True-blue Virginia. And then there’s Florida.

The New Neo Posted on by

Right on schedule, Virginia is turning into a blue state as a result of immigration:

Each year the federal government prints millions of visas and distributes these admission tickets to the poorest and least-developed nations in the world…

A census study entitled “Immigrants in Virginia,” released by University of Virginia (UVA) researchers, documented the phenomenon: “Until 1970, only 1 in 100 Virginians was born outside of the United States; by 2012, 1 in every 9 Virginians is foreign-born.”…

UVA’s report explains that more than three out of four of Virginia immigrants (77 percent) are coming from either Latin America or Asia””immigration from Europe, the report writes, “lag[s] far behind” representing only 10 percent of Virginia’s immigrant population. This is consistent with trends nationwide. According to the 2013 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration Yearbook, only 8.7 percent of green cards issued by the federal government went to immigrants born in Europe, a product of immigration changes pushed through by Ted Kennedy in 1965.

DHS’ yearbook, however, does not provide information on parental nativity”“ in other words, it doesn’t say whether an immigrant from the United Kingdom may be the child of Saudi parents.

Additionally, according to DHS, of those refugees issued admissions slips into the United States, 75 percent came from four countries”“ Iraq, Burma, Somalia and Bhutan”“ while another 15 percent came from Iran, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Dominican Republic.

Large numbers of these settlers handpicked by the federal government have come to Virginia.

This has been done with little national fanfare (I have no idea whether it’s a big deal locally), and with no need for the locals to acquiesce at the change in their community and little opportunity for meaningful action against it. I strongly suspect that, if people there do protest, they are shouted down as racists.

It’s a brilliant approach by the left. It works, and by the time anyone is aware of what it means, the demographics and politics of a state have changed—perhaps forever, as seemingly happened in California.

Speaking of California, please refresh your memory on the history of Proposition 187 there. Some day I hope to write a longer post on the subject, although today isn’t that day. Today I’ll just mention that Proposition 187 was passed in California in 1994 and nicknamed “Save Our State.” It was designed to halt the benefits already flowing in California to illegal immigrants. Although it passed by the wide margin of approximately 59% to 41%, ultimately the will of the people didn’t stick, because of a concerted legal assault by the left in the federal court system, and the failure of a Democrat as governor, Gray Davis (who succeeded Republican Pete Wilson) to defend it there.

Sound familiar?

One more thing—there’s another article today about a somewhat different kind of immigration that might be influencing the political makeup of a very important swing state. This time we’re talking about Florida, which is experiencing an enormous influx of people fleeing economic problems in Puerto Rico. They are already citizens, and although when living in Puerto Rico they cannot vote in presidential elections, once they become residents of Florida they are like any other (non-felonious) citizen who resides there, and they can.

Interestingly enough, however, it’s not clear which party most of the new arrivals affiliate with. At least, that’s what the WaPo article says:

Puerto Rican voters tend to lean Democratic, but a great number of the newcomers do not identify with any party, making them appealing targets for politicians and recruiters on both sides.

And, according to the article, both parties are courting them with vigor.

The Royal class

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s take a look at some beauty.

This is a video of company class at one of the best ballet companies in the world, Britain’s Royal Ballet. “Company class” means it’s a class that’s taken by the company members, who are professional ballet dancers. But the class itself is very much like most of the ballet classes I’ve taken in my life, a goodly portion of which were taught by British teachers.

I described the progression of a ballet class in this previous post. A class is carefully designed to warm up the body in a progression of exercises aimed to stretch, strengthen, protect, and build, and it is composed of equal parts hard hard work and enjoyable artistry. It goes from small movements at the barre to bigger ones, then to smaller (and slower) movements in the center to bigger ones, culminating in large jumps and movements across the room in a diagonal and in a circle.

The video is long, so I’m starting it at a point late in the class in order to show you some of the big jumps and the diagonals and circle movements.

A few comments. Note how very young the women look (and are, for the most part). Shorn of their stage makeup, costumes, and glamor, extremely slender but strong, with small sleek torsos and long strong legs, they have a purity and a dedication that lends them the air of acolytes in some secular artistic/athletic church. The men are likewise sleek and strong, and not especially big, but when they jump you can tell that ballet doesn’t consider the sexes the same. The men’s movements are large and bold, despite their grace, and many of them add special little fillips and tricks at the end of the combinations.

