Canadian Cincinnatus

Michael Bryant's Troublesome Saab Convertible

 

After reading excerpts of Michael Bryant's statement to the police about his involvement with the drunk and deranged bike courier, Darcy Allan Sheppard, I'm surprised the Ontario government isn't demanding a recall and inspection of all Saab convertibles.

First, it apparently stalled very easily when Bryant, inching his way through the stop and go construction traffic on Bloor last August, was forced to slam on the brakes when Mr. Sheppard decided to abruptly park his bike in front of the Saab.  Second, according to Mr. Bryant, these Saabs apparently accelerate dangerously when you try to restart them, such that it lurched forward and bumped Mr. Sheppard's bike, sending him from just belligerent into a rage.

Of course, Mr. Bryant will never be cross-examined about this story since the charges have been dropped, and rumors that he honked his horn at Mr. Sheppard will also never be heard by a judge.

What Mr. Bryant did say in his statement to the press yesterday was that it could have happened to anyone.  "There but by the grace of God go I," he said many friends had told him, and he's right.  The defense was able to find a video of Mr. Sheppard assaulting another car a few weeks earlier in a very similar manner, reaching through the driver's window to clutch the steering wheel while standing on the running board of the SUV. 

That driver must have been a cool cucumber though, because not only did he not accelerate wildly and smash Mr. Sheppard off on a fire hydrant, but he didn't even feel a need to call the police at the time.  He must have found some other way to deal with the situation that didn't involve anyone dying.

Yet another example of bike road rage occurred few weeks after Mr. Sheppard's attack on Mr. Bryant.  Once again a bike courier attacked a driver (of a nice Benz as I recall) downtown.  In fact it seemed like the bike courier was a copycat of Mr. Sheppard, reaching through the open driver's window to assault.  This driver wisely exited his car from the passenger side to get away from the courier, and then came around the front of the car on his feet so that he could face the courier mano a mano.  Fisticuffs ensued, but by the time the police got there both driver and bike courier refused to press charges on one another.  Apparently they felt they'd clearly settled this little bit of road rage all by themselves.

I saw the photo of Mr. Bryant the day of his arrest, sitting in the back of the police cruiser, and I saw his press conference the next morning when he was wearing that crisp suit the police had brought him in jail.  What struck me was how lucky he was that Mr. Sheppard, although reaching through the driver's side of the convertible and pumped up on booze and rage, didn't put a scratch or a bruise on Mr. Bryant's face.

Perhaps it was because Mr. Sheppard was too focused on the steering wheel and hanging onto the side of the speeding car to consider punching the driver.  After all that was all he could hope to control of the car.  Mr. Bryant had sole control of the break pedal and the gas pedal.

Of the four + minutes of Mr. Bryant's press conference this Tuesday that I saw on the Toronto Star's website, he spent two minutes thanking friends and his wife for their support.  He spent over a minute defending the justice system.  He spent 20 seconds saying it was a tragedy that a young man had died and on condolences to the Sheppard family, telling us that he had "grieved that loss."  He spent 45 seconds lecturing us all that this was not a morality play about bikes versus cars or rich vs poor.

What I didn't hear from Mr. Bryant was an admission that he'd behaved badly or acted unwisely. What I didn't hear was a conscious recognition of the fact that no matter how you slice it, Mr. Bryant's actions, his foot on the accelerator, had resulted in Mr. Sheppard's death.

Mr. Bryant did state at yesterday's news conference that he was terrified throughout the incident.  I wonder how Mr. Sheppard felt, clinging to the side of a speeding car going the wrong way down Bloor?  Did he feel terror?  Did he think that maybe he'd made a big mistake?  Was he hoping Mr. Bryant would stop?

I once heard that the British like their heroes dead, and Canada still has a lot of Great Britain running through its veins.  Mr. Sheppard is certainly no hero, but he's dead and his corpse is rotting in a coffin.

Mr. Bryant is still alive.

Mike Downtown

What President Obama could do about the Gulf oil slick

President Obama has been roundly criticized for his passivity and apparent disinterestedness over this issue. His strategy has been to blame BP and demand that they take care of it. Obama’s supporters say that this is correct because the US government doesn’t have the expertise or the equipment to solve this problem. To the extent that anyone does, it is the oil companies.

This is true, as far as it goes, but what the US government has is almost unlimited resources (even in its current indebted state). What could it do? How about offer a prize, say $25 billion to the first person or group who caps this well. This would be like the X-Prize that resulted in the first private manned suborbital space flight. Instead of bureaucracy, why not unleash the innovation and private creativity that has historically made America great. I bet the solution would as unexpected as it would be quick in coming.

