Canadian Cincinnatus

Its official now, the War on Terror is over

Several days ago “Navy SEALs secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges” Their crime? The alleged terrorist – who murdered the Blackwater contractors and had their bodies savagely dragged through the streets - was allegedly punched in the face by the three enlisted SEALs.

To give the SEALs their due, they have “refused non-judicial punishment — called a captain's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial” In other words, they aren’t going to allow themselves to be rolled by over-the-top political correctness, and want the matter aired. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done, as the one message that has doubtlessly made its way through SOCOM, and likely the entire military, is don’t show too much zeal in fighting terrorism. Heaven forbid you might shoot a terrorist and be charged with murder.

It is difficult to overemphasize the stupidity of this development. In a war, you are permitted to shoot your enemy on sight if he is wearing a uniform, even if he has his back to you. And if an enemy combatant is wearing anything other than a clearly identifiable uniform, as recently as World War II, the Geneva Conventions permitted him to be summarily executed after capture. Remember, all the German saboteurs caught infiltrating American lines in the Battle of the Bulge who were lined up against the wall and shot simply because they didn’t know who won the World Series in 1943? At the time, executing these prisoners was so uncontroversial that the firing squads were photographed.

During a Q & A at the UN after his speech there, while answering a question about Afghanistan, President Obama made an aside that I thought was very revealing about his belief system. He casually threw out the dismissive remark that “I don’t care about things like victory.” That’s a swell attitude for the Commander-and-Chief of the US military to have.

There is a word for somebody who wants the side that he is on to lose. 

Barack Obama’s curiously blank academic record

It has been said that in academia, you must publish or perish. Steve Sailer details Obama’s academic publishing record, or lack of it in this post here.

 So in light of this, how do we explain Barack Obama’s academic career? He spent two years at Occidental College before transferring to Columbia where he completed his BA in political science. His next academic stop was Harvard where he got his law degree, graduating magna cum laude. In his first year at Harvard, he became editor of the Harvard Law Review. In his second year he was its president. From 1992 to 2004 he was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. All of these are among the best and most respected schools in America, if not the world.

And yet, as Steve Sailer pointed out, in all the time he spent ascending the academic ladder to the tip of Olympus, he has published exactly zero peer-reviewed articles? For instance, one of the perks of being the editor of the Harvard Law review is that you are allowed to publish an article of yours in each issue. In all the time he was involved with that publication, he wrote nothing. What happened to publish or perish?

I think far too little time has been spent analyzing this remarkable facet of Barack Obama’s unique life. It is for sure that if this curious detail had been in a Republican presidential candidate’s resume, the mainstream media would have subjected us to endless stories asking the question: what is wrong with academia these days? Strangely enough, the right wing media has been almost as reticent on the matter.

While it seems reasonable to conclude that affirmative action played a big part in Obama’s academic rise, we still don’t really have a complete answer to the question.  John Derbyshire speculated, when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, that Obama is just awards-prone, in the way that other people are accident-prone. By that he means is that in the same way that some people get into a lot of accidents for no apparent reason, people want to give awards to Obama for no discernible reason.

No doubt. But it still begs the question, how did Obama achieve so much in academia without publishing a single damned thing?

The rehabilitation of George W Bush by Barack Hussein Obama under the direction of Khalid Sheik Mohammed

Former assistant DA, Andrew C McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted the blind sheik in the first World Trade Center bombings, believes there is a hidden agenda behind President Obama’s decision to try KSM for 9/11 in New York City:

The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies ... enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

 

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. 

 

... And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. ... It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts.

While I don’t pretend to have a window on Obama’s sphinx-like soul, I do find it plausible that Obama would want KSM’s trial to be a trial of George W Bush by proxy.

I only add that the extent to which Obama succeeds at putting George W Bush on trial is the extent to which George W Bush is rehabilitated in the eyes of the American people. Sure Obama’s hard-left base will be happy as a pig in manure by the spectacle, but what average Americans will see is a propaganda orgy for Al Qaeda, America’s enemy. From this they will learn to equate Obama with losing the terror war and George W Bush with defending American interests. The contrast between the obscene anti-American chaos of the trial and the 7 years of peace and safety under President Bush will not reflect well on the Obama administration.

