He has met the enemy and it's us.

 

Bugger off Bush

 

From Mark Stey's column: Bush re-enters the room.

The official observances for the twentieth anniversary managed to be even more wretched and grotesque than I'd expected - the most obvious affront being Bush's equivalence between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the "perpetrators" of 1/6: They were both "children of the same foul spirit", he declared, diminishing the three thousand victims of the former by comparing them to a congressman who had to hide in the stationery cupboard because some goofball was taking selfies with his feet up on the desk.

Twenty years ago, the forty-third president's entire executive branch totally failed the nation. Sample quote from page 184 of America Alone:

FAA Command Center: "Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?"

FAA Headquarters: "God, I don't know."

FAA Command Center: "That's a decision somebody's going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes."

FAA Headquarters: "You know, everybody just left the room."

"Everybody just left the room": Your federal government in action. Under Bush, no one paid a price for it: That's your "foul spirit" right there, Pericles. It will be the same when the Chinese yank the rug out from under the dollar: Everybody just left the room - at the White House, at the Fed, at the Treasury ...but not at the IRS, where they're still hard at it freezing the savings accounts of January insurrectionists' nine-year-old grandkids.

Six months to the day after 9/11, Dubya's Immigration and Naturalization Service (as it then was) mailed out two student visas to Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi at their Florida flight school. Unfortunately, Messrs Atta and Shehhi were unable to avail themselves of their new American visas as they had neglected to have their mail forwarded to their new address at Big Smoking Hole in the Ground, Lower Manhattan.

So the forty-third executive branch, on its new money-no-object war footing, is handing out visas to deceased terrorists whose pictures have been on the front pages of American newspapers? No way was Bush putting up with that! He acted decisively - and moved Janis Sposato "sideways" to the post of "Assistant Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner for Immigration Services", where she needed a much longer business card that stuck out awkwardly from her breast pocket, which is kind of embarrassing at cocktail parties.

America is a land that rewards failure (see Thoroughly Modern Milley's chest), which is why it lost the war. On 9/11 Bush had left the room to read My Pet Goat to grade-schoolers, after which he spent the day being flown to one "secure location" and then leaving the room to fly to another (presumably even more) "secure location". On Saturday, he was speaking in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where twenty years ago, after "everybody left the room", the ad-hoc militia of the fourth plane provided the only good news of that grim Tuesday: If the twin towers were Pearl Harbor, Flight 93 was the Doolittle Raid, and on the very same day.

Bush owed a debt to these men for acting while he was invisible. Yet his brief remarks barely mentioned those heroes, and none by name. Instead, he retreated to the lame tropes of the ruling class, and started yakking on about "nativism" and "religious bigotry" (ours, not the hijackers') in contrast to those admirable Americans who "reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees". These are surely pitiful consolations for the Afghan debacle, and weirdly irrelevant to the heroes of Flight 93, who were rather deplorably unicultural - "white male frat jock yuppies". As for "welcoming immigrants", one might think that, even for as oblivious a ruling-class man as Bush, that would be in somewhat bad taste given what happened twenty years ago. From page 249 of After America:

In the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia... four young men obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flight on September 11th.

They did so by bribing a Salvadorean illegal immigrant to certify that they all lived at his address. Hundreds lived in his modest flat: it's part of the non-gaming of the non-system that is not only tolerated but venerated by the Uniparty.

Among the beneficiaries of the 7-Eleven ID scam was Ziad Jarrah, who led the team that stormed the cockpit of Flight 93 and who took the pilot's seat.

Which is why Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett and thirty-six other passengers and crew are dead.

Read the whole thing. 

George W Bush is so attentive to his own security that, ahead of his state visit to the UK, he demanded the Queen replace every window at Windsor Castle. (Her Majesty told him to bugger off, as well she should.) 

The Cons Are Alright

 

Kurt Schlichter speaks for me; perhaps for you.  Recognize yourself here?  If so, you’re an ally.  

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: We cons will be fine and we’ll win in the end, but it’ll take time and hard fighting.

