McCarthysim and censorship in Minnesota

If you can't rebut, try silencing your opponent

Excerpt:


This past Thursday Melendez called a press conference and condemned the first of the two advertisements -- the one featuring the veterans -- as "un-American, untruthful and a lie."

The two advertisements can be viewed here. The first of the two ads is devoted to the Iraq war veterans; the second to the Gold Star Families, featuring Merrilee Carlson of St. Paul. Mrs. Carlson's son Michael was killed in Iraq last year; the Wall Street Journal published Michael's "credo" this past Memorial Day.

In Minnesota the mask has fallen from the Democratic Party. It has condemned the message of Lt. Col. Bob Stephenson and the other veterans supporting the mission in Iraq as "un-American." Yet it has gone beyond its outrageous condemnation of the ads. It has actually sought to suppress the message of the featured war veterans and Gold Star Families, emailing Party members and urging them to contact television stations demanding "the removal of the ads."

What do Democrats elsewhere think of their Party's campaign condemning the servicemen and Gold Star Families in the ads as "un-American"? Does Brian Melendez speak for them?

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman has now devoted two hysterical columns to condemnations of the advertisements. Coleman's first column made a basic error of fact as a result of its reliance on a far-left Web site and cited the testimony of a Kerry delegate to the 2004 Democratic convention as a "nonpartisan" source. (John fisked the column here.)

Coleman's second column fastened on "the Delores Kesterson issue" -- attacking the Gold Star Families ad for presenting the stepmother of Erik Kesterson in lieu of his mother. For this bizarre point Coleman relied without attribution on his friend "Hesiod"at Daily Kos. Coleman overlooked fellow St. Paulite Merilee Carlson -- the genuine biological mother of Michael Carlson -- in this rant.

Lt. Col. Stephenson is the co-chair of Minnesota Families United for Our Troops and Their Mission. Col. Stephenson is featured in the first of the two advertisements in issue. On Saturday John interviewed Col. Stephenson on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. You can listen to the interview here.

The Democratic Party has officially pronounced that Col. Stephenson and his ads are "un-American." That such a thing could happen is almost beyond belief -- a Marine officer with more than ten years of active duty labeled "un-American" for supporting America's foreign policy -- but it is nevertheless true. And attention must be paid.

I say:

Un-American, you say?

A long, long time ago, McCarthyism was the province of the Right. A long, long, loooooong time ago.


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Letting the UAE run our ports?

Okay, we've all seen the scare quotes. Many of us have hyperventilated and spun conspiracy theories over Bush's determination to let an Arab-owned company run our ports, or something. Some of us have seen the overly protesting pooh-pooh treatment in an editorial on the Financial Times. So what's this all about? Is it a big deal?

Well, the Bush administration thinks it's a big deal, because Dubya is sticking to his guns. Republican politicians think it's a big deal, because they're distancing themselves from him. Democrat politicians think it's a big deal, because they're stooping to the worst race-baiting hypocrisy in order to attack this. But how big a deal is it, really?

A fairly big one, actually. But not for any of the reasons most people are screaming.

First, here's a dose of facts from Squiggler to help calm down those who are capable of calm. He links to Indymedia, of all places.

Excerpt:

The critical point is that Dubai Ports World won't be running the port of Baltimore, or any other U.S. port for that matter. What it would be doing, as ex-Rep. Helen Delich Bentley (R-MD), a respected expert on Maritime matters, explained in a Feb. 18th letter, to the "Baltimore Sun," is hiring the longshoremen to load and unload the cargo from the vessels. The Maryland Port Authority, an agency of the state, she underscored, would continue to "run the port of Baltimore's public terminals and be the spokesman for the port in general." Bentley added that this transaction only means that the "UAE's Dubai Ports World will be the firm bidding competitively for contracts to handle cargo coming off or loading on to ships in the six ports where P&O Ports has contracts. Baltimore is one of those ports." (2)

It is also important to emphasize that the vast majority of the cargo handling in the six U.S. ports mentioned above is done by union labor, who are locally based workers. They are card carrying members of the International Longshorman's Association (AFL-CIO), which is headquartered in New York City. This is the same union, (Local 829 ILA), that this writer belonged to, in Baltimore, back in the late 1950s. The idea that the longshoremen will somehow not be able to do the same kind of highly professional stevedoring work for Dubai, which they did for the P&O company, and other stevedoring companies before them, just doesn't fly. For the ILA member, it will be just another day's work on the docks, irrespective of who's doing the hiring.

I say:

Okay, I feel better now. But not all the way better. I've still got serious misgivings.

One big red flag is Jimmy Carter is coming out in favor of this. Jimmy Carter. Possibly the worst President this country has ever had. He's not just stupid. Even stupid people are right on occasion, by sheer accident. But Jimmy Carter is *never* right. It's as if he sits down to figure just what stance on a given question would do the worst damage to the free world and to the United States, and that's the position he takes. Yes, I'm questioning his patriotism. Would you prefer I question his sanity?

Another detail that bugs me is hardly anyone is asking the big question. What big question? This big question: should foreigners - any foreigners - be in charge of our ports in the first place? National security is one thing you just don't outsource. Not even to the Brits. And the Arabs are way more foreign than the Brits.

Don't talk to me about globalization. I think it's a big mistake to globalize before the world has been made safe for democracy. First, let's have some international rule of law that actually means something. Then we can globalize all we like. Right now the world is a bad neighborhood. Always has been, of course. But only recently have we deluded ourselves otherwise.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Cold War being over is over. It's not 1992 anymore. We need to face facts.

Our ports should be policed and run by American companies, and should be required by law to hire only American citizens, subject to a background check. I don't trust the unions to look out for us. Unions are weak, and when they're not weak, the Mafia are running them. We need a law.

