Victor Davis Hanson has a column looking at the big things that happened (or didn't happen) after 9/11. It's great, read the whole thing, yadda yadda but there's two sections I want to point out.

3. The taboo enemy dead. After Vietnam, who would wish to count enemy dead? To a 21st-century public, such terrible arithmetic might seem macabre, intrinsically politicized, or simply irrelevant in war. The age-old idea that killing die-hard enemies wins wars and ensures the peace is for some antithetical to the spirit of counterinsurgency doctrine, at least superficially so. Few would ever channel William Tecumseh Sherman’s frightening remarks that to win the Civil War the Union army would have to kill or humiliate several thousands of the Southern "cavalier" class, whose livelihoods depended on slavery, whose zeal had started the war, and whose boasts of martial superiority had galvanized the Confederate belief that its fighters were far better than the Northerners and could trump inferior resources.

Tens of thousands of hard-core jihadists from as far away as Algeria, Chechnya, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies, Libya, Syria, and Yemen obeyed the calls for jihad issued by the likes of Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi. They flocked to al-Qaeda’s "main theater" of jihad in Iraq - and in Baghdad and throughout Anbar Province were killed in droves by the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies. Only off the record will military officers confess that the eventual American success in Iraq was due in some part to doing away with murderous jihadists and impressing the local population with our martial superiority. And even off the record, few will suggest that the absence of such killers from the world’s pool of hard-core terrorists may well have made life safer at home. We are in a new age when we "beat" or "subdue" the enemy but do not admit that we do that often through killing him. The Iraq War has become a story about troop levels, hearts and minds, and training the Iraqis, but not much about a shooting war in which thousands of jihadists lost.

Note the boldfaced sections in the 2nd paragraph. LeMay's quote comes to mind - "If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."

And what about our Darth Vader, Cheney?

5. The Cheney monster. By 2011 a gaunt and ill former vice president Cheney was the constant butt of late-night comedians and derided almost weekly by smug columnists. But how and why that metamorphosis had come about was never explored. It was as if Cheney was now and always had been Darth Vader, a man who liked to shoot his hunting pals and who sat in retirement with ill-gotten Halliburton riches. Few reminded us that for nearly 30 years Dick Cheney was a centrist fixer, praised by liberals as fair-minded, bipartisan, and sober and judicious in his rhetoric. ...

The charges against Cheney seem to rest on the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists who had had a hand in the planning of 9/11 - and on Cheney’s unabashed defense that such harsh interrogation saved lives and that he would most certainly do it again if we were in similar dire circumstances. ...

Somehow bloggers and op-ed writers have established by their selective outrage a narrative that it was immoral of Cheney to approve the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists like KSM, but quite moral of Obama to expand fivefold the Predator targeted-assassination program that served as judge, jury, and executioner of suspected terrorists - and of any living thing in their vicinity when the Hellfire missiles obliterated their compounds. It is apparently the nature of a therapeutic culture to demonize one of the architects of the present anti-terrorism policy of renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, etc. only to apotheosize one of its chief critics - while quietly assuming that Cheney so convinced Obama of the utility of these protocols that the latter adopted nearly all of what he inherited.

(Published by ace.)

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:26 AM | Comments (50)
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No, seriously.

The Republicans have decided to not formally rebut the President's Thursday night speech. I think that's a bad call myself -- always rebut, even if you're not even rebutting, but merely selling your own ideas and your own credentials as pro-jobs -- but that's what they decided.

Nancy Pelosi is furious. Furious that we're not rebutting Obama.

Yes, furious. You see, it's now also disrespectful (by which we mean racist) to not rebut the President's horse-load.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that the Republican leadership’s decision to forgo a direct response to President Barack Obama’s jobs speech Thursday is “not only disrespectful to him, but to the American people.”

The California Democrat, in a Tuesday night statement, blasted the tactical decision of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) not to take to the airwaves to state whatÂ’s otherwise clear: He doesnÂ’t agree with the bulk of ObamaÂ’s proposals.

