Senator Kerry urges dialogue with Iran, Syria

Following the fine tradition of Fonda, Dodd, Sheehan, and Belafonte… Kerry criticizes US policy from Egypt while fellow Democrat Bill Nelson meets with Assad in Damascus.

Why is it that the admirers of these people make such a fuss about Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in the 80s? Because Saddam eventually turned into an enemy? Isn’t that it? And don’t the same people make a similar point about the CIA and bin Laden? Never mind that Saddam and bin Laden served US interests at the time. Reagan should have considered the blowback. He should have known these snakes would turn against the US.

Well then why are moonbat heroes always so eager to meet and indulge every tinpot enemy of the US? After their hostility is well known. The moonbats don’t even have to predict the future. They just have to read the news. Beyond hypocrisy.

The ISG report is so worthless its not worth criticizing. How embarrassing. No surprise that Kerry supports its most ridiculous proposal. After its worthlessness is well known. Iran and Syria are fueling the chaos in Iraq. Beyond stupidity.

UPDATE: Classic. Eight days after 9/11 they blame the CIA for bin Laden. Today they cheer for Chavez.

Reagan sang the praises of the native Afghanis. The Arabs, including bin Laden, played a late and very small role in expelling the Russians. More traveled to Afghanistan for jihad after the Russians left and US support stopped. Sorry to burst Norm Dixon’s bubble but Reagan didn’t praise or support the Arab jihadis, and he had retired and gone senile before the Pakistani-based Taliban even existed.

Ralph Peters says we can’t win. Tim Russert says Rummy wants to cut and run.

Next stop, peace with honor. So many worthless words. When the US left Vietnam millions fled. Millions died.

The mass media is usually eager to connect Iraq and Vietnam. Not when it comes to the aftermath. Emboldened by the latest election results they’ve now narrowed the argument over Iraq to finding a way out. Our oh-so-war-weary society just can’t stomach the costs and sacrifices anymore. Iran and Syria will help. Jimmy Carter stands ready too! They know our own paranoid and thoughtless actions have created these purely hypothetical so-called jihadis. Our boys shouldn’t be dying over there for questionable causes like freedom and democracy. If it’s not about oil (though it sure as Halliburton is) we’ve got no business being there at all.

That’s a bit of a caricature, but only a bit. Even the military has a part in this latest episode of Let’s Pick An Exit Strategy:

The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.

Insiders have dubbed the options “Go Big,” “Go Long” and “Go Home.”

The situation is serious, yet the chattering class is obsessed mainly with how the US will give up. The timetable. The euphemisms. Those who think further know withdrawal will only make a bigger mess. Many think it will only affect Iraqis.

In this surrealistic atmosphere there are quite a few other options.

Go Scapegoat – Read the Iraq Study Group report. Do exactly what they advise. Refer to them alone all future questions about Iraq.

Go Strongman – Return to the long and ignoble traditions of realpolitik typified by US support for the Shah, Saddam, Mubarek, Musharraf, and other secular autocrats. Identify the next Saddam. Back him.

Go Moonbat – Scream at the top of your self-important lungs about the incalculable injustice and misery already created by the US’s pursuit of an arrogant imperialist vision of hegemony. Demand that they do something about it. Scream that it can’t be done. Make them pay for it. Scream about how much it costs.

Go Team – What the rest of us wish we heard from the moonbats who see the members of our all-volunteer military as stupid misguided children who need protection rather than as noble capable protectors motivated by a powerful sense of duty, honor, and respect for their country and for civilization in general.

Go Fish – No WMDs in Iraq. Try the neighboring mud huts. The one to the east has potential.

Go Muslim – There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet. Keep it simple. Moonbats go Shia, Wingnuts go Sunni. Partisanship proceeds as usual except we all get suicide belts.

Go Easy – The problem is we’re not being nice enough. We’re not being fair. Our torture and eavesdropping the true crimes. The jihadis skulk and cut throats only because they’re misunderstood victims. Pay no heed to their silly rhetoric about pigs and apes and unbelievers. What really ticks them off is Bush’s police state. And his racist mishandling of Katrina.

Go Caveman – Off with the gloves. The jihadis eshew even basic civility. Their apologists say whatever works in war is fair. OK then. Ramadan? Not on my calendar. Sniper in a minaret? Knock it down. Imams preaching violence? Jail them. Everywhere, not just Iraq. Of course then we’ll be called xenophobes, racists, invaders, infidels, inferior. Oh that’s right. We already are.

Go Orgasmic – You expected more from heathen hedonists? If it weren’t for the fact that they’re consumed with pampering themselves and shooting blanks we might consider this option more seriously. Instead we’ll just wait a generation or so until they party themselves into oblivion.

Go Figure – The only real option, notwithstanding the last, for those of us watching but nowhere near the controls.

Richard Dawkins has been foremost among Darwin’s defenders for many years, speaking and writing to popularize and refine the Theory of Evolution. He also coined meme – the idea that ideas are replicated, altered, and selected and thus can evolve.

Not long ago Dawkins was spreading a meme about Brights:

Think about your own worldview to decide if it is free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities. If you decide that you fit the description above, then you are, by definition, a bright!

