As usual, Mark Steyn does a nice job of dissecting Obama's carefully crafted speeches. This time, it is Obama's Westpoint discourse. From National Review Online:

Obama’s speech is only about Afghanistan if you’re in Afghanistan. If you’re in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it’s about America. And what it told them is that, if you’re a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience. Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign-policy “realism” seem so unreal when you’re up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half a decade to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, “unrealistic,” but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators’ heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon.

More on the SEALs' Dilemma

We can't let this story fade into the background. From the Washington Examiner:

As former President George W. Bush would say, Ahmed Hasim Abed is an evildoer. He masterminded the killing of four American military contractors and ordered the desecration of their bodies in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. Abed was considered a high-value target in the war on terror, so when three Navy SEALs brought him to justice, they should have been hailed as heroes.

Instead, they were reprimanded for allegedly injuring Abed. After being turned over to Iraqi authorities, Abed complained of being punched, which caused -- quelle horreur! -- a bloody lip. All three SEALS requested and were granted court marshals in order to clear their names. Those proceedings will convene in January. The SEALs surely believe they acted appropriately because military courts are notoriously strict and severe compared with civilian courts.

Writing for the Washington Post, George Will throws in his two cents on Climategate:

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future...

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over...

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

Applying Alinsky to Afghanistan

From Andrew C. McCarthy, writing for National Review Online:

...the president is a power politician who shrewdly reads the vulnerabilities of both his opponents and his backers. He knows conservatives want to support both our troops and presidential initiatives that at least seem supportive of our vital interests. That makes conservatives a cheap date for Obama. He feels free to run down Bush and to tar our history: “We are not as young — and perhaps not as innocent,” he told the cadets at West Point, “as we were when [Franklin] Roosevelt was president.” He also frames national security as a distraction from his more important work socializing our economy. He knows that as long as he is tepidly supportive of a military mission — even one that neither aims to achieve nor can possibly achieve victory over America’s enemies — conservatives will not only overlook the slights; they will anxiously commend him and help the New York Times take the lash to those who won’t.

The president also knows the Left has no place else to go. They’ll grumble about “escalation.” We’ll get the occasional Michael Moore outburst. But as Horowitz observes, this is the same theater that has gone on for decades. Alinsky’s principles hold that open radicals unwittingly betray the cause by honestly urging their radicalism on a society that doesn’t want it. The trick, which Obama has internalized, is to masquerade as a concerned but benign member of that society and speak in high-minded abstractions – “our values,” “social justice,” “equality,” “dignity,” and the like. That way, you sell yourself as a well-intentioned leader but, upon acquiring power, determinedly shift Leviathan toward your own radical conception of values, justice, equality, and dignity.

Weakland's Web

There is a bit of reluctance on my part to post this depressing news story from Milwaukee, but as followers of this blog know, tracking the history of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is a recurring theme here, in the hope that a restoration of a decimated vineyard will one day be upon us.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online

Weakland shredded copies of sex abuse reports, documents say

Former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland routinely shredded copies of weekly reports about sexual abuse by priests, according to formerly sealed testimony turned over to Milwaukee County's district attorney on Thursday.

In a 1993 deposition, Weakland admitted destroying copies of the reports in his office, according to a partial transcript of the deposition released by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Summits Galore!

The Beer Summit of last summer (I hosted a couple of my own in honor of this.)

From the New Republic:

It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that Obama would go a bit summit-crazy once he was actually in the White House. Little more than a month after taking office, he held a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” where he solicited ideas for battling the deficit; a few weeks after that he hosted a “Health Care Summit” to kick off his drive for health care reform; and later still came the “H1N1 Preparedness Summit” and the “Distracted Driving Summit.” Then there were the assortment of international summits (Summit of the Americas, NATO Summit, G-8 Summit, G-20 Summit, ASEAN Summit), head-of-state summits (Karzai, Zardari, Medvedev, Hatoyama, Hu), and, of course, the Beer Summit with Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley. And today Obama's summitry comes full circle when he holds another jobs summit, where he and 130 other people (including Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, and even Eric Schmidt, in case he has any new ideas he didn't put forth 14 months ago) will chew over how to get the unemployment rate out of double digits. Add it all up and that's an astounding amount of gas-baggery in such a relatively short period of time.

Emphasis added.

