137 Comments

1. josé maría:

It is obviously a religion war and a clash of civilizations. Obviously the muslim world has not evolved at the pace of the western world. The differences can no longer be avoided. Our existence is a provocation for them. They need to kill us and instaurate the Caliphate. Western world will have to force the whole islamic world to change or be destroyed.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:29 am 2. richard mcenroe:

There will not be a concerted outcry. The Arab street is too cowed by decades of Islamofascist oppression and the Muslim community in the West is constitutionally incapable of condemning any terrorism without a reflexive, “yes, but Israel still… ”

(Not that Ismalofascist oppression is not a factor in the West, even in the US, Arabs and Arab Christians in the heavily Islamic neighborhoods of Brooklyn have been assaulted for condemning the 9/11 attacks)

But this marks a significant change in the tactics of the Islamofascists, if it is kept up. Have they recognized that their attacks on Muslim Iraqis are alienating the populace, and are seeking now to set up a straw dog foreign influence to bring the people back to their support?

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:37 am 3. richard mcenroe:

Roger ó BTW, these people are already fighting a religious war. It’s time we publicly acknowledged that.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:38 am 4. Coisty:

I would expect the Iraqi government to condemn the attacks but I’d be very surprised if the Islamic world in general felt anything but indifference regarding attacks on Christian churches. Even those who don’t support such acts will reply “but what Palestine?…Kashmir?…the occupation?”

I used to work with Arabs and I took a couple of courses in ME history at university in classes made up mostly of Arabs and the characteristics of Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, that stood out the most for me were their belief that they are always in the right and always the victim of someone else. Perhaps in private they don’t feel that way but public self-criticism appears to be an unknown concept to them. Lack of empathy for non-Muslims, be they East Timorese or Western Christians, Jews, or Hindus, or even occasionally Muslims of a different race – Kurds, Sudanese blacks – is difficult not to notice. Obviously all nationalities and religions feel a connection to those most like themselves but Arab Muslims strike me as the group most uniformly unsympathetic to anyone deemed “the Other”.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:58 am 5. lindenen:

This is pretty common in the ME. I remember last year around Christmas reading a long list of attacks on Christians from places as far flung as Indonesia to Pakistan to Africa.

Am I mistaken in thinking that until the 1980s Lebanon was majority Christian? But many of those people ended up running for their lives.

Aug 1, 2004 - 11:14 am 6. richard mcenroe:

Coisty ó You have no room for anyone else when you’re living in your past…

Aug 1, 2004 - 11:28 am 7. Jay Rice:

What is Islamofascism except a religious fanatic with a bomb? This is a religious war. While the west is becoming secular, the Middle East has moved to fill a vacuum in their own populations, and the power crazed are supplying the VISA card to buy the armaments.

There will be no mass Muslim indignation. Like you, they might be “nearly appalled,” that’s close to almost indignant but failing to make the leap to outright pissed off. We’re all victims in this, the Arabs as well as the west, as well as the bystanders. The freedom to be left alone isn’t an option anymore.

The attack on the Christian churches, however, may be a good indicator that they are unable to concentrate on military targets and want to make noise without taking risk.

Aug 1, 2004 - 11:49 am 8. Goof®:

Am I mistaken in thinking that until the 1980s Lebanon was majority Christian?

Probably (read that undoubtedly,) but then it was in the interest of the Christian community (first paragraph of the link) to not know for sure.

Lebanon Population

Aug 1, 2004 - 12:06 pm 9. Rick Ballard:

Goof,

Good cite, the article should have been titled, “How the Flower Became the Stinkweed”.

Aug 1, 2004 - 12:41 pm 10. Ron Wrght:

Just updated an alert I sent to several groups I moderate. I posted some of this several topics below on the situation in Iran.

To post this quickly I’m linking to the post I made over at Little Green Footballs:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=11948#c0070

Ron Wright, Moderator

HSPIG Forums Site]

http://www.hspig.org

PS Please browse our website for other items of interest. The bottom line is that we have to collectively protect our on backyards.

The White Horse from DC won’t be riding into town anytime soon to the rescue.

Aug 1, 2004 - 12:51 pm 11. Rick Ballard:

My Dear Ron,

Give it a rest.

Best Wishes,

Aug 1, 2004 - 12:59 pm 12. PeterUK:

Lindenen.

All the Middle East was Christian before Islam, there were great and civilisations before that, similarly Israel was a Jewish nation before Islam existed.

Muslims want the Caliphate back,they stole the Caliphate in the first place.

Aug 1, 2004 - 1:07 pm 13. Ron Wrght:

Sorry Rick,

I’m an investigator in a large Metro PD in Southern California. Have been for over thirty years.

We must get ahead of the curve to anticipate and intercept any potential attack the danger of not interdicting an attack is unimaginable. We can’t afford to take the hit the consequences our to great.

One threat scenario that scares the hell out of me. If aQ has smallpox stocks (not even weaponized), assuming suicidal delivery agents. Infect your agents and have them mingle along our southern border with the Hispanics waiting to cross.

Our public health system will crash and won’t be able to handle the epidemic that will follow. The CDC’s current ring containment defense will fail as you will have mutliple oupbreak cits at the second and third generation infections.

Only thing once you unleash a doomsday device you run the risk of it coming back at you.

This is a message that needs to get out to the American People whether you are on the left or right. The threat of Islamofacism is a very real and present danger to our Country.

Here’s a post I just put up at Michelle Malkin re specific info re what to look for. The feds have their hands full and need the help of the American People. The blogosphere is the best way to diseminate this information because our media has failed to objectively cover this threat.

Ron

*****

UPDATE ALERT

Here’s an alert I posted to some groups I moderate. It has special relevence here as Michelle has pointed out a significant weakness on our War On Terror against Islamofascism. This being our leaking borders.

A point of reference was the arrest of the female in Texas about ten days ago and the absurdity of the release of the Islamic male subjects detained at the border because of lack of jail space.

DAH! won’t people ever learn.

I’m sorry to bring this message but whether you accept it or not our Country is at war. The time for political correctness is over.

There are those of us who don’t believe the White Horse from DC will be riding into town anytime soon to the rescue. We must realize we all must protect are own backyards.

No putdown on them because their plate is full. The 100k federal agents that can be thrown at this problem is a drop in the bucket.

This must be a concerted effort involving the American People as additional eyes and ears to watch for unusual activity. Don’t have time to go into this here. Check out our site.

But in brief in the world of Trek before a Romulian Bird of Prey can attack, it must decloak before it can fire. This is similar to aQ terrorist cells on the ground already.

THEIR BEHAVIOR – while not criminal will tip of the existence of underground cells.

Key – 3 to 5 males (rare for females but changing tactics), ME of Islamic origin, travel, train, eat, sleep together in the cell group for reasons of operational security (Leader is akin to the political ofc of the old Soviet Union), will pay months in advance for apt/car rentals, will pay in cash, don’t seem to go to work, and stay out of sight.

These are classic signs that Gaven DeBecker, “Fear Less,” calls pre-incident indicators. These are things that regular citizens will see as out of the ordinary. One example is a group going to a farm supply company and wanting to purchase ammonium nitrite prills (fertilizer) when it’s obvious that they are not into farming.

These are the kinds of behavior that will tip the activation of a cell. Generally there will be three types of cells – financial, logistics, and operations.

They will be compartmentalized off form the others with the team leader the only one knowing the facillitator who knows how to contact the other groups.

Financial cell will raise money locally and/or assist in getting funding into the country. Logistics will rent apt/cars and other groundwork including casing potential targets. Operations are the suicidal agents that will carry out attack.

Not uncommon to make a number of dry runs to test defenses and operational readiness to counter attack.

If you see any of these activities,

DO NOT HESITATE to contact one of the Regional FBI Joint Terrorism Tasks Forces through out the Country.

Remember if your hackles go up and it’s unusual to you, CALL don’t wait. Don’t be blown off by dispatchers or phone answerers. Get your info to one of the JTTFs. They are the ones who have their ears on and take action.

Ron Wright, Moderator

HSPIG Forums Site

http://www.hspig.org

Here’s the link to the additional update re the southern border:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=11948#c0070

Aug 1, 2004 - 1:33 pm 14. Rick Ballard:

Dear Ron,

I don’t care if you’re the Grand Poobah of Panjundrum. You’re interrupting a conversation and what you say can be done in two lines and a link. You’re burning the proprietors bandwidth, you’re defining trolldom to a degree that I find truly objectionable.

Hie thee to a monastery and commence penance, thou art no friend of mine.

Aug 1, 2004 - 1:44 pm 15. PeterUK:

and anyway Roger knows this he has his own satellite

Aug 1, 2004 - 1:53 pm 16. DennisThePeasant:

Ron Wright-

I’m a C.P.A. in Central Ohio. Have been for 20 years.

Now that we are done with establishing just what big deals we each are, let’s talk blogging etiquette.

As I tend to indulge in a bit of off-topic posting myself, I tend to not get particularly cranky about it in others. However, there is a substantial difference between posting off-topic in a thread and highjacking a thread with off-topic posts that shill for your own website and/or organization. You are not posting at this blog, you’re using this blog to advertise. That makes me cranky. It is in bad taste, and will not get you traffic from the type of people who could actually benefit you…because what you are actually saying to those people is simply that you don’t quite know what you are doing.

Just because you’ve got yourself a cause doesn’t excuse you from behaving appropriately. I suggest you give it a rest. Permanently.

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:07 pm 17. Rick Ballard:

Peter,

He does not. He has an agreement with the Mossad, that’s all. Also, the CIA and the BND. Those are just research ties related to the Moses Wine novels though. The NKVD relationship goes way back and really doesn’t pertain today. Especially with that KGB fellow running Russia.

More people should read the Wine series in order to achieve a higher understanding.

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:07 pm 18. chuck:

Coisty,

I don’t quite get with all the broad brush characterizations of Muslims here, but my personal experience agrees with yours. That is, I have spoken with educated, successful immigrants from the region and been surprised by the degree of self pity that comes to the surface at some point – glistening eyes, folks almost on the verge of tears. It’s as if there is no room for personal endeavor or responsibility, but all that is wrong has come from elsewhere. I don’t have the experience to make this a general observation of the religion/area however.

As to charity, I believe that charity among Muslims is required, but the western Christian idea of charity to all is somewhat unique in the world. I would even go so far as to say that this Christian view is encorporated into the various socialist visions that came out of Europe. On the other hand, racial prejudice is probably universal among imperial powers, and the early spread of Islam was certainly imperialistic.

I do think we are involved in a religious war. This isn’t new. The cold war was in it’s own way a religious war also. Simple wars for natural resources and territory seem to be a thing of the past, leftist analysis to the contrary. In fact, this was always a problem I had with the left, everything had to depend on some simple economic gain. I suppose this came from the old analysis of imperialism, but it made it impossible to discuss anything that depended on ideology or religion in any sensible way. For instance, I recall hearing that Vietnam was about oil! Give me a break. Michael Moore continues this essentially brain dead view of the world. But it is certainly a simple way to reason for the simple.

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:09 pm 19. David Thomson:

I find it amusing that the Islamic nihilists neverendingly criticize Israel. The reality is that this great nation would have to be invented if it did not already exist! Arabs can freely blast Israel, but donít dare take to task their corrupt governments and Wahhabi clerics. Israel serves as a psychological safety valve for these folks. And yes, victimization runs rampant within the Arab community. It is indeed supposedly somebody else’s fault that these Muslim followers find life to be difficult. However, it is a mistake to blame this self-pitying condition solely on Wahhabism. One should never ignore the unbelievable harm caused by Western liberal radicals such as Edward Said.

Iím relieved that many people are realizing what Iíve been saying for the last few years: The West must encourage the Islam world to enter the 21st Century. We are not merely acting altruistically—but also out of the primal motivation of crass self preservation. Our very lives may depend on our accomplishing this noble goal.

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:12 pm 20. Catherine:

fyi

Shortly after the 3-week portion of the Iraq War ended last year one of the papers ran a terrific profile of two Christian businessmen in Iraq, a father and a son, who were doing great, burning up the pavement.

At some point in the interview they said, “Christians in Iraq are like Jews in America. We’re good at business.”

I loved that.

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:29 pm 21. Catherine:

ok, now I’m going off topic—-

I just found, via Betsy’s Page, a terrific BBC round-up of world press reaction to Kerry’s speech.

Here’s one from Russia. (Does anyone know anything about this paper?)

To a great degree there is no Democratic party candidate John Kerry. There is an abstract “anti-Bush” candidate who has been compelled, in accordance with the US electoral system, to take on human form and assume a human name…

The weakness of his positive programme, his sombre mien, so unusual for an American… and finally, his unique, from the American point of view, potential first lady, create the impression that Kerry is not destined for victory at all.

Sergei Lopatnikov in Russia’s Russky Kuryer

Kerry fails to convince press

Aug 1, 2004 - 2:48 pm 22. David Thomson:

ìI don’t quite get with all the broad brush characterizations of Muslims here, but my personal experience agrees with yours.î

I have no hard data to offer, but enough anecdotal evidence to feel quite confident in accusing most Arabs of indulging in self pity and victimization. But why should this be surprising? They are encouraged by both their religious tradition and the Western liberal establishment to think this way. They are supposedly the sons of Mohammed, Godís favorite prophet. The radical liberal establishment ceaselessly tell them that they are victims of Western imperialism. Somebody has obviously cheated them! How else can they explain away Israelís affluence and military power? The Americans and the Israelis must be in partnership with the Devil. If you accept their premise, the rest of it readily falls into place.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:01 pm 23. Catherine:

What Kind of Religion is Islam? by Alain Besancon, COMMENTARY, July 2004.

This is the single best article I’ve read on the subject of Christianity, Judaism and Islam thus far.

Besancon (a French conservative, according to my husband) argues that Christianity and Judaism are indeed sister religions, as we’ve been taught, but that Islam is not.

Islam, he says, is a “natural” religion, essentially a pagan religion.

Christianity and Judaism are “revealed” religions. Besancon devotes his opening section to demonstrating the ways in which Christians (and possibly Jews–I don’t remember) labored to convince themselves, wrongly, that Islam was a religion like their own.

The essay is challenging, and I didn’t instantly see what its implications were for the war with radical Islam, although Besancon has a terrific passage on the nature of time in Islam. Mostly I just had an “uh-oh” reaction. I’ll re-read soon.

The article is subscription only, but here’s one passage:

A common feature of natural religions is a sense

of God, or of the divine, being everywhere present

in nature. For the Greeks and the Romans, it was

enough to contemplate the cosmos, the created universe,

to be certain, prior to any process of mental

reasoning, that God, or the gods, existed. Not to believe

in them was a sign of insanity, marking off the

unbeliever from the realm of the human.

This is not the Christian viewpoint, which holds

rather that the existence of God can be grasped only

with the help of investigation and reason, with faith

coming in as an act of heavenly grace to seal this acquired

knowledge. But the Christian perspective is

not the Islamic perspective, which in this regard

bears a greater resemblance to the classical pagan

sense of things. Islam does not suppose that faith is

needed to perceive the divine presence; that presence

is obvious. Although Islam is, to be sure, a religion of

faith, where faith comes in is in acknowledging not

GodÔøΩs omnipresence but His oneness.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:04 pm 24. jerry:

Catherine:

Excellent posting. It is good to see that Russian journalists still maintain their intellectual traditions. Besides George Will, I can’t think of any American journalist who could catch the mood with such subtle humor while hitting the nail of head.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:14 pm 25. Rick Ballard:

Good evening Catherine,

The CNN Gallup USA Today poll confirms that Mssr. Kerry has failed to score.

