Canadian Cincinnatus

How Obama is different from George W Bush

Consider the Air Force One Manhattan fiasco, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown DVD box set diplomatic incident (that was coded for North America and therefore unplayable in the UK), and Hillary’s gift of the “overcharge” button to the Russia foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

If Bush had done any of these things, they would have entered the cultural landscape like the time when George H W Bush threw up at a Japanese state dinner, which was played up for years afterwards. The mistranslation of the reset button and the fact that nobody bothered to check the region code of the DVD’s would have been hailed as proof positive of Bush’s provincialism. The gratuitously insulting treatment meted out to Gordon Brown would have been a demonstration that Bush was out of his depth with regard to foreign policy. And if Bush had tried to pass the buck on the Air Force One Manhattan photo op incident onto underlings the way Obama and his press secretary just did, the MSM would have chanted “the buck stops here”. Instead, they bought it. If the photo op had been done by the Bush administration, they would have asked hard questions like, what was the reason for photographing Air Force One flying past the Statue of Liberty? Was it for a political campaign? Were there any campaign contributors on that plane? Was the taxpayer reimbursed the cost of the flyby? Etc. But they didn’t.

Because Obama did it, all of these embarrassments are passed over quickly, but only if it is not possible to not mention them at all. In fact, if a person got all his news from the mainstream media, he would likely be unaware that any of these things have happened at all.

This is why Republican attack ads traditionally have been so much more effective than Democrat attack ads. Democrat ads just regurgitate what has already been repeated endlessly on CNN. Nothing new here. But GOP ads come like bolt from the blue to the disinterested voter, introducing him for the first time to the all kinds of factual, relevant information that the liberal establishment has assiduously ignored. The anti-attack-ad editorials by the MSM are only proof positive that this is true.

The fly in the ointment is that the MSM are no longer the only game in town. These things are being remembered by blogosphere, talk radio and Fox News. Consequently they increasingly bleed over into mainstream culture under the MSM radar screen.

The key to solving the Afghanistan problem

Whenever a solution to the Taliban insurgency is sought, people look at Pakistan. After all, it is from the ungovernable northwest provinces of that country where the Taliban finds sanctuary, much the same way the Viet Cong were able to rest and regroup in North Vietnam and Cambodia. It has been pointed out that in most successful guerrilla insurgencies, the guerrillas have a nearby base from which to operate from. But then when Pakistan itself is examined, how it is itself a borderline failed state - a smouldering cauldron of seething Islamic fundamentalism, ruled (such as it is)  by a government that is both internally weak and in possession of nuclear weapons, the analyst throws his hands up in despair. There is no solution to Afghanistan, at least one that is not worse than the disease.

Directly after 9/11, it became fashionable to say that what was needed, outside-the-box thinking. Too bad it no longer remains popular to do so, because if one did think outside the box, it would soon become apparent that the solution to Afghanistan does not lie in Pakistan but in Iran – Afghanistan’s other neighbour.

The interesting feature of Iran – that makes it totally unique in the Moslem world - is that it is a place where Islamic fundamentalism represents the past not the future. The people (who incidentally are Farsi - not Arab - and descendants of the original Aryans who came down from the north to rule the Indian subcontinent), have had it up to here with the revolutionary busybodies who make the lives of ordinary Iranians miserable with their inflexible micromanagement and doctrinal cruelty. Most Iranians alive today have been born after the Khomeini revolution or were too young to remember anything of life before 1979. They harbour no romantic memories of overthrowing the Shah. The only bad government they have ever known is the one currently running their country. In contrast, Pakistanis look to Islamofascism for hope to alleviate their current miserly. Islamism is the current misery in Iran.

The Cold War has an important lesson to teach us about the War on Terror. For most of the Cold War the West practiced containment. In other words they fought Communism at its fringes, where it most represented a glorious future to the populace and where its faults were least apparent. The results were, not surprisingly, less than spectacular - stalemate at best, though often defeat. When Ronald Reagan switched tracks and began targeting the Communist core, he hit back at the place where the populace hated Communism the most and where the Communist idealism no longer existed. Behind the iron curtain in Europe, Communists were opportunistic careerists not idealists. Eastern Europe was also the industrial base of the Communist world. When this rotten core was attacked directly, the whole edifice collapsed.

Iran is to Islamofascism what Eastern Europe was to Communism. Topple Iran, and you deal the whole Islamic fundamentalist movement a grievous body blow that it will be hard pressed to recover from.

