THE FOLLOWING REPORTS EACH relate to a topic I discussed in some detail late last year, and I post all of them here because – even though they are all a day or more out of date – they are nevertheless relevant.
The first, a Jeff Jacoby column from The Boston Globe, addresses the similarities between Bush Administration foreign policy and the foreign policies of the Kennedy, Truman and Roosevelt administrations. Jacoby's facts also explain, albeit obliquely, why I (who once proudly and steadfastly identified myself as "a lifelong Democrat") was long ago driven out of "my" party: I could no more abide the Democrats' matrifascist-inspired (and thus ultimately anti-American) pacifism than I could assent to their hate-speech subversion of the First Amendment, their hysterical frenzies against the Second Amendment and their female-supremacist erosion of the Fourth and Fifth amendments.
Thus in 2004 I voted for a Republican whose domestic economic policies I mostly deplore – and unless the Democrats offer me a genuine hawk in 2008 (assuming I am still alive by then), I might well do the same thing again.
Bush is of course not a genuine hawk. His continued blundering in Iraq – particularly his defiantly insufficient assignment of ground troops – is an outrage that utterly belies his hawkishness. It also reflects an indifference to our soldiers lives and well-being that, just as some Democrats have already charged, is very much in keeping with this administration's domestic-policy indifference to the plight of working families and lower-income people in general. But in the all-important realm of foreign policy, Bush is nevertheless superior to John Kerry, whose contempt for those of us here below the salt is even more breathtaking. Never mind Kerry's insulting avoidance of economic issues. Kerry also made it damnably clear he would not only unilaterally disarm the U.S. (voluntarily relinquishing our nuclear bunker-buster program), but would very probably withdraw in haste from Iraq and – worse – revert to the failed policy of treating Islam's 1400-year war on civilization as a mere crime problem. To paraphrase what Abraham Lincoln said of General U.S. Grant, at least Bush fights.
In any case, the Jacoby link is here. (If registration turns out to be necessary, I apologize.)
The second link, to a news report in The Seattle Times, is an "I told you so" for some of my Pacific Northwest readers – people who include my best friends. It shows that – just as I predicted – the Seattle/King County Democrats are handing Christine Gregoire the bill for delivering her gubernatorial victory. The link is here. For my earlier analysis of what this Seattle/King County coup will almost certainly mean, go here.
As you read it, remember I voted for Gregoire. (See also "Three Examples of Terrible Stupidity," below.) Were Gregoire able to maintain the moderate policies she espoused during her campaign, she would have preserved the state's social safety net against Bush League ravaging, and she would have been solid on the Second Amendment (having infuriated the Seattle/King County matrifascists by opposing additional restrictions on concealed carry). But now all that promise is destroyed. Political reality dictates that we will have instead a Washington-state variant of what the national Democratic Party became in 1960, when Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley stole the election for JFK and thus took total control of the Democratic Party – which he and his cronies ran with Hitler-type absolutism for nearly the next dozen years.
The last link is a sheer pleasure to post. It is yet another report of brilliance and heroism by our canine friends, akin to all the other true stories of dogs who save children from drowning, drag grown men from burning buildings and fearlessly protect their human companions – often as fearlessly as the tiny Dachshund who, near Seattle in the late 1970s, saved his owner from a rapist by leaping on the rapist's back and attacking so savagely the rapist required nearly 200 stitches before being thrown into jail. Once again, another of the infinity of reasons I so love dogs. Also – and note as you read how this latest story's canine subject obviously knew the tsunami was coming – another reinforcement for my belief that dogs are aware of realities we humans cannot begin to imagine. The link – to a news report mostly obscured by the obscene all-tsunami-all-the-time circus of media mindlessness – is here.
Posted by Loren at January 3, 2005 11:47 PM