Bracing for Haditha

The left wants the alleged massacre of civilians at Haditha in Iraq’s Anbar province to become a new My Lai. They intend for it to discredit the American effort in Iraq just as the actions of troops under Lt Calley in a village in Vietnam nearly forty years ago undermined the war effort in Vietnam.

What actually happened in Haditha? So far we don’t know. So far we understand that Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marines were hit by an improvised explosive device and then “went on an hours-long killing spree to revenge their comrade's death, leaving about twenty-four men, women and children dead.”
As Jed Babbin writes:

Navy and Marine Corps investigators are at work, and other reports indicate that at least three Marine officers, including the battalion and company commanders, have been relieved of duty. It's also reported that more than one enlisted man has been detained pending charges about to be brought.

Obviously liberals and Democrats, let alone Al Jazeera, want to exploit the incident for all it’s worth.

[Rep. John] Murtha, on ABC's "This Week," said, "Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" He's not only ready to condemn the Marines, but all their leaders.

Democrats had better hope that this attack on our nation’s armed services pays off for them with coverups and massacres as far as the eye can see. Because if not it could taint them as enemies of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for another generation.

What is Freedom For?

Up until recently girls were socialized to become wives and mothers, or in the words of the London Economist (sub):

provide comfort and sustenance for their menfolk and children... Any other activity was peripheral.

In Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women the Christian Arab Jean Said Makdisi describes how she “extricated herself, but only partially” from this traditional culture.

And yes, she is the sister of the late Edward Said, author of Orientalism.

Grandmother Teta was educated in the mission schools of Syria, but

the aim of all this admirable teaching was not the guide the women towards freedom, only to turn them eventually into better wives and mothers.

A graduate of Vassar, Mrs Makdisi returned to Lebanon with her husband to teach at Beirut University College, and found that the Lebanese civil war gave her a “passport out of the isolation of middle-class domestic life.” Echoes of Betty Friedan.

Now she watches her daughters-in-law deftly “juggling family and career.”

The great innovation of modernity is freedom, that is, the release of substantial numbers of people from total immersion in work, principally the struggle of bearing children and supplying the food and shelter to bring one or two of them to maturity.

But the industrial revolution changed all that. Its vast outpouring of wealth eased the struggle of life, and of creating life. We see emerging in the nineteenth century the concept of “voluntary motherhood,” the idea of bearing children as a choice instead of dogged obedience to tradition and the way things are.

But then the question arises: what did you do with your freedom? What is so important and vital for you to do that you should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

It is not surprising that the notion of “overpopulation” appeared at about the same time that the prosperity of the industrial revolution allowed people to become less focused on children and more on their self realization. People could say that parenthood was problematical because more children just made the world more crowded.

But if everyone decides to do something else rather than have children then we get today’s Europe where people are not having enough children to replace themselves.

So the question returns: What is so important and vital for educated, liberal women to do that they should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

That is the question that conservative women writers like Carolyn Graglia in Domestic Tranquility and Jennifer Roback Morse in Smart Sex are raising.

And it is a question that is not going to go away. Because for the vast majority of men and women it turns out that there is nothing more important than having children. The other things that modern freedom affords usually turn out to be self-indulgence and vanity.

If you don’t have children, then you wonder if your life has any meaning.

The Culture of Violence in Britain

We've known for a while that the nostalgically remembered Britain of Bobbies and the stiff upper lip are gone forever. Today's Britain is a violent place, more violent than New York City, according to many accounts.

For one thing there is now a knife culture. Writes Shaun Bailey, a charity worker and author of No Man's Land: How Britain's Inner-City Young Are Being Failed,

Where I work, in the estates of west London, youngsters as young as nine or 10 talk to me about "shanking" each other over any kind of "beef". "Shanking" is stabbing. "Beef" means to have a problem or misunderstanding with someone.

And then in the London Times Damian Whitworth relates the story of a friend attacked 20 feet from his front door by an assailant with a knuckle-duster. And he writes also of witnessing violence between a young man and a woman just in front of his front door.

How could this happen in welfare-state Britain, governed for years by a mommy welfare state?

I mean, there's no gun culture, no wild west tradition like in the cowboy United States. How could this happen?

Of course, we are asking the wrong question. We know exactly what is wrong. The violence is not happening in spite of the welfare state. It is a product of the welfare state, and arises wherever people excuse bad behavior with a “root causes” analysis, as in, we have to expect rage until we have solved the root causes of poverty.

On the contrary. Poverty doesn't cause violence. Violence arises when it is tolerated. People who are allowed to be not-responsible in their lives will soon learn to act in a not-responsible manner. People that are allowed to be violent will soon learn to be violent. It happens everywhere the welfare state is tried.

And it can be stopped, any time the political elite is ready to do it. Police Chief Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani did it in New York City.

Meanshile, the kids are knifing each other in jolly old England. Until their elders get a clue.

Let's Celebrate the World Congress of Families

With Google in trouble for skipping observance of Memorial Day—we only do light-hearted observances, they say—here’s a light-hearted event for them to celebrate.

It’s the World Congress of Families, being held in Warsaw on May 11-13, 2007.

