We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Bush and Cheney struck back against the New York Times’ public espionage. The Times’ executive editor Bill Keller issued this letter in an effort to defend the decision to sell a few extra newspapers by endangering American lives. Hugh Hewitt demolishes it here. The conservative blogosphere piles on: Instapundit, Powerline, and Austin Bay weigh in. Michelle Malkin prints a response from Treasury Secretary John Snow.

Press Secretary Tony Snow spells out the White House view here at a press conference: Publicizing government secrets kills Americans. It’s very simple. Everyone can understand it. The MSM has seriously injured itself with this story. Let’s hope that it stays in the news cycle for a long, long time.

And does anybody still believe that the Democrats will recapture Congress next November?

This kind of story just makes me sick:

The Bush administration and The New York Times are again at odds over national security, this time with new reports of a broad government effort to track global financial transfers.

The newspaper, which in December broke news of an effort by the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ telephone calls and e- mails, declined a White House request not to publish a story about the government’s inspection of monies flowing in and out of the country.

The Los Angeles Times also reported on the issue Thursday night on its Web site, against the Bush administration’s wishes. The Wall Street Journal said it received no request to hold its report of the surveillance.

Administration officials were concerned that news reports of the program would diminish its effectiveness and could harm overall national security.

“It’s a tough call; it was not a decision made lightly,” said Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief. “The key issue here is whether the government has shown that there are adequate safeguards in these programs to give American citizens confidence that information that should remain private is being protected.”

Who the heck do these newspapers think they are? It’s not the job of some newspaper editor to second-guess governmental decisions about national security. That isn’t their area of expertise, and it shouldn’t be their decision to make.

There are certainly grey areas here, where it isn’t clear whether a story is actively harmful to national security, or merely embarrassing. But this one isn’t a close call. This is at least the second time that our domestic press has explained to the enemy exactly how our government is collecting information to prevent the terrorists from killing us. They might as well print a how-to guide telling the terrorists the best ways to evade government detection and successfully execute an attack, like Mexico does with its emigrants.

There’s a grey area between printing an appropriate news story on national security and incidentally harming national security. There’s also a grey area between incidentally harming national security to sell newspapers—and treason. I think that the New York Times et al are deep in that second grey area.

Update: Andrew McCarthy at NRO gives more details and sums the story up nicely:

The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

Sorry for the inactivity here, but I’ve been sick and my life has become very busy-strange. And it doesn’t show any signs of stopping any time soon. I’m barely even keeping up with politics these days, so occupied is my time now with challenges that are time-consuming, energy-consuming, and more compelling than my usual grind.

But this is too good not to share: Bill Whittle of ejectejecteject.com has been off the blogosphere radar since January, and I’ve missed him. He writes in enormous frenetic bursts of deep thought that come at irregular intervals, and his latest post Rafts is no exception:

. . . Civilization is not a natural state. It is highly artificial and daily runs into our proclivities for murder, greed, pride and mayhem. And because of that artifice, it is a structure that not only must be built, but one which must be maintained, only once, and that is constantly. Victor Davis Hanson — whom I deeply admire — described this as rust build-up on an iron structure, rust that must be regularly removed if the structure is to remain standing. That seems exactly right to me. And so here is my poor attempt at providing us with something no more or less important than a small wire brush.

The maintenance of that Civilization requires many prerequisite tools, and in the following pages I hope we can examine some of them. But the elbow grease, the one indispensable element, is that belief: belief that this work is worth doing. It is the belief that we can drain the open sewers of our most base impulses, and in their place build lives of decency and civility. It is, in the long run, the belief that we can make Tinkerbell fly.

Now there are people who do not much admire this iron bridge we have built, this bridge from the terror and anarchy of the jungle to the distant shores of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There was a time when these forces were strong enough to tear down that bridge. That time may again come. But for now, they lack the power to pull down this Civilization. But they do have the power to get us to forgo the wire brush.

