SWIFT BOATING OBAMA

You may not know it, but what you are seeing
is a robbery in progress. The Clinton syndicate
is in the process of robbing Barak of his good
name and reputation. They are in trouble, and
must act now.

The immense weight of an expertly organized
machine is finally baring its steel teeth to stop
the Obama surge. Hilary has long been the
agreed on heir to continue the cozy friendship
with Wall St. and the industrial-military
complex that husband Bill cemented so
successfully (and got filthy rich doing so.)

But the upstart Obama, unwilling to wait his
proper turn, is threatening to upset the best-
laid plans. Hil's ascendancy seemed locked in
a few months ago. Now it's starting to unravel.
Ergo, he must be destroyed politically. It's as
simple as that.

So in comes the wrecking crew. Obama is being
"swift-boated" in subtle but effective ways by
various selected friends and insiders of the
coalition. They are jockeying for positions in
the new administration (I surmise), and earning
jobs by using their knives. (Why else would
prominent and respected people turn to doing
hatchet jobs on an innocent and admirable man?
Why would they parrot nonsense first aired on
Fox News that as a child in Indonesia, Obama
attended a Muslim religious school (madrasa)?
CNN sent a reporter to the school he attended
there, and found it to be an ordinary (but well
run) public school, much like schools here.

But now a prominent Hilary backer, former
senator Bob Kerry, has repeated the lie about
the madrasa, while pretending to complement
O. on his Muslim roots. He doesn't have any
Muslim roots. His mother, who raised him with
the help of her parents, was a secular humanist.
His dad, who abandoned the family when he was
two, grew up in a Muslim culture in Kenya, but
rejected it, and became an atheist as a young man.
Obama was raised without religious instruction,
and through his own searching became an active
Christian as an adult.

Then there is Obama's teen-age drug use: hardly
news, and not fatal in itself, but a start. (You
don't fell a strong tree with one blow. You keep
cutting.) You speculate aloud whether there have
been reports of drug dealing? Just asking!
Then a story appears on the front page of The
Washington Post about his Muslim background
and supposed connections. All conjecture, and
neither news nor factual. Why is it even in that
prestigious paper at all? Somebody's friends?

You'll hear more of all this, I'm sure! These are
desperate people, and very, very powerful.

STILL IN DENIAL: V. D. HANSON

Victor Davis Hanson is among the most learned
of Bush's defenders. His latest attack on Bush
critics appears in The National Review (12/14/07)
and is titled: "Conventionally Ignorant." The
problem with calling people who don't agree
with you "ignorant," is that it implies superior
knowledge. And Hanson has superior knowledge
in abundance when it comes to ancient battles.
(He's a retired professor of military history.)
How that makes him an expert on the contem-
porary Middle East over, say, Vali Nasr, is up to
you, dear reader, to discern. (Nasr was born in
Iran, speaks all the M. E. languages, spends a
lot of time there, and refutes, in his writings,
every point that Hanson raises.)

Hanson's thesis is that conventional wisdom
parroted by pundits and politicians is all wet.
To prove this, he brings up several "often
repeated statements," and then proceeds to
show how wrong they are. The first of these
erroneous statements that he wishes to correct,
is: "There is no military solution to Iraq." (Ital.
his). His refutation to this (often used by the
Bushies) is that there was a military solution
to WW II, resulting in prosperous democracies
in Germany and Japan, so there!

His argument commits the fallacy of irrelevance:
he is implying a non-existent similarity in the
two situations. When Japan surrendered, the
Emperor ordered his people to respect and obey
the American occupiers, which they did. I was
there. The Japanese had an existing government,
and a long tradition of respect for law and order.
They have little cultural diversity, and no signi-
ficant ethnic or sectarian divisions. Germany
was similar in many respects, plus it had a long
tradition of democratic government prior to
Hitler. It was eager and ready to get back to that.
We still have troops in both of those countries,
without anyone attacking them, and with the
permission of their governments.

In Iraq, 60% of the population think it's okay to
attack and kill Americans. 70% want us out of
there now. The "no military solution" opinion
comes not from our pundits, as V. D. H. claims,
but from every top general who has ever served
there, including Gen. Petraeus. And it is, of
course, absolutely true. What V. D. misses is
that it's a civil war in which we continue to arm
all sides. Why are we doing that? Ignorance,
perhaps? We don't know what else to do, and
won't quit? The most astonishing thing about
Hanson's piece is that he has written an article
about Iraq without mentioning once the most
salient fact of all: the bitter, violent struggle for
power between the Sunnis and the Shia! You
didn't have that in Japan and Germany, V. D.
Nor did we have the GWOT. He doesn't mention
that either. There has been no military solution
in five years of killing in Iraq, and no political
solution either. We can't be defeated militarily,
that's true. Nor can they be, at least at any cost
we are willing to bear. So it's an impasse that
can go on for years.

"We haven't tried regional diplomacy" is another
falsehood, according to Hanson. He calls it
"another red herring" (like "no mil. solution).
However, the key to regional diplomacy is
obviously and clearly a solution of the Israeli/
Palestinian conflict, which V. D. H. also neglects
to mention at all! On the possibilities and
difficulties of regional diplomacy in the M. E.,
google Vali Nasr and read any of his writings,
especially The Shia Revival. He covers all
bases there.

"We need to talk to Iran." This is another oft-
repeated statement that V. D. wants to debunk.
He writes: "We always have had some sort of
dialogue ongoing in a background capacity with
Iran." That is just flat false: unremitting hostility
and false accusations, along with oft-expressed
determination to bring about regime change is
hardly "dialogue." He wants us to believe that
all the problems between us have been caused
by Iran. Yeah, like our overthrow of their
democratically elected gov't. back in the 50's
when we installed the Shah? And our financial
and military support for Saddam, when he
attacked Iran without provocation? We need
to know the truth and tell the truth. That would
be a great start!

"We can't impose democracy on anyone." This is
supposed to be a canard, so he seeks to refute it
with a long list of democracies that finally came
about after years of violence and conflict. Does
that show that democracy was imposed? No, it
begs the question: you really can't impose
democracy. That's self-evidently true. People
won't have it until they want it, in which case it
isn't being imposed. Can democracy finally
emerge out of conflict? Of course!

"Iraq is the worst (fill in the blanks) in American
History." His answer to this is that it's not over
yet. In other words, we can't say the operation
was botched until the patient dies. As long as the
patient is breathing, he may live in spite of our
worst efforts! In that case, it's a success. Never
mind the costs and the long term consequences!

ROMNEY ON RELIGION

Mr. Romney's speech on religion was fairly
instructive, and at times inspiring. It was also
factually incorrect on at least two counts: his
claim that "freedom requires religion" is
demonstrably false. There is no necessary
connection between those two. Historically,
religion has more often been the enemy of
freedom than it has been a friend.

Among our founding fathers, the leading
writer on freedom (Tom Paine) was an atheist.
He was a friend of Voltaire, France's leading
writer on freedom, also an atheist. Both saw
religion as a major threat to freedom, not a help.
Obviously, their views on freedom did not
depend on, or were derived from, religion.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution,
also took a dim view of the influence of religion
on government. He wrote: "a zeal for different
opinions concerning religion" has throughout
history "inflamed [men and women] with
mutual animosity, and rendered them much
more disposed to vex and oppress each other,
than to cooperate for their common good." He
fought long and hard (and successfully) to
prevent the country, in its official documents,
from being named a "Christian" nation. He
fought unsuccessfully against publicly paid
chaplains in Congress and in the armed forces.

Mr. Romney also erred in attacking something
he called the "new religion of secularism." Not
only is there no such religion, it's an impossi-
bility! It's a contradiction in terms: an oxymoron,
like "an army of one." "Secular" is an adjective.
It means "nonreligious." You can't have a non-
religious religion.

Religions have rites, rules, and revelations -- all
pertaining to the sacred. There's nothing sacred
in secularity. That's the criticism against it. It is,
by definition, unsacred, unreligion, this worldly,
profane. It looks like Mr. Romney is confused
about what religion is, as well as what it does.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net