Considerettes

The Rumsfeld memo is being defended by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in much in the way I concluded yesterday:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers said the memo, which poses more questions than answers, was written to generate ideas on how to begin the secretary’s long-term goal of transforming the Defense Department to meet new threats.

“The experts will tell you that if you talk to somebody about change or transformation of anything, they will tell you that the larger an organization and the older an organization, the more difficult it is to change it, and it’s not going to happen unless you have a CEO bought into the need for change. So, what you’re seeing in this memo, the way we do business, is that our boss is challenging us with a lot of questions on are we changing ourselves to deal with this 21st century threat environment we find ourselves in,” Myers said.

Rumsfeld is challenging the status quo in the DoD because the status quo in the world changed on 9/11. He’s not ducking the hard questions, he’s got the courage to be asking them, and he wants answers.

Of course, the Democrats are willing to use anything at all for political gain:

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s comments are an illustration of the concern that they have about the failure of their policies in Iraq so far. There can be no other description of those words than that,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Rumsfeld is thinking outside the box. Daschle is still inside the box, criticizing anyone who leaves it, and hoping that criticism garners him and his party more votes. Never mind that these kinds of memos and questions and challenges are necessary, nay required, for this new warfare if we want to survive it. Nope, for Tom Daschle, power is the prime mover.

The good news is that not all Democrats think the same way.

Many members of Congress said it was critical the questions Rumsfeld raised be addressed.

“This is a far-reaching call for his advisers to think outside the box,” said Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, who met with Rumsfeld Wednesday.

“Are we winning or losing the global war on terrorism? Those questions need to be answered,” said Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

But there are still plenty of those that just don’t get it.

Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., was more critical. He said the memo showed the administration has exaggerated its success in the war on terrorism.

Not so. These questions are ones about getting at the root of the terrorism weed, and we wouldn’t even need to be asking them if we were still frightened, hunkered down behind our own borders, hoping that it wasn’t our building that would be dive bombed next. Instead we’re making progress in the war on terrorism. These questions highlight that we’ve made good progress and now need to look at the tougher issues.

I finally got a real live blogroll set up. Blogrolling.com is up and running again, so I’ve got it all squared away, and now have an actual list of blogs I frequent. Enjoy!

USA Today reports on a memo Rumsfeld sent out. Granted, it sounds more dour than his typical public pronouncements, but I would imagine part of the reason he is more upbeat outwardly is that he’s got, not just the military’s, but the entire nation’s morale in his hands. Still, let’s take a look at the 3 points USA Today notes:

• The United States is “just getting started” in fighting the Iraq-based terror group Ansar Al-Islam.
  Administration officials have been saying we’re just getting started with terrorists in general. There has never been the illusion (even in Rumsfeld’s “positive public comments”) that this was going to be anything but a long, hard fight. No news here.
• The war is hugely expensive. “The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ cost of millions.”
  What war isn’t hugely expensive? Although, that’s not exactly what Rumsfeld is saying. He’s simply noting that terrorism costs less than protecting the citizens plus routing the terrorists from their holes/havens/palaces, and that this reality is something that should be taken into consideration. No news here.
• Postwar stabilization efforts are very difficult. “It is pretty clear the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.”
  See the first item. Stabilizing Iraq means instituting a government of the people, not of the Ba’athists. This takes time. Another country you may be familiar with took about 7 years to go from post-war to constitution. The U.N. thinks Iraq should be ready to go it alone in less than 1. Rumsfeld is correct in saying that it will take more time than those in the ivory tower think it should. No news here.

So this is not really news at all. The three main topic pointed out by USA Today don’t really give us any information we don’t already have, or could figure out with the simplest knowledge of history.

That, of course, hasn’t stopped others from trying to prove that, when things don’t go precisely as planned, those plans were just trash talk to get the gullible citizenry on-board. The implication being that this never happens with plans laid by Democrats. Admitting that fighting terrorism is a new kind of war and that we may need radical changes in how we prosecute this war vs. those in the past is being portrayed by Bush-haters as a sign of stupidity or weakness, instead of what it really is; a bold, paradigm-shifting solution to a different kind of threat. Again, the implication is that a Democrat would have done the same ol’ things in the same ol’ ways because “we’ve always done it that way before”. Is this the “progressive” thinking that liberals so highly tout?

