From JD Johannes in Iraq:
There is a growing dispute in the junior enlisted ranks of the Army and Marines that is pitting soldier against Soldier against Soldier and Marine against Marine. This dispute is affecting unit cohesion and if not checked could lead to an unreparable fissure in our military.
During my two previous trips to Iraq the grunts were united, now I have seen a split develop.
If this split among the ranks is not resolved the dissension an animosity will grow until there are two camps within the enlisted ranks, neither willing to budge from their position.
The dispute is over Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff.
The junior enlistedmen--primarily the ones aged 19-21, grew up on Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff. Now that the child stars have grown up, and their admirers from child hood days are men fighting a war--the battle lines have been drawn between the two camps over which one is hotter.
When Hillary Duff's CD made its way to one outpost, the Duff supporters were flaunting her new brunette hair and sleek look. Lizzy McGuire no more. And the grunts who weren't already in her camp took notice.
But Lindsay Lohan shed the Disney image in 2005 and gained a solid foot hold among the ranks.
As the dispute in one squad bay heated up, an older soldier stepped in to broker a deal and find common ground. All grunts can generally agree that Vida is hot. But there is a small subset of soldiers and Marines who are now making the argument that Jamie Eason is the perfect woman and should take the mantle of the pin-up girl of OIF-5. Vida they argue is sooo OIF-3. Love that expression!
The debates will rage in motor transport shops, outposts and squad bays from now until the end of the war.
Hillary, Lindsay, Vida, Jamie--know that you are held dear in the hearts of rough and dangerous men who stand willing and able to visit violence on those who would deny your right to flaunt your goods in magazines and on MTV.
And in that context, the soldiers know exactly what they are fighting for. You just gotta love these guys!
Posted by: The Doctor ||
05/24/2007 15:46 Comments ||
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#3
One knows he is getting old when the first Rantburg stop is "Good Morning" and moreover you are familiar with all the babes such as Jane Russell, M. Monroe, Bette Davis, Diane Dors (Fluck), etc. You also wonder who in hell are: Hillary, Lindsay, Vida, and Jamie. And then you wonder where you left your prune juice.
#4
ST2045: there's nothing wrong with you. It's the same piece of equipment. You just like the older models built with traditional materials instead of the newer ones that are faster and use a lot of silicone and composites.
Gotta lose that prune juice, though.
Posted by: Mac ||
05/24/2007 18:53 Comments ||
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It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.
From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization traces to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).
Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now.
Exhibit A through Z is the Iraq war, a major military undertaking by the United States fought, after the 2002 resolution, with little or no support by one of the nation's two political parties. When one Democratic senator persisted in support, his dissent was not allowed, as normal in our politics, but punished with ostracism. Feel free to call this take-no-prisoners opposition "principle," but it's also uncharacteristic for our politics.
One is tempted to settle for a politics whose goals rise no higher than destroying the careers of opposition party figures. But the fate of the immigration bill--an attempt to resolve a real problem--reveals the costs a system in a state of permanent opposition. The left prefers unsolved immigration as an issue to "run" on. The right, more bizarre, insisted we "do something" about illegal immigration, then revealed this week it will let nothing qualify as a solution.
A cynic might argue, plausibly, that so long as the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank don't mismanage the dollar or euro, the world's integrated economies will grow and in time reduce the political class to entertainment, like professional wrestling. Europe may be able to slide by on this basis, but a U.S. politics preoccupied with inconsolable grievances will in time erode America's role in the world. Of course that too could be the point for some in the battle now.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/24/2007 06:30 ||
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#1
The right, more bizarre, insisted we "do something" about illegal immigration, then revealed this week it will let nothing qualify as a solution.
No. We want a real solution, not a get out of jail free card for criminals.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
05/24/2007 7:55 Comments ||
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#2
And a solution which does not guarantee another thirty million ambling across an undefended border over the next ten years.
#3
instead of creating a new law which the political class will refuse to enforce, we insist they enforce the existing law and secure the border. For that we are called xenophobes and racists.
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/24/2007 9:33 Comments ||
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#4
Ditto to all the comments above. The WSJ editorial folks seem as delusional on immigration as they are (unfortunately, uniquely) sensible on the war and many other issues. Odd.
Actually, I also think he gets the Florida thing quite wrong. If there had been 684 more votes for Gore, I don't believe there was any chance of lawsuits from the Bush camp, and though I was not involved and only have acquaintances in that effort, my distinct impression is that there would have been no legal challenge. More like Ashcroft's dignified acceptance of a fairly dubious result in his own race.