It’s not just the foreign press.

What does your husband say? Will he raise himself on Nov. 2 in non-chalance or in dread?

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:16 pm 26. Catherine:

more from Besancon

This passage in particular gave me a fairly stark Uh-oh (the boldface is mine):

. . . the characteristic Islamic denial of the stability

and consistency of nature. According to Islam,

the world is not governed by an unchanging natural

law. Atoms, physical properties, matter itself: these

endure only for an instant, being created anew at

every moment by God. Nor is there any straightforward

cause-and-effect relation between events that

occur in time. Although daytime usually coincides

with the presence of sunlight and night with its absence,

God can change things around as He likes

and make the sun shine in the middle of the night.

Miracles are thus not to be seen as suspensions of

natural law but as shifts in the ÔøΩhabitsÔøΩ of God.

With causality abolished, anything can happen:

in place of causes, there are only sequences, one

thing after another. The same applies humanly.

The creation of Adam does not make him the

ÔøΩcauseÔøΩ of the human line that comes after him:

rather, each individual is created, like Adam, from

scratch. ÔøΩHe created you in the womb of your

mothers, creation after creation.ÔøΩ Each stage of

growth is, similarly, the result of a new creative act

of God, whose intentions, like His nature, are concealed

from us. With time itself perceived as an unconnected

series of incidents, and nature reliant on

the ÔøΩhabitsÔøΩ of the Creator, it is no wonder that to

many Westerners the Muslim cosmos has seemed

a borderland between dream and reality.

Another, related feature is the denial of history.

The Bible is a history, a narrative of a revelation

that proceeds in stages. God intervenes in this narrative

by means of deeds and words, the memory of

which is preserved by tradition and in an inspired

book that is perpetually subject to interpretation.

The QurÔøΩan, by contrast, is uncreated, and there is

no interpretative magisterium. It does not contain a

history, but stories. God intervenes only to extend

His protection to His prophets and messengers,

who are infallible and without sin, and to destroy

their enemies. Since the same message is transmitted

by all the messengers, the ÔøΩhistoryÔøΩ takes on

the feel of an infinite repetition. There is no clear

differentiation of past, present, and futureÔøΩ another

dreamland.

I don’t know that this belief system is bad news, of course, but it doesn’t sound good. It’s hard for me to imagine a person who doesn’t believe in cause and effect–at least, not the way we do–being responsive to threats and deterrence under any circumstances at all.

Of course, I assume that in “everyday life” all people “believe” in cause and effect, because they live it (don’t they?) . . . but still . . .

This passage is the first & only thing I’ve ever read that put me inside a mind in which suicide bombing would not be crazy.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:23 pm 27. Skookumchuk:

Catherine:

Kind of tough to develop a scientific tradition, too . . .

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:35 pm 28. David Thomson:

I should add something more to my previous comments regarding the liberal establishmentís consensus view that the Arabs are victims of Western Imperialism, especially that represented by Israel: probably every single military and diplomatic backer of John Kerry tacitly, if not even explicitly, feels this way! The odds strongly suggest that Iím not even slightly exaggerating. Why then is this not widely known? Indeed, a very good question.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:38 pm 29. mrp:

Lebanon’s Daily Star has an article that demonstrates the profound change that has occured in the Middle East during the past year and a half:

Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah met Sunday with Iraqi Premier Iyad Allawi, whose visit in Kuwait City coincided with the 14th anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

The prime minister, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, and other senior officials also attended the meeting, the state news agency KUNA reported, without giving details.

Allawi also held talks separately with Kuwaiti newspaper editors and the chairman of the Kuwait Journalists’ Association, the agency said.

Iraq’s interior minister also reported that at least two of the Christian church bombings in Baghdad were the works of suicide car bombers.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:42 pm 30. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

I wish I had the entire article at my disposal. From your post it seemas that Besancon’s definition of Islamic cosmology (which I can neither deny nor uphold) lends itself toward outcome being the definitive with relationship to actions taken. If an action has a negative outcome then the outcome’s progenitor becomes suspect. Thus both Bin Laden and Saddam become suspect.

An interesting theory and one that accounts for the disappearance of Bin Laden and Saddam in the current Arab iconography. The emphasis of symbols over substance makes sense and falls back to Bin Laden’s “strong horse” statement. It also relates well to the IDF’s extermination of “leaders” in the PLO terrorist movement. Maybe nailing Arafat would garner unforeseen results?

Are you listening, Ayatollah Rafsanjani?

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:42 pm 31. Catherine:

Rick B

I swore I wouldn’t do this, and now you’re lured me in! (It’s all your fault! I take no personal responsibility!)

I formally predicted, to myself, zero-to-little bounce for Kerry after the convention.

And I nailed it!

This is unbelievable hubris. God is going to get me for this, and I hope He does. (OK, no, I don’t.)

Hubris aside, the reason I predicted zero-to-little bounce is the thing I’ve been struggling to express about Kerry that I still can’t quite get at, but that has to do, I think, with being an ex-liberal.

I’ve continued reading conservative response to the convention, and it’s all positive, positive at least in the sense that they see Kerry as having successfully produced a convention about patriotism and military strength.

But I felt certain, partly based on my husband’s reaction and partly based on my own, that the convention had failed.

The convention failed because it was about Vietnam.

If you really think about that for five seconds, a Vietnam convention has to be a recipe for disaster.

It has to be a recipe for disaster because:

We lost in Vietnam

A few months ago I was standing around contemplating the possibility of a John Kerry presidency and suddenly this campaign slogan jumped into my head:

Vote John Kerry!

Lose this war, too!

Devoting the entire Democratic convention to Vietnam means devoting the entire Democratic convention to remembering and sanctifying a military defeat.

That’s not good.

By chance I picked up a terrific book at my publisher’s: The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. My husband snatched it up immediately, since one of the cases it covers is France during the period he’s writing about, and he says it’s fantastic. So I hope to get to it soon.

In any case, all you need to read is the title to get the point. Military losses are horrifically traumatic for countries.

And here is John Kerry, Mr. Vietnam.

Not only is he Mr. Vietnam, he is also Mr. Flew To Paris To Consort With The Victor.

Kerry presents himself as a guy who either doesn’t seem to notice that we lost the Vietnam war, or doesn’t care that we lost, or is/was actively glad we lost because we had it coming.

I don’t care what people think their politics are, that’s a turn-off for anyone who isn’t actively anti-American—-and I’m fairly certain most Americans aren’t anti-American even when they sound like they are. (That’s a subject for another post.)

I still can’t work out exactly why the Democratic convention would be “worse” for liberals (and ex-liberals) than for conservatives . . . but I’m pretty sure it was. I keep reading literally glowing reviews of the Kerry film from conservatives.

Here’s realclearpolitics:

The biggest mistake of the entire convention was not running the Kerry biographical video in prime time. It was brilliant. The footage of Kerry fighting in Vietnam was mixed superbly with clips that made him seem funny, warm, and strong. It was a powerful piece of propaganda

Let me tell you, that is not the film my husband and I saw. I wish I had a picture of the look on my husband’s face at the end of the documentary. I can’t actually describe his expression, other than to say that it was a pure negative. I probably had the exact same look on my own face.

I’m not getting any closer to the “answer” here, but I knew in my bones that the convention had failed.

So I was incredibly relieved when I saw the polls; I would really hate being wrong about something I felt in my bones.

Anything else, sure.

But not this. The film & speech felt so profoundly wrong I would have been horrified if Kerry had gotten a big, fat bounce out of them.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:58 pm 32. richard mcenroe:

Skookumchuck ó There is actually a movement in the Islamic scientific communmity to develop an “Islamic physics” which seems to fall back on the old Aristotelian worldview.

This folly is not limited to Islam. There is a similar movement towards “Vedic physics” in India.

Aug 1, 2004 - 3:59 pm 33. richard mcenroe:

Here’s a link

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:05 pm 34. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

Bob Shrum is an idiot. He has never missed a chance to miss a chance. He has labored for seven losing Presidential campaigns. He’s 0-7 and Kerry selects him to run the show?

Tell your husband that it’s not the party’s fault (if it’ll make him feel better). Tell’im that Kerry bought the nomination fair and square, tell’im that the world wasn’t ready for Howard Dean. Then tell’im – “I wonder if Hillary is really tied to Terry?”.

This whole damn thing is a charade, if Bush gets 5-6 additional Senators then it’s over really big time for the Dems. Congratulations, Hillary! You get to be the first woman top line loser in US history.

It ain’t just JohnJohn taking the hit.

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:16 pm 35. Catherine:

Rick B

I’m going to have to sort your comment out (not quite following—-)

I think I have your email, yes?

If so, I’ll send a copy.

Skookumchuk

LOL!

It’s a pretty arresting passage, isn’t it (even with all the Typepad-contributed upside down question marks, which do not appear in Preview!)

If Besancon is right, a whole lot of things follow . . . none of them good. I think.

I actually found the article slightly terrifying.

If an intellectual analysis of religion can be like a horror film, Besancon’s piece was, that’s for sure. I was working my way through it, duking it out with a lot of unfamiliar ideas & arguments, and each time I really got a paragraph’s meaning I’d have an immediate, “Oh sh**” moment.

We watched The Abyss again last night. Do you remember the scene where the crane has broken off and is plunging down through the ocean towards the underwater rig? The characters all stand frozen in front of their picture window-to-the-sea, staring at the looping cable that’s hitting the ocean floor just in front of them before the rig gets there and crushes them all to death. It’s riveting.

Then, finally, at the very last moment, the rig hits bottom . . . a few yards in front of them.

They’re alive.

They start laughing and crying and hooting and then . . . . they see that the crane is still moving, and is falling off the ocean cliff they’re perched on. And they are attached to the falling crane by that long, looping cable.

In the next moments they stand frozen again, watching as the cable plays out again, spilling over the cliff, with all of their lives tied to it.

Reading Besancon was kind of like that scene in real life.

Rick B

What does your husband say? Will he raise himself on Nov. 2 in non-chalance or in dread?

On that front I have actually behaved myself today. I have not called his attention to any of the polling data, nor to the Iowa Electronic Market data.

I think, though, that he’s confident of a Kerry win. Although I read a great Ignatius column not long after the war about how “If you gave the Iraqis truth serum you’d find out they don’t want us to leave,” that comes to mind.

I’d love to know what’s going on in that unconscious of his.

The Iowa Market data is very interesting. It shows a huge bounce for the Edwards pick and then, for the first time, Kerry pulling ahead of Bush going into the convention.

Then Bush pulls back ahead about midway through the convention.

I think you can see the daily prices here (but the graph is even more striking):

http://128.255.244.60/pricehistory/PriceHistory_GetData.cfm

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:24 pm 36. chuck:

richard mcenroe,

Richard, there was also the Ice Cosmology for the Nazis and the dielectical materialism based science for the Russians and Chinese. Then, there is the postmodern approach that posits that science is just opinion, and hey, let’s have more enlightened opinion. Science is successful, and so a touchstone for the effective. Everyone wants on to the train, but only on their terms. I think it is self evident that science based and anything but science is a complete boondogle, but the attempts never cease.

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:30 pm 37. Catherine:

Rick B

Did Shrum create the convention?

I wasn’t sure.

We both voted for Edwards in the primaries. My husband couldn’t stand Dean, and he doesn’t like Kerry. I hope to heck he would have voted for Lieberman if Lieberman had still been in the race, but he didn’t believe for one second that Lieberman could win in a general election, so he might not have.

I have to say that, when I’m not being hostile and argumentative, I do see his point.

I have zero sympathy for the ABB attitude (less than zero, to be honest) but I get why a non-alienated Democrat wants a Democrat in office, and I even get why a non-alienated Democrat would vote for Kerry just because he’s there.

The Dems just don’t know what they’re doing at the moment. Michael Ledeen is right; their ideas have aged, and they haven’t figured out what their new ones are going to be.

There are times when I can actually see myself what I think would be a good Democratic “vision”–or, at least, a vision that could tempt me back into the fold.

But it’s nowhere in the party (though I didn’t see Obama’s speech, so maybe I’m wrong.)

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:34 pm 38. Knucklehead:

Rick Ballard,

I don’t have much faith in polls. In addition to their “philosophical” alignment with the Democratic party I believe (without evidence) that the MSM (the polltakers and reporters) have a vested commercial interest in making it seem as if the there is a real contest.

But just today I had Yet Another Experience with women saying (and I quote this time rather than simply assigning the word), “Kerry makes me feel skeevey.”

Is there some point where the MSM basically accepts that this in not likely to be a particularly close election and begins turning on Kerry rather than carry on with the false “narrative” and winding up looking like fools? Or, similarly I suppose, is there potentially a point where they accept that their relentless attempt to make Kerry viable is doomed to failure and leap off the wagon that is headed for a cliff?

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:48 pm 39. Catherine:

Rick B

The emphasis of symbols over substance makes sense and falls back to Bin Laden’s “strong horse” statement. It also relates well to the IDF’s extermination of “leaders” in the PLO terrorist movement. Maybe nailing Arafat would garner unforeseen results?

OK, I think I follow.

That’s very interesting.

I’ve felt for awhile now that Israel must have a kind of “gut” comprehension of who they’re dealing with that we just do not.

But if that’s the case, I also have to wonder why they can’t explain it to us.

It’s possible that, being Western themselves, and sharing a sister religion, they may not be able to explain it in words. They just “know it when they see it.”

Or, alternatively, they may have explained it to us perfectly well, but we weren’t able to grasp what they were saying.

More evidence for what you’re saying: a couple of years ago Sullivan carried a passage from what is apparently a core Islamic political text, dating way back, which unfortunately I don’t think I have.

The jist of it, though, was that it was a sin to follow a fallen leader.

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:48 pm 40. chuck:

Catherine,

I don’t think the tactic of eliminating leaders requires a deep cultural analysis to justify. Didn’t the FBI and Department of Justice go after the big mafia dons, and not the little guys. Get serious, given the choice, who else would you go after. Especially given limited means and a desire to make them most effective. Leaders are leaders because they matter. See also Pizarro and the Inca.

Let’s not wander off into the literaray and philosophical when the merely practical will suffice.

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:56 pm 41. penwil:

Catherine,

I thought of you and your comment the other day about the feeling you had of Kerry being surrounded by death, when I had lunch with a friend earlier today who called Kerry “The French Mortician.”

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:57 pm 42. Skookumchuk:

richard mcenroe:

So sad. Well, translating Hellenic Aristotelian texts was really all they ever did. And after 1400 or so, when attention shifted from rediscovery to discovery, things just kind of petered out.

Catherine:

About the bounces. I think Edwards is somehow perceived as normal – in the psychological sense. Personable, charismatic, but with normal, trusted mainstream values. Whereas Kerry and Teresa are aloof and disengaged – a sort of Democratic Maximilian and Carlota to be imposed on the American electorate.

Aug 1, 2004 - 4:59 pm 43. Catherine:

Knucklehead

But just today I had Yet Another Experience with women saying (and I quote this time rather than simply assigning the word), “Kerry makes me feel skeevey.”

