In war, when leaders screw up, men die.

It’s a simple equation really. The number of soldiers who die needlessly can be directly correlated to the inverse proportion of bureaucrats and politicians who are responsible for making sure they have everything they need to do the job.

In this case of Marines speaking out about their experiences in Iraq, what becomes frighteningly clear is that from the top down – including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his boss, the President of the United States – our civilian leadership has failed on a variety of levels to insure that the men and women they send to Iraq are given everything they need to not only do the job, but make it home in one piece to their loving families.

And while I generally try to take whatever I read in the New York Times with a grain of salt, in this case there are too many Marines willing to go on the record to ignore. There are few if any “unnamed sources.” Marines quoted in the linked article give their names and ranks. The criticism they give is professional, and to the point.

What they describe is what Marines call a “clusterf**k.”

On the rare occasions I’ve ventured to criticize the Administration’s war effort, it’s been in the area of post-invasion planning. The more we learn about the situation on the ground in the aftermath of large scale combat operations, the more we see that the Pentagon, simply put, “screwed the pooch” in just about every way imaginable.

And what also becomes clear is that despite the best efforts of Secretary Rumsfeld, the Pentagon is an ossified, backward, pitiful giant that moves at a pace that makes snails seem fleet of foot and appears to care more for it outmoded, antiquated procedures than it does about protecting their most precious resource – the men and women we ask to go into harms way and protect us.

Two years after the end of combat operations, we’re still asking soldiers and Marines to do their duty in Iraq with inferior equipment. When our warriors have to scavenge scrap metal from junkyards in order to protect themselves, something is seriously wrong.

I can understand the shortage of armored Humvees at the outset of the occupation. But to have two years go by with the problem unresolved is just plain criminal:

Company E’s experiences still resonate today both in Iraq, where two more marines were killed last week in Ramadi by the continuing insurgency, and in Washington, where Congress is still struggling to solve the Humvee problem. Just on Thursday, the Senate voted to spend an extra $213 million to buy more fully armored Humvee. The Army’s procurement system, which also supplies the Marines, has come under fierce criticism for under performing in the war, and to this day it has only one small contractor in Ohio armoring new Humvee.

Marine Corps officials disclosed last month in Congressional hearings that they were now going their own way and had undertaken a crash program to equip all of their more than 2,800 Humvee in Iraq with stronger armor. The effort went into production in November and is to be completed at the end of this year.

“...and to this day it has only one small contractor in Ohio armoring new Humvee.” (???)

Are you trying to tell me that out of the $420 billion we’re spending on the defense of the United States of America that we can only find one small company in Ohio to armor our Humvees two years after the occupation began?

This is preposterous.

Also two years after the occupation began “Marine Corps officials disclosed last month in Congressional hearings that they were now going their own way and had undertaken a crash program to equip all of their more than 2,800 Humvees in Iraq with stronger armor.”

LAST MONTH! What in God’s name have you been doing for the last two years while the men you’re responsible for protecting have been getting blown to bits?

If I had family in Iraq I’d be on my way to Washington right now. I’d camp myself in front of Rummy’s office and demand that he see me. And when I got in there, (and I have no doubt that he would see me, the Secretary proving time and again that he does care about the men under his command) I’d let him have it with both barrels, telling him exactly what I thought of the job he and the brass hats sitting on their overly ample asses are doing.

There is some historical context to how military organizations have always viewed the troops. Until the Crimean war and Florence Nightingale, the value of an individual soldier was judged by what he could do for that army on the battlefield. If he got sick or wounded, armies pretty much let the poor devil fend for himself. Army doctors were notorious for incompetence. And even if dedicated, the state of medical knowledge until recently made a trip to the infirmary a soldiers worst nightmare. Florence Nightingale and later, Clara Barton, changed that by demanding that the soldiers get decent care at army medical facilities. Their efforts paved the way for the ultra-modern, first class military trauma units of today.

This negligent attitude carried over into how armies have supplied the troops as well. In Normandy, when it became clear that the half tracks we were using were poorly armored (.50 caliber rounds could easily penetrate its thin skin), the army was terribly slow in solving the problem. And in an eerie echo of Iraq, our men scrounged and scavenged pieces of metal to reinforce the half track’s armor for more protection. (HT: Stephen Ambrose)

The military didn’t solve the problem then for the same reason they’re not solving it today. It’s one thing for Rumsfeld and top brass to fire off memos demanding that the job get done. It’s quite another to light a fire under the slower than molasses procurement bureaucrats whose god is procedure and who worship at the Church of Regulations.

