Why attack Syria?

The New Neo Posted on by

Is Obama really going to attack Assad’s regime in Syria, or is he just talking? And if he does attack, how far will he go, and what is his ultimate goal?

There’s no dearth of speculation on all those questions. We have Ralph Peters in the NY Post:

Mr. President, do you really think it’s wise to send our missiles and aircraft to provide fire support for al Qaeda? That is exactly what you’ll be doing, if you hit Assad.

Assad’s an odious butcher, filth on two legs. But in the world of serious strategy, you rarely get a choice between black and white. You choose between black and charcoal gray…

For the record, I don’t regret getting rid of Saddam or Khadafy. I regret the ineptitude with which we did these things. When you propose a war, don’t ever expect a cheap date…

We have a president who thinks that, “Gee, maybe, well, gosh, I said I’d do something, so maybe I should…”

That last sentence I quoted in particular seems to describe Obama’s likely state of mind. He drew the line in the sand, and cannot afford to go back on it. And I believe that whatever military response he is contemplating is highly likely to be small and symbolic, in the mold of some of Clinton’s efforts (Bill, that is).

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline is also against an inadequate and half-baked response:

…[W]hen our interest in preventing an Assad victory is factored in, I believe the case for military intervention becomes solid.

But that case rests on selecting military action that sets Assad back significantly. Otherwise, our action won’t help prevent his victory, won’t meaningfully punish him, and will have no hope of deterring him ”” a difficult task in any case, given that Assad is fighting for survival and his supporters see themselves as fighting to avoid genocide against their minority group.

In other words, if Obama aimlessly launches a cruise missile or two, his action will be a mere gesture ”” a transparent, and transparently weak, attempt to save face in light of the “red line” remark. It will be deserving of ridicule and contempt, and will be worse, in my view, than no response at all.

Whatever action Obama takes should meaningfully degrade Assad’s military capacity. If it doesn’t, then Assad will assume that the military benefits of using chemical weapons outweigh any cost Obama is willing to inflict. And the rest of the world will conclude that, to paraphrase Kerry, the international norm against using chemical weapons can be violated without meaningful consequences.

Ah, but Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney has gone on record in saying that the goal is not to oust Assad:

I want to make clear that the options that we are considering are not about regime change,” said Jay Carney, the president’s chief spokesman. “They are about responding to clear violation of an international standard that prohibits the use of chemical weapons.”…

“It is our firm belief that Bashar al-Assad has long since forsaken any legitimacy that he might have to lead and that Syria’s future must be one that is without Assad in power,” Mr. Carney said.

He said it’s in the national security interest of the U.S. to make sure the use of chemical weapons “not go unanswered.”

So, if one believes the administration (always an iffy proposition), it appears that Obama is contemplating a small action of some sort to show he means what he says, sort of; does not intend to directly overthrow Assad but to somehow weaken him and encourage his overthrow; and has no idea what would happen next except turmoil.

That’s the best I can do to understand what’s going on, but it makes sense from what I’ve gleaned about Obama over the years. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the first few lines of one of Macbeth’s famous speeches:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s Richard Fernandez’s perspective.

Also this:

Obama is trapped by his own propaganda, the victim of his own myth. He came to power on the strength of his supposed genius; his messianic transcendance. He was destined to make the world America’s friend; usher in a world without nuclear weapons; and fundamentally transform the nation. He was even going to make the oceans fall. Why he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of achievements he had not yet even attained.

It is these expectations that weigh down on him like lead. Had Obama not made any of these vaunting boasts he might not look like the fool he is now. But as his speech on “Red Lines” exemplifies the teleprompter can write check[s] his autopen doesn’t even know how to sign.

Perhaps the only remaining reason for striking Syria without first deciding policy is simply to demonstrate to low information voters that he’s still President; that he can still do something, even if that something is pointless.]

Allan Bloom: on learning history and cultural relativism

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again.

But I thought I’d present the quote anyway because—like so much of Bloom’s oeuvre—it shows his uniquely facile mind and brilliant observations.

It was from an audio recording of a lecture that Bloom had given back in (to the best of my recollection, anyway) the mid-1980s. I had tried to transcribe it faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:

You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.

Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.

Bloom was not a cultural relativist; he believed it was a pernicious influence that had taken over American education. Time has proven him correct, has it not?

Obama, Martin Luther King, and warnings

The New Neo Posted on by

This Wednesday Obama plans a twofer, donning the mantle of two previous American giants:

President Barack Obama will make remarks on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28 as part of a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the demonstration best remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The White House announced that Obama ”“ the first African-American president of the United States — will speak at the “Let Freedom Ring” event, which will be held to recall the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

That civil rights movement demonstration drew some 250,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his unforgettable remarks.