I’m SO glad to hear that!

I certainly feel “skeevey” and worse when I look at John Kerry. Not that I have the first clue what skeevey means.

It’s his thinness, for starters. (One of the New Republic guys actually wrote a piece called “The Thin Man” way back when Kerry first threw his hat in the ring; it was wonderful. The point of it was that in the famous story about Kerry turning his Swift boat to the shore the goal wasn’t to charge the enemy, but to make the boat into a “thinner target,” and that this was a consistent Kerry trait.)

And it’s his hands. Those long, long, delicate hands.

And that salute! With those tiny shoulders and those E.T. hands!

Aack!

Talking this way makes me feel like a nut, I have to say. In Real Life I don’t sit around sizing up people’s body parts.

Seriously.

But there is something physically off-putting about Kerry that I just can’t not see.

I’ve been wondering if I was the only one.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:01 pm 44. Catherine:

penwil

I had lunch with a friend earlier today who called Kerry “The French Mortician.”

I love it!

Thank you!

I really am grateful, btw, because I have an “issue” about “seeing” things–dark, judgmental things–others don’t see.

I can never tell whether I’m right, or whether I’m just dark and judgmental (and way off the mark, to boot).

Hearing an anecdote about a complete stranger who called Kerry a “French mortician” is amazingly reassuring.

Thanks!

skookumchuk

Yes, definitely.

Edwards & his wife strike people as normal.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:07 pm 45. Knucklehead:

Catherine:

You are a force of nature. You frighten me, but in a good way – the way a good roller coaster does.

If Besancon is right, a whole lot of things follow . . . none of them good. I think.

You do, indeed, think. And thank you for sharing.

If Besancon is half right a whole lot of things follow. I’ve been wondering how the heck it is that Islam seems to have wedged itself in some 15th century fantasy despite all evidence suggesting the fantasy is, well, a fantasy.

If I’m reading the snippets of Besancon you shared with us correctly, it strikes me that Islam is stuck with this idiocy that measures “right” and “wrong” by whatever succeeded or didn’t yesterday. So they cycle back and do the same things and if they don’t succeed or fail according to yesterday’s pattern they have no idea what how to proceed tomorrow. What a frightening and doomed way to move through time!

I have been fearing, deeply fearing, that we are, indeed, engaged in a religious war/clash of civilizations and hoping that I was completely misinterpreting based upon insufficient information. I’ve been hoping that what we are really dealing with is a bunch of criminals who have figured out how to take advantage of a bunch or lunatic religous fanatics. I fear, more every day, that this is not the case and that there is a plague upon us which must be erradicated – and the plague is not named “Wahabbism” but rather “Islam”.

I feel sick.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:07 pm 46. Knucklehead:

BTW, Catherine, “skeevey” is one of those rare instances of a slang word that just doesn’t require a definition. Just saying it is all one needs to understand it. It ain’t good. Its even worse than the feeling that Clinton left some of us with – that just hearing him speak left us feeling like we needed a shower to wash off the grease or something. “Skeevey” requires disinfection.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:18 pm 47. richard mcenroe:

Rick Ballard ó So Roger has a time share on that satellite? Cool! Can I get one for the satellite that covers the beaches of Rio? (What? I have to think about politics all the time…?)

Catherine, Knucklehead, Penwil _ That convention speech was the longest I’d forced myself to watch John Kerry. There is something deeply wrong with that man. I don’t know what kind of nest of snakes is wriggling behind that man’s eyes, but it has no place in a position of authority… and I feel even less regard for my own party for pretending this is not the case…

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:30 pm 48. JB:

Knucklehead,

Many of the polls (Newsweek, e.g.) are not of likely voters by any means and are disproportionately skewed towards Democrats and Independents to boot.

They’re totally lame.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:38 pm 49. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine

The Iowa Political Markets are the worst I have seen for Bush this year. I just went over there and the vote share market, where Bush was ahead continuously all year is now a tie.

I thought it odd that Kerry ran on the war, too. Isn’t it possible that attacks on his record from that time can have an effect? I sure hope so or I and a lot of other Vietnam Vets are wasting a lot of time!

BTW… new book: Unfit for Command – by John O’Neil (the guy who took over Kerry’s boat, and who debated him in 1971) and Jerri Corsi (a historian) – now #2 on Amazon but net even available yet. Here is the link.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:48 pm 50. Knucklehead:

JB,

Interesting observation. Some of the ABB sentiment and the “pox on both their houses” sentiment I hear seems to come from people who, if probed carefully, don’t seem to be inclined to vote. There seems to be a fairly good sized segment of our citizenry who is quick to comment, in no uncertain terms, upon political matters but doesn’t vote. I find this unfathomably odd but I refrain from suggesting they should start voicing their opinion at the ballot box this November

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:52 pm 51. richard mcenroe:

Which is the appropriate Iowa market to look at?

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:53 pm 52. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

Best to think that he was allowed to purchase his disire. He has never incurred necessary obligations because his heart’s desire has never opened her purse strings – until now. No one owes him even a smile in the morning. He is Nowhere Man. He awakes tomorrow in a world of uncertainty with a compatriot practiced in providing the world with a winning smile while pronouncing the most egregious lies ever heard. His base despises him, his wife tolerates him and his partner glows with thoughts of ‘08.

Good morning, John, your hearts desire awaits.

Re Shrum – no, he didn’t organize the convention but he organized the central theme. If I were a Democrat (praise be that this never befalls me) I would take him, McAuliffe and Hillary out behind the barn with a shovel. The party would be better upon my return.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:56 pm 53. JBR:

Does it strike anyone else as odd that it has now been three days since the convention and we’ve only seen the CNN, Zogby and Newsweek polls? Where’s ABC/Wash. Post, CBS/NY Times, NBC/WSJ, Fox, AP/Ipsos, etc? The thought occurred to me that if some of these polls had turned out really well for Kerry they’d be out in a bit more of a hurry.

Aug 1, 2004 - 5:59 pm 54. Catherine:

Knucklehead

You are a force of nature.

Wow!

Now that is a compliment!

Thank you!

You made my day!

Aug 1, 2004 - 6:17 pm 55. Ron Wrght:

Knucklehead.

Your fears are well founded. The media has failed to educate and inform you on why you should feel that way.

Rick B. Sorry didn’t mean to intrude. My original post was short with links to essays which support my position which I believe was on topic re the evil we now face in the world. The Israelis know the enemy we face. Read the links on Islamofascism – I have a close friend who is an Iraqi Christian who grew up over there and has first hand knowledge before he fled with his parents to this country

Story – Yes, real problem with rise of Islamofascism. Iran almost has nuke. Iraq would have had one if we had not gone in (Run John Loftus + nuclear). Game is still afoot.

Check out Dr. A. E. Kahn re nuclear non-proliferation treaties are now unenforceable.

Our media is not covering the War On Terror objectively and I agree with the person who said they may be gaming the election to make it close for the sake of ratings and circulations.

They’re still “stewed” about, “Where’s the beef [Iraq].” It’s not over until the “fat lady sings.” The story is out there. The WMD was there it just went to Syria before the war as well as Lebanon.

Roger is right with regard to the, “Power and Politics of the Blogosphere.” Iran is ripe for a revolution by the “Joyless Generation.”

I may have gone a litte OT on my first reply to you. But this is a message the American People need to hear that the media is not reporting.

This is the messsage the American People need to hear before the next election whether you are a Dem or Rep.

This is all in the links I posted in my first post which was very abreviated.

Before you jump the next time at least read the essays at these links.

I agree with Roger and my favorite saying lately is:

BLESSED BE FOR THE INTERNET AND THE BLOGOSPHERE

that allows the free flow of information transcending political boundaries and the constraints of the editorial and media conglomerate boardrooms.

As in the X-Files the, “Truth is Out There.”

Ron

Aug 1, 2004 - 6:26 pm 56. JB:

Knucklehead,

Your intuition is accurate as usual.

Now, here’s the kicker: the latest Gallup/CNN/USAToday, the first fully post-convention shows no bounce for Kerry (if you want to be statistically rigorous) and has Bush gaining (50-46 lead), you if want to be speculatively optimistic.

This is one poll Matthew Dowd has singled out as fairly reliable.

Aug 1, 2004 - 6:44 pm 57. JB:

But it’s doubtful you’ll see “Kerry Kreeps Out America” headlines anytime next week

Aug 1, 2004 - 6:47 pm 58. penwil:

Also telling is that the TV ratings fell off during the second half of Kerry’s speech, which suggest some people who tuned in to take a look didn’t like what they were hearing (or maybe it was the skeevy feelings) and turned it off.

It could always be wishful thinking on my part, but I don’t expect him to come off well in the debates. Aside from the fact that when he speaks extemporaneously half the time you can’t make sense of what he’s saying, his lack of genuineness is going to show up sharply against Bush, who is comfortable in his own skin and shows it.

And a lot of people do vote based on their feelings. They shouldn’t, of course, but they do.

Aug 1, 2004 - 6:58 pm 59. JB:

“And a lot of people do vote based on their feelings. They shouldn’t, of course, but they do. ”

We should be glad this is the case. Given the woeful job the MSM has done vetting Kerry and illuminating his record, a typical “head” vote would be disasterous for the country. But a half-informed electorate sensing “something wrong” with the guy will be our saving grace.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:08 pm 60. Catherine:

Knucklehead

I have been fearing, deeply fearing, that we are, indeed, engaged in a religious war/clash of civilizations and hoping that I was completely misinterpreting based upon insufficient information. I’ve been hoping that what we are really dealing with is a bunch of criminals who have figured out how to take advantage of a bunch or lunatic religous fanatics.

This has been my own constant question, and I go back and forth on it.

I have no idea, and I’m constantly bothered by how truly foreign Arab culture & Islamic religious belief is to me and to everyone else.

There are plenty of times when I look out on the world and ask myself: So where’s Frodo when we need him?

OTOH, I do know that there’s a huge wide savvy streak in Arab culture that allows them to run circles around us. When it comes to who’s living in a “dream world,” I wouldn’t automatically put my money on the other guy, that’s for sure.

Arafat is said to have visited with the North Vietnamese govt many years ago, who explained Western media to him, and told him he needed to fight and win moral victories in the press. He didn’t have to be told twice. He got the point, and has been duping the West ever since. (I think my source on this is Yossef Bodansky in THE HIGH COST OF PEACE.)

For a well-researched version of the non-Frodo view, there’s Jessica Stern in FOREIGN AFFAIRS a year or so ago, an essay called “The Protean Enemy.”

Here’s a great passage:

MALLEABLE MISSIONS

Why do religious terrorists kill? In interviews over the last five years, many terrorists and their supporters have suggested to me that people first join such groups to make the world a better place — at least for the particular populations they aim to serve. Over time, however, militants have told me, terrorism can become a career as much as a passion. Leaders harness humiliation and anomie and turn them into weapons. Jihad becomes addictive, militants report, and with some individuals or groups — the “professional” terrorists — grievances can evolve into greed: for money, political power, status, or attention.

In such “professional” terrorist groups, simply perpetuating their cadres becomes a central goal, and what started out as a moral crusade becomes a sophisticated organization. Ensuring the survival of the group demands flexibility in many areas, but especially in terms of mission. Objectives thus evolve in a variety of ways. Some groups find a new cause once their first one is achieved — much as the March of Dimes broadened its mission from finding a cure for polio to fighting birth defects after the Salk vaccine was developed. Other groups broaden their goals in order to attract a wider variety of recruits. Still other organizations transform themselves into profit-driven organized criminals, or form alliances with groups that have ideologies different from their own, forcing both to adapt. Some terrorist groups hold fast to their original missions. But only the spry survive.

I believe that.

The whole article is posted, and it’s worth reading:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030701faessay15403/jessica-stern/the-protean-enemy.html

So I can’t get a fix on what we’re up against, and if you believe Ledeen, I don’t need to. (Though in this particular case I probably don’t believe Ledeen. Know Your Enemy, I always say. Old Girl Scout motto.)

One other thing: I never believe in apocalyptic scenarios, almost as a matter of principle, but also because I’ve lived long enough to have encountered zillions of them, none of which have ever come true.

That’s not to say the apocalypse can’t happen and won’t come, but it is to say I’m not holding my breath. (My favorite saying in life is the old Mark Twain line about how “It doesn’t pay to worry because the worries you have are never the worries you get.” Definitely true for me.)

So I’m operating on the principle that our enemy will listen to reason, “reason” meaning we kill them wherever we find them.

hi John! and Richard M, too

Uh-oh—-I’m reading different data.

I’m reading “Winner Takes All”; John is reading “Vote Share.”

The Vote Share data is crummy. John’s right.

No. Wait a minute. I think the “Vote Share” data only goes through July 20. (Yes? No?)

Winner Takes All goes through midnight last night.

The Winner Takes All data is great. Bush has a huge “lead” over Kerry up to the moment Kerry picks Edwards; then in one fell swoop they’re tied.

Tied, and then going into the convention Kerry pulls ahead.

Then, on midnight July 28, Wednesday (this was Edwards’ night, right?) the lines switch. Bush is ahead. As of midnight last night Bush was ahead by 3 cents. (My understanding is that the market is structured so that a penny equals a point in the election.)

Basically, Bush gets a 3-point bounce out of Kerry’s convention, assuming I’m reading this right.

I hope someone will go check, because now I’m wondering.

Supposedly the IEM has done better at predicting elections, even months ahead of time, than any of the pollsters individually.

There’s a Larry Kudlow article on the IEM & its Bush data here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200407290755.asp

“Every Penny Counts”

The Iowa web site is confusing; here’s where I’ve been going:

Iowa Electronic Markets (you can google it):

http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/

Click on “Political Markets”

Click on 2004 Presidential Election Winner Takes All

Click on EITHER (OR BOTH):

IEM Daily Prices Graph (you’ll see the graph I’ve been describing)

To get raw data click on:

IEM Data

When you go to “IEM Data” click on IEM Daily Price History

Select July 2004 for history of prices in July

I’m assuming the average price of the day is the one to look at.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:15 pm 61. Rick Ballard:

Dear Ron,

U R a troll. Begones or suffer the wrath of Simon. (When he gets around to it.)

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:18 pm 62. Catherine:

JB

Wow.

I hadn’t seen USA Today yet, just another report somewhere.

This is exactly what I believe I’m reading in the IEM. A bounce for the other guy. (It’s more pronounced in the Iowa Market than in CNN/Gallup.)

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:21 pm 63. Catherine:

everyone

Here’s something cool.

The USA Today report says this is the first time since 1972 that the Dems haven’t gotten a bounce out of their convention.

Patrick Belton had a fabulous post (Oxblog) from the convention saying he’d been exchanging notes with the person sitting beside him, and both had agreed that the entire convention was about Vietnam, AND about Iraq being Vietnam.

Belton said something like, “This puts them back with the winning formula of the 1972 convention.”

I’m going to have to look that up.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:23 pm 64. Catherine:

found it!

OK, I got my dates mixed up, but this is great:

(from Oxblog)

10:10 candles and violin solo of amazing grace, in an attempt to make use of – erm, I meant to say commemorate – the memory of 9/11. Blue spotlights fan the delegates. Shockingly, the violinist was neither black nor female, and – quite possibly – may have been heterosexual. That this is a party which wishes to base itself upon compassion and inclusion is beyond doubt. But the point can be made so frequently and unsubtly – and even ham-handedly – by the convention organisers that it frequently assumes something of the character of self-caricature.

