One Week That Shook The World

This was a week to remember. Students a hundred years from now will be writing doctoral theses on what happened in the last seven days (and in the week to come), and scholars will still be arguing over what precisely happened. This is History with a capital “H,” a turning point in the affairs of the nation and of mankind so fundamental that not a single man, woman or child on this planet will be able to avoid its effects.

For the great industrial nations, especially the United States, the course of history has been drastically altered. Even our dreams will have to adapt to the new financial and economic realities.

By Thursday of this week it had become apparent that the U.S. Treasury bailout of American International Group had bandaged one major wound to the system of credit in this country, but a $89.2 billion run on mutual funds (long considered one of the safest investments this side of a savings account) was threatening to dry up most of the available investment capital available in the United States and the Free World.

Making matters worse, the fall of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Freddie Mac, Fanny Mae and the inability of Washington Mutual to find any bidders for their assets had dealt confidence in the banks a seeming deathblow. People were wondering aloud by Thursday afternoon if Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were next to go. The financial underpinnings of the real estate industry were crumbling.

Within days, perhaps even hours, the deluge would come. The last great investment banks would close, the stock market would crash, mutual funds (and thus the world’s investment capital) would be drained dry by panicked investors and the developed world, including all of the Americas, Europe, Russia, India and the Pacific Rim nations would be thrust into a protracted and catastrophic economic depression that made no distinction between capitalist or socialist systems. All would suffer deeply.

The United States Government, the only entity on the planet big enough and powerful enough to have a chance at avoiding this global catastrophe, has decided to effect a revolution in the relationship between Government and the private sector every bit as profound as the New Deal. The United States is becoming the real estate owner of last resort. Only instead of phasing these massive changes in over six or seven years, we intend to write the program this weekend and enact it as law next week.

The United States is undertaking to acquire the “toxic assets” of the banking system –the home loans, especially, that are in danger of foreclosure, the exotic derivatives based on real estate and so forth…to the tune of as much as one trillion dollars ($1,000bn). This will free up the resources of the banks needed to fund economic expansion.

The alternative, which was to let the banks fold, would have meant a freeze or a collapse of credit in this country, bringing the economy to a screeching halt and negatively impacting every American family.

Since the great banks of the world are so intimately interconnected, it is also likely that the misery would not have been limited to the United States –a notion appreciated by investors world wide in the past week.

Government is also coming to the rescue of the mutual funds industry. President Bush announced that the United States will extend dollar-for-dollar insurance to mutual fund investors.

So far so good. The details are being hashed out even as I write these words by Federal Reserve Bank officials, Treasury Department representatives and congressional leaders. The final product, if it is not a horn of plenty including every goodie that well connected congressmen and senators could wish for, it will be passed by Congress and signed into law in the next few days.

If it works, like the government’s Resolution Trust Corporation, it will be one of the great achievements in this history of the Republic. But it will come at a price.

Where do we get the $1,000,000,000,000? We can’t borrow that much from the Chinese. We can’t print it because the dollar has already lost too much of its value. It will have to come from taxes. And if it does, we will not have a lot of money left over for national health care, global warming, alternative energy, an expanded military, college for all, and the other items on the Democratic and Republican wish lists.

This may also mean the end of Reaganomics, which had a lovely run from 1983 to date under four presidents. One of the central props of the system, de-regulation, is doomed. Not that regulation would have prevented the bad banking and management practices that got us into this mess, but the people and the politicians will definitely re-burden the private sector with tons of paperwork after this.

The other prop of Reaganomics, affordable taxes, may also go by the boards. My math may be faulty but if we need one trillion dollars that means every man woman and child in the United States will have to kick in an additional $3,322 in taxes to obtain the money.

We may not be ready to exhale just yet, but we have more hope this evening than we have seen in months.

Doomed!

We avoided The Perfect S**tstorm just in the nick of time this week, thanks to the government bailout of American International Group (AIG). That is not to say that the worst of the liquidity/credit crisis is over, just that we’ve avoided a sudden and terrible climax to it. We may yet see the credit system in the United States come crashing down, taking with it financial institutions from across the globe and initiating a universal economic depression.

To figure out what happened let’s climb into the Wayback Machine and set the dial for 2005. We arrive in, for the sake of argument, Scottsdale Arizona, a prosperous suburb of Phoenix and one of the most desirable mixed residential and commercial communities in the United States.

A glance at the Arizona Republic or Craig’s List tells us that housing costs, which have always been moderate for this area (since incomes are moderate, at best) are starting to soar. Property owners are being told by real estate agents and mortgage lenders that their homes could list for double and triple what they would have brought a mere five years ago. Homes bought at $300,000 are now worth $700,000. Why not sell now, make a killer profit, and buy some more houses, flip them and make even more profit?

The real estate in the desert at the edges of town is becoming hot property in ways other than temperature as well. Take a parcel of land, develop it for condominiums and sell 2,500 square foot units for $600,000 and $800,000! Construction costs are holding steady, so this looks like a wonderful way to get rich quick.

Now whether you want to buy houses to flip them, or to live in, or if you want to build luxury condos in the middle of the jumping cactus fields as an investment, you will need capital, i.e. money. This means establishing credit and obtaining a loan…a mortgage.

Nothing surprising there, but home values have outpaced earnings drastically. Where real estate values have jumped by 100 and 200 percent, wages and earnings have increased, oh, maybe 10 percent in the same period of time. These wage earners still need places to live and many want to make money in the real estate boom.

The banking industry makes a substantial portion of its earnings by writing loans for residential and commercial properties. With a real estate boom on there is a lot of business to be had. Soon the airwaves are buzzing with countless ads from banks, credit unions and acceptance corporations telling you that if you want credit, you can not only get it, but that banks will fight for the chance to lend you the money!

To attract business the stringent risk assessment process by which your ability to pay was measured is being relaxed. For some categories of borrowers special interest rates below prime are being made available. Banks are writing loans that are not secured by anticipated future earnings of the borrowers, and which rely on the current rising values of real estate during the boom.

