Vox Popoli

From the Washington Times:

American voters, while split over who should be the next president, overwhelmingly predict that President Bush will vanquish Sen. John Kerry, an expectation that could affect the outcome of a close election. While the various national polls show that voters prefer the president over Mr. Kerry by an average of four points, those same surveys place Mr. Bush some 20 points ahead on the question of which candidate is expected to win.

“This could be a big cause of concern for Kerry,” professor Vicki Morwitz of New York University said. “If people really think Bush is going to win, they may have a slight tendency to shift their preference and ultimately vote for Bush, even though they were a Kerry supporter to begin with.”

Of course, by the strange logic of Republican Party cheerleaders, who always assert you should only vote for someone who is expected to win, everyone in the country should vote for Bush now. Just like they all voted for Clinton instead of Dole.

My 46-34 record of NFL picks this season renders my predictive skills suspect, but I’ve been saying that Bush will win easily for months now. That doesn’t mean I’ll vote for him, of course, because I don’t support anything he’s done in four years except for his tax cut.

A proposed $500 million tax increase to put more police on the streets of Los Angeles has drawn fire from opponents who say top law-enforcement officials are trying to scare voters into approving it with commercials that raise the specter of a suburban crime nightmare.

But Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who along with police chief William Bratton is championing the November “cop tax” ballot initiative, defends the campaign and said voters need a grim dose of reality about crime in America’s second-largest city.

“Crime is a scary problem for all of us,” Baca told Reuters. “Crime is not something that anyone should take lightly.” The measure would raise the sales tax in Los Angeles to 8.75 percent, among the highest rates in the nation.

What’s the difference between the police and organized crime again? Ah, yes, the voters have a choice when it comes to giving the police a raise. Because if they don’t, well, what can the poor police do about the prospective suburban crime wave….

Joseph Farah changes his mind:

Ask yourself today: Will America be safer with Bush or Kerry in the White House? That’s how simple the choice is today. All other considerations merely muddy the water and complicate what is seen by our enemies as a clear choice.

If we were at peace, this might be an opportune moment to consider building a third party. It might be a great chance to protest the choices we have. But we are not at peace. We are at war.

Again, it makes no difference who is in the White House. Neither Bush nor Kerry will have the capability of stopping terrorist attacks. It is more reasonable to think that Bush and Clinton ordered/permitted the 9/11 and OK City attacks than it is to believe that a president, any president, could stop another terrorist attack in the United States. In Israel, it has not made any difference whether Likud or Labor was in power as the terrorist attacks have continued regardless of who is in office, and certainly there has been no shortage of terrorist attacks on Americans in Iraq with George Delano in office.

If we are indeed at war, which I assert we are not in either a technical or a realistic national sense, then George Bush has been a horrendously inept Commander-in-Chief. Where are the comparisons to Germany and Japan now, as the violence continues apace? The borders are wide-open to the countries with whom we are supposedly “at war” and I daresay that the leaders in Washington are far more concerned with keeping the stock market afloat than ending the terror threat to Americans.

As Umberto Eco recognized thirty years ago, governments and terrorists have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Each needs the other, not necessarily to survive, but to thrive. There must always be a villain; if the villain actually exists, so much the better. I’m disappointed that Mr. Farah has fallen for the lamest and oldest argument in the centralist book, but then, he’s far from the only one to do so.

Derbyshire defends “My Boy Bill”

Jonah, Ramesh: Your insouciance about the prospect of Bill O’Reilly going down in scandal is, I believe, misplaced. You may not like the guy; a lot of conservatives don’t like him; any time I have put in a word for O’Reilly on this site I have got a sheaf of e-mails from conservatives telling me at great length why they don’t like him.

Sure, O’Reilly’s no movement conservative. Sure, his positions on actual issues are all over the place. Sure, he’s way too full of himself. Sure, he thinks the feddle gummint should get into all sorts of things you and I would much rather it keeps out of. Sure, he’d split the difference between Churchill and Hitler in his efforts at “fairness.” Sure, sure. Consider the following points, though.

1. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. O’Reilly is a **huge** hate figure for the Left. They loathe the guy. His downfall would be immensely energizing for them. Whatever you think, *they* consider him a conservative.

