And Again, And Again...

But at least we're mixin' up our mixed analogies. Neo-neocon, of the “I Used to Be a Liberal But After 9/11 I’m Outraged by Chappaquiddick™" contingent:

And then there's the phrase "catastrophic circumstances in Iraq." The [San Francisco] Chronicle takes it as a given that the situation in Iraq warrants that particular adjective rather than one a bit less--well, less catastrophic. I'd hate to have seen how the current-day writers and editors of a paper such as the Chronicle would have dealt with the early years of World War II, or the Civil War, or any number of other conflicts. Fortunately, they weren't around then.

Lordy, is there some chance you're talking about the Deep South press? Because the Northern papers (and the Border States') were all over the map, advocating anything from Total War to letting the South secede, so much so that Lincoln shut down 300 of them for opposition to the war. Is that the sort of dealing you had it mind?

WWII, of course, is the great exception to the rule of contentious debate and opposition to military involvement which was somehow erased in its wake, but that exception is only general and sometimes overstated. The American public believed in that War (still does), believed (somewhat erroneously) that we had been the victims of a sneak attack; yet the finger-pointing and blame apportionment after Pearl went on for months, and in public. FDR himself ordered that the military news not be sugarcoated. You might want to check out the work of Ernie Pyle or Bill Mauldin.

As for today, we might remind you that the start of our little Iraq adventure was met with an across-the-board spasm of rah-rah that would have made Hearst blush, despite the fact that much, if not most, of the population was at minimum somewhat opposed to the timing of the war, despite having been bilked by Judy Miller's Three Column Monte routine. Or that had we had a clear and honest debate before the war, assuming such a thing is possible, you and your President wouldn't be trying to get out of that hole by digging up.

I Can Keep This Up As Long As Y'all Can

Victor Davis Hanson, "Don't Blame Rumsfeld!", Da Corner

I don't see how removing the Secretary of Defense helps either the country or the Republicans, especially given the pre-election vote of confidence in his full tenure. He was on the right track reforming the military; the removal of the Taliban and the three-week victory over Saddam were inspired.

So we are down to his supposed responsibility for the later effort to stop the 3-year plus insurgency, whose denouement is not yet known. Rumsfeld's supposed error that drew such ire was troop levels, i.e., that he did not wish to repeat a huge presence in the manner of Vietnam, but sought to skip the 1964-1971 era morass, and go directly to the 1972-5 Vietnamization strategy of training troops, providing aid, and using air power.

Y'know, for a bunch for whom any comparison of a certain SE Asian nation with our glorious Iraq adventure was tantamount to treason just four years ago, the Right sure keeps bringing the subject up these days. Hanson, here, is somewhat less disingenuous than the rest, maybe because of that part-time gig as a military historian, albeit one whose primary goal these days seems to be finding moral lessons for children among history's carnage. So this time we will lead off by not even mentioning that Professor Hanson passed up his opportunity to get his military history first-hand; in the long run his pursuit of an advanced classics degree just made Vietnam that much more meaningful for the rest of us.

We can't really argue directly with what little is actually said about Vietnam above. Okay, Nixon's so-called Vietnamization was supposed to be the policy we were pursuing all along, but that's small beer. Instead it's the interesting mirror-reversal at work here: Rumsfeld is defended as having sidestepped the "Morass Phase" of Vietnam, except he does so in a war he and all the other war buffs kept telling us was nothing like Vietnam. (Reminiscent of Our President's renewed effort to get Congressional approval for actions he claims don't require it.)

As I've said once or twice before, the "Rumsfeld Doctrine" stuff is just bunkum. We went into Iraq with 150,000 troops because that was all we could muster without a draft, a massive reorganization of existing military obligations, and/or an Afghanistan-style international alliance, and any one of those would have required a delay of at least a year. And that delay a) would have demonstrated that Iraq was no threat, nuclear or otherwise; b) would have allowed the hated Europeans to broker a peace that did not give George W. his chance to out-manhood his Daddy; and c) did not fit in with the reelection scheme, which is how this thing began life in or around the summer of 1999. A draft would have taken about 18 months, plus it might have been so enormously unpopular as to stop the war in its tracks altogether. A large international force might have been assembled for fall of 2003, but these guys weren't really interested in coalition building, since the base is still feeding off the Birch Society anti-UN paranoia, as anyone who might have casually mentioned an international coalition in their hearing back in '02 can attest.

So spare us the "remarkable three-week victory over Saddam" bit. That was the world's only superpower scraping up the rusting remnants of a once fifth-rate power. It's like saying Hitler deserves credit for making such short work of the Poles, if only his later actions hadn't hit a minor snag a little farther to the east.

That occupation, or failure to even have a plan in place to conduct one, is Rumsfeld's legacy in Iraq. The actual battle, such as it was, we'd been wargaming for twenty years. Let's remember that an insurgency is not exactly an unknown tactic sprung on us for the first time. This was precisely one of two potential threats (other than there actually being WMDs) any military historian could have foreseen: an insurgency using small arms and improvised weapons, or turning Baghdad into Little Stalingrad. And let's not forget what Rummy said about the nascent insurgency at the time: "[A] mixture of a small number of terrorists, a small number of militias, coupled with some demonstrations and some lawlessness." None of which the Pentagon was prepared to deal with.

