Posse Incitatus

Rites of late February

It must be late February, beca

use the Detroit papers are full of lame and convoluted arguments in favor of letting a mediocre Michigan team into the NCAA tournament.

As is tradition, the sportwriters have exhaustive knowledge of the absolute minimums required to gain entry: overall winning record, winning conference record.

Both are true.

But for Michigan to gain entry, we have to presume that the rest of the field is as marginal as they are, which simply isn't the case.

As a football fan who is relatively knew to college basketball, it has taken me a while to figure out that there are literally hundreds of "basketball schools" out there - schools with names I've never heard of. Some of these outfits don't even appear to have a football squad, but they dominate the boards.

Thus the usual Michigan arguments "Our fans travel well!" and "We're in the Big Ten!" appear to have zero relevance to the topic at hand. Instead, schools with names like Xavier, Marquette and Gonzaga find themselves looking down on the Wolverines from lofty heights. Their student enrollments may only reach into four digits, but they can put five men on a court. More to the point, five men who know how to win - which is more than Mighty Meeechigan can say.

Meanwhile, the Spartans are also undergoing their usual late winter routine: finding out of they can fumble away the Big Ten title. The team is more confused than ever this year - dominating monsters, rolling over against punks and then phoning in games they can't afford to lose. They have four games left - Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and Purdue. Two of them should be easy wins, two should be tough, but the problem is that no one knows which is which.

A team which lost to Northwestern at home for the first time since Reagan was president is simply too unpredictable to, uh... make any predictions. Against Wisconsin, the Spartan faithful got to watch three teams on the court rather than the usual two: Wisconsin was there, and the Spartans showed up with themselves and their evil inept twins. Very odd.

Hopefully the team has finally acquired a sense of urgency. Certainly they did during the last 12 minutes on Sunday. We'll see if they can maintain it.

Meanwhile, down in Ann Arbor, the arguments will continue until the final, doom-sealing loss.

The Oscars came and went

The opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference. 

The Posse is truly indifferent to Hollywood.  This year, not only did we not watch the ceremony, we neglected to blog about how we weren't watching.

Thanks to commenter David for reminding us, or the whole thing would have passed us by entirely.

Why Obama may push gun control - no move is too inept

Earlier, I downplayed fears that Barack Obama's administration might try some sort of gun control.

A large part of my argument rested on the belief that Obama wasn't stupid; that he understood the mood of the country and that he would try to govern within his mandate.

My bad.

It is increasingly clear that his operation is now the gold standard for ineptitude, picking unnecessary fights, taking untenable positions and nominating a series of cabinet secretaries that had to have been suggested by Karl Rove.

Exhibit A is the mind-boggling provision in the "Stimulus Bill" to roll back welfare reform.  Mickey Kaus has this covered.  He is also correct that undoing this reform pretty much plays to the stereotype that liberals aren't about results or helping people, they are just about keeping people on the dole.

The fact that the first major legislation to come from a Democratic administration is all about demolishing one of the most popular and universally admired achievements of Bill Clinton's presidency speaks volumes.

Right to Life and the National Rifle Association did not get heavily involved in the campaign.  The way things are going, Obama is going to force both of these groups to fight like mad.

Gun owners are already bracing for the worst - permit applications are up, sales through the roof.  The real question is whether the Dems in Congress will repeat their 1993 March to Minority.  So far, it's looking that way.

It's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Let none get out alive

 

Growing up as I did in a liberal town, it was not surprising that tended to see things through the liberal lens. Let there be no mistake, I was never a liberal myself – I was always a fierce anti-Communist and thought highly of Reagan – but I internalized many of their concepts.

One of those was the pro-choice notion that abortion would ensure that only “wanted” children were born. Why it made perfect sense! And since we were overpopulated anyway, the more kids that didn’t happen, the better. (I can recall a conversation in high school where I noted with pride that I was an only child – and that I too would have only one, ensuring a net population decrease. Wasn’t my family virtuous?)

But one thing that I never fully grasped was what abortion actually was. The literature ran eavy on the “keep your laws of my body!” and very light on the specifics of the various procedures.

Part of this was the willful deception used by the abortion lobby to conflate abortion with all birth control. They argued that anyone who objected to the slaughter of infants also wanted to ban condoms and pretty soon we’d be in some bizarre world where women were treated as reproductive slaves. I think they made a book and movie about this. I watched the movie in Sci-Fi Club and was really, really bored by it. That’s what I remember: boredom.

Anyhow, the more I learned about abortion – what it was, how it worked – the more grisly and morally reprehensible I found it.

All of this leads to this article which I found via Best of the Web about a “botched” abortion, that is, a procedure where the baby didn’t die inside the mother.

Apparently the child was born and then killed, which of course is wrong. The “right” thing was for it to be killed and then pulled out in pieces. If that had happened, we’d all be none the wiser. A human life would have been snuffed out, but no big deal.

If nothing else, it illustrates the moral depravity of the abortion movement.

