Macho Nachos

Sound the Refrain

Yesterday, I posted my War Weary piece in a number of different places because I felt that it was important to grasp some historical perspective in the face of growing public uneasiness about the war, and most especially, a growing belief that complete and immediate withdrawal from Iraq is the right solution. The post, in its various locations, was picked up by a number of liberal hotspots and drew a lot of "interesting" commentary that I'll get to later.

The line, divorced from the rest of the post, that seemed to really get liberals frothing was when I said that the Iraq war was "barely a war." Some folks have been interested to know whether I will retract that statement. The answer is no. Of course, all war is war, and all those who fight in war on behalf of their country are performing a brave service. But, in the context of comparing the Iraq war to other conflicts in which America has been involved, specifically World War II and Vietnam, the inescapable point of history is that in contrast to most major American conflicts, the Iraq war has indeed been small in terms of the loss of American lives. Infinitesimally small, in fact.

It has highlighted one of the main points that I brought up in my original post - namely, that:

It has become a point of political extremism these days to point out the rather obvious fact that, in the historical scale of warfare, the casualties we have sustained in the Iraq war have been small.

And that doing so would likely lead to the abandonment of historical perspective in a "sea of shrieking hysteria." Well, I think it's safe to cross out "likely", because that has, in fact, happened. It's natural, of course, to think of the pain that one is currently suffering as the worst that has ever been suffered, but history has an inconvenient tendency to render that notion utterly false in a rather large hurry. An objective historical perspective allows us to realize that, as the history of warfare goes, for a large number of different reasons, the Iraq war has been remarkably sanitary by comparison to virtually any other conflict. And, further, that it is difficult to imagine the current American public being able to stomach the sight of thousands of drafted young men coming home in body bags daily to protect the far-off continent of Europe from a madman aggressor, when they are seemingly unable to stomach the loss of 1,800+ volunteer soldiers for a similar cause over a three year time period.

What has been interesting (although not unexpected) to me is the degree to which liberals have completely misunderstood the basic point of "War Weary." If there's one thing that I'm weary of, it is the constant bickering in this country over the last three years over the reasons we went to war in the first place. It seems an unavoidable conclusion to any objective observer that an unbridgable chasm exists at this point between war supporters and war opponents over whether this idea was a "good idea" or "worth it" from the inception. So, fine. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm willing to grant every loony liberal conspiracy that exists, and concede that we went to war so Halliburton could get rich. Wonderful.

The point is: now what?

It's been absolutely appalling to me the degree to which liberals have been willing to stick their heads in the sand about the reality that there are real-world consequences, often measured in loss of life, for not fulfilling your promises in the global policy sphere - and for showing weakness to a determined enemy. Recall that one of the reasons that Osama Bin Laden was emboldened to unleash a string of terrorist attacks against the United States was the military debacle that was "Black Hawk Down," which led him to famously conclude that America was a "paper tiger." Nothing in our response to the Bali bombings, the USS Cole bombings, or any other terrorist attack led him to conclude otherwise - and so he believed that he could strike America with a single bold stroke and fell our resolve, and thusly 9/11 happened. The lesson is that the neighborhood kids don't pester the pit bull because they know there are serious consequences for poking a stick in the eye of a pitbull - they pester the basset hound because he is lazy and easily loses interest.

The reality is that one day soon, China is going to test our resolve when it comes to Taiwan. North Korea is going to launch some "test" missiles at either Japan or South Korea. We are already having to play the brinksmanship game with Iran. As the world's lone superpower, every single crazy despot in the world is watching us with an electron microscope, to see if we can be made to blink. If we say, "Forget it, let's take our ball and go home" now, you can bet that challenges to our interests at home and abroad will immediately become more frequent and more severe, and the world will become an infinitely more dangerous place to live.

The other interesting (although not surprising) non-response to this basic point has been to just call me a "chickenhawk." Having nothing to say in refutation to my point (or, in some cases, plainly lacking the wherewithal to grasp that a point existed or what it was), a number of liberals believed that if they could shout me down personally, that would somehow alleviate the reality of the situation. A sampling of their fare:

There is a recruiting office probably very near to where you are. Or, if you publish your address, I'll look up one for you. I understand that they are having trouble finding new recruits and it appears that you are more than willing to be sent to the middle east. That is, unless you have an excuse of anal cyst or 'other priorities' as other Chicken Hawks have declared.

Further:

I know you don't like fried chicken. That would be cannabalism for you.

No one is asking that you ask others to sacrafice. We are asking YOU to sacrafice by putting you life where your mouth is. Join up if your cause is so noble.

You seem to have no problem seeing others risk their lives ONLY if you are able to hide behind your Dell, dude.

bok bok, coward

Or, my personal favorite was this guy, who wrapped a stupid argument in a lame attempt at cleverness:

Give me a C....

C!!!

Give me an H....

H!!!

Give me an ickenhack!

ickenhawk!!!

What does it spell?

CHICKENHAWK!!!

Truly, I cannot hope to compete with such incisive logic. And the refrain goes on and on and on.

I can, however, lament the disconnect that many (not ALL!) on the left have with a shared responsibility for the good of this country. It's easy for me to point out that this "argument" is not really an argument at all, but rather a passive-aggressive attempt to shame someone into ceasing making an argument because of a perceived moral weakness in the other person. It's further easy for me to point out that the question of my military service is irrelevant to whether I have a legitimate basis for commenting upon the history of warfare and our society's reactions to it. I have a friend who is in the Army, whose job is to repair helicopters. His undergraduate work in college was on American history. Which experience, do you think, he would say was more valuable to his understanding of the question at hand?

