Right Wing Nut House

I note with some disappointment the reaction of many conservatives to the History Channel’s broadcast of The People Speak,, a project brought to us by the radical professor of political science, Howard Zinn.

Referring to Zinn as an “historian” is something of a misnomer. Rather, he uses his research into history to advance a personal, political, far left agenda. In other words, scholarship takes a back seat to politics.

Is he “anti-American?” Zinn, much more than most on the left, is dissatisfied with America not only as she has turned out, but even as she was conceived. His decidedly deterministic and Marxist interpretation of history sees the “revolution” as a gigantic trick played upon ordinary people, substituting British tyranny, for the merchant and manufacturer tyranny of the upper class that was homegrown. This makes him “anti-American” in the sense that he hates even America’s founding.

So yeah, he’s one of the few Americans that I would have little hesitation in referring to as “anti-American.”

But Zinn has also done this country - inadvertently - an enormous service. His book A People’s History of the United States popularized social history in a way that more academic social historians have never been able to do. There have been a few social histories of the United States that found favor with the public. David Hackett Fisher’s Albion Seed which told the story of the migrations to early America was a best seller. My personal favorite is a trilogy by the former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin simply called The Americans.

But Zinn’s one volume People’s History is riveting reading and is used as a textbook in some high schools and many colleges today. Zinn gets in your face and forces you to see the underside of America that is just as real, just as compelling as any patriot’s story you are likely to read. It is full of angry people telling their stories, indicting America for its many sins against Native Americans, women, blacks, and unionists.

Yes, this is “real” history and deserves as much of an airing as any narrative history that reveals the sunny side of our past. The reason is “perception.” Good history - popular history - always has a point of view. Events are revealed according to the biases, both conscious and unconscious, of the historian. There is the danger - one that Zinn tumbles into - that the historian will become too emotionally involved with the subject matter and begin to make decisions that de-objectify the narrative. But good historians writing good history overcome this prejudice by thoughtful scholarship and not romanticizing or demonizing their subject. Conclusions are drawn carefully, and not without a bellyfull of primary source material that leads the reader to draw conclusions almost naturally, without much help from the author.

Zinn lets ordinary Americans reveal his point of view while structuring his narrative for maximum emotional impact. It is a damned effective technique although one should question how “scholarly” this approach might be.

An honest assessment then, would give these ordinary Americans directly affected by slavery, Jim Crow, second class citizenship for women, cultural genocide of Native Americans, and the government’s resistance to the formation of unions their voice and an equal place in our national storybook. Their words reflect their personal perceptions - their real life experiences - with oppression.

It is hard for some of us to acknowledge the fact that the glowing words and idealism found in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution didn’t mean squat to a very large number of our fellow Americans for a very long time. This is the way it was, and still is in some respects, which is why it is vital that we listen to what they have to say and acknowledge that we have often fallen short in making our ideals a reality for all Americans.

There is no shame in this. Indeed, I celebrate the fact that it is part of our exceptional nature that if we fight hard enough, and long enough, we can change the very nature of our society, something that is an impossibility just about anywhere else on earth. It is this revolutionary spark that is nurtured by books like A People’s History of the United States, even if its author is an anti-American, Marxist loon.

The History Channel would have done well to limit the scope of this project. It appears from their website that they have not. Wandering off into subjects that are clearly the personal pet peeves of Zinn would seem to make The People Speak almost unwatchable.

Case in point, this segment on the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line in the winter of 1781. The narration leading up to a description by a Continental soldier named Samuel Dewee of the execution of 5 mutineers is laughable - a travesty really. The narration is read by poet Staceyann Chin and describes the officers eating well and being clothed in fine, warm uniforms while the ordinary soldier went about in rags while being paid in “worthless Continentals,” the inflated paper money. The mutiny was a protest against soldiers not having been paid since the beginning of the war and resentment against some officers was commonplace as it is in any army.

The facts are a little different. Most officers had not been paid either. If they ate better - a highly dubious proposition - it was because there were some that received their salary in coin, dispensed by the Pennsylvania state government, and were able to purchase food from the farmers in the surrounding countryside. These were usually officers who were still carried on the rolls of the state militia. Most received nothing.

And the executions? While corporal punishment was common in every army at that time, there is no official record that anyone was executed for the mutiny. It is hard to say what Dewee was describing when he told of these executions because according to histories developed from primary source materials, no one was put to death as a result of the mutiny. A few weeks after the Pennsylvanian’s protest, some New Jersey troops tried the same thing - with much different results. Washington sicced some hard eyed Connecticut men on the New Jersians and the mutiny died in a few hours. He also executed some of the ring leaders.

The question I have is why include this little vignette at all? Are we supposed to be shocked that starving, unpaid patriots would rebel against the authorities who were the cause of their intense suffering? Matt Damon was apparently so shocked that his junior high knowledge of history prevented him from imagining the bad things that have happened in America that he wanted to share with the rest of us.

And this is my major beef with this entire project. I have seen several of the segments from the series and the whole enterprise stinks of sanctimony - as if American history of this kind is locked away in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day. All these liberal Hollywood and artsy-fartsy types have the arrogance to think that they are revealing anything that a 5th grader couldn’t discover on his own by taking a walk to a local library or even getting on line and performing some simple minded googling.

An example is Matt Damon’s melodramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence. That document contains a list of grievances of the colonists, some of which may find an echo with both right and left today. I have no doubt this is Zinn’s doing, as the radical is constantly calling for revolution of the non-violent kind.

In fact, for Damon and some of the others who read the letters, diary and journal entries, speeches, and other media upon which the show is based, it appears that they approach the subject matter as if there has been some kind of plot to keep our inglorious past hidden from the American people. Simpletons who are exposed to critical pedagogy are usually floored when they realize that they don’t know everything. And upon receiving knowledge that overturns their assumptions, are almost evangelical in their desire to lecture the rest of us about what we don’t know.

