A Few Final Thoughts

... before the election.

I'm tired of writing about politics, but we're not done yet. It ain't over 'til Fat Boy howls in anguish, which, G-d and the American people willing, will be very soon.

I received a last-minute pro-Kerry e-mail from some well-meaning friends in San Francisco. They sent me editorials by Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Avi Wikonur. I spent the morning composing a lengthy rebuttal in my head, but at this point, frankly, I haven't got the energy.

Let me say what I really mean. I haven't got the patience to plod through the same arguments again and again. I sit in front of this computer every day, sometimes for 6 or 8 hours at a stretch, and I've heard every argument there is. There isn't anything Dershowitz or Wikonur can say that I haven't heard already.

There is only one candidate who cares about making the Mideast, and the world, a better place. Perhaps Kerry actually believes his own insane claims that the Iranian mullahs will be induced, through gentle persuasion, to give up their nuclear ambitions. Kerry, in fact, seems to have a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality, which is the single thing about him that disturbs me the most.

I'm rambling. I don't know what else to say right now. I feel like I should have some profound thoughts on the eve of the election, but I'm just numb. I'm numb, and I don't know what to say.

Update

My blogroll is now in some remote semblance of order, although it still needs a lot of work. But please take a look, I've sorted out my links a bit, and, even more important, added some new ones.

I don't have time to post this morning, got to get to class. (M/W/F: Calculus and Women's Studies. Tu/Th: Early American Literature.) Hope to post a little this afternoon if time permits.

And BTW, thanks to everyone who has taken time out of their busy schedule (even if just 2 seconds!) to visit Dreams Into Lightning over the past six months. Feel free to post a comment here, if you have any questions or if there's something you'd like to see more/less of, or if you just want to chat.

Catch you later ...

Let's blogroll!

SPECIAL EDITION: The Portland Mukhabarat

It's worth mentioning Auntie Cracker again. "Everyone should vote!" Errr, no. If you don't care, if you're not informed on the issues, then don't vote. So says Auntie Cracker, and I agree.

No on Amendment 36 to the Oregon Constitution! Join ampersand, bean, and friends at Alas, A Blog in defending the right of lesbian and gay couples to marry. Also some positive comments about Log Cabin Republicans, lots of feminist stuff, and a fabulous cartoon called Hereville.

For the political omnivore, a group blog called Blog Junky has your fix.

Sure, you knew Lyndon LaRouche was insane. But do you really appreciate the full depth, breadth, and scope of his madness? Or what lavender can do for a seven-year-old girl's room? What do Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson have in common? For the answers to those and other questions, you must visit Jason Holliston.

Hat tip for Alas, Blog Junky, and Jason Holliston: Michael J. Totten.

Walter, we love you. Now shut up.

What has happened to Walter Cronkite's brain? The newscaster we all grew up on seems to have jumped the proverbial shark. Ocean Guy, from his vantage point on A1A, wonders if Walt has lost his mind. Portlander Auntie Cracker thinks the time has come for Cronkite to be kept quiet. (I left a comment with Auntie, too.)

And while you're checking out Auntie's current posts, follow her link to "Jayhorn". It's disturbing. Trust me on this one.

Michael J. Totten returns ...

... to his homepage after helping to hold down the fort at Instapundit. If you scroll down on his current screen, you'll find his impressions from his stint in the upper realms of the blognoscenti, plus his sailing trip up north to Washington, and observations on the experiences of those annoying "liberals for Bush" like Christopher Hitchens and Marc (Armed Liberal) Danziger. MJT - who also wants you to know that he still reads Andrew Sullivan - speaks succinctly for many of us when he says, "despite the fact that I’ve been pushed toward to the right, I haven’t joined the right." Go read his blog.

UPDATE: Don't miss the new guest post by Danziger, The Struggle of Ideas.

The Lancet doesn't glitter ...

... in this analysis by Andrew Coulson.

Also follow the link to Rip Rowan at The Skeptician.