Rumsfeld’s memo shows he is a realist and a visionary. That’s the kind of person we need in charge of our post-9/11 military.

UPDATE: A thanks to Mr. Preston at Junkyard Blog for linking to this entry from his in-depth commentary on the subject.

Playing a little catch-up here, due to being on the road last week.

• Federal Takeover Dept.: This article should make you feel safer. I know I felt so much better while flying last week that box cutters and chemicals can still be smuggled onto airplanes. I would really like to see a study done on how much (if any) safer we are, now that airport security workers get their paychecks on federal paper stock instead of from private companies. It would have to be in an apples-to-apples way; whatever kind of tests they used to do.
  UPDATE: Apparently, the items had been smuggled on-board 5 weeks earlier.
• Truth in Labeling Dept.: The Congressional Black Caucus needs a name change–perhaps the Congressional Liberal Black Caucus–because it’s clear they aren’t concerned about all blacks in general. Here’s a story that points this out. “The black Democrats said [nominee Janice] Brown’s conservative credentials make her unfit for the D.C. judgeship. ” Democrats continue to insist on conditions to judgeship that they’d be suing over if the shoe was on the other foot.
• “World Ends, Minorities Hit Hardest” Journalism Dept.: Sarah at the blog “Trying to Grok” is a military wife, and lends her perspective to the daily life of a military family, especially relating to Iraq. She had a post recently (and has had further follow-ups) showing how a mainstream news source like the Washington Post can take a perfectly balanced article (in this instance, a case study of both the good and bad from Iraq in “Stars and Stripes”) and turn it into what amounts to another declaration of “Iraq is a quagmire!” Bias is busting out all over.
• Repackaging Dept.: Moderate Democrats (for liberal readers, that should be “reactionary, right-wing traitors”) are suggesting that the party rethink its position on gun control. Now, I would rather they rethink it on constitutional grounds instead of simply being concerned about “alienating them[selves] from mainstream voters” (i.e. change what we say we’re for, so they’ll like us). And I’d rather it not be a simple change of terminology from “gun control” to “gun safety” (i.e. a thorn, by any other name, still hurts you). But still, it looks like there could be some movement in the right direction. We can only hope. And vote.

Another content-free U.N. resolution passed unanimously today.

The U.N. Security Council Thursday unanimously adopted a U.S.-sponsored resolution that calls for the establishment of a U.S.-led multinational force and appeals to U.N. members to provide troops and money to help support the struggling U.S. occupation of Iraq.

So what does this mean in concrete terms? When the resolution said that members would provide troops and money, what does that actually mean?

But France, Russia, Germany and Pakistan said after the vote that they would not make any new military or financial contributions to support the resolution.

So just like resolution 1441, which threatened violence while most of the Security Council members didn’t have the will to follow through, we now have another resolution not worth the paper it’s written on.

How nice; we got a raised hand by some rather rich countries (at least in the case of France and Germany), but nothing else. Thanks for nuthin’, fellas. Why in the world do people put any stock in this useless organization?

Two clips from the same news story.

Clip #1: Democrat Joe Lieberman…is promising to ensure that upper-income Americans pay more taxes than they did before President Bush’s record-breaking tax cuts.

Clip #2: “That’s class warfare….”

Question: Who gave the quote in clip #2? Karl Rove? Bill O’Reilly? Some Republican deriding Lieberman’s proposal as yet another “soak the rich” scheme?

Nope. Joe Lieberman said it, interestingly enough. But, in spite of the fact that his own proposal feeds on that very class warfare, he doesn’t call it that. Instead, he decries the idea of giving you back some of your own hard-earned money “class warfare”. Talk about your double-speak! Lieberman calls tax refunds “class warfare”, and then turns around and promises the middle class that he’s gonna get those rich folks.

It’s just the same, tired rhetoric from another Democrat. The headline for this AP story is, “Lieberman Proposes Tax Boost for Wealthy”. This is news? You could replace “Lieberman” with virtually every Democrat politician in Washington, D.C. and it would be true.