He admires Mark Steyn as much as I do, and rightly so:

It doesn’t seem to take much arguing to conclude that Western Civilization, if not on the path to utter destruction, is at the very least somewhat frayed around the edges. One gets that sense of desperation most clearly from my good friend Mark Steyn (whom I have never met nor spoken to and who doesn’t know me from Adam) and his reports from an aging and impotent Continent whose civilization has ruled the world for no less than half a millennium and who now stands hunched and toothless, without even the courage to shake a fist at the backs of their new overlords… who, indeed, seem only able to mutter their gratitude that they will not live long enough to witness the final collapse.

I love the ease with which he flows from big ideas to visceral profanity:

The forces of ignorance and barbarism – bearers of ruin and despair wherever they make camp – are growing in confidence. But beside their will to destroy and die they have nothing. These Death Cult barbarians think this is all they will need – that, and an initial alliance with the forces they most despise. I still hold out hope that they will crack open a second book – a history book, say – that might at the eleventh hour give them some insight into the avocado nature of the Civilization they seem determined now to assault: soft and pulpy on the outside, impenetrably tough and hard within. They are going to do more than chip a tooth on us, these raving, bloodthirsty lunatics: they are about to make, I think, the same mistake that others have made before them – to see the Cindy Sheehans and Michael Moores as representative of a corrupt and dying culture, rather than what they really are: somewhat entertaining animal acts we Westerners use to pass the time while waiting for the next opportunity to pull the gloves off, and kick some new inhuman, barbaric horde onto the ash heap of history, where reside Aristocracy, Slavery, Fascism and Communism, holding in common only the mark of our boots on their asses.

This section was particularly relevant to my life right now:

People of good will on both sides value peace and freedom, yet we have diverging choices to make, and we have to make them now. We have to chart our course, a course for our country, and ultimately, a course for the entire world.

We need a map. Several are for sale. How do we choose?

Actually, it’s not so difficult. We can choose the map that best conforms to the coastline we see unveiling before us. We choose the map that best matches reality – the objective, external, indisputable reality of bays and promontories, capes and gulfs and rivers and shoals.

We can, indeed, lay out competing philosophies on the table, and see where each conforms to reality and where it does not. No maps are without distortions; none of these are likely to be, either. And one map may conform perfectly to the coastline in one area, and be dreadfully amiss in another. We can cut and paste them as we wish. This is too important for us to be arguing about who is right – all our energies must go to getting it right.

And before we start, we must agree to one thing: we will never be so full of arrogance and blinded by pride that we dare confront a place where our map does not match the coastline, and proclaim that the coastline must be wrong.

This chartroom metaphor is priceless:

I have a mental map of the world. So do you. So did Lenin, and al-Zarqawi, and Winston Churchill, and Attila, and Ronald Reagan. Everyone has an internal map of how the world works.

The problem is that we get rather fond of these maps. Some people get so fond of these maps that they do nothing but sit around in the dark depths of the chart room and compare maps. If they see something on another map that seems to agree, more or less, with what they have sketched out on their own, they feel vindicated. This is human nature. I do it, and you do it too.

People will sit in the chartroom, and argue about their maps, while the ship of history rips out her keel. But as the arguments rage hither and yon down in the chartroom, as maps and cartographers are bandied back and forth like trading cards and people come to blows over mapmakers dead a century or a millennium before, there does remain one small, unassuming little token of hope. Not much really — just an action so simple and obvious that we overlook it time and time again. What can we do to end this arguing about which way to sail and on what map? How can we tell where the reefs and channels really are? Dear God, is there nothing we can do to get an answer among all these authorities?

Well, there is something we can do. We can get up from the chartroom of theory, this dungeon of pointless debate and argumentation, and go and stand on the bridge. We can look at the world as it really is, and draw new maps as we go on.

In Bill Whittle’s lexicon, the word ‘intellectual’ is an epithet:

These people, down below, arguing endlessly in the chartroom -– they have a word for themselves that they find flattering. They call themselves intellectuals. A friend of mine referred to me as an intellectual the other day, and I nearly knocked him off the bar stool. What a repellent thing to say to a man who tries on a daily basis to pre-flight his facts to make sure his theories – his maps – are as accurate as it can be. Things change. Things that were once true sometimes no longer are. The map has to change or you are in deep yogurt. It is that process, not my map, that I am trying to teach to the best of my ability.