I discuss the hidden messages being conveyed by all of the veteran symbology with the delegate next to me. We decide the message transmitted by all of the invocation of veterans is:

Vietnam=Iraq

mendacious government at the time of Vietnam = Bush

speaking the truth to power = veterans, Kerry, and RFK

This, of course, puts the Democratic back on the solid and successful footing of the Chicago convention of 1968.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:27 pm 65. Catherine:

John Moore

I thought it odd that Kerry ran on the war, too. Isn’t it possible that attacks on his record from that time can have an effect? I sure hope so or I and a lot of other Vietnam Vets are wasting a lot of time!

I keep waiting for all that stuff to register on the general public, and wondering if it will.

For my part, I was made into an implacable enemy of John Kerry the first time I read your web site.

I’m an early adopter (I know it’s supposed to be early adapter, but I like “adopter”), but I’m also very mainstream, straight down the line. (I test literally dead center on that test-your-politics quiz Sullivan posted a year ago.)

Given that I’m always trodding the beaten path, I would normally expect the rest of the country to have the same reaction I did (or, uh, the same reaction at a slightly lower level of intensity).

OTOH, for that to happen the public will have to focus on what the veterans are saying.

It seems to me that now that Kerry is campaigning exclusively on I-served-in-Vietnam his record before, during and after Vietnam starts to become open to scrutiny, as it wasn’t before.

We’ll see.

terrific articles:

I think these are all posted at realclearpolitics, which I read every day now:

Fred Barnes in WEEKLY STANDARD on Bush’s campaign strategy

Robert Kagan on Kerry’s speech (very important, and terrific)

Also an interesting statistical piece by Kinsley saying economic times are always better under Democratic presidents—(I’m waiting for the response from conservatives—)

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:37 pm 66. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

Might be ‘68, or ‘72, or ‘80 or ‘84 or ‘88 or ‘00. Dudn’t matter the candidates is a major league D – U – D.

I heard the convention cost $85 million and I sure hope it’s true. It is truly time for the Dems to either change or ??? If the left wing is so stupid that they think that the Boston sing-a-long fooled anybody this poll is proof of their delusion.

Two slight errors – Michael Moore next to Rosalyn Carter and Al Sharpton directly behind Kerry. Odd how images carry meanings.

Or was the rest of the world not supposed to notice?

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:38 pm 67. Catherine:

everyone

whoa

Here is realclearpolitics:

Poll Represents Negative 5-Point ‘Bounce’ Among Likely Voters Versus Last CNN/Gallup/USA Today Poll 11 Days Ago

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:38 pm 68. Ron Wrght:

I’m gone! I hope you don’t live in a target area. Don’t say no one told you.

Ron

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:40 pm 69. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

That’s known as a “bunker buster” dead cat bounce.

Part of Shrum’s subtle plan – not to be revealed until later (by Hillary).

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:42 pm 70. richard mcenroe:

Catherine ó Thanks. It looks like the relentless press negativism has been having its effect tho. Now to see if Kerry’s enforced public presence and the RNC make any big difference… I expect they will.

A few more Marine photo ops should do it…

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:43 pm 71. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine

I had been following the vote share market because it had a much longer history. The winner-take-all started, I think, in June.

Now I look at both. What is surprising is that the vote share gave Bush around a 5 pt lead from months ago until a few days ago, at which point it suddently went to a tie. The WTA has been more volatile.

The market isn’t scaled to election percentages. It uses a way of valuing things such that a share can range in price only from 0 to a dollar (or maybe 99 cents).

In 2000 I put some money in there and played with it for a bit – but it took too much time, and you can’t put in enough money to make any difference.

Interestingly, this was one of the technologies for the incorrectly maligned Total Information Awareness program of Poindexter’s. That whole thing was quite a clever program and should have been put in place. But as I’ve said before, we aren’t serious about terrorism as long as things like that are shot down on civil liberties grounds. Civil liberties are hard to exercise as you are dying of nerve gas poisoning.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:43 pm 72. Catherine:

John M

The only Vote Share graph I can find stops at July 4, which was roughly when Kerry picked Edwards and suddenly pulled into a dead heat with Bush.

Are you seeing a different graph somewhere?

I was a huge fan of the “terror market.”

Also on my list of things-to-read is THE WISDOM OF THE CROWD, which is about the idea that crowds are smarter than the individuals making up the crowd.

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:50 pm 73. Rick Ballard:

John M.,

Soros can put in a relative little and gain a relative lot of influence. Trade volume and size would be helpful in determining veracity. The Bing/Soros combo is really distorting typical cash flow analysis. What kind of pardon do those guys need?

Aug 1, 2004 - 7:50 pm 74. Sandy P:

–Whereas Kerry and Teresa are aloof and disengaged – a sort of Democratic Maximilian and Carlota to be imposed on the American electorate.–

A Rantburg poster’s wife put it this way:

Why would I want a president and first lady who would treat me the way the french do?

Aug 1, 2004 - 9:11 pm 75. Greifer:

Do these people seriously want a religious war?

Mr. Simon, it has BEEN a religious war. The islamofascists/radical islamists are fighting the Crusades. They think all non-muslims are infidels, and they define “muslim” by their own very strict and perverse definition.

but they are not fighting a political war, a land war, a resource war. they are fighting a religious war–and they will not stop until they have won, or their version of that religion no longer exists.

who kills the Hindi in Kashmir? who kills the Jews in Israel? Who kills the Christians in Kurdistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, America, Karfur? Have you noticed yet that it’s a religious war? what is it going to take for you to NAME it one?

Aug 1, 2004 - 9:49 pm 76. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine

I am not seeing graphs that end early. I looked at the winner-take-all and the presidential vote share Bush-Kerry.

Rick

There is a relatively small amount of money that anyone can invest. Hence one would have to put together a conspiracy to do much to alter the stats. There’s also the question about why he would want to do that.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:06 pm 77. TmjUtah:

Howdy -

Topical:

I think the Islamist movement is in the process of coming to grips with the proposition that a second Bush Administration is probably going to happen.

They (the enemy) have pushed Spain, the Philippines, and the U.N. around at will but the objective reality is that if the United States doesn’t give up they cannot win. Kidnappings…beheadings…carbombs…Islamikazis…the flavor o’ the day this fine Sunday happened to be Christian Churches.

Who are they trying to appeal to with this tactic? Presbyterians who think Israel is a terrorist state?

The groups may have different names – Al Qaeda, al Aqsa Brigades, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc, etc, etc,…but they all seem to work from the same script, don’t they? Barbarism by the Book. It could be a reality show on UPN, couldn’t it? I mean if you were to pop out of a cave after twenty years sleep and read a compendium of press accounts of what these people had done, don’t you think a reasonable person would ask “Why haven’t we taken care of these animals before now?”.

There’s NOTHING to negotiate. They want nothing from us that we can give except our freedom or our lives. Right from the start of this experiment called western civilization we learned that the currency that buys freedom IS, more often than not, life. There’s no finite end to terror…but if we are going to end this conflict we can easily put a face on who must be defeated. The enemy is fundamentalist Islam. The creed runs across borders, oceans, and continents. As I type this chances are better than even that a murder is being executed in the name of the prophet of the Religion of Peace.

The muslims of the world better get a Martin Luther. Or at least a pope. Something. Failing an act of self-elevation or divine intervention, at some point in the future the ‘bad’ muslims are going to write a check that all the muslims in the world won’t be able to cash.

There are several vital questions to be answered in the next four years:

1. What level of lethality will the enemy employ once our elections are decided? I contend that a Kerry presidency will see a drastic reduction in overt terrorist activity coupled with a concerted campaign to make nice diplomatically simultaneous with preparing cells and improving training, weapons, and finances. Remember: Conflict = defeat has been the left meme for three years now. The Islamists know that North Korea ate Clinton’s lunch in spite of repeated inelligence warnings. They know exactly how to deal with people that want it to be September 10 again. Corallary: I believe that Bush’s reelection will more than likely see bombings or other attacks attempted here and abroad, with the damage dependent on how well our security performs. Iran and Syria must be priorities for regime change, and they know that Bush will want the maximum amount of time available in his second term to accomplish democratization in their countries.

2. Will our citizens have the unity of purpose to understand that merely toppling regimes or high-profile individuals will not be enough to end the threat? Nation building by elections, sewer lines, and roads will not be enough. We have to be ready to kill the Islamists whereever and whenever we find them and NOT be restrained when supporting new governments that do the same.

This isn’t law enforcement. It’s plague eradication.

3. Will we have the guts to legally identify Wahabbist Islam as a political movement and thus strip away the protections traditionally accorded to places of worship? There are scores of Wahabbist mosques and madrassas scattered across the United States. It’s insane. It would be like hosting Hitler Youth Camps across America in 1943. It must stop.

4. In the aftermath of Bush’s reelection, what will become of the Democrats? I feel as long as there is some shred of hope that Hillary might have a run in 2008 there will be somebody answering the phones and the media will still do the agitprop work for them…but the day the Clinton’s walk out I don’t see any ’second team’ willing or able to take over. The party of FDR is for all intents a work-from-home scam operating under a stolen trademark, and has been since 1992.

We live in interesting times.

OT: Back from lazing about in Park City, Utah. Life is good.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:09 pm 78. Sandy P:

Catherine, is the start date for that Kinsley article 1927?

If so, care to guess which party sat in the big chair 1920 – 1927?

And it wasn’t called “The Roaring 20s” for nothing.

So, why did the person who wrote that article pick that certain start date?

I think Econopundit covered this.

Aug 1, 2004 - 10:23 pm 79. exguru:

If the Democratic Party implodes following the reelection of George Bush, we can be rather confident the Republican Party will then split, and we will have a two-party system again. This is not a one-party country.

The folks at http://www.realclearpolitics.com say a new CNN/Gallup/USAToday poll shows Kerry got a seven point NEGATIVE bounce from Boston…

Whether or not that poll was aberrant, it is clear Kerry didn’t do well. Remember, Dukakis got a 17-point bounce, and Al Gore something in double digits, too.

So the question is why. Was it the ersatz patriotism? Was it the personality? Was it the lack of positions? Was it his wife?

My thought is Kerry has become a victim of his own insincerity. He cannot say what he believes and still get elected, and this enormous burden, not shared by either of his opponents, is beginning to show. In my opinion, he believes we should delcare victory and come home, he believes same-sex marriage should be universally available, he believes in raising taxes, etc. Mondale proved he can’t say the latter, but the whole Weltanschauung has been repudiated by the voters in recent years, not just the futility of favoring tax increases. Au fond, Kerry has not changed his philosophy–as was well understood by those who nominated him. He remains an unelectable Massachusetts liberal.

Aug 1, 2004 - 11:08 pm 80. Goof®:

This would be a smile if it weren’t just a bit on the dangerous side.

This is not a religious war, but people such as yourselves can contribute to someday making it one.

On the night of August 9, 1969 in a mansion located within an exclusive enclave of Los Angeles known as Benedict Canyon five people were murdered. Among those found dead maid the following morning was actress Sharon Tate (wife of film director Roman Polanski) and coffee heiress Abigail Folger. Some bodies were strewn across estate, but Sharon Tate, who was more than eight months pregnant, was hung and laid dead on the living room floor. Graffiti found written in blood at the murder scene said, “Death to Pigs.”

The next night another murder shook Los Angeles. A wealthy couple, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home on the edge of Hollywood.

These grisly acts during the summer of 1969 came to be known as the “Tate-LaBianca Murders.” Three months later police arrested a group of cult members for the murders who called themselves “The Family” (a.k.a. the Manson Family, the devoted followers of Charles Manson).

The Family seemed obsessively fixated upon their leader’s dark vision of a coming apocalypse. It is believed that Charles Manson envisioned the Tate-LaBianca murders as a pivotal point in a coming apocalyptic drama. Through these deaths Manson hoped a race war would begin that would engulf society and thus initiate the fulfillment of his prophetic view.

Nothing like playing into the scenarios of psychotics with prophetic views.

What can I say about someone who intentionally flys a plane full of people into a building full of people? I can say that I don’t understand how they could do something like that; I can say that I don’t want to understand how they could do something like that; I can say that I want the psychotic whose prophetic views they were trying to make a reality dead and forgotten; and I can say that I want everything possible done to prevent those prophetic views from being realized.

I am confident that both Bush and Kerry want what I want.

The election talk is a smile. No danger there. Nothing of any importance will happen until much further along.

93 days to go.

Oh, what I came for was to write that as remakes go The Manchurian Candidate is an improvement on The Truth About Charlie and inferior in every, and I do mean every, way to the original. I am reminded that the first time Matt Damon stood out, in my view, as an actor is in another Desert Storm-Medal of Honor-Denzel Washington movie, Courage Under Fire, from eight years ago. All in all, I think that is the better movie (though I still think Meg Ryan was miscast and the cinematography isn’t nearly as interesting.)

Aug 1, 2004 - 11:15 pm 81. Syl:

Goof

You gotta get out more.

Catherine

“Vote John Kerry!

Lose this war, too!”

That was one of my first thoughts when Kerry won the primaries!

In those early days (no link because I don’t remember where I read it or if it was something seen on tv) someone was discussing polls and there was an indication that many who were just learning about John Kerry were a little uncomfortable with his anti-war protests back in the days.

I’ve heard not a word about such a thing since. Either nobody is asking or nobody is telling.

Something that bothered me about his touting his Vietnam service then was how could he bring attention to it without people discovering what he did after? Seemed like such a dangerous thing to base a campaign on in time of war. It’s fine with his base, of course, they’re war protesters too. But the rest of America? How does Kerry think he can get away with it?

He must really think Americans are stupid. And then to skip over the intervening 30 years in his speech as if they didn’t matter? I mean are we to believe he jumped out of a swiftboat into the primaries?

Voters don’t like gaps in a candidate’s record.

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:10 am 82. Goof®:

Syl

I did want to pass along a line of dialogue (or my memory of it) from The Manchurian Candidate remake:

The Internet–sacred sanctuary of idiots and nutters.

As memes were not mentioned, you did not immediately come to mind.

Smile.

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:46 am 83. wxjames:

Some thoughts on Kerry the man. He was in Nam for 4 months. For 3 of those months he was being trained to operate a swift boat. That leaves about 30 days during which he spent my estimation of 200 minutes in harms way. He received 5 decorations during that time, or one decoration every 40 minutes. Imagine that from a man who spent 20 years in the US Senate and didn’t accomplish shit.

Aug 2, 2004 - 5:07 am 84. ricpic:

There is no doubt at all, in my mind, that we are engaged in a religious war.

The problem we face is that political correctness has so infiltrated our thinking, at all levels, that it inhibits the ability of our leaders to fight an all out war against those who are determined to destroy us.

For this reason I believe the worst, in the form of nuclear attack on one or more of our great cities, will have to happen before we can throw off the suffocating mantle of the anti-western mentality (which is what political correctness boils down to) and fight a total unapologetic war for our very survival.

Aug 2, 2004 - 5:44 am 85. mrp:

The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed editor, Paul Gigot, has an important column posted at the WSJ’s opinionjournal.com site (easy registration required).