Of course, you would have to word the proposition so that BP doesn’t get to profit from its disaster but hey, that’s what lawyers are for.

Is $25 billion a lot of money? Yes it is. But in an era where the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars of ‘stimulus’ money on dubious money-wasting projects, why not $25 billion on a demonstrable good?

In addition, it would be a good example of how big projects can be tackled with prizes and innovation, rather than cushy cost-plus contracts. Which is why Obama wouldn’t do it. Unless it was clear to him that the solution is going to come from ACORN.

With government spending, bad policy aligns with bad politics

Steven Malanga has an excellent column at Real Clear World, which makes the case that the huge federal deficit is not the fault of American taxpayers:

“It's become fashionable to pin the blame for our outsized national debt (to say nothing of staggering state and local obligations) on ordinary Americans who apparently want more government than they are willing to finance. In this respect, it seems, we're really no better than those Greek protestors we've been sneering at. And until we own up to the fact that we are the problem, so the commentary goes, we shouldn't expect elected leaders in Washington (or Sacramento, or Albany, or Springfield) to offer reasonable solutions to our deficit woes.

 

The problem with this assessment is that it is starkly at odds with the facts.”

Rather, Malanga claims, America’s fiscal woes are the fault of out-of-touch politicians who consistently push pork-barrel projects and entitlement programs that the American public has repeatedly said it opposes.

“Let's start with the newly empowered Democrats. They expended most of their political capital and an enormous amount of energy in the last year not on finding ways to cope with our long-term debt problem, but rather on passing a new entitlement program that the majority of Americans consistently said in surveys they opposed.”

“That health reform legislation is the biggest new entitlement since the one that the GOP gave us when it ran Congress and occupied the White House. The vast expansion of Medicare under the Bush administration was a new spending program that had little grass roots momentum. Coming from a president who ran as a fiscal conservative, the Medicare prescription drug program was a political ploy aimed at gaining a few percentage points in the polls during a reelection cycle. It was bigger government that few people were demanding, especially at a time when we were fighting two wars which, whatever else you think about those wars, were already helping to balloon the federal deficit.”

 

 “Liabilities have soared not because taxpayers were demanding outsized pay and pension packages for government workers, but because politicians responding to narrow interest groups have liberally provided these benefits with little idea how to pay for them.”

 

“Voters have made politicians pay for these transgressions when given a chance. When Gray Davis told Californians just before the 2002 election that the budget was in fine shape, only to later reveal a massive deficit worsened by big new pension promises he endorsed, voters recalled him. When Jon Corzine promised in 2005 to fix Jersey's budget mess by taking on expensive public sector entitlements, but instead raised taxes and did little to restrain government pay, he became a one-term governor. And President Bush might have been a one-term occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. if the Democrats had nominated someone who could take advantage of discontent over his fiscal policy. They didn't.”

This raises the obvious question, why do politicians support bad policies that are also bad politics?

Answer: because more government spending empowers them and less government spending takes away their power. When a Congressman gets a brand spanking new bridge-to-nowhere, it is not so much his voters who he seeks to impress, but rather the bridge contractor - who dutifully ponies up generous campaign contributions to return the favour. The average people are increasingly left out of the loop. But they are starting to wake up. Look at the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker kickback that were given to Senators Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson in return for their vote on Obamacare. The reasoning behind these payoffs was that the unpopularity of Obamacare in Louisiana and Nebraska could be negated by the ‘popularity’ of free federal money. The only trouble was that the voters hated the ‘free’ federal money even more than they hated Obamacare. Instead of saving Ben Nelson’s career, it finished it off. Ben Nelson was reduced to ignominiously fighting to have the Cornhusker Kickback cancelled.

The limitation of this strategy is that you can only get away with it for only so long. Each uptick in arrogant big government incrementally adds to the voter’s sense of alienation. And once the alienation bursts out into the open, there is hell to pay. This is the reason why the Tea Party movement swept America and entrenched incumbents are dropping like flies. The same dynamic was at play in Canada in the early nineties when the Reform party rose up out of nowhere, generating levels of enthusiasm rarely seen in Canadian politics. The Canadian people had enough of the venal Brian Mulroney, decked out in Gucci, haughtily lecturing them about what is really good for them.

What does Michael Ignatieff want us to do with the prisoners captured by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan?

I suppose Canada could send them to Club Gitmo, or if that isn’t cool with the Liberals, we could make our own equivalent camp, say, Camp Baffin Island.  But I can’t think of a course of action that would prolong the legalistic (and defeatist) nitpicking by the opposition.