It’s sad but true: there are people who are deathly afraid to go up on deck, face the sunshine, and realize that the maps they have so lovingly and painstakingly crafted over decades are essentially worthless scraps of paper. They are so wrong, in so many places, that they are far worse than no maps at all. They draw all manner of hazards where there are none, and disastrously, they show open seas and smooth sailing in the most treacherous and deadly places. Such maps are not merely worthless; they are dangerous.

There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.

Then the source of the title:

Socialist intellectuals will tell you that Cuba is a model nation: universal free health care, near total literacy, and essentially no gap whatsoever between the rich and the poor. They call it an island paradise where brotherhood and compassion reign in stark contrast to the brutal inequalities of the heartless and racist capitalist monster to the North, ruled by its Imperial Nazi King, who is the devious mastermind of all manner of Conspiratorial Wheels and is also a moron.

Capitalist intellectuals -– and there are not many, since most of these people have jobs -– argue that Cuba is a squalid, corrupt, poverty-ridden basket case, a land of oppression and secret police and torture chambers run by a megalomaniac who practices the most idiotic, inhuman and degrading economic system ever invented.

So here we sit in the chartroom, with our competing maps. What to think?

Well, ask yourself what it would take to give up your home, your country, your family and all your friends. Ask yourself how desperate you would have to be to sneak out in the night, and strap your family – your grandmother and infant son – to a collection of inner tubes lashed together and set out in the dark surf across 90 miles of shark-infested water in the dead of night, hoping against hope to make landfall. We can all agree, I think, that that kind of desperation could only be driven by a fairly passionate first-person opinion of such things. Surely this goes beyond what you or I would do to win a map argument at Starbucks.

So. Go up on deck, get out the telescope, and answer one simple question for me and for yourself:

Which way are the rafts headed?

Really, please, read the whole thing if you can spare the time. And if you enjoy it, then I recommend his meditation on the War on Terror, titled Tribes.

I thought the video of Zarqawi going boom was endlessly entertaining, but this is even better: It’s in the Koran.  It’s the jihadi worldview set to a fun and bouncy melody.  Click one of the Windows Media or Quicktime versions, so that you can read the words.

A radio ad today described something as having “infinite dynamics”. So on the one-in-a-million chance that the ad’s copy writer reads this blog, let’s review some parts of speech:

‘Infinite‘ is an adjective literally meaning “without limit”. As an adjective, it can only describe a noun. Something described as infinite should have some unlimited quality, such as duration, size, scope, number, etc. The noun in context should immediately suggest the sense in which it is infinite.

Few things outside of math and science are truly infinite. Outside of those fields you can use this adjective as a mild hyperbole: You can claim to have infinite patience or infinite regard for someone.

Some people use this word to describe something that doesn’t go forever, but the limits of which are indeterminate. And example would be the non-ironic use of “infinite joy”. While that use is consistent with the etymology, other words will almost always work better there. More on that later.

‘Infinity‘ is very common in math and science, but outside of those areas it’s even rarer in its proper use than ‘infinite’. It’s a noun. It describes the concept or state of boundlessness, which is an awfully abstract idea for ordinary discourse. It also appears in the mildly fanciful phrase “An infinity of . . .” to denote an infinite quantity or number of something.

‘Infinitely‘ is this set’s unwanted stepchild. It’s usually the word that people want in a non-technical setting, but they avoid. My theory is that they learn this word in math and science classes, and there they almost never this form.

The joy of ‘infinitely’ is that it’s an adverb, which means that it’s the only word among these three that can properly describe an adjective. And in ordinary use, an adjective is usually what you want to describe as extending forever or being limitless, e.g., infinitely tall, infinitely long, infinitely powerful, and what should be the most common: infinitely many.

Even when you could use one of the other forms, you’re usually better off with ‘infinitely’, because it’s more precise. If you describe a noun as infinite, then you must ensure that your reader will understand which aspect of that noun you’re talking about. If the radio ad tells you that something has “infinite dynamics”, you’re left wondering which property of the dynamics is the infinite one. Are the dynamics infinite in strength? Infinite in duration? Infinite in complexity? From the ad’s context, I suspect that it meant that the dynamics were infinite in number. But I’m still not sure. Maybe they just thought that ‘infinite’ sounded cool.

