The Redhunter

October 4, 2008

Barack Obama and the Fall of the Democrat Party

If I had lived throughout the latter half of the 20th century, I'd have been a Democrat during most of it. Unlike most conservatives today I admire FDR. I would have liked Eisenhower, I suppose, but found his nuclear weapons policy unacceptable. I like JFK and RFK, and would probably have voted for LBJ because he was a foreign policy hawk and promoted civil rights at a time when such advances were sorely needed. I would have also probably voted for Humphrey in 1968, but that is the last time I can say I would have voted Democrat. With the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, I'd have take a turn towards the GOP. I probably just raised a few conservative eyebrows in this paragraph but so be it.

So here is the current nominee of the Democrat Party

The only, and I mean only, reason Ayers isn't in prison is because the government so screwed up the case that all or most all of the evidence was thrown out. Nobody, not even Ayers himself, disputes his guilt.

Whatever happened to the party of Harry Truman, John F Kennedy, or Henry "Scoop" Jackson? They would be spinning in their graves if they knew what was going on today. Zell Miller is another that I miss. The Democrats have even chased away the last decent member of their ranks, Senator Joe Lieberman.

Even Bill Clinton was a moderate by today's standards, he having famously once been chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC is the voice of moderation in the party, but has now been reduced to a shell of its former self. The "progressives", most notably Barack Obama now shun all of its positions.

Amazing, isn't it, how far the Democrat Party has fallen?

The Democrats are now the party of the crazy anti-war left, who welcome Moveon.org and Michael Moore into their ranks. Although Barack Obama did not start out as part of this movement, he has certainly embraced it.

In 2004 this party nominated John Kerry, a man who returned from Vietnam to betray his country by his participation in the "Winter Soldier" tribunal/investigation, and the disgraceful group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971 is positively awful.

And today they've nominated a man who sat at Trinity United Church and listened to a racist kook hatemonger for 20 years and only left when it became politically expedient for him to do so. Say what you want about Sarah Palin's Wasilla Bible Church, there's no comparison. So far I've listened to six sermons from that church, and can find nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary. In fact, they're really quite mainstream and I found them inspirational. So there.

It's also the sheer creepyness of the messianic "Obama worship" that is disturbing. I think that conservatives sometimes go too far with Ronald Reagan, such as when during the primaries the GOP candidates where trying to out-Reagan each other. Commentators fall into this trap too, with Heritage even having a "What Would Reagan Do" section on their website.

Obama's Jimmy Carter foreign policy is grating because it's so naive in irresponsible, but I've already written about that at some length.

Mostly, though, it's Obama's past associations, namely those of Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, that get me. The Tony Rezko stuff, while bad, is the garden-variety corruption. The man should not be the Democrat candidate.

I've covered the Wright stuff, so now let's talk a bit about his association with the unrepentant 60's terrorist William Ayers.

First, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy reminds us in National Review of just who Ayers is and how he is still lying today about what he and his terrorist Weathermen wanted to do:

In (a) Fox interview...Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people -- the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, "by design"; they only wanted to cause property damage. ...

First of all, "that moment in the townhouse" he's talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers
...

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder.
...

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972," he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

And he wasn't singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama's motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman "War Council" meeting in 1969, Ayers' fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" And as Jonah recalled yesterday, "In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a threefingered 'fork' gesture its official salute." They weren't talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself "the Family" colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.

On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk, were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm. semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.

When she was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment in 1985, the only remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned Rosenberg -- commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

Going to Tom Maguire at Pajamas Media we now look at Obama and Ayers:

Barack Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers have worked closely together on education reform since 1995, and possibly since 1987. Obama has obfuscated and minimized this association in his public statements and on his website. Why the cover-up? We don't know, since we aren't sure what is being concealed.

It's becoming known as the Annenberg Challenge cover-up and it's become big news since the McCain campaign highlighted it in a press release late Wednesday.
...

This is what we know. Bill Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a violent radical student group of the 1960s. His father, Thomas Ayers, was a prominent Chicago business and philanthropic leader who served as an adviser to Mayor Richard J. Daley, father of the current Chicago mayor. Although he is not apologetic about his terrorist past (and had the bad luck to be quoted as saying, in an interview that ran on Sept 11 2001, that "I don't regret setting bombs. ... I feel we didn't do enough."), Bill Ayers has been accepted back into the Chicago political community and has been an informal adviser to the current Mayor Daley on education reform.

But regardless of his cachet in the liberal circles of Chicago politics, presidential candidate Barack Obama has not been eager to explain his own relationship with Bill Ayers. Published reports from February 2008 gave a glimmer of their ties. In 1995 Ayers hosted a fund-raiser for Obama prior to Obama's run for Alice Palmer's seat in the state Senate; they both served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago from 1999 to 2002; and Ayers donated $200 to Obama's state Senate campaign. Other researchers and reporters (for example, Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times) noted a few joint panel appearances and a favorable review by Obama of a book by Bill Ayers.

But even this was more than Obama was willing to admit. Asked point blank by George Stephanopoulos in the Philadelphia debate preceding the Pennsylvania primary to "explain that relationship for the voters," Obama prevaricated by pretending he scarcely knew Ayers:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

Lie.

Stanley Kurtz, writing in National Review, explains why

Although the press has been notably lax about pursuing the matter, the full story of the Obama-Ayers relationship calls the truth of Obama's account seriously into question. When Obama made his first run for political office, articles in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald featured among his qualifications his position as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation where Ayers was a founder and guiding force. Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers. During Obama's time as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers's own education projects received substantial funding. Indeed, during its first year, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge struggled with significant concerns about possible conflicts of interest. With a writ to aid Chicago's public schools, the Annenberg challenge played a deeply political role in Chicago's education wars, and as Annenberg board chairman, Obama clearly aligned himself with Ayers's radical views on education issues. With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years (therefore "exchanging ideas on a regular basis"). So when Ayers and Dorhn hosted that kickoff for the first Obama campaign, it was not a random happenstance, but merely further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership. Of course, all of this clearly contradicts Obama's dismissal of the significance of his relationship with Ayers.

Unbelievable.

But Obama followers see nothing wrong with this. They're either in denial or don't care.

And what is Ayers doing today? Why, He's a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the title of Distinguished Professor.

Which tells you everything you need to know about today's left. The left that makes up the anti-war base of the Democrat Party.

Remember, the only reason Obama has distanced himself from Ayers is the same reason why he distanced himself from Wright; not because he disagrees with them, but because he found it politically inconvenient to remain friends with them. And it's not that Obama agreed with everything Ayers or Wright said or did, that's not the point. The issue is that Obama may not have agreed with everything about them, but was ok enough with them to hang around them. He didn't see them as especially objectionable.

There's nothing to equal any of this on any Republican candidate for president since Watergate, and that happened when Nixon was president, so it's not really the same. The left has nothing like this on John McCain (the Keating five stuff having been thoroughly investigated, and to be sure while he showed "poor judgment it's not like associating with an unrepentant terrorist). They can say what they like about Sarah Palin, most all of it's false and anyway it's all penny-ante stuff compared to this.

Sunday Update

Silly me, I forgot it was racist to bring up Bill Ayers! Or so says Douglass Daniel of the AP.

Shame on you for nominating Barack Obama.

Update

Don't take it from me that Obama knew full well about Ayers, take it from Mark Halperin of Time Magazine (h/t TWS)

Halperin: "Is it fair to say that [Barack Obama] continued to associate with [Bill Ayers] professionally -- and personally on a casual basis -- even after he learned?"

Robert Gibbs: "He continued to serve on a charitable board and an educational grant board with money supplied by Walter Annenberg, a Republican who was an ambassador under Richard Nixon. Yes."

Halperin: "But with the knowledge of Ayers' past?"

Gibbs: "Yes."

Apparently it's ok to associate with unrepentant ex-terrorists as long as you condemn them.

Got it.

Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 30, 2008

A Childlike View of the World

David Gelernter knocks it out of the park with a piece in The Weekly Standard that will leave youngish yuppie liberal types seething.

His thesis is that the generation who grew up after the 60s Cultural Revolution know little about recent history, and most of what they do know is wrong. Recall Obama actually using the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit as a reason why he should meet with Ahmadinejad.

He calls them "gen-CR", and his indictment is stinging

We know what to expect of gen-CR. Unless they have grown up in regions or families with an unusually strong grasp of tradition, patriotism, and reality, gen-CR'ers tend to have a fuzzy view of history, an unconditional belief in tolerance and diplomacy, and contempt for the military and war-making. Their patriotism (such as it is) tends to focus on the "global community" or "the planet" or some other large, meaningless object. (Beyond a certain point, patriotic devotion spread too thin simply evaporates-which is a good way to get rid of it if you are, say, an English intellectual trusting to the European Union to eradicate this primitive emotion.)

Ouch.

To be sure, not everyone in a particular generation fits to type. After all, not all baby boomers burned their draft cards and protested the war in Vietnam. But there are certain general characteristics (dare we call them "stereotypes"?) of each generation.

