Pearl Harbor Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is the sixty-eighth anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows, about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

A couple of facts: it’s become fashionable to believe that FDR knew about the attack in advance and let it happen anyway. But those 12/7-truthers are almost undoubtedly wrong. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war, and he knew a Japanese attack was coming at some point, and informed his generals to that effect, but he knew none of the particulars in advance.

It’s odd how this idea of a government in cahoots with the enemy, willing to let innocent Americans die, keeps coming up again and again. A certain not insignificant segment of the population appears to favor such conspiracy theories, probably because we don’t like feeling vulnerable to sudden attack. We’d rather think Daddy in the White House could have stopped it but chose not to—that makes him powerful but amoral, rather than powerless to protect us.

Here’s a post I published last year on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated. Will and resolve in war remain extremely relevant these days, in Afghanistan (at least Obama hasn’t made any references yet today to “the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor,” his gaffe from July, 2008).

Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

”¦No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Here’s the speech itself:

[NOTE: The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. It reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. A wise choice.]

The lonely fight of an AGW “denier”

The New Neo Posted on by

Read his cri de coeur here:

I find it rings flat with me to have to face people asking where the scientists were when we were overcoming so many many obstacles to get a rare fair hearing. The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room…We were there screaming our lungs out all along.

[ADDENDUM: The NY Times covers itself in glory by pretending that Climategate is all about a few emails where scientists got a little carried away with the rightness of their cause. Once again, the Times shows its contempt for its readers and their knowledge of the facts, as the editors say “run along now children; it’s okay, the Times has spoken.” Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the scope of the Climategate files knows it’s about far more than the emails, but the Times is counting on its ignorant readers to remain so.

“No one should be misled by all the noise,” write the editors. And it’s true; no one should be misled by their noise any more, although many undoubtedly will. But the Times is increasingly a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.]

[ADDENDUM II: How to write an entire WaPo op-ed about the dire need for massive government intervention to stop global warming, without ever once mentioning Climategate.

And watch Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt bob and weave as he pretends to answer questions, all the while resolutely following the current MSM meme and claiming that Climategate is all about the emails. The code and the messy and manipulated database are never even mentioned. But hey, as Hoyt quotes another Times editor as saying, “We here at The Times are not scientists.”

You can say that again. Of course, the same increasingly seems true of the researchers at CRU.]

The worst and the dimmest

The New Neo Posted on by

[McChrystal’s] chance came at an Oct. 8 meeting of Obama’s principal advisers, presided over by Jones — the “dress rehearsal” for a full-scale National Security Council gathering the president would hold the next day. Speaking by video link from Kabul, McChrystal began with the policy underlying his approach, established by the White House review, hastily compiled in February, that led to Obama’s March 27 strategy announcement and the deployment of nearly 22,000 new troops through the spring and summer.

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to a participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ ”

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what McChrystal created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger and more longer-lasting . . . than we had intended.”

Whatever the administration might have said in March, officials explained to McChrystal, it now wanted something less absolute: to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, deter it and try to persuade a significant number of its members to switch sides. “We certainly want them not to be able to overthrow the government,” Jones said.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this.]

Foxy lady Paloma Faith

The New Neo Posted on by

This is Paloma Faith, an English actress and singer. I’d never heard of her before, but the following outfit was probably designed to remedy that condition. If so, it succeeded admirably:

palomafaith.jpg

And here’s a closeup, which I sought because I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, and couldn’t figure out what I was looking at:

palomacloseup.jpg

So, what sort of animal tail is Ms. Faith sporting? I’m still not sure, although I tried some Google image searches to find out. Are those squirrel tails? (Don’t think so; they seem a bit too thick). Or raccoon tails (to go with the eye makeup)? (Don’t think so; they’re not striped enough.) I have finally come to the conclusion that Paloma might be displaying three fox tails on her breast, for reasons best known only to her.

The entire hideous ensemble puts me in mind of a dark memory from my youth: the fox fur stole, a fashion still popular in the 50s although it originated earlier. I had a deep horror of those little beasties, which consisted of the entire fox skin (yes, including the feet, head, and all, eyes replaced by glassy orbs) wrapped around the neck and hanging casually down the front, the fox jaw somehow securing the whole thing by its teeth being used as clamps.

And here is a photo of the real thing. You can’t get its full measure unless you see it being modeled, however (I couldn’t find a good photo of that; please provide a link in the comments section if you do):

foxstole.jpg

Noonan on Obama and Afghanistan

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, I’m back to critiquing Peggy Noonan’s columns.

