Thomas Sowell has a new article up at National Review regarding the new American right: the right to win. It covers a nice smattering of issues all relating to the leftish notion that if someone isn’t happy, then somehow injustice has been done.

As the election approached, pundits warned that, if Obama lost, there would be riots in the ghetto. We will never know. But since when does any candidate have a right to win any office, much less the White House?

The worst of all the reactions from people who act as if they have a right to win have come from gay activists in the wake of voter rejection of so-called “gay marriage,” which is to say, redefining what marriage has meant for centuries.

It’s good stuff. The whole postmodern, libertarian notion that “you can do anything you want until it begins to invade on my rights” is a joke, particularly in this age that trends towards socialized medicine (Medicare/Medicaid) that requires John Q. Taxpayer to pay for the medical complications affiliated with other people’s lifestyle choices, whether gay, gluttonous, lascivious or otherwise.

We still have speed limits, you know.

I was listening to the radio on my way to work the other day and they played a clip from a woman who was losing her house due to foreclosure.  The woman had chained herself to her house and stated on record that she did not want the bank to be able to take her home and hoped the politicians would “do their job” and help her to keep it.  Now, I feel bad that she and her husband are losing their house.  I understand that people are going through bad economic times.  However, since when is it the government’s “job” to protect us from our own decisions?  The problem is, this reliance on government for bailouts and handouts is not unique to individuals.

Recently the government passed a $700 billion bailout package.  $700 billion–our national annual budget is currently about $3 trillion.  Nearly a third of our national budget for a massive bailout of stupid financial decisions?  Also, the big news today is about the big three auto makers here in the United States lobbying Congress and the President to take action and come to their rescue.  They are requesting up to $25 billion in government aid to avoid a failing domestic auto industry.  I thought the United States won this ideological battle with the Soviet Union and other communist regimes–central planning and government ownership does not work. I guess someone forgot to tell our own citizens that we “won” this ideological battle.

However, with the election of Barack Obama we’re seeing a resurgence in demands for government help.  Not the Constitutional help we’re used to like national defense, but help from our own dumb choices.  When will people return to what made this country what it is today?  Taking responsibility and building their own future without an inefficient and soulless government there to redistribute assets and catch us when we fall. After all, there is always a price for government intervention. Always.

I voted for Proposition 8. I voted for Proposition 22 in 2000 to make marriage between a man and a woman. Please do not commit this atrocity of governmental bullying and overturn Proposition 8.

If you do, you show the utmost disrespect to the will of the people, to morality, to our country, and to yourselves. You will be nothing more than spoiled, out of touch ideologues forcing your values on your helpless constituency.

Interesting commentary with lots of poll data about why American Jews instinctively vote with the Left, despite the seemingly obvious danger in which that places the state of Israel. The key paragraph:

To the question, ‘Would you support or oppose the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons,’ 47% of Jews said they’d oppose America moving to save Israel from nuclear annihilation, 42% would support it, and 11% were unsure.

This is perhaps the clearest indication that a significant segment of the Jewish community either doesn’t give a damn about Israel or is delusional.

A few personal anecdotes (for whatever they’re worth):

I went to high school with many ethnic Jews (about 22% of my school in fact) and while many brought unleavened bread to lunch during passover week, most could not tell me what passover was all about. They knew the ethnic side of the story, at least the food part of the deal, as many, understandably, complained the entire week - but the ones I spoke to did not know its history. Being an evangelical Christian, I knew all about the lamb’s blood on the door post and the angel of death “passing over” these homes on the eve of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, but most thought I was crazy and just looked at me with blank stares as if to say: “Lamb’s blood? Whatever man, I just know I have to eat bad food during this week.” Some even commented that I was dead wrong. “Passover had nothing to do with that,” they said.

In graduate school I encountered a woman of Jewish heritage who told me that the only reason the United States protects the state of Israel is because the Christian fundamentalists in this country believe that Jesus Christ will return to the temple mount to usher in the end times (as if somehow Christ couldn’t descend from heaven, return to Israel, rebuild the temple, and establish his kingdom on earth without it being in the hands of the Jews or without the United States’ support). She seemed to believe that supporting the state of Israel equated to ushering in a Christ-centered end times, rather than simply supporting the Jewish state’s right to exist. As she didn’t believe in Christ, then she couldn’t support Israel. I found her reasoning rather puzzling. While she can certainly believe whatever she wants about the end times and Jesus Christ, she seemed to believe that the state of Israel was a Christian thing and should not be of Jewish concern.

