Angela Merkel begins what could be an avalanche of world leaders opting to skip the opening ceremony at the Bejing Olympics.

As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games’ opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown’s determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

“The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate,” Tusk said. “I do not intend to take part.”

Question to ponder; would this have happened three years ago, before the conservative (by Euro standards) wave that swept Sarkozy and Merkel into office (and reinforced the  small-“l” liberal governents of Klaus and Tusk)?

If Merkel and others do not attend the opening ceremony, it is likely to reinforce a growing sense in China that the Olympics is being used to vilify the host.China had hoped to use the games to highlight its economic development and growing openness. But it is increasingly proving an opportunity for critics to bash China’s one-party political system, human rights abuses, treatment of minorities and tightly controlled media.

Wow, China.

One of the biggest problem in trying to “talk” about “race” with people – mainly but not exclusively with the white liberals who try to control so much of the “debate” – is that while it is human nature to be a racist, a sexist, a classist…a me-ist, in short, is the same problem one always encounters when dealing with people whose fundamental approach to life is idealistic, rather than pragmatic (and what is a liberal but an arrested idealist?); the definition of “racism” becomes less a matter of “lynchings” and “detritus of slavery” and “lack of opportunity”, and more a matter of “failure to adhere to some inhumanly-obtuse standard of purity in thought”.

William Raspberry – in a column that appeared nearly two decades ago, long before the online era – allowed that the former version of racism was dead, and was manifested (as of about 1991) primarily in the sort of ignorance that is, to a modestly secure person, more or less irrelevant.  Now, as I noted the other day, the aftereffects of institutional racism are still with us – mainly, in my humble opinion, in the devaluation of the male, especially the father, in black society.  And there’s a “racism of low expectations” that operates in our welfare system and in our schools, to be sure.  Those are sins of arrogance, political hubris and institutional stupidity (I’ll be charitiable), though, not of racial malevolence; as partisan as I am, I’m not going to say “the Department of Education and the Klan are different sides of the same coin”.

So dialog me this;  does anyone actually think there’s not less racism – defined as “active ractial hatred” – today than there was 50 years ago?  If not, how so?
Bonus question:  If your answer is “yes”, can you show me a society in all of history that has done as much to repeal human nature, as fast as our society has?

Derb on the gathering wave of revulsion over China’s behavior:

All sort of other ideas for embarrassing the ChiCom gangsters are buzzing around. Some are suggesting, for example, that athletes simply not show up for the opening ceremonies…There is also the idea, which I rather like, that an entire national team might shave their heads the night before the ceremony to show solidarity with Tibetan monks and nuns, the bravest and most persecuted of Tibetan patriots.

And he notes that this is unfamiliar territory for Beijing:

At the Olympics, the Maoists will be dealing with free people from free nations, and there is only so much they can do to control them. It’s not clear they understand this. They’ve been living for decades in a bubble of unchallenged power, and are not very imaginative.

And this is important. While societies and markets are instinctively adaptible, governments are not. People coloring outside the officially-approved lines is hard for these systems to deal with. A simple thing like “conservatives voting conservative” has flummoxed the Minnesota DFL and Media (pardon the redundancy) for over 20 years; the Chinese, obviously, could have it much worse.

And speaking of the market:

The opportunities for embarrassment are endless, and the prospect of it very delicious to anyone who loves liberty. Personally, I hope their stinking Olympics is a huge fiasco, and I see encouraging signs it may be.

On the one hand, Derb is right; Communism is just not good at making big things happen. On the other hand, the American media has a huge investment in presenting a spectacle – not a news story. I don’t anticipate much light being shown on the cockroaches.

Now, if the attendees include bloggers?

I was going to write something about the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

But, as is often the case, Jeff Kouba at TvM does it better.

Excerpt:

Bush was laying out the case that diplomacy means nothing if it isn’t backed up with a stick. Tea and crumpets do not make thugs and terrorists shake in their boots.

Hillary and Barack and the craven party they represent want to go back to those days of feckless diplomacy where dictators quickly figure out that there are no real consequences for aggressive violence. This is really what we’re voting on in November. What are we going to tell the world? Will we say as a nation we still have the resolve to see this through, or we will signal retreat?

Go read it.

Given the pessimism some of us note from the Obama campaign, I love the quote that DowningWorld noted, from the late William F. Buckley:

But the recently-departed William F. Buckley knew better. He knew that there is no need for despair in America. Here’s a quote from a collection published by the Wall Street Journal:

Despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.

Well, one American party vaguely remembers this…

I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:  I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college.

My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere) was so far to the right, he described himself as a “monarchist”, with a straight face; he also introduced me to a series of writers that helped push me along on my journey from left to right; Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, Tolstoii, Paul Johnson, and even P.J. O’Rourke. 

Dr. Blake and I weren’t entirely alone; the other upper-division major at the time was a guy named Scott.  We’d been friends since high school; a year older than me, we’d played guitar together in any number of abortive bands; he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Madagascar Red” in the college paper that I edited which, with the hindsight and gauzy soft focus that two decades’ remove grants all things, was as funny as anything in The Onion.  Honest.

Anyway, Scott was another conservative in the English department.  And as my own journey to the right coalesced, the three of us became something of a conservative brickbat-throwing machine at Jamestown.

The school’s library was run by quite a different specimen – a woman who was, in addition to the wife of my History minor advisor, a bit to the left of even the academic norm.  A well-meaning sort, but…well…

She had a “suggestion book” at the entrance to the stacks; if someone wanted to see a book or other resource, they could write it into the book.  There was a column for the librarian’s response. 

One chilly October morning, Scott and I walked into the library.  He looked around, grabbed a pen, and wrote down “Please get a copy of God And Man At Yale“. 

The response took a week or two; finally, the librarian wrote something snarky and dismissive.

Wrong move.

In an exchange that resembled a blog comment section, fifteen years before blogs were invented, Scott and the librarian mixed it up – he making the case for including this key, vital book in the collection, she backpedalling and trying to justify (eventually) its exclusion.

I think Scott graduated without seeing the issue resolved. 

The long and short of it being that the whole fracas was my introduction to the pure, simple joy of being a conservative underdog, duking it out with the leaden, lumpen establishment.

Just saying; without that dust-up on William F. Buckley’s behalf, this blog might never have existed.

Castro is resigning.

Good news, to be sure.  But, as Val Prieto points out, he’s walking out on his own time, according to his own plan, rather than being chased from Havana by a crowd of his subjects carrying guns in one hand and copies of the Constitution in the other:

I certainly don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, there is, after all, a little bit of happiness buried deep down inside because of the news, but, at the risk of sounding cliche, this is a tempest in a teacup.

We’re going to hear hopes that this is the beginning of change in Cuba. We’re going to hear arguments for the lifting of the embargo. We’re going to hear wishy washy eulogies and praise for the bearded bastard. We’re gonna hear a lot of crap today and in the next few days. Cuba experts will be coming out of the woodwork with their own particular theories and there will most certainly be editorials galore.

But at this point, it’s not a 1989 situation – where the edifice of the Communist dictatorship was smashed to pieces by an irresistible popular uprising, where attempts to control the crash ended either peacefully but decisively (Poland, Czechoslovakia) or in a hail of gunfire (Romania).

At this moment, Cuba’s change of government is a controlled crash; Castro’s had the year-plus since his illness became public knowledge to arrange an orderly transfer of power to Raoul, and to ensure that all the loose ends – like popular anger – are controlled for.