…the old ways don’t fit, what worked before doesn’t work now…

I used to subscribe to The Weekly Standard and National Review, .. As for NR, it’s sad – you post-internet cons don’t dig it, but back in the day, Buckley’s baby was it. There was no other conservatism. When it came in the snail mail once every two weeks, you got your fix for another fortnight. …Now, ...I'd happily let NR burn. …

Does it matter if they left us or we left them? I tend to think that they were never truly with us. Have we really changed? On the surface, maybe. I used to be a hawk. I even went to a couple of the conflicts that all the smart people on our side said were super good ideas. And then I watched the utter failure of these same geniuses – a kid could nearly go from being a fetus to buying a Dos Equis in the time America’s been chasing jihadi banditos around the Hindu Kush to no avail.

I heard the lectures about free enterprise then realized that I wanted no part of being in the party that enabled mega-corporate pillaging of our middle class for the benefit of the Chinese communists.

And I watched Conservative, Inc., manage decline while filling its cruises, and then I watched the guy I defended from all the “Chimpy McHalibu$Hitler” slurs turn around and cavort with the people calling me worse….

The hell with these people.

We’re done with them, but not with conservatism. We carry that torch now. The True Conservatives™ sure as hell aren’t even pretending anymore – we just had a whole year of “The Conservative Case For Biden.” They care only about their cheesy little fellowships in DC at the Conservativish Forum for Freedom and Eagles and Taking Dumb Businessmen’s Money and More Eagles, where they scribble unread pap on lame blogs. They eagerly collect the tech titan’s 30 pieces of Bitcoin to join in the cancel chorus of conservatives who actually believe in something besides securing these dorks’ sinecures.

But we know it now. We see it, and there’s no unseeing it.

As the Lincoln Project – if you accept that Abe’s project was trying to score with teen boys – collapses, and we giggle, there’s no hiding the corruption of Conservative, Inc. Well, now there’s a new conservatism, and it’s going to happen without the Fredocon caucus.

Remember George Will? Me neither.

To reprise a cliché of my own making, Donald Trump was the avatar of our dissatisfaction with the garbage Establishment and the refusal of the useless, sclerotic and cruise-oriented losers allegedly on our side to defend our interests. It didn’t help that these credential-fetishizers … always despised us. Some were born snobs, and some embraced snobbery – there’s no snooty like “I got out of the trailer park and I gotta ensure no one ever makes that connection between me and my déclassé past again” snooty. But they all think we are stupid, borderline evil, and utterly unsuited to have a say in our own governance. In that, they express their class solidarity with the caste status neurotics of the left.

So, why my optimism?

Well, as we’ve seen, our opponents inside our tent are worthless. Moreover, our enemies outside on the left are buffoons. Ted Lieu? Adam Schiff? Toots Swalwell, the guy who actually thought the Chi-Com courtesan liked him because he was cool? These are singularly unimpressive people who project an aura of competence solely by appearing on camera. But they are stupid, and weak, and the idea that our enemies are these brilliant Lex Luthors crafting intricate conspiracies from their secret lairs is ridiculous. All this stuff happening now is not the result of some cunning strategy but of dumb luck, the inevitable cyclic nature of politics, and some mistakes by our own side (Did you ever notice how most of the things that went bad for Trump happened when he listened to Establishment Republicans?). These are not supermen – these sissies would probably cry because I just assumed their gender.

… Every answer we seek is within the Constitution and the documents that went into creating it. What we sell is freedom, prosperity, and human dignity. What the other side sells is, at best, a soft corporate/political tyranny of the mediocre.

And the most important factor is that we are now conservawoke. Red pilled, if you will. We see the lies. And we see the liars. That ridiculous XX-Jeb! hack Nikki! Haley keeps trying to happen and we keep laughing at her. ….

We’re done with GOP weather vanes who say whatever the Establishment tool in front of her wants to hear. Recently, Nikki! sat down with Tim Alberta of Politico and said… who cares? We had her pegged at “she sat down with Tim Alberta of Politico.” If you can’t tell who the enemy is, it’s you.

So? And? If freedom was easy, everyone would be doing it, and those of us who have read history from before 1619, and/or have resided outside this country can clarify for you that freedom as the natural state of man is most def not the case.

No one is going to give us anything but serfdom – you can have as much of that as you want, and gratis. But freedom has to be taken, one GOP state reforming its election laws at a time, one new conservative-friendly social media venue at a time, one action-packed and conservative-oriented series at a time.

