On being a traitor

Kudos to Samir Khan, who in a recent essay explained what neither President Bush, President Obama, nor Osama bin Laden have been able to articulate: why a U.S.-born Muslim would be "proud to be a traitor to America." (I found the article on a website called Unjust Media, but it apparently originated on Mr. Khan's own website-magazine, Inspire.) With beautiful clarity he explains:

I am a traitor to America because my religion requires me to be one.... I am terrifically proud to be a part of such a religion and what Muslim wouldn’t? Islam has the answer to life’s problems and it is what bonds humanity together for the good.... Islam requires its domination and after eighty plus years of living in a post-Caliphate world, I would think that it's about time Muslims came together to tear down the obstacles. The most important of these obstacles today is obviously America.

That bit about eighty-plus years refers I think to the emergence of a secular Turkey in 1924. The idea is that Kemal Ataturk severed the last strand of the once-glorious Ottoman Empire, which at its height ran north almost to Vienna and Kiev, west to Algiers, and southeast to the Indian Ocean. To this you can add Spain, Portugal, Indonesia, and the Philippines, in the more grandiose vision of Islam-as-universal-nation--and perhaps Germany and France as well. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On citizenship

It's now official: you needn't be a citizen in order to vote! Says the New York Times in one of the shortest news stories of the week (copied in its entirety):

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a state law that requires people to provide proof of American citizenship to register to vote, saying the law conflicts with the federal National Voter Registration Act. Nina Perales, national senior counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that few illegal immigrants tried to register, but that 30,000 citizens had been rejected for registration under the law, which voters passed in 2004.

One of the judges on that panel, as I learned elsewhere, was my former favorite justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. What am I missing here? If a state may not require its citizens to be citizens before they can vote, what the hell does citizenship mean? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bowing to foreign opinion

Shelby Steele--who is that anomaly, a black conservative--ponders the phenomenon of Barack Obama in today's Wall Street Journal. The title is A Referendum on the Redeemer, and basically it's a more intelligent discussion of an emotion first encapsulated by Sarah Palin: "How's that hopey changey stuff working out for ya?"

Mr. Obama, as Mr. Steele argues, is our first 1960s president. This is a much more momentous fact than Bill Clinton's emergence as our first Baby Boomer president: though influenced by the 1960s, Mr. Clinton actually grew up in the two decades that followed World War II, and that was the worldview that shaped him. (It wasn't until 1968, when Mr. Clinton was 22 years old, that The Sixties really got rolling.)

Why is this important? Because the 1960s mindset is one that sees America as essentially evil. Bill Clinton didn't believe that; Barack Obama does, hence the kowtowing tour that marked the first year of his presidency.

This is why (says Mr. Steele) so many Americans believe that their president wasn't born in the U.S., or that he worships in secret as a Muslim. Neither is likely, but the deeper suspicion--he isn't one of us!--most certainly is. America as a force for evil may be a popular notion at National Public Radio and indeed most of the mainstream media, in our university faculties, and among the Good People generally. It doesn't sell so well among the great mass of the Americans, including a good many who joyfully voted for Barack Obama two years ago. We will hear their second thoughts on Tuesday. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The man who saved General Motors

There's a delightful take-down of Steven Rattner's self-congratulatory account of the Overhaul of GM -- in The New Yorker, of all places! I would have expected TNY to revel in the surgical swiftness of Team Obama's remake of the company that was once America's premier builder of automobiles. (Today, of course, America's premier autobuilders speak with Japanese accents.)

Malcolm Gladwell's review is sub-titled "Who really rescued General Motors?" The answer (get ready for it!) is not Steven Rattner, and certainly not the man he installed as GM's new chairman (and who stuck to the job for just over a year before he quit). No, the man who saved General Motors was none other than Rick Wagoner, whom Mr. Rattner fired. It was Mr. Wagoner who got rid of GM's pension burden, persuaded the UAW to accept roughly half the prevailing wage for the company's new hires, and put in motion the new generation of automobiles that are now winning praise from critics (if not yet from buyers).

As for Mr. Rattner, he comes off sounding a bit like a college sophomore. In a devastating last paragraph, Mr. Gladwell lets the auto czar wind his own shroud, as he concludes the story of his second (only his second!) whirlwind tour of Detroit:

Then it was on to G.M. and finally to Chrysler. But not for long, because time was short and the real work of saving Detroit, of course, has nothing to do with Detroit. “We walked among the vehicles—sedans and trucks and even a Fiat 500—as the Chrysler people talked about advanced hybrid power trains and new, environmentally friendly diesels,” Rattner continues. “But by this point our goal was not to miss our flight back to the mountain of work that awaited us back in Washington.”

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Snowing on Ajax!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Despite?