There is going to be much ado about new “freedoms” in Cuba and “changes” in policy and what not. Some are going to point to these as proof of raul’s willingness for change. But, you know what? Freedom doesnt come piecemeal. The few crumbs this “new and improved” castro regime will toss down to the Cuban people will do little to stay any true hunger for freedom.

The day there is real change in Cuba – and not a carefully choreographed one – will be the day when every single Cuban on the island is allowed to know who Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is. When every Cuban is allowed to know exactly and truthfully why he, and so many like him, have been rotting away in putrid jail cells for years.

For fifty years, the Cuban people have been physically, mentally, spiritually, ideologically, culturally and emotionally emasculated. Today’s news is just another snip in a surreptitiously planned and meticulously orchestrated surgery.

The best we can hope for at this point?  Surgery sometimes goes awry.   Sometimes transplants get rejected.  Bad news in most cases.

Good for Cuba, in this case.

Hang in there, Val and company.

Humans have a deep-seated need to belong to something bigger.

And I’m not just talking about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, here. Bear with me – Ed and I were talking about this on the show on Saturday, and I’ve got this urge to elaborate. And we know how ugly that can get…

———-

For most of history, that “something bigger” has meant “higher powers” and “eternity” – the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, Valhalla, Nirvana, whatever. Organized religion, for much of human history, has focused (or, depending on the religion and your point of view, exploited) that human need, for good (hope, charity, Haendel and Bach) or ill. Religion is a hot topic, one way or another, for most of the organized world’s people.

And part of being “part of something bigger” also means “being against something bigger and badder and on the other side”; to Christians, it’s evil in its many forms, from Satan to temptation to what-have-you.

After the left claimed God was Dead in the late 19th century, that human impetus didn’t go away, of course. People have exploited that human desire even as they denied the Higher Power that had been its focus.

Marxism replaced God with ineluctible forces of history. Lenin turned that academic notion into a pseud-messianic crusade, an overarching “something bigger” that subsumed all of Russian (and, to his warped little mind, world) society. Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian with a keen understanding of how people work, expanded his cult of personality to Messianic proportions – lessons the likes of Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, Idi Amin and Pol Pot (himself a former Buddhist monk) exploited. And of course, they replaced Evil with a variety of enemies – class enemies, countries, anti-cults, whomever.
Hitler learned from Lenin’s mistakes, and did him one better; rather than banning God and the thousands of years of communal tradition His worship brings along, he co-opted it. An atheist, he wrapped himself and his party in the traditions of German Lutheranism and the mythology of German Catholicism, and – more importantly – the overarching German notion of Volk. This concept is a hard one to explain to Americans – I minored in German, and I’m only familiar with its outer edges – but it’s an idea at the nexus of the German land, language and history; Blut und Boden (“Blood and Territory”) is a phrase as familiar to students of Volk as “Domini et filii et spiritus sanctus is to Catholics, something with a meaning far beyond the literal to the adherent. Volk goes well beyond folklore and tradition, and was a sort of meta-religious link to Germany’s pagan past, underpinning German life and faith and culture the way paganism is just behind the surface of Latin, African and Caribbean Catholicism.

And so rather than having to spend time and energy vanquishing thousands of years of folk tradition and religious teaching, all Hitler had to do was take advantage of it.

Volk aided Hitler in putting a Big Evil – Judaism – in front of the people, as well; the Volk tradition viewed life on the land as inherently more noble and valuable than life in the towns; it viewed town and city life as corrupt and ignoble. And it associated Jews with city life, and at its extremes blamed them for its ills and corruption. The Lutheran Church in Germany drew heavily on Volk tradition and mythology, while the Catholic Church of the day added its own level of anti-Semitism which, again, was ripe for Hitler’s picking in Germany and especially Poland.

But in all cases, in the USSR and Red China and Nazi Germany and to similar extents in fascist countries everywhere, there were Big Enemies to replace the ones they’d abolished.

———-

Ed and I talked about Michelle Obama’s “Save the Nation’s Soul” speech on the Northern Alliance show last weekend (the podcast should be up soon). We called out this statement of Mrs. Obama’s:

And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn’t gotten better for regular folks. ….

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Ed’s response on the show was similar to what he wrote on his blog:

But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I’d look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I’ll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I’m not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

And my first reaction was similar; “Step off, ‘Chel.  My soul is between Christ and I”.

But it’s really a lot worse than rude presumption.  It’s not just that government is a lousy place to go for moral repair.  It’s that when govenrment tries to serve as a national soul, things break and people get hurt.
Fortunately, Jonah Goldberg just wrote an entire book on the subject, and the reaction to the book sparked a really great blog,  on which he writes;

Many of the tropes of a political religion/liberal fascism are evident. He exalts unity as it’s own reward. His talk of starting new and starting over often sounds like more than merely “turning the page” on the Bush-Clinton years. It sounds a bit like starting at Year Zero.

Which was the hallmark of Lenin and Mao; the past had to be wiped away (and its practitioners, real or imagined, sent to gulags) before the future could really get underway.

But what I find most intriguing is his rhetoric of destiny and “choseness.” He often makes it sound like he has been selected by forces of providence or God or simply history for this moment. He is, in Oprah’s words, “The One.” But even more interesting, he tells voters they are the ones. “This is it,” Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.” That’s pretty oracular stuff.

And…:

Such a vision is comforting because it plays upon man’s inherent desire to belong, to be protected by his fellow man and his community. “Strength in numbers” is the narcotic of all populists, the logic of all “people powered movements” as leftwing bloggers like to say (though for reasons that defy easy analysis, the left has mastered the art of casting itself as the voice of the dissidents against the oppressive, stultifying “herd mentality” even as it places the group at the top of its hierarchy of political aesthetics). This is the motivating passion behind the fascist quest for order.

Sometimes it sounds like Obama wants to talk about God’s plan when he’s talking about his own campaign for a New Order. But most times, you can see that he wants to stay on the secular side of the divide — where his white base resides — but without giving up the prophetic vision. He wants to persuade his followers, and perhaps himself, that he is elect, but he cannot do so without religious language.

There’s much more, and you should just go read it.

I get leery of the likes of Mike Huckabee (note: not “Huckajesus”.  Just…no.  Don’t) and his rhetoric – but invoking ones’ personal, transparently-visible, well-known faith (anyone who thinks Christianity has a secret agenda has been sleeping for the past 2000 years) into the White House is both limted by the Constitution and mediated by the fact that it is completely open and transparent.  Most importantly, it’s a very different thing than turning the state into its own pseudo-religion.

It’s not a new observation that the Olympics have become a joke; even when I was a kid, watching the ’72 games in Munich (before the massacre), I remember hearing complaints about the doping, the commercialism, the professionalization of the Eastern Bloc athletes, the jingoism the games spawned, and on, and on, and on.

But for anyone who thinks the Olympics’ shameful, politicized nature is a new thing, I present for your review this photo:

When the subject of the ’36 Berlin Olympics comes up, most Americans think Jesse Owens, the black runner who went toe to toe with the “master race” and said “you got no game, beeyotch” (or words to that effect).

Not all of the games’ spectacles were so ennobling. The photo above is a shot of the British soccer team, giving the Nazi salute at an exhibition game in Berlin’s Olympiastadium in 1938, on the orders of one of Britain’s Foreign Office and “Football Association”, who wanted to mollify Hitler in the interest of lace-undie diplomatic nicety.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. David Mellor writes for the UK Daily Mail:

    Was Hitler made more reasonable by that salute, or by the willingness of the world to offer him a massive propaganda boost two years earlier at the Berlin Olympics by turning up without a squeak of protest? Of course not, which leads to some interesting parallels with today.