I think most American Jews share this sentiment. They are ethnic Jews only. They eat unleavened bread, they don’t eat pork, they send their children to Hebrew school to learn the language, they throw bar/bat mitzvahs for their 13 year-olds, but they generally aren’t religious Jews and they largely, surprisingly, do not seem to care about the state of Israel. Or as the article stated, maybe they do care and it’s just not their top priority or they’re delusional.

A hero of mine, my all time favorite talk radio host (now turned documentary film maker), John Ziegler, has just posted footage from his upcoming film entitled “Media Malpractice… How Obama Got Elected.” The official webpage can be found here. Please check out this terrifying video/teaser/trailer.

When we think of Islamist terrorists, doesn’t our reaction frequently boil down to “hey, what’s their problem? Why don’t they just ‘get democracy,’ move into the 21st Century, leave behind all this primitive religious fervor, and quit killing people?”

Basically: what makes them think there’s something worth fighting over?

The idea that Islamist terrorists don’t have something “worth fighting over” is founded on secular assumptions - that no religion is better than another, or at least that no religion is worth spending your entire life’s energy trying to defend and promote. It is the ultimate arrogance, condescension, and insult to their value as human beings to dismissively say to them that what they believe in is not worth fighting for. If this extreme form of Islam is true (as they believe it is), that we are infidels, that it is their God-given duty to convert or destroy us, then it certainly is worth fighting for. Our very act of dismissal provides fuel for their argument that secular western society is ignorant, relativistic, and has no direction but downward.

The problem is not that these “pre-modern” “savages” have yet to be “enlightened” by the modern (or post-modern) secular western world, or that their impoverished conditions have caused them to lash out at our success. The problem is that their worldview is dangerous, wrong, and evil.

No secular means or democratic solution is going to weaken their resolve. And no watered down “can’t we all just get along” line of diplomatic reasoning will ever have any impact on such zealous individuals.

That’s the bumper-sticker I want!

This is relatively old news, but gross misconceptions about the Iraq War continue to pervade the public discourse (primarily on the left, although in fairness the right doesn’t appear to know how to counter the misconceptions effectively). Plus, during the election I believe that it was an area where McCain allowed himself to be tied to President Bush unnecessarily, thus benefiting Obama.

It appears to me that the mantra “Bush lied, people died” has become the common wisdom on the Left and has become the main argument for withdrawing troops immediately from the region. (Note:what passes for truth on the Left generally amounts to a pithy statement about a complicated issue that can fit onto a bumper sticker).

“Bush lied…”

Webster’s dictionary defines a lie as

an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.

Thus, in order for the “Bush lied” part of the maxim to be true, one of two things must be true:

1. Bush knew absolutely that Saddam did not have WMD

2. Bush believed it highly likely that Saddam did not have WMD

Now, the judgment that Saddam had WMD hung on several points (at least those that are unclassified):

1. The human source known as Curveball, an Iraqi who claimed (falsely as it turns out) to have inside knowledge of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons operations. His primary claim was that Saddam had reconstituted his chemical/biological weapons program via mobile facilities.

2. Satellite photos that indicated the presence of heavy-duty flatbed trucks, forklifts (necessary for transporting chemical weapons) and decontamination trailers (in case of emergency) at Al-Musayib, known prior to Operation Desert Storm to have been a chemical weapons facility.

3.The fact that the intelligence community had failed to accurately assess Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs (which proved to be extensive) prior to the Persian Gulf War in 1991. As the intelligence community had failed to accurately assess his weapons programs previously, analysts overcompensated and made leaps of faith that should not have been made.

4. Saddam relied on various deception campaigns (including the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors). He wanted the West to believe that he had WMD. Obviously at the time, the West did not know that they were deception campaigns, but hindsight is 20/20. (Note: the motive for these deception campaigns is still unclear. In the collective Western mind it makes no sense to fake that you have WMD when the world’s superpower says that it will invade your country and kill you if you have WMD, but clearly Saddam’s decision-making calculus was different. He called our bluff, thinking we would not invade, and it didn’t work out in his favor. We misread him and he misread us. Most believe that Saddam wanted the West to believe he had WMD because he wanted Iran (and his own people) to believe that he had WMD as a deterrent to a threat on his power and as a status symbol.)