My guess is that Donald Trump has played his (crucial) role and will move on after humiliating the Democrats again by scoffing at their latest puny impeachment. He will be a kingmaker and an important asset in bringing forward the new blood we need to re-energize us. Populism had a tough four years. We’ll take a breather for a bit, then charge. Look at our bench! Ric Grenell, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, and many more. Look at our expanding network of media outlets, not least of which is Townhall. Look at the new voices we’re seeing, often from the world of podcasting, and often of people who became at least conservative-curious because they saw the failures of the left (Tim Pool, Michael Malice, Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan).

And look at the doddering, failing enemy, presiding over the collapsing Potemkin village that is the failed Establishment.  Yeah, the cons are alright.

Re-thinking George W. Bush

It's a club and we ain't in it.

 

Artist Richard Bledsoe on George W. Bush

2020 is an appropriate year to indulge in hindsight. I must admit now when looking back, I got played.

I profoundly misunderestimated the true intentions and agenda of a man I once respected. I suspect I was not alone in buying into the delusion. We all can’t blame ourselves too much for being fooled. We were up against a massive psyop of enormous subtlety and resources, and the alternatives we had presented at the time were outright monstrous.

The Bush Pipe Dream

No one expected Iraq to turn into Denmark.  What the Bush administration expected was that by having elections, giving people an opportunity to choose their own leaders, Iraq would become a modern democracy.  They were foolish and I predicted that they would fail. 

 

But neither is there any reason to believe that “Muslim Arabs alone of all peoples are destined to live in tyranny forever, unable to sustain any kind of halfway-decent halfway-democratic government” without an interim period of benevolent rule by people who believe in decent democratic government.

The problem with Muslim society is Muslim culture which has several thousand years of embedded experience of tyranny and corruption reinforcing all the actions that militate against the decent democratic government.

The belief that Muslim countries can convert the modern democracies on the European model is as much a pipe dream on the Right as the belief on the Left that Socialism will work if only we give it another try.

Japan is an example of a country with no history of democracy being converted into a decent democracy.  Germany – with the failed example of the Weimar period – had no history of being a successful democracy, yet it is today.  But before they were “turned loose” as it were, they experienced decades of military occupation following the Second World War.  In fact, to this day, there are American military bases in both countries.

Britain left behind it scores of countries they once colonized and then set free, many of which have become stable, decent democracies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. 

The big difference between the success of the British Empire and the Allied victory in World War 2 was the imposition of decent rule by a foreign agent who believed in honest, representative government at home and the imposition of good government on a people and culture who were not familiar with any of the basic tenants of a decent representative republic.  

The experience in Iraq demonstrates that in a culture ruled by a dictator you will have rampant corruption and – in the case of most Muslim countries – a tribal system in which the first loyalty is to the tribe rather than to the nation.  Combine that with unreformed Islam and all you will get from an election is the elevation of the next theocratic dictator whose objective is to gather wealth for himself and his tribe. 

Mark Steyn gives George Bush a few well deserved whacks

Mark supported Bush, but he, like me, has become disenchanted with him.

But I have to say Bush's remark on Trump shows an almost pathological lack of self-awareness. [Bush pondered that he might be the last Republican President in American history] If 43 is indeed "the last Republican president", it will be not because of Trump but because of the conditions that enabled Trump - that's to say, the state of Bush-era Republicanism by the time of 2015.

In parliamentary systems, parties that outlive any useful purpose die either very quickly (Italy) or rather slower (Britain). But the United States is unique in having a frozen two-party system for a century and a half - until 2016. To take Bush's statement as correct, that year the GOP base chose to elect an independent - and that's on Dubya, Jeb, Mitt, McCain, Ryan and the rest and what they did to their own party. A certain amount of self-reflective circumspection might be appropriate.

The Republican elected officials prepared the party for burial, having abandoned the middle class in every way but rhetoric.  They were rich, they were powerful, and they were enthralled to the corporate elite who fell over each other to see who could outsource jobs to Asia, Mexico or Central America faster.

They invaded the Middle East, won the war but lost the peace because they totally misunderstood the culture and the religion of the region. 

They misunderstood the world and they misunderstood the country.  That's what led to Donald Trump.