And if Obama’s scheme is so successful that President Bush is indicted for war crimes by some transnational European tribunal of some sort, the American people will become even more incensed. If an international body claims legal jurisdiction over a former American President - any former American President, whether he is George W Bush or Jimmy Carter – the American people will view it – correctly - as a direct attack on American sovereignty. The uproar will be so tumultuous that Obama will have to go to bat for Bush just to save his own skin.

And if KSM ends up being acquitted – a distinct possibility given that the evidence against him was acquired by intelligence agencies rather than law enforcement – the contrast between Obama and Bush will become even starker.

Though Obama thinks he is being clever, he is committing political folly of the highest order.

Is Obama edging away from his hard-left domestic agenda?

A whole number of tantalizing details emerged in the past week, which suggest that President Barack Obama may be getting cold feet about his pedal-to-the-metal domestic policy agenda.

First there is the news that the White House Communications Director and Maoist, Anita Dunn is leaving the White House. If you will recall, she was the architect of the war against Fox News, whose ratings have been soaring ever since war was declared. Second, was chatter that Rahm Emmanuel, a.k.a. Rhambo, may want ‘to return to Congress’ in the upcoming mid-term elections. Though he has always expressed a desire to return to Congress when his work at the White House is finished, I find the timing of this latest rumour curious. As you will likely recall, it was Emmanuel who famously said, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, and who, consequently, is considered to be the driving force behind Obama’s domestic strategy to date. Third, there is the statement that the Obama administration might give up on passing cap and trade legislation. And last are the rumours that the principal subject of his 2010 State of the Union address will be deficits and debt reduction.

All this may be smoke and mirrors of course. After all, Obama has already given one major speech on the evils of the federal debt, but considering that he give that speech on the same day he quietly signed into law the $410 Omnibus spending bill (complete with a record 9,000 earmarks), one can be forgiven for doubting Obama’s sincerity on the subject.

However, there are many reasons for Obama to ponder a reverse course today. Like any modern politician, he keeps close watch on the polls, and the polls have not been good for a while. The results in the Virginia and New Jersey elections this November are almost identical to the results in these same elections in 1993. This parallel cannot be lost on Obama, who must realize that if he loses Congress in 2010 as decisively as Clinton lost it in 1994, his left-wing domestic legacy is finished, just as Clinton’s was. From 1994 onward, Bill Clinton was ‘successful’ only because he skillfully took credit for the overall good effects of the legislation Newt Gingrich shoved down his throat while simultaneously (and disingenuously) denouncing those same policies in their specifics. Of course, he was also successful in the way he navigated through his personal scandals, a form of achievement I doubt Obama aspires to.

If Obama wants to avoid the same fate, he has to lay comparatively low for the next year so that he can salvage what he can of Congress in November 2010. While he is too committed to health care reform to back off now, he must realize that the massive tax hikes on basic commodities like energy that will be mandated by cap and trade legislation will finish off the Democrats in Congress for a while. Even though it is likely that the Dem’s will lose a significant number of seats in 2010, if they can hold on to a majority by their fingernails, Obama will have preserved some options for the rest of first term.

While wheeling and dealing with the opposition came naturally to the gregarious Bill Clinton, Obama has a very different personality. I suspect that he will find the to’ing and fro’ing of retail politics very contrary to his Eloi nature.

Is Putin’s puppet, Dimitry Medvedev, cutting his strings?

Last Thursday, Russia’s President, who everybody views as little more than a puppet of the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, gave his annual ‘State of the Union’ speech to both houses of the Russian parliament. The contents of this speech have raised more than a few eyebrows.

In it, he said that the Russian economy is too dependent on “Soviet era industries” (i.e. the manufacture of Soviet era weapons) and the “export of natural resources” (i.e. oil and gas). If “backwards Russia” ever hopes to modernize, Medvedev contends, Russia needs to “break with the past” and develop a modern free market economy based on IT, telecommunications and space technology. While it is hard to picture Russian telecommunications as ever becoming cutting edge, much of what Medvedev says is true, because right now, the Russian economy is anything but liberal. It is, rather, a one-sided, top-down affair dependent largely on oil and gas exports and the export of cheap weapons to countries that either can’t afford or are barred from purchasing more expensive but more effective western military technology.

