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logomachy--1. A dispute
about words. 2. A dispute carried on in words only; a battle of words.
logomachon--1. One who argues about words.
2. A word warrior.
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2004-11-24
Thanksgiving
Heavenly Father, we thank You for all Your blessings this year, for our successes and for the strength to bear up under adversities.
We thank You for our family, for our friends, for our community, and for our countrymen. Their service and sacrifice through the centuries have made Your loving promise a reality for us: to them we owe the bounteous comfort and opportunity that we enjoy as Americans.
We particularly thank You and ask Your blessings for those who dedicate their lives to our protection. Send Your Spirit to guide them, strengthen them, and protect them, especially our soldiers far from home today; may this Thanksgiving Day be for them a day of satisfaction and rededication.
We gratefully acknowledge that difficulties and misfortunes are signs of the freedom that You have given Your creation and are invitations to draw closer to You. In the coming year, give us the grace to be agents of Your Providence, as Christ taught us. May we and all men strive to live by the Truth of Your Love.
Merciful and generous Father, we thank you for this life and hope to be with You in the next. Amen.
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2004-11-22
Get a better kid
A paradigmatic moment occurred election night on NPR that shows that Republicans and Democrats don’t just check off different lines on the ballot. They live in different countries, if not in different universes. Scott Simon interviewed two women in Milwaukee, long-time friends, at their regular ladies’ bowling night. One had voted for George Bush. The other had not.
The Bush voter said that she thought Bush made the right decision to go to war in Iraq.
The second woman had voted for Kerry. Why? Bush had said all during the 2000 campaign that he would try to “end the divisiveness” and “bring us together”. But it had gotten so much worse that at her three-year-old’s play group, the “moms for the Democrats sit on one side and the moms for the Republican children play on the other side”, and “we can’t move forward on any issue, on Iraq, on anything social unless he brings us together”.
She reminded me of a young matron I met 35 year ago during an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C. She was protesting the war because her very young son was watching the news on TV and having nightmares.
I didn’t know what to say, then. Now, I would just tell her to get a better kid.
Like this one.
Elizabeth and the Gulf WarElizabeth was five-and-a-half when the shooting started in the Gulf War. At bedtime, we added a prayer for our soldiers and pilots, and as I tucked her in, she asked, "Is there going to be any shooting around here?" I told her that the Persian Gulf was on the other side of the world and assured her that a war in Iraq was not going to come to our neighborhood.
That didn't seem enough for her. It wasn't just that she had no sense of the distance from the Persian Gulf to upstate New York. She had no sense of proportion about combat, no sense of the ineffectiveness of combat, of the opportunities to discover, as Winston Churchill said, that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."
So I started to tell her funny stories about Vietnam.
Blowing up the ammo dumpActually, the first story was more about exhilaration than comedy. It was about the time I was on the company reaction force to help the perimeter guards during the Tet Offensive in 1968.
"One night when I was in Vietnam", I started, "there was an attack, a big attack." I told her how we got out of trucks and stood in the dark, watching red lines of tracers from guard towers and helicopters stream down beyond the perimeter fence. As it started to get light, the sergeants told us to line up and walk toward the shooting.
My section of the line came to a steep pile of dirt. "It was almost as high as our house and much wider", I described it to Elizabeth. My friends and I climbed to the top of the pile and saw we were on a wall, or berm, protecting a huge pile of ammunition crates.
We had been sent to clear Viet Cong from an ammunition dump!
We walked down the berm, around the crates, and over the berm on the opposite side, where we found a barbed-wire fence.
As we sat down, the pile of ammunition blew up, just a few minutes after we had walked past it—the Viet Cong must have left a time charge. The ground rolled like an ocean wave. I bounced twice as though I were on a trampoline and flopped onto my stomach. I looked over my shoulder and saw a big column of smoke rising from behind the berm. I thought, "Uh-oh. What goes up must come down". I scrunched myself up as small as I could and wished that I could crawl into my helmet.
"Why?" Elizabeth said. "What happened?"
"It rained rocks for a minute," I explained, "I saw a jagged chunk of steel the size of a softball land right next to my elbow. But only one person was hit, and he just had a bad cut."
"Nobody was killed," she said.
"No," I replied. "Most of the bullets and explosions don’t hurt anyone. That’s why there is so much shooting."
