Chris Dorner Manhunt

Clearly, only the police can be trusted with firearms.

Aggrieved former LAPD cop Chris Dorner is on the run.  He’s killed three and released a long, angry, narcissistic, but otherwise coherent manifesto.  He sounds like an entitled, over-promoted guy who fell back on the old saw of racism when things didn’t go his way. His Navy career didn’t work out, he was a mediocre cop, and when his training officer was ready to call him out, he decided to lie about her.  After stewing for a few years, he finally decided to throw in the towel and get even in a blaze of glory.

He also was a liberal-leaning gun control supporter with opinions on just about everything.  Somehow this angry cop’s rampage is being used to support gun control.  But notice, suspending moral judgment for a second, how his actions and the overreaction of the Southern California cops provide strong evidence for one of the key foundations of the Second Amendment.  Second Amendment supporters say that the right to bear arms flows from our founding history, where armed Americans threw off the control of the British and its state-of-the-art military.  This possibility and this reserved “last resort” power was always supposed to reside in the people and their arms.  We are told it is unrealistic today that this would ever be necessary or that it could ever be effective.  But here we have one man without any supporting network tying up thousands of law enforcement officers who are used otherwise to operating in a permissive environment.  The police are crippled, over-reacting, and one man has created fear and chaos throughout Southern California.

If the government ever truly were resisted by even a smallish percentage of Americans, it would not get very far.  Dozens or hundreds or thousands of Dorners could easily destroy its ability to govern at all.  And we have seen this in our own history in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have also seen it in the history of other nations such as Northern Ireland, Algeria, the West Bank, and today in Syria.

First world militaries and their tanks and planes and high tech gear are not so effective at addressing this kind of problem, and, in their over-reactions, tend to alienate the very people whom they purport to represent.  This is the essential “David and Goliath” paradox of guerrilla warfare.

Now Dorner is a grievance-collecting nutjob, as best we can tell. And he was also a former cop, which suggests letting “only the police and military have guns” is not necessarily such a bulwark against shooting rampages and mayhem.  Let’s not forget Nidal Hasan or the biggest shooting spree killer of all time, Woo Bum Kim, a pissed off South Korean police officer.

On a purely tactical level, actions like Dorner’s or of the DC Sniper or of any of the other criminals who go “toe to toe” with law enforcement, show that the ability of the government to police things when it is opposed directly (rather than merely evaded in the manner of the typical criminal) is very limited. And if this type of activity were to happen on a large scale in an organized or spontaneous resistance by, say, 1% of America’s 100mm gun owners, it would be utterly impossible for the military, police, and other apparatus of the government to govern.

This would be a nightmare scenario, of course, just as all wars are terrible affairs. One could not know that such claimed oppression and call to resistance were not the prelude to tyranny, as in the French Revolution. But political oppression, the greatest tool of mass murder in the last century, is also nightmarish.  To pretend that it is an unknown phenomenon of right wing fantasy and not a real threat to freedom in a decadent, divided country like the United States today is the real fantasy. At least in a world where we retain our arms, we have the means to protect ourselves from any number of threats:  common criminals, an oppressive government, or would-be oppressors masquerading as freedom fighters.

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Our Unserious Leaders

America’s politics are more and more resembling those of the Soviet Union, where very little is at stake, 90% of the issues are off the table and decided by committees of connected elites, and the  theater of politics, including elections, are there mostly to cover up the reality. 

Last week we observed vitriolic denunciations and counter-denunciations of Republicans and Democrats in the run-up to the budget funding bill, but in the end only $60B (and possibly less) was ultimately cut.  These cuts only affected the small sliver of discretionary spending.  This is chump change when we have a $1T yearly deficit and tens of trillions(!) of unfunded liabilities in the decades ahead.

Obama this week in a highly partisan speech denounced the Republican proposals, in particular those of the fairly serious Paul Ryan, as mean-spirited and violative of the American “social compact.”  His liberal supporters swooned at his passionate defense of the welfare state, but in doing so he and they as well remind us that they are not serious people and are not taking seriously the unfunded liabilities that cannot be sustained in the decades ahead.  Something must give. 

Republicans may not be terribly serious or courageous on average, but a few of them are very serious and are saying what needs to be said about the budget problems.  Of course, sacred cows like our bloated defense budget, bailouts for banks, various forms of corporate welfare such as farm subsidies, and much else should be on the table.  But at least the topic of our fiscal problems is on the table among Republicans and not dealt with through magical thinking, as in the mind of Obama.  Much of the credit belongs to the Tea Party, the amorphous collection of grass roots conservative activists who were not terribly impressed with W’s spending spree and were jolted into action by Obama Care.  This movement, while containing many unserious people, has at its core a very serious point:  we are spending ourselves into oblivion and must get a handle on it or our country will destroy itself. 