What causes the eyebrows to rise is that his mentor, Vladimir Putin, is almost synonymous with outfits like Gasprom and the Russian military industrial complex, it is hard to see this as anything else but a rebuke. It all may be just a smokescreen, but if it signals a rift between the two men, it can only be a good thing.

Perhaps Medvedev will consign Putinism to the ash heap of history.

The significance of the Tea Party movement and its rise

As most know who have been following the race, the result of the special election in New York’s congressional district 23 was that the Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman lost in a safe Republican seat to Democrat Bill Owens, even though the official Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, had withdrawn. At first sight, this ‘civil war’ among the right bodes poorly for conservative chances in 2010 and beyond.

But I contend that in the long run it bodes extremely well for conservatism. For what the events of NY 23 show is that a grass-roots conservative movement has developed in the US that is separate and distinct from the Republican Party.

This is good because, for an ideology to progress, it needs both partisan and nonpartisan wings. The partisan wing - a political party – is needed for the obvious reason that they are the ones who will enact the agenda. But a nonpartisan wing – the ‘movement’ – is also just as necessary. This is because a politician’s most important priority is re-election, not issues.

The movement is important because the popularity of issues with the electorate changes over time. When an issue, say deregulation, is popular, the conservative politician is happy to embrace it. But when it is unpopular, he will, in the interest of self-preservation, drop it like a hot potato. This is where the movement comes in. The movement advances the issue in good times and defends it in bad times. In the long run, one of the biggest factors in getting a policy adopted and accepted by society is persistence. Movements do persistence well, politicians don’t.

While the politician cares very deeply about who gets to be driven around in the ministerial limo, the movement doesn’t care at all about that. The movement cares about issues and principles. It doesn’t care which party affects the desired changes. In fact, a right wing leader of a left wing party can sometimes be preferable to a left wing leader of a right wing party. One movement that ‘gets’ this is the NRA. If both candidates in an election race are pro-gun, the NRA doesn’t get involved. Ditto if both are anti-gun. They don’t have a dog in those fights. But if the Republican is pro-gun and the Democrat is anti-gun, the NRA will step in. But - and this sometimes happens – if the Democrat is pro-gun and the Republican is anti-gun, then the NRA will support the Democrat over the Republican. That is because the NRA is pro-gun not pro-Republican.

The possession of a ‘movement’ is an advantage that the left long held over the right – until recently. The Democrats were always kept faithful to their left wing principles by a constellation of left wing activist groups. With the exception of the NRA and anti-abortion groups, the Republicans aren’t kept in line by anyone, which is why GOP politicians tend to start out conservative and drift leftwards in the time they spend in Washington.

With the rise of the conservative and libertarian blogosphere, talk radio and the tea party movement, this is changing. There is now a force out there to keep the GOP true to its small government principles. The mainstream media, obsessed with trying to paint the Tea Partiers as the activist wing of the Republican Party, have completely missed this critical development. A number of Republican politicians who supported the stimulus bill were booed when they tried to speak at Tea Parties over the summer. It was the same Tea Partiers who pushed the stimulus-loving Arlen Specter out of the GOP. And of course, it was the conservative movement who revolted when the unprincipled backroom boys in the New York Republican Party decided that a RINO, who was well to the left of her Democrat opponent, be the GOP candidate in NY 23.

In the short run, this situation can create problems. Arlen Specter’s vote would have been nice to have now that Obamacare is entering the Senate. And it would have been good to see a Republican elected to NY 23. But it is much more important for the Republican Party to respect conservative principles. In the long run, not only will this result in many more conservative policies being implemented, it will also result in more electoral success for the GOP.

