Category Archives: Politics

Political Climate: The Democracy Crisis?

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It may be natural for former Vice President Al Gore to express discontent with the state of democracy in the U.S. His remark that “we have to solve the democracy crisis” comes a little more than two minutes into his new slideshow on TED.com. He doesn’t elaborate, nor does he identify a nation whose version of democracy he prefers. Perhaps he would prefer our democracy to be less participatory, so long as it was dedicated to the higher cause of controlling atmospheric carbon.

Historical note: We first encountered then-Senator Gore’s environmental activism about 20 years ago. We were serving at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory — perhaps its name had changed to the Astronautics Laboratory by then, we don’t recall — as Chief of Bioenvironmental Engineering, and were called upon to answer a Congressional Inquiry from the senator. We produced a detailed report on the emissions from our rocket testing, to answer the question of whether proposed revisions to the Clean Air Act would hamper our development of national security-related propulsion technology. (These were the days of dot-matrix printers and e-mail did not exist, so we stood at what was probably a 2400-baud fax machine, hand-feeding our 30-page report into the thing; it’s a wonder we got anything done back then, things were so primitive.)

Back on topic: We were very interested in — read, “concerned by” — Mr. Gore’s assertion that it’s one thing to change our individual behaviors, but “it’s more important to change the laws.” What does that mean? If a law typically either requires something or prohibits something, what new requirements or prohibitions would he put on our citizenry? In pursuit of the elusive carbon molecules, would we be required to purchase and use mercury-containing fluorescent bulbs,* or to pay a tax on all our exhalations?

Note that we’re not challenging the scientific argument, because we haven’t studied the subject enough and frankly our days as an environmental engineer were limited and long ago. Some of the evidence, like the loss of ice caps, is quite compelling; we recall discussing the relative thinness of the ice sheet we stood on in North Star Bay at Thule Air Base in Greenland during the spring of 2001. No, what we’re challenging is the idea that governmental action is the best means of addressing the issue.

We challenge the assertion that we have a democracy crisis. Our democracy is deliberately deliberative, yes, and can be slow to act — especially from the perspective of those who feel like they are ones calling in the wilderness. But quick action is not necessarily good just because it is swift; and neither is carefully considered action necessarily bad.

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* For the record, we already use them in several of our lamps, despite the fact that their light is quite garish and uncomfortable to our eyes. We’ll try not to break them.

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Reading AUDACITY

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As if I don’t read enough already — slush for Baen, science and current affairs articles for my university job, and a little (precious little!) pleasure reading — on the advice of a good friend I started reading Senator Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. (I love libraries.) It’ll be slow going, I think, since I’m using it as my “put me to sleep at night” reading.

I was interested in his characterization of his run for the Senate as “one last race.” Famous last words, as my mom used to say.

And I wasn’t sure how to take his detailed descriptions of the Senate chambers — the doors and damask and all that. On one hand, I was surprised that anyone other than an interior decorator or architecture buff would be so observant, and so was skeptical that he actually wrote that part himself. On the other hand, I was a little jealous that I’m not that observant … and I think my writing probably suffers as a result.

More on this subject at another time. Break’s over; back to the slush.

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Rev. Wright and the Imams

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Beneath the kerfuffle over the incendiary statements Rev. Jeremiah Wright made during sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ, the episode illustrates our very human tendency not to confront those in whom we have vested authority. It’s true in most places, of most people, that we rarely confront those whom we have accepted as leaders and especially those who represent to us some legitimate authority.

Where, for instance, are the moderate Muslims who disagree with and disapprove of the fatwas issued by radical clerics? They exist, and remain silent.

Where are the moderate members of Rev. Wright’s parish who disagree with and disapprove of his comments? They exist, and remain silent.

We are far more apt to challenge those whose authority and legitimacy we don’t recognize or to whom we have few ties; thus, in politics in our free country, we have no shortage of critics no matter who is in power. It’s very difficult, however, to stand up against a legitimate authority figure — one whom we have ample reason to respect and follow under normal circumstances — and say, “No, that’s wrong.” It takes courage; and when we are faced with difficult pronouncements from religious leaders that kind of courage is particularly hard to come by.