Obama is no leader.  I believe he knows the fiscal crisis to be a reality, but he also knows that it would be very costly politically to do something about it.  He has been willing to expend this capital to grow the welfare state into a permanent institution that makes everyone a welfare case through Obamacare, but he has not done what is necessary to preserve (or sensibly reduce) the commitments already made in the form of Medicare, Social Security, and much else.  This reveals him as what I always thought he was:  a coward, a mouthpiece for conventional Democratic Party talking points, and someone indifferent about America’s strength and prosperity.

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Reality Check on Military Tribunals

Military tribunals make perfect sense for members of al Qaeda.  These individuals are non-citizens, their prosecution often depends on sensitive intelligence, and their presence in American courtrooms would be disruptive and a security risk.  In war, military tribunals have been used from the Revolutionary War forward, and their streamlined procedures, ability to hold proceedings in secret, and capacity for swift justice recommend them over civilian procedures designed for ordinary crimes.  Of course, the  years-long delays in trials for Guantanamo Bay prisoners and the failure, since 9/11, to execute huge numbers of al Qaeda members in our custody suggests the “swiftness” part is not taken seriously enough by the executive branch.  By contrast, in World War II, Germans using American uniforms to infiltrate allied lines and disrupt American units during the Battle of the Bulge were summarily executed.  But, even so, these tribunals are preferable to the alternative, even if their potential efficiency has not bee employed to great effect.

So it is with a mixture of happiness and schadenfreude that I learn the Obama adminsitration is going to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in a military tribunal down in Guantanmo Bay.  Recall that Obama and many of his supporters preened self-righteously about the demerits of preventitive detention, the need to accord al Qaeda detainees full POW status, the evils of military tribunals, the inhumanity of drone attacks and much else during the 2008 campaign and before.  That is, the left didn’t only rail against the War in Iraq, where they had a point.  They also railed against every aspect of the war against al Qaeda. 

On both fronts–preventitive war and the use of cedures for terrorists–Obama is in retreat.  He is realizing that most Americans don’t really give a fig about terrorists, they want them killed or captured, and simply have the minimal humane concern that innocent goatherders be returned to their families if they can be reliably identifiied.  We all know, and Obama and his buddies forgot, that the burdens of proof are shifted in wartime and that we must err on the side of safety, particularly as we face a foreign, ruthless, and uncivilized enemy that deliberately hides among civilians.  It is not America’s fault that the innocent Afghanis and al Qaeda terrorists appear similar; it’s al Qaeda’s, with their ragamuffin appearance and terrorist tactics. 

I’d like to think this decision is a sign of Obama growing in office, but it appears more like simple triangulation.  Just as he dropped his lifelong obsession with gun control once he became president and realized it was political dynamite, it’s obvious that his views on foreign policy and the law of war were mostly campaign props, instincts developed from years in liberal Hyde Park, rather than well thought out positions.  Here he has been temporarily burdened by the incompetent Eric Holder’s “true believer” implemntation of these principles, but Obama’s political instincts are not so terrible than a guaranteed loser–such as a face off with 9/11 Families in NYC–is going to be pursued to the bitter end. Even on his signature issue, race and American identity, he left his pastor of 20 years when it became a problem. 

We are reminded from all this and much else that Obama is not a man of high principle; his chief principle is his love of self and his interest in political survival.  And thus all that “hope and change” rhetoric is now quite obviously a bunch of gliterring genrealities uttered by a thoroughly ordinary politician.

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Afghanistan: What is Progress?

I’m really amazed, frankly, that for ten years the commanders of US efforts have said that “we’re making progress” as things seem, more or less, not to have changed much after the bulk of al Qaeda fled into Pakistan’s western tribal regions in early 2002.

Retired Marine Bing West’s new book looks very interesting.  He basically says we’re not winning, the commanders are full of it for self-serving reasons, that our strategic assumptions are wrong, and that the best thing to do now would be to scale back the mission radically and pursue the narrow American national interest in tamping down the international terrorist component over there.

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Hope and Change

There’s a few interesting signs that the western world is awakening from its slumber.  David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, announces that multiculturalism has failed and that Muslims are not assimilating and it’s their fault as well as the fault of the idiotic multiculturalist philosophy.