And it's not just because we went to war on the cheap and in a hurry. Army commanders reported being unable to plan even the basic make-up of postwar units because the Pentagon offered no direction, and because bad news got put on hold for months at a time in hopes that something would turn up and magically turn things around. That is not entirely Rumsfeld's doing--you can lump Cheney, Rice, Perle, and Feith, and the President, assuming he was paying any attention, right in there with him--but the Pentagon was responsible for day-to-day operations. And they were less than a failure. They were criminal.

One more thing--you'd think a military historian might have, by this point, tumbled onto some of this. Maybe realized that the latest episode of Jim Baker pulls his old boss' kid's nuts out of the fire again includes actually talking with commanders in Iraq and finding out just how badly the civilian leadership has screwed up. For the life of me I can't figure out who guys like Hanson think they're hiding the truth from anymore, unless it's themselves.

Olio

• Jesus Christ, I hate phony events like the Rumsfeld resignation. Especially when local news is doing man-in-the-street interviews so we can get what are termed, for want of a better word, Hoosier's "thoughts". It's all eggnog. People are drinking the stuff because the calendar tells them to, but that doesn't mean they have palates, and they don't, and there's no reason I should care about their opinions. Their opposition to the war now is as facile as their support for it was forty-four months ago, and getting their opinion about the "significance" of this "news" is just a way of saying, "Boy, this sure is some big change, huh?" when it's nothing of the sort. It's like getting all excited because they designed a new label for Cheetos.

• Candy Crowley's real name is Magda. So she was named after the least-talented Gabor sister. The "Candy" business, I guess, came about when a producer saw her audition tape and realized she ought to be working under a porn name.

• From today's Times:

Robert Gates, a Player From a Past Bush Team

By SCOTT SHANE

Robert M. Gates is a throwback to an era in foreign policy marked by caution and pragmatism.

And swapping drugs for arms. But unless he's got a time machine I'm pretty sure we're still gonna be in Iraq tomorrow.

News Analysis: Rumsfeld Did Not Change With the Times

There are so many directions you could go with this I'm almost sorry I couldn't be bothered to read it. Example: maybe he was too busy watching tapes of the two-year blowjob he received from the press.

• Cui bono, Republican division? It's too early to tell, but my gut instinct is it's Rudy, who gets the religious nuts off his back somewhat. But it could be exactly the opposite. The religious right saw '08 as their year, their last big chance to seize the Republican nomination before their power waned, but now they're completely demoralized. Will that make them come back even stronger, though? These are the people who vote in the primaries. So it either helps Giuliani or it hurts him. You don't get that kind of analysis just anywhere. Not for free.

• This is why someone should be telling professional chuckleheads like Joe Scarborough to nix the "Bush failed because he wasn't conservative enough" routine. The President is beyond redemption under any circumstances, and finding someone even crazier than he is not exactly the ticket back to the Big Time.

• And, I'm not buying the "evangelicals switched to the Democratic party" exit poll crapola. More liberal evangelicals voted. The whole thing is a reminder of how "religious" has supposedly meant "Republican" for the last twenty-five years, when it doesn't. Although that's one mischaracterization of Christianity the nuts never seem to complain about.

• Oh, and I hope you got the opportunity to see Jerry Falwell--whose presence is desperately needed on one of those Fat Celebrity shows--respond "Never heard of him," when asked about Ted Haggard.

• God knows I love Digby, and he/she writes some of the sharpest analysis around, but:

As Perlstein's piece shows, this new group of energized progressives are not children, 60's hippies or fools.

coming on top of three straight days of Vietnam rewrites gave me an acid flashback. Okay, maybe it's a throwaway, or maybe it's more of this "George McGovern ruined my party before I got to it" revisionism, but please. I'm just a Midwest suburban punk who was still too young to drive when the 60s ended, but I did actually lay eyes on some who were not ordering up lifestyle choices from Relix magazine or caught in a time warp, which puts me one up. The hippies I knew were apolitical, except maybe where it came to their local Selective Service board. Most were sort of instinctual left-libertarians. If, instead, you intend that as a rubric for the thousands of young people in the 60s who marched for civil rights, facing certain harassment and often much worse, or who took to the streets to stop an unjust war, instead of typing up their objections, and you're doing it to aggrandize a few keyboard commandos who happen to raise money for political candidates they like, well, shame on you. The people who screwed up the Democratic party were the pragmatists and the poll watchers who ran and hid from Reagan's Great Communicating. You can look it up.

• I think the interesting post-election question is how the lapdog media deals with it. Does McCain still go on The Timmy Show every other week? Have I already answered my own question?

One Whoop. Medium.

I wasn't expected to join in the general merriment, was I?

Good.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Indiana contributed three new House members, because it shows what I think I started off trying to say with this blog after the 2004 debacle--that there is still a core of reasonableness in what was written off as perpetual Red State flyover country. It would have been nice to see a more general Throw The Bums Out sentiment torch one of our entrenched Republican districts where the hope that blastocyst Hoosiers will once again be able to pray in public schools trumps all concern over Hoosiers of the actually breathing persuasion.

