Alert! Alert! Rogue Yemeni Email Shuts Down US State Dept!

Don't mean to minimize the dangers of Islamic terrorism or anything, but the latest round of travel warnings and temporary embassy closings has an especially bogus "Shark Week"-level hype to them:

The United States will temporarily shut down its embassies and consulates around the world Sunday -- including those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt -- as a precautionary measure over terror-related concerns, State Department officials said. 

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf did not say how long the international installations would stay closed -- only that the decision was taken “out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting.” Officials would not describe the nature of the threat.  

Sunday is a normal workday in many Arab and Middle Eastern countries, meaning that is where the closures will have an impact. Embassies in Europe and Latin America would be shuttered that day anyway. 

“We have instructed all U.S. embassies and consulates that would have normally been open on Sunday to suspend operations, specifically on August 4,” a senior State Department official said Thursday night. “It is possible we may have additional days of closing as well.”

Hey, maybe there's really a bunch of terrorists massing somewhere, ready for Benghazi II, but I just don't believe it. And, why the heck are we closing embassies, even for a second? If you don't want a repeat of the attack on the Libyan consulate (which was actually a "mission," or some such), then maybe post some Marines with actual weapons containing actual bullets and see how far your typical terrorist gets. But, that's not how things work under the Obama Doctrine, where concepts like "Defending Yourself" and "Refusing To Knuckle Under To Vague Threats" are now verboten for being the tools of imperialist running dogs. Anyway, one of Obama's two big talking points last year was that "Osama was dead and al-Qaeda on the run," so what's the problem?

I will have no problem repudiating the above should there be a massive, fatal terrorist attack sometime in the next couple weeks, but how likely is that to happen? Not very. But, this grand display of weakness and duck & covering will encourage the next "out of nowhere" attack. 

Edward Snowden: Hero Or Zero?

That was the question of the day on the radio and the official Free Will formulation is (drumroll): "Zero + 2."

The guy's a zero for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with his deciding unilaterally to release classified information to the leftoid Guardian, a publication that has gone out of its way to undermine America. Then there's his laughable claim that Hong Kong was some kind of libertarian, free speech paradise. Good to know our worldly transnational sophisticates haven't caught up with the news that HK stopped being a free trade entrepot back in 1999. Snowden doesn't talk or act like a patriot, so excuse me if I don't join the "Snowden = Paul Revere" chorus line.*

Still, he gets points for making us confront an ugly reality, namely that the gov't is collecting an enormous amount of personal information about us and our interactions with the world. I get it that the NSA is making use of this information under close supervision and only when there is a probable cause rationale for running our numbers through a database. Other than that, it's just sitting there, inert. No, I don't find that reassuring. Instead, each of us now has a digital sword of Damocles over us, waiting to fall when we run the wrong google search, or receive too many phone calls from the wrong continents. The gov't won't look at you until it does, something that we have learned from the IRS and which we should not soon forget (also note that Mr. Patriot doesn't seem to have been motivated by the IRS's torment of conservatives and Tea Partiers).

But, what Snowden should be making us ask is whether all of this meta-data gathering is the best use of our time and resources. The whole point is to fight terrorism (remember that?) but it's hard to see that the system is working well when we've got a couple yokels from Chechnya blowing up the Boston Marathon without much trouble. We're seemingly spying on true blue Americans (and patting them down in airports) while studiously avoiding the Muslims who are causing all of this trouble in the first place!

There's one way to fight a war against a shadowy transnational guerrilla movement with a deadly ideology: kill as many of them as you can when you can; capture the ones with valuable information and then never let them go; seek out and destroy their leaders, etc. Doing targeted  computer searches of phone records and internet searches makes sense when you are fighting a war in such a manner. We *kind of* did that under Bush - and the left never stopped wailing about  the shredding of the Constitution and the slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now we have this new strategy: drone killings from afar and electronic snooping of every American's phone and internet records. Not an improvement.

(And what about the low quality of the folks who are getting top secret clearances so they can work on all of this electronic snooping? It was bad enough that soccer mom Valerie Plame could plausibly call herself a CIA operative, but at least she was getting her hands dirty. Bradley Manning was a gay Welsh 20 year old from Oklahoma with relationship issues. In an earlier era, he would not have been in the army, but in the Obama era, he had a security clearance that gave him access to State Dept. emails. Snowden is a high school drop-out with a naive view of life and freedom in other countries and who donated money to Ron Paul - not that there's anything wrong with that, but a Paul-bot is not the sort of person you would want with top secret clearance.)

Edward Snowden committed crimes and has acted in a way that has hurt the United States. His motives are mixed at best. But, given the expense and low success rate of the intrusive programs he has revealed, it would be nice to see a re-appraisal of what exactly we are doing to ourselves in the name of national security.

* and please don't expect me to appreciate your ability to parse the difference between Snowden and the worm Bradley Manning.

Non-controversial: Obvious Conclusions About the Boston Bombers

I'm not in the mood for stirring up trouble, so I'll just jot down some of the obvious truths we can agree have grown out of the Boston Marathon bombing:

We got some Mighty Warriors For Allah out there: a couple yokels from Chechnya on welfare (and look like were drug dealers, too) who blew up women and children wearing jogging clothes.

Sure the mom is nuts, but she's also an instigator and as much a jihadi as her kids. That's how the dynamic works with the Palestinians - the young men do the killing, but the moms and sisters are back at home barking at them to kill more Jews.

That aunt in Toronto is something else, too. I assume she's the mom's sister.

Really, if we're going to have chain migration, we need to have chain deportation too. (except for the uncle. He's cool.)

Seeing these Muslim women's finger-jabbing, self-justifying rants, I'm reminded of what they used to say about New Dealers like Alger Hiss who were really secret Communists - the wives were more left-wing than the hubbies.

