Paul's Blog of Wisdom

In the September 9th-15th edition of The Economist, they say that the "paleoconservative moment" of 2006 is bad news for the Republican Party. By that, they mean that if the Republican Party gives in to the apparent revolt of the anti-illegal immigration crowd, it will hurt the Republican Party. Well, apparently it will also hurt the Democratic Party, since more than half of Democratic Senators also voted for the 700 miles of fence, as I mentioned here.

They talk about Buchanan as being "nativist" and they show a picture of him with a pitchfork and signs saying "STAY AWAY" and "STAY OUT," therefore clearly saying that he is anti-immigrant. No, he's not. What he says, if The Economist bothered to listen to him, is that he thinks we should focus on bringing immigrants who meet 2 criteria: that they would be of a benefit to our society and that they are from a culture which could assimilate more easily into ours. He says that he prefers bringing immigrants from, say, Great Britain, Ireland or Italy to bringing immigrants from Mexico. That is not anti-immigrant, but The Economist, which is usually so smart in their arguments, seems completely unable to look at this issue in a fair, intelligent way.

I also love how The Economist says that "Mr. Buchanan is right to argue that the immigration system is a disaster, and that a country cannot survive if it is nothing more than a 'polyglot boarding house,'" yet they later say that "His analysis of the immigration problem is not just misguided: it is a recipe for disaster." So, which is it? Is he right that the immigration system is a disaster, or is his analysis a recipe for disaster?

The Economist says that Mexicans "come to America in pursuit of work, not reconquest." Well, it's surely true that the main purpose of coming here for the vast majority of Mexicans is not to reconquer the southwestern U.S., but that doesn't mean it won't cause huge social problems down the road or that it couldn't lead to reconquest. The majority of Mexicans believe that the southwestern U.S. belongs to them, as I've mentioned before. In 50 years, 75% of the population of the southwestern U.S. could be either Mexican or of Mexican descent if nothing is done to fix our immigration system soon. Let's run a little hypothetical experiment. If the governor of, say, California in 2050 said that he was going to pay his state's taxes to the government of Mexico and the government of Mexico started providing services to the state of California, thus making California a de facto Mexican state, would the Mexicans in California really protest? Do you really think they would? I'm not so sure. The retaking of the southwest wouldn't happen with a bang, but with creeping little bits of increasing involvement between the 2 entities like this. Each little creeping bit would seem okay in and of itself and then, before you know it, the southwest would effectively be run by Mexico and most of the Mexicans who are here would be just fine with that and wouldn't protest. That's the fear, not that every Mexican is coming with a gun in hand to attack America and retake the southwest by force.

I am absolutely stunned by this:

Among its final tasks before leaving to campaign, the Senate on Friday night passed and sent to President Bush a bill authorizing 700 new miles of fencing on the southern border...The Senate vote on it Friday night was 80-19.

When I heard that the filibuster was over and it was coming up for a vote, I was confident that it would pass, but I thought it would get somewhere in the range of 60 votes or so. But 80?! Wow! I'm very pleasantly surprised by that. Remember all those people saying that voting to crack down on illegal immigration was such bad politics? Well, apparently, not only virtually all Republicans now think that it's good politics, but the majority of Democrats think so, too. I guess the media elite were just wrong once again. I'm shocked.

This is an editorial defending Wal-Mart, which often offers better pay/benefits than the “mom and pop” stores that everyone says we need to protect from Wal-Mart (how dare a business offer products/services for prices that people like better than those of its competitors? *sheesh* The audacity. Market failure! Market failure!)

“Darn it! You see? You let these greedy capitalists corner the market and drive all their competitors out of business, and what do they do? They, um ... slash the price of life-saving drugs by 86 percent” (http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Sep-25-Mon-2006/opinion/9824692.html).

“There do seem to be competitors left, by the way. Walgreens and CVS saw their stocks slip by 7 to 8 percent on news of the Wal-Mart announcement. What ever will they do now? Struggle to drop their own prices, perhaps.”

Let’s see. I think there are 1 or 2 places to work in, say, Las Vegas. Yet, when Wal-Mart opens a new store, for some reason, they still have employees who are willing to work there. In a market economy, if you don’t like the service or prices at one store, you simply shop somewhere else. If you don’t like the pay and/or benefits at one employer, you simply work somewhere else. So, why does anyone continue to work at Wal-Mart in a place like Las Vegas with plentiful jobs around every corner? And no one can possibly say that Wal-Mart has no competitors. Every grocery store chain—and there are lots of them—is a competitor. Every retail store—and there are TONS of them—is a competitor. Every pharmacy—and there are several big national ones and lots of small, local ones—is a competitor. This is not a market failure. This is quite clearly an example of market success. If you wanted to put in a textbook something extolling the virtues of a market economy, this would be a perfect example. I contend that Wal-Mart has, through its low prices, done more to alleviate poverty than any government program in the history of the world.