It would have been nice to hear the story of a courageous Senator Obama calling his spiritual advisor on the carpet for denigrating the United States of America (especially after his swearing-in as a Senator). In the same way, it would be wonderful to hear about courageous Muslims calling their imams and mullahs and clerics on the carpet for the heinous pronouncements they make. The latter requires more courage, however, since the potential penalty could be much more severe than the former; that in itself tells us something about the Islamofascists in authority in radical Islam, and why the civilized world should extirpate them.

I remember hearing Larry Crabb quote Pascal to the effect that when the whole world is moving in the same direction (e.g., toward depravity), it only takes one person who decides to stand still to show the wrong movement for what it is.* But that one person has to “be strong and courageous,” as the Scripture says. Which is why it doesn’t happen quite as often as it should.

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*He used the illustration in his address to the 1994 National Youthworker’s Convention in San Diego.

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This Is Why We Started the Anti-Campaign

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Commenting on New Hampshire State Representative Michael DesRoches’s failure to show up and vote in the recent legislative session, and his announcement Monday that he would resign, James Taranto wrote in Best of the Web Today,

Resigning? He should be running for Congress! If there were more guys like Michael DesRoches on Capitol Hill, imagine how little harm they’d do.

Exactly our point when we started the Anti-Campaign. Remember, the Anti-Candidate is not on the ballot for any office, anywhere, but would be happy to collect your vote for the same: any office, anywhere. We promise nothing — not even to show up — because we agree with Thomas Jefferson: “That government governs best which governs least.”

Governing least — we’d be happy to.

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More on Wiretaps, and the War

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The House voted, but they didn’t go with the bipartisan Senate version of the intelligence bill. From the Wall Street Journal (emphasis in original), a glimpse of why the House version is almost unbelievably bad:

By requiring prior court approval to gather foreign intelligence from foreign targets on foreign soil, the House measure would also further involve unelected judges in warfighting decisions. By the way, since when do foreign targets have a right to any court review under the U.S. Constitution?

Now the House and Senate get to see if they can come to terms with each other. We can only hope they keep national security in mind while they do so.
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This is a great round-up of Democratic sentiment on the Iraq campaign of the Terror War (some will dismiss it because it was rounded up by President Bush’s former Senior Advisor, Karl Rove):

In September, Mrs. Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus “the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.” This week, she said “we’ll be right back at square one” in Iraq by this summer.

In December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to admit progress, arguing, “The surge hasn’t accomplished its goals.” He said a month earlier there was “no progress being made in Iraq” and “it is not getting better, it is getting worse.”

Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Feb. 9 if she was worried that the gains of the last year might be lost, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot back: “There haven’t been gains . . . This is a failure.” Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee told the Associated Press the same month that the surge “has failed.”

It indeed seems as if “Democrats appear to have an ideological investment in things going badly in Iraq.”

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Gotta Love Those Speeches

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As a speechwriter, I look at speeches by prominent people from time to time, as well as the reporting about speeches. I probably don’t do it as often as I should. Then again, I don’t do a lot of things as often as I should; and some things I shouldn’t do, I do more often than I should.*

Anyway, some comments on recent speechifying.

1. Why can’t people be bothered to look up Bible quotes?

Tuesday Senator Obama gave a speech in which he attempted to … well, we’re not sure what he was trying to do, but his prepared text seemed to talk a lot about race. Others will dissect the delivered speech in more detail than we will, but this quote in the prepared text stuck out: “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us.” Notwithstanding that it wasn’t presented as a direct quote, that’s not what Scripture says. (To be extra-inclusive, the text continues: “Let us be our sister’s keeper.” That’s not in Scripture either.) There are Scriptural references to bearing one another’s burdens that might point in that direction, but in the main that reference was just incorrect.