Each person is in his/her little world, a world in which, unlike with a stage performance, they don’t have to worry about projecting to an audience. The mirror is their audience–that, the other dancers and the teacher. But in a class it’s possible to dance for the sheer joy of it, and I think what comes through loud and clear is what a wonder it is to be able to soar through the air with such control, making your body a thing of beauty and line and echoing the music.

I was not as good a dancer as they are, of course. But I was good enough that I felt that feeling regularly, and there’s nothing in the world quite like it.

Note also the teacher, mirroring in a smaller way with his body and hands and facial expression the ebb and flow of the movement, coaxing more out of the students, watching them intently and lovingly. He choreographs a little dance for each exercise, over and over again, teaches it to them quickly, and then watches and moves on to the next.

Standouts: the guy at 1:14:52 is quite a turner, as is the girl in the light-colored leotard and dark skirt at 1:15:40 who executes a series of fouettes and does periodic doubles with her hands on hips. What a natural turner! What speed around a plumb-straight line!

The problem of the problem of whiteness

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a really long (I confess I stopped reading it about halfway through) article called, “White people have a race ”” but everyone flips out when we talk about it.”

The piece begins with a description of a course taught at Arizona State by a professor of English named Lee Bebout, who is white himself. The name of the course is “US Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness,” and this was his motivation in teaching it:

I can study Chicano studies, I can do critical race theory to some degree, but without understanding whiteness, it felt like there was this big gap that I wasn’t able to understand in the field.

Bebout was surprised at the intensity of the negative backlash (he even received some death threats from white supremacists, which is to be strongly condemned). But the Vox piece asserts that those who were incensed at him misunderstood the focus of his course:

The people campaigning against the course were incensed at what they understood to be an entire semester dedicated to slamming white people. But the Problem of Whiteness wasn’t designed to convince students that white people are a problem. The negative language in the course’s title was simply a nod to how tough it can be to talk (or even think) about what it means to be white, when white is so deeply etched in the minds of many Americans as a synonym for “raceless” or “neutral.” The reaction to the course seemed to prove this thesis.

And here I thought that Bebout was an English professor. If so, and if his intent was as stated, why not call the course “The problem of talking about whiteness”? Instead, it was called “The problem of whiteness,” and so I think it’s understandable that people thought it was about—you know—the problem of whiteness.

Or perhaps some of those who objected had read Bebout’s reading list:

Bebout’s assigned reading list included books that had been around for years: The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), Critical Race Theory (1996), The Everyday Language of White Racism (2008), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), and more.

I confess to not having read those works. But they certainly sound very negative about whiteness. And I suspect that “US Race Theory,” which did not come up when I Googled it, is actually what is known as “Critical race theory” (or CRT) which is defined thusly and also the title of one of Bebout’s reading list books:

The movement is loosely unified by two common themes. First, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, and in particular, that the law may play a role in this process. Second, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and more broadly, pursues a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination.

Appearing in U.S. law schools in the mid- to late 1980s, critical race theory began as a reaction to critical legal studies.[4] Scholars such as Derrick Bell applauded the focus of civil rights scholarship on race, but were deeply critical of civil rights scholars’ commitment to colorblindness and their focus on intentional discrimination, rather than a broader focus on the conditions of racial inequality…

According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs:

“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

Ah, but I’m sure that Bebout’s course was merely an attempt to have a neutral, non-judgmental dialogue about whiteness.

Obstructionism and how it works (or doesn’t work)

The New Neo Posted on by

In the impeachment thread, commenter “Matt_SE” had an idea that sounds good:

There are two types of victories to be had: legislative and political. If you can’t get the former, then go for the latter.
That USED to be the plan, before McConnell’s Senate proved to be so spineless. It was obvious from the beginning that we didn’t have 67 votes, and that Democratic lockstep wouldn’t usually allow crossover votes.
No matter.
The point was to pass popular bills that Obama hated, have him veto them, then put Senate Democrats on the record as opposing the will of the people.
It was the exact opposite of Reid’s stealth campaign of never allowing a vote on a bill Dems didn’t want.

