Politics: January 2004 Archives

(Thankx Jeff)

One of Mr. Frum's readers sent him a very interesting email about the "problem" of the intelligence failure. Some hightlights:

...the intelligence community must naturally err on the side of pessimism and alarmism. The cardinal rule in military intelligence is to estimate the worst your enemy could possibly do, not what he probably is willing to do, or could economically do, or is likely to do. Worst-case analysis is the rule of the day. How could it be otherwise?

“I mean, here people are simultaneously saying 9/11 should have been anticipated, which would have required making seriously worst-case analyses about the threat posed by various low-level riff-raff, while at the same time making worst-case (instead of probable-case) analyses of the threat of Saddam Hussein was 'irresponsible.' Well, which is it? Which rule should the spooks follow?

According to the official records of the Department of the Navy, I'm a deserter. Or possibly a drug addict. I learned this several years ago when I applied to get my final two months of my G.I. Bill benefits, and received a letter saying that I could not have them because I was discharged by the Marines under "other than honorable" conditions.

That came as quite a shock, because not only was I not discharged that way, I've never been discharged at all -- I've been in the Marine Reserve continuously for 13 years (as of today, come to think of it!) But somewhere in the administrative bowels of the military, there is a record in a database saying that I was "administratively separated" from the Marines in 1997. That's the kind of discharge they give you when you commit an infraction and they don't want to bother with the expense of a trial. It's most often used if you don't show up for training, or if you test positive for illegal drugs. I've tried several times to correct this, because it bothers me that some computer is questioning my character.

I have also had an unusual training history, according to the Marine Corps' online information system. It says that I went to boot camp in 1994, but that I attended basic infantry school and radio school in 1991. It's unusual to be in the Marine Corps for three years before learning to be a Marine, but according to this Web site, that's what happened to me.

So when I hear corpulent gasbag Michael Moore talk about President Bush being a "deserter" because there is no record of him showing up for training in 1972-73, I take it with a grain of salt. Moore's assumption is that military records are never wrong, which is laughable to anyone who has actually been in the military.

Funny how Moore's crowd thinks of military men as murderous buffoons when it comes to warfare, but they think the same people keep meticulous, impeccable records of routine matters. They've got it exactly backwards: our Department of Defense is superb at fighting. It's the administrative part that never works quite like it ought.

Katholics for Dean -- the "K" stands for "Kennedy" in case anyone wondered -- has responded to one of my earlier blog entries. Amidst the usual leftist accusations of "hateful language", KfD continues to misinform the public vis-a-vis President Bush and Howard Dean's respective records when it comes to pro-life issues other than abortion. (As an aside to those who have been around the right-to-life movement for some time, unlike our innocent brothers and sisters in the womb, Howard's scream coming out of Iowa wasn't silent.) Anyway, John Betts does a fine job calling out KfD on the primary right-to-life issue. Meanwhile, I've blogged a little comparison between the President and the Governor on secondary and tertiary right-to-life issues. Not surprisingly, even if we set aside abortion, the GOP comes out way ahead of the Abortion Democratic Party on most right-to-life issues.

Yesterday, Howard Dean made an interesting comment in which he compared pro-lifers to the Taliban. In a nutshell, this incident summarizes why Catholics no longer have a home in the DNC. Here's an unofficial transcript from [sic.] Catholics for Dean: "And the implication that the government has the right to tell a woman when she can and cannot bear a child is different, but has the same philosophical root as the implications of the Taliban telling women how they're to behave and how they're to act."

Why the Dems Still Don't Get It..

Pete Vere

Kathy Shaidle, a fellow Catholic blogger, recently forwarded me her response to an interesting email she received. It came from a Howard Dean supporter named Tim Huegerich. Having performed a small internet search on Mr. Huegerich, he seems like a sincere pro-life Catholic. Which is why his attempt to recruit Catholics into Howard Dean’s campaign makes absolutely no sense.

“Aside from the issue of abortion...” Tim writes, “Howard Dean in line with Catholic Social Teaching across the board, far surpassing the other candidates. He opposed the Iraq war, stands for workers and fair trade, has delivered health insurance for all children in Vermont, and has begun a revolutionary change in politics by attracting thousands of disenchanted non-voters and financing his campaign with contributions from ordinary people averaging less than $100.”

Kathy's response to the concept of “Catholics for Dean” is rather appropriate. This is so embarrassing... she writes. While there is no question I would be a Democrat if every issue held equal weight, the truth is that some issues are more important than others. Abortion is one such issue. As a practicing Catholic, the right to life is non-negotiable. Period.

Hence the problem with every presidential candidate running within the Democrat primaries: 1) The Democratic nominees don't get the abortion issue; 2) The Democratic party doesn’t want to get the abortion issue; and 3) No Democratic presidential candidate even wishes to try and understand how practicing Catholics approach the abortion issue and why we think the way we do. Thus I am likely wasting my time in stating the obvious.