Certain neoconservatives, typically perhaps but still in a welcome move, have noted that democracy and the Arab world do not mix.  Their motive, of course, is not idealism but love of Israel.  But it’s good to see that a generally good thing, self government, is being recognized as bad when it leads to bad things.  The real question is why these fools were so foolish about the prospects of democracy in Iraq.  My guess is that Bush’s idealism and pathological refusal to make generalizations about other cultures had a lot to do with it.  And for many neoconservatives (and real conservatives too) the whole democracy thing was window dressing to take out a regime that was perceived as hostile to US interests and Israeli interests.

Finally, aSenate committee has noted that Nidal Hasan, the Army Major who shot up his infidel colleagues, could have been stopped if the Army and the other authorities were not so hidebound by political correctness.  Seriously, if we mean to win this war on Islamic extremism, we must name the enemy.  Instead, it’s as if the US was at war with “certain German extremists” in World War II rather than the entire German nation, which as a practical matter was the case then and now with respect to a goodly swath of the Muslim world.

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Paul Krugman’s Blood Libel

Sarah Palin got in some hot water this week for suggesting the left’s rseponse to the Loughner shooting was a “blood libel.”  Way back in the day, when Jews and Christians lived apart from one another in Europe, this was a popular myth of Jewish mendacity:  that they engaged in ritual murder of Christians for their religious ceremonies.  It was fueled by confusion, prejudice, and the theological view of Jews as the murderers of Jesus. More recently, it’s become a secular term to denote murdeous intent by one’s political and cultural enemies.  It’s undoubtedly what was leveled at the conservative half of the country by the left in the wake of Arizona’s shooting.  The self-righteous rage at Palin reflects the various ways she is hated as a symbol of this half of the country.  It also reflects another important phenomenon: the self-righteous view by the mostly leftist Jewish minority that no one can ever make an analogy to Jewish suffering without also agreeing with broader, mostly left-of-center Jewish views, and that to make such analogies is an act of hateful anti-semitism.

Paul Krugman, however, has upped the ante.  After his earlier, divorced-from-facts attacks on the right, he has now suggested that those critical of the federal government’s various unconstitutional welfare programs are engaged in “eliminationist” rhetoric.  That’s an interesting term.  It finds its origins in the propagandistic book Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen is an historian who penned a controversial and largely discredited thesis that the Germans of the Holocaust mass murdered Jews after embracing an “eliminiationist” paradigm, and that this view was widely embraced by Germans at every level of society.  While short on facts and analysis–after all, why did the Germans hide the Holocaust if it was a logical outgrowth of majority views–the book was popular and reached a mass audience.   Krugman’s defamatory slur is doubly troublesome, as it conflates the rhetoric that would eliminate welfare or national health care with the kind that would eliminate millions of people.  Details, details.

The left and right undoubtedly do not like one another in this country and have different values.  However, it is the left that appears more unhinged, at least in its mainstream.  While we have our share of fringe elements concerned about the Trilateral Commission and Obama’s birth certificate, it is the mainstream Democratic Party that invited Michael Moore to their annual convention in 2004.  It is they who responded to this attack with venomous rage before a single fact connected this mentally ill shooter to any political faction at all.  And now it is Krugman–not Sarah Palin–who has tried to connect his opponents with murderous, Nazi antisemitism.

I’m not sure if anyone else has picked up on this inflammatory usage of his.  In any case, he is a fool, and the left, in their hate, are projecting their own hostile and homicidal feelings on the right, whose Tea Party rhetoric and appeals to the Constitution are almost completely nonviolent.

Indeed, the left’s habitual violence, far from being condemned, is embraced at the highest levels.  While his campaign and Tuscon speech were largely conciliatory, Barack Obama began his political career in the living room of a former Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers.  The Weathermen, as they were also called, were notorious bombers, cop-killers, and all around bad people.  Angela Davis, a California professor, was involved in a communist murder plot in the mid 1970s; today, she’s honored as an esteemed academic.  By contrast, no one in the mainstream right rallied around Tim McVeigh (undoubtedly a right-wing, if extreme terrorist), nor Eric Rudolph, nor other violent extremists of the right.  Such extremism, incidentally, is a feature of any political movement. The question is how such extremists are dealt with and treated by the mainstream leadership.  Here the left has failed, where the right has largely behaved responsibly.  But the left appears to be engaging on a wide scale in what psychologists call “projecting”:  that is, imagining their opponents to have their own worst traits.

Let’s not forget, it’s the left that romanticizes Che Guevara and makes excuses for the dictatorship he served; is it any wonder they assume all their political opponents want to kill and destroy as much as they do.