I remember hearing President Clinton give a speech in which he smashed two of the Beatitudes together; i.e., he joined the first half of one verse with the second half of another. It’s hard to tell if these kinds of thing are poetic license, laziness, ignorance, or a mild form of disrespect.

2. Historical ignorance, or ignoring history?

Senator Obama’s speech started with the opening of the Preamble: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” The text continued,

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

Notwithstanding that many if not most of the delegates had been born in the colonies rather than having crossed the ocean to become colonists, this passage and the entire speech missed the key historical point that the Constitution did not “launch” our democratic experiment — it re-launched it. The “more perfect union” was specifically intended to be “more perfect” than the previous attempt; i.e., “more perfect” than the Articles of Confederation.

3. Words are important, as are the thoughts and actions behind them.

From an excellent commentary, “The Obama Bargain,” by Shelby Steele in The Wall Street Journal (emphasis in original),

… nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“God damn America”).

How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

So, what Senator Obama said in his long — very long — speech may have been noteworthy, but it doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of looking beyond the words.

4. Eyewitnesses to history are just like eyewitnesses to any event: they see things differently.

Yesterday, on the 5th anniversary of the coalition’s invasion of Iraq, President Bush gave a speech at the Pentagon. He said “removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision,” that the success of recent operations marks “a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,” and that “The costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.”

The same day, Senator Obama, front-runner for the Democratic nomination, gave a speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He said, “Here is the stark reality: there is a security gap in this country — a gap between the rhetoric of those who claim to be tough on national security, and the reality of growing insecurity caused by their decisions.” From those words, and his previous statements on the war, it seems clear why Senator Obama gave his talk near, but not at, Fort Bragg.

Senator Clinton, also in the running for the Democratic nomination, gave remarks to supporters and said, “We cannot win their civil war. There is no military solution.” Her remarks also wouldn’t go over well at a military base — which is probably the point.

In contrast, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain gave a statement that “Americans should be proud that they led the way in removing a vicious, predatory dictator and opening the possibility of a free and stable Iraq.”

It shouldn’t surprise us that folks looking at events from different ends of the political spectrum will see them in different ways. Be that as it may, it’s easy to tell, between the leading contenders for the Presidency, who has victory in mind.

Which leads finally to this: Presidential candidates who have no military experience need to understand a few things about the military.

1. We’re very dedicated to the well-being of the country, so much so that we put it ahead of our own (and often our families’).
2. We believe we’ve been fighting on the side of truth and justice; you’re welcome to believe otherwise, but don’t try to convince us we’ve been wrong and then say you’re the best person to lead us.
3. We don’t like to lose.

In other words, Senator Obama saying “I will end this war” (as quoted in this story) will never be as compelling to a military audience as saying, “We will do whatever it takes to win this war.”

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*For the uncertain, that’s a deliberate paraphrase of St. Paul. More an allusion than a quote, it works with or without attribution.

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The Paramount Importance of Defense

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Some who know me may think I’m referring to the Clemson Tigers in their quest for a first-ever Atlantic Coast Conference title, but no. (The Tigers haven’t been to the ACC finals longer than I’ve been alive, so it was great to see them get that far; and though it would’ve been terrific to see them win, it just wasn’t to be. And not because of their defense.)

No, this post refers to a new Anti-Candidate position posted in the “General Interest” forum area today, the Anti-Candidate Position on Defense:

National defense is the paramount responsibility of the government, the key thing that people cannot do for themselves.

Contrary to the best intentions of diplomats and the most pleasant dreams of optimists, the world remains a dangerous place. So we agree with Sun Tzu — Master Sun — that, in the opening words of The Art of War, “War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.”

There’s more, of course, and there’s also the overall Anti-Campaign thread.

As one friend wrote us yesterday, “We’ve got quite a candidate/potential candidate field for this election. It’s a shame the United States public doesn’t have anyone it can truly trust and for which to vote. Another barren election-scape….” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have the Anti-Campaign.