    In 1936, persecution of the Jews was stopped briefly, dissidents were rounded up and kept out of the way and Nazi Germany put on its best face for the Games.

Why bring it up today?

Because it’s happening again – this time in China:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The move – which raises the spectre of the order given to the England football team to give a Nazi salute in Berlin in 1938 – immediately provoked a storm of protest.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team…The clause, in section 4 of the contract, simply states: “[Athletes] are not to comment on any politically sensitive issues.”

It then refers competitors to Section 51 of the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

In other words, Beijing is putting all Olympic athletes under a gag order.

Oh – and for what it’s worth, my opinion of Prince Charles just jumped from “Hold” to “Buy”:

Prince Charles has already let it be known that he will not be going to China, even if he is invited by Games organisers.

His views on the Communist dictatorship are well known, after this newspaper revealed how he described China’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks” in a journal written after he attended the handover of Hong Kong. The Prince is also a long-time supporter of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader.

Why is the US participating in this sham, which serves only to legitimize the brutal, lethal Beijing regime?

I hereby coin a new term; Kersten Delusional Disorder.

I originally thought “Kersten Derangement Syndrome”, but I think KDD is a more serious pathology.

When they got the word that the Strib was going to hire a conservative columnist (to put in the stable with DFL monkeys Lori Sturdevant, Nick Coleman, Doug Grow, Kim Ode, Pat Reusse and, well, pretty much all of them short of James Lileks), the local lefty pundocracy acted like someone had proposed giving them a rectal exam with a pool cue; her addition to the staff – a lone conservative voice in a room full of people with boy and girl crushes on Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone – prompted the local Sorosphere’s most irritating conceit, the statement-as-fact that “The Strib is a conservative tool”.

Naturally, Kersten is pretty much right about everything, and is head, shoulders and ankles better than anyone else on the Strib columnist staff.

Last week, she wrote a column about Rep. Ellison’s “Department of Peace” proposal. Kersten points out the grim fact; institutional pacifism has a long record of abject failure to prevent war. She cites Norway, which, in the wake of the bloodbath of World War I joined Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and many other smaller European nations in declaring pacifism their primary line of national defense:

Norway’s commitment to what Ellison calls a “culture of peace” dates back to its founding in 1905, according to a 2006 report by Col. Karl Hanevik of the Norwegian Army. For decades, writes Hanevik, the country’s foreign policy was based on a firm belief that “international disputes should be solved via arbitration and international law.”

After World War I, Norway’s leaders placed their hopes for peace in the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, and let their military go to seed.

Norway declared neutrality when Hitler threatened in 1939.

Indeed, they officially resolved that all belligerents were equally wrong; that the Poles who were fighting for their lives, and the Brits and French who declared war in their support (but didn’t do much else) were equally as wrong as the Nazi regime that was bombing Poland’s cities.

Which is, indeed, one of the most corrosive conceits of today’s “peace” movement racket.

The country was wholly unprepared when Germany invaded on April 9, 1940…The German blitzkrieg rolled through Norway, and the king and government fled to England for safety…

Pretty thoughts didn’t work

Not only that, but the only reason King Haakon, his family and his cabinet were able to flee was because the only parts of Norway’s military that functioned as planned on that first day of the war – an ancient coastal fortress and a forty-year-old torpedo – sank the German cruiser Blücher and the German battalion that was supposed to cut off the retreat route from Oslo. And because the only squadron of Norwegian fighters that was capable of taking to the skies against the Luftwaffe broke up a German attempt to drop paratroops in the area.

Not, let us note, because of any pacifists’ actions.

Let’s make no mistake, here. Peace is something to strive for. Peace is almost always preferable to war. I said almost.

But pacifism is only tenable in a world where everyone believes in peace. Pacifists like to point out the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as triumphs of “passive resistance”. But both of their successes depended entirely on their taking place in a context of the (general) rule of law, in areas controlled by liberal democracies who were, if not initially friendly to either of them, at least not actively disposed to kill both men and all of their followers.

So – Kersten was right.

And her critics?

Well…

AlphaBetty writes for MNBlue, the home of an endless stream of dozey conspiracy theorists and purple-faced rantmongers. And her take on Kersten indulges in the same kind of selective, self-serving, myopic ignorance that, by nature, has to be prevalent to believe in things like “Departments of Peace”.

While Ms. Alphabetty may seek “peace”, she commits violence against clarity and context:

Norway was asking for it? Katherine Kersten blames Norway’s aversion to war for Germany’s World War II invasion of that country.

Popping a bully in the nose is a limited strategy in the school yard. That’s also true in the realm of international affairs. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you circle your defenses. Sometimes you stand together and say as a group, this will not happen here.On this last point, the citizens of occupied Norway have much to teach us.

If violence is not the path to peace, neither is passivity. In the face of brutal domination, Norwegians hung together. Risking arrest, they wore subtle symbols of solidarity, a paper clip on the lapel, a bright red hat or vest.Resisting anti-Semitism, they refused to speak German, pretending they didn’t understand a language as common in Norway at the time as English is today. In Oslo, commuters refused to sit next to Germans on the bus.Was it effective? The bus action clearly got the goat of the Deutsche(Germans). They declared it illegal to stand when seats were open. More importantly, the horrible effects of German domination, including Jewish deportation were somewhat lessened in Norway than in other occupied zones.

Today would have been the 97th birthday of the greatest president of the second half (and maybe all) of the twentieth century, and almost-certainly the greatest president of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan.

I’ll try to bring some jelly beans to the office.

I thought about digging out a slew of quotes from the Great Communicator – and other blogs no doubt will. Check ’em out.

But I was reminded of the greatest testimony to Reagan as I spoke with the fella from the Caucuses at the caucuses. The man, who grew up under the Soviet system, and I spoke for a while, and as we talked about conservatism, he move the conversation over to Ronald Reagan; he testified to the reverence people all over Eastern Europe feel for the man.

The Georgian reminded me of a quote I got from a Ukrainian co-worker a few years ago. A bit of a liberal bohemian himself, he’d likely never have been a Reagan voter.

And yet when we talked politics, he solemnly noted “Ronald Reagan gave me my life”.

With that in mind, I give you this.

Happy Birthday, Gipper.

As I’ve pointed out on this blog since its very first day, I started out as a liberal.  I’d probably have called myself a liberal into my early twenties; I voted for Reagan in secret in ’84.

But I remember pretty keenly when I first started having serious questions about liberalism.  It was Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise” speech.  I remember the speech – reading, hearing, watching, I don’t remember exactly how I remember it, but I do – and thinking “so that smug little bastard’s got his, and now he’s telling me I gotta assume I won’t get mine?  Screw him”. 

It took me a few years to realize that Carter was not the aberration – that Carter and his malaise were the rule, not the exception; that liberalism was all about patiently, politely asking those who had theirs – the money, the jobs, the medical care, the information, the security, the power – if you could have yours, your post-tax income or work or CAT scan or news or police protection or motivation or whatever.  Pretty please?  If I promise to be happy to pay for a better Minnesota?

And I have to hope that every time someone, somewhere, hears this deeply stupid remark by Bill Clinton, that a new conservative gets his or her wings:

In a long, and interesting speech, [Clinton] characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”

At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? “Slow down our economy”?

Reading this, I think we need to start by taking a moment to thank God or ineluctible fate or biology or whatever for Newt Gingrich and the ’94 Revolution; between Hillarycare and this sort of attitude, the United States could have come out of the nineties with an economy the size of Bulgaria.