What's harder for me to confront is the underlying disconnect between the American left and the shared responsibility we have from partaking in the blessings of this country. This deplorable attitude speaks of a mindset that the problems this country faces are the responsibility of others, and that no state-pursued action should exist unless carried out by its supporters. In what is still the difinitive treatise on this mindset, a wise man once said:

To restate, the argument is premised upon the notion that those who wish for the state to do a thing are obligated to do that thing themselves. In this case, war is the thing in question. Now, war is commonly regarded as the violence reserved for the employ of the state; as undertaken by individuals, it is no longer war, but crime, mayhem, murder, etc. So to begin with, we see that the posited moral impetus for action must be one of the individual specifically within the state. This individual is expected to fulfill a state function by virtue of advocating a specific instance of that function. Here it is war; but what of other state functions? For example, do we expect those who advocate subsidized health care to subsidize it themselves? Do we expect those who wish a road built to build it themselves? There are species of libertarians who advocate precisely this, and even species of antiwar libertarians who would regard this as completely consistent with their demands that war supporters go to war: but for the majority of the antiwar demographic, the logical consequences of this premise directly contradict their preferred philosophy of government.

We may further ask whether it is concurrent that those who do not advocate a particular course of action are obligated to support it. Again, there are a few libertarians who may say so; but it seems doubtful that most American leftists wish to undermine the principle of civilian control of the military, or the military's noninvolvement at any level (however abused that noninvolvement may at points be) in policymaking. We may take the antiwar crowd as being broadly people of sense, and we may assume that people of sense recognize how disastrous allowing the individual soldier or unit to opt out of any given lawful action would be.

We are left, then, with an assumed situation encompassing most in which those who believe that war supporters are morally bound to go to war also believe in certain cases in which non-war-supporters are morally bound to go to war. These positions are inherently contradictory by virtue of the latter conviction, which is based upon a belief in the lawful exercise of the power of the state by means of that state's mechanisms. Those mechanisms cannot in any practical sense wholly encompass the totality of all persons, or merely the totality of all persons wishing for a particular thing to be done. One might argue that the protection of the state, and participation in it, is morally limited to those who are willing to participate in those mechanisms -- for example, by soldiering -- but one is hard-pressed to imagine the average antiwar person advocating the Starship Troopers polity.

I would never, in response to an abortion-rights supporter, suggest that if they supported abortion so much, they should abort their own child, or become an abortion doctor. This kind of rhetoric is illogical and irresponsible, and fosters a greater disconnect in a growing part of the American population that sees no value in participating within the American system to make our country better. Let the refrain end.

War Weary

There are times when I am ashamed of my generation, although not for the reasons that you might assume. I am not naive enough to think that our generation is the first to struggle with difficult moral issues, and to be pulled through the mire of various kinds of depravities. Indeed, when it comes to being morally reprehensible, there is truly "nothing new under the sun."

What often disappoints me about my generation is the shocking lack of willingness that we have to defend ourselves and our culture from threats - and the weak-kneed lack of resolve to see even the most banal conflict through to its conclusion. Nowhere has this become more evident than in the current conflict in Iraq.

It has become a point of political extremism these days to point out the rather obvious fact that, in the historical scale of warfare, the casualties we have sustained in the Iraq war have been small. Infinitesimally small, in fact. Let it not be said that any of us would wish to minimize the lamentable loss of a single human life in warfare, much less approximately 1,800 in the same war. However, our respect for the dead and their sacrifice does not mean that we are obligated to abandon historical perspective in a sea of shrieking hysteria.

The reality is that 1,800 deaths casualties in a span of almost three years (approximately 600 per year, approximately 2 deaths per day) barely qualifies as warfare. Consider that, among a similar representative population in the United States, approximately 80 people will be murdered right here at home. In certain urban areas the number can rise as high as 300 per year or higher. In other words, there are certain areas of this country where innocent civilians are almost as likely to be killed by a flying bullet as our soldiers in Iraq are.

In further comparison to the wars of the past, our casualties in the Iraq war seem even smaller still. In a single day during a single batter (the battle of the Bulge) in World War II, it is estimated that over 5,000 U. S. soldiers died. Throughout the course of World War II, the greatest generation watched as hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest were forcibly drafted into a war to stop a madman who was terrorizing a far away continent, and further as over a hundred thousand of them died over a four year period. Even the widely disparaged Vietnam generation tolerated several years of forced enlistment, and much higher casualty rates without the benefit of an alternative media before becoming utterly war weary.

Our generation, on the other hand, in becoming weary of a war not yet three years old, fought by an army composed entirely of volunteers, in which we are suffering an average of two deaths per day, has demonstrated itself to be the most spineless and weak-kneed generation in recent American history. It is expected, given the way that post-invasion events have unfolded, to find a number of Americans disagreeing with our entrance in the war in the first place. It is unexcusable, on the other hand, to find the growing number of Americans who are now advocating immediate withdrawal, regardless of the future consequences upon the strength of our bargaining posture. This is nothing more than war weariness, and we have not yet earned the right as a generation to be weary of this war.

Part of the issue here, regrettably comes down to our President. It is true we should not have to be handheld through this conflict. However, it is equally true that we have demonstrated that we must have our hands held, if we are willing to stay the course. I have a sense that our generation is ready for more greatness and resolve that it has currently shown. However, we must be dragged, kicking and screaming, if we are to achieve it. The President should realize this. It is not difficult to perceive how many have forgotten the importance of this war, the other reasons besides WMDs that we fought it, and the disastrous consequences of demonstrating to your enemy that you can be defeated by constant irritation. These fears can be allayed by a constant and determined communicator. It is not that this President cannot be that communicator. It is rather that he will not.