Mr. Gigot makes the argument that last weeks’s Potemkin DNC has opened up a number of opportunities for GOP counterattacks:

Yet the very vagueness of Mr. Kerry’s promises is what gives the Bush campaign a chance to counterattack. Especially if you re-read his Thursday speech, it is not nearly as muscular as it tried to sound. Its hawkishness was mostly personal, more or less stopping in 1970 in the Mekong Delta. My guess is that this is all by design, since the last thing Mr. Kerry wants is a debate about his own antiterror policies. He wants to compare medals, not philosophies.

My read is pretty close to Mr. Gigot’s. Last week’s convention was an exercise in deliberate deception. The photo of John Kerry’s handshake with Daniel Ortega looks like a winner.

Aug 2, 2004 - 5:48 am 86. DennisThePeasant:

Rick Ballard-

Good to see you were able to get Ron Wright to take his jihad elsewhere. There is really nothing more frightening than a middle-aged man who has decided he must save the world singlehandedly. You know, if either of us had been thinking, we should have directed him to one of lil joe’s websites. That would have kept two fools occupied simultaneously.

I would have helped more, but Mrs. Dennis wanted to spend quality time together last night and I was unable to convince her that troll tossing on the internet constituted an activity that fell within that mandate. I never can figure out women.

Aug 2, 2004 - 5:54 am 87. jerry:

Tim:

You wrote:

“1. What level of lethality will the enemy employ once our elections are decided? I contend that a Kerry presidency will see a drastic reduction in overt terrorist activity coupled with a concerted campaign to make nice diplomatically simultaneous with preparing cells and improving training, weapons, and finances. Remember: Conflict = defeat has been the left meme for three years now. The Islamists know that North Korea ate Clinton’s lunch in spite of repeated intelligence warnings. They know exactly how to deal with people that want it to be September 10 again. Corollary: I believe that Bush’s reelection will more than likely see bombings or other attacks attempted here and abroad, with the damage dependent on how well our security performs.”

(1) This is an argument for Kerry’s election. However, this is not how Al Qaeda operates. There attacks are independent time, place and personality and are all directed at creating a catastrophic collapse. There entire attack strategy in predicated on mirror imaging their own fragile political systems. As such, they are personality independent. The Islamicists really don’t care about what Kim Jong Il does. They live in their own world.

(2) GoofA: Here is some interesting info on the events that Courage Under Fire was based upon. In 1993, long before the movie was made, I was at the Army PEO for A/C survivability in St Louis. I was there discussing helicopter survivability systems, i.e., flairs, Chaff etc. We got a briefing on Desert Storm losses. We lost one H-60 do to enemy fire. What happened was that the pilot, (the Meg Ryan character) flew the wrong way and went deeper into Iraqi territory. The combat controllers were franticly trying to tell her to turn around. She never did and got shot down. The loss for attributed to ground fire and pilot error.

Aug 2, 2004 - 6:25 am 88. Knucklehead:

GoofA:

I read your post above twice and, well, I must be misreading it very badly.

Are you trying to make a case that there is some similarity between terrorists who use Islam as either a real philosophical impetus or as a convenient cover and Charles Manson’s “Family”?

Are you making a case that the West, or the USA, should not see the WoT as a “religious” war because Charles Manson wanted the murders he sent his deranged morons off to commit to provoke a “religious war”?

I must be misreading your post and badly misinterpreting you point because it sure seems that roughly 45 seconds of half-hearted thought would show that sort of connection to be a leap beyond human capacity even when aided by chemistry.

Aug 2, 2004 - 6:37 am 89. Knucklehead:

Jerry:

On the surface Tmj’s assertion may seem like a case for Kerry. It is not that at all.

The Islamofascists movement had been operating with near impunity prior to the current president taking decisive action. They surely did not expect such a swift, forceful, and sustained response. They have lost the ability to plan, train, test, rest, and communicate in relative comfort. They were able to bring “recruits” into “their country” and schmooze them. They had everything they needed to continue to escalate their agenda and the boldness of their attacks.

The repsonse of the US to 9/11 has knocked them on their heels and deprived them of much of the “creature comforts” that are so necessary for organizational effectiveness and “growth”. Many give AQ credit for its ability to adapt and decentralize command and operations. Perhaps that credit is deserved, but how much of this “adaptation” is dilution of control and capability?

AQ needs time to regroup and restructure in something that approaches “peace and quiet”. They cannot disengage because the Bush Administration won’t allow them too. We are keeping the pressure on them. The only way they can even stay in business is to strike when and where they can. If Kerry wins and removes pressure they will take advantage to back off and regroup – I apologize for not remembering the word for it, but apparently the Mohammedan methods of waging warfare have a well developed sense of using the “truce” to reposition and refit with the full intention of resuming conflict on its terms.

Backing off the WoT and trying to find some sort of “Peace”, or pretend some sort of peace exists (declaring victory and coming home) is precisely the wrong thing to do. We have the capability and resources to keep the pressure upon the enemy and slowly but surely grind them into the ground. Letting them rest and refit is NOT a good idea and that’s what Kerry would do. They’d take every advantage of a rest and come back at us harder than ever. If they don’t have a nuke now they would have one by the end of four years of John Kerry simply because he would allow them the room to resume their quest for it rather than worrying about their lives every moment of every day.

Aug 2, 2004 - 6:55 am 90. Goof®:

jerry

Thanks for the info.

Knucklehead

Where were you in 1969?

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:07 am 91. jerry:

Knucklehead:

There is a degree of truth in what you say but it is only half right. The Al Qaeda planning cycle is long, thorough and inflexible. Because of the GWOT, there are constant disruptions to this cycle as operations are compromised and operatives neutralized. However, rather then speed up their planning, Al Qaeda simply restarts their cycle assuming that we will eventually miss something and they will carry out the attack. The Bush Administrationís warfare approach to terrorism places us firmly inside the Al Qaeda “OODA” (observe, orient, decide, act) Loop and restricts their ability to mount catastrophic attacks.

If Kerry is elected and we retreat to the Clinton era law enforcement approach, Al Qaeda will be able to complete their planning in peace and carry out ever more damaging attacks against the United States and Europe.

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:13 am 92. Catherine:

Good Morning everyone–Syl, hi!

I’m still waiting for news of the non-bounce (or, alternatively, the Bush bounce) to hit these parts, but no such luck.

The WSJ this morning is mournful, all but conceding a Kerry win.

I read someone somewhere (WEEKLY STANDARD) saying inside-the-beltway conservatives are completely demoralized, while outside-the-beltway conservatives are tooling along, assuming Bush wins. I think that’s true.

Just found a terrific little passage from WAPOS’s enormously long article on the 2000 election this weekend:

The 2004 exception: Incumbent presidents such as Bush historically don’t get much of a bounce. So look this year to see if Kerry is bouncing, and how high. No bounce is bad news for Democrats.

They don’t mention what happens when the Democratic convention gives the Republican president a bounce.

from: “Poll Position”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19540-2004Jul27_3.html

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:16 am 93. Catherine:

Oops—I meant to insert a question mark after the words WEEKLY STANDARD above, and dang if Typepad did not volunteer to do it for me this time.

(I may have read the inside-outside observation at THE CORNER.)

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:18 am 94. richard mcenroe:

What is John Kerry’s plan for Iraq and the WoT? We may never know.

Courtesy of Instapundit.com, Kerry is refusing to publicly state his plans for Iraq…

“I don’t care what it sounds like. The fact is that I’m not going to negotiate in public today without the presidency, without the power.”

Who exactly is he negotiating with? The American voters? ” Vote for me and maybe I’ll tell you what I’m going to do?”

Still, it makes a change from his conduct in the Viet Nam war, (he was there, you know) when he decided to go make his own negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris…

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:19 am 95. Catherine:

alll—

Hmm.

The Kerry non-bounce is not going to register, it appears. Even The Corner is discounting the Gallup poll, and no one mentions IEM.

Here’s James Surowiecki (THE WISDOM OF THE CROWD) on the Iowa Market:

If the IEM’s predictions are accurate, the prices of these different contracts will be close to their true values. In the market to predict election winners, the favorite should always win, and bigger favorites should win by bigger margins. Similarly, in the vote share market, if George W. Bush were to end up getting 49 perent of the vote in 2004, then the price of a George W. Bush contract in the run-up to the election should be close to 49 cents.

So how has the IEM done? Well, a study of the IEM’s performance in forty-nine different elections between 1988 and 2000 found that the election-eve prices in the IEM were, on average, off by just 1.37 percent in presidential elections . . . The IEM has generally outperformed the major national polls, and has been more accurate than them even months in advance of the actual election. Over the course of the presidential elections between 1988 and 2000, for instance, 596 different polls were released. Three-fourths of the time, the IEM’s market price on the day each of those polls was released was more accurate. Polls tend to be very volatile, with vote shares swinging wildly up and down. But the IEM forecasts, though ever-changing, are considerably less volatile, and tend to change dramatically only in response to new information. That makes them more reliable as forecasts.

What’s especially interesting about this is that the IEM isn’t very big–there have never been more than eight hundred or so traders in the market–and it doesn’t, in any way, reflect the makeup of the electorate as a whole. The vast majority of traders are men, and a disproportionate–though shrinking–number of them are from Iowa. So the people in the market aren’t predicting their own behavior. But their predictions of what the voters of the country will do are better than the predictions you get when you ask the voters themselves what they’re going to do.

IEM Winner Take All market (I can’t make heads or tales of the Vote Share data) has, as of midnight last night, Bush at $0.519 average price, Kerry $0.481.

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:41 am 96. Pixy Misa:

Knuckehead, I think the word you want is hudna. A lull in the fighting while both sides re-arm.

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:48 am 97. Catherine:

David Frum on Kerry

For all his talk of a ìpositiveî campaign, Kerry is negative in the most literal way: He is only comfortable talking about what he would not do.

This is what I get from Kerry: he is a pure negative, not just in the sense that he rarely smiles and constantly attacks, but in the sense that his accomplishments are all “negative,” too. He himself has said, explaining his lack of legislative record in the Senate, that sometimes the most important thing you can do is prevent other people from doing bad things.

That’s true, but in Kerry’s case it’s the whole magillah.

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:49 am 98. Catherine:

DennisthePeasant

I would have helped more, but Mrs. Dennis wanted to spend quality time together last night and I was unable to convince her that troll tossing on the internet constituted an activity that fell within that mandate. I never can figure out women.

Me, neither.

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:04 am 99. penwil:

Catherine,

Aren’t you out here in San Francisco with me? (Or am I mixing you up with the Katherine with the K?) The lack of bounce was buried in the Chronicle this morning in the very last paragraph of a Washington Post wire service article about Kerry on the campaign trail on page 2. Interestingly enough the Chronicle did headline the article “Kerry Won’t Say How He’ll Go About Persuading Allies To Help in Iraq” and the article has the Nixon comparison and his “I don’t care . . . ” reponse. Just my admittedly biased opinion and all that, but he really, really does not come across at all well in the article (which as a WaPo wire service article probably ran in a lot of newspapers across the country). He sounded arrogant, snippy, and condescending, and either a liar–pretending to have a plan when he really doesn’t–or having a plan he knows we voters won’t like, so he’s hiding it from us. Either way, I don’t think he’s winning himself any votes with this “secret plan” bs.

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:07 am 100. Knucklehead:

Jerry,

It seems we agree. I’d like to hear more about the half I’m missing or am incorrect about. AQ is apparently an “umbrella” or “overlay” command structure for a somewhat loosely knit confederation of terrorists groups. AQ is not the entire problem we face, it is merely the the most effective non-state terrorist leadership organization we are aware of. AQ is the organization which puts into place the boldest and most destructive attacks.

Leadership structures such as AQ don’t grow on trees nor do the likes of OBL. The structure and the individual leaders require time to develop and require a certain level of credibility and “status” to recruit and enlist their “direct” membership as well as to work out matters of communications and cooperation with their “franchises”. When AQ is, for example, free to operate as they once were in Afghanistan they can develop not only their attack plans but all the necessary subsidiary relationships. And they have “luxuries” that aid with recuriting and enlisting – “fancy” HQ’s and home compounds, elaborate training camps and “research labs”, etc.

They apparently had a facility where they trained 10,000 or more “jihadis” who seem to have come from the four corners of the world. They don’t have these sorts of facilites anymore and that means that every facet of their activities is more difficult and less “attractive” to would-be jihadis and confederate terroist organizations. It doesn’t stop them from planning and carrying out attacks, it just makes everything more difficult and more likely to fail and those things reduce, over time, their stature.

We need to keep hammering at all levels of the jihad structure. It seems doubtful that a Kerry administration would do that. Kerry would, IMO, allow them to regroup and regain facilities and capabilities and status that they have lost over the past 3 years. We don’t really need a “break” in the WoT (although we may feel we do). It is the Islamofascists who need a “break” or at least wouldn’t mind getting one.

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:27 am 101. Hepzi:

My observation is that the Kerry supporters, the ABB crowd, and the MSM are desperately ignoring the stated motives of the Islamofascists–for various reasons. To me its quite clear that the terrorists view this from a religious/cultural conflict lens. And that the intellectual climate of Islam equates power with Allah’s endorsement.

Its amazing to me how many in the West are un-done when confronted with this schism– including many of my [normally] analytical intelligent friends!

The Kerry/ABB crowd want more–more than anything–the Islamofascists’ motivation to be the US policies. Towards Israel, the UN, towards the house of Saud, towards troops in Saudi Arabia, you name it. This gives them comfort that we are dealing with a rational player that can be controlled through diplomatic negotiations. Its a control thing, IMO.

The MSM is so secular that they are missing the ENTIRE story, IMO. (Its not as if Al Qaeda, the fatwahs or even the mullahs are trying to characterize the conflict in anything BUT religious terms.)

I believe the MSM is motivated by the following assumption: the evangelistic Christians are a bunch of un-educated rubes in fly-over country–ready to grab their automatic rifles and declare jihad themselves, but for the careful and sanitized reporting of events by the enlightened press…saving us from ourselves thank you very much.

Negativity aside, I truly admire the even-handed response to date of the Iraqi Christians, and have been encouraged that several of the Iraqi Muslim leaders have de-cried the church bombings. I just checked Al Jazeera’s English site and they were indeed reporting the bombings.

Like the initial posters, I have been so discouraged by the Islamic community’s response over the last 3 years that I did not expect as much. I truly hope that some contructive analysis of the Islamofascists within the world Islamic community will result from this tragedy.

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:30 am 102. Knucklehead:

Hepzi,

It often seems to me the “elite” really do believe that the unwashed masses are one news story away from becoming a foaming, rabid, muderous mob. They really do believe that everyone else, everywhere else, is infinitely less dangerous than Joe and Jane Flyover. They have a world view that says US RedStaters are insanely dangerous but that the Mad Mullahs of Iran are perfectly rational and good people who we just badly misunderstand and haven’t developed the proper policies toward.

It is an amazing fantasy. What is it going to take to wake them up?

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:40 am 103. Michael_B:

Our existence is a provocation for them. josé marí

Proof, yet again, that it’s our fault.

The Al Qaeda planning cycle is long, thorough and inflexible. Because of the GWOT, there are constant disruptions to this cycle as operations are compromised and operatives neutralized. jerry

Exactly, though not sure about “inflexible” and I’d place particular emphasis upon the preemptive, varied (ranging from diplomatic/cultural to military) and long-range strategic quality of the GWOT as broadly conceived and implemented by this administration.

