Ruben Navarette, of the San Diego Union-Tribune, has a column on the subject of ‘jobs Americans won’t do.’ I’ve blogged on this before (here), and it amounts to this: we are not talking about jobs Americans won’t do, but about jobs Americans don’t really have to do because they have other options.

Navarette, attempting to demonstrate his case tells us about his appearance on a radio talk show:

A few months ago, while appearing on a radio show in Louisville, Ky., I tested the theory with a hypothetical. I blurted out that I'd offer a summer job on a horse farm – cleaning out stalls and other delightful tasks – to any young person who called into the station. I'd pay $200 per day, I said, which is a lot more than those jobs really pay.

When a call came in, I thought my experiment failed. Then the producer informed me that the call was from a mother who was asking for the job on behalf of her son.

That doesn't count. But it does illustrate my point. It's jobs that Americans won't do – not jobs that Americans won't do unless they're secured by mommy.

Not so fast, Ruben. The problem here isn’t that this mommy’s boy won’t do the job. It is just as I say: he doesn’t have to do the job because he has another option. His mommy has obviously given him the option of not working unless she lines up a job for him--something I doubt my parents even had nightmares, much less dreams, about permitting me to do.

And our federal government provides many other Americans a similar option: they get to live off those of us who are working. (And if they do want to work, why they can even be educated and trained at our expense.

Katie Couric has asked her viewers to help her come up with a closing line. Walter Cronkite said, “And that’s the way it is.” Dan Rather said—well, who cares.

I’ve got it.

She should close her evening broadcast by saying, “And that’s the way we’re spinning it.”

Alternatively, she could break up the monotony by occasionally closing with, “That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it—come hell, high water, or attentive bloggers.”

Sometimes problems are caused by how certain words are employed. Listening to Democrats talk about the War on Terror like a law enforcement issue (what with their wanting to try terrorist comabatants as if they were criminals) one can see how terminology plays a part.

Part of the problem with our War on Terror is the title itself. If you think about two of our other “Wars on…” you might see the difficulty that some have in conceiving of how to fight the War on Terror. Our two other wars are the “War on Poverty” and the “War on Drugs.”

Think about how those two “wars” are being fought, and have been fought. It isn’t too difficult to see how Democrats, among others, can conceive of the War on Terror as a law enforcement matter, just like the “wars” on drugs and poverty.

That, of course, doesn’t make them correct. Those two other “wars” shouldn’t have been called “wars” in the first place. And the fact that they have been should have no bearing on how the War on Terror is fought anyway.

I doubt that Democrats are alter their own “tactics.” But of course that just raises the question why I wrote this in the first place.

It’s plot exposition: it has to come out sometime.

Peter Hitchens has recently posted to his blog a sentiment regarding Great Britain with which I agree, at least as it concerns the U. S.:

I am amazed by the…rejection of my proposal for a return to Christianity and Patriotism, as our best defence against Islam. I would like to know why these things are seen as either difficult or impossible. Both these forces remain strong in our society, despite a 50-year campaign of denigration by the elite. I should say the country is just about ripe for a major swing towards morality, as the ghastly baby boomer generation fades away and its children view the hedonistic wasteland left behind.

As for patriotism, what is all this football-worship if not a sort of displacement of proper love of country, which so many have been taught for so long is wicked and bigoted?

All it would take to revive them would be a little willpower on the part of the defeatists who now complain so much - yet will not do anything and claim that such a revival is ‘cloud cuckoo land’.

I don’t believe, as some claim, that the re-Christianisation of Britain will make Muslims convert to Christianity. I’d certainly like to see lots of Muslims sign up for 1662 Anglicanism, but I’m not optimistic at present.

I just think that it will rob Muslim militants of much of their case, if we can demonstrate that we can be both ordered and free.

That is how we were within living memory. It is how we could be again. What feeble gutlessness is it to dismiss this possibility. Look at Poland, wiped from the map twice in two centuries by military force and unexampled savagery, yet now alive again as a thriving nation and culture - in which Christianity and patriotism support each other (emphasis mine).

Now, the part of the Muslim case that Mr. Hitchens has in mind is, no doubt, the moral case. I mean the argument that we have to be brought into submission because we are decadent beyond our own ability to correct and can only be ‘saved’ by the moral redemption that submission to Islam brings.

Just read this. It’s great, in my humble opinion.

It’s been over a year since the Vice-President’s claim that the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq was in its “final throes.” And of course, he now continues to take a great deal of flack for that claim—right up there with the President’s “mission accomplished” claim.

One problem which exists in this country is a deplorable lack of perspective, especially historical perspective. A result of this lack of perspective is an inability to learn from the past mistakes (and successes) of others.

A historical perspective would give people (even, one hopes, the pathetic press) the understanding that how long any set of ‘final throes’ will last depends on the nature of the event. Take, for example, an event of great historical significance, the fall of the Roman Republic. When did the Republic’s ‘final throes’ begin?

