I hadn’t seen this before, but it’s interested that a lot of the same names (‘communism’, ‘antichrist’) were used in reference against racial integration that are now being leveled at Obama today, especially by the fringe. While some modern protesters are certainly racists, I don’t think that most are. It’s good that people protest unbridled government spending. I wonder where these people were during the Bush administration, though…

Here’s an excerpt:

Zappacosta jumps first from the boat, reels ten yards through the elbow-high tide, and yells back: “I’m hit.” He staggers on a few more steps. The aid man, Thomas Kenser, sees him bleeding from hip and shoulder. Kenser yells: “Try to make it in; I’m coming.” But the captain falls face forward into the wave, and the weight of his equipment and soaked pack pin him to the bottom. Kenser jumps toward him and is shot dead while in the air. Lieutenant Tom Dallas of Charley Company, who has come along to make a reconnaissance, is the third man. He makes it to the edge of the sand. There a machine-gun burst blows his head apart before he can flatten.

Private First Class Robert L. Sales, who is lugging Zappacosta’s radio (an SCR 300), is the fourth man to leave the boat, having waited long enough to see the others die. His boot heel catches on the edge of the ramp and he falls sprawling into the tide, losing the radio but saving his life. Every man who tries to follow him is either killed or wounded before reaching dry land. Sales alone gets to the beach unhit. To travel those few yards takes him two hours. First he crouches in the water, and waddling forward on his haunches just a few paces, collides with a floating log — driftwood. In that moment, a mortar shell explodes just above his head, knocking him groggy. He hugs the log to keep from going down, and somehow the effort seems to clear his head a little.

It’s terrifying as-is, but even more terrifying when you consider how close it was to being a complete failure.

“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.”

- Charles Krauthammer, April 22, 2003

Writers and thinkers who aren’t self-critical are always the least interesting.

Classic.

Here it is:
It’s August 4, 1945, and you’re a Japanese soldier. You have captured an American soldier. Japanese intelligence suspects a massive attack on the civilian population, but isn’t sure when, where or how. (Whether or not the last part is historically accurate is irrelevant.) You have reason to believe that the American soldier knows some of the details of the impending attack, but he isn’t giving in. Is it morally allowable to torture the American? Is it a war crime? Keep in mind that if you’re successful in getting the information, it would be reasonable to think that it would save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Now, I don’t wish to make a moral equivalency between the WWII Americans and Japanese, nor the WWII Americans and the terrorists of today, but I don’t think that matters for the experiment. If the Japanese soldier would be committing a war crime in this situation only because he was one of the bad guys, then that suggests that the good guys are allowed to torture, doesn’t it? What would that reduce ‘good’ to, then? Why would we bother to have international laws and treaties about this at all, then?

The United States unequivocally called waterboarding torture during the trials of Japanese after WWII (though the Japanese certainly did many far-worse things, too). During Vietnam, the practice was declared illegal by American generals, causing at least one soldier in this picture to be court-martialed and discharged:

(image source)

Were they all wrong?

It’s a convincing case, I think.

(via waxy)

Jon Meecham’s Newsweek article, The End of Christian America, apparently revived the discussion on whether or not America is “a Christian nation”. Whenever I’ve heard debate on this issue, I’ve always found the affirmative position to be lacking. This recent Hitchens/Blackwell back-and-forth continues this trend:

(video won’t show in Reader)

First of all, I’m really unable to define what a Christian nation would mean. Can someone name some non-American, non-Vatican Christian nations? Britain has its own Christian church, so surely that has to count for something. While I can’t define what a Christian nation means, the supporting arguments brought up by proponents seem quite weak. They regularly try to proclaim that America’s founders were Christian, despite plenty of evidence that this assertion is somewhere between a lie and a gross exaggeration (some certainly were, but Jefferson and Franklin are easy examples of Deists). The fact that Blackwell brings up the Pilgrims in his argument, despite their having died over a century before the founding of the country, highlights the weakness of this point.

All the recent stuff with Somali pirates lately got me thinking about the Barbary pirates and how some things haven’t changed as much as we think. This looks like a tangent, but it’s not.. hold on. Andrew Sullivan brought up a relevant quote from America’s 1796 Treaty of Tripoli:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

What are the Judeo-Christian values on which the country is supposedly founded? The country is founded on the ideas of limited representative government, freedom of expression, and a wall between church and state. The most succinct codification of Judeo-Christian values that I know of would be the 10 commandments (here for your review). As far as I can tell, none of these are codified into the Constitution, though most of them have been state laws at some time.

Why is Islam left out of “Judeo-Christian”? Most of the 10 commandments are reflected in the Koran (source), and really, are they claiming that Jewish people had significant influence on the founding of the country? (There were about 2000 Jews in the colonies in 1776, many from Brazil, apparently.)

Side note on Meecham’s article:
I’d bet that someone else wrote that title, as the article itself is very thoughtful and, so far as I can tell, shouldn’t be too controversial. My guess is that the majority of the people complaining about it haven’t read past the title. Meecham wrote a followup here.

Nate goes through all the caveats in his post, so I won’t reiterate the obvious parts. One important point he included:

In general, however, the fates of different economic classes are linked. Since 1967, the correlation in the change in year-over-year income between the 10th and the 90th percentiles is .63.

This latter characteristic is something that I think a lot of liberals tend not to have a good appreciation of. There is sometimes a tendency among liberals to see the economy as a zero-sum game, but this is not really the case. When the economy is doing well, everyone tends to do well, unless the President is trying really, really hard (as Reagan did) to steer that growth only toward certain income classes. And when the economy is doing poorly, everyone tends to do poorly. The poor did awfully under George W. Bush, but the wealthy didn’t perform all that well either.

This may be a result of the tendency of liberal thinkers focus their attention on the rich-poor gap, usually measured as a ratio. This can certainly tells us something valuable, but if the goal is to look after the economic well-being of the least well-off, it is probably better to look instead at how the least well-off are performing relative to themselves.

Yeah

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” [U.S. Rep Steve Austria R-OH] said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

[via]

Apparently the March 4 inauguration date still wasn’t warm enough for William Henry Harrison.

(Science note: being in cold weather does not actually make you get a cold. Harrison didn’t die because of his record-setting inaugural speech.)