Right Wing Nut House

Glenn Greenwald is almost never right about anything. He is an hysteric, a red meat partisan Democrat (who piously rejects that label despite being outed recently as a member of the partisan Democrat email list “Townhouse”). He can be acerbic, cranky, and a serial exaggerator of laughable proportions. He is also smart, passionate, and a dyed in the wool defender of our civil liberties, one of the most articulate in the blogosphere.

If you get the idea that I have mixed feelings about Greenwald, you would be correct. I generally find his critiques of conservatives unbelievably shallow, almost grotesque in the cartoonish and simple minded way he paints the right. He natters. He takes forever to make a simple point (something I’ve been guilty of more than once). And to top it all off, he’s popular and gets tons of traffic, thus awakening the green monster of jealously in me and stimulating the id to take over my unconscious mind, forcing me to imagine all sorts of foul things that could befall his blog.

But today, I’m agreeing with him:

One Bush follower after the next who has been furiously protesting the publication of leaks by the NYT and other newspapers — almost all of whom has accused the NYT of treason, of providing aid and comfort to their Al Qaeda friends, etc. for reporting leaked classified information — have written today about this leaked story. But all of them are ecstatic over this story, celebrating it as a great and heroic blow for the Bush administration and as proof that The Terrorists really are the Epic Threat they’ve been claiming. And almost none of them are protesting the unauthorized leak, let alone calling for the reporters and editors at the Daily News to be sent to gas chambers or put in federal prison for the rest of their lives.

Their celebratory reaction to this leak is particularly noteworthy given that the Daily News article itself acknowledged that its source told it that the leaked law enforcement investigation “is an ongoing operation.” And the FBI claims that this leak has jeopardized foreign intelligence sources.

Before I pat Greenwald on the back, let me bash him over his pointy head. The only debate about the efficacy of the press publishing secrets in wartime is occurring on the right. The question of whether or not to arrest and try the reporters and editors who publish these stories has been a topic of heated debate only among conservatives. As usual, Greenwald’s critique is shallow and off target.

The left, as with almost every other issue involving national security, has failed to engage in any kind of serious colloquy, even among themselves, as to the national security implications of these leaks. Instead, all we get is the ridiculous notion that the information shouldn’t have been classified in the first place because al-Qaeda already knows everything we’re doing to track them so publishing stories that detail our methods is perfectly alright because the government is violating our civil liberties. The fact that we don’t know enough about how these programs actually work to make that kind of determination doesn’t stand in the way of the left when their on a roll politicizing national security.

No one can take their argument that al-Qaeda is in the know about all of our tracking methods seriously. Which is why despite the many sins committed by Republicans in managing the government, the Democrats are by no means assured of taking over Congress in November. As much as the American people dislike Republicans, they simply don’t trust the Democrats on national security matters. Nor will they until the left begins to engage Republicans on the issues and not the politics of keeping the country safe.

But Greenwald has made a point that many on the right cannot dispute today. The fact of the matter is that publishing details of this investigation has harmed our ability to keep the United States of America safe and we shouldn’t be ignoring this fact in order to make cheap political points at the expense of the left.

The damage done in impairing our ability to prevent another attack on this country was severe:

Disclosure of the bomb plot coincided with the one-year anniversary of a terrorist bomb attack on London subways and a bus that killed 52 and injured about 700. Authorities said they hadn’t intended to release details about the plot this early and that whoever leaked the information had compromised the FBI’s relationship with some foreign intelligence services.

The person who leaked the details is clearly someone who doesn’t understand the fragility of international relations,” Mershon said. “We’ve had a number of uncomfortable questions and some upsetment (sic) with these foreign intelligence services that had been working with us on a daily basis.”

Whether the leak came from the Administration or from a foreign source doesn’t matter. Cooperation with other intel agencies is absolutely vital to ferreting out the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States and any diminution of that cooperation is a blow to our security. It is clear that the New York Daily News should be placed in the same boat as the New York Times and other publications that use unauthorized leaks to either sell newspapers, make political hay, or both.

Greenwald makes another point that needs to be aired here; the rank hypocrisy on the right when it comes to the issue of national security leaks in general. As he points out, this isn’t the first time that there have been leaks showing the Administration on the ball that has had the right celebrating the government’s watchfulness. Consistency may be “the hobgoblin of little minds” as Emerson said but it should also be a faithful friend in politics. One can’t pick and choose which leaks are efficacious and which are detrimental. You and I are simply unqualified to make such judgements.