For my money, the initial death throes of the Republic began at least during that period in Rome’s history when the Gracchi brothers (Tiberius and Gaius) were assassinated. It is not so much that they were assassinated, but that their assassinations were the result of factors which to me made the fall of the Republic inevitable, especially the despicable behavior of the rich. Tiberius was assassinated in 132 B.C. and Gaius in 121 B.C. The Republic was dead by 27 B.C. at the latest when Augustus began his unusual reign. I believe that the ‘final throes’ began with Sulla’s march upon Rome in 88 B.C. My reason is that the fall of Republic and institution of the Empire was made possible by, among other things, the allegiance of armies to their generals (made possible by the fact that by this time armies had to look to their generals, rather than to the Roman Senate, for the rewards of military service), which was firmly in place by the time of Sulla. But for this fact, it would have been difficult for opportunists like the Julio-Claudians to seize and retain power the way they did. If we take my view those ‘final throes’ lasted from 88 B.C. to 27 B.C.—61 years. I suppose one could argue that the ‘final throes’ were only the period of the Civil Wars leading up to the inception of the Empire, from 45 to 30 B.C. Fine. That’s still 15 years. One could go still further and say that the ‘final throes’ of the Republic were during the final Civil War from 32 to 30 B.C. We’re still talking ‘final throes’ that lasted two years.

It’s only been one year and four months since the Vice-President’s ‘final throes’ claim. Just a little bit of historical perspective would permit his critics to see that they have no case against him. Nothing about the use of the phrase 'final throes' puts any time limit on those throes. But his critics aren’t interested in truth; they are interested in political expediency. And the educational establishment they’ve been running for decades has produced a population without the needed perspective.

The next change here will be a template change. You see, the truth is I've never really liked this template. I'm not sure I actually remember choosing it. I have a tendency to, uh, drink and blog. It's not as dangerous as drinking and driving (which, by the way, is illegal, if you don't know), but it can have unpleasant results.

Of course, that only raises the question why I've left this template so long. I have a tendency to put up with things that are at least tolerable, even if somewhat aesthetically challenged. That, and now that I've 'travelled' about the blogospere a bit I just think that the template grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

333 people died in Russia's worst terrorist attack.

The War on Terror is about them also.

I was just listening to John Stossel being interviewed on KOA-AM about his "Stupid in America" segment on ABC-TV recently. Because he was critical of teachers, 600 of them told him he had no business expressing an opinion on education because he wasn't a teacher.

That sort of reasoning is logically fallacious. In the segment, Stossel makes several assertions, among which are:

1. American fourth-graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries.

2. The constant refrain that "public schools need more money" is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student — $200,000 per classroom!

3. Most American parents give their kids' schools an A or B grade, but that's only because, without market competition, they don't know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve.

4. There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City's schools told me that the union's rules "reward mediocrity."

Now, those assertions are true, or they are false. (That's logic!) And the truth or falsity of these assertions is independent of whether John Stossel has ever taught. Those assertions are not assertions about the sort of experiences one has as a teacher. Those assertions are assertions about matters of fact. It must be that these propositions are true; that teachers know these propositions are true; and that they cannot, therefore, refute these assertions. In fact, the first teacher to call in to the show could do little more than complain about the "teacher bashing."

Given the quality of thought demonstrated by the preponderance of public school educators, it isn't any wonder that our children are poor thinkers. I mean, really, what's next? When you complain about the food at a restaurant, is the cook going to tell you that you have no business expressing an opinion on food because you are not a cook? If you complain to a mechanic that your car still isn't working properly, is he going to tell you that you have no business expressing an opinion on the operation of your automobile because you are not a mechanic?

What is it Stossel says from time to time? Oh, yeah: Gimme a break!

Yesterday I heard Irwin Chemerinski on Hugh Hewitt’s show say that the purpose of the First Amendment ‘religion clause’ is to limit religion. Funny, I thought the purpose of that clause, as with the rest of the Constitution, was to limit government, especially the federal government.

Let’s see

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … (emphasis mine).

Yup. Limits Congress. I thought so. And Liberals talk as if only the President ignores the law.

According to Bill Maher, President Bush and Ahmadinejad are equally as dangerous.  Why?  Because, according to Maher, they both believe that the Messiah is coming.   The American and Iranian presidents are equally dangerous because, as Maher puts it, they are both “a little too comfortable with the idea of the world coming to an end.”

Now this sort of garbage from Maher is precisely one of the reasons that I don’t think he’s as smart as he thinks he is.  Well, he may be as smart as he thinks he is, but that only makes what he does worse.  These are times in which we need to be thinking, not scoring laughs with assertions about superficial similarities.  Either way, Maher is hardly to be taken seriously.

First, even assuming that one could characterize the person Ahmadinejad awaits (i.e., The Twelfth Imam) as a messiah, that person is not Jesus Christ.  In case you don’t know, President Bush awaits the return of Jesus Christ.

Second, Ahmadinejad believes he can bring about the coming of the Twelfth Imam by hastening the destruction of the world.  So far as I know, the President doesn’t think he can do something to bring about the return of Jesus Christ, though he knows he can do something to hasten the end of the world.  More than likely, as an orthodox Christian, the President probably believes that Jesus will return when He is darn good and ready.

