Cincinnatus, Service, and George W. Bush

This morning I found myself once more delivering a “heritage lecture” to the assembled student body. The theme this time: service. By the end of the “Service Assembly” our students had raised $4,200.00+ for a local homeless shelter and to buy special equipment for handicapped students. There are those who voice some despair about the “youth of today”. I don’t see it. Kids are wise enough to recognize what is really valuable and to act accordingly.

Preparing for my assignment I found myself leafing through Livy. Seeking for an example of selfless service and honorable leadership, I happened across the account of Cincinnatus. An internet search reviled that many others have recognized his greatness. What follows is what I read the students:


Meaningful service requires sacrifice. It can be rendered by anyone willing to give of themselves for the benefit of others, but when that sacrifice is accompanied by a generosity of spirit that seeks no reward or recognition, but only the good of those in need, it bespeaks true greatness. As Lancers, we can look to our Lancer Heritage for inspiration in service. In 458 B. C. two powerful enemies attacked the Roman lands. The Senate sent two Consular armies into the field. The Army commanded by Minucius was trapped on a lonely hill top. Desperate riders fled for Rome; without help the Roman army would be destroyed.

The Senate knew they could not run the rescue by committee, and none dared take the job himself. The Senate looked for a single hero to save Rome. Their emissaries took the symbols of absolute power from the capital to the tiny, three acre farm of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. The heralds found Cincinnatus plowing his field. The crop he sought to plant would be his family’s only support. The messengers form the city begged Cincinnatus “to put on his toga and hear the Senate’s instructions.” His wife ran to their cottage to fetch his toga; he wiped the grim and sweat from his hands and face and put it on; at once the envoys saluted him, as Dictator, and begged him to save the city. Leaving his plow in the field, Cincinnatus headed for Rome.

Cincinnatus was in the Forum before dawn. He assembled the people, suspended all business, and called all men of military age to bring their weapons, five days’ bread and twelve wooden stakes to Mars field. That night Cincinnatus took his army to war.

They arrived at midnight, surrounded the enemy, dug a trench, and planted their stakes. Cincinnatus ordered his soldiers to raise a shout. At the cry, Rome’s enemy realized they were surrounded, and the trapped Roman troops knew help had come. Caught between two Roman armies the invaders were destroyed.

Cincinnatus returned to Rome. He entered the Senate chamber and gave back the bound rods and ax, symbol of his absolute power. His dictatorship of Rome had lasted sixteen days. He returned to his farm. His plow was still in the field were he had left it. He took off his toga and went back to work.

Cincinnatus teaches selfless service; setting aside his own needs for those who could not help themselves. He thought only of the good of those-in-need. When he had saved his country, he set aside the absolute power Rome had given him and returned to his humble life. His example of greatness in service has not been lost on history. Today, a city in Italy and Cincinnati, Ohio bear his name. And it was Cincinnatus who inspired George Washington; to set aside the power his military service brought him at the end of the Revolutionary War; to return to his farm. Later, after two terms as America’s first President, Washington again set aside supreme authority and returned to private life. Washington’s example has guided the course of America ever since. Washington was himself inspired by a simple Roman farmer, a man who valued service above wealth or power, a Roman Lancer named Cincinnatus.


Here my presentation to the students ended. I was pleased to think that they not only saw the model of Cincinnatus’ selfless service, one of giving without lust for power or glory; but many saw, in his just and necessary application of power, the answer to the neo-lib’s misrepresentations concerning the War on Terror.

I am impressed with how much Cincinnatus’ story is like that of George Bush II. President Bush did not seek the glory of a war-time Presidency. In the rubble of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the tyranny of a plotting Saddam, the atrocities of the Taliban, and the murderous dreams of al Qaeda; the danger swarmed against American and our country needed him. The “Senate and people” went running to Gorge W. Bush and begged him to take up the mantel of leadership. He “put on his toga and headed for the city”. In strict obedience to the Constitution, Bush climbed down from the ruins the Twin Towers, wiped the sweet from his hands and face and took up the leadership of a nation at war. The years have passed and President Bush continues to lead us day and night. All too soon he will head back to his farm and take up his “plow”.

