Considerettes

Five years after a “total ban” on guns, how’s Britian doing in the way of murders? Pathetically, notes Mark Steyn of the London Telegraph.

“Now, in the wake of Birmingham’s New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we’ll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world’s 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognizing the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire – draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.”

Banning guns has not made Britian more civil. It has made it a bigger target. This article is a stunning repudiation of everything the gun-controllers say should happen in theory when guns are restricted. Problem is, it’s only a theory, and it’s not working.

(Note: The London Telegraph requires you to register with them, for free, to read their articles.)

I’ve seen so many political cartoons trying to compare Bush’s response to North Korea to his response to Iraq, and it just goes to prove how little those guys understand the issues, or how willing they are to ignore facts to show their views in the best possible light.

I frequent Daryl Cagel’s Political Cartoon list because I’ve always enjoyed that art form, whether or not I agreed with the viewpoint expressed. It’s interesting to see the imagery cartoonists will use to get their point across. Today, many of the liberal-leaning cartoons (which is the vast majority of them on Cagle’s site) portrayed Bush as overreacting to Iraq via war while simply going through diplomatic channels for North Korea. The overt message is that they both might have nuke programs (and N. Korea has even admitted it), but there’s a disparity in the reaction. The subtext is either simply anti-war or that Bush is blundering through a foreign policy crisis.

What they’re completely missing is that Iraq had already made promises over a decade ago to dismantle and halt production of weapons of mass destruction, and spent the intervening years obstructing anyone from verifying whether or not they had kept to the contract. North Korea, on the other hand, was not known until just a couple months ago to have a nuke program. (Thank you Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter for assuring us that we could trust the word of a dictator while at the same time buying him off. That Nobel committee really show Dubya, eh?) Iraq is reaping the consequences of ignoring UN resolutions. Those consequences were clearly stated, and now the anti-war crowd is complaining that we’re enforcing the very UN resolutions they insisted had to be passed in the first place. I don’t know the terms of our agreement with North Korea, but hey, it’s just an agreement between two countries. The anti-war crowd only considers UN resolutions as carrying any real weight. (Until, of course, the hard choices have to be made about enforcing them.)

Two vastly different situations that liberals are trying to apply overly-simplistic rules to, and doing that would be the real foreign policy blunder.

Here’s a case of protestors just not getting it. Last year, an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado decided to protest mascots referring to American Indians. They decided to call their team the Fightin’ Whites to protest those names in general and the Fightin’ Reds of Eaton High School in Colorado in particular. The intent was to show how insensitive it must be to have a team mascot that allegedly makes fun of your race.

Well, back in March the AP reported that the “protest” wasn’t having the desired effect. When they decided to sell T-shirts of the “Fightin’ Whites” sales were surprisingly brisk. A member of the team, Jeff Vanlwarden, remarked, “It’s obvious some of the people are taking it the way it’s not supposed to be taken. They think it’s cool and we’re honoring the white man.”

Apparently Mr. Vanlwarden and most of his compatriots, as well as the whole crowd who walk with furrowed brows while pondering the Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins and Atlanta Braves, still have not realized what’s going on. See folks, it’s a mascot! It’s just a mascot. There’s no disrespect in it, and in fact there’s an honor that goes with it when a team wants to be identified with something or someone strong and picks you. Getting all bent out of shape about it is the epitome of hypersensitivity. There is no outrage over the Fightin’ Whites because it’s just a mascot.

And that’s why it’s intellectually dishonest to credit them with playing a part in the mascot changings that occured last year, as yesterday’s Washington Times article does. Liberal hypersensitivity has been sweeping academia, so the 20 high schools and 1 college that changed from American Indian mascots would have done so anyway. The momentum is already there. The Fightin’ Whites could only take credit for swaying people who had no problem with American Indian mascots before, but changed their minds because they thought the White’s mascot was demeaning. That does not appear to be very many at all.

Y’know, “Whites” is actually too generic a term to work up a really good outrage over. If they’d picked something more specific like the “Fighting Irish” or the “Fighting Scots”, then you’d rally folks to your cause, eh?

No, the problem is not a matter of images and symbols. It’s more a case of majoring in the minors at the University of Nothern Colorado, and getting worked up over nothing. There is no outcry over having the Whites mascot changed, and the Time article notes that other schools are considering a similar mascot in “protest”. The lack of outrage over that should be instructive.