The world is going to end.  Perhaps not in our lifetime—but it will end.  Maher should get comfortable with that idea.

Besides if the President were as comfortable with the idea of the world coming to an end as Ahmadinejad is  he’d just leave Ahmadinejad alone to develop those nuclear weapons, wouldn’t he?

H/T: Red Sky!

Recently the InstaPundit (what a cool name for blog) posted a link to his lessons from Katrina post from last year, a good post.

I thought I would do the same.  Also, this post covers the lesson in federalism that Katrina provided.

One thing I’ve been wondering about lately is why no one thinks that Blanco and Nagin refused to act just so that the President could be blamed for the whole thing.  After all, many people find it easy to believe that he allowed 9/11 to happen for politically expedient reasons.  It ought to be just as easy to believe that a couple of Democrats could devise a scheme whereby poor blacks are left to fend for themselves, leaving the blame for it all squarely on the shoulders of the President.

The short answer is that there is in my view precious little point in a blog’s having a pretentious (if not downright pedantic) sounding Greek name, requiring citations to esoteric texts for purposes of explication.

“Philologous? What’s that all about, man?” someone asks, after, of course, you’ve told them how to pronounce it.

“Well, you see, it’s a Greek word used by the philosopher Zeno to describe students of his whom he characterized as ‘curious to learn things.’ ”

“Do you want people to actually read your blog and tell their friends?”

“Well, that would be nice. Yes.”

“So you give it a name that few of them will be able to pronounce.”

“Uh, yes. That’s it exactly. Rare and memorable, don’t you think?”

“Uh, no. Rare and forgettable. That’s what I think. If anything, they’ll call it ‘Snuffalupagus or something.’ ”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yeah. I really do.”

He was right. One of my loyal readers, does in fact refer to this blog as Snuffalupagus, which has at least one thing going for it: Snuffalupagus was my little girl’s favorite Sesame Street character.

I hit upon “Deviant Scholar” in this way: my little girl, who is twenty-one now, suggested the name. Her reasoning was, well, great—if I do say so myself. It went something like this:

“Well,” she said, “you’re a scholar. But you’re nothing like any of the scholars here. You just deviate from ‘the norm’ in so many ways. These guys don’t listen to your loud heavy metal music. They definitely are not jeans-and-t-shirt guys. They are most certainly not up on culture, especially youth culture. They do not share your interest in communicating the fruits of scholarship with ordinary, everyday people. They only want to communicate with other scholars. You’re a scholarly deviant!”

I might add that I am not yet employed as a scholar, either. For one thing, I do not yet possess the terminal degree. And I have a problem with that whole specialization thing, and with being considered an ‘expert.’ I’m a card-carrying, charter member of Gen-X. Most of us aren’t into experts, except perhaps in the hard sciences, where expertise is objectively demonstrable and where theses and dissertations don’t have titles like “Homo-eroticism in The Beowolf”, “Prophets and Holy Men: The absence of homophobia in Aztlan”, “The Latent Marxism of Jesus of Nazareth.” (Note: those are not real titles. But they're pretty close to titles I have really seen!)

Deviant Scholar. That suits me just fine.

Thanks, kiddo. I knew I could count on you.

UPDATE: I have noticed that a lot of bloggers, if they have something other than their profile, have a posting called “About Me.” I’ve also noticed that in such a post they include such details as what their education is, where they teach, what books they’ve written. You know, like Glenn Reynolds. Well, I haven’t written any books but I have been writing a novel; I’ve also been researching and outlining two books. I drafted a few theological articles which I thought about submitting to Westminster Theological Journal, but haven’t had the guts yet. So, nothing published yet. And I don’t teach anywhere.

But it has occurred to me that I might say more about myself here than perhaps I can fit in my Blogger Profile. In my profile, I say that I studied english, history and philosophy as an undergrad. I once read a book written by a man who was described on the book’s jacket as being a “life long student of the humanities, having studied at” this or that educational institution. One of my friends read the jacket and quipped, “Yeah, I’ve studied at the University Texas. So what?” What my friend meant was that he was briefly a student at UT. So it may look like I’m trying to say more about myself than is warranted by the facts.

The reason I put it that way is to devalue my education a bit, to avoid any hint of a claim to be an expert by virtue of education. This is also the reason I don’t specify much about my graduate level education. If judgments are to be made about me or the content of my postings, then I prefer those judgments to be in response to the quality of my thought, my handling of the facts, my use of logic, my willingness to stand corrected.

Something I think needs clarified is the use of the term “scholar”. Typically these days the word is used to refer to one who is a member of academia, a university professor. That is not me – yet. I am no more a scholar, in that sense of the word, thanEd Morrissey is a ship’s captain. I am graduate level educated but, as I mention above, I am not employed as a scholar. To get to that point, I need either one more master’s level degree, beyond the one I presently possess, or a Ph.D.

See, that’s a problem. The higher one goes in degree programs the more specialized must be one’s area of study. Problem for me: I’m interested in everything. Isaac Asimov in writing of his own problem in this regard likened the problem to an orchard in which one was limited to, say, a particular branch on a single tree. “I want the whole orchard,” he said. Me too.