No shit? Where I come from calling yourself “bright” is a good way to get your ass kicked. Glibly denying any lacking in your worldview is another.

Dawkins rationalizes his bright idea like so:

I don’t know whether gay – meaning homosexual – just happened, or whether it was launched. Either way, it has been a successful meme. The new definition is in the dictionary, and it is used more or less universally by heterosexuals. Did some syndicate deliberately release gay into the memosphere? Or did it spring up spontaneously, then take off as a brush fire? I don’t know how, or when, gay got its start, but 2003 is seeing the deliberate launch of a new meme. It is bright, and we are at its birth. The bright meme is intentionally imitating gay’s provenance in the explicit hope of copying its success.

The gay meme improved the image and, I dare add, the happiness of a once unpopular minority. Similarly, bright is intended to come to the aid of another beleaguered community in the US: those who, in the most religiose country in the Western world, have no religion, who are variously labeled atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, philosophical naturalists, secularists, or humanists.

Lately Dawkins is pushing a related but more in-your-face strain of the Bright meme. Not content with his own disbelief Dawkins would like all believers to stop. Now preferably. It’s called New Atheism:

Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion.

Dawkins’ style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. “There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove,” he said. “You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”

It is ironic that such a prominent man of science and reason can miss the point so badly. Decades ago other great men ruthlessly applied these principles only to discover fundamental, insurmountable limits to what humans can know or understand. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems utterly destroyed the classic basis for atheism: the assumption that man alone can sort everything out without any need to invoke God.

The achievements of science are truly breathtaking but as it turns out the most profound intellectual results of the last century inform us that hard study and cold reason will only go so far. Dawkins impishly focuses on the infinite trees we can’t disprove and completely misses the forest. He is unable or unwilling to grasp that God is not Thor, a fairie, or a Flying Spaghetti Monster – God is all of these and the infinite other things we cannot know.

Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?

Dawkins can tear down all the Bronze Age straw men he likes. Rather than delighting in the hyperbole of a Flying Spaghetti Monster Dawkins would be better off soberly considering the implications of Shrödinger’s Cat or Maxwell’s Demon.

The elephant in the room that he will not and cannot address is the meme that infinity itself is just another name for God. Gödel himself embraced the spiritual and theological components of mathematical philosophy. Reading other explanations of Incompleteness and its implications what is hard to escape, even when put in the most dry and secular terms, is a sense of wonder and delight far superior to Dawkins’ ignorant sarcasm.

If memes are like genes then it’s fair to see attempts to manipulate ideas as similar to the unnatural selection responsible for such wonderous advances in animal husbandry and cultivation. The very existence of civilization depends upon the free exchange and improvement of ideas. Pushed to the extreme however, whether by activist atheists or Islamofacists, the intentional hunting down and killing off of “unacceptable” or “foolish” ideas is nothing short of eumemics.

I’ll take my thinking free, thanks. Without Mr. Dawkins or anybody else telling me what is or isn’t allowed.

Who Bears the Burden? Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Recruits Before and After 9/11
by Tim Kane, Ph.D. – November 7, 2005

Although Representative Rangel’s bill to reinstate the draft failed by a decisive vote of 402–2 in the House of Representatives in 2004, the issue will likely be considered again, especially if there are more terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Some motivations for the draft are entirely patriotic in the sense that they aim to protect America from aggressors. Others see the draft as an instrument of equality, as well as an instrument of pacifism.

Well deja vu all over again. I get it already. Charlie Rangel isn’t so much in favor of the draft as he is against war.

I remember he didn’t like Gulf War I either and back then he was demagoging race, whining that the over-representation of minorities in the military meant they would necessarily shoulder an unfair burden in casualties. It turned out the predominantly non-minority airmen and special forces were the ones who actually absorbed the disproportionate casualties. Not counting Saddam’s military. The way our military cuts through theirs you have to wonder why we stomach any tinpot very long.

At any rate Rangel hasn’t changed. These days he’s still requesting reports to support his race-based worldview. And as usual they reveal a truth that just the opposite of his expectations.

Unfortunately being wrong hasn’t stopped him. His latest angle: We need a draft to ensure that every race class shares the burden of military service equally. Once this is accomplished we will never again see war because no leader will dare face the wrath of a public so united against it.

This is the same old demagoguery with but a subtle change in grievance group. What’s remarkable about his thinking is that it is so obviously false in several ways. False in presuming that the draft’s random selection is more fair than self selection. False in presuming any deviation of the military population from societal norms is by its very nature unfair. That the balance of support for war would be different with or without the draft. And the ultimate falsity – that all this talk of draft and fairness is nothing but an indirect attack on the President’s ability to wage war.

Consensus within the military is against the draft and I’m inclined to agree, but I could be convinced otherwise through reasonable debate with the goal of making them stronger. I cannot be convinced to argue about it with someone whose purpose is to undermine them or our society’s ability to defend itself. Not much of what Charlie Rangel says makes sense because fairness is not his true goal. If you didn’t already you should watch this to understand my argument why.

