Posse Incitatus

At Least It's Over

The Posse didn't watch the DNC clownfest this week, but reports on it clogged the blogosphere. We look forward to some clearer air next week.

For those seeking a good summary and analysis, Robert Musil is hard to beat.

Oh, and the whole balloon thing was hysterical. We almost wish we'd watched for that alone.

The Darfur Question

As the situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate, it occurs to the Posse that the Bush administration may have something up its sleeve - something to once again totally change the international situation and the election dynamic.

Consider: the UN is once again powerless to do anything.

Consider: the victims are black Africans.

Consider: the US has no major commerical interests in the Sudan.

One of the opt-repeated complaints about US intervention in Iraq was that we had too much to gain from it. It couldn't be truly altruistic, and therefore had to be corrupt.

This has its roots in the leftist notion that morality and national interest can never happily concide; the only thing that can possibly motive conservatives is greed, perhaps coupled with hypernationalism.

Darfur offers immense opportuinties to turn these arguments upside-down.

If the UN once again fails to act, the cries of the "multilateralism before all" left will seem even more pointless and counterproductive.

Furthermore, by acting unilaterally, George W. Bush would be the first American president to prevent and African genocide - something Bill Clinton famously failed to do.

This not only has huge geostrategic implications, it could be an electoral bonanza. Black Americans would be confronted with the "racist" Republicans saving an African people from genocide. Even Al Sharpton would be hard-pressed to spin that in a negative light.

Moreover, the unspoken convention that human rights don't apply in Africa would be dealt a powerful rebuke. The Robert Mugabes of the continent would be unable to avoid the conclusion that the US might well come for them next.

The Posse thinks this is a wholly worthwhile endeavor. The type of operation would not be an overland invasion, but perhaps the establishment of true "safe havens" guarded by US firepower. Once it becomes clear that the US means business, the Sudanese government might well change its tune.

Could this be an open-ended deployment? Very likely. But better a permanent garrison than more mass graves.

The Deer Hunter

Seems Senator Kerry fancies himself a sportsman:

He was in Wisconsin the other day, pretending to be a regular guy, and was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. "I'd have to say deer," said the senator. "I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach... That's hunting."

The hell it is.

The Posse has some small knowledge of woodcraft. We are not expert hunters, be we know quite a few.

None of them crawl around on the ground when hunting deer.

Out west, we hear people hunker down on ridges and sometime "push" mule deer here and there (elk, too, and they are fine eating).

Over the past few years, we've also pushed various swamps and swales, though our companions usually botched the shot.

But for the most part, the successful hunters we know have sat very still, either in deep brush or in a deer blind, and waited patiently for the deer to come to them.

They did not pretend to be Audie Murphy going under the wire near some Nazi machinegun nest.

Even the choice of weapon seems strange. A shotgun? Sure. Slugs are required by law in some areas because of population density.

Here's just such a weapon.

But a double-barrel? Never heard of that. Maybe a fancy over-under - but only a super-rich guy like Kerry could afford a shotgun like that - if such a beast even exists.

Yet another example of Kerry trying to seem authentic, only to look like an idiot.

The Timing of the Leak

At the risk of bringing up something so last week, the Posse notes that the Sandy Berger story has all but vanished down the ol' Memory Hole.

Without the Dem convention, it would still be a hot topic, blogged on and updated regularly. But now the political reporters and even bloggers are busy in Boston. The story is effectively dead.

Seems like Jonah Goldberg was right.

Excellent work, Lanny.

Andrew Sullivan is a Moron

We can restrain ourselves no longer.

We used to read Andrew Sullivan on a regular basis, long before the Posse Incitatus was formed. He wigged out at times, but usually made sense.

Not any more.

Andrew's attacks on George W. Bush are so pathetic, we are compelled to take it apart:

ONE ISSUE ANDREW: Since I'm getting swamped by emails lambasting me for leaning toward giving Kerry a shot, it may be worth defending myself from the assertion encapsulated by the following email:

Why don't you just admit it Andrew? Whom ever supports Gay marriage can count on your support.

Of course, John Kerry doesn't support marriage rights for gay people. And in 2000, George W. Bush, whom I endorsed, didn't support equal marriage rights. I haven't noticed my supporting Al Sharpton or Dennic Kucinich on those lines either. The notion that someone who has views about a whole host of topics and who has backed both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the presidency is some kind of one-issue voter strikes me as deeply unfair. But telling.

Also telling is your constant abuse of Republicans for being anti-exclusionary when they – by your own admission – embrace the same damn position. The difference is that at least the GOP is open about it.

So let’s review: Karl Rove = evil, Democrats = tolerant.

What makes this so insulting is that the leftists you now play footsie with are the exact same people you used to castigate for enforcing a monolithic view of homosexuality.

Remember those days? Probably not.

I should say up-front that, of course, the president's support for the most extreme measure imaginable on the issue of marriage - a constitutional amendment - has obviously affected my view of him. The fact that he did so without even attempting to explain himself to the gay community or even his gay supporters merely compounded it.

Funny, Alphecca disagrees. He thinks Bush is spending too much time on this. Is he lying?