Democrats Die of Dog's Disease

Having spent the better part of the last thirty years defending boys from an ever growing population of grizzly bears, it was with some trepidation I contemplated the arrival of wolves in my “neck of the woods”. Years ago I regularly took my staff members to visit the wildlife museum at Mammoth on the North end of Yellowstone Park. There they had mounted specimens of most of the Park’s fauna. Another favorite was the scat box. A great wooden tray divided into cubicles of different sizes, covered with a sheet of glass, and filled with the dried droppings of every animal in the park. Another highlight was an entire wall of the museum dedicated to a mural and text describing how two men had been eaten by wolves in Yellowstone.

In the mid 80’s the Park closed the facility for remodeling. After some years hiatus we returned, eager to relive the joys of earlier visits. Imagine our disappointment when my guys found all the promised treasures removed. Gone were the taxidermied critters, gone the scat box, and gone the story of man eating wolves. I asked the young “Ranger Girl” behind the new plastic counter where the mural about the “wolves eating those guys” had gone. With a straight face that could have only been molded by ignorance, she looked me in the eye and said, “There has never been a documented case of wolves killing a human.” It is difficult to put one’s faith in such science.

Last spring our staffs’ first walk-around of camp discovered the scant remains of a moose devoured by wolves. As I examined the gnawed chunk of moose femur, about eight inches long, all that remained of “the mightiest beast in the forest”; I began to wonder at the wisdom of returning beasts capable of such destruction to the Garden of Eden.

Now comes news out of Yellowstone; wolves are dieing of a disease called parvo virus. The disease can cause extreme diarrhea and dehydration and kill more vulnerable animals. In fact, John Nielson of NPR reported that, only 16% of last springs litters of pups have survived. Nielson went on to point out that adult wolves are dieing as well. The over all Yellowstone population has dropped by one third, to 118 wolves. What is particularly disgusting is the way in which the wolves are reported to have contracted the virus. It seems they get the infection by sniffing dog droppings infected with the virus. How ironic that a once mighty predator, capable of devouring a giant moose, hide and all, or hunting down and killing hardy mountain men; is dieing out from crap sniffing. As I contemplate what a wolf pack could do to a Boy Scout troop, I cannot pretend that I feel much pain over the dehydration deaths of the mangy, moose murdering mongrels.

Now the parallel to politics becomes too evident. One is literally forced to see the comparison between self-destructive, crap sniffing wolves and the Democrat Party. Once the party of Wilson and FDR, it is now reduced to sniffing up dung and dying of diarrhea. One watches in wonder as the Democrat leadership hang their hope for power on sniffing up stink. Chanting that they have uncovered the culture of corruption the Democrats snuffle through the weekly cycle of crap smelled out in their constant pursuit of scat. There were accusations of Presidential inaction on 9/11, the whole Mike Moore disinformation stink, there were supposed connections to ENRON and Halliburton, there was the Dan Rather “National Guard story”, there were the abandoned arms in Baghdad, and Abu Grahib, twenty five thousand dead due to delayed hurricane response, NSA spying, Princeton clubs, and Abramoff. The Democrat’s stinks of the week, one after another have been revealed to the light and dried by the truth. But still the snouts search on. And in the meantime what does this “once great Party” offer the nation? What is the Democrat plan for energy, or abortion reduction, or winning the war on terror, or reducing the deficit, or protecting the environment, or bringing freedom to Iraq, or peace to Sudan, or ending starvation in North Korea, or ending nuclear weapon proliferation, or . . .? The Democrats have nothing to offer, nothing to hang their hopes on but the crap they sniff out and revel in. The infection is spreading. The Democrats own foulness is revealed by their constant rooting about for filth. Somehow I can’t seem to be able to affect much sympathy for the self-inflicted death of the Democrats by diarrhea and dehydration.

I must admit that I had some hopes for the wolves. Some long ago implanted dream about restoring the balance of nature in America’s wilderness. Now I see that dream threatened by the wolf’s compulsion to sniff crap. I once dreamed of an America where all peoples and all parties could unite for the sake of the nation, now I see the system threatened by dung sniffing Democrats.

I have no doubt that the media and their minions will try to hide the evidence and scrape the shameful mural from the wall, remodel the museum and throw out all the stuffed critters to craft America’s view. But we have our memories, and the manifest destruction that comes to all who are obsessed with crap.

Teddy Kennedy Swallows a Camel. And Did Anybody Know?