All of this being said, I can’t resist linking to this article in Raw Story that seeks to downplay the plot, thus re-enforcing the notion that the left is unserious about our security:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists,” their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed,” Giraldi added. “Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

There is every reason to take any plot, or “chatter,” or fantasies like this seriously. Even the article admits these perps are extremists with the desire to carry out such an attack. As we have seen to our endless sorrow, couple that desire with a fanatical determination to succeed and you get Mohammed Atta and 9/11. And the fact that Raw Story and most of the left would, in the aftermath of such an attack, skewer the Administration for not believing the extremists were serious only shows how truly frightening the prospect of the Democrats having their quaking hands on any of the levers that control our national security would be.

UPDATE

Pundit Guy has a perfect counterpoint to the left’s downplaying of this threat:

Have we become so far removed from that day in September of 2001 that we now criticize the very people who work 24/7 to protect us from being killed? Isn’t this the kind of complacency that the terrorists hope will spread through America, just so they can once more catch us asleep at the wheel?

In their eagerness to score political points about “fearmongering,” liberals have once again demonstrated that they are unfit to command. The American people will not elect those who have either forgotten 9/11 or who believe it didn’t change much.

“Those boys on the other side of that ridge…They never quite seem like the enemy.”
(General James Longstreet from the movie Gettysburg)

Longstreet was speaking of Union troops at Gettysburg, some of whom he had known and commanded before the war.

So what’s the excuse of our political and intellectual elites who never quite see an enemy when thinking about or writing of radical Islamists?

And not just western elites, either. In a frightening but predictable way, the entire War on Terror is in full backsliding mode as many ordinary citizens in Europe and America tire of the endless vigilance, the troubling compromises with civil liberties, the partisan political warfare, and the constant, nagging feelings of self doubt about the righteousness of our cause encouraged by 50 years of tearing at the edifice and hammering at the foundations of Western civilization by the European and American left.

At a time when our civilization is facing the greatest threat to its existence in more than 500 years, when the need for unity in recognizing, at the very least, that we are confronted by an enemy that wishes to do us immense harm, those most capable of giving voice to a rational defense of our values, our systems of government, our art - our very way of life, are wallowing in defeatism and worse, sympathizing with those who would do us in. Nurtured at the finest palaces of thinking the world has ever known - the Western university system - we are being systematically emasculated by the trimmers, the appeasers, and those afflicted with that most curious of Western diseases, the plague of multiculturalism.

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals - artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.

As early as 2002, leftist intellectuals sought to undermine the War on Terror by rejecting the very premise that we should be fighting a war at all. The “underlying causes” of the war were examined and found wanting. Policies of past and present western governments were used as justification for the jihadis to murder innocent people. There were even those who saw any effort of the United States to defend itself against states that gladly sponsor and support these murderous thugs as immoral.

And the damage to the cause has already been done. Exactly a year ago, Great Britain experienced its own national nightmare of a day when al-Qaeda linked terrorists claimed the lives of 52 British citizens in an attack on the London subway sytsem. The response of the British people to this attack was a curious combination of sorrow and appeasement. This exchange between a London policeman and an ordinary citizen who was protesting at a radical Muslim demonstration sponsored by a group whose leader thought the subway attacks justified is indicative of how a citizenry loses faith and courage when so few support the defense of their own country against murderous attacks:

…[an] English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

One wonders if those best able to articulate the value of free speech as well as how this peculiarly western notion is so vital to defeating our enemies would come out from the shadows and speak up with one loud voice in defense of this major Western tradition if such a conversation would ever have taken place. The policeman is there to protect the rights of all - not just those who threaten the peace.

In fact, western intellectuals are unwittingly assisting our enemies by feeding their paranoia and fantastical worldview. Every time they remind us of the moral equivalency between Westerners and jihadis, they feed the Culture of Grievance that so dominates the thoughts of radical Muslims:

How do you win against the Culture of Grievance? Call it COG for short, and don’t think you’ve never encountered it before. It’s at the heart of the Islamic radical movement, and a prime motivator of Islamic terrorists. COG is all over the place, but especially in places like the Middle East. COG is when a culture is more concerned about real, or imagined, grievances, than in just moving ahead and fixing things. Every nation has a certain degree of COG, which most of the time means little to foreigners. But when COG spawns terrorists (which COG often does) who go abroad and kill thousands of foreigners, than COG is an international problem.

Instead of a ringing defense of our way of life, the Western left emboldens the radicals by acknowledging that their claims of victimhood have merit. And while not coming out and advocating terrorism as a response directly, by justifying the murder of innocents by pointing to this policy or that event as “cause and effect,” the left plays right into the hands of those who use such critiques to mobilize and motivate their minions of death.