Yes, but here’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. I’m well aware that the point was to pass popular bills and have Obama veto them. But there is an impediment to that plan of action: many such bills can’t get to the floor for a vote in the Senate because that would need 60 votes, and not enough Democrats would cross over to give the Republicans those 60. In that impeachment post I also explained what it would take to circumvent that problem, and why it may not be worth it; that’s why I discussed cloture at such great length. But I’ll repeat it, because it seems important:

And if McConnell were to change the Senate rules and say that suddenly they only needed a simple majority to pass bills there, it wouldn’t help to override a presidential veto anyway, which would still need to reach that nearly-impossible 2/3-vote threshold. All that would happen, therefore, is that the Republican Senate would have thrown away a rule and be subject to a huge amount of criticism in order to get more bills on Obama’s desk that he would then veto. Is it worth it? I don’t think so, and this is why.

Talk about kabuki theater! Yes, it would satisfy the angry conservative wing, but it would accomplish nothing other than paving the way for the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in order for doing away with the 60-vote rule to actually accomplish anything in terms of legislation, a party has to have both a majority in the Senate (and House) and a president of the same party as that majority, so that bills won’t be vetoed. Historically speaking, the Democrats have been in that position since the FDR years far more often than the Republicans have.

In addition, there is little question in my mind that the vast majority of Americans are not following Obama’s vetoes with anything even remotely resembling the sort of attention we in the blogosphere give them. In fact, most people don’t pay any attention to that sort of thing. The publicity the Republicans would get from a series of Obama vetoes would be small, and it would mostly be noticed only by the news-junkie conservatives among us (I count myself as one of them). Most other people, if they noticed it at all, would take away from that entire exchange whatever it was that the MSM decided to impart to them, which would be something like this: “Republicans do away with time-honored Senate rule just to upset Obama, all to no avail.”

But, as I said, to most people it’s an arcane point of parliamentary procedure with little meaning. Maybe I’m wrong, but I challenge you to an experiment. Stop the next 100 people on the street, or your non-political-junkie friends, and ask them what happened to the Keystone bill. That was a very popular bill that Obama successfully vetoed because Congress couldn’t muster the votes for an override. How many will have a clue what happened to it?

Also, take a look at where those Keystone “nay” votes came from. It was almost entirely from true-blue states, with just an exception or two. There were very few senators from states where Keystone actually was popular who voted against it, and who would be at risk of disapproval if the people in their states were actually paying attention.

So as far as Matt_SE’s idea of the political approach of “put[ting] Senate Democrats on the record as opposing the will of the people” goes, it’s a good one except for one thing: lots of Senate Democrats can vote for these popular bills, as happened with Keystone (which was especially popular). The bill then goes to Obama’s desk. He vetoes it. Then it goes back to House and Senate, and probably all the Democratic senators where that bill is actually popular (those from red or purplish states, for example) can vote to override that veto. As long as just 36 Democratic senators hang tough against an override, the veto is not overridden and Obama wins. There are usually at least 18 states with 2 Democratic senators each where these bills are not so very popular and where Democratic senators voting against overriding a veto would not be at risk of being accused of opposing the people’s will.

That is the unpleasant reality Republicans face, even those who have a spine and want to do what it takes to undermine Obama’s agenda and to embarrass the Democrats as well.

[NOTE: By the way, if a Republican president were to be elected in 2016, and a Republican Senate is elected as well but is short of 60 Republican votes, the Republicans actually might end the cloture rule at that point because it would actually mean something. However, I strongly suspect that if the opposite were true, and a Democratic president and Democratic Senate short of 60 votes were to be elected, the Democrats would almost certainly end cloture themselves. But neither is the situation we find ourselves in at the moment.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a report on a plan by Mike Lee to jettison cloture for a vote in the Senate in order to pass a bill to abolish Obamacare that Obama will undoubtedly veto and will not be overriden.]

Some interesting facts about Walt Whitman

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not a Whitman fan (no, that’s not one of the interesting facts), although I like some of his poems. But looking at his Wiki entry I noticed the following items, which somehow seemed worth mentioning:

When Whitman was 6 years old “he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn.”

Whitman’s formal schooling ended at the age of 11.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was self-published, although it had this nifty engraving as the frontpiece:
whitmanengrave

Whitman was in his mid-thirties at the time, but he kept on revising Leaves of Grass as long as he lived.