...

A GOP aide quipped: “This is just dumb. The former speaker is criticizing us for passing up an opportunity to criticize the president."

Some things are so stupid you actually feel kind of stupid in noting that they are stupid.

In related news, Joe Wilson apologized in advance for not planning to shout "You lie!" to President Obama.

"I wish to apologize for my racial insensitivity," he stated via a press release. "I realize that it is an act of racial hatred to not tell the president he's a liar, but I have a pre-existing commitment to watch the Packers-Saints game and shout 'You lie!' at Al Michaels. If it would help ease racial tensions, I am, however, willing to call President Obama and tell him 'You Lie!' in a voicemail, which he can then re-play, at at time of his choosing, during his address."

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (228)
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Since I'm putting so many eggs in the "electability" basket I can't dismiss this out of hand.

Perry has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" that "weakens American values."

The usual math is that entitlements for seniors is the third rail of American politics -- seniors vote in great numbers, and are generally a swing-ish section of the vote, and tend to vote not quite as a single-issue bloc but largely based on entitlements.

Here's Karl Rove, calling Perry's position on Social Security politically "toxic."

On “GMA” this morning, Karl Rove noted that new GOP frontrunner has many strengths, but Rick Perry’s thoughts on Social Security are not among them.

Perry’s campaign has not backed away from what Perry wrote in his book “Fed Up” — that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” a “failure,” “something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now,” and one of many New Deal programs that have “never died, and like a bad disease, they have spread.”
But Rove pulled no punches today, calling that stance “inadequate.”

“They are going to have to find a way to deal with these things,” Rove said.
“They’re toxic in a general election environment and they are also toxic in a Republican primary. And if you say Social Security is a failure and ought to be replaced by a state level program, then people are going to say ‘What do you mean by that?’ and make a judgment based on your answer to it,” he said.

I know the convenient rap on Karl Rove is that he's an establishment shill who wants to knock down any sort of threat to his enabling power base, but in fact what he says is pretty much true. It is very dangerous to speak negatively of Social Security. This is not a new idea. It's been true since... well, since Social Security was proposed.

Noted conservative intellectual (kidding) Joe Scarborough simply declares that Perry cannot win a general election, period.

Without a doubt, it would be far easier for any Republican to win an election without mentioning entitlement reform, or to run on his own Mediscare-type campaign promising to not touch entitlements at all.

That said... taking that thinking to its conclusion, a candidate could get elected doing that, but then, upon winning office (if he won), he'd have two options:

1) Once again punt on entitlement reform and doom America to bankruptcy.

2) Actually attempt entitlement reform, but do so after breaking a promise not to, without a mandate for it, as that public was never given the chance to consent on that policy through the normal method of hearing a proposal and then informing its vote in an election based on that proposal.

For what it's worth, Michele Bachmann is fairly up-front about the need for entitlement reform. Most candidates do discuss it. Tim Pawlenty did. Sarah Palin endorsed Paul Ryan's Roadmap (which includes major reforms to Medicare). Chris Christie -- not a candidate, but piping up to argue for fiscal responsibility -- declares these issues must be addressed.

Republican star and likely Vice Presidential nominee Marco Rubio is quite forward-leaning in announcing "entitlements weakened us as a nation."

These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities.

I actually don't like this argument for several reasons, first among them, it's politically harmful. I don't like Rubio's or Perry's claim that it weakens us; I would focus on the fact that bankruptcy weakens us, and we need to change these programs to make them actually work, and continue into the future.

So I actually do believe that while these issues are dicey, and yet most be spoken about, Perry (and Rubio) are actually addressing these dicey subjects in a dicier manner than is even necessary. You don't want to play the Senior Scare card... on yourself.

Still, that's just verbiage. What ultimately counts is actual plans, actual proposals. And we can either do the responsible thing and attempt to change the math on entitlement reform, or we can continue down the path of financial ruin.

I think it continues to be better politics to do that latter, but it's not as politically suicidal to take the responsible position as it has been in the recent past.