None of this is meant to excuse the US Intelligence Community or President Bush from relying on false intelligence reports to invade Iraq in 2003. The intelligence community (and the intelligence communities of nearly every other country in the world) simply blew it. The “slam dunk” clanged embarrassingly off the back of the rim. However, relying on the experts who turned out to be wrong does not amount to “Bush lied.” Ultimately, it is the President who makes decisions, so the responsibility does lie as his feet, but it does not amount to lying as he had no reason to believe that his experts (and those of all his allies) were wrong. His experts simply got it wrong. [As an aside, this amounts to an intelligence error - incorrectly assessing something to be true when it is false - and not an intelligence failure - failing to adequately warn or prepare the executive for a situation that occurred.] Similar to when FDR’s experts failed to alert him to the possibility of a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, when Truman’s experts failed to anticipate that the Chinese would intervene on behalf of North Korea, or when Kennedy’s experts told him, two days prior to the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, that the Soviets would never attempt to place missiles in Cuba. (Note that all three examples are of Democratic administrations, two of which caused mass casualties and one brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, yet these three presidents are never reviled as “the worst President ever.”  On the contrary, the first two are widely considered to be in the top ten and JFK is held up by the liberal establishment as a great man and wonderful leader, an agent of change if you will.)

Some make the argument that the Bush administration pressured the intelligence community into giving them the answer they wanted to hear, namely that Saddam had WMD. This is a joke.

1.) This would also mean that the intelligence communities of Britain, France, Germany, and Israel (among others) were also pressured to provide “the right answer” to the Bush administration. Seeing as they did not want the US to invade Iraq (and at least Britain provided troops as well), why would they do that? You’d have to believe in really large conspiracy theories (such as “blood for oil” to believe this.

2.) What respectable person in their right mind knowingly distorts the truth simply because they are nagged about it? Just because a question is asked often doesn’t mean that the answer should change if the truth remains the same. (eg. is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? No, he’s actually living in my attic.) It’s absurd. Analysts aren’t teenagers at a party bowing to peer pressure to smoke pot, they’re professionals who make these sorts of difficult judgments for a living. Do they have their own biases? Certainly. Do they personally favor policy decisions over others? I’m sure they do. But do they deliberately distort the truth because the President asks them if they’re sure about a particular issue? No.

Other issues to address:

“The war is unjust…”

While there are additional reasons, for the basic reason that it’s never morally wrong to depose of an authoritarian leader who slaughters his own people, I believe the Iraq War is just. Now, one can make the argument that the Iraq War is imprudent, but making the argument that God’s idea of justice would somehow side with Saddam is laughable.

“The US should withdrawal immediately…”

The American people generally did not turn against the war until it realized that it would not be an easy victory and that if Saddam didn’t have WMD, they didn’t know why we were fighting it (a communication/leadership failure on the part of the administration). Well, the US should not withdraw troops immediately simply because the war is difficult or because the President relied on faulty intelligence. The reason the US invaded Iraq was to depose of Saddam Hussein who (mistakenly) was believed to have WMD that not only would have destabilized the region, but that he would give (or threaten to give) to non-state actors to use against the United States. Now, as it turns out, that judgment was incorrect; however, now that we’ve deposed Saddam, it would be morally unethical to just up and leave because its easier for us to do it that way. The fact that we have to stay and clean up the mess has nothing to do with the fact that Saddam didn’t have WMD.

Consider a parable: The local police break down the door of a house in the neighborhood, storm into the residence and kill the husband/father as he tries to escape, setting the house ablaze in the process. The police were after the man because they believed that he was the ringleader of a drug cartel. This turned out to be false upon subsequent analysis, but it was discovered that the husband/father had not only beaten his wife over a period of twenty-five years, but that he had also sexually abused their children, their neighbor’s children and had threatened all those in the neighborhood with violence, even killing some in order to establish his authority. Legally, the actions of the police were probably wrong as their judgment (or probable cause) for obtaining the warrant was incorrect. But morally, it’s hard to fault the police as they did away with a horrible man. Nonetheless, the police cannot simply leave the wife and children to fend for themselves because the man they killed (while deplorable) was not the ringleader of the drug cartel as they had initially suspected. That would be morally reprehensible. The right thing to do is for the police to buy the family a new home and seek counseling for the wife and the children while ensuring that the neighborhood is safe and stable enough to avoid becoming a target of nearby neighborhood gangs.

“It wasn’t prudent for the US to invade Iraq…”

Now, that’s an argument with some merit that should be discussed in detail by the American public and by the country’s leaders. Most would agree that this question, too, has nothing to do with whether or not troops should remain in Iraq until the situation is fixed. (If you accidentally break a window under false pretenses, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay to fix the window.) Sadly, this is not the debate that rages in our society today, nor is it the debate that the presidential candidates had on the campaign trail or during the debates. Essentially, the debates devolved to:

Obama: the war was a mistake (for unspecified reasons - presumably either because Bush lied or because it was a war for oil or because Americans are capitalists and capitalists are always imperialists or cynically because it was the message that won him the primary) and we should withdraw immediately, apologizing to anyone within earshot that we’re a terrible nation filled with mean-spirited, angry, bitter people who can’t speak languages other than English.

