Vox Popoli

Here’s an interesting dichotomy on how the right’s own biases can come into play. Because, let’s face it, we have our own biases, just as the left does and it’s foolish to make the same mistake they do by trying to deny it. When Robert Novak wrote about how the Bush administration is planning to withdraw from Iraq immediately after winning re-election earlier this week, it was dismissed by many right-wing commentators who are fans of the war as the mere floating of a proposal. In light of that, consider Eric Muller’s recent point about John Leo’s support of “In Defense of Internment”:

John Leo read Michelle Malkin’s book “In Defense of Internment” and concluded that it’s time to open debate on internment “past and present.”

Malkin has expressed frustration when I (and others) have read her book as endorsing the internment of Arabs and Muslims. How could we make such a mistake, she has wondered, when she says in her book (in one sentence) that she’s “not advocating rounding up all Arabs of Muslims and tossing them into camps?”

So you’d think that when Leo uses her book to call for a debate on “present” internments, Malkin would say it’s a misunderstanding of her views.

Nope. She calls it a favorable review.

Regardless of whether you agree with the notion of interning Muslims without regard for civil liberties or not, the conclusion you cannot escape is that Malkin’s logic in defense of the historical internments REQUIRES support for modern internments, because America is at more verifiable danger from Koreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians, Afghanis and Chechens than we ever were from ethnic Japanese.

If it is deemed not only possible, but even likely, for Robert Novak to float policy proposals, is it so improbable that Michelle Malkin is being used to do the same? Perhaps Prof. Muller, the anti-internment left-winger liberal japonicus and I are the only ones who hear this ominous drumbeat beginning, but the extent to which Malkin, Leo and others are willing to lie and warp history in defense of this newly declared debate on “present” internments should seriously trouble any of you who claim to believe in the supremacy of the individual over the collective.

Zekedood sends an email informing us that, as expected, Michelle Malkin can’t defend herself. Furthermore, I recommend having a look at her direct quote shown in bold below. Tell me if you think she’s telling the truth.

Yesterday Michelle Malkin was a guest on the Ron Smith show on WBAL in Baltimore. Ron Smith is something of a small-l libertarian. He came out very early (in 2002) on the anti-Iraq war side, citing the non-threat Saddam Hussein posed to the US, WMD or not. So when he teased Mrs. Malkin’s appearance by saying that he was going to ask about your challenge to debate her, I was certain that it was going to lead to something good.

However, he pretty much gave “me-so-Michelle” a free pass. He started the interview by referring to the opposition her book had received from various parties, particularly “Vox Day, the WorldNetDaily columnist”, and asked if she was going to take you up on your challenge to debate the issue on radio. Her answer: “I won’t be doing that. I have already addressed those

questions on my blog.” “Me-so” was then given a free pass to restate the case laid out in her book (without challenge) before the interview changed direction to discuss the Rathergate fiasco.

I decided to double check “Me-so”‘s contention that she had addressed your questions on her blog. Shock and awe! No mention of you or your questions. Not a peep. There was, in the August archive of the blog, a small section where she “took on” other bloggers who had questioned her premise. But there was no mention of you, your questions, or your contention that she whiffed badly on her research. More shock and awe!

I’m not sure with whom I’m more disgusted — “Me-so” for dissembling, or Ron Smith for being such a patsy.

I’m not surprised in the least. She can’t afford to have it known how little she knows about the military situation, so she’s hoping everyone will quietly ignore this until it passes over. The blogosphere can give her a free pass if it wants, but they had better realize that in doing so, they are imitating the mainstream media over which they are currently affecting such superiority. But why they’d want to sacrifice their own integrity to cover for someone who’s now proven herself to be a charlatan, a coward and a liar is beyond me.

In any event, I’ll be precisely delineating the many differences between her alternate history fantasy and the history of our space-time continuum on the Northern Alliance show this Saturday.

In college, WB had some friends from home who went to other colleges and were in a band. They were musically talented, although unfortunately none of them could sing worth a darn. He would come back from break with tapes of their recordings, one of which, the immortal “Who’s Gonna Buy the Beer” actually made it to vinyl on an independent label somehow.

The best thing about the Groundhogs, as they were called, was their magnificently offensive lyrics, which snuck up on you, disguised as they were by nice melodic guitar lines and sung in what would have been a pleasant manner if the singer’s voice hadn’t been complete crap. My personal favorite was the beginning to “Web of Love”.