N.B.: IT'S ALL ABOUT PERCEPTION WITH THIS PRESIDENT

"Offramps" in a Time of War

Writing for National Review Online Stephen Yates and Christian Whiton offer a withering critique of the tone and content of Obama's speech last night.

After three months of delay, President Obama has finally responded to the troop request from his military commander in Afghanistan. But the increase in forces comes with a poison pill. Mr. Obama’s hesitation created the space necessary for liberals in his own administration to trump his national-security team and lay the groundwork for an eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. He let politics hijack national security. The resulting policy is one of managed failure.

It is true that General McChrystal will eventually receive more troops for the mission Mr. Obama ordered him to execute last March. But the White House’s message has focused much more on “offramps” and the notion that the U.S. must ultimately withdraw completely from the battlespace. Given that it may take six months for the additional forces to reach Afghanistan, and that the dominant narrative is already withdrawal, there is really no commitment at all to winning what Obama called the “war of necessity” just this summer.

Emphasis added

And another blistering review from Der Speigel Online

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama's speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech. But it didn't help: The soldiers' reception was cool.

One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

What?

While lamenting the conspicuous dearth of rah-rah enthusiasm among West Point cadets for President Obama tonight, MSNBC's Chris Matthews referred to the place as "enemy camp".

Obama in the Eyes of the Arab World

Fouad Ajami has a fascinating piece appearing in the Wall Street Journal:

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

For It Before He Was Against It, Part II

The Wall Street Journal lays bare the rank hypocrisy of Senator John Kerry and decimates his recent criticism of the Bush strategy in the initial days of the war in Afghanistan.

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops.

In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the "unwillingness" of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals "to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden," the al Qaeda leaders escaped...

In 2001, readers may recall, the Washington establishment that included Mr. Kerry was fretting about the danger in Afghanistan from committing too many troops. The New York Times made the "quagmire" point explicitly in a famous page-one analysis, and Seymour Hersh fed the cliche at The New Yorker.

On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should "smoke [bin Laden] out" of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: "For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way." The Rumsfeld-General Tommy Franks troop strategy may have missed bin Laden, but it reflected domestic political doubts about an extended Afghan campaign.

Emphasis added

War Analysis

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A Different Kind of Leader, No More?

Michael Moore and the left are in a state of apoplexy and total breakdown as their beloved leader prepares to align himself with the baleful neocons (as they see it).

The fact is, liberals are bracing to learn a cold, immutable fact about politics: there's nothing new under the sun. As Barack Obama prepares to announce the surge in Afghanistan (finally), the left is painfully realizing that he is not le Roi Soleil they had hoped for.

From Rich Lowry, writing for National Review Online:

Prepare for the advent of Barack Obama, neocon. On the Afghan War, he is throwing in with the lying, warmongering running dogs of neoconservatism by ordering a surge of some 30,000 troops.

Obama has to become a president of victory even though he hails from a party of defeat. The responsibilities of office separate him from a political base that only sounded stalwart on the Afghan War so long as it was a handy political tool with which to beat George W. Bush about the head and shoulders.

On the Art of War

“As a portrait painter I am drawn to the human drama, the psychology and bravery. In the theatre of war, experience is condensed, there is an intensification of life.”

From the Telegraph: Arabella Dorman spent about a month as a war artist, embedded with British troops in Afghanistan. In the process, she whipped up some powerful portraits.

Art Appreciation

Annibale Carracci's Coronation of the Virgin

Read more about Baroque Rome here.

The Nuclear Family, No More?

From the Telegraph:

Nuclear family is broken warns parents' group:

The traditional nuclear family has irretrievably broken down and it will soon become normal for children to be raised by relations other than their parents, the head of a Government-funded parenting group has predicted.

Aunts, uncles, grandparents and even siblings will take on increasing childcare responsibilities in a form of “communal parenting” to cope with the effects of marital breakdown and growing pressures in the workplace, according to the Family and Parenting Institute.

Rising divorce rates, fewer marriages and the growth of civil partnerships mean that the traditional family model is no longer “the norm” and Government efforts to rescue it are futile, according to Dr Katherine Rake, the organisation’s new chief executive.

