Month: October 2007

Jon Rauch, as usual, is onto something:

Astonishingly, 26 Republican senators broke with President Bush’s Iraq policy last week. But you may not have noticed this, and it’s not your fault …

What was Giuliani actually doing when his scheduling issues made it impossible for him to attend the debate for African-Americans? You guessed it:

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"Everyone under 40 these days is voting for Obama."

Not in Texas, they’re not – and don’t kid yourself that they’re voting Republican either. There are a lot of quiet conservatives who aren’t saying much (they have a lot of pride invested in the old Clinton animosity) but I hear more and more neutral to positive comments about Hillary than I ever have before.  I repeat: this is Texas.  This is Sugar Land, Texas.  This was the district for 22 years of our dear old friend Tom Delay, one of the most conservative places in these United States, and they are softening to Hillary. 

I talk to all sorts of Soccer Moms and Dads every week, carpool with middle-roadish conservatives, and work and mingle with a whole spectrum of generally middle-class folks, here and in Houston (a much more liberal area), and I tell you many will have a tough time pulling the lever for Barack. Call it what you will but they are very suspicious of him – worried he is too liberal and won’t have their interests in mind, isn’t strong enough to defend against "terrorists", is inexperienced – and if he gets the nomination he will have an uphill battle to win these people over. I hear much the same from family and friends in southeast Pennsylvania (Philly suburbs), a very mixed conservative/liberal area. It goes against conventional wisdom but I would not bet on him winning in the general election, whereas my sense is that Hillary is respected for being more "mainstream", which in my experience is where most of America is.

On the other hand, check out this reporting from the Mountain West. No, I don’t think any Democrat will win Texas in 2008.

A simple exchange:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?

Seymour Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.

A tale of "unnecessary" fact-checking:

I think it’s some sort of chemical reaction — add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge.

Facts? He don’t need no stinking facts.

A reader writes:

The Karen and Shan peoples have been engaged in civil war with the junta for decades, and are no freer, nor more close to independence (an independence constitutionally guaranteed to the Shan) than your average Burmese.  What they need isn’t guns.  They need simple organization.  These soldiers have mothers and fathers, and they will be the ones who will induce a successful mutiny, or at the least, a system of satyagraha in which no soldier is served, spoken to, assisted, or even looked at by any member of society.  If they can find the strength of India, they can be free.  If they cannot, arming each one of them would be useless.

Another adds:

The days of the Revolutionary War are over.  Native Americans had guns.  The Iraqi insurgency even has pretty decent guns (AK-47s).  Having guns is just an invitation to get slaughtered.  Without equivalent firepower, no militia or popular uprising has any chance against a modern army.  Being seen holding a gun simply means "shoot me first".  There’s a reason why IEDs are the weapon of choice in Iraq.  Every time that the insurgency tries to stand and fight, or even snipe at the troops, they get mowed down.  If the Burmese people suddenly find massive caches of assault rifles, body armor, RPGs, armored vehicles and air support, let me know.

The Holocaust-denying British historian David Irving is back:

Drinking tea on the sofa of a 10-bedroom house he has begun renting near Windsor, Mr Irving says that his views on the Holocaust have crystallised rather than changed. He says that he believes the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the second world war and that the "Jewish problem" was responsible for nearly all the wars of the past 100 years: "The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A-Z. Between A-Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps."

The news about the arctic polar ice is staggering to me. My own view of climate change has shifted over the years I’ve been writing this blog from mild skepticism to something much more like active concern. It’s the feedback loops of global warming that have emerged in these years as something we didn’t fully expect and something that could accelerate the problem dramatically. Here’s an alarming report:

From their camp on Melville Island last July, where they recorded air temperatures over 20ºC (in an area with July temperatures that average 5ºC), the team watched in amazement as water from melting permafrost a meter below ground lubricated the topsoil, causing it to slide down slopes, clearing everything in its path and thrusting up ridges at the valley bottom "that piled up like a rug," says Dr. Lamoureux, an expert in hydro-climatic variability and landscape processes. "The landscape was being torn to pieces, literally before our eyes. A major river was dammed by a slide along a 200-metre length of the channel. River flow will be changed for years, if not decades to come."

Comparing this summer’s observations against aerial photos dating back to the 1950s, and the team’s monitoring of the area for the past five years, the research leader calls the present conditions "unprecedented" in scope and activity.

Why are we planning on occupying a hostile land for decades in order in part to secure an energy supply that is threatening to jolt our planet’s climate into new and potentially catastrophic heat? Or is the climate debate not allowed to impact our Iraq debate? The one silver lining of a major regional war breaking out in the Middle East is that it might finally force us to get real about alternative energy sources.

(Photo: the newly ice-free Northwest passage in the Arctic.)

A blogger with some knowledge of history wants to know. His evidence? This CSPAN transcript:

Podhoretz: There were 18 reasons to invade Iraq. Pena: But not connected to 9/11. Podhoretz: Well, yeah, Pena: Because he didn’t attack us on 9/11.

Podhoretz: I know.

Pena: Al Qaeda attacked us. Saddam wasn’t a known supporter of Al Qaeda.

Podhoretz: Hitler didn’t attack us at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did and we went to war against.

Pena: Well they were allied, they were part of an actual Axis alliance.

Podhoretz: Well, yeah, but not a very friendly one and what we did when people say how come we went to Iraq, well what we did when we went to war after Pearl Harbor was go to North Africa. We didn’t go to Japan or uh we took on, we took on the Africa Corps, Hitler’s elite force in Africa.

Pena: But again, Germany and Japan were aligned, clearly part of an alliance that was aligned against us, that was a direct connection. I’m having a hard time making any connection quite frankly between Saddam Hussein’s regime and……….. That was Al-Qaeda as an organization, who attacked us on 9/11…….We haven’t even gotten Bin Laden….We seem to have taken our eye off of the ball and given Bin Laden a pass. For all of the evil that Saddam represents isn’t Bin Laden a greater evil that we should be paying attention to.

Podhoretz: Well, it would be very good to get him and I suspect we will get him before long, the point is not Bin Laden as an individual was the guy to go after, what we were confronted with was a large totalitarianism force, call it Islamo-facism, we were not going after an organization called Al-Qaeda, Al Qaeda was one element of that force….It’s as if they say Al-Qaeda hit us, we hit them back and that’s the end of it.

Those who say nothing good ever comes from religion need to grapple with the heroism of Burma’s monks and now the support of Burma’s Christians:

Persecuted Christians in Burma are showing unequivocal support for Buddhist monks who have been leading pro-democracy marches against the country’s military Government, a leading human-rights activist who has just returned from the region has said.

Members of the predominantly Christian Chin tribe in western Burma have been holding pro-democracy rallies in the state capital of Hakha, mirroring those taking place across the country, said Baroness Cox of Queensbury, chief executive of the humanitarian charity Hart and a cross-bench member of the House of Lords.

In totalitarian countries, religious communities are often the last refuge of the hounded soul. From the monks of Burma to the priests and nuns of Communist Poland, faith can keep hope alive.