Monthly Archives: November 2010

Play nice or we’ll tell the UN! Ooh, scary!

Dark has fallen across the United States tonight, but the sun’s soft glow covers the Auburn Plains. Everything is in perfect order, and God is in control.

Kim Jung Sick and the White House pansies

Issue #101

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

By the time my 8^th grade math teacher, Miss Lunsford, made her umpteenth threat to get really, really angry the next time we made her cry, I and the other juvenile delinquents at McLean Junior High School had pretty much figured out that nothing unpleasant was ever going to happen (to us). Did North Korea’s lunatic ruler, Kim Jung Il, go to school there too?
            Mr. Kim must have wet his dictatorial pants when the U.S. military commander in South Korea, Gen. Walter Sharp, threw down the gauntlet in response to Kim’s second attack on the South this week: “We at United Nations Command will investigate this completely and call on North Korea to stop any future attacks,” he told the Associated Press.
            That’s like threatening to tell on your bank to the Better Business Bureau. Scary!
            Or like FDR warning Japan: “We find this attack on Pearl Harbor highly offensive. If you keep it up, we’re filing a report with the League of Nations!”
            North Korea launched the first artillery attack Tuesday on a South Korean island, killing two marines and two civilians. It fired more rounds Friday in response to U.S. plans for upcoming naval exercises in the Yellow Sea. These acts of war came eight months after North Korea sank a South Korean naval ship, killing 46.
            Now Kim promises to unleash a “shower of dreadful fire” if the war games proceed, the AP reported. 
            Communists in China and North Korea may have thrown Barack Obama into a glassy-eyed state of bewilderment with this latest threat, but they didn’t fool John Bolton, the Left’s favorite boogeyman who held the thankless position of U.N. ambassador under Bush 43. Bolton is now an analyst on Fox News Channel.
            On “Fox and Friends” this morning he warned that U.S. military posture will suffer if we back down under pressure and cancel the war games.
            We repeat his extended marks here because they explain the situation succinctly: 

. . . After North Korea sank the South Korean naval vessel in March, we backed off exercising in the Yellow Sea because of Chinese opposition. It would be a terrible mistake for the U.S. to back away again.
               Those exercises would be in international waters. We have every right to be there even with military vessels, and it would be a very bad signal of weakness to repeat our backing away. . . .|
               The North Koreans have used this over and over again. They’ve got almost a playbook that they pull out every couple of years. One of their favorite phrases is if we don’t sit down they will unleash a “sea of fire” on the Korean Peninsula. We haven’t heard that yet. Maybe that will come in the next couple of days. (Editor’s note: Since Mr. Bolton made these remark early Friday, North Korea did issue such a warning.)
               And it is risky dealing with this North Korean regime. No doubt about it. They’re irrational – right in the middle of a leadership transition. So you have to behave prudently. But if you empower them by giving into these kinds of belligerent activities, the lesson is, “It works.” They can get away with it. . . .
               This is also an opportunity for the United States. . . . But the regime in North Korea is actually fragile, and I think we should be putting pressure to try and bring that regime down. The way to solve this threat – the nuclear threat and others from North Korea – is the reunification of the Korean Peninsula. That ought to be the U.S.’ long-term policy.

 The follow-up question you did not hear is, how do we accomplish this? If sanctions and saber-rattling don’t work, what does? The answer must come from an adult American presidency, and that is at least two years away. One thing is for certain: Apologizing for American exceptionalism and trashing the most successful economic and political systems ever are tactics that have not worked. Pathetic pandering and bowing have not worked.
            And so this is what we get with a weak, anti-military Democrat in the White House. We don’t hold a good hand against China right now because of our debt to it and Obama’s intentional weakening of the dollar. Nobody should be surprised at the noise coming from North Korea. John Bolton isn’t.
            President Reagan was ridiculed as a cowboy, even as he engineered destruction of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Today we need someone like that – a Chuck Norris, not a Pee-Wee Herman. 

