James Robertson: Yet Another Federal Judge Gone Wild

By Nicholas Stix
Published at 5:06 p.m., Tuesday November 28, 2006.
Last revised at 11 p.m., Tuesday November 28, 2006.

When I got the FNC Alert below in my e-mail box at 4:44 p.m. today, I thought it had to be a joke. But sure enough, at Fox News, at 5 p.m., it was the headline at the top of the page, not yet linked to any stories. I checked the calendar; it isn’t April Fool’s Day.

“Breaking News >> Federal Judge Rules American Paper Money is Unfair to Blind People”

By 5:12, the headline had a story:

U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the Treasury Department has violated the law, and he ordered the government to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart.

Now the first thing that occurred to me was that this will make it easier to counterfeit money. And sure enough, Treasury made the same argument.

Government attorneys argued that forcing the Treasury Department to change the size of the bills or add texture would make it harder to prevent counterfeiting. Robertson was not swayed.

The good judge gave Treasury ten days to begin fixing the problem. How kind of him. I think Treasury would spend the time better, putting in its appeal.

"Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations," Robertson wrote. "More than 100 of the other issuers vary their bills in size according to denomination, and every other issuer includes at least some features that help the visually impaired."

So, America is unique. I like that. As for Judge Robertson’s implied claim that every nation on earth has deliberately changed its currency, in order to aid the blind, if you believe that, I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge. His claim sounds like a sophistic hook the plaintiffs and the American Council of the Blind came up with, for friendly judges like Robertson to hang their hats on.

Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, I can see changing their bills to accommodate the blind, not to mention in order to appease Moslems who see images of Mohammed everywhere, and currency cultists. But over 80 percent of the world's 200 or so nations would laugh at activists who demanded they change their currency for the blind … and then shoot them, and laugh some more. We’re talking about impoverished countries that are run by dictators, and where life is nasty, solitary, brutish, and short … but we're supposed to believe that the butcher-in-charge hops to, in order to change the currency for the sake of activists and their clients. (We’re also talking about countries whose currency is safe from counterfeiters, because it is worthless!)

What I think is going on here, is that the plaintiffs and their judge took the odd-sized foreign bills, and assumed that they had been changed to accommodate handicap activists.

"The fact that each of these features is currently used in other currencies suggests that, at least on the face of things, such accommodations are reasonable," he wrote.

He said the government was violating the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in government programs. The opinion came after a four-year legal fight.

"It's a landmark decision. I believe it will benefit millions of people," said Jeffrey A. Lovitky, attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, The Dominican Republic, Djibouti, Dominica, East Timor, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, The Central African Republic, Congo I, Congo II, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Etiopía, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, India, The Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, The Maldives, Moldovo, Morocco, North Korea, Kosovo, Lesotho, Laos, Lebanon, Nigeria, Niger, Namibia, Mali, Chad, San Marino, Somalia, Somaliland, The Sudan, Swaziland, Suriname, Togo, Tanzania, Syria, Tajikistan, Russia, Latvia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Rwanda, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Red China, Palau (Palau?), Mauritania, Mauritius, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and last but not least, good old Zimbabwe.

(I’m pretty geographically literate, as these things go, and yet a few dozen of this week’s new national names are Greek to me.)

How many of the 101 above-named nations – roughly half of those in the world today – do you see going broke, changing their currency to accommodate the blind?

This is the world we live in, not the world of Judge Robertson’s humanitarian fantasies.

The good judge’s claim that the federal government is in violation of the Rehabilitation Act is nonsense on stilts. Money is not a “government program.” If James Robertson gets away with redefining money as a government program, oh, the mischief that will ensue – on top of his own mischief, that is.

And for every person the turning upside down of American currency will benefit, it will wreak havoc for the hundred others who will have to foot the bill for the cost of printing up billions of new bills, and then foot the bill for billions of dollars in costs due to counterfeiting. Not to mention the millions of vending machines whose owners will then be sued by activists and attacked by the media as being guilty of “discrimination.” (Will Judge Robertson be around to claim ‘More than 100 of the other nations mandate that all vending machines take bills varied in size, according to denomination, and every other nation mandates that machines include at least some features that help the visually impaired”? I wouldn’t put it past him.) And the owners will get expensive new machines, whose costs will have to be borne by the 99 percent that will not benefit from them.

The Treasury has spent years and a fortune developing bills that are more difficult to counterfeit, something that Judge James Robertson evidently could care less about.

I can just hear someone say, “But what about justice?!” Yeah, what about it? This isn’t about justice, unless we redefine “justice” so that it means that certain selected groups can turn the world upside for everyone else, at everyone else’s expense, while everyone else is disenfranchised.