Whitman worked at the US Attorney General’s office in DC right after the Civil War, where his job was “interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons.”

In 1871 “it was mistakenly reported that [Whitman had] died in a railroad accident.” He hadn’t.

In 1872 he gave the commencement speech at Dartmouth.

He lived at his brother’s house in Cambden, NJ, for about a decade after that, and it was there that he received a visit from Oscar Wilde.

People claim he was gay. People claim he was bisexual. He claimed he had 6 illegitimate children. No one really has a clue what his actual sexual history was, although I assume that he knew.

Taking impeachment “off the table”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “RickZ” wrote the following today:

We gave the RINOs the Senate in 2014, only to be told from the get-go that ”˜impeachment is off the table’. That was bad enough, but to give everything Choom Boy wanted was beyond the pale; President Give Iran The Bomb doesn’t even have to veto any bills, which speaks volumes about the eGOPs being ”˜an opposition party’.

I’m not highlighting that in order to pick on RickZ. In fact, I agree with him in many ways. Let me list a couple:

I don’t think the GOP has been aggressive enough in fighting Obama. I think both Boehner and McConnell are, if not RINOs exactly, then certainly lackluster and insufficiently motivated to take on either Obama or some of the big issues, both in their rhetoric and personalities and by action. I think much of their hesitancy comes from their desire to please big money donors, a desire shared by the vast majority of Congress. This is a political fact of life inherent in the fact that money is ordinarily needed to get elected and stay elected, and money has an attraction even beyond that.

That said, it’s not true that Obama hasn’t had to veto some bills. One bill that House and Senate did pass but Obama has vetoed was Keystone, a vote which occurred in February of 2015, just one month after the Republican Congress came to power. They were able to accomplish this feat of getting it to the president’s desk for the simple reason that the bill had enough Democratic support to get it past the 60-vote Senate threshold. The Republicans even tried to override Obama’s subsequent veto, although the attempt failed because they couldn’t get enough Democratic votes to reach 2/3. This would almost certainly be the fate of most override votes in this Congress, which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried.

I’ve already said my piece on Corker-Menendez and explained why I think it helps fight the Iran deal rather than being some sort of deceptive kabuki theater that facilitates it. So here I’ll just add that Corker-Menendez is a bill that was passed by House and Senate, and which Obama would dearly have loved to veto. But he did not do so because he knew his veto would be easily overridden. Unfortunately, very few bills are going to get that degree of Democratic support, or even enough to pass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

Yesterday the House passed a bill that would withhold certain funds from sanctuary cities. Obama has already threatened to veto it, and his veto probably could not be overridden because of lack of enough crossover Democratic votes. This, unfortunately, would be the fate of most such bills with Obama in the White House. I don’t know whether the particular bill has enough Democratic votes in the Senate to get past the cloture rule—it would need six crossovers to reach the requisite 60 to stop cloture, and it would need seven more than that to override a veto.

And if McConnell were to change the Senate rules and say that suddenly they only needed a simple majority to pass bills there, it wouldn’t help to override a presidential veto anyway, which would still need a 2/3 vote. All that would happen is that the Republican Senate would have thrown away a rule and be subject to a huge amount of criticism in order to get more bills on Obama’s desk that he would then veto. Is it worth it?

Talk about kabuki theater! Yes, it would satisfy the angry conservative wing, but it would accomplish nothing other than paving the way for the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in order for doing away with the 60-vote rule to actually accomplish anything in terms of legislation, a party has to have both a majority in the Senate (and House) and a president of the same party as that majority, so that bills won’t be vetoed. Historically speaking, the Democrats have been in that position since the FDR years far more often than the Republicans have.

Then there’s the other statement in RickZ’s comment. It goes like this: “We gave the RINOs the Senate in 2014, only to be told from the get-go that ”˜impeachment is off the table’.” I’ve read that sort of thing often, but it is in error, I believe. First of all there’s a simple timing error, which is that Boehner’s statement about impeachment was made before that election of 2014. The second error is a failure to take notice of why Boehner said it and what he actually said.