And this is not to say anything at all about the Democrats' record of accomplishment over the past thirty years as the party which shot its two presidents in the foot and managed, without Joe Lieberman, to hand Ronald Reagan legislative victory after legislative victory. It's too late now to wonder whether the Democrats will behave aggressively in the face of six years of Congressional muggings, and it's been too late to wonder that for so long that it's not even an issue. The Democrats will be the Democrats. That's it. It has to be enough at this point that the thugs who ran the place for the last decade won't be running it come January, or that the Senate might at least start to become a deliberative body again.

Ask the football Eagles of Philadelphia, PA. Ridding yourself of a troublemaker only after he is universally condemned is not the same thing as winning championships. The problem has gone on too long and has become too deeply rooted. Democrats did not fight back against Reagan, and they lost an entire generation. Our public debate has become fatuous, our public men first intellectually dishonest then every other kind of dishonest. Our courts are politicized and our ballot boxes are untrustworthy. The simple understanding of checks and balances most of us mastered by the fifth grade has been turned inside out. We won the Cold War so we could set up our own gulags.

Candy Crowley is still doing election commentary on CNN. I'd like to know how Nancy Pelosi plans to fix that.

Who Asked For It?

R. Porrofatto:

doghouse, I suggest, for your own well-being, that you stay away from the Orson Scott Card piece that's fouling the air presently. It's a kitchen sink of crapola—he even throws in the "Congress lost the Vietnam war" turd. It would be like bungee-jumping without the big rubber band.

Well, I already had, via Roy, where, basking in his hospitality we spoke of Card's spirited efforts at protecting the War on Terra™ brand name, and had a great time as a couple of readers of Card's other fictional output noted the distinction between his sci-fi platitudes and his terrestrial Kill Everybody Who's Not Like Me ethos. This is the wonderful thing about the Internets. Other people read science fiction, so I don't have to.

But let's begin right where much of our current mess began, namely You Know Where:

You know: If America withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and exposed everyone who had cooperated with us to reprisals.

As happened in South Vietnam. The negotiated peace was more or less holding after American withdrawal. But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government. No more armaments. No more budget.

In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies, while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers.

Misstatements about Vietnam and American involvement there ought always to be corrected when they're used as political darts, and, as always, we remind readers of our simple, if somewhat biased rule: if you served, or were exempt from service, during the war you are entitled to give free rein to your opinions provided you respect others who served. If, like Orson Scott Card, you did not avail yourself at the time of your opportunity to personally join in a cause you now believe was righteous you may proceed without reference to that fact only so long as you display a reasonable understanding of the history. "Reasonable" does not include any reference to the Congress, the Liberal New York Times, or your fellow citizens letting you down by being insufficiently willing to spend other people's blood. And what you, dear reader, are probably thinking now is correct. There is an as yet unexplained force in the universe which seems to prevent this from ever occuring.

The negotiated peace...

Rule #1 in poker: if you've got a tell, try to hide it at least beyond the first three words out of your mouth.

No one, or no one outside the era's Nobel Peace Prize committee, actually imagined the Paris accords were anything other than Nixon's minimal conditions for getting his ass out of there, toute suite. We essentially had to waterboard Thieu to get him to agree. Even at a time when people were accustomed to disbelieve anything coming from Authority those "peace accords" were the Comedy Hit of the Year.

was more or less holding after American withdrawal.

At this point the people of "North" Vietnam--we're basically the only nation on the globe which recognized two Vietnams--had been at war for thirty five years. They could not be absolutely certain the Americans had actually left. And the accords called for democratic elections in the South and eventual reunification. Thieu's dedication to that agreement was, shall we say, called into question. That is to say the accords were never going to hold for longer than it took the North to figure: a) it was rested and refit; b) the US was not going to return; and c) there wasn't going to be a reunification otherwise.

But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government.

That Congress--both Democratic and democratic, since the public that elected it was long since sick of a war it had been told for ten years was six months from victory--cut aid to South Vietnam by about 30%, from $1 billion to 700 million, for fiscal 1975.

God only knows--certainly no American taxpayer knows, to this day--how much of our military and economic aid money wound up in somebody's Swiss bank account, but by unanimous agreement the amount is substantial.

No more armaments. No more budget.

In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies,

Not "no more", per above, and South Vietnam already looked like a military warehouse with no lock on the door. We'd armed them beyond their wildest imaginings, and kept it up for a quarter century, if you count our bankrolling the French. Were they ever supposed to fight on their own? We'd been promising that since 1962.

while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers.

Just for the record: the Vietnamese were supplied by one foreign power, the USSR. China permitted the supplies to move through its territory. The Chinese and the Vietnamese were, and are, suspicious of each other.


What, exactly, does Mr. Card want here? A blank check, same as he demands for the War on Terra? No public input, no Congressional oversight; some bozo who manages to get elected President despite the fact that most people don't like or trust him can commit us to such an exercise in perpetuity, whether or not it's efficacious? Pfui.

The message was clear: Those who rely on America are fools. We didn't even have the decency to arrange for the evacuation of the people who had trusted us and risked the most in supporting what they thought was our mutual cause.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean or from whence it comes. We spent $40 million on rescue operations, including (the numbers are a bit sketchy, as might be imagined) something like 40,000 people rescued by plane, 140,000 rescued by naval operations, and 40,000 homeless infants airlifted.