So be careful with these words; they’re easy to misuse. They also usually carry an antiseptic feel, in part because of the mathematical connotations, and in part because they don’t correspond to any definite images or sounds. We have many similar words that are much more vivid, such as: boundless, unlimited, bottomless, incalculable, immeasurable, inexhaustible, unfathomable, and innumerable. Those words usually come closer to what you’re really trying to say, which is that the number or extent of what you’re describing is so big that it can’t conveniently be measured or counted. There are many grains of sand on the beach, and no one is likely to bother counting them—but there aren’t really infinitely many of them.

Terrorist leader Zarqawi is now dead. This is the man who personally beheaded Nick Berg, and the terrorist who doesn’t know much about firearms. We’ve got pictures of the corpse. You can watch the movie right here. (It’s cool.)
The American Left is unhappy about this, of course. Ace of Spades notes that CNN chooses a headlines that implies sympathy for the dead, and that Kos is busy looking for something downbeat to say about an American victory. Dr. Sanity delivers a potpourri of leftist bloggers desperate to find a negative angle to the story.

In war, some days you win and some days you lose. Today we won. Let’s celebrate and remember, so that tomorrow’s setbacks won’t make too many of our friends wet their pants and call for surrender.

NRO contributor Carrie Lukas has a piece today on her five-year reunion with her class at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University:

In addition to the usual cash-bar receptions and class dinner, the school offered panel discussions with names like “The UN’s Footsoldiers,” “Mobilizing Adaptive Work,” and “What We Can Learn From Non-Profits.”

Now that’s the self-important, government-celebrating, liberal elitism that I remember! These titles brought back memories of countless lectures celebrating the nobility of “public service.” The message was always the same: While businesspeople are fueled by an ugly desire for dollars, government officials are servants of the people. Self-sacrificing and motivated by the public good, those toiling in agencies and public offices deserve a special kind of reverence.

Ms. Lukas is no mere conservative undergraduate seething at the stifling liberal orthodoxy of academia. She’s five years out into the real world and has had time for her youthful rage to cool and congeal into a more durable contempt. Her former school’s continuing liberal antics at the reunion don’t make angry; she sees it all as foolish and pitiful.

I’ve long wondered how academia imagines that it will survive in its current form. All universities rely to some extent on private donations, and they rely even more on their public images as prestigious institutions of higher learning. So alumni loyalty and public image are assets to a university, just as much as its endowment. All three produce income, if managed correctly. Yet today’s universities seem bent on destroying their intangible assets. They seem determined to alienate and offend about half of their students (that is, their future alumni) in their ham-fisted imposition of liberal orthodoxy. And incidents like Ward Churchill’s non-punishment or Larry Summers’ resignation, impose a similar cost on the intangible asset of public prestige.

Political correctness is far more expensive than most universities seem to understand. The cost is high, but the bill hasn’t come due yet. In twenty years, alumni such as myself and Ms. Lukas will be in middle age and near our peak earning capacity. Twenty years beyond that we’ll be the wealthy seniors with more money than we can ever spend, with wills to write. Our phones will ring with eager undergraduates working the fund-raising phone banks in an on-campus job, asking us to contribute our alma mater.

How many of us will write those checks? How many will think back to the halcyon days of political speech codes, kangaroo date-rape courts, and raw liberal hatred from the podium—and feel an eager desire to donate?

And how many of us will be serving in legislatures? How many of us will have megaphones with which to ask pointed questions about public funding of higher education? David Horowitz is already laying the foundation for legislativel pressure with his Academic Bill of Rights, and many politicians already understand that defending kook-run universities is not a politically safe position.
I don’t understand how anyone could fail to see the problem. Universities cannot indefinitely afford to be perceived and remembered as intellectual gulags. And the problem carries momentum, like a demographic crisis: By the time the damage is easy to see, then the trend will be nearly impossible to reverse. No one can prevent the younger generation from becoming the older generation, and we are not likely to forget what we learned when we were young.

That’s a shame, in sense. Most academicians are nice, honest, hardworking people who do a good job in their chosen field. The kooks aren’t a majority, or even a plurality. They’re a relatively small group compared to the overall number of professors. But they have far more power than their numbers, because their goals are political rather than intellectual, and there is no depth to which they will not sink. It’s like Lenin’s party in the short-lived Russian legislature under the Czar: It was a minor political party that never received many votes, but its members were well organized and willing to go to extreme lengths to seize power. And they did.