Social history is a valuable adjunct to narrative history - the latter usually concentrating on the “Great Man” or “Great Ideas” view of our past. But social history without proper context is incomplete and this Howard Zinn project for the History Channel appears to fail miserably in providing any kind of structure that would enlighten anyone about the true nature of America and our past.

WhiteKnightTwo, a four-engine jet-powered aircraft unveiled last year that features twin fuselages mounted on either side of a huge wing. Spaceship Two is in the middle.

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson unveiled his baby earlier this week; the first vehicle designed to carry commercial passengers into space. Dubbed “Spaceship Two,” the craft was designed by Burt Ruttan, winner of the $10 million X-Prize, whose Spaceship I soared 62 miles above the earth back in 2004.

Test flights will begin early next year, and if the government signs off on its safety, flights carrying paying passengers could begin as early as 2011.

Wanna take a ride? It will cost you $200,000 and you’ve got to get in line. Branson has signed up 300 passengers already.

Spaceship Two

Most of those ticket holders, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, were on hand for the SpaceShipTwo unveiling Monday at Mojave airport, braving rain, high winds and frigid temperatures to witness the long-awaited rollout.

Branson told the enthusiastic crowd that safety was Virgin Galactic’s No. 1 priority and that “we will not be putting anybody into space until the test pilots have done many, many, many trips on this spaceship.”

“Only when we are absolutely certain we can safely to to space will we go into space,” he said. “I promise you, it will be well and truly tested before we go into space.”

Schwarzenegger said attending the unveiling was “one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.” Describing Branson as “an extraordinary visionary,” he called Rutan “one of the greatest space engineers of our time.”

Branson may be a great salesman but how safe is “safe?” Spaceship Two will be the first in a long line of commercial ventures that will eventually make going into space routine. Until then, I’ve got just two words for the colorful Mr. Branson:

Krista McAuliffe.

True, a suborbital flight on a well-tested aircraft will not carry the same risks taken by McAuliffe and the crew of the Challenger. But ask Ruttan what can go wrong and the list he gives will be considerably longer than that of a commercial terrestrial airliner.

Here’s how Spaceship two will operate:

SpaceShipTwo will be carried aloft by a futuristic-looking mothercraft called WhiteKnightTwo, a four-engine jet-powered aircraft unveiled last year that features twin fuselages mounted on either side of a huge wing.

For the unveiling Monday, WhiteKnightTwo, with the rocket plane attached to the center of the wing, was rolled into view amid soaring music and floodlights.

SpaceShipTwo will be released at an altitude of 50,000 feet. A hybrid rocket motor burning solid propellant with nitrous oxide then will boost SpaceShipTwo onto a steep trajectory to an altitude of more than 62 miles.

The roomy cabin of SpaceShipTwo, about the same size as a large executive jet, features multiple portholes to give its passengers a spectacular view of Earth and space.

After about five minutes of weightlessness as the spaceplane arcs through the top of its ballistic trajectory, the rocket plane will fall back into the atmosphere, pivoting its wings upward in a “feathering” technique invented by Rutan to increase drag and ease the stress or re-entry. From there, the spacecraft will glide to a normal runway landing.

Ruttan says the vehicle is being built to safety standards that exceed those in NASA operations. Of this I have little doubt; NASA operates under the assumption that the shuttle will have a serious accident about once every 48 flights (some experts are even more pessimistic). That’s about once every 9-10 years at the shuttle’s current launch rate.

Although the number of Spaceship Two flights a year will be determined later, it will be considerably more than the 5 or 6 shuttle launches a year. So while safety standards may be vastly improved, there is still going to be a significant risk due to the increased number of flights - especially the first few years of operation.

Going into outer space - for the moment - is still a very risky proposition. For all intents and purposes, and for the foreseeable future, getting there will continue to be an experimental challenge. I agree that we must begin this great leap forward with the commercial exploitation of space. My worry is that some aspects - including safety - are being oversold. I have no doubt that Branson and Ruttan will do everything in their power to make Spaceship Two as safe as it can possibly be made. But if space travel has shown us anything, it is that our best laid plans, and all of our efforts, mean little when dealing with the forces of the cosmos arrayed against us in space.

Think of the early crossing of the Atlantic in the 15th and 16th centuries. Many ships were lost. But the technology and ship building skills improved dramatically because it was commercially viable to get to the New World. Those tiny ships Columbus sailed in to cross the Atlantic were replaced in 50 years by much sturdier and more sea worthy vessels. They in turn, gave way to more improved ships until crossing the Atlantic became routine and relatively safe.

I imagine something similar will happen with commercial space travel. There will be tragic accidents, no matter how hard the companies will try to avoid them. Some businesses will not survive. Others will learn from those mistakes and press forward. And not only will space travel become safer as we go along, but the cost per pound of lifting cargo and humans into orbit will also fall dramatically. The latter benefit will lead to a true revolution as these private space-faring concerns will move beyond tourism and begin the great enterprise of serious exploitation of space-based resources. That’s where this is leading. And it is possible that in my limited lifetime, that I will see that process well underway before I depart earth for more interesting climes.

I have no idea how long it will take. My gut tells me that the less the government is involved, the faster the pace of progress, although as long as there are private citizens going up, I would hope that there is some regulation that will set standards for a minimum amount of protection for passengers. And I imagine that some new branch of OSHA will oversee any space-based workforce as well. This is inevitable, but how it shakes out will play a large part in determining the technological innovations and entrepreneurial spirit that will infuse the industry.