Perhaps we should take a page from Israel’s playbook in this regard. While it is true that Israel has its own “Blame Israel First” crowd on the left, the self confidence and belief in what they are doing to fight for their national lives stands in stark contrast to the hand wringing in most of the west. And what is truly remarkable to watch has been the abandonment of Israel by the European left. They have picked up the cause of the Palestinian terrorists who not only wish to defeat Israel but destroy her. How they arrived at this sorry conclusion is a puzzlement. Nearly 60 years ago, the European left gave Jewish nationalism a boost with their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Why they have abandoned Israel in her hour of need has more to do with the Culture of Grievance than with any possible defense of Israeli society being reflective of Western traditions and values.

One would think that we could acknowledge mistakes made in the past without condemning an entire civilization to the ash heap of history. But apparently, the intellectual left is incapable of such a leap of faith. They have sacrificed rationality on the altar of Good Intentions. And I’m afraid that in the end, those good intentions may be the ruin of us all.

I think I need a drink. Bad. Bourbon, if you don’t mind. Make it a double, please - no ice.

I find as we almost reach the point of midsomer’s eve - when fairies and pixies dance around the sacred fire in the woods and the elves work their magic to torment us mortals - that the level of my ambition to do a decent day’s worth of writing for this site falls exactly to the level of my concern over my personal appearance.

As I sit at my desk, my hair is mussed, I haven’t shaved in 2 days, Zsu-Zsu has taken to maintaining a polite and proper distance from me (even in bed) and my cats are eying me with baleful glances of haughty disdain - as if I am an inferior being because I am unable to keep clean by licking myself all over.

I suppose I should break down and take a shower but to tell you the truth, there is something glorious in feeling grungy. Is this how our paleolithic ancestors felt all the time? I feel like grunting. Not the mindless ruttings of liberal commentators but rather the deep, satisfied vocalizations of a man at peace with his slovenliness and grateful for the primal sin of sloth.

I am revelling in my indolence, celebrating my apathy. My cup runneth over (and down my chin) with joy at the prospect of lazing in my bed watching re-runs of Law and Order at midday. Perhaps I’ll pop a movie into the VCR or slip a Gretchen Wilson CD into the player and kick back a spell. Maybe I’ll get lost in my Norwich, dreaming the dreams of the Byzantium emperors who failed finally and utterly to resist the advance of Islam. We are still paying for their stupidity today.

I could do any number of things. But before I can tend to my own psychic needs, the Watcher demands a pound of my flesh for neglecting he and my fellow council members over the last two weeks. Ergo, before I can play, I must pay:

Council results for W/E June 23rd:

Council Category

First Place: “The Iraqi Insurgency Has No Central Command” by The Glittering Eye.

Second Place: “Children in Danger From the UN” by Gates of Vienna.

Non Council Category

First Place: “The Jihadi Network’s Fatal Flaw” from The American Thinker

Second Place: “Srebrenica, Kosovo, Unknown” by New Sisyphus

Council results for W/Ed June 30:

Council Category

First Place: “The Dance of Escalation and Reaction” by Shrinkwrapped

Second Place: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like… Korea?” by The Glittering Eye

Non Council Category

First Place: “It’s an Islamic Jihad, Stupid” from Townhall.

Second Place: “Peter, Paul, and Ingrate” from Florida Cracker

If you’d like to participate in next week’s Watcher’s Council contest, go here and follow instructions.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

To hear many on the left tell us, our republic is held in thrall by a mass murdering dictator. He regularly tramples on our constitutional guarantees of privacy. He flouts the law at his leisure. With a crack of his whip, he bids his minions in Congress to slavishly pass enabling legislation that dirties our water and air, makes rich his cronies, clandestinely establishes a Christian caliphate right here in America, and secretly plots with corporations to steal elections.

And to make matters worse, this tyrant of a man is able to do all this by hoodwinking vast swaths of America’s electorate; that is, of course, unless you’ve been given God’s good grace to glean the truth from a “lapdog” press who have been hypnotized by their corporate masters to under report, misreport, and simply ignore all these horrific doings in our nation’s capitol. For in the end, it is those that prove themselves immune from this Napoleon’s magic spells who will save our republic and bring peace, freedom, and justice back to the galaxy.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

The left’s “riot of conceits” as R. Emmett Tyrell puts it, have never been more pronounced than when they raise the specter of Bush as dictator. It is not a new charge levelled against American Presidents. Even legends like Jackson and Lincoln had detractors who accused them of ruling with the iron fist of tyranny. And while both of those worthies defied the Supreme Court for one reason or another, in retrospect we can see that their actions fell far short of even the dictionary definition of dictator which defines the word as “one holding complete autocratic control” or “one ruling absolutely and often oppressively.”

But the actual definition of words has never stopped the left when it comes to erecting politically correct strawmen. “Racism,” sexism,” homophobia,” and “dictator” have meaning beyond the common usage of those terms that the rest of us, bound by tradition and respect for the English language, are constrained from following. In short, if the left wants to define dictatorship down, who’s going to stop them?