Aug 2, 2004 - 8:46 am 104. Knucklehead:

Jerry & Michael B:

The Al Qaeda planning cycle is long, thorough and inflexible.

AQ strikes me as a franchiser of sorts in the realm of global terrormeisters. I don’t doubt for one second that Jerry has identified the basic nature of their planning accurately.

“Inflexibile” is not the same thing as non-adaptive. They will surely adapt their methods as they move forward. I believe we see this now as they cast about to find which sorts of targets are going to bring them the best results (according to whatever sick criteria for results they have).

But once they’ve approved an operation it is very likely that they have a “process” that is, essentially, inflexible. That process surely includes room for adapting to changing realities, but it is almost certainly inflexible in listing out the requirements that need to be met to maintain operational approval.

Aug 2, 2004 - 9:03 am 105. ricpic:

For the left (which includes, among others, the Dems and the MSM) religion is “like so yesterday, man.”

They can’t get their heads around the thought that religion (traditional) is The Central Fact for millions upon millions.

Their own religion of secular humanism blocks the possibility, makes illegitimate the sway of all other religions.

But, of course, they’re not religious, they’re enlightened.

If these willfully blind, in this age, take power again — God help us all!

Aug 2, 2004 - 9:25 am 106. Knucklehead:

Not only does Wretchard put up another one of his fascinating articles, but it is also the topic of this thread and he mentions Roger’s Place twice (and even quotes on of y’all – I’m too lazy to go figure out who it was).

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/

Aug 2, 2004 - 9:58 am 107. Knucklehead:

And Stephen Den Beste weighs in (you’ll need some time, as always, to get through the SDB thoughts, but it is frequently worth the effort):

http://denbeste.nu/

Aug 2, 2004 - 10:02 am 108. TmjUtah:

Jerry -

John Kerry has floated a raft of platitudes and talking points based on the contention that George Bush has failed to win because the fighting continues. On the flip side he has offered no coherent policy changes beyond appealing to the U.N. and old europe. This tactic is not unexpected in a campaign cycle; any political consultant worth his forty pieces of silver will go a long, long way to avoid having his man tied down to specifics.

That worked when the vital argument facing the electorate was one of philosophy. It cannot work during time of war.

Nobody has mentioned it on this thread but I’d like to point out that one of the key pivots in any conflict is defining the goals of the battle and then concentrating on achieving those goals.

The evil neocon cabal ™ and other administration and cabinet staffers of the Bush administration analyzed the threat and contributed to what eventually became the Bush Doctrine. This identified the perpetrators of terror ACTS and their supporters/host regimes as the primary target of U.S. action. The Doctrine deemphasized the religious component that underlays all the different flavors of murderers we face because it was judged that the nation would more readily accept the proposition that we are going after the actual shooters/facilitators aggressively than if the objective had been rigidly defined as the eradication of fundamentalist Islam.

The published objective is to stop our people from being killed. To ultimately accomplish that goal we will at some point have to address why the killers kill…but before we can get to the group therapy/reintegration into civilization stage it is easily understood that our efforts should concentrate on finding, killing, or capturing individual opponents. The foot soldiers might be singing from the chorus of al Qutb or the mufti of Cairo or the vision of the caliphate but a large part of the reason they are in the chorus line to begin with can be laid to the environment of despair and despotism they were raised in. There are very, very few private soldier idealogues. We address the direct threat with fire and steel. We address the environmental factors by injecting an escape hatch from barbarism in our wake.

We have defined the battle as a refusal to be victims of violence. If Joe Muslim anywhere on the planet decides that he cannot practice his religion without he kill infidels then he should expect to pay for his actions. If Bill Muslim embraces instead the tenets of the internal jihad and coexistence – if he adopts prostelyzation or mere free practice of his religion then we rightly have no interest in seeking out or confronting him.

Think of how Mafia families have been taken apart in the past. The DA never stepped out and said “We will stamp out organized crime by next Tuesday” – he began by picking off soldiers, then lieutenants, then capos…until finally the godfathers had no more resources with which to operate. Today we are in the process of establishing the heirarchies of the enemy…identifying and mapping the interrelation of individuals and interests behind the offensive being waged against western civilization. Think of the whiteboards with family trees of mafia families you see on any True Crime documentary. It’s a given that the bad guys have a commonality of belief. That given isn’t as important as identifying, locating, and confronting them at this time.

The sitting administration recognised that there was no possibility of winning this war in three years. Physical resources aside, the patent willingness of the political minority to focus on exploiting the situation vice joining the fight was recognised early on. Instead of fighting a domestic battle of rhetoric driven by political expediency the administration has published an understandable doctrine and implemented it and for the last three years. We have enjoyed domestic security and struck significant blows against the enemy worldwide. The costs have been high…but the readiness of the administration ,in the face of high risks on the political front, to lead and act reflects an adult commitment to achieving objective results.

Returning to al Qaeda…and since I’ve read your last post…we agree on what the effect of the Bush Doctrine has been on that particular subset of the threat. We have significantly reduced the ability of any of the different groups to function because any of the regimes that supports them KNOWS that if we can trace back state involvement in a terrorist attack on our soil, under Bush the despots can be reasonable certain to endure an unsocial call from the U.S. armed forces.

The enemy finds itself in the same boat with the DNC conventioneers. They don’t feel strongly about Kerry one way or another but they dearly want anybody but Bush on the other side of this fight. They do think long term, and they dearly wish for a hudna in which to reorganize for operations down the road.

Aug 2, 2004 - 11:28 am 109. jerry:

Tim:

The Al Qaida leadership is a strategic situation not unlike Lee in 1864. They have quasi-Clauswitian view of warfare where victory will be won in a single decisive blow. However, they are unable to comprehend that their opponents is playing by different rules. Just as Lee came to grief in the forty day Wilderness campaign because the world had evolved from single decisive battle to continuous combat, Al Qaeda finds it cannot conduct operations effectively in an environment of constant pressure. Al Qaida is not seeking Hudna. They are struggling to maintain their operational tempo. The truce offered to Europe was actually in response to criticism from some radical Clerics who said that the Koran requires that you offer a truce to your enemies to give them a chance to repent. His offer should be viewed as a nod to Islamic law not as an attempt to go into ìwinter quarters.î

Aug 2, 2004 - 11:45 am 110. Bravo Romeo Delta:

One thing that I would like point out is that just because it’s a Clash of Civilizations for Al Qaeda and their intellectual ilk doesn’t make it true universally for all Muslims.

To wit, in response to the recent church bombings:

“Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that Sunday’s assaults on churches “targeted Iraq’s unity, stability and independence.”

…

“This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis,” Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.

The more senior al-Sistani, based in the southern city of Najaf, said: “We assert the importance of respecting the rights of Christian civilians and other religious minorities and reaffirm their right to live in their home country Iraq in security and peace.”

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:02 pm 111. PeterUK:

Is not the prevarication by Kerry over a strategy for Iraq costing lives? Terrorist attacks seem to have shifted to soft targets designed to prolong social instability and keep terror on the front pages.Standard tactics, but they obviously have an eye on the American Presidential elections and the tacet suggestion that Kerry can make everything better.

On AQ operations,the IRA maxim was “We only have to be luck once,you have to be luck all the time”

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:16 pm 112. Knucklehead:

Jerry:

I have to go reread my Clausewitz, but I don’t recall his…

… view of warfare where victory will be won in a single decisive blow.

I would dispute that AQ holds this view. I suppose we could be talking about matters of degree. IT seems to me that AQ engaged in numerous attacks of escalating ferocity (or at least building to a crescendo). It may be possible that they thought each one along the way would represent a decisive blow and that, as they were disappointed each time, they had to raise the ante.

If they were expecting decisive blows and could barely achieve getting us to pay attention they must have been quite frustrated.

Al Qaeda finds it cannot conduct operations effectively in an environment of constant pressure.

This seems to me to be accurate and certainly hope it is, but I don’t see how the following flows from it…

Al Qaida is not seeking Hudna. They are struggling to maintain their operational tempo.

One small point for starters. AQ does not need to “seek” a hudna but might eagerly accept one if it became available to them by, say, the election of John Kerry as president.

Are they struggling to maintain their operational tempo or to find and establish one? If they have no concept of continuous combat would the have a notion of operational tempo to begin with?

It seems to me they do not expect one decisive blow and that they do have a notion of continuous combat and operational tempo. But they made a very serious miscalculation about our willingness and ability to wage continuous combat and establish and operational tempo that is beyond their capacity to function under.

They believed they could stage a series of escallating blows until the weight of the total became decisive. And we gave them every reason to believe this by withdrawing from increasingly bold attacks that cost us little damage. We could run through the series of attacks from Islamoids in general and AQ in particular, but the results MUST have suggested to them that they could chase us back across the ocean and then hit us here and we’d withdraw into some sort of isolationism. They had no fear of a cruise missile here and there, pinpricks to them.

What they did not expect was the engagement they got from Bush’s DoD which accelerated to an operational tempo that produced a level and scope of pressure that they were not, and may never be, able to function under. Unfortunately they must be subject to some level of desperation to achieve a significant operation against us and, therefore, we can expect attacks and, since there is no such thing as a perfect defense, we will be hit and bloodied.

When that happens it will have no impact on our capability to maintain an operational tempo they can’t function well under, but our willingness to exert our capabilities will be called into question.

If I were AQ and the question were posed to me, “who do you want to win the US election?” the answer would be a loud and clear “Kerry!”

Whether or not he gives them a desired or merely opportunistic hudna is immaterial. He will, almost certainly, reduce the operational tempo and that will be respite enough for them to get back on their toes and off their heels.

I’ve heard some make the claim that Kerry would have to be even tougher to prove he isn’t a Froglovin’ Wuss, but that is not the least bit convincing. Everyone who wishes we’d go back to our 9/10/2001 resolve to pretend that we are not at war wants Kerry to win.

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:32 pm 113. epobirs:

For the Islamic side of the fight it is and has always been a religious war. When you have a relgion that defines nearly every conceivable aspect of one’s life including a directive to propagate the religion everywhere, by deadly force if necessary, how can such actions by adherents be read as anything other than religious?

If your opponent has an absolutist goal it makes little difference if you understand his motives or not. The only motive that matters is the one that will make him give up the fight on terms acceptable to you. If those terms cannot be found to exist the solution set is then narrowed down considerably.

Aug 2, 2004 - 12:54 pm 114. Hepzi:

Does anyone else feel that Kerry putting the whole Iraq effort on a public 4 year timeframe is tantamount to a trial attorney revealing the contents of his briefcase?

This really hacks me off!! 1). How does he come up with that timeframe in the first place? 2). Even if reasonable, why would you tip your hand? Couldn’t he come up with some other way of being specific….

Aug 2, 2004 - 1:07 pm 115. jerry:

Knucklehead:

Clausewitz wrote about the necessity of bringing your opponent to a decisive battle. This was his experience from the study of all wars to date. The decisive battle had a grip on European Military thought until after WWII. The whole German Blitzkrieg doctrine was an attempt to the bring miltiary engagement back to the single blow.

Al Qaeda certainly does have this strategic outlook. Bin Laden is caught on tape watching the the aftermath of the attacks. He clearly believed and stated his opinion that the United States would collapse in chaos as the result of the attack. He showed no appreciate for the robustness of a modern society or how the United States operated.

Aug 2, 2004 - 1:22 pm 116. TmjUtah:

Jerry -

Lee sought to provide a political lever by which the political divisions of the North could force a negotiated peace. He could justify prosecuting a war on the grounds of forcing a political solution that left the South free to pursue its own agenda. He sought to seperate the South from the North. He never entertained the thought of conquering the Northern States.

The enemy we face today makes no bones about their victory conditions: Assimilation, or failing that extermination, of any population that does not subscribe to their vision of what the world should be.

They called 9/11 a strategic strike. For that to be true then the buildings and people destroyed on that day would have to have somehow been irreplacable in the table of organization and equipment of western civilization. That is of course not the case. Those point targets represented at most physical manifestations of the success of our system but by themselves did not remotely represent the foundations of our strength.

Fundamentalist Islam attempts to tap the paranoia, despair, and hopelessness of millions of people with the intent of propagating the cause of that same malaise across the world. They don’t have a better idea to bring to the mix but they are more than willing to kill out of hand anybody that disagrees with them. To somebody inclined to respect the other guy’s point of view, accept the value of reasonable compromise, and just get along, accepting the fact that an opponent is for all intents a monster from outerspace is a huge leap to make. The proof of that reluctance is seen by the decades it took for the assault to be finally taken seriously. From Munich to today, their goals remain the same. We finally got around to accepting them at their word on 9/11.

A political solution that would bring an end to the killing on the part of the enemy is beyond any reasonable expectation. The only way to end the killing is to remove the shooters from the field and the only way to end their replacement is to destroy the system that feeds it. The Bush Doctrine provides a clear platform for pursuing those goals.

Al Qaeda doesn’t have an operational tempo to maintain, Jerry. They may have attacks in the pipeline, of course, but they have refused to recognise that their enemy isn’t an authority or an agenda, like themselves, but merely a system that has worked orders of magnitude better for people where theirs has failed. The only strategic strategy available to al Qaeda and their ilk is mass death because they have nothing to offer in a political debate.

We fight this war on point because we can afford to. We recoil at the thought of wars of extermination. It took more than thirty years to get us to address the threat; the elephants in the room are whether or not we have the political will to sustain the Doctrine to eventual success and the possibility that the enemy will employ WMD after being frustrated on all other fronts.

I don’t pretend that the Bush Doctrine is perfect. I do believe it is an effective balance between what must be done and the existing domestic political reality – prioritized in that order. I do not believe Kerry or his party can be counted on to effectively prosecute the war. Anything less than relentless pressure is simply opportunity for the enemy to retrench and strike again.

Aug 2, 2004 - 2:25 pm 117. PeterUK:

“He showed no appreciate for the robustness of a modern society or how the United States operated”

I would agree,further, Bin Laden doesn’t seem to know the history of the 20th century or the 19th century for tha matter.

Aug 2, 2004 - 2:25 pm 118. M. Simon:

Ron Wrght,

You know we really have to decide if we want to keep every one out of America. Not possible.

Or if we prefer to just keep out or capture the dangerous ones.

The huge volumes between the border stations make it easier for the bad guys to get through. If we let most of them in legally the bad guys would stand out.

Then there might be no need to decide who to jail and who to let go.

Aug 2, 2004 - 7:15 pm 119. Ron Wrght:

Sorry the troll is back.

Don’t wish to intrude again. Some one asked an intelligent question and deserves an answer.

The issue of Hispanic economic migration across our border is an issue in and of itself. Until the Mexican economy substantially improves, this will be a continuing problem. There are many sectors in our economy that need inexpenisve labor that the Hispanics are willing to provide. Our current policy is hypocritical. While we bemoan the alleged economic costs they impose on our infrastructure, we aren’t willing to pay the increased costs of goods and services if we lock this labor out.

This is compounded by issues of identity theft in which migrant workers buy personal profile info of real American citizens to get government documents to work, to drive, and secure loans. While many of these workers keep these loans current, it causes real headaches for the person whose ID has been compromised. The first being with the IRS and then securing loans when their credit scores are lower because of erroneous debt ratios.