How to do this? For a year or so after 9/11 there was an opportunity to invade Iran directly, as Michael Ledeen urged at the time. However, the window of opportunity for that action has long since closed. At this point in time, the best the US government could do is to subvert Iran from within. Set up anti-mullah radio stations along the two borders the US controls, conduct an internet campaign of sedition and subterfuge, and most important of all, begin supporting and training anti-mullah elements within that country. This approach would take time to work and it would require a reinvigorated CIA. It is not a quick fix, though it will achieve decisive results.

It would also require a President who is not an ideological surrenderist. But this solution is within the realm of the achievable if the US was led a President who was sufficiently imaginative and vigorous. 

Happy Lenin’s Birthday! er, I mean Earth Day

Once again, its that time of year. Every year on this day, I take the time out to remind everyone that April 22, Earth Day, is Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Lest you think this is just a coincidence exploited only by right-wing hate-mongers such as myself, consider the fact that the first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 – is the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.

To be fair, Earth Day is increasingly being celebrated on the spring equinox. This is a positive development that helps distance the environmentalist movement from the ideals of a bloodthirsty killer.

today is the 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre

Here is something I wrote at the time about it. I posted in on last year’s anniversary but as my readership has grown somewhat since then, I thought I should post it again this year as many of the cultural lessons have still been left untaught:


Everybody seems to be scratching their heads over this ghastly incident and why it happened. I have two ideas on the matter that nobody has brought out (and I have been reading the internet news stories on this subject intensively).

1. Conservatives talk about values. The problem is that for too many conservatives, values mean family values and family values mean stopping abortion. The problem here is that there are other values that they are neglecting: non-family values.
One non-family value conspicuously lacking in Denver was courage - the absence of which used to be called cowardice. I am not talking about the trench coat mafiosa here but the police. If I were a dead white male like Gen. Patton, I would submit that the feminized Denver SWAT team was made up of cowards. 
Consider this: Eight of the victims died in the school library. Witnesses in the library say that the two gunmen (strangely, it is not politically correct to call them gun-people) walked around leisurely, and systematically executed students they disliked (while giggling). It seems that they had time on their hands. Previously in the siege, the two were engaged in a gun battle with members of the Denver police. At some point, the police disengaged as the gun-people pulled back deeper into the school. This is when they killed most of their victims. To this, one cop was quoted as saying, "We didn't want SWAT shooting Swat”. Silly me, this is what I thought tactical training and radios were for. In their defense, they also claimed that they did not know how many suspects there were. All the more reason to maintain visual contact with the suspects you have identified. Otherwise, they could simply drop their trench coats and blend in with the exiting masses, which they didn't do, but thanks to the Denver SWAT team, they could have. I told this to someone, and he said, "What do you expect. They're trained for one thing: dynamic entry. That means, 25 heavily armed cops storming into a house and arresting a sleeping dope-grower before he wakes up." Consequently, if they are in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with a couple of determined computer geeks, they fold like a house of cards. 
The solution is not more laws, as it is not a legal problem. It is not grief counseling, as it is not a psychological problem. It is not more federal block grants, as the cops seem to be already awash in drug war money. The solution is simple: the cops involved should be publicly shamed. As a condition of their continued employment, and in exchange for immunity from prosecution, they should be forced to wear a white feather on their uniform - signifying cowardice on the job - for a year. They will scream; the police union will scream; Oprah Winfrey will scream; but they will also be ashamed.

2. Teenagers. They are a problem, and contrary to popular belief this group has not existed for more than a hundred years. In nature (and in history) teenagers do not exist. There are children and there are adults, the dividing line being puberty. Consider that the bar mitzvah is a ceremony celebrating the boy’s passage into manhood. It is performed at age 13. Consider also that teenagers worked in 19th century factories precisely because they were not considered children. They were adults, just like the teenage peasants before them who worked on feudal estates (while raising their own young families). 
Teenagers - people with the bodies of adults and the minds of children - were first created when the government decreed compulsory public schooling. And like most things made by the government, they are dysfunctional. I believe that the inherent contradiction between what society tells them and what their bodies tell them is the root cause of the teenage angst celebrated in books like The Catcher in the Rye. 
Additionally, as one home school advocate I heard on TV put it, "Who ever thought the best way to socialize our 13 year olds is to lock them up 6 hours a day with a thousand other 13 year olds?" In other words, they are being kept from adult role models at exactly the time those role models are needed the most. The result of this abstinence is a proliferation of strange teenage cults like punk rockers, goths and trench coat mafiosa.
The solution: Stop pandering to teachers unions. Teach kids as fast as they can learn and get them out in the work force as soon as possible. If anybody needs higher education then they should stay in school, but only if they have specific goals in mind. If these kids were living in a serious goal-driven environment they wouldn't have time for fantasies and weird cliques - the root cause of their evil.