So it’ll be a shame when so many honest academicians cease to enjoy the funding and prestige that they deserve because a small group of kooks has tarnished their image in the minds of alumni and the public at large. But don’t blame the alumni, and don’t blame the public. We didn’t cause the problem, and we can’t fix it. We can only keep our wallets closed until the universities convince us that they’re no longer run by kooks. Only the remaining moderates can save academia, and their numbers are steadily dwindling relative to the kooks. Maybe they could organize and fight back to save the institutions that they love. But it’s probably too late.

Many people use these words nearly interchangeably, but there are differences between them, both legal and historical.

‘Company’ has the same root as ‘companion’. The historical usage broadly refers to people you spend a lot of time with, as in “You’ll be known by the company you keep.” It isn’t common today in that broad sense, but appears regularly in a few narrow senses: Having a guest in your home is called having company. In military usage, a company is a group of associated soldiers.

And in business, a company is a group of people who all work together towards a common goal. The old-fashioned usage was “Bob Jones & Company”, meaning literally “Bob Jones and the people who work with him”. It was parallel to “Bob Jones & Associates”, or “Bob Jones and Sons”. Over time, ‘company’ came to refer to the enterprise itself, rather than the workers and their relationship with an owner or principal. The word had no particular legal meaning in most states until the late 1980s with the rise of the limited liability company, or LLC.

‘Partnership’ has an unclear origin. It may come from ‘parcener’, a French word for a joint heir, or from ‘part tener’ meaning partial holder, or from some other ancient word involving sharing or partitioning. Regardless of its precise origin, in the legal or business context it always referred to a joint owner. If two men are equal partners in a venture, then it means that each of them owns an undivided half of each item of property that the partnership owns. The original partnerships in English law probably involved undivided partial ownership of land. Real estate law was already quite well developed before large-scale overseas commerce was possible, so it was convenient to apply the concepts of real estate joint ownership to joint ownership of the many different types of chattels (i.e. non-land property) that a commercial venture might involve.

This idea of partnerships as joint ownership relationships remained in American law into the twentieth century. Even up to the past few decades there have been serious legal questions about whether a partnership can be considered a legal person that can, for example, sue and be sued in its own name. This was called the aggregate vs entity debate, and in most if not all states it has been decisively answered in favor of entity treatment. But that’s a recent development. The word’s history still involves co-ownership of property.

Corporations were always legal persons. ‘Corporation’ comes from the Latin ‘corpus’, meaning ‘body’. Two hundred years ago or more, a corporation could only be formed by a specific act of the legislature or sovereign. Only in the mid to late nineteenth centuries did some legislatures enact laws that allowed the automatic creation of business corporations. Even today there are certain types of quasi-public corporations, such as water districts of hospital districts in Texas, that can only be formed by a specific act of the Legislature.

Legal personhood and its consequent liability protection were always a major point of forming a corporation. Partnerships worked fine for small ventures and low-risk ventures, but partnership law required each partner to be held liable for all of the partnership’s debts to the extent that they could not be paid out of partnership property. This discourages people from investing in high-risk partnership ventures, as they would be risking not only the money they invested, but also face the possibility of personal liability for partnership debts in the event of a business failure.

Corporations were designed to change all that. If you invested in a corporation, then your losses were limited to your investment, which greatly expanded the number of people who were willing to invest, and therefore the amount of available private capital. All those consequences came from the core idea that the corporation was a separate legal body or person that could borrow money and take risks in its own right, independently of its owners.

I’m sorry if that’s more detail that you wanted; this is the kind of stuff that fills my head these days, and is slowly filling my nearly finished book. Here is a simple guide to using these words consistently with their roots:

• A company can be any group of people who work together, share a common purpose, or simply spend time together.
• ‘Partnership’ is best used when there’s some property that’s jointly owned. In American and English law, this is what you form if you and a friend shake hands and verbally agree to pool your money for a business venture. (And doing that without a written agreement is almost always a terrible idea.)
• A corporation does not exist without some sort of government action. If you didn’t pay the fee, then you don’t have a corporation. That’s also true for limited partnerships and limited liability companies. You can’t just decide to make these on your own; only the government can make them for you, because only the government can create legally recognized imaginary people.