Congratulations to Branson and Ruttan. I wish them - and their passengers - luck and success.

It may seem pejorative, or at best condescending to wonder if the messages contained in President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech are indicative of a more realistic view of the world than he has demonstrated previously.

But the president’s supporters must grant those of us who believe this the benefit of the doubt. The president’s actions and words previous to his decision regarding Afghanistan were, at times, inscrutable (Iran), and at other points, little more than highfalutin platitudes (disarmament).

Obama’s Nobel speech was different. He may be the first peace prize recipient in history to actually defend armed conflict in certain narrow circumstances. Very un-Ghandi like, that. And his straightforward defense of what America has accomplished over the last 6 decades as far as being a force for good in the world was welcomed by those of us who wondered at the president’s previous tepid remarks on the subject.

Many prominent conservatives not only praised the speech but expressed surprise at its more robust tone toward our security. The Wall Street Journal:

The address set a new tone for his young administration, which been accused by foreign-policy hawks of being too accommodating to overseas powers and too quick to seek favor abroad.

Mr. Obama made a muscular defense of American action against enemies, and recognized the existence of “evil” in the globe and the inherent fallibility of human impulses — core principles of a more traditionally conservative foreign policy.

At the same time, Mr. Obama stuck to the kinds of commitments that earned him the peace prize in the first place — the cause of international engagement over unilateralism, not only with institutions Washington has spurned in the past, such as the United Nations, but also the “evils” themselves. He cited Richard Nixon’s meeting with Mao after the horrors of China’s Cultural Revolution and Ronald Reagan’s engagement with the Soviet Union as efforts that moved the world toward peace and oppressed peoples toward freedom.

I think most conservatives don’t mind “international engagement” as long as the job gets done. I don’t know of anyone on the right who wouldn’t have welcomed with open arms the same kind of coalition that freed Kuwait in the Gulf War put together before the invasion of Iraq. That goes double for Afghanistan, where only around 30% of NATO troops are actually allowed to engage in combat at the present time.

It has not been Obama’s rejection of unilateralism, but rather his too easy reliance on “international engagement” to address problems that most of the rest of the world are reluctant to solve. The only consideration should be realistically addressing Iran’s nukes or Sudan’s genocide and to hell with whether we have to do it alone or if we get the entire planet on our side.

Process and form over substance and action; that has been the primary critique of Obama’s foreign policy as I understand it. And if this is the attitude that the president has now embraced, I welcome it:

“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” he said, evoking the horrors of war and triumphant scenes of peaceful protest. “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

I don’t believe it was an accident that the president added “acting individually” to that strong affirmation of just war and self defense. While it is true the president had previously said he would “go it alone” if US interests were threatened, the fact that he said it in the context of the campaign, made it suspect once he gained office - as have so many other statements he made that he has since abandoned.

Robert Kagan was impressed:

Wow. What a shift of emphasis. Something about this Afghan decision, coupled perhaps with events in Iran, has really affected his approach.

I don’t know what to say about an “Obama doctrine,” because based on this speech, I think we are witnessing a substantial shift, back in the direction of a more muscular moralism, a la, Truman, Reagan. The emphasis on military power, war for just causes, and moral principles recalls Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, “the just man armed.” There is something much more quintessentially American and traditional about this speech, compared to most of his rhetorical approach throughout the year.

It’s always dangerous to draw too many conclusions from a speech, but this is a big one.

Kagan’s “muscular moralism” does indeed describe the president’s thinking. Is it “new?” Perhaps Afghanistan and Iran, rather than forcing him to “shift” his thinking, has sharpened his focus. This from state’s man on Iran:

The United States will not sit silently by and ignore what happens on the streets of Tehran, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for Iran at the State Department said Thursday.

John Limbert, who was among diplomats held hostage by radical students at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 30 years ago, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “We believe as we have always believed that the Iranian people deserve decent treatment from their government.”

His comments came on the same day that U.S. President Barack Obama, during a lecture in Oslo, Norway, after he received his Nobel Peace Prize, declared the world is bearing witness to the struggle for rights and justice in countries such as Iran.

The president, in a departure from his prepared remarks, said, “These movements of hope and history, they have us on their side.” He used the word “us,” while the text of his speech said, “hope and history are on their side.”

I believe that is the first time in a public utterance the president identified the United States directly with the Iranian opposition. And Limbert’s tone was decidedly sharper than any previous words coming from our State Department:

Limbert said he found it remarkable that the young people of Iran are willing to come back to the streets again and again. “Iranians have been seeking a voice in their own affairs and decent treatment from their government now for well over 100 years,” he said. “Most of that 100 years, I would add, has been a history of frustration and defeat.”

Subtly different from last summer’s somewhat non-committal attitude the US took toward the crackdown. Of course, at that time, we were trying to engage Iran with regard to making a deal on their nuclear program. Now that the tentative agreement reached in Vienna on October 1 is deader than a doornail - rejected by Ahmadinejad - it appears that another round of sanctions are imminent.

In truth, I was never in doubt as to whether the president would use military force to defend American territory. And I still have questions about how he defines “just war.” But the president’s words were welcomed nonetheless as showing me, at least, that his attitude toward America’s defense has become a little more realistic and cognizant of the idea that we live in a more dangerous world than he was perhaps ready to accept last January 20 when he took office.

My latest at PJ Media column is up and its about the New York Times and the queerly (archaic form) fascinating section in their holiday gift guide headlined “Of Color” and featuring gift ideas for minorities.

How 1950’s of them.

Indeed, my original title was “The New York Times Gift Guide for All Your Negro Friends” but that was scrubbed for reasons unknown. I thought that the use of the archaic form to describe African Americans was apropos considering the subject matter:

Do you have a a Negro friend and are you having trouble finding just the right gift to get him dancing and singing on Christmas Day?