Bill!  Slapnuts Mr. President?   Let’s accept, hypothetically, that global warming is both real and significantly driven by human activity (and I am being hypothetical).  It is only through economic growth that humankind will develop a rational response. 

Economic growth slows population growth, as people develop the ability to feed themselves, curb child mortality, and need to have fewer kids to ensure survival.

Economic growth funds and eventually drives the innovations that allow society to perpetuate itself. 

If humankind indeed does need to save itself from itself, it will be through economic growth and the innovation that it drives.  Not through stagnation.

Not through Tic conceits like “slowing the economy down”.

Note to President Clinton:  the right stage door is calling.  You’re late for your exit.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION ADJUSTMENT: Commenter “Terry” notes that I took the quote out of context (see first comment, below). 

So Clinton’s not advocating economic shrinkage.  My bad.

Of course, his former Veep and most of the Green movement are, so my overall conclusions don’t change. 

…until Reagan’s Birthday.

The annual celebration will go on!

As we close in on this blog’s annual Reagan’s Birthday celebration, it blows my mind sometimes that there’s a whole generation of adults out there who have no concept of life that wasn’t in the post-Reagan world. People who don’t remember “Malaise”; who likely went through 12+years of schooling without really learning about the Cold War, who know little about Solzenitzyn and Reykjavik, the Brandenburg Gate; people who know the fall of the Berlin Wall only from music videos and various bits of post-irony.

I got an email from someone today; this person was born in 1985 and, like an awful lot of people, is not a political junkie (and is thus pretty normal!). This person writes:

Hey Mitch! __________ here….. i’ve got a bit of a question for you that will make you see how uneducated i am about politics before my time (i’m 22.)
i’ve been reading your blog, truthfully not understanding a lot of it, but i’m interested: the general consensus whenever Reagan is brought up is
that he screwed up. Even Republicans think this way. i was raised in a house where from noon-5 all our radios blasted Rush Limbaugh and Joe Soucheray. My parents are uber-conservatives, who raised me with this line: “Ronald Reagan was a GREAT president.” That’s all they said. i never thought about it much, but for some reason a lot of people have been talking about him lately, my parents saying “I wish there were another Reagan running” and everyone else, including many people who post on your blog saying “Wow, Reagan was a mistake.” What did he do that was so wrong that even Republicans are bad-mouthing him? i haven’t been able to do much research on this, but if you could point me in the direction of a “Reagan for dummies” or another such resource, i’d be much obliged. i googled it, but there is way too much stuff that i don’t even know where to start. Thanks!

If you’re busy, don’t worry about it-it’s just a
casual interest of mine.

Well, of course I responded! The notion that people can grow up in this society and get their entire exposure to Reagan from people who are dedicated to rolling back his legacy – teachers, professors, the media, Hollywood – is a national travesty; any chance to try to roll it back, even for one person, is an opportunity and a gift.

So my response:

A *great* book to read – and a fast one, at that – is Ronald Reagan – How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President”, by Dinesh D’Souza. It’s a
fast read, and it’s a GREAT intro to the life of Reagan by a guy who was about your age when he worked in the White House. I’d lend you a copy, but he only copy I own is already lent out!

I grew up in a Democrat house, and was a liberal until was…well, about your age! And Reagan was the first Republican I ever voted for. It occurs to me
there’s a couple of generations out there who don’t kow how hopeless this country felt during the Ford and Carter years; your (plural!) entire frame of
reference is post-Reagan America! If you ever get a chance to see “Miracle” with Kurt Russell – the story of the ’80 US Olympic Hockey team (jeez, that was years before you were born!), the beginning shows a lot of why America was in trouble before 1980; demoralized from Vietnam and Watergate, with economic troubles that seemed intractable (inflation AND high unemployment). Add in Jimmy Carter telling us in a speech that we might all have to get used to the US being a smaller, weaker country, and top it off with *Iran* taking 53 Americans hostage and making the world laugh at us for a year and a half – it was a miserable time to be an American.

Just to give you a *very* quick digest of Reagan’s pros and cons:

PROS:

• he turned that around. Reagan was all about hope, patriotism. America never stopped being great, in Reagans world, and never would! We were still the “shining city on the hill”, not just the lesser of evils.
• He articulated a vision for smaller government and lower taxes. Remember – before Reagan, the highest marginal tax rate was over 70%! He cut that to under 40%, and made it stick!
• He had a vision; a world without Communism. He’d spent the forties and fifties (when he was still a liberal Democrat!) fighting communism in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. When much of the punditry believed that Communism and all of its horrors were here to stay, Reagan said “No” – we were going to free all those hundreds of millions of people. When his advisors advised him in 1987 to go easy on Gorbachev in a speech in Berlin, Reagan said – before a crowd of rapturous, screaming Berliners – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”. Four years later, the wall that *everyone* thought was permanent…was gone. This was HUGE for me. I grew up just down the road from a missile silo – the first place that’d have been nuked had the world gone to war. I wondered as a teenager and twentysomething – “why would I dare bring a kid into this world when the chances for a nuclear holocaust are so high, and so close by?” My daughter was born not long after the Berlin Wall fell, and after NORAD stood down from “hair-trigger” alert for the first time in a generation. For that ALONE, I thank God – and Ronald Reagan. I’m deadly serious – I still get a little choked up over that, alone – and more than a little POed at the historically-ignorant liberals who just. don’t. Get it.
• He created a genuine dialog in this country. Before Reagan, Republicans – dating back to the forties – were not that much different than Democrats; both parties weree big government, high-tax, high-intervention parties – the GOP *slightly* less so. (In Minnesota, it took an extra twenty years to
  have that debate, but it’s finally on, and the DFL hates every second of it!). Finally, there was a genuine alternative – which a lot of liberals find very, very threatening.CONS
• He ran up a huge deficit. He spent A LOT of money on defense, and still managed to hold the line on t xes. That meant he spent a LOT of money, and racked up a big deficit. George Will dinged him endlessly on spending. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln both racked up huge deficits, too; they had wars to win, and the nation was better off for it in both cases. Reagan had a war (albeit a Cold one) to win, too. Some economists have shown that America *saved* so much money on defense in the nineties (because there was no more Cold War!) that it more than repaid the costs of the Reagan Deficit – indeed, the “peace dividend” was largely what made the Clinton Presidency so prosperous.
• He didn’t do that much about social issues. While he was pro-life, he didn’t advance the pro-life movement all that much. I suspect that it’s largely because he didn’t see the role of the federal government to be changing social views (and I agree!).

That’s about the quickest intro to Reagan I could give. He was, without any doubt, the greatest president of my lifetime, and the best of the last half of the Twentieth Century; I’m not sure who’s dinging on him and why, but there’s my two cents.

I think that was a good, quick summary…

(more…)

I was – it should shock nobody – a big geek in elementary, junior and (most of) senior high school. I read. A lot. I had my library card maxed pretty continuously from when I got one – in 1970, at age six – until I graduated from high school.

Mostly, I was a history buff; I read pretty much every bit of history Jamestown’s library offered. Now, in reading as in everything else in life, I’m not as a rule a systematic guy. My style: I’d pick a subject, and go on a jag of from a week to several months reading about it incessantly (not unlike someone we all know). And those subjects were all over the waterfront.

But there were two threads that made the biggest impression on me, then and now.