Democrats really do love Republicans — when they’re dead

Michael Goodwin

He was a patriot, a hero, a ­genial gentleman and a great American. You can’t pick up a newspaper or go near a television without hearing leftists gush with praise for the late President George H.W. Bush. Who knew they felt this way?.....

The heydays of press hatred for Bush and McCain came during their presidential campaigns. Long before they were saluted for their late-in-life stances against Trump, Bush 41 and McCain were declared unfit to be president.

The New York Times, which last endorsed a Republican for president in 1956, backed the hapless Michael Dukakis over Bush in 1988, and Bush went on to win in a landslide, picking up more than 53 percent of the popular vote and 426 electoral votes.

Four years later, the paper supported Bill Clinton, ripping Bush’s economic management as “exasperating” and his positions on individual rights as “infuriating.” It accused him of stoking racial resentment, of going to “radical ­extremes” in supporting right-to-life measures, and said his “capacity to govern has collapsed.”

When Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, he and Thomas got the same kind of character smearing that Trump and Brett Kavanaugh got this year.

Now, in his coffin, Bush is a model of American greatness.

After Trump is dead and Barron Trump is President, The Donald with be known as the Good Trump.

We Over-Honor Our Presidents

I feel the same way as I told my wife.

Today the stock market will be closed, the federal government shut down, the mail will not be delivered and classes will be suspended. Why? George H.W. Bush died.

Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic. To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.

In life they derided him and called him an elitist, clueless about real people and a Nazi (a title they give all Republicans).  Now that he's dead his political enemies on the Left call him a good guy. 

But he was a one term president and was elected to be Ronald Reagan's third term.  He had the good fortune to preside over the global successes of the Sainted Reagan. 

He did OK and lived a good, long life. 

RIP.

A short history of the last 50 years

The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day.

Gentle Reminder: Anyone Democrats Don’t Like is Unfit for Office

Do you remember almost 15 years ago the Democrats engaged in massive DERP! and claimed President George W. Bush was unfit for office?

I do. I remember the proglodytes’ seizures at the thought of BushChimpyMcHitlerHalliburton “lying” to the American people about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and demands that he be “chimpeached.” I remember the vivid comparisons between President Bush and chimpanzees. I remember some lawyer named John Whitbeck publishing a screed in the Arab media, claiming Bush was either an idiot or a liar, and it didn’t matter which, because in either case Bush was unfit for office.

The attacks on President Bush were indecent and malicious throughout his two terms in office. The Democrats were on the warpath. In June 2008 Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler, introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush in the House of Representatives. The effort never went anywhere, other than the Judiciary Committee where the resolution was left to languish until Bush left office.

And now it’s starting again. With liberals, history seems to repeat itself every few years. Psychiatrists are mobilizing a (bowel) movement to help remove Trump from office, claiming he is mentally ill, and therefore unfit to lead the country. Never mind not one of them has actually examined the President; apparently watching him on TV is enough to make a medical diagnosis about his mental health.

George Bush Criticizes Trump

Ace of Spades

One thing that strikes me is that Bush was pretty ignorant of the press as president or at least posed as being ignorant of them. On one hand, I guess, he was trying to float above them.

On the other hand, he very rarely rebutted the actual opposition party in the country, the national media, and I know many of his supporters pulled their hair out begging for him to actually do some presidential communications on this front. (And trying, futilely, to do for Bush what he couldn't or wouldn't do for himself.)

Strange to me that guy whose Administration was hit by a thousand Grim Milestones and cooked-up scandals (Valerie Plame, for example) would be so kind to the media.

My theory is that both the Democrats and the semi-deposed Establishment GOP have few hands at the levers of power -- except for their friends in the media and the permanent DC bureaucracy, so both have some investment in cultivating those power centers and pushing for them to have continued power.

Or even expanded power: Bill Kristol tweeted he favored the Deep State over the Trump state.

In the Democrats' case, it's just more of their same strategy of 60 years. In the Establishment GOP's case, it's making peace with an old adversary to destroy an even more dangerous, existential-threat adversary.

It just surprises me -- in a way that perhaps it should not -- that so many "conservatives" are now taking the media's side, as it's tottering and wounded in a way that it has literally never been in my lifetime.

For some, it seems, the leftist media isn't the hero they deserve, but it's the hero they need.