It was in the summer of 2014. The election would be occurring that November, and the Democrats were sounding the fear drumbeat of “If you elect a Republican Congress, they will impeach President Obama!” Democrats were trying to increase party turnout in the election, which they knew would be crucial for them, and also raise money for the campaign. That was the context of Boehner’s reply:

“It’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House,” Boehner said at the weekly House GOP leadership press conference.

“This whole talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Why? Because they’re trying to rally their own people to give money and show up in this year’s elections,” Boehner said…

“We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Boehner said.

Note the word “plans,” a well-known weasel word that means only “right now we are not actively planning to do it.” It isn’t any sort of promise to never do it. And not planning to do so was understandable because, without 2/3 of the Senate in order to convict, impeachment in the House would also be kabuki theater. The only effect it would have (other than to placate those conservatives who would enjoy the show) would be to rally support for Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican Congress has now been in session for seven months. You may think they are just playing along and pretending to stand for something, and perhaps you’re correct. I certainly see that possibility; I don’t trust them. But what I see is something a bit different: a Republican Party composed of some people like that and some who are devoted to conservative principles and trying their best, but stymied by a combination of factors, most importantly a president who will veto everything that comes to his desk that he dislikes unless Congress has the magic 2/3 to override, a total that is extremely hard to reach. Even if Congress’ GOP were composed of 100% principled conservatives (which of course it is not), they would still have to face this choice: do you pass bill after bill after bill that Obama will veto (and do it by jettisoning the 60 votes for cloture rule in the Senate) only to have Obama veto those bills? Is that really the best use of the limited time you have available to you?

Every time I write about this general topic I get accused of being a RINO myself, or of wanting to protect them, or of being insufficiently angry at them. I can assure you that I am none of these things (not that everyone will believe me). I have no particular party loyalty and I’m not even a member of the party. I didn’t leave one party to join another or to march in lockstep with them. I am angry that more has not been done; how could anyone not be? But when I look at the facts, I can’t deny them. This is the situation we face: less than 60 votes in the Senate and a president who has no reluctance whatsoever to use his veto pen if he needs to (although when Democrats controlled the Senate he didn’t need to), and a public that will probably turn on Republicans for any sort of government shutdown in response.

I think that the best use of conservative energy among the electorate would be to elect more conservatives to Congress. If conservatives can take over the leadership of the Republican Party in both houses of Congress, than you won’t have Boehner and McConnell to kick around any more. But whoever gets in there, the most helpful thing would be to also elect a Republican president, preferably a conservative. There are a lot of candidates to choose from who fit that description.

Hillarywear

The New Neo Posted on by

I had a post on Carly Fiorina today, and so here’s one on Hillary Clinton. Equal time.

it occurs to me that Hillary’s got some very odd fashion tastes.

Now, I know it’s hard to grow older in the public eye (not so easy in the private eye, either). We who are of a certain age remember Hillary as a fairly young woman from almost twenty-five years ago, and the difference between a woman in her early-to mid 40s and one in her late 60s is formidable. It’s not just the face (although there’s that), but also the body. There is a certain almost inevitable thickening, especially around the waist, even in those most assiduously devoted to working out.

Thus, I have nothing but sympathy for Clinton in that regard.

But why, oh why, does she choose so many awful and really strange outfits? I’m not just talking about the ubiquitous plain pantsuit; I’m talking about bizarre duds. Is she easily bored? Does she simply not have a clue what to do? Does she have a stylist? She certainly could afford one. Or is her stylist nuts?

Case in point: what is this? Chutes and ladders?

hillaryweirdjacket

And what’s up with this protozoa coat?

protozoacoat

Those are not just bad outfits for Hillary. Those are bad outfits for anyone, anywhere.

[NOTE: Yes, I know this post is frivolous. In my opinion, it’s not frivolous enough.]

Key Iran deal documents…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are missing from the information submitted to Congress, and Senators Corker and Cardin have written John Kerry to request them.

Maybe they should ask Hillary to check her server. Just in case.

More here.

“Most transparent” yada yada yada.

