Another Clintonian nugget from Obama

Barack Obama channels Bill Clinton with respect to Hillary Clinton. Joan Vennochi at Boston.com sums it up succinctly:

During their showdown, he said, "What exactly is this foreign policy expertise? Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no." Now he calls her "an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world's leaders, who will command respect in her capital and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world."

While I agree with pundits who see Obama's appointments as a type of comfort for conservatives since it could have been so much worse, the appointments really do not mean much until it comes time to implement executive policy. Obama claims that he will set the policy, and his staff will apparently dutifully implement his wishes. While that remains to be seen, the one thing we can dependably learn about Obama is through comparison of his rhetoric with his actions.

Sen. Clinton has no real qualifications in terms of foreign policy, as per (campaign) Obama? No problem. Post-campaign Obama will appoint her Secretary of State and express the highest confidence in her abilities.

There is at least one way to reconcile the statements such that Obama isn't reasonably viewed as having a forked silver tongue on a par with Slick Willy's. Sen. Clinton, in spite of her lack of experience, can perform brilliantly in the office of Secretary of State by obeying the string-pulling of Obama.

That reading somewhat ignores Obama's notable lack of foreign policy experience, of course.

We'll see what January holds.

India poised to cause more terrorism

Pardon the facetious headline, inspired by Robyn Blumner's apparent belief that the ill treatment of Gitmo detainees encourages terrorism.

Police hope to discover whether gunman Azam Amir Kasab came from Pakistan through the use of "narcoanalysis" – a practise banned in most democracies.
(The Times/UK)

Assuming that the use truth serum is viewed as ill treatment, this act by India should result in a number of violent terrorist attacks using the Blumner Rule Of Proportional Terrorism. Giving detainee treatment at Gitmo a baseline rating of 10, I figure that using truth serum on the Mumbai survivor rates at least a 4.

I'll have to drop Ms. Blumner a note and ask how we should rate the publication of cartoons disrespectful to Islam.

Another dispatch from Michael Yon applied to military hardware

Independent reporter Michael Yon, who may have spent more time embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined than any other reporter, has a new dispatch at his Web site.

The story deals with the means of wrapping up a winning war. Since my blog deals somewhat in armored vehicles and the like, I drew out a couple of paragraphs on that topic.

And so we rolled out of FOB Falcon in those giant MRAPs. It seems that most of the seriously experienced combat soldiers do not like MRAPs. Yes, MRAPs are great for the main roads and convoys, but they are too big and too cumbersome, and they get stuck in mud that you could peddle (sic) a bicycle through. MRAPs are not offensive vehicles.

(read more at michaelyon-online.com)

Yon has also heartily praised the Stryker vehicle. I find his views at an interesting variance with those of Richard North, who writes the "Defence of the Realm" blog. North misses few opportunities to criticize British acquisition of vehicles that inadequately protect the occupants. But as Yon notes, thoroughly protected vehicles create a catch-22 situation. To carry that armor, the truck must stay on a good road. And the enemy will focus its IEDs on the good road as a result.

In light of this reality, I find it hard to question the UK order for Navistar utility trucks that do not feature a V-shaped hull. Even for non-combat vehicles, mobility counts no less than armor protections because it provides the means for potentially avoiding IED attacks instead of simply resisting them.

The eventual solution, I suppose, will involve equipping armies with a variety of vehicles. Some will feature heavy armor to take on the booby-trapped areas that simply cannot be avoided. Others will maximize mobility while taking advantage of any protections that do not significantly detract from strategic mobility.

No doubt the above represents the thinking behind the JLTV program. Come up with a family of vehicles that will fill all the needed roles beyond those that require a heavily armored truck like the Buffalo. For maximal mobility, use the base version. For areas thick with IED threats, use appropriate add-ons.

I think the Brits may have missed the boat by skipping out on the JLTV approach.

Time: Shiites think Obama is one of them

It's not just right-wing kooks in Middle America who believe Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim: conspiracy theorists across the Middle East have embraced the idea with the same fervor they bring to other bizarre notions. I am not a bit surprised when, later in the conversation, Mohammed assures me that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that Saudi Arabia had agreed to bail out the U.S. economy in exchange for an American invasion of Iran.
(Time)

Perhaps he also thinks the moon landings were faked.

Is the a testament to the effectiveness of the right-wing attack machine, or simply a reminder that people tend to believe some odd things?

