When the Missiles Start to THAAD

The short road from the current border clashes between Israel and its Hamas and Hizbollah enemies leads to Damascus, according to Yossi Klein Halevi. The long road leads to Iran, the Iran that is working to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to project them.

That is why it is important that today down at the White Sands Missile Range they conducted a successful test of the THAAD missile, as reported by Jason Gibbs.

THAAD is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile. It’s the missile you would want if you were living in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem and the Iranians had operational nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Actually, the military folks weren’t just pleased with the successful test. They seemed euphoric.

"This was phenomenal," said U.S. Army Col. Charles Driessnack, the project manager for the Missile Defense Agency's THAAD program. "It performed as expected."

They have spent about $4 billion on THAAD thus far, and are $48 million over budget. They could get the missile ready for “emergency deployment” about a year from now.

It sounds like the eevil Republicans, despite twenty years of non-stop opposition from you-know-who, are finally getting missile defense deployed and, all things considered, not a moment too soon.

Feminists Against Choice

In Michigan the state legislature recently passed a bill to permit single-sex programs in the public schools. “No child would be required to attend a single-sex classroom,” writes Carrie Lukas, but parents would be allowed to choose. Those parents who believe that children learn better without the distraction of the other sex in the classroom could have their way. And those parents who believe that co-education “breeds healthy social interaction” could have their way too.

It is a radical concept, of course. The very idea that parents ought to direct their children’s education!

But the feminists object. Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women:

We strongly oppose these bills because the separation of boys and girls, and the underlying (and false) assumption that girls and boys are so different that they shouldn't even be educated together, introduces harmful gender stereotypes into public education. This could lead to, among other possible outcomes, emphasizing math and science for boys, and for girls, less rigorous course work.

Ah yes. The King Charles’s head for feminists. Off in a secret male-only classroom, there is a danger that boys will be gaining an unfair advantage over girls in math and science. We must stamp that out!

I recently spoke with a young women who delightedly told me that she was working as a genetics counselor. She had a degree in microbiology and had worked for a few years in a lab. But then she quit and went to Japan to teach English for a couple of years. Now she’s back and she much prefers her job as a counselor, helping people with genetic screening and associated life decisions, to working in a lab.

You can math-and-science girls all you like, but in the end most women will choose to do people work rather than numbers-and-things work. And why not?

But that is all by the way, and a distraction. Let us get this straight.

It is wrong and it is a gross injustice to maintain a public school system at taxpayers’ expense that impose a one-size-fits-all policy on the education of children.

It is wrong to submit the education of children to the centralizing power of political pressure groups.

It is the right of every parent to direct the education of their children.

And it is wrong for political activists to interfere with that right.

A Republican Brawl in 2008?

After President Bush is goes “a Republican Party known for ideological solidarity is on the cusp of a far more searching philosophical battle than are the Democrats, historically accustomed to bruising fights over the finer points of political theory.”

That is what liberal columnist E.J. Dionne thinks is coming up. “A Republican brawl.”

Why do I as a thoroughly Republican voter think that this is a load of hot air?

Correct that. I expect that John McCain will be as intemperate and out of touch with the Republican base as he was in 2000. Call that a brawl if you want.

Call it a brawl when the bloggers in pajamas take McCain apart. Oops, they are doing it already.

But as for the other candidates, men like Rudi Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, I expect a spirited contest with a lot of ideas spilling around. Call that a brawl if you want.

The fact is that the MSM just doesn’t have a clue about the Republican Party, and doesn’t have a clue about Republicans. It doesn’t know how Republicans think, or how they feel.

And anyway, when was the last time that Democrats has a fight “over the finer points of political theory?”

For one thing, parties don’t have fights over fine points. They argue about big ideas and little gaffes.

It is quite likely that the Republicans will be doing some serious thinking about where they go after Bush. But a brawl? In your dreams, E.J.

Religious Left At Prayer

You wonder about our liberal friends when they agitate for more social programs with fine moral fervor. What about all the money we are already spending? Doesn’t that count?

The religious left had a convocation recently, organized by Jim Wallis and reported by Mark Tooley. The idea was to reignite the Social Gospel movement of 1900.

Like most religious left outfits, Mr. Wallis's groups want to disengage churchgoers from concerns about abortion and homosexuality and refocus them on poverty and the environment... [H]e still looks to the federal welfare and regulatory state as the source of secular salvation.

Doesn’t the religious left worry a bit about concentrating all that secular power in the government? No, because “poverty is not a family value.”

It was at that meeting, you’ll remember that DNC chairman Howard Dean talked about the nation as back in the 1950 with McCarthyism and no civil rights, and all.

Mr. Dean shared hope for America as a "moral nation," with national health care, an increased minimum wage, and a protected estate tax. "The folks in this church are ones who live their faith through works--that is the mark of a real Christian," he assured his audience.

Something there just slipped past me. What exactly does morality have to do with increased government spending and higher taxes?

