Samizdata

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) has claimed the Iraq campaign “is costing like Vietnam”. I’ll leave it up to the reader to compare budget requests for Iraq with the costs of Vietnam. Particularly of interest is the table showing the actual incremental costs: the amount spent on Vietnam over and above the normal defense budget.

Keep in mind a few facts as you think about it. There is a bit of a difference in the value of a dollar between then and now. In 1965 you could still buy a comic book with a silver dime (debased coins had just been released that year). Vietnam lasted a decade and peaked at a half million troops. There were single day’s (certainly single weeks) in which the American death toll exceeded the losses in Iraq to date.

The conditions in Iraq are very different from Vietnam. For it to become “a Vietnam” would require:

1. a major portion of the Iraqi population deciding on civil war to overthrow or prevent a new government.
2. the Syrian regular Army operating across the border in support of the civil war.
3. the growth of jungle in Western Iraq and surrounding areas. (Cover for the enemy, denial of ground for armoured operations)
4. Russia (or France or China) pouring billions in modern arms and advisors into Syria and threatening nuclear strikes on American cities if the US crosses the border.
5. the DOD dropping doctrines of integrated operations and use of overwhelming force.
6. micromanagment of US strategic and tactical operations for purely political reasons.

This all seems very unlikely.

From James Taranto’s ur-blog Best of the Web comes this tidbit (scroll down to the bottom):

AdAge magazine reports on a big stride in racial progress:

A huge, black man raises his arms to gloat obnoxiously over a foosball goal, and this vile underarm stench overpowers everyone in the room.

It’s a Right Guard commercial, and it’s wonderful.

Actually, the BBDO, New York, ad itself–starring Tampa Bay Buccaneers star Warren Sapp–is pretty ordinary, a sort of generic argument for deodorant with a brand name attached. What’s wonderful is that the big stinker isn’t white.

AdAge’s Bob Garfield lists other recent ads that depict black characters as the butt of jokes and observer: “We’ll know when we’ve achieved some sort of racial equilibrium in this country when black people can appear ridiculous in the pop culture right alongside white people. The very fact that this phenomenon has been growing for two years, and nobody has even flinched, speaks volumes.”

Absolutely correct on all fronts. For years (and years) it has been a convention of US TV commercials that white men, and only white men, are portrayed as foolish boobs, and women, or men “of color”, are wise, clever, etc. I happen to believe that TV commercials can be high pop art and a wonderful oracle to consult if you want to know what the current zeitgeist is all about.

I applaud the new willingness of the ad industry to poke fun at black men as a good sign that race is becoming a non-factor to many Americans, and I plan to keep an eye out for more examples of the same.

It is Labor Day here in the US, and the inimitable Mark Steyn, as usual, hits the nail on the head in a delightful column extolling the virtues of capitalism and the purblind idiocy of the hard left:

The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.

The new received wisdom — forcefully articulated by, among others, Maude Barlow’s Council of Canadians at the laugh-a-minute 2002 Johannesburg “Earth Summit” — is that the masses themselves are the problem. To the irritation of their self-appointed spokespersons, the oppressed masses refuse to stay oppressed. If they were still down in the basement chained to the great turbines, all would be well. But, instead, they insist on moving out of their tenements, getting homes with non-communal bathrooms, giving up the trolley car, putting a deposit down on a Honda Civic and driving to the mall. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about with that kind of high-end consumerist lifestyle, things were fine: That was “sustainable” prosperity.

There’s no such thing as “sustainable” development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped ’em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won’t notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We’re not animals, and it’s a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth’s most valuable resource is us.

The whole article is a wonderfully wicked skewering of modern-day tribunes of the oppressed. I will confirm from personal experience Mark’s observation that speaking with a trade unionist is a disorienting experience. Bare, unvarnished Marxism/Leninism is still on display, with much talk about oppression of workers and the evils of capitalism. Mind you, the average union worker is more likely to be oppressed by the credit card debt he ran up buying a new boat and widescreen TV than by his boss, but nevermind…

Jane Galt has a thought-provoking post on the structural instability of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are a veritable festival of interest groups: unions, teachers, minorities, feminists, gay groups, environmentalists, etc. Each of these groups has a litmus test without which they will not ratify a candidate: unfettered support for abortion, against vouchers, against ANWAR drilling, whatever. A lot of groups means a lot of litmus tests, because with the possible exception of the teachers, no one group is powerful enough to swing an election by themselves.