Iraq violence update, December 2008

November proved a stable month in Iraq, though December is off to a rocky start. Hostile fatalities for coalition troops remained the same as last month, with non-hostile deaths up slightly.



I finally found a graphics tool to allow correction of the distortion I was getting with pasted Excel graph images. It takes a bit of time, since the process requires recreation of the image pretty much from scratch. But I'm satisfied with the initial results.


Casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces are up slightly for November. Even taking three month averages together to smooth out the bumps a bit reveals a slight increase in the fatality trend, which is perhaps confirmed by the spate of violence that kicked off December. A message from insurgents to Barack Obama, reminding him to conduct a rapid withdrawal? That's hard to say, since a number of factors have simply made it easier for attacks to take place. First, Iraqi security is handling more and more security duties. Second, concrete barriers erected as part of the surge strategy have been removed in some areas, making it easier to employ car bombs and the like.

The story remains the same. Iraq has been won, but not irrevocably.

Terrorist attack in India

MUMBAI: Terror struck the country's financial capital late on Wednesday night as coordinate serial explosions and indiscriminate firing rocked eight areas across Mumbai including the crowded CST railway station, two five star hotels--Oberoi and Taj. (Watch)

At least 80 people were dead and over 300 injured in the terror attacks, hospital sources said.

ATS chief Hemant Karkare was killed during attacks in the financial city. Additional Commissioner Ashok Tampte and encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar died at attack in Metro Cinema.
(The Times of India)

Perhaps I can expect an upcoming column from Robyn Blumner (The St. Petersburg Times) explaining how the attack stems from detainee treatment at Gitmo.

Racist dog-whistles

The past election campaign helped restore the concept of the "racist dog-whistle" to the public debate, for better or worse. Some comments by David Gergen some months ago touched on the issue, for example.

"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about."

As a fellow native of the South and a Republican, I completely missed the coded message, except for the part about Obama not being "one of us" in the sense that his history and rhetoric are well left of the political mainstream in the United States.

Am I a freak or something? Am I unusually hard of hearing?

I don't think so. Over the course of the year I've seen plenty of buzz about the racist dog-whistles from the left and combined scoffing and perplexity from the right.

Note the commentary from the left and Melissa McEwan:

The dog whistle piques them with something the average person won't see as bigoted, but that the constituency for which they advocate (and/or of which they're a part) will expect them to call out, because they instantly spy it and recognize it for what it is; they've heard the tune of that particular string being plucked their whole lives. Then whoever calls it out is marginalized as a hysteric, over-reactionary, looking to get offended, etc.

The average person doesn't see it as bigoted.

The constituency for which they advocate (and/or of which they're a part) will expect them to call out because they instantly spy it and recognize it for what it is.

If I'm interpreting McEwan correctly, I'm the constituency for which the McCain campaign advocated. But I missed the message and so did the rest of the conservatives to whom I pay attention--unless we're just a bunch of liars (I'm willing to give us the benefit of the doubt). And the average person doesn't get the message anyway. And if the average person doesn't get it then who does?

In McEwan's mind, I'd guess that racist Republicans get the message. Perhaps McEwan thinks a large percentage of Republicans are racist. I don't happen to think so, simply because that is not my experience. But more importantly, I have no evidence that racist Republicans received any such message. The only people that received the message, as far as I can tell, are David Gergen and other people on the left. But for McEwan, I might have thought they were average people in spite of their leftward tilt.

Now an example that hits closer to home.

I've written before about how I like to visit other blogs as well as message boards. Lately I've been having discussions on the Center for Inquiry's message board. The dog-whistle issue recently came up over there, using Rush Limbaugh as an example:

workinprogress:
But, did these local guys say anything more tacitly racist than their idol - Rush Limbaugh said when comparing the “backbone of America” Iowa farmers response to their flood with the disaster after the flood in largely black New Orleans? (worth noting that the flood waters in Iowa didn’t leave a city under water):

Limbaugh: I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois---I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property...I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can...whining and moaning---where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

Am I not supposed to be one of the ones who hears the dog-whistle? I frankly didn't get it. If New Orleans is the independent/cooperative region and Iowa and Illinois are the source of nanny-state dysfunction then is the example therefore anti-white racism? Is that a useful way to detect racism?

Or perhaps I should say, is that an accurate way to detect racism?

So to that portion of the post, I responded:

Bryan:
Eh? What’s racist about that? Try to be specific.

