Vox Popoli

Maybe Paul really is dead…. Courtesy of the thankfully inimitable Bane. Being born after the “Paul is dead” hooplah, I’d never given the matter a moment’s thought, but speaking as someone who has written a few songs professionally, I have wondered about the qualitative difference between the melodies flowing through the early Beatles music and the rather leaden tunes of post-Beatles McCartney-written songs. When Douglas Adams referred to Paul McCartney as a phenomenal songwriter* – I was first reading Hitchhikers when the Wings were still active and I really didn’t know much Beatles’ music – I had no idea how on Earth he could possibly write that.

*in describing the sweetly xenophobic songs sung by the people of Krikkit

The Farmer combines ideology with theology:

As a Christian I am subject to all three systems of law, the family, the natural law and the church. The arguments today are over who enforces the natural law. If God sets up human governments, and he clearly does. Then how will those governments enforce the natural law…. Some of you seem to be saying that no law or system would be preferable to what we have here in the US of A now. God did not create that kind of a system and some distorted kind of government would naturally form to fill the void

I’m curious to know if Farmer Tom supports the war on Iraq. After all, if God is setting up human governments, then there’s no more reason for the American people to wage war on the God-given Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein than there is for libertarian Americans to disdain their current federal government in favor of one that respects individual rights.

A major flaw in this submission-to-the-state argument is that it applies as equally to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime as to our former Constitutional Republic. I further note that it was in Satan’s power to give all the kingdoms of Man to Jesus. Either Christians have the authority – and the responsibility – to act in ALL circumstances or we lack it in every one. Most Christians lionize men of faith such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer; shall we criticize him instead for violating the laws of God-given Nazi Germany?

A better idea would be to fix the now corrupted system that the founders established . They set up a triune system of government. A constitutional representative republic. All three are necessary for the system to work. Both the people and the representatives must obey the law. The law cannot be changed with out consent of the governed.

What Farmer Tom appears to be missing is that most libertarians would be quite happy with a genuine constitutional republic. What we have today is the form without the substance; given the failure of the previous model, libertarians are focused on devising conceptual schemes to ensure that Leviathan is sufficiently crippled so as not to escape his bonds the next time around. What must be kept in mind is that the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties do not believe the system is corrupted as they are quite happy with their bifactional ruling party.

Libertarianism is, sopratutto, a reaction to government corruption and tyranny. Libertarians will support almost ANY system that genuinely reduces the power of the central state. The primary difference between libertarians and fraudulent advocates of “small government” is that libertarians do not covet control over other individuals. This is not inherent to libertarianism per se, but it is the essence of the libertarian spirit and dates back, I would argue, not only to Cincinnatus, but to the stayed hand of the Almighty.

Bill shows an astounding ability to miss the point:

I can’t believe this. For years now Vox has been bellyaching about how Bush won’t close the borders. Of course, in order to do this he has to convince Congress that it must be done, many of whose members have an ideological interest in America falling.

So, Bush is finally working on a bill that says “seal this hole in the borders – and damn the nit-picking wackos that get in the way.” And this is somehow a bad thing? Isn’t the EXACTLY what Vox has been advocating for years?

No, instituting an above-the-law Gestapo unanswerable to anyone but the Executive is not something that I have ever advocated for anything. I wouldn’t support instituting such a monstrosity for the express purpose of supplying me with daily cocaine, coffee, chocolate and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, much less establishing de facto national borders.

It seems Bill has a problem differentiating ends and means. I presume that although he’d like to see Republicans win the next election, he wouldn’t like to see them do so by executing every registered Democrat on October 31st, 2008.

It is Bush’s own administration that has declared it has no intention of tracking down and expelling the millions of illegal aliens in the country. To argue that he has suddenly transformed himself into a damn-the-torpedos champion of the borders defies credibility.

From WND:

Environmental laws have been the project’s chief roadblock, but the bill’s language appears to provide an unlimited scope, reading, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.”

Significantly, it also says courts are prohibited from reviewing the secretary’s decision.

Notice how Congress can’t be bothered to prohibit little things such as homogamy and abortion from the purview of the courts, but when it comes to something it deems sufficiently important, such as providing for total executive branch tyranny, it has no problem doing so.

It’s bad enough that the government doesn’t obey the law, but it’s really an ominous sign when they come right out and declare that they’re not going to bother even pretending anymore. At this point, I’m just wondering when the Department of Homeland Security is going to announce that its new anthem is Amerika, Our Fatherland.

Amerika, mein Amerika

Dear Leader smiles on thee

Implanting kids with sweet RFIDS

Their sinful ways to see

The bill’s language is just an oversight, of course. Of course. Now, I very much support immigration control, but not if it comes as part of a package including a legally totalitarian Geheimene Staatspolizei.