Remembering the 49

Kat at The Middle Ground writes that the cold-blooded massacre of Iraqi recruits should become a rallying-point for Iraqis. Will it?

.... What feels wrong from this side of the ocean is what appears to be a missing Iraqi national will or concensus about who they are, what they are fighting for and who it is all for. Seems like every group has their own agenda and can't see to the first agenda, the national agenda.

Patriots and Soldiers

Big Pharaoh takes a moment to fadfad - Egyptian Arabic for getting something off your chest - about the terrorists' tiresome search for new tricks:

The Wahabi/Salafi animals in Iraq showed us today a new way to display the different kinds of demons they have inside. They kidnapped over 50 young police recruits on their way from training and ordered them to lie down on the ground. They neatly organized their preys in rows of 12 and made them put their hands behind their heads. The animals then stood in front of each victim and placed a single bullet in his head.

That was a new show by the Wahabi/Salafi animals in Iraq. First they shocked the world by broadcasting their videos that showed Nicholas Berg being slaughtered. Today, these "slaughtering videos" are not blockbusters anymore, we got used to them. The Wahabi/Salafi animals like to innovate, they are creative people. Today they showed us a new thing. Organize young police recruits in rows of 12 then place a single bullet in their heads. How neat.

Fadfada

Seeing the massacre as a call to action, Alaa at The Mesopotamian provides a link to World Inquiry, which is organizing a multi-pronged campaign to support Iraqi freedom. WI's program includes collecting letters of support for Iraqi security forces:

My new partner in crime, Michelle, will be co-author of a plan to spread peace of mind in Iraq. Since my initial project, I have been contacted by all four representatives in the US congress from my state, and we have been offered assistance from one whom I am voting for this term to ensure this project's success.

This time, our sights are set much higher. We plan to send letters to the Iraqi Police and Civil Defense Forces in Fallujah, Najaf, Samarra, and Baghdad. 40 letters to one city, however impressive on the first go-around, will not cut it this time. We need you, the reader to petition your congressmen and women to write letters to these brave souls who wake up every morning without knowing whether or not they will have to die for their country to secure it, and whether or not they will succeed. We need letters from you, we need letters from your grandmother, we need letters from everyone we possibly can get from all walks of life and all political leanings.

World Inquiry project
The Mesopotamian

World Inquiry is also promoting an ambitious project to translate Federalist 10 into Arabic and distribute it in Iraq and the Arab world.

I'd like to write more about Big Pharaoh's post. It reminds me of an earlier post by Zeyad at Healing Iraq, which I'll try to track down soon. Unfortunately I don't have time to post more this morning; got to get ready for class.

Rabin Remembered

Reflections on Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995)

Israelis recently marked the ninth anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist named Yigal Amir.

Alison Kaplan Sommer writes:

Mommy, Yitzhak Rabin was killed in Tel Aviv, right? By a bad guy with a gun named Yigal Amir. And he was Jewish, too. Mommy, tell me again, why did the bad guy kill Yitzhak Rabin?”

It’s that time of year again.

As November rolls around, the questions begin flying thick and fast from my son Eitan — questions about Rabin’s assassination, exactly how he was killed, where he was killed, who killed him, and the hardest question to answer — why?

Eitan is seven years old — he was born in September 1996, 10 months after Rabin’s assassination in November 1995. He never lived at the same time as Rabin.

Yet — with all the ceremonies, memorial rallies, and class lessons about his life, through the ever-growing number of schools, parks, roads, and buildings named after him — Yitzhak Rabin is vivid and real and familiar to my son — much more so than today’s politicians.

Eitan can regale you with stories about Rabin’s childhood, where he went to school, his army career. But mainly, he can tell you the details of the assassination — the date it happened, the location — how Rabin was approached, how many shots were fired. He knows that the man who killed him was named Yigal Amir, and that he was Israeli and Jewish. He knows that Amir was angry at Rabin for signing a peace agreement with the Arabs. He knows that Amir is in jail and will never get out. And yet, every year, he wants to know more.