On to some history:

His (Obama's) announcement that he would meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions shows exactly why a president must not merely know history but have a decently nuanced view. It was wrong for Chamberlain to meet Hitler and foolish for JFK to meet Khrushchev, but right for Begin to meet Sadat and for Churchill to make repeated long, dangerous journeys to meet Stalin.

We've all read leftie blogs gleefully point out that we were supposedly "allied" with Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war, and how in 1983 Reagan-envoy Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad and shook hands with Saddam, and how these supposedly illegitimized our 2003 invasion.

Never mind that we weren't really "allied" with Iraq. For awhile I tried to point out that we were very much allied with Stalin's Soviet Union, and yet as soon as the war ended fought a Cold War against them for 40 years, so did our onetime alliance with them illegitimize that too? Eventually I grew weary and gave up. Too many on the left today lack the moral clarity to understand the difference.

But other than racism, sexism, or the new one, "homophobia", Hemingway points out that "Gen-CR recoils from the idea of enemies." Last night I was listening to Dennis Prager on the radio say that when he spoke with Europeans they told him that what they didn't like about America was that we spoke about good and evil. Anecdotal to be sure, but it rings true.

Start with a given: An Obama administration might still bring about defeat in Iraq; speeded-up troop with-drawals might weaken this new democracy and bring on its collapse like a burnt-out log into a blaze of terrorist violence. But if it did-if the left's policies proved tragically mistaken-Obama's supporters would never know it. What would the collapse of America's noble project in Iraq look like in the funhouse mirrors of the New York Times, NBC, Time and Newsweek and NPR and the rest of the establishment media? "In the end, Bush policy plunged Iraq into chaos, but Obama was smart enough to pull out before more American lives were lost." And that's what Democrats would "know" about Iraq.

It would all just be another excuse to blame George W Bush and from which to seek political advantage, the better to put us all under the rule of the EPA.

Members of the CR generation who had mainstream, establishment educations have been trained like pet poodles to understand where romping is allowed and where it is forbidden. The permissible range of thought on such topics as protected minorities, protected species, protected psychosexual deviations, et al. is clearly spelled out from kindergarten onward.

Yup. I see more intolerance among the "tolerance" and "diversity" crowd than anywhere else. The push for gay marriage is about a lot of things, but marriage isn't one of them. Their real agenda is to force everyone to accept and approve of the gay lifestyle whether they want to or not. Anyone who deviates from correct thought will be severely punished.

You doubt me? Consider the fate of Harvard President Harry Summers, and before the incident that got him in trouble he was considered a right-thinking liberal:

To understand this generational shift in the making, consider the resignation of Harvard president Lawrence Summers in 2006, under attack for having said that, just possibly, the far greater number of male than of female scientists might have to do with innate differences between men and women-something that a large majority of working scientists (male and female) almost certainly take for granted (whether or not they are willing to say so). But Summers had expressed a forbidden thought, and (despite his abject confessions and apologies at the Harvard show trials) was duly banished. In the gen-CR age now approaching, such embarrassing accidents will no longer happen. Forbidden ideas simply won't occur to the Harvard presidents of the future.

The Obama generation in action.

Posted by Tom at 9:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 28, 2008

All Creatures Great and Small

All Things Bright and Beautiful,
All Creatures Great and Small,
All Things Wise and Wonderful,
The Lord God Made Them All

I only just looked up that poem, and discovered it was written by one Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-1895). Little did he know that each of those first four lines of a much longer poem would become book titles for one of the most successful authors of the late twentieth century.

Under the nom de plume James Herriot, James Alfred Wight published a series of books in the 1970s detailing his life as a country Veterinarian in Scotland in the 1930s and 40s.. The first was actually All Creatures Great and Small, the second All Things Bright and Beautiful, and the third and fourth from the last two lines of the poem. The books were eventually adapted into a television series, which I believe ran on the Arts and Entertainment channel. There are a few other Herriot books also, but these four are the most popular.

At the time I was in middle and high school, and I remember my mom talking about how much she enjoyed his books. For the life of me I couldn't understand how the story of a country Vet could be remotely interesting. Little did I know how much in later life I would enjoy them. At various points in my life I've picked up and read all four. I watched the series when it was on TV, and it was one of the few boom-to-TV transitions that worked as it captured the books perfectly.

I was reminded of the books recently when my cat Athena died. She was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth so there was really no choice but for me to have her put to sleep. Almost exactly 15 years ago I had gotten her with her brother, whom I named Zeus. He died in a mysterious accident two years later (I think he hit his head while playing and broke his neck or something. I was in the next room, heard a sound I didn't like and went in to see him immediately but he was already dead). Not too long after I got another cat, an orange tabby whom I named Bengal (Bengal Tiger...). He died two years of kidney failure.

Here are Athena and Bengal at their best:

So after each of my cats have died I've gone back and reread one or more of James Herriot books. It's what I do for therapy, I suppose. Anyway it works.

So what makes James Herriot books so special?

There are several things that make the books, and TV series, so good. One is simply the superb writing and storytelling. Much of it is also characterization. The personality quirks of his partners and the local Darrowby farmers make for great entertainment. I have come to understand that the books are only partially autobiographical, and he employed some "literary license" in his stories. In other words, some of it is partially fiction. No matter, for it is all based on true experiences.

The books are written as a series of short episodes, each taking up a chapter or two of maybe 10-20 pages. They are absolutely laugh out loud funny. Herriot and his partners are always getting themselves into impossible situations. It's also stories of successes and failures, of many animals that he saves, but some he cannot. While most of it is farm work, there are stories of cats and dogs. More than the animals themselves, the farmers and pet owners are often the real subject of each episode.

The books are usually described as "heatwarming" in the reviews, and they are that. Though funny and historically informative, they are mainly the stories of people and their everyday life as regard their animals.

The first two books are five-star, with All Things Wise and Wonderful not far behind. The Lord God Made Them All is ok, and worth reading to round out the series, but is not as good as the first three. It's that time in the late 1930s and early 40s, during the great changes in medicine and agriculture, that make for the best reading.

Historically the first two books take place in 1938-39, when both human and animal medicine was in the midst of a great revolution. When Herriot starts practicing medicine, antibiotics were unknown, and their medicines were of the "Professor Smith's Universal Cow Medicine" variety. From All Creatures Great and Small, when Herriot has just arrived at Darrowby and with his new boss (later partner) Siegfried Farnon are surveying the dispensary, with all of it's bottles and tins of old-time medicine:

The two of us stood gazing at the gleaming rows without any idea that it was all nearly all useless and that the days of the old medicines were nearly over. Soon they would be hustled into oblivion by the headlong rush of the new discoveries and they would never return.

It is in the second book, All Things Bright and Beautiful, when antibiotics such as penicillin and the sulfonamides were introduced. It is perhaps hard today, when we take such things for granted, the effect that the new "wonder drugs" had. For the first time doctors and vets had medicines that actually worked.

Another theme is that for the first time veterinarians were treating pets on a regular basis as well as farm animals. Before this time the profession was centered around livestock and horses. Again, from All Creatures Great and Small

"Not much small animal work in this district." Farnon smoothed the table with his palm. "but I'm trying to encourage it. It makes a pleasant change from lying on your belly in a cow house. The thing is, we've got to do the job right. The old castor oil and prussic acid doctrine is no good at all. You probably know that a lot of the old hands won't look at a dog or a cat, but the profession has got to change its ideas."

And indeed in the second book Herriot takes several tough cases to a vet in a nearby town who - gasp - only did small animal work. Two of the reasons for the introduction of "small animal"(read "pets") work was the elimination of the plow horse as the mainstay of the veterinary profession and thus the need to find additional sources of revinue, and two, with the rise of a middle class people had the time and money to have pets and pay vets to minister to them.

There's much else, of course. World War II intervenes and all three take time out for military service. Herriot gets married and has children. Wikipedia and an "All Things James Herriot" website have much more if you want the full background.

But mostly, though, if you've never read James Herriot or seen the series on TV you just need to go out and buy the books. Pick one or more up from the library if you're still unsure whether you'll like them. But do yourself a favor and do get one. I promise you won't regret it.

I'll also get back to blogging now on a more regular basis.

Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 25, 2008

Book Review - Liberal Fascism

At various points in my life I've read fairly extensively about Communism and Nazism. As a good Cold Warrior, I wanted to know as much as possible about the Soviet threat, as well as communist infiltration of the West. World War II was of great interest, and I studied not only the battles and weaponry but the Nazi leadership, ideology, and history as well.

The twentieth century being in large part a great struggle between democracy and Orwellian totalitarianism, this seemed to me natural. Today I read about Jihadism, and try to understand our enemy and their infiltration of the West. I think my book reviews show this pretty clearly.

But fascism was something that I never read much about. Part of this, I think, was that Mussolini's Italy was such a non-factor in World War II. Other fascist governments, such as Franco's Spain or Peronist Argentina, were not expansionist and relatively minor violators of human rights (relative I stress compared to what Hitler or Stalin wrought). As such I never studied them or fascist ideology. I had some vague notion that fascism was militarism coupled with extreme nationalism, but that was about it.