It seems risky, but isn’t it a truism that real estate prices only go up? Even if a borrower defaults the foreclosure value of the property, given the current rate of growth of property values insures the lenders are not going to lose money. What is more likely is that everyone gets rich.

Back on Wall Street great corporations are buying investment portfolios based on this massive wave of mortgage lending. In fact, they are going “all in,” putting all their chips on exotic investment instruments --derivatives-- based, ultimately, on poorly secured residential mortgages. A measure of solace for the stockholders of these corporations is provided by AIG, which is doing a land office business writing insurance for these investments.

Back in our own time, it is obvious something has gone unexpectedly and dreadfully wrong.

The people who have been renovating houses to flip them are now unable to find buyers for their properties. The condos out on the desert the edge of Scottsdale are standing vacant. All signs of a real estate boom are missing.

Except it wasn’t a real estate boom; it was a bubble, and it has burst.

Without a buyer for the house he renovated the would-be Bob Vila cannot make the payments on the mortgage he got when banks fought for his business. During his struggles he probably got equity lines of credit on the house he wants to flip and his own residence which he has maxxed out. His credit card revolving debt is probably in the low five figures. There’s no way he can make the payments. He goes to foreclosure and the value of the properties do not make good the loss to the bank. The investors who built the condominiums are losing money on property taxes and defaulting on their mortgages.

AIG offered insurance on derivatives built on other derivatives built on mortgages. When real estate prices declined by 10 to 20 percent, these derivates in some cases declined in value by 100 percent! The people holding these exotic investment instruments based on mortgage lending are now flooding AIG with claims. AIG essentially insures the entire credit industry of the United States. The claims have exhausted AIG's liquidity...there's no more money to pay claims.

If they cannot meet their obligations then a credit blackout effecting every kind of borrowing from bank credit cards at the supermarket through mortgages will paralyze the economy. With no one to insure credit, no one will risk extending credit.

Now other factors enter into play, making this The Perfect Economic S**tstorm. The big one is energy costs. With the cost of light, heat and transportation increasing exponentially for American business, belt-tightening is in order –especially if the business in question has had failed investments in real estate! Belt-tightening means firings, layoffs and work reductions. Aside from more foreclosures, this means less consumer spending which means, in turn, layoffs and business failures in a wide range of industries supplying consumer goods, and fast-rising unemployment.

The federal bailout of AIG has postponed, maybe prevented, a credit collapse. Is that the happy end of the story? I doubt it.

Who Is Cool To Rule?

David Brooks has made a final stab at disqualifying Sarah Palin on the basis of experience in his infuriatingly patronizing N.Y. Times column today.

Brooks considers it a given that Palin’s lacks experience and prudence. Brooks makes the curious statement, “She seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness,” an assertion he fails to back up with examples.

Exactly how is Palin brash? Webster’s defines “brash” as, “heedless of the consequences, audacious, done in haste without regard for consequences, rash, full of fresh raw vitality, uninhibitedly energetic or demonstrative, lacking restraint and discernment, tactless, aggressively self-assertive, impudent.

Sarah Palin is “audacious,” having taken on Big Oil and the Republican establishment in Alaska and beaten them. Those actions may have seemed to have been made “heedlessly of consequences,” but she evidently knew what she was doing, because she squeezed a windfall tax out of Big Oil and won the governorship despite the enmity of the state GOP.

Was she rash? She would have been if she were incapable of winning the battles she took on. But she was talented enough to win. Working to the limit of your talents is not being rash.

Is she “full of fresh raw vitality?” So much so that it irritates her liberal foes to the point of derangement.

Therefore, if Sarah Palin is “brash,” as Brooks claims, it is the good kind of brash: audacious, daring, vital, fresh and energetic.

More curious is Brooks’ charge that Palin is “excessively decisive.” Decision is generally considered a positive quality in a leader. In a world where nuclear weapons are on a hair trigger and national leaders may not have the luxury of enough time to blink, the ability to come to a decision and stick to it is a positive good.

Take the recent Russia-Georgian War, for example. Barack Obama’s initial response was to call on both sides to act with restraint and to submit the dispute to the UN Security Council –where one of the belligerent countries has a veto. Where is the decision in this mealy-mouthed manifesto? All that Obama succeeds in doing is to draw a moral equivalence between the aggressor (Russia) and the victim (Georgia) and propose an inherently impotent forum for solving the crisis. McCain’s first response was an outraged demand that Russia remove her troops from Georgia –a decisive, unambiguous statement that lays the blame for the war where it belongs.

Decisiveness is absolutely essential to leadership. If Brooks wanted to criticize Palin for impulsiveness or rash decision-making, he should have done so explicitly. On the other hand, there is no evidence in the public record of Palin making rash decisions as a mayor or governor…

Brooks falls back on the experience issue to disqualify Palin. Only education and experience, he says, endows the ruler with the required prudence and wisdom for governance.

Says who?

Let’s look at experience from the perspective of presidential history. Some of our most qualified leaders, in terms of education and experience, have made our worst presidents.

Among the worst are John Adams, the Harvard-educated co-signer of the Declaration of Independence who, as President, attempted to criminalize criticism of the government and embroiled us in an undeclared naval war with France. U.S. Grant was West Point-educated, commanded the largest American army up to that time and, as president, was unable to control rampant corruption in his administration.

Franklin Pierce (Bowdoin College) allowed himself to be used as a tool by the south to expand slavery into the Territories. Woodrow Wilson (President, Princeton University –Governor of New Jersey) was unable to convince his own country to participate in the League of Nations. Herbert Hoover (Stanford) presided impotently over the Great Depression. John F. Kennedy (Harvard –service in the U.S. Senate and House) and Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas State University-San Marcos, Senate Majority Leader) embroiled us in the quagmire of Vietnam.

