The sky is clearing and the evil sleet and rain storm moved northward over night, proving again that Pope Algore knows more than he lets on, and that he hears all, even those most humble of his servants. His command of the weather is exceeded only by the Evil Bush Rove and they must use a complicated Hurricane Machine. I sometimes think the picture to the right is a beta model of the evileeeeee machine, but I have lost my tinfoil hat and may be under the influence of rays from the man made global warming community.
But on to more sober thoughts.
The comparison of the Left’s desire to surrender to radical Muslim terrorists remains a topic, but has been reduced as we continue to have success in Iraq, and the media devotes their time to attacking, in their mind, even more dangerous targets, aka John McCain.
What was especially interesting yesterday was the announcement that al-Sadr has graciously extended the “truce” for six months. Although I usually don’t make predictions. I predict that he will direct his minions to start new attacks in September in an attempt to influence the US election in favor of the Democrats who have stated they will leave Iraq.
Remember where you read it first.
This, of course, is the fruit of being thought to be weak. And to our everlasting shame as a country and as a “culture” some call “western civilization,” we an easily look back and see the results of Chamberlain, and others, who thought they could do business with Hitler. That lapse in judgment cost only 10,000,000 lives or so, including 6,000,000 or so Jews.
Although our security forces have had great success, sooner or later something very bad will happen to us, in this country. When it does, we are apt to respond directly. Consider this from Walter Russell Mead It offers some interesting thoughts.
In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians—not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki……
Why is it that U.S. public opinion is often so quick—though sometimes so slow—to support armed intervention abroad? What are the provocations that energize public opinion (at least some of it) for war—and how, if at all, is this "war lobby" related to the other elements of that opinion? The key to this warlike disposition, and to other important features of American foreign policy, is to be found in what I shall call its Jacksonian tradition, in honor of the sixth president of the United States……
If Jeffersonianism is the book-ideology of the United States, Jacksonian populism is its folk-ideology. Historically, American populism has been based less on the ideas of the Enlightenment than on the community values and sense of identity among the British colonizers who first settled this country. In particular, as David Hackett Fischer has shown, Jacksonian populism can be originally identified with a subgroup among these settlers, the so-called "Scots-Irish", who settled the back country regions of the Carolinas. and Virginia, and who went on to settle much of the Old West—West Virginia, Kentucky, parts of Indiana and Illinois—and the southern and south central states of Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Jacksonian populism today has moved beyond its original ethnic and geographical limits. Like country music, another product of Jacksonian culture, Jacksonian politics and folk feeling has become a basic element in American consciousness that can be found from one end of the country to the other.
The Scots-Irish were a hardy and warlike people, with a culture and outlook formed by centuries of bitter warfare before they came to the United States. Fischer shows how, trapped on the frontiers between England and Scotland, or planted as Protestant colonies in the hostile soil of Ireland, this culture was shaped through centuries of constant, bloody war. The Revolutionary struggle and generations of savage frontier conflict in the United States reproduced these conditions in the New World; the Civil War—fought with particular ferocity in the border states—renewed the cultural heritage of war.
I hope I am wrong.