A few years ago I read a comment by Jonah Goldberg on National Review's The Corner blog that he was working on a book about fascism, and I thought "what a waste of time. We're in a war against radical Islam and he's investigating fascism? That can't be relevant to anything."

Was I ever wrong. The book that resulted from his years of research, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, is one of the most important books I've read about modern American liberalism, and its related twin, progressivism.

The book is now on many best seller lists, and Goldberg has a special Liberal Fascism Blog over at NRO where he answers readers questions and post news stories relevant to his thesis. Predictably, the book has thrown the left into a fit of rage, to the extent where Amazon had to delete several thousand "you suck" type "book reviews." The Amazon site was even hacked a few times and the photo of the book cover changed.

Unlike with most, the cover to this book is important. The fascism that Goldberg sees creeping up on us is not of the "hard" sort of a Mussolini or Hitler. Rather, it is the "soft" type of a Hillary Clinton.

The cartoon description of fascism which most people hold consists of two parts; 1) Extreme nationalism and 2) Militarization. While these are or can be aspects of fascism neither are central to it, at least in the way that most people think.

Book Objective and Thesis

Goldberg goes to some length to explain that no, he is not saying that all liberals are fascists or that being in favor of universal health-care coverage means that you are a fascist. Rather, his objective is to replace the cartoon image of fascism with a more historically based one, and in so doing demonstrate that it is modern liberalism, not modern conservatism that has its roots in fascism. More precisely, modern liberalism grew out of the progressive movement of the early twentieth-century, and progressivism in turn has it's roots in fascism and indeed in many cases was ideologically allied with it. Liberal fascism is different, Goldberg says, for what should be the obvious reason that modern liberals don't want to eliminate voting and line opponents up against the wall to be shot. This does not mean, however, that the ideological underpinnings are different.

Rather than go on and risk getting it wrong I think I'll just quote Goldberg himself:

In this book I have argued that modern liberalism is the offspring of twentieth-century progressivism, which in turn shares intellectual roots with European fascism. I have further argued that fascism was an international movement, or happening, expressing itself differently in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture. In Europe this communitarian impulse expressed itself in political movements that were nationalist, racist, militarist, and expansionist. In the united States the movement known elsewhere as fascism or Nazism took the form of progressivism - a softer form of totalitarianism that, while still nationalistic, and militarist in its crusading forms and outlook, was more in keeping with American culture. It was, in short, a kind of liberal fascism.

The term "liberal fascism" comes from a speech by H.G. Wells at Oxford University in 1932. He used it the term to describe what he called a need for a "phoenix rebirth of liberalism." Although known today as the science fiction writer who produced such works as "War of the Worlds", back then he was also known as a prominent progressive thinker. Today we see the term "fascism" as unreservedly evil, and the polar opposite of "liberal." What may surprise readers today is that his joining of the two - liberal and fascist - surprised no one in the audience, and was in fact well received.

Modern American liberalism is totalitarian but in a "smiley face" way, not like that of the twentieth century Orwellian nightmares; Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. By "totalitarian" Goldberg means that it wishes to control every aspect of our lives; from the food we eat to the light bulbs we can buy to the very words that are deemed acceptable (try using "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun and see what happens).

When liberals promote these totalitarian goals they claim that they are not ideologically driven, but are rather "listening to the experts", or seeking to overcome the left-right divide with a "Third Way".

Goldberg is not saying that simply caring about the environment or physical fitness makes you a liberal fascist. What makes you a liberal fascist is insisting that everybody else care too, or forcing everyone else to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle and using the power of the state to do it. The reason usually given is that it's all "for your own good," or "we all pay for it".

From here out the headings are the titles of the book's chapters.

Benito Mussolini: The Father of Fascism

The ultimate roots of fascism can be found in the Romantic nationalism of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the French Revolution. Jean Jacques Rousseau was the father of fascism and Maximilian Robespierre its executioner.

However, we all associate fascism with the Il Duce himself; Benito Mussolini. What may surprise people - it certainly surprised me - was his Fascist party's political platform. Here is some of it:

• Lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen, the minimum age for representatives to twenty-five, and universal suffrage, including for women.
• "The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce, and labor."
• End of the draft.
• Repeal of titles of nobility.
• "A foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy's will and power in opposition to all foreign imperialism"
• The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal workday of eight actual hours of work for all workers.
• A minimum wage.
• A creation of various government bodies run by workers representatives.
• The creation of various government bodies run by workers' representatives.
• Reform of the old-age and pension system and the establishment of age limits for hazardous work.
• Forcing landowners to cultivate their lands or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers' cooperatives.
• The obligation of the state to build "rigidly secular" schools for the raising of "the proletariat's moral and cultural condition."
• "A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time partial expropriation of all riches.
• "The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of all episcopal revinues."
• The "review" of all military contracts and the "sequestration" of 85% of all war profits."
• The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries.

Amazing. When you just see this he seems like a pretty good guy.

What's important to understand is that these weren't just words to Mussolini; he meant it. He didn't just use this platform as a trick to get into power, because he implemented as much of it as he could once he was in power. None of this is to excuse him, it's just a statement of fact.

Mussolini started as a socialist and became a populist. "Populism" is not really right-wing, it's more a phenomenon of the left. Populism is a "power to the people" ideology, and is usually a force on the left.

Mussolini made a big deal about "getting beyond labels" and seeking a "third way" between left and right. He promoted himself as a pragmatist who "made the trains run on time." To be sure, he governed as a dictator. But he was no Hitler or Stalin in his level of brutality. He won reelection in 1924 in what were reasonably fair elections, and his granting of womans suffrage gained him applause from no less a source than The New York Times.

Mussolini defined fascism as "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State." Mussolini himself coined the word "totalitarianism" to describe his system, and it's important to note that he meant it in a benevolent manner, as he saw his system as a humane one in which everyone was taken care of.

When Mussolini finally did write out his economic theories in the early 1930s, they looked more like standard socialism than anything else. His goal was to either nationalize industry or regulate it into submission. This was called "corporatism", but it hardly meant that he was in league with big business. Far from it, he was their enemy.

Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left

As with Mussolini's Fascists, Hitler's Nazis tried to transcend left-right labeling and promoted themselves as representing a "Third Way." This said, they campaigned as socialists, stealing issues from the communists because they were trying to appeal to the same worker base. The Nazis chose red as the background for their flag precisely because it was the color the communists used.

What made National Socialism - Nazism - different than other left-wing movements was it's adherence to what we today would call identity politics. With the Nazis it was Aryan supremacy, today it is the ethnic identity of minority groups. This is today something associated with the political left. Again, Goldberg stresses that this does not make modern-day identity groups neo-Nazis. What it does say is that the roots of progressive identity politics go back to the Nazis.

Just because the Nazis were anti-Semites does not make them right-wing, as antisemitism is hardly a phenomenon reserved for the right. Stalin and Karl Marx were a vicious anti-Semites, while Mussolini protected the Jews as long as he could against Hitlers desire to get at them.

Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism

Mussolini wasn't the world's first fascist dictator; that honor goes to Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States 1912-1920. If this sounds over-the-top, consider that Wilson arrested or jailed more political dissidents than did Mussolini during his first ten years in power. Wilson's ministry of propaganda was better than Mussolini's. Wilson sent more goons to beat up and harass opponents than did Mussolini (again, during the latter's rule in the 1920s. Mussolini got worse in the 1930s).

The "goons" who carried out Wilson's orders called themselves progressives. Their agenda consisted of eugenics (racial purity and weeding out the unfit), social Darwinism, and imperialism (real imperialism, not the cartoon sort ascribed to President Bush today). They worshiped the State and political power, didn't like organized religion, and looked down on individualism. They thought the U.S. Constitution was outdated and in need of change because it's system of checks and balances impeded quick action.

In short, Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement of the time had all the bad attributes and more that the left assigns to President Bush and the neocons today.

Theodore Roosevelt also exhibited fascist traits. Much of his appeal was based on a cult of personality. Roosevelt's America would be more like the militarist and welfare state of Prussia than anything else.

Although his campaign slogan in 1916 was "he kept us out of war", when Wilson pushed Congress to declare war on the Central Powers in 1917 almost all progressives supported him. President Wilson then proceeded to set up what can only be described as a fascist police state. His ministry of propaganda, the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, was positively Orwellian in nature. The mission of the CPI was not simply to explain the rationale for war, but to "inflame the American public into "one white-hot mass" under the banner of "100 percent Americanism."" The CPI had offices around the country, and turned out an impressive number of pamphlets, posters, buttons and the like in eleven languages not including English. It hired a hundred thousand "four minute men" who went around the country giving four minute speeches promoting Wilson and the war effort.

In addition to the "four minute men", tens of thousands more were hired to knock on doors and ask residents to sign loyalty oaths, or pledges not to use a certain luxury good that was needed for the war effort. This effort extended down to children, who were asked to sign a pledge called "A Little American's Promise."

Worse than any of this was Wilson's Sedition Act, which banned "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States Government or the military." What this translated into was that any criticism of the war effort was forbidden. As an example of how it was enforced, the Postmaster General was given the authority to refuse to deliver any publication he deemed seditious, and there was no appeal to his decision. At least seventy-five periodicals were effectively banned by his refusal to deliver them.

