Letter From The Capitol

Index 4/11/08

2 posts: (1) Iraq: President Bush Reports, and a Brit Does, Too--The Home Front; (2) Democratic Party Tribalism--The Home Front.

Iraq: President Bush Reports, and a Brit Does, Too

Here is the text of President Bush's Iraq address yesterday, plus a companion fact sheet released by the White House.  Yesterday I had a long conversation with a Brit friend who served a year in Iraq working for the feckless (he agreed) Coalition Provisional Authority, plus served many tours in the British military.  I ran by him my "Brits made deals with local mafias,thus abandoning the locals" complaint re Basra.  My friend answered that yes, the Brits did, just as in Northern Ireland, make such deals.  They were, he explained, simply necessary, and did not constitute abandoning the locals to the mercies (not tender) of the mafias.  Rather, the Brits would tell mafia leaders: "You get this much power, and this much money; you do not do the following, and if you do we will crush you."  Practical advice from an experienced hand.  And my apologies to the Brits, stalwart soldiers always.

Democratic Tribalism

Michael Baron looks at Obama - Hill and sees deep tribal divisions.  He presents numbers among various voter groups that show a sharper polarization within Democratic ranks than in any election he can remember.  Whites are 53-39 for Hill, blacks 80-17 for Obama, Latinos 58-39 Hill, Asians 71-25 Hill.  Academics huge for Obama, and public employees union members too--thus Obama carried most state capitols.  Youth for Barack, elderly for Hill.  Upscale voters for Obama, poorer ones for Hill, reflecting her appeal to what Barone terms Jacksonian voters: fighters who admire a fighter, and despise anyone who attacks their family or country (as Obama's former--and present--pastor did).  These divisions could lead many of the losing candidate's group to stay home, or, for Jacksonians, to vote for Big Mac.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg doubts the tribal war will cause many Democrats neuralgic about GOP foreign policy to stay home, but sees Hill's attacks on Obama inoculating Big Mac from charges of racism or vast right-wing conspiracies, as Big Mac need go no further in criticizing Obama than Hill has already gone.

Index 4/10/08

3 posts: (1) Al (Gore), Meet (La) Nina--"it's the Earth Stupid!"; (2) Mideast: A Tale of 30 Years & Two Peace Processes--Weenie Watch; (3) Unions: 2008 Jackpot?--The Home Front.

Al (Gore), Meet (La) Nina

The BBC reports that due to the influence of the Pacific Ocean current known as global temperatures will stay cool into the sumer, making for the decade 1998 - 2008 a net flat period, albeit a modern record warm level.  This follows a cyclical pattern, according to the World Meteorological Organization WMO).  La Nina ("the Little Girl") and El Nino ("The Little Boy") are alternating oscillating currents in the equatorial eastern central region of the Pacific Ocean.  They are centered around Peru's coastline.  The former, a cold current, causes global temperatures to drop; the latter, a warm current that causes global temperatures to rise.  The WMO asserts that soon global temperatures will resume their rise.  We, and Al, will have to wait and see.

Mideast: A Tale of 30 Years & Two Peace Processes

Caroline Glick supplies the numbers that refute the fantasy of a 15-year "peace process" purportedly initiated with the Olso Accords of 1993: 216 Israelis killed in the 15 years from 1978's Camp David to Oslo, versus 286 Israelis killed between Oslo and the 2000 Camp David (insanely generous) proposals' collapse, and another more than 1,100 Israelis killed since the September 2000 launching of the Second Intifada (Intifada I, 1987 - 1993, killed 172 Israelis).  so the past 15 years have seen some 1,400 Israelis killed by terrorists, some 6-1/2 times the toll for the 15 years preceding Oslo's pseudo-peace process.

So why does Israel's PM, Ehud Olmert, support continuing talks with the Palestinian Authority, which sponsors Nazi-TV brainwashing of Palestinian children, even co-sponsoring such stuff with Hamas?  Because on the fair evidence of it, Olmert is Israel's Jimmy Carter.  Especially given that, if one applies the 47x multiple to Israeli casualties, to arrive at the per capita equivalent for America, Israel's killed during "peace process" total would be equal to America losing 66,000.  Does anyone think that any American administration would be prattling on about a "peace process" with an adversary who had killed 66,000 American in 15 years?

Unions: 2008 Jackpot?

Wall Street Journal pundit Kimberley Strassel warns that unions are salivating at the prospect of winning the White House, and gaining a filibuster-proof Senate while keeping the House.  In which case, they will rolls back scads of reforms, being more powerful than they have been in 50 years.  They are keeping quite on much of this, operating under the radar to raise huge sums and assign immense manpower to the Democratic Party political machine.  Even, possibly, they will try to roll back the 1947 Taft-Hartley protection for "right-to-work" laws which enable non-union companies to survive.   the full checklist is scary indeed.