Stanley Kurtz of NRO wonders about libertarian religion:

To what extent are contemporary libertarians religious? What proportion of folks who read, say, Reason Magazine belong to a church or synagogue and attend services either regularly, or even with moderate regularity? What proportion of libertarians are self-consciously atheist or agnostic and/or attend church seldom or never? Does the answer differ for intellectual types and folks who may have broadly libertarian sensibilities but don’t keep up with Reason or all the libertarian blogs? Is it even theoretically possible to be a libertarian today and adhere to a traditional religion–as opposed to being “spiritual,” or belonging to a very liberal church? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but here’s my guess. Theoretically, you can be a libertarian and also be traditionally religious. In fact, this combination was probably found fairly frequently prior to the sixties and seventies, before “the social issues” moved to the political forefront. But nowadays, the vast majority of libertarians are probably either self-consciously secular, or are religious only in some thin, non-institutional, or highly qualified sense. Again, this is just my guess.

I don’t know about that. I’m a reasonably hard-core libertarian who only takes strong exception to the Libertarian Party on the issue of abortion and national borders – both on libertarian grounds, I should add – and I’m also an evangelical Christian who regularly attends an evangelical church. (Although I have to admit that we’ve only made it one out of the last four weeks, since our recent house visitors seem to insist on flying in and out on Sunday mornings.)

Anyhow, I believe that one can derive a libertarian philosophy from God’s attitude towards the human race. It is worth mentioning that while He did give Israel a king, the warnings He gave them certainly indicate that He appears to harbor more than a little skepticism towards the benefits of a strong central government.

I previously addressed this subject in a 2003 column entitled Christian and Libertarian, in case anyone else is interested.

Mediacitizen outs a White House reporter:

His crime had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with misrepresenting himself as a journalist in order to push an agenda friendly to the administration. Journalists, as the Fourth Estate, serve the public interest by challenging those in power with hard questions and thorough reporting, Gannon — or whatever his name is — did neither. He shilled for the president’s programs and presented White House press releases, verbatum, as news without giving attribution. This is not journalism it’s flacking for the party in power.

I don’t think Mediacitizen understands that shilling for the increased expansion of centralized government power and acting as a publicist for the federal government is exactly what almost every member of the ABCNNBCBS cabal does on a daily basis. Journalistic ethics are as mythical as the liver-devouring Promethean eagle and the idea that the Fourth Estate challenges those in power is thoroughly outmoded.

By Mediatoken’s definition, there are no journalists in the legacy media today. In fact, more than a few of them – Stephanopolous and Gergen come first to mind – ARE former government publicists.

Chris Naron asks a reasonable question:

Which is it? They hate us because we’re over there or because Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Like I said in the other thread, if you want to critcize Bush for being PC about why we’re fighting the war, I’m with you. I’ll even respect the opinion that nation-building never works. But that’s not what started this whole thing. You agreed with Patty Patty Buch Buch’s assertion that they hate us for reasons all our own doing and not for ideology.

That’s simple enough. They hate us because we’re over there. If we would leave them alone, they would focus their energies in places such as India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, the former Soviet Union and Europe – in other words, what they’d been doing since the 1950s. This would arguably be more dangerous in the long term, but since the Dear Leader insists – repeatedly – that he is not leading a nation dominated by its secular elite into a religious war, it is a reality that is extraneous to the current discussion.

That’s assuming he can be taken at his word. If George Delano is lying, as I believe he has been since the beginning of the present conflict, he is going about this War on Islam in an incredibly ineffective way. This is mostly because he is following the lead of Harry Truman and LBJ in attempting to fight a war without a national consensus. As I pointed out in my article referencing Clausewitz, an attack on the heart of the Wahhabist jihad is the only way that this war can be brought to an end. Hedging it about with Shiite-run nations cobbled together by American military might will work no better than a ring of Communist nations surrounding Nazi Germany would have sufficed 60 years ago.

The important thing about the expansionist aspect of Islam is that an individual does not need to hate anyone to wage jihad against them anymore than a Christian needs to hate someone in order to assert that he is going to Hell. Most of the expansion-era Caliphs were not full of hatred like the modern terrorist leaders, they were simply fulfilling their version of manifest destiny. These two factors should not be confused.

“Nick.. exactly how long have you been reading Vox? Live and Let Live? When exactly has he, or any of us, said that? The fact that we do not support occupation and nation building, has nothing to do with peacenik tendencies.

We’ve advocated going in… killing everyone, and breaking everything, and leaving.

That creates a power vacuum that the remaining primitives must battle to fill. In a few years… when one finally rises to power, we go back, and do it all again. Ya see.. if our enemies are constantly fighting each other, then they aren’t fighting us.