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The New Model Army

DADT will become law soon, passed this week by the lame duck Democratic Senate after earlier passage by the House.  I oppose this law for all the usual reasons.

Like the gay rights movement as a whole, this is part of a broader cultural movement:  destruction of the military and other traditional institutions in the name of equality.  Their prerogatives, culture, ethos, and the human type the military allowed to flourish have become intolerable  in a society dedicated to an “equality” that allows no distinctions of right and wrong, man and women, or anything else.  The post-Vietnam denegration of the military began the process, which was accelerated by the Tailhook Scandal.  In an hysterical overreaction, women were forcibly integrated into units in which few had any interest and in which the units had hitherto flourished as all male domains.  Standards were lowered.  Less time was spent at the rifle range and more and more on endless lectures on diversity and sexual harassment.

The worst fruit of this process has been habitual dishonesty at every level of command.  Ignoring the facts and speaking the party line is now so ingrained, that no one with an interest in a military career dares note the farcical lack of physical ability among many women “warriors,” nor the lack of patriotism by certain diversity candidates, some of whom have a bad habit of shooting up their peers in the name of Allah.

As in the integration of women into combat units, the end of DADT will change the military more than it will demand any changes of the gays who now have the right to serve “openly.”  On what basis will a lack of hand-holding, male-male kissing, domestic partner benefits, a lisp, sex change operations, and God knows what else be justified?   Gays are allowed to serve now–let us not forget–they simply must keep that controversial part of their lives to themselves.  In other words, discretion and respect for public standards is required.  No more.  And there is no basis now to recognize that the secondary and tertiary behaviors described above are disruptive of military order.  Nor does anyone seem to care that this behavior is offensive to a great many of the people who actually want to serve in the military, conservative and religious people from the Red States, people completely unknown to the Pelosis and Obamas of the world, and people who will quietly resign and leave the military, just as many quality men have defected from certain combat support units because of the disruptive presence and double standards required to have women integrated in the ranks.  Oh well, no price too high for diversity, not even lost wars and homicidal Army majors apparently!

The DADT repeal has nothing to do with the good of the military, winning wars, or genuine concern for justice.  It is a big fat middle finger to an institution the left habitually despises and has since the Vietnam War.

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The Perils of Bipartisanship

The Republicans appear likely to indulge in their worst instincts by agreeing (a) to extend unemployment benefits while (b) signing on to various tax cuts.  While perhaps tax cuts would be valuable, the real driver of our economic troubles is a widespread fiscal disaster among individuals, states and localities, and the federal government.  At all levels there is too much spending, not enough saving, and therefore too much debt.  Tax cuts and spending increases are a formula for more debt, and real debt hawkishness–not the timid embrace of welfare concomitant with tax cuts–is what is called for.  If anything taxes should stay the same while massive spending cuts are enacted in order to go to war with the debt.  If things continue as they are, there will soon be a complete devaluation of our currency, a debt default and/or hyperinflation, and continued stagnation.  Further, these various efforts at stimulating the economy through deficit spending have little to show for them this time around at home, in Japan for the last ten years, or in the US in the 1930s.  Only the private sector can create real wealth, and for it to work, this 1/3-of-the-economy-sucking-government to shrink.

The government needs to get out of the way of the economy.  In the late 70s, the way to do that was through tax cuts, which were exorbitant before Reagan came into power.  But today the way is by its overall mass and impact to shrink:  smaller spending, less generous entitlements, and a serious effort to attack the debt.  If that does not take place, tinkering with this or that program or tax rate will mean little.  Further, the real lesson of the Bush years, one would hope, is that we cannot follow the repeated Republican short-term-thinking which would cut taxes only to maintain generous spending programs.  This only kicks the can down the road.  The spending is the problem:   whether that money comes from borrowing or taxes is somewhat immaterial, either way it is sucked out of the productive economy and will be foisted on taxpayers eventually in some fashion or other.

The worst kind of politics often comes from bipartisanship, where each side gets what it wants, gives up its principles, and the public as a whole suffers due to mutual political expediency by the parties.  Obama must be opposed tooth and nail, along with nearly every component of his agenda.  If taxes slightly rise to deny him a victory on continued deficit spending, so be it.  He must be stopped, rendered impotent, and spending must be cut.