One thing became clear to me after reading Bush's book about his father is that he is thoroughly Establishment, as is every member of his family.  He's not going to fight to change things for the American worker because they are cogs in the machine.  He and his class are very much a feudal aristocracy.  Noblesse Oblige and all that but Noblesse above all.

EVERY REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IS HITLER

 

In the Iran-Contra trial, Oliver North was accused of “following Adolf Hitler’s official strategy”. What did one have to do with the other? Nothing. But this sort of lazy accusation had become typical and routine. William Shirer, who had also compared Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi to the Holocaust and called Nixon an “apt pupil” of Hitler (Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim was Goebbels), compared Reagan to Hitler for intervening in Grenada. Then Shirer compared Bush I to Hitler for trying to outlaw flag burning.

By the Reagan years, the left had achieved a banality of Hitler analogies. Everything Reagan did was just like Hitler. All of Reagan’s associates were just like Hitler. It was Hitlers all the way down.

President George W. Bush inherited this banality of Hitlers. To left-wing Truthers, open and covert, 9/11 was the Reichstag fire, the Patriot Act was the beginning of a national dictatorship and Bush was a dictator. As Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” Hitler wasn’t elected, Bush was, but you can’t expect a left-wing loudmouth to know history.

Congressman Charles Rangel compared the Iraq War to the Holocaust. “This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed." (Rangel had also claimed that the Contract with America was worse than Hitler.) Senator Durbin compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps. Senator John Glenn compared Republican arguments to Nazi propaganda. “It’s the old Hitler business… if you hear something repeated, repeated, you start to believe it.” Like repeatedly accusing Republicans of Nazism.

What do we know for sure?

And so the only thing we can truly be certain of is that any Republican nominee will be Hitler. It doesn’t matter what he believes. It doesn’t matter if Democrats considered him a moderate 5 minutes ago. Accusations of Nazism remain the default argument for a Democratic Party turned far to the left.

Republicans aren’t progressive. Therefore they’re Hitler. It’s really that simple.

Optimists thought that the Democrats had reached “Peak Hitler” under Bush. But for the left there is no Peak Hitler. The same tired line of attack has been trotted out for fifty years. It will go on limping around the liberal corral for another fifty years or a hundred years. The Big Lie will continue being repeated to indoctrinate each new politically active progressive with the conviction that anyone to the right is Hitler and that every election is a brand new battle to stop Hitler 2.0 from taking over America.

Goldwater was Hitler. Nixon was Hitler. Reagan was Hitler. Bush was Hitler. None of the latter three men declared the Fourth Reich, made themselves dictators for life and ran concentration camps. But the Big Lie retroactively rewrites the past by claiming that last decade’s Hitler was a decent moderate while the latest Republican Hitler is a terrifying monster. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan were all resurrected as moderate contrasts to each other and then to Bush. The process of recreating Bush as a moderate has already begun. And so each Republican makes the electoral journey from Hitler to a political moderate whom a latter generation of liberals mourns while complaining that this latest Republican really is Hitler.

Read the whole thing.

Pat Buchanan: Donald Trump’s Rise Is Rejection of a Quarter Century of Bush Republicanism

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East.

“In the GOP nomination race, the chickens of a quarter century of Bush Republicanism have come home to roost,” Buchanan told Breitbart. “Trump’s triumphs to date are due to his recognition of, and identification with, the Middle American revolt against Bush family ideology and policy, and what it has produced.”

Buchanan explained that “America is rejecting the Bush immigration policy,” which has “proffered amnesty” to “12 million illegals… because it said the United States is helpless to do anything about their presence here.”

“America’s establishment has failed America,” Buchanan said, “The single clearest message in the presidential campaign of 2015-2016 is that the American people would like to cleanse our capital city of its ruling class.”

Buchanan exemplifies the strain of American culture that identifies with Middle America, populism and nationalism. The Bush family is part of the Ruling Class, Trump (despite his wealth) is part of the Country Class.  Trump is the beneficiary of the vision Pat articulated in 2008. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

By a margin of nearly five-to-one, the American people believe these so-called free trade deals lower wages rather than raise them, according to Pew polling data.

Read the whole thing.

How stupid and vicious do elites think 'we' are?