Certainly not Philip Slater, former chairman of the Brandeis University Sociology department, who wrote in The Huffington Post:

“Why are some patriotic Americans supporting a president who seems so bent on destroying America–America’s constitution, America’s democracy, America’s good name, America’s credibility, America’s land, air, and water, America’s solvency, America’s educational system, America’s security, America’s children, and America’s future…”

(HT: The New Editor)

Slater doesn’t use the word “dictator” in his article, but I daresay if he actually believes George Bush is destroying “America’s constitution” and “America’s democracy,” the implication can’t be anything less than his belief in Bush as tyrant. This from a man who advocates constitutionally destroying the presidency by separating the functions of Head of State from Chief Executive - an interesting construct in that the good professor nominates the actor Morgan Freeman to fill the same symbolic role played by Queen Elizabeth II in the British system. Perhaps someone should get in touch with Mr. Freeman’s agent and see if he’s available for a long running government gig. Since I haven’t seen him much in the movies lately, I’m sure he’d jump at the chance.

And who can forget CNN’s curmudgeonly host Jack Cafferty opining on air following the revelation back in May that NSA computers were gathering vast numbers of telephone records looking for patterns that would lead the machines to reveal terrorists and their sympathizers here in the United States. With flashing eyes and jutted chin, Cafferty thanked God that Senator Arlen Specter was asking questions about the program because “He might be all that’s standing between us and a full-blown dictatorship in this country.”

Leave aside for a moment the comical idea of Arlen Specter as democracy’s White Knight and examine Cafferty’s contention that Specter was alone in standing against the Administration in their march toward gathering absolute power unto themselves. The program had been vetted by lawyers from both the Justice Department and the NSA and appropriate Members of Congress informed. For the latter, the President can, in special circumstances, inform only the “Big Eight” in sensitive matters of national security which include the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate as well as the Chair and Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committees of both houses. This was done as it also had been done with the NSA intercept program revealed last December by the New York Times.

One can argue whether or not this consultation was enough in light of the invasive nature of both of those programs. This is legitimate debate - one that we will be having for as long as there is a war against Islamism. The tension between civil liberties and national security in a free society is inevitable, especially in time of war. But in case the left hasn’t noticed, dictators don’t “consult” anyone about anything. Just ask Hugo Chavez.

The Venezuelan tyrant recently received a boost in this country from that Icon of the Anti-Establishment Left, the Rosa Parks of the Anti War Movement, Cindy Sheehan who said yesterday that she would rather live in Chavez-led Venezuela than George Bush’s America. While Sheehan’s anti-war, anti-Semitic, and anti-American rants have been well documented, it is her obscenity laced descriptions of George Bush as Tyrant in Chief that the press has tip-toed around in a rather gingerly fashion:

The US government is now ruled by murderous hypocrites…criminals who should be arrested, charged appropriately, confined behind bars.”

“Our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs…gangsters who lust after fortunes and power; never caring that their addictions are at the expense of our loved ones, and the blood of innocent people near and far.”

“The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush.”

The press aren’t the only ones trying to disengage from Mrs. Sheehan’s unbalanced diatribes against the President. Democratic politicians who once fawned and feted the Goddess of Peace have turned their backs on this mother of all whackos. But her support remains strong among the netnuts on the internet who still believe, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once said, that Sheehan has “absolute moral authority” when talking about George Bush and the war.

And that is the nub of the left’s argument; that George Bush is either an aspiring dictator or already a de-facto member of that exclusive club. In order to see Bush as unprincipled tyrant, one must be wearing the special glasses that allow the viewer to see the unseen, to read between the lines of stories from a press too frightened and cowed to tell the truth of what is really going on in the Administration.

The fact that some fairly intelligent people actually believe this would be shocking except for the fact that we live in extraordinary times that have caused us to degenerate into a society where it is perfectly reasonable to think the absolute worst of your political or ideological opponent. Both right and left are guilty of this myopia, although the liberal left has taken political opposition and ascribed actual evil to their nemesis.

Jeff Jacoby’s article yesterday in the Boston Globe made the point that the Administration’s reaction to the Hamdan decision should, in normal times, put to rest any idea that George Bush was seeking to rule by dictatorial fiat:

President Bush learns the court’s ruling in Hamdan has gone against him. A five-justice majority held the military commissions created by the administration to try the Guantanamo detainees are invalid, since they were never authorized by congressional statute. The justices seem to have repudiated Bush’s claim that the Constitution invests the president with sweeping unilateral authority in wartime. “The court’s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground,” Justice Stephen Breyer pointedly notes in a concurrence. “Congress has not issued the Executive a `blank check.’ ”

Whereupon Bush says — what? “The justices have made their decision; now let them enforce it?” Something even more acidic? Perhaps he repeats a statement he has made previously — “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”?