More that I think about it, while Henninger makes some good points, his implied equation between donk and trunk misbehavior is simply inaccurate. It's hard to imagine the GOP types sliming the Marines and other armed forces as murderers or Nazis, trumpeting outrageous poisonous nonsense about deception on war intel, and other things that have slackened my jaw about Dem behavior in the last 6 years.
It's been astonishing to watch individual Dem figures do/say things that are way over the line, and hear not a peep of push-back from the more respectable types or elders. Much of the last six years has been one gigantic potential Sister Soujah moment on foreign policy and defense for the Dems, and nothing but the sound of crickets from people who know better like Evan Bayh, Harold Ford Jr., and of course much worse from types who historically had been rather mild and moderate, like - yes - Harry Reid.
I vividly recall watching Trent Lott the morning of the Afghan-Sudan cruise missile strikes in the wake of the African embassy bombings. He was doing a live stand-up outside the WH, and he was pushing some absurd wag-the-dog innuendo. I was spitting mad - and few people knew more intimately how unsuited the Clinton crew was for the national security part of the job. But to have the Senate majority leader barfing up that sort of nonsense the day the US was retaliating for a huge terrorist attack was, to that point, a new low in recent political history. Go into the WH, tear them a new one on substantive grounds for not doing enough, etc., emerge and denounce THE ENEMY for their depravity, perhaps suggest you'd support even more vigorous responses by the US. But come out and deliver a right-wing version of a Michael Moore slander?
Sorry for the rant, but the point is that Lott's behavior struck me as way out of line back then. But it was fairly isolated. The Dems have taken that misbehavior, magnified it times 10, and made it SOP. Henninger misses the more ominous implication of his general point - one party has left the reservation in terms of restraint and responsible opposition during time of war. This leaves informed, sensible folks with only one choice for the WH. THIS is unhealthy for obvious reasons, and is the real problem with the general topic Henninger raises.
#5
Well, Verlaine, I would disagree with you on this. I believe he has determined the crux of this issue correctly. There has been a growing split and facedown in the electorate since impeaching Clinton. And, the dubious election of 2000, a dirty matter regardles of who came out on top, has just reinforced the faceoff. But, the six years of seeming incompetence under Bush have really changed the tide. If you sense the mood among the general populace, they demand change. And there will be change in 2008. We'll have a complete Demo gov't with Pres & both houses of Congress going Demo by significant margins. The main change in voter base will be women and younger voters. This is enough to ensure a Demo sweep. Let's hope the Demo nominee is at least responsible. Big changes will be coming, because Demos may be able to maintain their superiority for a decade or more. The devastation of the Republican party under this administration cannot be underestimated. I would hope the Demos at least stop this North Americam Union BS, and decide to preserve US integrity and US jobs. This is a critical decision for the young people on the way up right now.
#6
Having been awake through the Vietnam era, the Nixon era, the Carter years, the Reagan era, and Clinton and I disagree with Mr. Henninger's conclusion that the tone is somehow worse now.
I don't have time to go through the entire last 40 years, but I will point out the differences of the sixties resulted in actual riots, and that the leftist press hated Reagan even more than Bush (but Reagan was a better politician and didn't have Iraq).
However, the internet has changed things in three ways. First, it has scraped the facade of civility off the process. The media used to be able to soften public images. Again going back to earlier years, there were many instances of public figures that would call back interviewers after the fact and change their statements or ask that comments be deleted. Such requests were routinely granted because otherwise the interviewer would be frozen out of future contacts. That "access" privelege is now all but gone, what people say is increasingly unrecoverable.
Second, it is much easier for any individual to participate in the debate. As is the nature of things, the people participating tend to be more passionate. Commentators used to have to be calm, be able to speak in complete sentences and have "presence" because their was a scarcity value to airtime or print space. No longer. Even such as I can post my thoughts and actually have the possibility of someone reading them. The passion (anger, whatever) was always there, but people like Mr. Henninger just never had to deal with it before.
Lastly, the political cycle has been accelerated and shortened. We used to have one party in power in congress for a generation. No longer. The Republican majority lasted less than a decade. The Pelosi/Reed majority is already sinking.
I think that Mr. Henninger's yearning for the good old days actually comes from his profession's loss of status and power. For them, life was better then.
#7
Frank G: instead of creating a new law which the political class will refuse to enforce, we insist they enforce the existing law and secure the border. For that we are called xenophobes and racists.
Excalibur: And a solution which does not guarantee another thirty million ambling across an undefended border over the next ten years.
Rob Crawford: No. We want a real solution, not a get out of jail free card for criminals.
Re: the immigration bill, here's an excellent column by Thomas Sowell [is there any other kind?] on the utter bogosity of the bill.
