Author: VD

May he go with God, into light and glory everlasting.

Anonymous writes: I’m female, and retired military (which for those of you who never served means at least 20 years in uniform). I cannot abide discussing political issues with most women (there are few exceptions) because they are not willing, and in some cases are not able, to think. So why did you guys give women the right to vote?

I assume our forefathers gave women the right to vote for much the same reason that many men abdicate their position as head of the household. They figure, well, at least they’ll finally shut up about everything, and really, how bad can it possibly be?

A few years later, while writing an alimony check that exceeds the rent for his studio apartment that is one-tenth the size of the house in which his ex-wife is living with the kids he hasn’t seen for a month, the man dimly begins to realize that somewhere along the way, he went wrong. Most men wrongly place all the blame on the woman at this point, little realizing how they were complicit in their own demise.

Alex writes: Vox=”That’s just bizarre. How does this make sense when Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are usually described as neocons, considering that none of them are Jewish?”

This is made clear in the very next sentence written by VDH… really, Im surprised at this kneejerk blog. VDH makes strong arguments and has done the research to back them up. You jump too quickly to damn when things don’t make sense to you, perhaps b/c they rub brusquely against your assumptions.

VDH=”Cabal” and “Nazi-like” are also used by others and with increasing frequency to promote the old idea of crafty, sneaky people pulling the wool over honest naifs (no doubt aw-shucks, unsophisticated folks such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice).”

Alex, surely you’re not so poorly read that you don’t realize VDH simply made that up wholesale, echoing fellow NROniks Mowbray, Frum and Goldberg. No one thinks anyone is pulling the wool over Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice. Name one person who does – VDH certainly doesn’t. Indeed, it flies directly in the face of the usual caricature of Cheney pulling Bush’s strings from behind the scenes. The vast majority who oppose Rumfeldian neoconservativism have never heard of Wolfowitz, Perle or Feith, much less Leo Strauss.

In fact, VDH goes so far as to specifically disavow the two primary definitions of neoconservative used by the neocons themselves – a particularly stupid thing to do – and echoes Mowbray’s silly hit piece that tried to pin anti-semitism on General Zinni, who, as I pointed out in a previous column, never identified a single neocon in the interview with the Washington Post that so riled the neocons and their friends. A strong argument? VDH’s uncharacteristically lightweight assertion doesn’t even rise to the level of an argument at all!

What we’re seeing here is the neocons clumsily attempting to silence their critics in the same manner that the ADL attempted to shut down The Passion of the Christ. I expect the tactic to work about as well, too.

According to an Associated Press story today Wal-Mart “facing lawsuits for alleged gender bias and unfair treatment of workers, will cut top executives’ bonuses if the company does not meet its diversity goals.” The article says that the pay cuts will be made “if the company does not promote women and minorities in proportion to the number that apply for management positions.” It then quotes company chief executive Lee Scott: “If 50 percent of the people applying for the job of store manager are women, we will work to make sure that 50 percent of the people receiving those jobs are women.”

If I was a lawyer, I’d bring a bias suit against the NBA. Clearly, the number of white men are shockingly underrepresented there, as no team should have more than 13 percent black players. Let’s nick David Stern’s salary if he can’t get some more white boys suited up next season.

This has got to be a parody. I think my favorite bit is the notion that “women have been kept in the dark about this for a reason.” How thoroughly and psychotically self-obssessed do you have to be to believe that the powers-that-be have a particular interest in your various excretionary options, which one would assume to be reasonably self-evident to any creature with more synaptic connections than a rotted stump?

Thanks a lot, Desert Cat.

Nancy Pelosi spoke on Meet The Press: “I made that statement that I did, and I think with great courage, if I might say about myself, because I am worried about the troops on the ground in Iraq or wherever our troops serve.”

The most powerful woman in American politics thinks she’s got great courage criticizing the other party’s foreign policy because she is vaguely worried about the troops, wherever they might happen to be. (It’s too bad Russert didn’t ask her where else she thought they were; that could have been funny.) She probably couldn’t face the obstacle course at boot camp without crying, forget the nasty, irregular guerilla warfare the troops are currently facing in Iraq. Great courage, mm hmmmm….

It’s strange, but women in front of a microphone cannot seem to resist the urge to talk about themselves. I, I, I, I, I. Margaret Thatcher, one of the few public women I admire, was a notable exception to this, as she discussed ideas, not how she felt about ideas.

Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton. The prosecution could easily rest on that evidence alone.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70% of men favored smaller government, but only 48% of women believed the same way. So men are far more likely to view big government as part of the problem, not the solution.

PJ O’Rourke once said: “Advocating the expansion of central government is a crime against humanity!” It’s pretty clear to me that one of the most destructive forces in our society has been women’s suffrage. Women consistently and reliably turn towards government as a solution for perceived problems, which creates more intractable problems, which then is used to justify more government intervention. This process is unlikely to stop until the entire edifice collapses of its own weight.