Not quite. He says he takes the court’s decision “seriously.” A few moments later he says it again. And then comes this: “We’ve got people looking at it right now to determine how we can work with Congress, if that’s available, to solve the problem.” There is no disdain. No bravado. No criticism. Just an acknowledgment that the Supreme Court has spoken and the executive branch will comply.

Some dictator.

Alas, while the Administration has already begun working with Congress to lay out the specifics in order to comply with the ruling, the left has conveniently ignored this bursting of their dictator balloon and kept up a steady drumbeat of ever wilder notions that Bush is the second coming of Ivan the Terrible. This criticism of Jacoby’s reasoned article is from the liberal blog Shakespeare’s Sister:

Failure to even mention in passing the rigorous endeavors of the Bush administration to undermine checks and imbalance the three branches of government is the least of his omissions, however. Perhaps the most important person who Jacoby fails to mention in his list of “D-word” spouting lunatics, is Bush himself.

“You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.” (Governing Magazine 7/98) — From Paul Begala’s “Is Our Children Learning?”

“I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” — CNN.com, December 18, 2000

“A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it. ” — Business Week, July 30, 2001

Convicted out of his own mouth? Or the freely elected President of the United States stating the obvious?

The above is revealing in that for the dedicated lefty, it is impossible to take anything the President says as he means it. It is necessary instead to substitute a meaning wholly irrelevant to the issue the President was raising - an issue commented on in one form or another by every President in history - in order to validate a set of beliefs that places the commenter in the privileged position of knowing something hidden from the rest of us; that because dictatorship is “easier” it follows that Bush wishes to be one.

As we approach the end of the President’s constitutionally mandated term in office, I have no doubt we will see rampant speculation on the left about whether or not Bush will in fact engineer another terrorist attack and use it as an excuse to remain in office regardless of who wins the Presidential election in 2008. Like the certainty espoused by liberals during the 2004 election that Bush would re-institute military conscription and other idiotic “sure things,” I’m convinced that on January 20, 2009 when the next President takes the oath of office, all the talk of Bush as dictator will disappear overnight and the left’s rhetorical slings and arrows will be readied for the next occupant of the oval office who incurs their displeasure.

Unless she’s a Democrat, of course.

I’m So Ronery
I’m so ronery
So ronery
So ronery and sadry arone

There’s no one
Just me onry
Sitting on my rittle throne
I work very hard and make up great prans
But nobody ristens, no one understands
Seems that no one takes me serirousry
(”I’m So Ronery” sung by the puppet Kim Jong Il from the film Team America: World Police)

I almost feel sorry for North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il. The poor bastard sits atop a country that is beyond being a basket case and probably beyond salvage. This from StrategyPage this morning from a piece entitled “Forget the Missiles, This is Even More Bizarre:”

While everyone’s attention was focused on North Korean missiles, the real story is the North Korean economy. It continues to fall apart, and more North Koreans are unhappy about that. Worse yet, more North Koreans are finding out how badly they have been screwed by their leaders. Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It’s no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem.

Stealing Chinese trains? Stealing from the only country in the world willing to keep selling you food and fuel to keep your robotic, regimented population from either starving to death or rising en masse to throw your ass on the dustbin of history?

Kim gets away with stuff like this because he’s a loon, not in spite of it. No one, including the South Koreans, really know what the tyrant is up to which makes him not only dangerous, but unpredictable. And there is nothing in the world that makes bureaucrats, diplomats, and government types more nervous and confused than unpredictability. The North Korean leader just doesn’t fit into one of the nice, neat little boxes that the State Department uses to categorize world leaders. Even President Ahmadinejad of Iran is understandable in that it is obvious that his motivations are at least grounded in his religious beliefs. But there simply is no rhyme nor reason to some of Kim’s stratagems, not when he pulls stunts like stealing trains from his major benefactor and launching missiles when most of the world is asking him not to:

North Korea test-fired several missiles in the early hours of Wednesday, July 5 (Tuesday afternoon Eastern time), apparently including the Taepodong-2, the long-range missile at the heart of diplomatic tensions with the United States and its allies, according to reports by Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN and other agencies, citing sources in Japan and Washington.

The long-range missile seems to have malfunctioned less than a minute into its flight, CNN and Reuters reported, citing American officials they did not name.

“Today’s launches were done despite advance warning by the relevant countries,” the top spokesman for the Japanese government, Shinzo Abe, told reporters early Wednesday in Tokyo, Reuters reported. “This is a grave problem in terms of peace and stability, not only of Japan but also of international society,” Mr. Abe was quoted as saying. “We strongly protest against North Korea.”