I would ordinarily consider it to be completely fitting for the first African-American president to make such a speech on such an occasion. But at this point in Obama’s presidency it seems to me to be the height of the exploitative manipulative hypocrisy in which he specializes—associating himself by pageantry with real American heroes such as Lincoln and King while working hard to counter some of what they stood for.

Let’s take a look at the words of King’s 50-year-old speech. It is very famous—and rightly so—for its inspirational “I have a dream” passage, although many people have since pointed out the irony of King saying “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” in light of the growth of race hucksterism in America.

But when I looked back at the entire speech, other words caught my attention, too:

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

I also noticed that, in quite a few of the somewhat condensed versions of King’s speech that appear online, that warning does not appear (for example, this site omits it). In fact, it was so often omitted in online versions that I began to wonder whether it only appeared in the published text and King had actually omitted it in his delivered remarks.

But no; you can hear it here, beginning at minute 7:37. The “bitterness” remark was also omitted from this shortened transcript, although the following similar passage is included:

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

And the marvelous new militarism which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers have evidenced by their presence here today that they have come to realize that their destiny is part of our destiny.

In his speech Martin Luther King expressed a dream of a colorblind society, not a society obsessed with color. I assume that he would have been very happy to see that a black man could be elected president, but he correctly foresaw the dangers of the bitterness and rage that has been the legacy of racial discrimination and the movement to redress it.

Here’s a member of the House…

The New Neo Posted on by

…who seems to get it—Diane Black of Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District:

If President Obama can unilaterally decide which parts of the law he must enforce, what is to prevent the next president, regardless of party, from unilaterally deciding to not enforce these and other laws passed by Congress? And how far is he willing to test Americans’ patience with his increasingly imperial presidency?

One wonders, however, what Ms. Black and her Republican colleagues are planning to do about it.

I’d never heard of Diane Black before, but I noticed that the article refers to her as “congressman.” And then I read this in her Wiki profile:

Black is one of three female U.S. Representatives in the 113th Congress who identifies as a “congressman.”

Interesting. Here’s the story on that:

All three of these women are Republicans from deep red states: Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black of Tennessee and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming…

Congressman Blackburn has previously stated that the term “congresswoman,” which is today used by the vast majority of women – and Republican women – in the House, is “grammatically incorrect” and a “politically correct misnomer” because the term “‘Congressman’ is not a gender specific job.”…

Representative Black’s composite voting record during her first year in the House in 2011 earned her the designation of the most conservative member of the chamber followed by a #26 ranking by National Journal in 2012.

Black seems to be unafraid of bucking the tide. Good for her.

“The Butler” and other Hollywood propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

The “Republicans are racist” propaganda program continues apace, along with other revisions of history. The Soviets would be so proud!

Mona Charen writes:

The latest entry appears to be “The Butler,” which misrepresents President Reagan…as, at best, insensitive to blacks, and at worst as racist. Eugene Allen, the actual White House butler on whom the film is supposedly based, kept signed photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his living room (pictures of the other presidents he had served hung in the basement).

…[Allen] did not, as the movie portrays, resign to protest Reagan’s policies on civil rights or South Africa…The filmmakers also insert a horrific childhood “memory” for Allen — his mother being raped and his father shot by a white landlord. Didn’t happen.

Would it interest black moviegoers to know that under Ronald Reagan’s policies, median African American household incomes increased by 84 percent (compared with 68 percent for whites)?…[T]o smear Reagan — a man who deeply loathed bigotry in any form and actually improved the lives of all Americans including blacks — in an attempt to prop up the drooping Obama standard, is contemptible.

We can call it “contemptible” all we want, and of course it is. But that sort of historical rewrite is one of the most commonly-used tools of liberals and the left. The reason is quite simple: it is astoundingly effective.

If one considers the historical Eugene Allen and the facts of his actual life versus the film “The Butler,” and compare the numbers who will learn the former story versus the numbers who will watch the latter fantasy and consider it history, we all know which group will win out by a mile. Multiply that by many thousands of similar messages per year (or even per day; I can’t even begin to estimate) and you have the situation we face.

Propaganda is extraordinarily powerful. It exploits hearts, it shapes minds, and it affects history. Films are just one form of propaganda, but an exceptionally popular one that often reaches people who are disinclined to dig deeper and find the historical truth, and yet still vote.

As Churchill said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Nowadays the only revision I’d make to that comment is that the lies travel even faster and further.

How are we to counter this? Yes, there’s the internet and conservative newspapers and TV and talk shows and even movies and books. But they are few and far-between compared to the absolute barrage of the opposite messages, plus of course what is delivered every day by the school system.