American Spectator columnist Ben Stein writes about the invasion of Iraq:

Certainly, it was one hell of a mistake. That’s obvious and cruel for all concerned. And to continue Donald Rumsfeld’s stewardship of the war effort when he has made such a hash of it strikes me as extremely peculiar. The man has his points, but guiding the Iraq war is not one of them. We are three years into it, have spent many lives and hundreds of billions we can ill afford, and we are worse off than we were three weeks after hostilities commenced. With the best troops on the planet and the best weapons on earth, we are clearly in a desperate mess.

I’ve ranted about this before.  I have no patience with otherwise reasonable conservatives who find delight in declaring that the Iraq war is a failure. Mr. Stein is not the worst in this regard; he knows his military history, and most of the column is devoted to proving how well the Iraq War has gone by historical standards. But even with that knowledge he can’t resist slinging mud at his friends:

Iraq was a mistake. And it’s turning out badly. We lack the national will to win this war. We had no good reason to be there in the first place. (Thank you, CIA.) We were supposed to not get into any more wars we did not absolutely need to be in. If we did get into them, we were supposed to go in with enough force to win. We screwed up every part of this and it’s a mistake.

Don’t they have editors at the American Spectator? We had no good reason to be there? None at all? We screwed up every part of this? Every part? No a single part has escaped this ubiquitous screwing-up?  Nothing went right?
And who did this supposing that we would not get into any more wars “we did not absolutely need to be in”? That would be a preposterous foreign policy. If you announce that you’ll avoid war until it’s absolutely necessary, then you’ve tied your own hands. You’ve told your enemies exactly how to take advantage of you. You’ve told them that they can harm you as much as they want and in whatever way they want—as long as it doesn’t make war “absolutely necessary”.

The fact is that war is never absolutely necessary. Everyone wants peace. The difference is that you and I want a peace in which we’re free to exercise our God-given freedoms, while our enemies want a peace in which we submit to the will of Allah.

War is never necessary—if you’re willing to accept slavery. So declaring that you won’t go to war unless it’s absolutely necessary is the same as declaring that you’ll never go to war, which is precisely what encourages our enemies to think that they can enslave us. Our enemies know that they can’t defeat us militarily. Their only hope is that we’re soft enough and stupid enough to throw down our weapons and surrender to some pictures and stories on the evening news, or a relentless drumbeat that “everyone knows” that we’re bad people doomed to fail.

Here are some basic truths to help you avoid the same trap:

—War is eternal. It’s built into our genes. A few of us will always want to enslave the rest, and since the dawn of civilization we have fought over who will rule the slaves. Or, more recently, whether the slaves will agree to be ruled.

—Life is painful. The singleminded pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to less pleasure, more pain, and ultimately death. Your future is bleak if you’re so frail that you want to wail and hide under the table just because the TV told you an ugly story and showed you some ugly pictures about children dying in Iraq. One western country has already tried surrendering to the scary pictures and stories, in the hope of making the horror stop. But it didn’t, of course.

—If we want to live as a country, then we must understand and accept that the world is mostly a brutal and horrible place with lots of people who would gladly kill or enslave us simply because our freedom and affluence insults them. We have not overcome human nature, war, or the desire to enslave—and we never will. We must face the horrors of today and tomorrow with eyes wide open. Ignoring those horrors won’t make them go away; it will make them stronger. They thought that WWI was horrible enough to end war. They were wrong. No horror will ever be enough.

—And if we want to live as a country, then we must take more seriously enemy propaganda repeated by our own citizens within our own borders.

Just over half a century ago, we plunged into a real war with real horrors. We faced real tanks, bombers, and battleships—not just some scary pictures on the TV. The country was deeply divided as it went into war. Many isolationists wanted us to stay out. Others wondered why we had attacked Germany when the attack came from Japan. There was no shortage of horrible pictures or horrible stories. And there were plenty of mistakes—big mistakes, colossal mistakes—that cost us thousands of lives.