Well, the New York Times has come up with one of the great ideas of the 1950s: a holiday gift guide for the colored folk.

You’ve probably struggled with what to give your doorman, or valet, or housemaid as an appropriate present. You want something not too expensive but something they can really use. This colored folk gift guide takes the worry out of your holiday shopping for servants and others who are complexion-challenged.

Don’t let the fact that this is the year 2009 fool you. The Times is just a little late, that’s all. A good idea is a good idea no matter what decade — or century — it is conceived. And when you think about it, the idea of giving our many-hued minorities their very own catalog of special gifts chosen with them in mind is probably long past due. After all, it’s been a few years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, and many lunch counters actually don’t mind serving non-whites.

Thank God we have the New York Times to help us measure racial progress in this country.

What is interesting about the guide is that it features gift ideas for many different shades of off-white. Not only Negroes will benefit from this ultra-modern idea, but the Latins, the Wogs, and even our friends from the inscrutable Orient can be inspired by these exotic and race-specific selections. It’s like taking a trip through an international bazaar — or getting in a time machine and traveling back to the good old days when everyone knew their place and Macy’s didn’t feature Kwanza displays.

As Ed Driscoll, points out on his blog, we have basically come full circle as far as racia attitudes in America is concerned:

Why be amazed? Elite colleges, with faculties that skew far to the left have been promoting the functional equivalent of “Separate But Equal” graduations and dorms for years - we first wrote about the latter topic (linking to a piece by Joanne Jacobs, former San Jose Mecury columnist turned author and pioneering edu-blogger) during the first year of our blog, back in 2002. Boston talk radio host Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation, which looked at similar trends in 2001.  As he said:

“In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the “multicultural” view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture.”

As is the current multicultural mania a perfect fit for modern liberal America. Not quite “separate but equal,” however. There is a current of thought that “authentic” racially-based constructs are superior to white society because past oppression has granted minorities an elevated moral position. The Times “Of Color” section in their gift guide is perfectly logical when seen in this light; separate, superior, and deserving.

Believing this nonsense allows for scathing personal attacks on minorities who don’t toe the line when it comes to their own cocooned racial group’s agenda. The fact that a lot of this criticism is blatantly racist in character is not surprising. Those white liberals who believe they occupy the same moral high ground as their oppressed minority brethren due to their “enlightened” views on race feel enabled to charge racial apostates with a form of treason in the most vitriolic ways.

And, of course, whites who disagree with them on everything from affirmative action to issues involving the confederate flag are racists. Any discussion of race with many on the left must begin by accepting their definitions, their notions of history, their ideas of what constitutes “racism.” Otherwise, the conversation is cut short rather rudely by those liberals accusing anyone who questions their moral authority to judge these matters as racist.

Is it any wonder there is little productive conversation about race in America?

No doubt many on the left would disagree with this analysis. Such is to be expected from those whose self-awareness on this issue is totally lacking. It’s hard to come down from the mountain, difficult to stop waving the bloody shirt on the battlements when genuine debate might reveal fatal flaws in one’s views on race.

And the biggest flaw is the arrogant notion that falsely identifying with the oppressed gives one the singular moral right to determine the legitimacy of another’s views.

Rare have been the opportunities in recent years to reach around and pat myself on the back, and this self congratulatory event warrants a small post of recognition.

Right Wing Nuthouse is ranked #70 on the Bloglines Top 1000 Feeds. One might legitimately ask how in God’s name was I able to secure nearly 20,000 subscribers to my feed - especially considering the fact that my sitemeter shows average daily visits of about 1500?

Simple. I cheated.

Well, not really. It seems that 4 years ago, Bloglines placed RWNH in their “Recommended” conservative political feeds. A new Bloglines subscriber could simply hit the “Subscribe” button and all the conservative blog recommendations would be included. I wrote them several times expressing my undying gratitude but never heard back from them. Let this serve as a public acknowledgment of thanks for their foresight and fabulous sense of taste and discernment for including this little site in their “Recommended” list.

This brings up a serious question. I know that many of you come here via some kind of feed reader. Is it better for you to have me authorize the display of the entire blog post in my feed? Or do you prefer the current set up where I whet your appetite by displaying only the first couple of hundred words?

Next to Bloglines, the single largest feed reader that visits the site is Google. Other than those two, I don’t get many visitors who use any of the major feed readers. I am wondering if I switched to displaying the entire post if that wouldn’t change.

Let me know your preferences in the comments.

Last night on Hannity, Dick Cheney charged the president with heresy.

Sean Hannity: You said about Barack Obama that he is projecting weakness to America’s enemies. Expand on that.

Dick Cheney: Well, I think most of us believe and most presidents believe and talk about the truly exceptional nature of America. Our history, where we come from, our belief in our Constitutional values and principles. Our advocacy for freedom and democracy and the fact that we’ve provided it for millions of people all over the globe and so unselfishly. There’s never been a nation like the United States of America in world history. And, yet when you have a president that goes around and bows to his host and proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me there’s a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.

American Exceptionalism is our civic religion. I take a little less expansive view than Cheney of what Exceptionalism represents; that it is, at bottom the simple recognition that our founding, our evolution, certain unique character traits, and the unimaginable expanse of the land itself sets us apart from other nations.

But does it set us above others? Does it make us a “superior” nation?

I believe that it does. There has never been a nation like America in the whole history of human civilization. This doesn’t make us perfect - not by a long shot. But if one were to balance the good against the bad in all that America has done both here and abroad, the scales would tip decidedly in favor of the good.