Back in the 40s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (often confused with Joe McCarthy’s Senate campaign against Communists in the State Department and other organs of government) turned its attention to the leftist influence in Hollywood and tried to counter it. The Committee was heavy-handed and there was a backlash against its efforts. But what is the best way to counter propaganda from within the entertainment world when that world is dominated by, and seems to attract, the left?

Making movies to counter the propaganda on the left has for the most part been remarkably unsuccessful these days, although I’m not sure why; it used to be far more popular. Perhaps it’s merely that there are not too many people trying to do it anymore (PJ founder Roger Simon is one of the few), and they most likely have trouble getting investors and distributors and good press; the prevailing tide is against it. It’s also not easy to do well, and for the most part people will not go to boring, didactic movies. So recent conservative entertainment is too often just preaching to the choir.

Back in the 1940s, conservative thought was more mainstream in Hollywood, and there was even a group known by the quaint title of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. This was a portion of their mission statement:

As members of the motion-picture industry, we must face and accept an especial responsibility. Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s greatest forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad. In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs. We pledge ourselves to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that give it birth. And to dedicate our work, in the fullest possible measure, to the presentation of the American scene, its standards and its freedoms, its beliefs and its ideals, as we know them and believe in them.

The Alliance had a great many members, some of them very well-known such as Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Irene Dunne, Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, and John Wayne. There are some Hollywood personalities today who are on the right (Clint Eastwood comes to mind, of course). But it would be very difficult to assemble a list of luminaries of similar length and status.

The Wiki entry for the group says it disbanded in 1975. It doesn’t explain why, but going to the source it quotes we see that the apparent reason was that the House Un-American Activities Committee had been dissolved that year.

My guess is that if that was the reason, it was hardly the only one. The real reason was probably that many of the supporters and members of the Alliance were getting well on in years (or dead: for example Disney) and were not being replaced. The early 70s was a time of increasing leftism, anti-Vietnam War activism, and general disillusionment with the US, culminating in the election of Jimmy Carter.

The Alliance probably just wore out, and the left achieved greater dominance in Hollywood and elsewhere in American life. It may indeed be time for a new Alliance (if one could even be scraped up), because it’s late and getting later.

The fog…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of chemical war, in Syria.

Ascertaining the truth is often difficult. Ascertaining the truth in that region of the world is even more difficult, as the article points out:

Syrian state media confirms that chemical weapons were used in the attack ”” but says it was the rebels that used them…

On one side, we have a hereditary dictatorship that has a track record of genocidal attacks on its own people. On the other side, we have an aggregation of impotent secularists and radical Sunni Islamists with a track record of mass-murder attack on civilians. The question isn’t which would use chemical weapons to further their cause, it’s which wouldn’t, and the answer is neither.

As for Obama:

The fact that he’s emphasizing UN approval as an obstacle shows you how reluctant he is even now to intervene. The UN’s not going to do anything about Syria; Russia will veto any nascent international coalition into oblivion. In fact, not only is the Security Council paralyzed, but the UN has ordered its chemical weapons team in Syria not to go to the Damascus suburb where the new attack occurred because it’s simply too dangerous for them. O’s stuck in a moronic cycle of his own making where he clearly doesn’t want to get involve in Syria but is compelled to respond to each new Assad provocation with ever finer gradations of heightened “concern.” That’s what Josh Earnest’s blather about a threat to U.S. national security is about.

[ADDENDUM: More here, from Caroline Glick via Powerline.]

Linda Ronstadt sings no more

The New Neo Posted on by

The cause? Parkinson’s, which can be a cruel and vicious (and protean) disease.

In my mind, Ronstadt is still a slim young thing with a phenomenal voice. Of course, she’s been neither slim nor young for quite some time. And now her singing voice has been stilled as well.

Let’s remember when:

The left is afraid of Ted Cruz…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and therefore has set out to destroy him.

Cruz is their worst nightmare: a brainy and fearless conservative with impeccable intellectual Ivy League credentials and minority ethnicity to boot. But they feel fully up to the task of turning him into a villain and a loser in the eyes of the public, and perhaps they will succeed.

Sarah Palin frightened the left as well. But her accent, mannerisms, populist hobbies, idiosyncratic and somewhat convoluted syntax, evangelical Christianity, and lack of academic stardom provided much ready-made grist for their mills. Cruz is a contrast: a champion debater as a student, a Princeton graduate and Harvard-educated lawyer (Obama’s alma mater, of course) whose law student career Alan Dershowitz has said was “off-the-charts brilliant.”

