Eye yay yay

The New Neo Posted on by

I lost my eyeglasses back in July, but since I only use them for night driving I can get by okay without them. And so, in all the flurry and brouhaha around my move, I’d neglected to replace them till now.

I must admit I was also hoping they’d somehow turn up, as lost things often do if you wait long enough. But there’s been no Lassie Come Home for my wandering specs, and it’s time to bite the bullet and fork over the money for new ones.

And yet it turns out that eyeglass prescriptions are a highly regulated area of modern life. They’re almost as dangerous as narcotics, apparently. Continue reading →

Dissing the generals and fighting the previous war: the historical underpinnings of MoveOn’s moves (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I here.]

The 60s in Vietnam represented a sea-change in attitude towards the military, and not only on the fringes of the Left. Respected mainstream jounalists began to see their task less as transmitting information and more as questioning authority, especially of the military brass and the civilian leaders at Defense in Washington. In many cases, those in charge were considered not just incompetent and/or confused, but purposeful liars, deceivers, and betrayers of the fighting forces under them whose lives were being wasted in a cause already known to be lost.

This press agenda took its full form not in the early days of the war, but after the PR debacle of the Tet offensive and the real debacle of My Lai and the initial investigatory coverup of that terrible event. Tet caused the trusted and avuncular Walter Cronkite to leap over the heretofore rigid boundary between reporting the news into opinion journalism. In Cronkite’s opinion, Vietnam had become a lost cause.

I’ve devoted a great many words to Cronkite’s Vietnam conversion (see this and this). In his famous Tet broadcast of February 1968, Cronkite spoke wearily of the nation’s loss of trust in those in charge of the war. This disillusion was also his own:

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.

The sense of betrayal is sharp. And, indeed, as I wrote yesterday, General Westmoreland in particular was the culprit here with his too-optimistic pronouncements about victory being close at hand. Prior to Tet, the astute North Vietnamese correctly calculated that they need not actually win the war in the conventional sense; all they needed to do was cause the perception that it would be longer and harder than Westmoreland and company had indicated. And so Tet was planned to do just that, and it succeeded wildly in its aims, despite decimating the forces of the North. Continue reading →

Fighting the previous war and dissing General Petraeus: the historical underpinnings of MoveOn’s move (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

The antiwar, anti-Bush Leftist organization MoveOn isn’t keen on preemptive strikes—except for its own towards its designated enemies, who now seem to include General Petraeus.

MoveOn has drawn quite a bit of metaphorical flak for its ad in the NY Times aimed at Petraeus. MoveOn’s boldness in attacking a very popular general and insinuating that he is not only mistaken but a dissembling traitor—and all of this before he even gave his testimony—has disturbed even some Democrats, if only for tactical reasons.

Nancy Pelosi, for example, says she “wished [MoveOn] wouldn’t have done that ad”— and I’ll bet she’s telling the truth. It puts the Democrats in an oh-so-delicate position. Do they alienate their MoveOn base by criticizing it, or do they draw the ire of the bulk of the great American middle for not supporting the military? Continue reading →

9/11: six years later

The New Neo Posted on by

[My 9/11 story can be found here.]

It’s been six years since 9/11. Too long for it to remain fresh in our minds, but too soon to know how the aftermath will ultimately go. We are still engaged in what has come to be known as the “war on terror,” a phrase no one really prefers but that’s hard to replace with a better one.

For some, fighting this war is the most important task on the world agenda. For others, it has become either an excuse for the sins of the present administration, or a highly exaggerated myth against an enemy that hardly exists, or both.

On the original 9/11, these positions hadn’t yet hardened into the bitter divisions we see today. Sure, there was the blame-America-first-and-foremost crowd, already quite vocal. For an excellent example of that genre, see what the abominable Michael Moore had to say as early as Sept. 12, 2001. He highly doubts Bin Laden had anything to do with the attack, of course, and it’s just racist for anyone to even suggest such as thing. But if Bin Laden did it, it’s our fault anyway, because we trained him and we’re the real terrorists. And Bush sparked it all by not cooperating with Kyoto and—this might just be my personal favorite—by walking out of the lovefest known as the Durban conference on racism.

