Bibi Rallies Israel

In his speech to the Knesset a week ago former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to rally the people of Israel and prepare them for what is to come. He praised the bravery of the troops and the stoicism of the ordinary people who told him from their bunkers:

“Go on”, they said, “we are ready to stay in the bomb shelters for many more weeks, as long as you finish the job”.

Netanyahu used his time to make three points, to set the agenda for the future.

1. The concept of unilateral withdrawals has collapsed.
   
2. The root cause of the conflict has been finally exposed. “At its core, this is a conflict about Israel’s very existence, whatever our borders may be.”
   
3. The need for alliances
   

There is, he said a simple way to understand the conflict.

If our enemies lay down their arms, there will be no more war. But if Israel lays down its arms, there will be no more Israel.

...

I believe that the day will come when a new Cyrus will emerge in Persia to replace the genocidal Haman of our day. But until that day comes, Israel’s enemies must know: This nation is strong! This army is strong! ... and the people of Israel shall dwell in their land for eternity.

Of course, he’s only doing his job, sharing his view of the steps needed in the days to come and inspiring the people of Israel with a sense of their glorious future.

But that is what national leaders are for.

Lebanon War Not Disaster, Says Expert

Military expert Edward N. Luttwalk has always enjoyed being a contrarian, sometimes annoyingly so.

Now that everyone is talking about the defeat of Israel in the Lebanon war, Luttwalk proposes that in retrospect it won’t seem so bad. He illustrates his points with comparisons to 1973 when it seemed that Israel was almost overrun by the Syrians and the Egyptians.

For one thing, the Hezbos did not fight as well as the Egyptians in 1973. For another, Israel stopped the advance of the Arabs in 1973 the moment that it got its army formations fully mobilized. Immediately upon full mobilization of the reserves it found that it could go on the offense.

Hezbollah, he writes, did not fight that well. You can tell that by the very low casualties suffered by Israel.

When an IDF company attacked the mountain town of Bint Jbail, losing eight men in one night, that number was perceived in Israel - and broadcast around the world - as a disastrous loss.



Many a surviving veteran of the 1943-1945 Italian campaign must have been amazed by this reaction. There too it was one stone-built village and hilltop town after another, and... a company that went against them would consider the loss of only eight men as very fortunate.

And the Hezbo rocketeers were unable to fire off their rockets in concentrated barrages that might have led to hundreds of Israeli civilian casualties.

In a way, Hezbollah’s position as an unrecognized armed community has given it an enormous benefit, because it operates in the shadows in Lebanon. But the closer it comes to a nation-state actor the more it becomes responsible for the safety and security of the people in southern Lebanon, and the more it will find its actions and options constrained by its status as an official government.

Blacks, Hispanics Dip At Top NY High Schools

About ten years ago New York City set up a special program to help boost enrollment of black and Hispanics at their three top high schools. You can only get into them by passing an academic test; no racial quotas allowed. So the program provided special tutoring for blacks and Hispanics.

Trouble is that the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics at the three top high schools has been going down in spite of the special tutoring program. What’s the problem, asks reporter Elissa Gootman in The New York Times? Robert Jackson knows. He’s “chairman of the City Council education committee.”

“The statistics clearly show that black New Yorkers are being shut out... Is it institutional racism or is it something else?”

Oh no! Not institutional racism rearing its ugly head! And in New York City too, where evil white conservative institutional racists and bigots are pretty thin on the ground! How could it happen?

Actually, if you look at the graph of enrollment at the three top New York City high schools, you can see what is happening. The real story has nothing to do with black and Hispanic students.

The real story is that enrollment of Asian students is soaring and the enrollment of white students is plummeting.

Of course, that is a story of no interest to the race baiters of New York City and the earnest liberal journalists at The New York Times. But Gootman puts her finger on the real problem for the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics.

Now parents, educators and academics explain the racial makeup of the schools by pointing to a variety of factors, including... the hiring of private tutors by the middle class and continued use of the admissions test alone.

Well. We’d better put a stop to that, for sure. Imagine, overprivileged middle-class parents are going out without permission and spending their own money on private tutors. There’s institutional racism for you. Or is it cultural racism?

Here’s an idea to deal with this problem. New York City should have a program to regulate the price charged by private tutors. Otherwise the rich and the middle class will skim off all the good tutors and the underserved communities will be marginalized and continue to be shut out of the good schools.

What is Going to Happen in November?

The generic ballot shows the Democrats up by 10 percent or more. And the Gallup Poll’s wrong track/right track poll shows that a majority of voters think that the nation is on the wrong track.

That means a Democratic win in the mid-term elections in November, right?

Actually, it doesn’t, according to political science candidate Jay Cost.

You can’t trust the generic ballot directly, he writes.

If you correct for the systemic pro-Democratic skew inherent to the generic ballot, you will see that - as of today - it is essentially predicting a draw. And, much more importantly, the generic ballot is not to be trusted anyway because it violates certain assmptions necessary to use it to make a prediction.

