Flood of '07

The 'old-timers' around school here say the last time they saw the waters this high was (depending on who you talked to) '88, '89, or '90. That should make it the 19 or 18 or 17-Year Flood.

Here are some pictures from in front of school.

Apropos

John at Powerline comments perfectly on Paris Hilton leaving jail.

Immigration

Michael Barone provides some historical perspective of immigration and border control.

Aristotle's Greatness of Soul

Peter Lawler posts this:

Greatness of Soul

Here's a comment I got on the thread below:

A quick and obvious point in light of the discussion on No Left Turns: Aristotle's treatment of the magnanimous man in the Ethics for the most part oscillates between a report of what he thinks of himself and what other non-magnanimous men say about him. Unlike the discussion of Socrates' magnanimity in the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle here largely treats magnanimity from the perspective of the city and hence political life.

I agree with you that as Aristotle tends to present him in the Ethics, the magnanimous man is the paradigmatic example of the overly stuffed shirt-he thinks (and others think he thinks) that nothing is greater than himself and that no one can perform the great deeds he can. For this reason, he is "slow to act and procrastinates, except when some great honor is at stake; his actions are few but they are great and distinguished"--interestingly in this last statement Aristotle speaks in his own name.

As you point out, the magnanimous man tends to think about himself in abstraction from everyone else; this explains his belief in his own self-sufficiency. And as you also note, this is most obviously the case in his indifference or unwillingness to wonder and our related need for love and friendship.

Yet, to me, Aristotle presents the magnanimous man as being aware of a chink in his armor; in particular he seems to have nagging doubts and perhaps a begrudging recognition of his greatness resting on others. To the extent that he thinks in terms of great political actions, the magnanimous man must on some level recognize that he is dependent on the city and its citizens-at least in terms of it providing opportunities-for his actions. His estimation of himself rests in part on his, to be sure, unstated recognition that he must live with other men in order to act magnanimously and in order to be honored as magnanimous.

One cannot really think of himself as a magnanimous man if he lives alone or among a small group of human beings. Rather, he needs the venue on which his "great and distinguished" actions can be performed and put on display.

This also raises the related problem of potential frustrations that would nag a man who thinks he may be magnanimous: what if one lives at a time when "great and distinguished" actions are not needed or called for--this obviously gets expressed in your criticism of the end of history thesis.

But apart from the fictive and undesirable nature of an end of history, it may well be the case that the greatest external impediment to magnanimity is the failure of a human being to live in truly interesting-hence humanly fertile-times.

Kerrey: Centrality of the War in Iraq

By way of Bill Bennett's radio program this morning came notice of former Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate now New School President's, Bob Kerrey, commentary on liberals and supporting the War. It is must reading.

It is entitled "The Left's Iraq Muddle". He begins with a concise restatement of the justifications for deposing Saddam and he does so by invoking the tried and true American foreign policy that believes democracies can be imposed by military.

Here is the key part:

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq's middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified--though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.

Do read the rest.

Character of America

Joe Knippenberg points out Will McClay's recent speech on how bad times have, in the past, always called out the best in America. And in particular, he sees our current struggle against Islamic extremism as our generation's challenge.

Here is the concluding paragraph:

The lesson for Americans is clear. There may be today, just as George Kennan famously observed 60 years ago of the Cold War, a certain providential quality to the challenges that have been placed before us at this time. Certainly the challenges presented by Islamist terrorism are ones that confront us (and even more profoundly confront Europe) in the very places where we are confused and irresolute, and force us to see that we have fallen into ways of thinking and living that we cannot and should not sustain. They represent a mortal threat—but they are also an opportunity. By forcing us to defend ourselves, they force us to take to heart the question of what kind of civilization we are willing, and able, to defend. Not merely as an academic question, but a question of life and death.

Read the rest here. Do note that McClay's speech is one of several given at the Bradley Symposium dedicated to "Who Are We Today? American Character and Identity in the 21st Century." Be sure to check out them all.

The Literacy of George W. Bush

According this report, novelist Thomas Wolfe challenges the popular image of Bush:

“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.”

Pulling the Plug on Oil

In his latest blog entry, "The Crazy Middle East", Victor Davis Hanson offers, among other things, a summary of displacements, oppressions, and occupations of people far worse than that of the Palestinians. His conclusion? The media has created and has elevated the crisis over and beyond much worse. His reasons? Oil. Fear. Anti-semitism.

But I think he misses something. And its strange that he would, since he has spent so much time writing about it. In other words, its the elites' hatred of the West. After all, it was a western democracy--the only western-like country in the Middle East--that drove the aboriginal benighted bedouins of the dunes from their unproductive lands and tents to set up a western liberal democracy, a western free market, all driven by the greedy, self-interest of western individualism with all its excesses, usually corporate.