Wilson's Justice Department created the American Protective League to enforce the Sedition Act. APL officers had the authority to read their neighbor's mail and tap their neighbors phones, all without a warrant. It had a "vigilante patrol" whose mission was put a stop to "seditious street oratory" and to physically assault draft dodgers. The Palmer Raids, named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, were part of all this.

It is estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested for some violation of the Sedition Act or failing to demonstrate appropriate patriotism. Many, though how many is not known exactly, went to jail.

In the end, of course, Wilson left office peacefully, so he was not a Mussolini or Hitler. But his administration was fascist nonetheless.

Franklin Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal

A lighter version of Wilsonian fascism occurred during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the time of the Great Depression.

At the beginning of this review we noted H.G. Wells use of the term "Liberal Fascism" to describe his brand of socialism. Wells was an ardent admirer of FDR. The reason, of course, was that Wells saw Roosevelt as a liberal fascist.

As with Mussolini and Hitler, Roosevelt was obsessed with "the forgotten man". It wasn't a cynical act for any of them. All were genuinely concerned with the economic well being of the lower-middle classes. And indeed the economy prospered under Hitler. Again none of this is to excuse Hitler or Mussolini, it is just a statement of fact. Further, neither is it to insinuate that Roosevelt was no different than the two dictators. For all his flaws, Roosevelt, like Wilson, did respect the vote and the democratic process.

Many European fascists saw Roosevelt as a kindred spirit. Both Mussolini and Hitler saw their programmes as similar to Roosevelt's New Deal. Mussolini gave a good review of Roosevelt's book Looking Forward. The German press praised FDR and his New Deal.

A core tenant of fascism is the desire to militarize society whether there is an external war to fight or not. The whole point, in fact, of fascism is to mobilize. What is important to understand, though, is that it is society that is being mobilized, not the military. The military is usually involved, but it's participation is not really central to fascism. It is the cartoon version of fascism discussed above that only sees the military aspect of fascism.

The progressives supported American entry into World War I not because they wanted to defeat Germany, but because they saw it as an opportunity to advance their domestic policy goals at home. They wanted to militarize society. It was William James who came up with the term "moral equivalent of war" to justify mobilization for one cause or another.

The New Deal was all about the militarization of society. The premier New Deal project, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had actually been started during World War I. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was modeled on Wilson's War Industries Board. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which constructed many city, state, and national parks, was the most explicitly fascist of all the programs. It's members wore uniforms and was rationalized as a program to "beef up the physical and moral fiber of an embryonic new army" (Goldberg's words).

Worse than the CCC was the NRA mentioned above. it was led by General Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, and man who questioned the patriotism of his critics in a manner that would have made Joe McCarthy blush. He continually referred to the NRA and it's mission in military terms, saying for example that "This is war - lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history." In fact, Johnson was an ardent admirer of Mussolini's fascist government.

The symbol of the NRA was the Blue Eagle. Usually depicted in textbooks as an innocent symbol that businesses put in their window to show that they went along with NRA guidelines("We do our Part" was the motto under the eagle), it was really the method by which Roosevelt and Johnson bullied businesses into joining. The NRA stuck it's tentacles into every aspect of daily life, or at least tried to. The Blue Eagle was used for propaganda in a way that Goldberg says is difficult to exaggerate, and indeed the whole thing was really more an exercise in state religion than economics. Heaven help any business that refused to sign up, because people were admonished by the government not to buy anything from businesses that didn't have the Blue Eagle in their window.

The bullying wasn't just verbal or economic; it often got quite physical. Johnson sent his goons to smash businesses that wouldn't sign up, and "G-Men" were used to spy on opponents. Goldberg says that "FDR used the post office to punish his enemies and lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress's war-making powers at several turns." The rationale was that as long as it was for the right cause the constitution didn't matter.

Goldberg is careful to note that despite the fascism in Wilson and Roosevelt's programs, at the end of the day they were not dictators. Neither sought to end elections, and neither cheated (at least not more than their opponents) to win. Theirs was a "nice" fascism.

The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets

The New Left that arose during the 1960s and "took to the streets" had many characteristics of traditional fascism. It prided itself on it's call to unity, but "unity" is at best a morally neutral concept. The Mafia is "unified". Many of the calls to "direct action" were made without any concrete goals in mind, action itself being the objective.
The student groups that took over universities and ousted the faculty were using out and out fascist tactics.

While Nazism is evil, it does not follow that every Nazi was motivated by evil intent. Many Germans joined the Nazi party because they liked Hitler's economic populism, or thought that their country had been treated shabbily by the victors after World War I. But although one might say that Hitler's program had it's "good" parts, it obviously crossed the line into evil. As such, whatever the "good" parts of the New Left of the 1960s, much of it was outright fascist thuggery. '60s leaders such as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn and others were continually calling for more violence and more destruction, and would have set up an Orwellian totalitarian state if they could have.

The left does not understand that love of country does not by itself lead to fascism. Patriotism is not fascism. During the 1960s the left got the idea that displays of patriotism were fascist and that criticizing one's country was patriotic. Outright anti-Americanism became fashionable among the elite during this time.

From Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson did more than anyone else to establish the federal government as a sort of "state religion." Liberals have used the myth of Kennedy ("Camelot" and all that) to promote this idea, especially the idea that if he had lived we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. The purpose of this was to expand federal power into all aspects of life.

Kennedy, like FDR, turned everything into a "crisis", the better which to whip up popular sentiment so he could get his programs passed. This crisis mongering is classic fascist behavior (though again this alone does not make him a fascist). Kennedy even created "crisis teams" to deal with issues and short-circuit the bureaucracy. Biographer Ted Sorensen counted sixteen "crises" in Kennedy's first 8 months in office alone.

"The Kennedy presidency represented...the final evolution of progressivism into a full-blown religion and national cult of the state." It was a rule by elites ("supermen") who had the special answers to our problems ("gnosticism"), all presided over by a "great man in the mold of Wilson and the Roosevelts" (cult of personality).

Remember, the progressives did not push their liberal totalitarianism because of the world wars or the Great Depression, they were glad that they occurred in that they gave them the opportunity to implement their existing ideas.

It was in the 1920s that American progressives redefined the term "liberal". Previously, the term had meant something along the lines of "individual and economic liberty without state control." It was "freedom from a dictatorial state". Led by John Dewey, they changed this to "freedom from want, from poverty, lack of education" etc. This meant that now the state had to get involved, and the idea of the activist state was born.

Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

Modern-day liberals claim that they have always occupied the high ground on matters of race. Would that they knew their own history. It was the progressives, fathers of modern liberalism, who were the strongest backers of eugenics, one of the most racist and scary programs of the twentieth century.

If you're not familiar, eugenics is the idea that "human stock" can be improved through controlled breeding, much like we treat cattle or crops. While this might not seem too harmful on the surface, in actuality it led to practices such as state-enforced sterilization of the mentally retarded, those with Down's Syndrome and the like. It also led to much racism, as many white progressives wanted to "control the lesser races."

What is amazing is that the progressive infatuation with eugenics has been almost completely erased from history. We are supposed to believe that on matters of race, liberals have always been the good guys and conservatives the bad guys. In reality, close to the opposite was the truth. The fact is that it was the left that promoted eugenics, and conservatives who opposed it.

Progressives supported eugenics because it was one of the means by which they wanted to achieve their "utopia", or at least a better society. They saw it as all quite scientific. This may seem odd today, but remember that since progressives saw nations as bodies, and problems within them as a disease. Excise the disease and you cure the body.

Progressives admired Hitler's eugenics program. This, too, has been conveniently forgotten. But the reality is that until the truth about how far Hitler intended to go sank in, his ideas looked pretty good to progressives. As with all else, Goldberg stresses that this does not put progressives in league with Hitler, or make them Nazis. No progressive favored mass extermination. But it is a fact that many progressives of the 1930s admired Hitler's program.

In the now notorious case of Beck v Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supported forced sterilization with his infamous justification that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The lone dissenter on the bench was Pierce Butler, usually described as an "arch conservative." Goldberg points out that it was the reasoning in Beck v Bellthat "endures in the often unspoken rationale for abortion."

To be sure, just because so many if not most progressives fifty to a hundred years ago were racists doesn't mean that their liberal heirs are too. But it does mean that modern liberalism was built on it, something that liberals are loath to acknowledge.

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was a terrible racist who wanted to use eugenics and abortion to reduce the black population and anyone else she deemed "unfit." She said this directly in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization; "More children from the fit; less from the unfit - that is the chief issue of birth control... We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us." The very stated purpose of her "Negro Project" was to use birth control to reduce the black population.

The mindset that promoted eugenics is that same one that supports abortion. Though the holocaust discredited eugenics, the idea behind it did not really disappear. "Family planning" is simply the term used today for what amounts to something very similar. Indeed, in a way Planned Parenthood is more eugenic that the old eugenicists, as abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined.

Liberal Fascist Economics

It is perhaps in the area of economics that fascism is the most misunderstood. In the left's cartoon version, fascism occurs when right-wing politicians conspire with big business to oppress "the little guy," or that European fascists were tools of big business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, as Goldberg demonstrates, "in the left's eternal vigilance to fend off fascism, they have in fact created it, albeit with a friendly face."