OH, and by the way... the WMD story is heating up again.



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The State of the Parties

I watched the President's State of the Union speech. It was a speech that had to be seen to be fully appreciated. It wasn't just Bush talking. It was the interaction from the audience. Particularly the left half. Bush was tactically brilliant. He grabbed everything that had been thrown at him - the wiretap controversy, Social Security, spending, the energy crunch, Abramoff - and threw it right back, and most of it stuck. His enemies keep making the same two mistakes: they see him as vulnerable where he isn't, and they fail to see their own vulnerabilities on the exact same issues. It's as if they're projecting their own failings on to him.

Along the way, Bush blew the cover of the "loyal opposition" by spelling out the difference between constructive criticism and defeatism. And that audience reaction to the Social Security reform line is something they're never going to live down.

The speech wasn't perfect. It was awfully weak on domestic issues. For example, he didn't lob the energy issue back as hard as I would have liked. He should have dwelt on ANWR, in addition to all those technological solutions that won't pay off quick enough. But on foreign policy he reminded us all of what needed to be remembered - that we are in a war of civilizations, and nothing less than the future of freedom is at stake.

How about the Democratic response, by the eyebrow guy? It was pretty good, actually. I'd even say it was perfect. That is to say, it had no flaws, measured by the standard of the sort of speech it was. But Bush was better. Way better, despite his flaws. How can this be? It's simple. Bush's speech was an entirely different type of speech. A better type.

If you want to know exactly where Bush's speech was lacking, review the Democrat response to it. Kaine didn't miss a single opportunity. And he avoided all the usual pitfalls. He didn't attack the GWOT directly. he just nibbled on the corners - pensions and body armor. He attacked all the weak points, avoided all the strong points, and came out as well as could be hoped for. Kaine understands the rudiments of tactics.

But Bush won this contest. By the time he was halfway through it was already a foregone conclusion. The historians will ratify this judgment. Nothing Kaine could have said would have changed this.

Why? Two reasons: strategy and advanced tactics. Bush thinks strategically, exactly as a Commander in Chief of the leading democracy ought to. He has a vision, and he can articulate it, and he did. Democracy for the entire globe. What about tactics? Well, the way he turned all the criticisms back against his critics shows a mastery of tactics, beyond the beginner level.

His opposite number understands beginner tactics well enough. As for advanced tactics or strategy, he had no options there. His party has squandered all its best options with mindless carping on the war. It's not Kaine's fault. Well, actually it is. He picked a real loser of a party there.

(Speaking of strategy... I'm reminded of the first Presidential debate of 2004, when Bush was very much off his game. That fool Kerry chose a revealing analogy for the Iraq intervention: he said it was if in response to Pearl Harbor we had invaded... where was it? Somewhere other than North Africa, where we did in fact invade, and then went on to win the war Kerry showed vast ignorance both of history and of strategy in that remark. Bush could have hit that out of the park if he'd been more with it. Oh, well.)

What did the Democrat response have to offer against all this? Talk of management. Delivering government services efficiently. Good management. Effective management. Management, management, management. Now that's fine for the state and local levels. There pretty much everything is about management and delivering services. But the State of the Union is about the national level, and not just of any nation. Of the global superpower.

"There's a better way." A better way to do what? This, that and the other thing. But not the one important thing. Not a better way to make the world safe for democracy. Mr. Eyebrow didn't have anything to offer there. He was hoping we wouldn't notice.

What the Democrats don't seem to understand is that management isn't everything. At this level, you need leadership. Clinton didn't lead, he only managed. His foreign policy - such as it was - was what got us into this current mess. He tried to manage the terror problem, instead of solving it. That's the fly-swatting mentality. It's a poor substitute for vision and leadership.

To one whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Democrats understand logistics (maybe) and so they think everything is a logistical problem. Bush knows better. And the voters sense, if perhaps imperfectly, that Bush is right. This country needs a leader, not a Pointy Haired Boss.

Actually, I'm being generous there, in search of a war metaphor. What the Democrats understand isn't logistics in the military sense. They understand the idea of moving goods and information in an organization. The smarter ones actually understand how to do it, on a certain scale. But everything's more complicated when there are lunatics trying to kill you. Somehow I don't think Kaine would do a much better job than the U.S. military.

Bush makes many little mistakes. Mistakes that his political opponents jump on like starving pit bulls, and then don't know what to do with. Bush makes many little mistakes, but those who oppose him make one huge mistake: they refuse to acknowledge that we are fighting for the future of our civilization, and that we deserve to win. Even if they knew how to exploit Bush's little mistakes, this one vast blunder of theirs outweighs all of his goofs combined. It absolutely destroys the Democrats' credibility. And this is why Bush can't be bothered to learn how to pronounce "nuclear." He knows it doesn't really matter.

(It could have been worse. Cindy Sheehan managed to get herself arrested for disorderly conduct before she could get on the cameras. That would have been something to see. She got arrested on purpose, of course. She just misjudged the timing, and so lost her camera opp. Anyway, we got to watch Hillary's face. And we also got to see a few foreign dignitaries squirm.)

I blame the Left. The extremist Left have hijacked this party, and are running it into the ground in a vain hope of riding to power on its coattails. This is *not* a win-win scenario. Both the parasite and its host are sick, and are slowly dying. Such is the fate of useful idiots, and of those who try to use them beyond their usefulness.

Democrats and Leftists, ask not at whom the smirking chimp smirks. He smirks at thee.

And what about the Republicans after Bush? Can they come up with another visionary to continue the fight for freedom? Well, at least they know that's what's needed. I'm sure they'll find someone. The Democrats are too stupid even to look for one. They still think the Presidency is just some sort of an upper management position.


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