American Moms & Dads, if your cute daughter who wants to "work for the Peace Corps" ends up in an abusive relationship with a swarthy foreigner and walks around wearing one of those stupid hijab-things - she has emotional problems.

The political refugee segment of immigration law is a relic of WW2 and the Cold War. Where we once welcomed hard-working, brilliant refugees from Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Viet Nam; now we're bringing in Somalis and Chechans who are likely not even our allies in whatever political fight they are supposedly leaving behind.

There are people out there who have been educated in US schools up to the PhD level - and they have no real ability to remain in the US once their student visas are tapped out. Meanwhile the mom and younger brother seem to have been on the citizenship fast-track. That's is stupid, dysfunctional, indefensible, etc. And there is no sign that this is going to change through the immigration reform being touted by the "progressive" crowd. (unless you are an illegal immigrant DREAM-er, of course)

I'm guessing the mom and younger bro did not read the brochures they received at their citizenship ceremony.

Remember how the symbol of our pre-9/11 fecklessness was how we were giving visas to Arabs seeking flying lessons, but who didn't want to learn to take-off or land? Now we've got Tamerlan Tsarnaev: the political "refugee" (who took lengthy vacations in his land of oppression) drug dealer on welfare who was investigated by the FBI and KGB, and who was arrested for domestic violence in this country - and all we were doing was "slow walking" his application for citizenship.

I'm sure one of the reasons US Intelligence (oxymoron alert) blew off the Russians' multiple warnings about Chechan terrorists in the US is because the Russkies are viewed as the "bad guys" in the Chechan Wars. The way things have been working out, I'm thinking the Russians had the right idea from the beginning.

I don't have access to any special knowledge, and have no real specialty in foreign affairs. All I do is read the newspapers. But, even I knew the following about Chechan terrorism pre-Boston Marathon:

1. Muslim 

2. blew up some Russian airliners using female suicide bombers 

3. attacked an elementary school and killed hundreds of children. (it was Newtown x 20).  

4. took a theater full of the Muscovite equivalent of New York Times readers - with dozens killed as a result.  

5. no direct connection to the US

Is it unfair for me to say that no one in the US government, at least at the FBI, DHS or ICE knows any of the above?

UPDATE: this doesn't really fit the "non-controversial" theme, but...remember the Rand Paul question to Eric Holder? (can you use a drone on a US citizen sitting in a café in the United States?) Remember how Holder hemmed and hawed? Everyone thought the AG was being obtuse, but in retrospect, doesn't it seem likely that Holder knew that there were US citizens out there (like Bro. #2) who were connected to Muslim terrorism and wanted to keep his options open? (and didn't want to admit that the gov't is granting citizenship to terrorists or people connected to terrorists).

Is There A Connection? CA's Lawmakers Are Highest Educated, Least Accomplished In The US

It's another one of those "studies" intended to prove that liberals are super-smart. In this case, the Chronicle of Higher Education has concluded that California's lawmakers - most of whom are liberals - are the best educated in the nation, based on the dubious metric of having graduated from college.

A study shows California lawmakers are the nation's most educated.

The Washington, D.C.-based Chronicle of Higher Education says 90 percent of California's legislators have at least a bachelor's degree and 84 percent went to a public college.

Virginia is the second most-educated legislature, followed by Nebraska, New York and Florida.

The study released Monday compares education levels of all 50 state legislatures.

The Sacramento Bee says Arkansas has the least-educated statehouse: 25 percent of its members didn't attend college

Best educated, yet they have failed spectacularly. CA lawmakers have done everything the intelligencia has told them to do: raise taxes, take on astounding debt, go "green," build high speed rail, fight against climate change, and tax & regulate the hell out of the productive members of society. They have paid out no-questions-asked welfare to fully one-third of the dependency class in the US. The result has been a fiasco. The highest unemployment rate in the country, a permanent budget crisis, and a real danger of default on the horizon.

Meanwhile, our "best educated" can't perform the basic functions of government. We can't/won't build new prisons. We can't/won't do anything about "our crumbling infrastructure" - always a big problem when Republicans are in office, tied up in red tape when Dems are in charge. We can't/won't do anything about the failing public schools that doesn't involve simply paying more $$ for further failures. We can't/won't secure the state's water supply. Etc.

Mostly, our "best educated" won't do the things that will pull the state out of its slump: lower taxes, shrink government, and throw out all of the anti-business green initiatives that seem to infest every level of government. Not only will they not do these things, they will disparage the intellect of anyone who suggests that the "Reagan Way" works better than the "Brown Way." In other words, we're the dummies! I tell you, you need to go to college to understand that.

Arkansas, btw, has the "least educated" lawmakers because 25% lack college degrees. Yet, somehow they persevered and managed to get elected to public office. Also, their state is not known for chronic unemployment and fiscal disaster. Again, who are the dummies?

Lynch Mob: Who Started The Jessica Lynch Myth?

This not a pressing matter, but W. Joseph Campbell points out that today is the eight-year anniversary of the first news reports about Jessica Lynch's "fight to the death" in Iraq. The Lynch myth did not survive serious scrutiny (even Lynch herself was smart enough to deny that she was anything but lucky to be alive). What has persisted is the idea that the Pentagon was somehow "behind" the story out of some nefarious need to cynically spread propaganda. (During a war??? How dare they!). Oddly, that was not the case either. According to Campbell's research, the "Pentagon was behind the Jessica Lynch story" story came from a single Washington Post story that was later discredited.

The military concocted the hero-warrior tale and fed it to the Post in a crude attempt to bolster U.S. support for the Iraq War. So the false narrative goes.

