The Happy Carpenter

Well, I guess Dick Cheney is almost as cool as Senator JFK

CNN reports that the Vice President,

"... In response to Cheney, Leahy reminded Cheney that the vice president had once accused him of being a bad Catholic, to which Cheney replied either "f--- off" or "go f--- yourself."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

New photo album added

New photo album added. Check out a few pics from tonight's sunset cruise to Three Rooker Bar. The Black Skimmer pic is really good, except for Mark's big ol' bald head.

Torture? You call this torture?

I was fascinated listening to the radio yesterday as Rush’s guest host, Tom Sullivan, read the DoD interrogation guidelines. Here’s the gist of what would be permitted:

Multiple interrogators
Lying to the prisoner (The Happy Wife wants me to point out that this could include false flag operations, where you fly the dude around in the air for an hour or two, land, then tell him he’s in Saudi Arabia and it’s his last chance to talk to us, the Nice Cops, before he gets his hands chopped off.)
Solitary confinement for up to 30 days.
Holding in a stressed position for up to four hours.
Intimidating with dogs.
Hoods.

After a few weeks, the administration and DoD reviewed their policy and took dogs and hoods off the list.

Too mean, it would seem.

That’s it? Are you kidding me? On the one hand, I’m relieved that the White House never told the MP’s to “pile ‘em up naked and give each other BJ’s in front of ‘em”. On the other hand, my suspicions of the press are confirmed (for about the 500th time since the war started). Gripping hand, I AM PISSED that we are playing patty-cakes with terrorists.

Calm down, Pedro. Let’s look into this a little bit more.

Best source I’ve found so far is INTEL DUMP, which will lead you to these actual memorada signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself.

I tried to read it, I really did. But there’s only so much “pursuant to ICC XXX.III….” I can take. I got far enough into it to see two salient points:

1.) It was clear the DoD was bending over backwards to keep within the law
2.) It was clear the Abu Ghraib abuses went outside the DoD guidelines.

Both of which we knew already unless we believed the major media, which we don’t, because we’re not idiots. We are not amused.

And as I read more of Intel Dump, I had the growing feeling that the lawyers within the DoD and the Justice Department definitely have the idea they are running the place, that legal reasoning is the most important and primary kind of reasoning, and that it’s perfectly OK for our troops to be constrained and even prosecuted for subparagraph whatever pursuant to minutia under the ratified-but-with-reservations-of-understandings AAARRRRRRGGGHGHGHG! First, kill all the lawyers. Ye Gods, and you think the press is arrogant?

I say put the commanding officers of the Army Infantry Divisions and Marine Expeditionary Forces in charge. If we catch men resisting us out of uniform or hiding behind civillians, then hang the sonsabitches as spies after, of course, interrogating them in any way that comes to hand. If the Arabs and the French are offended, so much the better. Juice those terrorists up with truth serum, let snarling dogs drool on them, maybe take a nip or two, and put them is serious sensory deprivation, I don’t care. If they didn’t sign the Geneva convention, they don’t get its protection. If they don’t obey international law, they don’t get its protection.

Sorry all you lawyers. It’s not that I don’t understand your objections and your reasoning. I do. I understand it and I still disagree with it, impossible though that may sound to you. Here’s something you don’t get: unless the soldiers and marines prevail, there is nothing for you to do. The mullahs don’t need you. So how about getting out of the way for a change, and get with the friggin’ program? And that goes double for you in the press.

When advocacy morphs into sociopathy

If you’re interested in my search for A Unified Theory of Liberalism, read on. Mr. Bret Stephens has a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal. Some excerpts:

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime adviser to President Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President Bush today runs "what is in effect a gulag," stretching "from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world." Mr. Blumenthal says "there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."
In another column, Mr. Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Mr. Bush's "splendid little war," he writes, "has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat."
The factual bases for these claims are, first, that the U.S. holds some 10,000 "enemy combatants" prisoner; and second, that 122 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in April.
As I write, I have before me a copy of "The Black Book of Communism," which relates that on "1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53 groups of corrective work camps and 425 collective work colonies. In addition, the prisons held 200,000 people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury were in charge of approximately 1.2 million 'specially displaced people.' "

The grieving sister comments on the 9-11 commission

The words of Ms. Burlingame, the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as published in The Wall Street Journal:

… somehow the 9/11 Commission hearings have succeeded in turning this, the most stunning and deadly attack on the U.S. homeland, into another Beltway soap opera--awash in politics and finger-pointing, complete with media satellite trucks, conspiracy-theory hecklers and witnesses made to feel the heat by having to stand and take an oath under bright lights….