In fact, I have argued on this site that it is this dichotomy - the mix of good and evil, slavery and freedom, selfless sacrifice for others abroad combined with grubby commercialism and exploitation - all of this together is what makes America, “America” and is unique, special, and without peer anywhere else. People the world over still line up to get in, and failing that, will do just about anything to get here legal or not. I believe that all of this places America above any other nation in history. It makes us better. It makes us superior. It makes us special.

This singular fact is so self-evident that those who deny it have to twist themselves into knots of illogic trying to debunk it, or more often, leave out inconvenient facts in order to achieve their goal of trying to prove that relative to the rest of the world, we are just another ordinary place. There has never been anything “ordinary” about America whether it be our sins or virtues. Our mistakes have been huge as have our triumphs. Destroying fascism, militarism, and Communism all in breathtaking short order, while also destroying much of Southeast Asia, Iraq, and what was left of Afghanistan must be seen in the context of our capacity to do enormous good while causing enormous suffering.

“Ordinary?” Not hardly.

In agreeing with Cheney, Ed Driscoll calls the president a “transnationalist.”

Flashback to the the preface Obama gave in April when asked by a journalist his view on the topic:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Which is a perfectly Clintonian “I didn’t inhale” sort of response: I’m willing to pretend, for the purposes of the more ceremonial aspects of my current position, to believe in the charade of American exceptionalism. But as a dedicated transnationalist, I’m far, far beyond such a petty antediluvian concept, myself. After all, those modern day “Greeks” and “Brits” are living on history that’s increasingly in the rearview mirror. They and plenty of other exhausted former empires believed in their own exceptionalism, and didn’t they seem awfully foolish in retrospect when their period in the sun expired, leaving behind nations a shell of their former selves — a moment I’m doing my best to engineer, myself.

Is this a fair criticism of the president? Is it even a criticism at all?

It is by no means a monolithic view on the left that the president espouses, but I think it fair to say that Obama’s transnationalism informs the views of many liberals who are suspicious of Exceptionalism as being just another word for “nationalism.” In this, it may surprise you to find out that I share those same worries. Substituting a raw chauvinism and an almost fervid religiosity with regard to our uniqueness instead of a balanced and realistic view of the pluses and minuses in our past is a danger to our politics and policy. It is this attitude that brooks no criticism of America, or her history - a form of “America: love it or leave it.”

This is Exceptionalism transmogrified by ideology. Something similar can be seen among the Noam Chomskys of the left who constantly confuse “America” with the “American government” and blame much of the world’s ills on our very existence. That too, is an ideological construct, informed by a pathological loathing of much of what the rest of us see as our virtues. Chomskyites don’t hate America as much as their Weltanschauung prevents them admitting that our arrival on the world stage should be seen as a blessing, not a curse. They can more accurately be portrayed as “anti-Exceptionalists” - the reverse image of the civic religionists.

President Obama is no ideologue on the matter of Exceptionalism. But his radically skewed idea of our history - a fault I believe he shares with many liberals - where he cherry picks and takes out of context what he considers to be our faults, is an extension of his own Nicene creed about the world order.

Indeed, since day one, the president has sought to re-engage the world on America’s behalf by walking softly, carrying no stick at all, and when he feels it appropriate, pointing to our past sins, and acknowledging that we caused problems. Little noticed when he does this is his strong, unapologetic follow up, taking his listeners to task for their knee jerk anti-Americanism. It’s almost Socratic in its dialog although I wonder how effective it is.

Not exactly “apologizing,” but at the very least, inviting his foreign audiences to draw untoward conclusions about our past - or his interpretation of that past if you prefer - while mildly remonstrating against the unreasoning hatred of America felt by many overseas makes it appear Obama wants his transnationalist cake while eating an Exceptionalist one. As we are coming to expect from the president, his Solomonic decision making process where he tries to split the difference on most issues serves the purpose of giving something for everyone while satisfying no one.

President Obama is not just an internationalist in the traditional American sense. He is seeking to re-order the world by deliberately subsuming American interests to make us “first among equals.” He is cooling the relationships with traditional allies like Great Britain and NATO, while making an ostentatious display of submitting to the will of the international community represented by the United Nations. For the moment, this has garnered him praise and support from around the world. I sincerely doubt that will last.

There will come a time in crisis where all heads will turn toward America for succor and Obama will stare blankly back, not quite believing that all of this talk about the new international order was mostly for show; that the governments of the world really do look to America to solve their problems for them come crunch time. It is here that a pragmatic belief in American Exceptionalism gives a president the confidence to proceed despite the usual clatter that will be raised against us.

Without that belief, would Obama risk his international standing to intervene to prevent catastrophe? Faith in international institutions is fine as far as it goes. But what happens in a few months when Israel is faced with the question of war or peace regarding Iran? What happens if the worst case scenario occurs in Pakistan and fundamentalists seize control of the government and dozens of nuclear weapons fall into the hands of those allied with terrorists? Does anyone expect the UN to be able to do anything to address these kinds of crises?

I am not advocating war. But the world will expect the US to get out front on these crises and I wonder if the president’s worldview would allow him to deal with these problems effectively? He may very well prove able to do so. I pray that is true.

But I think it logical to think that a strong belief in your own country’s superiority might make his job a little easier.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Monica Showalter, Rich Baehr, and Ed Lasky for a discussion of the Copenhagen Conference, Climategate, health care reform, and other newsworthy topics.

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We humans like things nice and simple. If we have to expend any more than minimal brain power to understand something, we get all cranky and upset. This is especially true if something that we thought we understood goes against our preconceived notions of the truth once we internalize more information.

I envy the technically inclined. They seem to be able to grasp difficult concepts with an ease that escapes me. And I’m not talking about those who might be educated in the sciences or other technical fields. It is much more basic than that. There are some people who are simply better at understanding complexities than the rest of us. It probably has something to do with the way their minds are organized.