His party’s rhetoric is obsessed with the fact that the richest 1% own 99% of everything, so he should understand that no matter how biased its sampling of society the military will always have more soldiers from poor families and less from rich. There just aren’t very many sons of senators and tycoons. By the way, who decides which biases are bad?

None of the military folk I know are in it for the money. They know the pay is crap and the work dangerous but they volunteer anyway. They like serving their country. They like the way of life. To my eyes they overly represent the cream of our nation.

Charlie doesn’t like that the military offers re-up bonuses. Democrats ordinarily champion increases in civil servant compensation but in this case Rangel chooses to decry money going to the military rank and file. Besides actually working the bonuses are mutually beneficial. All of which doesn’t appear to matter to Rangel.

Why? Because like John Kerry, Representative-for-life Rangel’s view of the military was formed during Vietnam. And it seems stuck there. They and the many that think like them act as though the military is a huge heartless machine, good for nothing but gobbling up young lives, and whose every attempt to grow must be thwarted. In their eyes the military’s rightful place is at home where it is safely forbidden by the Constitution from doing anything.

Many of us don’t see it that way. There are indeed huge heartless machines in the world, the real world, the world where virtually every strongman who comes to power at some point adopts an anti-corporate anti-American stand. Every day such tinpots squelch liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. Which is why we need a strong military. But every day our media mostly ignores all that and focuses instead on the most nitpickety inane non-stories it can find, especially if they feed the storyline of America as villain.

The mainstream media is divided between scaring their addicts witless about bird flu, the environment, meteors, albino Gypsy-Irish terrorists, and spinning great gobs of slick sweet nothings. All of which we are urged to believe is something the government must urgently do something about. While on the other hand the fight against militant Islam, or “Iraq” as they like to pigeonhole it, should never have been started (as if we started it) and should simply be declared stopped (as if that will stop it). This is the conventional wisdom now.

Most of us see the world beyond our small travels only through this distorted and schizophrenic media lens. In the US we’re presented a constant drip of frightful stories about the misdeeds of our military, but until recently we heard next to nothing about what Islam and its Jihad are really about. Many people haven’t watched what little has been shown. Hands up how many tuned in for The Path to 9/11?

What would public opinion be, on any topic, if the public actually knew what the jihadis want and just how large the “tiny minority” of extremists was before Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, Bush, their oil riches or colonialization? Well what the public understands is one thing. What is almost criminal is that to this day Charlie Rangel and many other politicians are still ignorant of the threat.

During Vietnam those who didn’t want to fight went to Canada and didn’t fight. The argument then was without the draft the military would wither away because nobody would be stupid enough to volunteer. Thus war would be ended and the flower power orgies could begin. Today we still have war. Of course. But nobody has to run to Canada. They just don’t join. Those who do volunteer for military service, especially after 9/11, know full well they are putting their asses on the line for the rest of us. Including, they well know, those against war.

One last point. We don’t draft garbage, fire, or policemen just because the job is dangerous or attracts the wrong proportions of people. We expect garbage to be picked up, fires fought, and criminals apprehended without having to join the neighborhood brigade. Different people are either happier or more productive doing different things. If the goal is fairness then nothing is more fair than leaving people free to choose, with special glory and appreciation reserved for those who choose to promote and defend the freedom from which the possibility of fairness, among other things, springs.

UPDATE 28 Nov: Rangel Adopts the Logic of Kerry’s ‘Joke’.

Fourth time’s the charm for the media cheerleaders. Their side is finally back in power. It doesn’t matter to them that the senior leadership – Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Rangel, Murtha, Conyers, Kennedy, Kerry – all reek of scandal strongly enough to have driven any Republican from office. These guys stir up macaca-like goofs once a year just for giggles.

The Alice in Washington wackiness has already begun. Kids in a candy store. Drunk with power. Will they practice what they preach? Listen to what the generals say? End earmarks and the culture of corruption? Protect us from the jihadis and the Norks? Riiiiight. In this Age of Treason we can only count on the Democrats for ever higher levels of partisanship and ever lower standards of conduct. If they follow their principles we can expect things like this:

• Tax rates will go up, revenues will go down.
• Judicial nominees right of Ruth Ginsburg will be rejected.
• The Nuclear Option will be renamed the Getting The People’s Work Accomplished Option. It will be used repeatedly.
• The war in Iraq will be defunded. The work and sacrifices of many people will be discarded. But for good reason. Because any part of the Bush Doctrine succeeding would just be too painful for those who truly detest Bush.

A signal has been sent. The reaction of our adversaries was predictable. They are happy. Emboldened by the feebleness of a divided America. To win they see now they don’t have to kill US soldiers, they just have to kill each other. The media guilt-trip eventually does the rest. For 30 years this has been the template. It doesn’t always work, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. In Iraq today as with Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia before the media has convinced nearly everyone the cause is lost. The majority is now officially “unhappy with how things are going in Iraq”. They’ve done a splendid job glossing over the differences between the polar opposite mindsets they’ve choosen to lump together: Peaceniks who never would have invaded Iraq and hawks who want to redeploy to Iran and NK. Good luck pleasing that “majority”.