"Four Canadian border crossings were shut down Sunday as about 60 of Canada's unarmed border guards walked off the job after they were warned that a person classified as 'armed and dangerous' may be headed into Canada."

Um, what? Is it me or is the word "guard" in these people's job description? What the hell is the point of having a border "guard" whose job it is to protect a border if they're completely unarmed and they just walk off the job when they're told that dangerous person is coming through? That's like having an unarmed military that just walks away when there might be a dangerous person coming. This is insane and it's all because the anti-gun Nazis in Canada are even more powerful than they are here.

I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying that it does not prove that coercion or torture should ever be used. There are some forms of coercive interrogation that I think we should use and some that I don't think we should use and I think they should be codified in law. With that said, I just watched The O'Reilly Factor and he had a guy on from ABC who said that he has talked to many interrogators from our prisons for captured terrorists. He said that some of the people that came forward to him came to him specifically because they were opposed to the interrogation techniques that they were using. He then said that the interrogators have told him that we have gained information from coercive interrogations that have stopped 14 attacks against us since 9/11, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which I believe is only a few miles from Dan, though I could be wrong about that. That's right, 14. My father has asked me in the past "Why haven't we been attacked again since 9/11?" Well, here's your answer. At the time, I said something like, "Well, maybe John Ashcroft is doing his job effectively." To put it quite bluntly, we haven't been attacked again since 9/11 because George Bush won the last 2 elections instead of his opponents. Now, if you think it would have been worth it to have been attacked all those times in order not to have had the very small civil liberties infringements we've had, that's your prerogative, but to all of you people to whom civil liberties are the primary concern, I think that you should really support small, hopefully temporary, civil liberties infringements now so that we don't get much bigger infringements later. What do you think people would think of your civil liberties arguments if we had been attacked 15 times in the last 5 years? Just imagine saying to a bunch of Americans who have been attacked 15 times in 5 years that having a female interrogator rub her breasts on a captured terrorist is just too far to go to stop attacks. What do you think their reaction would be? Do you really think anyone would give a crap about interrogations that are mildly uncomfortable to captured terrorists if we had been attacked an average of 3 times per year or do you think that they'd be screaming for us to nuke Tehran and Mecca and Demascus? Do you think anyone would stand for the recent situation in Afghanistan where we had dozens of Taliban in our sights, but we didn't shoot them because they were in a cemetery and our rules of engagement say we can't fire on cemeteries? Do you really think we'd be trying to weaken the Patriot Act or do you think we'd be frantically passing even more restrictive legislation? I'll let you decide the answers to these. Take this into account when you're thinking of the best way to preserve your civil liberties.

Sunni Arab terrorists are taking a beating, and you can see that in how they are pulling away from other targets so they can concentrate on Baghdad. For example, in the last three months, attacks on oil facilities, long a favorite of the Sunni Arabs (‘if we can't have it, no one can’) have fallen by nearly 60 percent.

This doesn’t mean that the violence is going to end next week, but the long-term trends are in our favor if we can just stick it out.

It would take another year or so to train Iraqi troops and police sufficiently to take control of Anbar province (the Sunni Arab heartland).

Everyone was saying that being strict on illegal immigration was bad politics not too long ago. *Everyone.* The Economist said that there was a fight in the Republican party between the only logical position, which is that of the President, and the gut position, which was to build a wall and send all the illegals home, which is roughly how they put it. The Economist assured us that if the Republicans went with the strict anti-illegal immigration stance, it would be devastating for the party. Now, all of a sudden the Republicans are starting to show a little bit of spine on *gasp* enforcing our laws by, for instance, voting to build a border fence and it's starting to look increasingly possible, though I wouldn't yet say likely, that the Republicans could keep the majority in the House and the Senate. Are these 2 things related? I think so. Not only that, but last year, only something like 38 House Democrats voted for the border fence and last week, I think 64 did. Plus, more Republicans than last year voted for the fence. Why is it that both the Republicans and the Democrats are moving toward the enforcement-first position right before an election if it's such bad politics? Does everyone, including The Economist, think that both parties are politically suicidal, or is it that this is yet another case of an accepted media truth being proven wrong? I guess we'll find out in about a month and a half.

This is something I've said until I'm blue in the face and, unfortunately, it's still true. We simply don't understand the enemy we're fighting.

The number of dangerous mistakes we have made before and since the outbreak of the war because we do not understand the opponent with whom we are faced is appalling. It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.