Whatever good will and sympathy the Holocaust might have engendered for the Jews, Israel's war-making and continued ruthless defense disturbs our liberal idealists who are already disturbed with the untethered self-interest and voracious appetite of western economic engine. For a world-view that honors and holds the noble savage of any continent overrun by the West's insatiable imperialism, the displaced Palestinian is the Middle East's American Indian.

Which brings me to Hanson's (to me at least) more valuable proposal: pull the value of oil out from under the Middle East by setting free our American ingenuity and development of our energy options.

Oil, father of us all

In the end, all reasoning and calculation comes down to oil, not energy independence just a lessening of our need to import by about 5 million barrels or so on the world market. Let Brazil export duty-free ethanol; drill in Anwar and off our coasts; build 20 or so nuclear reactors to replace natural gas and power batteries at night of small commuter cars; up the fleet average gas mileage; develop oil tar and oil shale; use alternative energies—and do all that inclusively rather than in an either/or strategy, and we can collapse the world price, and with it the strategic importance of this dangerous, dysfunctional, and ultimately irrelevant part of the world.

Without oil and nukes, the Arab and Iranian Middle East has no hold on the world, no more than does Paraguay or the Ivory Coast or Bulgaria or Laos. We wish them well, but find Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, the House of Saud, Hamas, Khadafy, and all the rest, well, all too retro-7th-century for our tastes.

It is a solution that is kith and kin with Reagan's so-called "Star Wars Defense" which, if only in speaking about it, the West spent the gimping Soviet Union into oblivion.

My vote for 2008 goes to the first presidential candidate who proposes such a plan. There is stuff for both liberal and conservative to value and endorse.

Tenet: The Point About Saddam

Rich Lowry has been posting salient points from Tenet's new book. Here is a key one (emphasis mine):

Exactly [Rich Lowry]

Here's a key point about the debate over Iraq—it was always fundamentally about how much risk we were willing to tolerate in a post-9/11 environment (page 328):

The absence of evidence and linear thinking, and Iraq’s extensive efforts to conceal illicit procurement of proscribed components, told us that a deceptive regime could and would easily surprise us. It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.

04/30 12:11 PM

Read some more here.

The War at Home

From Glenn Reynolds comes this pointed reply to the question "Is the war lost?"

It's up to you The Iraq war is lost or won if the American people choose to lose or win it. With the way things are going at the moment, I perfectly understand why they might choose to give up on the war. But that is not because the war is inherently unwinnable by a country as great and rich and powerful as the United States.

-- Kanan Makiya, Iraqi scholar who supported the U.S. invasion

Washington Post

Flight Patterns

This is pretty cool.

(ht: S. Hayward at NLT)

Nathan Hale: New Yardstick for Congressional Action

Nathan Hale over at The American Thinker articulates a principle that should be guiding our national legislators in their daily deeds and talk. It is pretty simple.

Does this action weaken or strengthen our opponents' will to fight?

And the corollary:

Does this action strengthen or weaken OUR will to fight?

The key, Hale points out, is that the point of war is not to kill people but to break his will to fight. It is for this reason that Lincoln sent Sherman to Atlanta, Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan. As Victor Hanson says, it is the moral way to wage war. The quicker the opponent's will is broken, and the more resolutely it is broken, the sooner life can return to and remain in normalcy, or at least, the best it could be.

Bush Undoing What Good He has Done?

Has Bush reversed the pro-democratic and pro-western reform he brought about in north Africa? So says this AEI scholar, Jeffrey Azarva, in his assessment of the work that Bush has done over his two terms. This would be a great misfortune. It would seem to indicate doubt in the central Bush doctrine of the universality of the love of freedom. Further, it indicate a return to realism, the western policy that has allowed the fever swamps in the Middle East to fester its radical anti-westernism in the first place. Not good at all.

Here is the beginning of Azarva's piece:

On November 6, 2003, President George W. Bush proclaimed, "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe--because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." This strategic shift, coupled with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, put regional governments on notice. The following spring, Tunisia's president, Zine El Abidine Bin Ali, and Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak--stalwart allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism and two of North Africa's most pro-American rulers--were among the first Arab leaders to visit Washington and discuss reform. But with this "Arab spring" has come the inadvertent rise of Islamist movements throughout the region. Now, as U.S. policymakers ratchet down pressure, Egypt and Tunisia see a green light to backtrack on reform.

(ht: Michael Rubin on the Corner)

Speaker Pelosi, Going Where no Grandma has Gone Before

Kathryn at The Corner was one the first to point out this editorial, in today's Post, putting a fine point on Pelosi's foolishness. You know, visiting Syria and inciting peace talks and understanding with the West and Israel.