The problem is not easily solved. Those procedures and regulations are in place to prevent corruption and graft. They generally do a good job of doing that. But the impediments they place in the way of quick action costs lives. Only a massive overhaul of the Pentagon procurement system – something that’s been promised since the early 1980’s – would solve the problem. But for all the internal studies and Congressional hearings held on the subject, nothing concrete has changed.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld promised to reform the military when he took office in 2001. His efforts have been generally well intentioned and well received. But an organization with a budget exceeding $400 billion and nearly three quarters of a million employees cannot be “reformed” in any real sense. Rummy can move pegs on the map board and fiddle with numbers but in the end, he’s left with unarmored Humvees two years after the Iraq occupation began. And that fact is killing our soldiers.

“It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief: enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best.” (E.R. Bulwer-Lytton

Funny. I always thought that the initials “BBC” stood for British Broadcasting Company. As revealed in this story however, it seems that I was mistaken. The most recognized broadcasting initials on the planet actually stand for “Bloviating, Biased Cads:”

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

The Tories have made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by producers, were caught at a party event in the North West last week. Guy Black, the party’s head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were “distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party”.

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

This is both horrifying and extremely satisfying – kind of like the reaction I get when watching Michael Meyers slice and dice deserving teenagers in the “Halloween” movies. Have you noticed that Mickey always seems to target kids who were in the clique in high school that you hated with a passion? The good looking, smarmy, image-obsessed lightweights who always seemed to be the first to get laid and always seemed to have money to go to the best concerts, wear the best clothes, and drive the best cars? To watch the football star get it was always a cathartic moment for me, an almost orgasmic gratification in watching some of my worst nemeses scream in anguish as the knife plunges into their well built, muscular bodies over and over…

But I digress.

It’s horrifying, of course, because the BBC didn’t have the good sense to use different hecklers at different events and because the camera crew was way too obvious when filming the stunt:

Tory officials became suspicious at the meeting in Horwich, near Bolton, last Wednesday, when they saw BBC camera crew focusing on the hecklers rather than Mr Howard. They twice challenged the two men and a woman involved, and discovered they had been equipped with radio microphones.

Mr Black said that they described themselves as “shoppers”. In fact, they were under direction from a BBC team making a programme called The History of Heckling for the BBC3 channel. The programme, whose producer is Paul Woolwich, is in the process of being edited.

For God’s sake guys! If you’re going to pull a political dirty trick at least have the smarts to carry it out with a little bit of subterfuge. Next time, use two camera crews. That way you can have one crew on the politician you’re trying to smear and the other one on your brave, heroic citizens speaking truth to power.

And that explanation! You’ve got to come up with something better than this:

Last night a BBC spokesman said: “This is a completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling. The programme observes hecklers at other parties’ campaign meetings and not just the Conservatives. The hecklers were not under the direction of the BBC and their activities did not disrupt the meeting in any way. The incident at the Michael Howard meeting only plays a small part in the overall programme. However, we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.”

The spokesman was unable to provide details of any other campaign meetings attended by the BBC3 crew. He said that the hecklers had not been paid a fee, but could not say whether they had received expenses.

The “art” of political heckling? Only a clueless moonbat would think that shouting down the opposition is artistic expression. That explanation just won’t fly. And please, no humor is necessary in your official statements. Saying “we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.” is an unnecessary interjection of levity. People have to believe that you’re serious about the inquiry into this deliberate smear. You and I know that when you use the words “in due course” you mean “after the election when our explanation won’t matter” which is actually pretty rich! But it may be too subtle for most Brits whose sense of humor tends more toward the broad strokes of Benny Hill or Monty Python.

Finally, please don’t make the same mistake that Dan Rather and CBS made here when they were caught trying to smear the President with fake documents. The folks at Black Rock caved in to the pressure way too quickly. If they had stuck it out a few more weeks, who knows what might have happened? They could have achieved their goal of electing John Kerry. At the very least, they could have saved themselves the time and trouble of going through the charade of an official “investigation.” Sure they would have been taking a chance that the only people who would’ve been watching CBS News after a few weeks would be either inmates in mental institutions and other folks unable to switch the channel on their TV away from CBS or people who only get one channel on their TV anyway.. As it is, that’s just about their entire audience right now so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered.

I would suggest the next time you want to pull something as outrageously clever and vindictive as this, you contact our own Democratic party. Or maybe some unreconstructed communists.

Pretty much the same thing, come to think of it…

Cross-Posted at Blogger News Network

The report clearing General Sanchez and other top brass of responsibility in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. That is, unless you believe Major Generals have the time and inclination to participate in fraternity style pranks and hazing:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who became the senior commander in Iraq in June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, had been faulted in earlier investigations for leadership lapses that may have contributed to prisoner abuse. He is the highest ranking officer to face official allegations of leadership failures in Iraq, but he has not been accused of criminal violations.