"I’m glad you weren’t hurt." She reached up for a hug.
"So am I, sweetie", I told her.
Too many magazines"Are the soldiers in the fighting afraid?" she wanted to know.
"Of course," I assured her. "You are always a little afraid, but you are mostly excited, and you can still do what you are trained to do, even when you are afraid.
"Did I ever tell you about Brian Ryan?", I continued.
The attacks and alerts of the Tet Offensive continued for a several weeks. One day, some of the men in my barracks were talking about what they would do if our company area were attacked, which wasn’t likely, because we were in the middle of one of the biggest American bases in Vietnam. Brian Ryan, who had just gotten to Vietnam, said that he wasn’t going to defend the barracks. If the Viet Cong attacked, he said, he was going to run to the bottom of the hill and hide in the pits where they burned out the tubs from the latrines.
We told Brian that hiding wouldn’t help. The Viet Cong would come looking for him. "Ol’ Charlie’s gonna come over the hill", we told him, "whoopin’ an’ hollerin’ and yellin’ 'Blyan Lyan, you die'". Brian just laughed and said he didn’t care. He was going to hide in the fire pits.
A few nights later, Brian was called out on reaction force and went to the company armory to get his rifle and ammunition. Brian filled his ammo pouches with loaded magazines, and because there was a big box and no one said to stop, he just kept taking more and more magazines and stuffing them into all the big pockets in the jacket and pants of his jungle fatigues.
This night, an ammo pile blew up even before Brian's platoon had left the road. Everyone hit the ground. When nothing more happened, everybody else stood up. Brian didn’t see any reason to move, so he stayed lying in the sand. A sergeant came down the line to check on people, and when he saw Brian, he asked "Is this man injured?"
"The fact was," Brian told us later, "I had almost killed myself landing on all those magazines, instead of nice, soft sand".
"We were all laughing," I told Elizabeth. She giggled a bit on cue. Brian went on, "But the best part was when we got back here. I had stuffed my pockets so tight that I couldn’t get the magazines out. I had to take off my clothes to work them loose. They wouldn’t have done me any good at all."
Elizabeth giggled happily at Brian’s silliness. I told her a few more stories of funny things that had happened to me, and of more close calls without result.
When I saw she was asleep, I thought of my friend, Harry, who had been a 19-year-old bomber pilot and POW in World War II. Harry was a Scoutmaster. When the younger Scouts couldn’t sleep at camp, he would tell them about his "18 death-defying missions through the flak-strewn skies of Nazi Germany". The kids never lasted past the second mission, he said.
The next morning, I looked in to see if Elizabeth needed any help getting ready for school. She was fine. "Pater," she announced, "I’ve decided what to wear. I am going to wear my red, white, and blue sailor dress today, in honor of all our soldiers and sailors."
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2004-11-18
Kerry Spot Does Applebee's
The usually excellent Kerry Spot at NRO recommends this balderdash to us:I also think there is something to this assessment of Democratic leaders' cultural divide from red state voters:One veteran Democratic strategist, Clinton White House political director Doug Sosnik, sums up the answer in one word: Applebee’s.
For Sosnik, the chain of modestly priced restaurants (more than 1,600 in 49 states), symbolizes precisely what is wrong with the party’s Washington-based elite.
Democratic leaders are out of touch with the American people, Sosnik said in a panel discussion Tuesday sponsored by the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
“The leadership of our party has a cultural disconnect,” Sosnik said. “Our leaders — particularly Washington, D.C.-based — don’t really have the same life, day to day, as all those people out there in those red states. We don’t eat at the same restaurants. I don’t know how many politicians in town that are leaders of our party who voluntarily go to Applebee’s, unless it’s for work. You look at the swing voters out there, what their sporting events are, the music they listen to, the celebrities, the television programs, it’s just not what the East Coast leadership (watches) — it’s not quite where we are.” That's one of the instant simplistic clichés that substitute for thought in political journalism. [Ed. What is it about journalists and politicians that they think anything that fits in a sound bite and headline slug is profound? Ans. I don’t know…and aren’t you supposed to be ranking on me, not other people?]