Many of you think it's no big deal, and you're entitled to believe that. For someone who has spent much of his adult life arguing for gay equality and for gay inclusion in the Republican party, it obviously is a big deal. How could it not be? If Bush favored an amendement restrcting the rights of, say, Catholics, would anyone be surprised if a Catholic decided not to support him on that basis? Would the blame be assigned to the voter or the president? The very notion that a gay person should simply acquiesce in the FMA is itself an expression of prejudice against gay people and the legitimacy of their aspirations and beliefs.

Yes, we think there are larger issues at stake, LIKE THE WAR.

Maybe you’ve heard of it.

MANY ISSUES ANDREW: But, of course, my concerns about Bush are emphatically not merely related to the marriage issue. The blog speaks for itself on this - over the last few years. From the minute Baghdad fell, I expressed concern about hubris and chaos.

Yes, you always had a defeatist strain. The minute anything went wrong, you were wringing your hands, as if all military operations were supposed to cause no casualties and no damage.

You were always a chicken-hawk in the sense that you favored war, but only a bloodless one.

At the first sign of fiscal disaster, I called Bush to account for his spending policies.

Yes, everything is Bush’s fault. For a political junkie, you are woefully ignorant of how government works. The president proposes, but Congress disposes.

If you want cuts in spending, you will have to get a more conservative Congress. Bush could veto every budget out there, and the spending would simply get put back in. Why was the budget balanced under Clinton?

It wasn’t his great fiscal restraint, it was the more conservative Congress that did it. We went from 55 GOP Senators to 51. When you trade in Spence Abraham for Debbie Stabenow, spending will go up.

You should be smart enough to figure this out.

As a cultural liberal, I'm obviously alienated by Bush's embrace of everything and anything James Dobson says.

And what about Michael Moore? Does he alienate you?

We will have to parse the next bit piece by piece:

As a believer in free trade, I was offended by steel tariffs;

Good thing Bush repealed them.

as a federalist, I was appalled by his incursion on states' rights, from marriage to marijuana;

You keep saying you’re a federalist, but it’s a pretty thin veneer. We’d wager if the Supremes found a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, you’d do back flips – federalism be damned.

as a balanced-budget conservative, I was horrified by the president's insouciance toward deficits and expansion of entitlements;

And you think Kerry will show restraint? The man more liberal than Kennedy?! This is beyond wishful thinking.

as a strong believer in the moral superiority of American values, Abu Ghraib was an indelible lapse, however effectively it is white-washed by the Defense Department.

Again with the defeatism. Because our soldiers are not angels, we will lose.

Abu Ghraib was a failure of discipline and nothing was “white-washed.” They were perverts, Andrew, who did all sorts of stupid things and then got caught and punished. Wartime is like that.

Does all this represent a capitulation to the "left"? On all these matters, I'd argue that my core principles remain unchanged.

Yes, you remain a defeatist looking for excuses to embrace the Democrats. You assume that our soldiers will win bloodless victories while avoiding any vice; you assume that Democrats will suddenly disavow their love of high taxation and high spending.

You are projecting your personal desires onto a party that will have nothing to do with them. It’s beyond wishful thinking and borders on intellectual dishonesty – not with your readers, but with yourself.

Should the war trump every other issue? In some ways, yes. But, as I have argued, I'm not sure that the choice is as stark as some want to make it out to be. I have yet to discern a distinction between Bush's and Kerry's Iran policy, for example.

Funny, the Iranian mullahs have. That’s why they want Kerry to win.

If our major unfinished task is "nation-building," I'm not convinced Kerry would be much worse than Bush.

Kerry, assuming he could take a consistent stand, would bail out at the first opportunity. He has already said that democracy isn’t important and that a dictatorship will work fine so long as our troops can come home. Furthermore, his advisors will be the same crew that ignored the threat of terrorism during the 1990s.

Why do you think they will be perfect this time around?

And Bush's errors - the WMD debacle, for example - have definitely made him less effective on the world stage.

Oh, so those were Bush’s errors? British intelligence didn’t make any? Get a fucking grip.

No British prime minister will go out on a limb for an American president in the foreseeable future. Pre-emption has been largely discredited - by Bush himself.

Blair was the one who wanted to go through the UN. Blair was the one who drove the WMD direction. Americans respond to the moral component, but Blair demanded the UN be involved.

What should Bush have done, disbelieve British and American intelligence estimates? Just shrug them off?

This is public record, Andrew. You’re re-writing history using DNC talking points as your Gospel.

When I listen to the president on the war, I am heartened by his support for democracy. I take back not a word of praise for his conduct after 9/11 and during the buildup to the Iraq war.

A position you share with a lot of anti-war activists. “Why I was for the war, but now…”

It’s a straddle. You vote for the war but not the money to pay for it. You support the “buildup” but not combat operations.

It’s intellectual cowardice.

But I think he has shown himself to be at worst incompetent and at best feckless in many aspects of the conduct of the war at a time when such lapses are unforgivable.

Funny that you find the Dem's lapses forgivable. Why they're ready for another chance! They turned down Bin Laden four times, but hey, everyone makes mistakes!

What a load of crap.

But let's assume you're actually being honest here (stupid, but honest).