As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president.

Remember, this is the woman who claimed that being a grandmother qualified her to be Speaker of the House. Well, this shows us that she is just a grandmother.

UPDATE: Here is Claudia Rossett on Pelosi's trip. It is called "Pelosi was Nuts to Visit with Assad". (ht: Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard)

UPDATE 2: What's this? Pelosi's trip broke the law? So says Robert F. Turner, a former assistant of Secretary of State, in the Wall Street Journal editorial today. It's titled "Illegal Diplomacy". He says:

The Logan Act makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States." Some background on this statute helps to understand why Ms. Pelosi may be in serious trouble.

(ht: Drudge)

Algeria 1957 and Iraq 2007

Commentary's Contentions has been the site for several good exchanges between specialists regarding Iraq and historical precedents. The first was Victor Davis Hanson and Max Boot and now Arthur Herman and Max Boot. I'll dig up the VDH/Boot exchange next. But first, Herman submitted an article in Commentary comparing the experience of the French in Algeiers in the late '50's with our experience in Iraq and the lessons we could learn. Max Boot offers his qualified agreement and then Herman responds.

UPDATE: Here are the letters between VDH and Max Boot, from the first of the year, on Iraq and the "surge". Apparently it starts with Boot. All the letters appears linked at the bottom of each letter.

Boot 1 & Hanson 1, Boot 2 & Hanson 2, Boot 3 & Hanson 3, Boot 4 & Hanson 4

Then and Now

James Taranto of WSJ's Best of the Web has real doozer: Guess which stalwart Senators would have penned the column "Iraq: the Decade After" in the Washington Post back in 2002? Here's an excerpt for a clue (emphasis added):

Although no one doubts our forces will prevail over Saddam Hussein's, key regional leaders confirm what the Foreign Relations Committee emphasized in its Iraq hearings last summer: The most challenging phase will likely be the day after -- or, more accurately, the decade after -- Saddam Hussein.

Once he is gone, expectations are high that coalition forces will remain in large numbers to stabilize Iraq and support a civilian administration. That presence will be necessary for several years, given the vacuum there, which a divided Iraqi opposition will have trouble filling and which some new Iraqi military strongman must not fill.

Senators Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel.

The very ones who just voted to pull out our troops by next year. Taranto's only guess as to how their "decade" of overcoming the greatest challenge has come and gone so quickly is that the planet they live on has a 150-day long year.

VDH - Ripples of 1979

In his latest entry over Works and Days, Victor Davis Hanson talks about the importance of Jimmy Carter and 1979 in the unfolding contemporary events involving the 15 abducted British soldiers.

Evan Sayet

Trying to post a YouTube... And this one is good. Evan Sayet is a political satirist for Bill Mahrer of all people, but he is a 9-13 Republican. His speech is "How a Modern Liberal Thinks". It is long but good. Click on the picture:



(ht: lgf)

McClay in Rome

As his introductory post on Commentary's blog, Contentions, Wilfred McClay posts on his experience of teaching a history of American religion class to Italian students at the University of Rome. It is a delightful piece, as most of his writings always are. But its interesting to hear what fascinates his students and, more importantly, what they help him, an American, see about American religion.

The key paragraphs:

In other words, it is all entirely new to them, so that the experience of teaching them has been energizing, and has caused me to see my own subject afresh. (Thank you, Senator Fulbright.) From the inside of American culture, one is at times impressed by nothing so much as the anarchy and inanity of American religion: its thinness, its institutional chaos, its individualism, its trendiness, its willingness to pander to the consumer and to the culture. These observations remain as valid as ever. And yet my experiences here, listening to students who have grown up in a largely monochromatic religious culture, in which the choices placed before them are far more stark, cast it all in a different light.

We Americans take our freedoms too lightly in other respects, and our highly voluntaristic religious culture—and the boisterous vitality and variety of religious expression that have resulted from it—is no exception. Not all of what it produces is to my taste. But the exercise of freedom is not the same thing as good taste. “It is the duty of every man,” Madison said, “to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to Him.” My Italian students help me to see anew the grandeur in those words.

President Bush Quotes Iraqi Bloggers

Today, Bush quoted two Iraqi bloggers (Iraq the Model) and their report that the surge is working. More at Pajamas Media.

UPDATE: Michele Malkin documents some disapproval in the MSM that Bush would use "unverified statements". Michele responds:

And never mind that Iraq the Model isn't merely an "opinion" blog reacting to news, as the snobs at the AP would have you believe. They are reporting news from the ground--which is a serious threat to MSM outlets like the AP that continue to rely on anonymous stringers relying on anonymous sources feeding them unverified statements.

She also posts Omar and Mohammed's response to the news.