Disaster? Of course, but that disaster didn't begin when "Congress cut off funds." It began when we decided to prop up the French colonialists, including footing 75% of the cost of French military efforts to reestablish their claim over the Indochinese who had bravely fought the Japanese for five years while the French capitulated. Or take it back to the 19th century, to the Europeans who sought to convert all those poor heathens to Roman Catholicism if you'd rather. That's who the so-called South Vietnamese were--the converted petty officials and servants of the French ruling class. That's who made the decisions than ended in 360,000 American casualties. Send a little vitriol their way, why doncha?

Look, the Very Concept of the Borat-Speak Headline Died Before You Were Born

Will You See His Movie-Film? (Washington Post)

'Borat' Makes Big One at Box Office (LA Times)

'Borat' Make Glorious Entrance at Box Office (CNN)

Is Very Nice! (Winnipeg Sun)

Borat make sexy-time dress-up in L.A.! (New York Times Magazine)

Lessee, Civil War? Loss. Vietnam? Loss. Iraq? Maybe We Should Let the Elitists Call the Next One.

David Brooks, "The Fighting Democrat" NYT, November 5

And thanks, I think, to Philips for sponsoring a week of free TimesSelect.

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the majority party, but then came the 1960s and many middle-class whites like Jim Webb drifted away. Webb served heroically in Vietnam and came back disgusted with the liberal elites who reviled the military and, as he wrote in 1997, “were trying to destroy the foundations of American society.”

Once upon a time some right-wing pundits could be counted upon to write interesting columns which challenged the reader whatever his political persuasion. This was, of course, some time before David Brooks filled as much of that description as he's capable of.

Can I ask again, without boring however few of you are left, just what the freakin' deal with the Sixties is with these guys? For David Brooks, born August 11, 1961, it can only be remembered, if at all, as a decade of clarinet lessons, orthodontist visits, and an introduction to the Multiplication tables, yet he can't help but write about it as if it robbed him of a) Ozzie, b) Harriet, or c) both. If he must write about it as an adult it would be nice if he'd bother to learn something, like how Once Upon A Time the half-dozen or so Negroes who were allowed to vote in the South, just a little, were all Republicans, and how they didn't drift away but were hurled bodily by the Goldwaterites.

Webb, on the other hand, may think what he likes about a decade he lived through, but I'm going to climb out on a limb and guess that Jim Webb, US Naval Academy '68, son of a career Air Force officer, admirer of Massa Robert, opponent of them Civil Rights carpetbaggers, was not exactly your average trade unionist forced to turn Nixon Republican because you couldn't tell the boys from the girls in those days.

He began to see an America riven by a social divide. On the one side were people like himself: tough, independent, hard-working traditionalists who know how to shoot, fight and endure; and on the other side were what he has at various times called the “drug-drenched,” “sex-enshrined” narcissists, who cower in their parochial elite enclaves and pass judgment on everybody else.

See Voltaire's prayer.

Webb named his son after Robert E. Lee, and wrote a book, “Born Fighting,” which is a full-throated defense of “Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.”

No, really, a full-throated defense of racism is apparently an admirable thing, provided it's at the service of some Manichaean fantasy about poor oppressed White Southern Protestant Sons of Robert the Bruce.

As Andrew Ferguson noted recently in The Weekly Standard, he took white Protestants — who have always been the villains in movies from “M*A*S*H” to “Remember the Titans” — and he described them as an oppressed minority group. And their oppressors were the highly educated liberal snobs from New York, Washington, San Francisco and L.A.

Always, since M*A*S*H. Yeesh, what a sentence. And it really is a shame Brooks is so unfamiliar with the more esoteric film fare of that era, like Clint Eastwood's overlooked Dirty Harry flicks, or the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and that guy who used to be governor of California, or the little-known James Bond franchise. I guess he missed The Siege and Rules of Engagement. For that matter, I understand the villains of The Passion of the Christ were other than white Protestant males.

“For the last 50 years,” he wrote in “Born Fighting,” “the Left has been doing everything in its power...

Which is considerable.

"to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions...”

Christ Almighty, this is the sort of thing that gets praised as "a straight-shooter speaking his mind" in the likes of the Weekly Standard. I wonder at what point it will occur to these people that the reason everything they touch turns to shit, the reason they get pushed around by elitist collectivist narcissist terrorist apologists, to the extent that they do, is that being wrong at the top of your lungs will only take you so far.

Jewish culture produces a lot of lawyers, Webb has argued, but Scots-Irish culture produces fighters,...

And drunks, and pederastic priests. I love this game. The Chinese are inscrutable. Negroes are very good at basketball. Mexican food is spicy. This shit was in the New York Times.

and he has spent his life defending the interests and values of these manly, individualistic, brawling populists.

And I say it again. I will gladly stake David Brooks to an entire race weekend in the infield at Darlington, provided that he agrees to speak on the glories of Scots-Irish populism at the next NAACP convention.

He’s criticized affirmative action and women in combat.

Oh, do tell. (He's called affirmative action "state-sponsored racism", by the way, and apparently with a straight face. )

He at one time opposed the Vietnam memorial, which seemed to rebuke the warrior virtues.

