Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

On the back and forth in the media as to whether the Fort Hood suspected shooter was an Islamic terrorist.

Ugh. I don't like labels either. So, think of it this way, and I'll leave you to your own conclusions. Timothy McVeigh, white dude with sympathies with the KKK, a virulent dislike of government authority over individual citizens, and a profound belief in guns rights and the right of revolution, is commonly known and we expect will stay known as a terrorist. Yet, here is a guy, disenfranchised by the military (he failed the physical exams for U.S. Special Forces), unable to secure a meaningful job after his military career (he worked as a security guard), frustrated by his inability to attract a mate (his co-worker Andrea Peters shunned his advances), and turning to a destructive lifestyle (he became an obsessive gambler), who by all accounts seems to fit the mold of an increasingly unattached and ultimately psychochotic lone killer. So, why is he only a Terrorist? Apparently this simple label, for most of us, fits just fine with him. But why? Because he wasn't deranged? Or psychotic?

If one digs into this comparison, it eventually becomes clear that "Muslim terrorist" is treated differently than the anti-government radical white dude. In the the latter case, there's an unmistakeable eagerness to attach belief system to violence. In the former, it's quite the opposite. Wow!

To make my point clearly and once again, imagine the feeling of bizarrness if McVeigh, in some alternate universe, was no longer a terrorist after the Olkahoma City Bombing, but simply a psychotic, sexually frustrated, lonely ex-military guy who just needed the right treatment, if only we could have recognized the symptoms early enough. Imagine if we blamed the military, and the U.S. government (he railed against excessive taxation), and all things governmental. so stifling to sensitive, stressed out McVeigh. This kind of bull shit gloss would never fly for the guy who eviscerated 168 people in that horrific terrorist act, and it repays careful attention why in Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's case, there is currently such a raging debate as to whether he was just sick, or something more. McVeigh, always, was just that something more. And if one is truly Enlightened, as I am, one would see that McVeigh was treated as a moral actor, an autonomous agent, and Maj. Hasan is on his way to being treated like an effect of so many causes outside of himself. And in this way, weirdly, perhaps we do win the battle of words, in Orwellian fashion perhaps, by making those enemies under the panoply of our political correctness not true humans, but only poor actors in dramas that they themselves did not and could not create. Only big bad Western World could create them, you see. We win by proclaiming our guilt.

Then again, maybe we're just chicken shit. And maybe our chicken shit nature is why McVeigh has his label, and others, theirs.

Obamaya!

Hmm. Just saw the latest poll numbers on Hardball with Yelling Mathews, and it seems the American People want the Republicans back. The change we can believe in?

Obama, that political phenom that had media pundits, bloggers, and just about everyone speculating that the country was in fact (or now) center left, is now in real danger of political losses in the House and Senate, and on that crucial litmus test question of whether Americans feel that the country is on the right track, he's losing.

Why? Why so soon? Because he looks like what-the-left-thought-about-dubbya right now. No, he doesn't sound like your crazy Texas neighbor gettin' his shit kickers on for a hoe down. No, he didn't breeze through Yale drinking cheap beer and keeping in close touch with his well-connected father. He's a legit Harvard guy. An elite. Educated, thoughtful in demeanor and in speech.

Only, he makes rediculous political decisions. As a libertarian, right leaning (mostly libertarian) guy, I'm applying the "Obamaya" label to him now. Why? We're sending troops into Afghanistan, a war that likely can't be won, and we're doing it in a way that maximizes discontent by left and right: more troups (left: bad!), but not as much as the general recommends (right: bad!). Nice.

He pushes through that fucked up stimulus package, 780 billion or whatever, deferring to the speaker of the house to write it, a political move that gaurantees it will be loaded to the brim with political goodies for every constituency in the Union. Ah, heck, we only created temporary gov'ment jobs? Nuts! And now unemployment is 10.2%, when originally forecasted to stay at or below 8% given the magic stimulus sauce. Oh, bull. Even liberal economists, like Jeffrey Sachs, think it's a political cookie jar and missed opportunity, nevermind the consevative-minded economists who've been screaming all along that it'll just add to the national debt (which no one doubts, by the way, that Bush initially created) without doing anything much substantive for working folks. Nice job, Obamaya.