Where are the Applebee’s Republicans?First, just ask yourself What’s so special—or especially dim—about Democrats. How many Republican big suits think taking the kids or the old folks to Applebee's is a neat evening out? Heart surgeon Bill Frist? Karl Rove? Mary Matalin? Even Sen. Rick "Cheaper by the Dozen" Santorum? Great folks, all. I am in awe of Santorum and his wife, who really walk the pro-life walk [Ed. don't be too hard on yourself. You've never claimed to be pro-life, just anti-abortion. And you haven't liked kids since you own kids were born and all the other sprats came to look like vermin over-population greedily trying to snatch nuts and berries from your offspings’ mouths.]
Great folks, but you won't find them at Applebee's. [Ed. Better admit that you are aggressively ignorant of spectator sports, pop music, TV, and celebrities, and you loathe Applebee's, much preferring Pizzeria Uno for that sort of night out.]
That’s one.
No basis in factThe liberal elite, which can voice their shock and frustration in the public prints, are projecting their feelings onto the unsuspecting electorate. There’s no glory in losing because a few million swing voters leaned a bit more for Bush this time than they did for Clinton eight years ago. Far better for one’s self esteem to be an embattled remnant of enlightenment overwhelmed by semi-human brutes who shop in big-box stores and salute the flag. That’s a soothing fantasy.
Face it: Bush won by less then 2 per cent of the vote. That’s right. If 2% of the voters had switched their votes, Kerry would the one claiming a 4 point mandate. This is not a polarized electorate. This is not a country where the red state hordes crushed the brave Democrats. As this Purple America map suggests, we are an evenly divided electorate.
In fact, this whole elitist NOKD (Not Our Kind, Dear) snit against the red states is so baseless that I have to conclude that it is all about liberal narcissism, not political analysis. [Ed. But you think that everything liberals do is about narcissism.]
True but irrelevantThird, saying Democrats don’t understand Applebee’s customers is true but irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether the Democrats understand Republicans. The Democrats represent whom they represent. There just happens at this time to be about 2% too few of them to win elections. [Ed. Aren’t you contradicting the “no basis in fact” point above? That was the losing part. This is the “don’t understand” part. The premise is true but the consequence didn’t happen.]
Can the Democrats turn the numbers around?. I don’t think there is a pool of non-voting potential Democrat voters out there who could be recruited to overtake the Republicans. 120 million actual voters probably exceeds the number of citizens with an adequate number of brain cells to vote intelligently. That nearly 10% were undecided at the beginning of October shows the supply of intelligent voters is pretty near tapped out.
For a while, the numbers will be moving against the Democrats. Pace the Purple Map above, this red county-blue county map shows there are only a half dozen true blue states. Most so-called blue states are really red states with blue urbanations. The red states and the red counties are growing in population. The 2000 red states picked up seven Electoral College votes between 2000 and 2004 just from the 2000 census. There will be more red-county voters in 2008 and the change will reach the Electoral College in 2012.
That leaves conversion. And here the Democrats come up against their real problem. It is not that they don’t understand red staters; their difficulty is that red staters understand them. The Democrats are the party of acid, amnesty, arrogant self-absorption, and abortion, and no others need apply. The self-anointed saints of the Democrat party, the high-toned old post-Christian women and the humorless scolds, the self-mutilators and baby cutters, the limousine liberals and radicchio snobs, have driven out all the sinners, the breeders who think sex is about self-giving love and life, the producers who want to enjoy what they earn, and patriots who rejoice in the debt they owe for what they have been given.
What do the Democrats have to offer someone who rejects the Democrats’ bitter, narcissistic nihilism and elitist social engineering? Not much. And suppose they managed to entice some swing voters with a few items from the Applebee’s menu. Where would the Dems put them? Where would they be willing to sit? Who in the present party would be willing to sit next to them, let alone join them at Applebee’s?
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2004-11-15
“Shame is the Reality”
Jay Tea at Wizbang writes “In praise of civilian casualties”. He doesn’t really lust for civilian deaths. His point is that over-sensitivity is counter-productive.
His argument is that once the NGO jihadists find that we will grant them a zone of sanctuary if they hide among civilians, they will do it all the time, ultimately causing more American and civilian deaths. He points to what happened with mosques. Our first reaction was restraint, and the mujihadin immediately began using mosques as ammo dumps, assembly points, observation posts, and firing positions. The result was that we had to treat mosques as military targets, and more mosques have been damaged than would have been if we had flattened the first one.
