…to airline security. Thoughts from Bob Poole over at Reason.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Obama’s Dark Night Of The Soul
An interesting essay by Walter Russell Mead, with which I don’t entirely agree. I don’t think that the president is as smart as I’m supposed to, and I think that Mead remains unaware of how ideologically driven the president is. I’m guessing that he hasn’t read Stanley Kurtz’s book
[Update a while later]
Obama can’t play center.
On The Stupidity Of The TSA
It is a source of continual astonishment to me that pilots — many of whom, it should be pointed out, are military veterans who possess security clearances — are not allowed to carry onboard their airplanes pocket knives and bottles of shampoo, but then they’re allowed to fly enormous, fuel-laden, missile-like objects over American cities.
The TSA is one more bit of idiocy on which George Bush was such a huge disappointment. This is another of those policies that the new crop of Republicans should renounce, and fix.
First It’s Cartoons
And now this:
Prominent Muslim religious heads have expressed anger and dismay on the information of a US dog being named ‘Khan.’ Maulana Syed Athar Ali said that it is a known fact that Muslims detest pigs and dogs.
“To name a dog a Muslim name by US security agencies is to deliberately incite the Muslim community. We would be meeting soon and devise a strategy to protest and seek apology from the US,” said Maulana Athar Ali.
Yes, of course. It was a deliberate act of provocation. And just how angry are they? This angry.
Hey, it’s a religion of peace. Or so they say.
The Enemy Has A Strategy
Of course, the White House strategy seems to consist of apologizing to them, and pretending that they aren’t enemies, but just Facebook Friends we haven’t met yet. “Enemy” is a term reserved for American citizens who don’t agree that we should become a bankrupt European social democracy as soon as possible.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Amateur Hour at the State Department.” Thoughts from Claire Berlinski:
I recently interviewed Turkey’s former ambassador to the United States, Faruk Loğoğlu. He is appalled — like many in Turkey — by the soft-headedness of the Obama administration’s diplomacy in this region. He finds Obama’s speeches about his personal warmth toward Islam ludicrous and inappropriate. “Obama can’t play the religious game,” he said. “He should be playing the security game. His policy toward Turkey is a bad imitation of the worst parts of Orientalism.”
It’s not merely the ideological color of the Obama administration’s diplomacy that worries me, but its incompetence. I’ve lately been examining in very close detail the events that led to Turkey’s “No” vote on the Iran sanctions package in the UN. I’ll be writing about this elsewhere, and the details are too complicated to summarize here. But one thing leaps out: our incompetence. How could there have been any ambiguity — and obviously there was — in our communication with Turkey about our negotiating position on the nuclear-fuel-swap deal? How is it possible that Turkey was receiving critically different messages from the White House and the State Department on an issue as significant as the Iranian nuclear program, for God’s sake? It’s inconceivable, but on looking closely at the evidence, it is clear that this is just what happened.
When the State Department spokesman sends a completely inappropriate birthday message to to Ahmadinejad via Twitter, it is, likewise, a symptom of utter amateurism. Apologists for this incident have suggested to me that this wasn’t such a big deal; it was sarcastic, they say, and it wasn’t a diplomatic note or official communiqué. I am guessing that had that Tweet said, “Tomorrow we bomb Iran into rubble,” the same people would have thought it quite a big deal indeed.
Unfortunately, regardless of what happens today, it’s not a problem we can solve for another two years. And it won’t be solved by replacing the president with the current Secretary of State, though that would be a modest improvement.
Are Stewart And Colbert Pro-Islamofascist?
…or just ignorant/stupid?
Based on their previous behavior, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Why yes, I’m not as impressed with their supposed intelligence and hipness as I’m supposed to be. Why do you ask?
It’s really a shame, too. I liked Cat Stephens in my youth, before he became a murderous misogynist nutcase. Or at least, I liked his music.
[Update a few minutes later]
Just how much sanity was on the Mall yesterday? A crowd estimate.
[Update a while later]
Here’s sample of the sanity on offer. Note the abundance of leftist projection (e.g. fear mongers, tools of corporations). And this is classic:
“[Barack Obama’s] made some progress, but the dude’s got to dig out of a big hole,” said an Obama voter from Maryland. “We need him to do what he asked us to make him do what he said he was going to do in the campaign.”
Got it.
Dude.
An Important Point For The Clueless Eric Holder
We have to be careful to analyze our enemies in terms of their circumstances, not ours. An analogous mistake is made by those who claim Guantanamo Bay “causes” terrorism or materially contributes to terrorist recruitment; the jihadists themselves care only about the fact that we are detaining Muslims — they don’t care where, and they don’t have a clue or a care about the differences between military and civilian processes under U.S. law. Good intelligence requires taking the enemy on his own terms, not as we would think or act under the enemy’s circumstances.
This, in the context of whether or not the latest attempt had anything to do with the elections.
The Racists At NPR
They’ve fired Juan Williams.
As a commenter notes at Riehl World, apparently there are some things that shouldn’t be considered.
[Update a while later]
This seems related — SF author Elizabeth Moon is shunned by PC SF fans. I think the best response to this is to purchase a book or three
[Update a couple minutes later]
A lot more Juan Williams links and thoughts.
[Bumped]
Geert Wilders, Western Sages
…and Islam:
During a March 2009 interview with the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, Wilders had earlier rejected the notion he “hates Muslims,” while providing a frank characterization of the totalitarian nature of Islam:
I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.
By making this latter claim, Wilders shattered a corrosive modern taboo, enforced rigidly and without forgiveness by cultural relativist politicians and government bureaucrats as well as influential “savants” in media, academia, and religion.
But Wilders’ assessment not only comports with scholarly observations made (primarily) before the advent of the postmodern Western scourge of cultural relativism, it is supported by contemporary hard polling data from 2006 -2007, and a more recent follow-up reported February 25, 2009. At present, overwhelming Muslim majorities — i.e., better than two-thirds (see the weighted average calculated here) of a well-conducted survey of the world’s most significant and populous Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries — want these immoderate outcomes: “strict application” of Shari’a, Islamic law, and a global caliphate.
We keep our head in the sand (or in the case of Joy Behar and Whoopie, up our fundament) at our peril.
A Radical Islamic Curtain
The Obama administration has always prioritized Israeli-Palestinian peace talks over keeping Iran from spreading its military tentacles throughout the Mideast, even in the face of Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weaponry. Plainly, President Obama’s Mideast policy is limping on both legs.
Madness.