For those who have lost sight of the unique value and accomplishments of Western Civilization, there is no true cause to defend. They can only count the cost. For them, PTSD makes a nice narrative. It can be applied universally. Even the most courageous combatant suffers emotionally, so naturally he suffers from some form of PTSD whether he knows it or not. In fact, his apparent mental health can be written off as further evidence of his illness: a cloak of denial that must be stripped away in order to find the PTSD lurking below.

In this way, the left has refined its loathing of the military, choosing to paint individuals within the military as victims – nice people turned into murderous brutes by a sick society.

So instead of having John Kerry slandering his brothers in arms to a Senate committee as murderous brutes, we now have Dr. Phil and other chattering heads painting a murderous brute as misunderstood and driven by external forces to extreme violence. Those external forces are immediately presumed to be military ones. Dr. Phil paints this as entirely rational speculation. At the same time, he calls any speculation that Islam may have played a role as dangerous and irresponsible.

Under the new therapeutic approach, the ultimate evil is the same – the military – but the argument is couched with the false elegance and sensitivity that so enthralls leftists and characterizes their sophistry.

The square peg of Major Hasan, a physician, a mental health professional, who has never seen a day of combat, must be driven into the round hole of PTSD.

Let’s call it pre-traumatic stress syndrome.

I don’t profess to know what really drove Hasan’s rampage. But I do know that it is foolish (nay, calculated) to immediately blame the military for creating this monster while reflexively ruling out any connection to Islam.

At the White House, it was “Classical Music Day.” A day for paying attention to one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization. The other 1,460 days of Obama’s four-year term will apparently be free of such tedium. Obama seemed ill at ease with high art. Somewhat refreshingly, however, he turned his sights away from Bush and took a cheap shot at another former President, pointing out that John Kennedy also didn’t know when to applaud.

As everybody else in the country focused on the election returns and what they portend for the Democrat’s agenda, the White House claimed that Obama did not watch the election returns on Tuesday night. Are we to believe the President is less interested in politics than everyone else? Contrary to earlier reports, he did not spend election night watching an HBO documentary about himself. He had seen it a few days earlier. Despite having that pressing chore accomplished, Obama apparently still has not made a decision on Afghanistan or invited General McChrystal over for a chat.

People in Teheran noticed that November 4 was the 30^th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy and the taking of hostages. Protestors there continue to blame America for their problems, despite the administration’s decision to abandon belligerence in favor of sweetness and light.

Obama did have time to issue a “masterpiece of appeasement” as Michael Ledeen calls it,

and all but groveled in begging the leaders of the Islamic Republic to make a deal:

I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.

He could not spare a single word for the plight of the people of Iran, who were being beaten, clubbed, stabbed and shot as he issued his statement.  He went on:

We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.

NBC News reported the Iranian protestors chanting “Obama, Obama, either you’re with them or with us.” Somebody needs to tell them that quoting George Bush is not likely to win over the current White House.

Meanwhile, Joshua Bell accomplished what General McChrystal has not: he got quality face time with Obama.

Memo to McChrystal: think about taking up an instrument, and make sure there are no HBO paeans to Obama on the day you want to visit the White House.

]]> http://www.artsandammo.com/2009/11/05/forum-over-substance/feed/ http://www.artsandammo.com/2009/11/02/poles-apart/ http://www.artsandammo.com/2009/11/02/poles-apart/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:51:46 +0000 Fitzroy http://www.artsandammo.com/?p=511 The Russians are conducting war games, simulating a nuclear attack on Poland.

And why not? After all, the Poles are basically defenseless. They pitched their tent with NATO, and took the risk of accepting a missile defense system on their territory. They obviously didn’t count on the naivety of the Obama Administration.

In July, the region’s most famed and influential political figures, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, wrote an open letter Barack Obama warning him that Russia “is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.”

But Obama cancelled the missile defense system (on the anniversary of the invasion of Poland in 1939 – the start of WWII), signaling America’s willingness to sacrifice its East European allies. The Russians recognized this development for what it was. Norwegians mistook it for visionary policy.

Now the Poles are experiencing the predictable results. At least now they won’t have any irrational expectations of help from the West. Obama has no cards to play, having already folded his hand.

Ordinary Poles were outraged by news of the exercise and demanded a firm response from the government.

One man, identified only as Ted, told Polskie Radio: “Russia has laid bare its real intentions with respect to Poland. Every Pole most now get of the off the fence and be counted as a patriot or a traitor.”

The Poles deserve better. Despite suffering catastrophically from the feckless policies of the West leading up to WWII, they contributed much to the Allied victory.

Come to think of it, we all deserve better.

Mao Zedong or Sun-tzu? Perhaps to White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, they’re just a bunch of Chinese and they all look sound pretty much alike.  