Okay, you have fallen completely for the notion that the liberation of Iraq and its rehabilitation could somehow have been planned out for years in advance in some back room of the Pentagon.

You know who else thought like that? Robert McNamara.

War is chaos, Andrew, and if it scares you, don’t advocate it. If you are going to ascribe every defeat and setback to incompetence you have no understanding of it and aren’t fit to comment on it.

The enemy wants us to lose. They will change their tactics and the key isn’t how well you plan, but how fast you adapt. This administration is amazing at making that adaptation.

It is well known that you supported keeping the old Saddamite Iraqi army around for police duties, a typically stupid and ignorant position given the facts on the ground.

The old army had already deserted en masse. The ones that remained were shot through with Saddam loyalists would could easily have infiltrated our operations and fed information to the Fedayeen. If you think the Shi’ites would have responded to such officers, you’re clearly insane.

Did the scope of the insurgency take us by surprise? Yes. But so did the speed of the collapse. Again, war is chaos and cannot be predicted. What this administration did was retool in record time and slowly squeeze the life out of the enemy.

And yet you demand more. You demand perfection. If you don't get it, it's time to throw the GOP overboard and go with the proven idiots, the Dems.

All this leads me to look at the alternative. Heaven knows I have been critical of Kerry. But I want to give him a chance. So sue me. I know in this polarized climate, such indecision is rare and punished. But it's my best take on what's going on. And the joy of a blog is that I can simply write that - and let the chips fall where they may.

It isn’t indecision, its intellectual dishonestly. You are deluding yourself and your readers by projecting traits onto Kerry that he simply doesn’t possess.

You are holding Bush up to one (unattainable) standard and then damning him for falling short. Then you suggest that Kerry somehow could achieve otherwise, utterly ignoring the people who would be entrusted by him with national security. Sandy Berger? Madeline Albright? This the Dem first team. The same people who blew it in 1998 are the ones you think will run a flawless war on terror.

It’s bullshit and we have to call you on it.

So, What Did We Watch?

Last night the Posse enjoyed the 2-disk unrated cut of Underworld. For a low-budget movie with little star power, it's really quite good and we highly recommend it.

The added footage wasn't all that interesting or necessary, but the new extras are nice. The "Fang vs. Fiction" documentary was amusing.

For the casual viewer, though, the original release will be quite sufficient.

Sorry, Not Watching

The Posse is taking a pass on the Democratic National Convention this week. Call it time off for good behavior.

Other bloggers have this thing covered and then some, and frankly the quadrennial parade of paleo-liberals has become too much to endure.

In the interest of balance, we probably won't watch the Republican convention, either.

The Third Front

The always essential Belmont Club has a series of posts on the Global War on Terrorism's Third Front: the southern Pacific.

The Arroyo government's craven capitulation to Islamic kidnappers has only made the situation worse. The Posse has long thought that Iran or the Sudan would be the next theatre of war, but Indonesia and the Philippines are far more vulnerable to terrorist infiltration - and through governmental weakness, far harder to clear.

Indeed, Arroyo has effectively advertised the southern reaches of her country as a haven and promised that hostage-taking will be rewarded, at least for the short-term.

That being the case, Islamic terrorists being hunted down and killed in Afghanistan and Iraq may seek greener pastures in the remote islands of the southern Philippines.

The Depravity Deepens

Thanks to the candor of Barbara Ehrenreich, today in the New York Times we find yet another example of moral depravity.

Apparently killing one's unborn children to avoid the horror of shopping at Costco isn't enough: women should be proud of their infanticide:

You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me.

"Say it clear, say it loud: I killed my children and I am proud!"

Get this: sometimes women who have abortions for medical reasons wish there were better alternatives.

Barbara is pissed:

The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing.

Indeed. They recognize that human life is precious. The scum.

But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis?

Everyone catch that? Aborting a child to avoid having to life in the 'burbs and shop at discount stores is morally the same as aborting one that may not survive.

Now the Posse would prefer to see even "defective" children carried to full term, especially since the definition of defective is so open to interpretation. This sounds an awful lot like eugenics, but hey, that's what choice is all about:

Medically informed "terminations" are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.

One wonders how the pro-choice movement will react if it is possible to test for homosexuality in the womb and these children are slated for "vanishing." All part of "a woman's right to choose," apparently.

What makes the piece so over the top is the barely-concealed rage that her "sisters" might actually regret or question the morality of this selective murder.

It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about aborting "defective" fetuses. At least 30 million American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as "convenience" - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group, only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.

Or maybe some of those women learned how truly awful abortion is once they experienced it. Far from feeling empowered, they repented of what they did and now wish they had chosen differently.

That isn't hypocrisy, it's learning from experience.

And there lies the true fear of the pro-choice movement. Society is turning against them and they don't like it.

Some day Roe v. Wade will be seen as a blot on American jurisprudence, similar to the Dredd Scott decision.

We can only hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

Harshest. Fisking. Ever.

The Posse takes a break from the Sandy Bergler scandal for this brutal fisking of the "peace movement" by Ali of Iraq the Model:

The Posse cannot do it justice, so read it in full. NOW.