The Post itself has been complicit in suggesting that machinations by the Pentagon were behind the bogus story. But it’s clear that the Post alone placed the “fighting to the death” story into the public domain.

And as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the Pentagon wasn’t the source for the hero-warrior tale.

Vernon Loeb, who shared a byline on the “fighting to the death” story, said in December 2003 on NPR’s Fresh Air show program that he “could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about” the Lynch case.

“They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch,” Loeb said.

“I just didn’t see the Pentagon trying to create a hero where there was none,” he added. “I mean …they never showed any interest in doing that, to me.”

Loeb declared:

“Our sources for that story were not Pentagon sources.”

Loeb described them as “some really good intelligence sources” in Washington, D.C. , and added:

“We wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong. That happens quite often.”

Loeb on another occasion was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “Far from promoting stories about Lynch, the military didn’t like the story.”

Those darned "intelligence sources." Have they gotten anything right in the last decade?

I'm willing to be charitable and say that the Lynch story was a typical fog-of-war tale that grew exponentially with the re-telling. Hard as it might be to believe now, but large segments of the American media got caught up in the excitement of war during the initial invasion, but their enthusiasm did nothing to help themselves or their readers understand what was going on. The embedded reporters were too close to the ground to get a sense of what was going on outside their immediate view, while the ones back in DC having lunch with "intelligence sources" were too far away. Plus, everybody - especially liberals in the media - wanted to believe that the first hero of the Iraq War was a 19 year-old slip of a girl instead of some 200 lb. redneck guy. Unfortunately, reality is almost never that cooperative.

Moreover, the American people are, at this point, so media saturated that they need something more than some warmed-over Audie Murphy tale to keep them interested in a war. What they really want is a victory and a quick resolution, both of which were a long time coming in Iraq. The Pentagon, at least, realizes that war is complicated and ambiguous with little room for true battlefield heroics. But the sophisticates in the media and politics still cling to the notion that "selling" a war is a matter of concocting two-fisted tales for the rubes. How much better if they would just stop insulting our intelligence.

Back To The Shores of Tripoli: US At War With Libya

Heading out the door to Brazil, President Obama paused for a moment to announce that, let me be clear, we are going to war against Libya. I don't think there are any more "what if George Bush did this" columns left to write

President Barack Obama demanded Friday that Moammar Gadhafi halt all military attacks on civilians and said that if the Libyan leader did not stand down the United States would join other nations in launching military action against him.

But the president also stressed the United States "is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya."

In a brief appearance at the White House, Obama said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would travel to Paris on Saturday to join allies in discussing next steps in Libya, where Gadhafi has pressed a brutal crackdown against rebels trying to end his 42-year reign.

Stressing that the United States was acting in concert with European allies and Arab nations, the president said, "Our goal is focused, our cause is just and our coalition is strong."

Obama's remarks came less than 24 hours after the United Nations Security Council voted to authorize military action — including a "no-fly zone" over Libya — to prevent the killing of civilians by Gadhafi's forces.

The idea is that this will be a war to do nothing more than provide a no-fly zone for Libyan rebels, who will have to do the ground fighting. And, that's great, only it's about two weeks late. Two weeks ago the rebels had the momentum and were marching on Tripoli, while Qaddafi was issuing blood curdling promises to fight to the last man. Now, it's Qaddafi who is on the march. Indeed, he is at the gates of the last rebel stronghold. Yes, he's now declared a cease-fire and, yes, apparently the Egyptians are arming the rebels and the rebels now have their no-fly zone, but...the above is not a recipe for success. At best, it promises more bloodshed and even a stalemate.

Two weeks ago, Qaddafi was on the ropes and could have been quickly dispatched by the mere presence of US forces (such as an air craft floating off-shore). Now? We're going to be stuck providing a no-fly zone to rebels whose politics and motivations are largely unknown. Hillary Clinton has been meeting with Libyan rebels in Paris, and supposedly these guys are liberal democracy advocates. Could be. But, this would not be the first revolution that put forward liberal reformers as spokesmen and then dispatched those reformers as soon as the real rebel leadership took power.

There's a lot of scuttlebutt out there that many of the rebels are aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which would explain how street protests could morph into an armed insurrection that nearly toppled the dictatorship in a few weeks time. Sure would be nice if the President had some workable intelligence to help sort this out, but he and his ideological allies have spent decades neutering the CIA's ability to gather such intelligence. Surely it says something that the Secretary of Defense, whose department has had to set up its own intelligence shops after the CIA's failures in Iraq, was loud in his skepticism of prosecuting this war. Oddly, it's been the diplomats who have pushed Obama to war. Hope they know something we don't know.

And, speaking of the president's ideological allies, how do you suppose they will react? I mean, it's not like Libya attacked us, right? Doesn't Libya have a lot of oil? Wouldn't want to be seen as "stealing" it, right? The rationale for this war seems to be that Qaddafi must go because he's killing his own people, but that was never enough, by itself, to support removing Saddam Hussein, was it? Plus, I'm old enough to remember all of the "cowboy war monger" complaints when President Reagan sent in the air force to decapitate the Qaddafi regime*. And so on. I've read that there are fears Qaddafi might us mustard gas on the rebels. Wouldn't it be a hoot if somehow we found out that he didn't have any mustard gas, or other WMD's, but let the world think he did?

Conservatives are often accused of having a simple-minded view of the world, but I would hate to have to go through the mental contortions of having to adjust my political posture to support the left-wing alpha dog of the day. Here, for example, is Nancy Pelosi's obsequious message of support:

"I commend the president for his leadership and prudence on how our nation will proceed in regards to Libya and work in concert with European and Arab allies to address the crisis," she said in a written statement.

Lotta smart power in the air these days.