‘Justice’ for a ‘tortured’ radical Muslim

Please let’s not hurt their feelings

Issue #100

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

We are relieved to learn that the acquittal of confessed mass murderer Amed Khalfan Ghailani on all but one of the 285 charges against him pleased the White House to the point of calling the trial outcome “a success.” Ghailani killed 224 mostly African employees of U.S. embassies when he bombed two of them, in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1998.
            The left-wing blogosphere boiled over in rage upon hearing the news, so outraged that Ghailani might get 20 years anyway. Lefty-lib amnesty groups want him sprung because he was “tortured” as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.
            And what was this “torture”? We aren’t sure but suspect Ghailani might have been yelled at, or worse, sent to bed early or made to stand in a corner. He was not one of the three Muslim terrorists who were waterboarded, a harmless though frightening procedure where the prisoner becomes convinced he is drowning. Our combat pilots can tell you all about this, because receiving it is part of their training.
            We visited a website called http://ricochet.com written by Adam Freedman. Here he boils down slate.com’s definition of torture:
            “mild, non-injurious contact” (e.g., poking the guy in the chest or a mild slap), or
            making a detainee stand for several hours (“stress position”), or
            telling a detainee “that his side has no hope” (the so-called “futility” torture), or
             “flattering” the detainee in an attempt to get him to make boastful admissions.

William D. Lutz is Professor Emeritus in English at Rutgers University and a lawyer who has written widely on the subject of euphemisms, jargon and doublespeak. In fact, he is a leader in the stamp-out-doublespeak movement in the United States and once edited its quarterly journal.

Prof. Lutz

       In his 1989 essay “Doublespeak,” he says that a euphemism becomes doublespeak when its intent is “to mislead or deceive.” He gives the example of a 1984 State Department policy announcement on its annual human rights report: “Killing” would be replaced with “unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life,” which, Dr. Lutz writes, “the department claimed was more accurate.” (One he especially likes, he said in a telephone interview today, is “extra-judicial rendition,” a nice word for kidnapping. The killing euphemism is still used today, he added.)
            Deceitful euphemisms are not the same as the watered-down meaning of a word like torture, but it does show how mischief can work to cheapen our language. Language abuse is a frequent theme of my impromptu sermons to freshman English students.
            Dr. Lutz does not share my thesis on the meaning of torture and does not think it is used unfairly in describing the treatment of terrorist suspects, though he acknowledges that what “we as a society consider torture (is) an area that is imprecise.”
            “Torture is a legal term that is defined by treaty, which the U.S. has signed,” he said, “despite George Bush trying to change the definition.” In other words, some practices of the C.I.A. and others during interrogation of Gitmo prisoners was torture because the treaty we signed says it was torture.
            Fair enough, and we’ll let Professor Lutz and the other lawyers debate this. Still, I cannot help but see vast differences in the treatment of Amed Khalfan Ghailani and people like Viktor Frankl. 

Viktor E. Frankl knew something about torture. A survivor of Nazi death camps, he resumed his psychiatry practice after the war and described his experiences in a 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl died in 1997 in Vienna. The book is still in print.

Dr. Frankl

 
Separated immediately from his wife, he maintained hope with the thought that she might still be alive when the war ended. She was not. She had been killed shortly after their capture, but thankfully, Dr. Frankl did not know this for six years. What he did know was the feeling of walking endless miles to and from work camps in January, his shoeless feet dead from frostbite.
            His definition of a good day is the finding of a bread crumb, to save for another day, to give to a fellow prisoner who needed it worse than he did. How he determined whose need was greatest he does not say, only that, “When the last layers of subcutaneous fat had vanished, and we looked like skeletons disguised with skin and rags, we could watch our bodies beginning to devour themselves.”
            He did not say if his feelings were hurt. My guess is that he didn’t have the Torah for reading, either.

The venom is directed today at Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced the decision to try America’s enemies in civilian courts, as if they had knocked over a 7-Eleven. “If you can’t do the job, step aside and let somebody else do the job,” Jim Riches, a retired deputy fire chief in New York whose fireman son was killed on Sept. 11, said on Fox and Friends Friday morning.
            But we must remember that the buck always stops at the top. Travesties like the Ghailani verdict would not end with the firing – deserved though it is – of Eric Holder. These will not stop until we have fired Barack Obama.

Time to tax those greedy millionaires and billionaires

Soak the rich – and the rest of us, too

Issue #99

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

Republicans shouldn’t feign surprise that nothing has changed in the ill-named “debate” over tax rates even though voters handed Barack Obama his head last week. Democrats still drive the national discourse – another euphemism for what is actually demagoguery – through their affiliates in the news media, and worse, Republicans continue to do a lousy selling job. As we have said to the point of weariness on these pages, education is the key, and Republicans haven’t been very effective teachers. 
            Teaching requires the patient willingness to keep coming at a problem from different angles until the proverbial light goes on in the student’s head – the “aah” moment. Frustrated that they can’t get media help in explaining complex concepts, Republicans resort to that age-old method some people use when unable to pierce a language barrier: scream louder. 