Of course, I realize that the reception that the Afghan Police give to the insurgents we capture is a little, ahem, more robust than that given by the Metro Toronto Police to a gangbanger in Scarborough, but we have to remember: Afghanistan is not Canada. Being like Canada is not one of the options for Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there are two options, the corrupt, far-from-ideal government of Hamid Karzai or those crazy Islamist kids we call the Taliban. It is a fact that how they – the Taliban - treat their prisoners is several orders of magnitude worse than the current rulers in Kabul.

 What the Canadian Forces are doing there is helping to secure option one. Given that we are already there, any decision we make about our troops there is at its root, a choice between these two options. In other words, if Harvard Mike and Taliban Jack decide to pull our boys out of the sandbox, then they are, in effect, choosing option two. They will be enabling the inevitable atrocities that the Taliban will commit after we depart in the same way that the Democrat controlled Congress contributed to the Killing Fields and the atrocities inflicted on the boat people after they failed to supply the South Vietnamese government when North Vietnam blitzkreiged through the country with their tank divisions.

Stephen Harper hit the ball out of the park with his handling of the Guergis affair

A month ago I posted an article complimenting Stephen Harper on his expert handling the Jaffer/Guergis scandal. At that point in time, his seizure of the narrative with bold action left the opposition flat-footed.

But I didn’t realize how right Harper was in what he did. After a month this is becoming increasingly clear as Harper’s strategy bears fruit. After Helena Guergis’ whiny, woe-is-me TV interview, the opposition parties started accusing the Prime Minister of treating her heavy-handedly. Let me repeat this point for emphasis: the opposition parties are rallying in support of a disgraced Conservative cabinet minister (after calling her a liar a month ago).

So given that we still don’t really know what’s behind her expulsion, where does that leave matters? Scenario 1: evidence eventually surfaces that the Prime Minister’s actions towards Guergis are justified. Scenario 2: the evidence doesn’t justify Harper’s actions.

Heads Stephen Harper wins, tails the opposition loses. Even in the worst-case scenario, the Prime Minister just looks like an overly strict, straight arrow. Well that provides a good campaign slogan for the Liberals! Vote for us, Michael Ignatieff isn’t that strict on ethics. Even the Globe and Mail agrees (as it holds its nose).

I had long been impressed with Harper’s parliamentary strategy, but now I am in awe. To master the events so completely that the opposition ends up defending your scandal-prone minister, now that is genius.

Stephen Harper is truly the chess master.

Ralph Peters is right about Afghanistan (this time)

Last week, I disagreed with Ralph Peters’ New York Post column lambasting General McCrystal’s Afghan strategy. This time I think he is right on the money when he states that it is a mistake for the US to try and erect a modern nation state in Afghanistan out of a bunch of independent tribes. 

“Our obsession with creating a centralized, Westernized state extends to our efforts to build an Afghan military. Our model is the romanticized WWII squad in which every possible ethnic group's represented, all Americans.

 

But people fight for different things, and Afghans aren't interested in fighting for a foreign-backed government or for ethnic groups other than their own.

 

The Brits cracked the code on how to get tribesmen to fight for them: You give them a substitute tribe that's an extension of their hereditary tribe. The Indian Army's regimental system fit the bill perfectly: Recruited from an exclusive tribal network or ethnic group, the regiment could count on soldiers performing well to avoid shaming their families (think Gurkhas). Plus, the regiment offered its own tribal rituals.

 

If you want to succeed in a tribal society, you exploit tribal identities. Our officials insist that would undercut our goals. Well, perhaps our goals should be more realistic.”

He agrees with my analysis that one of the keys to victory is to work with the tribal structure of Afghanistan rather than against it. As I have said before, the word of the day in Afghanistan should be suzerainty, not sovereignty. NATO - and Hamid Karzai – should be content with the nominal allegiance of the Afghan tribes. As long as they are not hospitable to international terrorist organizations, the tribal leaders should be given a modest amount of military and development aid, and then let alone. If they let in the Taliban or Al Qaeda, that’s when you slap them upside the head. Otherwise stand back (but watch carefully).

 The other key, which Peters has not mentioned, is the War on Drugs. As I have also said before, you cannot win a War on Terror and a War on Drugs at the same time in Afghanistan. It is no coincidence that the two provinces that give NATO 80% of the trouble (Helmand and Kandahar) is where 90% of the poppies grow. If you want to win the War on Terror in Afghanistan (which I define as the denial of Afghanistan as a base of operations for international terrorists) you have to turn a blind eye towards the drug trade.