One was Ernest Shackleton and the “Endurance” expedition of 1916-1919. Shackelton was a British explorer whose ship, Endurance, was crushed by pack ice during a hard Antarctic winter. He led his men for two solid years, surviving on the pack ice and then, as hope seemed to fade, on a couple of nearly-impossible treks across the superhumanly-turbulent South Atlantic, sailing hundreds of miles without sophisticated navigational gear in what amounted to open boats, in a climate where “dead of winter” and “heat of summer” aren’t really all that different. He made it, saving himself and his entire crew, in a feat that borders on mythic. Whenever life’s gotten difficult – or “difficult” – for me, I’ve looked back on Shackelton’s example, put my chin up, and kept on plodding.

My other big reading jones, from age 11 to maybe 16, was escape stories.

There were many, of course; during World War II, tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were held prisoner in conditions that varied from bad to atrocious, even with the protection of the Geneva Convention; all of them fared better than the Russian POWs (the USSR never signed the Geneva Convention, and neither Germany nor the USSR honored its terms with each others’ prisoners); all fared better than the concentration camp and extermination camp inmates, whose fate is a matter of shameful record.

And their stories – full of ingenuity, wit, hope, and above all endless perseverence in the face of near-impossible (and, in the case of concentration camp inmates, brutal and lethal) odds – inspired me, then and now.

Many of the stories should be household names, taught to students in our history classes as examples of the best of humanity. In 1944, the inmates of the German extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland – perhaps a thousand Jews and Russian POWs, there to work the machinery that consumed over a quarter-million lives, plotted to overwhelm and kill their guards and escape to the woods to try to meet the oncoming Soviets. A few hundred made it to the woods. A few dozen survived the German pursuit and the depredations of Polish civilians (who largely hated Jews more than Nazis). The story was made into a pretty good TV movie, of all things, in the mid-eighties, with Rutger Hauer, Alan Arkin and Joanna Pacula.

There was also the story of British Sergeant-Major John Coward, captured near Dunkirk, who escaped from several camps and infiltrated Auschwitz. He testified at Nuremberg.

But the biggest – and best-known – body of work on POW escapes was by three British authors – Paul Reid, Eric Williams and Paul Brickhill. Their work was closely related.

Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot captured after being shot down over Tunisia in 1943, wrote Reach For The Sky, the story of Wing Commander Douglas Bader – one of Britain’s top aces in the Battle of Britain, despite having two artificial legs. Bader was the subject of many books. Held at a number of camps, including the infamous castle at Colditz (documented in Reid’s Escape from Colditz, among others), where many “high-value” and “incorrigible” habitual POWs were held, Bader still attemped several escapes, despite his “handicap”.

Williams was a navigator on a British Short “Stirling” bomber shot down early in the war. Held in a camp on the Baltic coast of Poland, he attempted several escapes (memorialized in his book The Tunnel); afterward, transferred to Stalag-Luft III near Zagan, Poland, he carried out one of the most ingenious escapes ever, chronicled in his book The Wooden Horse: he and two other POWs built a wooden vaulting horse; the other inmates carried the horse, the inmates inside, to the same spot in the compound every morning. Camouflaged under the spot was a trap door, which led to a tunnel the men dug, patiently, with kitchen knives and condensed milk cans, every day for months. Finally, Williams and his two compatriots escaped. Improbably, all three made it back to the UK – one (Oliver Philpot) via Switzerland, and Williams and his partner John Phillips via Sweden.  All three wrote books – Williams’ is the essential one (and was made into a movie in the UK in 1950, something I expect only Lileks to know…)
Williams’ feat was mentioned in the other major book on the subject, Brickhill’s The Great Escape.  Brickhill’s book – a true story – covered perhaps the greatest POW camp break of all time, which took place at the same camp, about a year later. This story isn’t unfamiliar to Americans; it was turned into a major motion picture in the sixties which, if you leave out Steve McQueen’s role completely (Americans were involved in the beginning of the escape, but were transferred to a US-only camp early in the digging), wasn’t all that inaccurate by silver screen standards.

But don’t forget Steve McQueen’s role entirely. It returns in a bit. Sort of.

The escape itself was epic in scale; the idea was to dig three tunnels – “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry” – from the camp, allowing all 1,000+ inmates to escape. It went well beyond digging, though; the inmates – using jury-rigged, extemporized and smuggled materials – had to forge identity papers, create imitation civilian clothing, escape maps, iron rations for carrying on the road, and routes and tactics to get the escapees from the tunnel exit to freedom, for the POWs. (Brickhill was a POW at Stalag III at the time; barred from the escape by his claustrophobia, he particpated in other preparations).

And before any of that was an issue at all, they had to make the tunnels usable. Public TV’s Nova covered an archaological dig on the site of the old camp a few years ago. The soil in that part of Slaskie is thin, runny sand; Brickhill and Williams both spoke of the difficulties of digging through it, but it wasn’t until you saw it on Nova that you caught the full gravity of the engineering challenge it posed. The sand was a thin, yellow slop, resembling a combination of beach sand and diarrhea. The archeaological crew nearly lost a backhoe down a pit, when the side walls gave way; it would have been hard to build a useful sand castle in that slop. And yet, the Brits tunneled thirty feet down, building tunnels two feet wide and over 200 feet long, shored up with smuggled bunk boards and ration tins. They even built a trolley system on crude wooden rails, to ease the load of hauling the tons of sand – which then had to be distributed around the camp (it looked yellow and muddy until the sun could dry it, meaning that the inmates had to devise elaborate ruses to hide the stuff).

In the end, in March of 1944, 241 POWs entered one of the tunnels (one had been discovered, and the other used to hide sand); before the escape was discovered, 76 got out. 73 were recaptured (two Norwegian and one Dutch pilots made it to the UK); of the rest, 50 were murdered on Hitler’s orders.

I remember that story, like Shackleton’s, whenever I think something is impossible, or just too damn hard.

The above is a long, long lead-up to the actual story of this post.

The four great British POW escape books – Escape from Colditz, The Tunnel, The Wooden Horse and finally The Great Escape – all had one name in common; a young British officer, captured in the early days of the war, who attempted escape more than any known man. Steve McQueen’s motorcycle-jumping wise-cracking Yank in the Great Escape movie was said to have been loosely modeled after the real life exploits of Squadron Leader ‘Jimmy’ James, who passed away last week at age 92. S/L James particpated in the Great Escape – he was the thirtieth man through the tunnel on the night of the big break – as well as many earlier and later attempts. None of thsoe attempts got him back to the UK – he was rescued by American soldiers at the end of the war, as SS guards debated executing him and a group of other POWs that were bein held as hostages.  But all of which made him a legend among British POWs.

James was one of the few to escape execution after the Great Escape, and joined two others at the notorious death camp at Sachsenhausen, from where he made another daring escape by tunnel, only to be recaptured 10 days later.

Read the whole long, fascinating story.

And if you learn nothing else from his example, learn tenacity.

Realists on the right realize that, for the conservative movement, someone like a Ronald Reagan comes along maybe once in a lifetime.  We won’t likely see another.

Of course, most lefties don’t know this.

Well…one of them seems to (video).

I’m not sure if that’s merely an astute observation, or some wicked triangulation.
(From Peter in New York)

I try to be civil. Yes, indeed, I do.

But sometimes, it’s totally wasted.

To wit: Every time I try to figure out what are the most irredeemably stupid leftyblogs, I get to a short list; “Mercury Rising”, “Jesus General”, Atrios, “Clotting Stool” all hold places of honor…

…but at the top of the list is always “Shakespeare’s Sister”, a collection of the most vacuous, whiniest bloggers this side of Ken “Ned Luddington” Weiner.

And among the whole pack of defectives, “Space Cowboy” has to be…what’s the word?

The dumbest. The dumbest of the lot.