No doubt in 10,000 years, their DNA will have survived while mine and the other technically challenged humans will see our DNA go the way of the Neanderthals. Such is the relentless logic of evolution that favors the problem solvers, the adapters.

I bring this up because the more I read about Climategate, the less informed I become. I have to really work at understanding even the basics of what people like Mark Sheppard, Charlie Martin, and this fellow at Watts Up With That blog Willis Eschenbach seem to understand intuitively.

All three of these gentlemen are telling me that Climategate contains revelations so profound that they call into question a quarter century of scientific observations and theory about climate change. I have no reason to doubt their anaylses or conclusions. That’s because I barely have a clue of what they are writing about.

Distilling basics from this trio of very smart, accomplished people is difficult. But what I can gather is that something is very wrong with the temperature data, not just for CRU, but for the entire knowledge base on which the very idea of rising temperatures above what would normally be expected rests.

If true, this would be a flabbergasting turn of events. The theory of global warming rests on the observation that rising levels of CO2 corresponds directly with rising temperatures. The inference to be drawn from the data is that the rise in CO2 is the result of industrialized economies spewing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Correlation in both sets of data is necessary for the the theory to hold water. If you remove the rise in temperatures from the equation, all you have is increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and a theory that eventually, this will lead to a warmer planet. But without that temperature data showing a rise, it would be impossible to construct a viable model of how fast and how much warming would take place. It would be pure speculation if a climatologist tried to model future temperatures if what the record showed were normal fluctuations that could be accounted for by other indices (lack of solar activity, “Little Ice Age” warming, etc.).

So this is what has me flummoxed. Are the leaked documents from CRU a closing of the coffin for the AGW theory? This from Eschenbach would seem to make a strong case for it:

People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”

Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasofu . Climategate doesn’t affect that.

The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

OK - this I understand. But after examining a recent controversy in Australia where the raw data was, in fact, released for the temperature stations, what Eschenbach finds, is that those “homogenized” adjustments appear to be…biased in favor of warming:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Of course, that led me to look at exactly how the GHCN “adjusts” the temperature data.

[...]

They pick five neighboring stations, and average them. Then they compare the average to the station in question. If it looks wonky compared to the average of the reference five, they check any historical records for changes, and if necessary, they homogenize the poor data mercilessly. I have some problems with what they do to homogenize it, but that’s how they identify the inhomogeneous stations.

OK … but given the scarcity of stations in Australia, I wondered how they would find five “neighboring stations” in 1941 …

So I looked it up. The nearest station that covers the year 1941 is 500 km away from Darwin. Not only is it 500 km away, it is the only station within 750 km of Darwin that covers the 1941 time period. (It’s also a pub, Daly Waters Pub to be exact, but hey, it’s Australia, good on ya.) So there simply aren’t five stations to make a “reference series” out of to check the 1936-1941 drop at Darwin.

Yikes, indeed. Half a world away from CRU and we apparently have a similar situation where the scientists solve their “problem” with falling temps by simply massaging the data until it says what they want it to say.

But the thought gnaws at me; am I missing something here? Surely the way they massaged the data has some scientific basis, right?

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

If this, as we are told, is “how science is done in the real world,” lemme outa here.

But is it?

In reaching its conclusion, the climate panel relied only partly on temperature data like that collected by the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose circulated e-mail correspondence set off the current uproar. It also considered a wide range of data from other sources, including measurements showing the retreat of glaciers in mountain ranges around the world, changes in the length and character of the seasons, heating of the oceans and marked retreats of sea ice in the Arctic.

Since 1979, satellites have provided another check on surface temperature measurements. Strong disagreements about how to interpret the satellite data were largely resolved after the Bush administration began a review in which competing research groups worked out some of their differences.

Science is about probability, not certainty. And the persisting uncertainties in climate science leave room for argument. What is a realistic estimate of how much temperatures will rise? How severe will the effects be? Are there tipping points beyond which the changes are uncontrollable?

Even climate scientists disagree on many of these questions. But skeptics have been critical of the data assembled to show that warming is occurring and the analytic methods that climate scientists use, including mathematical models used to demonstrate a human cause for warming and project future trends.

This is where my personal conundrum ensues. There are literally dozens of studies showing that glaciers are retreating. And yet when one study comes out showing the opposite, the global warming deniers latch on to it with the fervency of a recent convert to a religion. Arctic ice is another measurement that features a host of studies showing it is shrinking and getting thinner while far fewer observations reveals the opposite.

They can’t all be frauds. They can’t all be hiding data, cooking the books, just for grant money. They can’t all be far left commies out to set up a one world government. Many of these observations must be accepted based on the idea that there is widespread agreement across several scientific disciplines that these observations reflect the facts. And if that’s true, then global warming as a theory has not been “debunked” but rather called into question - something the Al Gores of the world don’t want to do but which science, with its infinite capacity to be skeptical, must do if the scientific process itself is to remain a viable part of our civilization.

My point is that you have to look at the big picture. Picking and choosing which scientific evidence you wish to acknowledge is simply not acceptable. The raw temperature data looks flawed to me but what do I know? There are at least two instances of scientists massaging data to achieve a desired result. Does that destroy the entire theory of AGW?

What it should do is knock some sense into the fools who are gathering in Copenhagen. If this were truly about saving the planet, there would be no talk of requiring the kinds of draconian, economy destroying measures being contemplated by world leaders. But global warming is now out of the scientist’s hands and is in the political realm. And since politics is ultimately about control, government action to curb emissions will be the order of the day.

There will never be “certainty” about global warming. The question I have is, after we are finished pulverizing industrialized civilization and the climate doesn’t warm, where do we go to get our money back?

