Category: Politics

Be afraid, be very afraid. The End may, indeed, be near. Surely the stars must be mis-Aligned.

Since I assume that only people who can read are likely to frequent this site (except, of course, for those few students likely to be caught plagiarizing), I’m a little embarassed to admit that while listening to MSNBC Thursday night I found myself actually agreeing with Pat Buchanan. When the far left and the far right can join hands in a common cause surely The Circle must be nearly Whole. And who can tell what completing the circle foreshadows?

This is the same Buchanan I used to laugh at when he was on the McLaughlin Group, the guy who was so far to the right of McLaughlin that he often wasn’t visible unless you had a widescreen TV.

Buchanan argued that the Bush Administration had made no convincing argument that America should attack Iraq. Although readily admitting that Iraq had used poisonous gases on their own people, he argued that this, by itself, was not adequate justification for an attack. He pointed out that America, after all, has used the atomic bomb on the Japanese, and no one was arguing that that justified a first-strike against America. In fact, it was the West that invented and first used poisonous gases.

He argued, as does this MSNBC article, that the countries most likely to be invaded by Sadam, its neighbors, do not support our attempts to overthrow him. At the moment, only Israel, for obvious reasons, and possibly Australia, for reasons only Jonathon may be able to fathom, support our efforts at overthrowing Sadam. That should tell us something about how convincing the administration’s arguments are.

For me personally, the real irony here is that I was enraged during Desert Storm when we did not eliminate Sadam or at least remove him from power. I felt there was no greater injustice than the fact that we killed thousands of relatively innocent Iraqi soldiers who did not want to go to war, but we let the only person who really had anything to gain from the war stay in power.

Unfortunately, in my mind, that still does not give us license to go in years later and finish the job that should have been done before. As Buchanan pointed out, doing so would seem to require us to also take out leaders in Iran, Syria, and Northern Korea.

Buchanan argued that deterrents have worked in the past against those who have weapons of mass destruction, and there’s every reason to believe that they will continue to work against Sadam.

Let me tell you, as a former tank platoon leader and combat veteran, I would not want to have to lead a platoon of tanks into Baghdad. Tanks are not meant for urban warfare and are severely limited when encountering tall buildings, buildings where people can drop things on them, things like Molotov cocktails. Air support is equally ineffective unless you want a total bloodbath, one that would surely dwarf anything we saw on television in Vietnam. If we have to actually enter Baghdad to get Sadam, there are going to be severe losses that will come back to haunt those who sent them in. And such losses have even greater ramifications for the future.

If Pat Buchanan and I can agree that the invasion of Iraq is a mistake, perhaps we do, indeed, have a chance to prevent our country from blindly following Cheney and Bush into battle, despite patriotic echoes of Onward Christian Soldiers playing in the background.

Lest we become complacent, though, the latest Gallup poll seems anything but promising with 53% of Americans favoring sending ground troops into Iraq, with the only good news being that that percentage is down from recent numbers.

If President Bush has his way our grandchildren may very well never see a tree taller than a shrub.

Bush’s “no-nonsense” attempts to save the forests of the West from fire seem to come down to cutting down the trees before they get tall enough to cause serious wildfires. No denying that kind of logic. There’s certainly no denying this would put an end to forest fire.

Neither can anyone deny that there are serious problems in western forests. With the worst part of the traditional fire season still upon us, the West has seen some of the worst fires in history. There is little agreement on the best way to solve these problems even among experts in the field.

The Bush administration wants to blame these fires on precisely the people most interested in saving the trees, environmentalists. However, it strains creditability to argue that these people are to “blame” for the fires. Most of these environmental groups have been urging thinning and other steps to ameliorate the fire danger for years. For instance, here are three short-term suggestions by the Sierra Club to lessen these dangers.

The Bush plan would emphasize logging as the preferable means of controlling wildfires. According to Time magazine,

The "Healthy Forests" [you gotta love the guy who makes up these titles for Bush, he must have a degree in creative writing] initiative calls on Congress to pass laws that would "expedite procedures for forest thinning and restoration projects" and "ensure the sustainable forest management and appropriate timber production."

According to the Oregonian Bush’s message to a hand-picked audience of loggers and firefighters was that “His forest plan equals jobs”

One can only suppose that those jobs are “logging jobs.” The kind of thinning that’s based on logging practices has to include the cutting of the largest trees because they are the trees that bring the most money from logging companies. The smaller trees cost money to cut and get rid of, so there is no incentive to cut them down.

Nature’s suppression of wildfires has been diametrically opposed to this strategy. In nature, the smaller trees have been burned down by forest fires and larger trees, through the thicker bark’s natural resistance to fire, have actually benefited from the nutrient’s left by the fire and by the increased exposure to sunlight.

The Pacific Northwest’s forests thrived for millions of years when left to these techniques. The forest industry almost to today has relied on these trees, not the ones man has planted, for their livelihood.

It seems ironic that Republican conservatives who so often claim the moral high ground on religious grounds would put their faith in Mammon rather than natural forces when attempting to solve the problems in our nation’s forests.

I guess if Jonathon was brave enough to take the religious belief test and reveal that he is an INFJ, then I’m not afraid to reveal my political leanings.

Here are my results on the Political Compass test. Actually, there aren’t too many surprises here for me. Most of my problems as a teacher came from my Libertarian attitude. After all, why shouldn’t eveyone control himself? That’s not my job. What else would you suspect from someone who counts "Self-Reliance" as one of the greatest essays ever written.

And I guess my rantings against Bush and the Republican Conservatives would suggest that I’m also a little to the left on economic matters, even if that means I’ll have to pay more money to ensure that others less fortunate than me can afford medical care. Do you think you could figure that out when I revealed I was once a caseworker?

This is it, though, Jonathan. I refuse to take any of those on-line tests that make me choose between being a sparrow or a hawk, a rose or a dandelion, an elfen mage or a dwarfian fighter-cleric. I don’t care how many times you double-double dare me.

Some things are just too personal to reveal to a world of unknown people.

Besides, what is there left to read if you reveal all of your personality traits?