            How anyone could keep a straight face when claiming that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes is difficult to imagine. But that’s what we continue to hear across the leftist bandwidth, from the mainstream to the blogosphere. The Republican response? “A recession is no time to raise taxes.” That’s a great answer to someone who understands the failure of Keynesian fiscal policy, but most Americans don’t know John Maynard Keynes from Maynard C. Krebs. Wasn’t he that weirdo on Dobie Gillis?
            To be fair, some of the hard-chargers in Congress have laid

 out the conservative antidote to Obama socialism with conciseness and clarity. Witness the Pledge to America (http://pledge.gop.gov) and its plainly-written argument for lower taxes and smaller government. This is great for people curious enough to look something up. But Republicans need to take this fight into the street. They must be able to explain, in language the average marginally-informed voter can understand, the inverse relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.
            If you want more of something – income and jobs – stop taxing it so much. Republicans need to remind voters – with simple charts and provable numbers – that tax revenues increased when Congress approved the Kennedy tax cuts of 1963, the Reagan cuts of 1982 and the Bush cuts of 2002.
            Someone in the Republican brain trust has to figure how to explain that Obama’s insistence on raising taxes 49 days from now has only one purpose, and that is not to increase revenue to the government. Its only purpose is to punish productivity and drive more jobs out of the country.           

In 2008 the top 5% income producers – the ones against whom President Obama says it’s OK to wage class warfare – produced 35% of the income but paid 59% of the nation’s income taxes. The top 1% — the super-villains in Obama’s mind – produced 20% of the income but paid 38% of the taxes. These are the people, not incidentally, who create the jobs.
            If this is not fair share for the vilified class, Obama’s hated “millionaires and billionaires,” what is?
            There is more. The top 50% of all income producers – including those who managed to avoid paying any income tax because of offsetting credits and deductions – produced 87% of the income and paid 97% of the taxes. That may not be a dramatic spread, but here is the point: The lowest-earning half of Americans who file tax returns paid only 3% of the taxes. This does not include the millions who didn’t even file a tax return.
            These were the findings of the non-partisan Tax Foundation (http://taxfoundation.org) , reported more than a year ago. The coming tax hike, it reported last month, will result in “substantially higher taxes” for low-income workers.
            Shout it from the rooftops. Make refrigerator magnets and hand them out on street corners.

Why earmarks matter

Some of our friends on the right complain that the campaign against earmarks – tax money our Congressmen and Senators spread around their districts to buy votes from the folks back home – is a diversionary tactic designed to mask the real problem of entitlements. It’s only $15 billion, they say. We have to confront the Social Security and government union pension monsters if we have any hope of taming the deficit beast.
            But a dollar is a dollar, and anything that weakens a lawmaker’s ability to stay in power on our dime is welcome relief. Let them buy votes with their own money. “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money,” old Ev Dirksen once said.
            You might want to know that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has his name on more than $1.5 billion in earmarks over the last two years. Presumed House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner has never taken a nickel of them.