But unlike Peters, I am an optimist, in that I believe Afghanistan is the easiest country in the world to conquer - as long as you are not interested in governing it.

Toronto began warrantless home inspections last week

On March 16, the City of Toronto has formulated a plan – Project Zero - to do systematic, warrantless inspection of private homes to see if residents have complied with bylaws mandating smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, and fining people if they have not done so. As I read understand the process, they do not arrange an inspection in advance. Instead, they just target a street, knock on your door and demand to be let in.

When I first reported that this was about to happen, one of my readers took me to task and said:

“Put the tinfoil hat back on, the neutrino rays are penetrating your skull.

Ever heard of a trial balloon. There are not are enough fire inspectors to even contemplate such an action as this.”

Well Mr Critic, read this press release and put your tin foil hat on. The warrantless home inspections began – last Tuesday.

As I said on March 16, what is disturbing about this is that mission creep always sets in on government programs. When Human Rights Commissions were first set up, nobody envisioned them as having an absolute power to adjudicate over free speech, but now they do. When Children’s Aid Societies were first set up, their purpose was to resolve genuine child abuse cases. But soon these organizations wanted to expand their budgets and their clout and started going after ordinary families for petty violations. Spank your child or leave them at home at too young an age or even have a political view the children’s aid worker doesn’t like, and watch out. You as a parent now have to justify your actions to them, or they take the most valuable thing in your life away – your children. And by the way, the last example – about politically incorrect beliefs – is real. This case happened in Winnipeg a year ago.

The power to search homes without a warrant was first given to conservation officers to combat poachers. Now it has been given to the fire department. How long before the police – you know the people whose job it is to catch rapists and murderers – ask for the same power because, you know, rape and murder is far more serious than poaching and smoke detectors without batteries.

My question is this: at what point are we no longer living in a free country?

Ralph Peters is wrong about Afghanistan and General McChrystal is right

I have the greatest respect for the New York Post columnist and former US Army intelligence officer, Ralph Peters. Normally he is spot on. But in this article he errs in his analysis. For instance, Peters says:

“Bewildered by the lack of local support for our efforts to "help," Gen. Stan McChrystal and his staff decided that our problems in the Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, are all about electricity shortages.

 So, with the fate of our ballyhooed Kandahar offensive in doubt before it starts, the general wants to spend $200 million on generators and diesel fuel to improve the power supply.

It's a desperate ploy to make our politically correct counterinsurgency doctrine succeed: If we do nice things, the locals are supposed to rally to us and solve our problems with a minimum of violence. The only problem is that it doesn't work.

Would Kandaharis like to have more juice in their shambolic power grid? You bet. But the Eliot Spitzer Law of Foreign Affairs applies: You can't buy enduring love, just quick sex. And in Afghanistan, quick sex can get ugly.” 

Peters’ error is to assume that all the warm and fuzzy “hearts and minds” stuff is a bunch of PC hooey and we should get on with killing our enemy as robustly as possible. This thinking follows Ulysses S. Grant’s rule of war, “I find out where the enemy is, and I hit him there with everything I’ve got.” In conventional war, this is very true.

But counterinsurgency (COIN) operations are a very peculiar sub-species of war where a lot of the rules governing conventional warfare do not apply. The hearts and minds stuff is important because in a guerilla struggle, the side that the locals support will inevitably be the winner. They will support the side that offers them the best deal, in the form of security and living conditions, and who are perceived by them to be the strong horse. To that side, they will provide the aid and – most importantly - the crucial intel that allows the side receiving the information to target the enemy effectively. Guerrillas can no more operate among a hostile populace than the occupying army.

History is replete with examples of this sort. The most instructive is the Vietnam War, which is really a tale of two generals. When General Westmoreland was in command, the US Army crashed through the jungle in battalion sized formation, deluded itself with juked-up, body count stats and blasted the country indiscriminately with huge free-fire zones. Westmoreland was a pompous martinet who was more interested in his reputation in the Pentagon than he was in winning. After the Tet offensive proved that the emperor had no clothes on, he was replaced by the taciturn but effective Creighton Abrams. He immediately scaled back the bombing (at least in the South, the country he needed to win – he hit the Ho Chi Minh Trail much harder than Westmoreland ever did), eliminated the free-fire zones and concentrated his efforts on low-profile village security efforts. In his Saturday morning intelligence briefs, his philosophy was bad news first, good news later - if there’s time. And Abrams was spectacularly successful. How many of you know there were another three Tet offensives in his watch? You probably don’t because they all fizzled. By the time the US pulled out, the communist guerilla war was completely defeated. Don’t be deceived by the “US lost Vietnam” mantra. It is totally without foundation. The North captured the South the same way that Germany captured Belgium in 1940 - with a mechanized conventional assault. My point is that if you read what Abrams did, it bears a striking resemblance to what McChrystal is doing today.