McCain: the war was not a mistake, because the Iraqi people are now free. It was going poorly until I supported the surge. We should stay there until the job is finished. (However, this completely bypasses what makes Americans the most upset: we entered the war based on faulty intelligence.)

The winning debate answer for McCain: you’re right, we relied on faulty intelligence to invade Iraq (thereby distancing himself from Bush) and that was a mistake [although as an aside, one could make other arguments to support an invasion of Iraq - violating UN resolutions, etc]; however, this does not change the fact that we need to win the war now that it has begun. However, this proves (as does 9/11 and other intelligence gaffes of the past twenty years) that our intelligence system needs to be reformed. Namely, we need to place more emphasis on human intelligence. As Americans, we’ve grown spoiled, thinking that we can keep peace and solve all problems without getting our hands dirty by engaging in the shadowy world of espionage. Some have gotten intellectually lazy, relying on wishful-thinking that the United Nations, a morally bankrupt, feckless organization that can’t and often doesn’t enforce its own resolutions, is the answer to all the world’s problems. Nevertheless, Bin Laden & Co. now view Iraq as the primary front against the free world and we must view it that way as well. We cannot leave, thus handing the war to the terrorists, simply because it did not go as smoothly as we planned and simply because it was not fought properly from the outset. We are a united country today because Lincoln refused to allow the South to secede, despite the fact that he mishandled the war (by appointing feckless generals like McClellan) for the first three years.

In sum: I am not advocating that war should never be questioned. But when questioned, it must be done so responsibly (not done so to undermine a particular policy while US troops are in the field) and the debate must focus on the right questions. “Bush lied, people died” is a ridiculous statement made by the ignorant and intellectually bereft who place a political party and ideology above their country’s best interests. It misinforms the (already ill-informed) American populace and distracts from the necessary debate: was it prudent for the US to use force (as opposed to a combination of other tools of tradecraft) to contain Saddam even if turned out that he had WMD?

OBAMA’S ‘CHANGE’: BACK TO THE DEMOCRATIC WASHINGTON INSIDERS, from DickMorris.com. This article is of special personal interest to me, given a conversation I had with a guy I met at a birthday party earlier this year, during the primaries. He informed me that the best thing about Obama was what an outsider he was, and how every person he brought in through his administration was going to be new blood. I would imagine that guy is fairly disappointed now, given that a huge majority of Obama’s people are old Washington hacks. Now that’s change I can believe in!

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace, from the Wall Street Journal. Written by a former John Kerry advisor, no less. One of my favorite things to do in the last couple years is to talk to all the gigantic “Bush haters,” and ask them to explain to me why he is so evil. Usually I get, “oh he’s a war monger,” or “he lied about WMDs!” Now don’t get me wrong, Bush has done plenty of things that upset me. But I can at least define what those things are. I guess what it really must come down to is the fact that Leonardo Decaprio and Kanye West think that Bush sucks, and that must mean it’s true. The level of blind hatred backed up by complete ignorance from most of this country over the last four years has been pathetic. It’s be nice to see general unfounded hatred replaced by obvious, unfettered Obama fawning from celebrities and the media for the next four years. Or not.

Joe the Plumber case still dripping from Ohio.com. If Obama’s/the media’s treatment of Joe The Plumber is any indication of what the next four years are going to be like, then fasten your seatbelts. If there was any justice in the world there would be rioting in the streets over this one. Government agencies using government resources to smear/discredit a private citizen because they dared to ask His Mercifulness a question? Terrifying.

Report: ‘08 turnout same as or only slightly higher than ‘04 from CNN.com

Tolerance fails T-shirt test from the Chicago Tribune. An 8th grader wore a “McCain Girl” t-shirt to school as an experiment and recorded the results.

FRANKEN ‘FIXES’ STALK SENATE RACE from NY Post. Al Franken is an idiot, and I sincerly hope he doesn’t manage to weasel (read: cheat) his way into the Senate.

And I thought Global Warming was a slam dunk? Shame that some of the “data” reported recently has been shown to be fraudulent, and apparently sea ice is growing fast.