After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green’s probe.

Green reached the same conclusion in the cases of two generals and a colonel who worked for Sanchez

Only the most willfully self deluded among us believed the hysterical denunciations and wild charges being made by the President’s opponents in politics and the media. Did you really believe these cretins care one whit about the poor Iraqi terrorists and criminals who were the victims of juvenile hazing rituals and demeaning sexual game playing? Or is it more likely that the President, riding a wave of popular support for his strong leadership in the war on terror, needed to be smeared with wild headlines and false charges of complicity in order to defeat his reelection bid?

The “torture as national policy meme” was bogus from the start. Here’s a summary of nearly two years of inquiry by both Army and civilian investigators:

Barring new evidence, the inquiry, by the Army’s inspector general, effectively closes the Army’s book on whether the highest-ranking officers in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal should be held accountable for command failings described in past reviews.

Only one of the top five officers, whose roles the Senate Armed Services Committee had asked the Army to review, has received any punishment. That officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer who commanded the military police unit at the Abu Ghraib prison, was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand. She has repeatedly said she was made the scapegoat for the failures of superiors.

The findings, which provoked outrage from some civil rights groups and Democratic aides, came nearly a year after shocking photographs of American military police officers stacking naked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid and of other abuses first telecast nationally. Shortly afterward, an internal Army report chronicled the virtual collapse of the command structure at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad, in the fall of 2003.

So far, only a small number of soldiers, mostly from the enlisted ranks, have faced courts-martial for their actions at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Dozens of others have faced administrative discipline for abusing captives at other detention sites and battlefield interrogation stations across Iraq.

The facts are clear. Now the only line of attack left to the President’s political foes is the spurious charge of “whitewash:”

But some Democratic aides on Capitol Hill, civil rights groups and lawyers for lower-ranking soldiers who have been disciplined voiced dismay on Friday at the findings, which they said would fuel the perception that the Army was trying to protect its senior leaders at the expense of junior officers and enlisted soldiers.

Democratic aides, who along with their Republican counterparts were briefed this week on the Army inquiry’s findings, said Friday that they disagreed with the conclusions and would review the full investigation before determining their next step.

In other words, the Democratic aides need to figure out what else they can do to try and keep the “scandal” alive in the press and in front of the public. Never mind that they’re undermining the efforts of the military to win in Iraq. Never mind that every time the New York Times publishes another story from some Iraqi who says he was beaten or abused by those sex-crazed American female GI’s that it inflames the “Arab street” against what we’re trying to accomplish in that part of the world. These things don’t matter when placed against their overarching goal of politically damaging the President.

Great bunch of Americans, what?

The pitifully few cases of actual torture have been proven to be due to the employment of psychopaths and sadists in both the army and intelligence services; a black mark on those institutions but in no way reflective of the heroic efforts of the overwhelming majority of professional interrogators who’ve done a tremendous job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

And even though this investigation exonerates the government of any kind of involvement in “creating the climate” in which either torture or the prankish, unprofessional behavior at Abu Gharaib could be carried out, I personally am sick of the whole damn story and just wish we could move on to better things.

You can crawl back home
Say you were wrong
Stand out in the yard
And cry all night long
Go ahead and water the lawn
My give a damn’s busted

(chorus)
I really wanna care
I wanna feel something
Let me dig a little deeper
No, sorry…nothing

(Jo Dee Messina)

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Religious conservatives are often accused of conducting a war on rationalism. Their opposition to the teaching of evolution, abortion and stem cell research, as well as a belief in the mystical are cited as evidence that the religious right is a danger to core secular beliefs of the rest of us; that somehow, by politicizing issues that the secularists have politicized for years, their advocacy represents a danger to democracy in America.

Hogwash.

In fact, Christian beliefs are completely compatible with rationalism. And while many of us may look in askance at some of the fundamentalist Christian more problematic positions on science and the law, nevertheless there is no inherent conflict between a belief in God and democracy. One look at our founding documents can tell you that. They were written by men who, at bottom, believed they were being guided by the invisible hand of God, that the creator actually willed American democracy into existence. These were not radical Christians or wild-eyed religious reformers. They simply accepted what to them was self-evident; God favored America and by extension, favored the formation of the republic.

There is no more implacable enemy of rational thought than the politically correct left. For more than 30 years, they have waged a guerrilla war against the culture, against religious observance, against free speech, and against common sense itself all in the name of a nebulous, ill defined concept that’s come to be called “multi-culturalism” – a term that has almost as many definitions as it has adherents.