Jay Tea's post stirs an idea that I've been kicking around for a while, namely, that the guards at Abu Ghraib had the right idea, just at the wrong time and the wrong place.
As soon as I saw the pictures of a American woman smirking at kneeling, naked Iraqi men, I recognized the special humiliation the pictures would convey to Arab/Islamic viewers. She is a woman looking on a man’s nakedness. She is in pants and tee-shirt—virtually naked by tribal/Islamic standards. She is a soldier in men’s garb—a double offense against all that is right and decent to Muslims.
I was prepared for outrage from Arab sources. I wasn’t prepared to read in the Washington Times of the former prisoner who felt so humiliated that he had been unable to return to his home neighborhood. Now that the pictures had been published, he had no hope of ever returning. He would have to emigrate.
Where did he think he would go, he was asked. Oh, America would be his first choice. In America, nobody cares what has happened to you.
He got that right.
Arab tribal culture is primarily an honor-shame-revenge society , quite different from a primarily justification-guilt-justice society like the US. In Arab culture, if I piss on your boots, you have been shamed. The only way you can recover your amour propre is to diminish me, say by killing me or raping my sister (or sometimes by raping your brother; as I said, it’s different). In America, you want me to admit or be convicted of doing wrong. Chances are I agree with you that pissing on your boots is wrong, but the critical difference with Arab culture is that the focus is not on making you whole or at least dishonoring me; the focus is on making whole an abstract principle, Justice, in the name of the community.
How does this apply to US policy? The Iraqi attitudes that Americans find most incomprehensible—not to say idiotic—are the anger and blame that Iraqis direct against the US for invading their country. They’re glad Saddam is gone. They acknowledge that his henchmen, or worse, will prevail if we leave. As though to confirm every suspicion we have had about Muslims’ tenuous connection to reality, they say the invasion and occupation have shamed them, because they overthrew Saddam, or were about to, or would have. And what had Iraq ever done to us, anyway?
The U.S. approach from the beginning has been to try to minimize the subordination of the Iraqi people and the incompetence of their society. In other words, what we would think of as putting shame on them. This is precisely the wrong initial goal. The problem is that Iraqis have not been shamed enough, and they have not been shamed by the right person,. Our goal should have been to make their shame unavoidable and undeniable, and to make us the agents of the ending of their era of shame.
Instead of treating Saddam as a fugitive from blind Western justice, US propaganda should have emphasized that he had humiliated the entire Iraqi population. Instead of reprimanding the soldier who threw Old Glory over the face of Saddam’s statue as US soldiers pulled it down, we should have built on that image. We should have publicized the myriad ways that Saddam humiliated the people, how he robbed, raped, tortured, and mutilated them. They should have been shown that Saddam had shamed them before all the world. Iraqis should have had months of a steady diet of posters and videos showing how Saddam had ground them into the mud, and we had saved them. We should have rubbed their faces in it.
Perhaps then they would have recognized that they had not been defeated by US aggression but by Saddam and the politics that grew out of their own hearts. It might have put them in a more realistic frame of mind for the nation building that was necessary. We didn’t need to have conversations like this with the Germans and Japanese:“We, the Iraqi people, overthrew Saddam”—Crap.
“We were innocent victims”—More crap.
"The insurgents are Iraqi freedom fighters"--Sorry, that's Michael Moore, but still crap.
“You Americans should have . . .”— Shut the f* up. Whatever you were going to say, it’s just more crap. You Iraqis were harboring a dirt-bag monster. Your whole country was an offense against all that is clean, decent, holy, and life-giving. Get used to it! We are the cleansing sword of Allah. Get on your knees and give thanks. I always regretted that the U.S. acceded to Muslim and secular western sensibilities and stopped referring to the “war on terror” as a crusade. It seems that Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi is naming the operations to clean out Islamofascist strong points in the Sunni triangle. They should name the whole campaign Cleansing Sword.
One of the peculiar bits of nonsense practiced by the German Nazis was to put “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes you Free) over the gates to concentration camps. In the case of Abu Ghraib, it would be a declaration of sanity to put a sign “Shame is the Reality”.
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2004-11-11
I'd like to say he is only momentarily deranged . . .
by Kerry's loss, but I think W drove this guy batty long ago.
Anyway, he sent a letter to John Derbyshire at NRO's The Corner:
GLOAT, and watch your pretend Teddy ride up the mound of civilian corpses he thinks of as San Fallujah Hill.
