I was recently challenged on another forum to cite examples of my own writing where I have denounced various Bush era activities and policies. I was surprised to find that I was not able to give such citations, as they exist only in my mind. I have never committed it to print. So I will rectify this.

GUANTANAMO BAY
The capture and detention of prisoners of war is acceptable. What was not acceptable was the fact that the facility simply imprisoned them and then did nothing more. The prisoners should have been investigated according to military procedures to establish their crimes and involvement (to make sure we didn’t imprison actual innocent bystanders).

Prisoners of war captured on the battlefield are not entitled to the protections of the American civilian justice system.

But as a prison for convicted terrorists, I don’t have a problem with it.

IRAQ
Wrong target. Although it is nice that Saddam Hussein is no longer around to torture his people, that was never our job or our responsibility. We should not have invaded Iraq. We should have invaded Iran.

AFGHANISTAN
Although terrorists do hide in and are supported by Afghani forces, Afghanistan is not the main target. It is peripheral. Establishing “democracy” in Afghanistan is not going to solve the problem.

IRAN
Iran is the hornet’s nest, the source of the funding and training of most Islamist terrorists. We should have invaded Iran and wiped out that support infrastructure, but we didn’t.

THE MIDDLE EAST IN GENERAL
We should not be trying to “liberate” the Middle East. For one thing, what Bush/Obama want to do is not liberty. Secondly, the cultures of the Middle East don’t know how to be democratic (nor do they really want to be). Sometimes various factions hate their governments, but tyranny is okay. They just want it to be their kind of tyranny.

Dictatorship, especially Islamic dictatorship, has been the government of choice in that part of the world for centuries. Various religious factions vie for supremacy. They don’t want to get along — they each want to be the one in charge.

Even if we free them and give them democratic choice, they will just choose to install another dictator, and be back to square one. We are seeing this pan out in Iraq right now.

PATRIOT ACT / WIRETAPPING
I am not an expert on the contents of the Patriot Act or the implications of it. But in general I do not endorse the restriction of individual rights and/or liberty. Government invasion into personal freedoms never has an innocent motive and never has good results.

TSA / AIRLINE SECURITY
All this new “security” at airports in the US is a farce, a dog and pony show some call “security theater”. It doesn’t actually make us safer. There are still many obvious loopholes that would allow a determined terrorist (or even a halfway intelligent one) to destroy an airplane and kill everyone on board.

The failure to apply proper profiling further reduces it to a circus. That 82-year-old white grandmother from Iowa is not a terrorist. But that 27-year-old Arab guy from Turkey might be.

DEFICIT / NATIONAL BUDGET
Bush’s military spending would have been justified if we had actually fought the right war, in the right place, against the right enemies (Iran). But we didn’t.

TORTURE / WATERBOARDING
I do not and have never endorsed torture (including waterboarding) as a method of interrogation on prisoners. It doesn’t work. A torture victim will say anything to avoid more torture. Information thus gained is not reliable.

SUSPENSION OF HABEAS CORPUS
On November 13, 2001, Bush suspended the right of habeas corpus by executive order. Basically, habeas corpus means that detainees have the right to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. This is tied up in the right to a hearing, a trial, legal counsel, and the right to be free from detention if not charged with a crime.

This was to be used on “enemy combatants”, to allow the government to capture and indefinitely detain terrorists. The status of “enemy combatant” has been applied to American citizens, effectively suspending their rights to due process.

Foreign enemies are not “tried in courts”. They are captured on the battlefield and dealt with as prisoners of war by the military. The people waging war on the United States are typically not Americans. They may be here on visas, but that’s not the same thing. They are usually citizens of a foreign nation, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, etc.

I do not support the suspension of habeas corpus. An American citizen who wages war on the United States (such as John Walker Lindh) is guilty of sedition and treason, and should be charged and tried appropriately, with all rights normally due to citizens in an American court.

TARP / BANK BAILOUTS
This was never a good idea and I opposed it entirely from the first moment it was mentioned. “Too big to fail” is ridiculous. The banks should have been allowed to fail and recover on their own. Yes it would have impacted the economy. But it has anyway because TARP doesn’t work and was never capable of working.

AUTO INDUSTRY BAILOUTS
That’s Obama’s mess, not Bush’s.

I will add more material later as necessary.

That said, I know what he meant. Christie is definitely a breath of fresh air in the morass of contemporary politics — not necessarily because of his substantive policies, the full impact of which remains to be seen — but simply because he treats the people of his state like adults. He doesn’t pretend that the hard choices aren’t necessary, or that they can be made without pain, and he believes the public is mature enough to grasp the facts, evaluate them and act appropriately.

It’s a sad comment on the rest of our political leadership, on the left and the right, that that alone is enough to make Christie stand out from the crowd.

For those interested in more drawings of Mohammad, Craig Biddle has a collection over at the Objective Standard website.  And for those who just can’t get enough, check out the Mohammed Image Archive.

The problem comes from the way the distinction is framed: religion versus atheism.  But is this the right way to think of the dispute?  Atheism, per se, is a purely negative doctrine.  It indicates the lack of a specific kind of belief.  But men act on the basis of what they do believe, not what they don’t.  I’m an atheist, but that isn’t the essential defining characteristic of my beliefs.  Fundamentally, I’m an advocate of reason.  Atheism is a derivative consequence, not a primary.  I don’t believe in God because there is no rational basis for doing so.