The fact is that the more free the market, the less fascist, and the more regulated and close to the political center, the more fascist. The far left, at outright government ownership, is socialist. Remember; it was Hitler and Mussolini who promoted themselves by claiming that they were neither left nor right but represented a "Third way."

Both Mussolini and Hitler were supported by small donations, and not, for the most part, by money from big corporations. Both denounced big business and the wealthy time and again, Hitler most notably in Mein Kampf. Their political platforms stressed regulating business and taxing the wealthy to benefit the working middle class.

Fascism is when the state says to business "You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with - and help implement, - our political agenda." This was not only the deal that Hitler and Mussolini made with big business in their respective countries, but it was pretty much the one that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt imposed during the First World War and Great Depression as well. None of this can be called "right wing."

Indeed, as part of his New Deal FDR asked big business to write the very laws under which they would be regulated, and they happily obliged. In doing so they managed things so as to eliminate as much competition as possible through the simple expedient of making the laws so stringent that only the biggest of corporations could implement them. Thus, smaller competitors were regulated out of business.

Even more shocking, New Deal progressives studied Mussolini's corporatism, admiringly, in order to find things that they could apply here. The feelings were reciprocated across the Atlantic, with both Italian fascists and German Nazis praising Roosevelt and the New Deal.

"Fascism is the cult of unity, within all spheres and between all spheres." Therefore, as long as they followed the political goals of the regime they could keep their businesses.

it is forgotten today, but the Nazis were what we today would call "health freaks." Among their many campaigns were ones to reduce alcohol consumption by replacing beer with fruit drinks, fight smoking (before anyone else they saw the link between smoking and cancer) and promote organic foods.

In Nazi Germany, businesses proved their bona fides by being "good corporate citizens", not too different than what we have in the United States today. To be sure, what constituted being loyal differed considerably, but the philosophy is the same. In Germany it was firing Jews, in the United States today it is promoting "diversity" or "environmentalism."

Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism

Goldberg uses Hillary Clinton's 1996 book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child as the example par excellence of modern-day fascist thinking. It's very title, indeed, is about as fascist as you can get. If the motto of the Mussolini's fascism was "everything in the State, nothing outside the the State, then the implicit motto of It Takes a Village to Raise a Child is "everything in the village, nothing outside the village." The message is clear; your children belong to "everyone" which in the modern world means the state.

All this does not, he stresses, mean that Hillary is evil. Far from it, for hers is "nice fascism", all meant for good. That she means it for well, however, does not make it less fascist.

"Civil society" has traditionally meant free and open "independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion" and "the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic." It consists of churches, labor unions, all those clubs and organizations that people form for their own purposes and as long as they are not outright criminal are outside the control of the state.

Hillary has a different view of civil society. To her it is a "term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes." This is factually incorrect and startlingly totalitarian. There are no truly free associations or clubs in Hillary's world, for everything in her "village" is managed or controlled by the state to achieve "common purposes."

Hillary's "politics of meaning" is therefore a totalitarian philosophy. Again, this is "nice totalitarianism", but totalitarianism nonetheless. Also important to note is that she claims that she is promoting a "Third Way" approach.

Hillary and her cohort Marian Wright Edelman justify everything by saying that it's "for the children." And it's not just that she wants to make their current situation better; to her the children are in a state of crisis. Indeed, to her childhood itself was a crisis. There is no better to erase the wall between government and the private sphere than to declare a crisis.

Using "the children" as a propaganda tool to advance their goals was a brilliant political stroke. For Hillary it was just an opening to a broader political agenda. To her, families are not private units. Indeed, she has said that "As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child...For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate." It is indeed a favorite trick of the left to declare that one of their political goals is not in fact political, as anyone who has debated a liberal on the issue of "diversity" or "multiculturalism" has discovered.

Liberalism's entire "cult of the child" is similar, Goldberg says, to fascist thought. Children are controlled by their passions and feelings. Fascism is driven by will (see Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will). Our youth culture is driven by narcissism, so was fascism.

The New Age: We're All Fascists Now

When I was in high school in the 1970s I read both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Both impressed me, but the former more than the latter, because I saw 1984 as a metaphor for the Cold War, which I saw as more relevant. Over the years I've reread each work once or twice, and recently have come to believe that while Orwell's work was more relevant for the twentieth century, Brave New World is the better warning for what we face today.

It was therefore flattering yet unsurprising to read that Goldberg has reached the exact same conclusion. The totalitarianism of a Hillary Clinton or Al Gore is not that of Hitler or Stalin, but it deprives us of our freedom nonetheless. Today's totalitarianism, or Liberal Fascist State, is one in which everyone is at least nominally happy. All of our needs are met, and indeed no Gestapo or KGB will be coming to break down our doors.

Environmental Fascism

Environmentalism, Goldberg says, is fascistic partially because of it's "crisis mechanism." Al Gore and others preach the gospel of global warming and insist that the world will come to an end if we do not take immediate action. Anyone who demurs is denounced and called a 'denier" or worse. He and others like him will brook no debate. Worse, they insist on all sorts of measures that would create a sort of "economic dictatorship" of just the type that progressives have always wanted.

Environmentalism in general, and the "global warming" movement in particular, are totalitarian. Everything is or can be said to be an environmental issue. The new worry is our "carbon footprint", and every human activity is said to emit carbon, and therefore is to be regulated.

Environmentalism is also quite totalitarian because everything falls under it's aegis. Nothing is private, or out of the reach of environmentalism, because they see every activity as influencing the environment, and thus worthy of regulation. From the food you eat, to the material your sofa is made of, to the light bulbs in your house, they want to regulate it all.

There are many parallels with modern environmentalism and Nazism. Part of the Nazi program was centered on what we today would call "environmentalism." Nazi thinkers were worried about the whales, nature preserves, and "sustainable forestry". They were very concerned about eating habits, and there was a virtual "cult of the organic" among Nazi leaders. Hitler was a vegetarianism and Himmler pushed for animal rights legislation.

Interestingly, the Nazis used the same rationale that modern environmentalists use; "the common good supersedes the private good." A Hitler Youth manual instructed that "food is not a private matter!" and that "you have the duty to be healthy!" Today we hear smoking and trans-fats bans justified with the "we'll all pay" line.

The Tempting of Conservatism

Although fascism is a leftist ideology, and most fascist traits today can be found on the left, the right is not immune. Goldberg identifies three areas in modern conservatism where strains of fascism can be found.

The first is "nostalgia" to the extent that it romanticizes the past into something it was not. This leads to trouble when conservatives try and translate "traditional values" into national programs. Goldberg only devotes one short paragraph to this, and I'm not entirely sure what he means. Based on years of reading his writing at National Review, I know he's not saying that conservatives should not champion their values in response to the "kultursmog", or that anti-abortion laws are fascist.

The second area where Goldberg says conservatism gets into trouble is when in desperation it turns into "me too" conservatism. Here conservatives start to copy progressives, and it turns into a "liberal fascism light."

Lastly, conservatives are not immune to the temptation of identity politics. Sometimes conservatives are tempted to mirror-image liberal identity politics to give them a taste of their own medicine, such as a white conservative referring to himself as a "Euro-American" or some such. It is all very fine to hold conservative Christian values, for example, and of course to base one's voting or governance on such values. Proposing a Department of Judeo-Christian Culture, however, would be going too far.

Goldberg identifies Patrick J. Buchanan as the one conservative who has these characteristics. William F Buckley Jr, "officially" drummed Buchanan out of the conservative movement in 1991 by accusing him (and a few others) of Anti-Semitism in his book (and NRO article of the same title) In Search of Anti-Semitism. Ever though, Buchanan still hovers around the edges of the movement, and appears as a guest on certain conservative radio talk-shows.

Really more of a populist and neo-progressive than a conservative, Buchanan identifies himself as a "paleoconservative." Nevertheless, he has at various times come out against free market trading, the flat tax, in favor of capping executive pay, in support of higher unemployment benefits, and backs a "third way" type of governance. On foreign policy he is famously isolationist and generally opposes Israeli policies. The thesis of his latest book, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, that World War II was an unnecessary war, is downright bizarre.

For what it's worth, I wrote off Buchanan some time ago. First it was his isolationist foreign policy. Then, however, I became less and less comfortable with his talk about immigrants and the need to preserve our culture. I'm as anti-illegal immigration as the next conservative, and I want English as the official language of our country, but Buchanan takes it all too far. And if WFB says he's an anti-Semite, that's good enough for me.

My Take

The danger is that immediately upon reading the book you tend to be hyper sensitive to anything in the news that appears in the slightest fascist. It is tempting to see something fascist in all movements you don't like. I'll try and resist the temptation in the weeks and months ahead.

This warning acknowledged, I would be remiss if I pretended that there was nothing in the news that did not smack of fascism. The anti-smoking movement has morphed from something laudable into fanaticism. It's all very well to promote healthy living, but we've crossed the line when legislators want to ban "trans fats." And can't we live our lives the way we want without some sort of enforced "national service" plan?