Gloat, and see suicidal economic policies precipitate the worst economic dislocation in 75 years.
Gloat and enjoy the spectacle of a faith that imagines Torquemada to be the Redeemer; prefers burning Joan to the miracle of the loaves.
Gloat and chuckle as you watch a polity riven and divided by demagogue fueled ever more implacable hatreds.
Gloat. Time and reason will bring you low. Is it just my impression, or do nut cases on the right make extravagant claims of fact (Eisenhower and Earl Warren were knowing agents of the Communist conspiracy) while nuts on the left are exercised by fantastic metaphors? Is it that liberals live in a fantasy land (as opposed to a land haunted by fantasies) or are they just more pretentious?
Anyway,my brother points to the assumption that true Christian Gospel implies liberal social polices and that people who disagree are idolatrous heretics.
And one cannot but chuckle to read of his concern about a "polity riven and divided by demagogue fueled ever more implacable hatreds".
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Veterans' Day, since a.d. 400
Today, Veterans' Day, is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours (316-397), who was a veteran of the Roman army. Wouldn't this further evidence of the great Christian Anti-Constitutional Jihad Conspiracy just curl Maureen Dowd's toes!In his early years, when his father, a military tribune, was transferred to Pavia in Italy, Martin accompanied him thither, and when he reached adolescence was, in accordance with the recruiting laws, enrolled in the Roman army. Touched by grace at an early age, he was from the first attracted towards Christianity, which had been in favour in the camps since the conversion of Emperor Constantine. His regiment was soon sent to Amiens in Gaul, and this town became the scene of the celebrated legend of the cloak. At the gates of the city, one very cold day, Martin met a shivering and half-naked beggar. Moved with compassion, he divided his cloak into two parts and gave one to the poor man. I am not entirely enthusiastic about St. Martin as patron of soldiers. He had to be forcibly restrained to take the oath of enlistment and spent his early years in a rear-echelon ceremonial unit. When ordered into battle, he refused to bear arms on the grounds of Christian conscience, saying "Put me in the front of the army, without weapons or armor; but I will not draw sword again. I am become the soldier of Christ." Fortunately, the invading Germans offered to negotiate, and Matin was discharged a few days later.
This pacifism of early Christianity is a sturdy and authoritative tradition, but I find it unpersuasive, at least as a general rule. It was professed by men who were or who wished to be monks; that was why Martin tried to avoid enlistment. Certainly, as Chesterton pointed out, to the very limited extent that the Gospels give any sign of Christ's attitude toward soldiers, it is that He was rather fond of them. Maybe it was the lay down your life for another bit.
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2004-11-10
Good Riddance
Fox News reportsIsraeli on Wednesday approved a Palestinian plan to bury Arafat at his sandbagged West Bank headquarters, known as the Muqata, in Ramallah. Palestinians want to turn it into a shrine, defusing a potential conflict with Israel by dropping a demand for a Jerusalem burial. Yeah. Israel said the only way Arafat's corpse would be allowed into Jerusalem was dragged behind a tank and nipped at by wild dogs--they offered to import the wild dogs, if necessary.
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2004-11-03
I have a dream . . .
Over at NRO and Free Republic ("Vietnam Vets--WE HAVE WON!!!"---(Welcome Home!!!)) they're getting a little high on the new même: Kerry's defeat is the homecoming parade the Vietnam vets never had.
Well, second, Ronald Reagan shamed the country into having a bunch of shamed-faced welcome-home parades.
First, Kerry's defeat is a good thing for the Republic. Thanks to the Swifties and everyone who supported them for exposing Kerry's lies and lying and the vicious lengths his supporters were willing to go to. But this "parade we never had" stuff is veering perilously close to sentimental slop. As Dr. Johnson told Boswell, "Clear your mind of cant!" We haven't won. We have just prevailed in one battle. Half the country is proud to embrace the lies that stuff Kerry’s empty suit.
Personally, I don’t want to walk in a parade. I dream of walking down the street and seeing one of those proverbial homeless Vietnam vets—Oh! It’s John “Band of Mongols” Kerry, kicked out by Teresa, sitting on the curb in a ragged wet suit and his old fatigue jacket, holding up a sign: Will Marry for Money
There's more to my dream, but it begins to get uncharitable.
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