Today, the great hopes I had for an independent, bipartisan investigation into the events of 9/11 have given way to great sadness. After the Senate and House Joint Inquiry into intelligence activities leading up to 9/11 was published in 2002, I had a different perspective about who was responsible for the attacks. It was everyone, and no one. It was the systemic and institutional problems in the information-gathering, analysis and reporting structures of our dozen or more intelligence agencies. It was the legal barriers that prevented law enforcement and intelligence services from talking to each other. It was Cold War modalities that no longer applied to very evil men with apocalyptic delusions operating in adaptive networks with cell phones and laptops, and supported by millions and millions of dollars. It was our own fat complacency, refusing to see what was happening around us as American soldiers, sailors and civilians were being blown up abroad. It was the airline lobbyists who looked after their well-heeled clients as we fashioned airline security measures that called upon ACLU lawyers rather than law enforcement experts for advice about passenger screening.

I am no longer angry at the Bush administration, or at any Americans for that matter.

A bunch of punks

I’ve thought since before the war started in Afghanistan that the terrorists we’re fighting are a bunch of punks. Great at pushing around women, not bad at IEDing a humvees now and then, but without real grit or intelligence. A bunch of hacks, if you’ll pardon the expression, when it comes to executing innocent civilians. It seems Den Beste has been thinking along the same lines.

A reader of his asked,

“Do you think the recent be-headings in Iraq & Saudi Arabia is out of desperation or a widening of the war? Also do you think we will take out Iran's Nuke capacity before the election. I dread the thought of Iran having even non deliverable nukes.”

To which Den Beste responded,

“I think his question includes an implicit assumption that there is a unified enemy controlled centrally, and that the acts of these groups are intended to contribute to that strategy. It seems to imply that these groups see themselves as part of a larger struggle, and that they are responding to the overall state of the war.
I don't think it's like that. There is no central control at all. Some of the larger groups have operated in ways which indicated that they have something of a strategy, but there is no overall strategy. The groups doing these things are only dimly aware of the overall state of the war, and aren't really thinking of themselves as being part of a force trying to win the war.
Frankly, I think that the recent beheadings are copycat. Daniel Pearl was beheaded, and then a couple of years later, another group beheaded someone, and now other groups have noticed how cool it looked in the video, and the kind of prestige it brought to those who did it, and are imitating the others.

What a bunch of retards. Retards with knives and second hand explosives. If you want to see toughness in an enemy at warfare, compare these tangos to the Imperial Japanese Marines, the SS, or the Red Army. Granted, the Red Army weren’t our enemy at the time, but if you knew they spent hundreds of thousands of lives to take Berlin, you’d know they can be tough.

I often hear calls for us to me more brutal in executing the war, even from generally soft hearted people. What so many fail to realize is the temperance forced on us by nuclear weapons. Not holding back means obliterating our enemies in totality, and that is not something we’re prepared to do, nor would we be justified in doing so.

Yet.

But if Iran were to get The Bomb, and then coincidentally a nuke were to go off in the US, then we would be justified. That’s why we should obliterate all of their nuclear facilities soon – like the day after the election. What else is our fleet of B2’s for?

Den Beste disagrees:

The Iranians have been working on this for a very long time. How many facilities do they have? Where are they all located? If they've already produced enough fissionables for one or more warheads, would they not move that away from the enrichment facilities, and if so, where did they put it?
I don't think it's likely we'll attempt to take out Iran's nuclear program, either before or after the election.
If you try, you have to get it all. If you only get part, you're in deep trouble. If we take out the production facilities, but if they have already produced enough fissionables for one or more bombs and we don't manage to get that, too, what would they do next?

It’s not that DB doesn’t have a point. But I think we’ve seen that waiting for terrorists to come to their senses has been shown to be a failure. And how do you contain or deter a foe who thinks it’s OK to be killed in a holy cause? Maybe Iran does have a bomb stashed away, and probably we couldn’t find it. But if we start snuffing out anything that even smells like WMD production in that Evil land, maybe they’ll get the message. Or maybe their people, who are not all mad, will be motivated to rise up. Maybe bombing isn’t the total answer, but it’s a start.

The way I see it, if we do nothing about their potential nuclear arsenal, then it’s only a matter of time before they use it against us. But if we act soon, then we might take it out. And the very attempt would ecouragez les autres.

UPDATE

You know, a case could be made that we should have started our 2nd conquest in Iran, not Iraq. After all, the Iranian people have shown much more rebelliousness against the mullahs than the Iraqis did against Hussein, lately. (Then again, about 12 years ago Hussein slaughtered a whole lot of rebels, and there can only be so many in any given generation, yes?) The Iranians have quite a bit of retail American blood and humiliation on their hands, from the embassy outrage to present day support and refuge for Taliban/al Qaeda remnants. Until they started showing their cards, however, they had not displayed (so far as we the public know) a search for wholesale death.

On the other hand, an equally good case could be made for constructive engagement with Iran combined with support for its rebellious elements. Encarta defines Iran as the second most mountainous country (I assume they’re counting Tibet as a province of China, since Burma and Tibet would be gold and silver in mountaineity) and mountains aren’t good land for the Big Red One, the Rock of the Marne, or the 4th ID. Cracking Iran would be a hell of a tough pistachio unless a vital segment of its population had split the seam before we got there. Just like Afghanistan, which was described by one of our commanders as “the most incompetent opponent the Marine Corps has faced since the Barbary Pirates.”