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
(Abraham Lincoln, from his first inaugural address)

I often reflect on The Great Emancipator’s words on days like today. The attack on Pearl Harbor has dwindled to insignificance for a large majority of Americans, most of whom were not alive that horrible day. The survivors who recall where they were and what they were doing 68 years ago are now in their 70’s and 80’s. Their numbers are falling with every passing remembrance of Pearl Harbor Day while those left behind have made it their cause to remind us of what it was really like to live in an America when our comfortable illusions about our safety and security were smashed so totally, and with a shocking finality.

The white hot anger that took a nation still in the depths of a deep depression and lifted them up in their “righteous might” to smite the Nazis and Japanese militarists is not felt by most of us, although remnants of it still live on in the breasts of those who remember first hand the gigantic betrayal of the Japanese and the evil of Hitler and his henchmen.

December 7, 1941 is one of those “hinges of history” that marks a divide between two eras in our historical consciousness. Before that date, America saw itself as too good to sully its hands by getting involved in the grubby power politics of Europe, or the endless colonial conflicts that afflicted much of Asia. Afterward, we realized that our security depended on building strong alliances and being prepared for war even in peace time.

Our isolationism was tied to traditionalism, in that the experiment of intervening in World War I was almost universally seen as a big mistake. Wilson’s efforts to re-order the world via the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations was viewed as an aberration by many Americans who took comfort in George Washington’s plea to steer clear of foreign entanglements. Some historians - Page Smith comes to mind - have argued that America wasn’t psychologically ready to assume a leadership role in the world following WW1 and that the rejection by the senate of Versailles as well as our snub of the League of Nations reflected that reality.

In truth, America was not very adept at this imperialist business. Our few colonial possessions served as little more than coaling stations for our merchant marine and navy (the Philippines being one of the only exceptions). And while as early as 1919, the navy developed “War Plan Orange” to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, the prospect of involving ourselves in trying to deflect Japanese imperialist ambitions in Asia were not taken seriously until the mid-1930’s.

Even in 1941, the thought was that war with Germany was much more likely. This was due to the “undeclared war” we were already fighting in the Atlantic. Our destroyers who were convoying supplies to Britain and Russia came under attack several times prior to December 7 - including the attack of October 31 on the USS Reuben James, sunk by a U-boat with the loss of 115 men.

The shock of December 7 wasn’t that we were at war so much as it was the shocking betrayal of the Japanese, who were negotiating with us right to the end. The historical record reveals that the Japanese had every intention of issuing an ultimatum - an hour before the attack. But snafus in decoding and translating the last message meant that the Japanese negotiators weren’t received by Secretary of State Cordell Hull until the attack was well underway.

Still, it is revealing how much we deluded ourselves to the last minute before the bombs began to fall on Pearl Harbor that peace was possible with Japan. Not so much our government, who were fully aware that a huge Japanese naval task force was steaming into the Pacific, destination unknown. Thanks to our breaking the Japanese naval code, the government knew the blow was about to fall but were in the dark where. Roosevelt sent a personal missive to the Emperor pleading for peace just hours before the first planes appeared over Diamond Head.

But the American people were being told that there was still a chance to avoid war, which made the attack all the more shocking, while engendering rage at what seemed to be a stab in the back by Tokyo. Our false sense of security and childlike innocence about the world disappeared in the fire, smoke, and blood of Pearl Harbor, as did much of our Pacific fleet - vanishing beneath the waves along with our too optimistic and too arrogant worldview.

Where does Pearl Harbor fit into our historical consciousness today? We like to take “lessons” from history but in truth, this is nonsense. The currents and eddies underlying the historical tides on which we are but reluctant passengers are too complex, too obscure to glean what we might commonly refer to as “lessons” to be learned from historical events. In this respect, Pearl Harbor was the culmination of decades of history; the rise of Japan as a westernized imperial power went back to the turn of the century, for instance.And from the moment of the opening of Japan in the middle of the 19th century, the prospect of a collision between their imperialist ambitions, and our own commercial empire building in the Far East was virtually assured.

Nothing is ever as easy as it appears as far as history is concerned. And that’s why it is easy to fall into a “false” historical consciousness when it comes to events like 9/11 or even Pearl Harbor. Rather than history teaching us anything, it is far better to have it inform us, animate our spirit, and act as an undergird to our most closely held beliefs and values.

There can be no present or future without a past. Such might be seen as a banal truism except we seem to have forgotten it, as Wilfred McClay, currently a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center reminded us in this brilliant lecture at the Heritage Foundation in 1995:

Historical consciousness means learning to appropriate into our own moral imagination, and learning to be guided by, the distilled memories of others, the stories of things we never experienced firsthand. It means learning to make these things our own, learning to look out at the world we experience through their filter, learning to feel the living presence of the past inhering in the seeming inertness of the world as it is given to us. Of course, discernment between and among memories is of great importance. Not all are worth preserving, and not all are reliable. Here is where the practice of professional historians has been especially valuable, in preserving so much that would otherwise be lost and in ferreting out the evidence for certain propositions while uncovering the faulty basis for others. But the advocate of historical consciousness is likely to give preference to those memories whose importance and reliability have been established not merely by a select committee of the American Historical Association, but also by the passage of time. To repeat, historical knowledge and historical consciousness are different things, and the latter can never become the province of a historical priesthood.

The passage of time may have dimmed the immediacy of Pearl Harbor but its significance can never be diminished as long as we lovingly place it in the storehouse of our national memories. It is a part of us now, as surely as Yorktown, New Orleans, Chapultepec Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Argonne Forest, and all the other place names where American blood was spilled for a cause. Even after the last Pearl Harbor survivor breathes his final goodbye, the “date that will live in infamy” will continue to live in our collective consciousness as a recognized milepost, pointing us on our way to the future.