2. In war, you take what allies you can get. You’re not going to get Edmund Burke hosting on prime-time TV. Heck, you’re not going to get William F. Buckley, Jr. This is *TV*. It’s junk. If there’s a junk-conservative, a sometime-kinda-conservative, a not-quite-our-kind-of-conservative running a popular prime-time TV show, go down on your knees and give thanks. It’s more than we can expect. It’s more than we had for 50 years.

3. Conservatives have taken too many of these lifestyle hits. If O’Reilly goes down on a lifestyle charge, it’s bad for us, whether you like his program or not.

As much as I appreciate Derb’s own insouciance, I think he’s absolutely wrong on all three points here. I see it thusly:

1. So what if the Left is energized? Bill O’Reilly is not a conservative, never was a conservative and has more in common with Lenin, Stalin and Mao than he does with libertarians. The fact that the Left is dumb enough to burn one who loves the government almost as much as they do only indicates that they’re either stupid or faking it. Their hatred for George Delano is much the same.

2. O’Reilly and Fox News are a firebreak, not an advancement of freedom and human liberty. True conservatives and libertarians would likely be better off if Fox did not exist instead of being a mechanism for Big Tent Strong Government Republicanism smothering the right by feigning agreement then moving left at every opportunity. Again, George Delano is the case in point.

3. No, it isn’t. How does it harm the cause of freedom if somebody who constantly echoes the government’s message that they’re working for you goes down? Work for yourself and don’t let any blowhard or bureaucrat convince you that they have your interests at heart. They don’t.

Anthony Lobaido writes a fascinating tale of mercenary corporations active in Africa:

During its early years, the Clinton administration officially frowned on mercenaries, soldiers serving for pay in foreign armies or at the behest of private firms. The U.N. passed formal legislation outlawing groups like Executive Outcomes.

Yet white-led mercenary armies, like EO and its UK-based sister Sandline, comprised of mostly elite South African apartheid-era special force and British ex-SAS, have proven unbeatable in wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. As mentioned, the ANC used the apartheid-era special forces to destroy their old anti-Marxist enemy UNITA in Angola in the early 1990s.

Fighting in Angola in 1993, a small cadre of 30 to 50 white EO mercenaries defeated a well-dug-in UNITA force of 500, backed by Moroccan special forces at the important and strategic oil city of Soyo. Those mercenaries would fight and win the war in Angola “in only 15 months, this after the entire South African Defense Force could not win it outright over the course of 15 years,” Luther Eeben Barlow, founder of EO, told WorldNetDaily.

The truth is, the “yet” should be changed to “because”. Until the global institutions can control them as easily as they can control national militaries, Private Military Companies will be in official disfavor with the ruling elite.

While I have a high regard for the Hugo novel, even more do I love the musical version of Les Miserables. One of my favorite memories of nights out on the town was when WB, Big Chilly and I went to see it in Minneapolis along with our dates. The three of us had seen it before, but none of the girls had so Big Chilly and I went armed with plenty of Kleenex for them since we’d remembered how all the women in the audience were crying their eyes out by the end. Chilliette nearly needed to be rehydrated afterwards, as she started in even before the second song which has to be some kind of record.

My date lost it during Fontine’s death, which was respectable, but I was impressed how WB’s girl was holding out, until I heard some sniffles to my left after Gavrosh was killed. I offered a fistful of Kleenex to her but she patted my hand and told me she was fine. I started to bring my hand back when suddenly this big hand reached over from across her and snatched the lot from me. I was laughing so hard that I was shaking, but it was a totally inappropriate moment so I buried my head between my knees and tried to keep it quiet.

But when my date gave me a there-there pat on the shoulder, it was too much. I lost it entirely which also set Big Chilly off laughing; fortunately the music kicked in right then so we didn’t ruin it for anyone.

So, here’s the question. Which is the best song from Les Miserables? I love “Do You Hear the People Sing” as well as the confrontation between Javaer and Valjean that ends with that dual promise, but upon further reflection, I have to go with “Stars”. The deep bass, the rectitude masking desperate self-loathing and the tragedy of a man being destroyed by that which has made him successful simply sets it apart from a set of songs that are lyrically excellent as well as amazingly well-crafted – though admittedly simplistic and emotionally manipulative – from a musical point of view.