You just don’t know until you try. The fog of war is impenetrable enough while you’re in it; not even Rumsfeld can pierce it in advance.

Nevertheless, I feel it in my gut – and I’m not usually one who goes with the gut before the head – that we really, really need to slap those mullah bitches upside the head in one way or another before it’s too late. It doesn’t matter if we get them all or not. It doesn’t matter if they have a bomb already, are close, are far, or are only bluffing. They need slapping. We could drop an FAE or a micro-nuke on the site of our old embassy. We could obliterate every known nuclear site. We could bomb every site that looked remotely nuclear or WMD to a satellite.

Two things are sure:

1.) Ultimately, only the people of Iran can reform their country, but there’s a lot of room and maybe many 9 - 11 magnitudes of heartache for US between “now” and “ultimately.”
2.) The terrorist religious fanatics running Iran have no respect for diplomatic niceties or subtly nuanced probes.
3.) An almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!

The Case of the Gradually Disappearing Supreme Court.

From The Almanac of American Politics, by Stuart Taylor, Jr. July 1, 2008 -- With the retirement of 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens today, the Supreme Court's membership dwindled to four. The remaining two liberals … and two conservatives … are almost certain to deadlock on big issues including abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, religion, and presidential war powers. So any tie-breaking replacement for Stevens would be in a position to rewrite vast areas of constitutional law.

July 1, 2008 -- With the retirement of 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens today, the Supreme Court's membership dwindled to four. The remaining two liberals (Stephen Breyer and David Souter) and two conservatives (Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) are almost certain to deadlock on big issues including abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, religion, and presidential war powers. So any tie-breaking replacement for Stevens would be in a position to rewrite vast areas of constitutional law….

This uncompromising stance kept the president's political base happy. It also had the not-unwelcome side effect of insulating from any further Supreme Court second-guessing the president's claims of vastly expanded power to override the Bill of Rights and congressional constraints in the name of the war against terrorism. Since the Court began shrinking -- to seven members in 2005, five in 2007, and now a stalemated four -- both its prestige and its will to take on a wartime president have diminished. "I can't say I miss them much," the president has reportedly said of the departed justices.
So at a time when we desperately need a judicial check on executive power, the justices -- with a push from the president and the Senate -- may have taken themselves out of the game.

This should be required reading for all senators.

We lost a fine gentleman Sunday

One of the family passed away on Sunday, peacefully, after a long and prosperous life, surrounded by his beloved family.
He was a fine man, kind and accomplished. Dignified and funny.
We'll miss him a lot.

Rest in peace.

300 million people are systematically going about ending their liberty

Europe. After yesterday's trip courtesy of the Wilson Quarterly, I almost feel sorry for them. Today on topic is Mark Steyn, writing in the Telegraph:

Business as usual among the Europhiles. "The flurry of weekend opinion polling," quoth the Guardian, "has revealed a British nation that is strongly opposed to the European Union constitution and also deeply ignorant about it."

Alas, the stupidity of the people is an abiding problem of democracy. Fortunately, the EU has come up with a set of institutions all but entirely insulated from it. ...

The knuckle-dragging ignoramuses have figured out that, if this new body is full of offices and institutions - president, foreign minister, citizenship, etc - traditionally reserved for states, it's a reasonable supposition that a state is what it intends to be.

In that sense, all the things the Guardian says the morons are wrong about, they're right about. ...

Even in its attempts to reassure, the Guardian can't help acknowledging Euro-creep: "Many people believe, for instance, that the constitution gives the EU immediate power to increase taxes in Britain - a wholly unfounded belief."

"Immediate" power? What about, say, 2012? And, even if Tony Blair and other enthusiasts insist the EU is not a state, the final word may not be left to them. We're told that Britain's Security Council seat will be unaffected. Who says? Sooner or later, the rest of the world will start to wonder why the EU's foreign minister has two of the five permanent votes at the UN....

Today, thriving British federations can be found on every continent, except our own....

It's not the British people but their EUtopian elites who are deeply ignorant - of comparative data, historical precedent and basic arithmetic. The reality for Britain in Europe is simple: united we'll fall, divided we might stand a sporting chance.

Now me, I prefer radical solutions that meet with the facts. The Gordian Knot and all that, don't you know. You might say I'm an Obviotarian.

It's obvious Britain should not join the EU. They may be right next door, but they don't fit in. What they should be is part of the United States of America. Canada east of Vancouver and west of Toronto should join us too. Vancouver and Toronto should be city-states. They and Quebec should be part of the EU.

Wouldn't it be nice to reunite with England?

And now, Deep Thoughs

A looooong article from The Wilson Quarterly (the what?) via Real Clear Politics about why the Euro's are the way they are, and why we are the way we are, with respect to democracy (they're against it) and unilateralism (we're for it). Very academic and dry, but good food for thought. Like 8 pounds of beef jerky.

I feel like I'm earning a masters in political science with all this blogging.

Wretchard is good today, too.

And I've got a summer cold, dang it.