For some, multi-culturalism is “a movement that insists that American society has never been white, but always in fact multiracial and diverse.” This movement seeks to preserve distinctly different ethnic, racial, or cultural communities without melting them into a common culture. Here the common culture is seen as white supremacy, a culture of bigotry and discrimination, and the remedy as an emphasis on the separate characteristics and virtues of particular cultural groups. This would be the “anti-melting pot” definition.

Then there are the nut cases, the proselytizers, the true believers who see multiculturalism as a club to beat white America over the head with:

Multicultural education is a progressive approach for transforming education that holistically critiques and addresses current shortcomings, failings, and discriminatory practices in education. It is grounded in ideals of social justice, education equity, and a dedication to facilitating educational experiences in which all students reach their full potential as learners and as socially aware and active beings, locally, nationally, and globally. Multicultural education acknowledges that schools are essential to laying the foundation for the transformation of society and the elimination of oppression and injustice.

The underlying goal of multicultural education is to affect social change.

This attack on tradition and history is what the Christian right is defending. Using “racism and oppression” as an excuse, the politically correct left has sought to undermine the foundations of American society in order to remake it in its own warped, irrational image.

The latest attack on sanity from this crew is not to be believed. Students at Everitt Middle School near Denver were saying the morning pledge of allegiance:

The students in Vincent Pulciani’s seventh-grade class were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance this week when they heard the voice over the intercom say something they’d never heard before, at least not during the Pledge.

Instead of “one nation, under God,” the voice said, “one nation, under your belief system.” The bewildered students at Everitt Middle School in Wheat Ridge never even got to “indivisible,” according to Vincent’s mother, Christina Pulciani-Johnson.

The politically correct pledge was given by a guidance counselor, Margo Lucero, who was filling in for the principal, who normally led the morning ritual. Here’s her explanation for this inanity:

Mr. Kaufman said Miss Lucero had been spurred by the date, April 20, the sixth anniversary of the Columbine High School slayings. Both Columbine and Everitt are within the Jefferson County school district.

“The day was the sixth anniversary of Columbine, and she felt she should be all-inclusive, so she replaced the word ‘God,’” he said.

This is multiculturalism run amok. It isn’t enough that these philistines have tried for decades to call into question everything that American society and culture rests upon. That their efforts to denigrate our history, belittle our heroes, explode our most cherished myths, and rewrite the circumstances that led to our founding have done enormous damage to our spiritual underpinnings is self evident. The question is what can be done about it and more specifically, who is standing up to these anti-intellectual bullies?

The answer is not the libertarian Republicans who, while decrying these outrages, dither over what’s to be done like little old ladies at a quilting bee trying to decide whether to have crumpets or cake with their tea. Nor is much opposition to be found on the sane left who seem perfectly willing to use the multiculturalists as a club to beat their political opponents over the head.

The only effective opposition to these tyrants can be found on the religious right. And if it seems at times that the fundamentalist’s rhetoric is too apocalyptic for the timid libertarians who mean well but always appear to get their nose out of joint looking down on people of faith, I have a suggestion for my non-religious conservative and libertarian friends.

After you’re finished railing against the Republican party being taken over by the Christian right and bemoaning the influence of fundamentalists on public policy, please get off your high horse, stop your nauseating condescension toward these people of faith and join them in trying to save our culture from the intellectual Huns who are ravaging the foundations of American society right under your noses.

As it stands now, you’re part of the problem. Time to help define the solution.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin also blogs the story and reprints a hilarious “PC Pledge””

I pledge [allegiance] some occasional recognition
to the [Flag] symbols of oppression

of [America] the land mass referred to by oppressive European conquistadors as “America”

Go read the rest.

New blog: Yippee-Ki-Yay finds the new pledge “distracting. (Heh)

This is Jacko. He is a detector dog for U.S. Customs. He has
saved 179 concealed humans, found 32,000 pounds of pot,
800 pounds of coke, 10 pounds of heroin and $444,000
of dirty currency. Good dog.

(Hat Tip: Lucianne)

In what has to be one of the most astonishing betrayals of this young century, France has given a green light to mainland China to invade and conquer the tiny island nation of Taiwan:

During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo.

At the outset of a three-day visit to China, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he supported Beijing’s “anti-secession” law on Taiwan, and vowed to keep pushing for an end to an EU arms embargo that could open the door for Paris to sell weapons to the Asian giant.

Raffarin also signed or finalized major business deals with Beijing valued at around $3.2 billion (2.4 billion euros).