All of this feels eerily familiar. I was born in September 1964, 10 months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy — an event now being marked with 40th anniversary commemorations. At Eitan’s age, I, too, could rattle off stories of the Kennedy clan, recount the drama of Oswald and Ruby, describe where the grassy knoll was located and the color of the suit Jackie Kennedy was wearing that was splashed with her husband’s blood. ...

- An Unsealed Room: Rabin

Sharon's Gaza Plan Moves Ahead

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon scored a major political victory on October 26, with the Knesset's passage (by 67 votes to 45) of his controversial Gaza withdrawal plan. An earlier post on the subject can be found here: Disengagement.

I haven't blogged a lot on Israel/Palestine issues, mostly because Iraq and Iran have been occupying the geopolitical center stage at Dreams Into Lightning. Also, I don't believe the Palestinian/Israeli issue will be resolved in Jerusalem or Ramallah, because the problem really lies in Tehran, Damascus, and Cairo. As long as these foreign regimes are in power, they will do everything they can to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians impossible.

Also, my opinions on Palestine and Israel are not quite as clear-cut as they are on Iran and Iraq. But I feel I can say a few things with confidence, so I'll say them here.

I think President Bush is on the right track. People who see Sharon and Bush as being ideological twins, and those who see Sharon as Bush's "lapdog" (or, depending on how anti-Semitic they are, who see Bush as Sharon's lapdog), simply don't know what they are talking about. Sharon is traditionally a hardliner, and he has come toward an accommodation with the Palestinians after a long, hard struggle. President Bush - the first US President to explicitly call for the recognition of a Palestinian state - has also been leaning very hard on Sharon to plan for a withdrawal from Gaza, and to evacuate unauthorized Jewish settlements.

Both Sharon and Bush have been facing stiff opposition from hardliners on the Right. By pursuing his disengagement plan, Ariel Sharon is risking his political career - and, as the ninth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination reminds us, perhaps more than that. Sharon cannot act without his government's consent, which often has not been forthcoming. President Bush, too, faces opposition from conservatives who accuse him of being "soft on the Palestinians".

Bush isn't going to get everything he wants from Sharon, and Sharon isn't going to get everything he wants from his government. There are no lapdogs in this picture - just a collectioin of factions with different goals and occasionally overlapping interests.

The folks at Debka have made no secret of their opposition to Gaza withdrawal and settlement evacuation. Now I don't claim to be a Mideast expert and I don't have to worry about Qassam missiles hitting Oregon, but I do understand the Israelis' concerns about a militarized Palestinian state in either the West Bank or Gaza.

Still, Israel can only be Israel. The goal of statehood - and I mean Israeli statehood - must be to secure borders: In here, it is our land; out there, it is your land. Any Palestinian-Israeli agreement must work concretely toward that end.

Danny at The Head Heeb offers some helpful comments. I'll quote the central paragraph of his reflection on Rabin:

On Rabin’s Jahrzeit, one talks a lot of “Rabin’s legacy” which usually means the Oslo agreements. How do those agreements look from retrospect? Overall the outcome cannot be positive. It was a bold gamble, and it was largely unsuccessful. The agreements attempted to reverse drastically the way in which Israel, and beforehand the Zionist movement, approached the Arabs since the 1920s; reverse the logic of Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall”, which though serving Israel well in the past, was now proving harmful. This change has been very hard to implement. It turns out that certain elements of “Iron Wall” thinking has remained sound; as I mentioned above, the jury is still out about whether ‘land-for-peace’ is a workable formula (the jury should always be out on this issue as long as Israel is in the OT. What else is there?). What Oslo did make clear is that the “Iron Wall” which controlled the lives of millions of Palestinians, could simply not be maintained (indeed another way of looking at Oslo is as an acknowledgement of defeat in the first Intifada posing as a peace agreement – it was a shame that it relied on Arafat). The moderate Right has also come around to this point of view, which is why Sharon is promoting disengagement.

Go read the whole post at The Head Heeb: Rabin's Legacy.

