Reflections  

Crashing on Canada's Couch — It was disconcerting to watch George Bush, on Canadian turf, thank the people of Halifax for taking into their homes thousands of Americans who had been stranded when U.S. airports were closed and flights diverted northward on Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, his thanks came three years late. Of course, his gratitude was a prelude to making demands. (Neither the thanks nor the demands came with any concessions on trade issues, I note.) His talk of a longstanding friendship between Canada and the States sounded like those phone calls you get from old and "dear" friends who chat you up before requesting money. — Wendy McElroy

Join the insanity! — Libertarian presidential nominee Michael Badnarik agreed to join a Green Party move for a recount in Ohio, where idiot leftists continue to believe Kerry won more votes than Bush. Perhaps "join" is too weak a word. The Greens were not on the ballot, and thus had no status to sue for a recount, so Badnarik's involvement was necessary for the suit to succeed.

The recount will cost the challenging Greens and Libertarians $113,000 and the state of Ohio another $1.4 million. Some LP members have objected to Badnarik's participation because the recount forces Ohio taxpayers to pay that $1.4 million bill. I understand their feelings.

So why did Badnarik agree to the move? "We felt that joining the lawsuit was something we could do at no cost to us, and said we'd be willing to participate," campaign manager Fred Collins explained. "I don't believe the vote count will change dramatically. But this will go a long way toward making sure that votes will be counted accurately in the future." Barb Goushaw, co-chair of the Badnarik campaign, said that the move was "a cheap way for us to get more publicity," though she acknowledged that most of the publicity in Ohio was unfavorable!

Why did the Greens want the recount? According to a source close to their leadership, they believe that it may turn the election over to John Kerry, who, incidentally, is helping to finance the affair. The press release issued by the Greens referred to websites (e.g. "Kerry Won") that argue that Kerry actually got more votes in Ohio, because CNN's exit polls showed him running ahead of Bush.

I agree with those LPers who think this was a bad move because it imposed additional costs on Ohio taxpayers. But even if it had not, I think the decision was a mistake. The notion that Kerry actually won Ohio is simply preposterous, a paranoid fantasy of the lunatic left. I can see no reason why Libertarians should help them in their ridiculous quest, even if all it required was Badnarik's cooperation and about $10,000 of Libertarian money. And I doubt the resulting publicity can possibly be worth the loss of such little credibility as LPers have. — R.W. Bradford

Affirmative action for hypocrites — "You're hypocritical" is the favorite put-down of public discourse. It's swift, it's elegant, and most of us have used it. But it is often shallow, and unfair in a tricky way.

For example, in my state there is a region of irrigated farming. It is the most conservative part of the state, and these days it elects Republicans. Urban progressives love to note that the dams and irrigation works were paid for by the federal government. Therefore, the anti-government sentiment of the people there may be dismissed.

What that implies is that anyone who consumes a benefit conferred by the government loses his right to oppose the government. That is not a principle I want established.

It has been shown repeatedly that among college professors in states where people register by political party, Democrats outnumber Republicans by margins of up to 7 to 1. Some conservatives are making an issue of it. George Will wrote a recent column on it, and David Horowitz has said there is a "pervasive blacklist" of conservatives on college faculties. Horowitz is calling for an "academic bill of rights," which critics say would be an affirmative action program for right-wingers.

The instant response of "progressives" is to haul out the hypocrisy argument. Here are these right-wingers who huff and puff about affirmative action for black people, and now they want it for themselves! End of argument. Ignore them. They are hypocrites who care only about themselves.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Steven Lubet, professor of law at Northwestern University, uses this argument. He does it gently, with an air of fairness that is lacking in most face-to-face exchanges with the Left. He ends his column this way:

"Most major universities would likely benefit from the presence of more conservative scholars, who would sharpen the dialog and challenge many assumptions. I might even be convinced to support some form of recruiting outreach or affirmative action for Republicans — but surely my conservative colleagues would never stand for it."

The message: Yes, you have a legitimate complaint, but you're hypocrites, so we're not going to do anything about it, ho, ho, ho.

There is a problem with intellectual diversity on campus. The solution doesn't have to be a government program in which political outlyers are legally assigned to a protected class. Indeed, it had better not be that. Affirmative action for political ideas would be even worse than affirmative action for race, because it implies government management of thought, and that is not a place where any academic should want to go. But there are other answers, and using the hypocrisy maneuver is a way of not finding them. — Bruce Ramsey

Saving Spc. Wilson — One of the nice things about the American military is that it hasn't entirely been taken over by military people. In fact, I think that's one of the goals the Founders had in mind when they slipped in the bit about a "well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State." Militiamen weren't soldiers. They were just guys who'd agreed to take up arms on an organized, ad hoc sort of basis. As just guys, their real lives were back home, which made them a lot more likely to ask questions when some numb-nut higher up in the food chain said something preposterous.

We still have militiamen. Militialadies now, too. We call them national guardsmen and, in mid-December, a national guardsman from Tennessee got the chance to question the Secretary of Defense himself about some preposterous lapses in the military procurement program. What Thomas Wilson wanted to know was, how come American soldiers have to dig through landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor their vehicles?

Putting aside the suspicion that all that talk about "up-armor" and "compromised ballistic glass" suggests that Spc. Wilson may not have clung as tightly to his civilian identity as some of us would have hoped, it's still a good question. Why aren't all of our Humvees armored by now?