I know. In your dreams. Especially given the attitude of Ms Magazine.

But lefty outfits like Google should do some thinking about population. After all, the result of lefty politics and consciousness raising on population has been calamitous. As Don Feder writes, everything the left celebrates leads to an empty cradle.

Selfishness was celebrated. Marriage and children were downgraded to lifestyle options. Women who stayed at home to raise and nurture a family were derided. The importance of fathers was downplayed. Abortion was enshrined as a "human right." And contraception was ubiquitous.

Just think. If lefties continue, as in Europe, to embrace diverse family forms that don’t usually have children, pretty soon there won’t be any lefties.

The World Congress of Families is different. Held provocatively in the center of depopulating Europe, it

will address such timely issues as: the importance of marriage, fecundity as a natural expression of family love and hope for the future, how to counter assaults on the family (including pornography, drugs, a hostile media, cohabitation, divorce and marriage-substitutes), rejecting the contraceptive mentality, promoting pro-family policies, building a new culture of marriage and strengthening the vital bond of faith and family.

Sounds like a light-hearted affirmation of life. Just the sort of light-hearted event that Google likes to celebrate with a goofy version of their logo.

Mixed Reviews on the Paulson Nomination

On Monday, May 30, President Bush nominated Henry M. Paulson Jr., CEO of Goldman Sachs, as Secretary of the Treasury to replace John Snow.

So what does it mean, for the dollar, for economic policy, and for the administration?

In the London Times Gerard Baker sees his role as essentially defensive. Given that income tax reform and Social Security reform look to be dead, the only place where he can make a mark is on the dollar.

Will Mr Paulson be content to go along with the odd twin-track approach of the past few years — publicly expressing support for a “strong dollar” while in practice happily acquiescing in the US currency’s decline?

A Wall Street man may not like having the dollar depreciate on his watch.

In fact his main task may be to prevent the dollar decline turning into a rout.

But the MSM is ready to cheer. In Time Mike Allen echoed the White House line that they had “landed a whale.”

In the strict sense, he is right. Goldman Sachs today sits at the pinnacle of Wall Street. But can he make a difference as the Bush administration tries to deal with the triple threat of high oil prices, declining dollar, and rising interest rates?

The conservative base is sounding an alarm. In Human Events Robert B. Bluey notes that while Paulson has contributed to Republicans his wife Wendy is a financial supporter of Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

And there is the question of the Nature Conservancy. Both Paulsons are active in this conservation group that buys up land to transmit to the federal government. But there have been questions about the Nature Conservancy. That Hank Paulson is

chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy, which is under investigation for financial misdealings that benefited some of its officers and donors, should automatically disqualify him for the top Treasury job.

Goldman Sachs also has dealings with the mortgage giant, the Federal National Mortage Assocation.

According to last week's report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), Fannie Mae managers engaged in a series of questionable transactions, including two with Goldman Sachs, which improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years.

Maybe all this explains why the markets took a dive on the day that Hank Paulson was nominated to be Treasury Secretary.

Who Is Stupid Now?

Everyone knows that the Democratic Party is the smart party and the Republican Party is the stupid party. We know this because liberals and journalists keep telling us. We keep hearing, for instance how smart FDR and JFK and Clinton were. And how dumb Coolidge and Reagan and Bush were.

But if Democrats are so smart, how come that their Culture of Corruption campaign is going off the rails. Remember? Republicans represented a culture of corruption. Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham and all.

But now all we seem to hear about is the Jefferson bribery affair and the $90,000 in cold hard cash hidden in the freezer.

Oh and did you hear about Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) accepting free tickets to a boxing match from a state agency that was lobbying him?

The thing is that somehow those stupid Republicans have managed to remove their embarrassments from the limelight whereas the Jefferson scandal and the Reid boxing fixture look like gifts that keep on giving.

You have to wonder. Was Denny Hastert as dumb as everyone thinks when he complained about the search of Rep. Jefferson’s (D-LA) congressional office? And how is it that Sen. Reid’s boxing exploits are appearing in the public print?

Now Sen. Reid says that it’s his official duty to attend boxing matches, according to Kathleen Hennessey of the Associated Press.

As they say, never underestimate your opponent.

To Understand Our Liberal Friends

You’ll remember that in the twenty years before the 1960s black poverty declined by 50 percent. You’ll remember that crime was down. You’ll remember that unwed births were down. You’ll remember that more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Acts in Congress.

Then why, as Thomas Sowell reports, could a liberal colleague of conservative writer Shelby Steele have a such an emphatically different opinion?

"Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Now there are many of us who, while conceding the importance of the civil rights revolution, recall that many things got worse in the 1960s: crime, violence, education, dependency. It goes on and on.

Then why would liberals insist that they saved the country?

This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves.

Liberals came into the 1960s believing that they needed to rescue the country, and nothing is going to change their minds that the country needed changing or that they succeeded in rescuing it from a fate worse than death. Nothing can be allowed to shatter “the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society.”

Remember this, and keep it in a special place in your mind, for use in emergency. If liberals ever came to doubt their role as saviors in the 1960s it would kill them.