It seems silly but one of his motivations for acting the way he does could be that Kim feels neglected. Every couple of months it seems, his government says or does something so outrageous that it is bound to get headlines in the western media. Like a spoiled 2 year old child, Kim goes into a foot stomping, head banging tantrum so that all eyes will be upon him, however briefly.

Take yesterday’s missile launches. According to intelligence, the North Korean’s launched a total of 6 missiles including a couple of Scuds and their intermediate range missile, the Rodong as well as their ICBM, the Taepodong 2. The ICBM, of course, was the cause of all the excitement given that some analysts believed it capable of hitting the extreme Northwest part of the United States. At the very least, it would have no trouble hitting Japan, a fact not lost on Tokyo who has called for an emergency meeting of the Security Council today to discuss the matter.

What to make of this? First of all, the timing of the launches cannot have been lost on the United States, coming as they did on the 4th of July. Kim probably thought this a huge joke, a pulling of the lion’s tail as it were. And I can just see the tyrant clapping his hands together in joy at the prospect of the largest nations in the world worrying their heads over him as they sit down at the UN today.

But secondly there’s that curious “failure” of the ICBM about 40 seconds after launch.The Taepodong 2 had a successful test in 1998, buzzing Japan by flying over Japanese territory for much of its flight. Now, I haven’t seen this speculation anywhere else, but it could be that the missile was deliberately destroyed by the North Koreans themselves. Why? Because by launching the missile and then destroying it, Kim proves a point without being too provocative. He pulls the lion’s tail without awakening the beast so that it turns and mauls him. Kim gets his headlines on America’s birthday while proving to the world he can defy the United States.

Again, this is pure speculation but given Kim’s monumental unpredictability, it’s just cuckoo enough to have a ring of truth to it. In the asylum he inhabits, Kim would see such a stratagem as a huge victory. And the more unpredictable he is, the more fear he generates in the rest of the world. It is that fear that Kim is counting on as he expects Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and the US to try and buy him off by giving him enough aid to keep his country from sliding into total destitution and starvation.

High stakes, indeed. But if nothing else, Kim has shown a talent for survival. And in the game of international brinkmanship, the winner is usually the one determined to prevail at any cost.

UPDATE

Proving the old adage, “Nothing succeeds like success,” the North Koreans have launched a seventh missile, splashing it into the Sea of Japan like the others.

Ed Morrissey doesn’t think that this latest launch will make any difference at the UN today and I agree. What Kim wants he won’t get anytime soon - bilateral talks with the United States that would confer legitimacy on his regime and give him the respect he craves so desperately.

The launch of WAR Radio yesterday was a stupendous success.

Unfortunately, too much of a good thing is sometimes hazardous; our server crashed a couple of times by mid-afternoon and by the end of the day, Boss Kender decided to take the stream off line.

In our wildest imaginings, we never envisioned the kind of traffic we were pulling by mid-day - a holiday when we thought most people would be out and about, enjoying time with their families. Given the traffic we experienced yesterday, Kender realized that there was no way we would be able to handle the normal weekday load, hence the decision to wait until the weekend to continue broadcasting after we install our brand new, state of the art server that should be able to take anything we throw at her.

“The Rick Moran Show,” scheduled to begin today, will therefore be delayed until next Monday, 7/10. We apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment.

WAR Radio is up and streaming!

We’re still ironing out a few bugs and annoyances, but this is to be expected given the fact that something like this hasn’t been tried before. We ask for your patience and understanding over the first few days of operation as we try and iron out issues like calls from listeners, recorded interviews, and a server that can handle a limited number of streams (until we get our new one later this week).

In fact, if you have problems accessing the stream, I ask that you not give up on us. By the end of the week, our server capacity will be able to handle anything. But at the moment, it may be a hit or miss proposition. In any event, watch this space or visit our WAR Radio site.

One the the reasons I love to study American history is the opportunity it affords me to travel back in time and put myself in the shoes of people who lived long before I was born.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that these are the best of times in which to live and I wouldn’t trade places with those earlier Americans for anything. The fact is, I’m much too addicted to flush toilets, electric lights, and bologna sandwiches to pine for an opportunity to live in a time when outhouses were a fixture of the American landscape and going nearly blind by being forced to read by the light of whale oil candles was considered part of the price of being an educated man.

And needless to say, given the way that bologna is processed today, I can’t even contemplate the 19th century alternative although sweeping the floor of the slaughterhouses here in Chicago and placing the contents in a sack would probably come pretty close to what our ancestors would translate as my favorite food.

