The Case for Rumsfeld

No doubt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has an aggressive manner. No doubt he has made plenty of mistakes. No doubt he has humiliated dozens of generals. But resign?

We can understand why the MSM is parading the opponents of Secretary Rumsfeld through the chat shows. They will do anything to damage the Bush administration. It is not even
conscious; it is instinctive.

We can understand the frustrations of the generals. If only Rumsfeld had followed their advice. A Wall Street Journal editorial appreciates the many grounds that Generals Swannick, Zinni, and Batiste might have for wishing that they had been led by someone else.

But we the American people have different priorities. We want someone to think the deep thoughts about America’s grand strategy. We want someone to keep on the job in Iraq and deal with the larger geo-strategic issues arising out of global Islamism. And we also also want someone to transform the armed forces of the United States to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

It’s fine to criticize the president and the secretary of defense. But, as perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. writes:

It bears mentioning that few, if any, of those demanding Mr. Rumsfeld's removal offer an alternative.

In particular, it bears mentioning that nobody has proposed an alternative strategy. Even Candidate John Kerry in 2004 merely proposed to the voters that he would execute the president’s strategy in Iraq better than the president.

Since nobody is proposing a radical change in US strategy, what’s the point of changing horses? Rumsfeld will be gone in a couple of years anyway. And then the new president and the new secretary of defense can change anything they want.

Brit Working Class Warms to BNP Fascists

In Britain this week everyone is writing about the horrifying move of working-class Brits to the racist British National Party, or BNP. And there is a fear among the chattering classes that the BNP will make substantial gains in the local elections coming up in May. But they really cannot believe it. Writes Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph,

I find it hard to believe that a sixth of people in this tolerant, decent and middle-of-the-road country really will... put an X in the far-Right box when they fill in their ballot papers in two weeks' time.

Oh please. It is the middle class that believes in tolerance, decency, and middle-of-the-road. The working class belonged to the Labour Party because it was a fighting party that at least talked about a class war against the Tory toffs.

The problem is that the traditional working class, the non-working class that lives in “social housing” and “on the sick,” i.e., on disability rather than work, has rather gone off Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Actually, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the Labour Party has gone off them.

It used to be that the Labour Party lived and breathed the working class, but now it is more interested in canvassing support from social workers, teachers, and immigrant Muslims and doing the multicultural thing. Understandably the working class feels betrayed.

On top of that the welfare state has destroyed the authentic culture of the working class. It used to be that working-class men had jobs, got married, and supported their children. They liked a smoke, and they liked a drink. In the welfare state, they don’t need working-class men. Sorry fellahs.

In Germany when the ordinary people got reamed by the lefty politicians in the 1920s they regressed, in their demoralization, to the tribal politics offered to them by Adolf Hitler.

Today in France and in Britain the elite has tired of telling the working class that it is the salt of the earth. They have gone on to other enthusiasms. Whereas they used to demonstrate their progressive faith by throwing other peoples’ money at the working class now they show how advanced they are by encouraging unlimited immigration and making Britain into a tolerant multicultural society.

And they are surprised that their former proteges are upset?

What is happening is that the working class, the folk that the Fabian socialists had organized into the tribal politics of class, is now shifting towards another form of tribalism, the tribalism of being native French and native British and hating the new pampered favorites of the political class. Abandoned by their lefty tribal chieftains they are seeking new clan leadership.

Women and Forgiveness

Since it is Easter, columnist Minette Marrin is thinking about forgiveness. And, she admits, she doesn’t get the point. After reviewing the news of the past week, including the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, she writes:

I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.

There is, indeed, a good reason to wonder about the point of forgiveness in the larger social and political context. Evil is evil and must be fought to the death. But I think that the point of forgiveness manifests itself in the small world of the family, in particular in the face-to-face world of the woman and her personal relationships.

Let us try to imagine why forgiveness might be, not divine, but merely practical, and especially practical in a woman’s life and in her family relationships.

In the first place we have the evidence of Marvin Olasky and his 1990 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. He rehearses the system of rehabilitation used by 19th century charity workers in getting people out of the gutter and on to their feet. The first item in the A-B-C-D-E-F-G system as A for Affiliation. Upon meeting a needy person the charity worker would first try to find out about family members or friends upon whom their victim had a claim of support or affection. In other words, the workers were trying to bring together a family that had broken apart. It is likely that success would require forgiveness between the estranged family members.

Secondly, there is the evidence of the Asia Times columnist Spengler. Only half in jest, he laughs at the idea of women priests. “A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never forgive anything,” or indeed forget anything. While it is true that: “Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them,” the same does not apply to relations between women. Can women really afford not to forgive other women? Forgive helps women repair a damaged network of care.

The other reason is surfaced by James M. Ault, Jr. in his sociological study of a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spirit and Flesh. Everyone knows that fundamentalist churches are hopelessly patriarchal. Women are second-class citizens. Well, not quite.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

How might this destructive power have been mitigated? By forgiveness.

I propose that while the destructive conflict of the men’s feud is mitigated by law, women’s conflict is mitigated by forgiveness.

Is it perhaps significant that the major force in the early Christian church was well-to-do Roman women? It might explain why, in Marrin’s words: “Forgiveness is central to Christianity.”