Our first smart pop book, for example, was the best-selling Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Red Pill includes essays from computer scientist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, Yale philosopher Nick Bostrom, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, Buddhist scholar Jay Ford, Sun Chief Scientist Bill Joy and other notables. Red Pill has gotten mentions in The New Yorker, Premiere, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and dozens of other publications.

I was invited to contribute to a so-called smart pop book yesterday, and although I missed out on the one on the Matrix, I can’t possibly pass up the chance to contribute to one on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s also one in the works for Harry Potter, which could be interesting. The question is, do I actually have anything interesting to say about Hitchhikers? I’m not entirely sure that I do.

Jonah Goldberg asserts innocence:

Vox Day is frothing at the mouth about Bill O’Reilly and the silence of conservatives about him. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of patience with arguments like his which boil down to the suggestion that if I don’t write what he wants and when he wants it, then it must be because I sold out. It’s a shabby form of argumentation bordering on bullying someone into trying to prove a negative.

As for the substance, the comparison to Bill Clinton is faulty at countless turns, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. As for my motives for not writing about O’Reilly, they’re pretty straightforward. I don’t care very much about the guy. I’m not a fan of O’Reilly and I’ve said so countless times in print. I have a contract with CNN so I couldn’t appear on O’Reilly’s show even if wanted to. Actually, I wouldn’t mind appearing on the show for the fun of butting heads with him. But I don’t care enough about the guy or the story to spend much time following his shennanigans, sexploits or whatever. However, should he run for president of the United States, I will pay much closer attention.

Yes, I’m sure everyone just happens to be completely disinterested in this whole thing, especially in light of how the publisher-to-be of a certain disrespectfully titled book told me that he would have to run the chapter on The Freaky Factor past a well-known Fox star, (not B’OR), before they could decide if I’d be allowed to write on any perceived right-wing figures.

Perhaps the entire staff of NRO is much holier than this conservative publisher and they have no interest in the opportunities afforded by Fox News. Although the only mention of O’Reilly today came from John J. Miller saying that he’d been on The Factor talking about his book – which is a book on France that actually sounds very interesting – last Friday. I suppose it’s possible that the virtual water cooler talk at NRO revolves solely around minimum tax credits and stem-cell research issues; it’s just not very plausible.

Still, it was never my intention to single out Jonah, who was and is one of my favorite political writers. His name simply popped into my mind as a conservative commentator who came to prominence as a result of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and was far from silent with regards to it. I never expected him to devote a G-File to loofahs and Scandinavian stewardesses, (although it would seem to be a rich comedic vein worth mining), but the silence on The Corner and other conservative blogs with regards to the matter struck me as very, very uncharacteristic.

In any case, I’m not telling Jonah or anyone what they should write about. I’m simply pointing out the apparent cowardice and seeming hypocrisy of what many conservatives have chosen to avoid writing about. I could be wrong. As Mises writes, only the acting man can give definitive meaning to his actions, or, presumably, nonactions.

Jay Nordlinger writes on NRO:

Back to Edwards for a moment. I admit I’m ultra-sensitive to media bias (even while others are dull about it) — but didn’t the senator’s “Under us, the crippled will stand up and walk” sermon get awfully little play?

Actually, I agree that it got amazingly little play, although it wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed at first when read in full. (You have to love ellipses….) I even assume that it got little play precisely because left-liberals didn’t want to damage the Edwards campaign.

Of course, this is also why Nordlinger and everyone else at National Review (except for the irrepressible Derbyshire) have been totally silent on the alleged wrongdoings, moral and intellectual, of their friends The Freaky Factor and the Gestapette.

Nordlinger also complains:

So, John Edwards is making fun of George W. Bush for having been a cheerleader in school, while he, Macho John, was on the football field.

Look, if you’re going to be a male cheerleader, you’re never going to hear the end of it and rightly so. There’s no excuse. I don’t agree with John Edwards on just about anything, but I’m right there in the trenches with him on this one.

A female newspaper columnist harasses me:

great column! chock-full of richness and complexity. uh, what are you wearing? (just kidding, of course).

And no, it wasn’t Me So Michelle….