All in all this is one of the most important books I have read in the past several years, and comes highly recommended, whether you end up agreeing with all of his conclusions or not. Goldberg has defined and explained a political ideology of which I only had a vague notion. He has also explained much about the history of the progressive movement that I had not known about. Get this book and read it.

Posted by Tom at 8:00 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 29, 2007

Quote of the Century

Michael Ledeen says this is the quote of the century, and it's hard to disagree with him other than to ask why we should limit it to one century

It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the cause by writing editorials - after the fact.

Robert E. Lee, 1863

Posted by Tom at 8:25 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 24, 2007

Fake Arguments against Democracy

The latest argument coming from the left is that by not supporting Hamas, the Bush Administration, and conservatives in general, do not respect Democracy.

Here's Jimmy Carter (h/t NRO)

The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements, former US President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was addressing a conference of Irish human rights officials, said the Bush administration's refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was "criminal."

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Next up is a writer on the Daily Kos (h/t LGF)

The extreme contempt both Israel and the U.S. have for democracy means that, despite recent events in Gaza, the isolation and strangulation of Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza will likely continue. The probable Israeli response to Hamas’ assumption of power in Gaza will be to ease restrictions in the West Bank and engage in meaningless “peace talks” with Abbas, with the cynical aim of increasing his popularity relative to Hamas’. In the long-term, however, if Hamas remains resilient and does not submit to external pressures to relinquish power, we could very possibly witness a full-blown “‘Bay of Pigs’ type invasion of Gaza”, with Dahlan at its head.

If what we want to see is a relatively stable Palestinian democracy with the capacity to engage in meaningful peace negotiations with Israel (and again I emphasise that these are not the objectives of the Israeli government), the policies we should follow are obvious, as they have been for months. The Hamas government should be recognised as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and should be engaged with in the form of meaningful final status negotiations.

Sorry, but I'm not buying this.

The whole issue raises interesting, and I don't think completely easy to answer, questions about the nature of democracy, and it's twin, liberty.

The short version of my answer is that there is a lot more to democracy than just the mechanics of voting. Carter I'm not so sure about, but I have to think that most liberals and even leftists know this full well. So when the folks at Kos berate conservatives for not accepting Hamas because they were elected, I have to think they're not being entirely serious in their criticism, because it's eithe that or they're outright apologists for terrorism. I have to think that most who spout this line are just blinded by their hatred of President Bush. In short, they've got Bush Derangement Syndrome.

After all, if the Ku Klux Klan started winning elections in the U.S., I can't imagine the left would accept their right to rule regardless of the fairness of the vote.

Likewise, the Nazi party won a plurality of the vote in the 1933 elections, coming in first with 43.9%, more than twice that of their nearest opponent. The election itself was relatively free and fair, but who today would say that it really represented "democracy"?

All of this brings to the forefront the central question of elections and their relationship to what we think of as "democracy": Is it just or acceptable for a non-democratic party to come to power through elections?

What is Democracy?

The US Department of State helpfully provides a longish definition. Here are some of the highlights

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom.

Several "Pillars of Democracy" are listed

# Sovereignty of the people. # Government based upon consent of the governed. # Majority rule. # Minority rights. # Guarantee of basic human rights. # Free and fair elections. # Equality before the law. # Due process of law. # Constitutional limits on government. # Social, economic, and political pluralism. # Values of tolerance, pragmatism, cooperation, and compromise.

Wikipedia says that

Liberal democracy is a representative democracy along with the protection of minorities, the rule of law, a separation of powers, and protection of liberties (thus the name liberal) of speech, assembly, religion, and property.

I think that most Westerners can agree that all of the above are pretty good definitions of democracy.

Back to the Palestinian Authority

Clearly, then, Hamas does not qualify as an institution committed to democracy. Neither, for that matter, does Fatah. Therefore, when the Kos author talks about "extreme contempt both Israel and the U.S. have for democracy" we can conclude that he either has no understanding of democracy, is just off on a political rant and is thus guilty of lazy thinking, or is just an apologist for terrorism. Or, as I mentioned above, he's got BDS.

As for ex-President Carter, I think he's just a bitter old man. He never reconciled himself to this 1980 defeat, and for a Christian seems not to have learned how to forgive. He's thrown in with the worst dictators, has become a virtual anti-Semite, and I believe will be judged harshly by history.

The Algerian Example

What if a situation develops whereby a political party promises to dismantle the institutions of democracy if it is elected? What if it actually wins a majority of the popular vote?

Such a situation has actually occured, not once but several times in the post-WWII era.

In 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front won the first round of Algeria's first multi-party elections. The ISF had promised to turn the country into an Islamic state and institute sharia law. After the voting, the military stepped in and annuled the elections. Western governments either applauded or remained silent. This led to a civil war, and some 160,000 people were killed over the next ten years. However, in the end the insurgents were defeated and a true democracy (republic, actually) is emerging.

What it Means

We in the West are good at the mechanics of voting. Through international agencies we can set up relatively free and fair votes most of the time.

But our record at installing actual democratic values has been rather hit-or-miss. We got it right in Germany and Japan. India has also turned out to be a stable democracy. We got it wrong in Zimbabwe and most other African states. El Salvadore seems to be doing well, but Nicaragua not so much.

Iraq somewhat parallels the Palestinian Authority. It was easy enough for us to set up voting, not so easy to convince people to respect each other's liberty.

In the end, then, we need to recognise that democracy is about more than voting. We need to think harder about what it takes to instill concepts of liberty in troubled regions, and not fixate on voting. This is a tough subject, and will require much thinking and trial and error in order to get it right in a place like Iraq. The first step, though, is to have moral clarity on the subject, and to recognize the true nature of democracy.

Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 24, 2007

Edwards Shows His Colors

On the one hand this is really no big surprise, but it's interesting to hear him say so plainly that he doesn't believe that there's any jihadist or Islamist threat to the West (h/t NRO)

The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics, not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world. As a political "frame," it's been used to justify everything from the Iraq War to Guantanamo to illegal spying on the American people. It's even been used by this White House as a partisan weapon to bludgeon their political opponents. Whether by manipulating threat levels leading up to elections, or by deeming opponents "weak on terror," they have shown no hesitation whatsoever about using fear to divide.

But the worst thing about this slogan is that it hasn't worked. The so-called "war" has created even more terrorism—as we have seen so tragically in Iraq. The State Department itself recently released a study showing that worldwide terrorism has increased 25% in 2006, including a 40% surge in civilian fatalities.

By framing this as a "war," we have walked right into the trap that terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war against Islam.

There are so many things wrong in this it's hard do know where to start.

First, there's the big lie that the Bush Administration is manipulating threat levels for political purposes. Where's the proof, John? None, of course, is offered, because there is none to be had. Just because a threat level is turned up before an election doesn't mean that it was done for political reasons. One of the most basic tenants of logic and statistics is that association is not causation.

One thing that amazes me about the anti-war left is that they tend to assume that all of our intelligence findings about the enemy must be made public, and that anyting that is not public doesn't exist. The have no understanding that so much happens behind the scenes, things that won't and shouldn't be made public for dozens of years. The public actions officials take are but the tip of the iceberg, and the public sees only a bit of what is going on.

Judith Coplon

One example should suffice.

In 1949 an employee at the Justice Department named Judith Coplon was arrested in the act of handing top-secret documents to a known KGB agent. FBI agents had been following her for some time, and as she was handing the documents to the Russian agent the FBI swooped in and arrested them both. Coplon was caught red handed, as it were.

Newspaper reporters asked FBI officials how it was that they suspected her. They told some story about how they watched everyone in the DOJ records department, and discovered that Coplon was pilfering documents.

Coplon was convicted in two separate trials, but each time an appeals court ruled that certain evidence the government presented was inadmissable, and nullified the convictions. Eventually the government gave up and she was let free.

Fast forward to 1994. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (D-NY) Commission on Government Secrecy has the job of deciding which old covert programs can safely be made public. There is, after all, no reason to keep things classified forever, and the public should know about the successful efforts of our clandestine services.

One of the programs that Moynihan's commission decides to make public was project Venona. During project Venona, the Signals Intelligence Service (the precursor to today's NSA) intercepted and decrypted hundreds of cables sent from the Soviet embassy in Washington DC to Moscow during 1942-45. They were not able to decrypt all cables, and some were only partially decrypted, but the intelligence haul was monumental nonetheless.

In the cables some 349 American agents working for one or another Soviet intelligence service were identified by code name. Of these, American intelligence was able to identify by name 171, leaving 178 unidentified to this day.

Among those identified in the cables was Judith Coplon.

At Coplon's trial, government prosecutors had a problem. If they revealed the existance of project Venona, the KGB would be alerted to the fact that many of it's agents had been compromised, and the Soviets would redouble their efforts to secure their codes. On the other hand, by not revealing Venona, much of the government evidence that was presented might get thrown out (you'll have to read the details of the trials yourself if you want to know why, because the technicalities would time some time to explain and I'm not a lawyer anyway).

In the end, the prosecution took the only decision they could; they kept Venona secret. Partially as a result of this decision, Coplon's two convictions were overturned and she walked.