The liberals in this country love to berate the President for spending so much time in Crawford, accusing him of taking a five week "vacation." Honest folks know, however, that the job of being President never stops, regardless of where the President is. One of the things that Conservatives like about Bush is that he genuinely seems to dislike Washington, and being there. However, it is time to criticize the President for being in Crawford for so long for an entirely different reason. During this critical juncture in the war, when even prominent members of his own party are publicly defecting over the war, the President should have been using this time taking his message to the American people. We will not lose this war militarily, we will only lose it politically. For the President to ignore this reality and spend five weeks in Crawford while his detractors flail away at his policy and the public at home grows increasingly war weary is tantamount to neglecting his duty in the prosecution of this war. Sometimes, a President who wishes to be perceived as a man of strength and conviction, as the President claims to be, must do things he should not have to do for the sake of the cause he believes in.

I call upon the President to do so now. Remind us now, and remind us often, why this war is worth fighting. And remind us, most importantly of all, even for those who simply will not agree that the war is worth fighting, why immediate withdrawal represents disaster, and will cost more American lives in the long run than staying the course until the conflict is done.

UPDATE: Welcome, readers of the Daou Report! I can always tell when I've been linked by a liberal hotspot because the quality of the commentary around here relentlessly goes up, up, up!

A very few commenters have made some actual arguments (I seem to recall one in particular that talked about an "America as bully" perception, I'll try to deal with that later tonight or tomorrow when I have time), but most have been exactly as relevant to this discussion as the comment, "I like fried chicken!" Most frequently, I am accused of being a chickenhawk, a coward, or by people with enough sense not to actually argue ad hominem without discovering whether the basis for their personal slur has an attack, asked whether I have past military service. Well, given that my post was a point of sociological history as it relates to military action, I must assume that you're attempting to say that I cannot comment upon sociology unless I enlist in the military. In other words, as far as I'm concered, you're responding to the substance of my post by asking me whether or not I like fried chicken (I don't).

To be sure, that's a fascinating question, and one that we could spend all day debating, but being that I spend pretty much all day debating useless questions with folks who will never accept a solid answer (yes, I am a law student), I'll take a pass at doing so on my own blog as well.

Second, a bunch of people are positively puzzled at my "no profanity" rule, so I'll try to explain it using small words. If you use a word that would have gotten your name written on the board in the second grade, I will delete your post. If you continue doing so, I will block your IP, and report you to your ISP for abuse. Now, all of you are more than welcome to think that what I said was profane, and through my largesse I will allow you to call me all sorts of colorful names (principally because it demonstrates the intellectual vapidity of your own position... oops, did I say that out loud?), but you can't, on my blog, use certain words I don't like.

What is the lesson in all of this? Get your own blog, pay for your own bandwidth, and then you can use all the wordy-durds you want to when you're talking about that evil conservative over there at Macho Nachos. I may even visit sometime.

UPDATE: Welcome, readers of Norwegianity! Fear not! I have advice for your fearless author!

But first, a couple of minor points in response to a very entertaining post. First, if the nice fellow who writes for Norwegianity had noticed that my student loan post was encouraging Teri to act like a company, not a bureacracy, he might have reasonably implied that I was taking out a private student loan - but then, implication is a function of logic, which is neither the first nor the last refuge of most liberals. Nevertheless! I will grant the author that my student loan is welfare, if he will grant that all welfare is to be repaid to the government at about %11 APR, with an 8% origination fee. And thus conservative and liberal can agree on a compromise!

Also, a little mouse clicking through some links might have revealed that I covered Justice Sunday II at the behest of RedState.org co-founder Mike Krempasky, who asked me to cover the event since I would be in Nashville that Sunday anyway. A little reading might have led him to realize that I had to borrow the laptop I used at the event. In other words, I've yet to receive a cent for any blogging I've ever done, but I appreciate all the sincere efforts of my liberal friends to drive my hit counter up and remedy that situation!

Now, to the question that the author was so desperate for me to answer:

Dear Macho,

When I was young, my Mother had a job in town but my Dad was a farmer and worked at home. He fixed our noontime meal and did dishes while Mom brought home a paycheck.

Does this mean I’m gay?

Good news, the answer is no! However, given that you thought this question was somehow relevant to anything you read on my blog (especially the interview with Charmaine Yoest), it seems obvious that somewhere along the way something in your upbringing caused your powers of reading comprehension and logic to become horribly stunted and inadequate. My advice to you, as a friednly conservative to a friendly liberal, would be to get yourself some "welfare" (you'll have to pay it back someday, even if you go bankrupt) and see if a local community college can offer you some remedial courses in those two subjects - I don't think the damage has to be permanent!

Regards,

MachoNachos

UPDATE: Dear Lefties,

I shall make the same response en masse here as I have to your ideological brethren at Tacitus. Just because you can flood my comments section with crap doesn't mean that you're each entitled to an individual response, especially when you're all making essentially the same "point". Most of you are simply content to make the point that I am a "chickenhawk", and therefore nothing I have said of a factual basis in this post is worthy of your consideration. Which is absolutely fine, but it does make me wonder why you thought it worth your time to respond with the chickenhawk meme in the first place. Notwithstanding, you may rest assured that your constant assaults on my character have produced some very sincere shrugs. To those who are actually attempting to make points, let me say this:

Never have a group of people demonstrated such a spectacular failure to understand a fairly simple point as most of the left-leaning posters in this thread have done. Perhaps if more of you had bothered to read the entire post, rather than just posting a bunch of knee-jerk talking points after discerning that the post had something to do with BushCo, and furthermore, the war, you might have dealt with anything I actually said. I emphasize might.