I’ve never had a problem with the theoretical war on radical expansionist Islam that the Dear Leader constantly swears up and down that he is not fighting, as much as his strongest supporters would like to pretend he is. I have been and will continue to be a virulent critic of nation-building, which I note that many of the Dear Leader’s strongest supporters condemned when it was Bill Clinton leading the charge for it in Bosnia and Somalia.

Very little of what is happening in Iraq indicates a war on the jihad. A Shiite Iraq where the most extreme elements are on the leash of the government mullahs is not going to reign in the jihad over time, it is simply the establishment of a second Saudi Arabia. Nick B is very concerned about Wahhabism; strange that he does not note that the Dear Leader is Very Good Friends with the sect’s chief defenders, the Saudi royal family.

Remember Rule Number One. The official story is never the true one.

Pat Buchanan points out Delano’s misdiagnosis:

If we were truly being attacked for our beliefs, and not our behavior, the war would have no end. Yet, all the other guerrilla and terror wars against Western powers there have ended. How?

When the British left Palestine, Irgun terror ended. When the French left Algeria, FLN terror ended. When Israel left Lebanon, Hezbollah terror largely ended. These countries chose to resolve their terror problem by giving up their occupations and letting go. Their perceived imperial presence had been the cause of the terror war, and when they departed and went home, the wars faded away.

The president says we must fight them over there, so we do not have to fight them over here. But, before we invaded Iraq, not one American had been killed by an Iraqi in a dozen years. Since we invaded, 1,500 Americans have died and the number of insurgents has multiplied from 5,000 to 20,000. By Don Rumsfeld’s own metric, our intervention is creating more terrorists than we are killing. We are fighting a guerrilla army that our own invasion called into being.

Do our Saudi friends whose necks are now on the line agree with us that terrorists attack America because of our democratic principles? Or do they believe al-Qaida, when it says it is attacking us because of our Middle East policies and presence? It would appear to be the latter. For Riyadh has lately asked us to remove our planes from Prince Sultan Air Base and our troops from Saudi soil.

Is there anyone who believes that the IRA would continue its anti-British terror if the British Army withdrew from Northern Ireland? It is staggering that so few people understand that the root hatred for the United States government harbored by so many people around the world stems from the fact that there are US troops stationed in nearly two-thirds of the countries around the world. This dislike for occupation is of varying degrees, for while Italians and Germans may resent GI’s dating their pretty young signorinas and frauleins, they don’t hate it enough to bomb US bases in Naples and Ramstein. The Arabs, on the other hand, have demonstrably and violently resented it since at least 1983.

There has never been a time when occupied peoples have not harbored hate for their occupiers. The fact that we utilize a financial imperialism via the World Bank and the IMF instead of a physical imperialism, complete with settlers, only means they hate us a little less.

The only flaw I could see in Mr. Buchanan’s article is that I seem to recall the latest estimate of insurgents active in Iraq by an American military commander being 40,000. If this number is correct and Mr. Rumsfeld’s metric of success is killing terrorists faster than we create them – note that the Secretary of Defense understands how terrorists can be created by an occupying force – then we are not on the fast track to success in Iraq, the elections notwithstanding.

As for the elections, I have still not heard a convincing argument of how the election of an Iraqi government dominated by an Iranian Shiite who was an associate of the Ayatollah Khomeini is likely to be a step towards Western-style government in the long term. The best that Michael Ledeen could do was to insist that the Iraqi Shiites hate and fear the Iranian Shiites, which reminds me of the Left’s argument that Hussein’s secular Ba’athists and the al Qaeda fundamentalists could never make common cause due to their mutual hatred.

Considering that the famous aphorism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” actually hails from this very region, that appears to be a very frail reed on which to pin one’s hopes. If the Iraqi Shiites hate the Iranian Shiites so much, then how does one explain Sistani, who was not only born in Iran but is even named for a region of that country.

This strikes me as extremely unwise:

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Army’s right to force soldiers to serve past the dates of their enlistments, the so-called “stop loss” policy that can keep men and women in uniform during war or national emergencies.

Spc. David Qualls had sought a preliminary injunction to prevent the Army from forcing him to remain on active duty, claiming his enlistment contract was misleading. He signed up for a one-year stint in the Arkansas National Guard in July 2003 but was later told he would remain on active duty in Iraq (news – web sites) until 2005.

Let’s see. They’re supposed to fight for freedom in the service of a government that disregards the most basic foundations of private property rights? The concept of a national emergency or whatever is not only irrelevant considering the circumstances – New York is hardly being blacked out – but shouldn’t apply to the relevance of a contract anyhow. Long before the Roman legions were being promised farms, politicians worried about the consequences of failing to ensure that the soldiers under their command were not only paid, but treated properly.

One wonders if anyone has stopped to think beyond the immediate term to what impact this must have on those considering enlisting. I’ve heard from more than a few Marines about their concern that the use of this stop-loss will have on future recruiting.