If you don't support entitlement reform -- and entitlements were supposed to be sustained by the money collected from the payroll tax -- then you're in favor of general tax increases, and fairly large general tax increases, to pay for all this social safety net spending. If there is no effort made to bring entitlement spending more in line with entitlement revenue streams, the only remaining option is to simply start taxing the crap out of people.

Which is not very conservative.

Mitt Romney is probably playing this the cagiest by speaking so little about it.

But... that's not really clever, because that's what's been done for decades. It's not some genius, novel move. That is SOP. Clarification: Romney may speak little about it, but it's not true that he doesn't speak about it at all -- he does. Let me further clarify that I'm not against the basic idea of soft-selling this. But the more you soft-sell it, the less of a mandate you'd be able to claim were you to actually win the office sought. It's my belief that Perry is too forward-leaning on this, as far as politics, but Romeny isn't leaning far enough forward, as far as likely ability to claim a mandate for needed reform. I think both need some tweaking in their positioning.

And although the media now likes to pretend to forget this, even the SCOAMFOTUS promised entitlement reform during his campaign,* and was praised as an enlightened, courageous thinker for doing so.

I think I'd have trouble supporting a Republican candidate who was less forward-leaning on entitlement reform in 2012 than Barack Obama was in 2008.

Some things I'm not eager to gamble an election on; some things I'm more willing to do so. Entitlements are one of the areas I'm willing to gamble, because if we don't fix this, then we're really just arguing about which party will be the best administrators of the nation's bankruptcy proceedings.

* I keep saying he said this during his campaign, but the articles I always find in google searches have him making this promise in the first month of his actual presidency, in Jan-Feb 2009. I still think he said it during the campaign. If I'm wrong about that, though, he at least got praised for his entitlement heroism in very early 2009.

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (427)
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The media has been flogging the meme that the House Republicans are more unpopular than Obama for some time.

That's apples to oranges, as in that case you're comparing one guy to many, most of whom you didn't vote for and maybe wouldn't vote for, if you could.

But it's more deceptive than that:

The public hates Congress — and, in theory, that ought to be a good thing for minority House Democrats in 2012. In theory.

Most folks, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, would purge all lawmakers from office — even the local representative. By a 58 percent to 31 percent margin, registered voters believe Democrats will do a better job of “standing up for the middle class,” according to a POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground poll. And in a third survey released Tuesday, conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, only 28 percent of respondents approve of the way congressional Republicans are doing their jobs.

But buried in the Journal/NBC poll is a contradictory nugget: Registered voters, by a 47 percent to 41 percent spread, would rather have Republicans in charge of Congress. That’s the highest level of preference for Republican control since the question was first posed 15 years ago. At a time when the White House is fond of the mantra that an election is “a choice, not a referendum,” it appears that voters aren’t ready to choose Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi over Speaker John Boehner.

This suggests (but doesn't prove) that harder-core conservatives are right in their diagnosis here: A big chunk of the public is dissatisfied with Republicans, but for being too moderate, and not conservative enough. Or not getting the results they want.

Dangerous Precedent? WalrusRex is worried:

We can't base our political/economic theories on evidence. If truth were to gain a foothold in politics, where would it end?

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (140)
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An important theme running through it is that many did not want to even perform a test which might cast doubt on AGW.

Given a chance to do some science, and let science answer questions rather than "the consensus," it was preferred that science STFU and let the consensus speak.

But while the cosmic-ray theory has been ridiculed from the start by those who subscribe to the anthropogenic-warming theory, both Mr. Kirkby and Mr. Svensmark hold that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.

It should be noted that this position isn't really debatable -- carbon dioxide is provably a (weak) greenhouse gas. More carbon dioxide should lead to some increased temperature.

But how much? Carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas. All of the claims of out-of-control global warming rely non on the well-defined (slight) properties of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but on speculative "feedback" mechanisms of the earth's hydrosphere, all of which will careen dangerously towards weather anarchy if CO2 levels change the slightest. And it's here that "science" pretty much stops and "sophisticated computer modeling" begins.

