Month: July 2004

By now the three people who read this site should know to read Lileks every day, but if for some inexplicable reason you don’t, go now.

Today it’s mid-life crisis and, well, politics.

I need to do something different. Something besides childrearing and domestic reorganization. Take up the ocarina, perhaps. Write a concerto for the ocarina. Hone my body into a killing machine, infiltrate Iran, and play the ocarina on streetcorners. Team up with a popular TV show guy to invent a new coffee drink, score the commercials for the ocarina, add a Latin beat, and call the tune the Mo Rocca Mocha Ocarina Macarena.

…

I understand that [Kerry] defended America by serving in Vietnam.

One question: did Vietnam attack America?

Ah! The Gulf of Tonkin incident and subsequent resolution made it seem as if they had. So he fell for that, as everyone did. He voted to wage war against Iraq because he fell for that, as everyone did. He’s learned. Next time he needs hard proof, like a smoking crater in New York.

Make that another smoking crater in New York.

Via Power Line comes an essay in Esquire by someone who’s not exactly a fan of George W. Bush, but is compelled to examine the question of whether Bush might just be, well, right:

I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they’re decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency–or said he was basing his entire presidency–and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them.

…

The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing . He didn’t lose, at least in part because he was able to both inspire and draw on the kind of moral absolutism necessary to win wars. Bush has been unable to do the same, at least in part because he is undercut by evidence of his own dishonesty*, but also because moral absolutism is nearly impossible to sustain in the glare of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds, Bush cannot seek to inspire moral absolutism without his moral absolutism becoming itself an issue–indeed, the issue. He cannot seek to engender certainty without being accused of sowing disarray. And he cannot speak the barest terms necessary for victory in any war–that we will stay the course, through good or through ill, because our cause is right and just, and God is on our side–without inspiring a goodly number of his constituents to aspire to the moral prestige of surrender.

* Of course the “dishonesty” of the President is a myth invented by his enemies. The story of his so-called “desertion” from the National Guard has turned out to be utterly false. The sixteen words — that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger — have just this last week been borne out. The fact that the not only the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain, Russia — and every other country in the world that mattered — but the leaders of the Democratic Party, thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Den Beste has a brief overview of breeder reactor technology, as used in Iraq’s Osirak reactor — which Israel destroyed before it could begin producing weapons-grade material. In an update we learn that the Iraqi reactor was not even a power generator! It was build for the express purpose of weapons research and development.

This shows the utter duplicity of the French claim that Israel destroyed a warm fuzzy civilian power program. And guess who was in charge of the Osirak contract? Jacques Chirac, of course.

Given that Iran has just restarted its weapons program, in defiance of the civilized world, maybe we’ll see the Star of David or the Stars and Stripes in the air over Iran soon. Unfortunately they seem to be running a highly destributed program that lacks a single easily-targetted source.

Much screedy goodness:

you all remember the epic account of my Ten Service Calls to get the TV working.

This is why I am not completely undone by the news that it may take a while to fully electrify Iraq. It took DirecTV ten attempts to fix one dish, and no one was shooting at the techs.