And Cruz is not only a Republican but a conservative’s conservative who understands the philosophical underpinnings of the movement, and did so quite early in his life:

Cruz’s senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled “Clipping the Wings of Angels,” draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to President James Madison: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

As if more were needed, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.

Unlike a great many Republicans (but much like Sarah Palin), Cruz is unafraid to take unpopular positions and be aggressive in opposing Democrats’ liberal platform. This has caused someone like former auto-bailout head Steven Rattner to tweet, “Ted Cruz is just Sarah Palin with a brain.”

The “just” is obligatory (as is the Palin-bashing), but it’s hard not to conclude that the prospect is somewhat daunting to the left. They are seeking Cruz’s soft underbelly (their birther spurt being the most recent example) and will not rest until they find it and neuter him politically. Here’s what especially riles them:

Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an extra element of shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell exclaimed on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements.

It almost is…

One of the left’s deepest prejudices is that its opponents are stupid, and Cruz tramples on it. Chris Hayes of MSNBC actually says he fears Cruz’s brilliance. So should congressional witnesses. At hearings, Cruz has the prosecutorial instincts of a ”¦ Harvard-trained lawyer. Watching Attorney General Eric Holder try to fend off Cruz’s questioning on the administration’s drone policy a few months ago was like seeing a mouse cornered by a very large cat.

Cruz hasn’t played by the Senate rules that freshmen should initially be seen and not heard. In fact, he joined the upper chamber with all the subtlety of a SWAT team knocking down a drug suspect’s front door.

For people who care about such things ”” almost all of them are senators ”” this is an unforgivable offense…

Cruz lacks all defensiveness about his positions, another source of annoyance to his opponents, who are used to donning the mantle of both intellectual and moral superiority.

Although Cruz’s style and presentation are very different from that of William F. Buckley, he confounds liberals in much the same way; even those liberals who say conservatives are stupid could not deny Buckley’s braininess. But Buckley was not a politician (although he once ran for NYC mayor, he didn’t expect to win), and Cruz is most definitely a politician with aspirations to higher office.

I wish him luck; he’ll need it.

Wilt the stilt

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a photo of Wilt Chamberlain in fourth grade, in 1945. It’s pretty easy to spot him in the crowd:

wilt

The author writes:

[Chamberlain’s] almost twice the size of some of his classmates in this photo (see the girl in the front row on the far left as a reference).

Ummm—actually, no. That girl is sitting down.

And although the boys in the row ahead of him are standing, Wilt’s row has been placed on a step to elevate it. So the only children he can properly be compared to are the ones standing in the same row as he. Chamberlain is very tall, no doubt about it. But from the photo alone it’s hard to know exactly how tall (reports are he was six feet tall at age 10, and that’s certainly believable).

What’s more, fourth-grade boys tend to be pretty small, even smaller than the girls in the same class. Girls generally get their growth spurts early in puberty—boys later, and their puberty tends to occur later as well.

The commenters at the article seem additionally fascinated by the neat and relatively formal clothing of so many of the children. But if they’re surprised, then they obviously didn’t go to grade school in the 50s as I did, because back then that was still how all children dressed. They had no choice.

Dress codes at my New York City public grade school, for example, were very strict. On ordinary days the boys had to wear shirts with collars—no T-shirts!—and long pants but never jeans (which in my extreme youth were called dungarees). On assembly days (once a week), it was button shirts with ties. The girls’ daily garb was skirts or dresses even in the dead of winter. If it was really cold outside girls could supplement with woolen leggings (coats were sold with a matching pair) to keep from freezing on the way to school, but they had to be taken off on arrival.

leggings

But of course everybody knew that only babies or losers wore leggings. So most of us just toughed it out even in the foulest of weather.

If we didn’t comply with all of these rules, we were sent home and our parents informed. And believe me, you didn’t want that to happen.

Which reminds me:

More on the Christopher Lane murder

The New Neo Posted on by

Today the WSJ publishes an editorial pretty much along the same lines as my piece on the subject from yesterday.

From the WSJ:

The death of Christopher Lane, while as troubling as that of Trayvon Martin, will not become a national touchstone of racial and cultural debate or reflection.

But maybe it should…

There won’t be any debate over “stand your ground” laws or self-defense in this case because Lane had no chance to defend himself. There is no evidence so far of a racial motive. Lane seems to have been shot simply because he was there…

Some are focusing on the ease of obtaining a gun in the U.S., as (inevitably) is the reflexive CNN, and it would almost be a relief if we could blame such a murder on guns.

Then we wouldn’t have to focus on a culture that produces teenagers for whom the prospect of shooting an innocent man in the back on a Friday evening apparently raised not a scintilla of conscience. That is the deeper tragedy, and the real scandal, of too much of American life.

