Eugene Gets it Wrong (Again)

From the article:The Ambiguity of Wars End

Eugene, when Democrats give each other furtive looks in hushed discussions about not wanting to look like they are cheering for the failure of our mission in Iraq, all we need to do is trot out this article, and the thread is laid bare.

Of course we won in Iraq. We overthrew the merciless and bloody tyrant who had held his country and the region in terror for decades. We are leaving Iraq in as good a situation as could be hoped for given the religious and racial divides that exist there.

You have to get the images of World War II out of your head. The wars we are fighting now aren’t against nation-states. We didn’t go into Iraq with the intent of defeating it’s people who had waged, as a nation, war against the world around them. And yes Eugene, you paid lip service to this concept, but you grappled with it intellectually and came out the loser simply because you are handicapped by your ideology.

You were clearly disingenuous, bordering on outright dishonesty in your depiction of the situation. You say Iran has gained tremendous influence in the region and is on their way to becoming a nuclear power. You say it as if the Iraq war had something to do with that. How dishonest can you be? As IF Iran had been tracking towards a different destiny. Obama came as the messiah, bearing the peace branch to Iran. Do you see that at all slowing down Iran’s nuclear ambition? Please tell me you have the intellectual capacity to comprehend this. I can understand you peddling a point of view for cash, but there has to be some semblance of competency there.

An estimated 100,000 Iraqi’s died. An agreed tragedy. And estimates were that 10,000 Iraqi’s were being killed a month for Saddam to maintain his power. If it were me, I would much rather be an unintended casualty in a struggle for freedom than the statistic that was beaten and then starved to death in a cell for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. And yes, the cost in dollars was high as well and the cost in American lives is inestimable. But our brave men and women put it on the line and a portion of this country, who truly do stand behind our troops regardless of the political consequence or the shortsightedness of the politicians who put them in harms way, appreciate those individuals who are the finest of us all.

Though there was one nugget of wisdom in your entire article, and though it is obvious, I will give you credit for it anyway. Given where we are in Iraq, what does that mean for Afghanistan? That is a quandary for which there is no ready answer. Afghanistan has defied the concept of central government and stability through it’s entire history as it has been a crossroads for warring factions from far off lands. Is America going to solve that? Highly doubtful. So if we are going to agree anywhere Eugene, it’s under what terms do we leave Afghanistan. I would much rather leave the country standing up even if the government is crumbling around us as men who are not ready to take on the accountability of their own freedom will not maintain it for long.

What we do not want is the image of Americans running for choppers evacuating the country as quickly as possible a’la Vietnam (Thanks Mr. Cronkite).

But where Mr. Robinson and I will diverge is the concept of being ready to back into Afghanistan and stomp the Taliban if they ever come to power again.

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The Achilles Heel of Human Caused Global Warming

A new story has come out about record heat waves being the direct result of global warming.  For those who are ‘true believers’, it’s only obvious that this is true.  That the earth’s average temperature is going up, and, this is key, it is the direct result of human activity.

My point is not that mankind is not having some kind of impact on the global average temperature, and here is the achilles heel of human caused global warming; How much are we impacting the average temperature of the Earth?

The Earth has gone through massive climate changes.  We know that to be true.  You can read a common sense understanding of that point here.  To take that article to the next step, think about the fact that the Earth has survived huge meteor strikes.  Enough to kill the dinosaurs and much of the rest of life on the planet.  The dust from that impact cooled the earth.  And, somehow, the earth’s temperature came back from it.  We have had ice ages and ice age retreats, and man was here for none of it.

And now to sever the achilles heel of the warming movement; Exactly how warm should the earth be without human interference?  How much can we attribute to variations in the earth’s orbit or output of the sun?  No one knows.  Not NASA, not the CRU, not the UN.  Nobody.

But yet, we have Cap and Trade, which is really about moving money to the third world.  It won’t do a thing for the amount of carbon being spewed into the air.  On top of that, add the fact that the whole Chicago Climate Exchange, basically a stock market for trading carbon, is set to make the richest people on the planet even richer, and again, you have nothing that helps the amount of carbon going into the air.