The truth is that it is politics not the love of God that stirs in the breasts of the religious left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that many of us just don’t want to be forced to pay for the liberal moral vision.

Doing good works with other people’s money just doesn’t sound like the moral life to me.

But really, I’m just tired of all the phoney-baloney liberal rhetoric about the poor and doing it for the children. As Robert William Fogel wrote in The Fourth Great Awakening, the spiritual condition of the poor is worse than it used to be.

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

You could look it up.

In Britain, for instance, over the last century, violent crime has increased by over 2000 percent, even as social spending rocketed into the stratosphere. Or was it because social spending rocketed into the stratosphere?

A Word About Our Fighting Marines

We conservatives honor our troops. “Thank you for your service,” is the constant refrain of the talk-show host. But what do we actually do for them? Do we walk the walk or just talk the talk?

In the American Thinker they ran a speech delivered by Marine Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps Bases (West) to a San Diego community group.

Lehnert began with his son’s graduation at Stanford, at which Tom Brokaw told the graduates that

that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead the most powerful country in the world. The class was beaming.



And then Brokaw reminded them that the liberties and freedoms they enjoyed were being defended by young people their age that did not have their advantages.

Lehnert was the only parent of the graduating class serving in the military. But the Marines he led

tend to come from working class families. For the most part, they came from homes where high school graduation was important but college was out of their reach.

So when he approached three Marines sitting in the sun at a Marine golf tournament to raise money for wounded Marines and asked them why they weren’t playing,

they said that they’d never learned. No one in their families ever played golf and that this was the first time they’d ever been on a golf course. I asked them how many times they’d deployed. One of the young men had just returned from his third deployment and had been wounded every time...



I asked these Marines if I could buy them a beer. They looked at me and smiled. One of them said, “We can’t ask you to break the rules sir. None of us are 21 yet.”

Yeah. It does kinda give you a catch in the throat. But here’s the kicker.

Later this morning I’ll be meeting with educators across the California University system. We are trying to make California more veteran friendly. California hosts 40% of the combat power of the Marine Corps and 40% of the Marine veterans who leave the Corps do so out of Southern California bases. 96% have participated in the Montgomery GI Bill and are eligible for benefits but only a small number enter the California University system. That’s because California, unlike other states did not provide any veterans preference or even reach out to veterans. These combat veterans score in the top 50% of their age group, are drug free and morally straight but are lost to California and return to other states that aggressively work to attract them.

Governor Schwarzenegger is working to change that. We should all be working for change.

How American Racism Works

Conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager was watching videos of “people reacting to radio talk shows.” No doubt it’s a part of his job, to understand his audience.

But he was surprised to notice that there were no black people on the panels. Why not?

Oh, they used to include blacks, responded the firm that had organized the panels. But they had to give it up. White people on the panels would not publically disagree with the blacks.

Therefore, once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they really thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said.

To find out what whites thought, they could not be on a panel with blacks.

Makes you think, doesnt it? White racism, do you think?

Years ago I served on a six person jury. We were judging the guilt or innocence of a black man accused of assaulting a police officer. I found that I wasn’t sure which way I was going to vote until I had heard from the middle-aged black woman on the panel. Finding that she was ready to convict, we five white sheep were ready to go along and vote guilty too.

What do you think? Were we all white racists? Or were we just adopting the precautionary principle, staying out of trouble, making sure that nobody could call us racists?

It reminds me of the old song.

Who’s the racist of us three?

Is it me? Is it thee?

Or the liberal behind the tree?

It is all such a shame.

MSM Doesn't Get Freedom of the Press

It is interesting to follow Hugh Hewitt’s interview (perm) of Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Elizabeth Sullivan. Sullivan had published an article supporting the New York Times’s outing of the Bush Administration’s program to track down terrorist financing. So Hewitt got to do another of his forensic interviews, the kind in which he manages to show that the MSM journalist in question doesn’t have much “there” there.

HH: [The New York Times] named three specific, they named three specific cases where SWIFT had led to the arrest of terrorists. Those three, then, can be reversed engineered by the associates of those individuals. That's...those are three specific cases. But more broadly, what this FBI, Lormel man is saying is that when you tell and broadcast, you alert the less smart, the less sophisticated...



ES: The...it is, I think, not persuasive in this case. Not persuasive to me that that's the case.

Elizabeth Sullivan basically argues that the media should be the judge of whether to publicize a classified program, and that they should not be accountable for making a mistake.

I just don’t think that the American people are going to like that. The whole point of freedom is that it is not a license to do anything you want without accountability, but that it gives you freedom from prior restraint. But if you make a mistake, if you harm someone, then you should pay the piper.

The reason that we have a legal system is precisely to judge contested actions. Did the government judge correctly that the use of SWIFT for tracking down terrorists was appropriately secret? Is the New York Times correct in saying that its revelation of the classified program does not materially harm the nation’s ability to track down terrorists? Let’s try the facts and the law and find out.

And the MSM is arguing that because they are special, because they are important, they should not be accountable for their actions.

They just don’t get it.