Richard M. Nixon (Whittier College – U.S. Senate, Vice President) subverted the Constitution. Jimmy Carter (US Naval Academy-Georgia State Senate, Governor of Georgia) presided over the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and an economic meltdown. George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard Law--CEO, Texas Rangers, Governor of Texas) mishandled the Iraq War and relief operations after Hurricane Katrina.

What a talented, well-educated group of executives! But where are the benefits of experience and prudence? Obviously, a great education and extensive experience are no guarantee that a leader will be just, prudent or even minimally competent.

Among our worst qualified presidents we find Abraham Lincoln (nine months elementary school –Illinois legislature, US House of Representatives) who preserved the Union and freed the slaves. Harry S. Truman (Independence High School –failed haberdasher, local judge, one term U.S. Senate, one month Vice President) ended World War II with the atomic bombings of Japan, used an airlift to save besieged Berlin, founded NATO, rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and reasserted civilian control over the military by firing MacArthur. George Washington (no formal schooling – military general) established the modern presidency, helped write the Constitution, established tradition of giving up power after two terms, declined a monarchy over America and asserted national sovereignty against local challenges to Federal authority (Whiskey Rebellion).

Evidently, lack of schooling or experience is not a reliable predictor of performance as President either.

Neither is membership in the governing elite. Mr. Brooks’ protestations to the contrary, George W. Bush was and is a member of the elite political class –which proved to be no guarantee of great performance.

In the end, Mr. Brooks’ big objection to Sarah Palin is that she is not “one of us,” a member of the governing class. “Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared,” Brooks says.

So who are the “best prepared?” Who gets to define that? The editorial board of The New York Times? I submit the definition belongs to the people, not to academics, not to party bosses, and certainly not to opinion writers like David Brooks. Let the people choose their leaders from among themselves. No one should be entitled to rule (or disqualified) by virtue of their education, experience or membership in a cultural elite.

Democracy is the people selecting their leaders from among themselves –not from a list of “approved candidates” submitted by the press or the parties.

Blundering Into War

Wars usually begin because someone miscalculated the resolve of the other side.

Having successfully faced down England and France over the Sudetenland, Hitler thought that threats of war against Germany if he invaded Poland were simply bluffs. Hitler invaded and France and England declared war.

When Argentine dictator General Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands he refused to believe that a pacifist Britain would insist on taking back control of its colony by force. He expected Margaret Thatcher to accept the Argentine occupation as a fait accompli. Instead, she sent the Royal Navy.

Saddam Hussein was one of the great “misestimators.” When the I5anian Revolution purged the officer corps of the army he expected to be able to seize a tidy parcel of Iranian coast for himself. What he got was a decade-long stalemated war that won him precisely nothing.

So Saddam followed up that blunder with a bigger one. Figuring the West was too effete, too decadent to resist, Saddam invaded Kuwait, a nation friendly to the United States and a key oil-producing country. This time even France joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that, under the command of General Norman Schwartzkopf, destroyed the Iraqi military and tossed the invaders ignominiously out of Kuwait.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the potential of eclipsing the late great Saddam as the worst judge of another country’s intentions.

If he gets the Jerusalem Post he may have noticed an item this weekend headlined, “Israel slated to buy U.S. smart bombs.” The bombs in question are 1,000 GBU-39s, a GPS-guided munition that can penetrate 90 centimeters of steel-reinforced concrete to deliver a 22.7-kilogram package of high-yield explosives from a launch point 110 kilometers from the target.

This is not the weapon of choice to burrow into a target like the Natanz underground uranium enrichment facility in Iran. Israel has plenty of 900-kilo bunker-buster missiles for that particular job.

What the GBU-39 purchase demonstrates is that Israel is thinking ahead to the post-strike environment. Iran will surely unleash Hizbulla against Israel if Natanz is taken out. The GBU-39 will allow the Israeli air force to engage hardened enemy targets in Lebanon and Syria without having to overfly enemy-held territory. Ordering the bombs now is also a hedge against a possibly unsympathetic administration in Washington, should Barack Obama be elected.

The bottom line is that Israel is taking Ahmadinejad’s threats of extinction quite seriously. Even if Europe and the United States do nothing, Israel will not allow Iran to threaten its existence. Ahmadinejad needs to believe this.

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself...

Who is the scariest person in America?

According to the Sunday papers, Sharon Osbourne, Ed Koch, Matt Damon and Mary Mitchell, it’s Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the GOP candidate for Vice President.

Mrs. Palin is the target of a renewed round of invective from the media and political elites this weekend. In the past two weeks the Left has been spraying manure at the woman in hopes something will stick. All this has served to do is to improve the McCain-Palin poll numbers and to move the discussion away from Barack Obama’s programs to his qualifications for high office verses hers.

And yet, although Americans increasingly see the Left as a bunch of bullies ganging up on Sarah Palin, and even though Obama would dearly love to talk about economics, his “friends” insist on trying to drive a stake through Mrs. Palin’s heart. Thus the effort for Obama mires down in precisely the kind of slimy politics that Obama had vowed to avoid.

We are now at the point where the hatred of Sarah Palin on the left lapses into actual derangement as her enemies wish for her to be obliterated, jailed, destroyed, execrated. Let’s tiptoe through some of the verbal nosegays her enemies are offering:

“She hates women,” – Pink

“I think there's a really good chance Sarah Palin could be president, and I think that's a really scary thing, because I don't know anything about her,” –Matt Damon. What better reason for fear than ignorance?

"Palin should be [a] laughingstock to all feminists"—Mary Mitchell

“Sarah Palin named two of her children after witches.” --The New Republic

“She's friends with all the teenage boys. You have to say no when your kids say, 'can we sleep over at the Palin’s? No! NO!'” –Randi Rhodes, who also claimed this week that McCain was “well-treated” by the North Vietnamese while a POW….

“A cocky wacko.” –Senator Lincoln Chaffee

"Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." –Wendy Doniger, Newsweek.

“After four years of sex and treachery in Desperate Housewives, I thought I was a perfect pick for vice president.” --Eva Longoria

"I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." -- Bob Herbert, New York Times

“[Her] primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” –Carol Fowler, South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman.

“Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right.” –Cintra Wilson, Salon magazine.

"In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them ... “ –Ann Friedman, The American Prospect

“[Palin’s values] more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers…What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” --Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.

“Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.” –Cintra Wilson, Salon.

“…Night after night, [Palin] appears in my dreams, always as a scolding, ominous figure.” –David Plotz, Slate.

‘Tis said that insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. The Left expects that one of these days someone is going to say something about Palin so apt that people will turn massively against her in ridicule and scorn. That’s not going to happen.

What is happening is that Barack Obama and the campaign are diminishing themselves by fighting over the qualifications of the GOP voice presidential candidate, which only serves to bring Obama’s wafer-thin resume into sharper focus. What is happening is that the people who should be talking about the economy –the GOP’s weakest issue—are talking about Palin instead. The Left is revealing its snobbery, its elitism, its scorn for ordinary Americans and their culture, its hatred of religion, and, yes, its sexism when a female dares to disagree with revealed leftist wisdom.

Obama can still win this election, but he and his side are beginning to deserve to lose.

Obama, Charlie Gibson and Mr. Kim

What I like about Barack Obama: Being a Republican, I like the fact that when he is accused of something, he tends to repeat the accusation over and over –until everyone has it memorized.

It’s very important for Barack to have the last word and to be right. That’s why he repeats things like the “lipstick” remark –to prove he was right all along.

I also like his arrogant treatment of the truth. It betrays, I think, an assumption that either the press is going to shield him or that the average voter isn’t very bright. He claims he never voted against a bill to preserve the lives of babies surviving abortions. But as a State Senator in Illinois he did just that, including a bill modeled after federal legislation written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Obama cites as proof of his superior judgment his opposition to the War in Iraq (while he was still a state senator). He notes, with disapproval, John McCain’s inferior judgment for voting for the war. Then what does Obama do? He names Joe Biden –another vote for the war—to be his running mate!

If nothing else, the Obama candidacy has settled the question of which is more dangerous –drug use or Christianity. Obama’s admitted cocaine use as a young man, we are told, is nothing to be concerned with. The same people who dismiss his past with drugs, however, seem to be getting quite upset with Sarah Palin’s onetime affiliation with a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal church.

* * *

Did you catch part one of Charles Gibson’s interview with Gov. Palin last night? This is a subjective call on my part, but I got the feeling he could not stand her. He was all closed in on himself and he spoke to her in an unnaturally quiet tone of voice, as if he were forcing himself to talk.

One could make the case that he was marginally rude to Gov. Palin. He asked her if, when McCain offered her the nomination, she had had a moment of doubt as to her qualifications. She said she did not, prompting the frankly disbelieving Gibson to put the same question to her again! When she repeated that she felt no hesitancy, he accused her of “hubris.”

* * *

Kim Jong Il is apparently in worse shape than anyone thought. He missed a major military parade but, we are told, his absence was hidden by “production values.” The speculation is that he may be physically and intellectually impaired by the cerebral accident.

None of his three sons are suitable to take over the country and his generals all look under fed. …which brings us to the reason Mr. Kim had a stroke. For one thing he was a chain smoker most of his life, though he quit a few years ago.

Secondly --and this is an important distinction-- he was arguably the only fat man in North Korea. The destruction of agriculture in North Korea has been pretty thorough, even by Stalinist standards. There have been years under the late Kim Il Sung (“The Glorious Leader”) and Kim Jong Il (“The Beloved Leader”) when as many as a million North Koreans have died of starvation. Only Kim Jong Il has been able to stay pleasingly plump.

Kim Jong Il, by the way, loves shark caviar and dishes made of shark fin and fresh conch. If he is partially paralyzed he probably won’t be dining so royally in the future, though, and the Joy Brigades may have to be disbanded.

The Joy Brigades, for those unaware, are groups of junior high-aged maidens conscripted into State service by Mr. Kim, to provide highly specialized entertainment for his elderly generals and, of course, to satisfy his own pedophilic inclinations.

If Mr. Kim has been sidelined, it is very likely that the Chinese, with the full approval of the United States, will try to set up some kind of satellite government in North Korea. Perhaps the Koreans can be persuaded to let a couple million Chinese “volunteers” come in to run the country –and very gently disarm it of their atom bombs and million-man army. It would make for a surprise happy ending for that country’s sorry saga, and it would mean that pretty 13-year-old Korean girls would have a chance of making it to 14 as virgins.

Pigs 'n' Putts

Lenny Bruce once did a very funny bit about being on trial for using an obscenity in one of his nightclub comedy routines. The word, though shocking, isn’t all that shocking; the objection was mostly that Mr., Bruce had dared to use it in a night club full of undercover police.

In the bit, the word had to be used in the courtroom over and over so that the judge and jury would fully appreciate the gravity –and depravity—of the offense.

DA: “Mr. Bruce, did you say the word **** in your act?”

Bruce: “I said, ‘****.’

Court Reporter: “Could you repeat that?”

Bruce: “Certainly. ****.”

Judge: “Let the record show that Mr. Bruce said the word ‘****.’”

Court Reporter: “Could you spell that please?”

Bruce: “Of course. ****…* - *- *- *. ****.”

...And so on, with the reporters and spectators all muttering “He said, ‘****!’”

I am reminded of that story when I see the coverage of Barack Obama’s observation on the persistence of swinishness of certain animals despite the application of lip cosmetics.

Of course Obama was NOT saying Sarah Palin is a pig. Although I reject his politics, I still believe that the man himself is a thorough gentleman with admirable manners and a genuine desire to do good in the world. He seems to be a nice guy, in short, the kind who would not stoop to childish name-calling.

The trouble is that for such an eloquent man, Barack Obama has a tin ear. After her pit bull joke at the convention, Sarah Palin owns the word “lipstick.” If someone or something in this campaign is said to be adorned with lipstick, that someone is going to be assumed to be Governor Sarah Palin.