How stupid and vicious do they think we are? That's a question that I think explains a lot of things about politics and society today — and about this year's unpredictable presidential race.

The "we" in that question are ordinary citizens and the "they" are political and media elites who hold them in contempt. Which they do over and over again by trying to obfuscate and cover up the source and motives of terrorist attacks.

Barack Obama, who refuses to use phrases akin to "Islamist terrorism," is a prime offender, but far from the only one. His predecessor George W. Bush, after the attacks of September 11, made a point of visiting mosques and calling Islam a religion of peace.

Undoubtedly he then feared that many Americans would attack and assault Muslims, real or perceived, and a very few such attacks occurred. But government statistics count far fewer "hate crimes" against Muslims than against Jews.

Nonetheless Obama still behaves as if any suggestion that terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar!" has something to do with Islam will spark massacres and persecution across the country. The American people are seen as a great beast, incapable of reason or cool judgment. Stupid and vicious.

So they must be reminded that they are not morally superior to terrorists. At a national prayer breakfast, Obama felt obliged to remind Americans that Christians attacked Muslims — in the Crusades, 800 years ago.

Others have followed his example. In a press conference earlier this month Philadelphia police officials described how a Muslim dressed in a white religious robe fired multiple rounds at a police officer, "in the name of Islam," as he said after his arrest. You could see it on videotape.

At which point Philadelphia Mayor James Kenney proclaimed, "In no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you've seen on the screen."

How stupid and vicious does he think we are?

Actually, it's not that hard for ordinary people to keep in mind two different ideas that the elites think they'll find confusing — that most terrorists these days are Muslims, and that most Muslims are not terrorists. We keep similar things in mind every day. For example, we notice that most dangerously aggressive drivers are men, but also that most men are not dangerously aggressive drivers.

Still, dangerous drivers are dangerous. Americans are tired of hearing "Islam is a religion of peace" when for an uncomfortably large minority of Muslims these days it's the opposite. So they have been flocking to Donald Trump when he calls for barring all Muslims from entering the U.S. And conservatives who in another year would upbraid Trump for flunking multiple litmus tests are defending him because he dares to utter forbidden truths.

Americans may be noticing as well how far political correctness has gone in Europe, especially Germany. European and American elites praised Chancellor Angela Merkel for promising to take in 1 million mostly Muslim, mostly male refugees. Why can't America be so generous?

But ordinary people, there and here, have seen how police, municipal and national officials have covered up migrants' behavior on New Year's. Even mass assaults on women in Cologne and other cities, and how print and broadcast media eagerly cooperated. Cellphone cameras told the story which elite media wanted to ignore.

It's a story, as even some Americans notice, that shows the underside of a European multiculturalism that insists that all cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. The result is that authorities don't demand that Muslims respect the rights of women and gays, as in Rotherham, England, where they allowed immigrants to degrade 1,400 women for a decade, lest they be called racist.

Ordinary people can see, when elites allow them to see, that this gets things upside down. Human rights, toleration of those who are different, safety for those who exercise freedom of expression — these are products of the West, not the rest.

The hard question is how far tolerant societies should tolerate the intolerant. Societies value freedom of expression, but not when those include freedom to assault and kill. Societies are ready to welcome others, but not those whose values are discordant with the freedoms they strive to uphold.

Ordinary Americans, I think, have a better sense of how to get these questions right, without dissolving into irrational hatred, than the elites who look down on them as stupid and vicious.

Legacies

Thoughts on the Middle East Wars

Whenever a discussion involves the war in Iraq, there are inevitably many people who argue that the entire enterprise was a failure - or worse - a geopolitical catastrophe that has upset the Middle East apple cart. They are wrong. At the article by the American Interest I made this point in response to a comment by someone who believes that there is no " ... good strategy for success in either Afghanistan or Iraq." Saying we "need to be realistic." The point is that there is a recipe for success and it's not that difficult.  And we have been very unrealistic, but not in the way that most people believe.

Herewith my comment (with a few edits):

“We need to be realistic” is a great tag line, but very little realism has been exhibited by either the supporters or the opponents of the invasion of Iraq. The first unrealistic assumption is that “"of course" people everywhere would choose Western-style democracy and freedom if given the chance.” I never thought so and was worried by the Bush administration’s emphasis on this idea. I suspected that Bush 43 was too naive and this troubled me.