So I’m on a bit of a hiatus as I contemplate my next graduate attainment. Another master’s before the Ph.D.? Or go straight to the Ph.D. And for both of those questions, Study what, particularly? One or other of the following, I think: History, Philosophy, or Theology.

But you see, I would still be deviant because I would still be wanting to study and write outside of the narrow domains of those fields! And my problem doesn’t really get better if I am able to pick a field, because the idea of a Ph.D. is, for most people, to end up teaching at a university. That doesn’t always sound interesting to me.

At this point it’s all academic, so to speak. The brakes were put on the entire process by an illness in the family a few years ago and the attendant paying off of medical bills. Oh, yeah, and a kid in college. So, I may not be get to work on that terminal degree. Ever. In that case, I’ll still be deviant, because I’ll be reading and studying things with no hope of reading and studying for the purpose of producing anything as a result.

If I were the kind given to Jerry Springer or Oprah Show style public displays of disatisfaction with life (especially disatisfaction with how long it’s taking to get back to school), I might have called this blog “Dejected Scholar” (or maybe “Scholar, Interrupted”). But I don’t do public pychological nudity (H/T:Michael Savage).

I’ll keep you posted.

One more thing. In case you haven’t already noticed, I blog on everything. But I’m especially keen on the intersection of Christian faith and surrounding culture – just about all areas of cultural endeavor, including philosophy, politics, economics, history, science, religion, and the arts.

Someone asks, “Why would you advertise the fact that you’re an ‘insignificant microbe’?”

“What?”

“Yeah. Says so right on your blog. Why would you advertise that?”

I’m not an insignificant microbe in the TTLB ecosystem. I’m actually an Adorable Little Rodent. I don’t know what’s up with the TTLB. I did some checking and for some reason the standing of some other guy's blog is being reported on mine. Poor sap. He probably thinks he's an adorable little rodent. He's going to be disappointed when I get this fixed.

Quiet Time


In this the waking hour
there is sometimes not a sound to be heard
not even this time thankfully the dull
maddening cacophony of racing thoughts
in an already overcrowded lecture hall
(twelve hundred voices—all of them mine—
in a private auditorium demanding
the man solitary at the podium
attend to them all at once and yesterday dammit).


This time, this time (mark it!)
that dissonant audience is wonderfully absent
displaced thankfully by a gently-babbling
brook of comforting silence. Yes that’s it:
the sound of silence, listened for,
it can be audible and the usual tyranny deposed
and during this interregnum displaced
by some laissez-faire regime of meandering,
no, sauntering mindless thoughts.


Interesting phraseology that: mindless thoughts.
Like a pointless trail? Movement to contact
with no LD/SP, no objective? Yes, a road to nowhere
celebrated by some talking heads, no destination,
no map. Get lost (somehow) along the way and
enjoy the landscape, the view, the ‘points of interest’
where nothing particularly important or interesting
ever happened and even if they did no one cares.


Yes, enjoy it for the crowd will find you
soon enough and resume their demands.


Now and here let me be found
by some burning bush. Speak
for your servant barefoot listens


19 June 2006


Copyright 2006 James Frank Solís

Well, not if that duty means what the left say it means.

In concluding this “mini-series” on the minimum wage (here, here, here, and here) I have, I believe, an obligation to explain myself as a Christian, given the concern for the poor that a Christian ought to have.  I have to explain how it is that I, a Christian, find myself coming out against minimum wage legislation despite claims that it will help the poor

Concern for the poor is to be found in both the Law and the Prophets.  The Law contains much instruction for Israelites about how to treat the poor.  (And no welfare system on earth comes close to the standard imposed by that Law.)  I don’t want to quote entire passages here so have a look, if you wish, at Deut. 15.7, 8; and Isaiah 3.14ff for examples of relevant texts.

But the question isn’t merely whether we have a duty to the poor, as if knowing only that would serve as an answer to the question of whether we should support minimum wage legislation.

The question is: Given a responsibility to care for the poor, who precisely has this obligation?  The Israelites, to whom this Law was given and to whom the Prophets spoke, had no central government such as we have.  And such government as existed was not a charitable institution, a means of achieving ‘social justice’.  Each individual Israelite had this duty.  And this duty could not have been fulfilled merely by paying his taxes.

That last point is important because there are those who would say that very few individuals possess the means for caring for the poor; no one person possesses that much wealth.  From this, they believe, it follows that resources must be pooled together and then distribution made.  And to that extent I agree.  But paying taxes in order to have those taxes (really, only a small part of them) distributed to the poor is not the same thing as pooling resources.

I find fault with (Christian) welfare statists because they actually support something that effectively circumvents the Law, rather than being justified by it.  The Law does not require that something be taken; it requires that something be given.  As Christians well know, the Law addresses itself to the human heart, not outward appearances and pragmatic results.  The Law requires generosity in the heart on the part of the ‘haves’ towards the ‘have-nots.’  The welfare state is not a state in which something is given; it is a state in which something is taken.  There is no generosity in the welfare state.  There are no ‘cheerful givers’ (2Cor. 9.7).  And there aren’t any cheerful receivers either.  (We really shouldn’t be surprised.  After all,  one need not be grateful for what one’s government tells him is his legal right.  That, no doubt, is why we rarely see a grateful welfare recipient.)  There are only net tax payers, and net tax receivers.