One other such group for whom the judge has a particular solicitude, is terrorists.

Mooks like James Robertson talk “justice,” but have contempt for the law, and for any notion of justice worthy of the name. What they have is loyalty to certain groups, enmity towards the rest of us, and a hubristic self-righteousness. Robertson and his ilk in the judiciary, the bar, and among activists and politicians are in a competition to see who can incur greater costs to the American taxpayer, and cause more damage to American society.

The Death of a President

By Nicholas Stix


Forty-three years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America, was felled in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, dishonorably discharged, ex-marine. For most of my life, November 22 was always commemorated as one of the darkest days in American history. In recent years, such commemoration seems to have been fading.

President Kennedy was riding that day in a motorcade with his wife, Jackie, Texas Gov. John Connally and the latter’s wife, Idanell (1919-2006), and Texan Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kennedy had come to Texas to shore up a rift among Texas Democrats.

As soon as she saw her husband had been hit with gunfire, Mrs. Kennedy showed herself willing to sacrifice her own life, to save her husband’s. She threw herself across her husband, to shield his body from further gunfire with her own, as if she were a secret service agent, rather than America’s First Lady. Alas, it was too late.

Gov. Connally also was wounded, and his wife, Idanell Brill "Nellie" Connally (1919-2006), helped save his life by “pull[ing] the Governor onto her lap, and the resulting posture helped close his front chest wound (which was causing air to be sucked directly into his chest around his collapsed right lung).”

Later that day, aboard Air Force One, Vice President Johnson was sworn in as America’s 36th President.

On April 11, Oswald had attempted to assassinate rightwing Army Gen. Edwin Walker; one hour after assassinating the President, he murdered Dallas Patrolman J.W. Tippit, before being arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Two days later, Oswald was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, as lawmen sought to transfer Oswald from police headquarters to the Dallas City Jail.

Jack Kennedy has become, like his ersthwile fling, Marilyn Monroe, a Rohrschach Test, onto which people (particularly leftists) project their preoccupations. Thus do conspiracy obsessives project the notion that the President’s assassination had issued out of a conspiracy so immense, including at least two assassins, with the identity of the specific participants – the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, Fidel Castro – depending on the imaginings of the obsessive in question.

Likewise has Kennedy’s presidency been fetishized by leftwing obsessives and family retainers, who have turned him into a socialist demigod, who supported massive economic redistribution and radical “civil rights.”

The best way of summing up the real JFK versus the fantasy version propagated by the Left and Kennedy courtiers since his death, is by comparison and contrast to President Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent in the 1960 election.

Kennedy has been portrayed as a leftwing saint and Renaissance man, who gave us or supported (or would have, had he lived) the War on Poverty, civil rights for blacks, and utopia. Nixon, by contrast, was a rightwing Mephistopheles (“Tricky Dick”), and a crude, racist, fascist warmonger.

Politically, Kennedy and Nixon actually had much in common. Both were unapologetic anti-communists in matters domestic and foreign. Nixon successfully prosecuted for perjury the traitor and Soviet spy, Alger Hiss (which inspired the Left to work tirelessly thereafter for Nixon’s destruction), while Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner.”) was an unequivocal supporter of West Berlin against Soviet imperialism, and risked nuclear war, when he faced down the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Due to the statute of limitations, Nixon could not prosecute Hiss for treason or espionage.) On the negative side of the ledger, Kennedy betrayed the Cuban insurgents who carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion, by withholding promised air support, thus turning the invasion into a fiasco.

Domestically, at least in fiscal matters, Kennedy was considerably to the right of Nixon. Early in Kennedy’s administration, he signed off on what was then the biggest tax cut ever, and which set the economy on fire. In light of Kennedy’s fiscal conservatism and belief in self-reliance (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”), it is highly unlikely that he would have signed off on a program for massive government welfare programs. The War on Poverty was the idea of Lyndon Johnson, who exploited the nation’s mourning for JFK to ram his programs through Congress.

By contrast, Nixon introduced price and wage controls, a move that was far to the left economically of the Democratic Party, even after Kennedy. And it was Nixon, the hated “racist,” not Kennedy or even Johnson, who institutionalized affirmative action. Note that over 30 percent of blacks voted for Nixon for president, over three times as high a proportion than ever would vote for George W. Bush for president.