The so-called “anti secession law” passed by China last month was widely considered by analysts to be an indication that the Chicoms were finally ready to get serious about solving their “Taiwain problem.”

This scenario is eerily reminiscent of the shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia by England and France in 1938. Under another weasely Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, the French helped Adolph Hitler solve his “Czech problem” by allowing the Nazi brute to occupy the Sudetenland in direct violation of solemn agreements signed with the Czechoslovakian state to guarantee its territorial integrity. At a conference in Munich attended by England, France, Germany, and Italy, Nazi Foreign Minister Johann Ribbentropp mercilessly browbeat, cajoled, and threatened both England and France if they didn’t allow the immedate occupation of Czech territory. (A representative of the Czech government was not allowed to attend the conference. He was forced to wait in another room as the fate of his tiny nation was decided by others.)

Captured documents after the war show the true duplicity of the French who were more concerned with mollifying any domestic critics than in living up to its obligations under its mutual defense pact with the Czechs. The resulting occupation by Hitler of the entire country of Czechoslovakia proved strategically disasterous for France as it took the tough, well-trained Czech army off the board and weakened the western alliance against Hitler when war broke out a year later.

And now, once again, the French are cynically giving the go-ahead for a very large nation to invade a much smaller one.

The reasons for this indefensible action by the Chirac government are twofold; money and more money:

At the same time, he vowed that his government would continue to push for the lifting of what he called the “anachronistic” and “discriminatory” arms embargo against China. The embargo contradicts the current “strategic partnership” between the EU and China, he added.

During his visit to Beijing on Thursday, China Eastern Airlines and Shenzhen Airlines signed a deal with the European consortium Airbus to buy a total of 10 A319/A320 planes. And China Southern completed an agreement on its purchase of five A380 super jumbos.

The deals were signed between the carriers and the European consortium’s vice-president, Philippe Delmas, who is in China accompanying Raffarin on his visit

Clearly the French are eager to resume selling arms to whoever ponies up the francs. And given the large stake the Chirac government has in the European consortium that runs the airplane manufacturer Airbus, it’s not surprising that the French want to get in on the exploding Chinese air travel market.

If the French get their way, when the United States rushes to the defense of Taiwan following a Chicom invasion, we may be fighting against a host of French weapons systems including sophisticated Mirage jet fighters and technologically advanced Exocet anti-ship missiles.

Once again, the French have proven that in their quest to find a “counterweight” to American military power, they’re willing to sacrifice just about anything – including another country – to achieve their strategic goals.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

UPDATE:

I see where Wizbang also resurrects the ghost of World War II, referring to another French lickspittle Marshall Petain, who led the collaborationist government during the war.

Daimnation! calls France “The most amoral democracy on earth” and believes they’re cozying up to China partly out of “pure spite.”

This is one of those “grown up countries” Kofi Anan was talking about when the Oil for Food scandal first broke.

And Blogs for Bush weighs in:

So, France is in favor of arming one of the most tyrannical regimes on Earth, and has no problem if China decides that it has to invade Taiwan to prevent the “secession” of an island outside of Chinese rule for 56 years…ok, liberals, tell us again about how we shouldn’t make the French mad because they have a greater wisdom in the world than our cowboy President…

Why is it that France brings out the best rhetoric on the conservative side of the blogosphere?

Marvin is in the House!

HOW KARL ROVE ELECTED THE POPE (By Marvin Moonbat)

You probably heard that the Catholic people elected a new Pope, which is okay. I mean I’m not anti-Catholic or anything even though I thought the last guy they had in there was kind of a wacko. You don’t think so? Let me explain.

First of all, anyone who thinks there’s a God is sort of a loon anyway. But that’s just my opinion. I’m not anti-religious; being a tolerant, broad minded progressive its against my nature to belittle people for their beliefs. But anyone who thinks that they’re God’s representative on earth just isn’t playing with a full deck. If God wanted a representative here on earth, it certainly wouldn’t be someone from Poland and it definitely wouldn’t be a conservative. Not that I’m anti-Polish either, it being against my nature to belittle someone for their ethnic background. But, c’mon. Let’s get real. A Pole?. Don’t get me wrong. My mother had a Polish cleaning lady and she was great, except she couldn’t speak English very well. This led her to do some weird stuff like instead of cleaning the dishes, she’d clean the fish tank. It drove my mother nuts. We finally had to let her go because, being Polish we were sure she was stealing the silverware.