 

Cincinnatus, 1999

Why I am not a red Tory

I am not a red Tory because red Tories are not what they profess to be.

First of all, red Tories claim to be good at compromise when in fact they are much worse at it than principled conservatives. It has been said (usually by red Tories) that compromise is not only necessary in politics to get anywhere, but it is a good thing in and of itself for the political process, helping to reign in excess. This is true but there is good compromise and bad compromise and this is where the red Tories fall short. With good compromise, you bargain away peripheral items in order to maintain core principles. With bad compromise, you barter away core principles for expediency. A good compromiser makes concessions at the very end of the legislative process to get a forward moving but imperfect bill passed. A bad compromiser, pre-emptively compromises away core principles at internal policy debates before he even gets to the bargaining table, mistakenly thinking that this will score him some points with his opponents, who (correctly) smell weakness and proceed to bargain harder than they otherwise would have.

This is how John Tory got stuck with the faith-based funding issue. It started out long before John Tory ever arrived on the scene as a proposal to reform the Ontario educational system with vouchers. Fearing the reaction this proposal would get from teacher’s unions (they would have gone postal), it was successively watered down at PC Ontario policy forums until all that was left was the proposal to fund religious (but not secular) schools outside of the main system – a policy too watered down to be intellectually defensible and one that offended core conservative voters (unlike vouchers, which conservatives favour).

Second, red Tories claim to be moderate when they are not. Deep down, they have mostly the same principles the rest of us conservatives have. It is just that they are afraid to admit it, even to themselves. In other words, they are cowardly conservatives rather than principled moderates. How else to explain their (usually unsuccessful) instinct for appeasing opponents by throwing supporters to the wolves? The recent folly of Michael Steele and David Frum in denouncing Rush Limbaugh (the most effective and articulate spokesman for conservatism in America today) is a good illustration for this pathetic phenomenon. “Be untrue to thyself,” might as well be their motto.

Third, red Tories like to claim that their ‘moderation’ is the key to conservative electoral success. In making this claim, one would suppose that they have a great track record at the polls vis a vis principled conservatives to back this assertion up. But you would be wrong, they have a worse record. Take Robert (“wage and price control”) Stanfield, Ernie (“Dalton McGuinty isn’t a leader”) Eves, John Tory, Joe Clarke, Kim (“the Conservative Party is not right wing”) Campbell and Jean (“the Reformers are racists”) Charest (at least back when he was a nominal conservative rather than the Liberal he is today). In contrast, the most right wing leaders in Canada, Mike Harris and Ralph Klein, had no trouble winning back-to-back majorities. The electorally toxic Mike Harris won 50% of the seats in liberal Toronto in 1995 and held on to 1/3 of TO seats in 1999. Ernie Eves and John Tory together managed to capture zilch Metro ridings.

But what about principled Preston Manning, the greatest Prime Minister we never had? He never got to 24 Sussex Drive. Nevertheless he did have much legislative success, arguably having more influence on public policy in the 90’s than the Prime Ministers of the day did. Take his accomplishments: the Charlottetown Accord was defeated; the federal budget was balanced; and clarity legislation specifying how referendums on separation are to be worded was passed. All of these started out as Reform Party proposals that were met with derision by the political establishment when they were first proposed. In terms of electoral success, Manning started out principled, at which point his popularity rose. But then he got sidetracked by Rick Anderson into worrying about his image and his ‘marketability’. At that point he stalled.

Red Tory Bill Davis & right wing Stockwell Day are admittedly counterexamples, but my point here is not that red Tories never win, it is just that red Toryism is not the only, or even the usual, path to electoral success in Canada, as their exhortations seem to imply.

Brian Mulroney is an instructive outlier. While he contains plenty of red Tory elements, he was also on schedule to lose his 1988 re-election bid (thanks to a stream of petty scandals and few legislative accomplishments), except that the Liberal dominated Senate unwittingly gave him a present: if you want us to pass the free trade accord with the US, they told him, you must first take it to the electorate. Reluctantly he did, and he won a principled election where the conservative principle of free trade was vigorously defended. The 1988 election was saved because Mulroney was forced to be principled. As a corollary, his party got smoked in 1993 precisely because he jettisoned all his remaining conservative principles once free trade was passed.