I spent a good deal of last week listening to or watching the Alito confirmation hearings. Between NPR, and C-SPAN I think I got most of it. Some, including Joe Biden, Dem. Senator from Delaware, suggest the process “stinks”. I think Senator Biden’s real concern is how these proceedings have stirred up the stink rising from the Democrat Party.

Jesus taught us how to judge Kennedy and company’s behavior in the Supreme Court conformation proceedings.

St. Matthew 23:23-24:

23) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, “hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier maters of the law; judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

24) Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

The ugly mug of the Democrat Party hangs out to full view, its great mouth open wide. More and more Teddy Kennedy has become identified as the face of the Democrats. Not that he has done anything of value for the country, but because, in the bleeding jaw that is the Democrat Party, the diseased gums have receded around Kennedy, as though he were an infected tooth; now he hangs out like a rotting fang.

Now that great stinking maw, with snaggeled tooth, opens to choke on a gnat and swallows the camel.

The Democrat attack on Alito can be divided into three parts: politics, slander, and lies.

Politics:

The Democrats are afraid that as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Alito will stop the misapplication of the Roe - v – Wade decision as a blank check to kill the unborn for convenience sake. They cannot allow this abominable misapplication of the Constitution to come before reasonable minds. Therefore they continue to insist on the litmus test of a pro-abortion stance for any Supreme Court nominee. The witnesses who attacked Alito after his personal inquisition, flatly claimed that he would stop the “legalized” killings of the unborn if he is allowed on the court. That fact that the majority of Americans and the laws of nature and nature’s God demand an end to abortion on demand do not affect their decisions. These democrats are bound to the special interest groups who are invested in abortion, and choke.

Slanders:

Teddy Kennedy claimed that decades ago Judge Alito cited membership in a Princeton conservative alumni group on one of his job applications for a job in a conservative administration. When asked about why he would join such a group Alito explained that as a member of ROTC, he had been offended by Princeton’s attitude toward the military, and as this group was active in supporting the ROTC he had supported it. Kennedy then went on to read from editorial comments in copies of the organization’s publication which Alito had never read, and which the Concerned Alumni of Princeton openly disavowed in the magazine that contained them. The press is full of stupid claims and bigoted assertions, but does not mean that those who subscribe to the papers or the cable networks are stupid bigots. It is amazing that in the millions of words written by Judge Alito, and the thousands of his own pronouncements they could not find a single bigoted remark. All Kennedy’s army of bush beaters could scare up was this “guilt by association” accusation. It was a choked up blast of really bad breath.

Kennedy’s scraping fang next locked on a recusal (sp) issue. Judge Alito heard a single case out of over 4,000 in which a company which he had some investment moneys in was involved. That once the situation came to Alito’s attention he did recuse (sp) himself, and had the case retried, that Judge Alito had nothing to gain from the case no matter what the ruling, that he admitted up front that he made a mistake, and thus called for the retrial, meant nothing to the snaggeled tooth. When the case was retried the new court found in the exact same way that Alito had ruled! All Kennedy wanted to do was find some slander to gnaw on. Specter, Biden, Schumer, Durban, and the rest chewed along in unison spattering the proceedings with the stinking droll.

That’s it – in all the writings and actions of a life time, in all the business and proceedings of years of being a scholar, lawyer, and fifteen years of Alito’s judgeship, Kennedy and company could only cough up these two little gnats. And now they are vomiting all over the confirmation process until it stinks so badly that even Joe Biden wishes it would just go away.

Lies:

Judge Alito has heard over 4,000 cases, has written opinions on 350 appeals. The democrats have chewed this mountain of material like a ruminating cow, and from it culled out a few cases which can be twistingly presented to show a bias. Of course when a judge makes a judgment he is choosing one side over another. That the facts of the case are never discussed by the fang and the little molars is telling. The much touted strip search of the ten year old girl is most telling. Judge Alito’s position, was that a warrant to search “every one” in a known drug dealer’s house, a drug dealer that was known to hide his stash on the person of anyone, could be reasonably interpreted by a police officer to include a ten year old girl. The search, which was not intrusive, was conducted by a female police officer, in the presence of the girl’s mother, and the girl was never striped. None of these facts, which reduce this “Gestapo” like atrocity to a gnat, are ever presented by the foul mouth. All it can do is spew out rotten lies.