For over thirty years, leftist Democrats have sought to tar and feather Nixon as a “racist” for his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to Southern whites with promises of “law and order.” The presuppositions of the leftist critics are: 1. If one is not a leftist, one may not campaign for the votes of groups that may potentially vote for one, but rather must hopelessly chase after the votes of people who will never vote for him, thereby guaranteeing his defeat; and 2. Because the explosion in crime was primarily the fault of blacks, no politician may ever campaign on behalf of “law and order” (in other words, see #1).

Since leftists have long controlled the media and academia, no successful counter-movement has ever been waged against the Democrat Northern Strategy that continues to this day inflaming and relying on racist blacks for their votes and their violence.

If anything, Nixon was a stronger supporter of “civil rights” than Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon wanted to call King’s parents in support, but let his advisers talk him out of it. Conversely, Kennedy let his adviser, future senator Harris Wofford, talk him into calling “Daddy” King, which resulted in Kennedy winning the black vote.

In August 1963, the Poor People’s March, in which Martin Luther King Jr. would give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was almost shut down by the Kennedy Administration without King even getting to speak.

The march had been organized by A. Philip Randolph, the legendary socialist founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first successful black labor union. Randolph was planning on giving a radical leftwing speech written by Stanley Levison, a communist advisor to both Randolph and King, but as historian David Garrow tells in his biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, acting in his brother’s name, threatened literally to pull the plug on the demonstration, were Randolph to deliver the planned speech. Randolph relented, and gave a considerably toned-down speech.

There is no record, to my knowledge, of Nixon ever censoring a political speech, much less one by a civil rights leader.

As for Southeast Asia, Kennedy got us involved in the War in Vietnam; Nixon got us out.

Kennedy repeatedly jeopardized national security, both as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, and while President, due to his obsessive womanizing. By contrast, even Nixon’s sworn enemies have failed to find any evidence of his cheating on his beloved wife, Pat.

And as for the two men’s intellectual status, Nixon was clearly superior. The notion that Kennedy was an intellectual the planned product of a PR campaign engineered and financed by the future president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.. The elder Kennedy got his son’s undistinguished, pro-appeasement (echoing the elder Kennedy, who was a Nazi sympathizer) Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, published as a book, after having it rewritten by erstwhile family retainer, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock (whom JFK would later stab in the back, using future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as his tool of choice); later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, was ghostwritten for JFK by another family retainer, Theodore Sorensen, in order to give the young senator the “gravitas” necessary for a run at the White House. Working on behalf of JFK and Joe Kennedy, Arthur Krock campaigned relentlessly on behalf of the fraudulent work, and succeeded in gaining it the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, yet another fraudulent Pulitzer that has never been rescinded.

Nixon, on the other hand, really did write a series of important books on politics. But although Nixon was a true Renaissance man, he was a Republican, and so while the Kennedy hagiography of the press, Hollywood, and academia would slavishly promote the myth of Kennedy as Renaissance man, in the same parties’ corresponding demonography of Nixon, the last thing they were going to do was to give Nixon due credit for his very real intellectual accomplishments.

So, where does that leave us? Must we choose between the fictional but pervasive image of JFK as Renaissance man, socialist, and compassionate civil rights supporter, or Garry Wills’ revised version, in which Kennedy appears as a ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath?

If we jettison our illusions about the political leaders we support being compassionate, kindly, fatherly (or insert your romanticized cliché of choice) types, and admit that the ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath has been a frequent Oval Office type, that still does not free us from the obligation of weighing the virtues of this sociopath against that one.

While it is ludicrous to speak of a man who inhabited the office for only two years and ten months as a “great president,” John F. Kennedy had his moments. He gave us a tax cut of historic dimensions, stood up to the Soviets, founded the Peace Corps, and started the race to the moon that culminated in 1969, with Neil Armstrong’s world historical walk.

GOP’s 50-Year Reich Collapses!

By Nicholas Stix


Immediately after the 2004 election, many Republicans smugly predicted that the GOP would rule – as in, both houses of Congress and the White House – for fifty years. Well, this must be the year 2054, because it’s over. Republicans were crushed in House races, losing at least 23 seats, and even in the Senate, where although the dust has not yet settled, it looks as though the Democrats have also won the Senate.

Everything worked for the Democrats – gay-baiting, in the case of Cong. Mark Foley (R-FL), and race-baiting, in the case of Sen. George Allen (R-VA), the Jewish junior senator from Virginia. (Don’t accuse me of Jew-baiting – he’s one of my people!)

The wrong conclusions are almost guaranteed to be drawn from this election. We’re not hearing about the President’s base, which stayed home. I’ve been saying for at least a year that George W. Bush holds his Christian Evangelical base in contempt. One month before the election, the Evangelical advisor who was one of the people who had initially run the White House’s faith-based initiative, came out with a book in which he told of White House aides rolling their eyes and speaking derisively of prominent Evangelical leaders as “nuts.”