Lieberman on Morality and Iraq

Kathryn Lopez at the Corner posts these comments of Lieberman made today, in response to the Senate's deliberations of the Iraq War spending bill which includes an imposed exit date from Iraq. If I find more of his statements, I'll post them or a link.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Arguing for eliminating Iraq withdrawal language from the supplemental appropriations legislation, Senator Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) stated on the Senate floor today,

“Indeed, it is an awful irony of this debate that many of the same people who consistently and correctly call on the United States to do more to stop the bloodshed in Darfur now demand we abandon the Iraqis.”

Senator Lieberman continued, “We hear that Sunnis and Shia have been fighting for centuries, and that no matter how tragic, we cannot possibly hope to resolve this conflict. We have heard these arguments before. We heard them in the 1990s about Yugoslavia. We heard them about Rwanda. Like the euphemism of “civil war,” it is another way for us to distance ourselves, emotionally and morally, from what is actually happening—and from the people it is happening to. It allows us to think of these places as a sort of abstract tragedy, in which there are no victims, just victimizers, whom we can walk away from with impunity… The wanton slaughter of innocent people that our soldiers are trying to stop in Baghdad is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds, but the consequence of a deliberate, calculated strategy by an identifiable group of perpetrators—first and foremost, Al Qaeda.”

Concluding, Senator Lieberman outlined both the strategic and moral consequences of a premature withdrawal from Iraq, “I ask my colleagues: consider what it will mean if Congress orders our troops to pull back from this battle, just at the moment that they are taking the initiative. Consider the consequences if we knowingly and willingly withdraw our forces and abandon one of the few states in the Middle East to have held free, competitive elections to extremism and violence...”

“We cannot redeploy from our moral responsibility to the Iraqis. It is contrary to our traditions; it is contrary to our values; and it is contrary to our interests. And yet that is precisely what this Congress will be calling for, if we order our troops to withdraw.”

UPDATE: Republican attempts to remove the deadline failed, 48-50. Two Republicans (Gordon Smith of Oregan and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska) sided with Democrats and Lieberman and Mark Pryor of Arkansas sided with Republicans. (via NY Times' The Caucus)

UPDATE 2: Senator Lieberman's website has made the speech fully available here (scroll down).

Byron York on Alcee Hastings

Here it is.

One Senator Left Behind

"Wait for me guys!"

The Way of a War-Weary Democracy

This is discouraging. VDH's post at The Corner this afternoon.

A Lot at Stake in Iraq [Victor Davis Hanson]

Much of the debate over Iraq is framed over "perceptions" of power. That is, if we fail, others will immediately capitalize on the newfound sense that the United States is weakened and a window of opportunity has opened up. Lose in Iraq, the conventional wisdom goes, then Iran will accelerate its nuclear acquisition, Syria and Iran will be even more emboldened, Latin America will go even harder left, China will carve out a wider swath, and so on.

But, in fact, I fear it could be worse than that the perception of impotence that galvanizes enemies. If we lost in Iraq and fled, it would not be the perception at all, but the reality of power that would be gone, in the sense the United States would never in our lifetime intervene successfully again on the ground abroad-convinced it would inevitably lose.

I think we are also close to seeing the permanent end of any Anglo-American military collaboration. And there would be legitimate questions raised also whether the U.S. military could win any future war—given the knowledge that, barring some instantaneous victory, the American public would not allow it the time or the latitude to destroy its enemies.

Instead, the blueprint for any further American involvement is the current investigations of Marines in Haditha, the hysteria over an Abu Ghraib, flushed Korans, Bible-quoting generals, and all the other media headline stories that drowned out what we were doing in Iraq. Al Jazeera might prove to be more powerful than the 101st Airborne not just through its shaping of public opinion in the Middle East-but far more here at home in scaring Americans with its power to shape public opinion in the Middle East.

When Mr. Bush contemplates what to do about Iran, he knows—and he knows Iran knows—that we are on the verge right now of a tired American public that winces at the very thought of the media storm, political fury, and wild partisan charges that would accompany any more military reactions. But the next step would be the complete loss of public confidence, in the fashion of the French, that we even could win a war if we had to. And then watch out. Great powers, like the largest animals, have a small central nervous system that directs their enormous limbs and sinews. And when it goes—call it public confidence in one's civilization—then armies tremor, enervate, and, Europe-like, wither away.

Posted at 2:33 PM

Help Charlie Raingull!

Most people heard John Kerry's faux paux of a couple weeks ago--I posted on it below. Did you also see how some troops stationed in Iraq responded?


Evidently now, Charlie Rangel, in last Thursday's NY Times' article, brings it a little closer to home, the South that is.

“Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?” Mr. Rangel said.

Well, the troops in Iraq have inspired some in Mississippi to respond.