The Democrats bring in all kinds of “witnesses” to claim that they have read Alito’s record and can divine that he is a bigot, a monarchist, and how he will rule from the Supreme Court bench. That he will destroy the right to “one man one vote” and he will drag the country back to “Jim Crow” and segregation and will support racial profiling. They have university professors come in and testify that because of this theory or that, they can tell that Judge Alito’s support of law enforcement in certain cases he will allow the Executive to enslave the Legislative and Judicial branches, destroy the Constitution, and reduce American to a monarchy. They find a passing reference that Judge Alito made to the “Unitary Executive”, a reference which the Judge explained that he simply meant that the President was in charge of the executive branch. The tooth and company then belched out their theories of what he meant. They called Judge Alito a liar and explained that Judge Alito really wanted to set up a monarchy. The lie stinks.

The stench of bad breath has caused the decay of what is chewed and the bile churned up. The great classical scholar, Robert Graves, points out that the existence of corrupt men of power is a testimony to mankind’s need for its sense of smell. The rotting, stinking mouth that is the Democrat Party, straining at gnats, now opens to swallow the camels. We can all smell the stench. Here are some Camels relating to Supreme Court interests that are being sucked in by the monstrous maw.

Camel – The murder of One Million unborn Americans every year.

Camel – The exploitation of American Minorities by special interest groups bent on keeping them down. Many special interest groups require a climate of racism and anger to exist. These groups maintain their sway by encouraging more and more Americans into positions of dependency on government programs crafted to maintain the political power of the interest groups; groups that can only exist in an atmosphere of hate and fear.

Camel – The holding hostage of America’s resources by special interest environmental groups who use pseudo science and fear to prevent the use of vital resources, and lies to justify their existence and gin up money to buy politicians then used to grant the special interests grater power.

Camel – The revelation of America’s National Defense secrets by those entrusted to keep those secrets. This revealed information makes preventing the mass murder of Americans more difficult. It is interesting to note that terror cells suspects are now buying hundreds of disposable cell phones, their intent to duck the surveillance of the NSA which has kept us safe these past four plus years. At the same time Kennedy uses the word whistle blower to describe traitors who told our war time secrets to our enemies, he is calling for indictments for a non-crime concerning a non-covert CIA employ.

Camel – It was interesting to hear the tooth of the same party that sent in federal marshals to drag a little Cuban boy back to Castro and slaughter the folks at Waco, tear into Alito’s ruling to allow a judge rather than a jury to hear a case of federal marshals being sued for evicting admittedly dangerous people from their farm without hurting anyone.

Camel – While questioning if a demonstrated impartial judge leans too far “right” in his politics, Democrats swallow the camel of interpretation of the Constitution by the application of foreign law.

Camel – An activist judge in Vermont who releases a confessed rapist because he does not “believe in punishment anymore, and the prison system does not have adequate rehabilitation programs.”

Camel – Child services workers who can not enter the home of suspected child abusers without a warrant and do not attempt to go to the trouble to get one; resulting in a seven year old child being beaten to death by the abusive parents.

Camel – While claiming that there is nothing more constitutionally sacred than the separation of powers and the rights and responsibilities of the separate but equal branches of American government, the Democrats use an unconstitutional debate tradition (the filibuster) to prevent voting on judges and other important issues.

Jesus told us how to recognize “hypocrites who have omitted the weightier matters of the law”; they strain at the gnats, and swallow the camels. We can all tell the camel eaters by the stink. I thank Jesus for the advice and God for our sense of smell.

Already on the Record: Prophets of Doom Run a "Fowl" of the Truth

In the Aesop’s fable of “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg” we meet a farmer whose goose gives him every thing he could ever have dreamed of ; then the greedy farmer cuts the goose open to get at the eggs inside. Too late, the fool realizes that now he has nothing at all.

The coming of the New Year has prompted many to prognosticate the future of America, its President, its War in Iraq, and the failure of all. I am reminded of the prophets of gloom of the past whose confident doom saying only got them egg on the face.

Rush Limbaugh put me onto an article by the Historian Victor Davis Hanson from the National Review Online. Through the wonders of my classroom’s computer network hookup I had a hard copy in my hands within five minuets. All that computer training is paying off!!!

I will abridge it here and then supply some documentation to back up Hanson’s wisdom.