You want mistakes? How about the Tarawa landing, where many of the troops simply drowned just a few yards offshore, and the rest were left to fend for themselves on a beach virtually without cover? How about the Anzio landing, or the entire Italian campaign? How about Pearl Harbor itself, getting caught by complete surprise?  And then there’s the pointless meat-grinder that they called the Hurtgen Forest.
Back then they had a saying: “There’s a war on.” Loosely translated, it meant: “Shut up, you stupid whiner, and enjoy the fact that you’re safe in the states, rather than getting burned, shot, or drowned out there on the front lines.” Back then, people loved the country more than they hated each other, which is why they stayed resolute in the face of real homeland privations, and seriously scary pictures and stories in the news. They understood that mistakes happen, innocents die,and that baseless gloomy talk was not merely irritating, but a serious threat to the nation’s future.

You want to say that Iraq is a hopeless mess and mistake? Prove it! In this age of profound skepticism, the claim that “everyone knows” that Iraq is a disaster is somehow immune from doubt. I say that Iraq is now a constitutional democracy. The rape rooms are closed. The torture has stopped. Our casualty rate in this war is lower than in any other war. We demolished the enemy army in a matter of weeks. And the kind of continuous low-level violence that we see in Iraq is going on in lots of places around the world—right now!

Our Oprah-fied citizenry can’t bear to even think about the daily reality of millions. To them it’s all so shocking that they can’t think clearly about magnitudes of horror. You don’t like the pockets of sporadic violence that we see in Iraq today? You should have seen it when it was systematic and nationwide! But you didn’t see it, unless you really looked, because those scary pictures they didn’t put on the TV.

If our country won’t fight a war until it’s absolutely necessary, then our country wants to die, and maybe many of our citizens will deserve the slavery that will inevitably follow its death.

I say that our country should live, which means that it should be prepared to go to war. And suffer. We must be ready for our soldiers to bleed and die on foreign soil. And we must stand resolute against the very real possibility that our TVs will show us some scary pictures and tell us lurid stories.

Some will die. Some will bravely watch TV. War demands sacrifices of us all.

Liberals are giddy with excitement over reports that some Marines may have killed some innocent Iraqi civilians in Haditha. For years the libs been wanting the Iraq War to fit into their Vietnam model, and now they desperately hope to have found their My Lai. I think that’s unlikely, but in any case it’ll be weeks before the Marine Corps releases its report.

Congressman Jack Murtha and others are already trying these Marines in the media—based on leaks and incomplete information—for obvious political advantage. I heard liberal weenie Alan Colmes nearly hyperventilating about it on his radio show last week. Deep down, the liberals believe that most soldiers are sadistic thugs, and this story has brought those fantasies to the surface.

Few peole understand what happened in Haditha, but everyone can see what’s happening right now as a consequence of liberal opportunism over the incident. The terrorists in Iraq already use children as scouts, and feel no shame at hiding behind innocent civilians. Consider this story about he Palestinians sending children with toy guns up to an Israeli border fence, hoping to goad the Israeli soldiers into killing the children, so that the Palestinians could then use those deaths for propaganda purposes.

On virtually any facet of Iraq, the liberals don’t seem capable of understanding that their political opportunism yields serious long-term consequences. Maybe if I spell it out, they’ll understand:

The willingness of Jack Murtha and other liberals to go hysterical over a story like Haditha means that more pictures of dead children, accompanied by lurid stories, will move the terrorists closer to ultimate victory. This means that the terrorists will try to help generate more pictures of dead children and lurid stories, just as the Palestinians did. If the liberals in their quest for political power want more pictures of dead Iraqi children, then the terrorists will be happy to provide them.

So who’s worse: the terrorists or the liberals? The terrorists are at least fairly honest about what they want, and what they’re willing to do to get it.  But Jack Murtha is willing to virtually guarantee that more Iraqi children will be thrust into firefights, and then he preens about what an upstanding moral figure he is. It’s sickening.

In this post I argued that teenagers having sex with adults isn’t as bad for boys as for girls. But after seeing this, and this, and this, I’m completely prepared to admit that such encounters certainly can be damaging for boys. Horribly damaging.

(Warning: Clicking on the links may cause loss of appetite.)