The question of whether the war was a good idea to begin with is, perhaps, a useful mental exercise in a theoretical sense, and perhaps even a valuable one for loyal donkeys to make come election time (it worked great in 2004, keep it up!). However, in the real world, where we already are in Iraq, it does precisely zero good.

So, in a world where people are fighting the political battles of today, rather than the political battles of three years ago (or heck, even last year), the important question is not whether we should have gone to Iraq in the first place, but rather - now that we are there, should we leave immediately?

The point of my post, which has been reinforced by numerous commenters here, is that numerous folks of this particular generation apparently see no value of seeing a conflict through to its end, they don't see the value of keeping promises in the foreign affairs arena, and they think it a worthless proposition to avoid showing weakness to a deadly and dangerous enemy. This is dismaying to me, and it is the reason I am ashamed of this generation.

To draw an analogy, a husband and wife are debating the purchase of their new car. The wife, being generally the smarter of the pair, says, "No, honey, the interest rate on the loan is ridiculous." Says the husband, "But we need the car because of X, Y, Z. We will consider the interest rate later."

Two years later, when the couple is upside down on said car, the wife may enjoy some well-deserved I-told-you-so's. But they don't change the fact that the car is now in the couple's possession, and the bills come due every month. THe question for the couple is not whether they can undo signing the loan (they can't), the question is whether it is worth the numerous and far reaching consequences upon their credit rating to give the car back and suffer a foreclosure, thus affecting their finances detrimentally for years to come in a far greater manner than just paying the ill-advised note to its completion.

The liberals in this debate are perfectly willing to screw the foreign policy credit rating of this country for a quick fix of what they perceive to be a bad interest rate (that being, 600 dead soldiers a year) - never perceiving that the long-term ramifications of showing that weakness and lack of resolve might be exponentially higher in both military and civilian lives. There is always a long-term penalty for attempting to apply a band-aid to a leaking dam.

Now, of course it might be true that some interest rates really are too high, that some prices are not worth paying, that some situations might become simply so atrocious that immediate extraction is the only reasonable course of action, future consequences notwithstanding.

May God help our nation if that breaking point is reached when we have undergone a war that has not yet lasted three years or cost 2000 American lives.

The Mysterious Morphing Letter

Ever since Cindy Sheehan began denying that she wrote the "My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel" email, we've been a little suspicious of the truthfulness of those statements. More specifically, Josh Trevino was suspicious enough to contact Cindy Sheehan's press spokeswoman, Michelle Mulkey, to get the story "straight from the source," as it were. According to Josh, he spoke with Ms. Mulkey on the phone as she stood next to Cindy Sheehan, and subsequently sent her this email: Michelle, This is Josh Trevino from tacitus.org, whom you spoke with this afternoon. As per our conversation, I am writing to confirm that the e-mail at this URL.... http://groups-beta.google.com/group/bullyard/msg/7f523b1a73be1a36?hl=en ....was in fact written by Ms Sheehan to ABC's Nightline program. I am pasting the full text of the e-mail below. (Josh then pasted the text of the email in question) To which Ms. Mulkey responded - again, in the immediate proximity to Sheehan: I can confirm that this is NOT Cindy. She had a hacker send this email last spring and then changed her password after she was alerted to it.

Aug 18th, 2005: 17:56:54

That is, certainly, an eye-opening explanation for the existence of this email. Josh thought so, too, and asked a follow-up:

Michelle,

Thanks so much for your swift reply. I'm surprised to find the e-mail is not Ms Sheehan's, given the following:

1) Nightline has given confirmation to other journalists that it is from Ms Sheehan.

2) The text and themes of the e-mail are, to my knowledge, consistent with Ms Sheehan's other public statements.

3) Ms Sheehan was not a major public figure (especially compared with her status now) in March 2005, and hence was an unlikely target for hackers.

Any clarity you might provide on this would be helpful, specifically on the following points:

1) Which specific passages in the e-mail Ms Sheehan especially wishes to disassociate herself from.

2) Whether any progress has been made in identifying the hacker, given that this may be a Federal crime for which Ms Sheehan may rightfully seek recourse.

3) Any insights you may have on why ABC's Nightline apparently believes the e-mail to be a genuine missive from Ms Sheehan.

Again, your help is sincerely appreciated. Many thanks.

Most resp.,

Josh Trevino

tacitus.org

To that bevy of reasonable questions, Ms. Mulkey had only this to say in response:

That stuff will take a while. She may not have told Nightline about the incident, but she was a public figure and had been vocal for months by the time this happened.

Now, since that time, someone has apparently alerted Ms. Sheehan to the total implausibility of this story, given that her official excuse for the existence of this email now stands as follows:

Another "big deal" today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that. I had supposedly said it in a letter that I wrote to Ted Koppel's producer in March. I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a Nightline Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted Bettag and cc'd a copy to the person who gave me Ted's address. I believe he (the person who gave me the address) changed the email and sent it out to capitalize on my new found notoriety by promoting his own agenda. Enough about that.

Now, even folks who are pretty non-familiar with the internets can see that this is, first of all, a totally different explanation for the existence of this email. First, her claim was that someone "hacked" into her email account and sent the email, totally unbeknownst to her. Upon some reflection, given the extreme implausibility of this scenario, and further given that the entire rest of the letter is vintage Cindy Sheehan to a T, they have concocted this, "the person I sent it to modified it." A less humble person than Josh might wonder whether his rather pointed and unanswerable questions prompted the change in story in the first place.