The reason for the GOP’s decline in 2006 and 2008 was that they strayed too far away from their roots. The Republican dominated Congress passed the free speech threatening McCain Feingold campaign finance reform bill. It also passed pharmacare and the No Child Left Behind Act. And it also tried to amnesty illegal aliens. Republicans also failed to reign in the Community Reinvestment Act, at a time when they held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, which was the central cause of the 2008 financial meltdown. They failed to act because unprincipled party strategists thought ‘affordable housing’ was a winner of an issue. So how much of a winner do they think it is it now? Republican congresscritters also became addicted to pork, resulting in things like Ted Steven’s famous Bridge to Nowhere.

None of this would have happened if the Republicans in Washington had not been corrupted by expediency and a go-along-to-get-along attitude. In all probability, if a conservative movement had existed all along to keep them honest, the Republicans might have remained in power to this day.

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Yesterday evening, I was in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, attending a rally commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a person of Estonian heritage, the emotions this anniversary elicited were mixed.

(Incidentally, representatives of all three federal parties were there and spoke. David Miller was nowhere to be found even though the event was held in front of his city hall.)

On the positive side, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the fall of Communism and the regaining of independence by my homeland, was without question the single most positive political event that has impacted my life. As Reason magazine noted, the defeat of communism was the most liberating moment in all history.

 On the negative side, the freedom and independence of all the new Eastern European republics has never been in more danger than now. One the one side, you have a ruthless KGB thug occupying the Kremlin. As the Economist reported, the Russians recently completed huge military maneuvers in White Russia, whose only obvious purpose was to practice reinvading and recapturing Eastern Europe.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the White House is occupied by a man who seems to possess deep leftist sympathies and who, in 9 months of office, has already compiled a lengthy record of ignoring the aspirations of freedom loving people around the world – in Iran, where he has determinedly ignored the Iranian people and their still ongoing Green Revolution; in Honduras, where he has sided with a Chavez-like thug over the forces of constitutional order; and most relevantly, in Eastern Europe, where he unilaterally pulled the missile shield out of Poland and the Czech Republic (without even giving them the courtesy of advance notice), opposes the entrance of the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO; and now has turned down an invitation to attend a ceremony in Berlin commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Kremlin, such symbolism is noted.

What to do?

First, hope and pray that in 3 years, Barack Obama will be replaced by a responsible adult who actually believes that freedom is a good thing.

Two, the countries of Eastern Europe have to realize that the Lord helps only those who help themselves. NATO is developing a rapid reaction force. The Eastern European wing of NATO has to establish a rapid reaction force of its own, composed of only Eastern European armies, a force that has only one purpose - to defend the sovereignty of Eastern European countries. Their first act should be to hold exercises of their own, to counter the ones that Putin just held. The guiding principle of Eastern European countries in these perilous times should be the saying by Benjamin Franklin, “We hang separately, or hang together.”

AS AN ASIDE: Washington University in St. Louis shut down a rally commemorating Berlin Wall anniversary because it was "too offensive".

Toronto Doesn't Need Another Hero for Mayor

Ontario's liberal Deputy Premier George Smitherman jumped into the Toronto mayoralty race today, portraying himself as the man who can become the "strong mayor" that Toronto needs, a hero in other words.

The last thing that Toronto needs is another extremely left-wing mayor who is determined to fix things that aren't broken.

David Miller has already spent over $100 million dollars supposedly fixing St. Clair by removing two lanes of traffic.  And that's just the start.  Look out Scarborough and Don Mills, David Miller has already had the plans drawn up to fix your neighborhoods too.  He's already "fixed" Lansdowne, Runnymeade, Bloor, Dupont, Rogers Road and Jarvis, just to name a few, all of which have had traffic lanes removed at great expense on the weakest pretenses.

Why am I so sure that Smitherman is just another David Miller, despite Smitherman's claim to be a "candidate of the broad centre?"

Well it could be that until this week he was deputy premier of a liberal government that has spent so heavily that they make Bob's Rae's NDP government back in the early '90s look like a pack of fiscal conservatives.

It could be that Smitherman is the man who oversaw the e-health debacle, getting out of the health portfolio with just enough time left to let his successor, David Caplan, take the fall. Or perhaps it's Smitherman's love of wind mills, solar power and expensive electricity while he has been Energy and Infrastructure minister that has me concerned.