On the one hand, we are told that children are precious and that all manner of things need to be done “for the children.” I recall Bill Clinton using this phrase to justify just about everything he wanted.

Yet the same folks treat children with a degree of gruesome callousness that boggles the mind.

Let there be no mistake: this was not a “botched” abortion. It was a successful one. The baby died. Mission accomplished.

Increasingly, whether the child is killed inside or outside the mother doesn’t matter – it’s a mere technicality, a regulation to be waived or a law in need of a loophole. They’re already working on protocols to make that line easier to cross.

Reading this article, I can understand what the abolitionists felt all those years ago: that our nation, for all its faith, its good deeds and its kindnesses, was so steeped in evil that we were beyond any divine forgiveness. That the horrific cost of the Civil War – two percent of the entire population dead, entire regions devastated – was lenient punishment for what we had done.

The strategic opportunity

You’d have to turn to the back pages to find it, but Iraq seems to be pretty quiet right now.

The election went off without a single incident.

The old adage is: if it bleeds, it leads, and since there wasn’t any bloodshed, the media didn’t give it much coverage.

There was the Superbowl, Obama’s latest tax-evading nominees, and so the chattering class loss interest.

Still, I hope that wherever he is, George W. Bush is savoring the moment. It is his victory.

Bush did a lot of things to piss me off, and I think a lot of the current anti-GOP sentiment is his fault. He wasted more opportunities than most people get.

But...

He was right on the Surge and right on Iraq, and it counts for a lot.

Still, it seems clear that the Obama administration has little interest in Iraq.  Instead of being a lever they can use against hostile regimes, they see it as an embarrassment and they’d like our troops out of there as soon as they can bring ‘em home.  They are determined to squander this strategic opportunity.

I've often said that true realists look for national advantage and don't flinch from using every means necessary to get it.  Yes, they will work with tyrants, but they always do so with the intent of improving their nation's overall strategic position.

Today's "realists" seem intent on pissing off our allies and wilting before our enemies. 

The fact is that on a strategic level, George W. Bush left the US in a very good place.  Our military is battle-tested and highly respected.  We have forged new strategic alliances with key players like India.

It is our will that seems lacking, and now is not a time to go wobbly.

Consider:  Hosni Mubarak is Egypt’s president-for-life, and he’s had a long one. Still, he’s getting up there, and from an actuarial standpoint, doesn’t have that much time left. This leads me to wonder: how will Obama deal with the succession?

We know that when it comes to tyrants, liberals are all over the place. They kiss up to Castro but vilify Pinochet. So how will they react? I suspect they’ll simply recognize whichever strong man takes over. They’ll make noise about freedom, democracy, etc. but won’t actually do anything about it. After all, this is the bunch who thinks we can do business with Bashar Assad.

Here’s a pessimistic thought: What if the Egyptians fumble the handoff – what if civil disorder spreads and Al Qaeda pops up? What if Hamas decides to turn its attention westwards to get a real patron rather than one they have to bribe?

Does this White House have the ability to handle the situation? Will they use their leverage in Iraq or will they be sending dozens of roses to Libya and Syria?

The indications so far are not encouraging.  Everybody wants to test Obama's will - Biden was right about this at least.  We'll see how he measures up.

So much for the sympathy

What is going on in President Obama’s press office?  Via the Hated Instapundit we found this:

It’s 3 p.m. and the phone in the White House press secretary’s office is ringing. It rings and rings and rings. Eventually, a recorded voice asks callers to leave a message—followed by a second voice saying the voicemail box is full.

After a full week of such calls, a human being answers. But Ben Labolt immediately bristles when asked to spell his name, refuses to give his job title, and says he is going “off the record” until I stop him to explain that the reporter grants that privilege, not the other way around—a basic journalistic standard that Labolt seems unaware of. He soon hangs up without even hearing what I called to ask about.

Let’s hear it for transparency!

I have called 202-456-2580, the main number for the White House press office, going back to the Nixon administration. Never has anyone in the press office declined to spell his name, give his job title, or hung up, even after the kind of aggressive exchanges that used to be common between journalists and flacks—and between journalists and high government officials, for that matter.

So he has brought some form of change, it just isn’t change for the better.

The excuses (offered by other press secretaries and people in the comments to that post) are mostly along the lines of “Hey, they’re new on the job, give them some time.”

I’m sorry, but the election was held in November.  The administration has had months to assemble a public relations staff that understands how to answer a phone – and surely at some point they went over their job titles.

It is increasing clear that this truly is an “accidental” presidency: most of the people involved in it haven’t the fainted idea of what it is that they want to do, other than collect a government salary and burnish their resume.

The Obama administration is so used to having the press cover for them that they honestly don’t know how to deal with tough questions.  Their response is going to be to use doublespeak: claim to be one thing will being something else, and hope their shills will cover for them.

At some point, this won’t work because Obama will have to make a decision that can’t be parsed, split or obfuscated.  Either Gitmo will close or it won’t.  He won’t be able to say it is closed if it isn’t.  That is when the wheels will fall of the wagon.

It will be interesting to watch.