What is most interesting about this explanation is that, if it were true, Ted Bettag should have received a copy of the original email, since a cc is, by definition, a copy.

Needless to say, this "explanation" presents more questions than answers. And it still is pretty much the same stuff that Cindy Sheehan has said elsewhere. What about her widely publicized appearance at the VFP rally where her comments about America made the ones she is disputing seem charitable by comparison? What about the remarks she made at the Lynne Stewart rally at which she said, among other inflammatory things, "America was not worth dying for?" Does Ms. Sheehan wish to speak to those, either?

Why the heck is no media person asking her these questions? Instead, we get Anderson Cooper asking her once, tentatively about the single statement in question, and when she-who-must-not-be-questions says, "I never said that," Cooper responds, "You never said that? OK. Glad we had an opportunity to clear that up."

One presumes that Anderson Cooper has not been taking lessons from any of the journalists who have been dealing with Scott McClellan recently.

Fair Game or Foul Play?

John Cole is gasket-blowing angry at Michelle Malkin over Michelle's posting of the Sheehan divorce papers. A quick ecosystem check informs me that John and Michelle are the two bloggers most likely to link to my humble abode, so a smarter man would just let this whole thing slide.

I have never been accused of being a smarter man.

First, let me say that Cole has a valid point: Cindy Sheehan's rantings are so prima facie insane that they serve as an automatic discredit to her point (not that you'd get the mainstream media to notice that, by the way.) I agree that it's not necessary to bring her divorce into the picture to show that her message should not be taken seriously and that the left is disgraceful for using her. I further agree that the moral high road, in this case, would be to just let the divorce stuff slide on by.

However, I gotta disagree with both the vehemence of John's points, and his contention that Michelle is due heaping helpings of ridicule and abuse. As Michelle points out, the first person to bring Cindy Sheehan's family into this fracas was none other than Cindy Sheehan. In fact, this whole ordeal is just one long exercise on Sheehan trading on her family relation to her son.

It is perfectly rational that any half-arsed reporter who might be interested in covering anything not directly in front of his nose might take it upon him/herself to wonder what the rest of the family thinks about this. Maybe, they might even think to themselves, "Most kids have two parents. I wonder what Dad thinks about this." In so doing, even a half-arsed reporter would discover that Dad filed for divorce in the midst of all this.

Now, a lot of folks have made the point that that, in and of itself, says nothing. This is not exactly correct. Divorce always says something. It might not say, necessarily, that Patrick divorced Cindy because of this moonbat crusade, but it says something. It's enough, at the very least, to raise an eyebrow. The dumpster-divers at the Associated Press agree:

The husband of Cindy Sheehan, the mother camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the death of a son in the Iraq war, has filed for divorce, according to court documents.

Patrick Sheehan filed the divorce petition Friday in Solano County court, northeast of San Francisco. His lawyer did not immediately return a call seeking comment Monday.

The article, I will note, provides a lot more commentary than Michelle did.

So, I guess my point is, the story isn't necessary. But it is a story. And it's at least partly of Sheehan's own making. If Sheehan was just another garden variety war-protesting moonbat, she would never be accorded this celebrity. However, she chose to make it novel by dragging herself out to Crawford, setting up "camp Casey" and demand answers on behalf of her son, for questions he never asked. Why did she do these things? The obvious answer is to get her and her family noticed.

Now, she's complaining that her family has gotten noticed. From my perspective, she's making it harder to feel sympathy for her every day that goes by. The right thing to do at this point, as Mark Coffey points out, is to bring this woman home and get her some grief therapy, before she is left with nothing and no one in the world, besides a bunch of political activists who will discard her like an empty soda can when their cause moves on.

UPDATE: John Cole has since offered an unqualified apology for his remarks.

Why am I still covering this??

Sort of like the temporary paralysis I suffered when the non-story of Plamegate was in full-brew, I find myself endlessly fascinated with the shiny object that is Cindy Sheehan. In particular, I'd like to take a whack today at her denial that she ever said, "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." The full transcript from Anderson Cooper reads thusly:

COOPER: You were also quoted as saying, "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." How responsible do you believe Israel is for the amount of terrorism in the world?

SHEEHAN: I didn't say that.

COOPER: You didn't say that? OK.

SHEEHAN: I didn't -- I didn't say -- I didn't say that my son died for Israel. I've never said that. I saw somebody wrote that and it wasn't my words. Those aren't even words that I would say.

I do believe that the Palestinian issue is a hot issue that needs to be solved and it needs to be more fair and equitable but I never said my son died for Israel.

COOPER: OK, I'm glad I asked you that because, you know, as you know, there's tons of stuff floating around on the Internet on sites of all political persuasions.

SHEEHAN: I know and that's not -- yes.

COOPER: So, I'm glad we had the opportunity to clear that.

SHEEHAN: Yes, and thank you because those are not my words. Those aren't -- that doesn't even sound like me saying that.

COOPER: OK. I'm very glad we got that...

SHEEHAN: And I have read it. I have read it. I'm glad you did too.

You'll pardon us saying so, Ms. Sheehan, but that sounds like exactly the sort of lunatic thing that you might expect to find Cindy Sheehan saying. So the "it doesn't even sound like me" defense isn't really probably your strongest. But what about the rest of Sheehan's statement?

Well, technically, Sheehan did not "say" that her son died for Israel. She wrote it. And also, technically, she is not accused of saying that her son died for Israel. She is accused of indignantly claiming that her son did not sign up for the military to defend Israel. So, Robert Jordan readers, is it possible we are dealing with an Aes Sedai? Perhaps she isn't lying, but the truth we're hearing might not be the truth we think it is.

