Month: December 2009

Before the House of Representatives, December 2, 2009:

This is the 150th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown. When he attacked Harper’s Ferry with a handful of followers, the butcher of Kansas helped sow the seeds of the Civil War. Few things would have made Brown happier than the thought of hundreds of thousands of people dying for his own Scorched Earth method of moral salvation.

The New York Times op-ed page has a piece today touting Brown as an American hero. It seeks to vindicate him:

He was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution.

The fact that Emerson and Thoreau turned into cheerleaders for John Brown was among the worst failings for each of them. Both Emerson and Thoreau started out denouncing politics as a snare and a fraud. And both fell for Brown and his vision of progress via slaughtering innocent people.

Brown’s attempt to create a bloody uprising in Virginia helped close the final door to compromise between the North and the South. His name should be as odious today as those of other people whose violence sparked mass killing.
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Update 12/03: There have been some excellent revisionist histories in the last 20 years on how the Civil War could have been averted and how slavery would have been phased out without a national bloodbath. While some of the deep South states saw slavery as their essence, upper South states like Virginia were not so mindlessly attached to the odious institution.
Those who believe that a war was necessary to end slavery often fail to realize that much of the dire plight of freed slaves was the result of northern armies relying on Scorched Earth tactics in the final year of the war. When almost everything has been destroyed, it is difficult for anyone (except Carpetbaggers) to survive.
[Comments also welcome at my blog here]

One day out from Obama’s long-awaited announcement on troop deployments to Afghanistan the White House is getting plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Democrats, including Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee, have expressed concerns about both the cost of the war and the difficulty of achieving victory in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Republicans, such as John McCain (R-AZ), have hammered Obama for setting a timeline for troop withdrawals beginning in 18 months.

Despite the widespread lack of enthusiasm, however, the White House has made striking progress in turning around Weekly Standard editor and outspoken Obama critic (and Sarah Palin booster) Bill Kristol.

On November 23rd, Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard:

”Just what is Barack Obama as president making of our American destiny? The answer, increasingly obvious, is … a hash. It’s worse than most of us expected. His dithering on Afghanistan is deplorable, his appeasing of Iran disgraceful, his trying to heap new burdens on a struggling economy destructive,’’

But in today’s Washington Post Kristol was hailing the new “War President”.

“By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 — after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.’’

The extent to which Kristol’s reassessment reflects his political agility, or Obama’s, remains unclear.

Ron Paul cuts through the bull:

To answer Jim Bovard’s earlier question — will President Obama “out-BS” Bush? — I think no, after watching Obama tonight, it seems that Bush set a perverse standard that even an over-achiever like Obama can’t exceed.

But that didn’t seem to be Obama’s goal tonight. He was all about threading the needle, rather than pouring rhetorical Red Bull down our captive throats. The current president tonight showed great ambition to have it “both ways.” In other words, trying to please all of the people, all of the time … and we all know how that nugget goes.

First, unlike the increasingly annoying and completely unreflected talking heads at MSNBC, I did not think the President was utterly and completely  “pragmatic” or “practical,” exhorting no “soaring rhetoric” nor “bumper sticker” slogans like his predecessor. Sure, if one was listening only to the first 20 minutes  — but just as a few cadets in the audience were spied dozing off on the television feed, Obama was lapsing into old messianic territory — invoking the era of “Roosevelt” (coyly, without summoning “the Greatest Generation” or “The Great War” out loud) by declaring us all “heirs to a noble struggle for freedom” …

“And the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear: that our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might, and with the commitment to forge an America that is safer, a world that is more secure, and a future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes.”

We all have “common purpose” and ostensibly that is the “struggle against violent extremism.” He continued: “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict. We will have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

Yet at the same time he is passing along this Bush-flavored burrito of global struggle, world policing, nation building and freedom spreading, he tells his audience there will be some soft 18-month deadline, time line, time horizon or whatever, in which to accomplish the major goals of “disrupting, dismantling and defeating” al Qaeda (he is careful not to be too specific about where in Afghanistan they are supposedly hiding, rather he repeats the threat of al Qaeda “safe havens” in Pakistan and in “the border regions” several times), bolstering the central government (for now, apparently, President Karzai will do) and training enough Afghan forces to turn over security so we can leave, starting in mid-2011! Right. And I have a new ring road from Kabul to Kandahar to sell you …

All this, and then he says, “I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests,” and rightly points out the nearly trillion-dollar price tag on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before he even came to office last January. He invokes another old war horse, this time, for the frugal crowd, President Eisenhower.

“Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, ‘Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs’…

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

Obama declares this after announcing he needs $30 billion for the immediate insertion of 30,000 troops into a landlocked country with limited supply routes and an air base much in need of expansion. The logistical costs will be ginormous, not to mention the costs associated with the so-called “civilian surge” in Afghanistan and the renewed “partnership” (read: additional aid) with Pakistan. God forbid he mention the escalating lifetime cost of caring for veterans once they come home. But Obama the pragmatist tells us not to squirm, he will ensure the spending will be “transparent” and “balanced” with domestic priorities.

Whew. Forget the B.S, Obama’s rhetorical method leaves one’s head spinning. But his own head must be positively hurting, with all that concentration on the eye of the needle.