The media and other politicians are going to see this election purely as a referendum on the war, while ignoring the President’s Open Borders policy.

As Fox News’ Shepherd Smith observed, “There has never been a civilization in history that has survived that hasn’t controlled its own borders.”

Smith also quipped, regarding the close Virginia senate race, in which conservative Democrat former Navy Secretary James Webb currently (2 a.m., Wednesday morning) leads neoconservative Republican Sen. George Allen by 5,700 votes, “Virginia is for Lawyers.” “There will be a recount, and then there will be lawyers.”

As far as the war is concerned, will any of our best and brightest rethink their approach to warfare? Don’t hold your breath. If our leaders continue to construe of “war” in such a vague, open-ended, utopian fashion (“nation-building,” “exporting democracy,” etc.), then no matter how many victories our side achieves, they will keep expanding the mission until we are defeated. And if we fight “multicultural” wars, in which the rules of engagement are perverted, and our troops require the permission of lawyers (female, natch), before they may fire on a terrorist leader; and our soldiers and Marines must stand by and watch while the streets erupt in chaos and looting, so that the media will not show white American men killing Arabs; if the enemy is permitted to turn mosques into ammo dumps, mustering centers, and embattlements, while our boys are handcuffed from fighting accordingly; and if we are not so much as permitted to name the enemy, or to even name our operations as we see fit, because it might offend the enemy, then we might as well all bend over for the Religion of Terror right now, because America will never win another war under those terms.

Yet another mistake was in claiming that all people, everywhere, want the same things we do (peace and democracy). Arabs will die before they’ll accept peace, and they will vote, if necessary, to end democracy.

There was a realpolitik case to be made for war, and I made it, in early 2003. But I never supported a multicultural war.

Many conservative and Republican voters stayed home over immigration. While I can’t say how many did, it was enough to tip Congress over to the Democrats. The two geniuses, George W. Bush and Karl Rove, can take credit for that, though I doubt they will.

Our Enemy is in the Sand

By Nicholas Stix
Originally published on March 18, 2003


Whom to Fight?

The problem with fighting our Moslem enemies, as many observers have noted, is that the terrorists never identify themselves with any particular nation. Thus, each Moslem nation – excepting the Saudis – enjoys plausible deniability regarding its role in 911. What no one, to my knowledge, has noted, however, is that deniability cuts both ways. Just as Islam could not openly declare war on America, America cannot openly declare war on Islam. But we can fight Islamic nations, while denying that we are fighting Islam.

Were America to declare war on Islam, we would instantly have one billion unified enemies, in addition to our non-Moslem enemies, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Swedes, et al. Were world Islam to declare war on America, we would immediately cut off foreign aid to all Islamic nations, and pick off one Islamic nation at a time (which we may have to do, in any event). The others would then surely find the relevant passage in the Koran telling them that they are not obliged to bring about Armageddon, and sue for peace.

In the best-possible scenario, following the war on Iraq, any Islamic nation – even Saudi Arabia – we asked to cooperate with us in rooting out the terrorists in their midst, would do all it could to help. As I said, that's the best-possible scenario.

Deniability regarding 911 is least plausible in the case of Saudi Arabia. It was their men, and their money, that took down the World Trade Center towers, a section of the Pentagon, and four airliners carrying Americans. Days after 911, a friend who was teaching in Saudi Arabia wrote that a local imam had argued in the newspaper, that suicide attacks were perfectly justified within Islam, as long as the suicide part was only a means to a greater end, and not an end in itself.

But Saudi Arabia is also home to Mecca, the capital of world Islam. Attacking the Saudis, while perfectly justifiable morally, would have nightmarish consequences. And yet, if all else fails, we may someday have to invade Saudi.

Many paleoconservatives suggest we do nothing, aside from eliminating all aid to Israel. (I haven't seen their calls to eliminate the billions we give to Arab states, like Egypt. I must have missed those articles.) They insist that there is no evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; between Hussein and the anthrax attacks; no evidence that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); and no evidence that Hussein is a greater threat to us than say, North Korea.

There is evidence of al Qaeda activity out of Baghdad, in the person of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And we know darned well, that Saddam Hussein has WMDs; even the UN inspectors have reported that he has not accounted for WMDs he had prior to kicking out the inspectors in 1998, including 2,641 gallons of anthrax and an indeterminate amount of vx and Sarin nerve gases. Now it seems that Hussein even has a drone aircraft for the dispersal of chemical and biological weapons.