As is widely known by now, the article was posted to a group called bullyard from Cindy Sheehan's AOL account. Someone from bullyard apparently forwarded the letter on to Nightline, with Cindy Sheehan's name on it. Rich Lowry originally claimed that the letter was signed, but has since backtracked, saying only that her name was on the letter in question.

So, in order to believe this story, one would have to believe that someone hacked into Cindy Sheehan's AOL account - in March 2005, before she was a widely known personage outside of the extreme left (who all love her anyway), and sent this to bullyard. Further, according to the person at Bullyard, they sent a copy of the letter to Sheehan, explaining that it would be sent to Nightline, and never got a response from Sheehan. Hmm. That seems like the kind of thing I might want to disassociate myself from, if I didn't say it, and someone was telling me they were about to send it to a major news organization.

In point of fact, that email, which I still strongly suspect is authentic, is not the only place Sheehan has made inflammatory anti-Israel remarks. She duplicated the "Israel out of Palestine" remarks at a Veterans for Peace rally, as covered by fellow anti-war sympathizer Mike Ferner:

He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. We're not freer here, thanks to your PATRIOT Act. Iraq is not free. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism.

Call me crazy, but that sounds pretty much exactly like the letter in question - minus the phrase "agenda to benefit Israel", it's the exact same sentiment - including the part where Israel is at fault.

It's very strange to me, personally, given the other bizarre conspiracy theories she has embraced, and continues to embrace, that she would bother even attempting to distance herself from this one. I mean, if you're going to say that America is evil, unjust, and not worth dying for, why would you care about stepping on the toes of the Israelis?

If any prominent news personage develops the testosterone-producing organs to ask such a question, or any other question about her ridiculously extremist rhetoric, we'll be here to report.

UPDATE: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers!

Nick Danger on Able Danger

When he puts his mind to it, nobody does a story like Nick Danger. I've stayed out of the Able Danger fracas for the most part up until now simply because I haven't had the mental energy to follow the story. The details of it, however, are simply shocking, and Nick theorizes that this entire Cindy Sheehan ordeal is just the media attempting to wave a shiny object in front of our face to make us forget about Clinton dropping the ball on 9/11 (complete with picture!):

Any time I see the media waving a bright, shiny object in front of us, my first thought is to wonder what it is they don't want us to look at. To those of us who have a few miles on us, the ridiculous spectacle going on in Crawford, Texas right now is just a re-run of 1970's antiwar hoo-hah, as brought to us by the 1970's antiwar media and their "newsmakers" from the George Soros Tabernacle Choir.

Yes, they're all antiwar, and yes, they want to pummel the Republican in the White House in whatever way they can, and I suppose that getting their hands on a genuine Grieving Mother to wave in our faces is not something they have to play with every day, but even so...

One has to wonder whether we'd all be speaking German now if television had been around in the 1940's. Maybe not. Can anyone even imagine the media giving voice to a distraught, grieving mother who lost her son at Normandy, demanding that the war be ended? The bunch of them would have been shot.

But never mind that. The real issue is what's happening that is so important that the media needs to wave a bright, shiny object in front of us to keep us from looking.

 

Oh, here it is. I'll be darned. It turns out that at least one of our intelligence operations was sufficiently on the ball that they identified Mohammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and two other future 9/11 hijackers as an al-Qa'eda cell operating in the United States. They did this over a year before Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center's north tower, and al-Shehhi hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower.

As you'll recall, there was a lot of consternation and finger-pointing over the fact that our vaunted Intelligence Agencies had not seen this attack coming in time to prevent it. We even had one of those "blue ribbon panels," the so-called 9/11 Commission, investigate what went wrong that could have allowed such a complex plan involving so many people to come to fruition without being detected.

After huffing and puffing at us for several weeks on the television, they finally issued a big report saying it was all caused by mumble mumble and we need to knock heads and reorganize and make more bureaucracy so that it never happens again.

One of the things that it turns out they did not tell us was that "the Atta Boys" had in fact been detected; had been identified as an al-Qa'eda cell; and that the people who did this work wanted very badly to tell the FBI about it, so the FBI could go nab them, a year before the 9/11 attacks.

Only Nick is capable of such wordsmithery that I'd quote him this extensively. Yes, the point of this whole ordeal is that in the whitewash 9/11 commission report, which simply could not examine the facts objectively given it's fiercely partisan bipartisan composition (neither side wanted mud thrown on their side's administration), totally and completely missed the fact that someone was hopping up and down with information about Mohammed Atta, and was trying to tell the FBI about it.

They could not. Why? The simple (and correct) answer is, it's Jamie Gorelick's fault. Who was responsible for hiring and promoting this irresponsible buffoon? Look! A shiny object! The media is very interested in keeping you from digging into that information. I'll give you a hint, it just might hurt their favorite Presidential candidate in 2008.

We'll be there to remind everyone, never fear.

The Gimmick Pimper

There are a couple of stories that I haven't had the time or mental energy to focus on since I've been trying to help push the Air America story into the foreground, but now that it seems we're having some success in that area, I intend to start focusing on them.

The first is this Cindy Sheehan woman. Now, I'm assuming that most of you have heard of her by now, but in case you haven't, here are the basic facts of her case. Sheehan's son, Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq over a year ago. After the death of her son, President Bush visited the Sheehans at Fort Lewis (Washington state). Of this visit, Ms. Sheehan originally said this:

"'I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,' Cindy said after their meeting. 'I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith.'

"The meeting didn't last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son's sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

"The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

"For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

"'That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,' Cindy said."