But please forgive me; there’s a personal reason this time. As vanderleun has pointed out, she seems to have stolen my meme:

After the president announced his plan he seemed to slip in, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” Then came the reference to July 2011 as the date departure begins. It was startling to hear a compelling case for our presence followed so quickly by an abrupt announcement of our leaving. It sounded like a strategy based on the song Groucho Marx used to sing, “Hello, I must be going.”

Oh, I know; she probably doesn’t read me. It’s one of those independent parallel observations. And another reason I think she doesn’t read me is that in her very first sentence, Noonan writes:

A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.

Au contraire. I was looking for Obama to use the “e” word and call the enemy an enemy, and he most assuredly did not. This omission was hardly accidental; it takes work to write a speech like that without it. Noonan ought to know something about writing speeches.

But she still seems caught in the snare of Obama Arrangement Syndrome. And although she notices the “hello I must be going” message, she fails to draw any conclusion from it, or to recognize its importance as a communication of lack of resolve—one that the world, enemy and ally alike, will hear.

Jones and the Climategate data: when was it destroyed?

The New Neo Posted on by

The blog Wattsupwiththat makes an excellent point (hat tip: commeter “huxley”)—one that the press might have pointed out as well, had its members been the least bit interested in doing their jobs: if the raw data was actually destroyed back in the 80s, why do all of Jones’ subsequent emails indicate it still existed, that he was loathe to release it, and that he would even prefer to destroy it rather than have it fall into enemy hands?

These are the possibilities: either it existed all those intervening years and he destroyed it more recently, or it was destroyed back in the 80s and he didn’t want to admit that fact and leave CRU open to criticism. In other words, either he was lying then, or he’s lying now.

[NOTE: And yes, I know that “data” is plural. But in common usage in the US, it’s usually treated as singular, which I’ve done here.]

The Sunmaid maiden gets a makeover

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but I think this is an utter outrage.

Why mess with an icon that has stood the test of time? Oh, I know she’s been spruced up periodically in the past, but she’s always remained recognizably the same person (a person with whom, I might add, I identified—long dark curly hair, for example)—till now.

Here are the traditional Sunmaid raisin maidens:

sun-maid.jpg

And here is the new Disneyfied version, her folksy blouse replaced by something that looks like spandex, her hair lightened from deep brunette to a honey brown and worked on slightly by one of those ceramic straightening devices, and the grape basket gone, the better to show off the attractions of her new streamlined torso:

sunmaidnew.jpg

[NOTE: When I was a child, I used to gaze at the Sunmaid raisin box and contemplate infinity. She carried that basket of grapes, after all, and for some reason I always imagined there was a box of Sunmaid raisins displayed there, too. On that raisin box there would be a drawing of the Sunmaid raisin girl carrying a platter of grapes and another Sunmaid box, and on that box there would be…….]

Palin and the birthers: “it’s a fair question”

The New Neo Posted on by

The blogs are all over the fact that, when pressed about Obama’s birth certificate, Sarah Palin said that it’s a fair question. You know what? It is. But to the Palin-haters (and their numbers are legion), this is just another example of her dimwitted nutjobby flat-earther mentality.

Let’s hear what else Palin had to say:

Palin suggested that the questions were fair play because of “the weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son — ‘You need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he’s your kid,’ which we have done.”

Palin doesn’t sound so crazy to me—especially as compared to certain British-born journalists who write for the Atlantic. And saying it’s a fair question hardly means she thinks the answer would be that Obama is not a citizen. It means that she thinks the papers Obama has produced are still insufficient to completely disprove the accusations, and so he therefore needs to provide the long form of the birth certificate to lay suspicions at rest.

Palin has also made it clear that she puts the birth certificate question in the category of a “stupid conspiracy,” and that she herself isn’t interested in asking it. But she thinks it fair that since some voters want the proof, Obama should have to respond:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point ”“ not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews ”“ have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Clear enough? Palin isn’t a birther. But she defends their right to ask the question, and the duty of candidates to respond fully. Of course, that won’t stop her critics—but what will?

And let’s see, what else would be a fair question about Obama? One that springs to mind is “how about producing those college and law school transcripts?” The issue, as with the birth certificate, is transparency; I have gone on record as saying that I think Obama was born in Hawaii and did well at Harvard Law, although I’m not all that sure about his undergraduate grades.

Why is Obama holding back? Because yes, he can.

Is Obama his own worst enemy?

The New Neo Posted on by

It is interesting that two analyses of Obama’s newly-announced Afghan policy conclude with essentially the same thought. In the WSJ, Eliot A. Cohen ends his essay with these words:

As a wartime leader [Obama] will tend many wounds, but the most grievous thus far are those he has inflicted on himself.

