Bob Hayes Online

Caffeine. Is there anything it can’t do?

“Daddy, can you help me put on my goggles?”

“Sure.” (Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle.) “Are you a superhero?”

“Yes.”

“Really? What’s your super power?”

“I can do karate.” (Demonstration of awesome hand-waving skills.)

“Yeah? What’s your point total and build?”

“150, heavy DEX and skill focus, plus stealth adds.”

OK, the last part of the exchange I made up. But it’s only a matter of time.

Because it’s not like we need alternative energy sources, or anything.

Idiots.

Idiots are everywhere.

The show’s despairing, African-American, director:

“You take that word out of this story and you invalidate my history as an African-American male,” said Perry.

“Do I like the word? No. But to pretend nobody said it is wrong. I wouldn’t even consider doing that,” Perry said. “Context is everything, and it’s not gratuitous, it’s not for shock value.

“How can we learn about our present if we don’t educate people about what happened in our past?”

How, indeed.

40.

Let the mockery begin.

I will be working for a victory for John McCain. I think Obama is a bad leader and would make a terrible President. Nobody who has followed my writing would ever misunderstand that. I hope that McCain is going to win a solid victory in November, and I am praying for an undisputed, clean election.

People with my political beliefs, myself included, made a terrible mistake in the Clinton years. We decided en masse that because he was such a dreadful man, because he was so destructive to the office, that he was no longer our President. That he was illegitimate. That we hated him.

This was a profoundly bad thing for America.

Yes, he was a bad man and he did some terrible things and he was, in fact, profoundly destructive to the office of the Presidency. But we on the right lost sight of something: we were not responsible for what Bill Clinton was. We were responsible for what we were.

Our country is predicated on the idea that we don’t need to have civil wars and hyper-partisan destructive political conflict, because we provide a mechanism for the people to select our leadership. If the people vote for you according to the pre-existing rules, then hey, you’re the leader.

This arrangement is in danger. It was in danger in the 1990s from the right, and it is in danger today from the left. If Obama wins, then it will be the right’s turn to be the ones tearing down the fragile network of customs and beliefs that holds our nation together. I don’t think we should do that. I don’t want to be a part of doing that again. I did it in the 1990s and it was stupid and destructive and wrong of me. I’m sorry about it, but the only thing I can do about it now is to resolve not to do it again.

If Barack Obama wins, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he will become my President and I will support him. That doesn’t mean I won’t fight him like the devil on all the many, many things he will do that are wrong and bad; I will. That doesn’t mean I won’t criticize him ferociously and with a partisan growl; I will.

But I won’t declare that he is an illegitimate leader.

I won’t undermine him in front of the national leaders that he has to relate to in order to do his job.

I won’t call him President-Select Obama if the Supreme Court has to intervene, again, to keep the electoral machinery moving.

I won’t print up bumper stickers in 2012 saying Re-Unelect Obama.

I won’t, in short, do any of the things that the nauseating anti-Bush left has done in the last eight years. I did that stuff with Clinton, and now that I’ve grown up a little bit, and now that I’ve seen what it looks like when the other side does it to my guy, and now that they’ve held up a mirror, it’s a little bit sickening, and I’m more than a little bit ashamed.

Here’s what it boils down to, folks:

If Obama wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he becomes my President and your President.

If McCain wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he becomes my President and your President.

This is my pledge, my promise, my what-have-you. It’s written down, in black and white. Call me on it if I renege.

I ask everybody who reads this to do two things if they agree with me.

One, say it loud and say it proud, the winner of the 2008 election is my President, and whether I like him or not, whether I agree with him or not, I’m not going to be a Michael Moore-style flaming gasbag asshat about it.

Two, pass the link along. Send it to your friends, post it on your blog, whatever. It’s important. We are one country, and we have to pull together whether we agree with one another or not.

We are citizens of a republic.  Because our republic is so massively wealthy and so enormous in size, we can afford to have a professional military that has achieved a level of skill and deadliness that is unprecedented in history.  I don’t say that lightly; I’ve studied military issues all my life, grew up in a military family, missed going into the service myself through various physical defects.  I grew up admiring the Roman legions, Alexander’s hoplites, the Zulu Impi, and all the rest.  Military organizations are not the simple product of the weaponry and equipment and logistics that they can bring to bear.  Those things help in achieving deadliness, and they certainly make a huge contribution to the success of any military.  However, what really makes a military are the moral factors - comradeship, duty, loyalty, the feeling of being connected organically to the nation they are fighting for, etc.

Our military has achieved levels of those factors that are extremely high.  That, coupled with training resources that would make Caesar weep with envy, creates a human military that is of unparalleled effectiveness.  When you combine that with the fact that our technology, weaponry, and logistical capabilities are also unprecedentedly awesome, we wind up with, quite literally, the greatest military force in recorded human history.