Clearly, I acknowledge a duty to the poor.  The question is whether this duty to the poor is properly administered by the State via the power to tax.  There are at least two reasons why a Christian should think not.  First, it does not accord with a Biblical view of the relation of the State to other elements if society.  Second, as I’ve already argued, when it comes to minimum wage, it just doesn’t work.

In the Scriptures, when the nation of Israel was founded by God in the desert, a separation of powers was also instituted.  Each tribe of the nation had its own leaders, the elders of the tribes, who also doubled as judges in questions of law.  The elders of one tribe did not interfere in the internal affairs of another tribe.  If there were legal matters too difficult for the ‘lower courts’ those elders submitted the cases to the priests.  And only the priests, specifically the descendants of Aaron, could perform sacerdotal rites in the Temple.  Twice in Israel’s history, a King thought he had the authority to do so; and twice a King found out just how wrong he was.  Priests, and only priests, perform sacerdotal offices; kings, and only kings, do the works of justice and national defense.

The mere fact that some duty exists within a society does not mean that any person or group of persons in that society can perform that duty.  It would be a pragmatic argument to say that God really doesn’t care who does ‘it’ as long as ‘it’ gets done.  But one could then say that God doesn’t care who offers a sacrifice as long as a sacrifice gets offered.  But Saul and Hezekiah found out differently.  Because you see God really does care: when He tells someone they have a duty, they, and no one else, are responsible to Him to perform that duty.  I don’t get out of my duty because you have taken it upon yourself to do it for me; and you’re in trouble for doing my job for me.  Any one who thinks God is a pragmatist isn’t paying attention to Scripture.  Pragmatism is a uniquely American philosophy; it is not Christian ethics.  The State can no more fulfill a man’s obligation to love his neighbor than it can fulfill his obligation to love his wife.  In fact, it’s even worse than that.  I don’t even have to love my neighbor.  All I have to do to fulfill my obligation, according to Christian statists, is pay my taxes and pay my employees a certain wage as specified by my government.

So there is no logical difficulty in my being a Christian and at the same time opposing, among other things, minimum wage legislation.  And I would maintain this even if minimum wage legislation worked.

Too many Christians, it seems to me, find it easier to engage in Christian emoting than in Christian thinking.  They seem to think that any course of action, no matter how silly, will just work because, I suppose, God will make it work.  Or, even if it doesn’t work, their silliness will be credited as a work of righteousness.

Christians have a duty to be not just innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.  Saying, “But it’s to help the poor”  doesn’t say enough.  To say, “But it’s to help the poor” isn’t the same as saying that it accords with Christian principles of ethics.  Things don’t just work because we are doing them to help the poor.  Actions are not morally correct just because we take them to help the poor.  If not, we could just go round mugging rich people with impunity, since it’s ‘for the poor.’  What we do for the poor has to accord with the entirety of Christian ethics.  What we do for the poor also has to work.  When it is clear that it doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t accord with Christian ethics, we don’t have a license to continue.

Minimum wage legislation just doesn’t work.  For some reason, certain Christians either just don’t believe this or they want to believe that if it isn’t working then someone somewhere (probably some rich Republican cabal) is making it not work.  Too many Christians seem to believe that minimum wage legislation will work, or ought to work, merely because of the good intentions involved.  God will bless our stealing from the rich and giving the money to the poor because He wants us to care for the poor.

Once upon a time, an Isralite King name Saul thought that the mere fact that a sacrifice needed to offered justified his performing the service himself.  He was wrong.

Just this morning I found a new milblog (which I will blogroll post-haste).  This whole post is well worth the read, but here’s a passage that really quickened my resting heart rate:

The troops are the war. We are here to win the war. When the media portrays the war as being lost they are portraying the troops as losers. Please don't believe this lie and help your friends see through it as well.

Now, I’m still re-reading some of Plutarch’s Lives.  (I’ve decided to go ahead and just re-read the entirety of his Roman Lives.)  Reading the above-mentioned passage put me in mind of a passage I read just a few mornings ago while reading Plutarch’s Marcellus:

"O strange!" said Hannibal, "what will you do with this man, who can bear neither good nor bad fortune? He is the only man who neither suffers us to rest when he is victor, nor rests himself when he is overcome. We shall have, it seems, perpetually to fight with him; as in good success his confidence, and in ill success his shame, still urges him to some further enterprise" (26, emphasis mine, obviously).

Hannibal said this of Marcellus because, the day after he had handed Marcellus a defeat, Marcellus returned to the field of battle seemingly undaunted.  Marcellus, it seemed to Hannibal, was motivated by confidence when he was victorious and by shame when he was defeated.  Now, really, just how do you fight someone like that?