Jonathan Alter, in the New York Times, has a problem distinguishing cause and effect:

'It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow.'

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Gasp! anonymously financed groups!

As we count down to November 2, the front page of the New York Times more and more resembles a broadsheet from the Democratic National Committee. Here's a screenshot from the website this morning, peppered with scare words. "Anonymously financed groups are starting a coordinated final push to deliver control ..."  How sinister! But isn't this what all "groups" do in all elections? No mention in the Gray Lady that the largest anonymously financed group in this election cycle is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers. "We're the big dog," said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME's political operations. "But we don't like to brag." And if he did brag, you wouldn't read it in the New York Times. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bombing Iran

I've always assumed that when Iran's nuclear program got so far along that bombs were an inevitable product, the Israelis would blast the facilities out of existence, as it has done to other nations in the past. Not so fast, says Kenneth Pollack in The National Interest:

Most American (and Israeli) nuclear experts now think that Tehran is so far along that it could rebuild the entire program and be back to where it is at present in just a year or two. And many already fear that Iran has secret facilities, or is hiding key machinery and material for its nuclear program—then the program wouldn’t be set back much at all by a military campaign.

It is also worth keeping in mind that Iran probably will retaliate against the United States.... The Islamic Republic has a formidable capacity to employ terrorism and a lot of allies, like Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who could also cause a great deal of damage on Tehran’s behalf. If there is anyone out there who might be able to replicate a terrorist attack as terrible as 9/11, it is Iran.

Sanctions, he thinks, have a better chance of success--but tougher sanctions, allied with covert action and a greater emphasis on human rights. South Africa is the model here: the whole world was ready to dump on South Africa, especially the Good People, not for its nukes but for the odiousness of its regime. Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'If I've lost Maureen Tucker, I've lost Rolling Stone!'

I've never before heard of Maureen Tucker, nor the Velvet Underground, and I've only once before read Rolling Stone (that being the story that brought General Petraeus to Afghanistan). But if I were Barack Obama, I'd be having nightmares about this interview:

"I disagree with spending / borrowing / printing — damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! I disagree with the 'we won' attitude, which is the cowardly way of saying fuck you," Tucker said of the Obama presidency. "I disagree with an administration that for twenty months blames Bush. If the president and his minions are so damn smart, why didn't they know the severity of the situation? The president has actually said (and I saw it on video) that they didn't know!" Tucker added that she's not usually conservative-leaning. "I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream land be paid for? For those who actually believe that their taxes won't go up in order to pay for all this insanity: good luck," Tucker said.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Requiem for the Congressman

The Rasmussen pollsters asked "likely voters" if they thought their Congressional representative should be reelected. The results are amazing. Whereas the rule in the past has been that the United States Congress is doing a lousy job, whereas my Congressman is terrific, that now is very much a minority view:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of voters think it would be better for the country if most congressional incumbents are defeated this November. Just 27% think their representative in Congress is the best possible person for the job, and only 37% think their local congressional representative deserves reelection.

The problems are three: the auto bailout, the stimulus, and ObamaCare. For his part, the President worries that the people are scared. Indeed we are! We're scared of him. Mr. Obama's best option, it seems to me, is to follow the pundit who was so disappointed with the electorate that he thought the government's ought to fire the people and appoint a new one. Who the devil said that? For the first time in years, Google fails me. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Requiem for the buck

I ordered a pair of ski poles yesterday, and when I clicked on the Confirm button, it occurred to me that the price ($129) was more than what I paid for my first pair of metal skis, which I bought second hand at a ski shop in Littleton NH. That was of course before the Great Inflation of the 1970s, which turned our dollars into dimes. Lyndon Johnson wanted a Great Society plus a war, and the only way to pay for that was to print greenbacks. "It's our currency, but it's your problem," his Treasury secretary John Connally said to the Europeans when we exported our inflation to them. (By that time, Mr. Connally was Richard Nixon's Treasury secretary: inflation takes a while to work through the system.) Now I habitually move the decimal one place to the left when pricing things. Gasoline at $2.74? Not bad! That's actually cheaper than the 29.9 cents I paid to put a gallon in my Volkswagen Beetle.

Now we have another president whose ambitions are higher than the nation's ability (or anyhow willingness) to pay for them. The solution of course will be to flood the world with greenbacks. The gold bugs have already bid the price of their pretty metal up to $1300 an ounce; it was $35 when Mr. Nixon closed the door to Fort Knox and unhinged the dollar from reality. Can $3,500 be far off? Then I'll be moving the decimal point two places left. Gasoline at $28 a gallon is the legacy we'll leave to our children. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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The season's over?