Back to Edwards

In case it's not blindingly obvious by the example above, project Venona also revealed that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spys. Yet for decades the far left claimed that they were innocent victims of McCarthyism.

No I am not saying that we should blindly trust whatever the Bush Administration tells us. What I am saying is that people need to be aware that when they turn up the terrorist threat level and only issue vague justifications we need to understand that there is a lot going on that we don't know about, and won't for decades.

So when Edwards talks about the Bush Administration "manipulating threat levels leading up to elections" he sounds like a complete idiot.

War on Terror?

In a way, Edwards is right when he says that there is no War on Terror. Unfortunately, his reason is completely wrong.

The correct answer would have been to say that we're in a War on Terror makes about as much sense as describing World War II as a War on Blitzkreig. It wasn't about fighting a tactic, but rather about fighting an ideology.

As such, as I've said many times, we're really in a "War on Jihadism". Our enemies, in their videos, pamphlets, and communications, call themselves "men of jihad". We ought to do them the favor of taking seriously what they say.

But is it a war? Edwards thinks not. Like most liberals, he distrusts and dislikes military action, and any military action is usually characterized as "an over reliance" on it.

The jihadists have been saying for decades that they are in a war against us. When Osama bin Laden issued his famous 1998 Fatwa declaring war against the United States, neither Republicans nor Democrats took them seriously, to say nothing of the major media. Stunned by this non-reaction, bin Laden took it as a sign from Allah that the United States was ready to be attacked. We paid the deadly consequences on September 11.

Of course we're in a war. Using this term does not, as Edwards supposes, mean that military action is our predominant method of fighting it. For over 40 years we fought what was properly called the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union, yet employed many methods other than military action to win it. Does he want us to rename that time period also?

For that matter President Johnson and other liberals declared a "War on Poverty" in the 1960s. The plain fact is that applying the term "war" to something does not mean that those involved necessarily see military action as the prime or only method of fighting it.

Playing Defense

Much else that Edwards says in the speech is silly as well. Consider this passage

We must be clear about when it is appropriate for a commander-in-chief to use force. As president, I will only use offensive force after all other options including diplomacy have been exhausted, and after we have made efforts to bring as many countries as possible to our side. However, there are times when force is justified: to protect our vital national interests... to respond to acts of aggression by other nations and non-state actors... to protect treaty allies and alliance commitments... to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons... and to prevent or stop genocide.

Sorry, but no it isn't clear at all as to when you'd use military force. As Jim Geraghty comments, "Okay, but how would he, or any other President, know that all other options have been exhausted? How do you know with 100 percent certainty that no additional efforts, concessions, negotiations, requests, or efforts at persuasion will bring on additional allies? When is it considered enough?"

Recall that in 1991 a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate voted against the resolution authorizing President George H.W. Bush to eject Saddam from Kuwait. Yet the Bush Administration had garnered worldwide support, and had all of the necessary Security Council resolutions in place. If that wasn't enough, what was?

It would seem, therefore, that Edwards is setting up a series of conditions that he know cannot be met. No matter how much failed negotiation takes place, he can always say that we ought to give it "another chance".

This is nothing new from the Democrats. Some time ago I reflected on all of the little conditions they were setting up and drafted some new rules for going go war Democrat-style.

And Finally

One of two more points and I'll let this go. Edwards again

But I will also remove any civilian or military officer who stifles debate or simply tells me what I want to hear.

What does this even mean? That he's going to fire anyone who agrees with him? This is the sort of pap that gets applause from the crowd but doesn't really mean anything. I t sounds good in theory but would be hard to actually enforce.

These troops are exhausted and overworked, and we have been forced to dig deeper and deeper to find ground forces for Iraq and Afghanistan. This leaves us ill-prepared for the future. Today, every available combat active-duty Army combat brigade has been to Iraq or Afghanistan for at least one 12-month tour. We are sending some troops back to Iraq with less than a year's rest. To make matters worse, the Secretary of Defense just extended tours from 12 to 15 months, which is unconscionable.

The proper response, of course, would be to rebuild our armed forces, which have fallen disasterously in size since the end of the Cold War.

Last month the editors of National Review provided some facts that shows just how small our military has become compared to the force that ejected Saddam from Kuwait.

From 1974 to 1989, the Army had 770,000 to 780,000 active troops (all of them volunteers). Today, we have around 508,000. The Navy had 568 ships in the late 1980s; today it has 276, and its manpower is so reduced that it often has to helicopter sailors from homebound ships to outbound ones in order to keep them staffed. The Air Force’s number of tactical air wings has shrunk from 37 to 20, and the average age of its aircraft is 24 years (as compared with nine years in 1973).

In addition (sorry but I can't find the link just now to prove it) during most of the Cold War we spent about 8% of GDP on defense. Today it's under 4%. For a time we spent about 50% of the federal budget on defense, today I believe it's under 20%. One of the biggest failures of the Bush Administration has been to not increase the size of our armed forces.

Edwards gives a positively Clintonian response as to whether he'd increase the size of our military

The problem of our force structure is not best dealt with by a numbers game. It is tempting for politicians to try and "out-bid" each other on the number of troops they would add. Some politicians have fallen right in line behind President Bush's recent proposal to add 92,000 troops between now and 2012, with little rationale given for exactly why we need this many troops—particularly with a likely withdrawal from Iraq.

The numbers game only gets us into the same problems as the president's approach. We must be more thoughtful about what the troops will actually be used for. Any troops we add today would take a number of years to recruit and train, and so will not help us today in Iraq.

We might need a substantial increase of troops in the Army, Marine Corps, and Special Forces for four reasons: to rebuild from Iraq; to bolster deterrence; to decrease our heavy reliance on Guard and Reserve members in military operations; and to deploy in Afghanistan and any other trouble spots that could develop.

So does this mean he would or wouldn't increase the size of the military? I can't tell. 5 1/2 years from 9/11 and 4 years after the start of OIF and the best he tell us is that he "might" substantially increase the size of the military?

What he's doing is trying to have it both ways. In the first paragraph of the quoted secrion he's playing to the Kos kids, and in the last to whatever hawks are left in the Democrat party. In coming months he'll point to whichever paragraph suits him depending on his audience.

In short, Edwards gives us no reason to think that he would be a competent commander in chief. He is clueless as to the threat our nation faces, and has no serious plans to defeat the jihadists.

Posted by Tom at 12:30 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 18, 2007

Copperheads in Congress

I don't suppose there's anyone in their right mind today who couldn't imagine not fighting to free people imprisoned in the hell of slavery, especially when it's happening on your own soil.

And if you're like me, when you were younger and less well-read you had this view of events like the American Revolution, Civil War (from the North's perspective), and World War II as glorious crusades in which "of course" we were all in it together.

But it were the truth. Most history books will tell you that only about 1/3 of the colonists supported independence, another 1/3 were loyal to the crown, and the last 1/3rd just didn't care. Up until Dec 7 1941 up to 80% of Americans wanted nothing to do with aiding the British in any shape way or form. Yet who today could imagine not wanting to fight the Nazis?

We all know, I suppose, that the North stumbled many times in the road to victory. Lincoln went through general after general before he found one who could consistently win. And then after the victories of early 1863, came the losses of later in that year and early 1864.

The Federal Army was unable to fill it's ranks with volunteers and resorted to a draft, which proved so unpopular that riots broke out in New York City over it. Many northern Democrats, disappointed in the way the war was being conducted, decided that it wasn't worth it.

These "peace Democrats" became known as Copperheads. By 1864 they had gained effective control of their party.

There was a presidential election in 1864. From the Democrat Party Platform:

Resolved, That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.

Amazing, isn't it? Yet it's true; the "peace Democrats" of 1864 wanted an immediate end to the fighting and a negotiated peace that would undoubtably have left slavery in peace. Today's Democrats want an immediate withdrawal regardless of consequences, which would be a huge victory for the jihadists.

As with the Civil War Copperheads, today's variety think that they have the public behind them. They are convinced that the results of the last election "prove" that the American people want an unconditional withdrawal. But as a poll published in Investor's Business Daily points out, it isn't that simple (hat tip Power Line)

From the accompanying editorial

The party of John Murtha shamelessly seeks to defund and defeat U.S. troops on the battlefield and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Congress the terrorists wanted is doing their bidding ...

As we've noted on several occasions, Democratic talk of "redeployment" has encouraged terrorist groups around the world.

Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said before the 2006 vote: "Americans should vote Democratic," adding that "it is time the American people support those who want to take them out of the Iraqi mud." The statement could have come from Murtha, Kerry, Hillary or any number of Democrats.

We find it scary that the Democratic and terrorist game plans are indistinguishable.

I'd say that's about right. I'm reading Walid Phares' Future Jihad, which is the best book I've read on the terrorists period. He lays it out just as IBD says; that one of OBL's objectives was to get us to become divided and fight each other. Critics will say that it's all President Bush's fault, that if only we hadn't invaded Iraq we'd all be in it together.