Well. Now, she is saying this:

In an interview on CNN, she claimed Bush "acted like it was party" when she met him last year.

"It was -- you know, there was a lot of things said. We wanted to use the time for him to know that he killed an indispensable part of our family and humanity. And we wanted him to look at the pictures of Casey.

"He wouldn't look at the pictures of Casey. He didn't even know Casey's name. He came in the room and the very first thing he said is, 'So who are we honoring here?' He didn't even know Casey's name. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to hear anything about Casey. He wouldn't even call him 'him' or 'he.' He called him 'your loved one.'

Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject. And he acted like it was a party.

BLITZER: Like a party? I mean...

SHEEHAN: Yes, he came in very jovial, and like we should be happy that he, our son, died for his misguided policies. He didn't even pretend like somebody...

Well, predictably, the left is using this woman to trot out their cause that Bush is a liar, the war is immoral and unjustified, Bush lied, kids died, ad nauseam. She's been featured just about daily on Michael Moore's website for a while, done columns for Common Dreams, etc. The point is, a bunch of moonbats. That is not bothersome.

What is bothersome is that with relatively little prodding, she has also become the darling of every other major media outlet, including the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the list could go on, but suffice it to say that it includes pretty much everyone.

Let me just say it. I've got no respect for this woman and the way she is behaving. Her son volunteered, and re-enlisted to fight in the army. Part of being in the army is that sometimes you get sent into combat zone. Sometimes, in combat zones, people get killed. That's sort of why they're called "combat zones".

This woman would have a much stronger case to make if her son were drafted, but he wasn't. And for her to align herself with the anti-war, military-hating freakshow that she is carting around behind her is an absolute disgrace.

One other thing I'll say about her. In her column today at Michael Moore's website, Ms. Sheehan said the following:

November 2, 2004 was not his accountability moment: today is.

Apparently, she doesn't like Democracy in the United States any more than she likes it in Iraq. Perhaps she can visit Iran sometimes, where elections really are inconsequential and the will of the people expressed in choosing their leaders is irrelevant.

Because here, these moonbats he ample opportunity to make their "Bush lied, kids died," case - and lost.

WaPo Performs Takedown on Coughenhour

In a surprisingly pleasant editorial in the Washington Post (Courtesy of CQ), Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule take Judge Coughenhour to task for his ridiculous lecture to the Bush administration about their terrorist detention policy:

Last week U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour sentenced a defendant to prison for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport. In the course of the sentencing, the judge criticized the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 policies, such as the use of military tribunals and the detention of enemy combatants. He said that "the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart." Some people, the judge said, believe that the terrorist threat "renders our Constitution obsolete. . . . If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."

That's a little hard to follow. That courts can handle terrorists who are caught with explosives in their possession doesn't mean they are capable of handling the terrorists who manage to evade detection until the moment they immolate themselves with their victims. But worse than the judge's logic is the underlying sentiment that yesterday's law enforcement procedures are adequate for today's security threats -- and that any deviation from them is a betrayal of the Constitution.

It recalls the now notorious statement by Lord Hoffman, a British law lord who said, "The real threat to the life of the nation . . . comes not from terrorism but from laws," such as a statute authorizing detention of foreign-born suspected terrorists, which the law lords invalidated under the European human rights charter in December 2004.

Spot on. Posner and Vermuele have hit on the central fallacy of Coughenour's logic - that what is being done currently is constitutional, and what is not being done currently is unconsititutional. In point of fact, the Constitution says nothing about the detention of enemy combatants. Zilch. Zero. And so, to claim that the Bush administration's policy flies in the face the Constitution in an area in which the Constitution is conspicuously silent is, at first (and second) glance, more than a little screwy.

Judge Coughenhour has apparently fallen victim to the notion that once a practice becomes accepted for a certain amount of time (say, eight years - especially if those eight years happen to be 1993-2000), then the pracitce automatically becomes "constitutional." It doesn't. It becomes "accepted practice for the moment."

There might be valid reasons for not discarding the current practice, but let's not invoke the "constitutional" reason unless, you know, the current practice is actually in the Constitution. Perhaps we could formulate this into a Godwin's Law for judges - "As a liberal judge's opinion grows longer, the probability of the judge inappropriately invoking the Constitution approaches 1."

Posner and Vermuele roll on, shredding to pieces the "If we change our laws, the terrorists will have won" meme:

All of these have become judicial cliches to be invoked in arguments about how the global struggle against terrorism is to be prosecuted. Many cliches are, of course, true, but these are absurdities.

For example, consider the statement that the terrorists will "win" if legal rules and policies are changed in ways that restrict the package of civil liberties in place before the terrorist threat emerged. Whether such restrictions count as a victory for terrorists depends on what terrorists are trying to achieve. Although al Qaeda's ultimate goals are to drive American troops from the Middle East and, more broadly, to establish a Muslim caliphate in the region, its proximate goal is to kill ordinary people to bring pressure to bear on democratic governments. A change in policy that reduces the chance that more people will be killed does not hand the terrorists a victory; it frustrates their plans. A failure to alter any policies in response to a successful terrorist attack is, by contrast, a sign of weakness and paralysis; that would be a victory for the terrorists. Osama bin Laden was right to say that people will back the strong horse. But he was wrong about which horse will prove stronger.

Yes - who knew that Osama Bin Laden's final goal was to give the ACLU more work? Apparently, this is something that all good liberal judges know. One wonders if Bin Laden himself is similarly enlightened.