Then there's the Health Care debate, a never ending back and forth on cable news, local news, in newspapers, C-Span, shut up! Health care, the pressing concern. Oh, and by the way, it's all about left-right fighting points: abortion, public option, et cetera et cetera. No one spins it as a cost saver (because it's not), and everyone on the Hill just keeps fighting about their favorite ethical issue, all the while losing millions of Americans who want to feel confident again about the basic direction of the country. Fix health care? Sure, we should fix it. It's broken. Start with trial lawyers. Or start with expanding access to plans across state borders, freeing up competition among private insurers. Or start by policing existing insurers on hot button issues like preexisting conditions, and so on. But this turd is a big ole' pile of make-Obama-less-popular. Wrong time. Wrong discussion. Why can't Obama see this, if he's so damn not-Dubbya? Doesn't sound very Harvard to me (unless by "Harvard" you mean do-things-that-make-an-elected-official-be-not-re-elected).

What else? Beers with some yahoo cop in Cambridge and a professor friend? Cool. Fly off to Copenhagen or where the hell it was to lobby for Olympics in Chicago? Cool. Screw the Global Warming issue, spewing tons of jet exhaust into the upper atmosphere to transport a handful of important folks half way across the globe in search of that ultimate nobel goal of sports in your old neighborhood. Woo hoo! Hey, I like sports as much as the next guy. But I wouldn't jump on that flight and then grab the mike back home to guilt everyone else about the necessity of cap and trade and making you polluters pay. You may as well be Al Gore with this level of blind hypocricy.

So, people aren't buying it.

Why not? A really crappy theory: American-style Democracy is to blame. Uneducated populace, that sort of thing. If only the red state folks would drop their guns and religion and spend four years on a college campus not getting laid unless they parroted politically correct points made by their wish-it-was-the-sixties-again professors. Yes, there's an objective criterion! Dumb asses. You make lemmings look like General Patton (but isn't the lemming thing apocryphal?).

But surely, getting back to whatever the hell I was talking about, the troublesome AP polling data should not be read to suggest that Obama is failing at his job, surely not (this is sarcasm). Obama's job is: what? Inter alia (cool Latin phrase used only by the educated, so if you're not down with it you're almost definitionally an ignoramus, and probably a racist), Obama's job is to bring back confidence in the country, and bring that change that we all can believe in. Surely the fact that the majority of Americans now think we're heading in the wrong direction doesn't impugn Obama, does it? Hal? Hal?

He's from Harvard, after all. Not Yale. He ain't no Dubbya! No, he's not. He's Obamaya! Only, unlike Dubbya, who's gritty gut sense kept his base and enough independents on board through an improbable re-election, Obamya's bleedin' off independents by the month. Maybe he'll turn it around, we'll see (if not, we can always blame Dubbya!). But lately, it seems he shoulda been a Yale man (or is this spurious? doesn't matter, still not change, change we can the sloganizer came and took my sentence away...). Believe in! Huh.

America, the Beautiful

So I've established that the notion of policing other folks on their use of force extends beyond Iran. I want to broach a new subject.

The subject is Health Care. Launching into this: I'm so disenfranchised with Republican opposition, in the specific sense that they seem to have generated nothing more by way of objection than that the plan will be "socialist". But this misses the point. It's scare tactics. The Obama slash Congress plan is a distinctively American plan. Unlike other true socialist countries, our health care reform agenda has been discussed through and through as a gain to the economy. As an improvement of health care efficiency. As, in other words, a net improvement, to a predominantly Capitalist society. Better coverage. Less insurance company abuse. A plan to pay for it by cleaning up wastefulness. This is selling socialism with capitalist arguments. It's selling more America to Americans.