Good summary of some arguments against all the Prop 8 protesting at PowerlineBlog.com. And just in case you didn’t know, Prop 8= Hate, which must mean No on Prop 8= happy love feelings. Just don’t tell these guys or these guys. Yay Democracy!

Underlying the main idea stated in Leadership and Communication is one of the defining principles Conservatism (or the Republican Party for that matter) will need to grab a hold of if this country is going to survive the next two, four (or God forbid, eight) years of potentially unchecked liberalism: political courage. Or more plainly stated, leadership. The GOP is currently hopelessly lost in a sea of political correctness, and everyone knows it. McCain, while an honorable and good man, proved once and for all what everyone on our side already knew- Moderate Republicans do not win. The GOP knows the model for winning is not to pander to the middle, but to establish roots in conservatism and move the country to the right through effective communication, but has abandoned that model completely. It is as if they think that Reagan’s success was based completely on his personality, and not on his ideas.

McCain passed on opportunity after opportunity to nail Obama and the Democrats to the wall on the issue of the economy. Instead, he allowed them to dictate the pace and topic of conversation for the entire last month of the campaign, and he rightly lost because of it. He allowed them to convince America that our economic crisis is somehow tied to Bush and his calls for deregulation, when the very people overseeing the regulating committees were Democrats. The seeds for this problem were planted, watered, fertilized, and lovingly tended to by Democrats. That’s not political posturing, it’s reality. Who was the number two money taker from Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac? Obama. In two years, no less. Who has run Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac for it’s entire existence? Democrats, largely Clinton cronies at that. Who passed the Community Reinvestment Act, the bill that led to the sub prime mortgage crisis? Who later decided that bill wasn’t enough, and put the original bill on steroids? Carter, and then Clinton, both Democrats. Was McCain just not aware of all of these facts? Or was he too convinced his path to victory was through his precious moderates? That’s one’s pretty obvious.

If the Republican party wants to survive, maybe even move ahead in the future, someone is going to need to step up and call a spade a spade. And I’m not talking about just articulating Democrat’s failures, though it is occasionally necessary. I’m talking about being a leader, who communicates ideas to the people, and tells them about history, what works and what doesn’t. Lord knows our school system isn’t doing that. Obama certainly isn’t. He wouldn’t know history if he was clubbed in the knees with it by one of his union member thugs. I’m talking about a leader who remembers that Capitalism is what made our country a super power in the first place, and Socialism is what will promptly return us to the stone age. I’m talking about defending our rights to personal liberty, reminding Americans of how important and precious those rights are, and forgetting about whether or not that gets you on MTV. Anyone want to take that job?

Good communication is a staple of good leadership. It is the ingredient that moves the country with purpose, separating the great presidents from the good presidents. It is well-reasoned, bold, rooted in historical truths and in touch with the realities of this fallen world.

While I do not believe that Bush 43 has been the worst president ever (usually postulated by someone who couldn’t name 5 presidents between Jefferson and Kennedy, let alone describe their policies), I think we can all agree that he has not been a good communicator. I do not mean this in the same way with which Saturday Night Live, Michael Moore and the liberal establishment has so much fun. I mean that Bush has not done a good job of presenting his case to the American people. He has not presented a message that is well-reasoned, bold, rooted in history, philosophy or national purpose and given repeatedly with conviction. The president is required to be the chief educator and in this regard Bush has failed miserably. Many times, his administration has simply hid its head in the sand and allowed the media to lambaste its proposals while the people slowly start to nod their heads, eventually won over by conspiracy theories, unsubstantiated myths and poor logic.

People want to believe. A good communicator merely has to tap into that vein. Thus, the infatuation with Obama. But it remains to be seen whether Obama has the gifts of leadership and communication - I mean this sincerely not as hyperbole - because his words thus far have been empty. They mean nothing. Even disregarding his countless policy shifts from his days as Illinois Senator and campaigner in the Democratic primary to his campaigning for president as a “centrist,” his words are mere boilerplate. Obama has already begun to backpedal because it is unlikely that he will achieve even 20% of his stated goals. Most are simply unachievable, either because they are unaffordable, unpractical or against the reality of human nature. He is the perfect candidate for the MTV generation:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide for the sick… This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

Poetic? Sure. Well delivered? I suppose. Presented with conviction capturing that deep longing within us? Perhaps for some. But specific and unequivocal? Not so much. Courageous in the face of adversity? Not really. Rooted in history and experience? Absolutely not!

In contrast, listen to The Great Communicator sixteen years before he achieved the presidency:

The entire speech can be found here.  The speech transcript here.