Secretary Rumsfeld didn't exactly answer the question. "You go to war with the army you have," he said, "not the army you might want or wish you had at some later time." Then he went on to blame the whole sorry debacle on physics. It was all physics' fault, he said. Not his. We, as a nation, are producing Humvee up-armor as fast as we can.

Afterwards, a government flack named Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence Di Rita chimed in with the news that the military is producing 450 sets of Humvee up-armor a month. Di Rita then went on to mention America's huge industrial capacity and how we'd won WWII — none of which answered the question, why don't we have the army we might wish we had at some later time?

This is some time later. Counting from Sept. 11, 2001, to Dec. 7, 2004 — the day Spc. Wilson asked the obvious — we were 38 months and 27 days into the War on Terror. When we were 38 months and 27 days into WWII, it was March 3, 1945, and we had the army we wanted by then. In fact, we had it in Germany.

By March 3, 1945, the army we wanted had already won every major battle on the Western Front. By March 3, 1945, the army we wanted had kicked the Axis out of North Africa and Sicily, invaded Italy, conquered Rome, stormed ashore at Normandy, broken out, liberated Paris, pushed back the Bulge and crossed the Rhine. By March 3, 1945, the Secretary of War wasn't trying to figure out how to up-armor jeeps so American soldiers could survive routine supply convoys through already-liberated territory. On March 3, 1945, the American army was about to enter Cologne.

After 38 months and 27 days fighting WWII, we weren't straining our industrial capacity to produce 15 sets of jeep armor a day. From the instant the first Zero appeared over Oahu, all the way through to the moment the final Japanese diplomat straggled on board the Missouri to sign the surrender, we averaged — including the time needed to design, develop, ramp up production for, and build with a labor force consisting, largely, of people who had planned to be housewives at this point in their careers — an entire brand-new tank every 20 minutes. And we did it while turning out a warplane every five minutes, a jeep every two and a half minutes, and a ship every four hours and 20 minutes. And a lot of those babies used armor, too.

So, Secretary Rumsfeld and spokesman Di Rita, having brought the Second World War to our attention, brought some other facts to mind, too. Like how German soldiers nearly froze to death outside Moscow in December 1941 — not because German industry couldn't produce winter clothing but because, with the Soviet armies collapsing during the summer, the Nazi government cancelled its war-production contracts. Then, when the snow hit the fan, the only way the Nazis could keep their young men from dying was to collect up all the ladies' fur coats they could lay their hands on and ship them east.

Now I don't want to make any unpleasant comparisons here, but the Nazis got into this mess because their civilian leaders were too savvy to upset the economy by spending more on the war than was absolutely necessary. So I leave it to you, Secretary Rumsfeld and Mouthpiece Di Rita, to explain to me how what happened in Russia in 1941 is different from what's going on right now, with American families having to mail fashionable body armor to Iraq to keep their boys from being blown away.

And how, given the same 38 months and 27 days in which our parents built 90,000 tanks, tens of thousands of landing craft, 300,000 military aircraft, 600,000 jeeps and 7,000 ships, we are straining to turn out 15 sets of Humvee armor a day. And why, exactly, that isn't your fault. — William Merritt

Do it for the children — Examining the post-election rhetoric made a few things clear. First, despite their culture-war talking points, the Dems and the GOP are closer to each other now than they've ever been. Second, neither has any new ideas: the Republicans are happy to continue their slide into European social statism; the Democrats are splintering as the lunatic interest groups they've relied upon for decades get more catty and shrill. Third, none of the other parties have the resources or the marketing sense to do anything more than congratulate themselves over each thousandth of a percentage point gained. Fourth, even if they did have cash to spare, it'd be tough to dent the brains of those used to waddling down to the precinct house to endorse their subsidy checks.

What's wrong with our third parties? Historically, the most successful ones have been personality cults. But once the celebrity leaves, the voters drift back to the big two. Thankfully, now that Jesse Ventura is no longer governor of Minnesota, this model, and its inevitable messianic windbaggery, is all but dead. Still, it got results, while the ideological platform parties — Libertarians, Greens, and assorted mixed nuts — might as well be listed on ballots as "None of the Above." (Nevada thoughtfully includes this option on its ballots.) So, where does a third party stand, if not on a rickety platform or behind a grinning idiot?

Simple: single-issue advocacy. It has to be something which produces a deep emotional response, yet not something that divides, like prohibition or abortion. It should be a cause which promises to end the polarization of the electorate, one which has the power to bring every decent American together to work towards a common goal. (See how the campaign ads write themselves?) Whipping up this type of frenzy is only possible when demonizing a tiny minority, depicting them as responsible for society's ills; given Americans' mania regarding anything done "for the children," this leaves but one possibility: forming the Anti-Pedophile Party.

Immediately, almost 100% of the population supports the new movement. Publicity will be easy to get; if the big parties won't debate the APP, we can smear them as being controlled by the child-porn industry, or by the North American Man-Boy Love Association. When they sputter and claim to be against pedophilia, we can say they're just jumping on the bandwagon.

As with any political party, the rhetoric is what matters. Having an agenda with only one item on it leaves a lot of wiggle room for forming policy, and everything the party pursues once in office can be as distantly related to the actual well-being of children as any "pro-child" proposal made in Congress or the White House. We can even begin dismantling government agencies: after all, the FBI has the world's biggest collection of child pornography, and every day field agents pose as minors and talk sexy in Internet chat rooms. That's sick, that's perverse, that's something America doesn't have to stand for. Vote for decency! Vote for values! Vote for the APP! — A.J. Ferguson

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