That's from 1944, but every word of it is still true today about Islamic fascism. Here's more:

Since we value individual freedom and material prosperity, we assume that those are also the supreme motivating goods of Muslims. Since we privilege material causes over all others, we ignore spiritual causes or reduce them to deformed responses to unfulfilled material needs. Since we prize the transparent fulfillment of the requirements of agreements we sign, we assume other peoples will also, even if those requirements contradict a more important national interest or a spiritual goal, such as fighting the infidel until the whole world is for Allah, as the Koran puts it.

Here's the summary:

As long as we indulge this reduction of the jihadist to our own assumptions; as long as we show by our actions that we are not really sure that the ends we pursue are just and right, right enough to do things at times we’d rather not; as long as we cling to “dangerous delusions” about human nature and the primacy of the material over the spiritual, we will continue to lose the war. For our enemy has none of our hesitation, none of our doubt, none of our fear of the world’s disapproval. He knows why he kills and dies. What will it take to teach us what we should kill and die for?

A-freaking-men.

In Ayman al-Zawahiri's latest tape, he mentioned an Algerian terrorist group joining al Qaeda and he said "We pray to God that they will be a thorn in the side of the American and French crusaders and their allies."

Isn't terrorism about the Iraq war, which France opposed? Guess not. The reason that people might think that terrorism is encouraged by the Iraq war is simple and understandable: lots of terrorists cite it as what drove them to terrorism. What the people who think this fail to realize, though, is that there's always something for the Religion of Perpetual Outrage to cite as a reason for attacking us. For goodness' sake, they go all the way back to the Crusades and Andalusia for justifications to attack civilians today. It simply doesn't matter what we do, they'll find something to justify their violent tendencies, whether it's Iraq or our formerly having troops in Saudi Arabia or support for Israel or the fact that we allow women to get educated and have jobs outside of the home or the fact that we didn't kick Bill Clinton out of office for having an extramarital affair (this was actually mentioned in at least one al Qaeda tape). It's not about our policies! It's about who we are. Many Westerners think that if only we're more accepting to the "other," then maybe they won't hate us as much, but it's just the opposite. It's very specifically the fact that we are open to the "other" that makes them hate us. The West's being so accepting to "decadent" behavior is what makes them hate us. They hate that we're open to any and all religions instead of just Islam. They hate that we accept homosexuals instead of killing them. They hate that we are open to any and all speech. What so many Westerners think will make them like us is really what makes them hate us. They hate our pride in individualism. Everything that we value, they hate, and that's all there is to it.

When people try to blame the Iraq war or other foreign policies for "creating" terrorists or for encouraging terrorists, they either don't realize or disregard one thing. The biggest increase in Muslim support for al Qaeda came on September 11, 2001 and the biggest decrease in Muslim support for terrorists has come since the beginning of the Iraq war. Many people don't realize this because it's barely reported. Muslim support for al Qaeda jumped on 9/11/01 and rose again in the run up to the Iraq war. Then, after the war started, and especially after it became clear that al Qaeda was slaughtering thousands of Muslim civilians, Muslims started to realize what a catastrophe al Qaeda had unleashed on them. Remember this: the support went up on 9/11 because the attacks showed that terrorism could achieve something and it was only after they saw that there were serious consequences to be had for terrorism that Muslim support for the terrorists decreased. There's a simple lesson here: terrorists conduct attacks because they think they'll achieve some goals. If you allow them to achieve their goals in response to their attacks, support for terrorism increases. If you punish them in response to their attacks, support for terrorism decreases. This isn't rocket science, yet so many people still don't get it.

Also, take a look at this:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20060915.aspx
"Most Islamic terrorists are not happy with the September 11, 2001 attacks, and consider these particular terrorist acts as an example of poor leadership."

"Years of effort in building up local terrorist organizations, was undone in months. It became more difficult to move around, to raise money and to communicate. Osama bin Laden's decision to attack America had been a disaster for Islamic terrorists everywhere."

"But for the average Islamic terrorist, September 11, 2001 was a disaster. They gained some more media attention, but lost much more. The Islamic radicals never had a shortage of recruits. Much more scarce were trained and talented managers and technicians. Hundreds of these fellows died, or were imprisoned after 911."

"To make matters worse, Western governments often let in Islamic terrorists and gave them refugee status, and allowed them to do fund raising and organizing. All that changed after September 11, 2001. So you can imagine how angry most Islamic terrorists are at al Qaeda."