Naughty tea party citizen-journalists to the rescue

A time to stand on principle

Issue #98

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

That was the easy part. Now the real work begins.
            The important lesson of this election is that conservative principles prevailed because countless numbers of us – yeomen without credentials or pedigrees – were willing to do the heavy lifting against odds the experts said could never be overcome. The Republican Party did not engineer this victory. The Republican Congressional committees did not win this election. Ordinary Americans whose only expectation of patronage is freedom were the ones who erected this firewall against entrenched interests desperate to retain power.
            The cause was aided by hoards of citizen-journalists led, most unofficially, by the one who coined that term, Matt Drudge. These disrespectful truth-seekers are especially offensive to establishment journalism because they dare work the trade without the establishment’s permission. Any day now I expect Ball State University to recall my graduate degree, and for the Greenfield Daily Reporter and the Evansville Courier and the Vero Beach Press-Journal to modify their archives to erase any evidence that I ever worked at those places.
            Many of us have occupied these trenches virtually non-stop for two years, and, like you, the bewildered patriot/voter/reader, need a break. But weary as we are of an election cycle that began the day after Barack Obama’s election, we must acknowledge that the critical state of affairs allows little time for leisure.
            The first order of business – the one that will assure the rest of America that we are serious about changing the culture in Washington – is to convince Republican Senators to hire new leadership. Since the Senate won’t impose its own term limits, we must impose them from without.
            Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appears ready to compromise with the very people who had no such bipartisan idealism before Tuesday. Worse yet, he appears ready to make a place in the Republican inner circle for Senator Lisa Murkowski, the liberal former Republican who lost the primary election to a conservative and then appears to have beaten him in the general with a write-in campaign. Fair enough. But she sits on the powerful Energy Committee and has no business sitting on any Senate committee as a Republican appointee.
            Senator McConnell could correct this outrage in an instant, but he won’t. Lisa is part of a Hatfield-McCoy feud in Alaska that put Sara Palin on the side of Republican nominee Joe Miller against the very liberal Murkowski clan and the Republican establishment.
            Senators voting for the next Minority Leader must not forget that Murkowski – with the help of Democrats eager to prevent a switch in Alaska’s seat from liberal to conservative – defeated the duly-chosen Republican nominee. Murkowski’s 2009 voting record earned only a 68 rating from the American Conservative Union. This fails far short of the Reagan Rule, which says that anyone who is with me 80% of the time is my friend.
            The latest buzz from Jamie Dupree, the Washington correspondent for Cox Radio, has Republicans offering Murkowski the chairmanship of an appropriations sub-committee to get her off Energy and discourage her from changing her affiliation to Democrat. Let her. What’s the difference between 53-47 and 54-46? From where I sit, not much. At least we would know where everybody stands, and Alaskans would come to understand that they have an unprincipled Senator who would do absolutely anything to stay in power. Not much to brag about. 

The real fear is Republican lawmakers falling for the Left’s new-found love of compromise. The stand against compromise is no more important than in government health care, second only to Obama’s willful destruction of the dollar as the most dangerous threat to our survival as a free society. American health care – the greatest the world has ever known – represents about one-sixth of our economy.
            Here is the truly scary, unthinkable scenario: Mushy Senate Republicans agree to repeal only parts of Obamacare and call it victory. “See, we got rid of prison time for non-compliance,” they will brag in their government-printed mail-outs.
            This scenario is especially fearsome because opposition to government health care may be subsiding – just as Democrats had hoped. Polls show different results, but a Fox News exit poll on election day showed only 48% favor outright repeal, down from a recent high of about 70%. Another poll showed repeal supported by only 27%. This is despite the reality of government control beginning to emerge: rising premiums, companies cutting benefits, insurers dropping coverage or quitting the market, new details of prison terms for doctors who disobey protocol.
            We needed some help in understanding this phenomenon and turned to Isaac Wood, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, an associate there of its director Larry Sabato and editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the first to predict Republican takeover of the House.
                “There are two main reasons for this change,” he told The Friday Letter. “First, the polling that has been conducted has been far from uniform. Every pollster has asked the question somewhat differently. Some list the major planks of the reform and then ask whether people support or oppose them, while others just ask whether they support or would like to repeal ‘the health care reform bill.’
            “Obviously, depending on how it is asked, you will get different responses. Also note that many of the most publicized polls have been commissioned by groups that either or favor repeal or support the bill, and the questions and results reflect that bias.
            “Second, the intensity of opinion has mellowed out considerably over the past few months. People may still have opinions about the bill, but they no longer believe it will either destroy or save Western civilization, as some appeared to claim over the past year. That could perhaps explain why so few are expressing a strong opinion, one way or another.” 

If the second of these is not a sobering thought, nothing is.

It depends on your definition of ‘compromise’

           “I think I’ve been willing to compromise in the past and I’m willing to compromise going forward.” – President Obama, November 3, 2010. 

            “Does the President want to work with the elected representatives of the American people, or does he want to try to hide for two years and pretend there was no midterm election? I think the President thought that words could substitute for policies.” – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Channel.  

A no-nonsense lesson in economics

            “The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then communism would have worked, but it didn’t work. – Tim Scott, newly elected Republican Congressman from South Carolina

Photo of Tim Scott / dailycaller.com