* oh, and Reagan gave an Oval Office address after he unleashed the military, ticked off the reasons why the attack was justified, and did not go jetting off to Rio immediately afterward. Also, when he signed off with "God bless America" you knew he meant it.

Taking A Leak: The Latest on Julian Asssssange

Like everyone else, I've been furious that Julian Asssssange has been able to travel the world releasing sensitive American documents with impunity. But, I've also grown to agree that many of his State Department leaks (the military leaks were contemptible, inasmuch as the Left was eagerly hoping to find - finally! - evidence of war crimes) were actually useful for providing a truer vision of American diplomacy and the world order than we do from official communiques or the American MSM:

Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserves a medal rather than prison. “He and WikiLeaks have done America a massive favour,” he writes, “by inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy.”

He’s right. And I suspect Rachman’s tongue is firmly planted in cheek when he says Assange should be rewarded. If the United States wanted all that information made public, the government hardly needed his help getting it out there.

Anyway, Rachman points out that many rightists in China and Russia, and leftists in Europe and Latin America, assume that whatever American foreign-policy officials say in public is a lie. I’d add that Arabs on both the “left” and the “right” do, too. Not all of them, surely, but perhaps a majority. I’ve met people in the Middle East who actually like parts of the American rationale for the war in Iraq — that the promotion of democracy in the Arab world might leech out its toxins — they just don’t believe the U.S. was actually serious.

And let’s not forget the most ridiculous theories of all. Surely somewhere in all these leaked files there’d be references to a war for oil in Iraq if the war was, in fact, about oil. Likewise, if 9/11 was an inside job — or a joint Mossad–al-Qaeda job — there should be at least some suggestive evidence in all those classified documents. If the U.S. government lied, rather than guessed wrong, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or if NATO invaded Afghanistan to install a pipeline, this information would have to be written down somewhere. The State and Defense department bureaucracies are far too vast to have no records of what they’re up to.

But, isn't it curious how the Obama Administration was "powerless" when Asssssange was publishing the "war crimes" (sheee-yeah right!) leaks, but is suddenly all gung-ho now that he has revealed the true state of affairs in the world's foreign ministries.

Asssssange, meanwhile, continues to grapple with the lame Swedish "rape" prosecution. In perhaps the unkindest cut, the entire 84-page report setting out the facts alleged by his accusers has been leaked and published in the NY Times:

Ms. A told the police that arrangements had been made for Mr. Assange to begin his visit to Sweden by staying at her Stockholm apartment for a few days while she was out of town. But the report said she returned Aug. 13, sooner than expected and, over dinner with Mr. Assange, agreed to allow him to stay in the apartment.

The details of their sexual encounter that night were redacted from the copy of the police report obtained by The Times. But The Guardian reported Saturday that Ms. A told the police that Mr. Assange had stroked her leg, then pulled off her clothes and snapped her necklace. The report quotes her as saying that she “tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again.”

According to The Guardian, Ms. A told the police that Mr. Assange pinned her arms and legs to stop her from reaching for a condom. Eventually one was used — but, she told her police interviewer, he appeared to have “done something” with it, resulting in its tearing.

Ms. W, 25, lives in the town of Enkoping, about 30 miles north of Stockholm. A few weeks before Mr. Assange arrived in Sweden, she saw him on television, according to the police interview in The Times’s version of the police report, and found him “interesting, brave and worthy of admiration.” When she discovered that he would be speaking in Stockholm, she contacted Ms. A to volunteer her help.

Her offer was not taken up, but she decided to attend the lecture anyway, where she met Ms. A in person. After the speech, she told the police, she sat next to Mr. Assange at a group dinner. He flirtatiously fed her bread and cheese, she said, and put his arm around her.

The group dispersed after dinner, leaving Mr. Assange and Ms. W alone, the police report said. They decided to go to a movie, where, the report said, the couple began caressing, then moved to a back row, where they continued. Two days later, Ms. W and Mr. Assange met again and walked around the city’s old town together, according to the police report. It said they decided to go by train to Enkoping after Mr. Assange balked at staying in a Stockholm hotel. Ms. W then bought his rail ticket, for about $16, after Mr. Assange told her that he did not have any money, and that he feared he could be traced if he used a credit card.

The unredacted police report obtained by The Guardian says that after arriving at her apartment the two had sex using a condom. In the report, she described waking up to find him having sex with her again, without a condom. Later that morning, Ms. W told the police, Mr. Assange “ordered her to get some water and orange juice for him.” She said “she didn’t like being ordered around in her own home but got it anyway.”

Jesus, this is lame. If this really is a CIA/Swedish black ops maneuver, we are a long way away from poison tipped umbrellas, or even kidnappings in Milan. If, as is more likely, this is a case of morning after regrets from a couple flakey strumpets, we are a long way away from "no means no" and "Take Back the Night" rallies.

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, and the other leakers in the military and State Department continue to languish in obscurity when in fact they are the ones who should be getting hounded by the government and the press. By rights, they should be getting the full Asssssange treatment, but instead languish in obscurity.

The Idiot's Progress: How Has Wiki-leaks Damaged US Interests?

I've joined with everyone else in railing against Julian Asssssange and Wiki-leaks. Michael Ledeen writes that many of the revelations from the State Dept. cables were actually "good" leaks, in that the true state of affairs in the world have been laid out in a way that benefits realists and to the detriment of diplomats and internationalists. Could it be that Asssssange is the rare useful idiot who is actually useful?

Even though some of the reported remarks of foreign leaders were undoubtedly given to Americans in order to deceive us or manipulate us, still and all I find the cables I’ve read so far to be very helpful to anyone trying to understand the world.