There is no great truth to be learned from this incident except that everything a candidate says from this point of the campaign onward is going to be scrutinized by the press and opposition party with scanning electron microscopes. Obama’s innocent crack about GOP policy has already generated tens of thousands of vehement words in print and on the air. Imagine if he had actually said something!

Reports that Kim Jong Il might be dead or seriously handicapped after suffering a massive stroke has dozens of people around the world saying, “Gee, that’s a shame.”

Doubly tragic is the fact, duly reported by the official DPRK news agency that not only is the world losing the services of a great statesman, but a great golfer as well. A few years ago, on his first-ever golf outing, the press agency informs us, Mr. Kim sank an astounding eleven holes-in-one! Not bad for the man who, as any North Korean schoolchild will tell you, has his hands full making the sun rise every morning.

George Bush Finds a General

I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but Bob Woodward’s The War Within paints a scene of George W. Bush’s wartime White House I find very recognizable as a Civil War scholar.

Lincoln’s big mistake was to be too deferential to his generals in the opening years of the war. Lincoln had commanded a company of volunteers during the Black Hawk War, never saw action and finished his service as a private. The generals in his Union Army –not including the men who won their stars thanks to their political connections—were professional soldiers, many of them schooled at West Point or VMI. Deference to their professional opinion came easily.

Better equipped, better fed and better armed than their enemies, however, the Union Army (at least in the Virginia Theater) took one beating after another as each illustrious commander, in his turn, was humiliated by the irrepressible Confederates. Bull Run was the ruination of Irwin McDowell. George McClellan got his comeuppance from a much smaller Rebel army outside the gates of Richmond in the Seven Days’ battles and failed to pursue a defeated enemy after Antietam. General John Pope was disgraced at second Bull Run.

Ambrose E. Burnside reorganized the army and then broke it to pieces charging up Marye’s Hill at Fredericksburg. Fighting Joe Hooker marched into the enemy’s country at Chancellorsville with victory in his grasp and stood stunned, like a deer in candlelight, as Stonewall Jackson flanked him and then routed him. The summer ended with a big Union victory at Gettysburg that was squandered when General George Gordon Meade smashed an entire corps of Robert E. Lee’s army and then failed to pursue it closely enough to finish off the Rebels.

Lincoln sometimes wondered if his generals were fighting for a win, or just for a tie, where the states came back together –with slavery. Undoubtedly some of the generals felt just that way. Some of his generals were heartsick at the slaughter of the battlefield. Improvements in arms and ammunition, especially the range and accuracy of the Minie ball rifle round meant that any big battle was going to produce a bloodbath. At Shiloh (1862) more soldiers died during the two days of fighting than in all the wars and Indian wars America had fought from 1775 onward.

It opened the eyes of Major General Ulysses S. Grant. Until Shiloh, he thought the Confederates would collapse after a few losses. Now he knew that only long and bitter fighting involving the dismantling of the south’s military and industrial war-making capabilities, the destruction of enemy’s will to resist –and the loss of tens of thousands of Union soldiers in the process-- would have to happen if the war was to be won. This became a school of thought in the army, attracting such men as Phil Sheridan, George Thomas and, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Lincoln had been looking for a general who wanted to seize the initiative and never let it go. Grant’s plan that all Union forces attack at pretty much the same time in 1864 had been Lincoln’s thinking for a long time…though his generals didn’t buy into it. Now the Union had a coordinated strategy for the entire war. Every Confederate army was to be attacked, allowing none of them to send troops in aid to another.

In 2007 matters looked just as grim at the White House. Bush’s generals were espousing the astounding notion that by drawing down forces in Iraq the war would be won more quickly because the Iraqi government would be forces to train up an army for its self-defense that much sooner. This was astoundingly illogical to Bush, who saw it as a way to turn Baghdad 2007 into Saigon 1975.

Bush cast about for new leadership, and came up with his own U.S. Grant in the form of General David Petraeus. Petraeus wanted five more brigades –about 30,000 men including 4,000 Marines to implement a plan whereby the U.S. would stay in the neighborhoods it fought for, rather than fight and go home to Camp Liberty. Petraeus went after Al Qaeda in Iraq and enlisted the help of our former Sunni adversaries in Anbar Province. He let the Shiite militias know he meant business, convincing Muqtada Al Sadr to call off his Mahdi Army and to personally exile himself to Iran.

Bush gave Petraeus the cover he needed to do all this, shielding him from the jealousy and intrigues of fellow officers in the Pentagon –much in the same way that Lincoln upheld Grant through the horribly bloody summer of 1864. Lincoln’s instincts proved to be accurate. Grant’s plan eventually dismantled the Confederacy. Bush’s instinct to go outside the box to find Petraeus and trust in the Surge has been rewarded with a war that is virtually won.

History may yet be kind to George W. Bush.

Ordinary Women and Sarah

“I Am Sarah Palin. Her Story is My Story”

T-shirts with that slogan are beginning to show up on websites and on the backs of women at political rallies. Women and men are excited by Sarah Palin because she is so recognizably one of us. More than that she represents a practical feminism that many women and thinking men have been yearning for and not finding.

Because she is pro-life, Sarah is ipso facto not a feminist…at least if you subscribe to the Gloria Steinem-Patricia Ireland definitions. Abortion is the cutting issue for the official women’s movement. Causes like withdrawal from Iraq, support of the Democratic Party and dedication to “racial justice” are also litmus tests of the true feminist.

When men and women watch discussion shows or read magazine articles about feminist ideals, the conversation is often about career (not job) issues verses home life and ways in which the sexual dynamic between men and women is changing. It is not about the ordinary problems of ordinary women.

Most of the women I know do not have glamorous careers or sophisticated sex lives. Quite a few are waitresses or coffee shop barristas. They include hospital orderlies who have to do nasty cleanup work. They are behind the counter at convenience stores. They are checkout clerks and stock clerks at the supermarket. They operate farm machinery.

