, "Dominion" casts aside partisanship for a search for truth. I never questioned our treatment of animals before reading his book. Mostly, I dismissed the issue – and the bleeding hearts who typically promoted it – as entirely juvenile and misdirected.  It took a conservative, Catholic, former Bush speechwriter to show – in beautiful and horrifying terms – the seriousness of the problem, and the contradiction between our treatment of animals and any claim of moral superiority.

Matthew has indeed done God’s work in bringing this to the surface. The photograph above is courtesy of Farm Sanctuary. Wikipedia’s description of it is:

"Female pigs used for breeding (called ‘breeding sows’ by industry) are confined most of their lives in ‘gestation crates’ which are so small that they cannot even turn around. The pigs’ basic needs are denied, and they experience severe physical and psychological disorders."

Pigs are as intelligent and as sensitive as dogs. And the way we treat them in factory farms is a form of barbarism.

“Man Up”

A reader vents:

What is up with your recent post, "It could get worse dept"? A ridiculous tirade. I can easily think of "another likely path": we’re going to withdraw to Kurdistan.  From there we can still try to guide the civil war to a quick finish by diplomacy and force projection if need be. And who knows. Maybe we can still negotiate a positive outcome.

Strategy aside, you need to stop with the depressing and defeatist attitude or I’m not reading your blog anymore. You supported this war.  Man up and start talking about solutions, instead of entertaining different scenarios about how we could maximize our losses.  You never should have assumed war would be predictable and that this would be easy.

I never believed it would be easy but I didn’t believe the Bush team would ever have been this reckless or incompetent. I’ve offered several constructive thoughts: a big ramp-up of forces, a redployment to Kurdistan, or complete withdrawal. The latter two are compatible. We could withdraw to Kurdistan while threatening to leave altogether, and leverage the chaos to get Iran to cooperate. I’m just leery of taking sides in a sectarian civil war, and gloomy about the capacity of this administration to manage any of this halfway competently. At this point, more optimism is unwarranted.

The Harmonic Convergence

Einsatz1

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Sixty million people died in the Second World War. World War II was a gigantic crime. We condemn it all. We are against bloodshed, regardless of whether a crime was committed against a Muslim or against a Christian or a Jew. But the question is: Why among these 60 million victims are only the Jews the center of attention?"

Mel Gibson: 

"I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game. I mean war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It’s horrible."

A Total Non-Sequitur”

A reader writes:

Upon reading your post titled "The Thing About Mary", I thought it was a total non sequitur for you to jump to the extreme of asking if same sex marriage opponents stand against the insemination of lesbians. For your information, a very significant number of same sex marriage opponents support same sex couple adoption if a reasonable search for a stable man-woman relationship cannot be found for a child. You are absolutely wrong to presume that "Christianists" – your misguided term for people who believe in universal justice and standards that come from a universal source – desire mandatory husbands for lesbian or single moms. Why does one have to support such draconian measures if they simply believe that government has the right to determine which type of institution is ideal for childrearing, and reserving the term "marriage" for that type of institution?

For you to trot out the few extremists, like there are in every bunch, as evidence of the supposed close-mindedness of same sex marriage opponents reveals a lack of desire on your part to confront the very reasonable, non-religious based, and non-bigoted arguments against the redefinition of this institution.

My point is to ask how opponents of gay marriage and parenting hope to enforce their view of the world. And if there’s nothing to be done, except ensure the instability of children brought up by gay couples, then maybe they need to rethink their strategy for the sake of the children. My further point would be to ask what empirical evidence there is that children brought up by two mommies or two daddies end up less advantaged than those brought up by a mother and a father. I’ve read countless studies, and, frankly, there’s no evidence to suggest any advantage to heterosexual rearing. The studies are not very good or very reliable. But the literature points to no reason for such a position other than prejudice. I published the full data of such studies, by the way, in my reader, "Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con."