The far-left Balak stepped in to help:

Balak:
Jesus made the deaf to hear, but apparently forgot to include dogwhistles.

Miracles aside, how does one rationally detect a dog-whistle communication, I wondered?

Bryan:

You perfectly illustrate the bankruptcy the racial thinking of many.

In Limbaugh’s statement, there is no mention of race at all.

By analogy, let’s suppose that I interview two job candidates. Candidate A has an excellent resume and references and interviews well. Candidate B has a poor resume and lacks critical skills required for the position for which he applied. Plus candidate B interviewed horribly.

I hire candidate A and not candidate B.

If candidate B is black, then apparently I am a racist.
Am I also a racist if I hire candidate B instead of candidate A?

Limbaugh’s comparison concerned patterns of behavior, not race. The comparison to job qualifications is apt.

Back to workingprogress:

workinprogress:
This is why you don’t want to discuss the previous article exposing the rabble-rousing techniques of talkradio hosts - the refugees in New Orleans were mostly black, and every listener to his show can make the comparison between the response of blacks and whites to flooding! Since Limbaugh didn’t bother to point out the extenuating circumstances such as the numbers of people trapped on their rooftops for days on end in New Orleans, or crammed into the Superdome for several days, it doesn’t take a codebreaker to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to his implicit conclusion that blacks are naturally lazy, immoral and violent!.........and it’s worth pointing out that this is an example of how hate-speech can discreetly dodge any rules as long as the host uses careful language and doesn’t shoot off his mouth like an idiot, such as Michael Savage or Don Imus!

Comparing the response to flooding in the two regions is racist unless you point out the supposed extenuating circumstances. I thought the extenuating circumstance was dependence on the government.

Balak returned to the fray:

Balak:

I should apologize for using the term ‘dog whistle’, as Bryan is evidently unfamiliar with it.

Perhaps we can improve his understanding using the famous words of Lee Atwater. Atwater was the political architect of Nixon’s racist ‘Southern Strategy’ during the late 1960s… (The technique has been effectively used by both wings of the Property Party ever since, and is a staple fare for Limbaugh and all the other right-wing talkers).

ATWATER: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N-----r, n-----r, n-----r,’ ”By 1968, you can’t say ‘n-----r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

I'm customarily drawn to the use of quotations in argument, since I see them so often taken out of context. This one was no exception, as Atwater went on to say that the latter issues were so abstract that they do away with racism. It ends up sounding like a sound and ethical political strategy used to lure Southern Democrats (the party of slavery). I should note that the strategy does not do away with the racism of voters. Rather the message dispenses with racism. Balak had used Atwater's words to argue the opposite, that the message itself carries that altered-frequency message of racism.

The discussion thread devolved from there into personal attacks after I quoted Atwater without editing out the offensive "n" word.

The dog-whistle. The average person doesn't hear it. Atwater argued that "racist" issues, once abstracted down to taxes and state rights and the like, emptied the message of racism. So what of the supposedly racist messages? Some people, such as Gergen, apparently hear the messages. If Atwater is correct, then how does that work?

Melissa McEwan offered a clue during her discussion of McCain's Spears/Hilton ad, even if in a rather clueless way:

Obama, dog whistles the ad, hitting old racists in the sweet spot, could (have sex with) these white girls – it's practically a Democratic tradition … JFK, Clinton, heck even Carter lusted in his heart – and we don't want that, now, do we?

If the ad communicates the idea that Obama could have sex with Britney Spears and/or Paris Hilton, then that thought cannot have been far from the viewer's mind in the first place, from what I can tell. Perhaps some enterprising scientist should devise an experiment to see whether the ad was capable of eliciting that type of response.

But let's suppose that the message could occur on some like basis. "Mr. Davis," an old racist, thinks he doesn't want Obama sleeping with white chicks after he sees the ad, leaving alone for now that ads aired by Obama featuring the candidate in the company of white women might well have the same effect.

Where the message is abstract, as Atwater noted, the supposedly racist message depends entirely on the subjective impression of the recipient.

For me, this explains the dog-whistle phenomenon with elegant simplicity. The "coded" message isn't really there at all. But subjectively inclined persons can receive the message anyway. Mr Davis gets it because he's always thinking that he doesn't want black dudes with white chicks anyway. Melissa McEwan gets it because of course Republicans are racists and of course they campaign like this.