Except for the occasional Seinfeld re-run, we gave up broadcast television years ago, in large part because prime time begins just about the time we go to bed. Then a friend urged us to watch Mad Men. I didn't even like the title! But I rented the DVD of the first season, then the second and the third. Now we huddle around the computer and buy the episodes from Amazon the day after they're aired for a buck ninety-nine--that's how addicted we are.

But it's over, according to the show's creator in the NYT. Mr. Weiner tells us a bit too much about how Mad Men comes to be (as with sausages, the less about that the better), but the big news is that the season ended last night. Good grief. No wonder Don Draper looks so sad: it's back to the Seinfeld re-runs! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It was a German war

I've devoted a good part of my life to World War II--living it, studying it, writing about it--and one of the things I find most irritating about the way it's remembered is that it was the work of the Nazis. I read of "Nazi-occupied Europe," as if Germany were just another conquered nation. And I read of "the Nazi army," when there was no such thing, only the Heer, abetted by the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. These were German institutions, not Nazi inventions. (To be sure, there was also the Waffen SS, a combat branch that could fairly be termed "Nazi.")

The Good People who dominate our universities and the press still hew to the Nazi/German dichotomy, but the Germans at least are beginning to spread the blame more broadly. (It helps, I suppose, that those who were active during the war are now either dead or in their eighties and nineties, and no threat to anyone.) The photo is from an exhibit at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, nicely written up in today's New York Times. There's also a slide show of images, including the one above. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

NYT 2.0

God, whatever happened to our "Newspaper of Record"? I go to the New York Times website and I see this: Education of a President. It's a puff piece of a nature so obsequious that Don Draper would have blushed to pitch to a Timesman of the 1960s.

"On a busy afternoon in the West Wing late last month," writes Peter Baker in prose that used to be restricted to what was then known as The Women's Page, " President Barack Obama seemed relaxed and unhurried as he sat down in a newly reupholstered brown leather chair in the Oval Office.... As he welcomed me, I told him I liked what he had done with the place."

The president of the United States, we are told, likes taupe. (I confess I had to Google the word. Mr. Obama has that effect on me. Neither did I know what arugula was, until he made it famous as an indicator of the Consumer Price Index during the campaign.)

I liked what he had done with the place! Mr. Baker goes on to explain what excited his admiration:

"The curved walls now had striped tan wallpaper, and the coffee table had been replaced by a walnut-and-mica table that, Obama noted, would resist stains from water glasses. The bust of Winston Churchill was replaced by one of Martin Luther King Jr. The couches were new. [The president] told me he was happy with the redecorating of the office. 'I know Arianna doesn’t like it,' he said lightly. 'But I like taupe.'"

It's all symbolic, we are led to believe, of a grand makeover of the presidency, which goes by the code name of Obama 2.0.

In the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up! I don't know who is more to be pitied, the president of the United States or a once-great newspaper. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And a sad day for the District of Columbia

Michelle Rhee, who held out hope that the thousands of children mired in the nation's worst school district might actually get an education, has resigned her post. Congratulations to the district's inept teachers, who held onto jobs they can't perform. And to President Obama, who sat by and did nothing while his own children were  limo-delivered to Sidwell Friends. And to the voters of Washington, who failed to reelect the mayor who appointed Rhee, and who actually believed in hope and change. Instead we get more of the same. It's a sad day for the kids, for the District, and indeed for the nation. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

¡día feliz!

A happy day for Chile and the world. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Maybe today

Things look good for the men below ground, as those on the surface prepare the hoist that will bring them half a mile to the sunlight after two months entombed. The Phoenix rescue capsule made its trial run yesterday and "didn't even raise any dust." Wonderful. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Roughnecks to the rescue

Reports the Associated Press from San Jose, Chile:

Jeff Hart was drilling water wells for the U.S. Army's forward operating bases in Afghanistan when he got the call to fly to Chile.
He spent the next 33 days on his feet, operating the drill that finally provided a way out Saturday for 33 trapped miners.
"You have to feel through your feet what the drill is doing; it's a vibration you get so that you know what's happening," explained Hart, a contractor from Denver, Colorado.

That's Mr. Hart at left above; on the right is Matt Staffel. Both are from Denver, and if the Chilean miners escape from their tomb this week, it will be in large part thanks to them and their drilling skills.

There was a time when American roughnecks to the rescue was standard fare in newspapers, on television, and in movies. Now it's a rarity. Is that because Americans have changed, or the media? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Valhalla at the 'plex

Yesterday afternoon we went to the multiplex, a thing we rarely do. The occasion was the season’s first broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera: Das Rheingold, and also the first in the Met’s new production of the Ring . Gosh, what a great three hours it was! Mr. Lepage’s production has come in for mixed reviews, to say the least, but I was enchanted. I liked the effects. I even liked Bryn Terfel's greasy Wotan. And Jimmy Levine, now pale as parchment and as corpulent as Sarah Caldwell (and like Ms. Caldwell, his legs can no longer bear his weight, so that he must conduct from a chair), proves once again that genius can overcome all obstacles. Ah, the music!