The right track/wrong track question is also unreliable.

Between 1984 and 1986, voters started to feel nice and sunny about the state of the nation. Net positive ratings rose by about 15%. Did that help Reagan and the GOP? No. Their share of the two-party House vote dropped by 2.3% - and they lost the Senate.

The fact is that elections are won on election day. Will voters be voting against $3.00 gasoline? Will they be voting against the mess in Iraq? Will they be voting for better health care benefits? Will they be voting for a tougher war on terror?

We don’t know. That is why we are going to hold an election.

What is a Conservative?

What exactly is a conservative, and what is a liberal? We like to squabble about such things. Partly we want to separate the sheep from the goats, and partly we want to flatter ourselves, to define our chaps on the side of the angels, and the others... well, they are on the other side.

Young and brilliant Ross Douthat takes a swing at the definition in The American Conservative, and reminds us that the “liberals” have always had the winning hand.

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon’s dictum that the ends of politics are “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point — and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism’s fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries.

More crudely, Douthat suggests that liberals (or progressives as they prefer to be known) are those who respond to the whisper first made in the Garden of Eden: “ye shall be as gods!” Conservatives have always balked at that one.

The thing is: it’s not as simple as that. Today’s liberals want to go full ahead on embryonic stem cell research and its veiled promise of immortality. Yet they also oppose genetically modified crops and declare that we must stop trying to dominate Nature in order in order that we might Save the Planet.

Conservatives, while supporting traditional marriage, are mostly devotees of capitalism and freedom, radical secular notions that exactly fit Bacon’s dictum about the conquest of nature.

So which side are you on?

Resource Bank for Defense of Marriage

Back in the 1970s gay advocates scorned “bourgeois” marriage. Now in the 2000s they are advocating “gay marriage” on civil rights grounds. And the occasional liberal court has agreed with them.

The gay marriage advocates have insisted, writes Ryan T. Anderson, that nothing about gay marriage implies polygamy or bestiality. Indeed conservatives who have argued that if gay marriage is justified on equal protection grounds then any sexual relationship can be so justified have been stigmatized as

slippery-slope reasoners, scaremongers, and bigots. After all, it was said, no one seriously argues in favor of state-sanctioned polygamy or polyamory.

But now polygamy and polyamory advocates have published an ad in The New York Times titled “Beyond Gay Marriage.” It has

more than 300 signatories include feminist icon Gloria Steinem, NYU sociologist Judith Stacey, Columbia University anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, Georgetown law professors Robin West and Chai Feldblum... [and Nickeled and Dimed] writer Barbara Ehrenreich.

So you know that things are getting serious on the defense of marriage front.

Just in time there is a resource bank available to defend traditional neterosexual marriage and it’s on the web at www.princetonprinciples.org.

It’s entitled Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles and it headlines recent research on the benefit of marriage for men, women, and children. Best of all, it has a bibliography where you can get to the primary sources on marriage research.

Here are the ten principles:

• Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.


• Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
  
• Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.



• Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.


• Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.


• Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.


• When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.


• A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.


• The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.


• "Civil marriage" and "religious marriage" cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.

Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Social Attitudes and Shame

Even though young people in Britain today are regularly drunk as skunks, university students would never think of driving drunk, claims Mary Ann Sieghart. “What a change in a generation!” she writes.

And social attitudes have changed for the better in other areas, too. People are abandoning their SUVs and recycling. It is not so much that the law has changed as a kind of “social revolution that may well save our planet.”

This social revolution is a tribute to the power of shame. It used to be kinda cool to drive drunk and get away with it. Today it is shameful. And as for failing to recycle! In Seattle we are well on the way to making it a crime.

Maybe there are other areas where the power of shame could save the planet.

Russian immigrant Julia Gorin clearly wants a social revolution in attitudes towards abortion. On the website of Ms magazine, she notes, you can sign a petition. “I had a abortion.” Bully for Ms.

But Julia Gorin narrowly escaped being aborted thirty years ago. It was only due to the nurse at the Soviet abortion clinic “who sensed a tinge of reservation [in my mother] and kicked her out.”

Just as well, because Gorin’s only sister was killed in a car crash in 2000.

How about setting up another petition, she suggests helpfully: “I was nearly aborted!”

One of the proud boasts of the twentieth century was its conquest of shame—or rather sexual shame. But it is clear that in the most progressive circles where sexual shame has been most thoroughly banished a host of other shames has been created: environmental shame, sexual harassment shame, SUV shame, racist shame, patriarchal shame, even glass-ceiling shame.

We conservatives should learn a lesson from this. As the consequence of legal abortion becomes more and more clear to women—and in the case of Julia Gorin’s mother it is a lack of “close people,” children and siblings, in her life—it will create an opportunity for another social revolution.

We should learn a lesson from the liberals. The key to a social revolution is not in changing laws. It is in changing attitudes.

We should work to change hearts and minds, and make abortion Safe, Legal, and Shameful.