I know I’ve read things dumber than Space Cowboy’s drive-by of the President’s visit to Yad Vashem, but for the sake of my outlook on humanity, I don’t like to dwell on them.

It was only just yesterday when Olmert Pile thought that Bush is a wise man full of Yale and Harvard infused wisdom. Here’s a closer look at that wisdom, as exhibited by our man of the hour during a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said. […]

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

[At this point, I guess I should take small solace that Mr. Cowboy hasn’t accused the President of bombing Auschwitz instead of finding Bin Laden. Oh, don’t worry – historical myopia almost as stupid follows. I digress].

“I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe,” Bush said.

I really don’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure that Bush realizes that had the US bombed the camp, the people of whose adhesion to religion he’s so enamored [why does Mr. Cowboy have a problem with that? – Ed.] would be stone dead. Bush doesn’t seem to be aware that there were survivors at Auschwitz; is he really saying to the survivors that they should’ve been killed for the greater good of “disrupting service” at the camp?

One wonders only briefly if Mr. Cowboy has read anything on the subject at all. Briefly, I say – lefties that have read history are rarer than All Star Wrestling fans who can recite James Joyce.

While nearly everyone that was in the camps ended up “stone cold dead”, as Mr. Sensitive Cowboy puts it, anyway, there were survivors. And, nearly to a person, they said (after the war) that they hoped we’d bomb not just the railhead, but the “showers” and crematoria, right amid the camps. In those days before GPS and laser-guided bombs, a bombing raid leveled everything within miles of a target in a rolling cascade of destruction. And yet in account after account – Elie Wiesel’s is the most famous (“we didn’t fear death – at least, not that death”); other resports come to us from the Black Book of Nazi atrocities, from British Sergeant John Coward, an escaped POW who infiltrated Auschwitz and brought out intelligence and served as a witness at Nuremberg; from accounts related at the Holocaust Museum – a shocking number of inmates reported that they’d have preferred a death from an Allied bomb, if the same raid took out the gas chambers and crematoria, to what they knew probably awaited them.

And it’s completely irrelevant, because it’s not what Bush was talking about. At our remove from the events – 62 years after Auschwitz was liberated – it should be fairly obvious to the thinking sentient person that Bush was talking about the larger concept of Roosevelt bombing the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex, as opposed to weighing operational options in preparation for setting up an Air Targeting Order.

Bush wasn’t sending targets to the Air Force; he was apologizing in effect for President Roosevelt’s inaction on the camps.
Speaking of “thinking people”, Mr. Cowboy tries to put a “thinking guy” costume on…

A true thinking man, the kind that really has wisdom, might have opined that the bombing of the roads and supply lines surrounding the camp would’ve been a great way to start.

Which was, indeed, what the President was saying.

Would it have stopped the killing? Definitely not. And neither would have Bush’s vision of bombing the whole thing.

Which is, of course, a scabrous lie… .

But the former could’ve netted more survivors. Sure, it’s speculation..

…the sort of ghoulish monday-morning quarterbacking that would get a guy kicked out of Source Games on Warhammer night for being “too weird”.
Also, ignorant as hell. At the Holocaust Museum, and in the many books written about Franklin Roosevelt’s policies on the extermination camps, you can see letters from Jewish leaders fairly begging FDR to bomb the camps, regardless of the loss of life among the inmates, to prevent further, future industrial murders.

Ghoulish, horrible stuff, the stuff of Sophie’s Choice come to real life, the notion of sacrificing hundreds or thousands of ones’ fellows and coreligionists to save hundreds of thousands more.

But speculation requires a reflective thought process and reasoning. All you have to do is watch any Bush presser footage to know, unequivocally, that he does not possess skill one.

Well, let’s be fair, Mr. Cowboy; you had your mind made up about that a long time ago, didn’t you?

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday

Let me know when the press orgy begins about Bush showing weak emotion.

“Weak emotion?”

Mr. Cowboy. You greasy little f*ckstick and wannabe Vulcan. I dare you to visit the Holocaust Museum, or Yad Vashem, and not come away emotionally wracked. I’m as dour and Scandinavian as they come, and by the time I got to the third floor of the Holocaust Memorial, I was biting my lip bloody. Many people – many in yarmulkes, many not – wept openly at the horror of what they saw. Some – my stepson was one – had to drop out of the tour. It’s just too much.

And any of them, from the President on down to the every visitor that takes the horror related at the Museum or Yad Vashem in, is a better person than you.

And I’ll tell you in person.

Fundraising for Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial “celebration” seems to be lagging:

As Minnesota enters its sesquicentennial year today, the state board established to direct the celebration has taken in about $1 million — a quarter of what had been anticipated and far less than the $8.5 million that Wisconsin raised for its sesquicentennial in 1998 and the $1.1 million ($8 million in today’s dollars) that fueled Minnesota’s centennial 50 years ago.

“For many of us, it’s a lifetime opportunity to honor the state we love and do some things that promote us for the future,” said Jane Leonard, executive director of the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Commission. “I do think we’re doing a remarkable job with what we’ve got, but we could use more help.”

State organizers last year had talked about $4 million for the yearlong celebration — half from the state, half from private contributions — and Gov. Tim Pawlenty included $2 million for the Sesquicentennial Commission in his recommended 2008 budget.

Why, oh why, could that be?

Some Minnesotans already are arguing — on opinion pages and in letters to the editor — over the Dakota War. If you thought the Sesquicentennial was going to be a Whiz Bang party celebrating Wheaties and Scotch Tape, you have been eating bad lutefisk. I mean, really bad lutefisk.

Minnesota was baptized in blood, and reminders are scattered across a vast landscape: A monument in a cornfield that marks the spot of a small settlement whose settlers — all of them — were surprised and killed on the first day of the war. A marker in a woods where more than 1,000 Indian women and children were imprisoned in a pen. A barren place on the Missouri River where hundreds died of starvation and disease after being “deported” by a new state that exiled the people whose language gave the state its name.

“Dear crackers; we’d like to have a state-financed orgy of recrimination.  Please send us money to make this possible.  Thanks.  Signed: Native American activists and their Guilty White Liberal friends”.

The Dakota War deserves a look.  It’s one of the key events in Minnesota’s history.

One of them.

On behalf of my ancestors – dirt-poor Norwegian farmers who came to America 40-50 years after the Dakota wars and raised bumper crops of rocks until they learned better trades, let me respectfully point out that there is more to the story.

David Brauer – former Twin Cities Reader (or was it the City Pages?  Who can tell anymore?) writer, KSTP-AM morning guy and MPR’s current Sole Voice on the Media, writes in the Daily Mold’s wrapup of the year’s top stories about something I was actually pondering myself over the weekend.

No, not this bit…:

Atrios lovingly labels the mortgage meltdown as a pile of poo, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that while inner-city neighborhoods have been shat upon, those are troubled places used to such muck; the real gonad-shrinking panic is emanating from the petro-enabled Outer Burbosphere, whose overvalued aura of Manifest Destiny may exhibit a steeper downward arc than our own fading American empire.

Many’s the lefty who fantasizes about the burbs’ crumbling and the US joining Sweden among the ranks of “former powers”.  Apparently equally many are the leftybloggers who think Duncan “Atrios” Black’s fourth-grade dribblings are quotable. 