The article says that Joe is “hoping to jump-start his presidential campaign” with this allegedly “fresh attack on White House policy”. It’s about as stale as you can get, and the folks who will be energized by it are those who have declared war on those who make more money than they do. The same policies appealing to the same envious contingent. >yawn<

I’m out of town on business this week, so blogging may be light.

It’s interesting that one of the first changes for the better that comes from the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger happens Germany. Almost ironic.

“The more confused we are by what they [German politicians] say, the greater our longing for a man or woman with simple words,” wrote Bild newspaper columnist Franz Josef Wagner. “The only problem is that it’s the wrong ones who usually master simple language.”
…
“Germany urgently needs something Schwarzenegger-like: a can-do spirit, unconventional thinking, courage, strength and vision. We’re facing the worst crisis since the war,” he wrote.

The sabotaging of the Schwarzenegger governorship has begun.

Aides to Sen. John Vasconcellos confirmed the liberal San Jose Democrat called Republican Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger “a boob,” said voters “made a mistake,” and announced that when the Legislature reconvenes in January, “I’m not sure I’ll go back.”

Other liberal legislators, from the Bay Area and elsewhere, apparently are thinking about skipping Schwarzenegger’s January State of the State address — his blueprint for working with the Legislature to tackle California’s deficit and other woes — because they believe he will have nothing to tell them.

How open-minded of them.

But even while saying they would try to work with Schwarzenegger, liberals among the Democrats who dominate the Legislature wound up talking about potential deadlocks with the moderate Republican.

“It depends on what the hell he wants to do,” Senate Majority Leader John Burton, D-San Francisco, said during a Capitol news conference.

“If he wants to take money away from aged, blind and disabled, or if he wants to take money away from poor women and children, I don’t think so,” Burton said. “Not while I’m around.”

Translation: “If he doesn’t tow the Democrat line, we’ll obstruct him at every turn.”

The liberal blogger Kos is trying to have it both ways, though. While he’s ignored the slings and arrows already being thrown at Arnold even before he’s sitting in the big chair, he yawns, “Expect Arnold to whine about Democratic ‘obstructionism’ in the state legislature.” Whaddya mean? If he complains about it, it’ll be perfectly justified. He’s having to face it already! Kos is displaying pure liberal partisanship; ignoring the behavior of the folks in his party while (pre-emptively) dismissing reaction to it.

He goes on to say, “Arnold has 100 days, starting the second he takes his oath.” How thoughtful of him. It took Davis 5 years to dig this hole, and he’s generously giving Schwarzenegger a liitle over 3 months to fix it all, while a blantantly obvious plan of obstruction is already being laid. California Democrat Party state spokesman Bob Mulholland said that a new recall push would begin at the end of those 100 days. Now ain’t this a classic! The recall of Davis was a grass roots effort based on performance, or lack thereof. Democrats, however, are poised to keep Schwarzenegger from getting anything done, while at the same time preparing to recall him over that very lack of progress. The former is what a recall is for, the latter is simple revenge of the sour grapes variety. That’s not public service, that’s power mongering.

Israeli forces are trying to shut down weapon-smuggling tunnels from a Palestinian refugee camp to Egypt, and it apparently didn’t go the way they planned. There were casualties, but all the numbers I’ve heard have come from Palestinian sources. These should all be taken with a grain (nay, pillar) of salt after they admitted (3 months after the fact) that Jenin was not a massacre (as they’d originally claimed) and that most of the casualties were fighters (unlike what they’d originally claimed). Always keep that in mind.

I’m a geek at heart and I peruse all my web server log files because of that. 🙂 I have been noticing that some of y’all are coming here from having bookmarked my site after visiting it via the link from NRO’s “The Corner” blog. I know that because you’re coming in to the October-2003-only archive page, which is where the link from NRO pointed you (which is how Blogger created permalinks; via the archive page since entries don’t scroll off of there vs the main page where they do).

All this to say that if you bookmarked me after coming from NRO, check your bookmark. If it says:
http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/2003_10_01_archive.html
change it to
http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/

And then you’ll keep seeing new posts when November comes.

(A public service announcement from Considerettes. Tax, tag, title and dealer prep extra. No log entries were harmed in the making of this blog entry. Percentage are APR with approved credit.)