I’m somewhat neutral on the migration issue. I’m just concerned we are able to forensically ID (fingerprints/biometrically) those who are on this side of the border. It’s been my experience working economic and other crimes that crooks will lie about their identity whenever possible and secondly will exploit jurisdictional boundaries whenever possible.

Once arrested they will lie about their name to avoid active felony warrants, violations of probation/parole, and enhancements for prior convictions etc. In our area the bail bond companies no longer require collateral to secure their bonds. On most felonies the standard bail is $5,000 which only requires a $500 premium. Most “tweakers” can get their friends to put up the money. They make bail prior to court arraignment and then FTA on their return court date. The irony is if they use a real persons name with other identifying info that person runs the risk of having a felony bench warrant issued in their name. Imagined yourself trying to get out of this one without being told, “tell it to the judge.” Many jails don’t forensically confirm the ID of arrestees prior to release on bail if the identifier linked info matches (name and other numerical info).

Not that migrants pose a problem here, it’s just that we should be able to catch the ones who are bad people we really want. There was a recent case of a illegal alien who went back and forth across the border several times. This subject was a wanted felon and should have been detained let alone being allowed enter the country. This subject was later arrested in Oregon after committing a murder.

Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organization are very aware of this and use similar methods to enter this country. With regard to the female detained in Texas, all I can say is but for the grace God go us, she was caught by an alert agent. Mind you she was traveling on a valid San African passport that had been altered. Was carrying over $7,000 in cash. More than likely she is a “mule” carrying orders to a facilitator in control of sleeper cells in this country. We won one this time.

What really fries me is subjects of Middle Eastern extraction have been crossing the border and have been detained only to be cite/released to appear later in court on this side of the border. Check this out over at http://www.michellemalkin.com. These folks then disappear into the woodwork. These are the folks destined to be the “disposable” terrorists. This is what concerns me when we have are hands on these folks and just let them go when this Country is at war. I’m sorry if it appears that I’m on a Jihad on this but somebody needs to start talking some common sense.

This goes for all the federal “warm and fuzzy” stuff with security at airports. The relative risk of an old White, Black (American), and or Hispanic lady with an underwire bar being a Jihadist terrorist is almost nil. But we are spending many millions of dollars for “feel good stuff” to be political correct when these dollars could best spent elsewhere.

Troll out again,

Ron Wright

Sorry the troll is back.

Don’t wish to intrude again. Some one asked an intelligent question and deserves an answer.

The issue of Hispanic economic migration across our border is an issue in and of itself. Until the Mexican economy substantially improves, this will be a continuing problem. There are many sectors in our economy that need inexpensive labor that the Hispanics are willing to provide. Our current policy is hypocritical. While we bemoan the alleged economic costs they impose on our infrastructure, we aren’t willing to pay the increased costs of goods and services if we lock this labor out.

This is compounded by issues of identity theft in which migrant workers buy personal profile info of real American citizens to get government documents to work, to drive, and secure loans. While many of these workers keep these loans current, it causes real headaches for the person whose ID has been compromised. The first being with the IRS and then securing loans when their credit scores are lower because of erroneous debt ratios.

I’m somewhat neutral on the migration issue. I’m just concerned we are able to forensically ID (fingerprints/biometrically) those who are on this side of the border. It’s been my experience working economic and other crimes that crooks will lie about their identity whenever possible and secondly will exploit jurisdictional boundaries whenever possible.

Once arrested they will lie about their name to avoid active felony warrants, violations of probation/parole, and enhancements for prior convictions etc. In our area the bail bond companies no longer require collateral to secure their bonds. On most felonies the standard bail is $5,000 which only requires a $500 premium. Most “tweakers” can get their friends to put up the money. They make bail prior to court arraignment and then FTA on their return court date. The irony is if they use a real persons name with other identifying info that person runs the risk of having a felony bench warrant issued in their name. Imagined yourself trying to get out of this one without being told, “tell it to the judge.” Many jails don’t forensically confirm the ID of arrestees prior to release on bail if the identifier linked info matches (name and other numerical info).

Not that migrants pose a problem here, it’s just that we should be able to catch the ones who are bad people we really want. There was a recent case of a illegal alien who went back and forth across the border several times. This subject was a wanted felon and should have been detained let alone being allowed enter the country. This subject was later arrested in Oregon after committing a murder.

Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organization are very aware of this and use similar methods to enter this country. With regard to the female detained in Texas, all I can say is but for the grace God go us, she was caught by an alert agent. Mind you she was traveling on a valid San African passport that had been altered. Was carrying over $7,000 in cash. More than likely she is a “mule” carrying orders to a facilitator in control of sleeper cells in this country. We won one this time.

What really fries me is subjects of Middle Eastern extraction have been crossing the border and have been detained only to be cite/released to appear later in court on this side of the border. Check this out over at http://www.michellemalkin.com. These folks then disappear into the woodwork. These are the folks destined to be the “disposable” terrorists. This is what concerns me when we have are hands on these folks and just let them go when this Country is at war. A complicating factor is the suicidal ones may have no prior records and have no prior fingerprint records in the automated fingerprint systems to match with to confirm ID. I’m sorry if it appears that I’m on a Jihad on this but somebody needs to start talking some common sense.

This goes for all the federal “warm and fuzzy” stuff with security at airports. The relative risk of an old White, Black (American), and or Hispanic lady with an underwire bar being a Jihadist terrorist is almost nil. But we are spending many millions of dollars for “feel good stuff” to be political correct when these dollars could best spent elsewhere.

Troll out,

Ron Wright

Aug 2, 2004 - 11:45 pm 120. Ron Wrght:

OK sorry, I did blow this one. Don’t know how the post repeated when I cut/pasted it back in.

I will donate to the free Iran cause on behalf of Mr. Simon to cover the bandwidth.

Troll gone hopefully forever this time.

Aug 2, 2004 - 11:55 pm 121. Knucklehead:

Ron Wright:

You raise interesting points, some of which have been discussed here before at some length.

We all tend to climb up on our soapboxes from time to time and try to catch everyone up on all the issues that wrack our fevered brows, but the primary attraction here at Roger’s Place (if I assess this correctly) is that people here are more inclined to sit and chat, or walk and talk, than they are to grab hold of a megaphone and get their message out.

Just a thought.

Aug 3, 2004 - 7:21 am 122. Knucklehead:

Jerry:

I may need to go back and revisit my readings of military history. Its been a while since I did any Clausewitz whatsoever and I was never a “student” of Clausewitz. My residual “understanding” of him is that he was the “conflict philosopher” who could be thought of as the “Father of Total War”.

It is entirely possible that I misread and/or that what I thought I understood has long since faded, but I have the impression that Clausewitz and Grant would have understood one another. The notion of “total war” seems to me to be based upon a rejection of the idea of “decisive battle” – an acceptance of the notion that defeating an enemy requires much more than rolling up his military forces in detail at some large battle.

I wouldn’t want to hijack this thread into a discussion of military history but it seems we have a different understanding of the nature of “Blitzkrieg” also. I never got any impression that Blitzkrieg was a strategy or tactic intended to arrange for and win a “decisive battle”. My understanding of “blitzkrieg” is that the germ of it (in its modern form – an argument can be made that Alexander understood the concepts quite well) came about during the final phases of WWI with the tactics that the last of the major German commanders of that conflict (name begins with an “L” IIRC, but I can’t remember the name) was developing to break the trench stalemate. Blitzkrieg never seemed a “strategy” to me. It always struck me as more of a “campaign” or “battle” tactic; find a breakthrough point and then pour through to exploit it by wrecking your enemy’s communications (communications is the full logistics, command, and control sense).

This is all somewhat moot, I suppose, to the overall discussion but it is interesting to consider whether or not AQ has anything like a true “grand strategy” and if it makes any real sense or not.

Aug 3, 2004 - 7:36 am 123. chuck:

Knucklehead,

Keep in mind the principal that people do what they can and rationalize it after. What can Al Qaeda do? Can they move armies, send a navy, rattle missles, impose trade sanctions? They don’t have these resources, for that they would need to be the government of a powerful country. So they resort to terror, what else is within their capability, really? I think what we see is simply a tactic based on ability. If they possessed stronger means they would be employed.

What other means do they see? One billion Muslims, that doubtless seems like a major resource, but the community is spread out, economically backward, untrained, unarmed. The numbers are misleading, but I’ll bet that Al Qaeda fantasizes that if these folks were united, then they could conquer the world. Likewise with the towers, they fantasized that these were the center and force of the US rather than our population, vast area and resources, and dispersed and numerous production sites. So no, they don’t understand what we are, and I think they merely rationalize what they have as being sufficient means.

Almost all the power is on our side. All we need is will and perserverance and success will follow.

Aug 3, 2004 - 7:38 am 124. TmjUtah:

I think Clausewitz studied Sherman. A lot.

Blitzkrieg was first coined by the German General Staff in the early 1930’s. They adopted the tank as an arm of battle long before any other world power did. Britain, France, and the Sov’s published doctrines that tied armor to infantry as sort of glorified mobile pillboxes.

The Germans built their armor formations to concentrate mobile power on a point. Their earliest organizational charts excluded organic infantry from panzer units but by the time they invaded west into continental Europe they had arrived at the Armor/Mechanized/Armored Infantry mix that is the norm today. They used the traditional German thoroughness to identify the priority of modern combat as logistical in nature, rather than merely martial. By being able to force a disruption in the enemy line and then race through to destroy the support echelons and sieze transport corridors, they could place their opponents in the position of fighting without hope of resupply. By coordinating air cover at the leading edge of the advance they were able to bring tremendous firepower into play in minutes instead of hours. The concept was originally tactical but rapidly evolved into a strategic tool because the Germans explored and understood the potential of motor/armor mobility coupled with air power long before their opposition.

The French and British air forces still practiced the ‘dawn patrol’ method of air power at the beginning of the war: take off and fly to where the guns were going off. Forward air control was rudimentary to non-existent, with no doctrine of managing air resources over the front beyond pointing them toward a town.

The nazis became so enamored of the lightning war they failed to appreciate Mahan’s doctrines of strategic power…and failed in the end because of their inability to reach the industrial strength of their enemies.

Aug 3, 2004 - 8:32 am 125. Knucklehead:

Chuck:

Keep in mind the principal that people do what they can and rationalize it after. What can Al Qaeda do? Can they move armies, send a navy, rattle missles, impose trade sanctions?

These are excellent points. For the sake of deeper discussion rather than as any suggestion that you don’t do what I’m about to suggest, I’ll respond with: keep in mind that armies, navies, rattling missles, and trade sanctions don’t need to look like our traditional “pictures” of these things.

An “army” doesn’t need to be the sort of uniformed and weapons of war equipped military machine we recognize as an army. An “army” can be a few thousand non-uniformed “agents” provided they have some reasonably effective command structure and a reasonable ability to be creative about “weaponizing” things we don’t recognize as weapons. A “navy” doesn’t need to be this vast and disciplined collection of modern warships. It can be a few tramp steamers and trawlers and boston whalers. One doesn’t need to have missles of one’s own in order to rattle missles if one has “allies” willing to rattle their missles on one’s behalf.

Last, but certainly not least, one does not interantional trade treaties or a United Nations to potentially impose “trade sanctions”. If, for example, a group of terrorists makes it too costly to conduct trade one has imposed a de facto trade sanction.

AQ, it seems to me, has at least a limited ability to do all these things. They can’t put an aircraft carrier taks force on the Straights of Hormuz (I’m probably picking a bad example), but they could concievably create sufficient havoc to close some important trade passage which effectively result in a “trade sanction” enforced (or at least created) by “naval” action.

One of the Big Mistakes I believe many of My Fellow Citizens make is seeming to simultaneously project both too little and too great capability upon “international terrorism”.

With one breath they seem to view this problem as if it were nothing more than a bunch of disconnected malcontents with no more warfighting capability than the Bloods or Crips. This mistake assumes that we are so powerful, and they so weak, that no matter what they do we can track them down and have our revenge upon them.

In the next breath they seem to assign them magical capabilities to row nuclear weapons into our ports and end civilization as we know it any time they want to. This mistake puts us into a hopeless situation where our only choices are to either pre-emptively wipe an entire “religion” or “culture” off the face of the earth or track down and “negotiate” with them to somehow give them what they want.

Reality, it seems to me, is to recognize not only our own limitations and abilities but also to recongize the enemies limitations and abilities. They cannot, of example, hold or retake a “country” from us unless we lose the will to take or hold a country. If we keep constant pressure upon them from all reasonable “angles” (military, diplomatic, financial, and “cultural”) then we can play to our strengths against their weaknesses.

We need to make sure that we do not play to their strengths and, IMO, any notion that “they can’t hurt us” or “they want something that we can negotiate about” or “we can’t stop them or win this sort of war” is playing to their strengths. We can, in fact, win against them. We have enormous capability to “escalate” (what the “Islamic Street” seems to have completely missed is that we have the capability to redefine “terror” into something they have never even imagined) and we could, potentially, be dumb enough to attempt to disengage.

If disengaging is a mistake and we can always escalate if needs be, it seems to me we have pretty good latitude to try various methods and techniques that lie somewhere between “sandbag the borders!” and “nuke ‘em till they glow!”. JMO, but I think we are engaged – at least under the current administration – in very creative, bold, and yet oddly restrained ways. Since I cannot know or assess the full details of the nature of this engagement, given that it seems creative and bold, yet measured, to me, I assign “benefit of the doubt” to the administration. I see no evidence that they are waging this fight stupidly or clumsily. I have no expectation that it will be waged flawlessly by ANY administration. Therefore, even if I thought Kerry was an acceptable candidate I would definitely be in the “don’t change horses in midstream” camp in this “runup to the election”.

Aug 3, 2004 - 8:48 am 126. TmjUtah:

Today’s enemy has chosen to percieve the root of the threat facing them as authoritarian in nature. It’s literally the only face they can put on us since the underlying concepts of western democracy are incomprehensible to them.

By assigning strategic priority to the targets they have – that they think are essential to the continued existence of our political and social fabric – they demonstrate a glaring lack of appreciation or honesty for what they are up against.

One non-jihadist muslim living with his family, peacefully coexisting with his neighbors, and participating in electoral politics is a greater threat to the fundamentalists than any number of heavy divisions commanded by Americans.

That’s why they attack us. Given time, the existence of vibrant western democracy, and the inability of fundamentalist Islam to improve the conditions of the people trapped inside its sphere of influence, their creed will die of atrophy.

Aug 3, 2004 - 8:52 am 127. Knucklehead:

Tmj,

You did a very good articulation of my “residual understanding” of Clausewitz and Blitzkrieg. Keep in mind that Sherman worked for Grant. What Grant was trying to achieve through Sherman was not “decisive battle” but to wreck the South’s ability to continue the war. It turned out to be decisive “action” but not really decisive battle (a fine point, I admit, but I believe the distinction matters).

It is also difficult to think of Sherman’s campaign as “blitkrieg” because it operated on a different time scale under different techological realities, but it has all the necessary elements. Move through the enemy’s lines and cut his communicatins.

Warfare, if we distill it to one of my hated “bumper stickers” is a matter of “move, shoot, and communicate”. All three are, however, interdependent. It doesn’t matter how far and fast one moves if one arrives in the wrong place or at the wrong time. One does not need to shoot everything or all the time and it does no good to shoot if no desireable effect is achieved. Communicating is a matter of the logistics of supplying adequately to maintain moving and shooting, but it also allows one to control those things and their timeliness and effectiveness.