. . . .

But the larger problem is that those interest groups are increasingly coming into conflict. African-americans want vouchers, but the more powerful teacher’s union says no. Latinos trend strongly pro-life, but don’t let NARAL catch them at it. Environmentalists want stricter standards that cost union members jobs. The more interest groups under the tent, the looser the grip the party has on any one group. And as social security and medicare turn into the sucking chest wound of the budget, the money for the programs that Democratic politicians have traditionally used to cement those interest groups to them is disappearing.

One can only hope. While I have little use for Republicans, I can at least sympathize with the tattered remains of their fiscal conservative wing, and they do occasionally put up a proposal, like tax cuts, that I can actively support. I honestly cannot remember the last major Democratic proposal that I supported – the Democrats are truly, through and through, the party of state expansion. In their eyes, there is no protruding nail that cannot, and should not, be battered down with hammer of the State. Even their lone “civil liberties” plank – the right to abortion – is shot through with inconsistency and has morphed into a demand for state funding, support, protection, and promotion of abortion. I would shed no tears for the collapse of the Democratic “coalition,” or for the less likely collapse of the Republicans.

I hope it is time for one of the periodic great realignments in American politics. Certainly, the collapse of one of the two major political power centers is a necessary precondition for such a realignment. The current polarities reflected in the two dominant parties are hopelessly blurred iterations of the class struggles of the ’30s, for crying out loud. A realignment might serve to create parties that will debate the one true issue of politics – the scope and power of the State. Currently, this issue is simply out of phase with the structure and ingrained habits and positions of the parties, as a result of which both consistently plump for a larger and more intrusive State. For chrissake, even tax cuts are sold with a pitch that the economic growth they will trigger will in turn result in increased government revenues.

Without an historic realignment of the political parties that channel and mold preference into politics into policy, the growth of the State in the US will continue unabated.

Have you had a bad day? Got a problem? Is your life a mess? Are you sick? Lame? Poor? Lonely? Unemployed? Or are you just fed up, listless and overwhelmed with feelings of exhaustion and hopelessness?

Well, you can always vent your frustrations by blaming your troubles on George W. Bush. Why not? Everyone else does. For everything. From perished pensioners in Paris to stubbed toes in Sarajevo to nosebleeds in Nairobi there is not a misfortune or a twist of cruel fate anywhere on the face of this planet that cannot be laid squarely at the varnished door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And this is all because that current occupant of the most important office in that august building went and ‘tore up the Kyoto Treaty’; the modern equivalent of snapping a ju-ju stick. Thus has Mr.Bush incurred the wrath of the angry spirits.

Of course, George Bush did not ‘tear up’ the Kyoto Treaty at all (which is a shame because it deserves to be torn up). But that doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing in truth here, we’re delving the murky, opaque depths of mythology and superstition. George Bush is for the modern left/green axis what the devil was for medieval peasants.

Perhaps Mr.Bush (or his advisers at any rate) is aware of this and decided to take advantage of the situation. After all, if you’ve been cast as the devil, you may as well go ahead and live up to the role:

The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America’s air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.

Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.

The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.

Now a word of caution here: the link is to the Guardian so the story may not be true at all. It may just be the product of their febrile imaginations (Next week: “Bush adds fresh babies to Whitehouse menu”). However, I certainly hope it is true and not just because it would mean good news for US industry and prosperity but also because it drives home the old lesson that being hated has its definite advantages. At a stroke, George Bush will have lifted a millstone from the neck of his country without doing the slightest harm to either his reputation or chances of re-election.

The devil may not have all the best tunes. He just has the freedom to whistle them.