But I think that visiting the 18th or 19th Century for a while would do all of us some good to one degree or another. It would help in understanding that the times we live in today are, in many ways, not that much different than the way things have always been in America. I have to laugh when someone on the right or the left points to our divisions, our polarization, the nastiness of our politics and use adjectives like “the worst” it has ever been or “we’ve never been this close to dictatorship” or anything to do with religious oppression, or race relations, or the economy, or any of a dozen other benchmarks that those ignorant of our past will use to try and convince us that the times we live in are unique in the strife and struggle manifested in our polity and politics today.

Balderdash!

Washington bemoaned the divisions in America of his day as the country split down the middle between those who supported the British and those that backed the French during the revolutionary struggles in France during the late 18th century. Washington himself was often accused of trying to set himself up as a monarch, a preposterous charge looking back on it but a cause for real concern back then.

During the campaign of 1800, Jeffersonians actually believed that if their man wasn’t elected, liberty in America would be destroyed (sound familiar?). When Jefferson won, there was a tremendous surge of relief that the evil Federalists would be prevented from turning the country into an English lap dog and a debased aristocracy.

This kind of thing wasn’t just rhetoric. Reading accounts of Jefferson himself from that time makes it clear that he saw his election as a fortuitous circumstance in history, that 4 more years of Federalist rule would have meant the nation’s ruin.

Boy - the Democrats sure haven’t changed much in 200 years.

During the Compromise of 1820, when South Carolina was agitating for the umpteenth time already to leave the union, the American people were ready to go to war to prevent such an occurrence. The level of vituperation directed against each other in Congress is shocking (as it would be until long after the Civil War ended) and individual members routinely came armed with pistols when the House sat in session.

Abraham Lincoln was usually caricatured as an ape in opposition newspapers. The invective hurled at our 16th President makes George Bush’s term of office look like a cakewalk.

I could go on and on. The clergy of early America railed against the materialism and the grasping for possessions of the American people - something de Tocqueville commented on as well. There were cries against the influence of religion in politics during elections of the late 19th century as prairie populism swept the country.

Moral condemnation has always been popular in politics. Abolition, “race mixing,” prohibition, and a dozen other “moral crisis” have roiled American politics since its founding. To believe that the mixing of politics and religion by ministers from the pulpit is somehow a new and novel political development indicates that those who make such an argument never read any of Martin Luther King’s thundering denunciations of racism and segregation from the pulpit of the Ebeneezer Baptist Church.

This is a very special 4th of July. It is special because despite more than 200 years of pretty much being at each other’s throats, America is still here. The miracle of America to me has always been this disconnect between our ideals of unity, community, and togetherness and a reality where those concepts are honored in the breach. And where the biggest schism occurs and where our schizophrenia is revealed in all of its glory is in the constant tension between individual liberty and sacrificing some of that liberty for the common good.

In the end, you can’t have charity without selfishness, altruism without greed, or love without hate. Not in this country. Not where 300 million people jostle each other on a daily basis with conflicting goals and ambitions. The friction caused by interest groups would make any other nation fly apart at the seams. Farmers versus city folk. Management versus labor. The rich versus everybody else. It’s a wonder sometimes that our preternaturally violent culture doesn’t explode into paroxysms of hate and murder given all the excuses we give ourselves to try and hurt each other.

To my mind, this is the most exceptional thing about America; our ability to live together in relative peace despite our differences.

So the next time you hear some blow-dried pundit solemnly intone about how unique our problems are, you have my permission to smile to yourself and remember that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Less than 24 hours from now, yours truly will be on the air as Wideawakes Radio (WAR Radio) begins streaming.

I can’t tell you how excited I am at the possibilities this concept has for me, for my readers, and for conservatives in general. At the moment, we’re trying to iron out some bugs in the stream as well as get everything prepared for the launch. But by tomorrow morning, the 230th anniversary of our nation’s founding, WAR will be here.

The plan tomorrow is to follow a loose schedule with hosts jumping in and out all day previewing their shows and introducing themselves to listeners. I will be on from 8:30 AM to around 10:00 AM Central time. I will be reading and discussing the Declaration of Independence - what the times were like when it was written as well as some thoughts on American exceptionalism and how that idea has been disowned by the left in recent years.

Not just the left of course. The Supreme Court has made a hash of American exceptionalism by interpreting the law not so much according to the Constitution as much as how their rulings will play in the salons of Europe. This takes the Declaration’s admonition of having “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” to its outer limits as the Court subsumes American exceptionalism in order to advance theories of government that are both foreign and unwelcome.

It should be an interesting time and I hope you join me.