And a tip of the virtual hat to Adam Diegel as Froh (on the left). He was the cleanest of the immortals, and a voice we will surely hear again. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Thank God for the First Amendment

The nutters at the Westboro Baptist Church have an odd (I almost said "queer") notion that God is punishing the United States for its toleration of homosexuals in the armed forces. That punishment takes the form of striking down American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Do they have a right to picket at funerals of dead Americans? Absolutely! It's protected speech under the First Amendment.

Should they picket at funerals of dead Americans? Absolutely not! What they're doing is offensive, ugly, hurtful, and unnecessarily provocative, and it shames them much more than the victims of their shabby harassment.

And of course the same is true of the offensive, ugly, hurtful, and unnecessarily provocative drive to build an Islamic mosque and cultural central next door to Ground Zero.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you like fries with that?

This enchanting photo appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. What we see here is one of 105 drive-through McDonald's fast-food restaurants now open for business in China, with 100 more planned for each of the next three years.

It's all part of China's discovery of the joys of the automotive culture. The country has built 30,000 miles of expressways in the past ten years. Chinese households and businesses bought 13.6 million vehicles in 2009, substantially more than the 10.4 sold in the U.S. (which, to be sure, was the smallest deluge of autos and light trucks in 27 years). China is now the world's largest automotive market, though it will take a while before the number of cars on China's roads approaches those in the United States.

All of which is grist for the doomsayers who predict that China is about to replace the U.S. as the world's dominant economy. Yet the odd thing about this supposed transition is that, when America took off in the 1950s, it was creating something never seen in the world before. China by contrast is more or less replicating what happened here half a century ago. Does that mean that nothing new will ever happen again, and that the whole world is about to be Americanized? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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No pressure!

Posted without comment. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Arlington cemetery vote

Harold "Hal" Groves enlisted in the Air Force in 1953, earned a commission and his wings in 1955, and flew as an F-4 pilot during the Vietnam War. He worked for Boeing for fourteen years, finally retiring to Myrtle Beach, Florida. He died in August, leaving behind a wonderful funeral notice online. The last sentence has attracted some attention: "In lieu of flowers, Hal has requested that donations be made to your local animal shelter or to any candidate running against Barack Obama in 2012."

Mr. Groves will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on December 9 at 9 a.m. I wonder if the president will attend? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And it's rated PG!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Meet the FETs

As the French have discovered, bracing someone in a burqa is a bit dicey: is this a housewife going to market or her husband with explosives around his waist? In Afghanistan, one can't cope with this problem by banning facial coverings, so the U.S. Marines have deployed Female Engagement Teams to do the bracing. Here's a great video from the NYT today. (You see what a newspaper can do when it does the news instead of ideological oversight?) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

latest from the new york times

What you see here are a christian, a muslim, and a hindu (not a jew, I wouldn't think!) strolling happily through the proposed islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero, as reported in the new york times today.

The nyt, which insists on calling the project "park51," is fast becoming a parody of the America-hating left, even to the point of devaluing the language we used to have in common. Thus Ground Zero has become "ground zero." It's much more difficult to become attached to an icon when it's expressed in lower case letters, isn't it?

For the editors at the new york times, there in times square on manhattan island, here's a quick guide to usage:

ground zero: the point on the earth's surface directly above or below an exploding nuclear bomb

Ground Zero: the point on Manhattan Island where the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sssh! it's a secret!

The Wall Street Journal has a hilarious lead story today, of which the first paragraph informs us:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA's campaign against militants in their Pakistani havens.

Secretly? For crying out loud, this story appears on the front page of the nation's largest newspaper! It's accompanied by the above chart, revealing that there were exactly 22 secret strikes in September as opposed to exactly four secret strikes in August. Let's hope that Pakistan and the Taliban don't spies in the U.S. military who are could ferret out those figures and use them to their advantage. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

General Junior, General Sis

The pudgy young man on the left is a four-star general in the North Korean army. How did he rise to such high rank? Easy: he's the son of the decrepit gentleman on the right, who happens to be the country's dictator.  Kim Jong Eun is 26 or 27, and he has presumably been tapped to be the third generation to rule the starving nation. (Clearly, however, some of North Korea's limited supply of edibles has been diverted to feed General Junior.)

Also presumably--nobody really knows what's going on in North Korea--there's a hedge against the possibility that daddy might die before General Junior is up to taking over. Another newly appointed four-star general is Kim Kyong Hui, the 64-year-old sister of the dictator. She would presumably (that word again!) act as regent while General Junior grows into the job. She didn't get to sit in the front row, however. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford