Cold Day

It's a cold day here in Utah. Snow and ice and a tough day in the field for me.

Things are chilly over at Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom, too. I posted the first and last paragraphs of the following essay on his thread:

What's the ability to determine the origin of a nuclear weapon based on its isotope signature going to do for the hundreds/thousands/millions of dead people whose ashes that material will had to have been gleaned from?

I fully expect to wake up some fine morning (maybe this spring - maybe sooner) and find out that U.S. forces have bombed multiple sites in the nation of Iran and have troops ON THE GROUND in several locations.

As has been noted before, Bush has stated that Iran will not be allowed to produce or possess nuclear weapons. Not "shouldn't be" or "we oppose" but "will NOT be allowed".

We think in terms of politics, polls, and PR way too often. That's not what we have a government for. The Iranian mullahocracy is the executive arm of world terror. Saudis and a grundle of other barbarian regimes may write checks and send excess manpower off to jihad, but the organizing entity - from the top down - is the government of the nation of Iran. If the Iraqis win, the game is over for those in search of establishing any caliphate.

The Democrats have been losing elections yet remaining viable via entrenched PR for most of my adult life. Their core beliefs - or what passes for core beliefs depending on the makeup of the loose coalition of narrow interest groups fighting for power - pivot on income redistribution, identity politics, state control of critical industries (healthcare, pensions, energy, etc), and multicultural/postmodern templates that debase notions such as good character, honesty, piety, and patriotism as antiquated concepts that need to be quashed. They seek to dismantle the judiciary's role of interpeter of law and instead create a fiat legislative third branch.

The top of the party believes in nothing but getting that office another two or six years or maybe picking off the presidency. They'll pit one neighborhood against another, one ethnicity against another, one income group against another, or even side with foreign aggressors, as they are currently doing regarding the war.

They appeal and cultivate the sizable minority of Americans who embrace the concept that the cause of their own perceived want or failure can always be assigned outside of their own personal responsibility. Whatever amphorous agendas they propose today are indistinguishable to those that marked my teen years: malaise, a struggling economy, and a sad, sputtering failure to finish the bright beginnings of the civil rights era. I remember Social Security debates as far back as my junior high school years - and the Dems owned the house and senate at the time, yet failed to do more than talk. As a middling-teen, I couldn't square how a country that came so far in two hundred years, and had just finished winning WW2 less than a generation before I was born, could get beat in a tiny hole like Vietnam. A cutting part of it all was an absence of pride, and even more deadly, an absence of hope. The worst was that some people -important and PR-famous people- were saying we deserved to be miserable because of our previous successes.

Not hard to glom on to "shining city on a hill" after an adolescence marked by the seventies, let me tell you what.

I build stuff. Rather, the work I do is critical in getting stuff built. Shit doesn't just happen. The Soviet Union didn't collapse. I am proud that my years spent in uniform helped in a miniscule part to beat the Soviets into the dustbin of history. It was hard work, sometimes dangerous, often monotonous, but necessary to see the objective achieved.

Democrats don't build stuff. They are a parasite on the fuzzy ass of freedom. Fecund and bloated, and hopefully about ready to fall off, but they do still possess the ability to poison the host. They willfully pretend that tomorrow doesn't have to happen. Listen to replays of morning - after - election coverage from any of the last five or six national elections. Election day is a moment of decision all too rare. The bedrock evidence in lost races, seats, and governorships of their continuing decline are made to fade against the voluminous, shrill, biased pop culture/media that tries so hard to define a reality that just doesn't exist anymore - at least not for the Democrats and their herd of cats.

People who measure their lives by news cycles are horribly unsafe to allow anywhere near adult institutions. Get them their own blogs, or maybe their own coffeehouses or drumcircles - but keep them away from the institutions that are supposed to keep us free and our families safe. Please. 2006 is coming - do your part.

The only reasons that Iran has for developing nuclear weapons are to increase its ability to export terror from behind a nuclear threat, or, since we are dealing with fanatics, to carry out a genocidal attack on the nation of Israel, and possibly us or nations aligned with us such as Britain, Australia, or Japan. Suicidal, you say?

A democratic Iraq - unquestionably sovereign, economically viable, and politically functional across the tribes and ethnicities within the country - is a death sentence for jihadism. A nation of free Arabs, finally broken free of the shame generated by subservience to despots over the centuries, will become the epicenter of a pan-Arab reformation that can avert the climactic last confrontation between Islam and Western civilization.

That's the stakes on the table, folks.

G.W. Bush and his cabinet know it. I'm pretty sure that the concept never makes it past the daily morning turns on the mechanism that stretches Nancy Pelosi's face over her skull. The leader of the Democrat Party? I don't think he thinks at all anymore, if he ever did. He's a caricature of the stereotypical "little guy" - and I don't believe he ever got past "yeargh".

So I think that someday in the not too distant future, probably between CNN's coverage of Pam Anderson's latest boob job and a story on how low unemployment adversely effects women and minorities, we'll get a bulletin letting us know that at least one part of our polity still understands the world we live in and is willing, and able, to do the heavy lifting necessary to keep us free, and at least as safe as can be hoped for in a very troubled world.

Impeachment, you say? Excessive force? Unilateral? We, with all our bickering and faults, still successfully practice constitutional government. We, of all the industrialized world, are the standard of economic productivity and stability, even execution of justice, and so rich we can even afford democrats.
We are the single most sought after immigration destination on the planet. All people, all colors, all creeds, from everywhere - come here. Many die trying. Look through the noise - through the yearghs - and see the beauty that we are become. We must protect this shining city on a hill. Do not doubt that the barbarians are at the very gates.

With great power comes great responsibility. Bush understands that. I believe he'll act when necessary - and if even the IAEA says the balloonis going up, time is short indeed.