Oh, I was searching

For a certain

Kind of girl to f—“

Or the wandering, almost Sultans of Swing-like “Bass Ale” which chronicled a weary working man’s night out at his local bar.

The other day, me and a couple buddies decided,

We’d go have a couple brews at the local bar.

We didn’t realize,

That it was going to be homos, all around us.

Yeah, the homos were coming in, they were getting ready,

For a big dance party, on Saturday night.

Oh, Saturday night….

It always amused me to put the tape in the car when I’d be out on a date or something, and it would take a couple songs before whoever was with me would realize what they were singing. Nine times out of ten, male or female, they’d burst out laughing. It got to the point that we couldn’t have a party without a mass demand for the Groundhogs tape, usually, of course, after everyone was adequately refreshed and in the mood for a riotous sing-along culminating in “Snorklehead”, which was either a Blyesque assertion of masculine independence from female oppression or an ode to lethal interspecies affection. I know all the words and I’m still not sure.

Groundhogs….

Since there’s no chance Malkin will show on Saturday, I’ve been passing some of the information I’d been retaining onto other blogs who are interested in continuing to strip the charlatan, along with the credulous sorts who are still taking her seriously. Was “most of the U.S. fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor,” John Leo?* I’ve saved some of the best bits for the Northern Alliance, of course, and I’ll arrange to post a transcript here in the week following the show.

1. I find it strange that many people have been urging me, one not very widely read columnist, to “move on” while simultaneously reveling in the all-Rather, all the time coverage of the conservative columnists and the right-leaning blogosphere.

2. I also find it ironic that the Guard memos are portrayed as a bigger deal than the beginning drumbeat to build support for internment. Considering the many empty, but staffed FEMA “detention centers”, I think it is improbable that this will remain an entirely academic debate for long. I don’t claim to know for whom those centers are intended, but one has to presume that they exist for a reason.

3. The total lack of interest in conservative fraud expressed by people at places like NRO, compared to their rabid Pavlovian reaction to the smallest sign of inaccuracy in all things Democratic, is disheartening, though not all that surprising. I see little reason to believe that professional Republicans are any better or more intellectually honest than professional Democrats, the illusions of their honest, church-going fans notwithstanding. It’s not so much that neither side has a monopoly on the truth as neither side has any interest in it, if it does not serve their immediate purposes.

4. I am very, very glad that I decided against pursuing a media career after I was signed by Universal Press Syndicate. I’d rather work for the Porn King. He has more integrity and the money is significantly better. And Heather Naeurt notwithstanding, the women are much hotter too. Not that Space Bunny is likely to go for either option, you understand.

5. It is intriguing to discover what some self-identified Christian conservatives believe will see you damned to eternal Hellfire. I was aware that some people believe it is necessary to vote for George Bush in order to pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, I did not know that accepting Michelle Malkin’s revisionist fantasy of WWII military history was also a requirement. Presumably that’s from the Book of Vulpes.

*And before someone starts arguing that it was the big important ships that were destroyed, please note that even if we count the beached Nevada as destroyed, that is still only 5 out of the 17 battleships that the US Navy possessed at the time. And, of course, 0 of 9 carriers, 0 of 18 heavy cruisers, 0 of 20 light cruisers, etc.

come on get down with the sickness

Madness is the gift that has been given to me.

That’s Disturbed, Bane, the best and most evil band of the last four years. I had a tough time choosing between songs for the chapter headings in The Wrath of Angels, since I always limit myself to a maximum of two chapters per band. Uh-wha-ah-ah-ah. Voices is the song I used in those little MP3 experiments from a few months ago.

I can hear the voice but I don’t want to listen

Strap me down and tell me I’ll be all right.

I can feel the subliminal need to be down with the voice

And make everything all right.

It’s actually one of the better descriptions of demonic possession I’ve ever read. I think the lyricist is a preacher’s son gone bad or something like that. Great music, though, it was the sort of thing I wanted to do with Psykosonik, but Paul and Dan fell in love with The Orb and we ended up going with stronger trance and rave influences instead.

Hindrocket kicks sand in Jon Klein’s face on CNBC:

Mr. JOHN HINDERAKER (Powerline.com Co-founder): Well, here’s how it happened. I would say this is not really a big exception to the way that we and other blogs operate all the time. I think that this story illustrates the medium, the Internet, at its best, but the same kind of thing has happened many times.