But I digress: here’s the part I started pondering late last week, myself, when i was writing about the Northstar Commuter Rail line a few weeks ago.  A few comments popped up in my comment section that mirrored some things I’d heard from some left-leaning friends of mine:

With the approval of the North Star I actually hopped on MLS last night and looked for homes in Elk River and Big Lake. Down Side, of course, it is crazy Bachmann land. But nice homes and a better price than burbia with a commute that would be very doable on the Rail…if enough people like me consider the move, her days are numbered anyway *smile*

In other words (not to stuff words into commenter, neighbor and pal Flash’s mouth, but it reflects something I’ve heard from other people, so I’m going to use the comment emblematically), once rail transit makes it politically correct for (white, middle-class) lefties to move to the ‘burbs, they’ll flee the mess that three generations of their own party’s policies have created.

Along these lines, Brauer adds:

Wouldn’t it be something if the flipped parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul were some day repopulated by the Hummer-scarred expats of Commuterland?

Indeed, I pondered over the weekend – should Linden Hills, Highland Park and Saint Anthony Park’s upper-middle-class Prius-driving yuppie demo decamp for the ‘burbs to escape the collapsed education system, crime and social ills that their own liberal/DFL machine, system and philosophy have made into untouchable institutions, it’ll leave behind a huge stock of housing at bargain rates – housing that is well-built (compare a 1910’s Edwardian, solid as Churchill’s bunker, with the shoddily-built, cheesily-appointed McMansions that glut the left’s future stronghold), well-situated (sited and built before the left’s tinkering with the market via Urban Renewal, when the free market still ruled demographics) and very, very liveable (as the Twin Cities were before three generations of DFL hegemony messed the place up). 

And conservatives – being people who appreciate value over “statements” and “messages” – will go where the value is. 

By about this time, the shoddily-mass-manufactured McMansions will of course be decaying into rotting husks, and the suburban high schools will be crime-sodden atrocities, and the DFL will be plaintively begging the prosperous inner cities to bail them out. 

As David Brauer notes, things change.  As history tells us, the more they do, the more they stay the same.

Happy New Year! 

And you know what that means, right?  Yepper, it’s time for the Shooties!

The Shooties have been an annual tradition here at Shot In The Dark for…well, a year, now. The Shooties stand watch over the regional media, alternative media, and political scene, ready to skewer the obnoxious, pretentious, and dumb (and, occasionally, reward the meritorious).

Technical awards were given out at a ceremony at Keegans’ last October.

So, with no further ado, let’s get on with the show!

The Baghdad Bob Award for Holding On To An Absurd Fiction Long Past The Point Of Pathetic: This award goes to the Minnesota Monitor. For the entire year of their existence, they denied – or, more accurately, refused to comment on, and declared all speculation “paranoid” – their relationship with George Soros’ attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, saying that there was no reason whatsoever to assume that just because the Monitor’s parent group, the ironically-named “Center for Independent Media”, shared offices with MM4A early in its organizational life, that there was any relationship between the CIM and the left-supporting billionaire.

Until former Strib reporter Erik Black put the qibosh on the “silly” “nonsense”-ical “attack” meme by…confirming it, as he was departing CIM employ and decamping to the MinnPost.

The Daniel Pearl Profiles in Journalistic Courage Award: This year, we award this award to none other than ace “journalist” Jeff Fecke, of the Soros joint Minnesota Monitor, in what will be the first of several awards this year.

While trying to “cover” a John Kline town hall meeting he claimed that that Congressman Kline’s staff had barred him from liveblogging – but then turned around and allowed a group of conservative bloggers to blog away unhindered. He wrote

“Minnesota Monitor had intended to liveblog the event. Unfortunately, while some conservative bloggers were allowed internet access, Kline staffers informed this reporter that I would not be able to take advantage of internet access that had been offered me after inquiry with the Lakeville school district.”

Like a lawnmower going over a gopher, Michael Brodkorb and Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci ripped Fecke’s claim of discrimination to shreds; Brodkorb even scanned and posted the forum’s rules.

Perception remained reality at the MinMoneyitor.

The “Let’s Go Find All The Narrow-Minded Bigots – and Lynch Them” Award for Even-Handed, Detached “Journalism” – Phil Krinkie was a famous tax hawk in the State House for many years. He’s also a great guy – funny, jovial, reasonable, a great ambassador for fiscal conservatism. Lori Sturdevant is a DFL hack whose every column is a bit of “unpaid” flakkery for the left in this state; not only does she never deviate from the party line, she usually is right in line with whatever transient strategy is in current effect. So when she wrote about a conversation with Krinkie, after reciting the entire catalog of DFL talking points about Krinkie, she added “Notice how much more reasonable a zealot can sound when chatting with an old classmate than when performing on the stump?”

There’s reason to believe she wasn’t even trying to be ironic.

The “This Is London” Plaque for Creative “Journalistic” Cribbing – Over the summer, the Minnesota Monitor’s Jeff Fecke got busted for low-grade plagiarism, shoddy attribution, and trying to bluster his way out of being busted for these mistakes with a creative edit or two. His only response? “On the advice of my editor, I have no comment”. Which was pretty much Fecke’s response to every question about his work with the Monitor last year.

The Richard M. Nixon Award for Ethics – Busted for numerous ethical lapses, the Minnesota Monitor – which came into existence trumpeting its “Code of Ethics“, which tells its practicioners to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly” – didn’t really admit or correct much of anything.

The Joe Isuzu Trophy – This award is given to those who talk a huuuuuge game, and delivery a tiiiiiiiny one.

And the “winner” this year is Minnesota “MNob” Observer, a lawyer apparently licensed to practice law in Minnesota and who writes for about sixty regional leftyblogs, whose analysis of the Olson v. Brodkorb summary judgement, er, flunked with dishonors.

The Minnesota Monitor “Do As We Say, Not As We Do” Award For Grating Hypocrisy – Karl Bremer – dyspeptic anti-Michele Bachmann obsessive from Stillwater – made huge waves when, mirabile dictu, nearly every left-leaning regional website simultaneously tripped onto a month-old, native-American-bashing post at “Anti-Strib”. And while Anti-Strib got ripped pretty soundly by the local Sorosphere (and, let’s not forget, a fair chunk of the regional dextrosphere), there was deafening silence about a comment Bremer himself left on a post at “Dump Bachmann“:

I thought I saw the name Drew Emmer among those arrested with Larry Craig for cruising MSP airport bathrooms for anonymous sex. I could be wrong, but Emmer’s behavior and comments seem oddly similar in both form and content to Craig’s.

There was never a comment from anyone involved in The [decreasingly relevant] Dump, or any other leftyblog outlet, about Bremer’s slander.

Being the darling of the local Sorosphere means not needing basic ethics.

The “Howard Dean” Trophy For Leaving Liberals Screaming and Sputtering: Every year for the last, oh, two years or so, the City Pages – the occasionally brilliant but always reliably hip-“counterculture”-lefty local “alternative” freebie ‘zine – gives two “Best Blog” awards. The “Best Liberal Blog” is generally stridently, constantly political (“MNVolved”, I think, in ’06, although it didn’t survive much beyond the award, and “Clucking Stool” in ’07); the “Best Conservative Blog” has been the one that talks the least about politics. In ’06 it was Nihilist in Golf Pants, and the award seems to have gutted the spirit of the once-prolific stalwarts. But in ’07, the “award” went to Dan Lacey of “Faithmouse”. Perhaps trying to avoid the City Pages “Best New Band” jinx (the “winners” inevitably break up) Lacey turned around and sold the “award” on EBay. It drew sputtering from the usual assortment of left-leaning waxy yellow blogbuildup, but who cared? The quietest blog smackdown of the year, it was also by far the best.

And finally, the big kahuna, the award that started it all:

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

And this year’s winner is: a triple play!

