Maggie's Farm

Cheney's Hard-Headed Realism

Leslie Gelb in WSJ:"As colleagues attest, Mr. Cheney harbors a bleak view of humankind, especially of Democrats and non-Americans. While well aware of American hypocrisies, he conveys the clear sense that other countries are worse, much worse. He condemns those countries that condemned us for unilateralism in Iraq, while themselves failing to enforce fistfuls of U.N. resolutions against Saddam. He reminds others who harrumph now over what we're doing in Iraq that they hardly ever criticized Saddam's monstrous behavior. A lot of Americans just feel safer with a guy who will stick up for America, hold other countries to account, and talk about the world realistically.

Meantime, too many Democrats portray the rest of the world as just a bunch of misunderstood bunny rabbits who misunderstand us. It's just one big misunderstanding. Democrats often seem to say that we can cure so much of the nastiness in the world with anti-poverty programs, and by allowing more foreign students to study here. Democrats correctly argue that while compromise remains the only proven way to gain allied cooperation, the Bush team until recently scoffed at compromising with them. But that good point gets lost in the naïve sense of the world Democrats convey."
Read entire: Click here: WSJ.com - Cheney Envy

The Bird Dog's vision of utopia would be a world in which the government would leave him alone as long as he follows minimal, uncomplicated, reasonable laws. He would much rather spend his time in the world of big enduring ideas, the worlds of farming and gardening and hunting and bird-watching, the world of poetry and music and dance and science and the Kingdom of God. While he believes that politics is cheap entertainment (since the Greeks - Demosthenes was a big draw), but it is also about dopey, mercenary, small people trying to mess with our lives. Like the LYF, the Bird Dog has a strong Libertarian streak.

So, with politics, unless you are talking about freedom and human dignity as granted by God, not man, the Bird Dog feels he's dealing with trivia. Still, ya hafta fight the good fight even though it may not mean much in the big picture, and even though the tyranny of one Caesar or another may win out in the end.

In moments of frustration, the Bird Dog just feels that we need to politically crush the Lefty totalitarians, the Statists, and the World Government dreamers, so we can get on with what is important in life. But it feels never-ending. It is never-ending. Our forefathers set up an arena for a permanent struggle between individual freedom and government power. I notice that even some serious science-dedicated blogs cannot resist detours into politics. Being Citizens of a Republic is a big deal, and a big part of our identity as Americans. So we can't drop the ball. It's a matter of Duty. (And anyway, if all of the Leftys saw the light, we Americans would still find plenty things to argue about.) But I still wish that that Duty didn't have to intrude quite so much on the important stuff...

Logic and Political Science and Terrorism

Leftist rhetoric about "underlying causes" has always been an annoying pebble in the shoe for the Bird Dog. Always has seemed like an excuse for not acting with confidence and force in the face of ugly stuff. Makes it sound as if life were nothing but one big psychotherapy session.

Therefore the discussions on the causes of terrorism are wearying to the Bird Dog. They are based on the assumption that terrorism is like a disease, and the assumption that political behavior can be explained, in a cause and effect manner, as if Political Science and Sociology were hard sciences. Furthermore, since few in those fields ever took hard sciences in college, they may have an illusion that Science has certainty and rock-solid truths. Even in medicine, simple "causes" are rarely found, and predictive powers are poor when it comes to an individual case.

War, terrorism, crime, the Jim Jones mass suicide - other sorts of society-disrupting behaviors are really just as difficult to predict or to explain as is their absence. These things are rooted in individual psychology and group psychology as much as they are rooted in history and social conditions. Destructive people tend to do destructive things, and even a small number of power-seeking people without inner restraints can do a heck of a lot of damage. That's why even the civilized US needs laws and cops and morals and values. Civilization always hangs on a slender thread

And this is why, for example,  Bin Ladin does not need understanding or psychotherapy, but needs to be killed. The causes of cancer are literally academic - but the solution is often the knife.

Each fall, intrepid, eccentric birders head out to the ridgelines and shores to count migrating hawks along the nation's flyways. Hawks, eagles, and ospreys inhabit the top of their food chains, so hawk populations are an indirect measure of environmental health, plus plenty of folks just dig hawks and eagles for their size and grandeur.

A wise pal (MM - thanks) warned me in the Fall, during an Audubon hawk-count, that if the Dems end up without either the House, the Senate, or the White House, they would go berserk and get wierd and dangerous. Man, was he correct. In just a few weeks, we see Teresa Heinz, Bill Moyers, Jimmy Carter, Screamin' Dean, Harry Reid, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, George "Bong-Man" Soros, Teddy "Hic"  Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Dan Rather, Barbara "Fang" Boxer, and God knows how many other members of the Liberal Establishment, go bonkers. In public. Plus even the Big Media - the only "Big" anything they don't bitch about - is in trouble. Even if they still have their easy day job, powerlessness makes some folks nuts, especially when they are accustomed to having it. The only one not going nuts is the Man With The Plan - Hillary the Re-Born Conservative.

And it's not just the election - it's the fact that Bush is doing well. How can an assumedly idiot (Andover, Yale, Harvard) Republican succeed in anything? When I heard that Kennedy had suddenly removed his famous negative speech (from just before the Iraq election) from his website, I knew these guys were in deep trouble. All they can hope for is a recession, a major reversal in the ME, or really anything bad.

The Great Rushbo has been saying for years that if ANYTHING goes right, it hurts the Libs. For years, he has been pointing out how the press can find the one negative statistic out of 100 good ones, but I figured that was his typical hyperbole. It isn't. I believe they hope for trouble, because trouble will help them, and invent crises if they can't find them.  Forget the Country, forget Freedom. Dr. Joy Bliss, our Blog Shrink (every blog needs one), always says that power is far more corrupting than money. Power is psychologically intoxicating to weak people - it's a drug - as mind-distorting as heroin or TV. Money just sits there quietly, and it's never enough anyway.

(Well, power is what democracy is about. It's the brass ring, along with job security and a pension anyone would envy. I guess we have to be glad that some people are willing to do it. But it's not like the good old days (?) when regular folks would run for elections as a brief public service, an interruption of their normal life. It's become a career, so you get careerists. Will not term them professionals.)

Anyway, we are seeing people - a political party - in acute withdrawal. A Detox Ward. People in DTs. But instead of seeing the traditional pink elephants, all they are seeing are Republican elephants.

Well, it's been a long hard climb for sanity to enter Washington, DC. We "normal" folks had the power to get it, but do we have the power to keep it?