That creates a problem.  The general citizenry begins to think of itself as being truly distinct from the military class.  We think of soldiers as “those brave men and women who protect us”.  And of course they are - and may God bless every one of them, every day. 

But at the same time, we are losing track of something that has to be a core value of a republic, if that republic is to survive over the long term.  The citizens of the republic, ultimately, are the people responsible for its defense.  We ably discharge our obligation to maintain and support our professional military, and obviously that military is going to be the front line in any conflict.  Consider, though, what happened on 9/11.  I am not the first person to notice that the professional military was not able to defend our country.  (Not their fault, I hasten to add - just the nature of an open society.)  The only effective military action launched on that day was launched by the citizen soldiers of Flight 93 - Americans who realized that they were now in combat, and acted accordingly.

That Flight 93 mentality is the mentality that all of us should be engaged in, all of the time.  I don’t mean that we should be wearing fatigues and constantly scanning the horizon for Charlie.  That would be counter-productive, as well as somewhat silly.  I mean, though, that we all need to realize in our bones that we are soldiers.  We are soldiers far behind the lines, and we are soldiers who have a great deal of material comfort and physical security, but we are soldiers nonetheless. 

Republics are defended, in the final analysis, not by their military forces, but by the fact that in time of need, every single able-bodied citizen is a fighting man or woman.  Al-Qaeda did not make 2,000,000 enemies on 9/11 - they made 300,000,000 enemies.  Every one of us is a citizen soldier, part of the defense in depth of our country, our culture, and our civilization.

That means that when we go on a business trip overseas and get caught by our enemies, we comport ourselves like soldiers.  We don’t give our enemies the propaganda victory they’re looking for; we spit in their faces and we die trying to kill them and get away.

That means that when we’re on an airline and three men suddenly stand up, pull knives, and start heading for the cabin door, we don’t wonder where the air marshal is or call 911 on our cell phones.  We form up and we take them out.

That means that we don’t breed nuance in our hearts, we breed ferocity.  We don’t look for excuses to hand over the job to someone else, we look for opportunities to defend our country. 

We are all of us soldiers, and our enemies should learn the lesson the hard way, every time they make war on America, every time they capture an American, every time they encounter an American.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part six of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College. Reason The Sixth: It Undermines Claims That The United States Is A Democracy

We are not a direct democracy.

We never have been.  God willing, we never will be.

The Founding Fathers (angel choir) were very wise men.  They recognized, from their extensive knowledge of the histories of the democratic and republican states that had come before us, that direct democracy simply does not work.  People are too selfish, too impulsive, too emotional.  Systems that have embraced an excess of democracy invariably collapse under the weight of socialist bread-and-circuses or turn into dictatorships.  Anyone who has ever tried to get ten co-workers to agree on a place to eat lunch instinctively and immediately understands why democratic governments undergo a constant temptation to just pick a dictator and be done with it; maybe Maximum Leader Stan won’t pick the best restaurant, but at least he’ll pick something and we can eat, for heaven’s sake.

Instead of democracy per se, the Founders (angel choir) recognized that a democratically-selected republic would be somewhat more resistant to the constant temptation of dictatorship, or the siren song of socialism.  The Senate was originally an appointed body (and should be again).  Representatives were directly elected, to give the people a legitimate direct voice.  The President would be selected by an electoral college, whose members would represent the will of the people in each state, but who would have the power to put the kibosh on truly outrageously bad choices. 

A lot of people with very dubious political agendas would like very much for us to be a direct democracy, because they believe (correctly) that their destructive beliefs could be more easily implemented if all they had to do was fool a certain percentage of the population.  The non-democratic aspects of our system, such as the electoral college, represent something of a barrier to such illegitimate aspirations. 

We’re a republic, not a democracy, and our political institutions reflect that spirit of delay, compromise, and the holding at arms-length the political will of the people.  The people’s voice is a trumpet, not a 10,000-watt speaker stack.  It strongly influences and ultimately controls, but does not hold the whip itself. 

That’s the list so far; if I think of new reasons to keep the EC, I’ll post them.

What he said.

Via Colfax.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part five of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.  (I should link to Gary Gregg of NRO, who is also doing a series on the electoral college, and whose post today hits the same theme as mine.  Copycat.)

Reason The Fifth: It Makes Cultural Extremists Unelectable

There is a cultural divide of some magnitude in this country.  Red-state and blue-state denizens don’t just inhabit different parties, in many ways they inhabit different worlds.  An easy example of that can be found in the reactions to my Why I’m Pro-Life post (those comments are now gone, alas) - red state folks nodding their heads and saying ‘yep’ and blue state folks not understanding where I was coming from at all.  These worldviews and cultural values aren’t right or wrong, necessarily, but they are very different.