It started on the morning of September 9th. We’re a group blog; there are three of us who do Powerline. My partner, Scott Johnson, got up early in the morning, and one of the first things he did was to check all the e-mails that readers had sent to us overnight looking for something interesting to follow up on. And one of those e-mails quoted from and linked to a post which somebody called BuckHead had done on a message thread at the Free Republic site, which is basically a message board.

BORGER: It’s a very conservative site, we should say.

Mr. HINDERAKER: It’s a conservative site, yeah…

BORGER: Yes.

Mr. HINDERAKER: …basically a message board. And Scott thought it was interesting because this guy had looked at these documents which had just become available online, and he made some very good points about the font and the appearance and so on of the documents, said, ‘I think they’re forgeries.’ Scott was intrigued by that, so he put up a quote and a link to the original post on Free Republic, and he said, ‘Hey, anybody else out there among our readers have any information about this?’ Well, that opened the floodgates. Over the ensuing hours, we received hundreds…

BORGER: Right.

Mr. HINDERAKER: …and hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from readers…

BORGER: Right.

Mr. HINDERAKER: …not all of them valuable, but many of them from people who had a remarkable knowledge of military protocol of the early 1970s, type fonts and typewriters and so on…

BORGER: OK.

Mr. HINDERAKER: …and other subject that were relevant.

BORGER: Well, and the rest is obviously history. Now, Jon Klein, let me ask you–it turns out that this blogger BuckHead is Harry McDougald, who is a very conservative lawyer from Atlanta. Who holds the bloggers responsible here in this battle to control the media?

Mr. JON KLEIN (Former CBS News Executive Vice President): Well, to hear them tell it, they hold themselves responsible. And, you know, that’s fine as far as it goes; it’s just not any kind of a third-party or any kind of a reliable check or balance against them. They are, you know, journals of opinion. And if they’re taken that way, they can be useful. But we can’t confuse the opinion of a guy shooting off an e-mail from BuckHead, Georgia, as fact.

Mr. HINDERAKER: I don’t understand that, Jonathan. Are you saying that Republicans somehow don’t have standing to point out forgeries?

One thing I couldn’t help noting is how the host kept saying “very conservative”. Have you ever heard any talking head utter the words “very liberal”? I can’t think of one example. I wonder if Powerline is going to start painting silhouettes on their fuselage soon.

I’m feeling a bit shattered here. Not because my case against interment is the least bit weakened, but my faith in one of my favorite conservative writers certainly is. Thomas Sowell, who at least did have the stones to respond, replied in part thusly:

Having read a number of accounts of the relocation over the years, I cannot recall any that was either as well documented or as well reasoned as Michelle Malkin’s.

The worst part is that he wrote this despite my sending him an example which proves that Malkin didn’t do the slightest bit of research with regards to the military necessity. Can you imagine him accepting a similar defense of FDR’s seizure of the nation’s gold supply, justified on the basis of a diary entry by William H. Wooden, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, stating that he believed the seizure to be economically necessary?

I’ve received numerous emails from conservatives, in various degrees of emotional upset that range from panties mildly twisted to totally rabid frothing at the mouth, expressing the opinion that I should not attack a ‘conservative” commentator because she is “on our side”.

Suffice it to say that I strongly disagree.

This is precisely the sort of behavior that the right so often condemns on the part of the left. We rip into leftists who won’t criticize John Kerry’s flip-flops, liberals who won’t admit to media bias, losers who still think Dan Rather just might have, if not a case, at least an innocent explanation. To turn around and say that a disingenuous and ignorant charlatan of the right should get a free pass on an abuse of the truth is outrageously hypocritical and incredibly short-sighted.

It would be one thing if I was nit-picking and poking at minor mistakes. But when the sole basis of an entire thesis is in error; this is not something that any intellectually honest individual can overlook, nor should he. Furthermore, no one who is on the side of the socialist FDR, the elevation of the interests of the central state over the rights of the individual and complete intellectual dishonesty, is on mine.

My only side is the truth and the Truth. I have no lasting allegiance to any other party or creed, and I do my best to follow where they lead. If that means that I travel alone, that I stand alone, then I will do so without hesitation.

Always outnumbered, never outgunned.