Liturgy: There to Here in 40 Years

How did Catholic liturgy, once awe-inspiring and ineffable to behold, so quickly find itself laden down by the accretions of gringe-worthy soppiness, folderol and kitsch? Some answers may be found in excerpts from an excellent article written by Kenneth J. Wolfe, appearing in the New York Times (of all places):

...it was Pius himself who was largely responsible for the momentous changes of 1969. It was he who appointed the chief architect of the new Mass, Annibale Bugnini, to the Vatican’s liturgical commission in 1948.

Bugnini was born in 1912 and ordained a Vincentian priest in 1936. Though Bugnini had barely a decade of parish work, Pius XII made him secretary to the Commission for Liturgical Reform. In the 1950s, Bugnini led a major revision of the liturgies of Holy Week. As a result, on Good Friday of 1955, congregations for the first time joined the priest in reciting the Pater Noster, and the priest faced the congregation for some of the liturgy.

The next pope, John XXIII, named Bugnini secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy of Vatican II, in which position he worked with Catholic clergymen and, surprisingly, some Protestant ministers on liturgical reforms. In 1962 he wrote what would eventually become the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the document that gave the form of the new Mass.

Many of Bugnini’s reforms were aimed at appeasing non-Catholics, and changes emulating Protestant services were made, including placing altars to face the people instead of a sacrifice toward the liturgical east. As he put it, “We must strip from our ... Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, for the Protestants.”

How was Bugnini able to make such sweeping changes? In part because none of the popes he served were liturgists. Bugnini changed so many things that John’s successor, Paul VI, sometimes did not know the latest directives. The pope once questioned the vestments set out for him by his staff, saying they were the wrong color, only to be told he had eliminated the week-long celebration of Pentecost and could not wear the corresponding red garments for Mass. The pope’s master of ceremonies then witnessed Paul VI break down in tears.

(Emphasis added)

It's not a stretch to propose that the virtual disappearance of a distinct Catholic culture and identity in the United States can be traced directly back to this attack on the ancient liturgy. Thanks to this experiment to make the Church more congenial to Protestants, an entire generation of Catholics (perhaps even more by now) has been denied the beautiful celebration of the liturgy that their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on and so on, going back over one-thousand years, experienced. Bugnini's wrecking ball changed all that within the short span of forty years. It's both remarkable and sad.

Swiss Surprise

From the BBC:

Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets, official results show.

More than 57% of voters from 26 cantons - or provinces - voted in favour of the ban, Swiss news agency ATS reported.

The proposal had been put forward by the Swiss People's Party, (SVP), the largest party in parliament, which says minarets are a sign of Islamisation.

Raising questions about the political underpinnings and agenda of the Islamic creed is entirely legitimate. Muslims in Switzerland will understandably question the Swiss commitment to freedom of religious expression, but that very freedom to express one's faith publicly is denied to Christians in many Muslim countries as well.

If the people of Switzerland (and Europe in general) were dedicated to passing on their traditions, this, coupled with a strong birth-rate and a high percentage of practicing Christians, would make concerns about Muslims and minarets less pressing.

More on the Climate Change Industry

Peter Hitchens has a great piece on the climate change hoax, appearing in the Daily Mail:

Many people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it.

Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it.

Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.

But take, just for example, the famous picture of polar bears on a melting ice-floe, supposedly doomed victims of global warming.

The USA’s ex-Vice President, the propagandist Al Gore, got audiences going ‘Aaah!’ by saying the bears had ‘nowhere else to go’. Really? The picture was taken in August, when the Alaskan ice always melts. The polar bears were fine. Think about it.

They can swim and they weren’t far from land. Recent studies show that most polar bear populations are rising.

The world was warmer than it is now in the early Middle Ages, long before industrial activity increased CO2 output, a fact that the warming fanatics have worked very hard to obscure.

Oh, and the most important greenhouse gas by far is not CO2 but water vapour, which is not influenced by human activity at all.

Meanwhile, an English court of law (despite buying the CO2 argument) has identified nine significant errors of fact in Gore’s Oscar-winning alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth, ludicrously being inflicted on children in British schools.

Among these: sea levels are not going to rise by 20ft any time soon; there’s no evidence that atolls in the Pacific have been evacuated because of rising waters; the Gulf Stream is not going to shut down; the drying-up of Lake Chad, the shrinking of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Hurricane Katrina were none of them caused by global warming; the only polar bears that have drowned were four that died in a storm.