November 6, 2006
Immigration and the War
As I have said many times before, so it should not shock anyone, I am a bit of a bigot. I hold to double standards, because, well, cultures vary and some are better than others.
Therefore, please do not construe my dismay against the Southern Border Wall (or the Anti-Laborer Protective Barrier) as a blanket ban on ALL border walls (although I may have stated that exact thing earlier, it was just for rhetorical effect). Likewise, when I say that I am pro-immigrant, please don't think that I welcome ALL immigrants to our land.
For instance, I would be entirely happy if David Frum were deported and a wall with towers and raked sand were erected between the US and Canada (so long as it had one way gates to accomodate the tanks when we finally invade).
Seriously, though, reading the neo(pseudo)-cons falling apart at the seams is a great joy. These twits, with their joyful spreading of liberal democracy and unlimited markets, have hijacked conservatism in the West, and watching them squirm is pure entertainment.
See how they set up their president!
See how they praise their president!
That president Bush, he's a good, decent man who goes to war for morals!
See how the war drags on!
Drag on, War, drag on!
Mission Accomplished!
See how the one secular Arab state is now becoming two Mohammedan states!
Hey! Who passed the law of unintended consequences?
Don't Blame ME! I never said we should do it THIS way!
See how they blame their president when their plans did not work!
The Neo(pseudo) Cons: They did it their way (and cried afterwards).
Remember the first Yuppies? They were in their thirties. They had gotten over their hippy days. They were really into Ron Reagan. The women wore monstrous clothes and big hair, and the men had really skinny ties. It was fashionable for restaurants to paint their walls pink and green and serve "cajun" food, which meant they burnt the catfish and dipped it in pure cayenne. Then they switched to Asian fusion, but I digress.
The yuppies sat in those restaurants and sipped white zinfandel (oh how sophisticated it all seemed), listened to jazz fusion and got into all sorts of mischief: jogging, bottled water, anti-smoking, cocaine (oops, that wasn't supposed to be on the program, but, hey it made you feel so POWERFUL! it was hard to believe that Reagan wasn't really for the stuff deep down), etc.
Where was I going with this little jog down memory treadmill?
Oh yes, the rise of the neo (pseudo) cons.
Anyway, it was in this era, the culmination of thirty years of bad popular culture and boomer degeneracy, that Ron Reagan pulled a Goldwater and stole the term Conservative. He was never a conservative, except in a vague emotional sense. Without the very real menace of International Communism, the neo-cons would have been laughed off the page.
Once again we have a real menace, or two real menaces: Mohammedanism and Liberalism. The neocons have (sort of) gone to battle against the former, but only insofar as the former gets in the way of the latter.
In our culture, we can forget about defeating the Mohammedans until we have first defeated the Liberals, and that means both the left and the right side of the Liberal movement.
The neo(pseudo) cons are the bigger enemy.
Tomorrow you will go to the polls. Remember that there are almost as few genuinely pro-life Republicans as there are pro-life Democrats.
GOP apologists will say, "oh no, there is a substantial difference, it is all about the judges!" But they are whistling Dixie.
The true cause of the GOP is free markets. If there is a good market for embryos, the GOP will soften its pro-life position.
I would never say Vote Democrat (as it is I will probably be voting mostly for Republicans, just because our California Democrats represent the crust from Satan's armpits), and the Falange is not yet ready for 2006, but get ready to start weaning yourself from your GOP habit.
As to the California voting guide:
Yes on 85 (obvious)
No on 86 (even if you are in favor of outlandish tobacco taxes, which you shouldn't be, this is a bad measure designed as a cash and power grab by a couple of major hospital chains)
The rest will come tonight, so before you vote, come onto Erik's Rants and Recipes and print out your voters' guide to take into the polls.
Posted by erik at November 6, 2006 8:23 AMLittle John,
I am no isolationist. Far from it. In fact, I would support an all-out Crusade of containtment and purification, including a complete expulsion of Mohammedans from the Americas, Australia, Europe, Lebanon, North Africa, and East Asia. I don't care if little Jim Jihad was born in Marin County, once he says "Mohammed is his prophet" on the boat he goes. Perhaps he will do well in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps not. That is not really our concern, so long as he is there.
Ultimately American military adventures were best when they were old fashioned defensive wars, for instance, against the Prottie "King" of England, or against the Barbary Pirates.
The Sioux (and the rest of the American Indians) were illegally squatting on land that rightfully belonged to European settlers (I am being serious here, the Indian view, as any avid reader of bumper stickers knows, is that "the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land." Since the land DOES belong to us, by extension, so do the Indians. I am not advocating slavery, but if Indians want to maintain their separateness, then they should at least give pause to the consequences). Therefore the Indian Wars were completely defensive wars. The saving of the savages was certainly a good that came of it.
The problem really comes in at WWI, when we blundered into that Prottie "King's" war on sentimental reasons (as well as not-so-cleverly faked "outrages"). It was our first disaster in Nation Building. It gave us Hitler.
Now WWII is more complex, because there was a semi-defensive side to it (if we discount the fact that we were taunting the bull with the muleta to begin with) in regards to Japan. However, the Grand Nation Building got in the way and we got rid of Hitler for...Stalin, Mao, Tito and a host of other lovelies.
So we get Korea, which ended in stalemate, followed by Vietnam, which we lost, but not without letting Pol Pot rise to power.
There is a difference between those things and what we have now in that those older wars were generally Democrat wars.
What works better is to help the locals take out their own trash, which is what we did in Chile, allowing the people to dump that Commie turd Allende and bring about the long period of prosperity that Chile continues to enjoy to this day (even as it has forgotten how that happened).
Posted by: Erik Keilholtz at November 7, 2006 9:40 AMEK-I don't live in CA anymore but I enjoyed your CA voters guide.
The rise of the neocons can be attributed to many things but yuppies and Reagan? Interesting.
Two thoughts: 1)In a post 9/11 environment U.S. isolationsim (far-left and far-right) won't shield us from the Mohammedans. Either would the international realism that dominated the post-War West. So, maybe the neocon strategy was worth a shot and, 2) the U.S. has always had an idealistic, democracy spreading foriegn policy even if it was naive and blinded to unintended consequences. Shall we run down the military adventures of this great land from the revolution to Iraq? The idealogical differences between the campaign against the Sioux and the Sunnis are not all that distinct. A good argument can be made that material shortcomings aborted the U.S. from encompasing the entire North American continent. That was long before neocons.