It would appear that Americans never learn. Fresh from getting bogged down in what is fast approaching a decade-long failed military occupation in Afghanistan, approaching the eight-year mark in the failed military occupation of Iraq, the Obama administration has now revealed its submission to the insane neocon foreign policy of its predecessor by preparing for military strikes on Libya. Let us be clear about this: There is no more national security interest at stake in Libya than there was in Afghanistan or Iraq. The rationalizations being cited could just as easily be used to justify an invasion of Bahrain, Yemen, North Korea or even China.
Tag: WND
WND column
The Totalitarian State of America
“Keep your laws off my body” is a popular abortionette slogan, but like so many feminist ideas, it is an observably nonsensical assertion. It is not at all difficult to find a whole host of laws that directly concern our bodies. There are laws dictating how we must clothe them, what we are permitted to ingest in them, how we are allowed to transport them from place to place and whom they are permitted to sexually penetrate. It is a rhetorical device, nothing more, and a remarkably silly one at that.
Unfortunately, the panoply of laws concerning one’s body are merely the tip of the legal iceberg. Americans are now living in a literally totalitarian society.
WND column
Looking at population projections for Texas, demographer Steve Murdock concludes: “It’s basically over for Anglos.” Two of every three Texas children are now non-Anglo and the trend line will become even more pronounced in the future, said Murdock, former U.S. Census Bureau director and now director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University.
– Texas Politics, Feb. 24, 2011
The harsh historical reality is that no human society ever survives. They come into being, they thrive, they decline and eventually they perish. If they were remarkable, perhaps they will leave indications of their past existence through literature and the arts, through place names and through their influence on subsequent ideas and modes of thought. But that does not bring them back to life; the modern Greece of IMF-inspired riots, burning banks and filthy streets is not the ancient Greece of the philosophers and the Athenian Empire.
WND column
The Battle for America’s Credit Card
The eyes of the Republican blogosphere are concentrated on Wisconsin these days, as the public employee unions and Democratic senators are lashing out in a desperate and futile attempt to defend the status quo of unsustainable state debt. But despite the mediagenic circus of shut-down public schools, doctors dispersing fraudulent sick notes and teachers waving misspelled signs, the battle between the unions and Republican Gov. Scott Walker is not one that demands reinforcement from either the blogosphere or the tea party.
The focus of the fiscally prudent should be on Washington, not Wisconsin. This is because the outcome in Madison is assured, whereas the one in the national capital is not. While both situations are unsustainable, Wisconsin has already reached the outer limits of its debt expansion. The federal government has not. Wisconsin’s limits are externally imposed, whereas Washington’s are not, at least, not in the near term.
WND column
Unlike many right-wing commentators, I did not endorse the tea-party movement when it erupted. Nor, like a few unusually shameless media whores, did I rush to leap in front of the parade and claim that I was leading it. I did not even think of doing either because I concluded from the start that the tea party is a useless and incoherent political mirage that is unlikely to accomplish anything of substance. It is not elections but the subsequent actions of the officials elected that matter.
Monday column
Ending the Multicultural Experiment
In September, a member of board of the Bundesbank, the German equivalent of the Federal Reserve, published a book titled “Germany is Abolishing Itself.” The reaction to Thilo Sarrazin’s thesis, which is that Muslim immigration not only threatens the existence of Germany, but of every country in which it is permitted, was mixed. While the pushers of multiculturalism and diversity exploded in outrage and Sarrazin was encouraged to resign from the Bundesbank board, the book became an immediate best-seller.
Unlike past sinners against diversity dogma, Sarrazin has neither apologized nor backed down. Various opinion polls have demonstrated that the majority of Germans agree with him despite the fact that the political elite in both major parties are still frightened to death at the thought of being forced to address the very large elephant in the Bundesrepublik’s living room.
WND column
Liberals and conservatives alike are celebrating the possible advance of democracy in Egypt. The Mubarak regime is reeling, his heirs apparent have fled the country and images of “people power” are filling television screens worldwide. Excited rumors of the police and military taking the side of the protesters against the regime are being reported as dreams of a Western secular democracy on the Nile fire the imagination of humanists everywhere. However, this excitement is every bit as ill-conceived as the neoconservative adventures that brought democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And seeing that Egypt lacks a military occupying force, it is unlikely that the establishment of a democratic government in Cairo will end as well as the foundation of the corrupt puppet regimes in Baghdad and Kabul have to date.
On a related note, NRO interviews someone who knows considerably more about Egypt than I do, but reaches similar conclusions:
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why all this optimism in the media vis-à-vis Egypt? Why do you believe it’s so wrong?
Barry Rubin: Everybody likes the idea of the oppressed and repressed masses rising up against a dictatorship. Both conservatives and liberals find this appealing. And because America is a democratic country and the current wisdom is that everyone all over the world is alike, the assumption is that Egyptians want to have civil rights and freedom. This is reinforced by the Bush-era support for democratic change in the Middle East based on the idea that the dictatorships have indoctrinated the people to be anti-American. That view is true as far as it goes, but one reason why the dictatorships have pushed the political line they do is precisely because they know it will be popular.
But what if this bipartisan preconception is wrong? What if the most likely alternatives are either an Arab-nationalist dictatorship or an Islamist dictatorship? First, the moderate democratic forces are weak, disorganized, and few in number compared with their two rivals. Second, in Egypt especially, many of the “moderate democrats” are quite extremist, even if they are leftist or radical-nationalist rather than Islamist in doctrine.
We also have some precedents: Iran’s revolution (Islamism); Palestinian elections (Hamas); Lebanese democracy (Hezbollah); Algerian free elections (bloody civil war); Turkish democracy (Islamist regime at present). This pattern cannot be ignored, there are reasons for it.
The reason one must assume a problematic outcome isn’t because the pattern exists, but because there is no alternative pattern of Western-friendly democratic outcomes in the Middle East to which one can point.
WND column
The dark secret of the college-loan system is that it is not designed to help students pay for college and generate a reasonable interest-profit for the loan provider that will be paid off within a short period of time after the student begins working and receives a degree-enhanced salary. It is specifically designed to keep the graduate on a treadmill of debt that will ideally never be repaid.
This should be readily apparent upon considering the fact that there is presently $850 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States. Since there is a total undergraduate enrollment of 14,473,884 students paying an average of $10,871 to attend college, the total annual cost of all college education is $157.3 billion. This means that past and present students are burdened with 5.4 times more debt than it costs to educate every single student currently enrolled in college. Since 44 percent of college students don’t graduate within six years, (and notice how the metric has climbed from four years to six years to artificially raise the graduation rate), the debt is 10 times the cost of educating a single national graduating class.
WND column
In the aftermath of the lethal Arizona shootings by Jared Loughner, the media have been caught up in an emotional orgy of sanctimonious worship of the state and its representatives. We have seen the ritual calls for more gun bans, the requisite quotes from the freedom-hating Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and Republican Rep. Peter King has even announced plans for new legislation creating an anointed class of legal aristocrats, in whose presence no weapons shall be tolerated.
Or presumably, as we have already seen in the arrest of Ms. Theresa Cao, verbal dissent.
WND column
In the past, most historians who have seen a connection between economic events and political or social events have considered it to be a material one. When viewed from this mechanistic perspective, there is a rational explanation for even the most seemingly irrational actions. Japan’s decision to attack the much more powerful United States during World War II is therefore explained by her need for South Pacific oil, while the present U.S. democratic imperialism is either driven by the desire to control Iraqi oil fields or defend the reserve status of the dollar.