So this Polish conservative Pope not only was anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-progressive in every way possible, he was also good buddies with our now dead but not lamented ex-President Reagan. Thought he was a cool guy and helped bring down the progressive socialist governments in eastern Europe. I ask you, how is socialism ever going to get a foothold in this country if we don’t support the governments that reflect our core values of progressive enlightened, leadership. Yes, they could have had elections and all that democracy crap. But they had the right idea with a few intelligent people telling the unintelligent what was best for them. This is the beating heart of progressive thought; we know what’s best so shut up and get back to work.

Anyway, this John Paul guy dies and the media has wall to wall coverage of this Catholic stuff. That’s all that was on for about a week. What about equal time for the other religions? What about the Muslim response? They could have given Osama bin Laden a half hour to rebut all that Catholic crap. That would only be fair, ya know. Or, they could have had some coverage of some other non-Catholic stuff like that Church out in New Mexico that wants to import hallucinogenic tea for their religious ceremonies. Maybe I’ll have to look into joining that Church. Sounds like they have the right idea about “seeing God.”

So I was talking about this with my friend Howie and he came up with this theory that makes perfect sense to me. He proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Karl Rove was the mover and shaker behind the scenes that got this Pope Benedict the 16th guy elected.

The first piece of evidence is a no-brainer. The new Pope is German, right? Well, it turns out when he was a kid he was in the Hitler Youth. He’s a Nazi! And since everyone knows that Rove is a Nazi, it just makes sense to connect the dots. They probably met at a some secret Nazi party meeting that no one knows anything about. At least that’s Howie’s hypothesis.

Second, there’s the smoke issue. I’m not really up on these things but I guess after every vote all the Cardinals took, if it didn’t result in a new Pope being elected, they’d burn damp straw with the ballots so that black smoke would rise from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. The day the Pope was elected, a lot of media people were reporting that, at first, they saw black smoke coming from that chimney. Then after a while, it turned white. Sound familiar? Yes, you guessed it. That’s exactly like the exit polls from last November’s Presidential election! At first it looked like John Kerry would win in a landslide and then, suddenly we had Ohio, Florida, and a lot of other states magically switching from Kerry to Bush. Only Karl Rove could manipulate the straw so that it would burn white.

Howie thinks that once that happened, the Cardinals panicked and decided they had to pick someone, so why not the #2 guy in the whole Vatican? They figured he’s old so he’ll probably die soon and then they can pick another Pope, a progressive Pope – one that the people want. This makes perfectly good sense to me since, when you think about it, what this Pope is saying is that being a Catholic is hard. What the people want is a Pope who’ll make things easier. So obviously, a progressive Pope would be the people’s choice.

Finally, Rove probably infiltrated the gathering of Cardinals to swing the vote his way. How do we know this? Well, we know how secret this White House is. By that I mean, when was the last time you heard the White House tell us anything about our plans to capture Osama or how we’re going to respond if China invades Taiwan or any other military secret that the people have a right to know? Well, the guys at the White House have nothing on these guys in the red robes in the Vatican. They obviously learned how to keep secrets from Rove. Howie thinks that Rove may have even disguised himself in a Cardinal outfit and gone there himself. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Well, that’s it for today. Chloe and I are going to a demonstration tomorrow in support of free speech. We’re going to a meeting of the College Republicans group so we can shout them down. It should be fun.

My excellent hosting company, Blogs About Hosting, had a glitch in the server and inadvertently took the site off line.

Apologies to all 47 of you who tried to visit but couldn’t.

One may think that politics and religion are two mutually exclusive activities or that religious people are somehow above the grubby, mundane maneuverings usually associated with the very earthly practice of the political arts.

At least when it comes to the College of Cardinals, nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, the College is made up the same kinds of people we find in leadership positions in western politics, albeit men with a great deal more humility (in most cases) and good deal less pomposity. But the fact is the heirarchy of the church has been engaged in this kind of political maneuvering for more than 1600 years, since the at least the First Council of Nicaea. In short, the Catholic church has a long (sometimes dishonorable) history of its heirarchy maneuvering for power.

It was a dirtier proposition when being in the Church heirarchy meant wealth, secular power, and status worthy of some Kings. Until the rise of secular democracies, Catholic prelates enjoyed privileges and advantages that surpassed all but the richest citizens and competition for “the red hat” was fierce. At that time, church politics was much more of a contact sport with candidates using tactics that would have made Boss Tweed or Mayor Daly proud.

That’s not the case today. The Church has accepted its diminished secular role and now seeks more of a pastoral function for its Bishops. This changed status hasn’t dimmed the fires of ambition that burns in many cardinals who seek to wear the white robes and sit in the chair of St. Peter. In the modern world where the media is the message, the jostling for power is carried out knowing that the glare of television will bring the decision making process – no matter how secret – into the light of day.