On the merits, unemployment benefits for 99 weeks are ridiculous.  People need to work, lean on family and friends, and nothing makes that happen more surely and quickly than a cut in these benefits.  Yes, there are bona fide hard luck cases, but there also a great many people that will look for and find a job within weeks of benefits running out.  If you subsidize something–in this case unemployment there will be more of it.  A much better program would be one where difficult make work was required to receive benefits, or if the government subsidized home sales and moves to places like North Dakota or Texas where work is plentiful.  More stringent work requirements for unemployment benefits (in the manner of the old “poor house”) would separate those truly unable to find a job from those running out their benefits to the max, while a spouse or parent or significant other’s income allows a middle class living when coupled with the benefits, plus some highly valuable leisure time.

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Obama’s Time Warp

George Will writes today about Obama’s strange “time warp” focus on the START Treaty with Russia.  Indeed.  If there is one problem not significantly affecting the world, it’s the dormant arm’s race with Russia.

But Obama does this often.  He is obsessed with 60s era racial gripes and thus struck out against a Cambridge cop last summer. He views the Third World, which has mostly made peace with free trade and capitalism, through the lens of the Cold War’s socialist nonaligned movement.  He pushed health care full steam ahead when it was very much the centerpiece Democratic issue of 10 years ago and irrelevant to our current economic problems.  In short, he is a kind of idealist, pushing the liberal ideas of his youth, and he apparently does not adjust very quickly or very well to a changed landscape.

On arm’s control this is particularly apparent, as he was writing about the “deadly” nuclear arm’s race back in college, and it’s one of the few insights into the standard-issue liberal views Obama had at that time.

The problem with all this, in addition to the poverty of his imagination, is that the modern presidency is very much reactive, defined by events, and required to rearrange priorities based on changed circumstances.  Bush, who campaigned for a more “humble” foreign policy, quickly realized how dramatically the 9/11 attacks changed the world.  Clinton, for all his faults, was a genius at “triangulation,” pushing smaller and noncontroversial policies after the dramatic failure of healthcare in ’94. 

Considering the scale of our current economic and foreign policy problems, Obama’s lack of agility and his impoverished vision do not portend well for success either politically or as a matter of policy.

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Obama’s Post-Election Rhetoric

I’ve thought for a long time that Obama’s rhetoric has some serious problems.  Earlier in the campaign, he was cajoling his supporters to work for him.   He has insulted middle America, suggesting it is fearful or racist at different times.  In dealing with Congress, he has been imperious and unwilling to adjust his tone and policies to his bipartisan opposition, and this was particularly apparent on health care.  He seems to believe that when everyone agrees with him is the essence of good faith and bipartisanship, and thus he gets quite snippy when he faces real, principled opposition. 

He has lost the touch, if it ever existed.  Americans want results, straight talk, and are worried about the growth of government.  His campaign, with its “fill in the blank” talk of hope and change, allowed Americans to think he would deliver some of these political goods.  He has not, and Obama is unwilling to learn from the midterm election; he thinks he’s right and that his policies will work in the end.  Also, he does not really understand America and never did.  He doesn’t believe that beyond “red and blue” states stuff from his campaign.  He’s a sophmoric leftist who finds large swaths of American history and individual Americans unseemly, racist, angry, stupid, and easily misled.  He has contempt for them.  And this contempt, coupled with his great love of and belief in himself, is absolutely fatal to a politician.  I do not believe he’ll effectively adjust to a Republican majority in Congress, and the weird confluence of circumstances that led to his election will not be repeated.  He plans to be saved by an economic recovery, but he won’t, because his spendthrift policies are fatal to any economic recovery. 

His only audacious hope should be something like what transpired in 1996:  a mild economic recovery couple with an atrocious, uncharismatic candidate along the lines of Bob Dole.  But I believe, unlike Clinton, he’s so out of touch with Americans and as visibly unsympathetic with them as any politician in our lifetime, that the deux ex machina of a terrible Republican candidate will not occur and even that may not save him.  One caveat, let’s hope to God that the mediocre Palin is not front and center in 2012; that actually might save him, and that would be a disaster for both the country and the Republican party.

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Obama’s Malaise

Obama is getting beaten up by core supporters, his lies are crumbling, his half-hearted war leadership has been exposed, and his lack of political skills and instincts is more and more apparent. Why is this so surprising?  His campaign was a big lie; the media participated in myth-making and didn’t do their job, from checking his Hyde Park left-liberal record to investigating his terrorist associations and the unlikelihood of his authorship of Dreams of My Father.

I am rather enjoying all of this, frankly, and an ideal end game would be a radicalized, alienated, small-government-oriented and ethnically conscious majority, mass disillusionment by liberals, and a serious dismantlement of the welfare state out of sheer necessity.