Those who demand we base conclusions on empirical evidence ("the science is settled!") must confess how little empirical evidence they have, and how much of their evidence is completely non-empirical.

A computer model, created with all of the unproven runaway-feedback assumptions global warming is based on, is as non-empirical as you can get.

You know what's empirical? Blasting a cloud chamber with cosmic rays to see how they effect the earth's cloud cover. But oddly enough, no one really wanted to test this out.

Through several more years of "careful, quantitative measurement" at CERN, Mr. Kirkby predicts he and his team will "definitively answer the question of whether or not cosmic rays have a climatically significant effect on clouds." His old ally Mr. Svensmark feels he's already answered that question, and he guesses that CERN's initial results "could have been achieved eight to 10 years ago, if the project had been approved and financed."

Nah, let's not run a genuine scientific test; let's keep running the same computer models, and then screaming that models based on the same assumptions keep "confirming" each other.

The biggest milestone in last month's publication may be not the content but the source, which will be a lot harder to ignore than Mr. Svensmark and his small Danish institute.

Any regrets, now that CERN's particle accelerator is spinning without him? "No. It's been both a blessing and the opposite," says Mr. Svensmark. "I had this field more or less to myself for years—that would never have happened in other areas of science, such as particle physics. But this has been something that most climate scientists would not be associated with. I remember another researcher saying to me years ago that the only thing he could say about cosmic rays and climate was it that it was a really bad career move."

The science may not be settled, but all betrayals of the One True Cause will be settled.

On that point, Mr. Kirkby—whose organization is controlled by not one but 20 governments—really does not want to discuss politics at all: "I'm an experimental particle physicist, okay? That somehow nature may have decided to connect the high-energy physics of the cosmos with the earth's atmosphere—that's what nature may have done, not what I've done."

Notice how defensive he is.

Why is a scientist made to feel so threatened for conducting an experiment?

Last month's findings don't herald the end of a debate, but the resumption of one. That is, if the politicians purporting to legislate based on science will allow it.

And they won't.

Dangerous Precedent? WalrusRex is worried:

We can't base our political/economic theories on evidence. If truth were to gain a foothold in politics, where would it end?

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (112)
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[Bumped: This is the last day for sign up. Picks have to be in tomorrow before game time.]

Well, it's that time of year again.

Yahoo Fantasy Football Pick'em league details below. Link for the lazy here.

Group 1 ID: 431 Password:hobo
Group 2 ID: 432 Password:hobo
Group 3 ID: 3003 Password:hobo
Group 4 ID: 3009 Password:hobo
Group 5 ID: 3013 Password:hobo
Group 6 ID : 428 Password:hobo

If you have already signed up for a league, then please do not sign up again. One team is enough and we want to make sure there are enough spots for everyone.

If you try to sign up and Yahoo tells you the league is full, then try the next league on the list. It's a first come first serve format.

Thanks to a generous donation from Ace, we've been able to double the prize for this year's winner. A free two year subscription to Ace of Spades HQ's website. Ace was nice enough to waive all commenting fees with your subscription. (Normally a $99 value) [seriously though, hit up the tip jar for the love of Pete]

UPDATE [DiT]: This seemed to be, missing.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:38 AM | Comments (97)
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MORON UPDATE: Vic is going home from the hospital today. I'm prayin' for ya, brother. Get well soon!

Teh Krugman: SPEND! SPEND LIKE THE WIND! Krugman's main fallacy, like that of most Keynesian acolytes, is that he interprets all labor as productive labor; all action as productive action. To him, paying one man to dig a hole and another to fill it in is actually a wealth-generating enterprise. The pernicious lie at the root of this fallacy is the concept of "free money" -- that money can be printed at will, or borrowed willy-nilly from the future, with no ill effects. They don't understand that the government has no money of its own; every cent that it spends must be taxed or borrowed from productive individuals.

Teh KrugmanÂ’s achilles heel.