It’s too bad that the concept of the states as laboratories of democracy has been abandoned, because I’d love to see the difference between two neighboring states, one of which permitted women to vote and the other that did not. It would be particularly interesting to see in which state women would prefer to live. I suspect the answer might surprise a lot of people.

The fact that the Kerry campaign would run these canards reveals an unsettling truth – that in order to win the female vote, Kerry believes that he needs to continually nurture women’s sense of grievance and victimization.

He has no other choice. Feminist women believe that they exist for no other reason than to be aggrieved. “I am a victim, therefore I am” could serve as the motto for the entire movement. I’m not advocating some sort of sharia here – as far as I’m concerned, women can work wherever and wear whatever they want. But allowing them a voice in government and politics is disastrous, if not suicidal, and has led directly to the loss of more American lives in three decades than in every war since the Revolution.

Someone had to say it. I just did.

VDH gets his history wrong: Neoconservatives? Let us be frank. This appellation is no longer a descriptive term of so-called “new conservatives,” those members of the eastern intelligentsia who were rather liberal on some domestic hot-button issues (tolerant of open borders, quiet about abortion, indifferent to gay marriage, etc.), but promoted a proactive neo-Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy (whether in the Balkans in taking out Milosevic or in trying to replace Saddam Hussein with democracy rather than a Shah-like proconsul).

Instead, face the ugly fact: “Neocon” is now a slur for “Jew.” General Zinni (who once boasted that 600 to 2,000 Iraqis were eliminated from the air in his Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign) is now ubiquitous on television hawking his new book, criticizing the war (on Memorial Day, no less), and being praised in the Arab news as he talks about “Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith” and all those who purportedly got us into Iraq.

That’s just bizarre. How does this make sense when Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are usually described as neocons, considering that none of them are Jewish? As for Zinni, he never made any reference to the ethnic or religious backgrounds of those he was criticizing. First Mowbray, now Goldberg and Hanson… National Review is running a serious risk of making itself a laughingstock on this issue.

Neocon is a slur for a fake conservative, Victor.

L writes on Nate’s blog: women who have the same credentials and the same responsibilities as the men in their fields are often paid less than their male colleagues. women are often denied promotions and tenure. women are often denied the opportunity to attend school. women are often subjected to the decisions of the male figures in their lives without ever being given a chance to think or to speak or to express their own opinion.

Ah yes, the whiny meanderings of a self-professed feminist are always amusing. Since they’re all afraid to post here, or even email me anymore, I’m forced to make do with the leavings of others.

I should mention that the above is just a selection of her stream-of-barely-consciousness, but it is nicely representative. As to her complaints: 1) Women are paid less when they work less. 2) So are men. 3) 56 percent of U.S. college students are female, so clearly we need to deny even more women the opportunity to advanced education if we’re going to have gender equity. 4) It’s impossible to deny anyone the chance to think, although Nate’s visitor seems to have passed on her opportunity to do so before writing.

Bah – this is child’s play.

The price of war does not stop being paid when the guns fall silent. This was driven home to me when I bought my first house from an older couple who had lived there for many years. My grandfather, a Marine who’d fought on Guadacanal and Tarawa, recognized the home seller as an Army veteran and asked where he’d served.

In Europe, the man answered, and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. He turned away for a moment, and then, composed again, he apologized and explained that he’d lost his brother in Normandy. This conversation was taking place 53 years later, but it was clear that the pain still lingered.

It is almost impossible for us, sixty years later, to understand the grim realities of D-Day. Yes, we are unfortunate enough to live in what a Chinese sage described as the curse of interesting times, and yet, we do not yet live in a real state of war. Most of us know a few soldiers who are involved in the present conflict – I was relieved to receive an email yesterday from my Italian cousin in Baghdad, telling me that he was fine after the embassy attack – but it is not the vast majority of young men of our acquaintance who are in uniform and in danger as was the case back then.

A few years ago, I took part in a massive simulation of Gold Beach, using the Advanced Squad Leader system. Each player was responsible for a section of the beach; I was commanding three companies of British troops plus 12 Shermans and a few funnies. The experience drove home how a relatively small number of defending German troops were able to inflict terrible casualties on the landing Allies, and it was sobering to see the pile of cardboard casualties grow and realize that each piece represented the lives of ten men.

To the left, I lost an entire company, and only a lucky shot and a wildly aggressive charge by one Sherman commander allowed me to take out the two AT-guns and get the two surviving companies off the beach. It was only a game, and yet, it is true that the valiant action of a single brave man can make all the difference in the world to the rest of the men involved.

In the end, after many hours, the Allies triumphed on the table just as they had many years before on the real beaches. But there was no celebration by the winners, instead we found ourselves standing quietly around the massive array of maps, contemplating those who had fought and died so long ago. Some may think that it is strange and silly, if not downright disrespectful, to view the tragic loss of human life through the lens of a wargame. But, sixty years later, this is the only lens that many of us have.

Soon, all the young men who stormed Normandy will be gone. But as long as there are other young men who are curious about history, who want to know what happened when, where and why, neither they nor their sacrifice will ever be forgotten.