There is little evidence of that Western-style democracy is the default position in developed countries and absolutely none in underdeveloped countries. The idea that the people of Iraq, with absolutely no experience with Western-style democracy, would embrace it was appealing but absolutely unsupported by reason or experience. The fact that the Bush administration was promoting this idea I attribute to one of two reasons: (1) they really believed it (bad), or (2) they were attempting to counter the Left’s theme that the war was a mistake and wanted to use Iraqi elections to counter that propaganda (also bad).

History is a great teacher if anyone bothers to study it. It doesn’t have to be ancient history. Within the last century we defeated Germany and Japan, both first world countries, and have troops there to this day. Japan had no history of Western-style democracy. After defeating the Empire of Japan we did not allow them to have elections and leave. We stayed to make sure that the kind of government we approved of grew up in the rubble of the war. General Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan as an American Proconsul until the Korean War. Modern Japan was largely created by Mac Arthur, not by Japanese elections.

Germany had a brief, unhappy history of democracy between the wars, but after WW2 the conquerors imposed military rule on the country which did not end until 1949. We had a veto power over who was elected and what policies were followed.  As an incentive, the US and other allies maintained a military presence in Germany ever since then.

So what political genius decided that after invading a country with no history of democracy, with a religion that’s hostile to Western-style democracy, all that was needed was a new constitution and a good election to become just like us?

The problems began when the Bush State Department decided to disband the Iraqi military and much of its civilian political structure, creating several million people without jobs and no way of making a living. In comparison, after WW2 the West left most of the German and Japanese political infrastructure in place, and a big enough military presence to quell whatever resistance arose.

Despite these blunders the US won the Iraq war, peace was mostly restored after a brutal struggle and winning the peace would be the challenge. Bush hinted that he understood by his references to the long struggle ahead as he left office.

Then the election of 2008 brought Obama to power. The man who said invading Iraq was a mistake.

Exit the Bush administration, and enter Obama. He declared Iraq was the unnecessary war but Afghanistan was the good war, took a victory lap and - ignoring the fact that Iraq, a disarmed country, was rapidly coming under the control of Iran – left zero military forces behind. With no military influence we could not change destructive Iraqi government policy, we could not dissuade Iran from increasing its influence, we could not even do anything to stop ISIS – the group Obama called the “JV” team – from taking the military gear we left behind and begin its reign of terror.  Today Iraq is rapidly becoming a client state of Iran unless ISIS (the JV team) takes over the entire country.

Obama threw away Iraq. He’s losing the war in Afghanistan. He’s managed to transform Libya from a country with a bad dictator who kept the crazies under control to a failed state that’s a safe haven for every Jihadist who wants a break from beheading infidels. He desperately wanted to turn Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood (slogan: “Death to the Jews”). He’s busy helping Iran become the hegemonic power in the Middle East (slogan: “Death to America”). And if he has his way, one day Jerusalem will be the target of the Persian atom bomb, solving his Jewish Problem™.

No war goes according to plan, especially a new kind of war with enemy combatants that look just like the farmer in his field, the passenger on the bus or the woman out shopping. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to leaders who want to protect Americans and defend American interests. But the current administration is in the process of shunning traditional allies and accommodating traditional adversaries.  Nixon to China was an example of a major change in American foreign policy. It has born much fruit. However,when these initiatives don’t seem to make thing better questions arise.

At some point, if you are looking at things in a clearheaded way – shedding rose colored glasses – you begin to wonder if it’s all a series of bad decisions by political neophytes or done with deliberate malice. You hope it's the former, but hope is not a plan.

Jay Rosen thinks that the Press has a deep dark secret.

“The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real.”

And what's the secret that' making them neurotic?

I’m sure you have your ideas. Here is mine. I know it will sound crazy (and provide a few chuckles) to those in the room tonight at the Washington Hilton, but I don’t care because the event is itself one gigantic neurotic symptom that begs for some interpretation.

The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real. The event at the center of this neurotic system: the failure to detect a phony case for war in 2002 and 2003 and more generally to challenge the Bush forces after 9/11. And this wasn’t just any failure. For a press that imagines itself a watchdog, failing to detect a faulty case for war, then watching the war unfold into the biggest foreign policy disaster in memory… that is an event so huge and deflating that it amounts to an identity crisis.