For the greens reading this, I am a big fan of recognizing that we have a responsibility to our environment.  That we should protect it for the appreciation of each other and our children.  But what the politicians and the bankers are putting front of us as solutions is about dollars and not the environment.  And the people moving the dollars around are going to get the scientists to say whatever they want them to say.  If you are serious about reducing global warming, keep focusing on the message of personal responsibility.  Engaging in the fear mongering of global warming, when we can’t, in any seriousness, determine our real impact on a global ecological system, undermines what everyone should be trying to achieve here.  We should focus more on conserving the environment within reach in responsible and practical ways and less on the dollars.

Obama Takes the Lead on the Oil Spill

No, not really.  Obama goes on vacation.  Well he is going to stop by Louisiana on the way to his vacation, reminescant of Bush’s fly-over of Katrina.  Is this guy real?  The worst oil spill in our nations history, we aren’t even sure what BP is doing now is going to work, and it’s a little down time for Bama.  On top of all of that, he is skipping the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington.  Obviously, the commander-in-chief thing shouldn’t get in the way of a lazy weekend wherever he is.

Obama’s House of Cards Begins to Collapse

Update:  It seems the timing here solid.  A day later, Peggy Noonan released an article He Was Supposed to be Competent in the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack H. Obama sought to be the leader of the third great progressive (read socialist or communist) wave following Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In moving the United States away from it’s individualist roots, Obama thought he had it in the bag.  Healthcare had passed.  Soon Cap and Trade would be in place, further weakening America’s Sovereignty and continuing to drain an empty treasury and transferring it to the third world.  Once he had secured citizenship for 20 million illegal aliens, the future of socialism in America was assured.

But then reality kicked in.  Many of the states were not going quietly into the night.  Resting the success of the Healthcare bill on the interstate commerce clause was a leap in mental logic at best.  13 states are pursuing legal action to challenge the law and we can assume that, with current polling, the advent of more republican governers will expand those challenges.

The Huffington Post goes off the rails (again)

This article was rolling right along. For a moment, for once, I thought the Huffington Post had nailed it. And then it went off on a republican ‘green bashing’ bender.   At it’s heart, the article finds that Obama and his administration are allowing BP to destroy the Gulf of Mexico and America is sitting by watching impassively.   Now an article can’t be in the Huffington Post and seem to be taking even an indirect shot at Obama without taking a shot at some conservative straw man.  And this article doesn’t disappoint.  For these portions, it goes onto a tirade about how Republicans are bashers of anything green.

The reality is that conservatives are against giving supporting a ‘Chicago Climate Exchange‘ which, at it’s heart, is simply a way for those with money to make more money off the back of the green movement.  And then you have ‘Cap and Trade’ renamed the ‘American Powers Act’.  These are not designed to reduce carbon ‘per se’, they are meant to generate wealth for third world countries and for the companies (Al Gore is rubbing his hands together right now) that specialize in these technologies.

And to the topic at hand, Obama should have pulled in NASA, NOAA, and every other resource he had at day one.  The biggest problem here is that he trusted BP and continues to trust BP.  And from one poster above, it seems he should simply go on trusting BP.  How does that logic work?

Americans should be up at arms.  This is a much worse disaster than Katrina and at least Bush had some shame that someone was fired over Katrina.  Obama is just posturing and giving us more teleprompter speeches.  Hey Obama, the whole world is watching.  This is your defining moment and will be forever.  You have already fallen down.  You have a very short amount of time to show some leadership to change this story line.  This will be a 30 year ecological recovery that will be the benchmark for how a government failed it’s people.  Every slime-covered bird that ends up on the television will be another testament of that failure.

The clock is ticking

Obama Nominates Kagan

Well it seems that Obama has gone with the obvious choice and selected Elena Kagan.  From the tepid response of Republicans, it looks like the GOP is not going to put up much of a fight.  This is probably due more to the fact that the selection doesn’t change the balance of the court on the basis of ideology.  We will still have the same number of votes for Republicans vs Democrats with Kennedy still being the swing vote.

It’s not like the Obama administration is taking chances however.  From the Huffington Post, an admitted left-wing blog, comes the article Democratic War Room Unleashed for Kagan Nomination.  The title pretty much sums it up.  The key issues around her nomination are he capability and credentials.  Having never served as a judge, does it make sense for this person to serve as a judge in the highest court in the land.  Right now, Elena Kagan seems like a cross between Harriet Meiers and Geroge Costanza.  More on this to follow…