Sorry. Welcome to the United States. We have no royalty here (except maybe the Kennedys and a movie star or two), so we really aren’t up on all the kiss-your-feet protocol. Maybe if you gave us the requisite three day notice, you wouldn’t have been subjected to the misery the rest of us endure when going through airport security.
On the other hand, maybe the future king could get his own airplane.
John Daly is out. He’s in good company. So are Jack, Arnie, Shigeki, Fuzzy,and Ben. And so is Weir.
Mike Weir has to sit around and watch someone else win the tournament, and be a part of the award ceremony. The previous year’s champion slips the green jacket on the new champion.
It may be tough.
Then again, Phil is making a move, and Mike might enjoy being the first one to congratulate him on winning his first major.
Wallace has a post regarding the 9/11 Commission which matches my sentiments quite well. Last month, prior to open testimony, I wrote a post about how difficult it is for intel folks to piece together bits of unrelated data to derive some sort of educated guess. If you don’t want to wade through it, the short version is “Damned Difficult.” Once an event has occurred, it is quite simple to look back and see how those pieces fell together.
During the Clinton Administration, the official policy was to treat terrorists as criminals. If they committed a crime, we would do everthing we could to track them down and bring them to trial. With that as the standard, it makes complete sense for Clinton to not have taken custody of bin Laden when he had the chance. In retrospect, it was a deadly decision. But I also wonder whether complaints about this failure are hindsight analyses.
When the Bush Administration took over, GW decided to treat terrorism as a war. I’m sure Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell stood tall and accepted the new philosophy. However, there is a bureaucracy in Washington with a tremendous amount of inertia. Much of that inertia is ideologically based, some of it very practical. But some of it is based in the knowledge that the new Administration wanting to change things may only be around for four years, and then things will change back again. Why bother. Think Richard Clarke. George Tenet.
The Commission members are busy posing, building some contacts for future “consulting” jobs, and enjoying the limelight. Even Bob Kerrey, whom I respected prior to this, have fallen prey to the partisanship bug. Everyone wants to find someone to blame.
Guess what, guys. Osama bin Laden is to blame. The only way our government failed is by allowing easy access to visas for 19 men who probably never should have been in this country in the first place. Sounds like Colin Powell needs to fire a few people.
Those of you of school age during the ’50s and ’60s will remember a grade we all received on report cards each reporting period that had nothing to do with homework or tests. It was called “Citizenship.” I don’t know whether this category still exists, but it seems to me, and Victor Davis Hanson that it doesn’t.
We got marked on our report cards in something actually called “Citizenship.” It had nothing to do, as so often today, with putting in hours of “community service” at various approved social agencies. Our “Citizenship” grades instead measured how “orderly” we were in class; whether we addressed the teachers with the proper courtesy and deference; how well we helped to clean the campus each week; and how presentable our desks and lockers were–along with assessments of our “personal cleanliness and general neatness.” Writing in our textbooks or putting gum under our desks, we were told in first grade, were crimes against “next year?s class, who now will have to use the damaged articles you people left behind.” Not bathing, or wearing the same clothes for a week, were not signs of civil disobedience or unhappiness with mainstream culture but rather indictments of laziness and unconcern for students unfortunate enough to sit near you.
I know, it sounds so old fashioned.
It was a simple concept: Pick up trash when you see it on the floor or ground. Address adults as “Sir” and “Ma’am.” Don’t shove others. Don’t write in your school books. Help others who need it. Don’t stick used gum on the underside of your desk. None of that is too difficult.
Did teaching these things fall by the way? Hanson believes so. And he links this loss to the inability of Americans to see themselves as a group rather than a collection of groups. He makes a compelling argument.
I’ve added Noam Chomsky’s blog to the links in the right column. It is not a daily visit for me, but I feel it is enlightening in many ways. For example, he says that the Geneva Accord agreed to last summer by a group of people not officially associated with any government would be adopted and end violence in Israel if only the US would support it. He says that it calls for a two-state geographic settlement.
All well and good. Unfortunately, the Palestinians don’t want that. So, how does he plan to make it work? No answer.
But at least I can read what he has to say on a fairly regular basis. I hope Rammer isn’t too upset that the link is next to his.
And his comments still don’t function.
Vietnam has become known as Nixon’s War. Why is that? Do people not remember that John Kennedy was the President who sent in advisors to help the South Vietnamese? JFK was the man who authorized the formation of the Army Special Forces, Green Berets, to be the prime advisory/training group for counter-insurgency operations. Lyndon Johnson was the President who initiated full involvement by our military after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which has since been debunked. All the major forces employed in Vietnam were sent by Johnson.
The body-count mentality of that war was proposed by Robert MacNamara and the other “Best and Brightest” in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations. The war was run from the White House, up to and including determining bombing targets and the exact routes aircraft had to take to hit Hanoi. By the time the 1968 election came around, people were sick of the war as prosecuted by Democrats. Johnson declined to run again, knowing he had no chance of winning.
Richard Nixon came into office with the promise of ending the war. After months of argument over the size and shape of the negotiating table in Paris, the North Vietnamese finally sat down to talk about ending the fight. Nixon did what the loudest critics wanted done. He pulled our troops out and left the South on their own. It was a “quagmire” only because that is how Johnson ran it.
Ted Kennedy, the last remaining brother, and the incompetent one of the bunch, wants to compare Iraq to Vietnam. It will only be another Vietnam if we follow his advice and put another anti-war Democrat in charge of running it. Vietnam was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s War. I would hate to see what happens if we allow Iraq to become Kerry’s War.
Sarah’s husband and his guys are headed out to do some damage.
God bless you, guys.
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