The mainstream media, as B36, points out, want to portray our military as losers, no doubt in an effort to pull a ‘Cronkite’ and so turn popular opinion that the result will be something like that of the Vietnam conflict.  Fine.  It’s not going to work this time.  It’s going to backfire.  I believe that their ‘conkriting’ will in the end be found to have done more to motivate our military to victory than anything else they could possibly do.  Why?  Because, even assuming that the media are correct and that we are losing, although Marcellus is long, long dead, shame (even just the thought of it) is still a powerful motivator.  Powerful.

Another Vietnam?

Many of those presently in the military have older relatives who served in Vietnam.  They know about the shame those honorable veterans suffered.  So I’m just certain that I can hear them saying, “[Forget] that!”  (No, that’s probably not exactly the way they’d put it, but this is a family-oriented blog.)

One day the media will realize that all they succeeded in doing was shaming our troops on to victory.

Works for me.  Hooah.

Some of the other big news yesterday is the easing of restrictions on the so-called Morning After pill.  And, of course, anti-abortionists (a.k.a. pro-lifers) are angry.  In part, I can understand the anger, since I also am pro-life (since about 1990, two years after I became a Christian).  However, it has always struck me as odd that pro-lifers don’t attach sufficient weight to the fact that what they oppose (i.e., abortion and infanticide) is a consequence of the Sexual Revolution.

The Sexual Revolution has happened.  If people are going to be having sexual intercourse with the intent only of getting the pleasure involved in sexual climax, that is, no—or at least little—interest in having children, then, when contraception fails, abortion and infanticide are inevitable.  Want the consequences of the Sexual Revoltion taken care of?  Do something about the Revolution first.

But (if one is both Christian and anti-abortion) start with the Christian community, whose sexual mores—lets’ be honest—aren’t much better, if at all, than the mores of those outside the community.

Oh, yeah:  Those for whom abortion is just about a sacrament aren’t very happy about the restrictions.  It seems they’re still too restrictive, since minor girls are still required to have a prescription.  I should be nice to them, I suppose.  After all, they’re only trying to reduce by half the number of teen pregnancies in the U. S.

And there’s no point in bringing up the fail-safe method of reducing the number of teen pregnancies, because it won’t work: they’re going to have sex anyway.

Random thought:  If we handled gun violence the same way some want to handle teen pregnancy, rather than creating gun control laws we’d be issuing bullet-proof vests.  Gun violence is going to happen.  Better to just protect ourselves.

In a previous post, I mentioned certain similarities between the way Democrats malign the President and the way in which Fabius Maximus maligned Cornelius Scipio for the sake of achieving political advantage.  At the end of that post I suggested that perhaps we should call this strategy of Democrats, ‘fabiating.’

There are of course a few Republicans who will do some ‘fabiating’ of their own.  One of them is John McCain.  Now he comes to tell us that we were mislead about the war in Iraq.  Now, because I happen not to remember not being misled about the war, I believe that McCain is fabiating for the same reason that the Democrats are: to acquire some political advantage.

According to McCain, we were effectually told that the war in Iraq would be something like a walk on the beach.  Now, of course, no one in the administration actually used the phrase ‘walk on the beach,’ so one wonders how McCain thinks that ‘walk on the beach’ could entered anyone’s mind.

One way is for someone to flat ignore what is said, substituting for what is said what he wishes were said, because what he wishes were said is easier to argue against that what actually was said.  Take for example the recent behavior by Chris Matthews (of “Hardball”).  He played a clip of the President saying that no one in the administration ever said Saddam Hussein ordered the 9/11 attacks.  Immediately after playing that clip, Matthews asked his guest (I think it was Senator Santorum) how he reconciled the President’s claim that there was no connection of Saddam Hussein with 9/11 with a recent assertion by the Vice-President that there was a connection.  Did you catch what Matthews did?  The President did not deny a connection; he denied that the nature of the connection was an order by Saddam Hussein.  In other words, Saddam can be connected in some way with the 9/11 attackes without having ordered those attacks.  Matthews, a typical Democrat ‘fabiator’, just arbitrarily defines the terms such that he can have the President denying a connection and the Vice-President asserting a connection.

So when I say that McCain is ‘fabiating’ by asserting that the administration communicated something that it did not in fact communicate, we can see that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone would arbitrarily define key terms just to create out of whole cloth some problem for which the adminstration can be criticized.  And one of those things is, supposedly, telling the American people that the invasion and its aftermath would be so easy as to be correctly equated with a ‘walk on the beach.’

What we were actually told, among other things, was that one of the purposes for the invasion was to fight terrorists over there, so that we wouldn’t have to fight them here.  A ‘walk on the beach’?  Fighting terrorists has never been a walk on the beach for other nations, like Israel, who have been fighting terrorsts for decades.  One has to wonder just how the American people, having been told that the invasion of Iraq was an action perusuant to the Global War On Terror (a war we were told could last a long time, perhaps even as long as the Cold War), could ever have gotten the idea that any aspect of the war would be in any manner comparable to a ‘walk on the beach.’  If they got that idea, despite having been told the type of war that the war on terror would be, then they (i.e., the American people) themselves are to blame for telling themselves that it would be a ‘walk on the beach.’  McCain is ‘grieved’ that the administration did not do a better job at telling “the American people how tough and difficult this task would be.”  But really: how could we not have known how tough and difficult it would be.  I, James Frank Solís, never had any doubts.  I can honestly say that nothing—NOTHING—about the Iraqi theater of the Global War On Terrorism has come as any surprise to me.  Anyone who is surprised just wasn’t paying attention.  And, really, whose fault is that?