Which reminds me of a classic song form the glory days of Mad Magazine, nearly 50 years ago.  At the time, Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters were giving America the fits, and the folks at Mad penned these lyrics to "As the Caissons Go Rolling Along":

As the Teamsters Go Rolling Along!

On the street, on the road
We won't carry a full load
As the Teamsters
Go rolling along

Make them pass on the right
Keep your union card in sight
As the Teamsters
Go rolling along

For it's high high hey
We want a raise in pay
We shout out our grievance
Loud and strong

And when e'er we like
We just call a strike
And the country
Stops rolling along!

Index 4/9/09

One post: Rice on Race, and Rice in the Race--The Home Front.

Rice on Race, and Rice in the Race?

Comes now Condoleeza Rice, offering her take on the Obama "Pastor of Disaster" and on racial matters in America.  Said she, last Thursday, to editors and staff at the Washington Times:

Black Americans were a founding population.  Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding.  As a result, descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.  That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.

She added, noting that her family had "endured terrible humiliations.":

America doesn't have an easy time dealing with race.  What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn't love and have faith in them — and that's our legacy.

Rice added that she thought Obama was right to give his Philadelphia speech and called race in America a "paradox" that remains "unresolved" to this day.  She also said that she was attracted to George W. Bush not because of her feelings about Bush's foreign policy, but because Bush championed "No Child Left Behind" legislation for education (Rice was deputy provost at Stanford, before joining the administration).  She was silent as to the vitriol of Reverend Wright, and as to the approving reaction of his congregation, probably fearing that any comment would inject her into the political campaign.

Rice's comments are important for several reasons.  First, she had personal, searing experience in her youth, having at age 9, lived through the horror of the Birmingham bombing that murdered four black girls, whom Condi knew.  Second, Rice is the highest-ranking current appointed black official, as Secretary of State, and remains the most visible African-American worldwide, save possibly for Colin Powell.  Third, Rice is a Republican--probably aligned with the Giuliani-McCain wing of the GOP, but still, to the political right of most Democrats.  Fourth, Rice has used the civil rights analogy, applying it to the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.  Finally, Rice has, since joining the Bush team in 2001, often been slimed by racialist black liberals, frequently in vulgar terms, because she is both Republican, and non-racial in her public persona.  (She has been called a "skeeza" by Obama's pastor, an urban slang term that is too vile to print in LFTC as text, but the link is there for those with strong stomachs.)

Begin with the obvious: Rice surely in no way agrees with Obama's racist lunatic pastor.  Nor does she carry a Jupiter-size shoulder-chip as does Michelle Obama.  Nor is her background that of the street organizer Barack Obama was.  As for Obama, anti-P.C.er Ann Coulter culls a bracing set of black-rage quotes from Obama's first book, in which he talks of numerous temptation moments when he wanted to belt white acquaintances.  Coulter pulls no punches, and one quote in particular will make whites wonder.  She writes:

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: "It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."

Rice's progress was that of a child of a family whose remarkable achievements included that all her forbears, since the Civil War, had graduated college.  She was a prize student, a promising pianist, and found a mentor in Joseph Korbel, father of Madeleine Albright.  She rose to National Security Council staffer under Bush 41, afterward went to Stanford, and now sits at the pinnacle of appointed officialdom.  In person Rice is, always, quintessentially personally gracious--impossible to dislike.

Yet I find Rice's remarks unsettling.  First, her silence on the appalling pastor, and, by implication, Obama's continued partial embrace of the reverend, makes one wonder if Rice regards such extreme rhetoric, which as noted above surely hardly reflects her own views, as merely a generational statement, or the ravings of "an old uncle" come down from the attic.  One further wonders what Rice thinks of Obama's use of "typical white person," a phrase I cannot imagine escaping from Rice's lips.

Rice's assertion that African-American slaves qualify as co-founders is one that requires redefinition of what constitutes participation in founding.  Founding a society is a conscious act, based upon shared communal values; it is hard to see slaves so qualifying.  This of course in no way whatsoever diminishes the entitlement of their descendants to be full participants in American society.  Her choice of "birth defect" is puzzling, too.  A birth defect refers to an immutable characteristic inherited from parental genes.  The decision, by Dutch immigrants, to bring black slaves to America in 1629 was hardly inevitable, let alone, genetically programmed.

Rice can thus be viewed as a figure at once trans-racial yet not truly post-racial.  The terms are often conflated.  Like Obama, her manner is welcoming and her daily speech and conduct modes free of racial tint.  And like Obama--albeit I cannot imagine Rice sitting through, let alone approving, the sermons of Pastor Wright (or this sermon defending Wright and Louis Farrakhan, from a white liberal rabble-rousing pastor), she carries to this day and will carry for the rest of her days the psychological scars of her family's racial experiences and legacy, with its associated feelings of humiliation.  How would Rice feel about Obama knowing (she does not know) that Obama's church posted the Hamas charter at its website?