We need to maintain maximum flexibility and effectiveness of our ability to move, shoot, and communicate while disrupting our enemy’s ability to effectively do those things. Disrupt their communications (always remember that “communications” is far more than “talking to one another”, it is the full panoply of command, control, and logistics), slow down their movements or disrupt the timeliness of their movements, make them spend more moving farther and slower. Keep them from shooting and make them waste ammunition, disrupt and co-opt their communications.

Do all this while simultaneously reducing the attractiveness of moving, shooting, and communicating for their side and their ability to sustain the conflict will wither and, hopefully, die off without the need to escalate to a degree none of us really want to witness.

Aug 3, 2004 - 9:08 am 128. Knucklehead:

Tmj,

…the underlying concepts of western democracy are incomprehensible to them.

Not only are those concepts incomprehesible to them, but whenever they gain a flash of insight those concepts are completely destricutive to their own view. They cannot live in a world where all things are the will of Allah and thanks are directed to Allah and all must submit to everything around them because whatever it is reflects, after all, the will of Allah and one must than Allah for it.

This is as incomprehensible to me as our system must be to them. It seems like a forever loop of chasing one’s tail and yelping and then thanking “the lord” when one catches it and chomps it. Where the heck can that ever go?

I look at that and see something I can’t fathom and when some flash of insight arrives (typically delivered on a platter by Catherine!) I get the sinking, sick feeling that there just ain’t room in the town for them and us (and I ain’t willing to move to the cemetery just yet).

It ain’t gonna end soon or be pretty in the meantime. Bummer.

Aug 3, 2004 - 9:17 am 129. chuck:

Tmj,

IIRC, the writings of Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller were more influencial in WWII than those of Clausewitz. Liddell Hart’s biography of Sherman was the book that emphasized Sherman’s tactic of keeping open several possible lines of attack and choosing that where the resistance was smallest; he also remarked on Sherman’s choice to abandon his lines of supply up into TN that the Confederates had sent Forrest to interdict. Of course, to me it appears that Liddell used Sherman as a stalking horse to promote his own previously developed theories of warfare, but the book is still of interest.

Aug 3, 2004 - 9:26 am 130. TmjUtah:

Knucklehead -

I was an artilleryman once upon a time, so I understand shoot/move/communicate.

The bad guys are just that. BAD. This isn’t a question of competing territorial interests or economics. Americans live and function happily on the leading edge of an indeterminate world, following our dreams and unconsciously assuming that the folks on our left and right are content to do the same. We tend to ignore the problems we cannot directly lay a hand on. Maybe it would be easier to understand fundamentalist Islam if the Religous Right in America actually bore any resemblence to the charicature endlessly published by their opposite numbers in our political arena. As it is, even the worst fearmongering misrepresentation of evangelical Christianity or even an accurate portrait of the KKK falls light years short of the stark reality of what the Islamic agenda means to the civilized world.

The rise of Eurabia aside, there’s just no way for them to function as a worldwide government even if they were able to project enough death and destruction to make it happen. They might bring down civilization via plague, but I don’t see a viable end state for them in the absence of a main enemy. Should they ever defeat the Great Satan, they’d just revert to tribal warfare.

Are they crazy? I don’t know. History is littered with the rise of fanatic political movements in either secular or religious flavors. I know they intend to kill us where they can on the way to eradicating western civilization. Not much reason to invest any more investigation into the why when the what is so clear.

Chuck -

Sherman was profoundly influenced by his experience at Shiloh and the battles that followed. He was intimately familiar with the mind of the Southern aristocracy and doubted very much that the north could ever force a battlefield decision against them. Given the North’s overwhelming superiority in men and material he foresaw any victory coming at the cost of millions of lives and a South devoid of a male population.

The war would be won only when the population as a whole had been coerced into abandoning the myth of the Southern aristocracy. He did his part by destroying the supply line that left the rebel soldier in front of Grant shoeless, hungry, and distraught over the fate of their family.

His determination to take the fight to the sinews of the Confederacy was a revolution in military thought. He dictated the tempo of the fight by forcing the enemy into a reaction mode. He deemphasized the glory of battle in favor of just ending the fight as quickly as possible. I’ve read Hart but not Fuller.

Clausewitz is more popular than technical, agreed. Truisms are always more marketable than specific stategies reflecting the existing weapons, technology, and politics before an authority or pundit.

Aug 3, 2004 - 10:44 am 131. Knucklehead:

Tmj,

You mean you don’t accept that the Islamofacists are just really nice and wonderfully exotic people whom we misunderstand and pushed too far by stealing their petroleum from them?

Are you saying that the “Religious Right” isn’t run by Torqueyomamma and isn’t running massive torture and racial bigotry campaigns throughout the US?

Aug 3, 2004 - 11:02 am 132. TmjUtah:

Knucklehead -

I cannot recall the last news account of a convenience store robbery that included the line “The suspect pushed the cash amount for his purchase across the counter and cooly walked out of the store.”

Yup. We’ve stolen their oil at their price and then guarded the transport line out to the world, too. For what, fifty years?

I survived a youth experience with a highly unpleasant example of right religious extremism. Like all cult-of-personality abberations laid on top of a mainstream religion it followed one of the two available options: it collapsed the moment the leader overreached the dogma he purported to represent. I am proud to say I had a hand in bringing matters to a head.

It wasn’t a Martin Luther moment or anything. I just asked him (during a sermon on harlots) why it was necessary to destroy my girlfriend because she declined the attentions of his son(s)…imagine the final scene of Carrie, without the pig blood, and you almost get the picture.

Americans don’t do extremes…unless you call patriotism and a belief in our ability to get the job done extremism. Some do. That is their choice and their affair. They attempt to slip on the striped pants and top hat every four years but I don’t think it’s working all that well since 9/11.

Aug 3, 2004 - 11:27 am 133. Knucklehead:

Tmj,

It could be that I am just completely insensitive to some sort of heavy duty pressure that My Fellow Citizens feel wrt matters of religion. Or perhaps I am just flat out lucky enough to have escaped it by sheer happenstance.

I was subject to nine years of education in parochial school. It didn’t take. I’ve been into churches or all sorts of sects MANY times, none of them ever locked me in, I was always free to exit at any moment of my choosing. Along the way my experience suggests that there is as large a “religious left” as there is a “religious right” (more on that momentarily). I’ve been subjected to, as far as I know, as many “visits” from those who wish to “convert” me as most other people have. They never cost me anything more than a few moments of my time and, rarely, some sharp and pointed words requesting that that they leave me alone and turn their attentions elsewhere. All that suggests to me that “religion” isn’t any more “contagious” than, for example, homosexuality. It ain’t smallpox and I can’t “catch it” unless I go looking to catch it.

So that makes me downright aggravated by the people who seem to view the First Ammendment as something which should guarantee them “freedom” from any exposure to anything “religious” under any and all circumstances. I can’t help wondering what they are afraid of. Do they believe they, or their children, will bolt from home and join a monastary if they hear Silent Night sung by the Munchkin Fourth Grade Singers on school property? I don’t think so. I think it is just an expression of animosity slathered with an unhealthy dose of superiority complex. But what to I know.

On the matter of Religious Right vs. Religious Left… My experience with various churches (Christian as well as Jewish sects of a fairly borad number of sects) suggests to me that there is every bit as many “congregations” leaning Left as there are leaning Right.

In most cases those who belong to the congregations, I’d wager, don’t view their lean to the left or right as an attribute of their religion. They’d almost certainly explain their political leanings in other than religious terms, or at least try to. Yet we never hear boo about the Religious Left. Why is that? Is it merely because those who belong to the Religious Left have successfully defined their leftism in non-religious terms and the Religious Right has failed to do something similar? Or is it that the MSM and elites dislike religion but are fully willing to tolerate there fellow leftists who subscribe?

BTW, I believe your example of dealing with a case of “religious extremism” demonstrates my point about how it is basically simple to deal with. It may have seemed difficult and painful and cranked up some serious emotions for you at the time, but in retrospect you might admit that it wasn’t particularaly difficult to set the dopes straight and that they had no lasting impact upon your life – the “extremist” part wasn’t as if they got to whack you with sticks or make you grow a beard or force your girlfriend to don a veil or burka. What we seem to view as “religious extremism” is downright milquetoast as far as extremism goes.

Which is all to say that I find “radical secularism” (or anit-religousness, not really sure which it is) far more bothersome and inconvenient in my own life than “religious extremism” has ever been. When folks set in to foaming about the “Religious Right” I tend to think they’ve got their own issues they might want to ponder on a bit.

Aug 3, 2004 - 12:35 pm 134. jerry:

Tim:

Thought this was dead thread and didn’t respond to your comments on Lee’s strategy. I don’t know where you got the idea that Lee was fighting a Fabian strategy, unless you meant after his defeat a Gettysburg. Prior to that Lee sought to inflict a decisive military defeat on the Army of Potomac, take Washington and dictate a peace favorable to Southern Independence. That was clearly his intent in the Antietam Campaign in September 1862 and the Gettysburg Campaign a year later. His intent at Chancellorsville just prior to Gettysburg was to destroy Hooker. He cancelled his third day attack, which would have been Pickett’s Charge in May instead of July, because of a perceived opportunity to defeat Sedgwick’s VI Corps.

Comparing Hart and Fuller to Clausewitz is not valid. First, both writers accepted Clausewitz as a given. They wrote more about means then ends. Clausewitz is not a strategy cookbook, itís a philosophy of war.

Al Qaeda certainly has an OPTEMPO. Their desired attack schedule is 12-18 months. You can check the dates.

Aug 3, 2004 - 12:39 pm 135. TmjUtah:

Jerry -

Yes, Clausewitz is a philosopher and authority, the others were more historians, I agree. I was imprecise.

Lee’s campaign objectives may have been aimed at Washington but the primary objective was to bring the Army of the Potomac onto ground of his choosing and destroy it. Not beat them, not rout them, but to utterly destroy them. The posse of inept Union generals that had paraded the federals in front of his guns for almost three years gave him valid reason to believe that he could accomplish that mission. He correctly guaged his chances for surviving a war of attrition as nil. The invasions were aimed at D.C. because Lee knew that the political pressure brought to bear on his opposite number would only help to keep the Union side on script.

Lee sought that once crushing victory near Washington because he had to force a collapse of political will in D.C. to have any chance of winning. I always thought the dream of capturing Washington was given too much weight in the commentaries of the war. Yes, the town is in a swamp but by early 1863 what it didn’t have in defensible terrain it more than made up for with earthworks and artillery. Lee NEVER had enough oomph to win a total victory in the field and hope to have enough moxie left to take D.C. by storm. He never had the resources to attempt a true invasion of the North, so he concentrated on dictating tempo and holding the initiative against the enemy in the field. He lost the ability to do even that the day Grant marched after him after the Wilderness. And the Union troops cheered because they knew they had a general that would finish the fight.

Sherman did fight a lightning war, for his era. He moved his troops to preplanned objectives, fighting only those enemies who interfered with reaching those points. He moved at the fastest pace his troops could sustain and the minimum trains (wagon and rail) necessary to keep him supplied. He abandoned his supply lines entirely for his march to the sea.

Knuckle -

My little story about my antiepiphany was anecdotal. It did cost me a lot. It took me twenty years to discriminate between the existence of God and the works of men using scripture for their own agendas. Some lessons have a steep price tag.

But I’m much better now.

Aug 3, 2004 - 11:44 pm 136. Knucklehead:

Tmj

My little story about my antiepiphany was anecdotal. It did cost me a lot. It took me twenty years to discriminate between the existence of God and the works of men using scripture for their own agendas. Some lessons have a steep price tag.

But I’m much better now.

This thread is probably deader than a doornail, but just in case you check back in I feel some need to tell you that I found your comment very thought provoking.

First off, glad to hear you are much better now

Second, I suppose I’m sorry to hear that it cost you twenty years to sort out some stuff that is, it seems to me, very important to you. Sorting it out, however, is what matters most. Best wishes with that.

The thing that provoked what I found to be an odd series of thought for me was the matter of how I arrived at some sort of innoculation against “religion” vs. how an obvously thinking man like you needed 20 years to sort out the stuff important to you.

Early on I arrived at the notion of “where’s the rub?” I honestly don’t get why the existence of religion and/or “believers” so deeply upsets so many people. Aside from ocassionally having to wait a few minutes while a congregation clears their parking lot, or shooing away the odd missionary or moonie here or there, religion just never has “cost” me anything of much value to me.

It may be that I had some odd combination of an early turn toward skepticism or, perhaps, that my early exposure to religion was RC back in the days of the Latin Mass. Since I couldn’t understand a work they were saying (that may not have mattered since RC doesn’t focus on “scripture” all that much – at least not outwardly to the congregants) I arrived early in life at some odd notion that “religion=ritual”. And, well, I just couldn’t find a connection between the rituals and any notion of God that the catechisms seemed to want me to get. I just could not associate the ritual with “God” and, from a darned early age, essentially rejected the religion I was born and educated into.

I suppose that colored all my future exposure to religion. As I was exposed to other sects of Christianity they all seemed like RC-lite to me probably because while the ritual was toned down it sure looked familiar. And the scriptures they seemed to highlight were nothing new. This, of course, didn’t apply to the Baptists I was exposed to quite extensively. They thumped the heck out of their bibles and believed some really odd things wrt RC, but I never saw that as much more than a semi-harmless schtick with some petty bigotry woven in.

Next came exposure to several sects of Judaism and that left me with some idea that the “congregation” part of Judaism was largely a “make it up as you go” sort of enterprise. The Jewish people I got to know well enough to make some exploration of how they went about managing their congregation suggested they sort of “shopped for a rabbi” until they found one who fit (Whattayamean you fired your rabbi? Can you guys do that?). I even got exposed to some sort of deconstructionist Jewish congregation. That one baffled the heck out of me. I asked for an explanation of what the heck they were up to and what I got was that, essentially, they seemed free to rewrite the text to mean whatever they preferred. Once one goes that far I don’t see the point to religion at all.

I later learned that some Christian sects do something similar. That ain’t the way it works, IIRC, for RC. The Powers That Be send the congregation its priest(s) and lord knows where the Bishops and higher ranks come from

As far as The Bible goes, I arrived at “Wait a sec here… this thing started in Aramaic and went through Hebrew and then Greek and then Latin and back and forth and bounced around with those really wierd popes for a few centuries and guys named King James had their cracks at it and you want me to take this as gospel? Not today, thanks anyway.”

So all that was behind me before I ran across my first exposure to “evangelical” and by then my scepticism was way too strong. Once I set eyes on the $2000 sharkskin suit and the Merc I wasn’t listening all that much.

But, in all that, I never ran across anyone (other than the nuns, of course ;>) who made my life difficult in any way I could detect (like I said earlier, I may be just completely insensitive). So while I certainly reject religion I’ve never learned any reason to have any animosity toward any religion I’ve ever been exposed to (unfortunately this is changing and I don’t like having to face up to that). I always had this odd notion that I could walk or stay as I pleased – never felt much “coersive” power from it.

Maybe I’m even odder than I think I am.

Aug 4, 2004 - 3:17 pm 137. TmjUtah:

Knucklehead -

Amen. For the both of us.

Aug 6, 2004 - 1:38 pm

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