Of course, McCain’s fabiating knows no bounds.  He even goes back to the whole ‘Mission Accomplished’ garbage.  And what is interesting about that is the way in which the report mentions both the problem and its solution:

Bush stood below a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” on May 1, 2003 after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The war has continued since then, with the death of more than 2,600 members of the U.S. military. Vice President Dick Cheney said last year that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its final throes.”

Supposedly, the declaration, “Mission Accomplished” constitutes some sort of problem because the Iraqi theater of the war continues to be an area of conflict.  But notice what the sentence says: “Bush stood below a banner proclaiming ‘Mission Accomplished’ on May 1, 2003 after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”  But the solution to the supposed problem is in the sentence:  collapsing Hussein’s regime was precisely the “Mission” that was “Accomplished.”  

Apparently, most journalists (and liberals generally) haven’t any experience of military service.  For that reason they do not know that “Mission Accomplished” doesn’t mean “The war is over.”  After the invasion of Normandy was successfully completed it could have been declared, “Mission accomplished.”  That hardly meant that the war was over.  It meant only that Operation Overlord, completed 25 August 1944 at the latest, was a success.  The war did not end, in Europe, until 8 May 1945, nine months after “Mission Accomplished” was declared with respect to Operation Overlord.  After Operation Overlord other operations began (like, e.g., Operation Cobra).

If the American people believe they were mislead they have only their own ignorance to blame, ignorance of a great many things it seems.  And ignorance is just the reason that ‘fabiating’ ever succeeds.

And John McCain wants to try to pass himself off as an honest politician.  Some one should tell him: ‘fabiating’ isn’t the pracice of an honest politician.

I’ve been re-reading some Plutarch over the last several days.  Last night while reading his Life of Fabius Maximus I was struck by a few things from one of the passages.  But first I need to describe the scene.  It is during the Second Punic War (218 -202 B. C.).  Hannibal, the gifted Carthaginian general, has invaded Italy from Spain via the Alps.  Condensing the story a bit, Fabius Maximus is commissioned to deal with Hannibal.  Fabuis’ strategy is to avoid direct engagement with Hannibal’s forces in an effort to tire him out and limit his movements.  The Roman citizenry have mixed feelings about this strategy.  To some, Fabius is simply a coward, to others a brillian tactician.  After all, crossing the Alps—depending upon which historian you wish to cite—has cost Hannibal several thousands of troops; and having to forage for food and other supplies was not going to do him any favors.  (Of course, conquering various Italian cities did.)  So Fabius’ approach made some sense to his supporters.  Typically, to give his critics their due, Romans preferred to meet the enemy on the field and have it out.  The ‘Fabian strategy’ was tiresome to the masses, who wanted a quick end to the war.  (Sound familiar?)  It is to Fabius’s credit that Hannibal did eventually confide to his closest confidants that he would be unable to take Italy as he had hoped.  At this point, onto the stage steps Cornelius Scipio, recently returned from defeating the Carthaginians in Spain, as Plutarch reports.  What I found interesting about this passag as I read it last night are certain parallels with our own times.  Now, I am not one of those who believes that history repeats itself.  But I do believe in something called human nature.  I believe that humans in various circumstances have a finite, albeit large, set of possible responses to those circumstances.  Some of the stakes involved in the Punic Wars are, I believe, relatively—and relevantly—similar to our own.  In the passage which follows, I have italicized certain phrases and commented upon them in bold face type enclosed in square brackets in order to highlight amusing similarities.

25 But now Cornelius Scipio was sent into Spain, where he not only conquered the Carthaginians in many battles, and drove them out of the country, but also won over a multitude of nations, and took great cities with splendid spoils, so that, on his return to Rome, he enjoyed an incomparable favour and fame, and was made consul. Perceiving that the people demanded and expected a great achievement from him, he regarded the hand to hand struggle with Hannibal there in Italy as very antiquated and senile policy, and purposed to fill Libya at once, and the territory of Carthage itself, with Roman arms and soldiery, and ravage them, and thus to transfer the war from Italy thither [i.e., take the battle to them so we don’t have to fight it here at home]. To this policy he urged the people with all his soul. But just at this point Fabius tried to fill the city with all sorts of fear. They were hurrying, he said, under the guidance of a foolhardy young man [rushing to judgment, rushing to war], into the remotest and greatest peril, and he spared neither word nor deed which he thought might deter the citizens from this course. He brought the senate over to his views; but the people thought that he attacked Scipio through jealousy of his success, and that he was afraid lest, if Scipio performed some great and glorious exploit and either put an end to the war entirely or removed it out of Italy, his own failure to end the war after all these years would be attributed to sloth and cowardice [Well, at least in wouldn’t be attributed to his being busy playing with an intern during his free time.].