Some of the President's critics have insisted that North Korea is a bigger danger than Iraq. The New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, for instance, insists that the president is insane, comparing him to the deranged, fictional skipper in Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, Captain Queeg. Insisting that Iraq poses no danger to us, Krugman demands that Bush simply jerk over 200,000 U.S. troops out of the Persian Gulf. What Bush should do with those troops, Krugman does not say.

For a genius like Krugman, military brinkmanship is as easy as picking up a misdirected restaurant order from one table, and setting it down in front of a different customer. "Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear and present danger?," lectures Krugman, at once blending an air of superiority with the unintended self-caricature of a superficial, tenured academic with no realistic sense of the difference between armchair pronouncements and the movements of an armada, just this side of a conflagration.

The Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer, is a lifelong apologist for communist imperialism who is well to the left of Krugman. As David Horowitz observes, regarding a rigged "debate" co-sponsored by the University of California School of Journalism and the L.A. Times, to which no conservatives or Republicans were invited,

"According to Scheer there is no reason now for the United States not to 'wait four months' to give the inspections time to work, while implying that he would then support a U.S. military action (something he has not done in his entire life) if they failed. No one on the platform discussed the difficulties of keeping 250,000 troops in the desert, during the summer heat, and spending a billion dollars a week to do it, while Democrats are complaining about the budget, and bivouacking them in an area where they would be a prime target of terrorist attacks."

As Horowitz notes, Scheer and his comrades have called on the U.S. to "contain" Hussein, arguing that containment worked against the Soviet Union, without disclosing that they had fought tooth and nail against containment, and surely would once again.

If Krugman, Scheer, and the other Americans playing the North Korea card, left and right, were serious, they would be making concrete proposals for action. Like our "sophisticated, worldly," French enemies, whom the critics adore, they just want to divert us from attacking Saddam, who in two to five years will have nuclear bombs, at which point the issue will be moot. Then they'll blame George W. Bush, for having missed his historic opportunity.

The real issue for many of the President's domestic critics – including many at the New York Times – has been keeping us out of war, so that George W. Bush can lose the 2004 election. On the left, ice-cold political calculations are at work. These people are not against military adventurism, let alone a rationally defensible war. They supported Bill Clinton's military adventures, which he undertook without Congressional authorization, and now deny that George W. Bush HAS Congressional authorization to make war.

When Bill Clinton was elected, I recall how socialist Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who was opposed to all military actions by GOP presidents, immediately began chafing at the bit, for Clinton to start dropping bombs.

Note that Saddam Hussein has violated the terms of the 1991 ceasefire in every way imaginable, from kicking out weapons inspectors in 1998, to hiding WMDs, to firing hundreds of times on allied planes, and even shooting down an unmanned drone, in the no-fly zones.

Tuesday, The New York Times repeated the standard line of those who may seem to be appeasers, but who are actually using Saddam Hussein, in order to hurt America.

"This page has never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed. Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this administration has gone about it."

Similarly, when Leslie Gelb, now the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, said on the Charlie Rose show Monday night, after the President's speech, that he supports a war on Iraq, just not the way the President is doing it, what the retired Timesman was really saying, was that he wouldn't support a Republican, no matter how right he was.

A law of ethics and politics, maintained by such different thinkers as Kant and Rousseau, states that if you desire certain ends, you desire the means to attain them. A consequence of that law, is that if you think you desire a certain end, for which there is only one means, and you shun it, you really don't desire the end. There is only one means for disarming Iraq – removing Saddam Hussein from power.


The Pakistan Option

Perhaps, instead of the Iraqis or the North Koreans, we should attack Pakistan. After all, Pakistani troops have fired on our troops across the border in Afghanistan, which constituted acts of war, the Pakistanis harbor al Qaeda terrorists, and the Pakistani people are in a fierce competition with the Saudis as to who loves the late Osama bin Laden more, and hates America the most.

But the Pakistanis are our "allies." What that means is that, although in a nation of 147 million people, perhaps only one person supports the U.S., that person happens to be dictator-general Parvez Musharraf. Musharraf has given us invaluable assistance, in hunting down al Qaeda leaders. Musharraf will probably meet the same fate as another pro-U.S., Islamic dictator-general, Egypt's Anwar Sadat, but at present he is useful, and usefulness is the most America can hope for from any Islamic nation.

Note, too, that the Pakistanis also have The Bomb, which complicates matters further, a complication we seek to prevent from arising in Iraq.
HomebodiesPaleoconservatives have also argued variously that America suffers from multiple domestic crises that are not being addressed, and that a war against Iraq would merely be for Israel's sake.