To a practicing Catholic, what lay in a woman’s womb is not just some anonymous blob of cancerous tissue. Rather, it is a human life. Abortion ends that human life. Therefore a Catholic is no more open to negotiating the abortion issue than an African American is open to debate over slavery. Catholics believe that abortion is murder, and when the state permits abortion, Catholics believe that abortion is state sanctioned murder. Regardless of whatever stance a candidate puts forward when it comes to other issues, abortion trumps them all. As practicing Catholics we believe in freedom of choice within the abortion debate only insofar as a well-formed Catholic conscience always chooses a pro-life candidate over one who is pro-abortion. We simply have a hard time voting for politicians who campaign on the killing – rather than the kissing – of babies.

When I mentioned this uncomfortable fact (at least from the perspective of a pro-life Deaniac) to Mr. Huegerich, he replied: “You underestimate the gravity of these ‘other issues.’ 24,000 people die every day around the world from hunger [...] there are also 42 million uninsured Americans enduring untold suffering.” These are indeed legitimate issues that concern the Church’s social teaching. Yet like her system of governance, the Church’s social teaching is of a hierarchical nature. Catholic social justice begins with the right to life, from which all other social rights and obligations flow. The state’s duty is to protect this fundamental right. Common sense dictates that a butchered baby laying in a Planned Barrenhood dumpster has no need of socialized healthcare.

There once was an exception to the Democrat’s well-deserved reputation as the Abortion Party. His name was Bob Casey. He was the Governor of Pennsylvania. Back when we lived in Scranton, our family had the good fortune of moving into the Governor’s neighborhood. In fact, we often stopped to converse whenever we met on the sidewalk. Governor Casey was a principled Catholic, a principled politician and a principled Democrat. If he were still living, I would support his presidential campaign over that of any Republican candidate.

Throughout the Governor’s political career, the right to life was non-negotiable. He put his faith first and his political aspirations second. Yet when the DNC silenced Governor Casey at the 1992 convention, it became clear that there was no longer any room left in the Democratic Party for practicing Catholics – an observation since confirmed by the Senate Democrat’s fillibustering of any pro-life judicial nominee. The DNC silenced the debate over abortion and sent practicing Catholics packing for the GOP and various third parties. The Republicans did not use abortion as a wedge issue, rather the DNC handed us over to the GOP. And if pro-life Catholics are now wary about engaging in bona fide dialogue in the Democratic Party over abortion, as Mr. Huegerich alleges, it is because the Democrats shut down the dialogue and showed their lack of good faith when they silenced Governor Casey.

Whatever other faults one may find with Dubya and the Republican Party – and the Republican pro-life record is far from perfect – there is still room under the Republican tent to argue the pro-life case. This is not the case with the Democrats who, in the interest of short-term political expediency, chose to abort their traditional Catholic constituency. Having subsequently lost the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and several key Governor’s mansions, their post-electoral-abortion syndrome is the consequence of this decision.

[Permission to reproduce in whole is granted by the author, provided that credit is give to CatholicLight.StBlogs.org ]

Is Howard Dean the missing member of Guns N Roses? I just stopped by DeanGoesNuts.com where Dean's recent primal scream is set to a number of different songs. Most of them aren't bad, but check out the one where Dean's naming of the states is set to GNR's Welcome to the Jungle. The timing between the two is so accurate, it's spooky.

Speaking of Howard Dean, Jeff Miller posted a hilarious parody of a Billy Idol song based upon Dean's primal scream. That being said, I'm gonna stand by my previous comments that Dean is the guy to beat in the dem. primaries. Clark is a close second.

Yeah, I know, conventional political pundits are counting these two out right now, and I think this is a mistake. Dean and Clark are the only two major candidates who realize that the traditional dem base is not gonna get them elected. So they're trying to reach into other constituencies. There's gonna be some rough sailing in so doing, as we've seen this past week, but given the media's short attention span, it isn't the end of the world.

Dean put a pretty good spin on things yesterday when he was on Letterman. His Arnie impersonation was excellent. His primal scream will likely make him a stronger candidate once this blows over since it, to a certain extent, immunizes him from future criticism for his over-the-top behavior much like the Gennifer Flowers situation immunized Slick Willie from the Monica Lew[d]insky affair. It is also the wakeup call the Dean people needed to tone their guy down. We're now seeing Dean 2.0, namely, the balanced-budget and quasi-libertarian Dean.

Hopefully, Kerry and Edwards will stay in the game with Clark and Dean long enough to insure a badly damaged dem candidate in the fall election.