Sean Penn’s taking a break from the rigours of playing Saddam’s patsy, and he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s been played that way. People are making fun of him by asking “How’s Iraq?”, but he doesn’t seem to get the joke.

Would someone tell this guy that stumping for a dictator is Bad Press(tm)? (At least among the clear-headed.)

Alternet Update: As of today, still no mention of the propaganda bonanza Hussein picked up from Sean Penn’s visit. And as I read more of their “news” articles, it seems crystal clear that all that section is is a place to expound liberal opinion under the guise of news reporting. (Not that it was ever really unclear that it was all just liberal propaganda, but I’d not done any follow-up before.) This, of course, makes it pretty durn easy to ignore from here on out.

Happy 2003! Had a nice, long vacation, and now Considerettes is back.

So consider this: During my vacation, on Dec. 29, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) suggested that the draft should be started up again. Because we need to ramp up for war? No, in fact his reasoning, if you want to call it that, had nothing to do with numbers. He merely wanted to manipulate public opinion. He feels that war with Iraq would be wrong, and he’s willing to toy with the military to get his way.

We all know that the tax system in this country is more and more used for social and behavorial manipulation and not just revenue raising. Now it seems Rep. Rangel would like to use actual human beings as capital to trade in order to tug at the nation’s heartstrings. This points out a number of things.

• Rangel would rather endanger lives (i.e. water-down the all-volunteer army with conscripts) than make Saddam play by the rules he agreed to.
• He believes that members of Congress determine matters of national security solely on the basis of whether their kids will be involved.
• He apparently can’t appeal to our brains, so he has to resort to emotional manipulation.
• He thinks his ends justify those means.

Rep. Rangel doesn’t seem to be able to trust Americans to act or think on their own, and they must be manipulated by whatever means necessary. And he’s not alone. As I read other blogs, it appears that sentiment is shared.

Christmas vacation has started, and so you probably won’t see much, if anything, of me through the end of the year. Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

The web site AlterNet.org, according to their mission statement, certainly sounds as if it’s nonpartisan. Well, I don’t know about the rest of the site, but their War on Iraq section certainly leans (nay falls) liberal. And it has recently exhibited one of the classic symptoms of that; a lack of understanding of reality.

In a December 16th posting, they reported lauded Sean Penn for “putting his body behind his anti-war rhetoric” and visiting Baghdad for a look at the people there who blood he imagines he’ll have on his hands should we go to war with Iraq. Given the miniscule percentage of casualties of the last Gulf War that were civilians, one has to think those folks are pretty safe. They have only Saddam himself to fear if he ups the ante. However, what AlterNet isn’t reporting, and what Sean Penn is shocked to discover is that Saddam used the visit to create propaganda for himself. Baghdad’s online news service invented plenty of quotes to attribute to him, claiming that he condemned threats of war from the US and Britain, and that he confirmed that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Penn, nor the liberal, ironically named Institute of Public Accuracy, apparently won’t comment about the backstabbing from the fine Iraqi people he was there to comfort.

Some have suggested that the anti-war crowd is essentially a pro-Saddam crowd, and that their actions give aid and comfort to the enemy. I wouldn’t go that far in a generalization (although Saddam does…he says he’s hoping they win the day), but Penn’s actions certainly could exhibit that effect. His new moniker “Baghdad Sean” has been well earned.

Again, it’s a classic symptom of a liberal worldview. This doesn’t come as a surprise to any clear-thinking person, but those who are totally taken aback by this turn of events are all of the same political persuasion. Wonder if AlterNet will, in their quest to provide “quality journalism, dependable research, issue-focused public interest content and passionate accuracy”, will even give this turn of events a mention.

Let’s watch and find out.

And speaking of not looking at history, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America does some deconstructing of his own on the 9th Circuit court’s decision on the Second Amendment. Considering how much judges rely on precedent, this has to be willful ignorance.

Michael Medved has a great article deconstructing the top 10 anti-war arguments, just in time for political discussions during the holiday parties and dinners. Bon apetite!

What a lot of this comes down to is parroting back anti-war excuses from the last half century replacing “Iraq” in the place of the last bad guy. It also requires taking a blind eye to history, which is never a good idea (as any historian will tell you). Neither of those actions is wise when one is debating something as serious as warfare.