The notion that we must choose between addressing our domestic sovereignty issues and going to war was made by the often brilliant Paul Craig Roberts on a bad day.

The need to resolve one issue does not preclude pursuing the other. More recently, in an otherwise excellent column on the problem of U.S. corporations that engage in the pseudo-trade of "outsourcing" (Sending materials to countries where cheap labor makes products which are then "imported" to be sold to American consumers.), out of left field, Roberts suddenly expressed opposition to a war on Iraq:

"A country devoid of high productivity jobs is a poor country. Is the United States on the outsourced path to becoming a Third World country?


"The Bush administration should think about this question before it gratuitously attacks Iraq. The consequences of war in the Middle East are unknown."

Roberts sounds a little like "Osama bin Laden" on the gag videos David Letterman periodically plays on his show: "Dave, I just wanted to wish you a happy Valentine's Day." The tape seems to be over, but Osama catches himself, and adds, as an afterthought, "Oh, and death to America."

I guess we all have a lot on our minds these days.


Was 911 Our Fault?

The most enduring paleoconservative (and libertarian) argument against war, echoes the argument made by many on the Left:

'911 was a rational response to America's meddling in every corner of the world, and expressed Islamic anger at our support of Israel. We have made the world hate us. The proper thing to do is to come home from the four corners of the Earth, and not go off to war everywhere.'

The claim that America brought 911 on itself, makes perfect sense ... if you're a Moslem.

Over the past twenty-odd years, Moslem nations have accepted billions of dollars in aid from us, and let our military fight its battles in Kosovo and Kuwait.

The Moslem world may dream of the destruction of America, and cheer on attacks on America, but it also desperately desires congress with the Great Satan. It wants our oil money, our military protection (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Kosovo), our foreign aid money, our cigarettes and alcohol (albeit on the sly), and it even lusts after our women. Moslem hypocrisy is a bottomless pit; defenses of Moslem hatred of America reflect poorly on their advocates.


The Politics of Humiliation

Nine-eleven didn't happen because of America's aggression; it happened because of years of passive-aggressive behavior on America's part, and because Moslems have decided to take over the world. (I know, not all Moslems, but the rest will follow.) It followed a series of murderous attacks and humiliations of America by Moslem terrorists, most of which the U.S. simply "took," or which it permitted our Moslem "allies" (usually the Saudis) to cover up, and add insult to injury: Beirut (241 Marines killed, in 1983), Saudi Arabia (5 U.S. military advisers killed in Riyadh in 1995); Saudi again (19 serviceman killed and 500 wounded at the Khobar towers, in 1996); Kenya and Tanzania (260 dead, 5,500 wounded) and Yemen (17 sailors killed, and 39 wounded on the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000). And those are just some of the more notorious cases. Note too that almost half of the dead cited above, and the majority of the wounded were not Americans, but were nonetheless attacked, because our enemies considered it so important to murder Americans, that they considered any number of non-Americans who got in their way, collateral damage.

My historically-minded colleague, Allan Stover, dates the beginning of the Moslem war on the West to September 6, 1970. That was when "Islamic terrorists hijacked Swissair, TWA, and Pan Am airliners and blew them up. The next day, they attacked a British airliner and destroyed it." Stover continues, "That date, September 6, 1970, marked an Islamist declaration of war against Western nations. Sadly, we´ve been either too oblivious or too much in denial to realize that we´ve been in a state of war since then. The major attacks against America alone should have made that clear."

Our inability or unwillingness to properly retaliate has not only harmed us, but continually humiliated us, as well. And in addition to all the attacks on American personnel, there is the continuing humiliation of American servicewomen by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Note that while progressive, enlightened American elites may look down on old-fashioned notions of honor (except where the honor of protected affirmative action classes is concerned), much of the world still considers causing a person, group, or nation to lose face, a grievous offense.
Granted, we have no business dressing up women who are useless in combat as senior officers, and giving them authority over men who are real troops, sailors, and airmen. But with that said, if we are going to give these women officer's rank, we have to act as though they really are officers.
For all that Arabs complain, particularly regarding Israel, of being "humiliated," the practice of humiliating non-Moslems ("dhimmis") and even lower-caste Moslems, is considered sacrosanct in the Moslem, and particularly, the Arab Moslem world. The Saudis consider us their servants. Saudis have also repeatedly been guilty of kidnapping or abusing American children, and fleeing, with the help of Saudi and U.S. State Department officials, to the corrupt, Islamic monarchy.