EN writes:

I talked to a DC-based Bushivek campaign worker on Friday morning and she said they are stunned at the number of people who are telling them they will not vote for Bush.

The Bush doctrine, such as it is, has failed. He’ll still win re-election because John Kerry combines the worst characteristics of Michael Dukakis and Bob Dole with a smarmy, Clintonian lack of principle, but he’s practically a lame duck even prior to his second term. JG, who is in Iraq, states:

There’s enough troops over here to take care of the insurgency. The main problem is the politicians. Post Abu Ghraib, the most important intelligence gathering asset has been hamstrung. Also, we’ve been at the brink of destroying Sadr and his militia at least a half dozen times, but politicians have intervened and Sadr escapes and rearms with Iranian hardware.

I actually have to explain that statement a little more. We’ve got enough troops to destroy any resistance over there. Our going into Najaf, Sadr City, Falujah – we kill these people by the score, literally hundreds and maybe lose one guy. When (if) we get intel ID’ing a bad guy, a squad is sufficient to take down the house and take him into custody.

What we don’t have enough troops for is patrolling the borders (where Syria and Iran are shipping in weapons by the ton, where half of these suicide bombers come from), patrolling ALL the streets, putting check points all over the place and searching suspicious vehicles. We’re trying to get the Iraqis to do that, but insurgents are whacking Iraqi Interim Gov’t ministers regularly and take out Iraqi Police by the dozen at recruiting/training stations. It doesn’t help that the Ministry of Interior doesn’t pay these guys except every now and then, half of them are unarmed, many are not in uniform (I’ve got pictures) – the training is cursory for both the Iraqi Police and Iraqi National guard…so half the time in a firefight they run away.

I don’t believe we have the political will to do what needs to be done over here – so we’ve already lost this war…and I think any other future war with a dedicated resistance.

We’ll find out soon enough if there are enough troops or not, if the generals start requesting more troops once the next enemy offensive starts. But it’s been clear from the start that there has been no plan to win, no end game, no clear-cut definition of victory against which progress can be measured.

I fully expect that history will regard Bush as a incompetent Commander-in-Chief who was lucky to escape full responsibility for his disastrous decisions. Leading a nation into half-hearted, undeclared war is a guarantee of ultimate failure; Bush would have gotten away with it had he been content with Saddam’s scalp. I see many correlations between the administration’s decision to expand their goals into full-blown nation-building with the IJN’s decision to extend their defensive shield to the Aleutians and Midway. In both cases, easy early success led to hubris and a fatal error.

My primary concern at this point is that only a second 9/11 could possibly give the American people any more tolerance for war. If I can see this, presumably so can those internal enemies from whom our military forces, and the President, have sworn to defend the Constitution….

JDR asks:

And what is your view on the “military necessity” question in respect of the few million muslims in this country, many if not most of whom have directed hardly a scintilla of criticism at islamic fanatics that are commiting mindless attrocities 24/7? Did 9/11 give rise to such a military necessity? Will the next islamist attack on our soil do so?

This raises a fair point. On the one hand, technological advances have significantly increased the striking power of a small group of men, or even an individual, while rendering conventional military defenses relatively useless. To a certain extent, the very notion of “military necessity” is not applicable, as massed troops are more appropriately classified as potential targets than preventative measures. And the lack of criticism is indicative of nothing in and of itself; this, too, has no relation to military matters.

Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy And Hope, wrote of the cycle of martial technology. His theory was that as individuals obtain armaments that are basically the equivalent of professional arms, the power of central government declines. Governments, of course, fight this, but fighting against the technological imperative is always doomed, for governments as it is for individuals, businesses and societies.

My belief is that the next large terrorist attack, whatever the source, will have the result of inflaming the American populace, but unexpectedly, a part of its anger will be focused against the government and its failure to even consider the immigration issue, in addition to the resident illegal aliens. It will not have the expected effect of creating an increased demand for an expansion of external warfare. The old rules are changing, but as Prechter states, government is reliably the last institution to realize this. Therefore, I suspect that the next major attack will cause the administration to initially advocate more war, but the frightened public, having lost its faith in offensive war as a reliable defense, will instead cause/allow them to focus on further destroying civil liberties.

I have no problem with deporting aliens, legal or illegal, of any race, creed or color, but I am 100 percent opposed to allowing the government to disobey the law and violate the rights of its citizens under the aegis of security. That way lies the unleashing of the red hand.