Hogwash. The left would still object to the Patriot Act and Gitmo. Take Iraq out of it and the right and left still have fundamentally different views of what the war is even about. The right sees it as a war against fundamentalist Islam, and the left sees it as a police action against criminals. But more on that when I review Phares' book.

John Murtha has become the chief Copperhead and his plan for our defeat is in full swing. The Washington Times explained on Friday that

When the House votes today on the resolution denouncing Mr. Bush's plans for additional troops to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq, members should be under no illusions about what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are trying to do: to make it impossible for American troops to properly do their job in Iraq. In an interview yesterday with MoveCongress.org, a Web site for a coalition of anti-war groups, Mr. Murtha, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, explained that by placing conditions on $93.4 billion in new combat funds, he would make be able to effectively stop the troops in their tracks. "They won't be able to continue. They won't be able to do the deployment. They won't have the equipment, they don't have the training and they won't be able to do the work. There's no question in my mind," Mr. Murtha said.

"We will set benchmarks for readiness," a top Democratic leadership aide told the nonpartisan Politico.com Web site, which summarized the Democrats' strategy this way: "If enacted, these provisions would have the effect of limiting the number of troops available for the Bush surge plan, while blunting the GOP charge that Democrats are cutting funding for the troops in Iraq."

No one should be fooled by Murtha's "readyness standards". They're fraudulent and everyone knows it. If you don't believe me listen to what Murtha himself said as quoted by the IBD article

"We're trying to force a redeployment not by taking money away, (but) by redirecting money,"

The Democrats, and some Republicans, don't just think that the Keane-Kagan plan, "A Plan for Success in Iraq", around which the "surge" is based, won't work, they're trying to ensure that it won't . It's shameful enough that they've given our most vicious enemies aid and comfort with their stupid resolutions, now they're trying to pull the rug out from under our troops feet too.

Copperheads, all of them.

Posted by Tom at 9:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 26, 2007

Two Wars

This from today's Washington Times "Inside the Ring" column

Sen. James H. Webb Jr., Virginia Democrat and decorated war hero, gave the Democrats' response to President Bush's State of the Union address, and likened Iraq to the 1950-53 Korean War.

Mr. Webb said, "As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. 'When comes the end?' asked the general who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War II. And as soon as he became president, he brought the Korean War to an end."

We think that is an apt comparison, but probably not for the same reason as Mr. Webb's.

Like Iraq, the U.S. war in Korea was dogged by poor planning, the wrong types of troops, failed tactics and major miscalculations, such as China coming to the communist north's defense. The American death toll: 36,000 in theater.

But in the end, America won. The north's invasion was reversed and the south was preserved. It matured into one of the world's great democracies, free markets and U.S. allies. And a free South Korea helped blunt Josef Stalin's plan for a communist Asia. What some have called the "forgotten war" was messy and unpopular. It drove Harry S. Truman from office. But it made the world a better place. It just took 30 years to realize it.

What's interesting is that at the time the Korean War was not necessarily seen as a victory. But there's also another war that we fought some time ago that didn't work out so well, but that most people today would say was absolutely necessary.

But before we get to that war, let's talk a bit about Korea.

My point here, btw, is not to go after Senator Webb. Both he and the President gave pretty good speeches the other night. As you may guess I thought the President did better, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

Back to Korea. If you're not sure why the Korean War was viewed as a fiasco at the time, you can start with Task Force Smith and the Chosin Reservoir.

Our initial justificatioin for fighting the North Korean invasion was to simply preserve the integrity of the South. However, after we successfully turned the tide with the invasion of Inchon, President Truman changed his war goals and decided to liberate the entire peninsula. General MacArthur dismissed warnings that the Chinese would intervene if he got too close to their border. As we know, the Chinese did intervene in a massive invasion that inflicted tremendous casualties on US forces and drove us completely out of the north. A stalemate ensued that was only ended when newly elected President Eisenhower negotiated an armistice (not a peace treaty) with the Chinese and North Koreans.

We were so traumatized by the Chinese intervention that during the Vietnam War 15 years later we imposed strict requirements on our pilots when they attacked targets in the north. At the time, we saw the lesson of Korea as "don't piss off the Chinese or Russians or they'll intervene and cause a wider war".

Yet as the article from the Times points out, South Korea is a stable democracy today and generally a very good ally. Sure, we've got some current disagreements over policy with regard to the north (see "Sunshine Policy"), but all-in-all it's hard to find anyone today who doesn't think the Korean War was worth it. However, at the time Truman was much-criticized for it.

Another War

One-hundred forty-odd years ago the United States fought another war that was, at times, deeply unpopular. It was said to be an unnecessary war, one that could have been resolved by negotiation, the President was accused of changing his goals halfway through it, and of massively violating our civil rights. Further, the war was conducted incompetently and the reconstruction period afterwards solved nothing. The oppressed people it was supposed to benefit didn't get their rights for another hundred years.

I write, of course, of the American Civil War. President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, probably illegally. While he initially justified the war simply to preserve the union, after the battle of Antietam he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, effectively introducing abolution as a justification and war goal. The Emancipation Proclamation was very controversial in the North, with some troops even threatening desertion over it.

Some Democrats in the North became almost violently anti-war. They became known as "Copperheads".

By 1863 and early 1864 the war was going very poorly for the North. The Federal Army was unable to meet it's recruiting goals, which led to the imposition of a draft. The draft proved so unpopular that riots in New York City broke out over it.

Because of these and battlefield setbacks, the war opponents gained much strength. They were able to take over the Democrat party to the extent that the Democrat Party Platform for the 1864 presidential elections demanded "that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities" and a negotiated peace with the South.

Of course, the North won and the Union was restored. But the Reconstruction period that followed was marred by political disputes up North, the long and short of it being that it ended in 1877 without the civil rights of blacks being assured. With the imposition of Jim Crow, a visitor to the South in the 1920s or 30s might be forgiven for wondering if in fact the Civil War achieved anything at all.

How We View History

Maybe I'm all wet, but it is my perception that the way we view events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II is that "we were all in it together" fighting for a glorious cause. Because the Korean War is more recent, I think many people have at least some inkling of the controversies involved, at least that of the insubordination of General MacArthur.

But when I go back and read the history of these events, what amazes me is how much we fought with each other. The colonialists seemed to spend as much time bickering with each other as they did fighting the British. When you read about how the New Englanders opposed the selection of George Washington to lead the Continental Army soley because he was a Virginian, and they wanted "their man" in charge, you just want to go back in history and scream at them. And this is not to mention that only about 1/3 of the colonists even supported revolution. But this is how history works, I think.

So here we are today with the current situation in Iraq. I've made no secret of both my disappointment with how President Bush has done in handling it and the larger War on Jihad, but right now I'm even more disappointed by the anti-war crowd.

Laying that aside for the moment, we need to realize that wars that are seen as obviously necessary today were often quite controvesial at the time.

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December 28, 2006

Gerald Ford - An Appreciation

My earliest political memories are of watching the 1976 Republican National Convention. My parents were supporters of President Ford, and therefore so was I. I was not the rebellious type, then or now. Besides, what Ford said and stood for seemed to make sense.

There was an interloper at the convention, who my parents felt threatened to split the party and thus lessen our chances of victory. All I remember was watching the TV cameras turn to someone called Ronald Reagan, who was sitting in the audience, and who waved to his fans who in turn cheered him. My parents didn't like this, for reasons not entirely clear to me at the time. In later years they became huge Reagan supporters, and it became evident that theirs was simply a call for party unity.

Ford of course lost the election, and so the first presidency I followed with any detail was that of Jimmy Carter. In the next four years the country seemed to careen from crisis to crisis, with the president having no clear idea of what to do about any of them.

The only thing I recall with any specificity about Ford's term was the Mayagüez incident, and it seemd to me that he did the right thing, given what he knew at the time he made the crucial decision to send in the Marines and Navy to rescue the captured crewmembers.

During one of their debates, Carter criticized Ford over his handling of the incident, which I thought terribly unfair.

In later years I, like most people, I suppose, remember Ford mainly for what he didn't do after leaving the presidency; criticize his successors. He went away to do...well I wasn't sure quite what he did all those years, but had the vague feeling it was sitting in some distinguished post somewhere offering sage advice in his usual steady manner.

Surely his brief term in office offers plenty for a conservative like me to criticize. "Whip Inflation Now" was just about the most silly economic plan of modern times. That he continued the Nixon/Kissinger policy of detente will also never endear us to him. But for all his policy errors, he proved a far better president than his successor. And when the 1980 election rolled around, he quickly agreed to campaign for the man who almost took the nomination from him in 1976.

The most important thing he did was pardon Richard Nixon. It was also the correct decision. That he did so knowing full well that it would cost him dearly polically is a tribute to his character and leadership.

Ford's legacy will be that of a steady hand on the helm in a time of national distress. He was refreshingly "boring", at a time when we needed someone with a steady temperament, someone who "looked" like a president and acted as such. He served our nation well when it was needed.

Previous
Jeanne Kirkpatrick - An Appreciation
Pope John Paul II - An Appreciation
Memories of Reagan
Yasser Arafat - An Unappreciation

Posted by Tom at 4:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 23, 2006

Nobles and Knaves, The Contest</