Seniors Like Medicare Drugs

For months we have been hearing horror stories about the complexities of the new Medicare Part D drug program. Seniors were totally angry and confused and would likely take their revenge in November.

But now that the deadline for signup is approaching, it turns out that seniors are fairly content, writes Donald Lambro in the Washington Times.

[T]he latest Washington Post/ABC News poll found 74 percent of all seniors said they had "an easy time" signing up, compared to only 24 percent who said it was too confusing.



As for all those reports suggesting the discount savings were small to nonexistent, this poll found just the opposite. A sizable 63 percent said they were saving "a lot" or "some," compared to 26 percent who said their drugs were just as expensive.

Of course, for us taxpayers, maybe that isn’t such good news. If all those seniors are so happy, maybe it’s because we are getting shafted.

Even the AARP is happy. Its “poll, released last week, reported 78 percent of seniors who have signed up for the benefits were happy with its results.”

The fact is, of course, that the plan is complicated. When you get ready to sign up you find that there are literally dozens of different programs out there.

Still, it’s good to find out that the gloom and doom merchants were wrong. Again.

Conservative Cool

What young person would be a conservative in Britain? That is the question that Nigel Farndale asks in the Daily Telegraph.
The answer, unfortunately, is nobody. The problem is the David Starkey test.

Dr Starkey once said that, as a young man, he felt more embarrassed about coming out as a Conservative than he did about coming out as a homosexual.

Hmm. And that is just the half of it. Your average impressionable Brit is deeply affected by his favorite rock stars and comedians. One leading comedian asserts on his website that he is “committed to non-violence and is an active campaigner for CND and the Campaign Against Arms Trade.” Thank goodness.

But here in the United States things are a little different. There is a feeling—tell me if you have felt it too—that there is something risky, something edgy, something transgressive about being a conservative. It must help that we have a genuine conservative movement with campus chapters and all. And then there are the conservative rites of passage, being hauled before the diversity Star Chamber for conducting a diversity bake sale, and having the conservative speakers you bring to campus heckled by the Angry Left.

If you are a conformist, a girl for instance, you listen with rapt attention to your professors railing away against the evil Bush and the awful Halliburton. If you are a guy, you just cannot be a man and just let yourself be covered in ordure by some pimply lefty.

But how can we help our Brit fellow travelers get some backbone?

Irish to Observe Easter Rising: Brits Keep Stiff Upper Lip

For the first time since 1969 the Irish are going to observe the Easter Rising of 1916 with a military parad. They will celebrate the Easter Sunday when Irish patriots (or terrorists) rose in rebellion against the Brits and seized the General Post Office. The result was the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and independence from Britain for the Irish after centuries of oppression.

In the Daily Telegraph Tom Peterkin reports that

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister, has said that the parade is an opportunity to build on the Easter Rising's legacy and pay tribute to those who built the republic.

and also identify his Fianna Fail party with Irish nationalism, as opposed to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, which has reached 10 percent popularity in Ireland.

But some say that it “will romanticise the violent rebellion used by the Provisional IRA.”

Back in Britland a Telegraph editorial about the event keeps a stiff upper lip and commends the Irish.

We hope the weather holds, and the participants enjoy themselves. As we often observe in the context of Orange marches, the ideal ought to be of a society where such parades can happen uncontroversially.

Then comes the little dig.

We hope that Unionist politicians will attend the ceremony in future years; and, by the same token, that Northern Ireland's republicans will turn out to applaud their Orange neighbours' parades.

The parade will feature a march past by the Irish Defence Forces so presumably there won’t be a flap over whether the Irish gays and lesbians get to demonstrate their Irish pride.

Pope Walks Way of the Cross

Back in 2003 the Slovakian government signed an agreement with the Catholic Church “to let doctors and health-care workers in Catholic hospitals decline to participate in abortions as a matter of conscience.” Let no good deed remain unpunished. This year “the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights... ruled Slovakia in violation of its EU 'obligations,'” according to Daniel Henninger. Tolerant, those Euro-secularists, aren’t they?

It is evident that Pope Benedict XVI understands the stakes. According to George Weigel, biographer of Pope John-Paul II,

"Ratzinger has been thinking about Europe for 25 years," Mr. Weigel told me. "He needs to address the problem of a Europe in which consciences are being coerced by transnational institutions. This is the cash-out of what he means by the dictatorship of relativism. It's a real issue with real world consequences."

Can the Church hope to make headway against the fierce secularism of Europe? Henninger thinks he may. In 2004 as Cardinal Ratzinger he had a debate with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the pope, if you like, of Euro-secularism, and Habermas emerged from the dialog to create

a mini-sensation by suggesting that religious communities deserve respect for having "preserved intact something which has elsewhere been lost."

In Italy there has been a renewal of interest in the monastic life among educated young women.

Today Benedict XVI lead the Way of the Cross procession in Rome. Opening with a prayer, Benedict said Jesus' suffering "is the whole of human history, a history where the good are humiliated, the meek assaulted, the honest crushed, and the pure of heart roundly mocked."

On Sunday he will celebrate Christ’s resurrection for the first time as pope.