Which makes the whole recent "push" for health care reform so quintessentially, well, American. We'll extend coverage and better the health care system. No one, really, really, will have to pay for it. Sure, we may nudge up taxes here or there, and tweak this or that program. But hell, no one will really suffer, not really, and we'll have a better system to hold up as trump card against scrutiny. This is America, after all! We're not some sorry European-style government that has to recede into punitive taxes and a real bleeding of entreprenurial spirit among its populace, taking care of the sick in a pathetic charade of dependency masquerading as morality. Hell, no. We'll make health care better, and make the country better, and by God we'll make America better!

Final thought, if health care is so bad because Insurance Companies control it (and I hate them, too, like everyone else), why not force health insurance to compete? John Stossell it, my man. Go the other way. Who ever produced any statistics to the effect that REAL competition among providers wouldn't fix our current health care woes? Who is so naive to think that we have REAL competition now?

But, anyway, my point (again) is that even while proposing to socialize medicine (as Republicans charge), we're doing it in a way that shows yet again our superioirity to real socialist countries, a point that seems lost on the "Hannity" crowd. We're still America. We make, even in Obama land, decidedly Capitalist arguments for our reforms. Better Health Care, paid for. Efficient. American. Works better. Runs better. America. America the Beautiful. We're still aiming to put a man on Mars, by God. Better have a competitive health care system. Not some grey depression of real socialism.

On Force

So following up on my prior post, I've refined my view to the following non-refined firehose-on-all position:

Let everyone have weapons! The whole problem is in the policing. Who is the U.S., the "First World" to say what-have-you to any other nation state? I want every nation on the planet the opportunity to have nuclear weapons. Iran? Nuclear warheads that can reach the mainland. The guy following you on the sidewalk, as you guide your kids and grumpy wife towards the ice cream shop (just four more blocks, honey!)? A loaded .44. He after all hasn't DONE anything yet. He's a person, not some statistic to be manipulated by The Man. Who made some government RULER of his free choices? Who made the U.S. Government RULER of some other nation-state's free choices? Iran, nukes. All the world, nukes. No more bully cops, please. Deadly force everywhere; not that we wish it for its own sake, but only that we have no reason to deny it, while our government itself wields it around.

So I think this position ought to be consistent, in the sense that all of my knee-jerk Liberal friends (but they have the truth!), and my knee-jerk Conservative friends (but they have the truth!) ought to see the value in a hands off policy when it comes to non-felons and non-warring other nation-states, like Joe Bob, or Iran. It's not what they might do, or even what they say they might do, Dick Cheney. It's the question of what gives the current jerks-with-deadly-force the right to take away from them, or to prevent them from acquiring, for fear of what they might do. Who are we to police everyone inside and out, on grounds of what might happen tomorrow? Suppose I buy an AR-15. I might shoot up the mall. Suppose Iran buys weaponized nukes. They might shoot up the Middle East. Neither has happened. So screw off!

We all desire freedom, as W. once said. He must have secretly admired Iran. Get the NRA to help them with messaging, W. They'll assert their rights to nuclear yet. As Timothy McVeigh recited, creepily, moments before his execution by the State: ... I am the captain of my ship...". And so he was. And so we are.

Joe Bob, Iran, and Dunderheads

You know this raging debate in the States over Iran, I've been thinking on it. Conversations more than a few with friends liberal, conservative.

And liberal goes like this: how dare you sir? To suggest that whatever power the First World might have be yielded coercively to attempt to curtail or prevent the development of nuclear weaponry by another nation-state? Iran, for instance, seems docile when compared to no less than the United States: we invaded two Muslim countries in recent history, after all. What has Iran done? You hypocrites!