A second cliche is this: that a nation that permits incremental reductions in its civil liberties in response to threats to its citizens is not worth defending. The truth is that few people have accepted Patrick Henry's call to "give me liberty or give me death" -- this was a rallying cry, not a policy paper -- and in any event nations are rarely faced with such a stark choice. An incremental reduction in civil liberties is not equivalent to their elimination.

British and American traditions are two-sided: They acknowledge that governments have an obligation to protect people's lives as well as their liberties. No nation preserves liberty atop a stack of its own citizens' corpses, but if one did, it would not be worth defending.

The spurious assumption behind both cliches is that whatever package of civil liberties happens to exist at the time a terrorist threat arises must be maintained at all costs; adjustments that reduce liberty are bad even if they produce greater gains in security, potentially saving people's lives. This is a virulent form of the fallacy of the status quo -- that whatever exists must be good. In fact, the balance between security and liberty is constantly readjusted as circumstances change. A well-functioning government will contract civil liberties as threats increase. A government that refuses to adjust its policies has simply frozen in the face of the threat. It is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.

Indeed - liberal judges have long been content to restrict civil liberties (especially religious civil liberties) in response to the changing times - the assumption by these same judges that restricting the liberty of enemy combatants, captured on the field of battle, is somehow analogous to the destruction of everything that is good in this country is so absurd that it's laughable:

The two cliches about terrorism are familiar from debates among commentators and politicians. What is new and surprising is their citation by judges as self-evident truths. Judges do badly when they appeal to speculative causal theories about terrorism or to the romantic ideals of civil libertarianism. Both are incompatible with the kind of balancing that is so much a part of the judicial function. That ideals have a tendency to explode on the rock of fact was spectacularly demonstrated in Britain, where terrorist carnage occurred just a few months after the detainees in Lord Hoffman's case were released under legal compulsion. It is too soon to tell whether there was a causal connection between the two events, but Lord Hoffman's casual dismissal of the threat to citizens' lives now appears grotesque.

The day before Coughenour's soliloquy, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he doubted whether statements such as Lord Hoffman's "would be uttered now." Perhaps that's true in England, but it seems that American judges have yet to learn the lesson.

More Brinksmanship

Baldilocks reminds us why we have nukes in the first place:

[W]hen I read some of the posts and columns which excoriate anyone who even considers naming a possible WMD target of the US in the wake of a WMD attack on us and I notice the dripping condescension from many of the various “arguments” against, I am reminded that (some) civilians forget the arsenal of death on which this country is sitting and what it is for: deterrence, either before or after. The purpose of the arsenal is for making an enemy think twice about attacking us either the first or the second time. Anything other purpose is secondary--if it exists at all--such as whether a nuking will make a given group hate us more or not.

Otherwise, why bother to maintain it?

To have someone say ‘don’t talk about it’ and tell me that I am ‘irresponsible’ for doing so makes me wonder what planet they’ve been living on. Then I remember that I am the one who has spent most of my adult life on “another planet,” a planet on which anyone with functioning cognition knows what our military’s purpose is and what it is capable of, security clearance or no.

Are you listening, Hugh Hewitt? There's a difference between the fantasy-land which politicians often inhabit and this other thing called "The Real World" in which the use of nuclear weapons has consequences - or at least, it better.

Who are They After?

Over the course of the last two years, those of us who have supported the war in Iraq have been beaten over the head with the canard that "Iraq isn't making less terrorists, it's making more." The implication, of course, is that if we would all just duck our heads in our little holes and not meddle with the Arabian peninsula, then Al-Qaeda would leave us alone.

Recent events have conspired to put this particular canard to death. First, there were the recent bombings against Egypt, who of course had no interest (financial or troopwise) in the Zionist assault on the Arabian peninsula. Now, in a story that has thus far flown much farther under the radar, it appears (with a tip of the hat to CQ) that Al-Qaeda has unsuccessfully targeted India. The significance of this development should be obvious, but Ed Morrisey lends us a hand:

But the final target raises the most questions about the supposed causality between American/Western interference in Southwest Asia and AQ operations. Afroze, an Indian, had targeted the Indian Parliament. Why India? India opposed the American intervention in Iraq later, and before 2001 had not maintained terribly friendly relations with the United States. India also had no troops in the Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, where US troops supposedly provoked the AQ response.

So why plot to attack India -- a plot only subverted by the failure of the "courage" of the terrorists assigned to strike it?

India has a long history of Hindu-Muslim tension. Pakistan and Bangladesh owe their existence to a British partition of the Asian subcontinent when it pulled out in 1947. Ever since the split and massive relocations in the period that followed, the mainly Hindu India has disputed the borders it shares with Muslim Pakistan, which resulted in a nuclear standoff not long before 2001. Both nations claim the Kashmir province, and radicals on both sides provoked both governments into several bouts of brinksmanship.

AQ targeting of India shows quite clearly (as does its attempt to strike Australia) that the analysis of American causality as the origin of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings clearly do not make sense. If anything, India's targeting shows that AQ doesn't just dream of an Arabian peninsula under its tyrannical control, but an Asian and African continent ruled by a new Caliphate. That has nothing to do with American interest in the Middle East, but rather an old dream of world conquest that has haunted the consciousnesses of lunatics for centuries.

Indeed. If these recent developments don't wake up our liberal friends, I'm afraid that nothing will.

Which is a crying shame, since we could use their help in presenting a unified wall of defense against these madmen who are bent on world domination. It would certainly be helpful to the continued survival of our country if they could somehow bring themselves to both hate George Bush AND realize that he is not at fault for the existence of Islamofascists who wish to kill us. It would be great if they could stop hating George Bush, but I know when I'm asking too much.

Wake up, liberal America. We're at war for our survival, and believe it or not, your help would be appreciated.