That is also an issue of far greater consequence to the future of young black men than the acquittal of George Zimmerman in his awful showdown with Trayvon. If only Mr. Sharpton and his fellow black leaders paid attention to what was missing in the lives of those three teenagers. Maybe President Obama would even care to use it as one of his teachable moments.

Fat chance.

One person who is using it as a teachable moment is James Johnson, the father of another boy who was threatened by the trio. It was Johnson who made the call to police that led to the arrest of the three.

Yesterday I called Johnson a hero for several reasons. Today we have a videotape (hat tip: “carl in atlanta“) in which he states he thinks the Chris Lane killing (and several further killings that he says were planned by the group) was a gang initiation. Johnson (who knows the three suspects well) also cites lack of fathering as a factor:

Wish we could clone this guy.

Note, also, what he says about the tightness of the black community in Duncan, Oklahoma. I speculated about that yesterday in this comment:

Also, Duncan Oklahoma is a VERY white town…the town is only 1% African-American and over 90% white. I have little doubt that the three suspects knew many black people in town, of course. But a randomly selected victim would almost certainly have been white.

I’m assuming that all three suspects lived in Duncan. Do the math: Duncan has a population of about 22,500. If about 1% are African-American, as stated in the link, that would be about 225 people. So this would be a very small group in which many would almost certainly be known to the others.

Again, I want to caution that these facts do not mean the motives weren’t racial. They may very well have been; we just don’t know.

What we do know is that Obama not only has declined to use the Lane murder as that sort of “teachable moment,” but that his only comments on the matter so far have been the following:

This sounds like a pretty tragic case,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest replied when told about the murder of Christopher Lane. Earnest said that he hadn’t heard about the murder previously…

Earnest said that Obama’s comments after the Trayvon Martin case apply here. “[T]he president I think himself has spoken pretty eloquently about violence,” Earnest said when asked why Obama commented on the killing of Martin but not of Lane. “He expressed his concern about the impact of violence in communities across the country,” he added, referring to Obama’s comments after the Martin case.

Obama’s comments after the Martin case? First there were some off-the-cuff remarks about how Obama identified with Trayvon Martin. Then he gave a speech after the not guilty verdict was rendered, the text of which is here. In it, the president focused mainly on airing African-American grievances about profiling (including reminiscences about his own experience in that regard), empathizing with the grief of the African-American community without mentioning anything about Zimmerman or his family, asserting the need to have still another “conversation” about race, fighting against stand your ground laws (which had nothing to do with the case), ascribing African-American violence and poverty to “a very difficult history” (i.e. slavery and discrimination), and calling for a federal program to give young young African American men “the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.”

Extrapolating from those previous remarks, it’s difficult not to conclude that in the Lane case Obama identifies more with the accused killers and their families than the victim of their attack (whom he has not mentioned), that he would like to work in some further gun restrictions if he could (which probably would have little or no relevance to the facts of the case), that he thinks the killers were angry about profiling, that their violence was motivated by that same “difficult history,” and that they need to know we care. Not a word about the actual influences that seem to have come into play here: gangs, father absence and the breakdown of the family in general, and a popular culture that glorifies and extols senseless and nihilistic violence as a way to prove that one has the requisite toughness to enter manhood.

Bradley Manning wants henceforth to be known as Chelsea Manning

The New Neo Posted on by

No, this is not the Onion:

“As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun.

Transsexualism is an extremely poorly understood and controversial condition—its cause, its meaning, its very reality, and most pointedly its proper treatment. I’m not going to go into all that in this post except to say I do not think it is a unitary phenomenon. I have come to the conclusion that some transsexualism has a biological etiology, and some a more purely psychological one (which can sometimes feature quite a bit of pathology and sometimes not), and some a mixture. We’ll leave it at that for now.

What interests me about this new Bradley/Chelsea Manning announcement is that he/she (never was the use of the double pronoun more apt) seems to want us to pay for it:

“I’m hoping that Fort Leavenworth would do the right thing and provide that. If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that they are forced to do so,” Coombs [Mannings’ lawyer] said.

Fort Leavenworth told Courthouse News on Tuesday that it does not provide sex-reassignment surgery or hormone therapy, but it does provide psychiatric care.

Methinks somehow that a lawsuit by Manning to compel more than psychiatric treatment is in the offing.

And I can’t resist pointing out that bad puns almost irresistibly present themselves. So please forgive me for asking why Manning does not go the distance, as it were, and request to change his/her last name, too?

ADDENDUM: I absolutely have to revisit this clip right about now (hat tip: American Digest):