The recent conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI is a fascinating example of the politics of perception. According to this article in the International Herald Tribune, the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger was a result of both the future Pope’s careful lobbying as well as the conclave bowing to the inevitable:

Joseph Ratzinger of Germany became Pope Benedict XVI in rapid fashion, rushing to election by a scant four votes over less than 24 hours in conclave. How it happened began to emerge Wednesday once the cardinals who chose him left the secret gathering and were no longer bound by a gag order imposed by Ratzinger the week before it started

Ratzinger was widely believed to be a leading vote-getter going in, but was thought by some Vatican analysts and prelates to have only a modest chance of election. His age, 78, and reputation for divisiveness were blamed. Most thought he would swing his votes to a fellow conservative.

But the cardinals defied those expectations.

In picking Ratzinger, they were clearly drawn to his defense of traditional Roman Catholic doctrine in the face of what he called the “dictatorship of relativism,” or shifting winds of belief in a secular society, during the Mass that opened the conclave on Monday.

His choice also indicated that they believed shoring up the fundamentals of the faith was a main priority, despite extensive discussion about the needs of the church in Latin America and elsewhere outside Europe.

But it was also his dignified celebration of John Paul’s funeral Mass on April 8; his guiding hand in the cardinals’ daily meetings during the interregnum, or period between popes; and the preconclave Mass that helped to convince the cardinals. Ratzinger fulfilled those roles by virtue of his position as dean of the college.

Spending more than 20 years at the top of the Vatican heirarchy, the new Pope was in an excellent position to orchestrate the series of events that led to his election. In addition, prior to the death of John Paul II, it seems pretty clear that then Cardinal Ratzinger had been busy lining up conservative supporters both in the Vatican and elsewhere:

Most agreed that Ratzinger entered the conclave as the man with the most support – perhaps 30 to 50 votes out of the necessary two-thirds, or 77. During the first vote Monday night, it must have become clear that his position was strong enough to be a viable candidacy. Two ballots on Tuesday morning sealed the deal, and he was elected on the fourth.

Going into the conclave, he had active help in mustering votes from powerful cardinals of the Roman Curia in charge of major departments, including Darío Castrillón Hoyos, Alfonso López Trujillo and Julián Herranz, a member of Opus Dei. Giovanni Battista Re, Crescenzio Sepe and Angelo Sodano were also mentioned as Ratzinger backers, perhaps in the second round.

The tipping point came, Politi wrote, when two crucial Italians – Camillo Ruini, John Paul’s longtime vicar of Rome, and Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice who had often been mentioned as a candidate – threw their support to Cardinal Ratzinger. Scola had worked in Ratzinger’s congregation.

The prospect of a drawn-out battle most likely scared off the opposition, and their leader, Carlo Maria Martini, sent his votes to Ratzinger.

Were there any other candidates? As I speculated here the Italian contingent of Cardinals did indeed coalesce around one candidate, Cardinal Martini, but it must have become apparent by the weekend that history would pass him by:

Cardinal Martini may have had an inkling of what was ahead. On the weekend before the conclave, a priest who had seen him said he appeared to be distressed.

As in secular politics, there are winners and losers.

Pope Benedict’s political skills will be put to the test early and often as he seeks to unite a divided church. Many more moderate and liberal elements will question his call to resist the “dictatorship of relativism” because of his strict formulation of canon law. Others will seek to wrest more control from the centralized power structure of the Vatican and attempt to act with more independence. And then there are already questions about the 77 year old Pontiff’s health which could lead to a mindset among some that if they can delay implementing church directives long enough, a new Pope could be elected more to their liking.

These are indeed political calculations. And the men who make them, although guided as they believe by the holy spirit, nevertheless do not operate in a vacuum. The real world decisions they make have consequences both for the Church and for the almost billion adherents to the Catholic faith who look to their bishops for leadership and guidance in an ever more secular and changing world.

UPDATE

Jay Tea at Wizbang has some excellent thoughts on the inevitability of Benedict’s elevation:

1) Ratzinger was, for about twenty years, the closest advisor, assistant, and confidante of Pope John Paul II, to the point of some calling him John Paul’s “alter ego.”

3) Even before the Conclave, nearly every observer had him pegged as the likely winner, and I don’t recall any other Cardinal even being named as a possible rival.

He also has a look at the chances that the new pope will initiate drastic changes (not likely!).

How soon they forget.