And in yesterday’s Spiegel article, Gabor Steingart closed with:

The American president doesn’t need any opponents at the moment. He’s already got himself.

So, is Obama his own worst enemy (despite the fact that he hates using that word to describe our actual enemies)? I think so. Even if Obama is the Leftist ideologue he appears to be, he could have pursued a slightly more moderate course and kept that fact hidden. He might have thrown a few more bones to the Right and to the cause of bi-partisanship, and not seemed to be so radical nor such a hypocrite.

This would have alienated—and alerted—far fewer people. And certainly, there seems to be no reason why he couldn’t have come up with the content of his recent Afghan speech many months earlier, and avoided worrying much of the American public (and avoided giving Dick Cheney a perfect rhetorical opportunity) when he appeared to be dithering while soldiers died.

Many observers of Obama’s West Point speech (I was not one of them; I read it rather than watched it) found Obama’s delivery stilted, cold, and lackluster. Perhaps there are limits to Obama’s acting ability; even he can’t seem to feign support for this particular policy, with its split personality.

But perhaps there’s even more going on to cause Obama to lose some of his positive energy. My guess is that, for the first time in his life, he feels the heat because he can’t get out of the kitchen, nor talk his way into making it any cooler. The press is still treating him with kid gloves compared to almost any other president, but compared to the media treatment Obama has been used to getting (fawning idolatry), they’re being tough on him, and he must not like it at all. And the unaccustomed scrutiny means that more and more people are connecting the dots and finding the Obama picture less than pretty. This may be a first for him.

Even an egotist like Obama may now be beginning to recognize things are not going well. When the very liberal New York Magazine runs an article that states, “You’d have to be stone deaf not to hear the air hissing out of the Obama balloon,” you know something’s up—or down. The article also features the following description of the Obama White House:

After 300-plus days in office, the president remains, for many of his supporters, a worryingly indistinct figure. One whose pragmatic sensibility is crystal clear but bedrock convictions are still blurry. And whose White House has proved less than fully adept at the marriage of politics and policy, preferring all too often to fall back on their boss’s charm and dazzle to advance the ball upfield.

“I have no idea what they believe,” a leading House Democrat and Obama ally told me recently when I asked if he could define the administration’s governing philosophy. “I know that their governing strategy seems to be, ”˜Don’t worry, the big guy will make it all right in the end.’ They have the sublime sense that they don’t have to do all that much to plan events, or to come up with the message for what they’re doing, or to line up support, because whenever they need to, they can just put Mike Tyson in the ring. And I think (a) it’s wrong, and (b) it’s a bad way to run a White House.”

It’s odd that Obama’s supporters seem to still find him ideologically vague whereas his opponents—present company included—find him much less so. But both sides are more and more in agreement that this is a White House and a president filled with an unusually high level of hubris and arrogance, even in a profession not known for humility.

Did I say hubris? It seems that Obama may be entering nemesis time.

Climategate: using the tried and true Madoff approach

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “BumperStickerist” at Ace’s makes the following observation about Climategate:

What the CRU is doing is identical to what Bernie Madoff did.

Bernie asserted that his investment scheme was legit.

Bernie didn’t share his raw data.

There were skeptics who doubted that Bernie’s investment strategy was legit.

But …

The statements put out by Bernie Madoff’s company were “peer reviewed” by a government regulatory agency. So the skeptics were simply kooks who didn’t understand investing – despite many of the skeptics having expertise in the area of finances and regulations.

Nice analogy. But Madoff was a relative piker compared to the masterminds of Climategate. This is not to make light of the substantial suffering of Madoff’s victims, nor the magnitude of the evil of Madoff as perpetrator.

But Madoff was a single person. Although he was in a position of trust to his investors and he grossly violated that duty, scientists hold an even higher obligation to be truthful. In a sense, their investors are the entire population of earth. And the researchers at the CRU, as well as several other climate scientists who were their colleagues, co-conspired to elevate their own belief system above the facts, in order to advance a political agenda (as well as their own careers) that would (and still could) negatively affect the economy of the whole world.

For a very long time they got away with it, even though (much like Madoff) they would not show their work. At least Madoff is now in prison. Will Jones and Mann ever follow?

[ADDENDUM: Daniel Henninger has a must-read column in today’s WSJ. He makes some points similar to the ones I made in one of my first posts on Climategate, when I said:

The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.

Henninger writes:

If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an [sic] stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Climategate is a matter of extraordinary and nearly unprecedented seriousness. Science itself is threatened.

(Hat tip: “Tom.”)]