The only thing to be wary of his the Republican party’s infidelity to decent policy.  From its addiction to nation-building in the Muslim world to its bad faith on immigration, it’s not so clear that this radicalism won’t get defused and wasted on stupid liberal policies simply because they’re advanced by Republicans. That said, Republicans function better as an opposition party, and we are very lucky McCain is not putting the final nail in the coffin that is the GOP.

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Glenn Beck U

I enjoyed this lively piece at Reason’s website on Glenn Beck’s latest attempts to “teach history.”  In fairness, I like some of what Beck says, applaud him for addressing Obama’s racial agenda, and the people I consider myself aligned with instinctually and ideologically seem to like him.  But there is also something off-putting about him.  He’s herky-jerky in style and disorganized in his thinking.  One thing conservative intellectuals can do and should do is provide evidence and reason-based defenses of the prejudices of ordinary people.  These prejudices often have great wisdom built into them, but without some defense based on facts, social science, history, and other evidence, they remain mere prejudices and dissipate rather quickly under the assault of vice, propaganda, and false history propagated by th eleft.

But one problem Beck has is that he refuses to take on certain liberal gods.  He still thinks America’s history is tainted to the core by racism, but he resolves this conundrum by blaming liberals for all of America’s sins, even the ones that were the product of a certain kind of conservatism.  And he does this, often times, by the most convoluted and ridiculous conspiracy theories imaginable, such as blaming the Holocaust on the race prejudice of U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson.

I do believe history is complicated; it’s too easy to find and judge “villains” operating under very different circumstances in the past.  On this question of America’s “racist past,” I believe it was often more complicated than commonly presented, with unevenness of practice and local circumstances and other mitigating factors that deserve consideration as part of the entire record.  Finally, I think the disorder, violence, and decline of America in the age of “civil rights” counterbalances the scales of America’s earlier, often un-Christian racism, in no small part.

Setting aside the particulars of that rather large question, the big problem I have with Beck is best summarized at the end of Michael Moynihan’s article:

A tiny bit of knowledge (no, McCarthy wasn’t completely wrong), combined with an enormous Fox News constituency and an unflappable trust in one’s own wisdom, is a dangerous thing. Beck doesn’t demonstrate the perils of autodidacticism, but the perils of learning the subject while at the same time attempting to teach it.

Woodrow Wilson was an imperial president who cared little for civil liberties; the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression; the anti-communists were on the right side of history. Yes, yes, and yes. But these stories can be told without exaggeration, without relying on conspiracy, without the rehabilitation of a heavy-drinking senator who believed that Gen. George Marshall was a Soviet agent.

All things to consider when dispatching your application (and $79) to Glenn Beck University.

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The Victory Mosque and Obama

Location of Ground Zero Mosque

Obama, like former President Bush, defends the religious freedom for Muslim Americans to insult the rest of us, just as he is willing to defend the honor of Islam itself.  But this is an unpopular stance.  Most Americans have heard the anti-American cheers, seen the strange practices, and become fed up with the murderous triumphalism of Muslims worldwide.

Obama this week weighed in on the propriety of the Cordoba Housea, a large Mosque planned within blocks of the former World Trade Center.  It is called by some a Victory Mosque, not least because it is large, garish, and intended to open on September 11, 2011.  Barack Hussein Obama is siding with Muslims against the Christian majority of Americans in a typically haughty way.  Worse, to do so, he is willing to sketch a false history of America, where Islam was part of our national fabric from its earliest days.

Islam is, in fact, a very recent import, a consequence of the 1965 immigration reform, which favored Third Worlders over Europeans. And the consequences of that change have included periodic acts of terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks, but also including the Nigerian Christmas bombing, the murder of Army recruiters in Arkansas, various “honor killings,” and a number of other foiled attacks.

This Victory Mosque is a middle finger to Americans.  It is a statement of triumphalism by an expansionist, violent religion that is so different from Christianity, that the religious freedom of its believers must be severely restricted, just as the freedom of cults to commit mass suicide, practice polygamy, or smoke Peyote is also restricted.

The Reality of Islam

Obama, Bush, and Mayor Bloomberg all err in treating Islam like any other religion.  While it is a religion, it is a special type; it is both universal (like Christianity) and fully comprehensive in its directives (like Judaism).  It offers a complete way of life for those under its domain, and unlike traditional Judaism, does not exempt non-believers from the vast majority of its detailed directives.  Indeed, for Islam, legislation itself is seen as a God-task, and they believe that Sharia is God-given perfect legislation, that no one is really free without Sharia, and that the destiny of all mankind is to flourish under Sharia.