But Moore and others were tangential and relatively muted voices, distant enough so that I—who relied back then almost exclusively on the MSM for my news—barely heard them, and was able to imagine for a while that a time of renewed unity of purpose was at hand. Continue reading →

Another act in the surge theater: setting the stage for Petraeus’s testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve likened the political machinations around the surge to theater. And today, as we await General Petraeus’s testimony, the usual players are taking on their customary roles.

The MoveOn Left continues to consider it important to disqualify Petraeus as a liar and Bush stooge before his testimony even begins (“General Betray Us”). Harry Reid has his finger to the wind and is saying the Democrats will now consider withdrawing their demands for a withdrawal date. The Nation calls the surge a “cruel hoax” and discounts any positive results as fleeting and illusory, by definition. And the NY Times kicks up a lot of dust in an effort to spin the fact that the public overwhelmingly trusts military leaders such as Petraeus more than the President or Congress to report on Iraq and make recommendations on how to deal with it. Continue reading →

Osama gives a history lesson

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s American History 101, the 60s according to Osama:

In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the white House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the Presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up from the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefitting from the continuation. And so Kennedy was killled….

Osama has Donald Rumsfeld as a major villain of the pre-JFK Vietnam War although Rumsfeld was a mere twenty-something aide to two relatively obscure midwestern Congressmen at that time. He only started his own political career as a Congressman from Illinois in January of 1963. And prior to 1965, the year the first American combat troops were ordered to Vietnam by Kennedy’s successor Johnson, our involvement there was limited to financial aid and military training of South Vietnamese troops.

But Osama seems to think that JFK was elected President on some sort of anti-Vietnam War platform after Rumsfeld and his aides did all this Vietnam villager killing. and that Kennedy was then killed because of his antiwar activity.

I’ve often lamented present day ignorance of history in general, and of the second half of the Vietnam War in particular, but this is ridiculous. Osama needs to get some new researchers; I think his present ones might be mixing up their Kennedys, mistaking Bobby’s 1968 antiwar Presidential campaign for JFK’s 1960 one.

But perhaps Osama and his aides don’t need to do their homework. Perhaps Osama knows that one can claim almost anything these days and get away with it. And there’s nothing better for The Cause than to say “yada yada yada VIETNAM yada yada yada VIETNAM yada yada yada….”

History is just a constructed reality anyway, right? A bunch of competing narratives, and if it suits him to make the Democratic JFK the martyred antiwar hero of the Vietnam era, the better to appeal to antiwar Democrats today, so be it. But I don’t think that even most Americans who are ignorant of history are quite that ignorant.

Berating the Democrats: Osama, meet Arianna

The New Neo Posted on by

What do we learn from the latest Osama videotape?

(1) He’s alive.

(2) He looks like crap, between his dyed beard and his cadaverous mien.

(3) The appeal he’s making is to the useful idiots in the US whom he sees as his de factro allies. It must be hard for them to hear him berate them for not doing enough to end the war.

Here’s Osama on the subject:

People of America, the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven’t made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment.

I don’t know about the “vast majority,” but Arianna Huffington is certainly “afflicted with disappointment,” and quite vocal about it.

One can forgive Osama for not having a familiarity with the American system of checks and balances, and how the veto functions. Not to mention that he may not be all that aware of how many Blue Dog Democrats there are, and how hard it is for the Democrats to actually embrace defunding the war and to re-gain their reputation as anti-military and pro-retreat.

But what’s Arianna’s excuse? Continue reading →

Bill and Bush: the comeback kids

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill Clinton referred to himself as “The Comeback Kid” during the 1992 campaign, when his moribund candidacy was revived in the state of New Hampshire. Now Clinton might be poised to quite literally come back—to the White House, that is, only this time as the first Presidential husband ever. We’d have to coin a phrase for it: First Man? Bill’s return would make Clinton-haters’ blood boil almost as much as would its cause, Hillary’s election.