It will no doubt annoy the Israel haters no end to discover that Arab leaders seem to be even more concerned about Iran than the crowd in Jerusalem, for example. And it’s very helpful for everyone to see that the “Axis of Evil” was real–the strategic cooperation on missiles and nukes between Iran and North Korea (with Chinese complicity) was intense.

No surprise that the cables have been denounced as “mischief” by Ahmadinejad, since they document the fraudulent electoral “results” that gave him a second term, and present the ghastly details of Iran’s use of the Muslim version of the Red Cross for espionage and murder in Iraq. Indeed, if I wanted to invent evidence to document the case against Iran that I have been making for twenty years or more, I could not have done better than the State Department cables just released.

Two thoughts:

First, it would save the world a lot of time and trouble if most of this stuff were published, rather than classified.

Second, the leakers should be punished violently. It has to be possible for our leaders to talk privately, both among themselves and with foreigners. If it’s all going to be leaked, candor will vanish and we will be locked into a wilderness of mirrors.

As Ledeen says, some of the Wiki-leaks info was useful information...but the leakers should still be "violently punished." I think that's a good balance. The revelations Ledeen cites above are not "new" - they are the sort of things widely discussed in the blogosphere and even in the foreign press. But, they are not the sort of things discussed much either by our government or by our MSM, both of whom seem to live in fear of an American public roused into action by the thought of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons via North Korea and China, among other things.

Asssssange is wrong for taking upon himself the task of deciding what secrets America should have. But America is wrong for tolerating some of the secrets it keeps from itself.

Dumb Like A Fox: When Is Intellect A Disqualifier for Higher Office?

There are a lot of Republican Wise Men (and women) out there who reflexively disparage Sarah Palin's prospects as a presidential candidate because they consider her to be dumb. Leaving aside the fact that these folks almost never comment on the intellect of Democrats like the estimable Maxine Waters or Nancy Pelosi, Jeffrey Lord also reminds them of a recurring theme in American politics: whoever is at the top of the Republican presidential ticket is always too dumb to be president.

Barry Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a GOP presidential nomination in 1964, would have been lucky to be tagged as being merely too dumb to be president. He was also said to be, according to Time magazine, "psychologically unfit to be president," "emotionally unstable," "immature," "cowardly," "grossly psychotic," "paranoid," a "mass murderer," "amoral and immoral," a "chronic schizophrenic" and "dangerous lunatic." One psychiatrist breezily announced Goldwater had a "strong identification with the authoritarianism of Hitler, if not identification with Hitler himself."

...

Reagan, also pegged as a war-monger, was called an "extremist" at the beginning of his political career and an "amiable dunce" just after his election to the presidency. They were a mere blip in the cascade of insults about his intelligence hurled in Reagan's direction over almost a quarter century as a serious American politician. This particular man who was "too dumb to be president" won the Cold War without, as Margaret Thatcher said, firing a shot. Not to mention launching the American economy on a path to creating some 50 million jobs over the next three decades.

...

George Romney was a liberal Republican, a spectacularly successful business executive as the chairman of American Motors. On the strength of his dazzling business career he was elected Governor of Michigan, where he became a popular political figure with both voters and the national press.

Then a funny thing happened to George Romney. In 1967 he began running for the 1968 GOP presidential nomination. The polls showed he was the man-to-beat for the nomination, the one man in the Republican Party who could take on and beat LBJ, the same LBJ who beat Goldwater in 1964 by a landslide. Then, returning from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, Romney incautiously allowed as to how he had been "brain-washed" by the Johnson administration on Vietnam. And…. bam.

Within a media cycle the brilliant business executive and innovative Governor of Michigan had become -- you guessed it -- an idiot too dumb to be president. The dumb-as-a-post tag hung around his neck by a media concerned that old George was making just a little bit too much progress and that Tricky Dick, as they called Richard Nixon, would be easier to beat. Romney was finished. His last stint in government was not the White House but the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Nixon days the equivalent of political Siberia.

...

Perhaps the most instructive case of "too dumb to be president" is that of Gerald Ford. Elected to Congress in 1948, a man with a ready smile and outgoing personality, Ford had won rave reviews from the liberal press when he challenged the House Republican Old Guard following Goldwater's defeat, becoming Minority Leader. All the way through his House career, and on into his surprise accession-by-appointment to the vice presidency following the resignation of liberal bête noire Spiro Agnew, the moderate Republican Ford was pictured as good-ole smiling Jerry, the steady, smart House leader who had not an enemy in the world. He played golf with his old pal House Democratic leader Tip O'Neill. Just a nice, smart, swell guy, said the press.

Then a funny thing happened to good old Jerry Ford. In the wake of Watergate he became president with Nixon's resignation. Within a month he pardoned his predecessor, believing (correctly) that until the nation had rid itself of the Watergate/Nixon obsession he, Ford, would have an impossible time getting things done as president. Nothing dumb there. Ford had no sooner announced the pardon and disappeared from the television air waves than the re-positioning of Ford by the liberal media had begun. The man who had graduated from Yale Law School and been the epitome of openness and hard work was, in the blink of an eye, dumb as a post and a conniving liar to boot. Up from the mists came a Lyndon Johnson quote saying that Ford the college grid star had played too much football without a helmet. An on-camera tumble on the slippery steps leading down from the door of Air Force One led to the depiction of the most athletic president since Teddy Roosevelt as a bumbling fool. On a new program called Saturday Night Live, an unknown writer/actor named Chevy Chase rocketed to fame portraying Ford as dumbly prone to hilarious stumbles and dramatic falls over all manner of furniture. Chase anticipated the Tina Fey as empty-headed Sarah Palin routine by decades.