The issues that Paul Craig Roberts considers domestic matters have doubtless contributed to our Islam/terrorism problem. People from countries that shoot down like dogs those who breach their borders laugh at a country whose officials do not respect and enforce their own borders and sovereignty. However, foreigners also learn to hold in contempt a nation that permits its citizens to be harmed with impunity. Folks like Roberts and Pat Buchanan, above all, should appreciate this point. We need to deal with our sovereignty problems domestically AND on the world stage.

But why Iraq? Is attacking Iraq a purely arbitrary call, as in, "You're Moslem, you'll do"?

As some hawks – and even socialist dove, Michael Walzer – have pointed out, we are already at war with Iraq, and have been since 1991. Hussein violated the ceasefire agreement from the start, and so we have been involved in a "little war," limited to bombing runs, ever since "Gulf War I" ended. (More recently, Allan Stover has written a column in which he draws a tight historical analogy between Germany's violation of the 1919 Versailles strictures against re-arming after World War I, and Saddam Hussein's violations of the 1991 Gulf War sanctions against re-arming.)

However, whereas Walzer tries to make a virtue of the "little war," I believe that Hussein and the Arab world will not admit defeat, until he is crushed. The lack of a crushing, humiliating victory over Iraq has made us look weak in the eyes of the world, hence the "heroic" opposition to us in the U.N. Security Council, and in so much "world opinion." As some observers have noted, Saddam sees his mere survival since 1991 as a victory. We must show him that he has lost, in the only way he will understand. This is not about hatred, but rather about winning, and limiting the loss of life.

The "world" – i.e., socialist elites – criticizes America for its "unilateralism," but it was our playing along with the U.N. in Gulf War I that caused us to stop at the Iraqi border, rather than march on to Baghdad. The sins of multilateralism have come back to haunt us.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman supports the war, in spite of himself, yet complains that President Bush is going about it all wrong, because he has "unilaterally" set a course for war. Aside from the fact that we do have allies, Friedman has made a fetish of multilateralism, which he and many others have converted from a means to an end, into an end in itself. At its best, multilateralism means more soldiers, firepower, and money for the war, and for the peace thereafter, and less cost in blood and treasure for any one power. At its worst, multilateralism means being subject to the treachery, manipulation, and demands for war booty of dubious "allies." Friedman, et al., mistrust American sovereignty, while naively trusting international sovereignty. That way lies ... the U.N.

The State of Nature
The notion that passivity towards the Moslem world will result in peace for America is delusional. Politics hates a vacuum, and passivity by a supposed world power would open a vacuum that another player would look to fill. Just as Saddam Hussein cannot afford to be seen as weak by an Iraqi citizenry which would respond by quickly dispatching him, so too can America ill afford to be seen as weak by the nations of the world. It was such a perception that led to 911, and that if not soon dispelled, will lead to worse. Like it or not, an analogy holds between Iraq and world politics. In both cases, the state of nature holds, where as Thomas Hobbes observed in Leviathan in 1651, life is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

The philosophical basis for the paleoconservative and libertarian call for not waging war, comes from President George Washington's call, in his farewell address, for avoiding foreign entanglements. That's certainly sound advice, but I don't think the Father of Our Country meant that we should betray our allies, or let our enemies attack us without our hitting back. By all means, we should scale back our foreign commitments (say, by exiting NATO and the UN). But developing a more sober foreign policy is a long-term plan that does not contradict meeting our enemies in the short term. Washington, whose advice was based on prudence and 18th century circumstances, would not have considered ignoring the war being waged against us prudent.

And so, we must fight back, or die the death of a thousand cuts. Or maybe just a few cuts. If we batter and humiliate enough of the Moslem world, we will succeed in putting the fear of Allah back into most Moslems, who will then give up their dreams of destroying America. And the few who cling to hopes of Armageddon will be manageable.

The war against Iraq will not be a distraction from the so-called War on Terror, it will be a continuation of the War on Islam, er, Terror.

The State of White America: A Major New Study on American Race and Ethnic Relations

By Nicholas Stix


Every day one reads about some new racist abomination – the lynching (aka fatal, “botched robbery”) of a white, the black race hoax du jour, the creeping Hispanic reconquest, the arrest (see also here and here) or threatened arrest, and violation of the constitutional rights of someone who has broken no laws, but who has violated multiculturalism’s racial and ethnic dogmas – but long for some sweeping, scientific and philosophic overview of what is destroying America, one town, one classroom, one workplace at a time. Your wait is over.