They sell tickets at the multiplex, or they are behind the refreshments counter. Some are dispatchers and some drive cabs. Some wash dishes at the diner. Some answer the phone at the office. Some of them are young and attractive, some of them are old and, frankly, kind of tired. Some make good money; most don’t. And some work a second job –in addition to raising one or more children. Often, this is done without a father in the house, living one or two desperate paychecks away from ruin.

The feminist movement isn’t talking about women like these when it talks about “having it all.” These women have it all dumped on them. Work and a family aren’t even a choice for these women, but matters of necessity.

The feminists don’t even know who these women are. Waitresses, maids, janitors, farmers, cops, cabbies, and orderlies --they may or may not be from “flyover country” but to the feminist elite they are “flyover people.” The left elites reason that powerless and poorly educated, these women can only be led. They cannot lead.

Then, improbably, from the Republican Party, emerges a woman who demonstrates the universality of true feminism and proves that respect and equality for women are deeply conservative values.

Sarah Palin has earned her bread through hard physical labor alongside her husband. She has a decent education but not a fancy one. She is articulate but not glib. Her accent is a northwestern drawl. Her clothing is unfashionable but respectable. And she is prickly.

She has that same prickly quality the women we know ourselves get when the school defaults on a promise to their kids, or they plan to locate something hazardous in our neighborhood, or the town refuses to put up stop signs at that dangerous corner. Sarah gets her back up and speaks up.

Sarah does as she likes. If she wants to hunt, she hunts. If she wants to go snowmachining, she’s off! And if she wants to run for office, she gathers a bunch of her friends together and gives it a shot. Her husband is there to pick up the slack with childrearing and housework –when Sarah is not attending to those items personally. They make a good team as she makes the most of the choices that life in Alaska gives her.

The issues that preoccupy the women we know so well, the Wal Mart Moms, these Hockey and Soccer Moms who try to do the right thing for their families, are the issues Sarah Palin has lived with all her life. How are we going to pay for groceries? Where is the rent/mortgage money coming from? Do I like those kids my daughter is hanging out with lately? Should I get a third job on the weekends?

With enormous talent and energy Sarah Palin has answered the big issues in her life through enterprise and hard work. This ability to solve life problems in the same way men have always been able to in a free society, by using all her God-given talents, earning respect and recognition for deeds rather than sexual characteristics, ought to be the ultimate expression of the feminist ideal.

Well, it’s not. The left has defined in very specific terms what feminism is and what a feminist must believe in if she would call herself “feminist.” Sarah Palin, does not have a fancy degree, has no show business talents, is not a part of the L.A.-D.C.-NYC cocktail circuit, has no bonafides as a member of the permanent political class, dresses unstylishly, prays in church and is a breeder.

She is, talents aside, common and ordinary. Modern feminism has no use for common women and their issues. But thanks to Sarah Palin, the Republican Party has discovered that these women we know so well are a natural constituency.

The WORST Generation

Sometimes when our children emulate their parents it can be a beautiful tribute to the older generation. And sometimes it is neither beautiful nor flattering either to a generation or a country.

The generation being emulated in the streets of St. Paul Minnesota this week was not the generation that worked and served during the Vietnam War. They were –and are—The Unsung Generation, the heroes who did the work, fought the battles and were spat upon and called names by expensively educated leftist vagabonds.

And it was not the generation that grew up in the Depression fought in the Second World War, and who came home to raise the standard of living in the United States to the highest of any nation in history –while at the same time feeding our former enemies, rebuilding Europe and protecting them from Soviet invasion. That was, undeniably, the Greatest Generation.

No, the generation being emulated by the hoards of vile-mouthed, masked vagabonds in St. Paul last week were imitating the generation that ridiculed the hard work and conformity of their parents, who mated with barnyard indiscrimination, who introduced drug abuse to our culture as something that celebrated freedom, and who, in the streets of our cities, did the work of our enemy in time of war. It was that most self-absorbed, self-righteous and deeply self-centered youth the country ever produced. They were, and are, The Worst Generation.

In Denver, they protesters nd Worst Generation types were pretty much under self-control for Obama and the Democrats. There was a kind of 1960’s retro festival vibe to the week as today’s “activists” hobnobbed with real-live unreconstructed Worst Generation types. They did not “Recreate ’68.”

In St. Paul, in the land of “Minnesota Nice,” the “protesters" and Worst Generation types were as obnoxious as they could be, calling police vile names, smashing store windows, overturning trash barrels, attacking and threatening delegates, starting fires, throwing glass bottles, puncturing tires, blocking traffic, and skirmishing with the police. Some Molotov cocktails were seized; conspirators planning to kidnap delegates were thwarted. The convention was protected and 818 protesters were arrested.

It was pretty weak tea compared with the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Maybe today’s young hooligan simply does not have what it takes to live up to the standards of The Worst Generation…

McBrilliant and the Polar Bear

A month ago I was comparing John McCain to a sack of wet oats…unfavorably. There was no spirit to his presentation, no presidential charisma, just a tired looking Old White Guy stalking the speaker’s platform while Barack Obama bestrode the world like a rock-star colossus.

McCain’s lack of vim was contagious. The conservative base of the party was going to hold their proverbial noses and vote for the ticket, but they sure weren’t going to get very enthused about it either. Some simply shrugged and said, “I’m gonna sit this one out.”

Then McCain performed his first authentic political miracle. Somewhere deep inside the former Skyraider pilot, the quintessential Navy jet jockey decided he had had enough.

Advised by his campaign manager Rick Davis, McCain’s television messages against Obama took on a satirical edge, tying the Illinois democrat to the triviality of the celebrity culture, and mocking the stage-managed pomp of some of his appearances –like the speech at Berlin’s Victory monument. McCain jumped all over Obama when he suggested that keeping your tires inflated properly could be just as effective as drilling for new oil. Thousands of “Obama pressure gages” were distributed –to the fury of the Democratic candidate—and the daily polls showed the gap between the two men narrowing as the Democratic convention neared.