On July 5, “The Rick Moran Show” will premier at its regular time of 7:00 - 9:00 AM Central. Hopefully by then, we’ll have a way for you to stream the show using Internet Explorer. At the moment, the button on the left sidebar for accessing the stream only works in Firefox.

Ain’t the internet radio business interesting?

For a full rundown on hosts and times, go to the WAR Radio site.

NOTE: THE STREAMING BUTTON DOES INDEED WORK IN INTERNET EXPLORER NOW. HOORAY!

One fascinating aspect of the controversy over the terrorist bank monitoring imbroglio has been the insistence by the press that 1) the terrorists already knew about the program so it wasn’t a secret; and 2) it’s okay to reveal secrets as long is it’s in the cause of “the people’s right to know.”

Does anyone else see something a little strange there? It was okay to reveal a program that all the reporters and editors involved wrote was a “closely held” secret when the story broke but now we’ve decided it wasn’t a secret anyway?

I must confess to becoming dizzy from all the spin being created by the press and the left on this issue. Round and round we go, careening from explanations about what a good thing it is to reveal secrets that, in the opinion of the press, are essential to the preservation of liberty to why it doesn’t matter because the terrorists know everything so its not a secret anyway.

Stop the world I want to get off!

This encomium to the freedom of the press, waxing poetic about the media’s right to publish anything it damn well pleases by Time Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengler is a real jaw dropper. For sheer brazenness on the issue of press irresponsibility, it has no equal. And its dripping condescension and arrogant assumptions about the American people reveal a man so out of touch, he may as well be writing from another galaxy:

The stories in the New York Times and other newspapers about the government’s highly classified program to monitor bank records have provoked outrage from the White House. President George W. Bush called them “disgraceful” and said the revelations caused “great harm” to America. Vice President Dick Cheney said the press had “made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult.”

I do not know if they are right. What I do know is that Presidents in wartime assert that their constitutional responsibility for national security trumps any issue of civil liberties. Often that has meant trampling on them.

First, I suppose it’s possible one could out a “highly classified program” that everyone knows about, although one would think the very definition of “highly classified” would preclude such a construct.

But note Mr. Spengler’s uncertainty about whether or not the Administration’s criticism is valid. In other words, when in doubt, publish. That seems to sum up all of the gratuitous chest thumping we’ve seen from the likes of Bill Keller and Dean Baquet who, as editors of the New York Times and LA Times respectively made the decision to publish details of this top secret program. And reporter Eric Lichtblau, who stressed how secret the program was in his New York Times article, is now backtracking furiously:

“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.

(HT: Patterico)

The fallacy of that particular piece of illogic is in the details. For instance, Hitler knew full well we were going to invade France in the summer of 1944. But could you imagine the New York Times publishing the fact that the intended target of the invasion was Normandy and then defending its decision by saying that Hitler knew we were coming anyway?

I realize the exaggeration inherent in my example, but the essential truth of it holds. The terrorists may have known in a general way that we were tracking their bank transactions. But given the specificity of what we were doing with Swift contained in the Times article, it is ridiculous to assume that this information wasn’t at least helpful to terrorists and their financial enablers in either confirming their methods were effective in avoiding scrutiny or how vulnerable they truly were to detection.

The former is probably equally as damaging as the latter. And the fact that Stengler doesn’t even acknowledge that possibility is revealing. By taking on the role of Commander in Chief in deciding what information should be shared with the American people, the press in this case proves themselves inept, incapable, and incompetent in evaluating potential damage to our security, reason enough to slap them down particularly hard on this issue.

In fact, Stengler’s only acknowledgement of responsibility is this curious statement:

The government’s assertion that it must be unhindered in protecting our security can camouflage the desire to increase Executive power, while the press’s cry of the public’s right to know can mask a quest for competitive advantage or a hidden animus. Neither the need to protect our security nor the public’s right to know is a blank check. So listen carefully because, after all, you are the judge. It is the people themselves who are the makers of their own government.

What Stengler fails to mention is that if a President oversteps the bounds of the Constitution in his grab for excess executive power, he can be held responsible through impeachment. Making the press accountable for misusing their trust is an entirely different matter.

How do we hold the press responsible? The free market is a useful tool in that if enough people get upset with the newspaper over publishing secrets and cancel their subscriptions, the paper dies an ignoble death. But in reality, the chances of this happening are extremely remote and in fact, would be unprecedented in American history.

This has given the press a kind of immunity that no President or politician enjoys. For this reason, Stengler’s carefully constructed house of cards about the equal responsibility of the press and the executive is, in the end, a chimerical attempt to hide the fact that the press is asking the American people simply to trust it when it comes to revealing secrets, that their motives are pure and their judgement supreme to that of the people’s elected representatives.

If there is another definition of “hubris,” I haven’t seen it.