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Read the Oath, Sen. Obama: It Says Protect and Defend

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An old boss sent me this link to a brief video of Senator Obama declaring how he would reduce our nation’s readiness. I put a thread in the Space Warfare Forum about one of his comments, but here I’d like to address his naive comments about nuclear weapons.

(First, I find it appalling that he would “institute an independent … board to ensure that the Quadrennial Defense Review is not used to justify unnecessary spending.” In other words, plainly he does not trust the military, even in the person of the Secretary of Defense — whom he would appoint — and other appointees — whom he would appoint — who would oversee the QDR. But, in his defense, there’s no reason he should know much about what the QDR is or how it works, since he hasn’t been in the Senate very long. And by all accounts, considering how little work he accomplished there, he actually wasn’t in the Senate as long as he’s been a Senator.)

Now, the “goal of a world without nuclear weapons.” To use an overworked but still apt analogy, good luck putting that djinn back in the bottle.

As one who actually did grunt work in the field of nonproliferation (on the space technology side), I’m all for halting the spread of nuclear technologies in order to keep tyrants and crackpot ideologues from getting nukes. But what’s this happy horse manure about “hair trigger alert” and deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals? Perhaps it’s a good thing that a career civilian like the Senator doesn’t know about the safeguards in our nuclear command and control system, although it sounds as if he doesn’t believe they exist — or perhaps doesn’t trust them. But it seems almost shameful that someone who wants to be the Commander in Chief should be so unaware of how thin our nuclear arsenal has become over the last few years, as we’ve taken weapon systems offline (e.g., Peacekeeper) and not replaced them, that he would wish to cut it even more.

This is dangerous enough rhetoric, but I shudder to think how dangerous the world would be if he got the chance to put his ideas into action.

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Thank Heavens Our Elections Aren't Like Russia's …

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… that is, like Russia just had: In Russia, Medvedev Sweeps Presidential Election.

The fearmongers who believe the worst of the United States might actually be afraid of a similar scenario here. Those who think secret police are waiting to take them to prison for their dissenting opinions might spend sleepless nights afraid that President Bush could eschew all precedent and simply tap someone to succeed him — a neo-conservative ideologue, no doubt. They might be afraid that the party apparatus (run by the cabal that secretly controls both the Democratic and Republican parties) would then eliminate not only all political opposition but even most press coverage and criticism. And if the question should be put to the lemming-like citizens, who are so much less enlightened than those brilliant critics who see through the facade of patriotic public service, of course we would run out and vote overwhelmingly for the heir apparent.

In their fevered nightmare, instead of two parties actually competing, the single party would, like Medvedev’s party, collect 70% of the votes. And their worst fear would be realized when, instead of moving into retirement and other interests, President Bush would, like Putin, plan to take some new “Prime Secretary” position from which he would secretly run the government.

It would almost be worth it to see that scenario play out, just to see how many of the lunatic fringe of the far Left would stroke out. (It has already seemed as if they were campaigning against President Bush himself.)

Thankfully, we live in a country of laws, with a Constitution well worth supporting and defending and political traditions we wouldn’t give up lightly. It’s remarkable that the governmental system our Founding Fathers designed is so robust and so well-balanced.

So we will endure another election cycle, with all its hyperbole and posturing, and we will peacefully accept the results and live the best lives we can under whatever administration we elect.

And, to paraphrase Joseph de Maistre, we will get the government we deserve. Presumably, just like the Russians did.

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The Anti-Campaign: Politics as UNusual

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In February, a little weary of the primary season and not too pleased by any of the prospective candidates, we started the “Anti-Campaign” for one simple reason: the idea made us laugh.

Now we’ve started The Anti-Campaign Thread on the forum (in the “General Interest” section), as well as The Anti-Campaign Page on the web site. From time to time we’ll post our thoughts on various issues.

So far, we’ve covered the issues of guns (we like ’em) and taxes (we don’t like ’em, but we tolerate ’em). The taxes discussion was especially timely, since we e-filed our taxes today. (Oh, joy.)

The Anti-Campaign … making sport of politics, “the only sport for adults.”

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