Much more at the link. The point, of course, is that whoever dares to run against Obama in 2012 will be declared to be too dumb to replace man who has added trillions of dollars of debt, has presided over trillion dollar deficits, passed a trillion dollar stimulus that failed, passed a health care "reform" law that was opposed by a majority of the country and which has thrown the health care system into chaos, has socialized the banking and auto industries, has failed to stop nuclear proliferation in Iran, has lost control of millions of pages of formerly top secret military and diplomatic documents, and so on. Yes, we don't want to get in the way of the Express Train of Intellect & Accomplishment!

We don't know which GOP presidential hopeful will be declared dumb if Palin doesn't run. But it's coming. Maybe Tim Pawlenty's (leaked) college transcripts will be filled with C's. Maybe Bobby Jindal will momentarily falter when asked about SB9353, the pending legislation related to the federalizing of the avocado crop. Maybe Chris Christie will be caught in an open mike referring to the teachers union as a bunch of broads. Maybe Mike Huckabee will fail to display an appropriate reverence for Charles Darwin. Maybe Mitt Romney will fall of a stage. If you've been following politics for any amount of time, you know the sort of "gaffes" that Republicans can be subject to, and which can be put on an endless media loop should it strike the MSM's fancy.

Meanwhile, Democrats are constantly doing dumb things while in office without much public comment, at least in the MSM which still regards itself as the nation's official debating forum. Just yesterday, the lame duck Senate passed a food safety bill that contained a tax provision that properly should have originated in the House bill, rather than the Senate's. (Not that I care, the food safety bill is yet another Big Government disaster). But still, we're talking about a bill that was drafted by human beings who had done this sort of work before. And this is the same crowd that splits their sides over Sarah Palin?

The fact is that it is a rare moment when any Republican of note is portrayed in the media as having a brain. For many casual viewers, the wonder of the Health Care Summit from earlier this year was how the GOP attendees put forward calm rational arguments, while it was the Democrats - exemplified by Louise Slaughter's crazy story about a constituent wearing her dead sister's dentures - who were emotional and dismissive of such concepts as math and reality. (as in, this bill is too expensive and will not accomplish its stated goals). But, some GOP back bencher puts on a prissy face about an ant-covered Jesus at the Smithsonian, and suddenly it's all-hands-on-deck.

When John McCain first nominated Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, there was a scramble to put any information about Palin on the air. CNBC ran an endless loop of an interview that Palin did with Maria Bartiromo on the topic of energy. Have you ever seen it? I'll bet not, and if you see it, you'll know why. Palin is very impressive, speaking passionately and knowledgeably on energy policy that would impress anyone not on the left side of American politics. Some of her verbal tics are present, of course - I remember chuckling at the time over her repeated use of the phrase "America's hungry markets"- but she goes toe to toe with the Queen of Wall Street, laying out the case for a free market, domestically based solution to America's energy problems - throwing in some criticism of the Bush Administration along the way. Here's an excerpt if you don't believe me:

Number of views on Youtube? 2,665. See what I mean? Her intellect has been hiding in plain sight, but no one can see it.

Sarah Palin isn't too dumb to be president. But, it may be that her own party is too dumb to recognize that they believe a chariacature created by their political enemies.

Asssssange: Another Doc Dump From Wiki-leaks

Sheesh. It's another massive document drop from Wiki-leaks, this time of 250,000 State Department cables.

Hundreds of thousands of State Department documents leaked Sunday revealed a hidden world of backstage international diplomacy, divulging candid comments from world leaders and detailing occasional U.S. pressure tactics aimed at hot spots in Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.

The classified diplomatic cables released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks and reported on by news organizations in the United States and Europe provided often unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from U.S. allies such as Germany and Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan.

The cables also contained new revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab world fears of Iran's growing nuclear program, American concerns about Pakistan's atomic arsenal and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression.

There are also American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats — going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.

None of the revelations is particularly explosive, but their publication could prove problematic for the officials concerned. And the massive release of material intended for diplomatic eyes only is sure to ruffle feathers in foreign capitals, a certainty that prompted U.S. diplomats to scramble in recent days to shore up relations with key allies in advance of the disclosures

Once again, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and The NY Times have the "scoop" in that they were able to coordinate with Wiki-leaks on the release of the material, and were able to view it all ahead of time. Is this even journalism? If it is, it's the sort of journalism practiced by the people who re-type press releases from non-profits about how pizza causes cancer.

The worst part of this isn't the revelation of even more "secrets," since none of the headline revelations are shockingly unexpected. Oh, they might be surprising to anyone who relies on the US mainstream media for all of their news, but if you are outside of that bubble, then you already knew or suspected that China was spying on Google, that North Korea has been helping Iran to arm itself with nukes, and that the Sunni Arab nations have been screaming for the US to attack Iran. Oh, and Libya's Col. Kaddafy is a loon. Say it ain't so.

No, the worst is knowing that some time in the next few days we will be treated to another smug, humorless press conference from "brave" "whistleblower" Julian Assange, the combination journalist/activist/conscience of the world who seems to be able to practice his peculiar craft with impunity. Spare me. The heroic whistleblower's press conference has become as much a part of the media environment as Amber Alerts and Gloria Allred mistresses. Asssssange is just another anti-American leftist with a media bullhorn from his fellow travelers in the international media. That he can apparently travel the world dispensing classified military and diplomatic files with impunity just underscores how impotent the American government and its intelligence community have become. We're going to be waiting a long time for the equivalent release of docs from China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

You can pretty much draw a straight line from Daniel Ellsberg to Philip Agee to the serial leakers of the Bush years all the way to Asssssange. All of these people committed crimes. So did the media organizations who enabled them. But since they cloaked themselves in a calculated nobility, and acted in a way approved by the Left, they were largely left alone. Of course, now that we have a leftist American government, we have reached the logical end: nothings gonna happen because people like Obama secretly approve of what Asssssange is doing, even as they "denounce" it for the benefit of all us bubbas who still care about national security. (as The Other McCain notes, we didn't have this sort of mass release of classified information until Obama took office).