The case of Stephen Harper is also instructive. While he is definitely pragmatic and cautious, at least until this last budget he had not yet jettisoned any core beliefs. He had merely deferred them. Because he is operating in a minority government situation, he does not have a lot of maneuvering room. But I think that what prevented him from landing a knock-out blow against the bumbling Stephane Dion was that he did not make the conservative case with the voters. In any event, the jury is still out on his performance.

Andrew Klavan on the liberal counter-argument that trumps all conservative reason

One conservative pundit who I have only recently noticed and who has impressed me with his outspoken thoughtfulness is author Andrew Klavan. Over at Pajamas Media, he succinctly and eloquently describes the strategy that liberals employ to overcome conservative argument.

How to solve the Somali piracy problem – part 2

Now that the hijacking of the American cargo ship and the capture of its captain has been successfully resolved, now is perhaps a good time to revisit an article I wrote on Nov 17, 2008 about the Somali piracy situation. In it, I posited a simple, cost effective solution to this scourge. While my solution is more applicable today than it was back when I originally proposed it, my proscriptions have nevertheless been ignored, no doubt because policymakers have been too squeamish to get their hands dirty implementing the necessary measures. What they don’t realize is that sooner or later, they will have to spill blood but the sooner they do it, the less they will spill. The problem will only escalate until the pirates are finally put in their place.

Meanwhile, over at the Telegraph, noted military historian John Keegan channels the spirit of Stephen Decatur.

Over at the American Spectator site, Jeffrey Lord provides a helpful history of past presidents and how they handled ship hijackings – with widely varying results. (Hint – the ones who were tough on the hijackers were more successful.)

But...I thought Obama was cool!

He is cool. That is precisely the problem.

‘Cool’ is a sham concept. 80 years ago when Ernest Hemmingway first popularized the term, it meant (what Hemmingway considered to be) the supreme masculine virtue of grace under pressure – hence why somebody who possesses it may be described as cool. But in the intervening time, the meaning of the word has been so bowdlerized that today it is a method by which the entertainment industry manipulates the opinions of teenagers. ‘Cool’ is now little more than an advertising gimmick.

This is how Obama is, or was, cool. He was an apparently empty suit into which last November a majority of American voters placed their fondest dreams. In fact, the suit contained the teachings of a black separatist demagogue, an unrepentant terrorist and a couple of old commies. 100 days into his administration, Americans are beginning to see how well cool is working out.

In three and a half years, I suspect Americans will be ready to judge presidential candidates on the basis of their principles and their leadership skills rather than how ‘cool’ they are. 

The Toronto Star: A Criminal Enterprise?

I read that Robert Kennedy Jr called coal companies "criminal enterprises" for polluting, so I wonder what Mr. Kennedy would say of the Toronto Star?

I'd heard from one Scarborough resident last year that the failing newspaper had started delivering to him, and all attempts to stop it failed.   Needless to say, this resident wasn't paying for a newspaper he abhorred.

Last week, my neighborhood was hit.  Suddenly everyone, want it or not, gets a Toronto Star dumped on their porch every morning.  My wife has made three brave attempts to stop it, wading through the circulation department's computerized phone system to beg for it to be halted, yet still it comes to our door like junk mail.

Perhaps I should write Mr. Kennedy and tell him about all the trees that go into the newspaper, for not all that pulp is recycled.  Perhaps I should draw maps for him showing the routes of the carbon spewing trucks that drive through our neighborhood every morning, delivering a paper no one wants.

Would Mr. Kennedy call the Toronto Star a "criminal enterprise" for needlessly spewing pollutants from diesel trucks and contributing to global warming?  Let's not even get into the carbon footprint of their ink and paper printing presses.

My guess is that Mr. Kennedy would turn a blind eye, because the democrats are desperately trying to find ways to save their biggest promoters: the old print media.

Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin wants newspapers to be allowed to become non-profits, so that they could run on a PBS model of fundraising.  Of course, that means their content would now be scrutinized by tax auditors for "fairness."  Does that mean that they would be required to shift from left-leaning reporting to the center?  PBS certainly isn't the bastion of fair and balanced coverage.

In the next five years, the right must aggressively block any attempts from the left to prop up, fund or support failing newspapers.  Otherwise these criminal enterprises will pollute forever, but unlike Mr. Kennedy, I'm referring to their left wing content--not their carbon footprint.

Mike Downtown