But what really made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end was the Obamaesque quote that Smitherman wanted to bring a "post-ideological" consensus-building approach to city hall.

Yeah right.  Sentiments like that from left wing politicians can usually be translated to read: I'm reasonable.  As long as the Right Wing does everything I say we'll all get along.  If not all the fighting from here on is their fault.

Worse, Smitherman has promised to fix Toronto's massive budget shortfall with a "dose of fiscal reality," when what it really needs is several massive cuts.  Tweaks on the budget won't cut it.

Toronto needs a realist, not a hero.

Mike Downtown.

Why would Maj. Hassan go on a killing spree in Fort Hood?

Maj. Nadil Malik Hassan, a psychologist with the US Army, and scheduled for deployment in Iraq, went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas yesterday, killing 11 and wounding 30. At the time of this writing, the reason why he would do such a thing remains an inscrutable mystery.

One possible clue is that he yelled, “Allah Akbar” during the attack. Allah Akbar means God is Great and is a popular thing for jihadists to scream when they attack infidels. The easy conclusion from this is that he is an Islamic terrorist, but since Islam is the religion of peace, this explanation is improbable.

There are also reports that Hassan had previously made “outlandish” comments condemning US foreign policy, claiming that Iraqis and Afghanis “should stand up and fight their aggressor”, i.e. the US Army that he serves. However, since these reports are unverified, the prudent thing to do at this point is to discount them completely and assume they never happened.

There are also reports, again unconfirmed, that when he was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he got poor performance evaluations that may have resulted in his transfer to Fort Hood. Since the likeliest explanation for his poor evaluations is that he is a level headed man with a deeply spiritual side (which kept him serene), and that the bad appraisals were only the result of spontaneous and unprovoked racism on the part of the white Christians he worked with, this doesn’t shed any more light on the matter.

I don’t know. I’ve got to say, this whole thing has got me stumped. A real mystery.

UPDATE: New York Post's Ralph Peters seems to have solved the riddle.

Toronto's Year of Living Financially Dangerously

Mayor David Miller set himself free when he announced that he wouldn't run for mayor again, free to do anything he wants with Toronto without trivial concerns like voter anger.  Thanks to the "strong mayor" powers McGuinty granted his buddy Miller, that means there's a lot of potential for damage.

Miller has started by issuing 30 year debentures for his capital spending plans.  That means I might not live to see Toronto's new debt paid off, and I'm in my forties.  He's also committed Toronto to contracts for TTC streetcar right-of-ways (AKA car blockers) in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and new streetcars in the billions.

Toronto's next mayor will find his hands tied, and the city's bank account way overdrawn.

But it gets worse: the Millerites are now talking about a City of Toronto sales tax!

The timing is stunning.  The province's manufacturing industry has taken a major body blow from the recession, McGuinty's HST is about to drive up the cost of fuel, natural gas, heating oil, electricity and numerous other essentials by 8%, and Miller figures this is a good time to tack on more!  I thought everyone wanted to get the economy moving and consumers spending?

But I bet this isn't the end.  I foresee road tolls suddenly coming back up for discussion before April 2010.

The next mayor of Toronto will have to be a truly strong mayor, and not because the province grants him/her that power, but because they come by it naturally.  The next mayor will have to cancel contracts for bike lanes and streetcar right-of-ways.  All road construction must only be essential maintenance, not needless narrowing to constrict cars, like the narrowing of Jarvis and Bloor.  Speed bumps will need to be dropped from the plan.

Will these decisions be easy or popular?  Easy: no.  The greens will scream and protest.  Popular: if the new mayor is clear and strong, voters will surprise everyone, as they did when they elected Mike Harris to a second term.

My vote was for Karen Stintz, but she has dropped out.  So the question for the Right: take the easy way out and hope John Tory doesn't blow it, or find a better leader?

My hope is that either Denzil Minnan Wong or Case Ootes jump into the fray, but not both.

Toronto needs a strong mayor.

Mike Downtown