Forgotten are the tens of thousands of ordinary citizens taken away never to be heard from again. Forgotten are the millions – no one will ever know how many – of peasants who perished in one of the 20th century’s most dastardly deeds; the deliberate starvation of the Kulaks:

But in November of 1928 the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivization. It was called a move against “rural capitalism”. Grain requisitioning intensified and peasants were forced to join collective farms. Anyone opposing collectivization was labeled a kulak. The policy of “liquidation of kulaks as a class,” formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant executions, and deportation to concentration camps. The policy targeted the most productive elements of Russian agriculture.

Contrary to official propaganda, peasants resisted collectivization and preferred to consume or destroy everything they had before joining. Food production dropped drastically; at least 4 million died in the resulting famine (mostly in Ukraine). But Stalin succeeded; in 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. Productivity, however, was very low. The existence of famine was denied and those who talked about it were treated as counterrevolutionary elements.

Forgotten are the numerous purges of the party, the military, the arts, and all segments of society in which more millions died either as a result of execution or their being sent to the infamous gulags. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who lived the nightmare reality of a political prisoner in Joseph Stalin’s Russia had a gruesome reason for the gulag’s existence:

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”

Now it appears that some in Russia seek to rehabilitate Stalin’s image by erecting statues in his honor. By doing so, they will dishonor the millions who fought his tyranny and paid the ultimate price for their courage:

To the dismay of many, proposals to erect new monuments to the tyrant for what apologists see as his “outstanding” war leadership have won support from figures close to President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

A shiny effigy of the Communist dictator in a prominent position might even put uppity foreign powers in their place, said one senior politician.

“They never miss a chance in the West to rewrite history and diminish our country’s role in the victory over fascism, so that’s even more reason not to forget Stalin now,” said Lyubov Slizka, a parliamentary vice-speaker

The only history being rewritten in the West has consisted of writing Stalin’s part in starting World War II in the first place out of those same history books. It’s a story best told by William L. Schirer in his masterpiece “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

Stalin was to say later that by dealing with Hitler, he bought the western allies time to rearm. This is the same excuse Chamberlain gave for his shameful surrender at Munich, since debunked many times over. Stalin’s real reason for the Nazi-Soviet Pact was his agreement with Hitler to basically divide Europe between them. In the secret protocols of the treaty found after the war, the Russians agreed to give Hitler a free hand in the west while Stalin gobbled up Finland and the Baltic states. As a bonus, the two dictators would partition Poland (for the third time in 400 years) with Hitler getting the eastern portion where most of the people lived. Stalin got what he thought was a 1000 mile buffer between himself and Hitler which turned out to be an illusion.

What made this deal especially odious was that Stalin had been assuring both France and Great Britain that he would support them if they felt it necessary to go to war over a German invasion of Poland. Stalin gave a private assurance along these lines to the British Ambassador to Russia on August 26, 1939.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed on August 30. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1.

To erect a statue to a man whose actions cynically led to the deaths of 20 million of his own countrymen is madness. But that seems to be what’s affecting Russia these days as she marches steadily toward an authoritarian government:

Officials in Moscow have insisted that no statues of the dictator will appear in the Russian capital. But his name resurfaced last year when a Kremlin memorial plaque to “Volgograd” was replaced with one to “Stalingrad”.

That city was renamed Volgograd in 1961. Since then, veterans’ associations and the Communist Party have lobbied to have the name change revoked, citing the importance of its victory over Hitler’s armies in 1943.

But, while preferring to stay above the debate, Mr Putin has spoken against the move, saying: “I’m sure that it would give rise to suspicions that we are returning to Stalinist times.”

Putin wants to continue his stealthy assault on freedom without the political baggage of Stalin hanging around his neck. When the time comes, he may try to rehabilitate “Uncle Joe” himself as a way of stoking the fires of nationalism. Such a move would no doubt open old wounds:

The resurgence of Stalin, no matter what the context, threatens to open fresh rifts in a society still traumatised by the horrors of his rule, critics argue.

“Imagine the reaction to Hitler monuments in Germany – that’s how we regard this,” said Boris Belenkin of Memorial, a human rights group originally founded to remember Stalin’s victims. “This individual has no moral or historical right to any monuments.”

There’s no doubt that for many Russians, the image of Stalin would bring back some sense of the glory years, when the Soviet military was feared throughout Europe – so much so that the United States abandoned 150 years of isolation to permanently station troops on the continent to counter Soviet expansion.

The question is, what other memories would that image bring back? And will the Russians finally come to terms with their part in starting the largest, most destructive conflict in human history?

It would seem not to be the case if the Russian people, egged on by unscrupulous politicians, wish to rehabilitate the image of one of the great mass murderers in human history.