I haven't seen too much about Hodean's abortion views. I assumed he was as pro-abortion as the rest of the Democrat candidates -- which is to say, he is in favor of any abortion at any time for any pregnant female, no matter how young or vulnerable she is. That assumption was correct.

Now it turns out that he is a liar about abortion, too. In a speech, he claimed he saw a 12-year-old female patient who was pregnant with her own father's child. He left out the part that someone else was convicted for getting her pregnant. The invaluable Tim Russert confronted Hodean about leaving out that inconvenient fact. (By the way, conservatives should thank God that someone as intellectually honest as Russert is NBC's main political analyst. He's a liberal Democrat, but he asks tough questions of everyone he interviews.)

Not that anyone should be surprised by this revelation -- after all, if you believe in unrestricted abortion on demand, you have to believe in all kinds of untruths: that the state has no business intervening to protect a helpless child, that an 8-month-old fetus doesn't experience pain and isn't really alive, that most abortions are performed by the free choice of the mother and not out of male coersion or sheer terror...et cetera, et cetera.

I have a lot of empathy for a scared girl who is pregnant long before she can handle it. I have not even the feeblest amount of compassion for politicians who think it's all right to get rid of her child and call it a good social policy.

Looks like Hodean is going to have a rocky road on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, if indeed he makes it at all. His third-place showing in Iowa will be hard to recover from, especially since he'd been camped out there for two years and was the odds-on favorite as recently as three weeks ago.

Senator Kerry is a better candidate for the general election, but his nomination will doom the Democrats anyway. Why? Because Hodean's supporters aren't going to campaign for a regular, boring, "establishment" guy. They wanted moxie, spunk, fire -- all of the things that Kerry does not have. The Deanie babies will be disillusioned with the election, and possibly with politics in general. That's fine by me -- I hope they're so mentally scarred by the experience that they never vote again. If they do vote, they'll probably latch onto whomever the Green Party nominates this year, which is the next-best thing.

Let me be the first one to tag Hodean as "Dot-com Dean." His candidacy has had the feel of a dot-com company circa 1997. Hodean attracted a ton of venture capital in the form of Internet donations, and his "user base" of college students and graying hippies were excited about the novelty. Yet when it came time to deliver the product, it didn't quite live up to the hype -- the rollout was fraught with gaffes, and the target market didn't embrace it wholeheartedly. The established "brick and mortar" candidates learned from his mistakes and swept him from the field.

Howard Dean: the Pets.com of Election 2004.

In November, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Wellesley) she said we needed a different mix of troops in Iraq, with more MPs, civil affairs, and special operations forces, and less heavy infantry and armor. Rush and Hannity and all the rest were all over her, saying she was "anti-military" and was using this to attack Bush, etc.

Thing is, she's right: tanks require a huge amount of logistical support, and they aren't great for patrolling. As a civil affairs Marine who served with an infantry battalion in Iraq, I agree with her, and I'm pro-military and anti-Clinton (any Clinton, even George. Sorry, P-Funk.) Why disagree with someone just because their other opinions and actions are repulsive? When someone is right, they're right. If they're wrong, don't resort to sloppy ad hominem attacks. Tell her why we need artillery to fight small groups of insurgents, instead of deploying sniper teams to ambush them.

So now she's in trouble because she made some comment about Indians running gas stations. The outrage is over the top. (Had she ever shown any inclination to tweak the noses of the P.C. police, she might have gotten away with it -- but can you recall any other comment she's ever made that was the least bit un-P.C.?) It's part of the strain of liberalism that holds manual labor to be inherently demeaning. I wonder how well that goes down with the unions. Wait -- modern unions are all about avoiding labor of any kind. My fault.

Let the record show that I have now defended Hillary Clinton for two different things. I will now go lie down for a while so I can recover.

Hodean, the heir apparent to Algore, continues to blather about his religious "views." The primary mission of Christianity is "to reach out to people who've been left behind." You thought it was to get sinners to repent and go to heaven. Silly you. Don't point out that this definition is equivalent to secular political liberalism, because that would be hurtful.

Dean's decision to sign the Vermont civil unions bill was part of this "reaching out" process, he said. Compared to the rest of the population, self-identified gays are better educated, hold professional jobs with substantially more pay, and live in nicer neighborhoods. Exactly how are they "left behind"? Oh, yes: there are still people who think that a marriage needs a man and a woman, the way it's been since before Abraham. They must be overridden by the courts and browbeaten until they learn to love gay sex. Traditional Christians don't need to be "reached," they need to be corrected, with the force of the state if necessary.

I also like his comment about his wife's medical practice: "There's not that element of self-sacrifice of her career that there is in some political families." God forbid! Some think marriage is all about self-sacrifice -- like St. Paul and the Holy Father and the One on whose behalf they speak -- but what do celebate men know about personal fulfullment?