THE PLAGUE OF SUCCESS http://www.nationalreview.co,/

“After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. . . Patriot Act. . . war in Afghanistan. . . the removal of Saddam. . . and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wire tap intercepts of phone calls . . .

Now the horror or 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. . . The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure. . .

Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian bones in the high desert – not a seven week victory and a subsequent democracy in Kabul of all places.

Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning the Taliban and al Qaeda – hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled NORAD’s subterranean fortress. . .

Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly. . .

The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousand of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election – at a cost of some 2100 war dead – he would have been dismissed as unhinged. . .

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turnout better than anticipated? . . . (A bitterness of disappointment we are familiar with here in the Agora)

One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins. . .

Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers . . . in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit . . . The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem – murder, rape, arson, and theft, Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. . .

A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they are doing a lot more to kill jihadists that the French or Germans who often either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go.

Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. . . The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with(out) Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. . . .

Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more – and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more. (Sounds like Aesop' s fable to me!)

Had the farmer in the Aesop’s story been smart enough to truly look ahead he would never have murdered his goose. By way of evidence to Hanson’s exposition above I offer the following foolish farmers.

We begin with the war in Afghanistan. Before the seven weeks of war brought Liberty to Afghanistan many sought to kill the effort with demoralizing claims. Note how all have proven false. There is much disappointment in the anti-Bush crowd now. Disappointment sparked by the bitterness of having ones predictions made lie by events. Please observe the dates of the quotations presented. I will be doing a lot of quoting now. We have all heard these silly claims before, but I would implore you to read them so you can stand witness to the RECORD. My words are “bolded” to help you discriminate them from the quotes.

Maureen Dowd (NYT) October 28, 2001 “Liberties; Can Bush Bushkazi? (I had to pay for this one, what a waste!)

The terrorists and Taliban have the psychological edge on three fronts: military, propaganda and bioterror. . . President Bush has been lured through the high-altitude maze to the minotaur’s lair, or as it’s know in the novel “Flasman,” “the catastrophe of Afghanistan.” Now, like the British and Russians before him, he is facing the most brutish, corrupt, wily and patient warriors in the world, nicknamed dukhi, or ghosts, by flayed Russian soldiers who saw them melt away. (No!! I'm not making this up, Maureen actually wrote this. I wonder if she even knows what in means to flay someone. Her stupidity cooked her own goose!) . . . Are we quagmiring ourselves again? “Yes, it may be a quagmire,” President Musharraf of Pakistan said to Peter Jennings. (Now he tells us.) . . . Just as terrorists, American or foreign, cunningly used our own planes and mailboxes against us, so they used our own morality against us. We were stumbling over scruples against a foe with no scruples. (Interesting this from a woman who now condemns Bush’s lack of scruples. I guess one should just pay for her comments and not follow her advice.). . . With Muslims, the media-savvy troglodytes in a cave were still out spinning Ari Fleischer at a podium. And even as Rear Adm. Stufflebeem denied we were getting bogged down over there - - always a sure sign we’re getting bogged down over there - - the pentagon issued a disconcerting plea. . .” (I guess Stufflebeem, then chair of the Joint Chiefs, was right after all. Not so, Maureen.)

From Stars and Stripes (Of all places. It shows the courage of our military to tell their “students” ANYTHING), Tuesday, September 26, 2001, “Chorus grows against military intervention in Afghanistan”, by Tom Jensen,

RAF MIKDENHALL, England – American cruise missiles and ground troops are not useful weapons in a war on terrorism, some people have stated saying about any military intervention in Afghanistan. “you can go in and rearrange a hell of a lot of sand and rock [with bombs and missiles], but what is accomplished?” asked retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, . . . .Carroll cautioned, too, against any ground force. Not only will land mines be a major factor, he said, but the Afghan Taliban fighter have the advantage of the terrain, which they know intimately. . . Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr . joined the chorus Sunday . . . “It would only demonstrate once again the impotence of the American superpower,” the double Pulitzer Prize winner wrote. Such an attack, he wrote, would push moderate Muslims toward hatred of the U.S. and produce a new generation of suicide bombers. The historian and former adviser to President Kennedy said Afghanistan is “Famous for its unconquerability,” a lesson learned by the British Empire and the Soviet Union. (I guess Schlesinger failed to note that the British Empire and the Soviet Union, had learned the same lesson about the unconquerability of the United States, and now so have the Taliban! I wonder if Schlesinger has?) . . “American troops in Afghanistan would be even more baffled and beset than they were a third of a century ago in Vietnam,” Schlesinger wrote. . . . To allow the situation to become a clash of civilizations, he wrote, would be a catastrophe. “Bin Laden has set a trap for the United States,” He wrote. “Let us not walk into it.” Jay Farrar, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and international Studies in London [said] “. . . there is very little a conventional military force can do.”