Yes, feel the injustice. Hear the shrillness. But here's were we have a nice if unintended result, a rare gem of a result: it seems that the dunderheaded liberals and the dunderheaded conservatives can find common dunder: he who chooses weapons is choosing good! Yes, I know this seems at first blush counter-intuitive, but hear me out. First World Liberals want Iran to decide for itself whether it needs nuclear weapons. Let them have them; we either know that they'll not use them in Nazi-like fashion (we're quite good at predicting future conflicts you see, you see not), or we know that if they do decide to use them we're sitting morally pretty by insisting that we stuck up for the sovereignty of other nations. Either way (sans the WWIII stuff), we're good. Real choices! Weapons choices! This is the stuff of autonomy, and autonomy is good!

But here's where things get weird. This let-em-have-weapons-who-are-we-to-say-no idea is pretty comfy with Joe Bob, too, the guy down the street who spits out rage about the U.S. Government, who he views as trying to prevent his own acquisition of deadly force (and how do THEY know how he might someday use his weapons?). But what is Joe Bob saying? What is Iran saying? Here we have a nice, rare meeting of the minds between dunderheaded Liberals and Joe Bob Conservatives, both viciously grumping about the reach of state power into their own or someone else's affairs. Deadly force? Nuclear force? Back off! It's my damn right, and my damn pergogative to have whatever the hell I want, and who are you (Orwellian First World, Orwellian State), to say what or how I might use my deadly force? You over-reaching, power-abusing, beaurocrats! You self-appointed cops of the world!

And so now with the benefit of such wisdom, I see finally that all politics really does come together, and a river runs through it (this last comment means nothing, much like so much poetry, but I like poetry. And guns. And hell, maybe even personal nuclear weapons, though I don't want to pay for them, or store them. But this is for some other blog). It turns out that this stick-up-for-the-little-guy-to-have-insane-amounts-of-deadly-force idea finds a nice cozy home in liberalism and it seems with the NRA: "Who the hell are THEY? To tell me what I can or can't have? Or how I'm going to use it?" Right on, Joe Bob. Right on, Liberals. Don't tell me, you fucking sleezy existing power structure. You're half the enemy yourself...

John Williams in D.C.

John Williams burst on the scene like a superhero, shoulder pressing several members of Code Pink in one hand, slamming a double Jack and Coke in the other. At this moment, he could do no wrong. He was Tiger Woods playing golf, Kobe Bryant shooting hoop, Peyton Manning throwing the football. But it couldn't last. As Williams strided toward the West Face of the Capitol building, a member of Code Pink reached down and managed to untie his shoe, generating a cascade of events that resulted in his ignominous fall, scattering the remainder of his beverage onto the shocked crowd and depositing Code Pink in front of the Capitol no worse for the wear. Williams never got the deals at the Capitol. He'd be damned if he would stand for this again. But already through the crowd congealing around him the Pinksters were gone, and the Capitol police were beginning to look his way. He turned his back to the crowd and strutted away. Later that afternoon, he was found staring at a moon rock in the aeronautics museum. Sulking. Pensive. He never got the deals in D.C.

MAD for Iran

We can say: "Don't let 'um have nukes" is the West's current strategy with regard to Iran. But what about: "Give 'um all nukes"? Is there a mutual assured destruction model for the Middle East? Suppose Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yeman, Oman, Kuwait, et cetera all had nukes (say, by redirecting the West's money and time away from detection and protection towards some distribution of nuclear capabilities for all Middle East countries). Now, for example, Iraq can't just go "tribal" on Kuwait, storming in with conventional forces like in the Gulf War. It faces nuclear retaliation. And so on for other conflicts with other countries. The Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) model has kept the rest of the world out of catastrophe since the beginnings of the Cold War. Why not in the Middle East? Do we really think the leaders of these countries would be quick to fire nuclear weapons at each other, thus extinguishing vast populations of people, poisioning there own lands for generations to come, and in general bringing any possibility of progress or reconciliation to a screeching halt? Or, would some group of Muslim-countries point their newly minted nuclear missles at the hated Jew-country? Would Israel adopt the policy of pre-emptive strike? Would MAD fail?