inkblurt

The New Yorker

Yet another example of incompetence in Iraq. For ideological reasons, we disenfranchised the majority of people who formed the fabric of the country — professionals and experts and leaders who happened to be Baathist only because that’s what you had to do in order to survive. No gray areas in the mind of this administration, resulting in binary logic like this.

Here’s a question I wish more people would ask: Why didn’t we take some of the billions we’re paying federal contractors and put some of these Iraqis to work rebuilding their country, rather than just ousting them and leaving their idle hands to make devil’s workshops?

So it wasn’t the war or the economy that tipped the balance after all…

Four more years… let’s not be quite so asleep at the wheel this time, ok?

Food for thought:

Religion’s Kidnapping of the Campaign

We liberals sometimes forget that the United States has two sets of Founding Fathers: the Puritans of Massachusetts (inspired largely by the 16th Century French refugee to Switzerland John Calvin) and those remarkable avatars of the American Enlightenment: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Paine (inspired by, among others, the 18th Century French refugee to Switzerland Voltaire).

First of all, go vote.

But then, before you start complaining about the Electoral College, be sure you understand it and its history: Origins of the Electoral College :: Ludwig von Mises Institute

And then read a somewhat romantic but still astute (and incredibly eloquent) argument for preserving the institution:

Statement on the Electoral College — Floor of the United States Senate, June 27, 1979 by: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.)

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explains how the Bush White House is the first to use religion in its particular way.

The White House Wasn’t Always God’s House

George Washington was a nominal Anglican who rarely stayed for Communion. John Adams was a Unitarian, which Trinitarians abhorred as heresy. Thomas Jefferson, denounced as an atheist, was actually a deist who detested organized religion and who produced an expurgated version of the New Testament with the miracles eliminated. Jefferson and James Madison, a nominal Episcopalian, were the architects of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. James Monroe was another Virginia Episcopalian. John Quincy Adams was another Massachusetts Unitarian. Andrew Jackson, pressed by clergy members to proclaim a national day of fasting to seek God’s help in combating a cholera epidemic, replied that he could not do as they wished “without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the general government.”

This particular statement should be proclaimed far and wide:

“The most dangerous people in the world today are those who persuade themselves that they are executing the will of the Almighty.”

(Note: I disagree a bit, however, about Reagan and Carter and others never using their faith to get support or votes… I recall Carter’s being a Sunday-school teacher being used in his favor by his campaign, to say ‘here’s an honest God-fearing guy who isn’t going to lie like Nixon’ … but still, when it came to making actual decisions about the nation, none of these others openly proclaimed that they were doing whatever came to them in prayer.)

The editors of the grand old magazine have, for the first time in its history, endorsed a candidate. And they manage to write the best single statement I’ve yet seen explaining why we need a regime change of our own. Check it out at The New Yorker.