Don't they?

It's just another front in the battle over words. If people like McEwan get can you believing that McCain ads juxtaposing images of Spears and Obama are racist, then you're just hearing a different note on the dog whistle.

Force Protection earns UK "Wolfhound" contract

Force Protection's going to the dogs. That is, Force Protection vehicles are delivered to the Brits and given canine nicknames. First, FPI won the contract to provide the "Mastiff" vehicle to Great Britain. Then the company won a contract to make a Cougar 4x4 called the "Ridgback." Now, they will make another modified version of the Cougar, dubbed the Wolfhound.

Force Protection Inc.’s agility and speed of response to customer requirements is playing a key role in winning new orders for its range of mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Moody, pointed to Force Protection’s selection by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) as the Preferred Bidder for the Wolfhound Tactical Support Vehicle (Heavy) programme as an example of the way his company is strengthening its capability to respond to urgent operational requirements. “We completed design work and built two prototypes for Wolfhound, which is based on our highly successful Cougar vehicle, in just 90 days. During this time we also carried out blast tests and mobility trials.”
(DefPro.com)

Defence of the Realm has a photo believed to represent the Wolfhound, along with some information about the program.

Combating moonbat math at Iraq Body Count

The latest editorial column posted at Iraq Body Count exemplifies my objection to that project.

The author, Lily Hamourtziadou writes with her neural blinders on in service to her ideology.

After noting the bare facts regarding the recent agreement between Iraq and the United States to keep U.S. troops in Iraq through 2011, Hamourtziadou veers into the weeds of illogic:

Sadly, for every step forward achieved, a step is taken back with every innocent death, with every civilian that is shot, blown up, tortured. This week 133 civilians lost their lives in violence; 9 of them were children. US forces shot dead 3 men resisting arrest.

That’s many steps back.

This woman is incoherent. If every step forward results in many steps backward then logic dictates that no progress in Iraq is possible at all. The best we can hope for is no steps forward resulting in no steps backward. Obviously that is nonsense, and perhaps I should give Ms. Hamourtziadou the benefit of the doubt by crediting her with hyperbole.

The big problem with her analysis, of course, consists of the fact that insurgents--perhaps the three who resisted arrest among them--are causing most of the civilian deaths by far. Extremists carry bombs into downtown markets. Is that supposed to target the United States somehow? One could plausibly argue that the aim of insurgents is to wear down the U.S. and force its withdrawal, but that ignores the fact that peaceful conditions in Iraq would allow the U.S. to withdraw its troops much faster. Moqtada al Sadr made that realization, so why can't Hamourtziadou?

At the bottom line, the number of deaths is decreased by aggressive opposition of violent extremists. Iraq Coalition Casualty Count prominently posts the numbers that Iraq Casualty count omits. Civilian deaths are way, way down in Iraq, and a huge amount of credit goes to the work of coalition forces.

At least 3 more years of American occupation then. A lot more people will die during those 3 years. It is doubtful Iraq will ever recover from this war, now that terror has come to its streets, now that its society has been divided so deeply.

I imagine if people like Hamourtziadou had their way that U.S. forces would have withdrawn instead of instituting the surge strategy. Let's suppose that had happened. I know that many take it as an article of faith that the violence in Iraq was caused entirely by the presence of foreigners, but let's be realistic. Sectarian violence is not the product of the U.S. intervention. Saddam Hussein repressed the Shiites and Kurds very brutally, and those groups have a sharp-edged axe to grind against their past oppressors. Add to that the hatred and distrust of the Iranians who are trying to influence the Iraqi government.

The truth is that the violence would very probably be worse if the U.S. had vacated Iraq. And perhaps people like Hamourtziadou would count every death on a ledger of Western blame. But that would just show that she is a moonbat.

The math works like this: Coalition troops risked their lives to decrease casualties stemming from sectarian violence and insurgent activity. The net result is a radical decrease in civilian casualties. The radical decrease in civilian casualties, combined with the strengthening of a central and plausibly non-sectarian central government charts a course toward a stable, unified and non-repressive Iraq.

And that's a giant leap forward.

Video: the MaxxPro Dash

Navistar bigwigs describe the MaxxPro Dash at one of those defense hardware show & tell conventions.

The video is hosted at the Navistar Web site. Click download to download the .wmv file or visit the Web site first if you're the more cautious type.

clipped from navistar.mediaroom.com