(I found Schlesinger invoked again on) : “Radtimes resist@bes.com for Sun, 04 Nov. 2001.

Arthur Schlesinger: Are we trapped in another Vietnam? . . . Today the enemy is in the shadows; he strikes in cities well know to every American; and he turns the most familiar conveniences, the airplane and the letter into vicious weapons – and ordinary people are the target. . . Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were evisceration the enemy? (Something the bombs did do.) This has given way to somber comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. . . . Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. (“Thanks” to a politically motivated and constantly interfering Democrat controlled Congress.) Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralized, undeveloped, rural societies. (I guess that limited impact was all it took to undo the invincible Taliban.) . . . we may have to send in our own ground forces. Do we do that next month in face of the grim Afghan winter, Moslem religious holidays and unexploded land mines? (Which of course America did.) Or do we wait for spring? In any even , a quagmire looms ahead. As for the post -Taliban regime, this has vanished into a gruesome tangle of tribal feuds and rivalries. (Oh YA?) . . . Nearly every day newspapers carry stories about new and mysterious instances of anthrax poising. Behind anthrax looms the specter of smallpox, which, unlike anthrax poisoning, is contagious. . . If terrorists can find ways of unleashing a smallpox plague, it might be like the Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the 14th century.”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr him self wrote on 9/24/01 at http://www.digitalnpq.org/global_services/global%20viewpoint/09-24-01schlesinger.html

Bombing is not likely to eliminate Bin Laden and his crowd, who have well prepared hide-outs. It would only demonstrate once again the impotence of the American superpower. . . . The only thing that would probably please Bin Laden more would be an invasion by American ground forces. Afghanistan is famous for its unconquerability. The British Empire and the Soviet Union failed in their efforts to dominate the country, and they at least knew the rocky terrain and had people who spoke the languages. American troops in Afghanistan would be even more baffled and beset than they were a third of a century ago in Vietnam. There is, in addition, the land-mine problem. According to Robert Fisk, Middle Eastern correspondent for the Independent in London, Afghanistan contains one-tenth - - more the 10 million - - of the world’s unexploded land mines, laid by the Soviet Red Army. . . Moreover, by November, freezing weather will arrive, and the Pentagon has no hope of dispatching troops and winning the war in the six weeks remaining before winter come to Afghanistan. Nor could an invading American army count on serious assistance from the internal anti-Taliban resistance their most effective leader, Ahmed Shah Masoud, having been assassinated shortly before the assault of America. . . (I guess Schlesinger didn’t know about Hamit Karzai) Bin Laden has set a tarp for the United States, let us not walk into it . . . The quest for a knock-out blow is an illusion. (NO! it was Schlesinger who was crafting illusions!)

(Here are some great “Mistaken Wartime Predictions from the Punditry" collected by Glenn Reynolds posted on the Free Republic December 11, 2001, sixties@lists,village.virgnia.edu )

Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 11/6/01: “Whatever the case, this war appears to be behind schedule.:

Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, 11/4/01: The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it’s already in one. The U.S. is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it.

Sen. Joe Biden: Los Angeles Times (news story0, 10/26/01: Sen. Joseph Biden, Jr. (D-Del.) warned that unless the air attacks end “sooner rather than later,” the U.S. risks appearing to be a “high-tech bully. Every moment it goes on, it makes the aftermath problem more severe . . .”

Cokie Roberts, ABC News, 10/28/01 (to Donald Rumsfeld): “the perception is that this war the last three weeks is not going very well.”

(And my favorite from the NPR)

Daniel Schorr, NPR, 10/27/01: “Well, I don’t know how long this was supposed to take, but it’s certainly going a lot wore than was expected . . .”