Obviously, Sharia has little in common with Western ideals of freedom, self-government, and dissenssus, but we continue to delude ourselves that these people’s beliefs will fit in somewhere nicely between Methodists and Presbyterians.

Islam, further, counsels various types of violence against non-believers who resist Muslim expansion, disrespect the Prophet, or otherwise run afoul of its directives.  Since so many Americans would do so without even trying, Islam is not compatible with our way of life.  Recall, for example, that Said Qutb, intellectual grandfather of the Muslim Brotherhood was deeply offended by a church dance in 1940s Colorado.  This was not exactly Times Square circa 1975!

Both Bush and Obama misunderstand Islam for different reasons.  As a religious but sentimental man, Bush saw all religion as a positive for the individual’s moral life, but didn’t really understand the content of other religions very well, as he came from the anti-intellectual evangelical tradition.  As a political man with an identity crisis, Obama, by contrast, sees all religion as identitarian and political, and is pro or con based on whether the group involved claims to be oppressed by the West, but he does not take any religion’s particulars very seriously as theological matters.

I take Islam quite seriously on its own terms and imagine those who believe it do too.  I also am not a “chicken little.” I know most Muslims probably get from Islam what everyone else gets from their religious traditions:  a sense of the eternal, the sacred, human connectedness, the God-given aspects of right and wrong, the importance of decency, etc.  I imagine, like Christianity, Islam gives solace in death, a sense of importance in life’s milestones, and conveys the need for charity.  The difference is that Islam has built into it, and non-negotiably, a specific code. The more serious a Muslim is, the more he understands the necessity of imposing this code as directed by the Koran.

The often used Reformation analogy is inapt.  Hopeful writers argue that Christianity was violent and illiberal prior to the Reformation, and that we’re OK now, and Islam will be too, after it changes its ways in the same manner we have.  Besides having the history quite wrong–the so-called Reformation ushered in a century of European blood-letting–there cannot be a reformation that makes Islam more like modern Christianity, because the past of Islam is as violent as the present.  There, in fact, have been many reformations in Islam, including Wahhabism.  None of these “back to basics” movements involved a rejection of Islam’s total role in the believer’s and nonbelievers’ lives.  To excise Sharia from Islam would be like excising the Gospels from Christianity.  We must conclude that while there are good individual Muslims, they are good only insofar as they ignore or reject large parts of Islam.

The Unlikelihood of Assimilation

What people really want (and in the case of Obama, expect) is for Muslims not to take their religions so seriously, just as Christianity declined in influence the aftermath of the 17th Century’s brutal religious wars.  But there is no reason to think this shift will come from Islam itself.  In Europe, this movement found its roots in shared Christian ideas regarding the conscience.  In other words, to separate Church and State did not do violence to basic Christian teachings.  In Islam, to denigrate the role of religion in the arena of legislation would involve various blasphemies, a downgrading of religion, and a limitation of government power that does not comport with the totalistic nature of Sharia.

While I believe America’s religiosity, tolerance, economic opportunities, and limited numbers have contained the power of Muslims in our country, nonetheless, introducing them to this alien soil was a mistake and continuing to do so increases our collective endangerment.  This has been particularly apparent from the experience of Europe, where Muslims are more numerous, more radical, and substantially more aggressive than they are here.

Some legal basis should be found to stop the Victory Mosque, including a recognition that freedom of religion does not include the freedom of certain religions to conspire against the republic and threaten violence on non-believers.  These are essential aspects of most variants of Islam contra the happy clappy Religion of Peace talk from Bush and Obama and other elites.  Longer term, however, we must recognize that the false “freedom” of open borders is hurting the actual freedoms and inherited way of life of ordinary Americans.

The Freedom to Preserve Our Way of Life

The existence of individually good and decent Muslim American does not change the fact that the au courant restraints on our freedoms that we now endure are a direct consequence of the recent introduction of Muslims into country made up largely of European Christians.  Ours is a country accustomed to an historical balance of liberty and order based, in part, on the loyalty and fellow feeling of the vast majority of Americans. We are now searched at airports, eavesdropped on by the FBI, forced to pay for long foreign wars, and reluctant to “offend the Prophet,” all in the name of the counterfeit “freedom” to have aliens from the Third World living alongside of us.

It does not offend freedom to keep foreigners out of our country, any more than it infringes on natural liberty if I have walls around my home to keep out strangers. Real lovers of liberty should see that our freedoms depend upon restricting immigration of cultural aliens, particularly Muslims. If not, we will have the human rights’ equivalent of Gresham’s Law: the false freedom of open borders will replace all of the actual, historical freedoms we’ve come to cherish such as free travel, physical safety, privacy, free speech, artistic freedom, nonviolence in politics, and the rule of law.