Any day now will see the publication of the report, The State of White America, by the National Policy Institute. Yours truly had the honor and the privilege of serving as the study’s editor, and with Edwin S. Rubenstein and Robert J. Stove, as one of its authors.

Indianapolis-based statistician Edwin S. Rubenstein is one of the top quantitative social researchers working in the U.S. today. It was his research which provided the empirical basis for Pat Buchanan’s new bestseller, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Rubenstein, a columnist at VDARE, the premier source for information, analysis, and commentary on America’s ongoing immigration disaster, heads up ESR Research Economic Consultants.

Melbourne-based historian Robert J. Stove is the author of elegant essays and erudite historical studies alike. His first book was the acclaimed biography of sixteenth-century composer Palestrina, Prince of Music. Stove’s most recent work is the alternately chilling and entertaining, The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. Stove is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and a frequent contributor to, among other periodicals, Chronicles, The New Criterion, and National Observer.

“SOWA” will honestly answer the following questions and more, cutting through the MSM’s lies, spin, and newspeak:

What is the single most important indice in predicting the quality of a school district?

What is the daily reality of urban public schools like?

How has the American workplace changed over the past 50 years?

What is the reality behind charges of “racial profiling”?

What really happened in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

How goes it with those “family values” that President Bush insists “don’t stop at the Rio Grande”?

How many Hispanic immigrants really are assimilating into American society, and how many are insisting that American society assimilate to their subculture?

What are the names of the terrorist organizations that arguably have wreaked more havoc on American society than Al Qaeda, and which the MSM refuses to honestly report on?

SOWA unflinchingly answers these questions and many more!

Mandingo: Boglerizing History and Logic

By Nicholas Stix

Any non-black who attempts to engage in dialogue with American blacks today, soon discovers that black race hoaxes are not merely the stuff of Big Lies, a la the Tawana Brawley Hoax, the 2000 Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax, etc., but central to the most mundane exchanges. Witness the following entry in an IMDB.com discussion of the tawdry 1975 exploitation movie Mandingo, set on an antebellum plantation, and which emphasized white racist savagery and interracial relationships, not only between the brutal old slaver’s son and a slave girl, but between the son's wife, played by blonde, professional sexpot Susan George, and the heavyweight boxing champion (and non-actor), Ken Norton Sr.

chesterrodney: “Susan George couldn't get another major role in Hollywood after ‘Mandingo’. She was reduced to ‘B’ type movies and made for TV movies after that. Hollywood didn't want to see her in any major films or major acting roles after her love scene with Ken Norton in ‘Mandingo’. Hollywood to this day is scared of showing black love. And they don't want to see a big muscular black man with a white woman!”

That is a racist black fantasy. Susan George had specialized in playing sluts before Mandingo, she played one in Mandingo, and she continued playing such roles thereafter. Since Mandingo was itself a trashy B-movie, the notion that her career went downhill thereafter, is ludicrous. Besides, you provide no evidence that she was blacklisted (or is it, whitelisted?). All you have are your racist fantasies.

Sidney Poitier had already crossed the particular color line "chesterrodney" speaks of in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967, an A-movie if ever there was one, which was nominated for ten Oscars, and won two.

Jim Brown had his famous shower scene with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles in 1969. And Raquel Welch is white, was considered white at the time (Hispanic whites are more obsessed with their whiteness than are non-Hispanic whites), and only very recently, for opportunistic reasons, decided to publicly become a “proud Latina.”

And important independent movies, such as One Potato, Two Potato in 1964, had already explored interracial love affairs between black men and white women. Chesterrodney has invented a non-existent issue, in order to vindicate his racist fantasies. If anything, Hollywood, like the mainstream media in general, has an allergy against showing black women in the arms of white men.

chesterrodney (later): “As for Susan George, I never said she was blacklisted from ‘A’ list status in Hollywood. I said she was blacklisted from getting roles in major Hollywood movies.”

Although he never used the word “blacklisted” in his first statement, Chesterrodney obviously meant just that. But he not only uses the term in his second statement, but goes beyond simply contradicting an earlier statement, to contradicting himself from one sentence to the next! Way to go, man! You not only boglerized movie history, you boglerized logic, as well!

To boglerize – my coinage – refers to the practice of film “historian” Donald Bogle of misrepresenting movie history by recounting pictures in which blacks played minor roles, as if the blacks were the stars and the actual white stars were invisible, of ignoring dominant performances by whites in movies in which they co-starred with black performers (e.g., Rod Steiger (or “Stieger,” as Bogle calls him) and Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night), while dishonestly celebrating the black performer, and most pathetically, of routinely misspelling the names of white actors, while never doing so with the names of black performers.