The DNC turned out to be a pretty good show, with Obama emerging from a Greek temple on the last night to give the best speech of his life before 80,000 adoring fans. It was the talk of the political world…for twelve whole hours.

Then John McCain pulled off his second and most brilliant --and luckiest—political miracle of the year by announcing he had selected as his running-mate Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, 44, an attractive brunette who also happens to be as tough as railroad spikes, an accomplished reformer, a gifted speaker, an authentic values conservative and the most popular governor in the United States.

The public got one look at her Friday in Ohio and went bananas. Suddenly the electricity and excitement that Obama’s appearances generated became a part of the McCain Straight Talk Express. Wherever he and Palin went, they were mobbed by excited, adoring masses who wanted a better look and to connect with them. Obama and his speech disappeared from the national conversation.

As everyone who reads this blog or who has opened a web page or read a newspaper in the past week knows, Sarah Palin found herself on the receiving end of the biggest effusion of bile ever spewed at one person by the liberal press and the left blogosphere.

They accused Sarah Palin of every kind of moral, political and motherly failing they could think of. They questioned the parentage of her Down’s syndrome child and then used him to question whether she could be a good mother if elected. They uttered half-truths and rumors that no one bothered to check out. For a solid (and sordid) week new gallons of mud were flung at the candidate almost every hour in the hopes that something would stick.

Last night, with the mainstream media ginning up rumors that McCain would have to dump her, Palin walked out onto the stage of the Republican convention, poised, attractive, recognizably and typically American and looking every inch like a happy warrior. For some forty minutes, demonstrating incredible skill and poise as a speaker, she demolished the Obama-Biden ticket without once mentioning them by name. With devastating wit and impeccable timing, she skewered the Democrats while simultaneously showing herself to be supremely likeable and competent. It was the best political speech by an American woman…at least in its delivery…ever, and one of the very best by anyone in the past ten years.

This latter-day pioneer woman of grit, wisdom and good cheer appeared unbroken and unbowed by the oceans of spew that had been dumped on her. Instead she was fighting back like an angry polar bear –forget the pit bull metaphor—and showing veteran politicians how to fight back against slander.

How the convention loved it! There had not been such rapture at a GOP gathering since the active career of Ronald Reagan. Some people were strongly reminded of the Gipper and of Margaret Thatcher. Cross a Great Communicator with an Iron Lady and Sarah Palin is what you get.

The next day even Palin’s critics were grudgingly admitting she had done a good job speaking. Her friends, I assure you, were over the moon. Rush Limbaugh, never a big McCain supporter, was calling him “McBrilliant.” The ever-lovin’ base was awake, on the phones and digging up cash for the campaign. People who were sitting out the election were chomping at the bit to vote for McCain-Palin.

As the left continued to pile on the slime she only became more and more of a sympathetic figure to the American public –which for some reason never seems to side with the bullies. Was this planned or just the kind of good luck granted to great commanders like McCain, who are willing to take a bold risk?

Thursday afternoon, a former sack of wet oats swung onto the podium for a walkthrough of his acceptance speech. He walked with the gingerly tread of a hotshot Navy jet pilot, and grinned like the happy warrior he is –a man whose bones might break but never, never, never his spirit. The game was on!

John McCain, Sarah Palin and Good and Evil

A reader responds: The jury is out on Johnny Mac's brilliance but [the Palin announcement] did upstage a great speech.

Out here [California], everyone thinks the Palin choice was not one of McCain's finest moments.

He seems to make snap decisions and views this complicated gray world in black and white moments of impulse.

If he picked her because "the base" would revolt on the convention floor if Ridge or Lieberman were chosen, then where is the “maverick” in him.

Why do you think he did not pick Huckabee (who can play a little bass as well as have somewhat of a grasp on things Republican?)

And I replied: I have to admit that Mike Huckabee's bass playing endeared him to me early on...and that he was my second pick for the nomination...after Fred Thompson.
I think Huckabee comes across as too much of a hick for McCain's tastes. Also, he does not really think out everything he says.
As for Lieberman and Ridge, they are pro-choice, which means that they would be spat out as readily by the GOP convention as a pro-life candidate would have been rejected by the Dems…had Obama selected one. Corollary: The Democrats will never nominate a pro-life candidate and the GOP will never nominate a pro-choice candidate.
Sarah Palin is a woman of surprising capacity. I have been reading and watching old interviews of her and she grasps the number one issue--energy--firmly and authoritatively. I also admire the way she has knocked down the GOP Corrupt Bastards Club's hold on the Alaska Government...and beat a windfall tax out of Big Oil that she turned over to individual Alaskans...and got the natural gas pipeline project started after 30 years of failed negotiations...
When McCain says he vetted her as thoroughly as the other candidates I believe him as he is an honorable man.

If McCain wasn't able to see nuances, he would not have been able to write campaign finance reform law with Russ Feingold or forge a deal on appointments of federal judges with Ted Kennedy, or write a bill on immigration reform both parties (but not the president) could heartily endorse... and play a major part in every bipartisan piece of senate legislation over the past 18 years or so...
McCain has a very keen sense of what is good and evil...a sense that was sharpened under five years of torture as a POW. That's why he can buck his president on the waterboarding issue.

It's fashionable now for people to say that there are no such things as "good" or "evil." Morality tends to be nuanced out of existence. Pat Moynahan called the process, "Dumbing deviancy down."
And yet, in this world there are some things that are decidedly good and decidedly evil. Evil exists in this world...metaphysically, spiritually, physically. The genocides in Darfur and Rwanda are and were evil. Racism is evil. Torture is evil --and we have no business doing it, because we are supposed to be the Good Guys... Nazism is evil. Crime for profit is evil ...even if the profit is only revenge or a sexual thrill. Starvation is evil. Sickness is evil (believe me I know). All forms of cruelty are evil.
Fortunately, the undisputedly good things are in much greater supply. Work is good, because it confers dignity. Familial love is good, because it banishes loneliness and selfishness. Erotic love is good...as long as the "love" part is not forgotten, and as long as it is loving and not using...Knowledge is good...Peace is good....unless it is a peace of fear that allows others to do evil things (see the rise of Nazi Germany as an example)...Charity is good...as long as it does not stand in the way of capable individuals finding work. Hope is good...if it makes us persevere and is grounded in at least a small but reasonable expectation of success…and what we hope for is itself neither selfish nor evil.
I don't dislike Obama. I think he is a good man. I just don't think his ideas will work. McCain comes closer to my way of thinking.