Another example is the Surge in Iraq. The clear-and-hold strategy employed so successfully by General Petraeus is what McChrystal is replicating in Afghanistan.

One of the things I always hear asked is how can the US win in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union, with its atrocity-filled, no-holds-barred approach, couldn’t? What these people don’t get is that the Soviet Union failed because of its atrocity-filled, no-holds-barred approach. There are many examples in history of countries who failed COIN warfare for the same reason. Another example is Nazi Germany in Yugoslavia in World War II. Every Nazi reprisal on civilians strengthened Tito’s resistance.

Another instructive example is Northern Ireland. As long as the Republic of Ireland was poor, the Troubles in Northern Ireland kept going. But when Ireland slashed its top marginal tax rates and became more prosperous than the North, the IRA shriveled up into an ordinary run-of-the-mill mafia. Why fight the poorer Protestants when there is money to be made at home? What General McChrystal is trying to do with things like building power plants is to create a functioning economy. When people see hope, they are less likely to side with apocalyptic religious lunatics.

Of course, the elephant in the room, one Peters did not mention, is the heroin industry. Something like 90% of the world’s heroin is grown along the Helmand River. This is their only cash cow, and NATO is at least nominally hostile to this industry. This is a big problem and the real force behind the Taliban in Helmand and Kandahar Province. As I have said before, in Afghanistan, you can have a War on Terror or a War on Drugs, pick one. You can’t have both. Unfortunately, McChrystal’s hands are tied on this issue. If the US loses Afghanistan, it is because it failed to make a clear choice here.

David Cameron is John Tory

David Cameron started with a 28% lead in the polls 6 months ago and was barely able to eke out a minority government. Why? Because his positioning of the Conservative party was perfectly wrong. In other words, his wounds were self inflicted, just like John Tory’s were in the last Ontario election when everybody was sick of the Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty but Tory managed to make the election a referendum on funding religious schools.

David Cameron’s Big Idea when he took the helm was to make the Conservative Party more ‘warm and fuzzy’ to broaden the Conservative big tent. To further this goal, he embraced environmentalism, calling the Conservatives the real green party. Then the economy crashed and the expense scandal hit. As a result, anti-incumbent fever swept the electorate and the voters’ minds concentrated on the economy. Euroscepticism was popular too. A perfect environment for traditional conservative values: small, modest government, patriotism, anti-EU policies, Margaret Thatcheresque tax cuts and deregulation, and a dismantling of the PC police state that grew by leaps and bounds under Cool Britannia. Cameron hit all of these themes – eventually, but by then his credibility was weak.

The voters wanted a change and Cameron offered them Tweedlededum instead of Tweedlededee. In the middle of a perilous crisis, Britons were given a choice between three establishment candidates offering minor variations on the status quo.

It never ceases to amaze me how Red Tories on both sides of the Atlantic keep insisting that their watered-down brand of conservatism is the ticket to electoral success, even though the voters keep handing their lunch to them. The Red Tory bargain is to trade principle for electoral success. The trouble is, a lot of the time you end up with neither. Red Tories are often a failure, even on their own terms. 

Let Greece fail

The riots in Greece are certainly disturbing. And I don’t have enough of a feel about the situation to be able to say whether this is the usual cause-of-the-month club types out on an outing or whether Greece is really on the edge of a communist revolt. I sure hope it is not the latter. My family has experienced communism and I don’t wish that horrible fate on anybody.

On the other hand, Greece must be given the freedom to fall down. The 100 billion Euro IMF loan will do nothing but kick the problem down the road for a bit. It also telegraphs the following message to the other PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain): no need to take drastic action; put the hard decisions off and you will be rewarded with a whack of cash by the IMF or the EU or Germany (I was going to suggest the UN as an option but then I came to my senses - they are useless). Making an example out of Greece might be the shock these other countries need in order to proactively begin dismantling their own welfare states. Too big to fail has to end 

And if Greece really is that far gone that the Greeks would rather tear up their society than reform it, it must be understood that what comes out on the other end won’t be communism – communism has never solved any real-world problems. It will be disillusionment with communism, and big government.

It is always darkest before the dawn.