That is the promise we can make to the survivors today. This is the promise we can make to our children and grandchildren as we teach them to develop their own historical consciousness about America and the world.

That’s a legacy for which the Pearl Harbor generation can be proud.

It doesn’t help their case any when warming advocates deliberately (or ignorantly) refer to climate change skeptics as “deniers” of global warming.

The deniers fall into the Luddite camp; those who reject any notion that man made climate change is even possible and indeed, harbor delusions that there is a world-wide conspiracy of thousands of scientists across several disciplines who are manipulating data to garner more grant money and enslave them. They see Climategate as a vindication of this view and believe the entire science of global warming has been “debunked.”

The skeptics are, for the most part, willing to examine all relevant data while attempting to keep an open mind about the conclusions reached regarding global warming. Their criticisms are confined to specific aspects of the debate and do not generally tail off into conspiracy theories or conclusions that AGW is a complete fiction.

There are indeed some skeptics who have reached the scientific conclusion, buttressed by their own evidence, that the science of AGW is flawed and is not “settled” in any sense of the word. Are they deniers because their criticisms of warming evidence like “the hockey stick” or the even more problematic ice core temp studies seek to debunk what is now “established” AGW science? Or are they responsible scientists seeking the facts?

Warming advocates do not even try to separate the two which can lead to idiocy like this from the Guardian today:

Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada’s leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.

In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office, said Weaver. The attempted breaches, on top of the hacking of files from British climate researcher Phil Jones, have heightened fears that climate-change deniers are mounting a campaign to discredit the work of leading meteorologists before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit tomorrow.

“The key thing is to try to find anybody who’s involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can … take out of context,” said Weaver. The prospect of more break-ins and hacking has forced researchers to step up computer security.

Fears of further attacks by climate-change deniers have also put Copenhagen delegates under increased pressure to reach a comprehensive deal to limit carbon emissions, with Britain’s chief negotiator, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband, warning last week that there was no certainty that a deal would be reached. “We need to have our foot on the gas all the time,” he said on Thursday. “We should not be complacent about getting a deal.” It was crucial that Britain, and Europe, showed ambition in setting an agenda for a tough, binding agreement and not let the efforts of climate sceptics derail negotiations, he added. “Our children will hold us in contempt if we fail now.”

The poor scientists are not familiar with a media feeding frenzy. Everyone and their brother is out to make a name for themselves by scooping the world and proving that warming advocates are cooking the books. Breaking and entering is a serious matter as is purloining personal papers and emails. This kind of nonsense should be punished. But stunts like impersonating workers are as old as newspapers and is hardly evidence that anyone is out to “smear” prominent climate scientists.

And talk about conspiracy nuts! To ascribe this competitive activity on the part of bloggers, writers, and press to get dirt on climate scientists as to “climate-change deniers” who “are mounting a campaign to discredit the work of leading meteorologists before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit tomorrow,” is balmy. If this is organized in any way I will eat my Bears hat. Positing a conspiracy to discredit Copenhagen is as loony as saying the entire AGW movement is one gigantic, organized conspiracy to force One World Government down our throats. It doesn’t track that way if you know anything about how the modern media works.

Nevertheless, Climategate deniers - those who are whistling past the graveyard believing that the scandal doesn’t change anything - have sought to lump both deniers and skeptics together in an effort to counter the growing perception that these are scientists with something to hide. It doesn’t help AGW science or their case against the CRU hack when so many of their colleagues are fighting tooth and nail against FOIA requests to reveal the underlying data that supports their theories.

On that subject, Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy has a great post on the quest of Steve McIntyre to get the authors of the hockey stick graph to release their data so that their conclusions can be duplicated. What McIntyre found without that data was shocking, as Lindgren’s link to Bishop Hill’s post on the subject shows:

[In 2005, Steven] McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999. Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original — in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn’t: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.

With Polar Urals now unusable, paleclimatologists had a pressing need for a hockey stick shaped replacement and a solution appeared in the nick of time in the shape of a series from the nearby location of Yamal.

The Yamal data had been collected by a pair of Russian scientists, Hantemirov and Shiyatov, and was published in 2002. In their version of the data, Yamal had little by way of a twentieth century trend. Strangely though, Briffa’s version, which had made it into print before even the Russians’, was somewhat different. While it was very similar to the Russians’ version for most of the length of the record, Briffa’s verison had a sharp uptick at the end of the twentieth century — another hockey stick, made almost to order to meet the requirements of the paleoclimate community. Certainly, after its first appearance in Briffa’s 2000 paper in Quaternary Science Reviews, this version of Yamal was seized upon by climatologists, appearing again and again in temperature reconstructions; it became virtually ubiquitous in the field: apart from Briffa 2000, it also contributed to the reconstructions in Mann and Jones 2003, Jones and Mann 2004, Moberg et al 2005, D’Arrigo et al 2006, Osborn and Briffa 2006 and Hegerl et al 2007, among others.

Read the whole post on McIntyre’s tireless efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery. It wasn’t until years later when the Royal Society published a paper using Yarmal data and was he able to hold the Society to their longstanding policy of requiring authors to archive the underlying data to make it publicly available. Finally, nearly 10 years after his first request, McIntyre got a hold of Briffa’s data and was able to destroy the hockey stick graph.

The lesson? The snoops who are digging for a smoking gun at the Canadian climate facility are misguided for engaging in illegal activity. But they wouldn’t be tempted if there was more transparency in the AGW community. The same holds true for any lab in the world and one would expect that the same standards these scientists would hold skeptics to would be honored.

That said, lumping “skeptics” in with “deniers” is a transparent smear and should be abandoned.