Category Archives: America

UPDATED: Portrait Of An Occupied Country (& Kids)

America, Just War, Middle East, Military, Nationhood, Republicans, War, Welfare

If my daughter was being looked over or even chatted up by frustrated foreign soldiers out on patrol, I would be worried. The image of this stunning, fragile, Afghan girl, dwarfed by the obviously “attentive” military men, conjures the fate of Abeer Qasim Hamza. (At least in the mind of this mother.)

Naturally, Republican deadheads like Laura Ingraham and James Hirsen railed against Brian De Palma’s depiction, in “Redacted,” of the girl’s rapists and killers.

“‘Redacted’: De Palma Tells The Truth”” serves as a reminder of the hazards to Their Children of Our Occupation:

“… A mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes: The only image we have of her is the one plastered on her Iraqi ID card. It was taken when she was a two-year-old tot. She lived with her mother, father and three siblings in the village of Yusufiyah near Mahmoudiyah.
Unfortunately for them, their farmhouse was situated near an American traffic checkpoint. The neighbors later said soldiers would watch the girl go about her chores, and gesture lewdly. The culprits, led by ringleader Pfc. Steven Dale Green—a school drop-out with a police record; recruitment standards are being lowered to fill quotas—would stage mock raids on the family’s home during which Green fondled Abeer.
Finally, Green, accompanied by Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard, hatched a scheme to rape Abeer. In they went, shooting and killing Abeer’s parents and sibling, and then gang-raping her. When they were through with Abeer, they summarily executed her with a shot to the head.”…

In “Portrait Of An Occupied Country,” Al Jazeera intelligently analyzes how NATO (read the US) is rapidly replacing and usurping local Afghan societal structures.

UPDATE: Remember little, innocent Abeer and her family, who died a horrible death at the hands of American soldiers. May the family rest in peace; may the murderers be put to death for their crimes.

Public Prefers Obama To Bush Policies

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Economy, Government, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Yet more proof that Americans love a big government: “According to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, 46 percent said Obama’s path would do more to improve economic conditions in the next few years, compared to 29 percent who said policies put in place by Bush would.”

Don’t take my statement vis-a-vis statism to mean that Bush was less one than is Obama. Not true. The two men exist on the same continuum of statism. Obama has picked up where his buddy Bush left off. My point is simply this: Americans have no aversion to the president who is perceived as more of a big government guy, and is certainly no less of a central planner than was Bush.

In a really strong column I covered the other day, Anne Applebaum encapsulated the singular statism from which Americans suffer:

“…When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane at Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, thanks to bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.

In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not the federal government, and if the oil rig is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, each one of these kinds of events sets off a chain reaction: A new government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports, and new monitors are sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Washington Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control.'”

…this hidden world, with its 1,271 different government security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearance, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal; it has been set up in response to public demand. It’s true that the French want to retire early and that the British think health care should be free, but when things go wrong, Americans also write to their representatives in Congress and their commander in chief demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy [when it was meant to be a republic], Congress and the president respond, pass a law, put up a building.”

[SNIP]

Applebaum’s position, it goes without saying, has been my own for as long as I can remember.

Americans: Needy, Coddled Statists

America, Europe, Government, The State, The Zeitgeist

Americans Say They Hate Government Yet Expect More From Government Than Anyone Else.

For once, a mainstream columnist goes beyond the partisan staked-out positions to look at Americans as they truly are. As an outsider myself, I agree with “American Hypocrites” by Anne Applebaum:

“If you don’t live here all the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans—with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs—demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t just want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is either prevented or fully compensated. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

To put it bluntly, middle-class Americans of the right, left, and center have now come to expect a level of personal financial security that—despite the stereotypes—most people would never demand from their governments. In a review he wrote earlier this month, Brink Lindsey, the vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute—a man who knows what he is up against—pulled up some extraordinary statistics. Most Americans, it turns out, are suspicious of the free market. And most American also approve of high government spending. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don’t trust free markets, and also think ‘the benefits from … Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs.’ And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The number is still 62 percent.

…in Washington, these expenditures are known as ‘third rails’: If you touch them, you’re dead. President George W. Bush talked a little bit about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The ‘privatization’ of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was just too unpopular, particularly among his own supporters.

Read “American Hypocrites.”

UPDATED: 'Brace For Impact!' (Breaking: BHO EXPERT AGREES)

America, Business, Capitalism, Debt

“[A] very successful entrepreneur now living abroad” wrote to John Derbyshire, in response to an article Derb wrote detailing what a “terrible country the US is” if you want “to start an imaginative new enterprise”:

“Capitalism is dead in the US . . . The US was not destroyed by the Russians, the Chinese or even the militant Islamists. They did it to themselves . . . The $104 trillion debt is beyond any possible means of repayment. The only way out will be to monetize the debt by hyperinflation . . . I’m now watching the final days from 8,000 miles away . . . In November 2008, half of the US electorate put a loaded ballot in their mouth and pulled the trigger . . .”

Derb: “There’s a 40-foot tsunami in plain sight on the horizon, and we’re playing beach volleyball. Can Petraeus turn Afghanistan around? How unpopular is the healthcare bill? Will the feds sue the state of Arizona? (What’s that distant rumbling sound?) Is Turkey a friend or an enemy? Should Rahm Emanuel go? Is Elena Kagan gay?” [Or should Bill Kristol resign … Pat Buchanan said something to the effect that Americans are a deeply silly people in serious times.]

Vox Day writes: “The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”

Derb “favor[s] aerodynamic analogies over Vox Day’s merely automotive ones. So: Heads between knees, arms over heads, hold that position. Pray if you’re inclined to. Brace for impact!”

UPDATE (July 12): I’ve searched the Net high-and-low, news outlets, Reuters too, are not reporting what Bill O’Reilly has just announced. A member of BHO’s commission-to-investigate-and-approve-the-levels-of-debt-the-USA-is-carrying has said we are on the road to ruin. Isn’t it curious how left-liberal mainstream media doesn’t even break vital stories any longer? If Bill is right, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, the man is a former Clinton official.

Talker Juan Williams, a simple sort who has long championed Keynesian deficit spending, denying that huge debt is in any way economically deleterious, suddenly got religion on austerity. It is as I said in the post asking the Punditocracy to quit, truth comes into existence in America as soon as someone in the establishment pronounces it, usually a decade or so after we’ve been screaming it from the rooftops.