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| Race Commission Out in UK |
Then Why Are We Arguing?
by Christopher Chantrill
September 24, 2007 at 4:43 am
EVERYONE agrees that President George W. Bush is determined to “win” in Iraq, and that the Democrats are determined to bring our troops home.
But that is not what Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is saying, according to Martin Schram. On Meet the Press a week ago on September 16,
Mr. Kerry was rather sharp and certainly clear in stating the Democrats’ position on the Iraq war. He did everything but call it what it really is — a two-pronged military strategy: (1) Gradually redeploy most combat troops in Iraq as Iraq’s civil war cannot be won militarily; (2) Keep enough U.S. combat troops there to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.
And when you examine the fine print of the Democratic presidential candidates positions, you get the same result.
Barack Obama: “My plan would maintain sufficient forces in the region to target al Qaeda within Iraq.”
Hillary Clinton: “I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.”
You can see what is going on here. Despite their rhetoric, the Democratic leadership is in accord with the Bush administration on what to do in Iraq. Defeat Al Qaeda. But the Democrats can’t admit it, because their left-wing netroots have been raised on the strict catechism of the war-is-a-cycle-of-violence religion in the academy.
We’ve said it here before. Senator Kerry has a peculiar habit of articulating the current administration strategy as his own brilliant idea while declaring that the administration’s strategy is a total failure.
Somehow, I get the feeling that the Democratic leadership is a lot closer to President Bush’s strategy in the war on terror than they like to admit to their supporters.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Comments:
Posted by: Nancy Coppock on 09/26/07 12:35pm
Christopher, Exactly. What exactly are the Democrats arguing about? It's like that funny commercial wireless phone commercial where the teenagers are "rebelling" against their parents giving them a new phone with lots of minutes and text messaging. Hillary has been fighting these wrascally wrepublicans ever since she rebelled against her Daddy and quit being a Goldwater girl. She, like her party are just arguing because they can't say something is right or proper, or good because "intellectuals" can always find the hole in any transcendental argument. I'm sick of 'em.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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