Belmont Club: What Arafat Forgot

'Palestine was cursed by the example of Algeria, which after evicting the French, could spend the next three decades cleansing itself of the poisons of terrorism. Arafat forgot that the Jews, unlike the French in Algeria, were as much a part of region as themselves. In place of protracted war, which at all events ends, Arafat embarked upon an eternal war with the eternal Jew. He would enter Algeria's tunnel of terror with no light at the end of it.

The Intifada may have hurt Israel, but it consumed Palestine...'

Read Wretchard's full post "The Noonday Train" at Belmont Club.

Blackfive on Kerry's KLA Ties

The Kosovo Liberation Army worked closely with the Clinton Administration - and at the time, Blackfive says, "that was not unusual or illegal. But now some things may have changed with the KLA, like forming ties to Al Qaeda."

Read the whole story at the link.

The New Republican: Ipse Dixit

The liberal magazine The New Republic has come up with a new reason for voting against Bush: he's not a good conservative.

Well, any port in a storm. Of course, it's not a new observation either. Back in August, a liberal friend e-mailed me an article from the New York Press by William Bryk, titled The Conservative Case Against Bush.

Now The New Republic takes its turn (October 25, 2004 print issue: "Conscientious Objector" by Michael A. George, p. 20.) The tactic is a pretty familiar one: "See, one of THEM doesn't like him either." You give your case more impact (the thinking goes) by bringing out a real live one of whatever group it is you're targeting. If you want to attack Israel, you bring out a real live Jew to condemn the Jewish state (a ploy that too many real live Jews are willing to go along with). And if you want to attack Bush, what better way than to produce a real live conservative who will come out and say ... what?

He'll say that Bush is no conservative.

Well, hell, I coulda told you that.

The New Republic could have told you that, too, and in fact they did. Back in March of 2003, TNR published a magnificent issue on the topic of "Liberalism and American Power" (March 3), which included Lawrence F. Kaplan's piece on p. 21, titled "Bush, closet liberal." Now Robert George discovers that "initiating a war to 'liberate' an entire region far from our shores can hardly be called a conservative cause." (Mr. George might want to review Leon Wieseltier's helpful guide to political debate in the November 1 TNR, where Wieseltier explains, "you do not refute a proposition by putting inverted commas around it." But I digress.)

The conservative case against Bush is fair enough (if a bit familiar, by now, to anyone who's actually been awake for the last couple of years): he's certainly no fiscal conservative; the Patriot Act scarcely qualifies as "small government"; and, oh yes, conservatives don't launch wars of liberation (or "liberation" if you prefer). Well, for the sake of argument, let us agree that Bush stands guilty as charged.

So what does this real live, real conservative do, now that he's realized he cannot vote for Bush? He doesn't say whether he's voting for Kerry, or staying home. "Of course," he adds, "a conservative can still cast a libertarian vote on principle."

This business of voting "on principle" is a fine bit of chutzpah from the magazine that rails, yet again, against the "irresponsible" Ralph Nader on p. 12 of the very same issue (Ryan Lizza, "Sole Influence"). The Nader article is unitntentionally revealing: Lizza writes that "From Moveon.org to the Howard Dean campaign to the liberal blogosphere to Air America radio to new think tanks sprouting up around Washington, D.C., an entire network of exactly the kind of activists that Nader has long praised is suddenly being born. Their singular goal is to defeat Bush." Exactly: they lack a coherent vision, unifying principles, or any positive ideology; their singular goal is "to defeat Bush."

President Bush has succeeded in retaining as much popular support as he has - despite some highly controversial decisions - precisely because he appeals to a wide variety of Americans: traditional conservatives, neoconservatives, centrists, and even liberals. Bush's supporters may differ on a host of less important issues, but they are united, both in principle and in practice, on the things that matter most. His opponents are united only in the fact of their opposition to Bush; so it is inevitable that the single uniting symbol for them is their presidential candidate: that perfect vacuum of a man known as John Kerry.