Yup. We don't hear about that little sample of the manly, individualist, populist code triumphing over snobby Eastern elitist tastes these days, do we? Seem a photo of Vietnam vets reaching out to touch that godawful Soviet-realist sculpture people like Webb forced the government to erect as a tribute to their tooth-deprived hillbilly aesthetic?

“Watching the white phallus that is the Washington Monument piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted,” he said. But the “degrading ditch” of the Vietnam memorial seemed to do no such thing.

Okay, I admit it. I went through this whole thing just so I could use that quote.

And we may be about to learn if the party of Nancy Pelosi can make room for the Jim Webbs of the world. We’ve already learned that the party of George Bush and Tom DeLay did a terrible job making room for its own mavericks and moderates.

Yeah, and it's a shame your column had gone on so long there wasn't room to name any, David.

Jim Webb is a Republican running as an Opportunist. They only interest any Democrat could have in him would be in using him to take over committee chairmanships, excepting maybe the schadenfreude of watching "Presidential hopeful" George Allen, Jr. suck the gas pipe. But then there's plenty of schadenfreude available these days, Dave. You can barely scrape the damn stuff off your shoes in some spots.

This election is about the desperate need to turn out the Den of Thieves in the Capitol. "Democrat" is just the only means available to do so. That's still the party of Toothless Acquiescence to the Iraq War, the looting of the Treasury, and the Rape of Civil Rights. One more Webb or Lieberman or Crazy Zell signing on means nothing; those people are, simply, so wrong about things that "reality" will take care of them sooner or later. And patience is a virtue we elitists have had long practice of. You can wake me when the Democrats are finished throwing Bush administration officials in the slam and have moved on to putting Ken Starr and Dickie Scaife in the docket. In other words, don't threaten me with how long I might have to hold my breath, Mr. Brooks. I've already been doing it for decades.

End Times

This cheery recommendation from Amazon:

Meat Loaf is back with Bat Out Of Hell III, the long-awaited third record in the Bat Out of Hell trilogy.

Frum Here to Moronity

Via Roy, David Frum's Hypocrite Gambit in defense of Some Unnamed Hypothetical Christian Fundamentalist Leader who becomes the target of unsubstantiated charges of, oh, let's imagine a monthly crank-fueled Bonerfest with his poolboy. I started to leave a comment over there, but it went on so tediously it had to become a post. First, Frum lets us know that, of course, The Left is having a field day:

On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

Pssst. Dave. Anyone to the left of Amy Sullivan already thought that, assuming they feel like being generous, and anyone to the right, and religious, is supposed to think that, too.

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue - or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

After all, the first man may well see his family and church life as his "real" life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.

Yet it is the first man who will if exposed be held up to the execration of the media, while the second can become a noted public character - and can even hope to get away with presenting himself as an exemplar of ethics and morality.

How does this make moral sense?

Here's a tale for you, David.

I used to be a semi-regular viewer of Bill Buckley's Firing Line, but somewhere in the first Reagan administration I began to feel that either Buckley was losing it, or the strain of defending a supposed purist Conservative administration which was proving to be among the most venal and least competent in US history was becoming too much. The last show I remember watching was a program on or around the '84 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, and Buckley jocularly posed a moral conundrum for the panel: "Could one construct a conceivable moral universe in which the moral force of Mother Teresa was subservient to that of Sister Boom-Boom?"

Older readers may recall that Sister Boom Boom had gained a measure of fame by 1984 for having run for mayor of San Francisco, and that her fifteen minutes were extended by the Democratic Convention by the Bay. A quick Googling of "William Buckley" and "Sister Boom Boom" reveals, unexpectedly, that Bill was still milking the former head of the Nun of the Above ticket for the Roman Catholic snicker quotient at least as late as 1998, or fourteen years after anyone outside of San Fran had given her another thought. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, Buckley's mock question was met with derisive laughter, and I seem to remember uttering three words as I walked over and snapped the teevee off (remotes weren't that big in those days, kids):

"Alan Turing, motherfuckers!"

Because, of course, the answer to this "absurd" moral equivalence is so sophmoric that anyone reduced to laughter at the very thought is either an illiterate or a hopeless bigot. I didn't even have Christopher Hitchens' book on Ol' Agnes in my arsenal in those days. If you couldn't imagine a possible moral universe made better because homosexuals lived a life free of persecution, shame, psychiatric intervention, or tax-free religious denunciation, and if, conversely, you couldn't imagine a possible universe in which promulgation of a false and antiquated belief system was responsible for any number of historical ills, then you weren't paying attention to the real universe you were hypothetically moving through.

So that's the simple answer, David, not that it couldn't have occurred to you if you'd tried, not that it would change that brain-dead commentary of yours if it did. The question needs to be put the other way: what, other than your claims of moral superiority, would possibly make the dishonest man the exemplar in your example? Nothing. Which side can be demonstrated to have done real harm to real individuals? Yours. And isn't courage still a moral virtue, or did that one dive down the rabbit hole right after honesty and integrity?

We don't know what more Alan Turing might have accomplished had he not been driven to suicide by the forces of law and "morality". We don't know if the proverbial cure for cancer might have been lost along with some kid imprisoned, lobotomized, or hounded to an early grave somewhere. We don't know the cost of treating people as pariahs for no good reason, the costs of leaving children in foster care, or worse, rather that letting Those People adopt, just as we'll never know the full costs of slavery and racial discrimination. But we do know that sometime, somewhere, some imbecile former speechwriter will be sure to praise a hypothetical white Southerner for recognizing his mistake while ignoring the people who suffered at his hands.

We know something else. We know the morally superior preacher of Frum's invention wasn't working as a male prostitute to earn enough money to spread the Word of God; he was living in tax-free splendor while hiring man meat on the side. How convenient. How moral. How Republican.

Belt Up

Star photo by Heather Charles

The lead story from yesterday's Indianapolis Star:

Pull 'em up, head of IPS says

Task force being formed to propose rules on appropriate dress
By Andy Gammill andy.gammill@indystar.com
November 2, 2006

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White is calling for strict new rules he hopes will force girls to cover their midriffs and boys to pull up their sagging pants. White has marching orders waiting for a new dress code task force: Spruce up students' appearance. "It's going to be a new look in IPS in 2007," White said. "I think the parents on that task force know what they want to see." His main targets are students who wear inappropriate clothes, such as the pants worn by teen boys that seem to sag lower every year, he said.

Answers to your immediate questions:

• Yes, there is an election coming up in Indiana next Tuesday. Yes, many of us are aware there's a war going on, though increasingly that information is available only to those with an internet connection, a degree of curiosity about the world, and a long-term memory.

• No, our local youth did not suddenly catch up with fifteen-year-old fashion trends; they've been dressing like that just as long as children from Chillicothe to Caspar have.

• Yes, I'm as dumbfounded by the story, the timing, and its placement as you are.

Okay, as a 50-year-old white male, part of the Star's obviously preferred demographic, I guess this is supposed to make me feel a) solidarity with people who are threatened by Negro fashion choices and b) relief that the fine African-American gentleman who runs those inner-city schools is doing something about it.

Sorry, no sale. Take another look at that picture. That was the best they could do. Remember, Roman youths started wearing their togas like that just before the Fall.

[About that demographic thing: about three years ago the Star began adding Regional (read: white suburban) sections to its daily output. The composition was roughly 80% school/high school athletics/feel-good educational stories, 20% town board sewer construction debate tablings. The Star is now gearing up for separate Carmel and Fishers (read: extremely white Upper-Middle to Upper Class Suburban Republican Hellholes to my immediate north) editions. The inner city gets squat. It's the same with teevee sports coverage (less so with educational coverage, since that is mostly reserved for news, like weapons found or students molested or 16-year-old motorists who use roadside trees instead of brake pedals). Starting several years ago the major Indianapolis media suddenly decided that their mission to inform included all but dropping coverage of traditional high school sports competition taking place in the actual city where they published/were licensed in favor of taking helicopter jaunts to wherever white girls were playing seasonally-adjusted softball. It is now virtually impossible to find sports results for Indianapolis city schools unless one happens to be state-ranked or advances in a tournament. This despite the fact that, as Jonah and others have assured us, poor people all own big-screen teevees, so they can watch the news, and most have indoor plumbing with flush toilets, so they also have use for the Star.]

In the interest of unbiased reportage the Star also dedicated four whole column inches to a sidebar noting that "other schools in the area" also report some of the same clothing issues (paging Claude Rains!), but noted in the story that "outlying areas" report that clothing issues are under control. Just like news coverage of locker room sexual assault. That sort of thing goes on the inside of the second section, and when the sheriff says action will be taken in a couple days, we take him at his word and move our attention elsewhere.

And here's another interesting fact I would have learned from a longer sidebar, except I'm married to an IPS teacher so I knew it already: all of these troublesome clothing choices are already in violation of the dress code enacted in 1999. The superintendent didn't need to call a press conference, and he doesn't need to appoint a Task Force (to include "faith-based representatives"--I'm thinking of applying for the Satanist slot) to "solve" the "problem"; all he needs to do is to tell principals to enforce the existing code if they aren't already. Of course, then you don't get your name in the paper, and the white suburban demo which pays nothing in local taxes toward the operation of your district but does control access to how you get portrayed in the media, imagines you're Doing Something and doesn't ask Why It Took 18 Months. And with media assistance they'll never have to wonder why you redrew school boundaries this year in such a way that gang and neighborhood rivalries exploded in several schools and are still being brought under control, because they've never heard about it. Next year, we hope, those fights at least will look much neater.

Finally, I'm through asking for a link to the studies which show running high schools like prisons improves the education process. I'll settle now for any evidence they're even good prisons.

Lessons

Our story begins last Friday, with my Poor Wife and I watching the local news. The CBS affiliate starts off its broadcasts with a teaser of Tonight's Top Stories. It's a sentimental favorite of mine, for a number of reasons. It's the Top Eight Stories because it's Channel 8, an idea so remarkably free of cortical event (Channel 6 has weather at :06, :16, :26, etc., of the hour) you have to wonder if they're trying to attract the "pets who can operate the remote" demographic; it began a year or two back when 8, once the venerable news leader in the market but now fallen behind the even more idiotic NBC affiliate, went into full panic mode and paid some consultant several large for something called the "Working News Hour" concept, in which news hairdos walk around the studio and newsroom while trying to read and avoid furniture; because that idea lasted about eight months before they mostly sat back down again; and, particularly, because it's a quick way to see just how screwed up what used to be called "news judgment" really is these days, in convenient ordinal form.

(In fairness, this is the only local channel with a daily segment reporting on Iraq.)

So, we're sitting there at the end of our 1551st week of marriage, sort of, and one of the Top Stories concerns "a 16-year-old student who was robbed at gunpoint" outside my wife's school. I give her a look, and she gives it back. She knows nothing about it.

Now we're both on alert, my wife because she naturally wants to know the story, and me because I'm unusually sensitive to what I consider to be the racist local media portrayal of our city school system over the past thirty years. We don't have to wait long; it was the first or second story.

The toss is something about how a local mother is demanding Indianapolis Public Schools do more to protect students after her son was robbed at gunpoint, and not for the first time. My antenna began to twitch. Then it's over to the field reporter, the field in this instance being the outside of the school, where we learn...well, we actually learn very little besides the fact that Channel 8 has decided to see how much sensationalism they can milk from the story, plus the added minor detail that the robbery occurred "outside the school" only if by that you mean "somewhere else in the state". In fact, he was robbed--let's add "allegedly" to that--at his vehicle parked on a side street. Bzzzzzt! Our lead now amounts to a mother's demand that the school patrol the streets? With what, exactly? Perhaps this is a job for, I dunno, the police? Let's hear what they have to say. I'm sure a savvy reporter would have sussed out this basic tenet of our civic life. Bzzzzzt! Nothing from the police. I feel the start of a tic coming on. We close the remote with "officials at the school were unavailable for comment," with the hint of sneer that always accompanies that statement, despite the mitigating circumstance that it's 5:00 on a Friday. If you imagine that school administrators are still sitting in their offices at that point, waiting for phone calls from reporters, you...well, you're mistaken, that's what.

The exact viewing sequence gets a little fuzzy here, because my wife had the remote and her natural inclination to change the channel every fifteen seconds was magnified by her devout belief that she 1) can suck up every last detail of a story from all three channels if she switches fast enough; and 2) that the coverage on some channel other than the one she's watching will be any different than what she's already seen. I do recall watching another remote, this one from a different side of the building.

At some point, though, we get the story from the young man himself, speaking at his home with his mother in the background. He says he had a bad cold (remarkably free of symptoms, now; probably the excitement) and went to the nurse around noon and got a release from school. He left by a side door, and when he got to his car he was jumped, relieved of his money, jewelry, and car, and left in fear of his life. His mother adds that he was robbed twice at his previous school before being given a transfer for safety's sake. By now we have been informed that the young man is "a nationally-known rap artist", and there's some suggestion that jealousy is the motive.

Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt!

The kid is carjacked, and so far we've seen the outside of his school and the inside of his house. No police? No discussion of the potential threat to the rest of the motoring public? Just a kid claiming he was robbed because he's a nationally-known rap artist? When was the last time they checked the batteries in the bullshit detector over there?

My wife sees the Saturday morning news on 8 (and no doubt every other channel), and reports that the robbery now took place in the school parking lot, and there's no mention of the car being stolen. So in one rather swift action we have 1) placed the criminal activity on school grounds; and 2) removed the carjacking and the responsibility to report a major felony to the authorities. Hmmm.

Only problem is, this is almost certainly bullshit, as there is a severe shortage of parking spaces, such that only seniors get a lottery chance at one. There's no special Nationally Known Rap Act section. The area is patrolled.

Naturally this was the end of the story arc as far as the locals were concerned (it never did turn up in the newspaper). And somehow my wife missed the phone call relay that was supposed to inform her of the special teachers' meeting they called about it, so she missed that, too. She did learn that the school found out about the incident because an assistant principal was returning to the building and saw four young men dash out a side door at a high rate of speed and run off up the street. He gave chase and caught them hiding in a vehicle, presumably the one which was later stolen on the news. It was our respiratory-challenged young rapper and the posse he'd rounded up after the stick-up. Maybe that's what cured his cold. Maybe that's why the school ducked comment.

She gets this story later. In the meantime she's grilling her Seniors about it. (It's art, remember; her students aren't garden-variety high school wiseasses, they're self-aware cynics.) You've got to watch the video, they tell her. Finally she relents and lets them use her computer (the unblocked one) to call up the clip.

"Look! Momma sure had time to get her hair done first!" says one. I love my wife's students.

Someone points out the mysterious white man sitting in the living room the whole time. Lawyer? PR man for nationally-known rappers? Who is this guy? How'd this story wind up on that evening's news with no police involvement?

Lesson two, straight ahead:

"What's the deal with that?" my wife asks them. If you were robbed, would you call your mother? Wouldn't you call the police?"

The look of wonderment on her face as she told me the story was more of the "why didn't I see this coming?" type than shock at the response:

"Every last black kid in that class said No," she tells me.

Shut The Fuck Up

Lock and load. And I do mean load.

Okay, so my first inclination was to write "John Kerry is an asshole" a half dozen times and be done with it. How does someone turn a one-liner into a paragraph? Why is Kerry even attempting jokes? Why hasn't he fired his staff? Better yet, why haven't they fired him?

Then I took a brief nap before dinner, and came back downstairs to find my wife had the "News" with Brian "Get the Hell Out of My Garbage Cans" Williams on, and I decided to write "John Kerry is an asshole, but why is this NBC's lead story?" eight or ten times and be done with it.

But I knew that wouldn't do, so after dinner and the Trick or Treaters were done I sat down to take a look at the Corner. And after all of about twenty seconds I made up my mind to write, "John Kerry's an asshole, this shouldn't be NBC's lead story, but what is the friggin' attraction of making a huge deal of your obviously ginned up outrage over your own willful misunderstanding of something somebody you don't like said? It's like they make no distinction over there between speaking to people and disciplining pets. But then I might have had to quote K-Lo, and I'm trying to quit.

I had pretty much decided that instead I was going to ask how it is that Laura Bush can say something she actually means (or, perhaps more accurately, that they've decided she means) which is in fact genuinely insulting and not be the lead story on NBC "News" with Rocky Raccoon, but something possessed me to check in with the Powerline Boys. And, of course, Hineyrocket never fails to disappoint:

It seems clear that the roots of Kerry's blunder--like so much else where Kerry is concerned--go back to Vietnam. It was an article of faith among liberals (and many others) at that time that the Army consisted largely of the poor--kids who couldn't get into college and thereby obtain a deferment. It was also an article of faith that non-white Americans died in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam. That turned out not to be true, and I confess that I was astonished to learn, only within recent years, that there was no such ethnic disproportion in the Vietnam dead.

Which idea gets the official Powerline Military Advisor Seal of Approval from Generalissimo Dafydd ab Hugh, the Audie Murphy of the PlayStation 2.

So, then, okay. I should have known. Let's try this again:

1. The closest either of you fucks ever got to military service was watching shit blow up at the local Googleplex. It doesn't require you to keep your opinions to yourselves. But coupled with your military jock sniffing it should at least require you to stop and think one minute before you slam those who actually served. (The Generalissimo throws in Jimmy Carter, John Murtha, and Max Cleland for good measure, and it probably just didn't occur to him to suggest that John Glenn's spaceflights were faked.)

2. You don't know shit about Vietnam, and my suspicion is you care even less, except when it's time to trot out any of several volumes of Right Wing Vietnam myths. And this is one of them. From HistoryNet.com:

CASUALTIES BY RACE: ENLISTED MEN

Of all enlisted men who died in Vietnam, blacks made up 14.1 percent of the total. This came at a time when blacks made up 11 percent of the male population nationwide. However, if officer casualties are added to the total, then this overrepresentation is reduced to 12.5 percent of all casualties. Of the 7,262 blacks who died, 6,955, or 96 percent, were Army and Marine enlisted men. The combination of the selective service policies with the skills and aptitude testing of both volunteers and draftees (in which blacks scored noticeably lower) conspired to assign blacks in greater numbers to the combat units of the Army and Marine Corps. Early in the war (1965 and 1966) when blacks made up about 11 percent of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to more than 20 percent of the total. Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., protested, and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back. As a result, the black casualty rate was reduced to 11.5 percent by 1969.

CASUALTIES BY RACE: OFFICERS

During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force became substantially white enclaves - enlisted and officer casualties were 96 percent white. Indeed, officer casualties of all branches were overwhelmingly white. Of the 7,877 officer casualties, 7,595, or 96.4 percent, were white; 147, or 1.8 percent, were black; 24, or 0.3 percent, were Asian; 7, or .08 percent, were Native American; 104, or 1.3 percent, were unidentified by race.

We get all that, did we? It wasn't "an article of faith" that African-Americans died in disproportionate numbers. It was a fact. A fact that shamed President Johnson so much that he took action. Blacks still died in higher proportion to their percentage in the population, even when we add in the officer corps to which they were basically excluded. It was a war which made extensive use of helicopters and of bombs and defoliants dropped from planes. And the ARNV had the ability to shoot them down. And the pilots who died were white, because all officers were white. For the terms of the argument it gives an entirely false picture to dilute the number of African-American causalities that way, but even so, blacks died in greater proportion than their percentage of the population.

And which, one is tempted to say, demonstrates again the real commitment to Our Troops among the White Cavaliers of the 101st Keyboarders™.

And again, if you knew anything about it you'd know this. College deferments were ended in 1968, because of the unfairness of the system. That's why George W. Bush ended up at the front of the TANG line, and why Danny Quayle pushed a typewriter in the Indiana Guard. Because they couldn't just keep taking classes.

Really, boys. You got a mulligan. You didn't deserve one, but you got it. You got an opportunity to watch someone else do your fighting again with the same lousy result. It's way past time you stop lecturing people who know more than you do. And it's time to admit to yourselves that making shit up is just increasing the amount of shit you find yourselves in.

OH YEAH, I FORGOT: If Mr. Hineyrocker had dropped by Memorial Hall at Harvard he might have noticed that of the 407,000 US military deaths in WWII, 697 were Harvard students. Of the 58,000 dead in Vietnam? Twenty-two.