Shame Enough to Go Around

There is still plenty of shame to go around as the leftist press and blogosphere reach deep down into the mud bucket to smear Sarah Palin through her daughter and even her daughter’s fiancé.

Shame on the New York Post and the New York Daily News and all the other papers that quoted from high school junior’s Levi Johnston’s My Space page in which he uses a vulgarity to describe himself. Is it the prurience of this little detail or the desperation of some media types to smear Sarah Palin –however indirectly through her daughter’s boyfriend—that drives this sort of “coverage?”

Shame on Representative Robert Wexler (D-Florida) for taking the rumor that Palin had supported the Pat Buchanan campaign (back in 2000 –she actually supported Steve Forbes), and elaborating on the lie by saying:

“John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer *with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel …John McCain has failed his first test of leadership and judgment by selecting a running mate who has aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics. It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments.”

It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? But there is more, so…

…Shame, doubled, on Mark Bubriski, an Obama campaign operative, who emailed the Miami Herald, among others, saying, “Palin was a supporter of [MSNBC analyst] Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,”

Bubriski deserves double the shame because he not only smears Sarah Palin, but Barack Obama as well. I believe Obama when he says lay off the kids. I believe him when he reminds people his mother was only 18 when he was born. I believe him when he says he wants a new kind of politics. But loose cannon like the left bloggers and campaign “aides” like Bubriski smear Obama by belying his principles. For shame.

Shame on The New York Times, and specifically reporter Elizabeth Bumiller who claims, incorrectly, that Palin was a member for two years of the Alaska Independence Party, “which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede.” ABC’s chief Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper, repeated the stories. –but at least he added this: “Gail Fenumiai, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, tells ABC News that …’Gov. Sarah Palin first registered to vote in the state in May 1982 as a Republican, and she has not changed her party affiliate with the Division of Elections since that time.’”

The reason for the story, besides administering a good old fashioned sliming of the candidate, is to call into question the process by which McCain selected Palin…a major Democratic talking point.

At the rate that the militant left is slinging mud at Sarah Palin, her kids and even her kid’s boyfriend, I expect to have ample material for two to three blogs a day, as will the rest of the right-of-center blogosphere… At least until the left realizes how it is hurting, not helping, Barack Obama’s cause.

They may get a clue tonight when Fred Thompson gives his speech to the GOP convention. The topic is the sliming of Sarah Palin. I’m not going to miss it…

* Emphasis added. Buchanan denies this vehemently.

Psst! Hey! We Won the War! Pass It On…

Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province is no longer an American battlefield.
Anbar, along with Baghdad, was the birthplace of the Iraqi Insurrection, which developed after we beat Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 without any kind of cogent plan for military government afterward. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Beginning as the kind of lawless destruction and looting you typically get when no one is in charge of enforcing the law after a war, the Insurrection evolved into a loose coalition of tribes and Sunni veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army out to make the U.S. Occupation of Iraq as costly (and brief) as possible.
The world’s attention was finally caught by the insurrectionists when they ambushed a carfull of Blackwater civilian security personnel in Fallujah, lynched them and strung up their mutilated remains on a bridge.
Our response was slow in coming, but the city of Fallujah was to enter the annals of the U.S. Marines as one of its great battlefields. We fought in that city repeatedly, and in Ramadi, and along the highways of the province. We fought two enemies in Anbar, the Sunnis themselves and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was made up mostly of foreign fighters.
We were on the defensive. We reacted to events. We won our battles, but typically went back to our snug bases after victory, leaving the battlefields, like Ramadi and Fallujah for the enemy to reclaim. We did not have the confidence of the civilian population, who said nothing when they knew when and where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being planted to mine the highways. Amputated limbs and grisly head wounds caused by the IEDs became symbolic of our war there.
In February 2007, General David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq. He authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, which had become the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. Now he would apply it’s precepts practically.
Petraeus told Congress before shipping out that his plan called for decentralizing U.S. forces, especially in places like Baghdad. We would no longer concentrate in places like Camp Liberty, but go out to meet the enemy and stay on the battlefield after we’d won. It would require more troops to do this, which Bush and his new Defense Secretary provided –the famous Surge.
One thing that makes a commander great is that he is lucky. AQI made Petraeus lucky by acting like a combination occupying army, de facto government and Gestapo in Anbar Province. These Jordanians, Saudis and Syrians tried to run the Sunni province using terror and murder to enforce their fundamentalist Islamist rule over the native clans and their sheikhs. The Sunnis turned to the Americans for help just prior to Petraeus’ command.
Petraeus eagerly accepted the friendship of our erstwhile Sunni enemies and the two sides began to work in concert to crush AQI between them. With the people themselves on our side now, letting us know who were planting IEDs and where and where the enemy was basing their forces, American casualties began to taper off while AQI deaths and captures soared. Together, the Coalition armies, the Iraqi Army and the Sunnis drove AQI out of Anbar.
And now with AQI (for the moment) thoroughly beaten, with a competent Iraqi Army in existence, with the civilian government gaining more confidence and credibility every day ruling over a united Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, the most violent province of the war, Anbar, has been turned over to complete Iraqi control.
You might have missed the news, because the announcement came while Gustav threatened New Orleans, while Sarah Palin and her family was in the news and the Republican Convention was getting under way.
That’s how a modern war ends these days –slowly, gradually and unspectacularly. There is no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, just a statement to the press that, in effect, the war is over and we won.