#8
I don't know, Woozle Elmeter2970. The trailing daughters, like the offspring of a number of parental Rantburgers, love the snark and intelligent exchange at this site, running to read over my shoulder whenever they hear me giggle. As a result we've had some interesting discussions, even though trailing daughter #2 is adamantly uninterested in politics at any level. Both of the trailing daughters (#1 is a rising senior in high school, #2 a rising freshman) firmly believe that the Democrats and the Progressives are stupid, reactionary dinosaurs whose refusal to accept reality poses a real and present danger to the country and to world the trailing daughters' generation will shortly inherit. They see the major precepts of American Conservatism (classical liberalism to the rest of the world) as the obvious choice of those who use their intelligence to analyze the world. Both plan to vote Republican as a matter of principle... and td#1 will be eligible to vote in 2008.
This generation was marked by 9/11, as previous generations were marked by the Viet Nam War, WWII, or the Crazy Years of the Carter-early Reagan period. They spent 9/11 in lockdown at school, and found out afterward that a shadowy Muslim group had declared war, not on the US, but on all those hewing to Western concepts of freedom... to the death.
It is this generation that continues, six years after 9/11, to meet and exceed Armed Forces enlistment goals in the tip-of-the-spear units. This generation who've made charitable works -- not just writing a check to United Way -- part of their everyday life, starting in elementary school. This generation that has had so much PC nonsense shoved down their throats that they notice the nonsense faster in many cases than I, at the the ripe old age (if my calculations are correct) of 46, just as my generation was untouched by television advertising that had sent baby boomers into a buying frenzy (remember Mickey Mouse watches and Daniel Boone hats? In my day the Pet Rock craze was consciously ironic, and most of us painted our own). Nowadays the fashion industry can't even tell the girls what length skirt to wear, or what brands to cleave to.
The Democratic Party is in many ways tied to the baby boom generation. As they fade, so will that party. Or so it seems to me, in my admitted naivete'.
#9
Interesting discussion. I am an anti-democrat and have been for 30 years or so. Why, I lived in New Jersey, and I witnessed the force feeding of legalized gambling, lotteries, sales and income taxes, and high property taxes. All that time, the democrats never stopped handing out freebees to the chronically unemployed, while I struggled to save to buy my own home and support my family.
I read and heard republicans talking about empowerment of the people to move the economy forward as they move themselves up the ladder of lifestyle.
I was, in fact trapped in a state where I was given no support but forced to support those who remain worthless. I left for Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Pennsylvanians are no more aware of the cancer of democrats than New Jersey was, and they now have a freebee handing governor who needs to increase all of the taxes this year with a legialature who are scared shitless of the reaction of the voters.
In the final analysis, I find that democrats will do anything to buy votes or create votes, then parasite on the real American patriots to pay the bill for their corruption. Unfortunately, some republicans also spend beyond my means for bridges and such, although the republicans are in the main honest and within the law. I rely on Club for Growth to find good conservative candidates and send money to their campaigns. CfG has put many into the House and a few into the Senate. In time, we will control the Congress. Till then, expect to have to watch every move they make in DC. Trust no one.
#10
If politics has devolved into nothing more than a pitched battle, then fine by me. I just wish we had a few Repubs who relished the fight, and were articulate enough to blast every God-damn demo lie for what it is.
#14
the six years of seeming incompetence under Bush have really changed the tide
Huh?
Would that "tide" have included the counter-cyclical congressional win in '02, the resounding re-election in '04, and the itty-bitty (slightly below average) off-year loss of Congress in '06?
I think a Dem tide in '08 is so far from certain that you can't even see "certain" from there.
The split in the electorate doesn't seem new. The hard core of idiocy is about 40% on the Dem side - almost no matter what happens, they're unhappy or unwilling to credit a GOP leader. That's probably below where it was in much of the last few decades.
#15
What has been lost is the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party. They are all pretty much idiots now, or at least seem totally tied to the nutroots at Moveon and Soros & Co. Sad really. Stalin must be smiling.
. . . After the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, America proclaimed itself at the end of history meaning that the spread of our style of democratic capitalism was now inevitable. Now a mere 16 years later, some are just as sure we approach our own end.
But our rivals are weaker and America is far stronger than many think. . . .
Go read it all. It's VDH, so you know it's good.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/24/2007 08:08 ||
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Amnesty would actually free what amounts to a slave class.
As illegal aliens, they have far fewer of the right of citizens: they cannot unionize; they can be cheated, and thrown out of the country if they do not let themselves be cheated; they are not covered by health and safety laws; they cannot sue their employer in federal court; etc., ad nauseum.
But this does not go to the heart of the argument.
The truth is *either* that they should be kicked out, *or* that they should be given amnesty. But allowing them to remain here, and remain illegal, is very close to slavery.
Once legal, they *can* do all of the things to protect themselves that citizens can, so they great scam will be over.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