And, it's remarkable how - with all of the blaring media headlines - there has been very little said about Bradley Manning, the source of at least some of these documents. Manning is presently sitting in solitary confinement. He is also known to have been motivated to betray the US because he was upset over the end of a gay relationship. Oh, and he was Welsh. So, yes, let's make sure we give him a security clearance! And, let's make sure that we not have too many MSM revelations of that information - some things really should stay secret, don't you know. Not only that, there seems to be very little curiosity about who might also be leaking this stuff (I doubt Manning had access to State Dept. material). While CIA and FBI moles are hunted and prosecuted, State Dept. vipers - whether Alger Hiss or Joe Wilson or that Cuban spy from last year - are often celebrated. Maybe the Times doesn't want to know, but does the Times/Wiki promise of confidentiality extend to all media outlets everywhere?

Pres. Obama and Sec. Clinton can bemoan this all they want. The fact is that they, their party, and their ideological allies have profited more from the work of the Asssssanges of the world than they have lost. The US simply has no secrets so long as these people are in office.

Flight of the Intellectuals: Does the GOP Need an Academic Elite?

This Professor Bainbridge post is a little old but still timely. It's an "apology" to Bruce Bartlett who was one of the most vehement Bush 43 critics on the Right. Such was Bartlett's disgust with Bush that he ended up voting for Obama and supporting a Keyensian economic model to pull the country out of its fiscal and economic mess. He was also an early proponent of the current "GOP/conservatism is filled with morons and I just can't stand it" school of thought. Bainbridge, a law professor who has written in the past about the need for a right-wing "academic elite," and how it's getting embarrassing to be a conservative declares that Bartlett was on to something:

Back when Bush 43 was President, I was a huge fan of Bruce Bartlett. I especially loved his book Impostor. But when Bartlett broke with the Republicans back in 2008, it seemed to me that he had gone "from being inside the tent pissing out to being outside the tent pissing in." It seemed like apostasy.

I still don't agree with some of Bartlett's current view on economics, which still strike me as "the sort of Keynesian economics he one would have found anathema." Likewise, I still don't agree with his decision to vote for Obama.

But he is clearly right that there has been "a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."

You can see the problem in the many hate-filled comments to my post on why the GOP needs an academic elite or my post on why it's becoming embarrassing to be a conservative.

On Bartlett: OK, I get that he is a Reaganite, and a leading conservative light for longer than I've been alive. But, if you are out there voting for Obama and supporting Obamanomics (or what you say is the right wing version), I think your conservative credentials going forward are highly suspect. Not trying to run a purge here, or anything, but supporting Democrats is anathema to conservatism. If you really can't stand the GOP, vote Libertarian.

As for Bainbridge's frankly snobby call for a conservative GOP elite (read his posts if you are into Palin insults, or think it's fair to link birthers to mainstream conservatism) ... does Bainbridge believe that politics is an intellectual pursuit? It certainly is not. That doesn't mean there's no place for intellect and policy knowledge, but there is certainly no need for a PhD or JD level of knowledge to be successful in politics.

Just look at who is put forward by the other side. Paul Krugman with Nobel Prize for Bush bashing? Jesse Jackson with his "creeping genocide?" Al Gore with his pompous lectures about destroying the planet (and his faux-professorial Assault on Reason)? Al Sharpton with his bullhorn? Sonia Sotomayor's "empathy" justice? Bill Clinton and his Oval Office blowjobs? What about Katrina vanden Heuvel? Ariana Huffington? Nancy Pelosi? Carol Browner? Jan Schakowsky? Harry Reid? And, what about the undeniably smart Chuck Schumer, who has to play second banana to the aforementioned Reid? Or, how about our "constitutional law professor" president who doesn't seem too concerned about whether the bills he signs into law are actually constitutional?

Next to all that, I think Sarah Palin's not having a "favorite" Supreme Court case stacks up nicely.

America XXX: Security Theater

Drudge has been highlighting stories about the brewing revolt against the TSA's full body scanners, which were pressed into service after last Christmas' abortive underwear bomber nearly brought down a Detroit bound airliner. A guy in San Diego was kicked out of the airport for refusing the proffered choice of either a full body scan, or a pat-down that included genital manipulation. (to get on an airplane??). He wrote about his experience here in great detail. There is also a video going around showing an outrageous TSA body-search of a three year old girl.

There is also a brewing showdown with TSA involving pilots and other flight crew members, who desire neither repeated exposure to the scanners' radiation, or the degrading experience of having your private parts touched, all so we are not accused of the dread racial profiling, even though we all can list the five characteristics common to virtually all plane-borne terrorists.

As you might expect, Free Will was on this issue last year, but since my analysis appeared on New Years Eve, it kind of got lost in the shuffle. Here's a refresher. I think it still holds up.

I think there is a bigger problem with whole body scans: they are completely degrading. Call me old fashioned, but the idea of some TSA time-puncher watching hundreds of Americans pass by everyday in a state of x-rayed undress is not something that society should consider acceptable. Is TSA going to be looking at naked images of nuns? Little kids? My wife?

Security experts swear that "if only we had been able to full body scan the Pants Bomber," he would have never gotten on that flight to Detroit. Oh, bulls***. Airport security is the second to last line of defense (passengers are the last line). Our expensive security services are supposed to be doing everything they can to make sure bombers can't get on the plane in the first place. How's that working out? Not well, as it seems a half-dozen security services knew about this guy, and yet he could still get a visa to enter the US carrying no luggage. Before subjecting civilians to full body scans, could we at least subject our intelligence community to brain scans to see if there's any activity upstairs?