Mickey Kaus thinks that may be the animating factor behind Dunn’s excuse for touting Mao Zedong as her favorite philosopher. Dunn said she was merely parroting Lee Atwater, the late Republican election guru:

“My source for the Mao quote was actually the late Lee Atwater, either in an article or bio I read after the 1988 election. Now that I’ve revealed this I hope I don’t get Keith Olbermann angry with me,” she wrote, noting that she had also quoted Mother Teresa.

But Atwater was a big fan of Sun-tzu, a military strategist whose writing predates Mao Zedong by about two and a half millennia. Kaus can’t find anything in the record suggesting that Atwater was a fan of Mao Zedong, but notes that he regularly carried a copy of Sun-tzu’s Art of War with him.

But hey! No biggy. Can’t we just agree with Dunn that one Chinaman is pretty much the same as another, even if one of them is credited with the deaths of 50 to 70 million people and the other one isn’t?

Just keep telling yourself that Bush was stupid and Obama is smart, so the fact that Obama has surrounded himself with idiots can be overlooked.

The study, published this week in Science, says that biofuels, marketed as a low-carbon alternative, will actually emit more carbon dioxide than burning gasoline over the coming decades. . . .

The problem stems from a basic error in the Kyoto Protocol - and subsequently copied into European and US environmental legislation - which calculates emissions without taking the source of the fuel into account. . . .

“It literally means you can chip up the world’s forests and burn them for fuel without noting the effect on the world’s greenhouse gases,” adds Timothy Searchinger, a research fellow at Princeton University.

Will this news do anything to dampen the current obsession with enacting new, sweeping regulations based on the old data? Silly question. It’s full steam ahead for the political class.

Like doomsayers throughout history, Gordon Brown says the upcoming Copenhagen summit is our last chance.

“We can’t afford to fail. If we fail, we pay a heavy price,” he warned. “For the planet, there is no plan B.”

Al Gore sees hope in Brown’s hysteria, and says it is swinging public opinion and business leaders his way.

They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years.

(Is anything melting faster than Gordon Brown’s political career?)

Pew Research reports that Gore is wrong, finding that the gap in public opinion between Americans who support cap and trade and those who don’t has narrowed from 60% in 2006 to 24%.

That shift still leaves a decided majority in favor of environmental policies that can only be justified by spurious data like the Kyoto snafu on carbon emissions. A significant chunk of the population believes the debate is over.

So a lot of people still consider it logical to burn the world’s food stores in our gas tanks while leaving the oil underground.

Yes, and the country’s collective testosterone level has dropped significantly since Obama’s inauguration.

The good news, for the French at least, is that Sarkozy has stepped into the void, and the level of French testoserone is on the rise.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians.

This comes shortly after the Obama Administration reversed the decision of the Bush Administration not to participate on the council.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said: “Those who suffer from abuse and oppression around the world, as well as those who dedicate their lives to advancing human rights, need the council to be balanced and credible.” She said the United States seeks election to the body “because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights.”

Nice work, Susan. What’s the next step? Perhaps the starry-eyed advocates of “international law” (a group that includes certain members of the Supreme Court) will argue that this resolution should be honored in our courts, notwithstanding our parochial and outmoded First Amendment.

Turley concludes:

The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech. It is a danger that has become all the more real after the decision of the Obama administration to join in the effort to craft a new faith-based speech standard. It is now up to Congress and the public to be heard before the world leaves free speech with little more than a hope and a prayer.

The Obama Administration is convinced we can solve all problems if we just sit down and talk. Only watch what you say.

What to do to save their reputations and glittering careers as Chief Scientists, Presidents of the Royal Society, Government Ministers for Climate Change, Failed US Presidential Candidates Turned Nobel Prize-Winners, Journalistic Would-Be Stringers-Up of AGW-Deniers, green NGO empire-builders and professors whose entire livelihoods and academic status have accrued from more than two decades of peddling the biggest anti-science scam of all time but which is now threatening to expose them all to ridicule on an epic scale as global temperatures cool?

‘We cannot grow indefinitely in economic terms without moving towards the death of what is most distinctively human, the death of the habits that make sense in a shared world where life has to be sustained by co-operation not only between humans but between humans and their material world,’ he said. . . .

He has attacked belief in market forces as ‘idolatry’; praised the contempt of Marxists for ‘unbridled capitalism’, and, last month, condemned the City because no-one has said sorry for the excesses that ended in recession.

How ironic. Economic growth stops and the Archbishop complains? One has to conclude that it is the excesses that have Dr. Williams’ chasuble in a twist, not the recession that he would hope to achieve by other means.

Like the servant to whom only one talent was given, Dr. Williams advocates merely preserving the status quo. But Williams won’t even do that. Praising anti-capitalist Marxists, endorsing the demise of democracy, dithering as the Anglican Communion unravels, it seems the Archbishop is preserving nothing he was entrusted with.

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena Sendler. During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. Being German, she KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack for larger kids. She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2,500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. . . . She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.