Nixon was another famous comebacker. When he said they wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore, after his 1962 loss in the California gubernatorial election, it was hardly envisioned that he would become President just six years later.

Bush cannot ever be elected President again (do I hear sighs of relief from many quarters?) and wife Laura is highly unlikely to pull a Hillary and run. But Bush is having his own modest comeback lately. Congressional opponents who thought they had him on the ropes vis a vis Iraq and the surge have had to realize that they simply do not have the votes to override his agenda. How they ever thought they might in the first place is a mystery to me; they would have needed substantial Republican support that never seemed to be there.

The lesson seems to be that, in politics, it’s not very savvy to underestimate your opponent or count him/her out. Those who are attracted to the political fray often have an unusual and unexpected ability to bounce back.

They ain’t marching anymore: disbanding the Iraqi Army

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s become common wisdom to say one of the many huge mistakes of the postwar era in Iraq was to disband the army.

But it’s always puzzled me that so many people seem to think it’s a self-evident truth. I’ve wondered, for example, why people thought there was an army left in the first place, and how they thought they could reconstitute it when it had melted away by the time the invasion was over.

Would we just announce army members should appear at a certain time and place, and expect it to happen? We would get the old Baathist generals in to command them to do so, and why would they cooperate? Or would it be done by a house to house search, looking for old uniforms? Wouldn’t these have been tossed, as well as any papers that went with them? Would we go to some master list in Saddam’s defense department, and round up all the men who’d served under him, and imagine they’d make the switch easily to being in an army that would serve the occupation’s needs? Or would we vet them and sort them out, and be successful in telling who was friend and who foe—and, if so, why would this process be any better or easier than just asking for volunteers, paying them, and starting from scratch?

This is not to say that it’s a self-evident truth that disbanding the Iraqi army was a the best thing to do, either. Continue reading →

I knew it all the time: the skinny gene

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, of course. Scientists have discovered that certain people can eat anything and everything and not gain an ounce.

Well, duh. I could have told them that years ago.

In the early 70s I was blessed with three roommates of that sort. It was rather trying listening to them compare notes on the fattening foods they were eating in a vain attempt to pack on the pounds; sort of like eavesdropping on a club I couldn’t join, though I’d have dearly loved to.

Bags of potato chips and candy bars were seeded throughout the house, the better for them to bulk up, but to no avail. They remained very thin—skinny, even. While I? Well, let’s just say I remained “not so very thin”— except when, by force of enormous willpower during my dancing years, I kept my consumption down to one thousand calories a day while exercising like a stevedore.

I can’t really complain, though, because even though I haven’t been blessed with the skinny gene I at least seem to have been blessed with the “more or less average” gene.

At least so far. These things can change, you know. My very own mother was not just skinny but emaciated until she was a young woman. Then she became merely slender, and in midlife she finally reached average, where she has remained. And I have friends who started out skinny and ended up heavy, with no seeming change in eating habits and not even much of a difference in exercise habits. Plus, we’d all do relatively well in a famine.

And those three skinny roommates? Well, I’m still acquainted with them, and guess what? Those genes are holding; they’re still pretty skinny. And think of the fun they’ve had along the way.

Vietnam: remembering the second act

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent Atlantic article by Robert Kaplan entitled “Rereading Vietnam,” the author discusses a number of books that have been given little press and short shrift by reviewers. These are histories and memoirs written by men who served in Vietnam and consider it to have been an honorable task, and they feature tales of heroism in the face of great odds.

In his piece, Kaplan mentions an anomaly in much other writing about that war: the relative absence of attention paid to its second half; its “Vietnamization,” Nixon-driven, half.

I’ve noticed this myself. It sometimes seems that, other than historians and war buffs, most people’s knowledge of even the most basic facts of the war gets cloudy after the year 1969. Continue reading →