We've spent the last eight years standing in long chaotic lines at the airport. We no longer can indulge in the old ritual of greeting our loved ones at the gate. We've been taking off our shoes. We've been taking off our belts. We've been emptying our pockets, and then elbowed by jerk screeners retrieving their gray plastic bins. And, of course, we've been pulled aside for extra screening, regardless of race, age, nationality, or travel history. Why? All so certain people, say, young Nigerian Muslims who travel to Yemen, won't be subject to "profiling." And, so no TSA employee ever has to use their brain.

If it really is our fate to have full body scans, can we at least subject only the 500,000-odd people who are on the government's various watch lists - which no one seems to consult, anyway - to that sort of screening? That would be a lot more rational than making all 300 million Americans go through an increasingly degrading process to no good effect.

I still can't believe that scans have been rolled out without the government - especially one that is run by the sort of ACLU types who are forever searching out new unreasonable searches and seizures - considering whether people would accept them as legitimate. At the very least, they should be limiting the full body scans to the people on the government's watch list, simply as a matter of efficiency and conserving resources, but TSA seems intent on potentially scanning everybody.

Deflation Studies

Via Instapundit, here's a look at the lurking specters of inflation and deflation. Central bankers are supposedly trading copies of an old book about the Weimar Inflation in an effort to understand the forces that can be set loose if/when highly indebted governments give in to the temptation and let the printing presses rip:

As it happens, another book from the 1970s entitled "When Money Dies: the Nightmare of The Weimar Hyper-Inflation" has just been reprinted. Written by former Tory MEP Adam Fergusson -- endorsed by Warren Buffett as a must-read -- it is a vivid account drawn from the diaries of those who lived through the turmoil in Germany, Austria, and Hungary as the empires were broken up.

Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

"In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended," she wrote.

Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to undertand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments.

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. "Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else," said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. "My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice," said one well-connected woman.

Not sure what anyone needs to "learn" about the social and economic effects of inflation. The history of Weimar Germany is as much a part of the cultural conversation as Kristallnacht or the League of Nations. In other words, well read people know what's going on. Americans over the age of 40 should have some memory of the Great Inflation, even if it has been wiped from the history books. Profligate governments love inflation, but the voters end up hating it and finally rising up and rebelling against the elites who fanned the inflation. Often you end up with a Hitler or - more likely - Juan Peron taking power; but sometimes you get lucky and the inflation leads to Ronald Reagan. Whichever way it works, the people who start the inflation are never in charge when it ends. That's the real risk of inflation for the elites. Even if they don't say this out loud, they know this deep down.

On the other hand, there's deflation, which central bankers profess to fear, yet often fails to arise. Japan's Lost Decade has been the most compelling deflationary episode in the modern era, one that has played out in real time in the second largest economy in the world with the eyes of journalists, policy makers, economists, and the business world upon them. And yet, no one knows what's going on:

The old bogeyman of deflation has re-emerged as a worry for the U.S. economy. Here's something else to fret about: After studying more than a decade of deflation in Japan, economists have slowly realized they have no idea how it works.

Deflation is usually associated with a Great Depression-like drop in demand. Consumer prices, incomes and asset prices fall. Interest rates go to zero, as low as they can go. As prices and incomes fall, the cost to borrowers of servicing debt does not, sucking life out of the economy and pushing prices down further. A bad situation, in short, gets worse.

In 1932, U.S. consumer prices fell 10% and between 1929 and 1933 they fell 27% in all.

But Japan's experience has looked nothing like this. Rather than being deep, destructive and concentrated in a few years, deflation has been a surprisingly mild, drawn-out affair. Consumer prices have been falling in Japan for 15 years, but never by more than 2% in any single year. Japan's deflation has been a morass, but not the destructive downward spiral many economists predicted. Why? And what does it portend for the rest of the world today?

Economists don't have good answers. "We don't know how deflation works," says Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who has been studying Japan since 1997. "We don't have a way of rationalizing steady, several-year flat deflation," he says.

How can this be? How can we not even have an idea how deflation works? How can we not know what's happening in Japan, which is hardly a mysterious Hermit Kingdom. Where's Paul Krugman? Where's (fill in famous progressive economist here)? Sounds like a good research topic!

The problem, I suspect, is not that we don't know; but that the elites don't want to know. After all, Japan hasn't just had 20 years of deflation. The deflation began with the bursting of a housing bubble exacerbated by (1) a government which propped up its financial sector, rather than allow insolvent banks to fail and (2) engaged in an epic bout of stimulus spending that left Japan with towering debts. Sound familiar? And none of it has worked. At all. In fact, the only things that worked were the Koizumi Reforms, which sought to privatize government entities like Japan Post, among other things. Privatization of government services worked?? Don't want to say that out loud!

And given Japan's experience, isn't deflation preferable to inflation? Japan is still, after all of its troubles, the second largest economy in the world. Japan has remained a wealthy, productive society. Its heavy industries have remained prosperous and innovative (indeed some have obtained a real global reach). They're building robots, for God's sake! Most important, Japan has not suffered the economic and social upheaval that accompanies inflation. This is not to say that Japan's deflation has been a picnic. The Japanese equivalents to Generation X have had their prospects stunted to help "pay" for the profligacy of earlier decades. Jobs are not as permanent or as plentiful as they once were. But, this is not as troubling as a bout of inflation destroying the yen. At least, it shouldn't be.

I'm not going to pretend to understand what monetary policy is better than the other. But it sure is curious that inflation seems to be the default preference for the elites, and the only restraint is their knowledge that the beginning of major inflation would also be the end for them.