If you reframe the question in terms of reason and faith, the entire playing field changes.  What has reason ever done for humanity?  In a modern industrial society it’s difficult to identify a concrete value that doesn’t flow from reason.  Science, technology, medicine, industry, political freedom — all are children of the age of reason.  (Stephen Hicks has a nifty diagram of the connections in his book Explaining Post-Modernism; on-line version available here.)  Now consider the contrary question: What has faith ever done for humanity?  The era of history in which faith was most dominant is aptly named the Dark Ages — a time when the average lifespan was approximately 30 years and everyone existed in what we would today consider grinding poverty.  Disease ran rampant, literacy was extremely rare.  Heretics were burned at the stake.  Men who took their faith the most seriously, like Saint Francis, would use rocks as pillows, drink laundry water, and sprinkle sand on their food to dull the taste.

Reason is man’s basic means of survival.  In essence, the answer to the question “What has reason ever done for humanity?” is “Allowed it to live and prosper.”  The answer to the question “What has faith ever done for humanity?” is “Led it to suffer and die.”  The religious men whose actions benefitted humanity created those benefits to the extent that they acted rationally, i.e. to the extent that their faith did not interfere with their reason.

Attempting to think about this issue in the terms laid out by the religionist is futile.  The setup leads down a blind alley to a false conclusion.  The lesson is that one should never uncritically accept the terms in which an intellectual opponent wants to frame a debate.  Concepts matter.  Don’t let your enemies pick the ones you use.

One of the narratives the left has been setting up recently is the classic “conservatives are just a bunch of racist rednecks”.  They’ve been particularly anxious to set this frame up around the Tea Party movement in the hopes of scaring off and/or driving away the independent voters who have been attracted by the Tea Party’s message of fiscal responsibility, but they’ll use it on mainstream Republicans too.  It never gets old.  Now, if you want to fight a narrative line, you must not do anything that feeds into it and gives it credibility.  Any fact that even seems to support the narrative may be seized upon, repeated endlessly as ‘proof’ of its accuracy, and used to cement its power in the upcoming news cycle.

In light of the above, I now present to you Bob McDonnell, the recently-elected governor of Virginia.

Idiot.

• Profoundly immoral.
• Ruinously impractical.
• Defended mendaciously.
• Supported corruptly.
• Enacted through procedural abuse, in the face of strong public opposition.

Exactly which of these things should I not be angry about?  Anger is a response to perceived injustice.  Condemning anger means one of two things: either the object of the anger is not in fact an injustice, or we should be emotionally indifferent to questions of right and wrong.

Moran goes on to note that “that reason wins a lot more converts than screaming” — which is true.  But reason and anger are not mutually exclusive.  The appropriate response to our current political situation is anger, rationally grounded. It is the rational identification of the facts which gives rise to the anger, and the anger provides the motivation to act to correct the injustice.  This is not an academic exercise.  Our lives are, quite literally, at stake.  If we’re not allowed to get emotional about that, when is anger appropriate?

Subject: This makes sense to me!

I think we should print this off and send it to our congressmen…..over and over again until they “get it”!!!

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
   1. Two Six year Senate terms
   2. Six Two year House terms
   3. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms
2. No Tenure / No Pension: A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security: All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system; Congress participates with the American people.
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans.
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
7. Congress and the President must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people. Signing statements will not be used nor honored.
8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11. The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

If you agree with the above, pass it on to all in your address list. If not, just delete.

I thought that, as a list of proposed solutions to the problems afflicting our government, this largely misses the point.  Herewith, my response.

That stuff feeds an emotional desire for vengence, but doesn’t really address the fundamental problem.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a government whose sole function was the protection of the individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness; the purpose of the Constitution was to establish such a government, with powers limited to those necessary and proper to the fulfillment of that end.  Our government has thrown off those restrictions, arrogating effectively unlimited power to itself.  Our leaders are contemptuous of the very idea that the Constitution limits their power — you may or may not have noticed the derision with which House Speaker Pelosi dismissed a question regarding the constitutional authority enabling a government takeover of the health care system.  (She said that “wasn’t a serious question” and refused to answer it.)

Unsurprisingly, the power we have allowed our government to amass attracts unsavory people, whose personalities are marred by narcissism and power-lust.  Is it surprising that such people fasten themselves to jobs that give them the power they lust for, refuse to give them up, and proceed to act as rulers while treating the American people as serfs?

As long as you have a pot of honey, you will have flies attracted to it.  You can’t stop the process by putting a lid on the pot — you have to get rid of the honey.  Restore the limitations on the government’s power.  A Congress that has no authority beyond protecting the individual rights of the people would be a Congress with no ability to dispense favors to favored constituents or special interests.  Such a government would not need multi-trillion dollar budgets, and would not be in a position to bail out the connected or punish the productive when they refuse to abase themselves.

It is widely acknowledged today that our government is thoroughly corrupt — but what does that really mean?  A government action is corrupt when it directs government power and resources to an inappropriate end.  But since the proper end of government is the protection of individual rights, this means that any government action not directed to that end is inherently corrupt — and that is 90%+ of what the government does today.  Corruption is the norm, not the exception, and the problem is not structural, but functional — specifically, that our government officials have lost their understanding of what their proper function *is*.

If we wish to reclaim our government and halt the ongoing theft of the liberties envisioned for us by the Founders, this is the issue we must push.  We must insist that our Congressmen understand the purpose of their jobs, and we must replace those who reject that purpose with new Congressmen who do.  This job starts by finding such candidates and supporting them in the upcoming primaries, wherever possible.  I suggest contacting your local Tea Party organization as a good starting place.

This video is NSFW, so wear headphones and don’t watch with other people around.

I’m so, so sorry.  (No I’m not).