There is an essential relationship between liberty and community. A community with a sense of collective identity, mutual interest, and trust can afford a substantial realm of freedom within its confines. Enemies in the gates, however, generate a climate of uncertainty, insecurity, and, ultimately, the suffocation of liberty. This occurs as people rationally conclude that the government’s first duty to provide order is threatened by the combination of dangerous interlopers taking advantage of freedoms that evolved under more peaceful and trusting conditions for the benefit of more peaceful and trustworthy people.

Obama does not feel loyal to this traditional American community, which he regards as racist, overly exclusive, and mean-spirited.   In conflicts between that (mostly white and Christian) majority and minority interests, he routinely sides with the latter, even though this is politically costly.  For him, this reaction is a long-cultivated instinct, just as his defense of Professor Gates against an ordinary Cambridge cop was quite natural and authentic.  Obama can’t help himself in these cases.  He is from the multicultural branch of leftism and wants to “keep it real” and not “sell out.” At best he feels sorry for the primitive, prejudiced New Yorkers who dare, in a very nonviolent and American way, say that enough is enough. 

But I feel contempt for Obama in return. 

These New Yorkers are good people, relatives in many cases of our murdered countrymen, and their patriotism and pride of place are far more admirable and pro-social than any of the corrosive, Marxist, black power trash that Obama believes.  Is it any wonder that the President who went to a Church that cheered 9/11 as our just punishment–”chickens coming home to roost”–wants to bring the insult of this event to its apotheosis?

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Obama’s Afghanistan Problem

There have been a few excellent editorials, including this short piece by Gary Wills, in recent weeks noting that Obama risks becoming the LBJ of his time:  a man with an ambitious domestic agenda, whose foreign policy mishaps and inconclusive, persistent prosecution of a counterinsurgency are his undoing.

I think the analogy is apt, but the left and the country in general seem a great deal less interested in the war now that George W Bush is out of office.  Casualties are mounting, many of the same problems of corruption exist in Afghanistan as in Iraq, and the war’s results are mediocre at best.  Yet Obama has a freedom of movement on this that defied his predecessor.  LBJ, by contrast, was seen as “the man” by the New Left and was given no real breaks for his progressive agenda at home or Democratic Party identification.  Indeed, the 1968 Democratic Convention was the sight of one of the greatest riots of the far left as part of the anti-Vietnam movement.

Obama, I believe, will muddle through in Afghanistan and not take a significant hit.  The main issue that has eclipsed all others is the dreadful state of the economy, which so far seems impervious to the various spending and stimulus measures he has issued.

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Obama and Amnesty

It may seem strange that Barack Obama has recently started to push immigration amnesty, even as he has serious and pressing issues to deal with in Afghanistan, the Gulf of Mexico, and in the economy generally.  But when you look at his trademark initiatives–Cap and Trade, healthcare, “stimulus” support for government workers–it’s pretty clear that he is willing to focus his energies on game-changing and permanent shifts in federal power.  Healthcare, for instance, will bring in huge swaths of the middle class into government dependency, much as Medicare and Social Security have with the elderly.  Amnesty is of a piece with these initiatives:  if successful, it will yield a huge swath of reliably Democratic and largely working class Hispanic voters.  Millions of dependent voters would be created overnight.

Obama’s listlessness and alleged incompetence may be real, but they are secondary issues; he shows great cunning and precision when looking to expand federal power to pursue liberal ends.  Indeed, this same passion for shifting power away from America’s traditional elites–whites, business owners, local governments–also explains his odd foreign policy gestures, which are typically insulting of traditional European allies while obsequious to the hostile Third World.  Obama is his father’s son:  the Third World anti-imperialist revolutionary with a socialist bent, smarting over the indignities of yesteryear and also today, where his own group’s arrested development is a daily embarrassment.  Obama’s “incompetence” coupled with his use of political power makes sense when we realize he has no interest in American power or preserving it, but instead is interested in advancing the interests of outsiders, foreigners, minorities, the poor, and other groups that have historically been less powerful and less successful under the free market, limited government economic regime of historical America.  A la Charles Beard, this order is ipso facto unjust precisely because the people that Obama wants to succeed do not do so well under this system, even as formal barriers to minority participation and advancement have been removed and, indeed, been replaced with an extensive affirmative action bureaucracy to advance their interests at the expense of the talented American majority.  Obama will not be content until the high have been made low.  It’s like the 1970s Ten Years After song, “Tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more.”

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