Now it is likely that Fabius began this opposition out of his great caution and prudence, in fear of the danger, which was great; but that he grew more violent and went to greater lengths in his opposition out of ambition and rivalry, in an attempt to check the rising influence of Scipio. For he even tried to persuade Crassus, Scipio's colleague in the consulship, not to surrender the command of the army and not to yield the time of Scipio, but to proceed in person against Carthage, if that policy were adopted. He also prevented the granting of moneys for the war. As for moneys, since he was obliged to provide them for himself, Scipio collected them on his private account from the cities of Etruria, which were devotedly attached to him; and as for Crassus, it was partly his nature, which was not contentious, but gentle, that kept him at home, and partly also a religious custom, for he was pontifex maximus, or High Priest.

26 Accordingly, Fabius took another way to oppose Scipio, and tried to hinder and restrain the young men who were eager to serve under him, crying out in sessions of the senate and the assembly that it was not Scipio himself only who was running away from Hannibal, but that he was sailing off from Italy with her reserve forces [i.e., using a back door draft and stretching the reserves thin], playing upon the hopes of her young men, and persuading them to abandon their parents, their wives, and their city [i.e., lying them into a risky, ill-advised war—or, wrong war, wrong time, wrong place], although the enemy still sat at her gates, masterful and undefeated  [i.e., Scipio wants us to take our eye off the ball.   Where’s Hannibal?]. And verily he frightened the Romans with these speeches,  and they decreed that Scipio should employ only the forces which were then in Sicily, and take with him only three hundred of the men who had been with him in Spain,— men who had served him faithfully. In this course, at any rate, Fabius seems to have been influenced by his own cautious temper.

But as soon as Scipio had crossed into Africa, tidings were brought to Rome of wonderful achievements and of exploits transcendent in magnitude and splendour [Too bad, for Hannibal, that the Romans didn’t have our media elites bringing “tidings.”]. These reports were confirmed by abundant spoils which followed them [and today would be written off as stolen oil in a war for oil]; the king of Numidia was taken captive [Fine.  But where’s Hannibal?]; two of the enemy's camps were at once destroyed by fire, and in them a great number of men, arms, and horses; embassies were sent from Carthage to Hannibal urgently calling upon him to give up his fruitless hopes in Italy and come to the aid of his native city; and when every tongue in Rome was dwelling on the theme of Scipio's successes [due, of course, to the fact that the Romans lacked an ‘objective’ media to report on Scipio’s failures], then Fabius demanded that a successor should be sent out to replace him [And Democrats today want Rumsfeld to resign and to impeach the President.]. He gave no other reason, but urged the well remembered maxim that it was dangerous to entrust such vast interests to the fortune of a single man, since it was difficult for the same man to have good fortune always. [Today we want to remember that you don’t go to war without your ‘traditional’ allies.] By this course he gave offence now to many, who thought him a captious and malicious man, or one whose old age had robbed him utterly of courage and confidence, so that he was immoderately in awe of Hannibal. For not even after Hannibal and his army had sailed away from Italy would he suffer the rejoicing and fresh courage of the citizens to be undisturbed and assured, but then even more than ever he insisted that the city was running into the extremest peril and that her affairs were in a dangerous plight [“We’re no safer today than on 9/11!!!”]. For Hannibal, he said, would fall upon them with all the greater effect in Africa at the gates of Carthage, and Scipio would be confronted with an army yet warm with the blood of many imperators, dictators, and consuls. Consequently, the city was once more confounded by these speeches, and although the war had been removed to Africa, they thought its terrors were nearer Rome.

It’s not earth shattering by any stretch of the imagination.  For me, it makes Democrats even more amusing, though no less dangerous.  Perhaps intitially Democrat opposition to the President’s policies—especially the invasion of Iraq—was legitimate, due to what Plutarch calls, referring to Fabius,  “great caution and prudence.”  Perhaps.  One, and only, one of the reasons I see them as being little better than the self-seeking Fabius is how they insist (limiting myself only to the Iraq issue) that the President lied about WMD.  To do this they have had, though they fail to mention it, to redefine what it is to lie.  To lie is not merely to assert a proposition that is, or later turns out to be false.  Sometimes a person is just wrong.  To lie is to assert a falsehood knowing that it is a falsehood.  It’s one thing to say that Saddam Hussein probably has WND and has failed to supply confirmation of the fact that he has not, and to be wrong about it.  It’s another thing to make the claim that Saddam Hussein has WMD, knowing that he has not.  On the definition that the Democrats, for purposes of self-seeking, have now given to the word lie you and I will never want to be wrong about anything.

Heck, come to think of it, the Democrats are also redefining the term Fabian strategy.  It used to mean employing delaying tactics (which is a favorite terrorist stategy, but you can’t expect Democrats to know anything about that).  By the time Democrats have redefined it, employing a “Fabian” statagy will mean doing unto your political rival what Fabius attempted to pull on Scipio. Oh! I've got it! Let's call it 'Fabiating.'