The problem isn't as simple as low aggregate demand. The core problem is that the economy needs a microeconomic reset, where supply (production) and demand (consumer) are brought back together through an undistorted and smoothly functioning price system. That means the government has to back off, not become more active. Moreover, dumping more money into the system as Krugman recommends, is really throwing good money after bad, and will make the economy inevitably worse off. In short, across the board increases in spending are likely to reinforce the very factors that cause the economy to collapse in the first place.

Apparently, the only way to save the economy is to totally destroy the concept of “moral hazard”. Privatize profits; socialize losses. Rewarding spendthrifts and punishing the prudent is a highway to hell, regardless of any short-term benefit. If you subsidize behavior, you get more of it -- so if you reward people for wasting money, they’ll waste even more money. Debt-default has to hurt -- a lot -- before people will stop doing it.

Still, there is the reality that losses must be realized by someone. Whether it is the mortgagees for overborrowing or the banks for overlending, the losses must be taken and accounted for, or we'll never see a rational valuation of real-estate assets.

Chancellor Merkel is facing a smorgasbord of unpalatable choices vis a vis the Eurozone. Democracies are funny that way -- they often work contrary to the way the “experts” would like them to. And Europe has a bad habit, historically, of dispensing with democratic rule when it proves inconvenient.

The predictable failure of “magical thinking”. We live in an age of "magical thinking". It is the dominant characteristic of our political class and much of our population.

Fannie Mae: "How dare you trick us into buying those crappy mortgages that we begged you to make! That's a lawsuit, mister!"

DOOM! Everybody's catching the fee-vah!

Bad news on retail holiday hiring. a lot of businesses arenÂ’t expecting the usual holiday boost.

Jeremy Warner at The Telegraph wonders if the world is doomed to another Depression. Given the abysmal quality of the political class on both sides of the Atlantic, I'm not hopeful.

Here's another really ugly problem: too many older Americans are carrying way too much debt into their senior years. And that's on top of not having enough money saved for their long term needs even apart from the debt they're carrying. This means, of course, that retirement must be delayed indefinitely. And this in turn prohibits job mobility (promotions etc.) for younger workers because older workers are not leaving the workforce in the numbers they used to.

Via the IBD, "A Dangerous War Against US Banks".

Democrat Rep. Barney Frank of the House banking panel wants to stick banks with all the bills from the crisis he and other affordable-housing zealots helped cause. "I don't mean to demonize," Franks said, "but Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo and Bank of America and Citicorp and Morgan Stanley and the large hedge funds can pay for this."

Posted by: Monty at 05:00 AM | Comments (278)
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I'm fresh off my vacation, and I needed a good chuckle this morning. WaPo columnist Richard Cohen didn't disappoint:

The Hamptons is where the Democratic energy, money and intellectual firepower of Manhattan goes for R&R. ItÂ’s just not another beach.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Nice humblebrag from Cohen: "The Hamptons are where Democratic intellectual firepower goes to vacay...and I was there, of course." Unfortunately, Cohen's meager observation stumbles off into incoherence from there.

Cohen claims that disenchantment in the Hamptons, like Matt Taibi's, stems in part from Obama's failure to be liberal enough (he cites the ever-repeated Krugman line that the stimulus failed because it didn't raise the deficit enough), but then he writes that these same unhappy folks would consider voting for Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, though not Rick Perry.

Huntsman is definitely to the Left of Perry. But Huntsman isn't to the Left of the President and neither is Romney. It's amusing that in the midst of his own personal freak-out over Obama's disillusioned followers, Cohen feels the need to drop in the DNC's continuing attempt to paint Huntsman and Romney as electable and Perry as not. A fine example of Democratic intellectual firepower this is not.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:32 AM | Comments (159)
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The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinces but one.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (68)
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Now a third National Guardsman, in uniform, has died from gunshot wounds.

Could that be random chance, or was the gunman targeting uniformed Americans?

The gunman was a Mexican national with, they're saying, a valid US passport.

Posted by: Ace at 08:34 PM | Comments (88)
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