Now add to that very specific failure a larger lesson that is also too painful to face: in Washington access journalism has been a bust. It doesn’t work. Its practices made possible the spectacular fall down in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Under Obama it’s been so thin that Politico is this week asking: is the White House press corps becoming obsolete?) After a maximal failure like 2002-04 there needed to be a critical reckoning with the whole idea of “access to inside sources as reliable route to scoops.” You can’t maintain that idea and think of yourself as a watchdog, an adversarial force. Not with what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Got it? The thing that's making the press corps crazy is their guilt for failing to stop Bush from invading Iraq. Ever since then, the press has been dysfunctional.

When you read that you realize how deluded Rosen - a handy symbol of the press - really is.

After being challenged, Rosen gets testy. It's fun to read the comments.

Just a reminder: ‘Bush-era policies’ were as following:

via Moe Lane

• Gas prices were low.
• So was unemployment.
• The labor participation rate was higher.
• Minority representation in the middle class was increasing.
• We had a manned space program.
• We had elections in Iraqi towns, instead of slave auctions.
• Our allies in Europe trusted us.
• Our rivals worldwide were wary of us.
• And our enemies did their absolute damnedest to hide from us. Well. The ones still breathing, at least.

What I find infuriating about the way Bush handled Iraq

The problem with the Bush philosophy regarding a conquered Iraq is that he wanted to believe that it would be possible to transform this little part of the Middle East into a democracy in a few years.

This was wrong and it led to unnecessary bloodshed and inevitably to the Obama disaster of total disengagement.  Leading to ISIS.

For some reason I believed that Bush was a realist and would see that it would take decades of American control and education.  Just as it took a long time to transform Japan and Germany, countries that were hundreds of years ahead of the Middle East in terms of cultural development.

Jerry Pournelle is a realist, describing how to settle the problem of ISIS ...

And their [ISIS] weakness is that unlike al Qaeda ISIS cannot fade into invisibility: you are not Caliph if you do not have territory in which to impose Islamic law, including slavery, beheadings, and cutting off hands. If you do not impose these things you are not, according to the Caliphate Muslims, a Muslim, and can and indeed must be corrected or deposed. So it goes.

Which means, just now, that a division of US regulars and all the warthogs, with some Marine air, and USAF anti-missile air superiority planes, could in a year destroy the Caliphate. We give North Iraq to the Kurds. Central Iraq to whomever we select among the factions. Syria – not clear, but possibly to the dictatorship, with what conditions we choose to impose. It doesn’t matter because it’s fantasy: Obama will do no such thing. But we could do it if we had a President.

I THOUGHT IRAQI CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE A BUSHITLER/CHENEY FANTASY

Glenn Reynolds:

New York Times: The Secret U.S. Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs.”

If you read the NY Times story, it's another attack on Bush for keeping the finding of chemical weapons secret because they were old. In the NY Times world, finding old weapons is worse the not finding any WMDs.

Ace of Spades  documents the lies the Times printed.

Progressives deeply invested in the lie during the Bush years that no WMD were found in Iraq. Bush gave many reasons for the war, but progressives seized on just the presence of WMD and then pretended it was the only reason for war. We've known they've been wrong about the lack of WMD for many years now. But, upon the chance that ISIL will find and use any remnants of WMD, however, progressives have had to modify their story even more.

Now, progressives have finally admitted that Hussein's stockpiled weapons were found during the Iraq War, but claim these were not the weapons Bush said would be found. This is just one more lie. And they've compounded it with another lie: that the sole reason for the Iraq War was an active weapons program.

As I have demonstrated from Bush's own contemporaneous words, an active weapons program was not the sole reason for war. In fact, an active weapons program was not even mentioned in the multiple speeches Bush delivered to the American public and to an international audience.

Do not let the NYTimes get away with its false history of the Iraq War. The war was not made solely based on claims of an active Iraqi weapons program. It was made because, as President Bush explained repeatedly to the American public: Saddam Hussein possessed old weapons of mass destruction, desired to evade inspections so as to keep them, hoped to restart his weapons programs in the future, and could pass weapons to terrorist groups with ambitions to harm the West.