Vietnam then and now: the turning

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Totten has an excellent article on Vietnam today. The country is a capitalist (or at least mostly-capitalist or semi-capitalist) success story and Ho Chi Minh’s worst nightmare:

Hanoi’s economy looks and feels entirely unregulated; the city bursts with activity. Though luxury boutiques, technology stores selling Apple products, high-fashion clothing outlets, and international food chains are easy to find, individual street-front proprietorships predominate. The state still owns or controls some of the largest companies, but the vast majority of businesses are too small to be centrally managed. On a single block, I saw the following for sale: Vietnamese flags, Ho Chi Minh T-shirts, candles, incense, bolts of cloth, used clothing from the U.S., fake money to burn in offerings to ancestors, Angry Birds toys, exotic fruit, meat skewers, iPhones, tea, jewelry, Italian shoes, French pastries, spices, herbs, motorcycle helmets, bootleg CDs, bootleg cigarettes, Japanese BBQ, carpets, funeral boxes, silk, paintings, and bootleg paperbacks with misspelled blurbs on the back.

The city is extremely business-friendly…

But there were many years of suffering after the war:

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle…

Saigon, the South’s former capital, suffered when the North took over. “All the schools were shut down,” says Tuong Vi Lam, who vividly remembers when her side lost the war. “My aunts and uncles were in college and they had to quit. They just couldn’t get there. Property was confiscated and given to northerners. Communist propaganda was even put in our math books. We had questions like this: ”˜Yesterday a soldier killed three Americans and today he killed five. How many Americans did he kill total?’ The books don’t have those kinds of questions anymore, but they did for five or ten years.”

Vietnam was finally independent and unified, but it fared no better than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba””and almost everyone knew it, including many in the Communist leadership.

At some point it became clear even to the Communist leaders of the mid-80s—who were not as doctrinaire as their Soviet or Chinese counterparts, according to Totten (a point I think is key to the transformation to come)—that something had to lighten up. And that’s how the thaw began.

Now let’s go to the man who is our present Secretary of State, John Kerry, when he was addressing the Senate Council on Foreign Relations in 1971 on the subject of Vietnam:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace,..

…if you read carefully the president’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: “But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.” But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now…

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more. And so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say, “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Well, Vietnam has had a turning, but not the one that Kerry envisioned. It has turned back to capitalism for the most part, and seems very very happy to do so. Apparently those peasants weren’t so content just to work in the rice paddies, and seem to have somehow divined the difference between Communism and, if not democracy exactly, then at least capitalism. Turns out that they cared.

And they really, really like Americans. From Totten:

Vietnamese anti-Americanism scarcely exists. What we call the Vietnam War, and what they call the American War, casts no shadow””especially not in the South, which fought on the American side, but not even in Hanoi, a city heavily bombed by the United States. I saw no evidence that the U.S. (or anyone else) ever bombed Hanoi. All the damage has apparently been repaired, and most Vietnamese are under the age of 30””too young to remember it, anyway…

Today, both the Vietnamese people and government””in the north as well as the south””view Americans as allies.

Capitalist allies.

Let’s try to get Carly Fiorina into the debates

The New Neo Posted on by

Carly Fiorina may not end up being the Republican nominee, but she’s one of the most impressive candidates around in terms of her ability to respond to questions in a forthright and cogent manner, state conservative principles, and do it all with serenity and a smile while never shying away from pointed criticism of her opponents—and that includes the best way of dealing with the record of Hillary Clinton that I’ve seen.

And of course, in this age of identity politics, it would be good to have Fiorina on the debate stage as an example of a conservative Republican woman.

But she’s never held political office and has little name recognition. I keep mentioning her to people as someone to watch, and virtually no one has ever heard of her (I know a lot of LIVs). And yet I keep seeing comments all around the blogosphere from people who say the equivalent of “I had never heard of her before, but the more I listen to her the more I like her.”

So here’s my suggestion: send as many people as you think can stomach it a little blurb about her and a link to a short video showing her in action. You can choose you own video—there are many on YouTube. But I suggest this, this, this, or this.

I also suggest sending the email to liberals, too, as long as they’re not way on the left, and to any low information voters you know. Women are probably particularly good recipients, since I think many are interested in a woman candidate but aren’t as keen as they’d hoped to be about Hillary. Fiorina is the female anti-Hillary.

[ADDENDUM: And then there’s the old tried-and-true, donate money, as well as the Facebook “like.” Also, you might want to urge other people who like Carly to be part of the email campaign.]