Thus, with many, probably a majority, of trans-racial African-Americans still not post-racial, final reconciliation seems not in the cards for at least a generation, if ever.  Add to those the not inconsiderable number of African-Americans who are not even trans-racial--that is, they are overtly racial, as with Jesse Jackson--and  one would have to be the proverbial cockeyed optimist to believe that an Obama presidency would bring post-racial society to America.  What author Shelby Steele calls "race-holding"--blacks holding whites to feelings of racial guilt in an effort to bargain for further advancement from a stronger political and social position--will continue even with an African-American president, unless that president explicitly calls for an end to same.  Neither Obama nor Rice--nor Colin Powell, for that matter--appears likely to do this.

Recently, there was tirade unleashed by the father of tennis champion sisters Venus & Serena Williams, as reported by Fox Sports:

The man who described Irina Spirlea as an "ugly, white turkey" after the Romanian collided with Venus at the 1997 US Open, savaged Chris Evert and Tracy Austin.  "Tennis is a prejudice game," he said. "Well, I'm black and I'm prejudiced, very prejudiced.  "People are prejudiced in tennis. I don't think Venus or Serena was ever accepted by tennis. They never will be.  But if you get some little white no-good trasher in America like Tracy Austin or Chris Evert, who cannot hit the ball, they (media) will claim this is great."

Such comments are in stark contrast to the comportment of tennis greats Althea Gibson (1950s) and Arthur Ashe.  But they signify that even towering success won't suffice for many blacks, to cure them of anti-white racism.  Needless to say, a tirade of such viciousness by a white players father would kill his kid's career, unless the kid expressly and unambiguously--not strategic partial distancing like Barack Obama--denounced the father.  Couple with this the dismal 2005 crime statistics that show 8,000 blacks murdered--5 times that annual rate of American troops killed in Iraq since 2003, blacks committing murders at a rate 7 times that for whites, for 1976 - 2005 backs killing 94 percent of black victims and 86 percent of white victims, and for the same 30-year period, blacks accounting for 52 percent of America's homicides and 47 percent of victims.  these numbers are for a group representing 1/8th of the population.  More than three times as many blacks live in prison cells as occupy college dorms, and 10 percent of all black males between ages 25 and 29 are in prison.  Columnist Ralph Reiland, who offered these figures, asks whether Obama ever connected the racial vitriol unleashed in black churches with such dismal numbers.

Most puzzling of Rice's views is a reference Rice has made, not repeated last week but of interest as related to the same topic, comparing the Palestinians fighting Israel to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in America.  I am seven years Condi's senior (though the lady looks far more than seven years my junior), and cannot recall blacks firing rockets into Birmingham or or sending suicide bombers into downtown Selma, or anywhere else; violence was the province of white racists, including government officials contemptuous of their obligation to enforce the law faithfully.  Civil rights marchers merely wanted to use the same restrooms, drink from the same fountains, sit at the same lunch counters, and otherwise participate fully in American life.  While Rice surely does not hate Israel as does Obama's pastor, it is disturbing that she equates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an entirely different situation.

Then, in America, peace depended upon whites meeting black goodwill with goodwill of their own; today, in the Mideast, peace depends upon the Palestinians similarly responding to Israeli goodwill.  Instead, Palestinians answered Israel's 2005 goodwill gesture of unilaterally ceding Gaza with a barrage of rockets that continues to this day.  That a sitting Secretary of State, one closer to her president than any of her predecessors (with a quasi-familial relationship to the Bush family), does not grasp such vast differences is more worrisome than her attitude on America's domestic race problem.

What makes all this even more potentially significant is that Rice is being spoken of publicly as a possible V-P choice for John McCain.  Although her  performance has made many GOP base voters neuralgic, she is an immensely attractive, scenario-changing figure.  Recently, she appeared before a prominent group of conservative insiders that meets weekly, unprecedented for someone in her position.  She is not my pick for V-P, due to her performance as NSA & at State, and I seriously doubt she could bring many black voters to vote for the GOP this November.  Indeed, it would not surprise me if many black voters of the stripe of those attending Trinity United Church of Christ (Obama's church) would view Condi as an "oreo cookie" candidate; yet Rice's searing experience in Birmingham, and her pointed refusal to tout her race, would make for a riveting fall campaign.  Big Mac throw such a Hail Mary.  So stay tuned.

Index 4/08/08

2 posts: (1) Saint Hillary of Hinsdale's Magic Moment--The Home Front; (2) St. Barack of Trinity: The Resurrection--MSM Murders.