(Here are two more I dug out of Newsweek)

MSMBC.com Newsweek, “Letter from Afghanistan: Ragtag Army by Owen Matthews, Sept. 28, 2001: The grim reminders are everywhere in this hostile terrain. Every road, every ditch and field from Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul up to the Hindu Kush 80 miles to the north, is littered with the rusting and twisted remains of Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers. . . a boy-soldier carries a Martini-Henry rifle of 1880’s vintage. That’s a souvenir of an even earlier incursion; the British attempt to subdue the tribes of Afghanistan.. . . Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance . . . rolled out its crack troops . . . The intention was probably to show that the alliance is willing and ready to topple the Taliban regime. It ended up looking more like something out of the Keystone Cops. . . ( It turned out that these “cops” were very effective after all, in spite of News Week’s scorn.) But the display did more to illustrate why the alliance has over the last five years lost some 95 percent of the territory of Afghanistan to the Taliban. . . “Without our help the Americans will not be able to do anything.” Says Quayum, a native of the nearby Salang district. “It is difficult for me to imagine how Americans can fight here.” (We don’t have to imagine it now, we know they fought very well. And then this on Bagram airport) . . . the base is now a wasteland of shattered concrete barracks and the littered wreckage of MiG-21 jets. A forlorn memorial to Soviet war dead stand among the debris, and the base's gates with their red star motif swing free.” (Now Afghanistan is free!)

MSNBC.com Newsweek, “Ultimate Fighters” Sept 28, 2001 – Tom Carew look to history for proof of the fighting qualities of the Afghans. “The last time they were conquered was by Alexander the Great in the forth century B.C.” (Something I pointed out to my student at the time; by way of giving lie to the much touted claim that Afghanistan had never been conquered.). . . And his conclusion may be unwelcome to military planners in Washington. “They are the ultimate fighters in their own terrain.” (Until American soldiers came!) . . . the nature of the country produces a super tough breed of warriors adept at using the terrain to their own advantage, says Carew. “They know the land like a Welsh sheep farmer know his hillsides.” (Isn’t it wonderful that far better fighters can be produced right here in American classrooms and training camps were students and soldiers are taught to deal with ANYTHING?) If crude, their [the Taliban] tactics were adapted to their strengths. “they will only attack when they want to . Otherwise you just won’t see(m) them. They will hide like foxes. “supplies are buried in dumps across the country, known only to the guerrillas. . . They are very hard and ferocious fighters. . . That ferocity can show itself as barbarism, especially in the treatment of prisoners, Carew has told of how mujahedeen slashed open the stomachs of captured Russians and left them to die in the baking heat. Indeed, the brutality is one reason why Carew is convinced that Afghanistan will be no place for conventional troops. . . the technology of modern warfare may be ill-suited to Afghanistan. Armored vehicles may be bogged down; misty valleys add one more hazard to helicopter flying.” (Where is Carew’s retraction of all this silliness?)

I know this is getting long, but my efforts have not even scratched the surface of the inanity presented just before and during the first weeks of the Afghan War. Of course reality was completely contrary to the dire predictions. The weekly news magazines couldn’t even get their “doom and gloom” warnings of American defeat onto the news stands before the war was over and Afghanistan on its way to democracy!

I had thought to present the same "quantity" of shameful doom saying by the know-it-alls on the left pertaining to the Iraq War. We all know that the results were the same. Even as weekly new magazines and Sunday talk shows joined Baghdad Bob to line up and bewail American defeat before the walls of Babylon, the liberated Iraqis were dancing in the streets and pulling down the statues of Saddam. Perhaps, if any kind of discussion ensues, I can post some for consideration, for now I will present only the two most telling “quality” misstatements by Senatorial Prognosticators. I’m sure both of these Democrat prophets of doom would like to hide their silly fears. They will not retract, but it's ALREADY ON THE RECORD!

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002, to the School of Advanced International Studies:

. . . Some who advocate military action against Iraq, however, assert that air strikes will do the job quickly and decisively, and that the operation will be complete in 72 hours. But there is again no persuasive evidence that air strikes alone (Never the Bush plan.) over the course of several days will incapacitate Saddam and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Experts have informed us that we do not have sufficient intelligence about military targets in Iraq. Saddam may well hide his most lethal weapons in mosques, schools and hospitals, If our forces attempt to strike such targets, untold number of Iraqi civilians could be killed. (But they were not.)