• Alice “The Phantom” Hausman and Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg, for declaring the Gas Tax the culprit in the 35W Bridge Disaster even before the bubbles had stopped rising from the submerged cars.
• Nick “the Engineer” Coleman, for going on national TV to blame the disaster on Republican tax policy, three days after the collapse, while the NTSB was still unpacking its bags.

Positively loathsome.

And that’s it for this year’s edition of the Shooties! So until next year, thanks for stopping by, and remember – if you’re in the media, the alt-media, or regional politics, and your head is tightly jammed where the sun doesn’t shine, I’ll be busily writing down the details!

David Warren takes an oblique look back at ’07:

The journalist’s prayer, at the end of each year, should be, “I don’t know what happened in the year just passed, and I won’t know what is happening next year. Lord preserve me from the smugness of those who think they know, and help me to see thy truth.”

So go there and read the whole thing.

Hollywood Liberals: all the history that’s convenient to observe!

In his book, “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” Lou Cannon notes how Reagan “expressed revulsion of the brutal destruction of Afghan villages and such Soviet policies as the scattering of mines disguised as toys that killed and maimed Afghan children.” He did not need much convincing to aid the Afghan resistance.

Cannon credits Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle and CIA Director William Casey with allaying any concern that providing Stinger missiles to the mujahadeen might lead to the missiles’ capture and copying by the Soviets. Also involved, says Cannon, was a bipartisan coalition “led by Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson in the House and New Hampshire Republican Gordon Humphrey in the Senate.”

So you have at least five players, including Reagan, involved — four of them Republican conservatives. Ikle notes: “Senior people in the Reagan administration, the president, Bill Casey, (Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger and their aides deserve credit for the successful Afghan covert action program, not just Charlie Wilson.” So guess which one Hollywood makes a movie about?

I think it’s a rhetorical question.

To be fair, the movie doesn’t mention Jimmy Carter either. It was his naivete about Communist expansion that led the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Had Reagan not beaten Carter in 1980 there would have been no Stingers and no victory in the Cold War.

But don’t expect a movie about Reagan’s victory over communism or Carter’s surrender to it.

Mark my words: In ten years, Hollywood will credit Harry Reid with winning Iraq.

Tom Cruise.

How do people think of him in the US? Good actor, but kind of a nutjob, what with all the bouncing around and the silent childbirth and the Scientology?

I’m probably not far off, right?

I’m not sure how much weight to give a single newspaper column (albeit a column in a relatively conservative paper by regional standards), but it’d seem Cruise’s decision to do a movie about Claus Von Stauffenberg – the Prussian Junker officer who tried and barely failed to assassinate Hitler – is resonating among Germans:

Es bedurfte eines Querdenkers, um dieses Vorurteil zu durchbrechen. Es bedurfte eines Weltstars, um sich damit im Ausland Gehör zu verschaffen. Durch seine Entscheidung, Graf Stauffenberg sein Gesicht zu leihen, wird Tom Cruise das Bild, das die Welt sich von uns Deutschen macht, verändern. Das Ansehen des Landes zu retten, gerade auch im Ausland, war einer der wichtigsten Beweggründe Stauffenbergs bei seiner Tat. Durch Tom Cruises mutige Entscheidung, diese Rolle zu spielen, wird Stauffenbergs Anliegen auf mittelbare Weise doch noch verwirklicht. Eine breite Öffentlichkeit wird anhand seiner Geschichte verstehen, dass man sich dem Unmenschlichen widersetzen kann, und dass Heldenmut und eine menschliche Haltung noch wichtiger sind als der Erfolg einer Tat.

What? You took Spanish like the rest of the “path of least resistance” crowd? OK, auf Englisch:

It took an unconventional thinker to break through this prejudice. It required a world-class superstar to get that message to audiences abroad. With his decision to lend Graf von Stauffenberg a face, Tom Cruise will change the image that the world has of us Germans. To rescue the image of his country – especially abroad – was one of the key motives Stauffenberg had for his deeds [attempting to assassinate Hitler]. Because of Cruise’s courageous decision to play this role, he has indirectly fulfilled Stauffenberg’s intentions. Based on his story, a huge audience will come to understand that one can oppose inhumanity, and that a hero’s courage and nobility are even more important than the success of his deeds.

So I’ve wondered for years – how badly do the Germans want the world to ignore, or at least temper their view of, the Holocaust and World War II?

It’s true – there were Germans who resisted the Nazis.  Unlike Stauffenberg – who planted a bomb that came within an unlucky fluke of killing Hitler in mid-war, and who died for his efforts – most died, unlamented, in concentration camps or Gestapo prisons.  Some fled Germany (and some of them turned around and fought with the Allies).  They were a thin film among the German people, many of whom were enthusiastic Nazis, very many of whom (if you believe Goldhagen) were culturally and theologically anti-semitic, most of whom acquiesced with Naziism for whatever reason.

But I’ve known a zillion Germans.  I speak, or at least spoke, the language well enough to get past just the words.  Germany’s done a lot to purge itself of the mindset that led to its many, many sins (as even Goldhagen noted in the afterword to Hitler’s Willing Executioners).  So I can’t say that I blame them for wanting to show some part of the other side of their culture.

I can’t wait to see it, honestly.
(Via ModVoice)

I used to joke about it; someday, even the hard left won’t be able to deny that Ronald Reagan changed history by setting in motion the events that brought down the USSR.

And when Hollywood and The Media realized this, they’d set in motion the machinery to claim credit for it themselves.

And thus we have Charlie Wilson’s War:

This is progress. With “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a trio of liberal Hollywood A-listers — director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actor-producer Tom Hanks — have made a movie that acknowledges the evil of Soviet communism, celebrates Cold War hawkishness and more or less decries the post-Vietnam evisceration of U.S. intelligence services.

Hey, by 2027, we may even get a film about American war heroes in Iraq.

I do want to see the movie; left-symp filtering aside, it’s one of the great – and heretofore uncovered – subjects of my lifetime; the collapse of the USSR, decried as impossible by the left even as late as 1991, a fait accompli by the time Bill Clinton took office.

It’s possible, too, that the filmmakers have fashioned a new genre of Washington-based drama, one that combines detail-laden high seriousness about geopolitics with the screwball sensibility and smart dialogue of Preston Sturges.

Perhaps.  There’s no denying that Aaron Sorkin is as talented a writer as he is a smug Hollywood liberal.  It’s a maddening conflict for a conservative who loves good art and a good story. 

I’ll have to try to see it over the weekend, and give my review after the holidays…

The number of survivors is inexorably dwindling, but some Pearl Harbor survivors are still busy telling their story:

Ten years ago, about 15 Pearl Harbor survivors were part of the pool of veterans who mingled with visitors, according to Skip Wheeler, a National Park Service ranger at the Arizona memorial who coordinates the volunteer effort. Now there are just these five.

One of the regulars, Air Force veteran Bill Cope, died on Nov. 25 at age 94.

“The attrition level is here, and we know that every day that they show up, it’s sort of like a gift,” Arizona Memorial historian Daniel Martinez said.

The numbers are reflective of the nationwide loss of the “Greatest Generation,” and the ever-shrinking survivor turnout for the anniversary of the attack that launched the United States into World War II. There are only about 5,000 remaining survivors of the attack, according to Mal Middlesworth, national president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

As we noted last summer at the dedication of Minnesota’s WWII Memorial, Minnesotans fired the first shots at Pearl Harbor, and fought in the hundreds of thousands in the war that ensued. 

Know a WWII veteran?  Thank ’em again.