"The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was seen as yet another disaster (for Islamic terrorism) caused by al Qaeda's rash 911 attacks...And because of 911, America turned a Shia majority Arab country into a democracy. Not only did that put the Sunni Arab minority out of power, but gave all Arabs an alternative to religious or secular dictatorship. Islamic radicals consider democracy an un-Islamic invention from the West. If it catches on, as it appears to be doing in Iraq, it will cause Islamic radicals no end of trouble."

So, the next time you hear that we're less safe from terrorism now or that our attacks on Afghanistan and/or Iraq have increased the power of the terrorits, you'll know the truth. When/if it's become clear that we've won in Afghanistan and Iraq, al Qaeda is effectively done. History will prove this to be true.

My biggest fear about civil liberties arguments is, and has been for a long time, that the public and the government will overreact to the small civil liberties infringements we've had over the last few years and go too far in the other direction, leaving us even more vulnerable to attack than we were before 9/11. In fact, I think this is already starting to happen a little bit and I think it will continue to happen until we get attacked again.

Oh...my...God. This is the most despicably one-sided and biased "article" I've ever seen. Disgraceful. I would think that even ultraliberals would get disgusted by this "article." Take a look at this:

"The sweep has had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy."

"'When his momma brought this baby here and left him, tears rolled down her face and mine too,' Rodas said. 'She said, `Julie, will you please take care of my son because I have no money, no way of paying rent?'"

"'These people might not have American rights, but they've damn sure got human rights,' Robinson said. 'There ain't no reason to treat them like animals.'"

"'This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up,' Slater said."

""These people come over here to make a better way of life, not to blow us up."

There is 1 tiny, little sentence that rebuts this propaganda. Here it is:

"Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Marc Raimondi would not discuss details of the raids. 'We can't lose sight of the fact that these people were here illegally,' Raimondi said."

That's it. That's the other side. I challenge you to read the whole thing without feeling like you're going to puke. No, there's certainly no bias in the mainstream media. In fact, there's a conservative bias, say some liberals. Please.

Paul

Did you hear about the “torture” that we inflicted on an al Qaeda big shot which was reported in the New York Times over the weekend? The “torture” included playing Red Hot Chili Peppers music loudly. The humanity! I guess we’d better go stop parties all around this country as the party guests are all being tortured!

According to The Economist, a recent poll showed the destruction of al Qaeda to be the #1 foreign policy goal among conservatives and the #10 foreign policy goal among “leftists.” I don’t know exactly what they mean when they use the term “leftists.” I don’t know if that’s people who are registered as Democrats or people who are self-proclaimed liberals, but the fact that destroying al Qaeda is only the #10 goal among those “leftists,” and the apparent fact that the ultra left wing holds extra sway over the Democratic party right now means that, as upset as I am with the Republicans right now, a takeover of the Congress and/or the Presidency by the Democrats absolutely scares the crap out of me at this particular stage in history. I saw Gary Hart on a political talk show recently and he actually said with a straight face that the way to win the war on terror is to get back on the good sides of our democratic “allies,” “like France,” he said, so that we can share intelligence with them. My mouth dropped open at the absolute stupidity of what he said. Never mind that I think France has more to apologize for over the pre-Iraq war diplomacy than we do—and I will defend that until the day I die—and not only are we currently sharing intelligence with our democratic allies (and French intelligence apparently has been extremely effective and helpful in the war on terror), but the fact that this was apparently the only thing he could think of when asked how to win the war on terror absolutely scares me. If this is what passes for Democratic foreign policy, I can’t imagine even fathom giving them my vote.

How many times have you heard about the "Taliban resurgence" or the "growing insurgency" or the huge "increase in violence" in Afghanistan lately? These terms are so ridiculous and misleading. You hear breathless claims like "2,000 people have been killed in southern Afghanistan in the last few months!" and things like that all the time. *Sigh* The reason for the increase in violence is that NATO has been absolutely beating the crap out of the Taliban lately. Yes, destroying your enemy constitutes violence, but the way it's described is horribly misleading. And those 2,000 people killed? Well, about 1900 of them were Taliban members and probably half of the remaining people killed were civilians. Yeah, it's really difficult for crazed gunmen to kill civilians. Here's the reality:

"NATO's battle with the Taliban has turned into a massacre. NATO intelligence and air reconnaissance has come up with more targets than NATO has troops to take care of. NATO commanders want another 2,500 troops to deal with this, but they won't get them before this years campaigning season is over. While the Taliban keep turning out press releases about how they are winning, the reality on the ground is quite different. Day after day, groups of Taliban fighters are caught by NATO troops, and when these battles are over, there are 10-20 dead Taliban for each dead NATO trooper. Even by Afghan standards, this is a defeat. The old timers, on both sides of this fight, know that the tribal warriors cannot sustain these kinds of losses."