In the Gulf War, many of Saddam’s soldiers quickly retreated because they did not believe the invasion of Kuwait was justified. But when Iraq’s survival is at stake, it is more likely that they will fight to the end. (In fact they saw Saddam’s cause as no more just this time around; because it was not.) Saddam and his military may well abandon the desert, retreat to Baghdad, and engage in urban, guerilla warfare.

In our September 23 hearing, General Clark told the Committee that we would need a large military force and a plan for urban warfare. General Hoar said that our military would have to be prepared to fight block by block in Baghdad, and that we could lose a battalion of soldiers a day in casualties. Urban fighting would, he said, look like the last brutal 15 minutes of the movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

Senator Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, in a floor Speech on Oct 11, 2002, Under:

THE DANGERS OF BATTLE IN BAGHDAD

Third, an invasion of Iraq for the purpose of regime change would necessitate a march on Baghdad. Such a course would expose our forces on the ground to serious risks, in hand-to-hand, street-by-street urban warfare in a foreign capital. We would lose much of our advantage in superior air power and technology. The military and civilian casualties could be substantial.

The former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, retired Marine Corps General Joseph Hoar, testified before Congress, and I quote, “In urban warfare you could run through battalions a day at a time. All our advantage of command and control, technology, mobility . . are in part given up.” Those are sobering words, Mr. President: “Battalions a day at a time.”

Consider how silly the facts made all these predictions. With the beginning of 2006 we have a host of predictors, fans of catastrophe, and politicians invested in defeat; who prophesy disaster for American, and for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West. They are fools so greedy for power or determinedto force their views on all, that they have decided to kill the goose and take all the golden eggs. History will hold them to account because their words are ALREADY ON THE RECORD!

Darwin Was for Intelligent Design

Federal Judge John Jones ruled on December 20th ’05 that the 9th grade Biology Teachers of a Dover, Pennsylvania School District cannot read a one “minuet disclaimer” at the beginning of their class’s study of evolution. The “recitation” concluded that there are “gaps in the theory” of evolution and that intelligent design was another explanation they [the students] should consider.

I tend to agree with Jones’ ruling. I am against teachers being required to read anything to students. On the other hand, I am against teachers being prohibited from reading anything to their students. Where I disagree with Jones is that he does not stop with preventing the reading of a mandatory disclaimer. He goes on, in his lengthy opinion, to condemn involving God in the creation process as illegal, even unconstitutional. He argues that those who teach the possibility of divine involvement in creation are using the government [read school] to establishing a specific religion; in his opinion Christianity. All those of other religions who also hold that God or the Gods created the universe, or at least organized Cosmos out of Chaos, might find his judicial stretch troubling. What Jones has done, in the infinite wisdom only granted to members of the judiciary, is rule that one part of the Constitution cancels out another; in fact that one part of the Bill of Rights cancels out another; in fact that one end of the First Amendment cancels out the other end of the First Amendment.

I wonder if the judge, having cooked his brain for weeks in the arguments of fanatics on one side and the other, realized his ruling will ban Charles Darwin from the classroom. Once you throw out free speech to protect any position, you are in trouble!

It is obvious to anyone who has read Darwin’s Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; obviously not a pre-requisite to those who develop theories to explain it, disclaimers to condemn it, or court rulings to impose it; that Darwin believed in Intelligent Design.

I quote from The Origin of the Species:

“ To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter BY THE CREATOR, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes like those determining the birth and death of the individual. . . It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different form each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ration of Increase so high as to led to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed BY THE CREATOR into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” (From the sixth edition published in 1872, my copy by The Easton Press, 1976, pgs 444 – 445) (Capitals added for emphasis and clarification)

What Darwin does not do, what Science cannot do, and what the book of Genesis refuses to do, is answer the question on HOW God created anything. I believe, along with Darwin, that God laid down the laws that made evolution possible. The fossil record and the study of genetics can trace the wondrous progress of His hand; but no authority, theological, scientific, or judicial can explain how the laws came into being.

We come back to what ought, under the Constitution, to be taught in the classroom. Neither the religion of the Christians nor the Atheists should be imposed on anyone; either by forcing the reading of disclaimers or by excluding the opinions of Charles Darwin from the classroom. Nor should students be kept in a hothouse of scientific design which denies the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans; which denies the beliefs of the students and teachers themselves.